Monstrous Skin

Simone de Beauvoir famously turned our conception of gender on its head when she declared that "one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman."

Perhaps this is even more true, though a little less socially revealing, if one was born with male genitalia, which at maturity, one chose to use to dominate and control a female by raping her, resulting in one being kidnapped by one's victim's deranged and vengeful plastic surgeon father who forcibly performs a sex change operation and keeps one locked in the cellar, undergoing complex and groundbreaking surgical procedures, reading Alice Walker and meditating on particular works of art until one is, or at least understands what it is to be a woman.

This is the plot of Pedro Almaldovar's latest film, The Skin I Live In. The villain/'male' protagonist of the film is Dr Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, a surgeon working controversially in transgenesis to develop a hardy, synthetic skin for use on burns victims. Amongst his peers he holds a dual reputation as both a genius and a mad-scientist. At a conference on surgical technology he voices the views of every post-humanist meddler since Dr Frankenstein with the question, why shouldn't we use science to improve the human body?


Because it is unethical, say his colleagues, because it is illegal.

But the doctor has long since fallen out with the law. At his country estate, he keeps the beautiful woman named Vera locked in his cellar. Each night he supplies her with morphine, each morning the servants send up breakfast, art supplies, yoga manuals and feminist literature. Vera fills her days perfecting poses, writing on the walls and making little sculptures in the style of Louise Bourgeois. There is, of course, the odd suicide attempt or seizure of slicing self-harm but all in all Vera's life doesn't appear to be any different from the lives of countless damaged folks in our prescriptive rehab culture.

Even before we find out about Vera's origins, we are alerted to her status as inhuman the by the locked doors and cctv cameras, by the sudden retrenchment of all the other domestic help and by the hissing of the housekeeper.

"Kill her," she says. "Kill her or she will kill herself."


Why this beautiful, enigmatic woman is a monster who should be put to death is the driving mystery for the plot. While at the outset our sympathies lie with Vera, who appears to be the victim of the meglomaniac, paranoiac doctor's deranged fantasies. When we learn that Vera is in fact a male rapist, Vincente, our sympathies are interrupted. Suddenly we are unable to trust our eyes - the familiar woman-as-victim position is transferred to some other hapless she. The beautiful Vera is a corrupt object concealing a terrible crime. There is a play with masculinity here too. A man has a right to seek revenge against another if this other has grossly wronged a woman belonging to the revenge seeker. Vera/Vincente's brutal treatment at the hands of their victim's father further problematises the ugly, vengeful nature of those often heard cries that rapists should have their dicks cut off. Does Vera's status as a rapist justify her own rape? Or perhaps, if you are a man, and a rapist, is experiencing your body as the always inevitable site of rape the only way to empathise with sexual assault victims, and further, with women? Do you need to become a monster - a spliced creature with no 'true' nature in order to stop behaving monstrously? Rape can be said to destroy the victim's sense of identity. As Vera/Vincente's body slowly heals the audience is given a concrete analogy to the healing process of a victim of rape who might suddenly find the skin they live in to be a concealing and inadequate thing, which neither protects nor represents them. Vera/Vincente has to learn to recognize themselves again.


The writing on the wall says: I breathe, I breathe, I know I breathe.
The writing on the wall says: Art sets you free.

Dr Ledgard has mounted CCTV cameras in Vera's room, and in the evenings he likes to pour a whiskey and reflect on her from a distance, as though she were art herself - a master painting. The keeping of a woman as a beautiful possession is a familiar plot from life and literature but the monstrous Vera/Vincente turns this trope on its head. When s/he looks up from their draped odalisque's pose and makes eye contact with the viewer, we are reminded of the constructing nature of the gaze. It is the gaze, as much as the knife, or the paintbrush which constructs the woman.

"I know you watch me," Vera tells the doctor, mounting a seduction through playing to the gaze, playing to the doctor's sense of shame. Even though Dr Ledgard objectively knows Vera's origin and what he has inflicted on their bodies, he still trusts that Vera, like any good woman, has become supplicant and obedient with love. He can only believe his eyes - Vera has become a 'woman', with all the confabulations that this category assumes. In The Skin I Live In the seductive potency of woman-as-construct is such that it obliterates the other, lesser aspects of the self, like, say - that she is really a male rapist.


The idea of gender as a monstrous and incoherent invention is not new. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway evokes the image of the monstrous, cyborg body as a site of 'potent fusions and dangerous possibilities'. Monsters, she tells us, who share their linguistic root with demonstrate, are tasked always with signifying. They define the limits of our communities and the failures of our categories. They are the transgressive mutations and evidence of culture and nature gone awry. They are also the place where we can construct feminist myth making beyond the limits imposed by the necessities of agreeing upon what 'makes' a woman. "Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of man and woman."

In The Skin I Live In, the Vincente/Vera monster's super power is the slowly developed power of empathy. For me, this is at the core of the feminist mission - the attempt to empathise with one another in terms of what it is like to 'be' in each of our specific skins. Broadly, this means not just men considering and working to understand the particular situations of women, but women working to consider and empathise with other women who are different from themselves in terms of race, class, geography, sexuality etc. Feminism means trying our best to inhabit the skin of one another and understand its implications. This empathetic activity is totally incompatible with raping.

In the end, the relationship that develops between Vera and Ledgard is emblematic of the complicity between men/women/culture in the construction of woman as object. That Vera is not sacrificed to some order of the natural is the most powerful aspect of the film. Because it is the monster who survives, and the authentic, excused self who dies, the monster must now learn to articulate his experience with all the tools that it has furnished him/her with. Like a woman, Vera testifies, confesses, seeks shelter. Like a man, Vincente gets revenge.

By allowing the monster to survive and attest, not only to their own mistreatment and abuse but that of others, The Skin I Live In holds up survival as the alternative to redemption.

Vera/ Vincente is not born a cyborg monster in a feminist science fiction, but rather becomes one.

Auteur at The End of the Earth

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia begins with a close up of Kirsten Dunst's face, features collapsed into a dark grimace, as a rain of dead birds falls from the sky behind her. Set to Wagner's Tristan and Isolade, the film's overture continues by way of surreal montage. A bride wades through a jungle of grey yarn. A charge of electricity emanates from Dundst's fingertips. Charlotte Gainsbourg sinks into the disintegrating green by the 19th hole of a fantastic golf course. On the horizon, a magnificent planet - the errant Melancholia - rises to eclipse the sky. A wide shot shows its collision with Earth, which explodes upon impact leaving an imprint no more significant than chalk dust.

Von Trier's apocalypse is hyper real. The Earth is eulogized with images that seem torn from high class fashion advertising. It fits nicely then that Dundst's character, protagonist Justine, is a depressive fatalist who works in advertising. When Wagner fades out the film follows Justine on her wedding day at an opulent manor house in an undisclosed location. Despite the elegant attendants and sumptuous surrounds, Justine is unable to engage in the ceremony or find an appropriate emotion for the occasion. Instead she behaves badly. She avoids her groom, skives off to take baths and fuck an interloper. She insults her boss and generally gets down to the serious business of destroying her life.

In showing all the painful details of Justine's wedding, Von Trier portrays life in the shadow of the death planet, Melancholia as nothing more than a series of empty rituals and beautiful images. For the audience, it's easy to move past the well lit chaos of the overture and be lulled into a familiar mode of reception for 'family drama', quietly moralising and sympathising with Justine and her guests. But when we glance at the night sky and see the faint red star of Melancholia approaching, our engagement is disrupted. At the point of imminent collision with Melancholia, how can we put stock in the importance of this messy family affair? Further to this, how can the melancholiac, whose past is lost and whose future always appears catastrophic, create meaning?

The thinning of excess meaning is a narrative function of apocalypse. Apocalypse is a definitive ending in light of which all preceding events are interpreted. In the bible, apocalypse reveals the truth of history according to God's judgement, before a completely new world descends, 'prepared as a bride adorned for her husband'. However with Melancholia, Von Trier withholds revelation, the bride does not behave as expected and apocalypse is presented as pure spectacle without revelation.

