The music video above shows a pop singer, a black man, picking up on the “black swan” trope in a very stylish way. He’s formally dressed, standing up from an elegant dinner party where his partner was evidently an extravagantly costumed black woman, to go to a white piano where he plinks out a call to a bevy of black cygnets. The song is evidently a warning to them. I know next to nothing about pop music or Kanye West etc. so I can’t tell you more than that. It appears to me that this vid is about urban surface wealth, ego, and what is being called “game” as in the sex games between men and women now that marriage and stigma are out of the way.
In fact, it’s a sort of illustration of the recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Hard Core.” http:://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/ Natasha Vargas-Cooper gives us the feminist “facts” about sex with only personal boundaries, and the tough reality that men want only sex and are willing to be aggressive. In fact, to her this is the essence of maleness, which she approaches through porn, marked as the worst stuff anyone can find on the Internet. Pretty bad. Her marker is penetration of a woman’s anus by two men at once. (It always strikes me that such acts approach anatomical unlikelihood, but what do I know?) Her bottom line is not that, but the cruelty, banality, and hopelessness of the search for intimacy through sex. Except that she blames it on the narcissisism of men like the one Kanye is depicting or like the choreographer in “Black Swan.”
Anyway, here’s where I throw in my quick switch. Last night I watched “Mrs. Henderson Presents” which is about the famous Windmill Theatre in London that featured nude tableaus, which were ruled works of art so long as nobody moved, and which became a symbol of cutting edge defiance in the face of vulnerability during WWII. This covertly fascinated my father, so there were find-able accounts in our house when I was very young. It was part of my father’s romance with nudity and innocent sex. He would have loved this movie. I did.
The girls were desperate for jobs, barely surviving the Big Depression, and they were nice girls, many from the countryside. In fact, the DVD extras included a party for those women, now quite old but just as elegant as they ever were and totally unrepentant. They spoke about how carefully protected they were. Mrs. Henderson (who died in 1944) is portrayed by Judi Dench whose specialty is a kind of wise-child willingness to be open-eyed. There is a sub-plot in which one of the girls is not participating in the culture-wide romance bonanza of WWII because she falls deeply in love with men she is fond of and the breakup is far too painful. Mrs. Henderson tricks her into a relationship with a sweet young man who gets the girl pregnant, then goes back to his previous sweetheart. She is killed by a bomb, which solves that plot dilemma.
But the REAL dilemma of love at the core of the tale is not even physical, not young, beautiful, nude or even caressing. It is the meeting of more than minds -- shared enterprise? World-view? Soul-mates? Oh, that’s going too far. Mrs. Henderson is in love with her impresario, who “stirs her heart” as her wise friend notes, but circumstances like his pre-existing marriage, the class divisions, and even -- to some extent -- her totally committed marriage until the death of her husband, keep them from having anything but a business and friendship relationship. It’s the TENSION of the yearning against the impossibility and the resulting driving of human emotion to the level of universals beyond social rules that makes this so intensely moving.
It’s “game,” right enough, but at a far higher level than banging. Hot, young, fast, and soon-over seems to be today’s style, including some kind of violence, but in the end it's about money. This is media promotion for sales purposes. In this context money is not in the Jane Austen bourgeois sense of comfortably stable income, but in the ostentatious nouveau riche sense of no limits -- especially on taste. The ethic is “Wild Palms,” that deeply silly psuedo-tech series I just watched. No woman too skinny, no house too vast. (I DID like the clothes.) And the ultimate greed is immortality as much as immorality.
That’s fine and maybe it fun to watch sitting here in this little village while the temp sinks below zero, but these are not quite what one had in mind for the behavior one’s own children -- which is, of course, why they’re so attracted to it.
I do see the kind of greedhead narcissism and wretched excess that Natasha Vargas-Cooper rightly labels pornographic. A formal Blackfeet Tribal Council member stopped through yesterday and we talked about the just-now-daylighting of sexual abuse of reservation tribal women. (Again. It’s something that cycles. I mean, the abuse is constant -- the media attention cycles.) He said that in the year he was on the council there were between two and three hundred cases of identified but unaddressed sexual abuse of women out of the population of 8,000 or so. Probably there were twice as many unreported incidents, muddled up with drunkenness, incest and fatal accidents.
Even the Supreme Court agrees that pornography varies widely from place to place and time to time. Restrictions are not quite like those on alcohol -- totally banning alcohol is hopeless but alcohol stays the same. Porn changes all the time, more like designer drugs. What ends up suppressed is not the porn itself but the stigma, taboo, and black-out over understanding the dynamics of “game.” Not least among problems is the gap between generations. Consider Mrs. Henderson counseling the girls in the dressing room by telling stories of her years in India.
But how can there be anything other than a terrible chasm between the experience of women who would have been disgraced by sex out of wedlock and their choice among the possible mortality of childbirth, the impoverishment of raising children alone, lethal back-alley abortion, and avoiding sex altogether -- and the easy-going “let’s-start-with-sex” attitude of youngsters since the Pill.
It’s strange but true that the boys of Cinematheque who have survived through paid sex put a high value on tenderness and protection -- MORE than a hard core feminist writing for a high end mag in the US.
That sort of "unconsummated" love affair that Mrs. Henderson and her Impresario have used to be something of a fixture in novels and movies, until the 60s. Most younger viewers have no concept of the depth and nuance of what's going on when they see something like that.
ReplyDeleteIt was also, I think, a scenario that the British seemed to especially enjoy. If you watch the banter between John Steed and Mrs. Peel (terrific names, and she in a leather catsuit!) in The Avengers you pretty much get the final coda on that particular cultural moment.