ahr kruh TER muh

A few years ago Planting Peace bought a house across from the Westboro Baptist Church and painted it rainbow colours.

Last year a little girl told them how wonderful it would be for them to have a house painted in the transgender colours, so she would also feel safer, accepted and represented in her neighbourhood.

I mean

look at these things

they’re like tiny

fluffy

dragons

but instead of breathing fire they squeak and cuddle 

in caves

and leaves

and they have funny ears and noses

I mean really

bats are amazing

zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/

noun

a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

Roses (2016)

THIS WONDERFUL MOVIE WAS MADE BY LOTTE REINIGER! SHE WAS ONE OF THE PIONEERS OF ANIMATION!!!! SHE MADE OVER 40 FILMS IN HER CAREER USING A TECHNIQUE SHE INVENTED WITH HER HUSBAND! WALT DISNEY ENDED USING HER MULTI PLANE TECHNIQUE IN HIS OWN MOVIES! AND SHE FUCKING MADE THE FIRST FEATURE LENGTH ANIMATED MOVIE!! (she ended up fleeing Nazi germany eventually work in north america, both us and canada, on other movies.)

 This woman is one of the most important figures in animation HISTORY!

I mean, his doctrine of radical individualism is a sham that ultimately reduces his followers to faceless conformity. This isn’t deep metatextual wankery - it’s the literal text of the film.

In the book Nurture Shock, which is a child psychology book that identifies common parenting mistakes, the author spends a chapter on children’s television. The author specifically talks about how media designed to teach morals often backfires – children who watch morality lessons express *more* behavior problems and become *more* cruel.

Now the author says it’s because of how these programs are structured. First they depict bad behavior, and then they explain why the behavior is bad, showing consequences, and tying up the program with a moral.

Small children aren’t smart enough to understand the moral. Small children learn by emulating behavior they see. They see a bad behavior and they learn the bad behavior. Just exposing children to bad behavior is enough to make them internalize that the behavior is something lots of people do, and therefore something acceptable for people to do to do.

If you try to explain to them after the fact that the behavior is harmful and to be avoided, that message is too complicated and goes right over their heads. You can’t tell little kids “do as I say, not as I do.”

Now the author of this book says “small children aren’t old enough to understand the moral.”

But honestly? Adults have the exact same problem.

Tyler Durden loses in the end. That’s the moral of the movie. Unfortunately that moral is too complicated for the vast majority of the audience. The typical adult audience member does not think critically enough about film media to process this moral.

A critical viewer thinks – the point is that Tyler is wrong! The point is that Tyler is doomed by his own hubris! HOW CAN AUDIENCES HAVE MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT IF THE MOVIE?!?!?

Easily, considering the movie only really devotes 5% of its screen time to explicitly denouncing Tyler’s behavior, and that explicit denouncement only arrives at the very end of the film.

The other 95% of the screen time is spent watching Tyler Durden jerk off.

Look – you can’t film two hours of bareback sex followed by a five minute tutorial on how to correctly use a condom and a 30 second montage of miserable teen parents changing diapers, then call your film a safe sex PSA.

You did not make a safe sex PSA.

You made a porno.

You can try to argue that the bareback sex is an ironic subversive metaphor, and that the “real point” of your film is proper condom usage and an anti-teen pregnancy message, but the fact is, the majority of your audience is going to change the channel the moment the cumshot finishes.

This is why I loved Fury Road so much, and also what I felt was so profoundly revolutionary about the movie. Fury Road is a movie about women escaping violent misogynists. Yet editor Margaret Sixel had the SHEER BRILLIANCE and AUDACITY to cut all the footage of misogynist violence out of the movie. 

Mad Max: Fury Road proved that it is possible to denounce misogynist violence without depicting it.

Mad Max: Fury Road showed that refusal to depict misogynist violence is in and of itself a denouncement of misogynist violence.

We don’t need to show what victims went through to make victims sympathetic. In fact, voyeuristically depicting acts of cruelty only further objectifies victims. George Miller and Margaret Sixel understand this.

Similarly, George Miller made a point of using telling his videographers to use camera angels that focused on the action of the scene, instead of voyeristically zooming in the female castmember’s breasts/asses/legs  – because he understood that when the camera ogles the female characters in an objectifying manner, the audience, who views the movie through the camera’s lens, is forced to ogle and objectify. George understood that sexist camera work creates a sexist perspective, and a sexist perspective tells a sexist narrative.

The thing is that the narrator is always sympathetic. Intimacy and familiarity breed sympathy. The audience is primed  to feel sympathy for the narrator simply because they are speaking more than any other individual character.

No matter how unreliable, or morally dubious you make the narrator, they are still the hero or the story. Every villain is the hero of their own story. And when the villain is the narrator, the audience is hearing the version of the story in which the villain is the hero, and the audience is moved by that perspective.

We can give Fight Club the benefit of hte doubt and look at Fight Club as an intellectual experiment to see whether or not it’s possible to tell a story from the villain’s perspective and still denounce the villain’s actions.

But the fact is, the experiment didn’t work. It was a statistical failure. The vast majority of the audience did not recognize the film as a criticism of toxic masculinity, but rather, a romanticization of it.