The second part of the film follows Justine's sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Unlike Justine, Claire won't embrace the nihilism of end times and wants things to be 'nice' until the last possible second. While her husband (Kieffer Sutherland) urges her not to worry, and to 'trust the scientists', there is no doubt that the sisters' emotional connection with the apocalyptic exceeds any rational, scientific description of Melancholia. While Justine claims to have always known it would end this way, Claire anxiously measures the planet's distance with a bent coat hanger loop, which when shaped around the perimeter of its silhouette and pointed out from the chest, shows the planet decreasing or increasing in size. This device is a perfect illustration of the way we all measure the significance of the universe in relation to our own bodies. We construct events, our lives and rituals with an apocalyptic significance - revealing new ages, truths and worlds.

The apocalypse is a representational event, that is to say, it hasn't happened yet. When, in 1994 Jean Baudrillard joined with Francis Fukayama in declaring that the world had already ended, he was appealing to the post modern perception that order, both temporal and spatial has become impossible due to the proliferation of real-time media, surveillance and simulation. The collapsing of symbolic space makes us anxious about our endings, which are described as both impossible and paradoxically having already occurred when linear, universally narrated history lost plausibility and signs detached from their referents in the service of consumer capitalism. The psychological implications of living in this endless, post history waste land is, according to Baudrillard in his book The Illusion of The End, characterised by melancholia

"We are, then, unable to dream of a past or future state of things. Things are in a state which is literally definitive - neither finished, nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is, deprived of its end. Now, the feeling which goes with a definitive state, even a paradisiac one - is melancholic. Whereas with mourning, things come to an end and therefore enjoy a possibility of returning, with melancholia we are not even left with the presentiment of an end or of a return, but only with ressentiment at their disappearance".

Lars would agree with Jean. Melancholia is natural, an appropriate psychological stance given our extraneous position in relation to history and nature. The pace of modern life is accelerating toward a horizon of smoke and rubble. How can we ignore the sense of heading at breakneck speed into catastrophes which we can neither prevent nor understand? Planetary collisions, nuclear annihilation, terrorism, starvation, climate change: it takes more will to ignore apocalyptic threat than to be devoured by its melancholic shadow, or indeed to follow Baudrillard in concluding that we reached crisis point long ago and are now continuing in ruins like victims of trauma.

Von Trier has admitted that the world would benefit from an ending (if no-one had to suffer) and that his inspiration for creating Justine was his own 'experience with depression and doomsday prophecy.'

Biblical narrative has provided a blueprint for Von Trier's film making before and he has continually explored themes such as the essence of evil and man's alienation from nature. His two most recent films (Melancholia and Antichrist) are linked aesthetically, through their visual style, the deployment of overture and art images, and thematically in their reworking of bible stories. If 2010's Melancholia is Lars' version of Revelations, (though he fears it is an exploitative romance, 'a woman's film') then 2009's Antichrist is his take on Genesis (he claims that it is simply, 'his version of a classic pork roast'.).

Von Trier is known for toying with audience expectation. In Dogville and Mandalay he used theatrical staging to interrupt audience immersion and create critical distance. In 1987's Epidemic, the story of the film's composition collides with the dark SF narrative which is its subject. In Europa, he uses the conceit of a hypnotist to imply the complicity of audience and protagonist in a depiction of historical genocide (Nazis, of course!). In his Golden Heart Trilogy, he explores the ideal of 'female goodness' based on the notion that enduring wickedness is high virtue and in 2009's Antichrist, he exploits the horror genre to explore conceptions of the abject, the inerrant 'evil' in nature and the basis of misogyny. In all Von Trier's films the audience experience is destabilised. Strange allusions interrupt the completion of meaning. Philosophical rouses are staged in which the viewer's morality becomes the object of deconstruction.

In 1995 in Copenhagen, Von Trier, along with Thomas Vinterberg founded The Dogme Collective. Their manifesto called for discipline as an antidote to the decadence of cinema. In the market boom of affordable cameras and film stock the dogme movement saw potential for the democratization of cinema. The dogme manifesto called on directors to take a 'vow of chastity' and practice a bear bones, restricted method of film making. The rules of dogme film preclude the use of props, soundtracks, fancy camera tricks, lighting, temporal dislocation, video cameras or arty film stock. Genre films are strictly forbidden. Lars attributes part of the appeal of this obstructive discipline in his work to the psychological effects of an over liberal childhood where everything was permitted.

Melancholia's plasticized, luminous aesthetic is a far cry from Lars' dogme days when he railed against a culture of film making which was "cosmeticized to death". Considering his new film Von Trier wonders if it turned out "too nice" and reflects, ruefully that, "it's hard to inject a little bit of ugliness". But he still managed to do so, if not straight into the main vein of the film, then certainly the fatty excess of it's publicity.

Responding to a question about the film's use of Wagner at a press conference in Cannes, Von Trier muses, "I always wanted to be a Jew, but it turns out I am a Nazi."

In the Youtube footage, Dundst looks on, blank faced as Von Trier continues over the stark soundtrack of digital shutters and journalists licking their lips.

"What can I say? I understand Hitler... I think he did some wrong things yes absolutely..." Dunst's facade cracks, she whispers something like, "Oh my god, this is terrible," over her shoulder. Von Trier breaks pace to justify himself to her, "No but there will come a point at the end this when..."

Unfortunately for Lars, The End and the revelation it affords is not in sight. While his 'nazi gaff' rendered him officially persona non grata from Cannes in 2011, it's likely he'll be back soon with The Nymphomaniac and it's equally likely that there will be controversy surrounding that film too. There is controversy surrounding all of Von Trier's films. Exploitative treatment at the hands of the Danish director is rumoured to be the reason Bjork will never act again. Nicole Kidman firmly stated that she wouldn't do a sequel to Dogville. Von Trier holds a longstanding reputation as a deranged agitator, a sadist and perhaps most famously, a misogynist.

"I think he hates women and he wants to punish them," a friend recently told me at a BBQ.

But I always thought that the men came off much worse in his films. The men in his films are exploiters, rapists, control freaks, sycophants, saps and hypocrites. That the women, generally smarter and more interesting characters, tend to bare the brunt of these men's tactless cruelty seems like a fairly accurate, if over dramatised, version of what happens in real life. In breaking the waves, Emily Watson plays a 'good' woman who finds herself manipulated into prostituting herself for her paraplegic husband's vicarious thrill. In Dancer in the Dark, Bjork plays an immigrant who retreats from the injustice of her life into a hysterical passion for musicals, but is still driven to despair by the monotony of factory work and the racism of the community she has moved to. In Antichrist, Charllotte Gainsborg is a grieving mother and PhD student who becomes convinced by her own academic research into the routes of misogyny that women are in fact evil. Her husband meanwhile, holds the historically misogynist rhetoric of psychological therapeutics against her and tries to 'cure' her of her melancholy.

Lars von Trier, in his work and his life, appears to remain skeptical that melancholia is something that can be cured. In his famous essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freud differentiated one process from the other as a dichotomy of the 'natural' and the 'pathological'. Some time after the loss of the object, Freud claims, the mourner will 'return to reality' where as the melancholic remains caught in the experience of loss eventually turning the sorrow against themselves. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”

For a melancholiac then, the end of the world might seem like a relief; a vindication of the emotional certainty that folks like Justine (and I'd guess Von Trier too) experience.

Von Trier's pathological fear is a part of his film making. He is unable to get on planes and so filmed the two first parts of his America Trilogy in Europe. His phobias sometimes necessitate directing remotely, via monitor, to avoid entering anxiety inducing locations like aircraft or oilrigs. Documentaries and interviews suggest that Von Trier operates from a creative but insulated space. His ideas develop there, sheltered from reality - an opposing place where sensitivity is often more important than provocation. When he is forced to 'return to reality', he flails around in the schism. "I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive," he babbles, stepping backwards into a pre-dug hole, "I found out I'm a Nazi!" he calls out on the way down.

At the risk becoming a Von Trier apologist, I am sure he's not really a Nazi. By declaring that he 'understands Hitler', Von Trier is making the mistake of reducing history to mise scene, ignoring the reality of history and its legacy and rendering the Second World War as an allegory in which one finds oneself, suddenly under lights, in a Europa style narrative game: Close your eyes, when you wake up you find yourself in Europa, are you a Nazi or a Jew? Only your creator knows.

"I'm the best director in the world!" says Lars, over and over, to anyone who'll listen.

