Wednesday Collective — “Birds of Prey” Edition

I’m going to keep talking about “Birds of Prey” because it is just that important a film. It’s underrated, speaks to our time, and it’s a lightning rod of toxic reaction to its feminism and diversity. I stopped counting how many comments from people with “nazi” in their name I had on my article “’Birds of Prey’ Box Office Failure is Make Believe”.

This is a film with a generationally good action-comedy performance in Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. It has award-worthy design. The direction is wildly assured and draws from a shockingly large range of influences to create something unique and precise. Its scenes are often thickly layered with dueling perspectives even as Quinn’s own storytelling drives the plot. It’s subversive in a blunt, forward, and challenging way that’s needed.

I used to run Wednesday Collective as a weekly gathering of articles on (mostly) film that I found interesting. One of the joys of being a critic is sharing voices with readers that cover diverse perspectives, and that help me learn. Let’s talk about what they have to say about the film’s treatment of trauma, its “Tank Girl” connection, its meaningful costuming, director Cathy Yan, and Margot Robbie as a producer.

BIRDS OF PREY, Trauma, and the Female Gaze
by Jessica Plummer

This is a superb article at Book Riot that deals with a particular moment in “Birds of Prey”. It’s something I could tell was playing out differently, but because I have a male gaze, I focused on the reaction and what that said about toxic masculinity.

There was also something else happening in the scene that I couldn’t identify, that plays to female gaze. That there are so many moments in a film like this, and that it can produce this level of layered meaning in a scene, continues to blow my mind.

It’s also an argument for why we need more women in film and as critics. A male director wouldn’t have included this in the film. A male critic wouldn’t have noticed it in the film. Yet as a man, I can benefit, know more, and find more beauty and care in a piece of art simply from it being included and pointed out to me.

A Girl is a Gun: ‘Birds of Prey’ and the Legacy of ‘Tank Girl’
by Maya Thornton

Maya Thornton points out for Adventures in Poor Taste one of the stronger influences in “Birds of Prey”: director Rachel Talalay’s 1995 cult classic “Tank Girl”.

Her article considers the through-lines in story, design, and comedy, how each film treats women (and how men react), as well as the differences in how studios acted toward these films in 1995 vs. 2020.

She doesn’t mention, but Margot Robbie’s production company LuckyChap Entertainment optioned the rights to “Tank Girl” in September 2019 as a starring vehicle for Robbie. That doesn’t mean it will definitely get made, but with the film already months into pre-production and director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (who directed Robbie in “Dreamland”) tapped to direct it, it’s reasonable to hope.

Harley Quinn’s ‘Birds of Prey’ Costumes are Full of Hidden Meanings
by Irina Grechko

Fashion-centric site Nylon goes into the inspirations behind costume designer Erin Benach’s unique and varied costumes. The strongest influences in “Birds of Prey” are DIY glampunk and glitterpunk, but Blaxploitation, 50s fashion iconography, and emo clubbing accessories each inform characters in the film.

Benach needed to create costumes that made statements, told histories, and defined the world of the film. They needed to be utilitarian and focused on the characters’ preferences instead of the male gaze that dictated Harley Quinn’s costume design in “Suicide Squad”. One of Benach’s most interesting imperatives was to take these influences and do something revolutionary with them – add pants.

How ‘Birds of Prey’ Director Cathy Yan Saved Harley Quinn From Joker and the Male Gaze
by Melissa Leon

Here’s a rangy interview with director Cathy Yan at The Daily Beast. “Birds of Prey” is one of the most self-assured films I’ve seen recently, and it offers a storytelling voice that feels more authentic than anything else DC or even Marvel have done. Yan talks about accentuating the female gaze and how a woman filming women focuses on the actual performance being given. Yan wanted to make sure her characters sweat and that the work and effort they put forth was aspirational – not the impossible beauty standard of an impeccably photoshopped magazine cover.

This is also a different Gotham City than we’ve seen, and Yan has a precise reason for this. She discusses why she wanted to make Harley’s section of Gotham feel like a neighborhood on the outskirts instead of gloomy, downtown Gotham – that a story taking place on the outskirts of power avoids telling a story that focuses too much on established patriarchy.

How Margot Robbie Changed Her Hollywood Destiny
by Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen breaks down Robbie’s path to production and how it enables her to choose her roles and expand the range of other voices in film. The BuzzFeed News article reminds us that Robbie isn’t just clearing a path as an extremely capable actress, she’s also one of the promising and hardest working young producers in film.

Petersen does this in an absolutely brilliant and captivating piece that calls to account male journalists’ coverage of young actresses. It takes steps beyond this to interrogate the opportunities blocked to women as producers and how Robbie’s seized on becoming an important and exciting risk-taker. It highlights the history of how studios have limited women’s opportunities as producers, how women have fought back, and how patriarchal systems artificially block women into competing for limited opportunities while men aren’t similarly obstructed.

That would be more than enough to make the article stunning and important, but Petersen also threads how class plays into the opportunities women have, and how it informs and leads to typecasting, while also recognizing Robbie wouldn’t have this opportunity if she were nonwhite. I’m trying really hard not to swear to accentuate just how good this article is.

When something is this well-researched, clearly voiced, intersectionally woven, and pointedly structured, it is important. It functions as crucial journalism as well as a clear-eyed piece of art unto itself. Read this, it is one of the best articles covering the industry of filmmaking that I’ve recently read.

If you enjoy what you’re reading, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.

Focus On: Photo Battle

by Gabriel Valdez

Photo Battle is my new favorite blog. Two photographers enter, one photographer leaves.

Every week, two photographers are given a single-word theme – empty, shadow, two, fear – and submit three photos centered on that theme. Readers vote for their favorite set. Photographers will battle each other a few times and…past that, I’m not sure of the rules. Tourney, round robin, single-elimination, I don’t think it matters.

