Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man!

Published
by
alison
on September 4, 2008
in bluishorange, lists, media and television
. 7 Comments

If any of you are Metafilter-readers or regular NPR listeners, you’ve probably heard about the Bechdel rule this week.  If you haven’t heard of the Bechdel rule, here it is, as written in Bechdel’s comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.”

I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements: One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about three, something besides a man.

When I read this, I thought four things:

  1. Boy, lots of cool people are named Alison with one L.
  2. I bet that every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer follows the Bechdel rule.
  3. But Dr. Horrible definitely doesn’t.
  4. And I bet a lot of my favorite movies fail, too.

It should be noted here that I don’t think that the Bechdel rule should be seen as a hard-and-fast rule–rather, it’s something to make one think about how movies are made, and for what audience.  After all, there are quite a few very good movies that don’t follow this rule, and I’m sure there are some bad ones that do.  It just now occurred to me that a lot of hard-core porn films probably follow the Bechdel rule: the parts at the beginning where they talk about how the cable needs to be fixed, or the refrigerator just broke, or whatever.

Anyway.  Because I find this Bechdel rule very interesting, I’m going to test all the movies on my shelf at home:

The Big Lebowski: Fail.  Two women, Bunny Lebowski and Maude Lebowski, who never speak.

Election: Pass.  Tracy Flick and her mother talk about the election, and Tammy Metzler talks to her sort-of-girlfriend Lisa, though it doesn’t go very well.

Adaptation: Fail. Susan Orlean and Charlie and Donald’s respective love interests don’t talk to each other.

Far From Heaven: Pass.  Cathy and Eleanor talk about the party they host together.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Fail.  Clementine and Mary never meet.

High Fidelity: Uber-Fail.  It’s got lots of women, but they never talk to each other.  This movie fails for a lot of reasons.

Wayne’s World: Fail. Obviously.

The Royal Tenenbaums: Pass.  Margot and Etheline talk about Margot’s depression.

Donnie Darko: Pass. Sometimes Kitty doubts Mrs. Darko’s committment to Sparkle Motion.

Being John Malkovich: Pass-ish.  Lotte and Maxine talk to each other, but they talk about sleeping together while Lotte’s in John Malkovich, so I’m not sure it counts.  That movie’s hard to classify.

Shakespeare in Love: Pass.  Viola and her nurse talk about theatre.

Roxanne: Fail.  Roxanne and Dixie talk, but they talk about men.

Sideways: Fail.  We never see Stephanie and Maya talk to each other.

About Schmidt: Fail. Warren’s daughter and future mother-in-law never have a conversation.

Punch-Drunk Love: Fail. Barry’s sister and Lena talk, but they talk about Barry.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Fail.  Doris Crane, Ann Nirdlinger, and Birdy never speak to each other.

Pollock: I never watch this movie because it’s too depressing, but I suspect a fail.

So that’s a 64% failure rate.  The point of this, of course, is to illustrate the fact that all too often, women in movies are seen through the eyes of men, or else they’re used as props to illustrate what the central male character is going through.  Rarely are they shown dealing with their own issues that are unrelated to men.

That’s why High Fidelity gets an uber-fail.  All the women in it are props for Rob Gordon to lean against or react to or use to deal with his own issues.  The girls he dumped are happy to see him and talk to him years later, and even when Laura’s dad dies, she chooses to deal with it by having sex with Rob, a plot point that always rang false for me.  I know that the way Rob relates to women is the central point of the movie, but the women in question could really use some help with their self-esteems.

Now that I think about it, the television shows I like follow the Bechdel rule much more often, sometimes even on an episode-by-episode basis.  Buffy, pass.  Veronica Mars, pass.  The Office, pass.  Gilmore Girls, pass.  Lost, pass.  30 Rock, pass.  Granted, most of these are shows with large ensemble casts, and with central issues unrelated to male-female relationships, so it’s easier for them to pass.  But neither Veronica nor Buffy nor the other female characters on those shows could be called props by any stretch.

I’m not sure that this indicates that television is better at fleshing out its female characters, but maybe it does.  Or maybe it’s just that my taste in TV shows runs toward those with female main characters, while my taste in movies runs toward those written and directed by quirky men (Anderson, Kaufman, the other Anderson, Payne, Coens, etc.) who usually write about male protagonists.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m more familiar with television than film.