Experimenting with ideas and images is how Von Trier untangles his chaotic and frightening world. His respect for art as a system of interpretation is everywhere in his film making. Melancholia is full of quotation marks. Several shots of Bruegel's The Hunter align the film with a tradition of 'art of ages' as well as with the aesthetic mysteries of Tarkovsky's Solaris. At one point Justine, in a fit of rage, goes into the library and replaces all the displayed prints of abstract art with allegorical paintings. Justine, like Lars, rejects studied, rational abstraction in favour of a melodramatic excess of story where genre and metaphor collide and obliterate each other.

But is art enough? For the barren ego, can art fill the void? For want of a definitive answer, Von Trier the melancholiac continues to make movies. For Justine though, art is just another corrupted commodity. Though as a shelter from the final, definitive loss, it turns out a representation is as good as anything 'real'. In her final moments Justine cobbles together a 'magic cave', constructed from kindling to comfort a fearful child. It is here, in their own feeble representation that Justine, Claire and Claire's son seek shelter. At the end of the film, which is also the terminus of the world, they sit together in this primitive structure, powerlessly awaiting doom.

Meanwhile, back in the cinema, we too sit out another apocalypse in a magic cave. We are all swamped by meaning, all living lives that are both apocalyptic and hollow. We gaze upon a flaming horizon, waiting to be obliterated by Melancholia, unwilling to return to any 'reality', without the will to see how fragile, how un-cave like our accomplishment, this fragile lean-to of sticks.

Born Innocent, Born Dead!

Last week, while sitting in Effie's salon, listening to her tales from 80s suburban youth and waiting for my perm to set, I thumbed through an issue of Cosmopolitan and was dismayed, though not surprised to see yet another spread about fertility and the various advantages to having a baby while you are very young. In this article the statistics regarding correlation between age of maternity and the likelihood of congenital birth abnormalities were posed as thinly veiled threats to young female readers. By the time you are 25 you are blah% more likely to have a baby with downs syndrome, the magazine warned. By the time you are 30 you are blahblah% more likely and also put your baby at risk of blah and blah disorders and abnormalities. With the original figures glossed over (as a marker, let's just say in Victoria, statistically, you are more likely to be so depressed you kill yourself than have a down syndrome child at 35), the message I got was this: women who prioritise their own lives over that of a conceptual infant are irresponsible and reckless. An older mother who selfishly declined to get pregnant when she was supposed to puts her foetus at serious risk. She gambles with aspirations, her quality of life and is an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system. Put this together with other Cosmo articles from the website, which make claims such as 'studies show that women on the oral contraceptive pill choose less attractive partners', and what we have is a decidedly anti-contraception, pro birth agenda, which targets the most superficial concerns in all of us. Better to be a young, hot, uneducated, inexperienced mother than an emotionally and intellectually mature woman with a 'less attractive' boyfriend.

Unfortunately, women seem to be getting the message. A week later I was at the pub with a 30 year-old, childless friend who drunkenly recounted the same sorts of stats that appeared in Cosmo. Because she wants to have children, these statistics don't feel like an instrument of repression, they feel like a harbinger of doom. Better to have a child before you are ready than risk having a child who needs care for their whole life, right? Perhaps these new tactics are replacing the old oppressive myth of 'the biological clock', a ticking time bomb which resides inside you and erodes free will. Or perhaps I have just ticked over into the next demographic in which, if your 'biological clock' has failed to sound the alarm, less metaphorical wake up methods are employed. Birth abnormality statistics are the severed horses head under the satin sheets of well spent youth. Don't you owe us something, girl?

Threatening folks with 'deformed' babies is an ancient way of controlling sexuality and establishing a taboo, just look at what it's done for incest. But is having a baby at 40 on par with fucking your brother in terms of social deviation? I'm concerned that women are reading these statistics and getting spooked before considering whose interests they reflect. I.e. it is in the interest of social normativity, not necessarily in the personal interest of a woman, to have a baby while she is under 30. Threatening statistics and social pressure make having a baby with an unsuitable partner, or taking a foetus to term at an inconvenient, disruptive or difficult time seem like unmissable opportunities.

In Cosmo, there were no explanations of what the 'disorders' represented by the percentages mean for child, mother or community. All we need to know is that they are damn serious, so serious in fact that 'a leading obstetrician has proposed education programs for high schools'. So now, going into schools and scaring students into having babies is an educational imperative. And here I was thinking that teen pregnancy was what we DIDN'T want, or does that not count for rich white girls?

Beautiful teen mommies are a stand-out feature of million dollar entertainment franchises this year. In Gossip Girl season 5, 18 year old Blair Waldorf is pregnant. No-one questions the wisdom in this immature bully having a baby. Who cares if she crowned her senior year in highschool by hazing a teacher and slandering class mates to get her own way. It's all hugs in Manhattan for a glowing teen mommy. Of course, you can bet that if Gossip Girl were a TV show promising 'your one and only look into the scandalous lives of LOWER East Siders', Puerto Rican Blair corollary would be shot in a 'gang related incident' before the child (probably slighted with all kinds of 'abnormalities' anyway) could be brought to term.


In the new Twilight movie being a teen mommy is the only way to fuck without compromising your 'innocence' and the first step on the path to immortality. The film follows Bella Swan through her fairytale romance. The 18 year old's dream has come true and she gets to marry her 200 year old boyfriend, Edward. Her mother hugs her excitedly and tears up (because Edward's hot as fuck, and as we all know, age is measured by how you look and not how many years you've been alive for). Bella's mother also gives her a special hairclip which is quickly earmarked as being for Bella's own, as yet hypothetical, unborn child, thereby transferring Bella's own, as yet unfinished childhood onto the spectre of the child she will inevitably mother. Their is a slight snag in proceedings when Bella's alternative love interest, the werewolf Jacob, rocks up to make peace with the diminishing possibility of consuming her virginity. However when the other shoe drops and dog boy realises that innocent Bella will, in fact, be giving said virginity to her vampire groom, he becomes enraged. 'You'll kill her', he snarls at Edward, leaving the audience to wonder whether we would actually risk our lives to fuck Robert Patterson, or if we'd prefer to stay quietly moist in the safe darkness of the cinema before heading home to our 'less attractive' boyfriends, or even (shock horror) girlfriends.

Bella, a straight white gal who's not on the pill, opts for Rob. She fucks her vamp and immediately falls pregnant with a demon baby. For innocent, mortal Bella, only the impregnating fuck is permitted. For the rest of her honeymoon she struts around in lingerie and arranges the sheets to cup her arse in hopes of mounting a sly seduction. Her husband stoically refuses to give in to temptation, citing the bruises on her arms as reason enough. He's a good vampire paedophile. Back when he fed on humans he only killed 'molesters' and he could never hurt his bride, because, although it is fine for an 18 year old girl to 'give herself' to a 200 year old man, it is not okay for her to enjoy a rough fuck.

So poor sex-starved Bella leaves her erotic awakening behind and enters an accelerated nightmare of the old wives tale 'I didn't think you could get pregnant the first time'. She experiences the first trimester in a week. By the end of the month she's an emaciated skeleton defending to the death her right to give birth against those who are cruel and heartless enough to call her 'baby' a 'foetus'.

After a splatter style birth scene in which Edward (off screen) tears the baby from his wife's withered body with his teeth, Bella 'dies'.

Her baby meanwhile is in great danger from the wolf Jacob who intends to reap his revenge on it. On seeing the infant though, Jacob's anger melts into love and he experiences an eroticized vision of the baby as a beautiful pubescent girl, running through the forest with flowers in her hair. This gives him some kind of wolf protection boner and he immediately 'imprints' on the baby, transferring his paternal lust from Bella to her sprog and protecting it from the wicked ways of any other wolves in the pack. Everyone in the vamp camp thanks him and he becomes the house pet, an obliging doggy destined to become involved in the sexual awakening of a child.

Breaking Dawn is probably the most comprehensive coming of age story ever written. Bella comes of age by becoming a Mother, something 'more than herself' as was earlier alluded to by Edward in his wedding vows. Her baby meanwhile comes of age as a hot teenager who runs wild with the wolves the minute she is born. This is less weird then it sounds. It is near on impossible when looking at a baby, not to invest it with all the fucked up constructs of the world we live in. This is why we gender babies while they are still in utero and carefully continue to socialise them according to social norms. In some sense, every time a girl baby is born, people imagine her running through the woods with flowers in her hair.

