The banners, they'd all flown in the last war
Joss Whedon has been making a bit of noise recently about what he has taken to calling "torture porn". Initially this took the form of a letter to the MPAA requesting that they remove the rating from the film Captivity, the central conceit of which is the abduction and torture of a young woman. At this point, it seems likely that Whedon had not seen Captivity but was, as he makes clear in the letter, objecting simply to the advertising campaign which was occupying large and prominent hoardings all over Los Angeles.
I noticed this at the time, but it didn't interest me a great deal. I'm a great admirer of Whedon's work as a writer, director and creative force behind some of the greatest American TV of the last decade (a parameter into which some of Buffy no longer fits, but heigh-ho. Memento mori) but I don't belong to that peculiar genus of fanboy who will take up arms on an issue merely because someone I admire raises it: in fact I thought it was slightly bogus. In the letter Whedon attempts to head off accusations of censorship by citing his support of the First Amendment (referencing his history as a maker of horror stories) and his distrust of those who recommend banning something "for the good of the people". Then he tramples over the First Amendment and recommends a de facto ban for the good of the people. Removing the MPAA rating from Captivity dramatically reduces the number of US cinemas that are prepared to show the film. Since all the major studios are signatories to an agreement to submit all their films to the MPAA (the process is technically voluntary), the cinema chains they own will not show unrated (or even NC-17) films. Refusing a film a rating is therefore a functional means of restricting it to independent and arthouse cinemas, thereby ensuring that its audience will be minimal. Whedon calls for this action explicitly to protect people: because "this ad [and by implication the film] is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people that have to see it."
Yesterday he posted a rather longer tract to the Whedonesque website, discussing initially the "honour killing" of a 17 year old Iraqi girl, Du'a Khalil, and the facts that it was filmed with mobile phone cameras and that the footage was available on CNN, and later drawing this into his theme of torture porn and his continuing quest to have Captivity in some manner banned or censored. This was rather more interesting to me, because of what I consider to be the entirely specious moral equivalence he draws between the practice of killing your daughter or sister or cousin for perceived infractions of a barbaric, mediæval, repressive and misogynist creed and filming it as sport; and the practice of making fictional, nonreal films with some, though by no means all, of the same themes.
Let's, as Michael Howard once began, be clear. I have no disagreement with Whedon when he says that the phrase "honour killing" is a breathtaking oxymoron. There is no honour, and certainly no manliness, in the violent subjugation of women, whatever the religious or anthropological justification. (I am reminded here of a scene in the TV series Nip/Tuck in which a Somali woman has a procedure to rebuild her clitoris following her religiously-motivated mutilation as a girl in "a place where men are such pussies, they have to neuter their women to get a hard-on", as Dr. Troy says.) I offer no demurral, either, of his revulsion concerning the filming, for posterity, pour encourager les autres, of this subhuman act and its subsequent availability on the website of a major news network. (No, I haven't checked it out, and I won't be linking to it.) But I'm afraid that's where he starts to lose me.
Perish the thought, Joss. Let nothing come between you and your relativism. An "agenda" that dares to posit a link between burying a woman up to her neck in sand and throwing rocks at her head, or (say) holding her down at the age of twelve, hacking off her clitoris and sewing her labia shut with coarse twine, and the "culture" (for which read religion) that enthusiastically condones these actions as the natural order of things is, like, obviously nothing more than dumb jingoism and clearly has nothing to do with the contravention of civilised ideals like freedom, justice and individual rights that transcend mere nationalism. We are better than that; let's not be afraid to say it.
Moving on to Captivity, or more accurately its trailer:
Much of the rest of Whedon's piece seems to grow from this (slightly meretricious) revelation. He takes great exception to the fact that the first words (in the trailer, anyway) that we hear Elisha Cuthbert scream are "I'm sorry."
