Blog Title: Being Boring

Blood for Blood

In The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston is cast as a superstarlet, good enough at acting to win Academy gold. In that film, considering Houston’s limited thespian range, the gesture was assuredly an affirmation of performative prowess, despite the action on screen. These 16 years later, a like shadow runs over Clint Eastwood’s latest bleakie, The Changeling. Before one frame of the pic was shot, there was Oscar speak of Jolie’s turn in this missing children (melo)drama. And sure enough, before venturing off to the cinema today, I was on the phone with a friend. “Oh, she’s supposed to take home an Oscar for that.” Well, the film deigns to think so too. There’s a completely throw-away scene so-near the denoument in which the girls at her office beg Jolie to attend an Oscar party. She cannot oblige them as there’s entirely too much work to be done, but she still listens over the radio. Cleopatra is up against It Happened One Night and Jolie waits with her hands wrung over her chest as they choose her preferred feature. Our alignment with her character (and knowledge of Cleopatra’s dubious reign over film history) congratulates the Academy for their sound choice and… perhaps appeals that the wisdom echo in the 21st century? As the crane scales over the scene of the final shot, we reregister the title on the marquee down the road.

Clint Eastwood has joined the ranks of the Hollywood “stuff of legends” department here. Every moment of the film ebbs a bankroll of studio confidence and Eastwood delivers manipulative moments of duress on par with the likes of Spielberg. All the chips are stacked against our heroine and we/she are put through the debilitating motions of denial, tears, even grimy institutionalization (yes, replete with scenes of electroshock therapy). All of this with one hand on the Art dial to make these utter 50s claims at genre trickery seem required, justified and adding to the auteurist necessities of Eastwood’s vision. Anyone who has read this blog more than once should know that I mean no good on this claim. I’ve been infrequent in posts here as I’ve revisited some old friends in recent weeks. There was a trend of missing children films that I took to writing of first on these “pages” with Panic Room, The Forgotten, Flightplan, Freedomland and The Invasion and have been recently developed a second academic analysis. The Changeling was required reading, as it were. It’s all there, part and parcel, but blended with a vaguely Chinatown vie at credibility. We’ve even got the dirty police cover-up and an actress who, at her toughest, could perhaps get Faye Dunaway to give that flawed retina an awesome tremble.

The missing child film speaks nothing to missing children, but to the horrors latent in the heart of contemporary culture. Emma Wilson’s lovely book, Cinema’s Missing Children goes so far as the venture that the 1990s abduction/murder narratives were attempts at representing the horror and abject despair which is all but representable. They functioned as meditations on the space of complete loss. After 9/11, these dialogues assumed a more patriotic purpose and the child came to figure as the social as these structural figures vanished on that day. The child is both the social order that seemed to evaporate until Bush sounded the war horns and the security which felt similarly abused, rotten from the outside. When the child is returned in most of these pictures, the symbolic/political structure which seems to have toppled is now in full form again, bathed in the golden lights of the films’ reunion scenes.

So why does mister Eastwood find it necessary to tell this tale now? After the infamous flop of The Invasion, it would seem child abduction narratives are on the wane. Nor does he allow the moments of raw emotion to erupt and address the true horror of the scene (sorry Joles, that fantastic lip tremble just don’t cut it). To attest that this sort of missing child narrative has always existed is not quite it, either. Perhaps the nostalgia of “better” times (certainly better clothes) functions to suggest that even our vies for pre-Nam ideals for “the family” are not as sound as they appear. There’s not even much sense of family even in Eastwood’s world, just justice and vengence. When the child finds its parent (there are a few gone missing here) they are whisked from the narrative toute suite. No, this is about vengeance. This is a re-jigged, Dirty Harry appeal of eye for eye. Jolie simpers and purges those inexhaustible aquaducts, but quickly flips the switch and sneers on, through many trial sequences. This is not Wanted, dear, though you’d never know it from the gratuitous and gleeful hanging scene (which recalls the scene from Capote which, umm… got an Oscar) and the Hills Have Eyes-eque Riverside farm house with whirring old fans and Texas Chainsaw style rusted blades scattered about.

Not much adds up and you feel really toyed with. But you feel justified through Jolie’s successes, which you knew were coming from the start. But those successes somewhere lose track of what they were aiming for. Unless they were aiming at impeccable wardrobe design, because, however much I sneered at this grisly film’s emotional assaults, I did gasp at all the great cowl necks, flapper suits and fur lined coats. Jolie certainly found the right role in terms of lipstick shades, but it would be nice if it went beyond that.

Elegy

I recently had my ipod stolen at some dreary Soho gaybar. In truth, it was getting old. I bought it 3 or so years back following the introduction of video capabilities (which I used as a tax write off, being a student of video art, and all). Blemished with more than a few traces of battery, the gadget was additionally beginning to show internal signs of fatigue. When playing 'Sensitized' off Kylie Minogue's X album, for instance, Bjork's face peered from the cover representation instead of Kylie's; instead of Saint Etienne's Boxette cover art, I was treated to the Future Bible Heroes' Memories of Love. Apart from this the trusty little player was in near-top form.

I bemoaned its girth, having recently moved to London and counting regular tube rides on my day-to-day. The now-bulky device was too large to slip into any pants' pocket. I cursed it at the time but was surprised by the ways in which I miss it now.

[The only image I have of my dear ipod, bottom right-hand corner]

We are a commodity culture through and through, and no matter how much Baudrillard I can consume, the pangs and effects of this comsumptive drive cannot be displaced. Apart from missing my daily soundtrack (and embarrassed by my penchant for strolling about, unconsciously mumbling, quietly orating my own), I began to consider the memory data that was lost in this theft. 'How many times did I listen to X?' I caught myself wondering. An ipod keeps track of play count. I can joke that I've played the album 800 times, but is it really 37 or 62? These bits of info, unimportant as they seem, appeal to my analytic practice -- this diminutive machinery was a form of bibliography [Kylie cited 53 times], now lost. And what of the innumerable playlists? The litany of tracks carefully assembled for listening over the past three years erased in a single, selfish act.

Of course, what is perhaps more pertinent the question is, 'How could I forge such a sensitive attachment to plastic bits of gadgetry in the first place?' What privileges this machine? Well, it is day to day. And to this extent, it could acquire religious purportions. In my prior life, commuting by car in Los Angeles, this little guy (who, I should mentioned, bore the name Gratuitous in my itunes) was my daily conduit to joissance via Pet Shop Boys, Sally Shapiro, Grace Jones, and, of course, Kylie Mingoue. Losing him is a bit like those scenes in ghost films when the kooky medium suddenly lowers her hands and loses that glazed look in her eyes. She's no longer tapped into that disembodied ether, she's no longer special. Just a person. She loses definition.

I'm over it. Since the thing is ultimately a toy, its replacement is in that corporeal ether right now, cradled in the caring arms of a FedEx worker. Poised for me to bring it life. But the sensations of loss that swam through my mind when I was distanced from this thing were really strange, unexpected. The importance we bestow onto our objects is a key and yet entirely perplexing fact of our contemporary life. Goodbye Gratuitous. I hope that, where ever you are, whatever you're playing, your life is just as sweet. And whoever you happen to be podding, may he love Kylie.

Oh, silly me, it was a Soho gaybar...

The Bodyguard Feature-length Commentary

In an attempt to enter into the digital age, I have started exploring alternative technologies for the dissemination of Film Criticism and Theory. Or, in another turn of phrase, click below to download my feature length mp3 commentary of The Bodyguard.

