Acephalous

EXTRA! EXTRA! FEMINISM DEBUNKED! RAPE NOT REAL!

What are we going to do with all you lying bitches? Here we are generously giving you privileges you don’t deserve, and one of you pulls this shit? I just don’t—what else can I say?

We tried.

We tried to make you rational. We pretended not to ignore your vaginas and needs and civil rights and you repay us by having one of yours fake rape? Don’t you realize this discredits everyone who shares your junk? Christ—that’s it. I’ve had enough.

Feminism is officially cancelled.

Shut the fuck up. I don’t want to hear it.

You don’t have the right to complain anymore. You could’ve stopped this one woman from fabricating this one rape but you didn’t. And I don’t want to hear about all the other rapes that are real or go unreported because I don’t.

I don’t want to hear about them.

This woman lied about a rape threat! Just imagine what the person she invented is going through right now. His fictional parents are crying great heavy tears at this false accusation against the son they never had.

If he already didn’t exist he’d be wishing he never had.

So that’s it feminists. If you can’t rally in defense of men who were never born then I just can’t fathom what you’re good for.

Representations of rape in comic books

[I'm re-posting this because I received an email on my earlier post inquiring as to whether "cartoons" are capable of tackling difficult social issues responsibly. I think this old post demonstrates how something as ostensibly slight as a "cartoon" can have a profound impact on a person's moral development.]

The year was 1988. I was a recent transplant to Louisiana and a tad on the introverted side. (What with being deaf and all.) So I spent endless hours reading comic books. I may have “like ‘em liked” some girls at this point, but can find no evidence of it in my fourth grade yearbook. Not only did I know nothing about girls, I distinctly remember not even knowing what this “rape” thing I heard about on the news was. But I mowed my lawn every day—my father having decided to instill the value of hard work by allowing me to earn $4 whenever I wanted by re-mowing what my new work ethic transformed into a hilariously mangy lawn—and so I had plenty of money to blow on X-books. Meaning I spent most afternoons blissfully unaware of anything that didn’t involve the X-Men or X-Factor or The New Mutants or, if I was desperate enough, Alpha Flight.

One late October afternoon, I purchase a copy of X-Men #236. On the cover Wolverine and Rogue are hung by their feet from a scaffold, flanked on both sides by grinning fools in military garb. (This image disturbs me more now than it did then.) What had happened? The X-Men had sacrificed themselves to save the world, only in the end they were granted a reprieve: they would be dead to the world but would live undetected and undetectable in the Australian outback. They were invisible to all forms of electronic recording devices. They were able to move throughout the world invisible to all by the naked eye. Or so they thought until a fascist state called “Genosha” declared war on them. To make a long story short: shit hit fans. Wolverine and Rogue were captured.

For those unfamiliar with the comics or the films, Rogue has the power to absorb the memories and/or mutant powers of whomever she touches. So, naturally, she doesn’t touch anyone for fear of knocking them unconscious and draining them of their “life energy.” Her entire life Rogue has wanted nothing more than to touch someone without hurting them. To be loved. But she’d come to accept the fact that this would never happen. This self-sacrifice moved my fourth-grade mind. I sympathized with her despite having no clue as to what she sacrificed or why. I only knew that it pained her and, being the good sympathetic identifier that I was, I felt her pain by proxy. So without really knowing why, I wanted Rogue to be able to touch people.

And after she’s captured by the Genoshans, she’s stripped of her mutant powers. Now she can touch people without having to worry about killing them. For a moment, I’m happy for her. If only she can get out of this jam she’ll be able to touch someone! That’s all she ever wanted! Then I hit this panel:

And I was confused. That’s Rogue huddled there in the corner. She’s traumatized. Over the next few issues she’ll disappear. Another personality—and I mean that literally—will emerge. Rogue will be so hurt by whatever “liberties [were] taken when she was being processed” that she’ll cede control of her psyche to Carol Danvers. (Read the link.  It’s too complicated to explain briefly.) Needless to say, despite not knowing quite what those “liberties” were, countless data points began to constellate for me. I saw “touching” and “forced” and “fascism” and “liberties” circle the pained figure in the panel above and I was confused. Angry. Upset. I didn’t know why, but I knew that I was. My sympathies had identified with something they couldn’t comprehend.