It's worth knowing, at this point, that Whedon has a great affinity for what he calls "strong women". That phrase is unbearably trite these days, and there was never a time when it didn't by implication dismiss other women not granted such a label as weak and inferior. Contrast with the (both pejorative) uses of "strongman", who is either a circus freak, all brawn and no brains, or a tribal leader, exercising power through fear and impervious to reason from we sophisticated intellectuals: a strong woman is universally a positive thing, so by interpolation a mere "woman" is inferior. To talk of "strong women" these days is to make the same error as Diane Abbott made on This Week on Thursday, when she chose as her moment of the week the fact that Lewis Hamilton, F1's first black driver, had assumed sole custody of the top of the Championship table. Diane is still fighting the battles of the 1970s and so probably thinks that there has been some great conspiracy to keep black drivers out of F1, but the simple fact is that motor racing generally seems to have relatively few black fans. No doubt when he sits in a McLaren, Hamilton is a racing driver first and a black man second, and if I were he I would have found being made part of Diane's superannuated race agenda insulting and patronising. So it is with Whedon and "strong women". Brought up largely by his mother (it's unclear why this was the case), he cites her as a strong influence in his writing and his identification as a feminist, but the battles she was fighting when she brought him up are not the same ones that are being fought now. A woman that some years ago would have merited the epithet "strong" is these days simply a woman.
Anyway. "I'm sorry" sends Whedon off on some riff (well, in music metaphors, more of a slightly disorganised progressive jam that lasts twenty minutes) about how society sees women as wrong, as something that needs to be corrected. This meme is apparently perpetuated despite, as he makes very clear, more than half the population of the world being women. Must be a conspiracy. We don't even know, of course, when or why Elisha screams, "I'm sorry". It probably isn't the first thing she says. It may have been taken completely out of context. She may have done something terrible.
Oooh. No, I don't wish to indicate that she could have done something to warrant or justify her abduction and torture. That's why we'll be on her side, something I can say without ever having seen Captivity. Elisha is the protagonist, she is the focus for the audience's projection. We root for her. But she might still be legitimately sorry about something.
But no. Whedon prefers to assume that she is being made to apologise for being a woman, and as such is merely yet another cipher in the code that runs through society's intellectual and social fabric that suggests women are inferior, manipulative, "morally unfinished". (Er, what?) From here he descends into a mass of contradictions. Misogyny is rife, but misandry doesn't exist (here's a clue: Blogger's spellcheck knows the former but thinks by the latter I meant "Sandra"). Women are tough, the equal of men - but we can't show them being tortured. Where was Whedon's campaign about "taking something away from the people who have to see it" when Hostel and Saw (and sequels ad nauseam) were being released? Ah, these depict the torture of men. Men deserve it.
Oh boy. As a connoisseur of horror, one would have thought that by now Whedon would have mastered the technique audiences were advised to practise when viewing Last House on the Left: "keep repeating, it's only a movie". For someone as well-versed in the simulacra of film as Joss Whedon so casually to gloss over the differences between the two pieces of footage defies belief. The "upcoming torture-porn" is available for our viewing pleasure because it is not real, and we know it; it was made by consenting adults who weren't harmed, and we know it. The murder of Du'a Khalil is not available for our viewing pleasure. It is available for our viewing horror. It is real, and we know it. A girl is actually losing her life at the hands of her family in casually brutal fashion, and we know it. It documents a grotesque act of repression and retribution for imagined crimes, an act seemingly committed with the full knowledge and consent of what passes for the community or the society in question. It is another appalling testament to the use of violence and fear of a closed society, and if we can bring ourselves to watch it at all we do so with churning stomach and rising fury. We don't sit down with a bucket of Coke and put our feet up.
The irony is that in fighting the last war, as it were, Whedon is just as guilty of patronising women as Diane Abbott is of patronising Lewis Hamilton. Does he think that Elisha Cuthbert was in some way forced to make this film? She's a successful actress who is short of neither a bob or two, nor the means to make more. She made Captivity because she chose to. Is Whedon suggesting that she is misguided or somehow complicit in the imagined subjugation of her sex? Is it not more important that she be free to make a film that he disagrees with, however indefensibly, than that his rather outdated views on gender politics be given sway over art, however unpleasant or transgressive?