What’s exciting is staring at two evocative photo sets every week and letting your mind wander. While I don’t typically like creating artistic battles where there aren’t any, I tend to think Photo Battle‘s purpose is more in sharing art with a growing community. Every week, fans of one artist are exposed to another they may not have heard about.

I was tipped off to this by the brilliant Laura Zalenga, a German photographer who uses photo manipulation to create clever, fairy tale imagery. The photo at the top of this article is one of her submissions for the “Shadow” battle, in which she faced off against Aliza Razell, a Scotland-based photographer whose imagery evokes David Lynch and Jonathan Glazer by way of Jim Henson and Waterhouse.

Photo Battle is a phenomenal way of featuring photographers and introducing new artists. It’s one of the most enjoyable blogs I’ve discovered.

Less Than 5% of Music Producers are Women. That Must Change.

by Amanda Smith

Read that again: Less than 5% of music producers are women. That’s a problem.

Ruth Saxelby at FADER spoke with 13 women producers about how to make the music industry more accessible to women and encourage more women to break into it.

The truths echoed here are both encouraging and depressing. The reality is the treatment of women in the entertainment industry is a symptom of a larger dismissal of our talents in many professional circles dominated by men.

There have been good women producers, and at a higher rate than men (when you compose less than 5% of an industry, only the best of the best will represent you). These women aren’t recognized by a boys’ club that prefers to reward the status quo.

Go read FADER‘s series of brief interviews, “Why Aren’t More Women Becoming Music Producers?” If you have friends in music, forward the article to them. This article is a stepping stone. Use it as a primer. Encourage them to be more open-minded.

Producers interviewed include trailblazers like Fatima Al Qadiri, WondaGurl, Caroline Polacheck, Tokimonsta, and Ikonika.

Our Stupid New Future — Saudi Arabia and Digital Drugs

by Olivia Smith

All else is turning digital. Why not drugs?

The Saudi and Lebanese governments are taking stands against “binaural beats.” Government agencies are holding emergency meetings to outlaw the laziest subgenre of electronic music.

Binaural beats are two tones that create a third tone when combined. These governments believe advertisements that such combinations make listeners high. Companies like iDoser claim binaural beats can re-synchronize your brain waves like they’re reacting to different drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, opium, and peyote.

I claim a statement like that makes it pretty clear iDoser has never even used a brain. Never you mind that the scientific community agrees with me and has dismissed iDoser’s claims, the United Arab Emirates already outlawed this form of “music” in 2012.

Claims like that make iDoser money, curiosity (and stories like these) create new customers, and the placebo effect keeps customers coming back. And fundamentalist nations like to have panicky meetings about who can jump the highest at shadows. They’re like liberals that way.

[Editor’s Note: Knowing Olivia’s politics, this confused me. In Australia, liberals are conservatives. Remember, everything’s upside-down down there.]

If you happen to be a Tibetan throat-singer, give this area of the world a wide berth. As for me, I’m downloading Brian Eno and printing Magic Eye pictures. I’m a plane trip away from making my fortune!

If the authorities ever close in on me, I’ll just break out the brown note.

What’s New, What’s Expiring on Netflix

by Gabriel Valdez

I notice a lot of people sharing what’s expiring on Netflix. Typically, it’s Daily Dot and Huffington Post (makes sign of the cross, sprinkles holy water around) links being thrown around, but these are usually half-assed and only cover what’s expiring on the last of the month, not what’s expiring mid-month.

There’s more complete information out there from more independent sources, and Justine Baron at JustBMovies writes monthly rundowns on What’s Expiring Soon and What’s New on Streaming. She covers all dates, not just the first and the last of the month (most sources miss this little nuance).

If you’re Canadian or British, first off: congratulations, that’s awesome, cause my god, I love your accent, but secondly, she’s got you covered, too.

The What’s Expiring Soon is current and her newest What’s New usually comes out on the first. Best of all, you don’t have to wait 500 years for Huffington Post (smears garlic on face, jumps in a colloidal silver bath) to load 13,666 ads for things you don’t need while torpedoing your computer or phone with third-party cookies (mmm…third-party cookies.)

JustBMovies also features some pretty solid movie reviews and regular rankings of your favorite directors and stars.

Focus On: The Fashion Photography of Holly Parker

by Gabe Valdez

Fashion photography has long suffered a big problem – decades ago, it dissociated from glamor photography and began favoring the clean lines and in-the-studio feeling of the commercial photography that became so popular in the 80s. Commercial photography sold us computers, TVs, cars, phones, anything technological by delivering clean-looking lines and shining, pristine surfaces in front of a black or white background. Commercial photography’s simple, perfected, antiseptic tone told us: here is the product, it is desirable.

Fashion photography took a number of these cues – it began isolating models in the same antiseptic settings. This had the result less of selling clothes than of selling the models themselves. After all, clothes sales aren’t what companies are after – they’re after brand loyalty. You have to sell a product again and again. You have to sell an image once. Over the years, however, buyers have become more and more resistant to commercial photography’s gimmicks. They aren’t nearly as effective as they once were.

So what’s different about Holly Parker? She returns a certain class to fashion photography, replacing hypersexualization with allure. Her models – women and men – are typically posed as strong and complex figures, not as helpless or sullen product. It’s an incredible and important difference.

Think of a photographer much like you’d think of the director of a film. Lighting, angle, composition, retouching and editing – it all comes together to make a huge difference in the shape a model’s performance takes.

Whereas some photographers still stress a model’s gauntness or pose them plaintively, as if they’re a toy waiting to be picked up by the viewer, Parker highlights a model’s muscle and tone. A big part of this is due to her favoring natural light over complex lighting set-ups. The portrayals she gets from models are realistic yet still iconic. They’re more colorful than the overly serious commercial approach to fashion photography, and they stress the landscape around a model as much as they do the model herself.