Click here to hear me talk for 2+ hours about Whitney Houston

I'm hoping that it's fun. I must apologize forthright for the somewhat lackluster quality of the sound recording. I'm working with a limited means (eg, a 4-year-old laptop) but I hope you'll find the observations insightful. There are excepts taken from Lynn Tillman's essay Looking for Trouble - or Privileging the Subtext which can be found in her book The Broad Picture, Ann Friedberg's 'A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification’ reproduced in Psychoanalysis & Cinema, portions of 'Trying to Hear "I Will Always Love You"' from my book FEVER PITCH and an essay, 'The Cinema of Whitney Houston' that I have written with Kevin Killian and will appear in Kevin's new cinema book published by FANZINE press and in a slightly different altered version in Hedi El Kholti's new magazine, Animal Shelter later this year.

oh, heather...

Girl, don't let the bad press bring you down. You're still royalty and we're here for you, should you need to talk it out...

Torpid

Call it the heightened sense of awareness brought on by... trauma, is it?

I moved to London 10 days ago and things have been a whirring combination of quite smooth and harried. My general temperament has been rather introspective (as behooves a move, I suppose). Moving to a foreign land is like work travel, where you may know a few people, but lose the daily routines which lend life structure. I've been quite reclusive and my bouts of nonpragmatism have all been very hermetic. I've been blowing through the back catalogue of Chris Kraus (Aliens and Anorexia and Torpor, thus far), a writer I adore -- who, though eloquent and painstakingly irreverent, does nothing to mollify this self-analysis. Instead, Kraus' critical prose invades my thoughts as she drifts from Berlin to New Zealand, Romania to the Hamptons. I find myself near tears at the purchase of candied peanuts on the South bank, in part some Kundera-esque revelry in Kitsch and because, on my second day of reading on a parkbench before the South Bank Center, killing time before yet another orientation seminar, I'm upwind from the mediocre cellist who plays for the tourists (daily, I've gleaned) and downwind from the candied peanut fellow. I love that smell, though I'd never purchased the things at any of their urban incarnations. This moment, between these two vendors, was perfect. I welled up. I took it too far by buying some, though. Half way through a mouthwash cup of them, I wanted to throw up.

But this is a film blog (can't you tell from all of the Kylie posts?!) and I must report on the newest Ozon offering (speaking of sugar coating). It's the only cinematic outing I've made so far. It did nothing to dissuade any of this intense interiority. You see, the eponymous Angel lives a life entirely in her head. The goings on around her are all filtered through the escapist fantasy any child reared above a grocery would invent. She writes hopelessly florid texts -- enough to make Charlotte Rampling squirm -- and becomes the Queen's favorite author. But she briskly drowns in her own denial of (real) world events.

It's a hopelessly wrong film; none of the embellishes Ozon heaps onto Angel ever truly amount to much, and though we're given glimpses at lovely "what could have been"s, were left with this bulbous costume drama and a completely uncompelling, disdainful lead. I saw the film at the ICA and, eating a sandwich on the grass of Mall park, in a state of vague homelessness offered me rather succinctly to the desperate fantasies of the film. I'm empathetic to the teeth and Angel speaks aloud a similar self-narrativization that ran through my head. But this pipsqueak who writes trivial literature ultimately drove me back to Chris Kraus (with anything but torpor).

This has been my vicious cycle, one which the mammoth Film Studies readers stacked beside me in bed will assuredly cure.

From Torpor:"Tenses situate events relative to their closeness or their distance from the speaker. Rules of grammer give the empty space of human speech some shape. The simple past We left. In more complex tenses, "have" and "had," the helping verbs, help to separate the speaker form the immediacy of events. We had left. Had forms a little step between what happened and the moment when you're telling it."

R.I.P. Kylie Ann Minogue

No, Kylie is not dead. Though some, if you were to ask, would argue that her career is. The online world was abuzz with discontent for this last outing. X, as it were, did not mark the spot. And neither did KYLIEX2008.

No, Kylie is not dead. But this post is to serve as an epitaph. This is the clincher to a love affair. The goodbye letter. 'No More Rain'. 'Bittersweet Goodbye'.

I was just in San Francisco and saw Kevin Killian read from his delicious new collection of poetry, Action Kylie and I knew it marked the end. In the infancy of my Kylie obsession, a peer and close friend told me of Kevin's work. Our conversational, dish methodology was similar -- though Kevin is far superior and insanely more well read than I. Eagerly awaiting this forthcoming, "1,000 page KylieTheory tome" that my friend (who is admittedly prone to intense exaggeration) relayed to me, I emailed Mr. Killian and we met on several occasions. We met and discussed Whitney Houston, Lele Sobieski and, of course, Kylie. His first correspondence, dated February 21, 2007 09:47:50 PM PST read: "I disagree violently with *some* of your opinions, but you're a contrarian, like I am, and we have to stick together shoulder to shoulder" We got along best when just earnestly fawning over recent Kylie developments. Holding the copy of his poetry book in my hand -- a traded copy for my recently published theory book -- a beautiful moment of closure overtook me. Kevin's wonderful poems speak in lyric, far more succinctly than most ruminations of fandom. It's felt and loving. My work on the Impossible Princess was an affair, a blissful passing through; Kevin's fever is more epically impassioned, intransigent.

See, I had already (reticently) decided to move on, and this night was the brilliant send off. I am moving to London this Monday, the 8th of September, and developed my recent diva theory book, FEVER PITCH as an act of LA closure. I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of living here. Pop, as glassy and banal as the Los Angeles street scenes. The feeling of devotion in a town that is both devoid of devotion and exorbitantly drunk on it. And I wanted to move on. I had not yet made peace with this decision, but the three events I will now relate made it possible.

Kylie's new show, KYLIEX2008 was broadcast at 9pm London time on August 16th, 2008. That morning, I had a date to view the newest work by my close friend (and, were I to have one, mentor), experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr. It was a wonderful piece, though I had to sift through it twice to comprehend the visual narrative. It begins with a vinyl rip of 'Theme from Valley of the Dolls' and closes with one of the Cale pieces on Songs for Drella. We had a long, roundabout conversation where we both toyed with one another's intentions and eventually both conceded, seated at his perfunctory patio furniture. I kept glancing restlessly at his watch. At ten-to-one, (8:50 pm, London time), I urgently informed him that I had to be somewhere and scurried off to view the spectacle.

As the concert was an exclusively British broadcast, there were two, covert online viewing sites, both to be posted on 'Say Hey: The ultimate unofficial Kylie Minogue forum' an hour before the broadcast. I'd had trouble with the forum before and as I breezed into the apartment and threw open my laptop, I was not surprised to find it too populated to gain access. I hit google. Tapping in a series of searches, I finally found one address and leaned in to decode the horribly pixelated livefeed. "Drop your socks and grab your miniboombox..." Kylie crooned mechanically as she was lowered to the stage in a halo of circuitry. I don't like 'Speakerphone', the tune she used to open the tour, but her entrance sure was grand. Midway through the mashup, 'Boombox/Can't Get You Out Of My Head', the feed began rebuffering. I would get snippets, like a scratched CD only I'm also hunched over and attempting to decipher the jumble of pixel squares. Finally, it crashed and I gave up on the affair. My pulse was still quick, but I knew the whole thing would be uploaded onto the forum in high quality later that night. I could wait.

A physical trainer from Columbia Missouri named Yvette watched over my shoulder when I finally watched the download on a plane ride from St. Louis to San Francisco. She liked Kylie because her music was easy to work out to. We took in the rather rote extravaganza. I found myself more curious than exhilarated. I'd invested so much into this. This tour was launched at the peak of my Kylie obsession. I hung on every development that was made. When the tracklists were posted after each of the 53 European gigs, I would read them like poetry (My favorite poem in Action Kylie is the one in which Kevin reproduces, verbatim, the fictitious "leaked" tracklist and author credits for Kylie's Fever follow-up, City Games -- the flop which would truly be titled Body Language). Act after act, my weariness grew. She was not having the slightest bit of fun. She half-heartedly transitions into the single, 'Wow' by addressing the audience, "You all look so... WOW!"