I noticed this at the time, but it didn't interest me a great deal. I'm a great admirer of Whedon's work as a writer, director and creative force behind some of the greatest American TV of the last decade (a parameter into which some of Buffy no longer fits, but heigh-ho. Memento mori) but I don't belong to that peculiar genus of fanboy who will take up arms on an issue merely because someone I admire raises it: in fact I thought it was slightly bogus. In the letter Whedon attempts to head off accusations of censorship by citing his support of the First Amendment (referencing his history as a maker of horror stories) and his distrust of those who recommend banning something "for the good of the people". Then he tramples over the First Amendment and recommends a de facto ban for the good of the people. Removing the MPAA rating from Captivity dramatically reduces the number of US cinemas that are prepared to show the film. Since all the major studios are signatories to an agreement to submit all their films to the MPAA (the process is technically voluntary), the cinema chains they own will not show unrated (or even NC-17) films. Refusing a film a rating is therefore a functional means of restricting it to independent and arthouse cinemas, thereby ensuring that its audience will be minimal. Whedon calls for this action explicitly to protect people: because "this ad [and by implication the film] is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people that have to see it."
Yesterday he posted a rather longer tract to the Whedonesque website, discussing initially the "honour killing" of a 17 year old Iraqi girl, Du'a Khalil, and the facts that it was filmed with mobile phone cameras and that the footage was available on CNN, and later drawing this into his theme of torture porn and his continuing quest to have Captivity in some manner banned or censored. This was rather more interesting to me, because of what I consider to be the entirely specious moral equivalence he draws between the practice of killing your daughter or sister or cousin for perceived infractions of a barbaric, mediæval, repressive and misogynist creed and filming it as sport; and the practice of making fictional, nonreal films with some, though by no means all, of the same themes.
Let's, as Michael Howard once began, be clear. I have no disagreement with Whedon when he says that the phrase "honour killing" is a breathtaking oxymoron. There is no honour, and certainly no manliness, in the violent subjugation of women, whatever the religious or anthropological justification. (I am reminded here of a scene in the TV series Nip/Tuck in which a Somali woman has a procedure to rebuild her clitoris following her religiously-motivated mutilation as a girl in "a place where men are such pussies, they have to neuter their women to get a hard-on", as Dr. Troy says.) I offer no demurral, either, of his revulsion concerning the filming, for posterity, pour encourager les autres, of this subhuman act and its subsequent availability on the website of a major news network. (No, I haven't checked it out, and I won't be linking to it.) But I'm afraid that's where he starts to lose me.
I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda.
Perish the thought, Joss. Let nothing come between you and your relativism. An "agenda" that dares to posit a link between burying a woman up to her neck in sand and throwing rocks at her head, or (say) holding her down at the age of twelve, hacking off her clitoris and sewing her labia shut with coarse twine, and the "culture" (for which read religion) that enthusiastically condones these actions as the natural order of things is, like, obviously nothing more than dumb jingoism and clearly has nothing to do with the contravention of civilised ideals like freedom, justice and individual rights that transcend mere nationalism. We are better than that; let's not be afraid to say it.
Moving on to Captivity, or more accurately its trailer:
The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.
Much of the rest of Whedon's piece seems to grow from this (slightly meretricious) revelation. He takes great exception to the fact that the first words (in the trailer, anyway) that we hear Elisha Cuthbert scream are "I'm sorry."
