So they just unveiled the official White House portraits of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. What do you think? I give them a resounding "meh." The painting hanging in the background of George's portrait is one of W's favorites. It actually depicts a horse thief from a short story but to W it apparently evokes a religious missionary of some sort, i.e. him. I think the artist brought a little of the classic Frederic Remington cowboy appeal from the painting into this portrait. Still though... meh.
Laura Bush by John Howard Sanden. 2012
George W. Bush by John Howard Sanden. 2012
A commenter on Shakesville wondered how the artist got through the painting without wretching-- I assume because of W's politics, as he's a pretty average looking dude. Hell, I'd love to paint the official portrait of George W. Bush. Facially, he's interesting (a cartoonist's dream). He's known for action and outdoorsiness (Sarah Vowell once called him, "America's gym teacher") which opens the field to all kinds of interesting poses and lighting. But most of all, to those who loathe his politics, he's like some sort of inscrutable Mona Lisa. Is he stupid and innocent, a naive Christian led by the nose by Rove? Or did he know exactly what he was doing? How much of him is authentic? He could be a great subject. Laura Bush has already proven to be a fantastic subject, as shot for VogueMagazine. She's gorgeous, in my opinion, with a cat-like reserve that is at once smug and stifled. And her face has this odd intelligent buttery quality. None of that comes across in the portrait above, but it's fine, I guess.
Which leads me to some of my favorite official White House Presidential portraits from the past:
Abraham Lincoln by George Peter Alexander Healy, 1869. Lincoln got all the best portraits, which is awesome considering that he was a stunningly ugly man. The statue of him sitting regally in the Lincoln Memorial is incredible.
Andrew Jackson by Ralph Eleazer Whiteside Earl. I couldn't find a date on this but I'm guessing 1820s/30s. The man was a violent war-monger and colonialist [ETA: I meant "imperialist," as I was thinking about the Trail of Tears, not realizing that "colonialist" would be confusing given the historical context of just having won independence from the British] whose nickname was "Old Hickory." And very popular. This portrait gets that across I think.
Calvin Coolidge by Charles Hopkinson, 1932. The chair he's sitting in is fine furniture, certainly, but the "'Tis A Gift To Be Simple" quality of it, and the raw naked starkness of the rest of the painting, is an interesting choice for a Depression Era portrait. Especially the face turning away from the light and the shadow across the right side of the background. It reminds me of the simplicity and earthiness of portraits in the Napoleonic era when the opulence of the Rococo age was coming under vicious attack, a fitting parallel to the decade following the Gilded Age, Jazz Age, and finally the Wall Street Collapse that occurred in 1929, the last year of Coolidge's presidency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower by J. Anthony Wills.
Gerald Ford by Everett Raymond Kinstler, 1977. This is a nice, compelling portrait with good brushwork. I like it.
Franklin Pierce by George Peter Alexander Healy. 1858. Healy did several Presidential portraits and they're all very good. These people look very "historic," but still like real people who did tedious things.
Harry Truman by Greta Kempton. 1945. I love the sepia tones of this and how they pull a modern man into a 1770s Turner-like background. The clouds give a sense of cannon fire (war) and the sweeping on of history to reveal a bluer sky. Maybe that's not exactly how WWII was but it's a ideal sentiment that Kempton got across here. Truman was a maker of treaties and a supporter of NATO and the United Nations, part of a zeitgeist of catharsis.
Ronald Reagan by Everett Raymond Kinstler (same as Gerald Ford above). 1991. I love this for the silly pink phallus column in the background and candy-colored romanticism. I imagine the landscape behind him to be a bird's eye view of the subdivision from Edward Scissorhands. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Reagan nostalgia.
Probably my favorite Presidential portrait, EVER. John F. Kennedy, painted posthumously in 1970 by Aaron Shikler. I guess he could get away with this classic pose of defeat because the man had just been assassinated. There is so much of his presidency reflected here-- the massive controversy, the acidic vitriol similar to radical anti-Obama stuff, the "golden boy" look of "Camelot," the uneasy times of radical social change, and the relative impotency of his time in office, the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is no background here, just JFK in some sort of other-worldly ether. It's not exactly depressing, though; he looks thoughtful and human in an unprecedented way. The muted sunlight is also evocative of a man in a chapel in front of a stained glass window. It's a contemplative portrait for a stunned nation.
John Tyler by George Peter Alexander Healy. 1859.