What truly disturbed me was how vulgarly inconsiderate the concert was. In the third song, 'Ruffle My Feathers', Kylie lounges across two dancers, as though they were chairs. They happen to enshrouded in black gauze bags and the scene mirrors those at Abu Ghraib. 10 Million pounds were spent staging this concert and no one noticed the likeness? Later, Minogue -- who was famously diagnosed with breast cancer 3 years back -- is lowered to the stage atop a giant silver skull. This is her first tour of new material since and we find her playing with such iconography devoid of any of its charge? That's pop, I suppose. But this? Finally, no stranger to ethnic generalizations (see the Samsara portion of Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour in which Kylie is cast as a Indian/Middle Eastern goddess), the Naughty Manga Girl section sealed the deal for me. Not since Mulan have I witnessed such an affront of lotus blossom bafoonery. Watching pseudo-Geisha girls and Mongolian warriors divest to the grind of 'Nu-Dit-Ty', I was done.

Kevin's beautiful event reminded me where the resilience of this Aussie princess lay. Kylie's profundity can almost not be credited to her at all, but to all of those who invest in her. His poems use her lyrics to cope with personal traumas and bliss. Bouts of flawless prose weave through the vagueness of these pop lyrics. For Kevin, Kylie is personal. Far more personal, it would seem, than Kylie is to her own craft. His work speaks to pop's true power. Monumental in its interpretive potential, the same song can serve as an anthem to some, an elegy to others.

I'm mid-packing now and have no place to stay in the large city in which I'm soon due to land. Least to say, I'm stressed. As I was divying up the books and socks and shoes into their respective bags, I popped on the supplementary DVD for the recently reissued Criterion edition of Sálo. The doco in which I was interested was Italian with English subtitles. Read, not what one wants for use as a background soundtrack. I collapsed to the floor and burrowed through the spare selection of DVDs that have kept their plastic keep-cases. When I saw Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour, I knew what to do.

In my twilight hours of Kylie Minogue, I watched as the pink feathered showgirl princess is lifted to the stage. I saw the optimal optimism of the show. It's jam packed and truly a celebration. Kylie's so happy to be there, or happy to be looked at, anyway. And her ebullience is gloriously palpable. It's epic in all of the right ways. Giant headdresses and tinsel gowns, feather mowhawks and haute couture. She repeatedly surges with diva delivery that her voice can't actually hold, but that endures you to her more. Hearing her nasally coo through 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', from this current, stress-out and abandoning vantage, I welled up. Later, during a mash-up of her song 'Burning Up' and Madonna's rap in 'Vogue', she's raised to the stage atop a blond white mannequin chair (what's all of this with sitting on people?). "She's rising up on the back of Madonna!" my friend Sigrid observed and the performance which always seemed a misstep to me found fantastic new relevance. I went off to dinner as Kylie was dancing about the stage to 'I Should Be So Lucky'. Sigrid, who hates Kylie, was in the next room singing along "Lucky lucky lucky". This is the greatness of the Homecoming tour. Not only does the grandeur of it all convert the least likely to fans (Metallica records adorn Sig's walls) but, for a moment, my retirement was placed on pause. Like any beneficient, yet failed romance, I placed my hand on my heart and told her "It's all over"... that we're "throuuugh, oooo, Ohh ohh ohh..."and it was all okay.

Farewell my friend.

FEVER PITCH Preview

My book, FEVER PITCH, has gone off to print and is now available for purchase online here. Of course, I would much rather see you at the launch at Peres Projects (969 Chung King Rd) on Thursday, August 7th from 6-9 p.m. but if you're somewhere distant like either Portlands or Australia, I'll understand.

As a bit of a treat, I attached some of page screengrabs below (however hard I try, technology beyond screengrabs is still totally illusive!) The book was illustrated and designed by the brilliant Bay Area artist, Deric Carner. It took an entire week of straight work to lasso the beast and Deric did an AMAZING job. I could not be more pleased. Do take a look at some of the text and image below and I hope to see you next month!

In attendance at KYLIEX2008

This is an orphaned little piece that I quite liked but didn't end up fitting into either of my recently completed Kylie articels. I tried to tack it onto The Absence of Difference, but it never quite fit. I'll publish its original, fractured version here.

I was witness to a most fascinating form of spectacle yesterday. For the past 2 months, the Kylie Klan has been gearing up for X2008, her most expensive outing to date. 53 European venues, 10,000,000 Gbp, 4 acrobats and 9 costume changes. Speculation around the show had been bubbling in the forums for months. X2008 premiered in Paris just after the K was knighted by the French legion. If I were British, I might have been insulted. But, across the pond – and on vacation, no less – I sat riveted at my laptop, refreshing the pages of the forum.

You see, I attended the show through the infinitesimal remove of text messages, cell calls and camera phones. An attendant would call their friend and that forum-goer would input the information for the rest of use to revel in. I refreshed and news appeared, just as K was doing thousands of miles away. A click of the circular arrow and I would be updated: ‘Like A Drug.’ Yet just as banter in kindergarten telephone games becomes distorted, an unlikely event I had not anticipated came into play. Lies! People would write fictions into this ever-unfolding spectacle. At one point, early on, we the forum were informed that ‘No More Rain’ had been performed as a medley with Chocolate Rain (a viral Youtube video) and ‘It’s Raining Men’ (The Weather Girls, et al.). No wait – with Kylie’s single ‘Chocolate.’ In the end, however, ‘No More Rain’ would be played as an encore track all by its lonesome. French rapper MC Solaar was to have joined Mz Minogue on her final song, filling in for the absent MIMS on ‘All I See’ only to be revised with the click of the refresh button.

The real-time storm of info – true and false, vague and illegible, from Getty Images to near-abstract Nokia shots – was overwhelming, exhillirating and quickly became too much for this excitable spectator. I had to get out. Hours later, when I returned to the computer, the internet was abuzz with 30sec lo-fi cameraphone clips of tracks with French fans singing over Kylie’s vocals, bass so heavy that the only audible sound was the breaking of someone’s recorder function. Of course, the vast majority of this information comes from illegitimate sources – avid consumers like myself. Not the official ones. “It’s Not Official Until It’s On Kylie.com” an avatar reminds us on her homepage.

All of this focused my understanding. Was this event in which I partook not a frenzied version of the traditional ballad song passed from person to person, evolving with each voice? Did Kylie not function as a sort of modern-day folkloric or deity figure the people might speculate over and narrativize? The ballad perpetuated intrigue in the iconic or god and yet put them at the mercy of the people – their being lay in their proliferation by the people. A huge part of Kylie’s hype is tied to leaks, or unreleased tracks which have found their way onto the egalitarian internet. A dropped tune here and there can lead to months of hype when fielded into the correct hands. What we had on our hands in this instance was a whole carton of such treasures – A NEW TOUR!

Grace Jones does 'La Vie En Rose.'

This article initially appeared in README; Kunsole Songbook and other Stories, 2008. To get your hands on a copy or to understand fully what a Kunsu really is, please visit their website. The song’s initial impression is that of pure Disco; the signature track of her Studio 54 fame needed to be included on the A One Man Show performance video. By now, however, Grace Jones’ image is a critical blend of colonial African iconography, gender stereotypes and autohagiography by way of 80’s street culture. So how does one navigate this demand from new to old? She must seamlessly transition from her post-gendered persona to Disco Diva . To betray her image or betray her fans? This is a wicked and crazed performance.

Grace is shot in silhouette against a pink background. She plays the accordion, blurring the distinction of chanteuse and band hand. Shot from below, she is epic, mythic. Her flourishes are decidedly feminine (make-up, stilettos, gloves). She sports a suit, playing up her physical masculinities. The light slowly falls upon her face. Her shadow is cast as pink where a fiery yellow light defines her profile.

