The Westerfeld Effect

I had to look up this post again today, not for the last time I'm sure: http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2007/03/midi-nighters-on-tv/ .

Sullivan is really into My Little Pony right now. He says, "My little pony my best friend." So I was thinking, Sullivan is a brony. Only then I realized, Sullivan is two, so actually he's just a toddler watching a cartoon for toddlers.

brony tshirt

I'm always trying to express this thing, where you twist a thing too many times and end up with something very conventional, either the same thing you started with or something worse. I think Scott Westerfeld explains the phenomenon really well, and since I often want a name for it, I think we should call it The Westerfeld Effect. Right? 

Wanderlust

get it? michael sho-WALTER?

David Wain is like that weird cousin I used to see at family gatherings. Most of the time, I kind of try to avoid him. Most of the time, I don't get his jokes, and he makes me cringe a lot more often than he makes me laugh. But also, I feel a certain undeniable affection, like we have known each other for a long time. That's actually true, in a way--I used to stay up late watching The State after my parents went to sleep when I was in high school. And even then, I didn't get it, but I was fond of it. All of these shows--Wet Hot American Summer, The State, Stella, Wainy Days, Role Models--I like them even though I don't exactly think they are funny. At least, not most of the time. The occasional laughs are big laughs, but they are few and far between. Maybe it's a thing I have to be in the right mood for. If so, I was in the seriously right mood for Wanderlust, because I embarrassed myself laughing at it.

overreaction, pre-review, written in a big hurry, rushing to judgment

This is one of those movies I should just decide right now that I will never see because I already know what's going to happen, which is that I will sit there alternating between bemusement and rage, hating everything about the movie, and then later everyone will have thought it was cute or charming or sweet. I did not rewatch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I hated, for years, but it kept coming up on respectable smart film critics' best-of-the-decade lists, so I thought maybe I had been in a reactionary mood when I saw it. After all, it came out in 2004, and maybe I was still figuring out that it's not exactly fair that all the stories seem to be told by men for men about men and their desires. A discovery like that can make a person overreact for a while. So I finally went back and gave it another chance, just a few months ago. And I hated it, I hated it. It's so gross the way we watch this whole story that is not just theoretically told from his perspective, but literally constructed solely from his memories, she has no existence in this movie. There is no Clementine. And we're supposed to have feelings about their relationship, to care what happens to them, and never mind the fact that they are both so terribly unpleasant and unimaginative and ugly, they are also just one person not two. Just this one man, and his internal fantasy about a life. Note: I also find the movie impossible to follow from a plot standpoint, and not very pretty to look at, but I'm getting into the weeds now. I'm not here to talk about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, except in that it is sort of the quintessential movie in which there is a relationship between an ordinary man and an impossible imaginary fantasy girl.

But this movie. Ruby Sparks. Jeez. In case you don't have time to watch the preview, the premise is that Paul Dano's character is a writer, and he creates a flesh-and-blood woman out of nothing. He's the inventor of her. Sort of like Pygmalion, but less progressive. It's a cute idea, I get that. Except that it's deeply troubling--and also a massive cliche. Consider the idea that a woman's very existence depends on being the object of love. It's troubling and it's also so very very boring.

It's like Zoe Kazan (who wrote the screenplay, and also stars in the movie) read about manic pixie dream girls, and she thought: the trouble with every Zooey Deschanel character is that it's theoretically possible for her to express an opinion. What we really need is a story about a woman who is literally controlled, internally and externally, by the man at the center of the story. What we need is a movie about how fun and awesome it is to be the girl in that story, or in that relationship.

Watching the trailer, I felt sort of sick and gross, this dizzy feeling I get when I am forced to realize that people don't see things the way I see things. It's not unlike the feeling when I can't find my keys, even though I know exactly where I left them. Like the reality I live in is just not quite the same reality where anyone else lives. It's unsettling to know that people I can most of the time communicate with are loving the wit and/or charm and/or humor of a thing I find mostly baffling and sometimes outrageous.

From the trailer: "You can make her do anything you want. For men everywhere, tell me you're not going to let that go to waste." Ha ha. Get it? Men want women to do stuff that they don't necessarily want to do. It is rough for men everywhere.

I know, maybe the movie will redeem itself. I admit there is a possibility that the movie is not what I think it is, that in the end somehow it's a movie about female agency not a movie at the expense of female agency. I recognize that I am rushing to judgment.

I am trying to think of examples of stories in which a woman defines the fantasy, they must exist. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Stranger Than Fiction, and the thing is, that movie is still all about the dude. It's all about the experience of being fictional. So I don't think it works as a counterexample. Certainly there are movies by and about women, great movies that reflect experiences of women or tell good stories about women. But it's hard to think of any where she has all the power and his desires are just a reflection of her needs.

For Thaddeus

You win.

An Attempt to Explain Why I Didn't Quite Love The Muppets as Much as I Thought I Would

The Muppets is very muppety in a lot of ways. It captures the tone of the Muppets, and it made me laugh a whole bunch of times. It was fun to see these familiar characters acting like themselves, and Jason Segal also acting like a Muppet--possibly the only more adorable person on earth is Amy Adams. It was especially great to watch this movie, which is largely about restoring a beautiful but shabby old theater, at the Byrd. But I have some problems with The Muppets. 

The premise of the movie is that the Muppets, formerly huge television stars, have fallen out of popularity. I found this very confusing. I understand that this story takes place in an alternate universe, but I'm not at all clear on its relationship to 1) the real world or 2) the world of The Muppet Movie(s). In the real world, the Muppets have never stopped being popular, and they certainly did not disappear from public view during the three decades since The Muppet Show went off the air. I believe that The Great Muppet Caper came out after the show ended, and The Muppets Take Manhattan came out in 1984. In the 90s, after Jim Henson's death, three Muppet movies came out in theaters, and while they're not all stunningly successful as films, I would argue that The Muppets Christmas Carol is among the best of the many, many versions of that story. I asked my resident five-year-old pop culture expert about the Muppets, to see whether they have fallen into obscurity, and she readily identified the main characters and named her favorite (Piggy, of course). The Muppets may not be as popular as they were in, say, 1981, but they have never disappeared. I do not for a second believe that the real Selena Gomez in the real world doesn't know who the Muppets are. That said, I do not think the movie wants me to believe that the Muppets are very unpopular now exactly, so much as it wants me to believe that (in the world of the movie) they were once much more wildly popular than they ever were in real life.

The film is preoccupied with celebrity. That's okay--after all, The Muppet Movie ended with Orson Welles giving the Kermit & friends the Standard Rich and Famous contract. Being famous was always part of the Muppet dream. But I feel sure that Kermit's desire to be famous, way back when he met Dom Deluise in that swamp, was all about bringing people joy, and none about having people like him. Being famous is a necessary side-effect of making people happy, not an end in itself. So in this new movie when the rousing happy ending is this obscene celebrity orgy, when Wally is validated by hordes of fetishy screaming fans, that moment rings very false to me, not just because it contradicts or undermines everything that comes before it in the plot of the movie, but also because it has always seemed to me that the public aspect of being an entertainer, the part where people are staring at you, was the part that made Kermit a little uncomfortable.

Speaking of things that make Kermit a little uncomfortable...what happened to the relationship between Kermit and Piggy? Piggy's aggressiveness, both sexual and otherwise, is a big part of what makes her a feminist hero. Kermit's romantic relationship with Piggy has always been complicated by the fact that she is very intimidating. Kermit's mushy monologue to her just made me squirmy and uncomfortable.

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