This may seem counter-intuitive, as if it draws focus away from the model, or the swimwear or dress being sold, but to the contrary – it’s a photographer’s way of world-building. Parker shifts the viewer’s experience from one of desiring the model to one of desiring a time and place – an entire experience. This gives her models greater function, stresses them as performers inside that world she’s built instead of simply as commercial objects.

From a brand perspective, there are any number of reasons to favor presenting an experience over presenting an object. Perhaps that’s for another article – my precise interest lies more in how Parker’s artistry expands the role and power of the models inside her work.

In particular, she has a keen eye for the interaction of focal points, asymmetry, and different levels of shallow focus. This is my favorite shot of hers.

She finds a way to echo the color of the model’s top in the rock face and her skirt in the further cliffs. Moreover, the model’s offset stance – cocked head, arm held across herself, leg bent out – uses her body to direct the eye in a natural manner from top left to lower right along the photo. This is supported in the slightly lesser curve of the rock face, and if there’s one thing the human eye loves, it’s concentric encouragement. There’s a curve on the left, there’s a similar curve in the middle, the brain is visually pleased. The upper right of the shot is largely negative space – there’s stuff there, but it’s soft focus, and so our brain guides us back to the center, where we know there’s a reinforced pattern and we’re more visually comfortable.

This, too, is encouraged by the color scheme – light brown rock, light brown top, white skirt, white cliffs (I know it’s Berkeley Gold and Snow or something, but let’s call it light brown and white). This implies a certain verticality as our eyes go from left to right – as colors grade lighter to darker across an image, our brains tend to want to reassemble that vertically. Darker objects imply distance, reinforcing on a second level the increasing depth of the shot as it opens right. This creates a slight touch of disorientation. Again, this returns us to the center, to an anchored position. I’d be shocked if Parker didn’t retouch to bring the colors of the rocks, cliffs, and clothes closer together. What it all adds up to is a number of concepts that work in conjunction to return our eyes constantly to the fashion at the image’s center.

Now you can just plop fashion in the middle of a photo and your eyes naturally gravitate to it, but what Parker does is some pretty high-level conceptualization – she gives the fashion moment, character, and attitude. She creates a visual anchor while purposely throwing us off so we seek to return to it. What’s most impressive is that she’s not using one trick in isolation – that’s gimmick territory. She’s using several techniques that each strengthen the next.

I’m also a fan of her closer, portrait work:

Again, Parker plays with asymmetry and an empty upper corner in soft focus, but these qualities alone don’t amount to a great photo. They have to be part of a more complex whole. There are vertical and horizontal bisections happening here. Where the high collar meets the horizon behind the model creates an implied line across the entire photo, and where the shadow takes up the left third of her face (as we look at her) gives us a strict lighting separation.

This means the smallest quadrant – the upper left – is also the heaviest in terms of image. It’s dark due to shadow and it’s busy due to the model’s hair being pushed over. Our eye is encouraged to find a simpler, brighter position to start. The head wrap creates a very easy transition for the eye to escape right, where that soft focus corner again makes the eye go a little crazy. The out-of-focus sky has no texture and we want detail, so our eyes hook onto the top the model’s wearing – its texture is a repeated, orderly detail that creates a comfortable visual anchor in the image.

Stand back and look at the image – even after I’ve told you all this, your eyes go from upper left to upper right before making a diagonal cut to the center. Again, Parker’s disorienting you a little bit so that she can take charge of your eye and guide it through the photo the way she wants. This is what I mean by combining focal points, asymmetry, and shallow focus. Your eye doesn’t just shoot to the center. Parker directs it along the path she wants you to take.

She also breaks the rules and can be a little Werner Herzog with some of her contextual details. You typically don’t want an ocean background tilting to one side. But ask me if it matters given the performance she’s captured from her model.

This isn’t a perfect shot – there’s less technique here – but it’s one that communicates a hell of a moment. Most photographers – even most fashion photographers I know (sorry, guys) don’t have Parker’s knack for capturing the smaller moments of her models’ performances, let alone her ability to guide the eye in a way that suggests the experience of world, story, and character. Now, Parker does have a few faults. Her photography of men isn’t quite as assured, but it’ll get there.

Specifically, her preference for using natural light to show off both tone and imperfections like smile lines will be of terrific advantage. She knows how to build story and character out of these.

I’m highlighting Holly Parker because…well, it’s my job as a critic to point out the artists whom I hope are the future of their industry. Sure, Parker’s a woman in a male-dominated industry. She’s also a step ahead in the awkward, industry-wide transition from commercial-influenced fashion photography to a brighter, more character- and experience-driven style. I also feel her work is a far more empowering presentation of women in fashion than much of what’s been generally accepted in recent years.

More than anything else, however, Parker’s doing it in ways you don’t typically see in fashion photography, employing complex, intersecting framing and visual techniques across multiple levels. I’m analyzing her technique in the same way I might certain classical paintings, or a P. T. Anderson long-take. That’s certainly not true of most photographers, not at this level of complexity.

I’m not saying she’s Dorothea Lange or Alex Prager just yet. Her photography still speaks of someone who’s harnessing all these gifts. She’s still figuring out when and how to use them, but the intrinsic talent she’s showing at a very early stage of her career is phenomenal. Parker’s a superior talent and if she can continue to develop her own style and add even more tools and technique to her repertoire, I very much look forward to seeing more of her work both in the fashion industry and outside of it.

What I’ve analyzed here are just a few images. Visit her site if you’d like to see more of Holly Parker’s photography, or her work as a model.