The first vocal line is an abject shock! A horror! She starts the tune speaking with a vulgar nonchalance. France’s most celebrated chanson d’amour becomes a callous litany. It’s true punk. The French only heightens her air of detachment. This marriage of the foreign tongue and emotional remove recalls Dietrich’s tuxedoed performance of ‘Quand L’amour est Mort’ in Josef Von Sternberg’s Morocco. Drifting beyond androgyny through a tunnel of postcolonialism, Jones toys with the anxiety that gives rise to fetishism – reveling in or satirizing her symbolic lack.

As Meriam Kershaw noted in her essay ‘Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones, “Since its colonial conquests in Africa, France in general and Paris in particular had cultivated a fascination with the myth of the Black Venus… Josephine Baker had exploited this obsession with signs of racial difference, and Jones, with her striking figure and provocative manner, filled the fascination of les parisiens for things foreign and new.” The colonized croons the grandest song of her oppressors. Using language as metaphor, Jones internalizes the colonial conflict aligning it with the individual’s pressure to conform to gendered stereotypes. Chanson meets battle cry.

At a midlyric point, Grace startlingly slips into her original croon, that emotive force we had at first anticipated. Her strong jaw loosens into diva-mouth. But in a fluid motion, it locks and darts back to a grimace once again. Her eyes glaze – perhaps they might have once shed tears, but now they turn to marbles. She’s not lost control. Jones transforms the tune into a schizophrenic assault, a brash ballet of denial – jeering the audience’s hopes of her song, her femininity. She shapes the first chorus’ final lyric from croon to cartoonish yowl.

Jones is careful to always present herself in either profile or frontal shots, rendering herself iconographic. The world of ikons is not just her sartorial stomping ground, it is her.

At an instrumental break, she casually plays music as if no longer under our scrutinous gaze. She activates her role as being watched, shaming the onlooker and thus denying the pleasure of cinematic scopophilia. Unlike the typical concert film, A One Man Show is marked by the audience’s absence. The lack of an active looking at of Grace Jones refuses the video’s spectator an identifiable look of desire. If, as Laura Mulvey describes in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium…” Jones dashes the dominating gaze by allowing it no sturdy ground. “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate…” It is through the gaze of the surrogate that the scopophilic tendency is fulfilled. Robbing the scene of any look but Jones’ accusatory outward glare, the video’s prevention of voyeuristic fulfillment produces Jones as the agendered object of erotic pleasure, the fetish.

As Mulvey details the Sternberg/Dietrich films, “she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look.” She presents herself to the spectator, a fetish to be looked at, an object outside of gender – outside of that love which might humanize her or the colonialist who may conquer her. For Jones, they’re one in the same. She recommences with her accordion accompaniment.

The second verse closes in on Grace. The camera is far tighter in. She sings in English and we begin to comprehend her. Her linguistic demystification betrays a vulnerability only heightened by her facial 3/4-turn and this more scrutinous camera angle. She clasps the microphone guardedly – as though it were a weapon. Grace is under attack. She wants not to proclaim her love yet she does. ‘The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game’ seems a more appropriate standard for the moment. Her eyes dart about as though on the hunt, mere moments distinguishing her from huntress to hunted. She barrels through the verse, gaining cool as the camera tracks back. After another snarling “La Vie” she renders herself iconic, encore.

As the final chorus begins, she is pure disco. Grace wears the accordion like a shawl and is again placed against a purely pink backdrop. She offers a theatrical, sideways turn and delivers into the mic as she is supposed to, all emotional and in 3/4 profile. It’s pink and lovely and soaring.

Then the yellow is back! We’re full frontal, Ikon Jones. She holds her accordion, no longer a shawl but a tool. She grabs the microphone and launches into a commanding and hateful tear through of “La Vie En Rose”s until we’re close-up. Her scowl and rage melts into a teardrop. Cut to a wider shot and she’s shedding a solitary tear. It’s meant to be emotional in a way that reads as sloppy, uncharacteristic.

It is, of course, an ironic destabilizing of the tune’s femininely gendered schmaltz. A body double erupts in a flamboyant gesture. She puts both hands to her head and flails them about in an obtusely parodic woe, ridiculing the song’s melodrama. As Jack Halberstam wrote of Grace, “She loses control and her crazy gender, something much more charismatic than androgyny, her masculine intensity and her feminine mania literally force a connection between disco and punk – we dance with her to the edge of sanity, crying now, laughing later.”

A schizophrenic Grace ends the track, a blank look across her face. She speaks the final lines confusedly, crushed – attempting to make amends of these conflicting demands. The tune closes with a broken spell. Grace sloughs off the accordion and allows it to drop to the ground for the retrieval by a stagehand.

Manifesting the disparate and crippling social conventions prescribed to her gender, what’s more – shaping colonialism as gender metaphor – Grace Jones’ performance is a conflicted dance. This is one of Jones’ most subversive works as it utilizes that most famous of chansons – her vehicle, even – as a grounds for the deconstruction of normative social conceptions of femininity, locking them, embattled, within a singular performance. She aligns the spectator’s gaze with the violating charge of colonialism and uses it to critique gender stereotypes. She is at once masochist and sadist demanding our gaze and ridiculing us for looking – traipsing from reverence to rape in a single note.

Trying to hear 'I Will Always Love You'

I was a child of the nineties. Raised in a rather small town with nominal theaters and on solely-network television channels, I had first access to certain cultural phenomena through parody. The nineties were no exception to the Vaudvillian lineage which was by then the network sitcom and comedy hours, lampooning contemporary social conventions and trends. Realizing something first in parody develops a stigma of superiority within the viewer. In watching, and reading the comedy inherent in the ridiculed source, it is common to develop a sense of mastery over the once-earnest subject. In short, it establishes you as one of a body of people who choose (or, as they might argue, know) to laugh as opposed to cry. The parodic viewer might argue strength over he who finds the intentional value in that which is being parodied as he resists the parodied subject’s powers of persuasion.

Imagine the maelstrom of emotions colliding within me in recent months as I drive, cook, bathe, dance… to the motion picture soundtrack for The Bodyguard (a film that I viewed for the first time mere months ago). In the 90’s, the stigma of The Bodyguard was inescapable. Whitney was a force of nature that lurked in every sound-emitting device. Having never seen the film, only its cavalcade of doppelgangers, I had always assumed this “superior” position and read it as a frivolous picture, its soundtrack: audio wallpaper. I was too avant garde to even allow a moment’s listen to this pop disc.

In my (more) adult years, having a personal affinity to the Dolly Parton version of the (in)famous ‘I Will Always Love You,’ I took Whitney’s as a commercial affront to more heartfelt coos. I had recently ended a relationship and sat in a room with Parton’s take, crying. Dolly didn’t help, but her tune felt personal in a way that made Whitney’s meretricious.

It’s an elaborate construction – the buying of Whitney’s version. Ridiculed as the film is (and it is ridiculous), it is as much a key to the tune’s success as Whitney’s back catalogue. I don’t know if I ever actually sat down and listened to her ‘I Will Always Love You’ in its entirety before my recent viewing of the film, but the clumsy build of the film’s narrative erupts in a magnificent use of the power-ballad. The Bodyguard is, essentially, a feature-length, big budget trailer for the tune. In that final 3 minutes, my jaw dropped and I basked in the brilliant workings of this contrived picture. I let the track in – for the first time. And I will always love you.