At any rate, the baby has all of its faculties and eyes that are at a positively Hollywood distance from one another. Probably on account of Bella's youth, innocence and perfect, nubile body. While Bella lies, wasted on the birthing table, one of the older vampire spinsters of the group, who sat squarely in the pro life camp during debate, nurses the baby serenely, begging the question of why the spinster doesn't just have one for herself? Oh yeah - because she's old. Whereas a 200 year old vamp dude has sperm so potent it reduces term to a month and almost kills the mother, a similarly aged vamp lass is a dried up husk who has missed her chance at having her own progeny.

Later, after a duration of lame suspense, the vamp venom takes hold of Bella, her eye-lashes mascara themselves, her lips slick over in a fashionable shade and her chest puffs up into opulent (but not slutty) bosom. By this point I am so biologically involved with the character that all I wanna know is, will she breastfeed and if so will she lactate blood?

Either way, she is super MILFn' and has her pre baby body back, new and improved, within a day of the birth. Plus, now she's immortal, so that's pretty cool. You go girl, Mother Courage.

While, in Twilight, immortality means turning into a vampire, back in the real world, parenthood is constantly linked with immortality and having children is perpetually cast as the way to leave an imprint on the world. While this may be true to some extent, a child is not simply an extension of the Mother/ Father's personality. In many (dare I say most) cases, a child will reject its parents and their values and go about living their own life pretty quick, leaving the parents to wonder what is next and whether it might not have been better to read Proust or travel to the Greek Islands before undertaking this messy, ungrateful affair.

One thing that both Gossip Girl and Twilight do not like about motherhood however is the pregnant body. This is why Blaire is just about to hit 55 kg and Bella completed pregnancy and recovery in 10 days. Narratively speaking, there is just too much stuff that pregnant women can't do (flying, fitting into Chanel pencil skirts, walking on water, walking in Blahniks) and while a baby is a great symbol of a selflessness and a hip fashion accessory to boot, pregnancy and birth, even on TV, is a taxing experience that you will need all your youth and vitality to recover from.


I am glad for Bella and Blaire though, they have their immortality and their millions of dollars respectively to take the edge off motherhood. This means when crying and feeding get under Blaire's skin she can jet off to Paris and leave the infant with her obliging slave Deroda (who also has a child, whose life is remarkably off-camera. Presumably Deroda, as a polish immigrant in NYC, has to prioritise her job looking after someone else's 18 year old baby). As for Bella, she will still be college age when her baby graduates high school, so there's no rush. For the rest of us however, having a baby at 18 often means joining the unskilled, casualised workforce, forgoing the opportunity to study or travel or fuck around until we come to grips with what it means to us to be alive. If we do manage to get these things done, it will be by virtue of possessing strength and determination bordering on the supernatural. I'm not saying it's always a bad decision to have a child when you are young, just that it should not be a decision made under threat of deformed or 'abnormal' infants.

Breaking Dawn carries an epigraph by Edna St Vincent Merlaine, uttered in Kristen Stewart's vacant monotone over a relentless pipe and string romance,

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

The writers of Twilight have no truck with modern verse, they are happy to shamelessly distort meanings to fit their picture of childhood as a sentimentalised space of innocence, which is carried in the hearts of the good, and passed on to future children in an immortal march into relentless breaking dawns. In this sense, the poem is a bit like those Cosmo stats, it's decontextualised, doesn't give us the full picture. I think Edna, (a bisexual feminist who lived childless in an open marriage and wrote until the day she died) meant this poem as a call to be wary of that transition from childhood to adulthood that Hollywood types like to call 'coming of age'. It happens in a whisper, without us realising. It is not accompanied by symphony music, or a montage of blooming flowers. We will not glimpse it in ornate mirrors on our way to the prom.

The call into 'adulthood' is made socially in various ways, controlling the reproductive futures of girls and women is just one. In the end, social normativity is like a pack of CGI wolves: it's hard to ignore them growling and howling under your window but you aren't barking mad for speaking back.

For Edna, to be 'grown up' is to sit at the table with people who have already died, and she doesn't mean vampires. Grown ups have given up on passion. They sit silently around tables, not touching their cups of tea. In the very next line of the poem, she calls our attention to the sad passing of childhood and how, in a moment you can find that you have grown from possibility into conformity, from life into a kind of death without realising what you have lost:

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies
Nobody that matters that is.

Hahahahahahaha

Further to below post

Thanks to feminist ryan gosling tumblr what made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

Everything I need to know about love I learned from Aristophanes and Ryan Gosling

Back in the day, Plato tells us, Socrates along with Phaedrus, Aristophanes and some other infamous, wise pederasts attended a dinner party the topic of conversation for which was 'Love'. With typically democratic Athenian temper, each man took his turn orating his thoughts on the subject and, between short bursts of indigestion and asides on how best to conduct one's hangover or cure one's hiccups, it was suggested that there were several different kinds of love. There was common love, usually of a woman, an indiscriminate, animal love which meaner men and youths may feel. Then there was the pure yet problematic love between man and a boy (about the age his beard begins to grow). This intergenerational NAMBLA style love, it was decided, had many benefits but was improper as a boy of such a tender age might yet grow to become good, or bad, and thereby prove the love to have been good, or bad. Good love, said the lascivious ancients, is that which loves goodness.

It was generally agreed that love of beauty could not be good love as the possession of beauty brought no lasting, divine reward. Good love was transcendent and permanent, and sought only its soul mate. The criterion for defining goodness as well as the genesis of love good or common proved tricky to pin down. The swaddled philosophers reclined, belched, twiddled their beards in thought and discussed metaphors from Homer in hopes of coming to some solution.

Only Aristophanes believed he knew the secret origin of love.

"In primeval times," he told his learned friends, "the human form was not as it is now but consisted of three variations on one basic form. There was a doubled man, a doubled woman and a combination of both. This human form was circular in shape, had four arms, legs, ears and, of course, two sets of genitals in one of three combinations. Each plural person possessed one head with two faces set in opposite directions so that they might always see the world from many angles but never the totality of their own beauty. These people were super powerful because of all their excess senses. You may think these creatures grotesque but they were far superior to our poor, bipedal assembly. They could choose to walk upright such as we do now, or roll over and over at a great pace, all eight limbs propelling them toward their goal while simultaneously protecting their beloved, opposing face from scratches and cuts as they rapidly oscillated over rough terrain".

Aristophanes continued to explain how this primeval man was too fast of both limb and intellect in the divine opinion. So, to slow them down, the gods cleft them in two. This left some male figures torn from their male counterparts, women from women and men from women. Each separated figure longed to return to their other half and spent every waking hour embracing him or her, subsequently dying from hunger and self neglect, still locked in urgent cuddles. The gods, eager to bring about a practical solution to the rapid extinction of humanity, incorporated this nostalgia into the burgeoning human order and it became the unconscious necessity which brings humans to love, to sex and subsequently to films of the romantic comedy genre, the only genre in which the conundrums and falsities of the primal love myth might be played out, free from critique and criticism.

These days, knowing the category of primeval roller that we as individuals are descended from can help us in understanding our romantic proclivities in terms of gender, appetite and relationship style. For example, I myself am descended from an androgyne primeval roller. This explains and excuses my intense heterosexual coupling, my tendency toward adultery as well as my romantic fixations with distant, intelligent women and hot gay men, in whose direction my eyes, set away from my partner, were perpetually gazing in ancient times.

In order to consider the contemporary implications of this primeval inheritance, I will now examine it in relation to the splendid new romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love Steve Carrel is descended from a male/male primeval roller, the legacy of which is experienced as an aching in the pit of his stomach for a real buddy and a deep intuition for gardening. Meanwhile, his female wife and 'soul mate' wishes to renew the historical pain and be cleft from his countenance by way of that modern emotional/religious surgical implement, divorce. Feeling that he has lost one half of his true form (the primal memory throbs), Carrell first throws himself from a moving vehicle and then makes a sad nuisance of himself in a local bar. This is where Ryan Gosling, one half of a androgyne primeval roller, discovers him and pledges to make a pet of the lost man and help him 'rediscover his manhood' in a kind of hot-straight-eye for the average-straight-guy buddy up.

"Your wife cheated on you because you lost sight of who you are as a man, a husband and probably as a lover," dreamboat Gosling tells sad faced Carrel.