When I was hit by that car and pain plus medication turned my mind to cottage cheese, the most “intellectual” material I could stomach were comics. Re-reading this one, I stumbled into a realization: my feminist sympathies were first marshaled while reading a comic back in the Autumn of ’88. The medium is far from perfect, but it’s not wholly without value.  I’m not defending myself here so much as describing a stage in my development. So please don’t read this and think “Scott think spandex is progressive?” I don’t. Only once upon a time, it inadvertently was.

Walter White is no White Savior

Malcolm Harris is convinced that Breaking Bad‘s Walter White is yet another example of the White Savior, i.e.

The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican[.]

I’m not one to cut Dances-with-Braveheart-Smurf slack, as I abhor little more than the notion that a white mind triumphs over brown bodies, but in this case I think Harris’ criticism is misguided. Lindsay more than adequately addresses Harris’ concern with the “purity” of Walter’s product, so I’ll focus on the simple fact that Harris doesn’t understand the trope he thinks is operative here. He seems to believe that any time a white person succeeds in a predominantly non-white discipline, said person automatically qualifies for the title of White Savior. But the examples he provides—The Last Samurai and Last of the Mohicans—indicate that on some level he’s aware that this trope traditionally involves more than a white man out-doing his non-white competitors in whatever it is they’re doing. It involves a white man teaching non-white people how to be the best non-white people they can be by leading them into battle as only a white man can. There’s typically a cultural synergy—the white man embodies the “best” traits of whites and non-whites—that enables the White Savior to lead his primitative horde to victory.

The problem with claiming this trope to be operative in Breaking Bad isn’t just that there’s no cultural synergy, nor is it just that Walter cares little for the fate of the non-white people his work displaces. Walter cuts a culturally unique figure: he’s a typical white imperialist, a brash colonialist who believes his superior technical skills make him better than the “indigeneous” cooks, and the people he wants to enslave aren’t the “natives” but white people. Eighty-one percent of known meth addicts are white people, and Walter wants each and every one of them to be addicted to his product. He’s no more a Hawkeye out to preserve Mohican culture from white incursion than he is a Lt. Dunbar determined to stall American encroachment into Sioux territory. In short: the trope Harris wants to use to condemn Breaking Bad just doesn’t apply to a show that’s more concerned with the ruthlessness of capitalist competition than the color of the working class.

I’m not saying there isn’t a racial component to the show, because there obviously is. This just isn’t it.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can finish analyzing “Gliding Over All,” so more shortly.

Racism? Solved. Sexism? We're ... working on it?

In the spirit of this, I present this.

Mad Men: Who owns "The Other Woman"?

Most of what I read about the latest Mad Men ("The Other Woman") focused on Joan's decision to accept Pete's indecent proposal—and rightly so—but the title of the episode basically demands the audience answer the question "Who's the woman, and who's the other one?" As far as I can tell, the consensus seems to be that it's Joan, who unlike Megan and Peggy lacks a defined role in Don's life, but that strikes me as only significant in this episode and inconsonant with developments in the series as whole. Moreover, the final minutes of the episode indicate that while Peggy's role in Don's life may have been circumscribed by their working relationship in recent episodes, it bears remembering that, before Megan, Peggy and Don regularly confided in each other about things like the ramifications of unplanned pregnancies. In short, I'd argue that over the course of five seasons, Peggy's been Don's perpetual "other woman," and I think the structure of the episode bears this out.

But first things first, let me remind you of a moment from the first episode of the first season. Don criticizes Peggy for allowing Pete to enter his office and steal research from his trash, to which Peggy responds thus:

Don removes her hand, criticizing her again for attempting to manipulate him with her feminine wiles, then he comforts her:

From the beginning, Don's seen in Peggy a potential unrelated to notion that woman are sexual objects designed for male consumption—and she's the only female he hasn't fathered that he seems to feel this way about. She's exceptional in that she'll always be "the other woman," the one he doesn't desire for reasons that can't be reduced to the fact that she's not conventionally attractive. Don's occasionally paternal, occasionally fraternal affection for Peggy seems grounded in the recognition that she, like him, doesn't belong in the social circles of the advertising world, as well as it's corollary: that she, like him, can produce better copy because they're of this world instead of in it.