It’s a way of owning a moment, of conjuring a feeling with every press of the repeat button. With one play, we’re whirling on the runway, loosening the scarf and leaping into the arms of our loved one (let’s, for the moment forget that he happens to be a be-crew-cutted Kevin Costner). The track’s structure is such that each listen is a mounting narrative unto itself. Whitney starts off solo. This is her Dolly moment. She’s isolated (read: emotional?) in her delivery – though that mechanically magnificent voice which gave her great fame also robs Dolly’s vulnerability from the tune. Hence the a capella. Hold the schmaltz. Tell it like it is. And then an acoustic guitar. That helps. We’re treated to this sparsity for what feels like some time – interesting in the Houston cannon. It picks up after a while and we earn a beat - there’s our Whitney and the title line that now arrives as naturally as the pledge of allegiance. (I still can’t get into that sax interlude, however.) Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the song does not even flow from Whitney at all. It’s that kick drum that assures us that the best is yet to come – that she will always love you, again – Bigger! Just before the final bellowing “Iiiiiiiii,” it penetrates a false close of the song like a lite in the darkness. Then we’re in Whitney’s downpour. This is the big crescendo, the Oscar moment (had the song not been written 19 years prior), the moment that sells the chemistry absent in the films preceding 2 hours. That’s a lot for one moment, but Whitney sure knows how to work it. Repeat.

It’s difficult to be of a certain cultural persuasion and try a listen at this song. Not listening in the spirit of my youth in which I snigger and alienate the tracks foolishness nor the non-listening which the track has probably most frequently found: pouring from mall walls, doctor’s offices and from parking lot speakers, disguised as rocks. Perhaps this is in partial reaction to the cold irony of my initial take, but I buy into it and allow myself to assume a subservient role to a tune so precisely constructed for mass consumption that it is still the greatest selling female pop single of all time.

My initial impulse was that of embarrassment. Much like Carl Wilson who recently contributed to the 33 1/3 series a slim volume on Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love, my first few weeks of listening were done at low volumes with closed windows lest the neighbors or casual passers-by know my folly. But that is no way to treat this track! This is a behemoth. Whitney does not deliver Dolly’s coos but traverses the world with her chords. As soon as I became comfortable with this new love, the volume raised and the car windows were lowered. I owned it.

Now I’m not thoroughly convinced that this tune has the slightest thing to do with the song Parton’s wrote and performed. I’m interested in how, in discussing the track, my allusions have been spacial and have only referenced the title line of the lyric. I think ‘I Will Always Love You’ obliterates the necessity of language. ‘I Will Always Love You,’ because of its being as a cover, its being as a vehicle and its exhaustive repetitions is post-linguistic. Just as Rachel never truly falls for Frank in the film, I never, for a moment, even register the words Whitney barrels through in her delivery. (I remember an embarrassing moment some years back at a Karaoke bar in which I selected the track in jest, feeling oh-so familiar with it, only to find myself surprisingly at a loss for words - I had no idea how this song I "knew" went.) I know this is ‘I Will Always Love You’ because I know ‘I Will Always Love You.’ It is impossible to hear ‘I Will Always Love You’ (as a recording, a woman singing in a room) as the first few notes find the listener rapt in the exhaustive pop connotations that the song has since endowed.

These are personal (at school dances, weddings or my television watching and solitary crying), cultural post- and narratively pre-scribed. The song’s great commercial success has rendered it a glistening beacon of connotation and abstraction. I listen and I recall late night hit collection infomercials. I see scenes from shows as diverse as The Critic and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I wade through memories so steeped in my unconscious that they’re not truly memories at all, but vague feelings of recognition. And finally I see Rachel Marron. I’ve been doing my best to hear it these past few months, but there I always find myself, on that runway, tugging at my scarf and hurtling into the arms of love. Until I hit repeat and do it all over again.

On Wanting

I had a startling realization this morning, waiting in a too long a line for an over-priced latte at my neighborhood fair-trade coffee shop. My tastes have always been subject to great contention and I’m typically just as confused at my impulses as onlookers. In a recent conversation with a friend, over margaritas and a flat screen televising the Primary Democratic Debates, I offered my views on why I choose Hillary. There are a few really, and all stem from the “wrong” reasons. I was out to dinner with another friend the night she won the New Hampshire primary. It was a quaint little restaurant with 3 tvs sitting in various corners. Hillary graced the screen just behind my friend’s head. Her lips were curled outward in the most delirious of smiles. She scanned the crowd with the rabid victoriousness of a child who received not merely the train-set but the baseball bat too. For an entire year, that child pined for those objects and imagined his hands, encircling the wooden curvature of the bat, his eyes circling round and round, tracing the imaginary trajectory of that would-be train.

I was that child – not with bats or trains, god knows – but his wanting is something I know as instinct. So Hillary, with her glib grimace touched something innate and perhaps horribly awry within me. I want Hillary to win because she wants to, bad enough. This is something she has wanted, I imagine, from the outset, from the moment she uttered her first word: “President.” When others were attending to state of the union speeches, lil’ Hil was glued to the set, circling the oval office with designs of her own. She would do anything to get there – prompting more than a few in-poor-taste jokes amongst friends of Hillary’s many by-hand homicides or her drinking of freshly drawn baby’s blood. She wants this presidency the most, I feel. Because of her want, I want for her to have it.

It’s not just about Hillary, I realized as I changed Kylie tunes on my iPod, still eyeing the barista, 10 or so people ahead of me in line. I began to think about all the choices I’ve made in the obsessions I foster, musicians I cherish, actresses I adore. I can always trace it back to the Disney villain. I think of Aladdin’s sorcerer, Jafar (and I could also think of Ursula, the sea witch – but there’s a whole trove of problematics there that would need more hashing than I plan on doing here). I don’t recall his particular yearning at the moment – it was probably what most villains strive for when the going gets simple: Power. But damn did he want it. And while Aladdin and Princess Jasmine cooed to each other on their magic carpet, happening upon delightful things while Celine Dion piped in overhead, Jafar was out there being proactive about his desires. Aladdin stumbles upon the lamp and gets what he wants. Jafar tries to get shit done. Of course, he’s condemned for his productivity. If god will it to be, it will happen.

But I say fuck that. If I want that leather jacket, I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen. Am I a horrible person? I’d like to think not. In the movie version of me, would I be a villain? I suppose that’s likely. Is it petty? Totally, but I know it. I own that. I know what makes me tick, and that should count for something. There are lots of people who have endured from their implacability. I think that’s part of the reason I am an avid Kylie Minogue devotee. She skipped onto the scene in 1987 with her hollow cover of the Locomotion. 20 years later, she’s not the toast of Great Britain because she sat on a carpet and pointed out wonders as they passed her by. She took. You can see it in her smile. Her whole image is lite, sincere and girlie. But girlie fades at some point and her giving and perky smirk has acquired a particular undertone in recent years. You get a whiff of calculation, that whatever you’re thinking, she’s trying to be 2 steps ahead. Whatever she does, she’s in it to win it. Does this make her wrong? Is she a villain because she yearns for success?

I’ve always hated the requisite moment of those movies, from Babyface to Mahogany, where a woman comes out on top and, right when she has that raw pulse of success beating in her jaws, she packs up camp and goes back to the mister. I guess if you don’t you infringe upon Mommie Dearest or Fatal Attraction terrain. Is the libidinal really all that wretched? These are some alarming polarities. Of course, when it comes to the woman, success will always be aligned with emasculation (again, Ursula). But I have a great deal of respect for those who wear their desires on their sleeve.

In short, I suppose I’m saying that I like people who want. They need not be good at what they do, even – I think of Maria Montez’s acting attempts. She’s not fabulous because she’s good (far from it), she’s fabulous because she’s going to be a star whatever it takes. That fire burns in her Technicolor eyes. I’ve never been attracted to the seamless. Aladdin and Jasmine just have it too easy. I don’t get that they appreciate what they have. They stare out at the great wonders of the world with their just-so-almond-eyes AND WHIR RIGHT BY THEM! Their journey seems so effortless. These things happen to them. This is the appeal of destiny or, to another extent, what people hope for when they imagine “The One” as if there is a single being out there who has been crafted to perfectly compliment you and that fate will be the determining factor as to when this transcendental union might occur. Is this not far more self-centered than one who involves themselves actively in their narrative?