This statement defines one of the more interesting pretexts of the movie: that within the context of capitalism, modern men must consider themselves as objects of desire. They must 'make an effort' to be desired and to understand the structures on which desire is built. They must understand masculinity as a performance rather than simply a legacy claim. Manhood, therefore, is not an inherent quality of being born with a penis, or a socialised attitude which one simply assimilates to (or being descended from a creature born with two) but rather something which one can choose to either cultivate or 'lose sight of'.

Carrel admits that he has indeed lost sight of his manhood, in fact he hasn't really considered what it means to him to 'be a man' since 1984. For Carrel, as for many men, once he passed the threshold of youth, where identity is unstable and in flux, he has settled into an ill considered, status quo malaise of whatever. This, in some ways is a kind of liberation from gender offered only to the top of the privilege pyramid, a white, married, middle class, middle aged suburban man has little reason to consider gender. If it is not a source of oppression, there is very little imperative to spend exhausting hours deconstructing identities.

Carrel not only fails to define, redefine or reject masculinity, he also fails to consider the performative nature of romance, which is not the thing that happens when you and your 'soul mate' sit on the couch together but rather an elaborate construction of grand gesture, cliché and demonstrated knowledge about the other. This, says Ryan Gosling, is not good enough. As only one half of a primeval binary, a man who wants to partake in common love and all its tasty pleasures should be an expert in the language of romance and the art of seduction. A man should also cultivate and perfect his 'manhood', and, because this is late capitalism, in Crazy, Stupid, Love this involves a trip to the mall complete with makeover montage. Male makeover montage. Finally. It is unbelievably refreshing to see this comforting narrative cliche played out between two men, it draws our attention to the fact that capitalism needs masculinity to perpetuate in order to sell watches and whiskey just as much as it needs femininity to sell rom coms and Ryan Gosling. When Gosling tells Carrel the battle between the sexes is over and they won, what he should actually be saying is the battle between the sexes and capitalism is over and we all lost.

Rolling together for a while, Gosling and Carrel share with each other their own interpretations of manhood. Gosling challenges Carrel with his showy jack of hearts style. He is a yuppy Tyler Durden who looks-like-you-want-to-look-and-fucks-like-you-want-to-fuck. He baits Carrel over his cheating wife, who must have found, in Kevin Bacon no less, a man who is sure of what 'being a man' means.

"I bet Kevin Bacon is opening the car door for your wife right now," taunts Gosling.

Carrel however, ambushes his teacher with a cautious, responsible, paternal nature and somewhere in the middle the two merge, each becoming something of the other and in morphing, simultaneously debunking the masculine myth and reinforcing the need to address identity politics in your day to day life. Their reward? By finally finding in each other their true 'soul mates', they are now able to participate in 'good' love. Though unfortunately, due to the conservative dictates of the genre, not with each other.


Affirming Ryan's ideology, in Crazy, Stupid, Love, the camera makes a meal out of him. It's rare that a movie will objectify a male character more than any of its female characters but even in Gosling's sex scene the aperture ignores the woman and widens only for the rolling curve of his back, the tight bulge of his arse and dark pants-protrudence shrouding an undoubtedly large, smooth cock. Foxy lil Emma stone is just red hair and shadows.

The Gosling/ Stone hook-up sequence is one of the best I've seen, and I have watched a lot of fictional characters have sex. A lot. When they arrive at his apartment Gosling commences his seduction by numbers, mixing up meticulous Old Fashioneds and putting on a soul LP. Emma Stone will not be seduced off the cuff however. She skulls both their drinks, telling him they aren't her favourite. She then demands he remove his shirt, feels him up and then refuses to take of her dress.

"No way," she says, gesturing to his perfect abs "Not with all that going on."

"Can I put my shirt back on then?" asks Gosling.

"Nope," she says firmly as the man shuffles uncomfortably in her sightline.


It was probably around this time that my sweetheart whispered
"Man, I have to go to the gym," in my ear, thereby confirming that he, like Gosling, felt the shameful burn of gender objectification.

In late capitalism, a woman would have to be an idiot savant to not have at least considered and more likely found herself mired in the paralysis of her construction as an object of desire. Men however, are encouraged mainly to feel desire, rather than to embody it. Images are for them rather than of them and because of this they do not pose a threat.

Ryan Gosling, with perfect tan and musculature, delicious lopsided smile and just a hint of sexy shame blushing his cheeks, is one hell of a threatening image. In that moment he is a kind of sexy Jesus, crucified on camera for the sins of the male gaze and I liked it.

I am not suggesting that a movie which applies the same formula to men that is usually visited on women is a feminist movie. Unfortunately, it isn't. The second time I went to see Crazy, Stupid, Love I sat on the edge of my seat waiting for two women to have a conversation that wasn't about a man, but the movie, sadly, failed the bechdel test (if you don't know what this is check out this short feminist frequency video). Also, there is a pretty creepy insinuation in one of the sub-plots which asserts that it only the man who can identify their 'soul mate' and that they must relentlessly convince the hapless woman of this, even if it is making her uncomfortable and she is reduced to begging for the attentions to cease. Pfffft, women, they never know what they want.

This not-so-small problem aside, I loved Crazy, Stupid, Love. It is a buddy movie posing as a rom com and it has some interesting and relevant things to say about masculinity as a performance. Gently, it encourages a kind of self-reflexiveness in straight men. Crazy, Stupid, Love wants men to talk to each other about the lived experience of being men, it wants them to consider each others positions and the positions of their women folk. It wants men to think about the attributes and behaviour they might, consciously or not, consider as exemplifying 'manhood'.

One of the most pertinent scenes of this kind is a fight scene in which all the male characters want to hit each other. Each has as their motivation, some macho enactment of protectiveness, over their children, their buddies or their women. On the suburban lawn they tumble, without the speed or grace of their ancestors, and with no care for the faces that are grazed on the rough terrain that constitutes how-not-to-act-like-a-dick.

Fittingly, it is only Gosling and the female spectators who see the humour in this. It's takes a performer to know a performance, everyone else is just giving it away for free.

Back in the bedroom, Stone, who represents intelligence, pragmatism and epitomises 'good love', has made up her mind not to be impressed with Gosling's performance. For her, it is the man, not the manhood that will prove most seductive.

"Show me your big move," she baits.

But Ryan was serious when he said that a man should study romance and he has set the bar pretty damn high. Pretty, pragmatic Stone is helpless against his big move, putting on 'The Time of my Life' and re-enacting the Patrick Swayze/ Jennifer Gray lift scene from dirty dancing.

Swooooooooooon.

What's a gal, who was born at the start of the 80s and who used to be one half of a primeval super-roller to do but fall in love for good or bad?

The value and importance of grand romantic gestures is the other main theme of Crazy, Stupid, Love. This is not unexplored territory. We all grew up watching people make these kinds of gestures at each other on screens big and small. Usually, it was boys that did the gesturing and it was inherently related to the conceptual framework of 'masculinity', though in a form which could more easily be spoon fed to hungry girls than the similarly intentioned war epics and sports narratives. The grand romantic gesture was structured into a narrative about 'knowing what you want and fighting for it' or, for girls, being worth fighting for and, by extension, being someone who inspires 'good love'.

Even though I have never been passive when it comes to choosing and pursuing partners, as a kid I bought this logic and it is still intact and close to me today. I spent some time in my teen years concerned that my bedroom window did not face the street and therefore was not a place beneath which a pale, brunette boy wearing an oversized trench coat might stand holding a boom-box, blasting Peter Gabriel, or say, one of the more romantic NOFX songs. Somehow, it never proved to be a problem.

For Stone and Gosling, an honest discourse about the meaning of all this performance is what allows the object of desire to fall into 'good' love. In an intimate, tender moment Gosling, inevitably, reveals himself to be just another really, really, ridiculously good looking, lonely little human.

"I'm wildly unhappy," laughs our sexy Jesus.

He is aching, like most objectified people, to become a subject. And while part of the conclusion here seems to be that a normative, hetero, monogamous, 'real' relationship is the obvious reaction to finding your soul mate, I for one hope that this doesn't mean that 'the Patrick Swayze' was the last grand, romantic gesture that Stone is privy to.