Teddy Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, 1903. Sargent was one of the most brilliant portrait artists of all time. Roosevelt was one of the most fantastic portrait subjects, ever. Here you go. I love how Sargent evoked the authoritative, swashbuckling pose of Henry VIII for Roosevelt.
Henry Taft, by Anders Leonard Zorn (a Swedish artist), 1911. This is the portrait of the man chosen by Helen "Nellie" Taft to grant her access to the Oval Office. She had yearned to be in the Oval Office since childhood but couldn't be president because she was a woman; Taft was a well-liked man who only ever wanted to be a local judge. Helen married him and governed from the shadows.
Woodrow Wilson, by S. Seymour Thomas. I couldn't find the date (I could hardly find the painter. Sargent did a more famous painting of Wilson but it's not the official portrait. It's very nice, of course). I've always had a soft spot for President Wilson.
But wait... there's more! First Ladies usually had official portraits painted (though sometimes the official portrait is a photograph) and because the FLOTUS is often seen as the "human side" of the Presidency in the way that wives are referred to as the "better half" (gag), their portraits are much more interesting.
Helen "Nellie" Taft (the woman who ruled through Howard Taft), by Karl Bror Albert Kronstrand, 1910. This is a really weird pose and a totally strange portrait. But interesting.
Eleanor Roosevelt by Douglas Chandler, 1949. This is a bitchin' portrait of a bitchin' lady. Why have one Eleanor when you can have four? I also adore this as a portrait of an accomplished, mature woman, as opposed to some other FLOTUS portraits I haven't included here where a woman in her 50s or 60s looks like she's getting her photo taken at Prom, which I find wildly inappropriate. I love the elegant folds of the dove-grey jacket that subtly evoke a classical Greek toga and elegant drooping wrist holding the pencil just-so, like it is almost immaterial, a natural bridge between her concrete body and abstract thoughts. This has the same ethereal, idealistic qualities that I love about portraits from the 1810's and 20's.
Mamie Eisenhower (official harbinger of the powder-pink bathroom). Guess who painted this? Her husband, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Really.
Margaret Taylor. If you know who painted this and when (I'm guessing 1850s), please let me know. Why is it so hard to find information about an official White House portrait of a FLOTUS? Anyhow I love the brushwork, color and arresting, energetic gaze of Mrs. Taylor. This was a period in history when wealthy women dressed like human curtain rods from the set of Dynasty yet the colors and costuming lend it gravitas. Impressive.
Barbara Bush, by Herbert Elmer Abrams, 1994. This has some nice contrast. The clear crystalline naturalism offsets the stuffiness of Barbara Bush's appearance and makes for an attractive, interesting painting. The best of the Bush portraits.
Dolley Madison by Gilbert Stuart, 1804. I usually hate when people use the word "feisty," to describe women but it seems apt for a Quaker and social butterfly who, according to popular legend, rushed to rescue our founding documents from a burning building when the British set our White House ablaze (she actually directed a painting to be hastily removed from the White House as the British advanced, and though a slave of hers published an account saying she also directed slaves to rescue silver, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it is likely that a Frenchman named Jean Pierre Sioussat directed the slaves to do so).
Nancy Reagan by Aaron Shikler, 1987. This is formally beautiful but I don't know much about Nancy Reagan herself.
Grace Coolidge, by Howard Chandler Christy. Not sure of the date on this either. But she seems straight out of The Great Gatsby-- not in the sloppy nouveau riche way but that classic understated command of the very wealthy who assume they are able to be casual. "This dress?" I can hear her asking. "Oh, I just wear it on my little strolls!" The portrait is also compositionally fun and beautifully executed.
There's more to say on the concept of Authenticity (or "The Original") in art, and on the practices and social mores of art versus craft, than a short blog post will allow. But Tove Hermanson at Thread for Thought has a wonderful post up about artists who eschew "the original" by hiring assistants or outsourcing the labor, such as Sol LeWit and Andy Warhol, and compares them to the common practices of outsourcing labor in fashion design, architecture, street art and community activist art. Of course the catalyst for the post was Damien Hirst's stupid spot paintings, but who really cares about those?
[Video: a black & white Dove soap commercial from the 1950s. A young blond-ish white model with an updo, full makeup and bare shoulders demonstrates in a velvety voice why Dove is better than ordinary soap as the camera lingers on her flawless complexion.]