I like things, of that there is not doubt. A great part of my ideology might be clouded with an innate consumerism, but there’s also a horror to passivity that rests at the center of our culture. The strength of a commodity culture – and one that this article might, admittedly, be a testament to – lies in the act of acquiring (or wanting) and not in the object per se. Baudrillard: Affluence is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness. I get all of that, but I live in Los Angeles. I’m not in some pastoral New Zealand landscape where Beyonce is as far from my mind as filtered water. I distrust the casual far more than the yearners because I cannot relate to them. There is always a motivation lurking beneath of which I am terrifically suspect. When Kylie smiles, I see the nakedness of her enterprise. On Hillary’s glistening caps, I see writ the arrogance of a woman 10 times smarter than I ever hope to be. And I appreciate that. Most people are threatened, but I know where they stand. I know their intentions because they seldom drift farther than themselves. Everyone’s got an angle.

Frankly, if they don’t want it, why should I? If they’re not having a good time, chances are, I’m not either. I don’t have the time to wade through indifference. I like that Hillary knows what she wants, that Kylie can play the game. Give Ursula her damn crown. Much like this insipid wait for my artisanal double latte, she’s earned it.

List(less)ness 2007

The greatest things of 007 in no particular order

1. Torrents! - It took me long enough (and a younger boyfriend) to figure these out, but once I did, OH THE MAGIC! 7.85 Gigs of Kylie Minogue? Yes please! Albums months before their due date (KALA, White Chalk, Distortion, Seventh Tree...)? Hoorah! Unreleased films which might never find distribution (I Could Never Be Your Woman, Rohtenburg: Grim Love, Destricted) at your fingertips? The entire series of Dynasty? The asnwers are obvious! YES!

2. Speaking of Kala... M.I.A.'s second offering could have been a total flounder. Her politico-booty Arular was delicious but forewarned of 1-hit-wonderdom. Could this have been just a taste of a moment to never return? Then, she came back 'with Powa Powa.' Far less friendly than Arular, KALA's powa was evident from her months-prior self-release of 'Bird Flu' - the insanely unlikely dancefloor killer which has seen too few a dance floor. A bad decision to release 'Boyz' at the end of summer instead of promoting all that is the feverous stomper in the swealter of summer was a bad move. And its taken this long to find all of those girls in their ballerina shoes donning their 'How Many How Many' shirts. Girl needs better marketing - but she does get total props for having flip-flops as merch. Cause you know I bought 'em.

3. Live Free or Die Hard - by far the most fun I've had in theaters this year. This delight informs: if something gets in your way, drive a car into it! Helicopter? Asian villain? No problem. And Bruce Willis. I love Bruce Willis. I rented this one a couple weeks ago to rewatch and indulge and the whole time, I could help but holler - "I love you Bruce Willis!" The whole attitude towards information is priceless - as indulgent as the whole car thing. Need cause for our effect? Let Justin Long tap some buttons and of a sudden, presto - whatever information you might need is before you. This is something the Bourne whatever put to great use. But that one didn't have a chase between a mac truck and a stealth fighter. God bless 'em.

4. The Beckhams on the cover of W - culturally defining moment. Next.

5. White Chalk - P J Harvey takes a cue from Nico, who - at the suggestion of Allen Ginsburg - bought a harmonium she had no idea how to play and ran away to Ibiza to work day after day until she's produced an album's worth of songs. Harvey goes one step farther. Where Nico had no real personal sound prior to this, Harvey produced an album with piano that sounds totally consistent with any of her growliest works. Her best album in a decade, easy.

6. the moment in Bug where Ashley Judd screams: "I am the Queen Mother Bug!" God bless Ashley Judd.

7. The return of Paul Verhoeven - Long live the King. There's moment in Zwartboek where you start to wonder if Paul just made a tasteful WWII movie, and then Carice van Houten is stripped naked, beaten, doused with a mammoth vat of excrement and blasted with a hi-power hose. Then, you remember just what was missing in our big budget action fare. I haven't seen a midget hooker in a pink dress toting a machine gun this summer. And I'm all the worse for it.

8. The hype leading up to Kylie's X, though not the album itself - carrying on from the Torrent celebration above, X was preceded by thrilling leaks of the albums best songs and tunes which didn't make the album and, retrospectively, should have. To listen to the leaked material before the albums release and harbor the intense anticipation for the works that WERE good enough to make it there was a total thrill. Of course, scouring the internet like a scavenger is fun in itself. But looking forward to hearing the studio version of White Diamond, a Scissor Sisters song which was toured world-wide only to find it absent was an odd disappointment. Kylie said no to Scissor Sisters, Groove Armada, Mylo and Boy George and yes to songs called 'Nu-Di-Ty'. What's wrong with this picture?

9. Broken English - Parker Posey's back with Powa Powa. After making me sit though Superman Returns, Parker thanks me for my faith with Broken English. Another Cassavetes fancies herself a filmmaker. She's not totally wrong, but the weaknesses of this rather spot-on picture are all directorial. This is one of the best performances Posey's ever delivered and with Drea de Matteo, Gena Rowlands, Justin Theroux, Melvil Poupaud and Peter Bogdanovich to help out, it would be difficult to blunder it. Gena delivers the best line of the year: "You know what they say, your liver's fine as long as you don't drink 2 days a week. (pause) They don't have to be consecutive."

10. Out of the The Woods - She made it through the wilderness. 8 years since 1999's EBTG last offering Tempermental, Tracey Thorn comes with her first solo album in 25 years. It's not perfect in the cutting edge of music, challenging musical genres way, but it sure works for me. Tracey has really cut herself a niche for people who like to leave their hipness at the door and just get washed with her distinct vocals. This one didn't leave my ipod repeat all summer. Dance tracks will not put any spells on anyone not already a slave to her rhythm, but perhaps the quietly poignant ballads which she oddly made with one of the hottest dance producer/remixers right now will do the convincing.

11. And his name is Ewan Pearson. Hot as hell, an academic and having produced some of the greatest remixes in recent years, Pearson released his two full lengths, proper this year. One, a DJ mix, Fabric 35 and the other, Piecework, a 2 disc compilation of his remix material. Just listen to his 16+ minute remix of Goldfrapp's Ride a White Horse. This is the art of the remix, period. Did I mention he's hot?

12. Justice in Clubs, but not on the stereo - I can't really listen to the album straight the way through, but I'll be damned when I hear that D.A.N.C.E.

13. Rose McGowan.

14. Celebrity blog photos of Sharon Stone - Ever since her stroke, Sharon Stone has been popping up everywhere like Where's Waldo or something. She's hanging out with Lindsay Lohan and she's singing with Kylie Minogue. Her inclusion here is perhaps solidified by this photo of her at an aids benefit wearing what seems to be a fur comforter. This thing trains the entire carpet behind her and, from the blah look on Stone's face, you'd think she was at a MacDonalds or something. Not that you'd EVER catch her there.

15. Not having an iPhone - Because, I'm thoroughly convinced that everyone toting one of these things is an asshole. I don't care what it does when you spread your fingers, though truth be told, it does seem like an ingenious little toy. It's just that, whenever someone ahem... pulls it out, it is always with this glance that reads, "that's right, I've got one." And the bill to prove it, darlin'.

Gang, Bang.

Jodie Foster's recent contributions to the cinema have been statuary at best. Maternal catastrophes and oblique espionage strategies took over the typically internal actress. Miss Foster made an art of harboring gruesome memories - not enacting them, per se. So, with her newest offering, she more or less returns to her roots. True, in non-flashbacks we witness the pinba... er tunnel attack which puts her in a coma and her fiancé in a plot. But that's the fine oiled monster of Hollywood logic. Now, because we have lived through Erica's turmoil, we can understand her want to get even.

