#also. the way this is directly contrasted with the husband and wife choosing to live a lie.

[ireneae]

House 5.17, "The Social Contract"

#house md #houseedit #gregory house #james wilson #i.edit #x #scenes of all time!!! #a man will have one relationship where he doesn't have to tell comforting lies and knows he won't be told comforting lies in return #and it will be the most meaningful relationship of his entire life #also. the way this is directly contrasted with the husband and wife choosing to live a lie. #well !

[clarasghosts]

just finished white lotus season two, and the thing that got me that so many of the guests had in common was how they just wouldn't make choices. it's easy to say that's embodied in albie, the textbook definition "nice guy" (who is actually rather nice, in this case) not deciding things for himself, like not going to talk to portia just because she was talking to some other guy, and then ultimately falling for lucia's scam. but it's also portia leading albie on because she couldn't just decide for herself that she didn't like him, and then being tricked by jack because he had a strong enough personality to really rather force her into situations. with ethan, i spent the whole series wondering what do you even want, because he would get mad that harper possibly cheated on him, but he didn't seem to even want her either. and tanya's fate was sealed in season one when she almost made a choice for herself to really do something, but instead invested all her energy and money into a shitty guy who barely even seemed to tolerate her simply because he was willing to sleep with her.

daphne almost seems to get this in her insistence that she does what she wants in her life and marriage as a way of handling cameron's infidelity and general shittiness. but she's not as eyes-wide-open in her marriage as she'd like to think, since it's clear that his continued infidelity hurts her and she just tells herself that it doesn't. even doing what she wants is to spite her husband - it revolves around him and his behavior, rather than what she actually wants or what makes her happy.

by contrast, lucia and mia have much more clearly defined goals. they know that they want money (lucia), opportunity (mia), and freedom and control over their own lives. i think that's why, of everyone in this particular story, they end up successful. they knew what they wanted and worked deliberately and directly to get it.

and that's what makes dominic rather interesting (as much as it pains me to admit, since i tend to despise his type of character). he starts the story giving into every impulse the way tanya would give into her every insecurity. but then he decides he really does want to repair things with his wife (and daughter?), so he starts to consciously choose his actions with that goal in mind. and he actually makes progress.

#i guess moral of the story is know what you want and go for it or others will decide for you #moral of mia's story i guess is that if a guy offers to help you with your career in exchange for a 'favor' #just poison him a little #the white lotus

[annabethy]

42 ;)

#42 I’m going to save you from the terrible date you’re having,, percabeth

Annabeth’s sure her face looks incredibly pained right now as she stares her date in the eyes. She’s been on quite a few dates before. She thought she'd seen rock bottom by now, but no. This was rock bottom. Every two seconds her date was finding ways to insult her, and she was about one more comment from snapping.

“So, why did you decide to become an architect?” Luke asks. He leans forwards onto his elbows, and for once he looks genuinely interested by her answer. She truly doesn’t want to answer, but she knows that she’s stuck here for at least another hour if she doesn’t want to stoop to his level, so she doesn’t see any option other than to answer.

“I’ve just always been so interested by it,” Annabeth says, leaning forwards to match his stance. She smiles hesitantly when his eyes trail down the front v of her dress she had mistakenly decided to wear. She pauses for a few seconds, thinking maybe he’d have the decency to look away, but his eyes stay glued to her chest, prompting her to sit back up and pretend to scratch her neck just to block his view. “Ever since I was a little girl, I just wanted to be an architect, I guess.”

Luke clears his throat. “I can’t imagine why you’d ever want to do that though.”

“Uh—what?”

“Architecture is so… boring. Not only is it boring, but it’s for people that are good with math and have a big future ahead of them, and I just don’t get those vibes from you.”

Annabeth scoffs in his face.

“We’re both looking for something serious—“

“Never said that.”

“—so I’m going to be straight to the point. I want my wife to be someone there for me. I’ve a busy man, and I’m going to need your help so I can’t have you working your own job.”

Annabeth honestly didn’t think people like this actually existed. She’s met some despicable guys before; she was practically a magnet for them. But Luke had seemed like such a generous person, and she somehow thought that today would be enjoyable. She has never been more wrong.

“So what do you think?”

“I think…no?”

Luke furrows his eyebrows. “No?”

“Yeah, no.” She blinks at him, and she can tell that he expects a further explanation. She decides not to give him one.

“No one’s ever said no to me before.”

“Shocker.”

“What did I do wrong? It’s worked on a million girls before you.”

“Wow. A million. You sure know how to pick em.”

He stutters. “I just meant that girls love the idea of not having to work. You all want an easy life, and I’m offering you that.”

“I’m quite sure that no one wants that.”

“It’s a kind agreement.”

“It’s insulting is what it is,” Annabeth says. There’s a touch of humor in her voice because this could not actually be happening.

“I’ll make you an offer because I know that we both want this to work.”

Annabeth snorts.

“You can have a part time job.”

Annabeth rolls her eyes and straightens in her chair, ready to start scolding him loudly, not caring who hears, but before she gets the chance to, someone’s hand is settling onto her shoulder and squeezing. She jumps slightly, tilting her head back to see the person now standing directly behind her, and the face she recognizes but can’t quite pinpoint.

“Hey,” the guy says to Annabeth, looking as though he’s known her his whole life. “Sorry to interrupt but I just wanted to know what time you’d be home tonight.”

Annabeth blinks, her brain taking a minute to catch up with his words. “What time I’ll be home?”

Luke raises an eyebrow in what he thinks is a threatening manner. “I was in the middle of something here.”

“I just wanted to talk to my wife really quick,” the guy says, and Annabeth is sent reeling.

“Wife?” Luke asks weakly.

“Wife,” he repeats surely, smiling widely. He turns to Annabeth. “Also, dear, will you be bringing him home with you? Has he agreed?”

She’s about to open her mouth and state her confusion, but then the guy is winking at her when Luke glances away, and she suddenly gets his drift. “He’s getting there.”

Luke tilts his head like a lost puppy. “Getting where? I’m not getting anywhere with both of you.”

“Huh?” Annabeth pouts. “You said that you were serious about this though.”

“About what?” Luke looks thoroughly scared to hear the answer. Annabeth isn’t entirely sure of the answer herself so she looks to the guy with his hand still on her shoulder for guidance.

The guy clears his throat. “Threesome.”

To his credit, Annabeth thinks he looks quite disgusted with his own words.

“What the fuck?” Luke asks. He’s beginning to lean back in his chair, a precarious position.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you!” Annabeth says brightly. She pats the guy’s hand. “I wasn’t looking for a partner — I was looking for someone willing to help my husband and I. I love him, but after five years, it gets pretty boring if you know what I mean.”

The guy gasps. “We are not boring!”

“Then why are we looking for a threesome?” Annabeth challenges.

“Adventure?”

“No.” She turns to Luke. “You in or out?”

“Literally,” Percy adds.

Luke’s eyes go wide as he looks between her and the guy. He appears to be contemplating his existence, and Annabeth is very proud of the image her and this stranger have created. “Are you serious?”

Annabeth nods expectantly.

“Yeah, I don’t think this is going to work,” he says. He wastes no time before he’s gathering his stuff and practically running out, not even glancing over his shoulder to wave goodbye. Annabeth watches him go, surprised that it had actually worked. The two of them hadn’t exactly given an Oscar worthy performance.

The guy’s eyes trail after Luke until he’s out the door, and then he’s sliding down into the empty seat across from her a few moments later. Annabeth smirks as they stare at each other until he breaks the silence.

“So,” he starts, “you looked like you were getting stuck there. Thought you could use some help.”

She laughs. “And that’s what you thought of?”

“I didn’t really think about it before I set the plan in motion.”

“You should probably start thinking things through before you actually end up in a threesome…” She trails off in a silent question of his name.

“My own wife doesn’t even know my name,” he says, laughing and holding a hand out over the table. “I’m Percy.”

“Annabeth,” she returns. For the first time, she takes a moment to really look at him. Her breath catches slightly on his eyes that were a sparkling green. The crooked smile he was giving her made his face seem brighter in the dim lighting of the restaurant, and the quick flick of his eyes made her flush with heat.

“So, Annabeth, was I correct in assuming he was the devil reincarnate?”

“Painfully so.”

Percy chuckles, lacing his hands together in front of him and resting his chin on them. When he speaks, it’s gentle, for just the two of them. “Oh god. What did he say?”

“He wanted me to stay home and take care of his babies, or some shit.”

“Men,” he says, disgusted.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Yeah, but I like to think I’m different.”

“Oh yeah? How so?”

“Well, for starters, it seems that I’m the one on a date with you.”

“Is that what this is?”

“You tell me.” His eyes are dark but calm. She can tell that he won’t get upset if she rejects him. The way he composed himself was already a big contrast from the way Luke did. He kept his eyes on her face and his hands away from her. He gave her space — she was the one in control, and it was for her to decide what she wants to do.

“I couldn’t say,” she settles for, choosing to push him further. To see how he reacts. “You’re sitting in the middle of a fancy restaurant with me, but why are you here in the first place? Where’s your date?”

“Would you believe me if I said that I work here?”

She looks him up and down. He’s not dressed badly, but it’s by no means work attire. “Not a chance.”

“Well, I do. Kinda.” Percy chews on his lower lip. “I don’t work here, but I’m here all the time. It’s sort of my mom’s restaurant?”

“Wow,” Annabeth says, impressed. “A man who can cook.”

“I’m better with pastries, but I get by.” Percy chuckles. “But no, there’s no other girls in the picture.”

She notices that the smile hasn’t left Percy’s face for one second, and she has to admit she’s never been this intrigued by someone she’s just met before. Something in the back of her head tells her to use her common sense, but she’s been doing that all her life and it still ended with her on a date with Luke. She figures it couldn’t hurt to live a little for once.

“I don’t know how to cook,” she warns, “or pick my men, apparently.”

“It’s your lucky day! I can teach you how to cook, and this is, of course, for you to decide, but I think I’d be an awesome choice of yours.”

Her stomach flutters. “You might just have to prove it, then.”

“I can do just that,” he promises.

“So when’s this first date, then?”

“Did we not settle that this was an impromptu date?”

“You seem desperate.”

“You’re cute,” is all he says.

“I don’t think we want to start something where Luke was first,” she explains, fighting back the blush she can feel creeping up her neck. She grins at his appalled expression.

“You’re so right.”

“How about you teach me to cook for our first date?”

Percy brightens. “Now that I can do.”

And so she grabs her stuff, and he grabs his. He ends up dismissing her check, and when she tries to protest and put some cash down, he takes her hand in his and laces their fingers together instead. He had a gleam in his eyes, and Annabeth would be lying if she said she wasn’t excited.

They spend hours together in the kitchen, cooking everything Percy could think of. She almost burns his apartment down a few times, but he takes it in stride. The cookies come out warm and gooey, and it might be the best thing she’s ever made. By the time it reaches midnight, Annabeth is covered head to toe in flour and his lips are against hers. She doesn’t mind one bit.

#percy jackson #percabeth #pjo #annabeth chase #percy jackson and the olympians #thank u🥺 #ananbeth #asks #my writing

[dwellordream]

“Female friendship assumed a crucial role in novels that revolved around companionate marriage and assumed that parents could no longer legitimately choose husbands for their daughters and that friendship should partially or wholly define the ideal relationship between husband and wife. Historically, such philosophers as Aristotle and Montaigne had associated friendship with equality, similarity, and a reciprocal affection based on reason, in contrast to marriage, perceived as a naturally hierarchical relation based on irrational passions that defied control. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, an increasing tendency to view marriage in egalitarian terms transformed it into something like friendship between husband and wife, making friends agents of marriages rather than mere relief from the trammels of wedlock. 

