It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.
The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.
Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.
It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of preference.
It does not make you intelligent/ and/or nonconformist, if you aggressively criticize all erotic media and the people who appear in it, especially members of your own gender.
Someone can appear in updates on your favorite website or the boxcover of your favorite DVD or the cover of your favorite magazine. You can appreciate their work and that is awesome. But they probably are not rich for life off of the work you enjoyed (or didn’t). The world has enough pain in it. Don’t be cruel to someone who was generous enough to share their naked selves with you. Just don’t be a lapdog either. You know that whole rather walk beside me and be my friend thing? Treat models like human beings.
In the internet age, most of us become somewhat reduced to our avatars and how we come across when typing. Nonetheless, models are still human beings and no more or less human, no more or less right, no more of less deserving, for having had more pictures taken of them than the average person.
A lot of models are afraid to go interact in public because people online can be so critical and most models know they are not as beautiful as the best photos where they were lit well, made up just right, dressed in clothing they may not own, shot with good composition, and post processed to perfection. In real life, people tend not to say the sort of rude things they write when in keyboard warrior mode. But, after seeing one’s best efforts nit-picked to death online, not just models, but most creative people find it more difficult to interact IRL.
Photos of models or real world parties or whatever are posted here from time to time. If you have something nice to say about them, by all means do. If you don’t have something nice to say, please don’t fake it, but don’t go out of your way to be a dehumanizing cruel jerk either.
Mike Judge’s Office Space is a hysterically brilliant piece on the soul-sucking nature of certain sorts of employment. The scene where they smash the fax machine is one of the most inspiring moments in American cinema ever. Viewpoint character Peter Gibbons, played with perfect comic timing by Ron Livingston, decides that, rather than quitting his job, he will simply stop going. He and his next door neighbor Lawrence, played with deadpan humor by Diedrich Bader, discuss what they would do if they had mad money. Lawrence’s only unrealized ambition is to have a threesome with two chicks.
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Mainstream porn overflows with girl/girl sex, but it is all of the sort where the women are supposed to be into it because they are just soooooooo overheated and no man is handy, not because they like women. The male consumer can fantasize that all he has to do is show up with a taste of the real thing (i.e. cock) and that would just make those ladies’ day.
I find the whole issue difficult. On the one hand, I know that site members often enjoy girl/girl pairings, even if the women pictured would not normally have sex with one another in the natural course of events. So there is certainly money in shooting lesbian sex, but I suffer from the punk rock problem of not being particularly fiscally motivated. Something which puts even more social pressure on me to shoot faux lesbian interactions is that many altmodels believe that their ticket to fame and fortune is being photographed fondling the breasts of a model more internet famous than they are. You might be shocked at how much static I have received from mostly straight models for declaring a moratorium on fake lesbian shoots for BlueBlood.com. If two people want me to photograph them having sex, as an artist, I am only really inspired to shoot them if I believe they are truly into each other and would be making love whether or not there was a camera in the room.
When I was fourteen and had a youthful fixation on heterosexual couplings, I was troubled by the mainstream porn my friends were able to get ahold of in Israel where I went to ninth grade, because there was always some sort of lesbian scene in every flick. I have the vague notion that porn movies may have been illegal in Israel, so this probably limited what my underage unsavory pals were able to get their hands on, but I still viscerally recall my discomfitted response to the chick in Flesh Gordon being forced to eat hairy muff. Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons and watched science fiction porn. (Probably no surprise there.)
As an adult, my take on sexual orientation is . . . let’s just say different from what it was as a teen. I really don’t care about whether someone’s genitalia are innie or outie; I just want something real, something genuinely passionate, something with a true human connection.
Back in the early 90’s, when I would be interviewed about Blue Blood magazine in print, I would always say it was erotica and not porn and point out that I was a woman and women can only produce erotica. I thought I was kidding. But there is a certain oddness to the approach mainstream porn has to human sexuality.