At once far more artful than any of her recent pictures, and still not quite fun-artless, The Brave One is obviously an intended return to form for Miss Foster, who hand picked the role and demanded various script rewrites. And yet, there's a core deficiency in all of the film's characters. Even tortured Erica is so excruciatingly one dimensional that the shifts in her drive (revenge, justice, bloodthirst) bear no logical progression. Her character changes after the beating (we're privy to countless voice over analogies as to how she's become a stranger to herself, another person entirely...), but our capeless urban superheroine oscillates so greatly in her intentions that without any raison d'être, there is no plausibility to her transgression.

Self-consciously written to embrace a myriad of complex issues like vigilantism and that oh-so-fine line between right and wrong, the film becomes lost in the forest of capitol I Issues. Not knowing where, why or how to turn, the film's second hour is a muddled whirl, grasping for any morally firm ground. And much like Foster's perpetual flâneurie, the film breezes past such issues with a falsely confident terseness - as if mere mention was a form of critique.

Foster's acting is fine - as plausible as anyone in recent Hollywood who's won an Academy Award. It's a Performance and that's what we expect. But she could take happy lessons. The first of two unconvincing moments finds Foster chipper and shopping for wedding invitations, being reminded that the envelope is not cream but vanilla. Her perfectly sacrificial, perfect fiancé scoops her in his meaty and stable arms and her eyes show the worry of what's to come. "Not yet, Jodie!" a directing-on-autopilot Neil Jordan should have chimed. Unconvincing moment #2 (and because of this, one of the film's most memorable) finds Foster in a dingy bathroom, using a cracked mirror to apply lipstick - something so disarmingly awkward for Miss Foster. "Hey you," she flirts in the CRACKED (get it?) mirror.

Violence in The Brave One is something we have our nose rubbed in, not like Cronenberg's recent meditating on the explicitness of what violence truly is, but as a moral reminder - lest we forget. Foster guns down two robbers and potential rapists on the subway. A body slumps out the automatic doors when she leaves. A reminder of the action which occurred moments prior. Are we that prone to forget? Never is it quite disturbing - even a shot to the eye resembles a slot into which a child would insert a plastic peg.

Everything else is pretty dull. Jane Adams is hilariously underused - literally ignored out of the movie. And Terence Howard might as well have been playing a badged ottoman. But the ending! Oh, the ending! When we finally receive our undeserved reward! In perhaps the most bafflingly stupid plot twist I can recall, we receive our moment of emotional transcendence - replete with swooping crane shots, self-reflective voice over and Sarah McLachlan score. The ending's preposterousness made me love the film ultimately - perhaps because it overrides the purpose of its preceded 130 minutes. I learned a lot from Jodie last night - though I presently can't quite recall what. Save that she really needs to be taught how to correctly apply lipstick.

Coining the Feminine Fortification Flick

There would seem to be a new genre of cinema which has developed over the past few years, passing under the radar as summer action fare. Distinct from the phallocentric summer smash 'em / blow-up pic, we have recently found women struggling against the perils of urbanity to rescue their children from some unfathomable nasty. This nasty may come in the form of an absurdly convoluted hijacking scheme or an alien virus from space which overtakes the body. In any event, the narrative requires our female protagonists to deny her trust in fellow man and coast on impulse (contra logic) to keep her dear child from the harm at hand. Call it the Feminine Fortification Flick. Two years ago it came in the shape of the Jodi Foster vehicle, Flightplan. A woman, bereaving the recent death of her husband, takes her daughter on the newest, coolest plane ever only to have that child robbed from her. Shot from the estrogentatious point of view of our woman in peril, every figure in the film (read, masculine) is, not merely in her way, but the cause of her duress. Urban man's selfishness has caused many a woman to lose her child.

For the sake of this umpteenth remake of The Body Snatchers, in steps Nicole Kidman's Carol - a statuary figure of maternity if ever there was one. When we first lay eyes on her, donning the tightest white tee and see through sleep slacks - neither of which leave anything to the imagination, she's a marble sex object setting the breakfast table for her son. There's been a space shuttle catastrophe and all of the backwater ruralites just can't help touchin' the shards. These shards, of course, contain some alien compound which causes a cellular takeover in the toucher. All they need to do is go to sleep. They then become expressionless communists. Only problem is, until informed that, in order to pass as one of these reds, you must never show emotion, Kidman never shows a drop of humanism. She flatly declares the adoration of her son and she doesn't get hot from kissing (a horribly bored) Daniel Craig. To me, that's inhuman. But no, she's one of the remaining few who has not succumbed to the infectious bile these alien clones spew. In explaining the benefits to this new conformity, someone dear to her reminds her of a trip to the country. To take part in this alien race is to be interconnected(continuous), "like those trees in the forest" and see the end of world hunger and poverty. Doesn't really sound like much of a bad thing. And yet the narrative drives this woman to divorce herself from compassion towards fellow man as a means of survival. People run down the street crying and Kidman watches as they're hauled off to be sedated. Don't intervene cause then you're next. (Hating to be a contrarian, but haven't we learned anything from that whole holocaust thing?)

One must certainly take into account the target audience for these pictures - the suburban multiplexes of mid-America. In writing on consumer society, theorist Jean Baudrillard warns, "the tranquility of the private sphere has to appear as a value preserved only with great difficulty, constantly under threat and beset by the dangers of a catastrophic destiny. The violence and inhumanity of the outside world are needed not just so that security may be experienced more deeply as security...but also so that it should be felt justifiable at every moment as an option." Within the confines of our narrative, Kidman's passivity is this justification, translated for the patrons of the world who fortify themselves deeper within the home - buy the bigger cars, get the security system, do not talk to strangers - and shut out the possibility of urban peril. If society is your foe, the remedy is simple. This is the message these films purport.

As a film, The Invasion is irrevocably preposterous, and anyone who still maintains Kidman's strength as an actress must be exposed to this positively stoney performance. But the fact remains, this offering in FFF criminally justifies selfishness and brutality, even. The film's closing shadows a frightening justification on our occupation in Iraq - as a purely human impulse. "Own it," it would seem. That's what makes us human, a voice-over reminds, as if peace were something so alien to humanity that to embrace it would transform us into something else entirely. But that, it would seem, is terrain for Nicole to traverse.

Character Study: Claudia Blaisdale

The swelling pompousness of the opening score with its erudite grandeur. Even the little musical murmurs are decadent. Slight instruments which only belong in full orchestras tremor with excitement. My excitement. My excitement at every single episode. I'm blissfully unemployed and partaking in excesses of Dynasty, whose second season was released on DVD last week. I've already worked my way through it. 22 episodes in one week. 6 discs. Suffice to say I'm steeped. But everyone dismisses me when I talk about it. They click their tongues like I'm engaged in some frivolous affair - like watching the walls would be more worthwhile. I know better.

It's callous ludicrousness hasn't reached the extent that it would. Far from the Moldovian massacre, I'm worried about the arrivals of the more feathered ladies. The Eighties ladies. Girls really, cause Krystle and Alexis are the ladies. It still has its pertinence. It takes drastic turns you wouldn't expect it to. There's, of course, the gay son, but by season two he's rather old hat. So he beds Heather Locklear - cause what gay son wouldn't? Then he makes his zealous departure. Alexis makes Krystle lose her baby by firing a rifle at her horse. Nearly everything Alexis does is magically rancorous. And she turns this acerbity into sonnets. But Krystle gets even. The first ever Dynasty catfight is worth the legacy. I don't think its a moment which particularly warrants words.

After a dull turn in season one, I found myself shocked as Claudia endeared herself to me. Kooky Claudia whose fits of depression and maternal regrets burdened the premier season turn to balletically crazed hysterics. Oh Claudia, dear, dear Claudia. Your daughter, Lindsay, is gone. Her husband took her cause Claudia slept with the gay son. There's a lot of women around this gay son... Krystle accidentally shoots her in the head - that aids the crazy. Then she can fervorously scratch at the invisible head wound (here, hairdos trump naturalism) whenever irritated. Read, whenever she hears what she doesn't want to. "I finally figured it out about you." She tells Krystle, nodding her bandaged head like a battered Mother Theresa. "God punished you , he punished you. He took your baby cause you took mine.... You deserved to lose your baby. God chose to make it happen. Can't you see how simple it really is?" She throws a baby off a roof, but not before she declares what a beautiful mountain they're standing on. She develops a habit of flicking her wrist theatrically when she's upset.