The last five minutes of "The Other Woman" seem to bear this out. Keeping in mind that closing an episode is akin to owning it—the final moments will be the lasting impression left on the audience irrespective of the events they capstone—it stands to reason that for all the attention paid to the means by which Joan attained a partnership, "The Other Woman" belongs to Peggy. The celebration that accompanies landing the Jaguar account—which should, if Joan's actions are the centerpiece of the episode, be front and center—is pushed off-frame as Peggy confronts Don in the hall. Here's Don about to join in the festivities:

When he stops to talk to Peggy, director Phil Abraham cuts right in a manner that eliminates the celebration from the frame:

As the conversation continues, the sequence of shots and reverse-shots diminish the significance of the celebration which now only exists in the diegetic space as background noise. It acquires a status not unlike the act it celebrates: the partners know what Joan did and every time they look at her (or think of Jaguar) the knowledge that they prostituted her will reemerge like half-heard chatter at a party they barely recall attending—not unlike an off-frame celebration represented on-screen by noise leaking through glass walls.

But let me back up: Joan's sacrifice is rendered so insignificant that the celebration of its fruit doesn't merit screen time. Not only doesn't it merit screen time, but even when it should be visible it isn't:

When Abraham reverses back to Don, Peggy's head largely obstructs the audience's view of it. Even if it's partially visible on the right of the frame, it still plays second-fiddle to an unfocused shot of the back of Peggy's head. As the conversation continues, Abraham shifts from these medium shots of Don to medium close-ups of the both of them:

The sounds of celebration can still be heard, but they're distant and indistinct compared to this conversation. The framing alone suggests its thematic significance, but just in case the audience missed it, Abraham moves the conversation to Don's office:

Peggy follows him in and this reminds me of something from that first episode:

Different offices, but Peggy's posture, her position relative to Don and the impersonal scale of the long shot are strikingly similar. Moreover, as in "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," what begins as a cold sequence between professionals quickly evolves into a series of mutual recognitions. What they recognize has changed—what had been potential in the former has been realized by the latter, such that Peggy's departure now constitutes an actual loss instead of a hypothetical one—but so too has the dynamic between them. As in the first episode, Peggy offers Don her hand:

Only this time he doesn't reject it. He really doesn't reject it:

Whereas in the earlier episode Don clearly dominated the frame, in this one he only appears to. He occupies more space and is afforded frontality—if only by virtue of being the only one in the shot with a head—but his posture's that of a supplicant. The man who once upbraided her for touching his hand in an unprofessional manner is now a partner in a firm that whores out cherished employees for profit. He's kissing the ring because he knows his is now the morally inferior party. 

The remainder of the episode follows Peggy into her familiar office, down that familiar hall and in front of that familiar elevator, only this time the parting glance isn't from Pete, it's from Joan:

And instead of returning it, Peggy just steps into the elevator:

If Joan can't even own the episode in which she sells herself to make partner, how likely is it that the partnership she entered will work?

Conservative women are more than just "hotties in tube tops." (But hopefully, they're that too.)

Somehow I missed the fact that a group of C-List conservative bloggers turned on themselves over the issue of propriety at CPAC. At the same event in which this high-minded little event took place, it was reported that the female attendees “looked like two-bit whores.” That’s according to Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who feels the need to remind everyone she’s a doctor, presumably because her elevated diction might convince folks otherwise. Dr. Clouthier continues:

I was at another service-oriented gathering of young women where the girls were in tight bandeau-skirts — you know, the kind of tube-top skirts that hookers wear on street corners.

I’m fairly certain I know what she means here: conservative women shouldn’t dress in ways that make them look like “hookers … on street corners.” However, that point was contested by Dan Riehl—last spotted cowering in fear from some black toddlers who were “technically thugs”—who declared that he did, in fact, want to see conservative women dress like “hookers on the street”:

In my opinion, CPAC is about politics, not parenting. If it takes hundreds of new folks with perhaps more libertarian, than traditional, leanings to infuse a more powerful right in America, I’ll take it. And if some number of them are hotties in tube tops, I’ll find a way to endure because I love America just that much.

The more “hotties in tube tops,” Riehl argues, the more powerful the right will become, because nothing builds a stronger coalition more quickly than objectifying and diminishing half the people who might want to join it. To use the conservatives objection to gay marriage as a model of argumentation, first conservative women will be allowed to dress like hookers; then they’ll be required to dress like hookers; then they’ll be required to be hookers.

And as Robert Stacy McCain—the man most likely to declare himself the winner of a Hunter S. Thompson prose-alike contest—pointed out, this process has already started:

The Poulos Hoax?