Thursday’s Child — Friends of the Blog Day

We’re highlighting a couple articles coming from friends today, including a superb piece on photography by John Schell, an article on misogyny in the gaming industry by Elizabeth Tobey, and an article on the Slender Man murder and how much media is or isn’t to blame by folklorist Joseph Laycock.

But first, we’re required to include a David Bowie song in every Thursday’s Child article. It’s in the charter or something. Given our subjects of fashion photography, gender dynamics, and the folkore of memes, I can’t think of anything more appropriate than Floria Sigismondi’s weird, Tilda Swinton-inhabited music video for Bowie’s “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).”

Now, on with the show:

CO-ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Terrance Malick’s Darkest Film
Rob Turner

When I write a review, I’m limited to 700 words. My responsibilities are to translate the experience of watching a particular movie and to clarify in what ways it’s valuable. The bulk of the work is in my editing.

When I write a film essay, there’s no limit save the reader’s attention span. My responsibilities vary because the bulk of the work is in the research. It’s like a science experiment – you start with the seed of a theory or message and then you learn everything you can. Either the research proves out or you’re proven wrong. Either way, you’ve got an article.

Nowhere is the bulk of the work in the writing – that’s the fun part, that’s the part that you can’t get onto a page fast enough. You can sense when someone needs to write, absolutely needs it like breathing, and when someone is obligated to write. When someone needs to write, you’ll put everything else to the side and read them for pages. You want to know where their emotional journey as a writer takes you. When someone is obligated to write, you’ll look at three paragraphs as an eternity that deserves skimming at best. Research sits awkwardly; the seams in their editing are apparent.

Rob Turner needs to write about To the Wonder. It seeps through every word of his article. His research is considerable, yet hidden. His structure is exacting, yet elegant. That’s how you translate the experience of a film – you hide all the work behind it but the passion, the awe of being a witness to it. If that’s what Malick can achieve as a director in To the Wonder, that’s what a writer who needs to write can achieve in writing about it. Rob Turner does just that.

Anti-Strobism and Using Natural Light in Photography
John Schell

I know we have some photographers and models who read here, and John Schell’s article is an absolute must-read for them. Natural styles of shooting are often overlooked in film, and that’s doubly true in photography. There’s some superb advice here on how to shoot with natural light and play with over- and under-exposures. We’re used to everything being overly strobed and photoshopped and little details being blended out in fashion photography, whereas natural light brings out dimples, smile lines, and other imperfections.

We’re becoming somewhat resistant to excessively perfected photos, at least insofar as fashion photography goes. (Landscape, nature, and commercial photography are frustratingly different stories.) The imperfections that are so regularly hidden from us are what people remember best and most appreciate about each others’ appearances. They can make a photograph recapture a ‘day in the life’ feeling instead of a day in the studio feeling. They bring back a warmth and glow that glamor and fashion photography have lately abandoned in favor of antiseptic tones and clean lines.

Ditching strobes and learning to shoot naturally is a big step in the right direction. For another example of this, I do prefer the natural light style of Holly Parker, a photographer and the model in many of John’s shots. Look to Holly’s work for color composition, framing, focus, and very smart use of focal points. She’s got a cinematographer’s eye for composition. Look to John’s work for how he uses shadow, exposure, contrast/blow-outs, and especially implied motion. His work is more classically commercial.

Thanks to Holly Parker for pointing this article out.

Sexism and Misogyny in Gaming
Elizabeth Tobey

I know a few folks who work in the video games industry. Both women and men I know assert it’s their dream job, but for women it usually comes with a hesitation and a caveat about the online community. And by caveat I mean quoting threats of death and rape they receive on a weekly basis.

Elizabeth gives several examples from her own experience in the industry, as well as suggestions for how the community needs to change. Because of the inherently online nature of many games and their platforms, I believe what’s taught and reinforced about women through that medium has a far greater effect on youth culture than what’s taught even on film or television.

For the kind of response women in this industry regularly have to put up with, look no further than the first post in response to Elizabeth’s article, from anonymous poster Blah Blah: “Genders will never be equal, a woman could only take this viewpoint. Women have what most men want, a wet hole. Equal, so no more ladies nights, we won’t pay for your dinner on a date, you can open the door for us. Etc. You’re a woman that is employed as a public relations person…do you really think you’d have gotten that first job if you didn’t have boobs?”

I don’t know, Blah Blah, but plenty of men magically get jobs in the industry without having breasts. Also, ladies’ nights are not a treat for women, they’re an advertising plug for bars looking to drum up more business. Also also, try splitting the check if you can’t pay for dinner without expectations attached. Also also also, try buying a friend dinner with no expectations outside of having a nice dinner with someone. Also also also also, I’d like to suggest the mind-blowing notion that holding the door open for someone does not automatically mean they owe you sex. Controversial, I know. Five alsos in a row: try holding the door open for everyone who needs it, and not just the people you want to sleep with. Six alsos in a row: someone buy Blah Blah a copy of Strunk & White; I had to correct the punctuation while quoting him and I can’t be around for him all the time; I might accidentally hold the door open for him, and then he’d owe me sex.

Thanks to Elizabeth Tobey for letting us know about the article.

Media Algorithms and Bad Reporting
Erin Biba

I once saw a program titled Top 10 Deadliest Things About Volcanoes. I thought to myself, “I’m pretty sure number 1 is going to be volcanoes.” It was actually a decent program about the history of volcanic eruptions and their effects at different eras in our history, but the countdown approach was simply one made to entice viewers – “I can only think of 5 deadly things about volcanoes; I wonder what the others will be,” that sort of crap.

We have a sense that attention spans are shorter and that it’s everyone else’s fault but a writer’s or publisher’s. It’s the effect of technology, it’s the effect of movies, it’s the effect of 37 hours of TV a day. Yes, it is. That doesn’t change anything.