The liberal democratic principles subtending the companionate marriage plot defined young women as individuals capable of maturation and development, though often within more restricted limits than those placed on men. The heroine of a companionate marriage plot must know herself in order to choose a husband wisely; once freed from the requirement either to obey or reject parental dictates, she is aided in her quest for self-knowledge by friends who are equals and peers. Dorothea ignores the parental figures who attempt to dictate whom she should marry, but her encounter with Rosamond prompts the self knowledge that leads her to marry Will. Friendship between women becomes a model for managing social bonds in a capitalist democracy that promotes equality and individualism, cohesion and competition. 

In a novel about community and its fissures, the relationship between Rosamond and Dorothea provides one of the more hopeful glimpses of two very different people speaking openly about what separates and unites them. Their moment of amity converts the jealousy, rivalry, and secrecy that initially divide them into a sense of connection, and as such also provides a model for how men and women, as well as the rival camps of Middlemarch, can resolve their differences. Friendship between men is too vast a subject to be given its due here, but a brief discussion of its place in Victorian literature and society can help us to understand what was specific about female friendships. The first point to make, because it is the more surprising one, is that Victorians celebrated friendships between men, especially young men, in terms very similar to those used to laud intimacy between women. 

Lifewriting, conduct books, photographs, and educational treatises praised sentimental, spiritual, romantic, and physical bonds between men and made no fixed connections between male friendships and the legal category of sodomy or the controversial but common practice of sex between older and younger boys at public schools. Friendship between men was believed to promote enlightenment ideals of self-cultivation, sympathetic communion, and civic association. For men as well as for women, such friendships were shot through with erotic yearnings and domestic intimacies that were openly avowed; men did not hide that they slept in the same bed or made plans to live together.

For both sexes, friendship was an opportunity to engage in cross-gender behavior with impunity, within the confines of a same-sex relationship. As we saw in the previous chapter, women and girls could act toward female friends in ways they could not toward men; conversely, boys and men could more easily display susceptibility and sentiment with each other than with women, as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) demonstrates. Friendship for both sexes thus reinforced gender identity and provided respite from gender constraints. Male friendships also differed from those between women. Friendship between boys was much more likely to be described as a phase that ended when one of the men married, and it was more often understood in terms of rivalry, hierarchy, and sexual difference. 

Female friendship enforced an altruistic economy of reciprocity and a model of subjectivity based on cooperation, and its repertoire of bodily gestures emphasized contact between undifferentiated body parts such as hands, eyes, and lips. Male friendship feminized both of the boys involved, but was often described as feminizing one more than the other, resulting in a couple modeled more on the exaggerated gender differences of hierarchical marriage. Even when female friends adopted behavior associated with men, their relationship was still seen as intensifying the femininity of both parties. As a result, female friendship was more often compared to companionate marriage, which asked both husband and wife to develop traits associated with feminine forms of sociability. At its most minimal, female friendship takes the form of neutralized enmity. 

Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) represents even that scant degree of friendship as powerful enough to reconcile female rivals and anticipate friendship between husband and wife. Like Middlemarch, Hardy’s novel is a remarriage plot, in which the heroine learns how to love a husband as a friend only after surviving a disastrous first marriage. For Bathsheba Everdene, learning to overcome jealousy of her husband’s erstwhile lover, Fanny Robin, is a crucial step on the road to a companionate union. Bathsheba learns of Fanny’s existence only after her death, when Troy flaunts his preference by ordering Fanny an expensive tombstone and planting her grave with flowers. 

Though it would be consistent with her character for Bathsheba to despise the woman whose demise has only intensified Troy’s love, she behaves with uncharacteristic gentleness towards Fanny’s body and memory by tending her corpse and then replanting her grave after a storm destroys the flowers Troy had planted. Bathsheba’s initial perception of Fanny as a “rival” (229) gives way to a sympathy for the dead woman that constitutes a sort of posthumous friendship. In the plot of female amity, love between friends develops the emotional disposition necessary for companionate marriage. 

Bathsheba’s retroactive friendliness toward Fanny germinates the compassion that flowers in her marriage to the aptly named Gabriel Oak, which the narrator assesses as a happy union because it realizes the “good-fellowship—camaraderie— . . . seldom superadded to love between the sexes” (303). The narrator connects female friendship to companionate marriage through the water imagery that dominates both Bathsheba’s care of Fanny’s grave and the narrator’s last words about her marriage to Gabriel. Troy plants flowers on Fanny’s tomb but fails to notice that its position directly beneath a rainspout means that the first rain will destroy his blooms, much as his heedlessness helped cut Fanny down in her prime. 

It is Bathsheba, aided by Gabriel, who repairs the damage done by the “gurgoyle” that channels rainfall into an attacking force echoing her own prior hostility to Fanny: “The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave” (242). By replanting the uprooted flowers, wiping the mud from Fanny’s gravestone, and diverting the gurgoyle’s spout, Bathsheba expresses a newfound “superfluous magnanimity” that replaces her initial impulse to reduce an already dead rival to dust (246). 

That generosity redounds to Bathsheba’s credit at the novel’s end when she attains with Gabriel a love as “strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam” (303–4). The amicable deed of protecting Fanny’s grave from a destructive torrent metaphorically returns in the form of a marital friendship similarly resistant to water’s volatility and violence. Far from the Madding Crowd miniaturizes the plot of female amity: an elegiac gesture of friendship toward another woman begins to teach Bathsheba how to transmute stormy passion into the companionable affection that characterizes her happy marriage to Gabriel Oak.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Just Reading:  Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

#sharon marcus #victorian #victorian literature #history #marriage #sexuality

[silver-summertime]

song analysis: sapphic undertones in “ivy”

Happy New Year, y’all! Let’s end the year right with an “ivy” analysis. If you follow me, you probably know that I am OBSESSED with this song. It’s an absolute masterpiece and it might actually rival Cruel Summer for the title of my favorite Taylor Swift song.

So let’s get into it. From the first listen, this song read to me as being about an affair between two women, one of whom is married to a man. Obviously, the love interest in “ivy” could be a man, but Taylor chooses to address the song to a genderless “you,” so I’m going to have fun analyzing this as if it is gay. This song reads similarly to me as “Begin Again” and “The Way I Loved You,” which both have three characters who play similar roles. In all cases, the narrator speaks to a genderless love interest “you,” who is directly contrasted with a “he” figure. In “ivy,” it is unclear if the narrator is already married or simply engaged to the “he” figure.

We’ll start with the first verse, which sets the tone for the rest of the song. The line “where the spirit meets the bones” seems to have been inspired by the poem “Compassion” by Miller Williams. The full line is “You do not know what wars are going on/down there where the spirit meets the bone.” Thematically, the poem deals with the contrast between appearances and a person’s real feelings or mental state, which relates to “ivy” and “illicit affairs.” In both, Taylor writes about an affair from a compassionate perspective—in the case of “ivy,” it seems as if the narrator’s hands are tied; there is some external factor that prevents her from breaking up her engagement or marriage, which makes the listener sympathetic to her situation. I’d also argue that a lot of this sympathy comes from the perception of “ivy” as a period piece—it is easy to be sympathetic to a woman who is trapped in a marriage she never really agreed to in the first place.

Why does “ivy” read like a period piece? It’s all about the language. At contrast to “illicit affairs,” which very explicitly mentions parking lots and therefore has a more modern setting, “ivy” almost exclusively uses natural imagery. This is reminiscent of Romantic-era writing, which is characterized by a reverence for nature and beauty.

Examples of Romantic-inspired natural imagery:

oh, I can’t/stop you putting roots in my dreamland/my house of stone, your ivy grows

your opal eyes are all I wish to see

clover blooms in the fields/spring breaks loose

crescent moon, coast is clear

so yeah, it’s a fire/it’s a goddamn blaze in the dark

Beyond the use of nature as a metaphor, Romantic writing also features an emphasis on emotion over reason and a focus on the individual. “Ivy” clearly outlines a conflict between emotion and reason as well as individualism versus societal expectations; the narrator’s affair with the love interest (which is a transgression of societal norms) is a result of letting emotion outweigh reason. The narrator in “ivy” feels like she has failed to uphold society’s expectations of her as a wife—she directly contrasts herself with the “old widow” who “goes to the stone every day,” suggesting that the widow properly mourns her deceased husband. The narrator, by contrast, is “grieving for the living,” an inherently selfish preoccupation. However, the narrator’s emotions are presented in a compassionate light consistent with Romanticism.  

Certain lines also sound a bit historical because Taylor could have used more modern linguistic structures or vocabulary but chose not to. The line “your opal eyes are all I wish to see” instead of “want to see,” for example. See also:

your touch brought forth an incandescent glow

I wish to know/the fatal flaw that makes you long to be/magnificently cursed

my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand/taking mine, but it’s been promised to another

The way the narrator’s “hand” has “been promised to another” is what sticks out most to me; it very much suggests that the engagement is not the narrator’s choice but may have been arranged (a la Mrs. Bennet’s drive to marry off her daughters in Pride and Prejudice). It’s also a contrast to the way engagement is described in “champagne problems,” which is much more modern (explicit references to dorms, Chevys, and Dom Pérignon). This kind of phrasing is a conscious choice by Taylor to make the song seem more “literary,” which makes it feel historical rather than current.

So what makes me think this song is gay? Honestly, it’s more of a feeling than anything concrete, but that’s the way queer-coding works: subtly enough that straight people don’t notice it, but specific enough to the queer experience that we pick up on it. This is yet another example of Taylor writing about a relationship that’s “just wrong enough to make it feel right” (thanks, “Sparks Fly”). The narrator seems caught off-guard by the affair (repeatedly asking “how’s one to know?”) and blames the love interest for being irresistible despite the inherent danger of pursuing anything (“it’s the goddamn fight of my life/and you started it”).

Of course, if the song takes place in a historical setting, any affair would be grounds for societal condemnation, but especially so if the love interest is a woman. I think the lyrics “I wish to know/the fatal flaw that makes you long to be/magnificently cursed” are especially telling.

Breaking it down: a) the narrator thinks the love interest is irrational for wanting to start this affair because b) being with the narrator will make the love interest cursed. This latter part is important because historically, there is usually a lot more fallout for women than men after affairs. Even when a married/partnered man is the one engaging in infidelity, the mistress often takes the brunt of the criticism (see: the media’s treatment of Monica Lewinsky, many a country song where the woman blames the mistress instead of her cheating partner). This article is an interesting look at the double standards surrounding chastity and fidelity for men and women.

This is all a long way to say that if the love interest in “ivy” is indeed a man, there is no reason this affair would leave him “magnificently cursed.” The narrator, as a woman and also as the married party in the affair (the love interest is not necessarily married), would most likely be the one to take the majority of the blame. I think there is an alternative interpretation: the love interest’s “fatal flaw” is her romantic interest in women, which would certainly leave her “magnificently cursed” were anyone to discover her affair with a married woman.

So that’s why “ivy” seems gay, I think! Let me know if you have any questions or other theories, I would love to hear them. And please let me know if you want me to analyze any other songs. If only I had this much fun writing essays for English classes…

All sources are hyperlinked within the analysis, if you’re interested in some further reading.

#ts lyric analysis #ria writes #ivy #happy new year y'all! #also if you want to read the linked articles but don't want to pay #sci-hub is a fantastic resource #evermore #gaylor swift

[franniebanana]

CQL Rewatch - Ep15

I forgot this guy’s name, Yao or something? Honestly, I don’t care enough to research this, like, at all. I hate this guy. My friend and I now refer to him as the Hype Man, so I might just call him that from now on. But I wanted to say that I didn’t realize he was in it so early, so when I saw him, I was like, “That fucking guy!!” And I also totally missed that the point of Jiang Fengmian leaving was to take this worthless piece of trash somewhere. I wish he’d died haha. But then I guess there’d be less reason to hate him, and I enjoy hating him.

I can’t believe this is the first paragraph that people are going to see. If you’re reading this now, you’re like, why do I want to read this crap? And y’know what, I can’t blame you. The next few episodes are gonna be rough. I don’t even know if there will be much to say on my end. My friend, after watching these few episodes commented something like, “Huh, that really dragged.” I could only agree, pulling my hair out from the headache these few episodes were giving me.