According to Coco & Crème, Dove-- the moisturizer and knockoff salon shampoo juggernaut-- has conducted a groundbreaking beauty quiz Body Confidence Census of 2012, and concluded that women don't feel as beautiful as they "should." Coco & Crème explains:
When most women were asked to describe their looks and their body, the most common answer was simply 'average.'
“Only 2 percent of women are saying, ‘I’m beautiful’ and only 1 in
10 are saying, ‘I feel attractive,’ a Dove spokesperson said. “That’s
just not where we want to be.”
Ok, am I going crazy? Because the majority of women identifying as "average," seems like the only logical possibility here. Because that's how averages work. Most people areaverage. Average means "most people." When you offer people the choice of, "average" along with "beautiful," the clear implication is that "beautiful" means you think you're objectively above average in the looks department. And 1 in 10 women being above average-- "attractive"-- and 2 out of 100 being way above average-- "beautiful"-- seems about right to me. How many of us look anything like Megan Fox or Halle Berry? 2% actually sounds generous to me, considering the vast number of women who are older, fatter, zittier, lumpier, stockier, ganglier, and/or wrinklier than those two. And who set the bar for beauty so high in the first place? Dove, and other companies like them.
[Video: a 1993 Dove bodywash ad. It's lit in blue, giving it a sexy night-time Boyz II Men music video look. "Moonlight Sonata"-sounding piano music plays while a purring female voice describes the product. A tall, thin, young, conventionally hot white naked model demonstrates the product in her slow-motion shower.]
In fact, those sorts of companies intentionally endorse body types that are extremely rare as the only beautiful people. And then they are shocked, shocked! to find-- in their own manipulative study-- that the vast majority of women who don't have that rare type don't identify as "beautiful." I guess we'll just have to buy a bunch of Dove beauty products to catch up. "That's just not where we want to be," says Dove. I call bullshit: that is exactly where they want to be.
Older (early nineties?) Dove print ad. [image: top half is a blonde blue-eyed white model's face who looks a little like Kathy Ireland smiling slyly, wearing makeup and lit softly. Lines are super-imposed over her face breaking it up into sections that are numbered. Below, text reads, "Touch these 4 spots. If even one is dry, it's time for Dove." Smaller text underneath is unreadable, then there's a picture of Dove soap.]
[image: 1960s print ad featuring a sequence of four pictures of a white blond-ish model in makeup with a towel on her head in a bright pink bathroom smiling as she lathers half her face with Dove and the other half with ordinary soap, then pouting as she touches the rinsed ordinary side and exclaiming with delight as she touches the Dove side, then a picture of Dove soap. Text reads, "Lend us half your face and we will prove Dove doesn't dry your skin the way soap can."
A 1960s print ad featuring a smiling white model with brown hair and full makeup, manicure and up-do lathering up her naked shoulders, neck, face and hands with Dove suds and gazing lustily at the bar of Dove she holds, as if about to deliver a kiss. Text underneath reads, "Soap dries your skin but / Dove creams your skin while you wash" followed by smaller text and a picture of Dove soap]
[image: a still from a black & white 1950s TV ad showing a smiling blonde white model with full make-up, manicure and polished hair caressing her face with the words, "Dove Creams" superimposed.]
[image: a 1960s Dove print ad featuring a classic white model with brown hair and full make-up "washing" her face with Dove. Below a sequence of photos shows her rinsing off the soap and being shocked and delighted to reveal smoother skin, then pictures of Dove soap.]
Here are some more recent Dove ads that promote an impossible beauty standard, even as Dove claims to champion "real beauty:"
[image: over a solid baby-blue background, text reads, "Dove hair therapy: Dove Hair Rehab, [illegible] with Marie Claire." Pictures of Dove shampoos next to a thin young white model with thick shiny straight brown hair blowing in a magical wind, smiling with surprise at her own gorgeousness.]
[image: black & white photo of a naked thin young tan white brunette model throwing her head back, smiling contentedly and clutching her hands to her heart. She's covered in suds in the shape of an off-the-shoulder fur coat that mimics an old-time Hollywood diva in her bed-chamber. Illegible text and pictures of Dove bodywash across the bottom.]