But it does seem like television has more female writers, directors and show runners than movies have female writers and directors, doesn’t it?

i guess that makes me an old (blogging) woman

Published
by
alison
on August 29, 2008
in bluishorange and writing
. 4 Comments

Back in the day, I used to write a lot of really personal things on this site. I would talk about how I felt about everything–my job, my friends, my relationships–and for the most part I felt safe doing that without fear that anything bad would happen as a result. As I’m sure you can tell, that’s changed quite a bit. I’m older now, and my interest in things like job security and my friends’ privacy and my own privacy has trumped my desire to write freely and publicly online.

But.

While I’m satisfied with my decision to hold more things back on bluishorange, my desire to write freely online (even if it can’t be public) hasn’t changed. To that end, I set up a friends-only LiveJournal page, where I can talk about work and relationships and all the things I can’t talk about here, and only the people I want to read it can read it.

I’ve had my friends-only LiveJournal for less than a week, and I’ve already posted on it five times. Five times! That’s more than I post on bluishorange in a month! The knowledge that what I write won’t be publicly available has opened a writing floodgate, and everything I wish I could still write here has come pouring out over there. I love it.

In that way, my private LiveJournal feels like bluishorange used to feel–it’s a place where I can write about whatever I want, and my friends will read it and leave comments about it. And that’s the other thing that’s happened: the LiveJournal comments feel like old-school bluishorange, too. My friends leave comments, and I respond, and then someone else responds, and a discussion evolves.

Matt Haughey posted about how the comments on current blogs don’t have a living-room feel like they used to, and I know exactly what he’s talking about. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed all my old comments until my private LiveJournal came along.

Wednesday night I had dinner with my sister, and then she came over for a bit. After she left, I went straight to my LiveJournal and wrote this:

When I was a kid, my mother always told me that I’d appreciate my little sister when I got older. Maybe I didn’t like her now–she was always chewing with her mouth open, taking up space in the bathroom, and weighing in on my teen years in a derogatory fashion–but I’d like her when we were grown up. I didn’t believe her at ALL. There was no way I was ever going to like Megan. She got mad when I ate all the jelly beans and she made fun of me when I took too much time in the bathroom and she was always trying to watch TV when I wanted to watch TV and it didn’t matter that we wanted to watch the same things because she was annoying me just sitting there on the other couch and I could HEAR HER BREATHING and dammit, why couldn’t I be an only child?

But of course my mother was right, and now that I’m 30 you couldn’t pay me to be an only child. If I were an only child, who would I compare notes with on what our parents were like when we were kids? Who would laugh at all my jokes? Who would listen to whatever bullshit I was talking about (no matter how much wine I had with dinner) and tell me about everything she was going through, no matter if either one of us made sense or not? Who would remember what we were talking about before I segued awkwardly into a dumb story about my dog’s teeth, and then bring up the fact that before we were talking about my dog’s teeth, she was telling me about her internship in Houston, and then I can say, oh, yeah, you were saying that your boss said [this] and then you said [this] and I can definitely see why you felt that way, tell me more?

Yeah, there’s nobody like that.

I cannot think of a better way to spend a Wednesday night than having sushi and wine with Megan. Screw you for going to Brazil for two months, Megan! Who’s going to be my sister while you’re gone? If you don’t move back to Austin when you get back I’m going to disown you.

My friend Peter left a comment that said:

Now you’re beginning to cross over to posts you could probably post on your blog with little or no revision. Welcome to the slippery slope that is LiveJournal.

He’s totally right. What’s happening here is this: I feel really comfortable writing on my LiveJournal, so it’s making me want to write more, and so I do; I write about whatever I feel like saying whether it needs to be kept private or not. And then the LiveJournal becomes less about privacy and more about audience, or general effort-making, or the value of non-editing, or something. I’ll have to think more about this.

Update: It’s probably about the value of not trying too hard.

musical voyeurism

Published
by
alison
on August 27, 2008
in bluishorange and lists
. 7 Comments

For no reason at all, here are the top 35 most-played songs on my iTunes at work.  I wish I were still the kind of person who uploaded mp3 files of all these songs for you, but I’m not.  You should really look into Helvetia, though.

Broken Social Scene - Hotel
Cary Brothers – Canada
Helvetia - Beezlebub
Helvetia - Gladness (Is In the Heart)
Helvetia – Summer
Interpol - PDA
Liz Phair – Shane
Magnetic Fields – Two Characters in Search of a Country Song
The National - Fake Empire
The National - Mistaken for Strangers
The New Pornographers - Myriad Harbour
The Pixies – Bone Machine
The Pixies - Holiday Song
Rogue Wave - Harmonium
Rogue Wave - Like I Needed
Rogue Wave - Chicago x 12
Rogue Wave - Lake Michigan
Rogue Wave - Ghost
Rogue Wave - Sewn Up
The Sea and Cake - Up on Crutches
The Sea and Cake - Too Strong
The Sea and Cake - Crossing Line
The Sea and Cake - Middlenight
The Sea and Cake - Coconut
The Sea and Cake - Exact to Me
The Sea and Cake – Lightning
Shout out Louds – Blue Headlights
Shout out Louds - Normandie
Stars - My Favourite Book
Stars - The Ghost of Genova Heights
Sun Kil Moon - Lily and Parrots
Sun Kil Moon - Carry Me Ohio
Tegan and Sara - Back in Your Head
Wolf Parade - Grounds for Divorce
Wolf Parade - Shine a Light

if only they’d been older

Published
by
alison
on August 25, 2008
in bluishorange and travel
. 4 Comments

In case you were wondering, here’s a snapshot of what 23-year-old French boys are like:

1. They’re outgoing. The two of them struck up a conversation with Jessica and me while we were sitting on the front steps of our Amsterdam hostel at 11 p.m. I was drinking a coffee mug of cabernet while we people-watched and tried to stay out of the rain.

2. Their English is really good. “Hey, your English is really good!” I said.

“Thanks,” the more outgoing one said. “Where are you from?”

“America,” Jessica said.

3. They have some misconceptions about America. “Oh!” the outgoing one said. “I know how to say, ‘Yo, dog!’”

Jessica and I laughed. “That’s good, but not everyone talks like rappers in the States,” I said.

“Oh, really?” he said, disappointed.

“We really don’t,” Jessica said.

“Are you SURE?” he said.

“Yes. I think people talked like that in high school, didn’t they?” I said.

“Yeah, they did,” Jessica said.

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “Are you voting for Obama or McCain?”

“Obama!” we both said.

4. They really like Barack Obama. “Yes!” he said. “We just saw him speak in Berlin!”

“How was it?” I said.

“It was quite good,” said the shy one.

“So why do you not like McCain?” said the outgoing one.

The wine was talking for me, so I said, “When I hear him on the radio, his voice sounds just like George W. Bush, and it freaks me out.” I don’t remember what else Jessica or I said about it.

5. They love Will Ferrell, and they LOVE Judd Apatow movies.

“Did you see Superbad?” the outgoing one said.

“Yeah, but I didn’t like it too much,” I said.

“What, really? It was great! He is McLovin!” he said, pointing to his shy friend, who did indeed look a little like McLovin.

“Maybe a bit,” I said.

“It’s just the hair and the glasses,” Jessica said. Then we talked about Old School and the 40-Year-Old Virgin and some other man-child movies.

“You should see Pineapple Express when it comes out,” I said. “You’ll like it, it has Seth Rogen.”

“Seth Rogen?” the shy one said.

“Yeah, he was the one in the 40-Year-Old Virgin who said, ‘I’m ugly as fuck.’”

“Oh, yes, him! Let’s write this down!” the outgoing one said. The shy friend took out some paper and a pen and wrote “Pine Apple Express.”

“Pineapple is one word, like the fruit,” I said.

“Okay, and then you have to see Blades of Glory. You will like it!” the outgoing one said.

“Eh,” I said.

“What! You have to see it! I promise you will like it!”

“Here’s an American expression for you: I’ll take your word for it.”

“‘I’ll take your word for it.’ What does that mean?”

“It means you’re not going to do whatever the person said you should do, but you’ll believe them that it’s good,” Jessica said.

“Ah, so it is ironical, yes?”

“Yes!”

6. They understand why George Bush got into the Iraq war.

“WHAT?” I said.

“He had to,” said the outgoing one. “When things are bad America has to go in. They are the biggest, richest country in the world–”

“Not anymore,” the shy one and I said at the same time.

“But still, they are very powerful, and they had to go in.”

“Let me tell you something–” I said.

“Uh-oh, here she goes,” Jessica said to the shy one. They both laughed.

“–George Bush is a war criminal, and he needs to be impeached, but he won’t be, because–”

“What is ‘impeach’?” said the shy one.

“Oh,” I said. “Impeachment is when the government decides that the president might need to be removed from office, so they hold a trial to see if they can vote to remove him.”

“Oh, okay,” said the shy one.

“Bill Clinton was impeached, but it didn’t go through, and–”

“Nixon?” said the outgoing one.

“No,” Jessica said, “he resigned before he could be impeached.”

“Only one president has ever been impeached and thrown out of office, and it was Andrew Jackson. Wait–”

“Johnson,” Jessica said.

“Andrew Johnson, yes.”

[I was wrong, though.]

7. They want to hang out with YOU.

“Where is the red light district?” the outgoing one said.

“Oh, we just walked around over there,” Jessica said. “Go down that way and take a right at the canal, then take a left at the next bridge. It’s down there somewhere.”

“Thanks,” the outgoing one said. “Do you want to come with us?”

“We just got in and we’re pretty tired tonight, but thanks anyway!” I said.

“Okay. Well, it was nice to meet you. I will remember ‘I’ll take your word for it.’”

“Good!” I said. We all shook hands and they took off into the rain.

tits up

Published
by
alison
on August 20, 2008
in bluishorange and travel
. 8 Comments

On our second night in Brussels, Jessica and I went to a nearby square to find someplace to have dinner. Anyone who travels in foreign countries is probably familiar with this method of dinner-finding:

“What about this place?”
“I dunno, let’s look at the menu.”
[Looking at menu]
“Whoa, that’s expensive! Let’s keep walking.”

[Walking]

“How about here?”
[Looking at menu]
“Eh, we had pizza last night. Let’s keep walking.”

[Walking]

“Here?”
[Looking at menu]
“I can’t tell what this is.”
“Me, either.”

[Walking]

“What about this place?”
[Looking at menu]
“I think I can find something to eat here. You?”
“Yeah, this looks good.”

We sat down at a table outside and looked at the menu. The waiter came over and spoke English to us, so we asked him to translate some of the less-obvious words on the menu, and he helped us pick out some drinks and salads and pasta.

As we waited for our food, I noticed an elderly man sitting by himself at a table just behind Jessica, with what looked like a metal crutch propped up next to him. On his table there was a beer and a bunch of colored pencils; it looked like he was drawing something.

Just after our food arrived, the man stood up and hobbled over to where Jessica and I were sitting. “Excuse me,” he said in heavily-accented English, handing me a beer coaster, “I draw this for you.”

I looked at the beer coaster. It was just a regular coaster on the printed side, but on the blank side he had drawn this:

a gift from an elderly man

In case it isn’t glaringly obvious, this is a drawing of me. Topless.

Of course I was not topless at the time; I guess the drawing was just his representation of what I might look like topless. While I was quietly freaking out, the elderly man was telling Jessica that to get the breasts so perfectly round, he had traced around an old Belgian penny. Not a Euro penny, a Belgian penny, I guess to add a little Belgian nationalism to his topless works.

I say I was quietly freaking out, but really I wasn’t sure what to think. How was I supposed to feel about this? Was the topless coaster drawing offensive? Was it creepy? Or was it just a prop for a funny travel tale? The waiter came out, saw the drawing on the table, and chuckled. “He does that every day,” he said.

The fact that the elderly man was there at the restaurant every day, drawing all sorts of topless tourists, made me feel a bit better. If he was creepy, at least he wasn’t so creepy that he had alienated restaurant employees. As a former waitress, I’ve known restaurant regulars like this–they walk a fine line between creepy and normal, but if you work at a place long enough, they start to seem a little endearing.

Jessica and I were halfway through our meal when the elderly man came over to our table again. “Excuse me. What is your name?” he said to Jessica.

“Jessica,” she said.

“Yessica!” he said. “You write it here.” He handed her a beer coaster and a marker and pointed to the printed side of the coaster. She wrote her name and gave it back to him. A few minutes later he came back over and handed her the coaster. On the blank side he had drawn a train, with Jessica’s name incorporated into the front grill of the locomotive.

“Thanks!” she said.

He asked us where we were from, and we told him Texas. “Texas!” he exclamed, as though pleasantly surprised. A few minutes later he asked me to write my name down, and I received a drawing of “a steam ship on the Mississippi!” with my name on it.

“Thanks,” I said.