Okay, but seriously, Yao is so pathetic here! Talking about how he never thought they’d end up like this, and, “Oh, we were just a small clan, woe is me!” It’s amazing that he turns into the biggest prick, always right there hyping up the scapegoat-blame game rhetoric. Sorry, I hate this fucker.

A rare nice moment from Madam Yu. It was sweet having her show a caring side, packing medicine for her husband, snacks for her daughter. But of course, it was because Jiang Yanli had come to say goodbye to her earlier. Jiang Cheng is really like his mother—they can’t do anything for kindness’s sake, there’s always an obligation to the kindness.

I hate Wang Lingjiao, but I love her, and I love hating her. I’m conflicted. She’s just such a fun, evil character, more fun than Xue Yang in my opinion, probably because she actual interacts with the main characters in the story. It will forever annoy me that Xue Yang gets so much attention for appearing in a long-ass flashback (via empathy) and what should have been a flashback (Chang Clan) but wasn’t because they wanted it to be padding, I guess.

Anyway, Wang Lingjiao. She’s fun, she goes completely nuts—what’s not to love about her? She’s also someone who is so similar to Madam Yu, but because she also is ambitious and wants to take over Lotus Pier, Madam Yu wants her dead. Haha!

While Madam Yu is, objectively, a horrible person, I actually really like how her bodyguards aren’t treated like servants. I like that there’s mutual respect there, as there should be when you’re talking about protecting someone. Unfortunately, I think Madam Yu treats them better than her own family in most cases. It’s cool that the Jiang Clan doesn’t rely on servants to get food and tea and whatnot. These are things that the disciples and leaders must do for themselves. By contrast, the Jins have so many servants—it’s almost obscene by comparison.

Also I want to point out how hot-headed Jiang Cheng gets here, while his mother is just cool as a cucumber. It really shows you how unready he is to actually lead (which she points out). He’s so emotional, quick to anger, yet he has none of the foundations to really lead a group of people. Even when the disciples are explaining to them what happened to the kid and the kite, it’s Wei Wuxian who is keeping everyone calm and asking the questions.

I love that his first reaction here is to insult Wang Lingjiao’s intelligence. We’re basically getting a parallel to how he reacts to Wen Chao, which is fun because you can see how his behavior hasn’t changed at all. He uses his wit in both situations and is easily able to outwit both Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao. What’s kind of interesting is that Jiang Cheng will speak up now when he wouldn’t before. And I wonder is it because he is guilty for being silent earlier with Wen Chao, or is it something else? I think ultimately Jiang Cheng blames Jin Xizuan, Lan Wangji, and Wei Wuxian for what happens to his parents and to Lotus Pier. Even though, logically, it would have been destroyed anyway, he still wants to place the blame on someone who he can reach. All this is to say, I don’t think Jiang Cheng regrets not speaking up at the Wen Indoctrination. So I think he feels superiority over Wang Lingjiao really because he thinks she’s a stupid woman. And duh, she is not that clever. But she is smart enough to be able to use what talents she has to get ahead. She apparently is favored over Wen Chao’s own wife (who knew he was even married—not me lol), and you have to be ambitious and have some smarts to get that far. That’s not to say that Jiang Cheng wouldn’t treat a man this way too—I think he would. I think he picks and chooses who he’ll stand up to. He’s on his own turf, she’s an invader, she’s a woman—she only brought a few henchmen, right? He’s also been charged with watching over Lotus Pier in his father’s absence. Maybe he just wants to look big for once. Just a thought. Take it or leave it.

So, I think Madam Yu is enjoying this. She’s getting two things she wants: the Wens are going to leave and she gets to beat the shit out of Wei Wuxian. She doesn’t even have to be prodded to punish him, right? She barely waits until Wang Lingjiao has finished speaking. This has something she’s wanted to do for a long time. I think she’s hit him before, yes? But she can go all out right now, since Jiang Fengmian, his only real protector, is gone.

Also Jiang Cheng! Man, he’s torn apart! He hates to see this happening to Wei Wuxian—yes, he blames him for all that shit, but he doesn’t want to see this happen to him. It’s actually harder to watch Jiang Cheng in all of this than Wei Wuxian, who mostly remains as stoic as he could possibly be while she’s whipping the shit out of him. And again here, we get Wei Wuxian telling Jiang Cheng not to interfere, because the last thing he wants is for Jiang Cheng to be penalized too. He’s fine receiving this punishment because it’s a “better me than him” kind of a thing. It’s harder to watch someone else suffer than to suffer ourselves, right? I’m like that, idk if you readers are, but I think a lot of people are like that. I mean, I’ve always been that way, but it’s been amplified since I became a parent. And not only is he accepting of being whipped by Zidian, he’s ready to lose his fucking right hand. The hand that he wields a sword with. His dominant hand. He is ready to lose it with absolutely no fuss. That’s how much Wei Wuxian cares about Lotus Pier. His response is, “I’ll have to learn how to use my left hand.” It’s a passing line, a line when you can’t even see his face—but do you get how big that is? Jiang Cheng is up there losing his mind, completely emotional, crying, yelling at his mother to stop—Wei Wuxian is just silently gritting his teeth and taking it. They’re both brave (I would not want to stand up to Madam Yu), but different kinds of brave, y’know?

I do love this part. I’m not gonna lie. Seeing Madam Yu slap Wang Lingjiao around is something that’s deeply, deeply satisfying. I guess it’s just nice to see Madam Yu’s anger turned towards an actual villain, since up until this point, it’s been directly mainly at Wei Wuxian and her own husband. I think this part is forever tainted if you know how the story goes, because Madam Yu is just on fire! But if you’ve seen this series before, which hopefully you have (otherwise spoilers abound), you know it doesn’t end well for her. I like this plot device here, making you think that the good guys are going to come out on top, and then reversing it so quickly as soon as the Core-Melting Hand shows up. One minute, you’re cheering, the next, you’re…not.

I also want to point out how quickly things reverse here as well. Jiang Cheng is trying to protect and comfort Wei Wuxian throughout this whole scene, which is something we’re definitely not used to seeing. This has always (and I mean always) been more of Lan Wangji’s thing. But in kind of a nice twist of fate, we actually see Jiang Cheng caring for Wei Wuxian. But then, boy, do things change! We see a complete reversal of this behavior—first Wei Wuxian has to be there for Jiang Cheng’s emotional state, and then his physical one. And the man does not complain about it at all.

I want to say that I didn’t cry in my first watch of CQL until episode 50. That is 100% the truth, so help me God. However, when I watched this scene in the donghua, I cried like a little bitch. Cried probably isn’t the right word—how about sobbed. I sobbed. I think because I knew it was coming when I watched CQL, it didn’t really affect me (plus my husband was right there, not paying attention, but still on the couch with me, so I tend to not cry as much when he’s around. I like to cry on my own, okay?). Having said that, the second time I saw this scene, I fucking cried, and I really didn’t stop until after they told Jiang Yanli, because that sweetheart crying makes me cry, okay? I have a really hard time watching things about children and parents, because I always think about my own parents and my own kid, so it just makes me really emotional. The idea of never seeing your parents again, especially in such a traumatic situation, at the age of what—17? That’s something I can’t even begin to imagine. In a word, horrific. Traumatic isn’t even a strong enough word to describe the emotional and mental turmoil that a teenager would be going through. But I can probably ramble about that later.

And my heart breaks for Wei Wuxian here too. Even though she hated him, even though she treated him so poorly, I’m sure he still thought of her as something akin to a mother. She was the only mother figure he had in his life who was still living, so there was definitely an attachment there (and this is proven later). Even being acknowledged by her here must mean something to him. She may hate him, but she trusts him to keep her children safe and to protect them. It’s honestly so sad.

Ugh, this is hard to watch. As a mother, the idea of sending your kid adrift when you know you’ll probably never see them again is so heartbreaking. The connection you have with your children is something that no other relationship can match, whether you physically bore your children or not. They are a part of you. Like, let’s be real, raising children is difficult—they can test your patience, make you angry, make you sad and hurt (toddlers don’t care about you, yeah, I said it)—but you love them in spite of it all. And for me, I can never really hate Madam Yu. I can find her attitude and treatment of certain individuals deplorable, but at the end of the day, she loved her children. Was she a good mom? No, probably not. But I don’t think Jiang Fengmian was a good dad either (although I think he tried a bit harder). But I think she loved A-Cheng and A-Li, and I think she trusted Wei Wuxian to protect them. I think she gave him that shred of respect at the end.

In case you’re wondering, I fucking cried through to the end of this episode. I mean, Jesus, Yanli just gets immediately thrown into another boat and tied up with her brothers, after finding out that her mother might be dead already, and then her dad abandons them too. I just can’t.

I’m sorry this was short (maybe I’m not sorry, depending on how much you like the episode). I’m going to try and knock out more than one episode per week because I just don’t have a lot to say. These are mainly getting through the plot episodes, if you know what I mean.

Other episodes: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |

#wei wuxian #jiang cheng #cql #the untamed #jiang yanli #jiang fengmian #madam yu #wen zhuliu #core-melting hand #wang lingjiao #jiaojiao #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #cql rewatch #wwx

[deeplyridiculouslyinlove]

CSI Musings

Season 6, Episode 3: "Bite Me"

I rewatched “Bite Me” last night, and I’ve been thinking about the conversation between Sara and Grissom in the bedroom at the victim's house. Given that we have zero context for the somewhat pointed exchange that Sara and Grissom have while supposedly talking about the case but seemingly actually talking about their relationship, I’ve decided that to the extent this conversation is about their relationship (which it may not be at all), I interpret their exchange as taking place in a broader context where the two of them having been discussing living together and Sara has been the one to be hesitant to take that step. My reasoning and rambling thoughts below.

***

To start the scene, Sara seems to think it’s totally normal that the husband and wife may be sleeping in separate beds. She also appears to be the first one of them to relate the situation at the scene directly to her and Grissom’s relationship, by listing insomnia and working at night as reasons for separate beds—both of which seem like reasons she and Grissom would identify with. (Another good reason not on her list might be being in a secret relationship that cannot be revealed to one’s coworkers/surrogate family, just saying.) It seems somewhat weird for Grissom to respond to this comment from Sara that gives a lot of space to each of them in their relationship with a statement basically saying, "Hey I need space."

In other words if Grissom's comment that "maybe they were suffocating each other and he couldn’t breathe" is about him, the subtext of the exchange between him and Sara essentially goes: "There are lots of reasons to have some personal space away from someone you otherwise want to spend time with." "We spend too much time together, I need more space." Sara essentially is offering up reasons for two people in a relationship to have private spaces and experiences, and if that's what Grissom wants from their relationship, it seems weird that he would respond antagonistically rather than with agreement. Unless Grissom doesn't want to be with Sara at all and so is upping the ante in their conversation, which I think we can take off the table not only because of how much he clearly loves her and has previously shown us he wants to spend all of his time with her, but also for reasons discussed more below about where Grissom is on his romantic journey by the time we get to Season 6.

So I interpret Grissom’s comment that “maybe they were suffocating each other and he couldn’t breathe” to not actually be about him, but rather him implying/questioning whether she feels suffocated. He’s using “he” here because he’s ostensibly talking about the husband, who may have killed his wife and needs a potential motive. But Grissom doesn’t look at Sara when he says this line, which to me makes it seem less likely he’s telling her how he himself feels. If he really felt “suffocated” it seems to me that he would want on some level to push her away, but keeping his eyes averted makes his comment less assertive. (It also stops him from having to see her response, which would make sense if he’s feeling vulnerable and is afraid that she might confirm his fears in her expression.)

Sara seems sort of annoyed by Grissom’s comment, but doesn’t seem particularly affronted or caught off guard. She almost rolls her eyes when she turns to the nightstand, as if he had brought up a preexisting point of contention. I would think if my boyfriend that I also worked with constantly and had been in love with for years but just started finally dating said he couldn’t breathe around me, I would be pretty upset! But she takes Grissom’s comment in stride, and then chooses to continue the conversation by saying “you don’t have to sleep in the same bed to have sex…or romance.” I read Sara’s comment about sex and romance to be focused on the “romance” part more than the “sex” part, given the way she pauses before she adds “…or romance.” Again, maybe I’m just overly emotional, but if my boyfriend had just said he felt suffocated by me I wouldn’t choose that moment to push the subject further by talking about how much romance we could have in our relationship.