Far be it for me, a lowly adjunct so depressed by the market he let his MLA membership lapse, to criticize Michael Bérubé, the current President of the MLA, but his summary of James Poulos’ definition of what women are for fails to account for the fact that Poulos has forwarded a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made  in such detail or with such care. Thankfully for all involved, Poulos decided to respond to critics of his original post with wit and aplomb. Contrary to Bérubé’s claim that Poulos thinks “tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin,” all the founding editor of The Postmodern Conservative meant to say was that:

Those who would restrict officially recognized marriages to one man and one woman are seen by many gay marriage advocates as using the power of the law to atavistically reverse the partly organic, partly hard-fought progress of civilization.

Civilization, you see, is composed of one part “organic” and one part “hard-fought.” Those who support gay marriage want to use the “power of law” to reverse the “progress of civilization” by employing an atavism, which we all know refers to the reemergence of an ancestral trait in a modern species. This reemergence can be genetic—like when babies are born monkeys—or it can be social—like when Buck remembered that dogs are wolves and heeded the call of his wild. According to Poulos, the desire of the gays to revert to a state of nature by finding female bodies disturbing is a social manifestation of a genetic trend, because the gays are atavisms—throwbacks to the early human societies in which partly organic men fought hard against progress by refusing to procreate with women. How they survived has long stumped evolutionary theorists, what with success typically defined in terms of how many half-genes an individual loosed upon the EEA, but Poulos is right to claim that

a column that points out that a society which rejects the premise of a question about sex, gender, and natural purposes might very well have achieved a great leap forward in the progress of human civilization.

That he happened to be the author of this great leaping achievement is immaterial, because “philosophers from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger” are famous people whose names he knows.

 

It's here! It's finally here! Today I can be a proud white man again!*

And by “it,” I mean the day when white men and white male interests are finally represented in American cinema again, for today is the day that The Expendables is released. Given my interests and the past few months of my life, you might think I’d be more excited about the film based on a graphic novel in which dialogue like this appears:

You would be wrong.  The good folks at Big Hollywood have spent the past week convincing me that if I fail to appreciate the manly awesomeness of The Expendables my penis will fall off.  The assault on my manhood began on Monday, when Ezra Dulis reminded me of the true purpose of film itself:

All you’re doing is marveling at the most sensible use of a medium that consists of moving images: incredible feats performed by tough, charismatic men.

The dearth of action films designed for and marketed to men since the 1980s actually had made me forget how intimately the medium of the film and the genre of the 1980s action film were related.   As Leo Grin wrote in the second installment of “Bring on ‘The Expendables’”:

Rumor has it that Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables marks a return to the glory days of 1980s action mayhem and pro-American machismo. Its appearance on the cultural horizon has certainly stirred up memories of my mid-Eighties, Midwestern suburban adolescence.

Fly-over country is back!  After years of being denied films that represent the “action mayhem and pro-American machismo” native to 45-year-old white men from the Midwest who once “papered over [their walls] with posters and photos of oversize he-men,” beauty school drop-out and former porn star Sylvester Stallone has directed a film that revels in the fact that the “inherently brutal nature of males isn’t a design flaw but a feature.”** But the best part about The Expendables, according to the author of the third installment in the series, is that despite being a movie geared toward men who “love seeing stuff blown up,” there is “relatively little profanity” in the film.  Because God-fucking-Forbid someone embodies the inherent brutality of maleness while cursing.

Just ask the author of the most recent entry in the series, Kurt Schlicter, who claims that the 1980s represent the high watermark in American cinema because of, for example, films like the “great 48 Hours (1982), [which] blew minds with violence and profanity.”  But for Schlicter, the “archetypal specimen” for manly male films in the 1980s was Lethal Weapon (1987), because it was the first movie to prove that Hollywood could do something correctly; namely, produce “slick popcorn adventure/comedies with memorable action set-pieces paired with laugh-out-loud hilarity and featuring big stars and top shelf production values.”  That he writes this about 1987’s Lethal Weapon despite Beverly Hills Cop having been released three years earlier is beside the point—as is the fact that he spends the majority of the review gushing about Mel Gibson—which is that all of those movies would have improved if, as Darin Miller writes of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, “[e]very F-word [was] bleeped out by a computer game sound effect with a black bar over the offender’s mouth” and all “references to sex [were] humorous and relatively innocuous.”***

