Mechanical Candle ([info]ersatzinsomnia) wrote,
@ 2007-05-21 17:14:00
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Entry tags:horror movies, political, quip

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and Queens...
I was gonna post this over in [info]lord_darkseid's journal in response to his post here, but, in my typical fashion, it became too long and rambling to clutter someone else's comments with. In the post, Darius is commenting on this post by Joss Whedon, relating the recent "Honor killing" of Dua Khalil.

"Honor" killings happen all the time in countries that live under Shiara (sp?) law. We only see them on the news and via the web now, because we're over there. There are these groups who call themselves "morality police" who are kind of self-appointed or church-organized vigilantes with the implicit but not the explicit help of the police. That way, when they go out and beat some woman to death for hanging out with the wrong group, the police don't interfere and it kinda ends there. The Government says "wasn't us" and the church claims it was a "social uprising" against the woman's immorality. (I remember reading about how a female US soldier in Iraq was driving a refueling tanker on the airport tarmac and stopped to hook up one of the jets, when one of these "morality police" assholes ran out and knocked her down with a club because "women aren't morally allowed to drive." Fortunately, being a US soldier, she then stood up and beat the everliving shit outta him.)

Joss is perfectly right to try and call more attention to these groups. And he's welcome to whatever philosophical pontificating he likes concerning the ramifications of gender differences around the world. (However ridiculous the tired, trite, inverse-Freudian "womb envy" theory may be.) On the issues of entertainment, however, I coincidentally ran across this post in connection with that famous bingo game that's making the rounds. I have issues with the "bingo game" itself and the motivation behind it, but that's not relevant to what I wanted to say here. What is relevant is the writer's feminist perspective on some of Joss's work:

Buffy Summers - how I loathe what was done to this character - ended up forcing oral sex on a male character over his repeated verbal objections. To a musical sting. The writers, I am fairly certain, did not actually realise they had written a rape, particularly as this same character later attempted to rape Buffy, which was not treated as at all amusing.

See also: Men forcing demonic power into the First Slayer = metaphysical rape and utterly despicable. Buffy using Willow to force demonic power into possibly thousands of young women = empowering!

Women are entirely capable of stupid or evil decisions. But those decisions should be treated as such by the text, not lauded as a turning of the sexism tables.

This is an issue because Joss spends a good deal of time in a "holier than thou" approach, grinding after this new "Captivity" movie, and, for all I know, he may have a solid point. I haven't seen the ad campaign but... well, let's break it down.

1a) Traditionally, in movies, the horror genre has been excoriated as universally misogynistic because of its preferrential obsession with women as victims. (Even setting aside the borderline porn obsession that's becoming universal across all genres.) However, this overlooks the "final girl" factor in which a designated woman turns, self-empowers, and takes out the slasher/monster that's effortlessly killed everyone else. The trend is noticeably absent in many foreign genres (giallo), but is nearly universal in stateside films, the particular industry that Joss seems to be concentrating his scorn on. (See: every damn "slasher" ever.)

1b) The new trend of "torture horror" (which I, personally, dislike intensely) however, seems to be stepping things up significantly in the trauma department, concentrating on increasingly creative and shocking ways of gouging, cutting, piercing, or otherwise killing its targets, and using that as its principle advertising hook. For someone concerned with the the societal effect of entertainment trends, it's obvious that these new trends warrant examination.

1c) Yet, even within these new films, the old trends remain. The "Saw" movies in total could be seen as the story arc of the new twisted "hero"... Jigsaw's apprentice stepping up to replace her ailing mentor, and "Hostel" 's violence was primarily man-on-man. I think (heard, didn't see) that even "Turistas" follows the "final girl" trend.

2) Whether the "final girl" or the twisted new versions of it counteract the apparent misogyny that preceeds it is an issue that's been batted around academia for years, and frequently open to debate on a case-by-case fashion. I think there'd be little debate that "Ripley" from the Alien movies or Sarah Conner from the first "Terminator" are empowered female figures, nor that "House of 1000 Corpses" is, at its least, violently misogynistic. (The latter could be argued as just straight misanthropic, but that's a bigger argument.)


My point is, as much as I may enjoy many of Mr. Whedon's stories, if he's going to speak from the mount to us on the nature of gender relations in the modern world, specifically on the topics he's objecting to in "Captivity, then he really needs to take a close look at his own work. He's used the "rape trick" in Buffy more than a couple times. 1) Woman force sex on men = empowering/funny, man force sex on woman = deplorable. 2) Rape attempt used to denigrate & weaken main female character (look again at Spike's attempted rape of Buffy) 3) Rape attempt used to demonstrate evilness of main baddie (in the "three geeks" storyline).