My read is that she emphasizes romance here because the question of what her and Grissom’s relationship is all about is a larger topic of conversation between them at this time: if they’re not living together does that mean it’s just sex between them? Clearly Sara doesn’t think that has to be the rule. But Grissom is afraid that she doesn’t want to live with him because she’s feeling suffocated and like she can’t breathe. Sara is trying to reassure him that they can still be romantic even if they’re not living together. And it seems to work, because their final exchange before Grissom leaves is lighthearted and has none of the angst you would expect if they were fighting because one of them actually felt suffocated. It makes more sense to me that it is the fear that one of them feels suffocated that underlies this exchange.

This all begs the question of whether/why Sara might be hesitant about moving in with Grissom, particularly given that from what we’ve seen she’s been the more aggressive one in their relationship and he’s been the one holding back. But I actually think it makes a lot of sense in this particular moment. Sara desperately wants a relationship with Grissom, but she’s already given up her life for Grissom once (in moving from San Francisco to Vegas) and then had him ultimately reject her after giving her what would have felt like a runaround. She’s never really had a home, and she lost the only one she had before in an incredibly traumatic fashion. The idea of living with Grissom and building a real home together would likely be as terrifying as it would be exhilarating.

It also makes sense to me that Grissom would want to live with Sara basically as soon as they start having sex. We know that Grissom is not one to have sex without love, so it would be important to him that their relationship be explicitly defined as one based in love (romance). Living together is a very clear step indicating that a relationship is not just about sex, but is about the larger connection and partnership between two people.

Also, Grissom has already fought through his fear of being with Sara in Seasons 4 and 5, and I believe that by the time he chooses to be with her he already knows that he wants to be with her in every way forever. He enters their relationship knowing that it was coming, and having time to prepare himself emotionally for what it will mean to actually be with Sara in real life, not just in his fantasies. Sara, on the other hand, has finally gotten what she’s desperately wanted in getting to be with Grissom, but is only now in the stage of actively having to fight against her own natural inclination to protect and guard herself against the vulnerability that comes from a serious, long-term relationship because actually being with him is only now real. For her, he had pushed her away for years despite clearly having feelings for her, and she had far less warning that the dynamic of their relationship was going to change when it did in mid-Season 5. Obviously she is very happy (they have sex and romance!), and I don’t think her hesitancy to move in together lasts very long. But it makes sense to me that it might take her a moment to get to the point of being comfortable fully entwining their lives for reasons that are not ultimately about Grissom or their relationship really.

I also think it’s noteworthy that this is one of multiple episodes in a row in early Season 6 that Grissom and Catherine primarily work the case together, and Grissom and Sara spend only a small amount of time together despite them both being on the case. This is a contrast to the back half of Season 5 when they’re on nearly every case together (granted, Graveyard is small in that part of Season 5 with half the team gone, but with the addition of Sofia Grissom still wouldn’t have needed to basically only work with Sara the way he does.) If I remember correctly, in much of later Season 6 and Season 7 he and Sara work together all the time again. I’m so curious how the original Gum Drops script and reveal may have led to later Season 6 episodes that could have explained this scene in Bite Me, and the overall Sara-Grissom dynamic in early Season 6.

(Also y'all, their little flashlight hellos to each other at the beginning of this scene are THE CUTEST.)

#csi #sara sidle #gil grissom #otp: gsr #grissom x sara #my musings #I love you I always will

[maryroyale]

The lovely @curiouselfqueen tagged me on this one. (Thank you! I love these things.)

Uh. I have *feelings* about these? I have no idea why I feel so strongly, but... uh... there you go.

deep violet or blood red? Both? Not at the same time, but I love both. Purple and red are both power colors, but they convey very different things. Old ladies are allowed to wear both because they have the power to pull it off.

sunshine or moonlight? Oof. My default answer is moonlight? Some of the medication I’m on makes my eyes super-sensitive to sunlight. I’m like a damn vampire. Even on cloudy days I need sunglasses. I like seeing the sunlight through the trees when I’m in the woods? It’s pretty and far less painful.

Don’t get me wrong—I do love the moonlight. It’s so beautiful. Winter moonlight and summer moonlight are gorgeous.

80s music or 90s music? How dare you! Don’t speak to me or my 874 music genres ever again. Seriously though, I really love music. I listen to a wide variety of genres and some artists span decades. I love new wave and synthpop, but I also love pop punk and the swing revival. I can’t say one decade is better than the other.

orchids or dahlias? I like to garden, and from a gardening standpoint it’s dahlias all the way. Orchids are a wildly diverse species (over 25,000 types), but the pretty, delicate orchids they sell in stores are not hardy and require a lot of intensive, specific support. They’ll die if you plant them outside where I live. And the garden outside is what makes me happy and brings me joy.

garnet or ruby? These are such different stones. It’s almost like asking if I like chocolate milk or cola. Yes, they are both brown and you can drink them—but they’re really not similar.

Garnet— it’s semi-precious, plentiful, in use since antiquity. A decent go-to stone for jewelry. Like any gemstone, the color is determined by the type of impurities, so garnet can be almost any color. Blue garnets are the rarest. The Mohs scale for garnet depends on those same impurities because some can actually strengthen the hardness of the stone. Generally 6 to 7.5 on the Mohs scale.

I like garnets. Depending on the talent of the jeweler you can get lovely pieces set in silver that won’t cost an arm, a leg, and your soul. It was also my mother’s birthstone, so there’s that.

Ruby— Occasionally confused with spinels, rubies are pieces of corundum that contain the impurity chromium. Corundum that contains the impurities iron, titanium, vanadium, or magnesium are usually blue and referred to as sapphires. (Pink sapphires are actually poor quality rubies that the jewelry industry decided to rebrand to dupe the public. Similar to “chocolate diamonds” and other attempts to sell gems that don’t meet the criteria for their type.)

Corundum is a 9 on the Mohs scale. They highly sought after, have a rich mythos surrounding them, and feature prominently in history.

It seems like a lot of hype to me? They’re sturdy pieces of jewelry, not prone to breakage, but they ought to be for the price you pay. They’re pretty, I’ll grant you that.

moths or butterflies? Well, one is nocturnal and one is diurnal. One is fuzzy and stocky and one is smooth and slender. One is drab and one is brightly colored. I feel like I should picks moths on principle. I love Luna Moths. But butterflies are so very, very pretty. Moths I guess?

Aphrodite or Athena? Okay... so, um, here’s where it’s going to get heated. I apologize. I am *specifically* addressing how Athena and Aphrodite were worshipped/treated in Greek myths. I’m not looking at proto versions from Minoa, Mycenae, or Phoenicia. I’m also not looking at later syncretizations with other cultures e.g. Rome. It is the Greek myths that matter here because those are the myths and attitudes that were directly incorporated into Western culture. We’ve learned a lot about their origins, but *those* myths and attitudes were *not* incorporated into mainstream Western culture.

Athena was either born from Zeus’ head or his thigh. Either she has no mother—Zeus is her only parent—or Zeus swallowed her mother Metis (wisdom, prudence, counsel). This is critically important. In Athenian law, the father was the only legal parent. Mothers had no legal rights to their children at all. Athena is a very real symbol of that.

She is often portrayed as the goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and war. She is a goddess of industry (wine and olive oil). The thing we must ask is what kind of wisdom? What kind of war?

Plato argues this in Cratylus— that Athena’s wisdom could be a number of things from divine knowledge to moral intelligence. I think it’s important that Plato, one of Greece’s most celebrated philosophers, and more important one of the philosophers most embraced by Western Culture praised this choice of “moral intelligence.” [see Plato’s stance on poets in The Republic.]

Athena’s war is not the war of Ares, which is tied to passion and emotion. Ares represents the brutal aspects of war where humanity gives way to cruelty and inhumanity. Athena’s warfare is rational and “just.” Athena makes war on behalf of the city-state. Athena makes war to defend the government.

Athena’s purpose in myth and in poetry and song is to support the government. She is the shield of the king. She upholds and enforces the status quo. Look at her role in the Orestes trilogy. She supplants the Erinyes [the furies originally hunted and tormented ppl who committed matricide]. She decides that Iphigenia’s murder didn’t matter. Clytemnestra (Iphigenia’s mother) didn’t have the right to revenge for her daughter. Orestes was *justified* in murdering his mother because she killed his parent, his father.

Aphrodite also has a motherless birth, but it’s more incidental and spontaneous. Kronos cuts off his father Uranus’ genitals ( like you do ) and tosses them into the sea. Aphrodite is born from the sea foam. There’s a different feel to Aphrodite’s myth. An independence almost. Yes, a male god was involved because it’s a Greek requirement for any child, but it’s in such an incidental way. There was no purpose or intent on Uranus’ part. He had no control over her birth.

Aphrodite is an incredibly independent goddess. She owns her own sexuality and has autonomy over her own body. She is often referred to as the wife of Hephaestus, but in both the Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony, Hephaestus has wives with different names and Aphrodite is unmarried.

A goddess with this kind of freedom and power in her own right—not tied to a husband or male family member (sorry Artemis!)— is almost unheard of. It makes Aphrodite unique and interesting.

TLDR: I prefer Aphrodite.

grapefruit or pomegranate? Pomegranate. For so many reasons, not the least of which is it’s associations with death and fertility. It’s a lovely contrast and a reminder that death brings forth life e.g. Nurse logs.

angel’s halo or devil’s horns? Oof. This is another rant, guys. Horns as a symbol of divine power are used throughout history and throughout the Indo-European culture. From Egyptian gods like Amun and Isis to Hindu gods like Śiva to Canaanite gods like El and Yahweh, horns have been used to show their power and might. Moses has most famously been depicted with horns due to murky/difficult translations of the Hebrew verb keren/qaran, which can mean BOTH “to send forth beams/rays” and “to be horned”.

There was a concerted effort to associate horns with the devil/evil/bad. Horns are also used to imply fertility/abundance, and that may have played into the perception of horns as devilish. Moses with horns was used as a jumping off point to demonize Jewish people during the Medieval period in a variety of European countries and cultures.

Halos, too, have been used across history and cultures as a symbol of divine power. Sumerian literature talks about a bright emanation that appears around gods and heroes. Chinese and Japanese Buddhist art shows Buddhist saints with halos.

I choose horns because I choose to reclaim that divine power. I reject the idea that either symbol is wholly good or wholly evil. I reject the idea that sexuality by itself is evil/wrong.

sirens or banshees? Both!!! I must admit a partiality to Sirens that is based wholly on my preference for the sea/ocean.

lorde or florence + the machine? Both!!! I love both groups and I’ve listened to their albums so many times. I will admit that I end up listening to Lorde more often when writing.

the birth of venus or the starry night? Huh. I’m going to assume that you mean the painting by Boticelli, even though there’s more than one Birth of Venus.

Honestly, Venus Anadyomene (Venus rising from the sea) is my favorite. It’s her origin myth and anyone could paint it, draw it, write about it, and put their own spin on it. It is malleable because it is myth. It lives on and changes and grows with us. Boticelli’s version is particularly lovely.

Starry Night (1889) belongs to VanGogh. No one can really recreate it without copying his style or his vision. Verschuier’s The Great Comet of 1680 Over Rotterdam could never really be confused with Starry Night. Not even Munch’s Starry Night (1893) could be confused for VanGogh. The two paintings are wildly different in subject matter despite the fact that their subject is the night sky.

I doubt any modern painter would dare. O’Keefe called hers Starlight Night, and I can only guess that others would follow that naming pattern of not quite using the title Starry Night.

Boy, I bet @curiouselfqueen is regretting tagging me now... sorry?

[jpsatmur]

Thinking about the kinds of patriarchal violence depicted in three recent Malayalam films - JOJI, AARKKARIYAM and THE GREAT INDIAN KITCHEN.