It’s still the responsibility of the writer to capture that attention span and the responsibility of the publisher to prize it. The poetry community whines that it’s all but extinct save for a few intellectual circles while the organizations that define what poetry is reject slam and hip-hop as too commercial and performance-based. The literary community holds up drama while acting as if genre and young adult fiction – which still sells like hotcakes – is beneath it. Conversely, the studio system shoves money down the throat of genre fiction – a $200 million movie that makes $300 million will get sequels, while repeatedly making $20 million narratives that make $100 million (see Steven Soderbergh) will get a director run out of the system.

The point is that people are still interested in those things that demand our attention. Yes, technology’s to blame for the deficit in our attention spans, but so are the poetry and literary communities, studios, and publishers that are too afraid to demand their readers’ and viewers’ attention. Those communities and companies have as much of a hand in training readers and viewers how to read and watch as any technology does. If we don’t make demands of readers and invest in good reporting and good writing, then we’re just training those readers to reject us in a generation’s time.

There’s a reason people are coming to this site and others like it. It’s not the presentation; lord knows I need to clean that up. It’s because we have high standards for our articles and, honestly, for our readers, too. I’ll make top 10 lists here and there, but only if the list has a good reason to highlight something more important than a subjective ranking that’s likely to change tomorrow. I can’t even highlight others’ articles without writing commentaries that are just as long as the article. Readers have read, shared, and argued (oh god, have they argued) Russ’s and Vanessa’s work because people still want to think and be challenged when they read and they watch and they listen.

The only thing we teach readers by dumbing ourselves down is to learn to ignore us. The less you demand of your readers, the less they value you. And you cannot demand something of your readers unless you demand something of your writers first. That means prizing the ability to write, and that starts with publishers and publications both online and off.

“’Slender Man’ Murder Attempt Wasn’t Media or Madness”
Joseph Laycock

And finally, concluding with a consideration of the power of media in contrast to the power of community. How much is one to blame for violence versus the other?

I remember thinking after Columbine that, while those kids listened to Marilyn Manson and played Doom, neither of those things taught them Hitler’s birthday. Someone around them taught them that, and taught them that violence was a viable way of celebrating it.

The difference now is that community isn’t as immediate as it was even 15 years back. We’ve seen this with the Slender Man attempted murder, and we saw it two weeks ago in Isla Vista – your primary community may be an online one, and what you’re taught there isn’t as easy to monitor or put in context. As Laycock writes, it has nothing to do with an inability to differentiate reality from the internet – that’s a myth, and children are perfectly capable of that differentiation. Let’s not evolve a new Twinkie Defense.

It has everything to do with community, education, and social environment, three things that are now often conveyed through a less immediate and answerable medium than we’ve learned to deal with at this point. But read Joe’s article – he elucidates these and other ideas in far greater detail.

Thanks to Joseph Laycock for letting us know about the article.

Wednesday Collective — Ghost in the Cruise

This week, we’re talking about Ghost in the Shell, Tom Cruise, singing cowboys, the X-Men, Steven Soderbergh, and Indiana Jones. We’ve focused some Wednesday Collectives lately about specific interests, so we’re playing some catch-up – we’ll have even more articles in tomorrow’s Thursday’s Child.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
There is No Ghost in the Shell
LogosSteve

The thing about science-fiction is that the world catches up to it in short order. We may not have the spaceships of early 90s Star Trek, for instance, but we’ve certainly surpassed their clunky data devices and equaled their communication abilities. Star Wars movies made 15 years ago present us with dated, impractical visions of technology (oddly enough, the 30-year old films still feel more futuristic).

In the 80s, cyberpunk sprang to the fore of science-fiction. If nothing else, it was a reaction to Reaganism and the growing power of the corporation. Yet the subgenre’s originator, William Gibson, left his own genre a decade ago, saying that reality had caught up, and it was a far more insidious one than he could have imagined.

So it’s impressive that an anime film made 20 years ago looks like a grim vision of the future and asks us questions we’re still at the beginning stages of contemplating. Above is a staggeringly complete video essay on the questions about the soul, human consciousness, and the increasingly cybernetic nature of our lives that Ghost in the Shell raises.

The Fall of Tom Cruise
Amy Nicholson

I can’t understand people’s reasoning behind hating Tom Cruise. He stood on a couch at Oprah’s behest and he has a crazy religion. You know, unlike all those perfectly reasonable religions the rest of us have.

I know people who hate Tom Cruise but will geek out over Mel Gibson being in The Expendables, or who will gladly sit down for a Roman Polanski or Woody Allen movie. I know people who hate Tom Cruise who get upset when I turn off a Michael Jackson song.

Yes, he’s kind of crazy and his personality caused Katie Holmes to leave, but to lump him as somehow worse than that bunch and less deserving of our viewership based purely on personality is mind-boggling to me. He started out dirt poor. There are countless examples of his going out of his way and taking big financial risks to help directors and stars just getting their start. Directors come away saying he’s a workaholic on-set. Cast and crew come away saying he’s generous with his time, and pitches in with menial on-set tasks that other actors won’t. When he sues tabloids, he’s always given the entire proceeds to charity. Why don’t those things hold value?

Amy Nicholson answers a few of these questions for me in painting a picture of Cruise’s infamous Oprah appearance. Nobody could have known how badly timed it was – YouTube was a week old, Perez Hilton and Huffington Post just a month. It was a perfect storm of the Internet’s as-yet-untested viral tabloid ability and a breakdown in PR.

Her article also reminds us of Cruise’s early years, spent turning down tens of millions of dollars in action franchises so that he could instead play second fiddle roles to actors like Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, and work with directors like Ridley Scott and Oliver Stone.

