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oh for fucks sake!

Oh Fuck Off

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Oh, True Detective.  True Detective, True Detective, True Detective.  What are we going to do with you?

Spoilers

Season One’s undoubted quality was marred by the stock and shallow nature of the woman characters, by the show’s unrelenting focus on manfeels and manpain and the tortured, disoriented experience of masculinity in a world where the traditional masculine virtues are no longer zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. 

And you actually seem to have taken note of the criticism.  So for Season Two you’ve given us a woman character as co-lead.  She’s one of the three cops whose paths converge at the end of the first episode, and will presumably end up investigating this season’s plot alongside (in some sense) the highway patrolman one who can’t get his willy to go hard (at least in non-abusive situations) and the hard-drinking, miserable, semi-criminal Colin Farrell one.

But her bits of the episode are the weakest by far.  By far.  Noticeably weak, melodramatic, straightforward and rubbish compared to the less-scrutable strands concerning the other two.  So jarringly crap that they almost seem to belong to a different, inferior show.  One of the bits of the Law & Order franchise, for example.

She’s got an unsatisfactory relationship with her needy boyfriend, towards whom she is perfunctory and cold, apparently just using him (not very effectively) for sex.  Aww, poor him.  His girlfriend must have ISSUES of some kind if her primary focus in life isn’t servicing his emotional and penile needs.  (We meet the highway patrolman’s girlfriend later.  Her primary focus in life seems to be servicing his emotional and penile needs.  Funnily enough, there’s no indication at all that she has ISSUES of any kind… aside from pouty jealousy when he leaves her for even 8 seconds.)

Cop woman’s got a schizophrenic younger sister (we know she’s schizophrenic via the highly original and unclunky line “have you gone off your meds again?”) who is hostile towards her.  Cop woman had to look out for when their mother died which led to said younger sister being rebellious towards her and going off the rails, ending up on drugs and petty crime and porn (because, of course, no woman is a sex worker unless she has ISSUES).  Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that on TV before.

The woman cop finds out that her rebellious younger sister is doing porn by happening to raid the place where she happens to be doing porn.  So that’s not contrived at all.

We later learn of the underlying problem with Cop Woman’s life, and guess what… it all traces back to a man!  Guess which man.  Go on, guess.  Yep, you guessed it: Daddy.  She’s got Daddy issues!  Colour me fucking astonished.

You know how we find out about said daddy issues?  She goes to see her partly-estranged father during the episode as a result of picking up a missing person case directly linked to his hippy self-help commune.  So she goes to investigate (’cos, on TV, detectives are always allowed to investigate cases involving their own families) and ends up having a fraught chat with Daddy… during which we learn, in dialogue so leaden and expository that it belongs in the early scenes of an 80s Bond film, that she holds him responsible for her mother’s suicide (what a fucking surprise) and that she joined the police as an act of rebellion against his hippy lifestyle (again, unprecedented in TV drama).…

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Even Furiosa

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Further to some objections I’ve had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.

What Mad Max: Fury Road does – with its depiction of Furiosa – is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented – but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She’s just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it’s not a man’s fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn’t some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It’s front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe’s fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership – either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite – and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) – are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem ‘disabled’ in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks. …

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The Wank Delusion

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Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: “*vomits*”

Okay, let’s examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally ‘attractive’ woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right…

1.  It is assumed that this picture – i.e. the person in it – represents ‘sexiness’.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective – far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He’s probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is ‘reason’?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn’t make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses… in short: ideas… are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there’s not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don’t know what that means.*

4.  People’s level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don’t think paunches and big beards are sexy – which would mean you’re not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea ‘sexy’ anyway?  Even the idea ‘let’s have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you’d like to have sex with. 

6.  It’s difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn’t make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn’t make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll… but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the ‘New Atheists’ were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham. …

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