The Invisible Counterpoint

Patrick McEvoy-Halston  shared a  link . August 17 at 2:08pm One of the requirements for this group is that there not be any political campaigning. We've already seen that there is some confusion as to what this means. Posts have gone up -- like is "Dunkirk" a Brexit movie? -- that at least one person thought shouldn't have been permitted. Specific candidates have been mentioned, which also garnered some reproof (though how on earth we can go weeks at a time without ever mentioning "T" is a bit beyond me). Some clearly understand a bro ad conception of what campaigning is, while others see it precisely limited to arguing my-candidate-is-better-than-yours-so-there! Some see any political discussion as ruining groups that are a singular delight for their absence--ostensibly a rarity in the world of the internet. Some feel the absence of discussion of this sort would be starkly neutering.  My prompt for the group is for some discussion ...

Immediately after  seeing  the film, I worked over whether or not the movie works as something the alt-right would produce to alienate us from the left. Mostly the film does work this way  -- as a sort of, de facto, Breitbart production -- I decided, though it's not entirely slam-dunk. There is no disparagement evident for the crew of the space station being a multicultural mix, for instance. Race is not invisible in the film; it feels conspicuous at times, like when the Japanese crew member is shown looking at his black wife on video conference; but the film maker, wherever he was actually raised, seems like someone who was a longtime habitat of a multicultural milieu, some place like London, and likes things that way. But the film cannot convince only as macabre relating to our current fascination with the possibility of life on Mars -- what it no doubt pretends to be doing -- because the idea of “threat” does not permeate this interest at all, whereas it absolut...

I think there are two key moments in the movie when Emma Watson offers us the pleasure in seeing what the latest, most self-empowered female Disney character, is capable of. Early in the film she is assisting her father, whose trade is as a clockmaker, and presents him, twice, with exactly the part he next requires... but ahead of him realizing that this is the exact piece he is searching for. She, at this point, is leading him... and could presumably just as well be doing what he is doing, if such was her foremost interest. Basically this is a doctor-nurse situation where the routine, "nurse -- scalpel!," is played out to invert the patriarchal paradigm and presume genuine authority to the "nurse," but without the labour strife or mean gotcha: here, the father couldn't care less is his daughter was one hundred years ahead of him in ability and he, mostly put in the position of assisting her. He knows she's got him beat in many, many ways, and is just d...

The problem for a feminist, revisionist "Beauty and the Beast" is that no one character more causes us to shake our established preferences... to work toward a different finish than we were comfortably expecting, than the arrogant patriarch villain, Gaston. Belle reads as many books as she can get her hands on, but she represents the stage of moral perfection we liberals are all ostensibly at these days, so she's not about to throw any surprises our way, any new-fangled ideas on how to behave she got from reading some of her books: she'll only confirm what we know about ourselves. She'll school any number of characters on how properly to behave, implicitly school them to rise to her level, but (of course) she'll also embrace others' cultural preferences and eat and drink as they themselves would -- get dirty with them, in a sense, to help not only not shame but also bring equivalency to their relationship: "it's not only for you to learn to b...