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Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Conservatives Make Shitty Artists Because Conservatism Kills Art

"Hollywood is out of ideas!"

It's the great lament of the era of endless reboots and re-adaptations. There is nothing new in Hollywood, so they've resorted to remaking past efforts shot for shot.

Folks? That's not just a lie; it's an insidious, mean-spirited goddamn lie that serves to undermine artists and all the important work they do, and to shield the people actually responsible for the problem. There's no shortage of amazing ideas in Hollywood; they're just not getting made into movies because the thing we've run out of is obscenely rich people willing to risk a very tiny fraction of their wealth to produce good art.

The average budget for a major studio film runs about $250 million. Backers generally want some assurance that they're going to see that money again, so everything from scripts to casting is built around the question of how much return on investment can be squeezed out of ninety minutes in a dark theatre. As a general rule? The worse the economy is, the worse the movies get because financiers are too scared to do anything people might not pay their carefully budgeted money to see.

You can see this across all decades. The 1920s gave us The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Steamboat Willie, Nosferatu, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and all the other classics your grandparents went to see. Movies that pushed the envelope in terms of storytelling (for the time) and topics to see what they could get away with. Because the public had money to burn, and Hollywood was more than happy to see how many different ways they could make them do so.

Then the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression hit, and we got a little thing called the Motion Picture Production Code, more commonly known as the Hays Code. It wasn't a law, but a set of rules put forth by the industry itself to control the moral content of all films produced from 1930 to 1968. The generally accepted reasoning for the Hays Code was the plethora of raunchy films and equally raunchy Hollywood scandals that lived up to the Roaring 20s moniker. And indeed, the proposals for the Hays Code started as early as 1927.

But the actual adoption of it in 1930? Was all about money. As in, people were too broke after 1929 to have the kind of disposable income needed to attend movies, so Hollywood had to maximize profits by producing as few flops as possible. This meant making sure films were safe enough to not ruffle feathers and put people off going (remember, home video didn't exist; a movie's theatre run was the only money it would ever make). And so, the Hays Code was adopted for almost four decades.

As a result? In the early days of the Code, while filmmaking technology improved, films themselves stagnated as far as being creative and daring. The bad guy always lost, the good guy always won, authority was always respected, gender roles strictly enforced, and nobody the audience was supposed to hate was ever sympathetic. It was, quite literally, like watching the same goddamn movie for almost twenty years.

There were small bright spots that we still regard today as creatively daring, and that's only because of artists like Hitchcock and DeMille who read the Hays Code and went "challenge accepted, motherfucker." They adhered to the Code, but subverted the shit out of it. Films like Notorious (1946) with its two-and-a-half-minute kissing sequence where the actors parted every three seconds to stay within the guidelines. Frankenstein (1931) with its "Now I know what it feels like to be God!" that just skirted the line without stepping over it. The Wizard of Oz (1939) with the eponymous Wizard's moral ambiguity all over the place. And of course, Casablanca (1942) with the famous gambling scene.

Those are the movies we remember, the ones that dared to be risky. Everything else was aggressively forgettable.

And as enforcement of the Code began to weaken after John Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952 officially extended First Amendment protections to film, movies began to more outwardly flout it. The Code was even re-written in 1956 to be a little less stuffy (and slightly less racist), and then abandoned altogether in 1968 when it became evident that both the public and most of Hollywood were frankly getting bored and restless with it, and the more daring films were proving to be far more profitable. And it's no accident that this profitability coincided with the end of the Depression and the beginning of the near-constant-wartime economic boom of the 1940s through the late 1960s. People had more money to drop on movies, and were thus more likely to go out and see stuff that might not be their usual bag.

And like clockwork, the recession of the 1980s brought back the general spinelessness of the 1930s, just without an official Code to adhere to. Execs simply refused to back movies they thought were too avant-garde. And so the early 1980s movie landscape got us the same general lack of creativity. There were, again, a few bright spots that we still celebrate today, and again we do so because they dared to break the mold, take a risk, and live a little crazy. Some examples being Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, The Shining, Poltergeist, Tootsie, and The Neverending Story.

As the economy picked back up? The 1990s gave us more plentiful riskier shit. Terminator 2. Jurassic Park. Schindler's List. The Silence of the Lambs. Seven. Good Will Hunting. Event Horizon. 12 Monkeys. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The Hunt For Red October.

The early 2000s swung back the other way with recession of the Bush 43 years. Shit, I can barely remember movies that came out between 2000 and 2009, other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, and Kill Bill. Film was that fucking bland.