Granted, pointing out examples of ideological impurity on group blogs is about as difficult as dismantling a Jonah Goldberg article, but in this case, where they agree is more significant than where they don’t.  That’s because the to-this-point-exclusively-white-male-contributors of Big Hollywood have spent the past week convincing themselves, to quote from Steven Crowder’s paean to morally unambiguous children’s fare, that because of The Expendables “it seems that every self-respecting male has caught 80’s fever.”  His category of “male” reflects the limitations of his imagination to a damning degree:

I watched the cartoons he praises and the films the others loved, but my friends and I have not “resorted to re-visiting old B-movie beauties such as Cobra, Road House and Tango and Cash” because those are terrible movies.  All of these white men are nostalgic for an era in which the category of “mainstream black film star” only included Eddie Murphy because they’re unable to muster up much sympathetic identification with black men more complex than happy-go-lucky darkies in a minstrel show.  (Which, obviously, isn’t sympathetic identification.)  In other words, although these men may not be racist, they certainly pine for a time in which white actors were more ostentatiously manly and fewer black men graced the silver screen.****

Whatever have they done to you, Ms. Pryde?

I'm off to England shortly, and I'm going to use this as an opportunity to clear out the (mostly comics-related) queue.  A few weeks back, Kelly Thompson asked:

So is Kitty Pryde [an introverted Jewish mutant with the ability to phase through solid objects] the answer to all our problems?  A non-objectifying lead girls can get on board with?  The character I've often seen referred to as "everybody's girlfriend"?  Do we need more characters based on the Kitty Pryde archetype, or would that be just as boring as a glut of badasses?

Milo Manara provides an answer, and I'm fairly certain it's not the one Thompson wanted:

On the moral universe of Mark Millar (which is incoherent, but frequently explodes)

By now, you know how I feel about Mark Millar; but until I read Nemesis, I couldn't have accounted for why my dislike has always been so visceral. Turns out, all I needed was to witness his treatment of a character I have more than a fleeting investment in to figure it out. For those unfamiliar with it, the premise of the book is, according to Millar:

John Nolte's outraged on behalf of topless women everywhere.

It goes without saying that John Nolte will write something like this:

Annually we are showered with Leftist films created by morally superior beings who lecture us on human rights, civil rights, feminism, lookism, racism and any other “ism” they can conceive, when in real life they’re the very worst in all of these departments.

He honestly believes that because some people on the left are sexist or racist, everyone on the right is morally superior despite, you know, supporting policies designed to protect the interests of white males. In this case, his ire is raised by a New York Post article about the casting call for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie:

The filmmakers sent out a casting call last week seeking “beautiful female fit models. Must be 5ft7in-5ft8in, size 4 or 6, no bigger or smaller. Age 18-25. Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants.” And they warn that there’ll be a “show and tell” day. To make sure LA talent scouts don’t get caught in a “booby trap,” potential lassies will have to undergo a Hollywood-style jiggle-your-jugs test and jog for judges.

Nolte is outraged on behalf of surgically-enhanced women everywhere:

This isn’t some sleazy porn peddler in the valley doing this, this is…Disney. DISNEY is going to subject and exploit young women desperate to be stars to the indignity of a booby ”show and tell.” DISNEY is going to have them jog in place for producers and casting agents in order to keep score of the bounciness of their breasts.

Not only is this a case of discrimination against women whose only crime was undergoing a dangerous surgical procedure in order to enhance their appeal to sexists like Nolte, it involves a particularly dehumanizing "booby 'show and tell'" in which woman will be asked to "jog in place for producers and casting agents in order to keep score of the bounciness of their breasts." How does he know this? It says so right in the actual, unexpurgated casting call:

Must be 5'7-5'8, Size four or six - no bigger or smaller. Age 18 to 25. Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants. This is a show and tell of costumes with the director and the producers. Plan on an entire day of trying on clothes and being photographed.

Sticklers might insist that the prepositional phrase "of costumes" modifies "show and tell," and that there's nothing in the casting call about actresses being asked to "jog in place" so producers and casting can "keep score of the bounciness of their breasts." Since it's not in the casting call, where did this idea of a "booby 'show and tell'" in which a parade of topless women jiggle only what the good Lord gave them come from? Where else?

The imagination of John Nolte.

The man can't even defend hypothetical women without undressing them in his mind. This isn't to say the casting call isn't sexist, because like most items relating to Hollywood and the female form, it clearly is. The point here, as usual, is that conservatives who like to think of themselves as morally superior to liberals when it comes to racial or gender equality always reveal themselves to be purveyors of the very ills they decry. In this respect, Nolte is no different than affirmative action opponents who offer, as proof that we live in a post-racial society, the fact that there's a nigger in the White House.*

*Which reminds me: I really ought to write about that lovely conversation one day.