And that's not even detailing the pieces specifically germain here. Do I even have to list the number of times that Buffy gets tied up, chained down, or caged in the course of the series? (The occasion when Ethan Rain tied her down to carve symbols into her skin leaps immediately to mind.) Or how about objectification with the "Buffy bot"? Yes, Buffy always escapes, empowers, and beats the crap out of the baddie, but so do the other "final girls" in the horror genre. Why does he get a pass, and "Captivity" not? Is it due to the severity of the situations in "Captivity"? I know nothing of the story or the advertising campaign, but After Dark's quote that it's "...also about female empowerment" tells me we're dealing with another "final girl" story, just one within the "torture horror" genre.

In short, Joss has a good point about the way in which the world in general has ignored things like "honor killings" in the name of tolerating inherently sexist cultures. Further, Joss's concern with parallels between the honor killings and modern entertainment may be a truly important issue. That in mind, however, he really needs to re-think his own attitude of blamelessness about his own contributions before speaking down to the rest of the world. Things he's done in his own stories would seem, by his own standards to be beyond the pale.


Ohhh... I'm gonna get mail on this one...


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[info]dwchang
2007-05-21 10:20 pm UTC (link)
I don't claim to know anything about Buffy since *gasp* I've never seen any or read any, but I personally think Whedon's handling of Kitty Pryde in Astonishing X-Men has been good. She's a strong woman and quite capable of kicking ass.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-22 04:09 pm UTC (link)
Haven't read it, can't comment. I think it's just his totally oblivious attitude of blamelessness in this that's irritating me, especially after recalling how some feminist fan-groups were howling for his blood after some of the stunts he'd pulled in the later seasons of "Buffy."

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[info]sixstop
2007-05-22 04:34 pm UTC (link)
so... a media figure is blaming the media for the moral degenerates of society?

This is almost like Nintendo (pokemon)yelling at Konami for their blatant commercialism for Yugi-oh franchise causing moral decay.

...its no different than the majority of other hollywood/tv figures when it comes to trying to take a position of authority on something when their knowledge, experience, and relevance is dubious at best.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-26 05:48 pm UTC (link)
Thing is, I thought better of Joss, so this came as something of a surprise. His action statement is good enough, but the path he takes to it is just... warped.

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[info]wardenclyffe
2007-05-22 04:56 pm UTC (link)
The proposed "womb envy" is pretty weak. Personally, I think that the seemingly ubiquitous cultural meme of the weakness/impurity/evil derives entirely from the human being's embedded "might makes right" mentality. Because men are stronger, they can back their ideas up with force and therefore are more "right." The evolutionary product of this is the tendency for men to steer history, philosophy, and government.

This is reinforced by the biological advantage of the pair bond in raising human children. In fact, it is worth considering whether the modern trend toward female empowerment in developed countries is due (at least in part) to the influential economic advantage of the two-income household and independent woman earners.

I am strongly ambivalent on the subject of honor killings and so-called "barbarism" in general. You can't force people to be moral; other cultures have to learn their lessons the hard way, just like ours did. European culture learned not to go to war over religion by killing half their population in the 30 Years War. We learned the horror of genocide by committing it ourselves in the African colonies. We learned the glory of nationalism from Napoleon and the shame of nationalism from the World Wars. All of these moral lessons had their costs in human lives, but where they taught us to value life, perhaps they were worth the cost.

These nations and cultures are in a different place culturally than we are. I am tempted, but I hesitate, to call it a "different level of social evolution" because this implies a value judgment, which itself derives from the fact that I come from a different culture from the one I am judging. Yes, it seems horrible and tragic; yes, it seems like barbarism; but it seems like this to me, and in two hundred years I will be the barbarian.

Though I sincerely think we cannot force others to be moral, what we can do is wash our hands of them. Stop buying their goods, stop selling them goods, stop sending humanitarian relief. Let them develop in their own way, but don't foster barbarity by turning a blind eye in the name of the economy. This is why, as I have told friends several times, I would probably ruin the economy if I were to become president.

We create our own good and evil. To them, evil is anything which violates their moral way of being. To us, if you are an optimist, it is anything which violates a human's free-born rights; and if you are a pessimist, it is anything which weakens the synergies necessary to maintain a modern society and a modern economy. Humanity will always comprise a synthesis of good and evil.

I'd like to say I have a solution, but I don't. Ultimately, I hope that those principles which protect life will win out over those that devalue and destroy it by sheer population evolution.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-26 05:18 pm UTC (link)
You can't force people to be moral; other cultures have to learn their lessons the hard way, just like ours did.