Every year, AVN or Adult Video News, has an awards show for porn videos and porn performances from the preceding year. The first time I ever came across this particular awards show was some time after fantabulous writer-cum-video-director David Aaron Clark had written the first issue of Blue Blood in print up for the late lamented Scew newspaper. Forrest Black and I went to meet him and Mistress Shane after they finished up at the AVN awards show in Vegas. DAC and Shane were mostly being entertainingly curmudgeonly about the enormous breasts in teen prom dresses wandering around the casino, but I was un-jaded and wide-eyed at the time. I’ve still never actually attended an AVN award show. Admittedly, I don’t particularly care for that variety of video media, so much of it would really go over my head. But I’m still fascinated by the culture which surrounds it.
Yesterday sexpert blogger Violet Blue covered Syd Blakovich and Madison Young’s red carpet walk at the AVN awards. Now a good-looking pornstar can generally get work if she is willing to have sex with other females on camera, even if she will not have boy/girl sex that way. There is almost the sense that a pornstar who only does women is somehow more of a nice girl than one who does men in films. Offhand, I can’t think of any major video porn star who has sex exclusively with men on camera.
So you’d think that people would just find it hot if Madison Young brought Syd Blakovich as her date to the AVN Awards. The talented Julie Simone shot some stuff of Madison Young which will be appearing on BlueBlood.com soon and I already covered extremely sexy badass Syd Blakovich’s Ultimate Surrender triumphs on here. So you can pretty much take it as a given that I think Syd Blakovich and Madison Young dating would be hot.
Violet Blue reports that AVN apparently didn’t want Syd Blakovich, in her cool steampunk outfit, to walk the porn red carpet with Madison Young. WTF? Someone would have to check with Summer Cummings and Skye Blue to see if this is actually the first time a girl/girl couple has attempted to take that red carpet stroll together, but, whether this is the first or the zillionth time a woman has brought another woman as her genuine date, it is messed up that an industry which insists on girl/girl sex would balk lest anyone think it was genuine girl/girl sex.
I mean, is it really excessively feminist to request that Porn Valley not whine if the women, they want to fuck each other, actually enjoy fucking each other?
PS I’ve seen a bunch of sex blogs, Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles included, posting pics of Gianna Lynn and her AVN awards dates. With how much some folks yammer on about porn crossing over to the mainstream, as though sex were somehow totally separate from all other areas of life, you’d think somebody in smutville would have noted that Gianna Lynn’s dates were UFC contract winner Ryan Bader and former Arizona State University classmate and fellow MMA fighter CB Dollaway.
A few years back, a number of members of Blue Blood sites started writing in to say someone was making dolls of various Blue Blood hotties. As I recall, Mistress Domiana and Fetus de Milo were two where there were specific dolls folks felt were based on photos Forrest Black and I had shot of them. Maybe there were other girls; it didn’t seem at all significant at the time, and the Bratz have changed enough over time that the Jury in their recent court battle (more on this soon, even though it is not technically a sex trial) asked whether they could find for the plaintiff in the first generation Bratz and against for later ones. To the best of my knowledge, neither I, nor Forrest Black, nor anyone I’ve photographed has ever met any of the brass at MGA Entertainment, the company who launched Bratz as their primary toy line in either 2001 or 2002, depending on who you ask. I guess MGA Entertainment is headquartered in Van Nuys, which is at last geographically close to Hollywood, if not culturally. So who knows.
Blue Blood hottie April Flores got in her prototype this week from Topco. The prototype is of the Wild Fire Celebrity Series Voluptuous CyberSkin Pussy. So that appears to be working out, but I’ve never really found a ton of business value in that type of merch, so I never gave much thought as to whether Bratz were or were not inspired by Gothic Sluts or whatever.
Some folks who did give it a lot of thought and were positive Bratz owed them an intellectual property debt were at the doll manufacturing and marketing powerhouse Mattell, home of Barbie. Now we could start comparing Barbie and Bratz. We could discuss how generations use fashion to define themselves. We could hear opinions from parents who feel Barbie (which they played with) is classic and wholesome and Bratz (which their kids want to play with) just teaches little girls to be whores. We could go into the radical feminist view that both Barbie and Bratz give girls unrealistic ideas of what a woman’s body will and should be like, setting the stage for adult eating disorders, antidepressant abuse, promiscuous sex, and excessive submission to the patriarchy.