Dove is doing a "real beauty" ad campaign now, having scrubbed themselves of their dirty beauty industry past and leaving a softer more touchable corporation, hence the "Body Confidence Census of 2012." Dove has done various "Look, I'm a model but I'll give you the straight-talk, girlfriend" and "Women across America-- such as these middle-class white women-- love Dove: here they are in their natural habitats using their words" ad campaigns since the 1950s in addition to the campaigns featured above. But their most recent campaign is a send-up of stupid beauty industry messages that they previously participated in, much like the 7-Up (or Sprite?) commercials in the 1990s that mocked typical soft-drink ads. But beauty cannot be funny. Ever. Because beauty is equal to self-esteem. It is our very being. It is very very important. (For women, anyway.) Here's a sample of the new campaign:
[image: a grinning young white woman in a black tube top who is maybe a size 16 is pictured striking an exaggeratedly glam confident pose. Next to her text reads, "What do you think?" then underneath, next to empty check-mark boxes, "oversized?" and "outstanding?"]
[image: a gigantic cropped close-up of a little girl who is a red-head with freckles, staring into the camera with a level gaze. Overlayed text reads, "Hates her freckles."]
[Image: bottom half of image features 6 women of different races in white underwear standing in a line on a white background lit with studio lighting. They are grinning the slightly embarrassed grins of girls caught being silly and imitating models. They range from about size 6 to size 14. Large text reads, "Real women have real curves" followed by smaller illegible text]
[image: a redheaded young white woman covered in freckles with bare shoulders stares slightly down at the camera with a smirking yet vulnerable expression. Next to her face are two empty check-boxes with the options, "flawed?" and "flawless?"
[image: same deal as above, but features a flat-chested young thin black woman with a short afro and the options read, "half empty?" "half full?"]
[image: in front of a cappuccino-grey background a chubby black woman in her 60s sits with her shoulder to the camera and her knees pulled into her chest, turning to smile shyly at the camera. She is completely naked, revealing stomach rolls. She's lit with soft studio lighting and her hair blowing. Text is overlayed reading, "beauty has no age limit / pro-age: Dove."]
[image: a little girl of South-East Asian ethnicity is shown in cropped close-up like the red-headed kid above, with level gaze. Overlayed text reads, "wishes she were blonde."]
These are great ads. And I hate them. With the exceptions of the ads featuring the kids, which are excellent aside from the inescapable problem that they are plugging Dove, these ads are patronizing and insidious. But this post is long enough already, so if you want to know why I think that just hit me up in the comments. Back to the "Census."
Why does it follow that being average in the looks department is devastating to a woman's self esteem? I mean, I'm not stupid, I know why-- Patriarchy, our society, our consumer culture-- but this assumption is continuously unquestioned. Why do we constantly link self esteem in women with feeling beautiful, in the sense of being objectively attractive? Why is it not okay to state the truth about one's looks? Why is it unfathomable that a woman could feel unattractive (or average) and also feel perfectly fine about herself? After all, plenty of women who do feel attractive have terrible self esteem. What if it were ok for a woman to simply be average in appearance (as most, in fact, are)? What if it were normal to portray unattractive or average looking women living it up? What if unattractive or average looking women were considered viable movie stars at the same rate that beautiful women are currently? What if the "real women" frolicking in their panties in the new Dove ads weren't advertising beauty products but instead advertising a fun new water-park, or a social club for exhibitionists, or an athletic event, something where "real women" can live it up and feel great that is unrelated to improving their looks?
Lots of women are objectively un-pretty. Period. I didn't say they are worthless or unloved or helpless or involuntarily celibate or grappling with their own emotional agony. I said they are not pretty. So if self esteem is linked to feeling pretty, and those women know perfectly well they aren't pretty, what then? Could it be that being average looking, or even ugly, is not the end of the world? If women weren't taught in a million little way that they are synonymous with their looks, would it be so devastating to feel unattractive? Is it possible that our positions on the beauty-versus-self-esteem continuum is not the problem, that the problem is, in fact, the constant conflation of self-worth and beauty for women? In other words, the problem isn't that we're playing the game and failing to win, it's that we're playing the game at all.
To be clear, I don't fault women who play the game self-beautification (including myself). It has simply never occurred to many women that there's any other option, for one. And if they have considered the other option, it looks so bleak: fuzzy legs, hair that isn't flowing or exhibiting "multi-dimensional color," un-sexyness, surrendering to the same old body you were born with, practical shoes, less attention from men, less attention from other women, constantly getting judged as a clueless woman who simply doesn't understand beauty, a walking "before" picture with no after, giving up the intoxicating fantasy that there's a wonderful new life awaiting the prettier version of you. That's no fun. Our entire culture portrays the un-winnable game of beauty as a worthwhile past-time-- the only worthwhile past-time. In the sense of being un-winnable, you may win some "battles," i.e. feel good sometimes through self-beautification, but you are guaranteed to lose the "war." But when self-esteem through self-beautification is portrayed as the only game in town, I certainly see why women try to play it, and I admit that for lots of people that's the best decision to make about how to live in our reality. I also have no problem with the original article I linked to, which takes the "census" at face value. My beef is with the game itself and the industry behind it.