The patriarch in JOJI verbally and physically abuses his ne'er-do-well youngest son, Joji. Joji has failed to live up to his standards of success. Not directly alluded to, slim Joji also doesn't live up to the stalwart model of masculine physicality of the father and to varying extents, the two older brothers. However, it's this physicality that helps to undo the old man, as he overreaches his own physical limits. Joji's truly evil acts following his father's incapacitation are his own responsibility, but it's hard not to see the shadow of that abuse, and of the stunting of a different kind of masculinity, in his character. For a while, Joji owns a horse - perhaps some way to act out a kind of masculinity. The pellet gun his nephew buys can be seen as another play-acting or rehearsal of masculinity, one that becomes horribly real in Joji's hands. The role of the priesthood, as a seperate source of very gendered authority is significant too. 'Manly men' defy it - others fall in line as long as they can use it to further their own ends.

In THE GREAT INDIAN KITCHEN, the heroine's father-in-law presents patriarchal violence in a passive-aggressive guise. Soft-spoken, with a benign, avuncular smile, he quickly makes it clear he is going to crush her aspirations and individuality to remake her as the archetypal domestic slave. From preparing rice in the old, cumbersome way, to forbidding her professional aspirations, his control over her is nearly total, only ceding to his son her conjugal obligations. The son, meanwhile, is a mere extension of his father's will. He teaches social science in a girl's school or college, where he is steeped in more enlightened understandings of family and the individual, but he carries out his own form of rhetorical, psychological violence on his wife when she dares to criticise him. In the end, he dismisses his experience with a woman who would not conform as a mere 'rehearsal' for the rest of his life, with a new, more pliable bride.

AARKKARIYAM offers the most intriguing contrast between styles of masculinity in the form of the three men in the heroine's life. Her first husband was a rogue, thrown out of every school in town, getting involved in shady, violent acts, immensely generous with his ill-gotten gains when the mood took him, and neglectful to the extreme of his wife. A charming, dangerous rogue. He runs afoul of his father-in-law, as near a benign older man as any of these films presents us with, yet, just as much as Joji, a murderer. His crime can be seen as an act of love, a way to protect his daughter from a completely unsuitable husband. His second son-in-law is a different story. Also on his second marriage, he is respectful of the differences between his wife and him, affectionate to her daughter from her previous marriage. He runs some kind of import business and has to dodge bureaucratic hoops, especially as Covid guts shipping, and placate his increasingly frantic business partner. When his father-in-law shares his secret with him, he is paralysed by the moral crisis that follows. He reaches for knowledge, trying to understand what kind of a man his wife's first husband was. Ultimately, he helps his father-in-law get rid of the last traces of the murder, knowing this is a secret he will always keep from his wife. Unwittingly, he is implicated in violence too. It seems that even the best of men cannot fully escape complicity in the violence that is patterned into the masculine identity under patriarchy. Yet, in the acts of father-in-law and second son-in-law we see, maybe, the beginning of a way out.

Still, as long as the surrounding society is unchanged, what real hope is there for a woman unless she has the good fortune to eventually choose a better (not perfect - no one is that) partner, or turn her back on social expectations altogether?

A compelling secondary theme in all three films is the role of generational wealth, but maybe I'll write about that another time.

[noshitshakespeare]

Do you believe that Macbeth may be redeemable? I feel as though he was going to the extreme for his desire to the point that he was blind of his morals. Eventually, I believe that Macbeth saw the disasters he had caused when his plan was futile. The reasoning is because his guilt took over which led to him taking suicide. I find it ironic that in the beginning of the play, he felt as though he was able to be a high ruler in society but then he thought of himself at the end not worthy in society.

I’m not certain what you mean by redeemable, but first I need to contest one point you make… Perhaps I've misunderstood you, but Macbeth doesn’t commit suicide (Lady Macbeth probably does). Unless you mean that his sense of futility in the tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’ speech at the end is a kind of giving up… Even then he really is killed by Macduff.

This might be a point of contention (as in, it might just be that your reading differs from mine), but I tend to think of Macbeth as an interesting play precisely because – in contrast to someone like Richard III, who revels in his plots and murders – Macbeth is perfectly aware of the immorality of what he does. After all, Macbeth doesn’t immediately decide to murder; what characterises him is his reluctance, which forms a key part of his soliloquies in the first part of the play. You remember that in Act 1, scene 7, when he’s debating with himself, Macbeth is thinking of all the moral reasons he ought not to commit the crime: that it is against justice, that Duncan is his ‘kinsman and his subject’ (1.7.13), as well as his guest, and is a pretty good guy. Most of all, there’s that strange passage where he says that the effect of murdering Duncan will be that  

Pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’dUpon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.21-25)

Where most of Macbeth’sother reasons are about his social relation to Duncan, this one goes beyond that. The personification of ‘Pity’ as the ‘naked new-born babe’ suggests that Macbeth’scompunction has to do with killing another human being, a person who was once a child, and before being a king is a kinsman, guest or experienced man, a vulnerable human being who needs protection, not death. It’s enough to dissuadeMacbeth from the murder and tell his wife, ‘we will proceed no further in this business’ (1.7.31). To me, this suggests that Macbeth has a pretty strong sense of what’s right and wrong. Lady Macbeth is spot on in her assessment that her husband is ‘full o’th’ milk of human kindness’ (1.5.17). If anything, the remarkable thing about this play is that a man who is so capable of disinterested human love is torn between his inherent sense of his duty towards other human beings and absolute individualism turns him into the kind of person who feels that ‘For mine own good, / All causes shall give way’(3.4.134-35)

So I don’t think its quite right to read the play as one where a person feels confident in his right and then is crushed under the crippling guilt it causes (the Crime and Punishment model), because Macbeth is racked by guilt throughout. He knows the murder is wrong before he commits it, and he already understands directly after the murder that ‘to know my deed, ’twere best not know myself’ (2.2.72). He’s not exactly the exulting Richard III who feels that whatever he does is justified as a means to his ends: his ambition is not enough to excuse his actions.

I’m not sure about his feeling worthless in society at the end either. I may have missed something if he ever says so, but I believe Macbeth’s problem goes a lot deeper than that. Just as it’s not the social aspect that puts him off the murder of Duncan, Macbeth’s sense of futility when he calls life ‘a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’ (5.5.26-28) is more than a sense of worthlessness in society. It’s more the insignificance of all human ambition in the light of all time. Looking back at history from the perspective of the end of all human history, from ‘the last syllable of recorded time’ (5.5.21), achievement and failure alike seem pointless.

The question of redeemability is a difficult one, because it depends on one’s definition of ‘redeemable’(from a Christian perspective, for instance, Macbeth’s unredeemed because he never repents, though he does have a conscience). If the question is whether Macbeth is a sympathetic villain, I would say yes. What makes Macbeth such a brilliant tragedy is that the audience is placed in a position where they know that what Macbeth is doing is wrong, but can also understand the mind of this particular murderer. I don’t think it necessarily detracts from Macbeth’s culpability, but his awareness of the meaninglessness of his ambition and the greater duty one has to one’s fellow human beings is also key to this because it shows the difficulties of a man living in the kind of society that encourages him to act contrary to his fundamental understanding of his place in the universe.

Obviously, Macbeth isn’t entirely a victim of his circumstances since he does choose to commit a murder he doesn’t strictly need to, but when you take into account that this is a hierarchical society that creates inequality and essentially rewards violence and ambition, then it’s evident that Macbeth is not just a critique of an individuals actions, but an evaluation of the kind of society that individual lives in. In that sense, I think what Macbeth sees at the end is not so much the disaster he causes as the fact that the society he lives in is a kind of disaster itself.

#loveisloveforeverandeverrr #Macbeth #Shakespeare #Murder #long post #I do love this play

[ink-leaves]

Analysis- Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald: Writing About Abuse

*This post contains spoilers for the entire novel as well as description and discussion of spousal physical and emotional abuse*

I had known before reading Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald that Zelda and Scott’s personal life was, at times, strained. This is evident in probably his most famous work: The Great Gatsby. In which, readers can see many parallels between their lives and the lives of the characters in the story. However, I didn’t know that their relationship was so significantly flawed and unhealthy.

As I discussed in my review, I’ve tried to keep a reasonable mind when discussing this book, because at the end of the day it is a work of historical fiction. For that reason, I will be discussing this topic using the names of the characters for clarity. But the purpose of this post is to discuss only the elements of the writing that Therese Anne Fowler used to paint such a vivid picture of the black hole that is spousal abuse.

I noticed that Fowler was very careful not to stop at just one type of abuse, but to give a full spectrum view of what a terrible relationship looks like.

One of the most obvious signs of spousal abuse is, of course, physical violence. The first instance of physical violence in Zelda’s story is on page 118 when Zelda and Scott get into an argument after a disastrous dinner with Zelda’s parents. Here is the quote from the novel:

“He drank too much after dinner, and when my parents had gone to bed, we ended up in a truly ugly fight- and I ended up with a black eye.”

That is the whole description of the event. It isn’t expanded upon or thought over by the Zelda. It is simply pushed aside as if it Zelda receiving a black eye is something trivial, like a plate being accidentally broken. We don’t even find out by what means Zelda gets the black eye. The narrator is deliberately choosing to gloss over the event, acting like the behavior exhibited by Scott is nothing to be concerned over. I think it is also worth noting that this event occurs more towards the beginning of their relationship, where couples are often still in their “honeymoon” phase and rose-colored glasses are usually permanent fixtures. The next line then supports this, where Zelda says that she thinks she deserved it. Zelda even takes the time to calm her parents who are, of course, horrified when they see her in the morning.

The next example I have is on page 139, where Zelda and Scott are discussing their money troubles and Zelda wants him to return a very expensive coat he bought for her.

“I was confused. ‘Max and Harold lend you money?’

‘Against royalties, or future earning- it’s all money I’m going to get eventually, just, eventually doesn’t always arrive as quickly as I need it to.’

I went to the closet, pulled the coat from its hanger, and shoved it at him. ‘Send it back!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He plopped down on the sofa. ‘You look fantastic in this coat. In fact, I think you should take off everything you’re wearing and then put the coat on.’ His eyelids were dropping as he said this, and then they closed.

I watched him for a moment, thinking he’d fallen asleep. Then, without opening his eyes he said, ‘Don’t hate me. I’m sorry. It’s all for you.’”

In this scene, Fowler shows us a more subtle approach in spousal abuse; one that doesn’t occur with a single punch but rather a difficult relationship that occurs over a long period of time. Where instead of physical violence, the victim’s concerns are trivialized and then turned back upon them. Zelda has negative feelings towards Scott buying her such an expensive coat when he doesn’t possess the money to pay for it. But when she expresses this, he waves it off then makes a sexual suggestion to alter the subject at hand. He then twists the blame off of himself and onto her by saying that what he does, he does for her; that her simply being in his life is the source of his poor handling of money. During this exchange, Scott is also falling asleep from being drunk which, naturally, ends the conversation on its own. Eliminating any opportunity to actually discuss the uncomfortable problem at hand.

A similar situation happens when they are discussing baby names on page 143, just after Zelda has given birth. They had already agreed on naming the baby girl Patricia but Scott now wants to name the baby Frances, with the nickname Scottie.

“I knew, though, that Scott would replay this scene with everyone he encountered, and that they’d all see it his way. No one would disagree with the charismatic hometown hero. Even so, I would stubbornly continue to assert my preference for weeks, they way you do when you allow hope to prevail over knowledge, and in the end, I would grow tired of the battle, and Scott would win.”

This is a great example of how helpless and outnumbered Zelda feels in her relationship. And how an abuser can rip the figurative carpet out from under their victim and still act as though nothing has happened. Zelda continues to stand her ground on the issue, but the emotional toll it takes eventually become too much to bear, especially when she is put in such an isolating position. Eventually, it just becomes easier to go along with it. Scott has proven himself to be an expert at wearing down Zelda’s resolve, through the erosion of her entire support system and identity as an individual.

This is supported when Scott refuses to let Zelda pursue her career as a ballerina on page 284.

“I’m tired of this, Zelda. You’re not a ballerina you know; you’re my wife. You need to start devoting your time to your actual duties.”

This one hardly needs further explanation.

Another example is on page 275, while Zelda and Scott are staying at a mansion in Delaware. Zelda knows that Scott fancies a young woman that is staying at the mansion and that he is cheating on her with this young lady.

“Lois wears gingham and acts the innocent, as if the floorboards outside her bedroom don’t creak mere minutes after I wake in the night to an empty bed.”

Here Zelda is more direct with her descriptive than in prior portions of the novel but is still leaving the reader with a message that they need to decipher themselves. It is heavily implied that Scott is leaving their bedroom and joining Lois, but it isn’t directly spelled out, another instance of Zelda trying to tip-tow around a situation that is too painful to address head-on.

The same thing happens on an even larger scale just further down the page and is, in my opinion, one of the most impactful parts of the whole story.

“In winter, he’ll [Scott] attempt to give a speech at Princeton, but will appear at the podium drunk and mute; he’ll arrive home- where his sister-in-law Tootsie is visiting – still crying tears of mortification, then fight with his wife about her breaking the liquor cabinet’s lock, and bloody her nose in the process.”

This whole scenario being told in the third person significantly adds to that effect of separation and makes the scene more powerful. I think it was a conscious decision by Fowler to not use Scott’s name in the scenes further into their relationship in order to magnify this disconnection effect. It is in contrast to the beginning of the relationship where the speaker does include his name for these encounters. By saying “… and bloody her nose…” not “…and I ended up with a black eye.” it makes the scene feel like it is happening to someone else. When I was reading it I almost missed the fact that he hits her (now the second known occurrence) because it is said so matter-of-factly and without ceremony. I had to go back and re-read the passage to make sure I saw it right. Upon doing so, I realized that the whole passage is very haunting. It reads almost how I would image a fortuneteller reads a prediction: chronological, systematic, and disengaged.

The final scene that I think perfectly encapsulates the extent of the abuse endured by Zelda is on page 312. During this scene, Zelda has been offered a position in a ballet company in Naples. Scott forbids her from pursuing it.

“Scott pointed at himself. ‘I am in charge of this family, Zelda. If not for my blood, my sweat, my – my- my determination, you’d be nobody special, just another aging debutante wasting away the years somewhere in Alabama, getting fat off of biscuits and preserves. It’s my life that made yours worthwhile! And yet all I get is selfish ingratitude.’”

In this one statement, Scott manages to reveal with his own words what he truly thinks of Zelda, that without him, she is nothing. That he saved her from a worthless life. That she needs to be grateful to him for it. That even though he has taken complete control over her life Scott is the one that has actually sacrificed everything. She was nothing special when he met her and whatever he complimented her with then was a façade.

It is also worth discussing that Zelda is a very fit individual because of her dedication to ballet; not because Scott’s career is of any help to her physical fitness. It is not as if her marriage to Scott allowed her to dedicate more time to ballet, she could’ve continued to pursue it while living in Alabama. He chooses to take credit for her fitness and what makes her desirable. I also believe that at this point in his life, Scott is no longer physically fit. His years of drinking and lack of exercise have caught up to him and I don’t think it is a stretch that in this scene he is projecting his insecurity onto her.

It’s all such twisted things to say to someone you are supposed to love. It reveals so much to the reader in such a short period and is enough to convince even some of the more difficult to persuade readers that Scott is a deplorable husband.

As a reader, I had a physical response to this scene. It repulsed me so severely and simultaneously made me feel such sympathy for the character of Zelda. It is difficult for people that have not been in such a relationship to relate to the situation at hand. But scenes like this one allow people to get an idea of the agony of watching someone who was supposed to be an ally turn into your worst enemy and not being able to change anything about it.  Fowler’s writing forced me to pause and take a moment to comprehend the magnitude of what had just been said and could not be unsaid.

Final Thoughts | These are just a few examples that stood out to me in the novel. There are many more in the story that are just as important and impactful. Fowler did a great job of providing readers with such a vivid account of abuse in a marriage. If you haven’t read the novel I definitely suggest picking it up for an atmospheric and addicting story of Zelda’s life. Fowler’s account of these two characters shows readers what kind of entangled web spousal abuse can turn into and how it begins to seep into every facet of someone’s life until there is nothing left.

#writing analysis #zelda fitzgerald #therese anne fowler #fiction #historical fiction

[nclkafilms]

Something’s rotten in the United States

(Review of ‘Vice’. Seen in Nordisk Film Biografer Aalborg Kennedy on the 15th of February 2019)

The fact that I went to see Adam McKay’s latest film, Vice, just hours after Donald Trump declared a national emergency to aid his desire to construct a border wall in the south, seems tragi-comic to say the least. In Vice, McKay uses his absurd natural talent for telling the obscure stories to unravel former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “origin story” as well as the political reality that fuelled his ambitions and the eternal footprints that he firmly planted in the mould of American politics. Vice makes it clear from the beginning that it will not and cannot stay objective in its portrayal of its main characters - a fact it wittily comments on in a funny, mid-credit meta-referencial scene. Vice will divide people for obvious reasons but I - for one - am a fan of McKay’s incredible narrative skills that makes Vice a wildly entertaining, thought-provoking and (if you are in opposition to Cheney’s politics) anger-inducing feast.

We follow Cheney and the pack of people surrounding him all the way from his drunk, lazy time at Yale in the early sixties to his scary and shockingly ruthless prime under the presidency of George W. Bush in the beginning of the new century. It is a story that mainly takes place in the hidden corridors of American politics where the true power oozes from every crack in the law or established practices. The story about the “creation” of the Bush era’s Cheney is, however, only the bricks that form the much bigger road that McKay and his cast wants to take us on a journey down. Vice is an exposed, witty and often baffling exploration of the decaying nature of modern politics where lawyers, focus groups and officials influences, exploits and even forms the very government that we - the people - are choosing.

At the centre of the film is, of course, Christian Bale, who (as so often before in his career) is the main attraction here; partly due to another mind-blowing physical transformation to match the bodily presence of Cheney. Bale’s weight gain and the impressive work by the make-up and prosthetics team are only details in a powerhouse performance by the admirable Briton. He nails the distinctive mannerisms of Cheney and he manages to construct a marvellous, unscrupulous and multi-layered character that is easy to hate and much harder to care for. It is clear that the film portrays Cheney as a villain and perhaps even a crook (Bale thanked Satan for his inspiration when he took home the Golden Globe); but somehow Bale still manages to inject likeable assets into the character (especially in scenes related to his daughter Mary and his personal achievements). Cheney was and is a character fuelled by a personal drive towards power and influence - you can agree or disagree (as the film wants you to) with his means, goals and use of this power; that is completely up to you. But as with Cheney himself, Bale manages to manipulate us into simply witnessing in - an admittedly uncomfortable and sour tasting - awe as Dick finds one loophole after the other slowly fighting his way to the top, taking no prisoners on his way. One of the strongest and most interesting character studies of the year!

As in real life, Bale’s Cheney is supported by his stern, conservative wife, Lynne, who is portrayed by the always impressive Amy Adams. She might not be given that much screen time (it truly is the Bale show here), but she utilises every second she gets on screen. With her strong beliefs and strong influence on her husband brilliantly conveyed by Adams, Lynne is the lady standing in the even darker shadows as she pulls the strings of the puppetmaster himself. This is made perfectly clear to everyone (including Cheney) in an early scene where she has had to pick the young Dick up in prison once again. With a few cooly delivered lines and a firm look in her eyes, Lynne makes everyone aware of the influence she has on her husband. Together Bale and Adams turns in another impressive couple performance after they stole the show in American Hustle.

Next to Bale and Adams, Vice boasts a stellar supporting cast who not only bears physical resemblance to the real life persons (LisaGay Hamilton resembles Condoleezza Rice to the extreme!), but also delivers some mesmerising character portrayals along the way. However, the strongest assets of this insanely talented supporting cast are Oscar nominee Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush Jr. and most of all Steve Carrell as mentor-turned-subject Donald Rumsfeld. Rockwell’s Bush is naive, comedic and infantile to an extent where you almost feel sorry for him when Cheney and his team order him around. While it is a good performance, I cannot help but wonder how he “won” the awards spot ahead of Carrell, who delivers one of his strongest performances after turning to more dramatic roles. His Rumsfeld is believable and “hateable” - just as the film sets him out to be. He portrays a rollercoaster  development throughout the film as he starts out as a charismatic, yet peripheral when it comes to real political influence, mentor for Cheney and ends up as a dangerous, direct and sly political big shot facing several beatings throughout. When the final blow hits, you feel his pride as reality hits him hard.

Just as in McKay’s 2015 surprise hit, The Big Short, he returns here with this strangely stylistic and absurd mix of dark comedy, hard hitting political drama and hints of documentary. In a way, I am edging towards acknowledging McKay for de facto having invented a new genre here - both films feel distinctly unique and unlike any other films. Just as was the case with his financial crisis revelation, the aesthetics of Vice are sure to be divisive. You have fast paced editing (although Vice is allowed more slower paced segments than its predecessor), sudden inclusions of real clips or pop culture references, and returning situations where McKay skirts the classic dogmas of film making. The fourth wall is broken, the dialogue is suddenly and briefly deliberately stylised, hard-to-fathom terms and expressions are directly explained (i.e. through a hilarious cameo by Alfred Molina) and the genre is changed on the order of our narrator.

Speaking of the narrator, this might be one of few of the returning, successful elements of The Big Short, that simply does not work as well here. The character that delivers the narration here feels oddly distanced from the story and its characters in contrast to Ryan Gosling’s character in The Big Short, who was right in the middle of the story adding a relevance and credibility to his narration. Here, in Vice, Jesse Plemons’ character is never truly revealed and neither are his motives. While this is surely deliberate by McKay (as nothing seems left to coincidence), it did distance me a bit from the story rather than making me more absorbed. Ultimately, the character faces an ironic fate, it has to be said - making the character slightly more approachable. A fate that can be seen as yet another hit at Cheney and his politics’ influence on the American society in general.

The early reports put a lot of emphasis on the prosthetic work made by Vice’s incredibly talented make-up department. Understandably so! It is an impressive achievement to make Bale, Carrell, Adams, Rockwell and co. disappear into their characters through subtle and realistic prosthetics (making last year’s Darkest Hour look like a cheap Halloween party), but do not let this physical achievement deceive you and, thus, make you miss the sharp and important political points brought forward by McKay here leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth.

We live in a society in which we focus on our democratic rights more than ever, but we also live in a society in which a growing contempt towards the political establishment brings all new personalities to the table. It is here that McKay urges us to never forget the monsters that hides below said table, patiently waiting for the publicly elected “guardians” of our democratic rights to lose their focus or let “the political dish of the day” slip through their fingers on to the floor for the monsters to feast on. These monsters are there and we - the people - are the ones feeding them through our choices, our opinions, our representatives. The bad taste in your mouth is your responsibility, it is yours to change.

4/5

#Oscars #Oscars 2019 #Academy Awards #Film #Film Review #Movie #Movie review #vice #adam mckay #dick cheney #george bush #donald trump #christian bale #amy adams #steve carrell #sam rockwell #the big short

[foolgobi65]

What’s the deal with padmavati?

this is going to be a long long post im so sorry in advance.... to start off with, im a diaspora kid raised in a dominant caste hindu family, and i just finished watching this movie in hindi which is not a language i understand well so if i didnt catch some things im so sorry and please feel free to add more. 

im basically going to separate the movie from the news event, and go further into why its both a bad movie and a bigoted one. the rest of this is under the cut

ok! padmavati/padmaavat (they had to change the name) as a movie and as a general News Item is .... a fucking disaster. 

in terms of the news, the karni sena which is a hindu nationalist (terrorist) group decided that this movie was an affront to their ancestors and dishonored their “queen” padmavati. Padmavati is the character in a Sufi poem called the Padmavat, and thus did not actually exist. There was talk of some dream sequence where she got with Khilji, the antagonist but most people are pretty sure it doesnt exist. The Karni Sena and their ilk has turned to rioting since the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the movie should be allowed to play, and their latest act of Rajput Valor has been attacking schoolchildren to show India the true glory of their caste. Before the movie came out there was a bounty on Deepika Padukone’s nose, her head, the director Bhansali’s head, and threats by Rajput women to commit jauhar (burn themselves alive). 

All of this, notably, without a great deal of interference and sometimes the tacit encouragement of the BJP government in power both within the provinces that are affected as well nationally. 

This mess meant that the movie released about 2 months after it was supposed to, and created this idea that to watch it was to support free speech. 

padmavaavat as a MOVIE is also a giant fucking mess.

it’s got a ridiculously regressive worldview, and the movie so far is casteist, sexist, islamophobic and homophobic. it is also a poorly written, plotted, and edited movie. 

casteist: it glorifies the dominant rajput caste, does not include anyone from outside that caste at all, will not fucking shut up about rajput valor when its clear in the present that rajput valor and values has led to a lot of shitty things. within the movie the rajputs basically constantly lose yet are still somehow portrayed as winners. their biggest victory comes from padmavati, who is from Singhal (sri lanka) and uses her intelligence instead of just fronting about her “rajput values.” Also historically the rajputs didnt become winners until they surrendered to the mughals and became commanders of the mughal army. they’re huge losers who are trying to rewrite history because theyre a pathetic martial caste known for hundreds of their women burning themselves alive when the men lose a batttle. 

sexist: the whole concept of jauhar is based on the idea that a woman’s chastity is more important than their life. 11 year old girls, pregnant women, it doesnt matter. A rajput woman cannot be allowed to live if there is even a glimmer of doubt that she may be touched by a man. Within this, she doesn’t even have the dignity to choose to die, and must ask permission beforehand from her husband. Are there women who might have wanted to live? Who knows? They’re all dead now, coerced into burning themselves alive. I’d also like to add that the movie never addresses the fate of the /non/ rajput women, which highlights a huge issue of caste and how it affects gender dynamics of hindu women. Dominant caste women are considered pure, and so they must die to preserve this purity. Other women are ignored -- if they are taken as slaves, it doesnt matter because the real victory is that khilji couldnt take the Rajput women. 

Islamophobic: the entire movie exists to highlight the differences between the “perverse” “dark” “dank” “dirty” “insane” “cheating” “evil” Muslim, and the “clean” “light” “honorable” “pure” Hindu. The colors, the scenery, the food, and of course the characters themselves, all serve this insidious idea that Muslims are the savage invader, in India to plunder everything beautiful about it, especially its dominant caste women. By all nominal accounts, Khilji was a conqueror, and he acted like many conquerors did -- including, I might add, many “hindu” conquerors. If he was crueler than other conquerors, that is of course because of who he was as a person and not because of his religion. Khilji’s wife played by Aditi Rao hydari might have been the only actually good muslim character and even then she’s portrayed as the islamophobic victim muslim wife, trapped in a horrific marriage with a savage. There’s more to be said but like ... the foundation of this movie is the idea of a primordial culture clash which of course doesnt actually exist 

homophobic: malik kafur is khilji’s eunuch slave general and he’s portrayed as being in love with khilji. its one sided, and theres one homophobic comment by the rajputs at some point. khilji maybe could be seen as reciprocating a little but tbh its all just to further this idea that khilji and co are savage, foreign (muslim) perversions. a few scenes directly contrast malik and khilji v padmavati and ratan and clearly, the hindu heterosexual couple is meant to be the good, pure, holy one. i will say malik/khilji was the only pair i was really rooting for, and this was an almost 3 hour movie meant to center on padmavati/ratan. 

bhansali also lowkey exotified sri lanka and made it seem as like .. some foreign place with lots of buddha statues and like ... shes this strange jungle princess??? i appreciate the mention of buddhism in sri lanka/south india but i dont think she was shown to be buddhist so .... yikes. also it was 7 minutes but it was weird. he cant do anything right. 

special shoutout to the absolutely horrific jauhar scene for valorizing and glorifying hundreds of dominant caste women killing themselves because their king is too incompetent to win in single combat. the way khilji wins is btw a pathetic attempt by bhansali to make his victory actually ratan’s victory even tho ratan is a huge loser who cheats on his first wife, drones on about his honor to the point where i want to kill him myself, has the military sense of a guppy fish, and is visibly proud that the love of his life wants to burn herself alive for him. 

also SPECIAL shoutout to the end positioning of the battle between the rajputs and khilji as a “dharma yudh” or a war of righteousness. it is compared to rama v ravana, and the kurkshetra war and khilji v rajput is said to be the third war of righteousness, akin to these religious struggles. khilji is directly compared to ravana. its ridiculous. its dangerous. its horrific. of course the victory of truth in this instance is that the women khilji covets (only the dominant caste ones ofc) are burned to death. to position khilji (whose army carries flags that look EXactly like the pakistani flag) as the essence of pure evil, and the fight against him a righteous war of religion in this especially islamophobic time is disgusting. the writers should be ashamed. 

As a movie, the dialogues which i admit i didnt fully understand are apparently overwrought, sappy and ridiculous. 

the plot was too much, there were a bunch of plot points that could have been cut to make a better movie.

i was never convinced of the central love pair because there really wasnt anything about them that made me feel the other was worth being their one and only love. the falling in love process was rushed to the point that i think it should have been cut out altogether and the movie should have started with padmavati established as his queen. 

the treatment of ratan’s first wife was horrific -- shes basically sidelined and is jealous a few times and then kills herself along with everyone in the fire. just ... bad writing all around. 

the editing overall was bad. the editing of ghoomar to make the karni sena happy was atrocious. 

i hated ratan, i liked padmavati for like 30 minutes maybe when she’s in charge of the kingdom and is smart, i liked khilji despite the ways he was villanized, i liked aditi rao hydari as khilji’s wife, i liked malik kafur. the visuals were fine but the battles looked weird. 

overall its a shitty bigoted movie that people are watching because the movie itself is like ... soft bigotry and portrays a bigoted worldview but the karni sena hindu rajput terrorists are stupid and decided to throw a fit and stone schoolchildren. it became some free speech victory to go watch a movie that espouses the same worldview as the ones trying to shut it down bc 2018 sucks. 

sorry for the long rambly reply, if you have any more questions feel free to ask! if anyone has more to add please do -- like i said theres stuff that i might not have caught given my privileged worldview 

#padmaavat #padmavati #bollywood #crypticlance

[minervacasterly]

~The Saintly Wife & the Heathen: Ivan IV's First 2 Wives and Parallels to the Tudor Consorts (Part 1)~ Russia has a rich history. There have been famous kings, queens, emperors and empresses, not to mention revolts that remain notorious. Among the former is none other than Ivan IV, also known as Ivan “The Terrible”. This derives from the Russian moniker "Grozny", although a more accurate translation into modern English would be "the formidable". Certainly to many of his contemporaries, especially the common folk, he was formidable and in spite of all his terrible acts, he remained popular with them. Tudor fans may think that Henry VIII’s marital history is indicative of his excesses, but they’d probably change their mind if they grew up hearing about Ivan’s eight spouses with the same frequency as they did about the founder of the Church of England. No. Ivan did not break away from the Orthodox Church -founded by apostle Paul according to its popular accounts. Nor did he sacrifice the well-being of his entire kingdom because of one of his spouses (or at least tried to make it seem that way like his English counterpart to avoid any responsibility for his actions). But he was responsible for several of their deaths. In fact, even for the time -when kings and queens were demanding more autonomy over religious matters and as a result, often clashed with the Church- some of Ivan’s actions were seen as extreme. Sure, you can say that so were Henry VIII’s, but even Henry VIII had *some* limitations. Ivan was under huge pressure to keep everything in order. Like many Tudor monarchs, he was on thin ice. His life was far from easy. As he got older he got more paranoid. If someone were to ask him if there was one time in his life where he did feel happy, he’d immediately refer to his darling Anastasia, his first wife. Anastasia was handpicked from a handful of maidens, aristocrats’ daughters who were brought to the palace for him to choose. In a Cinderella style ball, the monarch danced with almost all of them until his eyes landed on her. Time seemed to stop and according to contemporary accounts and popular legends, it was love at first sight. He knew at once she was going to be his queen. And what he wanted, he was determined to get. Just as contemporaries said that Kathryn Parr -Henry VIII’s last consort- made every day feel like a merry Sunday, so did Anastasia. More importantly, her presence worked wonders on Ivan who had always been prone to fits of anger. Sadly though, their union didn’t last. After she died, Ivan’s descent into paranoia began. He suspected the Russian nobles (better known as the boyars). He believed they had poisoned. Legend has it that before she died, she begged Ivan not to marry a heathen. This is a direct jab at his next wife. Wife #2 was none other than Maria Temryukovna. Meant to fill the hole that Anastasia Romanov had left in Ivan’s heart, Maria was presented to Ivan less than a year after her predecessor’s death. Ivan was so smitten and taken by her beauty that he began courting her and shortly afterwards, married her. But Ivan grew disenchanted with her. In his opinion, Maria was a poor replacement, and an idiot. She could barely read or write and had a poor relationship with her stepsons. To make matters worse, poor Maria was also despised by Russian courtiers. Like Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, people spread horrible rumors about her. Some claimed that she was a witch and that her good looks were owed to a deal she had done with the devil while others didn’t believe she was a true Christian.* Anastasia had been loved by the general public. Even her detractors considered her a sweetheart. The same cannot be said for her successor. Courtiers and commoners alike resented her influence and in a highly religious age, they believed that her miscarriages and short-lived son, were proof of divine punishment. God was displeased with Ivan for taking a witch as a wife. And also like her English counterpart, she served as a scapegoat for Ivan’s actions against those who voiced political dissent. To be fair though, some historians have voiced support to this theory, pointing to Maria’s brother who was one of the leaders of this secret police known as the “Oprichnik.” The Oprichnick were brutal. They were the Tsar’s praetorian guard and were deeply committed to their sovereign. They were easily recognized by their black uniform and black horses. Ivan would ride with them at times to make sure that the deed was carried out, and that all uprisings were squashed. The truth as always, must lie somewhere in the middle. It is possible she could have planted the idea in his head, but given what is known about Ivan thus far, it is far more likely that Ivan was already toying with the idea and knowing that his wife and her family (eager to maintain his favor) would support it, he voiced it to them. Maria died on the 1st of September of 1569, eight years after her marriage to Ivan. Just as with her predecessor, there were rumors that she had been poisoned. Except this time the blame was laid directly at Ivan's door. Ivan always denied this and tortured those whom he believed were responsible for her death. Aftermath - Then & Now *While Maria was a practicing Orthodox as her husband and her predecessor, many believed that she was a secret Muslim whose family only pretended to be Christians to get close to Ivan and be the new power behind the throne. To make sense of this, we have to look at where Maria was born. Her father (Temryuk) was from Kabardia had a long history of conflict with Russia and the Turks. Maria's father was one of the many Kabardians who fought against the Turks and to keep the region safe from other raiders. A year after his daughter died, Temryuk died fighting the region's other enemies, the Crimeans. When Maria became Ivan's wife, Ivan was committed to secure Russia's borders. His marriage to Maria was not well seen by his fellow Russians who believed that due to their ancestry, Maria and her family were only there to undermine Russia's crown and the Christian faith. This is a stark contrast as to how Anastasia was -and continues to be- remembered. In August 2010, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia established the Imperial Order of the Holy Great Martyr Anastasia for women. The order is named after martyr Saint Anastasia who died on December 25th, 304, and Ivan IV's first wife. The order is granted to women who have distinguished themselves in the fields of science, art, education, among others, and raised social awareness. Images: Ivan the Terrible (left), Anastasia (upper right) and Maria's ring (bottom right).