I hope there comes a time when we’re able to remember Cruise as one of our most iconic movie actors, and not for an Oprah interview that – by the way – her attending audience that day was cheering. Well, until they got home and checked their e-mail, that is.

“Hollywood’s First Black Singing Cowboy”
Dennis McLellan

I’m not one to run obituaries. If someone dies, I don’t need a recap – I’d rather celebrate their life by discussing one of their films, or by sharing how their work affected me personally.

That said, history is riddled with important figures who we leave forgotten. Herb Jeffries is one of those figures. Before Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef took apart the Western there were straight-laced cowboys played by Gregory Peck and John Wayne. But before they saddled up, cowboys merrily sang their hearts out. In an age of crooning, white cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Jeffries was the premier black one. He provided a counter during an age when African-American heroes were simply not seen on-screen.

Interviewing Lauren Shuler Donner
Diane Panosian

Lauren Shuler Donner is one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, famed for being the woman responsible for getting X-Men onto the screen and, by extension, making the comic book movie genre viable.

I like this interview because it’s short, to the point, and all about Shuler Donner’s development process. Many producers toe the studio line and keep everyone on-schedule. There’s nothing wrong with that, but she’s known as a very hands-on producer. Her strength is her adaptability – she’s one of the few executives who regularly talks about viewing a project from the perspectives and needs of writers, directors, and actors. She gives some good advice about how to produce to the strengths of each of these jobs.

Steven Soderbergh is Terrible at Retirement
Alex Suskind

Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking because it was becoming nearly impossible to fund his style of modestly-budgeted narrative-heavy filmmaking. Nevermind that 15 of his 18 theatrically released films were profitable – even domestic underperformers like The Girlfriend Experience and Che made money for their studios because Soderbergh abandoned blanket overseas distributorship in favor of nuanced, sometimes individually-designed releasing contracts in foreign countries.

The thing about Soderbergh is that he can’t keep still. He’s recut two classic movies while developing and directing TV series The Knick with Clive Owen for Cinemax. He’s directed off-Broadway while starting an import business for Bolivian liquor…I know, it sounds like I’m just making up new David Mamet plots now, but Soderbergh’s a weird cat. I said a long time ago that if TV was smart, they would capitalize on the studio system’s failure by investing to keep Soderbergh employed behind the small-screen. It looks like they’re doing exactly that.

Fortune, Glory, and Evil Indiana Jones
Quint

I feel a bit dirty linking to a website like Ain’t It Cool News, but I really did enjoy this personal essay about Quint’s watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a kid. I like folding personal experiences into these kinds of essays – artistic analysis is nothing without being honest about how our own personal biases fit into them – and it makes me think of Temple of Doom in a light I hadn’t considered before now.

SHORT FILM OF THE WEEK
“More”
dir. Mark Osborne

Vanessa ran a short film a few weeks ago and I liked the idea. We’re going to try closing each week’s Wednesday Collective with a short film of the week. I’ll start with one of my favorites – a stop-motion animation from Mark Osborne called “More.” It was nominated for an Oscar and won best short at Sundance way back in 1999, when I was just a 16-year old twinkle in a college admission department’s eye. Ah, those were the days. The awful, awful days. “More” remains one of the most moving and effective short films I’ve seen.

Wednesday Collective — Talking About Isla Vista

Ask me about dance or film or anything else, and I can go on for hours right now. Especially right now. Ask me about Isla Vista and…I’ve written pages of reaction and vetted them with a close friend, and they’re just not there yet. I will tell you a quick story about the Pick-Up Artist and Male Rights culture, however.

I lost an old friend in February last year to the Pick Up Artist culture. Let’s call him Bob, though that’s not his real name. I had visited Bob in New Jersey for a weekend, but one untested restaurant later and I was slammed with the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. He was very helpful, even going with me to the hospital, but when he had to step out and I needed to ask his roommate for help, it became an issue. Let’s call her Alicia, though that’s not her real name either. You see, to put it in his words, Alicia was his. She had already informed him once that she was very much her own and no one else’s, but this didn’t stop him from exercising some territorial mark to everyone behind her back. As he described to me, one day she’d realize she owed him for his being such a good friend, and everything else would work itself out.

Bob had been spouting Pick Up Artist gibberish for years: “Have you heard about negging?” “What about getting a friend to talk you up?” “Do you have a backstory ready?”

For years, I had joined other friends in laughing off Bob’s PUA obsession as something harmless. We’d argue with him from a philosophical standpoint, but we’d invariably let it go as not something important enough to truly fight over. That was our mistake, because by the time that thinking had festered in him for years, by the time he found himself with his life truly backed up against the wall, women had turned into nothing more for him than a goal his suffering earned. Alicia was to be Bob’s reward for having a tough run of life, and he spouted off the PUA gibberish as if it were religious dogma.

I asked Alicia if she would still be around to let me back in after I hobbled down the street to get a prescription filled for my nausea. It was the end of a friendship. Now, I feared getting locked out for the day in a bad section of New Jersey while I could barely stand upright, but in Bob’s mind, other men in the apartment weren’t allowed to be alone with Alicia, because all men must think like he did. Suddenly, I became privy to the same kind of gender inequality we usually only attach to the most extreme religious fundamentalism. It didn’t matter that I was seeing someone. It didn’t matter that Bob and I had been friends for years. It didn’t matter that I must’ve looked real supersexy puking my guts out Exorcist-style. It certainly didn’t matter that Alicia was a person capable of her own free will. Bob could only understand the world through a reward-system of sex and male dominance. In his mind, every decision in his life had to be oriented around the acquisition and defense of sex.