The rest of the meal was uneventful except for the part where I arm-wrestled the waiter and he tried to give me a neck massage, but that’s another story. As we walked away from the restaurant, I thought about the topless drawing of me. What if the elderly man liked men instead of women? Would he draw pictures of shirtless or pantsless* men and hand them out to male tourists? I imagined how things might go if he handed out pictures of pantsless men:

“Excuse me, I draw this for you.”
[Punch]

If that’s really what would happen, then the beer-coaster drawing represents yet another thing that happens to women more often than men. Women are generally seen as more passive than men, and therefore less likely to react violently or negatively to things like this. Maybe the elderly man felt safe giving me the drawing because I’m a woman, so he probably wouldn’t get punched or even yelled at.

And he was right, apparently. I didn’t punch him or yell at him at all; in fact I thanked him. My general rule when I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language, don’t know the laws, and don’t know anyone besides my traveling companion is that it’s important to stay as safe as possible; negative incidents I might not walk away from at home are usually best avoided when abroad. So maybe that’s part of it. But the truth is that I am pretty passive. If a man in an Austin restaurant handed me a naked drawing of myself, I’d only make a fuss if he followed up with something inappropriate, and even then I’d probably just ask for the check and tell the waiter, “I’ve got to go, this customer is harassing me.”

The elderly man in the restaurant was obviously not coming on to me, and there was no inappropriate followup to be found. After he gave us our drawings, he didn’t talk to us again for the rest of our meal. If the same incident had happened in Austin, I’d have done the same exact thing that I did in Brussels.

There are a few other things at play here:

1. I felt less threatened because he was elderly, and walked with a cane. If he’d been large and/or muscular and imposing, I might have reacted differently, or at the very least felt differently.

2. My reaction to the drawing was a pretty American one. It’s an unfortunate American convention that, no matter what the context, the nude female form is automatically seen as a sexual thing to be censored.** Our movies are filled with more blood and violence and killing than with nudity, and when the nudity appears, it’s a big fat deal. Watching any amount of European television will tell you that they don’t look at nudity the same way we do. Perhaps the elderly Belgian man didn’t see his drawing as overtly sexual, at least not in the way I did.

I still struggle with my reaction to the drawing, and what it means as far as how I lead my daily life. I guess I don’t wish I’d been less passive at that restaurant in Brussels; the elderly man was harmless enough, as are your average men. But what about when things aren’t so harmless? I wish I didn’t feel the need to look behind me every time I walked down a deserted street. I wish I didn’t have to take my keys out and have them ready while walking to my car or apartment at night. I wish I didn’t feel like I can’t do certain things for safety reasons because I’m female. I wish about a lot of things that happen to women.

A friend once told me that whenever he’s walking down a nearly-deserted Manhattan street at night and there’s a lone woman walking in front of him, he’ll sometimes cross to the other side of the street to avoid freaking her out. And I think that’s what I really struggle with. Is it up to other people to try not to freak me out, or is it up to me to avoid allowing myself to freak out?***

As for the drawing, of course I took it with me, to use as a prop for a funny travel tale. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story.

*Side question: if he drew pictures of pantsless males, what would he trace for the penis?

**However gradually, I do think America is improving on this front, but we’re still much different from the rest of the western world in how we view our nudity.

***I think it’s both, really.

he has a PhD in horribleness

Published
by
alison
on August 12, 2008
in bluishorange, television and travel
. 8 Comments

To the three or four of you who haven’t seen Dr. Horrible yet: you must must must watch it. On the train to Berlin last week I watched it seven times in a row. Seven!

Now, I know that my love for Joss Whedon and my lesser, latent love for Neil Patrick Harris may make you think that I’m not exactly objective about Dr. Horrible. I understand where you’re coming from, and it may make you feel better to hear me say this: the plot of Dr. Horrible is pretty uneven, and the end of act III left me a little cold. I tried to be as upset about what happened as they seemed to want me to be, but I couldn’t. But here’s a list of things that totally made up for it:

1. I can’t imagine the songs being any better. The first song from act II has been in my head since I first heard it.

2. I can’t imagine the acting/singing being any better. Nathan Fillion’s handsome-superhero face is hilarious, and Neil Patrick Harris is a surprisingly good singer. I’d only seen Felicia Day on Buffy briefly, but I liked her, too.

3. The dialogue is of course brilliant.

4. Joss Whedon’s half-brother Jed co-wrote Dr. Horrible and did some of the songs. Jed Whedon is in a band called the Southland; their last (only?) album had some good songs and some fair-to-middlin’ songs. You should listen to the good ones.