Those might all be valid views, but the case, presided over U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson, this week was not, as many people supposed, about the ways Bratz is or is not similar to Barbie. The Bratz concept was developed by someone while he was working under exclusive contract for Mattel. His exclusive contract specifically stated that all such creations devised while in their employ were property of Mattel. This is a pretty common type of agreement for development teams. The idea is to prevent someone, especially someone with tons of access to proprietary info, from cashing their future competitor’s checks, while coming up with what they intend to market as a hipper and more current version of their employer’s product. Basically, this type of employment contract is explicitly to prevent precisely what the Bratz creator did.
So Judge Stephen G. Larson found in favor of Mattel. Mattel and MGA Entertainment have a couple of months now to decide whether to make Bratz and perhaps MGA a Mattel subsidiary, sell Bratz to MGA, license Bratz to MGA, or force MGA and all wholesalers and retailers to return any remaining My Hip Little Hoochie Barbies Bratz and then stack them up in the parking lot at 16380 Roscoe Blvd., pour newly less expensive gasoline on the clubby doll pile, and light it up.
Director Ramzi Abed’s film The Devil’s Muse was released on DVD by Halo 8 last week. Ramzi Abed and I have corresponded for years. We finally met in person when we were both exhibiting at the Erotica LA convention.
In a surreal twist, I invited Ramzi to dinner with a few other cool creative people I know a couple days ago and it turned out that he and high end party planner Sabrina actually went to university together. I didn’t know this until we were literally walking into the restaurant. I guess I just have really specific taste in pals.
The Devil’s Muse is about everyone’s favorite unsolved Hollywood crime, the Black Dahlia murder. In case you are morbid enough to be reading this, yet not morbid enough to be familiar with this investigation, I’ll give you the quick overview. Elizabeth Short was a 1940’s starlet wannabe, who was good-looking, a snappy dresser, popular with the gents, and whose tortured corpse was found literally cut in half. Her murder remains one of the most intriguing cold cases of all time.
Ramzi Abed says, his goal was:
“to do a feminist version of the Italian Giallo genre of violent erotic thrillers, but only to subvert the sexuality and violence to showcase Hollywood’s objectification of women. [He] also mixed in real and exaggerated documentary footage into the scripted film, to further create a reality television feeling to alternately confuse and guide audiences further.”
You can decide for yourself now, as Ramzi Abed’s movie is now available via Netflix, Amazon, or Halo 8’s Merch Lackey store.
I watched the Rock Docs: NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group documentary about NWA last night. Surprisingly, it made me think and actually somewhat changed my view on some things, most notably Ice Cube. I know, if something on VH1 made me think, apparently intentionally, then WTF is up with the universe?
I loathed Ice Cube the first time I heard his solo music. I first heard it at a time when the hip hop industry was working overtime at making it acceptable for white people to buy rap albums. Longtime Blue Blood readers may recall an article I wrote for the print magazine about my love of Ice T, which I called “I Shot the Sheriff and the Deputy”. (I’m a witty girl.) But the first stuff I heard by Ice Cube was not about the things I could relate to in an Ice T record. If there was anything about rage, disenfranchisement, and reaching for power on there, it was most definitely not for me. Ice Cube went on and on and on about how much white people overall suck and Asian people are this and Jewish people are this and white women are all ugly and blah blah blah. Apart from the deliberately alienating lyrics, this was also a time when rappers didn’t really tend to be that good-looking. Music television was around and MTV was instrumental in popularizing NWA, but let’s just say Ice Cube didn’t really have the good looks of LL Cool J, Nelly, or 50 Cent. Ice Cube looked like the pissed off guy who, if you had a party at your house, would get drunk and start breaking stuff as soon as his friends started having fun or getting laid. Like he should talk about what anybody else looks like. Hmph.
Then, at some point, Ice Cube appeared to have had politician-level quantities of Botox injected into his head and he started appearing in family-friendly comedies. I thought that maybe the deities of irony think that’s funny. But Ice Cube was appearing in exactly the kind of movies which are offensively wholesome. I’m not opposed to wholesome, but I am opposed to the kind of wholesome which makes you believe someone is just hiding most of who they really are. I am opposed to the kind of wholesome which is intended to make regular people feel terrible about themselves. And I thought Ice Cube was, by now, not only a racist misogynist, but a sell-out racist misogynist tool of the overculture.
Watching this VH1 special made me rethink my opinion that NWA was really just an example of Dr. Dre being great and taking a few guys from his neighborhood with him, folks who were just in the right place at the right time with the right friend. Taking nothing away from Dr. Dre’s brilliance, NWA may have been able to be what it was for more of a group synergy than I would previously have credited. Notably, Ice Cube actually wrote a number of raps, but I’ve never seen press coverage of the group talk about that before.
I can see why Ice Cube might have furrowed his brow like that, if he wrote some of NWA’s angriest words and then he saw Eazy-E being all about grabbing all the dough and having sex with as many groupies as possible. And he saw his bandmates settling into making something he saw as important and political into a business. As the seed money for the band and the studio they recorded in came from Eazy-E and much of the band’s street cred came from Eazy-E, he probably deserved a bigger slice of the money pie and, if he was more of a hit with the ladies than the others, maybe he was just plain sexier. He was certainly hotter than Ice Cube. And Eazy-E did die of AIDS from having so much random unprotected sex, so not that there wasn’t, ya know, a downside to being attractive that way.
Knowing that Dr. Dre went on to tap talents including Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent, I just kinda thought he was the brains of the operation. I’m not sure what MC Ren went on to, besides a few solo efforts, at least one of which did very well. DJ Yella went on to direct for mainstream adult video companies. I obviously believe that porn can be political, but calling a gonzo porn series DJ Yella’s Str8 Outta Compton really seems to show a certain willingness to overlook the importance, strength, and pride of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton record.
I feel a certain sympathy and understanding for Ice Cube now, that I did not before. If those words were his and he truly believed in what NWA had to say and changing the world and it was not about the money or the groupies, then it must have been gut-wrenching for him when those around him started talking like it was just business. I don’t know what year he legally changed his name to be Ice Cube, but it seems like he really wanted to be that guy, not just play a character to sell stuff.
On one level, I’m pleased that the internet facilitated the financial viability of my previously costly art project for my scene and community. Money can facilitate freedom and I like freedom. But money can be a really polluting influence as well, one which really brings out the wolves. I know I find it gut-wrenching when I hear “just business” from my peers and compatriots, some of whom are (or at least were) people I deeply believed in. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a data mining corporation like Experian simultaneously strip mine our culture and destroy any remaining privacy or control over our lives we might have. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream adult video corporation like Vivid recruit others I would have considered members of my tribe, while paying them far less than they would ever offer someone they considered a full-fledged member of society. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream porn site like SuicideGirls turn once vital sexual and feminist activism into bickering competitions which would be unseemly even in junior high school girls. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream clothing corporation like Hot Topic cheapen our style and make it something for children.
Maybe they have given up on true empowerment and feel like playing the clown is the only option left for them. If they can no longer recall what was supposed to be empowering about what they chose to do, then, in my opinion, they need to check themselves.
I’m not interested in being the court jester with the funny-colored hair in a disrespectful ruler’s kingdom. I’m thoroughly capable of putting on an Izod and having a nice salon do something more natural. I was bad at golf the last time I played at my grandparents country club, before being banned for punk rock behavior. But I could learn. And I love to eat, so I am ahead of the curve in knowing which fork to use.
If I decide to switch things up, it will not be to play the Pied Piper in leading people to work for Experian for free (while giving away their personal data) or Vivid for less than standard wages. I absolutely reject the notion that I should accept second class citizen status because of how I like to have sex or my gender or what I like to wear or what I like to listen to or having an artistic temperament. There is no obvious word for the kind of disenfranchised I am. But I won’t accept working for a corporate master on lesser terms because of it, any more than Ice Cube would for the color of his skin or where he is from.
All I’m saying is that Ice Cube made a reported thirteen million dollars last year and I no longer begrudge him it.
When the feminist publications like Feministe and the rock publications like AntiQuiet, and the news overlords like MSNBC all agree on something, it is safe to assume the topic is something as definite as the sky is generally blue. In this instance, pretty much everyone agrees that famous homophobe Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” video is a lot like a tremendously sucky version of a Girls Gone Wild set up.
More than a decade ago, Jill Sobule sang a bouncy tune, of the same name, about a woman who is titillated and unsure and excited about the new experience of having kissed another woman. Neither video shows a lot of lip-locking because both were intended for MTV airplay and, as a society, we tend to still view same sex kisses as potentially unsuitable material for kids. I think there will come a time when the idea of two women kissing being scandalous is as quaint as the idea of two people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds kissing is now. Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, recently had to work on their legislation because they had some old laws on the books to prevent black/white couples from other states from using Massachusetts to legitimize their otherwise illegal unions.
Because progress really can and does happen on so many fronts, the lameness of third wave feminism never ceases to disappoint me. If Katy Perry thinks it will turn guys on to tell them that she had a dream about kissing a girl, but, like, ew, not that she’d ever really do that . . . well, it probably will turn guys on.
Most guys I know, who would freak if their girl made out with another guy, think they will be just fine with it if she makes out with another girl. In real life, guys often beg to see this and then get really upset when the opportunity actually arises. Like it never crossed their minds that the chicks might actually be into each other, so then they get belatedly jealous. Personally, I think the swinger relationship model is at least internally consistent, but it is just silly to have the notion that it is totally cool for your girlfriend to kiss other girls, so long as she doesn’t like it. The idea of chicks kissing chicks because they really want to kiss a guy and need to get his attention . . . well, I guess I just think it is better to be more goal-directed towards what you really want.
Gentlemen, before your girlfriend starts kissing girls, decide whether or not you are cool with swinging. In most cases, the other party having a vagina doesn’t really mean it does not count, unless you are making your darling do something she hates. Of course, there is also the possibility that your girl is indifferent one way or the other to whomever she fools around with. To her, getting down with anyone may not be worthy of a musical anthem because it is a matter of some indifference and just really no big deal. This may include doing it with you.
Ladies, do not ever plant your beautiful sexy lips on anyone who would sing a song which manages to be sexist, male-bashing, and homophobic like “Ur So Gay”. Katy Perry does not deserve your kisses.
Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.
I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.
Here is where we come to problem number two. I dislike it when companies use a fake female spokesperson and have her pretend to run the company or some such, just so they can get some feminist points or chick support. I dislike it the same way I do when large corporations will back some supposedly indie project and send out phony press releases about what a bootstrap operation said project is. Basically, I think that a certain strata of American culture has figured out how to co-opt their own opposition. So Juno looks like a hip little film, with a spunky portrayal of how intelligent teenage girls approach the world. As played by Ellen Page, even in the trailers, the title character Juno looks like the sort of girl any teenage girl would want to be. Only the storyline of Juno has a teenage girl getting pregnant, deciding not to get an abortion, and giving her baby up for closed adoption to a woman in the middle of a divorce. This is pro-life without even the benefit of family values. Are the baby boomers really that scared that social security is going to go bust if younger generations don’t start breeding immediately?
I’m pro-choice, but I’ve never had an abortion. I realize that there is some powerful biology there and you don’t necessarily 100% know what you would do, until you are dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. So I’m not saying it is wrong for a teenage girl to bring her baby to term and then give it up via the out-dated closed adoption method where she can never meet her offspring, even if the child wants to meet her. I do, however, know that every single woman I know, who has had an abortion and saw Juno, came out of the movie feeling terrible about having had an abortion. So, if the film was not intended as pro-life propaganda being disseminated from within the castle walls of hipsterdom, then it was a poorly done movie, because that was surely the impact it had on its audience. If it was intended to cause more unplanned pregnancies to be brought to term, then good job, guys.
Witness the recent much-publicized pregnancy pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the fourfold increase in pregnancies at Gloucester High was the result of something which could be described with so sinister a term as “pact”, the fact remains that teen pregnancy appears to be on the rise in some surprising places. My mother mentioned this teen pregnancy story to me when it first broke and my first thought was that this was another example of co-option of cool to promote a counterintuitive agenda. Sometimes certain cultural patterns look obvious to me, but I’m not sure if others will share my view. Well, turns out high schools are now referring to this as “The Juno Effect” and this apparently annoys actor Jason Bateman, who played the prospective adoptive father.
You can be damn sure that, if kids were stealing cars after playing Grand Theft Auto, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started killing themselves after listening to Ozzy Osbourne, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started swearing after listening to Eminem, connections would be drawn. So, now that the shoe is on the other ideological foot, connections can damn well be drawn here too. Juno causes teen pregnancy. The film only cost $6.5 million to make and has grossed over $100 million, so maybe they can use some of those profits to help out all the unwed mothers they have inspired.
Last night, I went to see Beowulf with a bunch of my unsavory pals. This was our third attempt to put together a group of people to see it, but third time is a charm and there ended up being around a dozen of us including Blue Blood hotties Scar 13, Tassy Pink, Joel Awesome, and Kitty Von Klau, Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Allan Amato who shoots for Scar13.com and more. It was kind of cool because it seems like it is becoming less common to have a bunch of people get together for something simple like seeing a movie. Yes, I’m thinking of going to see a movie with naked vikings fucking water sprites as a wholesome activity. You have to consider what the rest of my existence is like to put it in context.
We saw Beowulf at the Arclight so we could view the 3D version. The Arclight has extra-comfy chairs and prides itself on its high tech theater equipment. This is Los Angeles, so the front hall featured a display with actual costumes worn by actors in the movie. I sort of thought they were all in motion suits and they made the flick video game style, but I guess physical outfits were involved at some point. I liked the clothing anyway. I think I need to start wearing a royal cape around. The Arclight personnel handed us 3D glasses on the way into the theater.
Spoiler alert: If you didn’t read Beowulf in school (or at any other point), then the rest of this might include spoilers. I studied all the Icelandic sagas in school. When I was in college, I actually took a class called “Kinship and Law in Medieval Iceland.” And now it is my job to do things like write up the Beowulf movie. I guess I wasn’t wasting time and money at university after all. Phew.
Most of the Scandanavian sagas came from many troubadours through oral tradition and they were about heroism and adventure. And possibly about the fact that vikings tended to drink mead stored in flasks which were fabulous breeding grounds for hallucinogenic fungus. Beowulf, by contrast, believed to be by one author of English or German origin, is almost a satire of the saga genre. In the book, it is unclear whether the hero Beowulf or the monster Grendel is really the protagonist. Grendel is a sympathetic monster and some scholars feel that he represents nature in the epic battle between man and nature. It seems like, in these environmentally conscious times, the movie makers would have hit the green message a bit harder. Personally, I buy recycled where I can, even if it costs a bit more. But I roll in a big American car and I leave my air conditioning on when it is hot, whether or not I’m home. So this didn’t exactly damage my enjoyment of the movie.
The main deviation from the original poem is in the nature of Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother. Scholars disagree vehemently with one another on whether Grendel’s mother was a heroic female warrior who, in response to the killing of her son, simply carried out the requirements of blood feud and debt. Or whether this descendant of Cain was monstrous in appearance. In the poem, Beowulf is described as killing her with a magical sword and then using that same sword to decapitate Grendel’s corpse and bring his head back to the mead hall. It is entertaining to think that the screenwriters looked at this and wondered why the warrior would have only brought back one head if he had slain two monsters. Their explanation might not be so true to the original, but many things can be explained by Angelina Jolie’s wet, buoyant, gold-slicked, CGI boobies. Many scholars believe that the original Beowulf poem was a Christian propagandist restructuring of familiar tales to impose Christian values on them. So one can hardly blame a modern retelling for imposing current rules of cinematic story structure on the film. Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother not only allowed Robert Zemeckis to bring us hot naked viking/water sprite sex, but it also honestly ties the Grendel portion of the Beowulf saga and the dragon portion together much more neatly, for modern sensibilities, than the original does. Some feminist scholars argue that Beowulf has a three part story structure where the battle with Grendel’s mother is as important as the one with Grendel and the one with the dragon, although the story is generally viewed as having a two part structure. It would probably be reaching to call the Zemeckis adaptation a feminist retelling, but it is tidy modern story structure for a modern audience.