I keep trying to write a response to your post, and keep getting convoluted out of all coherence. Lemme try a simple version:

The concept that these cultures need to "learn these lessons on their own" is, in itself, a cultural conciet not supported by history. In fact, these are cultures that pre-date our own by several hundred years, during which they somehow "missed the opportunity" to learn the benefits of equality of the sexes, so in what way should it be expected that they could make these discoveries now? One might say the widening contact with the outside world would force the issue, but that's merely a further reflection of the uncertainty of the situation: the world in which they are to "learn these lessons" is a very different one from that which western and eastern cultures learned their own lessons. In truth, the idea of universal equality arose (even in an idealized state) in each major cultural center only following several hundred years of being in a state of mastery over all forces external to the realm... being in endangering conflict only with those of a similarly "developed" status. (China/Japan, England/France/US) The "underdeveloped" (for the purposes of this conversation) countries and cultural regions of the world are experiencing very different environments than those experienced by Western and Eastern cultures.

I realize you didn't mean to imply you didn't understand these points, but their presence implies that the countries in question may not learn the same lessons that we believe are foregone conclusions. In a universal perspective, yes, the morality of any particular action has no inherent value, and thus cannot be empirically defined. Our own worry for life and limb, and the scale upon which warfare can now be conducted, however, require we pay attention and interfere. It is immoral (from our perspective) for Iran to build a nuclear bomb and destroy Israel. That morality has no inherent weight. It is, however, really freaking dangerous for everyone in Israel, everyone in Iran, and everyone else in the world, and that has real life-and-limb weight for ourselves. How can we not be concerned and meddle in others affairs when indifference may condemn us to history's dustbin?

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[info]wardenclyffe
2007-05-26 07:46 pm UTC (link)
There are good and bad points in your argument, which highlight good and bad points in mine; but rather than address them individually, allow me to reformulate and respond as a whole, for the sake of coherence.

The experienced world is one of facts. It is up to our human reason, in which I include both human rationality and human irrationality, to assign meaning to these facts. The world of meanings is inside, not outside, at least to the extent that one can think of an inside and outside; we have world-awareness, but we also have self-awareness, and as such we are of the world as much as we are in the world. What we perceive as objectivity is really nothing more than intersubjective validity, that which other people with a capacity for reason similar to our own can agree upon. Thus, the objectivity of values, or the value of ethics, only exists in the manner in which they are agreed upon.

Of course, you are right that these cultures are either precursory or contemporary with our own. However, asserting that they have had just as much time as we have to reach a specific ethical conclusion implies that humanity should be expected to develop ethically at some fixed rate, and if a culture has failed to do so, it is obviously defective. One could reasonably assert to the contrary that cultures should be allowed to develop toward reasonable ends at their own rate.

However, even this assertion assumes incorrect premises. It is wrong to think of the ethical "lessons" of history in terms of a straight timeline leading to a foregone conclusion. Formulating a theory in this manner requires one to believe that there are absolute, correct morals out there in the universe somewhere, toward which any positively progressing culture will move. The belief in absolute morals, and most specifically that such absolute morals coincide with one's own culture or religion, is the real cultural conceit. It is born from the flawed thesis that since a value or an ethic is agreed upon by those whose capacity for reason is similar to one's own, it must therefore be necessary and universal.

Other cultures do have to learn lessons on their own and develop on their own. It was wrong of me to imply that they should learn "these" lessons, meaning the ones which our own culture did. The manner in which their culture develops must necessarily proceed from the organic totality of their own experiences as a culture. However, to say that they will not learn equality because their circumstances are different from those in which we learned it is flawed for two reasons: first, the circumstances in which each individual learns this are independent and unique, and thus there is no one formula for equality; and second, this presumes that equality, as we currently perceive it in a Western sense, is in fact the most correct and valid expression of human reason. To put it in its most radical and polemic terms, this presupposes that equality is better than inequality. That judgment is itself steeped in subjectivity.

The question of the real, practical danger of this perspective is probably the most difficult and troubling of all the points you raised. It will require a great deal more thought before I can answer honestly and coherently. I admit that my philosophy is being built from the inside out, and to a certain extent I have not yet proceeded that far outward.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-27 02:02 am UTC (link)
Your summation brought many of my and your points together into a relatively coherent whole, and reached the same points I was trying to stress. Just for clarity, I didn't mean to imply that the ethical ends were presupposed, or that cultures are necessiarly flawed if they do not reach common ends in comperable times, or ever, or that progression toward ethical systems of thought were linear, rather than any other structure.

My difficulty is resolving those concepts with the "practical danger" as you acknowledge in the last paragraph. It seems a logically unresolvable problem between the ideal and the pragmatic, which, of course, is where the damn things are actually needed. Perhaps the only real truism concerning ethics is that, if they are inapplicable... they're inapplicable.

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[info]mloewnau
2007-05-23 05:53 am UTC (link)
I think a lot of what Joss is saying was brought on about the immediacy of seeing the Captivity trailer before seeing the news piece on "Honor Killings" and was more of a statement based on a gut reaction to just say something... anything really about a situation of institutionalized privilege that desperately needs to be addressed.

He was using his position to provoke more people into becoming activists and begin to take an effort to just make a better world. Just because he isn't using this as a case study to examine his own contributions to a generally misogynistic entertainment medium that doesn't invalidate the overall message that this isn't something that needs to be tolerated and that all right minded individuals are morally obligated to take some sort of action over it.

Captivity was part of the fuel that sparked his desire to say something. The fate of Dua Kahlil is really what this was really about.

That's not to say that your observations on Whedon and his own failings at objectifying women in the media aren't valid for appraisal and review because they most obviously are, but I'm thinking that this is more of a case of outrage over a real-life event than an attempt of an assessment of blame by him.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-26 05:47 pm UTC (link)
Wait a minute... I've seen that preview. They screened at the start of the "8 Films to Die For" screenings.

THAT'S what Joss is going on about? He chose that one over, say, Hostel 2, The Hills Have Eyes 2, House of 1000 Corpses, or any of the more hideously violent and directly misogynistic horror flicks coming out? Dude doesn't know his own genre...

Anyway, I didn't say that his point was invalidated. In fact, I said quite the opposite a couple times. It's just, he may be promoting activism, but his unintended consequence is that he's promoting activism against the movie, because the vast majority of his audience don't exactly have a say in stopping Muslim honor killings. Which is a pretty small-minded thing to do, making the victim of a Muslim Iraqi "honor killing" into a poster-child in the fight against violence in movies. What do these two things even have to do with one another?

Even then, it could be understandable... the viewing of the killing online gives him an epiphany that films are perpetrating similar fictional violence in film, and that is wrong. But that only makes sense if he were to say "I realize now that some of the things I've done in the past with my characters are similarly manipulative of gender expectations, and I have pledged myself not to do them any more and only write fully concieved non-exploited female characters, and make note of others who do not." His own work, doing exactly the same thing he complains about happening in this movie, belies his thesis. Contrary to your own note, I think Joss really is attempting to assign blame, not of the movie directly to Dua Kahlil's killing, but to media for perpetuating bigoted cultural perspectives. Why else would he focus on the film at all? If he thinks the film is merely a reflection of cultural bigotry rather than a partial cause then he really should have written more clearly. As written, he's paralleling the preview with the murder footage, saying that thinking horror movies are "cool" is the equivalent of thinking watching murder footage is "cool."

Which, if true, he needs to recognize his own culpability in this accusation.

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[info]mloewnau
2007-05-26 07:09 pm UTC (link)
I grant you that his comment about the movie being "torture/porn" was an extremely pointless exercise in inflammatory rhetoric that's pretty shallow when you look at the reasons for his comments and his own works in general. And given how the last Buffy comic ended it seems factious at best, but he started the whole post with a link to the Equality Now website and I think that speaks more about what his general issue is rather than a half-hearted attempt to equate a movie to the events that lead up to this unfortunate woman's death.

I didn't see his comments as promoting activism against the movie specifically. It's probably my own bias, but I just felt that it was more a comment about becoming socially active against those things that you find people being morally ambivalent too.

Unfortunately for Joss it does open him up to the very valid criticisms that you raised. One doesn't get a free pass because they're social activists and while the message for most of his work is extremely positive I think that you raise more than a few examples of how he works contrary to his own stated beliefs at various times.

After all, it the point is to spark conversations, activism and change then you have to allow your own position to be open to discussion and debate.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-27 02:06 am UTC (link)
Yeah, all my complaints are far subordinate to actual promotion of activisim to eliminate things like honor killings. Mostly I wrote about it because I had a niggling "wait a minute..." in the back of my head when I saw how the rant went, and was trying to nail all the loose-leaf pieces down in my head.

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[info]wardenclyffe
2007-05-26 08:28 pm UTC (link)
Lack of culpability? Maybe. However, the essay has a certain sense of being written en media res of a sort of conversion experience. Maybe he simply had not reflected on that point yet. Rebuilding one's world view progressively is a process I can identify with, though I prefer to work from the inside out.

If this essay does in fact mark a conversion experience for Whedon, then there is little point in looking backward at his work to find consistency with his current viewpoint.

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[info]ersatzinsomnia
2007-05-27 02:08 am UTC (link)
Oh, quite true. Should this be a conversion experience, then there's nothing about his past actions that need be considered.

...I don't quite see it as that, but only time will tell.

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