It is important to be honest and to talk about gender, desire and performance with your friends and lovers. It is also important not to give up on performance and desire. We all take our cues for desire from this mess of cliche, construct and sentiment anyhow, so if we can satisfy each other by employing imagination and acknowledging performance in our interactions then we might be less inclined to transfer our desire onto the array of consumer products placed just beyond the bed-head.

More glibly perhaps, Crazy, Stupid, Love still shares my concerns and joins with every rom com ever made to tell us that by sticking with grand, romantic gesture even when the odds are stacked against us, even (problematically) when the object of attention resists we are bound to always move closer to our soul mate. In the final sequence the ties between Gosling and Carrel are transferred in a tight, oedipal twist and even Carrel's 13 year old son, who has teetered on the threshold of creepy in pursuing his babysitter, is given some unlikely affirmation for his persistent believe in grand romance.

I left the cinema after seeing Crazy, Stupid, Love, invigorated. The rom com restores romance once more. In Movie Land, everything is as it ever was.

In life however it is unlikely we will encounter such deliberate, irresistible acts and neat, uplifting conclusions. This is probably because these gestures are hard work, often embarrassing and also because, in the wrong hands a romantic gesture can become an aggressive attempt at conquest. Still, if we are lucky enough to meet a 'soul mate' at all, we should take a cue from Crazy, Stupid, Love ,fight our more natural inclinations toward laziness, loss of selfhood and complacency as a grand romantic gesture in the name of love, both good and common. And more than this, we should consider our isolated bodies as a gift from heathen gods and fight primitive instinct, not to be quick to take up imitation of our primeval form: co dependant, circular in shape, attached at the hip with eyes that gaze, for the most part, out at the rest of the world and all the ways we wish it was.

Teen Sex Scandal! Fuck The Fame Away - hot pics inside

This year the tabloids have been making news. Not in the way that they usually do - by patching stories around blurry photographs and the testimony of unnamed insiders - rather they have become the expose, revealing decades of phone tapping, hacking emails, breaching privacy and perverting justice.

It didn't exactly come as a shock. We may remember the stop-at-nothing news man cliché from such classics as 1937's screwball comedy take on the Chicago news machine Nothing Sacred and Carry Grant's ruthless reporter in His Girl Friday to modern screenplays from State of Play to Thank you for smoking. What was surprising about the News Of The World scandal was its magnitude and its blatantness. Breaking the law appeared to be a commonly accepted part of protocol in one of the world's largest media conglomerates; an organisation that never considered themselves culpable, even when lives were damaged and police investigations compromised.

And in their defence? All they could come up with was finger pointing and an equally cinematic 'everything I've done was for you', appeal to our sympathies. Anything, it seems, is permissible in the service of the news. And the news is anything that we read - a definition which conveniently places blame on the consumer of 'news' or the victim of 'reportage', each of whom are accused of 'asking for it'.

While I don't think that a practice of ethical fandom is a bad idea, I would hate for its theorizing to be underpinned by any acceptance of blame by consumers. There are ways to titillate readers without stalking and hacking phones. Just because I looked at Paris Hilton's snatch doesn't mean I needed to see it.

I mean it wasn't, like, 'news'.

Increasingly, gossip and its brutal impact is a political issue. Police send officers into schools to talk about cyber bullying. Blogs and websites allow any nasty power-fiend with a PC to publish slander and expose classmates or town pariahs with frightening efficiency.

In the 80s, when you got labelled school slut, dissemination of your moniker tended to be restricted to toilet-door gazetteering and bus stop broadcast. These days, it can have a hashtag.

Just watch Gossip Girl for a fully product-placed timeline of web documentation techniques. In season one everyone is texting the show's bitchy narrator and blog host Gossip Girl with the latest eye witness accounts. Then it's photos, then videos and by season four a GPS function which allows interested parties to log on to the site and track Serena Van der Woodsen or Chuck Bass in their fucking and fashion motivated movements around the Upper East Side.

Gossip Girl is genius TV. It's a mash-up of technologically enhanced kids mystery genres like Secret Seven or Nancy Drew, the revenge driven soap-opera ala Days of our Lives and Melrose Place and the kind of high fashion branding and on the pulse references which link it to our consumption of celebrity culture and the desire it enflames.

As an aside, I am so fucking glad I am not a teenage girl anymore. Along with the aforementioned slut-tweeting, Facebook is a disturbing concrete representation to the ethereal concept of popularity and the massive increase in popularity of celebrity gossip magazines and sponsored TV shows increases the pressure to consume high ticket items that never crossed my radar during adolescence.

But it's not just shoes and bags that Gossip Girl is selling. It is also the notion of the 'tabloid self,' a marketable and represented image which you have to both promote and defend. The tabloid self is a strategic selfhood to be utilized both to get what you want and to discredit The Other who stands in your way. While this might seem like a fantasy to adult viewers, teenagers today already have at least five years experience in their own 'brand management'. Today's 18 year-old has probably watched their image develop across platforms from LiveJournal to Friendster, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. They know 'what works as web content'. They know how to get hits and present exactly the 'me' they want to be. The 18 year old of the future will have even more experience, having to devise methods for eliminating any social damage done by their Gen Y parents uploading kiddy pictures of them to the web before anyone thought about the ethics of the idea.

In Gossip Girl, the tabloid self is constantly challenged to reinvent itself into a new, better person. This reinvention, however, is always underpinned by a fervent belief in an essential self which, belying any attempt to change will reveal itself as the 'true' identity. Caught in a loop the characters degenerate into a dichotomous vacillation between good and bad, old and new, prude and slut, sober and heading for an early grave. Ultimately though, the message is that like every guilt ridden Proddy that came before, you are a no good sinner, no matter what leaf you turn over. It is this sinful self that friends and family are called to love. The show's message of redemption relies on a cycle of confession and forgiveness, with the characters absolving each other with 'love' like stand-ins for God himself.

The logic of Gossip Girl is tabloid logic. A photograph presents a whole person. A single incident symbolizes descent from or return to worthiness. In the real tabloids though, it is the reader who stands in for God, bestowing love and forgiveness. And the characters are real people.

The life and death of Amy Winehouse fits in here, sadly, as an illustration of the kind of damage tabloid logic can do. Like an episode of Gossip Girl, Winehouse's bio is full of double crosses - videos of her smoking what someone alleges to be crack passed anonymously to the police by vengeful rivals or story provoking paparazzi, her own Father leaking doctor's warnings about lung deterioration causing the going price for pictures of Amy with a ciggie to skyrocket. To defend his actions Mitch Winehouse claimed that using the media was the only way to get through to his daughter. Following tabloid logic - he was doing it for her own good. The media representation is the only way to communicate. Forget talking to you family. A picture or, say, a published STD test, tells a thousand words.

For half a decade, after each fall from grace reports surfaced about Amy's treatment program. Tabloids love rehab. 'Rehab' is the Mecca of tabloid logic, a perfect narrative symbol for the rise and fall of a tabloid self. A glistening fountain of youth, rehab promises to remake a person while at the same time much of its seduction rests on the inevitable defeat always already built into its structure. An alcoholic (the sinful self) is always an alcoholic and never anything else no matter how dry they are. This is the myth that tabloid muckrakers sort to perpetuate by hacking Winehouse's phone and bribing their way into her medical records. Looking at rehab like this, there is an ironic prophecy in Winehouse's hit song. She refuses to go to rehab, because being 'black' is part of the journey to coming 'back'. In other words, when you suffer from depression, you try to learn to incorporate the dark times, they are part of you.

Conceptually, rehab is well adapted to a consumer identity in which one immediately becomes what one is - it is simply a matter of a decision (don't drink, put your faith in a higher power) or a purchase ( new shoes, eyeliner) which facilitates the affirmation of the new self. On Gossip Girl, being photographed at the library might be proof of a new educational diligence, while later that day, being photographed at a bar disproves any change and shows us what we knew - that a drunk dog still turns old tricks. The characters even doubt themselves in the face of tabloid assertions. When Serena sees uploaded pictures of herself snorting coke she assumes, despite her sobriety, that she must be guilty and promptly checks herself into rehab for a new start.

While most of us have plenty of time to nut out, in private, what kind of standards we will set for ourselves and when breaking them is okay, for the tabloid self, worth relies on repentance, amens and forgiveness. The tabloid self is completely dependant on the opinions of others, whether they are your friends or your public. For Amy, adding youth, drugs and booze to the mix heightened her need for acceptance. When the world is hostile and blurry and you might have disgraced yourself before it the night before, you hide close to those who offer redemption. All this makes fertile grounds for a Grade A co-dependent relationships, just like the one between Amy and Blake Civil which has been wiped across the tabloids for almost half a decade.