Much as the original saga was almost making fun of the braggadocio of its predecessors, the Beowulf movie is sold as a costume adventure blockbuster, but it points out that maybe the adventures just are not really that great. When Beowulf kills Grendel, the monster is tragic and, despite Beowulf’s humorous and aesthetically pleasing nudity, the warrior comes off as a bully, brutalizing a monster who is no match for him. It is uncomfortable to watch and the monster takes an agonizingly long time to die in his mother’s arms.
The movie pretty immediately switches tone from a certain almost cheesy brashness to a dismal and depressing ever after. The plot goes briskly from the warrior king yelling “I am Beowulf!” Flava Flav style to telling his young slave girl that none of it was as great as it should have been, not the battles, not the treasures, not the kingdom, not the women. She seems distressed that not even the women excited him in a particularly pleasant way, but he pretty much confirms that he can’t even summon interest in sex.
Beowulf set out to do battle for glory rather than gold, but he has acquired both through his exploits. Beowulf’s closest companions revere him. He is a king. He has wealth and many followers. People keep telling him that his praises will be sung after everything then alive has turned to dust. But, basically, nothing feels good.
Unusually, for a Hollywood blockbuster, the writers of the movie get top billing in the closing credits. The screenplay was written by the very impressive duo of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Neil Gaiman is very well known in comic book and science fiction and fantasy circles. If you are gothic, you are probably familiar with his Sandman comic (or should probably at least fake like you are.) If you are more fandom-identified, then his somewhat tongue-in-cheek novels may be more your thing. Although Quentin Tarantino is the name everyone knows from Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary also has a screenwriting credit on it and has said in interviews since that he can’t hang out with Quentin Tarantino because the man just sucks the ideas right out of him. Roger Avary is probably best known for having written and directed the solid film adaptation of one of my favorite books, Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, (which Forrest Black and I shot some promo for with Scar 13 years ago.) There is some buzz about whether the technology involved in making Beowulf will ultimately somewhat replace actors, or at least turn them into licensable clip art. I will be interested to see if this sort of technology will ultimately mean that writers and scenic designers and people like that will receive more credit for how a movie turns out. Before I knew anything about how Hollywood works, it used to trouble me, as a consumer, that whether or not I enjoyed a movie depended very much on plot and story structure, only movies were never advertised as “written by the guy who wrote that other thing you liked.” A great actor with a horrid plot is generally Michael Madsen in that awful poker movie which comes on late night cable only. No Oscars there.
Perhaps because the original Beowulf saga mocked the more traditional sagas, although the movie is marketed as an epic adventure for fantasy fans, it feels almost like the viewer is being told that what they were coming to see is not as terrific as they might think. After the credits ran, most of my group of mighty thanes went to get shabu shabu. Everyone kept asking each other if they liked the movie. Except for Scar, who had promised to dislike the movie beforehand, no one seemed to know if they felt like it was a good movie or a bad one or somewhere in between. I know the film left me feeling a little extra aggro such that I wanted to attack the waitress when I asked her for a sparkling Voss water the seventh time. Not that people doing their job badly doesn’t annoy me normally, but not in such a visceral way. I think Joel Awesome and I might have been the only ones who were somewhat familiar with the saga genre. (Wait until you all see the super hot signature couples set of Joel and Kittie which Forrest and I shot for BlueBlood.com. All that hotness and smart and well-read too!) I think the movie was well-done and technologically interesting, but, being familiar with the original, I was mostly sort of kicking myself for being surprised that it was not a feel-good movie.
The message of the Beowulf movie seemed very much: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, with 3D glasses, and despair.” (Joel says that, when he was little, he used to confuse Gilgamesh and Grendel, so I can stick Ozymandius in my Beowulf if I want.) Fortunately, we had to give the 3D glasses back to the Arclight after the movie. It was disorienting, at first, to look at the world without them.
My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.
The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,
“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”
Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.
So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.
Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.
Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.
Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.
I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.
We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.
The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.
In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.
It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.
I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?
Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.
It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.
Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.
A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.
Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.
Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.
According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.
So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.
I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.