It's worth knowing, at this point, that Whedon has a great affinity for what he calls "strong women". That phrase is unbearably trite these days, and there was never a time when it didn't by implication dismiss other women not granted such a label as weak and inferior. Contrast with the (both pejorative) uses of "strongman", who is either a circus freak, all brawn and no brains, or a tribal leader, exercising power through fear and impervious to reason from we sophisticated intellectuals: a strong woman is universally a positive thing, so by interpolation a mere "woman" is inferior. To talk of "strong women" these days is to make the same error as Diane Abbott made on This Week on Thursday, when she chose as her moment of the week the fact that Lewis Hamilton, F1's first black driver, had assumed sole custody of the top of the Championship table. Diane is still fighting the battles of the 1970s and so probably thinks that there has been some great conspiracy to keep black drivers out of F1, but the simple fact is that motor racing generally seems to have relatively few black fans. No doubt when he sits in a McLaren, Hamilton is a racing driver first and a black man second, and if I were he I would have found being made part of Diane's superannuated race agenda insulting and patronising. So it is with Whedon and "strong women". Brought up largely by his mother (it's unclear why this was the case), he cites her as a strong influence in his writing and his identification as a feminist, but the battles she was fighting when she brought him up are not the same ones that are being fought now. A woman that some years ago would have merited the epithet "strong" is these days simply a woman.
Anyway. "I'm sorry" sends Whedon off on some riff (well, in music metaphors, more of a slightly disorganised progressive jam that lasts twenty minutes) about how society sees women as wrong, as something that needs to be corrected. This meme is apparently perpetuated despite, as he makes very clear, more than half the population of the world being women. Must be a conspiracy. We don't even know, of course, when or why Elisha screams, "I'm sorry". It probably isn't the first thing she says. It may have been taken completely out of context. She may have done something terrible.
Oooh. No, I don't wish to indicate that she could have done something to warrant or justify her abduction and torture. That's why we'll be on her side, something I can say without ever having seen Captivity. Elisha is the protagonist, she is the focus for the audience's projection. We root for her. But she might still be legitimately sorry about something.
But no. Whedon prefers to assume that she is being made to apologise for being a woman, and as such is merely yet another cipher in the code that runs through society's intellectual and social fabric that suggests women are inferior, manipulative, "morally unfinished". (Er, what?) From here he descends into a mass of contradictions. Misogyny is rife, but misandry doesn't exist (here's a clue: Blogger's spellcheck knows the former but thinks by the latter I meant "Sandra"). Women are tough, the equal of men - but we can't show them being tortured. Where was Whedon's campaign about "taking something away from the people who have to see it" when Hostel and Saw (and sequels ad nauseam) were being released? Ah, these depict the torture of men. Men deserve it.
How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
Oh boy. As a connoisseur of horror, one would have thought that by now Whedon would have mastered the technique audiences were advised to practise when viewing Last House on the Left: "keep repeating, it's only a movie". For someone as well-versed in the simulacra of film as Joss Whedon so casually to gloss over the differences between the two pieces of footage defies belief. The "upcoming torture-porn" is available for our viewing pleasure because it is not real, and we know it; it was made by consenting adults who weren't harmed, and we know it. The murder of Du'a Khalil is not available for our viewing pleasure. It is available for our viewing horror. It is real, and we know it. A girl is actually losing her life at the hands of her family in casually brutal fashion, and we know it. It documents a grotesque act of repression and retribution for imagined crimes, an act seemingly committed with the full knowledge and consent of what passes for the community or the society in question. It is another appalling testament to the use of violence and fear of a closed society, and if we can bring ourselves to watch it at all we do so with churning stomach and rising fury. We don't sit down with a bucket of Coke and put our feet up.
The irony is that in fighting the last war, as it were, Whedon is just as guilty of patronising women as Diane Abbott is of patronising Lewis Hamilton. Does he think that Elisha Cuthbert was in some way forced to make this film? She's a successful actress who is short of neither a bob or two, nor the means to make more. She made Captivity because she chose to. Is Whedon suggesting that she is misguided or somehow complicit in the imagined subjugation of her sex? Is it not more important that she be free to make a film that he disagrees with, however indefensibly, than that his rather outdated views on gender politics be given sway over art, however unpleasant or transgressive?
posted by Novus at 09:52
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