It took me the best part of my twenties and at least two co-dependent relationships to attend to decisions without first considering what other people's perspectives might be. However, free from scrutiny by gossip websites, tabloid magazines or even Facebook, I was left alone to discover that one can study in the morning and get pissed in the afternoon without doing irreparable damage to core identity.

An idea of self which emphasises sin and atonement conflicts with any notion of personal development which encompasses gradual learning. It negates the value of mistakes and changes of heart. It runs contra to the inevitable trajectory of a conscious human being who is never fully formed but constantly changing in relationship to its psychological, social and physical environment. It encourages people to make decisions about each other's capabilities based on superficial reputations and networks. It creates a guilty psyche, constantly craving flagellation for falling off the wagon.

Amy Winehouse's music was full of this kind of conflict. It's part of the reason it resonates so well. Her second album, Back to Black is dark with co-dependency, disappointment and the rhetoric of rehab culture, of 'playing yourself' and being 'your own worst enemy'. But it is also super sophisticated, full of the kind of cool irony which allows you to shake the ash from your hair in the morning, wear you beer soaked shirt well and move on with wry perspective.

It's tragic that Winehouse didn't survive to shrug against another day. Courtney Love, another talented, volatile trash-bag of note, whose portrait, pregnant and smoking, came to be used against her in a state custody case, has shown us all that it is possible to have a life beyond the news stands. This is not to say that the pressure hasn't affected her. And of course tabloids still wait for that 'inevitable' overdose disgrace. But Courtney at least managed to escape the fate of being badgered to death.

After Amy's death, the 'reap what you sew', moralising attitudes of tabloid logic have become insidiously implicit. Sentimental homage and the first ever flattering photos of Winehouse are printed in the same pages that used to berate her for being out of control, a junky, an anorexic, the worst dressed, the most hated, the least likely to live to thirty.

Another interesting text which explores the psychology of the sleazy press is the new Errol Morris documentary, Tabloid. The film tells the story of Joyce McKinney, 1970s true crime tabloid star and protagonist in the infamous 'Case of the Manacled Mormon'. McKinney is perfect tabloid fodder; pretty and bubbly with a dark past which finds her embroiled in a sleazy love-story-cum-stakeout-cum-kidnapping incident complete with cult mind control. She could be a wronged romantic heroine, a small town princess, a southern belle, a devious femme fatale and a whore with a heart of gold, depending on the mood of the writer and the conceivable photographic subtext.

Errol is typically gentle in exposing the edifice of tabloid reportage. Through interviews with the journalists and cuts to text from articles of the time, Tabloid highlights the way that reporters twist the story, give it sensational taglines and edge, guide its direction. Although McKinney, for the most part, had a pretty good time at the hands of the press, it gets out of hand, as it seems inevitably to do, and her post-celebrity life is characterized by depression, anxiety and agoraphobia she attributes to her traumatic experience by their hands. Lulled and sated by Morris's gift for teasing out the story and keeping the flourishes minimal and well targeted, I laughed all the way through Tabloid, until I wasn't laughing anymore and a deep, complicit sadness set in.

McKinney's story is a kitschy, camp version of most tabloid tragedies. Journalists may have a point when they criticize her for being quite happy to embrace the press until she realizes the risks. But don't the press have a responsibility not to breach privacy or print something which could ruin lives, careers or relationships without benefiting anyone with more than disposable entertainment? The phrase 'the public interest' as justification should not apply to fans who give a shit about what celebrities are wearing. Printing pictures of drunken it girls is not a community service, and while we are likely to look, we could just as easily be looking the other way.

On the small screen, Gossip Girl perpetuates the idea that tabloid harassment is the inevitable price of living the high life. Although website 'blasts' often destroy the lives of characters, they still see their author as a friend, and will sometimes work with her to bring down a common enemy. We the consumer are happy to accept this Stockholm Syndrome reasoning as it is important for us to perceive that there is, in fact, a price of fame and fortune. Amy Winehouse too, despite taking restraining orders against news organizations and paparazzi agencies, has paraphrased the cliché 'all news is good news' to which we should add, posthumously, the equally misquoted caveat 'until someone loses an I'.

Tacit acceptance and toleration of tabloid harassment by the entertainment industry has been pushed to the limits. Even the mainstay permissiveness of celebrity culture is not enough freedom for 'news' mercenaries. This suggests something to me about the insider culture in the media, there is still that cliché sense of the individual getting carried away, going as far as they can for a story, but now it is backed by what can best be described as an organised crime ring with money for the best technology an info-crim could desire.

The notion that those who 'court the tabloids' enter a Faustian bargain and deserve to loose their right to privacy imbues the media with the false characteristic of unaccountable, biblical evil. This is massive hyper-inflation. The media is just a bunch of common, garden variety megalomaniacs and bullies. We need to be very careful to ignore all arguments that attribute blame to particular individuals, usually the victims and ignore the responsibility of organisations and institutions.

After all, similar ill/logic is utilized by blood thirsty right wingers when they say that gay men deserve aids, provocatively dressed women want to be raped and drug users are begging for death.

There is nothing 'good' about tabloids. Gossip is jammed up next to ads for seven hundred dollar sweat shop handbags and self-esteem crippling celebrity diet plans. Yet still they jump off the rack at us. They are seductive because tabloid logic is a big part of our own logic. It speaks to the simplifying part of us which thinks only in binaries and yearns to be reborn fully formed and forgiven in a single moment. On an infinite red carpet we stand, a better, kinder, thinner, richer, more famous self, teetering on the edge of a precipice of guilt and desire. And then, with privilege comparable to living on the Upper East Side, we close the magazine, toss it onto the rack with the sugar free gum and chocolate bars, move forward in the grocery queue and on with our lives, complicated and unseen.

Decent Exposure

Under hard, white lights a beautiful young woman is sitting pretty-guineapig in a lab experiment. The research scientist is an awkward red-head with freckles and glasses. He doesn't make eye contact, preferring to busy himself with reports and gadgets. The girl gags as the rubber tubing is pushed down her throat. He tells her, thanks for doing this. He tells her, the pressure in your chest will increase. She tries to nod, to smile politely, but the tubing is restrictive and uncomfortable. Her pale, delicate neck is forced backwards, her throat held open by obstruction.

It's a familiar set-up from sadomasochistic porn. You know what's coming next.


The lab is the first of several typical porn locations in Australian novelist Julia Leigh's new movie Sleeping Beauty. Soon we will see our protagonist, Lucy, in the office photocopy room, the bar, the country mansion. The anticipation these locations generate is one part in what will be an unveiling of the role of the viewer, a revelation of our complicity in the creation of the subtext. As our expectations are confounded, or rather, left to our imaginations, we are encouraged to consider our motivations for watching the film.

I read about Sleeping Beauty before I saw it. My interest was piqued by what sounded like an unusual kind of Australian film (no-one called Chook, no loveable psychos, no country town characters or twilight wide shots), made by a woman about male ( and to a lesser extent female) desire.

The premise of Sleeping Beauty is this: a young woman accepts money to be drugged unconscious while older, richer men pay top dollar for nightly access to her body. When she wakes, she will remember nothing.

It's practically European, both in its theme and its promise of explicit sexual content.

Not wanting to appear moralistic, or pro-censorship in any way, I have been actively resisting the urge to write about what I see as a resurgence of the art-rape genre in recent cinema. When I say art-rape, I'm talking about the ubiquity of long scenes depicting graphic rape/sexualized violence against women in arty movies. These scenes, by a twist of logic, are generally justified as either 'defining' the female character' (i.e. 'I was no-one till you raped me baby' - Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) or masquerading as morality (i.e. 'wow, that guy sure is a bad guy, if I hadn't seen how bashed up Jessica Alba got, I wouldn't have known that...Meanwhile, how hot does Jessica Alba look bashed up?!' - The ).

These kinds of poor justifications for what are essentially exploitation scenes really bug me in art-movies because of the intellectual posturing. It is as though the budget or aesthetic of the film safeguard it from critique on its exploitative elements. Whereas a pop movie might be sexist or gratuitous, it rarely declares that this is an intellectual position. Also, it is worth noting that people are less likely to go and see a blockbuster in order to witness a rape scene, however with an art film, rape might be the only thing you know about the movie, as in the case of Irreversible. In the 'darker' art-movies, I have actually come to expect that strong female characters will be raped. This was evident to me when I recently watched Winter's Bone and a scene in a barn with a young girl protagonist and a bunch of hillbillies, did not turn into group-rape and torture porn. Given the ubiquity of these kinds of depictions, the question needs to be raised: are films depicting rape still saying something about rape?

After the release of The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom suggested that the depictions graphic violence against women was an ethical position "it's more moral to make it unwatchable," he said.

Call it a taste thing, but when I go to the movies, I am neither keen for a dubious yet didactic moral education or an unwatchable waste of time.

I am relieved to report that Sleeping Beauty is neither. Rather, it is a sensitive exploration of youth, aging, male sexuality and the many meanings projected on women's bodies by the viewer.

Lucy leaves the lab, and heads back out into her strange, disjointed student life. She works part time in a cafe and in an office. She picks up tricks at yuppy bars but still seems to be late with the rent.

She carries people, like her mother, a "mean drunk" and a free-loader who runs an astrology phone-line. Also, The Birdman, a thirty-something alcoholic and depressive, with shelves of continental philosophy. Lucy visits him to bring bottles of cheap vodka and listen to him narrate old nature documentaries, his helplessness encapsulated in this act of impotent mastery. One day The Birdman calls Lucy to come over. When she arrives, he is close to death. He asks Lucy to take her shirt off and get under the covers. He pulls her close to him, presses his body against here, rasps, and dies. Lucy wails, shivering with grief in the dead man's arms. We are left with the feeling that this was planned, that Lucy had agreed to be the woman in his deathbed.

No-one does anything to convince Lucy out of her nihilism, and she doesn't expect them to. Her requests to both the dying birdman and to her ex boyfriend to marry her, are like an ironic, impossible plea to be given some other role to play. The Birdman agrees making their conjugal bed his deathbed.

Her ex's response is anger,
"Fuck you Lucy. Fuck you to death."
Lucy is unsurprised, resigned.
"That's one way to put it," she says.

I have read a few articles which describe Lucy as a "passive protagonist". This doesn't sit right, and yet I am ashamed to say it took a while to occur to me is that Lucy is an ascetic, of the old-school, forgoing comfort, allowing herself to be the subject of humiliation and degradation in search of some relieving meaning. She is a perfect existentialist protagonist.


I would not have taken so long to realize this if Lucy were a man. We are used to depictions of artistic, intelligent males on this kind of trip, but if we see a woman, worse a 'girl' behaving as such we assume that she is fucked up. That something must have 'happened to her'. Like maybe she was raped.

It is in the spirit of this existential adventurousness as much as in pursuit of easy cash that Lucy answers an ad in her student paper (called, Ad Astra, making a wry joke in Latin - 'to the stars') and becomes entwined in the sex industry, first as a topless waiter at rich kink banquets and then as the sleeping beauty.

At the country house, the well dressed, middle-aged Madame explains the one rule for sleeping beauty,

"No penetration. Your vagina is a temple."
"My vagina is not a temple," protests Lucy, drinking the tea that will put her to rest.

While the reasons for a man wanting to fuck a beautiful, young woman in her sleep are not interesting, the unrealistic 'no penetration' rule allows the film to navigate much more nuanced territory than any art-rape movie can.

The old men who pay to spend the night with Lucy are impotent, enraged. Their desires have outlasted their bodies and they can smell death. In response to the rules explained once more by the tired, beautiful Madame, Man 2 bitterly admits his impotence. When we see him crawling on Lucy, threatening her with a vicious fuck he has no way of delivering, the effect is pathetic and sad. So too when Man 3 picks up her fragile body, cave-man style, only to collapse under the effort in a wheezing, coughing fit.

At the site of the Sleeping Beauty, the old body is sacrificed. The sexual fantasies of the men can only be played out over a sleeping form. A conscious young woman might laugh or ridicule. When the Madame assures the men that there is no shame here, that no-one is watching, she invites the audience to share the irony. We are watching. We can see their shame.

One of the most moving, and telling scenes is when Man 1 delivers a Haneke style soliloquy, giving a theoretical key to the film in the form of a retelling of the Ingeborge Bachmann story, The Thirtieth Year.

Bachmann was another existential woman, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the reception of Heidegger. Like Julia Leigh, her talent was recognized early on and, like Leigh she made the male inability to connect the subject of at least some of her work. The Thirtieth Year is a series of fragments from a meaningless life or multitude of lives, in which characters and events are interchangeable. The story dissolves occasionally into poetry and then moves forward despite itself. The text grapples, with itself, with its universalisms, just as its subject wrestles with himself to find meaning. The Thirtieth Year ends with the authorial interjection, in distinctly biblical tone,

"Rise up and walk, none of your bones is broken."

But in Sleeping Beauty, Man 1 insists that his bones are now, finally, broken. I heard this like a final confession, a plea to be beyond judgement, beyond spiritual repair and therefore beyond responsibility. The expectation now is that what the broken Man 1 wants from the sleeping beauty is despicable, unimaginable.

The men in Sleeping Beauty are identical to the male protagonists in Michelle Houellebecq's novels. Coming to the end of their lives these men look back on the events and achievements that have made them and feel that this has all meant nothing. They will die alone and insignificant. With nothing left to strive for, only the pleasure of the body is left. The men become slaves to the ideal of youth and, as their old bodies decay they learn to hate their own desire, as well as its object.

They want to fuck young girls. To possess and humiliate them. They loath their biology, which cursed them with a sex drive that does not diminish as their sexual competence and attractiveness does. They see youth as an affront to age, women as an insult to men and the seen as an insult to the hidden. They are unable to love their wives, are sickened by the bodies of women their own age and even, hate these women for the perceived relief afforded them by maternity and menopause. All this hatred comes in a very sorry, self-aware fashion; riddled with guilt and regret.

We are given a glimpse of the prototype for this kind of aging in the cringe inducing accuracy of the business-man-cliché who, earlier, approached Lucy in a bar, claiming, that while some people fake their deaths, he is faking his whole life. In this shitty pick-up line lies the irony of existentialist fiction, that the alienation of existence is experienced as unutterable rather than a banal condition of living, and that meaning will only become more slippery with time.

Yet, against odds and evidence, we are given to believe, both by Houellebecq and by Leigh, that what these men truly want is tenderness, the ability to admit that they need love, that they can be exposed and knowable.

One morning, after performing the sleeping beauty service, Lucy discovers a burn behind her hairline. In this instance, finding actual marks on the body is a reminder of the violence we ignore, which leaves no corporeal trace. She becomes obsessed with knowing how these men use her body. She buys a spy camera. Like us, Lucy assumes that the violence and degradation she submits to under the hands of these men is unthinkable.

The spy camera is a reminder of Lucy's m.o. She is making herself a voyeur of her own life. Constantly exposed, she foregoes privacy, going beyond the scope that the male gaze might otherwise have set, so that perhaps that world may bear itself to her. In the lab her body is subjugated and monitored as an object of experiments. In her sleep she consents to be used by an other. When she is kicked out of her Surry Hills terrace, she moves into a harbour suite where the privacy that the domicile provides is exposed as an illusion by the vast view. Perhaps the only sensible advice offered to her in the film, is from a one night stand, a friend, who on waking, suspended above the harbour, groans,

"You've got to get some blinds man."

Rather than heed the warning, Lucy sets the spy camera up beside the bed.


In the final exposure, Man 1 strips to a vulnerable, elderly nakedness. He drinks a strong blend of the tea prepared by the Madame and crawls beneath the luxurious sheets with Lucy. When the drug wears off, it is only Lucy who awakes, screaming as she understands what's happened.

It's an unbearable truth. It is so much worse that these men should desire a beautiful, young girl as an antidote for death rather than for perverse purposes. Perversity can be shrugged off or absorbed into the nihilist fog. Even beauty is a random thing.

Only death is universal.

When a last frame shows us the spy camera's perspective, what Man 1 required the sleeping beauty for, our expectations are killed. We are left only with the same, painful truth that Lucy is. What we thought was a story about sex is actually about death.