I ended up driving home on massive medication, and not having eaten in two days, because it was too disturbing to stay in New Jersey. When I got home, there were e-mails from him. There were texts from him. I started getting calls at 2 a.m. just to inform me Alicia was his. I scuttled the friendship. Bob had, over several years, adopted himself into a cult. And make no mistake – PUA and the Male Rights Association are cults, developed with the same purpose in mind as any other cult – to indoctrinate and addict paying believers. Like many cults, they need an enemy who’s visually different from their membership – in this case, women. Like many cults, teachings become more and more aggressive to the point of violence and hatred – the one who offers the best opportunity to blame and hate the enemy makes the most money.

I talked with Alicia some weeks later. She was fine. She had found a way to largely extract herself from the situation. I haven’t talked to Bob since, and I’m thankful for that.

MRAs around the country are cults, pure and simple. They don’t always take the look of cults because they’re compound isn’t brick and mortar, but rather an online, anonymous one. They have extensive online outreach, messaging campaigns, newsletters, forums, advice columns, all driven toward the purpose of indoctrination. Some of the more complex ones have oriented themselves around hacking women’s phones and computers. There’s a cottage industry of revenge porn, often involving photoshopping the ex-girlfriends of members onto the bodies of nude models, and then forwarding the resulting fake to the ex-girlfriend’s employers, friends, and relatives in an effort to make her ostracized and get her fired. Other members may volunteer their time to stalk the ex. If they can’t have her, she doesn’t deserve to have a life – that’s what many of these men feel. That’s what the idiot in Isla Vista felt. These cults have members who form the same kind of cause-driven militias that other cults have, and though these associations may be socially networked, their guns are very real.

I also don’t want to relegate the issue to a couple of dangerous nuts. What makes so many men susceptible to PUA and MRA is a culture that values sex as a reward to be won in our films, our video games, our television, our books. We don’t just need better gender representation in our media, but a reassessment of the value systems that our media reinforces. We have a Star Wars film with one female lead to six male leads. How much do you want to bet she’s a love interest? We have 25 superhero films centered around a man for every one superhero film centered around a woman. That includes the most expensive cinematic franchise ever created, which boasts exactly one female superhero among eight males. That’s bullshit.

Look, I’m only qualified to talk about this from a media and art perspective, maybe something of a political one, though it’s been a few years since I was in that game. Every reader is going to be qualified to talk about this through their own specialties. Figure out what you have to say, make sure it’s something that adds to the conversation, and voice up. We may think our goal is to keep Isla Vista from happening again, but the truth is, Isla Vista happens in the form of assault and rape thousands of times every day because of the way men are raised to view themselves, sex, and their relationship to women in this country. The conservative estimate is that a sexual assault happens once every two minutes in the U.S., but this doesn’t take into account an estimate that 75 to 95% of assaults go unreported. That means that the real number may be as high as once every six seconds.

But I’m not an expert in this. There are people far better equipped than I to talk about what caused this and what might begin the process toward addressing it. Please read their words and consider what they have to say. I’ll post their articles below without the usual Wednesday Collective commentary because, frankly, what they have to say, they say far better than I can:

Stockton Man Reportedly Opens Fire on Women After They Refuse Sex
Isha Aran

Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism
Laurie Penny

On Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista, Patriarchy
Chris Braak

Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills
Jessica Valenti

Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right
Adam Gopnik

Seth Rogen Is Not A Victim Of The Santa Barbara Killings
Jessica Goldstein

‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
The Onion staff

Thursday’s Child — Caravaggio, Poverty P*rn, and Superhero Wardrobes

Thursday’s Child is what happens when Wednesday Collective runs long or gets pushed a day. The only requirement is that it features a David Bowie song in the opening paragraph. Let’s go with that time he told Trent Reznor how he feels about Americans.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Get to Know Filmmaking’s Most Influential Painter
Stephen Akey

A big part of filmmaking (and critiquing) is knowing your art history. Hell, we wouldn’t have the establishing shot as we know it without Impressionism. Even as a viewer, you never know when that knowledge is going to enhance a movie. Hieronymus Bosch’s carnally oppressive, otherworldly madhouses pop up in thankfully brief, soul-scathing moments of Noah. The first Hunger Games owes its incredibly immediate sense of place to the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange.

War photography – especially from failed wars like Vietnam – has heavily influenced the Mexican-Spanish pulp resurgence. I suspect it reflects the lost wars that led to decades of Fascist rule under the PRI in Mexico and under Franco (after the Spanish Civil War) in Spain. Everything from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim has found glum, terrifying moments to reflect on their personal ideas of loss, ones that never fail to horrify more than any battle or monster can.

Perhaps no single painter has influenced filmmaking more than Caravaggio: the stark close-ups of Carl Dreyer’s formative 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc; the matter-of-fact, sometimes uncomfortably foregrounded violence of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics; the precise arrangement of players and light in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather; all the way through to the striking use of color and composition of Zack Snyder’s 300. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the list goes on and on.

Martin Scorsese might be the filmmaker who, early in his career, embraced him the most. Caravaggio seeped through the seediest moments of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The painter was, as Scorsese once told Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon, the entire reason for doing The Last Temptation of Christ.

Caravaggio himself had an interesting life. Not unlike a Scorsese character, Caravaggio had been formed by a violent, hardscrabble upbringing that was both key to his many successes and his strange, historical mystery of a downfall. He found more comfort with gangs, beggars, and prostitutes than he did with high society, and he was exceptionally clever at revealing – both in life and in his paintings – that high society played at that very same, cutthroat level.

Thanks to Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press for pointing this article out.

What is Poverty Porn?
Tom Roston

Don’t worry, it’s safe for work. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘genre of excess’ that Izzy Black proposed a few months ago. It seeks to make an accounting of at-any-cost stories of social and financial success, but it refuses to judge the characters therein (think The Wolf of Wall Street, Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring).