The economic recovery of the Obama years yielded another crop of Hollywood getting its groove back with Avatar, Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool, The Help, Hidden Figures, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, and the Captain America film series.

And now? Here we are again. Back to playing it safe, because the economy is on the edge of a knife and we're being governed by a madman intent on driving it straight into the ground in order to get what he can out of it while making sure everyone else is fucked. As a result? We've had exactly two memorable, daring films since Trump took the nation's helm, and they were Black Panther and The Greatest Showman.

To give you an idea of how far we've backslid in terms of daring, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) depicted three on-screen homosexual encounters. It's 2018 and Freddie fucking Mercury can't even be the bisexual man he was in his own goddamn biopic. Hollywood is that scared.

It all goes back to movies having that giant quarter-million-dollar price tag that investors may not ever see again because people don't have the disposable income to take a chance on a film they might hate. So they only throw their money at movies they can be reasonably sure will at least break even. And as a result? Only the safe shit gets made, with very few exceptions. Film, like everything else, gets more conservative when the cash flow dries up.

And artists take the fall for not having deep enough pockets to just make movies for the hell of it. Art stagnates. Art dies. Dinosaurs can't breed when they're all one sex. Unless, of course, life finds a way. And it has; on the small screen.

By contrast, a typical one-hour television episode only costs about $5-7 million, and the maximum is about $15 million for series like Game of Thrones. And episodes can be financed in small packs to see how the show performs before committing to larger budgets. Investors are far less worried about money, and ergo far more willing to take risks. Which is why we've seen some stuff from both cable TV and streaming services that would frankly never see the light of day in any other medium. Amazon Prime's Lore and Jack Ryan, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale and 11.22.63, and Netflix's Stranger Things and Orange is the New Black have all dared to push boundaries with regard to content that appeals to more than just straight white men. And the trend doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon.

Conservatism kills creativity because the lifeblood of art is change. Art needs new ideas to live, and risk-takers to thrive. Conservatism -- the fear of change, the rejection of the new, and the preservation of the status quo at all costs -- is inherently anti-art and anti-artist. This is why in authoritarian states, which are always conservative, art and its expression are among the first things to be clamped down on. You take away their will to resist by taking away any source of enjoyment or hope. In the words of Gmork, people without hope are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power.

The small screen is giving the Empress a new name. Long live Fantasia.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Trump's Worst Nightmare Just Came True

I've spent almost 24 hours trying to get my thoughts regarding the 2018 midterms into something that isn't screaming possum memes. I'm not sure how successful I'm about to be, either, but here we go.

Democrats did as well as could be reasonably expected last night. Taking the Senate was always an impossibly tall order. Too many Democrats up for reelection, many in vulnerable red state seats. It was all but assured Republicans would keep control of the chamber, and highly likely they would pick up a seat or two (which they've done).

But it's a pyrrhic victory. The Democrats not only flipped the House, but also 7 governorships and 200+ state legislature seats. Despite gerrymandering and voter suppression.

So what does it mean now that we control the House? Let's break it down:
  • Any further attempts to repeal the ACA are dead in the water. That shit will never make it past a blue House.
  • Indeed, any shitty, dangerous legislation coming from the GOP Senate will not survive a blue House vote.
  • Democrats now control all House committees. Of particular relevance right now? Judiciary, Oversight, and Finance.
  • House Democrats now have subpoena power to request whatever documents they need, and the ability to release whatever information they wish to the public as long as it's not classified.
What this means for Trump is that his life is going to be a living fucking Hell for the next 2 years. Everything he's done will be under the microscope, because these will not be partisan shitshow window-dressing investigations, but actual ones. And his criminality will become public record.

For a narcissist like Trump? This is the worst thing that could possibly happen to him. Being held accountable for his shit, and being so publicly.

And he's already starting to panic. Not even half a day after the midterms, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned. And Trump is looking to replace him with someone a lot friendlier. Unfortunately for Trump, this is going to work about as well as it did for Nixon, because now that we have an actual check on his power, you better believe House Democrats are going to investigate the holy fuck out of this. They're already planning to bring in Mueller for public hearings should Trump find an Attorney General willing to fire him.

I don't want to make any predictions for the future of the Trump Administration. But I will say that there is no scenario that bodes well for him. In 2020, there will be twice as many Republican senators up for reelection as Democrats. Considering how close the races were last night even in GOP strongholds, none of those seats are truly safe. And depending on what House committee investigations uncover? They may be even less so. Particularly if Trump's popularity drops below 30% (which is not at all unlikely).

If Trump becomes more of a liability than an asset? Republicans will have no choice but to turn on him, like they did with Nixon. The question is whether Trump will resign, or have to be impeached, convicted, and dragged kicking and screaming across the White House lawn.

For now? Winter is here.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

This Is the Greatest Show: "The Greatest Showman" Was the Refutation of 2016 We All Needed

When you think of media produced after the 2016 election that ostensibly gives the current administration the finger, lighthearted musical films are not generally going to be part of that repertoire. And indeed, The Greatest Showman was originally planned as a simple good time full of catchy music. But that all changed in November 2016, and what we got instead is a film so meticulously layered with meaning that it's less like circus peanuts and more like a funnel cake with all the toppings.

The creative team behind the film had started out with a simple, flashy, embellished version of P. T. Barnum's life and legacy. But when Donald Trump was installed in a bloodless coup and proceeded to take a great steaming dump all over basic human decency, the script was revised to work from a new angle that, true to the man it's based on, didn't just flip the Trump Administration the bird; it did so while riding backwards on a donkey and dressed as a giant penis.

Barnum is most famous and remembered not for the circus company that bore his name for over a century, but for his unique approach to the "human curiosities" sideshow, or what were termed "freak shows" at the time. Medical science was still in its infancy -- 1890s America still legitimately believed in vampires as the cause of "consumption" (what we know today as tuberculosis) -- so people with extreme deformities or mental disorders were a subject of revulsion. Others before Barnum had managed to turn the disgust into fascination, but it was Barnum's showmanship and marketing of "freaks" like General Tom Thumb and bearded ladies as actual performers that transformed public opinion of them into something wholly positive (Charles "Tom Thumb" Stratton was an international sensation, and his marriage to Lavinia Warren, another Little Person, was the celebrity wedding of its day).

In the current era when everyone from Black people to Mexicans to Muslims to transgender people is being increasingly reviled simply for being different, the message that needed to be sent was becoming more and more obvious. And it's something the crew felt a duty to put out there.

You can see the beginnings of this thread in the song "Come Alive" when Barnum is recruiting the freaks. Selling them the chance at being paid to be themselves, and to be free and out in the open:
I see it in your eyes
You believe that lie
That you need to hide your face
Afraid to step outside
So you lock the door
But don't you stay that way
It's essentially the same thing he sells Carlyle in their number ("The Other Side"), the chance to both make money and be free of the constraints of upper-class respectable society in which he's comfortable financially but his soul is on life support ("Now is this really how you like to spend your days? Whiskey and misery and parties and plays?"). The only difference between Carlyle and the freaks is the latter have nothing to lose. The end result is the same for both in that they get to finally make a living being who they are.

Now, Barnum himself is far from perfect. He's a huckster at this point, barely believing his own hype about personal empowerment that he's hawking to the freaks. But it doesn't really matter, because they believe him. And in turn, believe in themselves. Performing and being showcased as entertainers and seeing the cheers and applause from the crowds at the museum for the first time is otherworldly for people who have spent their whole lives being pariahs.

It's this rift, between the man Barnum sold himself to be and the deeply selfish asshole he was turning into, that really sets up his fall later on. But unlike the Wheelers, he has a net to catch him: the freaks, who have become his literal fire-forged family, whether he realized it or not.

For all of its historical inaccuracies, this is one part of the real-life Barnum that the movie nails perfectly. Barnum began his career as a pretty awful human being, exploiting a loophole in New York's anti-slavery laws in the 1830s to lease a blind, mostly paralyzed elderly black woman named Joice Heth for exhibition. Many of Barnum's initial "curiosities" featured the kind of in-your-face racism that permeated antebellum New York City.

But as with most good stories, real and fabricated, there's a twist.

While a huckster who sold his audiences glittery crowd-pleasing fantasies, the other side to real-life Barnum is that he paid his performers handsomely and made sure they were physically cared for, well into old age. Including those like the Davis brothers, a pair of mentally challenged Little People siblings, whom he could have easily gotten away with cheating. While he did exploit them in the most literal sense, it's important to remember that this was the 1840s; there were no other opportunities for "freaks" to make a living other than sideshows. There was certainly no job they could hold that would net them $200,000 in the mid-19th century (the equivalent of more than $5 million in today's money).

It's the kind of delicious, popcorn-flavored irony that only a troll like Barnum would revel in. He played to all sorts of bigotry to get the public to open their wallets, and then turned around and paid the very people they looked down upon more money than the haughty crowds would ever see in their entire lifetimes.

We don't know what made real-life Barnum change his mind later and join the abolitionists. But the fact is he did, even switching parties and running as a Republican during his stint in the Connecticut legislature in 1867 (when the Republicans were the literal party of Lincoln). While The Greatest Showman notably shies away from Barnum's real-life racist exhibitions, it does touch on his early bigotry when he starts to abandon the freaks (who feature prominently people of color) in favor of the blonde, blue-eyed Jenny Lind.

And again, while the film doesn't directly address Barnum's political ventures, it still acknowledges his change of heart in other ways. Most notably, in the penultimate musical number "From Now On" in which Barnum, after losing the museum to fire and his wife and daughters to his lust for fame, realizes that the family he built was what he really wanted, even if he was too blinded by having money and fame for once in his life to see it:
For years and years, I chased their cheers
At the crazy speed of always needing more
But when I stop and see you here
I remember who all this was for!
It’s one of the greatest things about this movie; Barnum may be the protagonist and the star. But the movie flat-out states that he and the circus owe their success to the freaks. That for as much as Barnum helped them be what they are, open and proud, they are key to him having a show at all.

And nowhere is this more evident than in their tearjerking showstopper, "This Is Me." At the height of Barnum’s race and insatiable thirst for more, he keeps them out of Jenny Lind’s post-concert soireé in order to impress the upperclassmen since he wants their money. The freaks, led by Lettie the Bearded Lady, use the very confidence Barnum sold them to crash the party.

The scene is the most memorable and moving one of the whole film for so many reasons, not the least of which is it being written as an artfully direct "fuck you" to the results of the 2016 election. But in the spirit of Barnum himself, it goes way beyond that.

In the latter half of the 20th century, freak shows saw a sharp decline in popularity and a very quick phase-out, as advances in medical science took the mystique out of physical deformities and mental and neurological disorders. But human nature being what it is, we’ll always need people to look down upon and shun for being too different. We always need a Tall Poppy to cut.

Beginning in the 1940s, the visible LGBT community became that group. We became the new freaks, with our crazy makeup, stuffed bras, loud and clashing colors, shaved heads, dyed hair, multiple piercings, giant tattoos, and general not giving a single paltry fuck anymore. And the freak show -- the hiring and display of people on the fringes of society for the entertainment of those within it -- was reborn from its (well-deserved) ashes as Vaudeville and burlesque revivals. Which in turn became the bedrock of the musical theatre golden age beginning in the 1950s.

The arts, and particularly theatre, has always been a safe haven for freaks, whatever that word has meant. In the mid-19th century, it was people with too many or too few limbs, odd-shaped heads, exceptionally hairy women, Little People, and giants. In the mid-20th, it was men and women and everyone in between who didn’t obey the social rules governing who you could be attracted to or the clothes and makeup you could wear. The stage and the theatre has welcomed them all, throughout history. The original "low-brow entertainment" was the one place where people deemed too "other" everywhere else could finally be celebrated and even loved.

"This Is Me" is a deliberate love and thank-you letter to all the queer people who have kept theatre alive for the last century or so, by reclaiming it as our own modern freak show. Where we’re paid to be ourselves, and America at least pretends to love us for a couple hours.

In this way, Barnum himself goes beyond being a complex character. He represents the old guard American attitude toward poverty, wealth, and diversity, and its evolution. He goes from viewing poverty as a moral flaw he must overcome in order to be successful and worthy in the eyes of the elite to seeing the snobbery of the rich as the moral flaw, and neither needing nor wanting their approval. He goes from seeing those who are different as useful tools to achieve success to seeing them as equals deserving of the same respect he is. For they also came from nothing and risked it all.

Likewise, Carlyle represents the next generation, viewing extreme wealth as not worth the wound in his soul that is pretending to be someone he isn’t, and that the social class one is born into should not be the sole determinant of one’s future ("It’s up to you, it’s up to me, no one can say what we get to be!"). He also views those who are different as fellow humans, deserving the same basic decency as anybody else.

Hence, Barnum passing the cane of ringmaster on to him. As the older generation’s harmful attitudes die off and evolve and as the newer generation takes over, the Greatest Show On Earth -- humanity itself -- gets better and better.

Because as the real-life Barnum said, and as the film quotes him, "the noblest art is that of making others happy."

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

What the Backlash To #MeToo Reveals About the Male Psyche

Besides the fact that it's fragile as fuck.

It's no surprise that a movement like #MeToo has garnered its share of detractors. And those detractors all seem to have one thing in common: they really really want men to be able to rape who they please.

The single biggest thread I've seen running through the criticisms of #MeToo is that it's punishing men for their sexuality, and punishing men for having a sex drive. And this honestly reveals something utterly horrifying about men and how they think; "rapist" is their sexuality. At least according to 1) themselves and 2) women they've brainwashed with the fear of getting raped.

Because that is the only thing that explains the conflation of punishing people who rape and abuse others with punishing men "for being men." The only way that makes any sense at all is if you think men raping people is the natural order of things. And if you think that, you only reinforce why #MeToo is both necessary and long overdue.

But that's always been the story of men. It's how men first seized the power they have. They took it out of others' hands through sexual violence, and have kept it out of others' hands by shifting the responsibility for preventing rape onto their victims. They hold onto power by being simultaneously brutal and infantile. Adult enough to rape, immature enough to not be responsible when they do it.

If you think this is nuts? Congratulations, you're a decent human being.

The backlash to #MeToo is rooted in exactly one thing, and that thing is the fear of being outed as someone who has committed sexual assault or abuse (or has shielded someone who has). And not even the fear of having done it, and thus irreparably harmed another person, but the fear of getting caught and exposed. The fear of consequences.

Because that is the only thing that men in power have ever been afraid of. Consequences.

People who aren't drunk on power, when confronted with the fact they might have done a terrible thing, examine and self-reflect and soul-search and try to ensure they don't do the horrible thing again. Because they actually fear causing pain to others. People who wish to keep a grasp on their power instead lash out and try to discredit the accusations. Because they don't give a shit about hurting others. They just want to minimize potential consequences by making the victims harder to believe.

All of the articles and tweets and Facebook posts trying to discredit #MeToo? That is their goal. To avoid retribution for what they know they've done, or what they know they don't have a problem with. They want to flip the conversation to scare victims back into silence, so that they don't have to alter their behavior and give up the power they've enjoyed.

Because that's what consequences do. They erode power. And to people who have been steeped in their own power for their whole lives, losing any measure of it frightens them most of all.

This is why you see lament after increasingly ridiculous lament about consent "destroying spontaneity" or "ruining the mood." Because it's not even the person that these men are attracted to. It's the forceful seizure and exertion of power.

Sex is a sport to them. And when the other team lets you win, the game isn't fun anymore. They get aroused by the challenge of beating their opponent into submission. #MeToo is the opponent that will not submit, and who they forgot is at perfect groin-kneeing height.

Winter is coming. And they're scared to fucking death of it.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Your Minority Status Is Not a Get-Out-of-Being-a-Nazi-Free Card

Chelsea Manning is nobody's ally.

She is a trans woman, she's running for Senate as a Democrat, but that does not automatically make her part of the Resistance. She was, in fact, never on our side. And by "our" I mean "the United States, period." Not only is she a convicted traitor, but the entity she fed our cables to, WikiLeaks, is the very same one that later ratfucked the 2016 election.

Chelsea Manning should, by rights, be rotting in Leavenworth until middle age, but Obama is a better man than literally everyone and gave her an early release. Her idea of repayment? Running against a perfectly fine Democratic Senator and cozying up to white supremacists.

While most have rightly dragged her for it, there is an utterly infuriating trend among her supporters to rationalize her behavior in a variety of ways. From actually buying her ridiculous "gathering intel" excuse to making her out to be a victim of alt-right grooming tactics. It's both alarming and sad that the far-left is so enamored with her status as a trans woman that they refuse to call her out for being in league with neo-Nazis.

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to be both part of a marginalized group and a horrible fucking person.

It certainly worked for Ernst Röhm, who managed to be both gay and Hitler's BFF and seemed particularly okay with slaughtering 10,000 gay men in the death camps alongside the Jews and Romani. In fact? It's shockingly common for gay white men to take up the cause of fascism and genocide.

It's the most basic response to a loss of power; the drive to reclaim it in other ways. Often horrible ones. It's like when the kid who gets slapped around by his dad for being "homo" finds out it feels really good to slap around the brown kids at school for being brown. And when you're denied power in every other way, discovering a source of it you can easily exploit is a hell of a drug.

So it's not a surprise at all that Chelsea Manning, who would have grown up steeped in white male privilege before figuring out she was trans, and who ultimately lost that privilege when she decided to betray both her country and her uniform, would seek to regain power any way she could. Being white is all she's really got, so who better to join forces with than Prosobiec and Cernovich?

The LGBT community doesn't have to protect her, nor should it. She has new friends now. And they hate all of you.

The Germans have a word for people like Chelsea. Who joined the Nazi Party not necessarily because they hated Jews, but because they desperately wanted to feel like they had control of something in their lives for once. That word is...

...Nazis.