#History

[ethanalter]

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Postmortem: Max Minghella on Nick’s Reveal

Max Minghella as Nick in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo by: Take Five/Hulu)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the “Faithful” episode of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Despite their puritanical leanings, the Founding Fathers of Gilead haven’t been able to completely eliminate sex from their evolving society. The ongoing fertility crisis makes procreation a necessary practice. What they have achieved is successfully removing the concept of romance, of pleasure — for men, and especially for women — from sex. Every bedroom encounter we’ve witnessed in The Handmaid’s Tale to date deliberately resembles, in the words of series star Elisabeth Moss, a sexual assault rather than a passionate coupling.

That changes in the final scene of the show’s fifth episode, “Faithful.” Leaving her attic room under the cover of night, Offred (Moss) heads directly to the apartment above the garage where the Waterfords’ driver Nick (Max Minghella) sleeps. No words pass between them as she removes his shirt and pants, followed by her own Handmaid habit. And then, they’re on top of each other, caught in the grip of a physical longing that’s been too long suppressed. Director Mike Barker makes the conscious choice to keep the camera on Offred throughout; Nick’s present in the room, but he’s almost incidental to her emotional (and erotic) experience.

“That scene, to me, is really about release for June,” Minghella tells Yahoo TV, referring — as he will throughout our interview — to Offred by her pre-Gilead name. “I felt like I was the least important factor. This society is so terrified of female pleasure specifically, so these moments of reprieve are important. That scene was simple to shoot [because] it was more primal than anything else I worked on. Mike is uniquely gifted to shoot such scenes — he’s a man with no filter. And Lizzie and I are very close and trust and respect each other. It’s was a very effective combination of people to tackle a scene like that.” (Fun fact: Barker has directed multiple episodes of Outlander, another show famous for its energizing sex scenes.)

Elisabeth Moss and Minghella in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

That Offred chooses Nick as the person to release herself with is a decision that, for her at least, seems based more on proximity than affection. While the enigmatic chauffeur has been a source of fascination for her since entering the Waterford residence, she’s more attracted to figuring out his deal than his personality. (She’s also clinging to memories of her husband, Luke, who we see in the flashbacks that are sprinkled throughout “Faithful” revealing how they fell in love. It’s a storyline that also gives the episode it’s semi-ironic title: Luke was married when he and June met, and he left his wife for her.) That fascination doubles after Ofglen warns her that there’s an Eye living in her household — and process of elimination makes Nick the most likely suspect.

Sure enough, he discloses his status as a member of the secret police to Offred midway through “Faithful,” getting a jump on a revelation that’s saved for the final pages of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. As Minghella explains, the fact that he confesses this early in the series signals that Nick is far more into Offred than the other way around. “There was a lot of discussion about how easy that confession should be,” he says. “I like the notion that June has this power over Nick that causes him to make decisions that aren’t necessarily [ideal] for his self-preservation. The power of love is a strong thing.”

Moss and Yvonne Strahovski in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Nick’s intense attraction to Offred, as well as his equally intense survival instinct, are both motivating factors behind his decision to agree to Serena Joy’s (Yvonne Strahovski) proposal that he be the one to father the Handmaid’s child in place of Fred (Joseph Fiennes). So with his boss’s wife standing guard, alternately watching them and looking out the window lest any of the household staff wander into this illegal arrangement, Nick has his own “breeding ceremony” with Offred, and it’s about as awkward and unpleasant as her evenings with the Commander — a direct contrast to the wild, unobserved sex they both enjoy later. “It’s sort of a miracle she forgives me after that,” Minghella says, chuckling. “I don’t think that Nick is delighted by that scenario; he has real feelings for this woman, and it’s an awful way for that to be expressed for the first time.”

The exact nature of Nick’s feelings for Offred remains more opaque in the novel — a side effect of the fact that he withholds key pieces of information from her until the narrative rushes to its conclusion. With the expanded timeline, and shifting points of view, that have accompanied translating the book to television, Minghella had to make specific performance choices that bring the character into sharper focus. Early on, for example, he decided that Nick should have a very “militant” physicality that complements his status as a secret government agent, and hints at a larger backstory that Minghella says will be disclosed in a future episode. “It felt a bit like doing Kabuki theater,” he says of the character’s deliberate movements. He relies on them to keep his face expressionless, avoiding any flashes of emotion that could leave him emotionally or physically vulnerable.

Now that Nick’s Kabuki mask has slipped, somewhat, in “Faithful,” Minghella teases that more of his true feelings may escape as The Handmaid’s Tale passes the halfway point in its 10-episode run and looks ahead to the just-announced second season. “What’s amazing is that you get to the end of this season and you really feel how rich [the show] is. It’s full of discovery and revelation, and yet we’re just getting started,” he says. Being able to grow with a character over the course of these 10 episodes has been a new experience for the 31-year-old actor, who — apart from a recurring role on The Mindy Project — has primarily appeared in feature films, including The Social Network and The Ideas of March. (Minghella is the son of Oscar-winning English Patient director Anthony Minghella, who passed away in 2008.)

“I found it fascinating to be behind the story,” Minghella says of his first brush with serialized television. “I was really learning about the person I was playing with the audience, week by week.” In fact, he signed onto the series not even aware of the prominence Nick would come to have in the story. “I think Nick had only three lines of dialogue in the pilot script,” he says. “It was interesting to discover that Nick would become such an intrinsic part of the story, and a pleasant surprise to be given a lot of challenging stuff to do.”

New episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale premiere Wednesdays on Hulu.

Read more from Yahoo TV: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Postmortem: Ann Dowd on Aunt Lydia’s Mind-Set ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Postmortem: Alexis Bledel on Ofglen’s Plight ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Postmortem: Elisabeth Moss on That Breeding Scene and Offred’s Real Name

#The Handmaids Tale #max minghella #_revsp:wp.yahoo.tv.us #hulu #_author:Ethan Alter #_uuid:5db42955-7521-3418-a4d1-6c3d2f66e01a #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT

[cinephiled-com]

New Post has been published on Cinephiled

New Post has been published on http://www.cinephiled.com/interview-iranian-director-asghar-farhadi-oscar-nominated-salesman/

Interview: Iranian Director Asghar Farhadi on His Oscar-Nominated ‘The Salesman’

When they are forced to move out of their flat, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), a young couple living in Tehran, are forced to move into a new apartment. However, once relocated, a sudden violent act, somehow linked to the apartment’s previous tenant, dramatically changes the couple’s life, creating a simmering tension between them, even as the acting couple prepares to star in an Iranian production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Writer/Director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past), a master at exposing domestic discord through his multi-layered films, explores the psychology of vengeance and a relationship put under strain in his powerful new film, The Salesman (Forushande). Time magazine named 44 year-old Asghar Farhadi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world in 2012, after his film, A Separation, won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, as well as numerous other awards. The Salesman is his seventh feature. I sat down with Farhadi and his translator in Los Angeles.

Danny Miller: Your films are all so original — sometimes shockingly so. Did you start with the idea of contrasting what this couple is going through with the production of Death of a Salesman that they’re performing in, or did that idea come to you later?

Asghar Farhadi: For a long time I’ve been wanting to make a film that had something to do with the theater. I started with the basic idea of a couple working on a play and then something happens in their lives that prevents them from appearing on stage.

How did you end up choosing Death of a Salesman?

I read a bunch of plays when I was trying to come up with what this couple was working on. I read a great number of plays until I got to Death of a Salesman. I had read it 20 years earlier, but after rereading it I knew this was what I had to use. There are so many connections between this play and my story. For example, the old man we see at the end of the film with his wife is basically an Iranian Willy Loman. I started to see the play as a kind of a mirror to the story that happens to my main characters. The main thing that my story and the play have in common is the theme of humiliation.

Is playwright Arthur Miller well known in Iran? Was that an existing translation of Death of a Salesman or one you created for the film?

Arthur Miller is very well known in my country. Every few years there are new translations of Miller’s play available in Iran. I think the last Arthur Miller production I heard about in Iran was a year ago — there are several production of American plays in Iran every year, they are very relevant to us and important.

Your two leads, played by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, give such extraordinary performances in this film. Hosseini is amazing but I can’t stop thinking about Alidoosti’s quiet and complex portrayal — so many layers. What’s your style with working with your actors — do they participate a lot in developing their characters?

I work a great deal with some of my actors, with others less so. I’ve worked with Shahab on several films so we’ve come to know each other’s language. We did have a great deal of rehearsal for this film but it might interest you to know that the main thing I worked with them on was playing the parts of Willy and Linda Loman. It mattered very much to me that they should appear like real theater actors. The person I probably worked with the most was the actor who plays the old man who comes in at the end of the film. This character could have been the Achilles heel of my film — his acting had to be just right. What’s important for me is that audiences watch my films and feel like they’re seeing life. I always tell my actors to imagine that they are in a documentary!

Our two countries have had a complex relationship, God knows, including now. Another thing that I love about your movies is that it gives more Americans the chance to see Iranian characters who are 100% relatable and living lives so similar to our own. When you’re making your movies, do you consciously think about how they might be perceived in other countries?

Yes, I am always aware of this but the reason I make films is never to demonstrate that we are like other people. In my opinion it’s certain politicians and the media that have constructed this erroneous image. And there’s certainly a segment of the Iranian population who may have erroneous impressions about Americans. When you look at these two peoples through the lens of politics, you end up with a very one-dimensional perspective. But it’s very interesting — in terms of emotionality, I find that Iranians and Americans really resemble each other.

As much as I completely related to this film and these characters, do you think there might be things about the story that we don’t get the same way because of differences in our cultures?

It’s possible that certain audiences may see some things as palpably as Iranian audiences. The sense of shame is something that is present for humans everywhere, but I feel that in my country and in some other countries in the East, it’s stronger. So, for instance, when the woman doesn’t directly explain to her husband what happened in the bathroom, I think it’s something that may be more understandable to an Iranian audience than it is to an American audience.

Oh, that’s so interesting. I think that many of us may understand that scene but in a totally different way — using our awareness of how trauma can close people down emotionally, but not as a cultural thing. Another thing that I love about your movies is that there’s never a black and white good versus bad, all the characters are way more complex than that. When you go to screenings around the world, do you get different reactions related to the morality of what’s happening in the story?

The feedback I’ve received in America and Iran is very similar. There are also some differences in opinion with both audiences. In American and Iran, some audience members judge the main character for his desire for revenge and in the moment that he slaps the other man. But some people in both countries say that’s the very least he should have done. But I found in Europe, for example, most of the people in the audience were completely against the slap.

Fascinating!

That’s partly why I’m saying that Iranians and Americans perhaps resemble each other more in terms of their emotions, I often have very similar reactions to my films in both countries as opposed to other parts of the world.

I first saw the film just before our recent election and since then I’ve been thinking about it differently, including the whole Willy Loman ethic that’s going on that led to our current situation. Coming from a country where I assume you’ve had similar issues with your government, do you have any advice for those of us now who are in disagreement with where we’re headed?

There’s only one way for the world to become a better place — and that is for humanity to be placed at the very top and for everything else to be placed below it. Without that, the world will never be a good place. When ideology is at the top of the pyramid and then humanity, the first thing that happens is that it divides the people into two distinct camps: Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians and non-Christians, and so on. Or imagine that politics is at the top and humans are beneath that. That will again start dividing people into camps: Americans, Mexicans, Iranians, Blacks, Whites, Immigrants, etc. I think that all of our struggles should be working to place humanity at the top of the pyramid.

And a great way to do that is through art. I hope that filmmakers like you continue to help us get out of our polarized stances a little bit and look at human issues that cross all barriers.

I hope that the this period ends up being a positive, beneficial experience for American society as it tries to become acquainted with itself.

The Salesman is now playing in selected cities. It is one of five films nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award but as of this morning, there was much doubt that Asghar Farhadi would be allowed to attend the awards because of the executive order that the President signed yesterday.

#Academy Awards #Asghar Farhadi #Shahab Hosseini #Taraneh Alidoosti #The Salesman #Interviews #What's Hot