The inevitable corollary of that is “poverty porn.” As Roston writes, it’s used to describe an image of the poor “that takes on an almost fetishistic quality, wherein the audience savors how miserable people can get. This can happen even with the best intentions, like those extended commercials for charities in which barefoot children from a third world country stare into the camera.” It takes shape in large part when documentary filmmakers each seek to out-bleak each other in the pursuit of funding.

Roston suggests a “poverty porn clean-up crew,” and has an interesting proposition to form it.

Work It, Superman
Lauren Davis

That’s quite a get-up Superman has there. You wouldn’t take him seriously. I wouldn’t take him seriously. Yet it’s pretty standard for women in superhero comics. Why does what superheroes wear matter? What does it tell the youth being brought up on them?

I’m thankful Marvel’s had the sense to mostly skip this sort of fetishism in their film adaptations. For Black Widow’s co-leading role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, she’s mostly portrayed wearing something sensible with a leather jacket. As I’ve said before, her most notable accessory is an assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher. It’s Captain America who appears in various states of undress and just has to break into the Smithsonian when every federal agency is looking for him. Why? To get the right piece of fashion for saving the world. It’s a refreshing and humorous twist.

What Captain America, RoboCop, and Her Say About Surveillance
Willie Osterweil

I don’t entirely agree with this piece. First of all, never ever start an article off by insulting a large group of people (in this case, liberals) – it signals you’re either playing to a base, or you’re too narrow-minded to consider your opponent as anything other than a hive-mind. Both mean that anyone sitting on the fence, as well as many sensible people who are already on your side, will consider you shrill and discount both your opinion and your effectiveness as someone who can influence others.

Secondly, I don’t agree with many of Osterweil’s points. But that’s no reason not to highlight someone else’s work if he makes those points intelligently.

Osterweil ultimately presents a challenging article about the use and interplay of surveillance and gender dynamics in Captain America, the RoboCop remake, and the Oscar-winning Her.

As an aside that this article touches on, I myself have become increasingly on-the-fence about Spike Jonze as a director. Critical kryptonite, I know. It’s not because of any fault in his abilities – if anything, he might be the best American director when it comes to marrying the various technical elements of film (visual structure, production design, costume, cinematography, editing) to pure artistic flair. More than anything else, perhaps no director has ever used sound as expertly and emotionally as he has. But man, his films’ views of women as creatures too erratic to think of others and as the cause and solution of every problem in a man’s life, no matter how young or old…it grates.

Throw onto that his production and story roles in the Jackass films, which increasingly think hidden camera is meant to be an excuse to sexually harass and abuse women without repercussions, and I have some serious reservations about many of Jonze’s values as a storyteller.

The Price of Rebooting a Successful Franchise
Scott Mendelson

Forbes is a terrible magazine when it comes to knowing what the real world is like. It’s also not often very good at analyzing economic policy, but when it comes to analyzing individual industries, it can actually be quite on-the-money (in this way, it’s the exact inversion of The Economist).

Here’s a rather good article on how Sony originally planned to reboot Spider-Man as a smaller, more personal story focusing on secret identity Peter Parker’s school life, with the action being less extravagant and more intimate. Now, I quite liked The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which could deliver fantastic individual scenes but not an entire, cogent story. The best moments undeniably involved Andrew Garfield’s interplay with Emma Stone and Dane DeHaan, when their characters were just bumming around New York and working out their personal issues. A Spider-Man focused on that? Brave, but with this group I have no doubts they could have made it special.

Instead, Sony (just like Warner Bros. is) got jealous of Marvel’s Avengers canon and – instead of blazing their own path – decided the best financial option would be to copy Marvel wholesale and go as big and multiple as possible. The result is…well, it’s certainly not the windfall Sony imagined, and the franchise may not even have the financial success it could’ve if they’d just stuck with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man another few films.

On a personal note, Spider-Man got rebooted after five years. It’s been 10 years since the last Blade movie. Get on it, New Line.

Screw the Movie, We’re Making a Production

One of the most successful movies of last year was the critically reviled The Canyons. Now, this takes some explaining. The Canyons was not a good movie. Written by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Paul Schrader, and promised a film about the future of movies, we imagined the possibility of a searing assault on the conscience similar to Ellis’s previous American Psycho. Instead, The Canyons was a wooden collection of uninteresting psycho-drama, soap opera filmmaking, and borderline soft-core. It cast Lindsay Lohan opposite adult film star James Deen.

One of the most intriguing – and accurate – theories about the film is that the entire production was a piece of performance art by Ellis, that the process of putting the movie together – recorded in painstaking detail by journalists and tabloid reporters alike – was the real commentary. The performance lies in those details and in our obsession and reaction to them, not in anything put on-screen. That a movie was made was just an unavoidable side effect. In that way, The Canyons may be one of the most important efforts in filmmaking we’ve seen in years. It’s just not one of the most important films.

John Patterson at The Guardian writes about The Canyons‘ contemplation on the wreckage of cinema.

Adam Batty at the beautifully titled Hope Lies at 24 Frames a Second writes about Schrader’s transcendental style.

And, of course, here’s Lili Anolik’s brilliant original article, Post-Empire Strikes Back, which lays out the argument for Ellis’s the-production-is-art, screw-the-movie approach to what he wants to say. This article in particular is for mature audiences only.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned That the Most Outlandish Ideas in That Film Were True
Erich Schlosser

Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy about the dangers of nuclear war. It posited a number of ridiculous contrivances – that a general who up and lost it one day could single-handedly launch a nuclear attack with no authorization. That the Soviets had built a “dead hand” system wherein nuclear weapons would be launched automatically if the Kremlin couldn’t be reached.

These were all insane and ribald concepts as to how the military of both countries really worked. Right? They were exaggerations Kubrick and crew made to make a point. Right? Turns out not so much – the reality was far riskier than the insanity Dr. Strangelove proposed.