Claudia is the design for future soap crazies like Kimberly (Melrose Place) and Amber (Footballers Wive$). She is the ultimate in feminine duress. Her suicide attempt at the opening of the season causes her to bed in restraints. She limply tugs at the bindings. Claudia's sole purpose in life is reunification with her daughter ("Where's my daughter!"). Blake's nemesis Cecil Colby makes her spy while under employ at Denver Carrington because he knows the whereabouts of her Lindsay. But when the car carrying Lindsay is found ablaze in an amazon jungle, Claudia is given free reign to cull from the sample book of crazy. She cuts out clothing she'll buy for her daughter from magazines "because clothes are so important at her age." She habitually places her fingers to her lips, eyes darting about the room. Her magnificence is in her casualness. The Colby baby is snatched and she sighs, breezing by the frantic parents, "Well I did see a foreign looking man with a dark beard by the greenhouse... but I didn't recognize him. Is something the matter?"

Caludia is really the star attraction of season two. Everyone else is cast as themselves. Linda Evans stands regal and statuary. Her appeal has never quite made sense to me: all white and flowing. But then I always preferred the Disney villains. And that would be Miss Collins. In her first show, she tells Fallon, her daughter, "I'm glad to see your father got your teeth fixed... if not your tongue." When a pregnant Fallon crashes her car into a mound of dirt, a beglitzed Alexis (donning a golden gown, trimmed with innumerable fox tails) shakes her conscious with a rabid hysteria. Collins' faux British exclamations of "FALLON! FALLON! Oh God, there's been an accident!" are, in a word, fabulous but don't hold a candle to Claudia's obsessive thespian free-for-all.

Dynasty worked because it refused to conform to respectability. Claudia is a soap Jodi Foster or Julianne Moore. The fact that she was a soap character allowed her to take the role to a far more indulgent place. She embraces the absurdity of her trappings and carries it over the threshold of decency. What would sadly become a one dimensional show with pallid character types is here, in its infancy, a delightfully absurdist melodrama with multifaceted characters. It's a well balanced extremism. It's decadence still casting a curious gaze on American want instead of pandering to it. There is no better a figure of this fissure than Claudia, who, in season one, was a lower class waitress. Recently out of her first stint in an asylum she viewed the Carrringtons like an exotic creature in a cage. By season two they all but adopted her, bearing the weight of her psychological instability. She doesn't know how to make the transition. But really, would we?

The Ballad of Nora Wilder

Yes, I have an affinity for Miss Posey. In my younger years, I picked up a rental VHS of Party Girl and my midwestern yearning for hipness contra my total geekdom found its ideal balance. In short, I fell in love. A decade on me, Parker's career has been a forewarning of sorts. In her most empathetic roles, she has addressed the dilemma of burgeoning adulthood. There's a scene in Party Girl where Mary complains, "I'm going to be 24 soon. I haven't done anything with my life." I'm feeling you now, Mary. She would , of course, discover the magic of the Dewey Decimal system and become a librarian. Well, Nora Wilder, Posey's incarnation in Broken English (released yesterday on DVD) traverses a similar terrain. Nora went to Sarah Lawrence for art but was somewhere sidetracked and now maintains V.I.P. relations at a swank New York hotel. "I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up," she laughs off into her cup of sake.

A romantic comedy, Broken English smartly adheres to that structure. The film takes great care in exploring the emotional costs of being single in New York City. The opening scene finds Nora dressing for a party, alone in her apartment. She smokes and considers a bottle of prescription pills. She replaces the bottle and examines herself. After repeated swigs of wine, dressed, she sits down. She's not yet ready to face the music.

As a romantic comedy, it works from a simple formula, but the film understands it as such: a formula within which it might confront some less attractive subjects. Nora is a woman of a privileged pedigree and the film cuts her no slack to this end (neither does it entirely condone it). A great factor in her trappings, it is of no import what life Nora makes for herself if she is to merely rely on a husband's trust fund. To rely so strongly on another is a gamble, and pushing 35, Nora is empty handed. She also suffers from crippling anxiety and one of the film's stronger scenes finds Posey rushing home to her medication. Nora has lost sight of what she wants out of life. Coasting through, the film's best moments are not those which find her on many disastrous dates (Josh Hamilton, Justin Theroux), but those moments alone, at home - doing the rote things which take her mind off of her life. Isn't that what a romantic comedy is for? Distracting from life's diversions.

A man arrives, of course. It helps that he's the absurdly sumptuous Melvil Poupaud. In addition to being delicious and French, he's benign and sturdy, though the film thankfully spares us from making their language barrier into a trite metaphor (man / woman). And so we arrive at the midsection swelled with jouissance. As simply as the movie falls into its daydreamy affair, however, so seamlessly does it oscillate to Nora's neurosis. Here, a woman so accustomed to failure, battles with her inability to yield to what just might be exceptionally good. She asks to define their romance in the bathtub - obviously investing a great deal of emotion into their union. "We have no contract," Julien replies. The film certainly simplifies Julien, but it is not his film. He is the catalyst for Nora's introspection. Such is the strength of the Romantic Comedy structure. He must eventually return to Paris, and invites her along. When she does not follow, so begins Nora's reevaluation of life.

True, having a man be the only possible catalyst for self discovery is not the most progressive of approaches. But once more, we are reading the film from the structural standpoint of a romantic comedy. This is how it occurs in such films. Genre carries with it strict rules of conduct which Broken English wholeheartedly respects; where there is room for liberties, however, is where shines brightest.

Of course, combining two of my favorite P's (Parker, Paris) endears me to it greatly (all that's missing is the Pet Shop Boys' soundtrack). Cause you know she goes to Paris to find Julien. Her scenes there with Drea De Matteo are a comical delight, but it is Posey's ability to balance the humor with turmoil that makes it her best acting credit to date. Make no mistake, the film is Posey's most humanely dark. Her misery is heartwrenching, but it does provoke a personal liberation. Cause, yes, it being a RomCom, she comes to the realization that she so desperately needs. And this moment is of such great importance that the film's final (if not entirely guessable) surprise seems but a pleasant addendum.

Mary's all grown up. Well, she's on the right track, anyway. The film really could be viewed as a thematic sequel to Party Girl - just swap Judy Lindendorf (Sasha Von Scherler) for Gena and the gay guy for Drea (neither are much of a stretch). What happens when the lights come up and you're 35? Thanks to Parker, I kind of know what to expect. Thank god I've got a decade to prepare...

Drôle over

Why in the hell did Catherine Breillat make Sex Is Comedy? (I figured, what with 2 Days in Paris in theaters, I would reassess another French filmmaker's vanity project last night.) Now I adore Catherine Breillat. She is certainly one of my favorite thinkers - favorite female filmmaker for certain. Breillat became famous in France in 1969 when, at 16, she published her first novel "L'Homme Facile" (then strangely translated into "A Man for the Asking"). It was subsequently banned to any reader under the age of 18. Her first filmic endeavor 7 years later, Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Girl), met a similar fate when it was banned outright for the remainder of the century.

Never relenting in either arena (though filmmaking was mostly limited to screenwriting throughout the 80's), Breillat has garnered a good deal of dubious street cred in her native France. Her name elsewhere (unless followed with "the director of Romance") is far from household. Sex Is Comedy goes above and beyond an earned entitlement as French provocateur, assuming that the on set goingson of a Breillat film are fascinating enough warrant a feature from. This is Breillat making a film about Breillat making a film. Now as an