Just because he hates feminism and festoons his virtual office with photographs of naked women doesn't mean he makes female students uncomfortable.

On Monday at 3:09 p.m., Donald Douglas belittled Roy Edroso's feminist credentials for publishing at the Village Voice alongside a link to a bikini burlesque slide-show that a web-editor had slapped on half the site. Edroso is a hypocrite, you see, because he claims to be a feminist and someone else created an active element that appears on his page.

On Tuesday at 12:41 p.m., Donald Douglas wrote a post about the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in which he complains that "Photobucket deletes any bikini images I've ever saved from SI, and it took practically no time for their prowling image-hawks to delete the brand new cover shot of Brooklyn Decker." Because Douglas never claimed to be a feminist, his saving bikini photographs to Photobucket for future use and prominently featuring an image of a topless woman on his blog is not hypocritical.

It is, however, extraordinarily odious and, in all seriousness, absolutely unprofessional. Many have been fired for less.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a female in one of his classes who is having trouble with her assignment. He tells you to come talk to him during office hours, and when you do there are posters of women in various states of undress covering his walls. How comfortable would you feel? Would you consider his office a safe place, or would you be worried about where his eyes wandered when they broke contact with yours?

I only ask because a blog functions somewhat like a virtual office: it is a private space that the public, including students, can access. It functions as an extension of your professional persona. I could understand if it transpired—as it often did when I taught literary journalism and had issues of Rolling Stone, GQ, and the like in my office—that a magazine on your desk contains provocative advertisements that are visible when you read the articles on the pages opposite them. This incidental appearance of contemporary marketing tactic would be the equivalent of Edroso's post at the Village Voice.

I cannot, however, understand the rationale behind plastering the walls with images of objectified women approximately the same age as the students you teach. This deliberate decision to decorate with photographs that stimulate him would be the equivalent of the seventeen posts Douglas has devoted to what he himself calls "fawning" this year alone.

"If you don't like my fawning," he writes in that post, "don't read the blog."

Which is fine for readers of his blog—but what if you were a financially strapped female student in his course at Long Beach City College? What if you were searching for course materials and stumbled upon American Power—a blog written by the very person you needed to impress—and clicked through only to find countless images of objectified women and your professor complaining that the copyright holder of others prevents him from saving and displaying more? How comfortable would you feel sitting their in during office hours?

Would the intensity in his eyes indicate an earnest and abiding commitment to teaching, or merely how far he had undressed you with them?

Update. In his defense, Douglas offers a link to a post in which he claims:

This is a private blogging matter. American Power is hosted on Blogger. None of my college identification pages link to my blog. I recommend my blog for students to read, on a voluntary, non-assignment basis. Occasionally I'll pull up an academic post in class as a lecture launcher -- and actually, THAT'S A GOOD TEACHING THING!

Translation: "This blog is a private, unaffiliated entity that I recommend students read and display in class."  The mind boggles.

Thankfully, Netflix says I'm only 23 percent similar . . .

. . . to the person who claims the Pang Brother's 2006 film Re-Cycle is "THE most EMO movie EVER" as if that were a good thing. The film, though, is THE most SOMETHING movie EVER, but I'm not sure what. The list could include:

• THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER
• THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER
• THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER
• THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER
• THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

As I said: THE most SOMETHING movie EVER. I'll start with the minor complaints and work my way forward:

THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER

Either those two are a little too close, or Wikipedia entries sometimes need editing.

THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER

Unless you're being intentionally thick, as Scott McCloud is in the (center) panel from DESTROY!!! below, there is absolutely no reason for subtitles to be duo-specific:

If I can see that the aborted fetus of the protagonist, Tsui Ting-Yin, is screaming and hear its banshee-keening, there is no need to have a subtitle inform me that [TSUI TING-YIN'S ABORTED FETUS IS TELLING ITS WOULD-HAVE-BEEN MOTHER HOW IT FEELS ABOUT BEING ABORTED VIA A HIGH-PITCHED SHRIEK THAT WILL LIKELY CAUSE TINNITUS]. To prove this point, I will continue reviewing the movie in the manner of its subtitles.

THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER

 

THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER

&

THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER