hahaha. yeah, the more i think about it, the less i liked it, until we're down to "i thought the dwight section was funny, and clive owen, benicio del toro, rosario dawson, and devon aoki all looked pretty hot."
not so sure about the feminist_rage rant, tho. the writer has points, but muddles others, especially through the kind of hyperbole that usually winds up making up a large part of that kind of rant. for instance, lucille does not parade around naked FOR men, she does what she would normally do and treats men as incidental. the women are not all "size 2", though I think it can fairly be stated that none is larger than an 8 or 10, which is still too small for realism. the irish terrorists being taken out was not an example of a "racist" stereotype unless you still cling to the fucked-up idea that the irish even are a "race" - that's a nationalistic statement, and so was the stereotype. The third point - about women being smacked around - is well-meaning but again hyperbolic; many many many more men are beaten up and killed through the course of the film, and this is not a film wherein the smacking-around-of-women receives implicit approval from the creators. (I think a more profitable complaint is a general one about the low value of human life in the film, not just female life.) The head-mounting is also something that is portrayed with disapproval, and probably not something that supports the rant writer's theory: it's meant to be sickening and wrong, so if someone objected to it for whatever reason - feminist or just on general principle that hobbits shouldn't eat people and put their heads on walls - then i think the film's creators did what they were trying to do.
I understand and have read many times over the reasons for objection to the idea of women, esp sex workers, being portrayed as the victims of a serial killer, but almost every commentary I've ever read on this slightly misses the mark in some direction or another. In some ways it's a deep discomfort with the idea that certain things arouse complicated feelings in most of the populace (of the WORLD, not just the US)... but I think they always have, and always will, whether it's ugly or not, and no matter how much we write essays about it being fucked-up.
And then I might add that I wonder about our own subconscious motivations for thinking it's fucked-up... how uneasy is our relationship to our own sexuality? It can't be the same for everyone, but I know a lot of women, even feminist women, are still being raised with certain messages, sometimes by religious or traditional parents, or sometimes by parents who were raised by those kinds of parents, or sometimes by parents who are just very fearful for their children. I know I got at least two out of those three. Are at least some of us enraged by this stock horror-film portrayal of sex->death precisely because it ties into our own subconscious feelings that we might, in fact, be "bad" and "dirty"? Regardless of whether this little pop-psych digression of mine is accurate or not, it would be understandable if it were the case for some, and probably even healthy. It would mean that we rebel against these messages about ourselves by saying, "That's fucked up!" when we see these fears depicted in entertainment. OTOH, that wouldn't necessarily indicate that EVERYONE having that response also experiences sexual guilt.
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Re: sin city
Date: 2005-07-06 04:36 am (UTC)not so sure about the feminist_rage rant, tho. the writer has points, but muddles others, especially through the kind of hyperbole that usually winds up making up a large part of that kind of rant. for instance, lucille does not parade around naked FOR men, she does what she would normally do and treats men as incidental. the women are not all "size 2", though I think it can fairly be stated that none is larger than an 8 or 10, which is still too small for realism. the irish terrorists being taken out was not an example of a "racist" stereotype unless you still cling to the fucked-up idea that the irish even are a "race" - that's a nationalistic statement, and so was the stereotype. The third point - about women being smacked around - is well-meaning but again hyperbolic; many many many more men are beaten up and killed through the course of the film, and this is not a film wherein the smacking-around-of-women receives implicit approval from the creators. (I think a more profitable complaint is a general one about the low value of human life in the film, not just female life.) The head-mounting is also something that is portrayed with disapproval, and probably not something that supports the rant writer's theory: it's meant to be sickening and wrong, so if someone objected to it for whatever reason - feminist or just on general principle that hobbits shouldn't eat people and put their heads on walls - then i think the film's creators did what they were trying to do.
I understand and have read many times over the reasons for objection to the idea of women, esp sex workers, being portrayed as the victims of a serial killer, but almost every commentary I've ever read on this slightly misses the mark in some direction or another. In some ways it's a deep discomfort with the idea that certain things arouse complicated feelings in most of the populace (of the WORLD, not just the US)... but I think they always have, and always will, whether it's ugly or not, and no matter how much we write essays about it being fucked-up.
And then I might add that I wonder about our own subconscious motivations for thinking it's fucked-up... how uneasy is our relationship to our own sexuality? It can't be the same for everyone, but I know a lot of women, even feminist women, are still being raised with certain messages, sometimes by religious or traditional parents, or sometimes by parents who were raised by those kinds of parents, or sometimes by parents who are just very fearful for their children. I know I got at least two out of those three. Are at least some of us enraged by this stock horror-film portrayal of sex->death precisely because it ties into our own subconscious feelings that we might, in fact, be "bad" and "dirty"? Regardless of whether this little pop-psych digression of mine is accurate or not, it would be understandable if it were the case for some, and probably even healthy. It would mean that we rebel against these messages about ourselves by saying, "That's fucked up!" when we see these fears depicted in entertainment. OTOH, that wouldn't necessarily indicate that EVERYONE having that response also experiences sexual guilt.
(more ahead!)