And where is the concern that men don't feel attractive enough? If it's so damn important to feel beautiful, why is there no ad featuring a little boy staring plaintively into the camera with the words, "hates his unibrow," and the understated logo of TweezerMan in the bottom corner? No one would look at such an ad and think, "That little boy is in for a world of heartbreak!" or "Wow, TweezerMan really understands mens' struggles." They'd probably say, "so what?" and laugh, because the boy in the picture will grow into a man who is valued by society as more than the sum of his facial hairs. His beauty just isn't that big a deal. People are concerned about men, though. The media has been overflowing with concern that men aren't getting paid enough, that they're getting left behind in the "man-cession," that they're suffering high rates of heart disease, that they're not graduating from college at the same rate as women, that they are plagued by violence. No one has clutched their pearls and cried out, "Most men say they feel "average looking!" Oh, no! Only 2% identify as 'hawt!' That is not where we want to be! Think of the children!"
I promise this is related to portraiture but I don't know how to tie it in in any pithy, or even logical, way. But this is something I really do think about every time a woman sits for a portrait. I know what she's expecting-- an understated homage to her beauty that may, as an afterthought, reflect her personality-- and these issues are something I grapple with. The farther I get down this rabbit hole of resenting the beauty industry, the more difficult it is to depict, let alone identify, what the woman probably values as her pretty assets, because I'm getting more out of touch with the commonly agreed upon standards of beauty. I want to depict character, what makes the person interesting, and that usually conflicts with a pretty, feminine portrait that the customer very likely wants. The customer is always right, she's the one who has to live with the portrait, and I don't want to make her feel bad. I'm feeling a little stuck. What do you think about all this?
ETA: I originally included notes about Dove chocolate in this post, but it's actually a different company. Unilever owns Dove soap; Mars owns Dove chocolate. Even though the logos are virtually identical and feature pitchers of cream pouring themselves into a finished product. My bad.
Moff's Law: The tendency of art or film criticism/analysis to draw commenters who whine, "jeeeez, it's just a movie/picture/joke. Don't think so hard. Just enjoy it, gosh." [Image: Wayne from The Wonder Years makes a "wtf" face.]
Jill at In Bed With Married Women wrote this about me, and it is so deeply apt:
I am quite certain that today you have discovered your Superpower. Too
bad it's thinking of spot-on names for obscure and unloved contraceptive
devices. We don't all get to have X-ray vision.
Just thought I'd brag about that. You know, in case any future employers Google my name and find nothing but un-condemning professional tidbits.
Another portrait for a client so I'm only showing a detail [Image: cropped close-up of ayoung white boy's face, smiling. Realistic black & white charcoal.]
Just a detail of the portrait since it's for a client. Drawn from life. [image: close-up crop of young white man's face, smiling, wearing a cap, like the military kind with a bill that old-timey Russian poets and coffee house kids wear. Not exactly a newsboy cap but similar. Also less ridiculous and more stylish than I make it sound. black & white charcoal, realistic.]
Just a portion of the portrait since it's for a client. She sat (extreeeemely patiently) while I drew this. [image: cropped close-up of a white teen girl's face smiling slightly. Realistic black & white charcoal.]
Self portrait in bathroom mirror before getting ready for bed. I look psycho on this, or as an artist I guess I should say, "tortured." Really though I look this way in most of my self portraits because I'm glancing up from my drawing pad at the mirror. The direct overhead lighting isn't helping things either. Still I think the drawing goes well with the video below. [Image: head and neck of a white woman with head tilted down looking directly up at viewer. Contour line drawing in blue and orange marker, somewhat unrealistic.]
Video: black & white close-up film of a cat, an obvious spoof of French 1960s existentialist cinema. A man narrates the cat's "thoughts" in French while subtitles appear. Melancholy piano music plays.
[cat sits in window]
Well... I'm still here.
I have grown my fluffy coat for the winter... like a Tsar's robe it requires... [owner snips fur around the cat's butt] a delicate maintenance.
I'm free to go. [Looks out window] Yet I remain.
The fifteen hours a day I sleep have no effect... I wake to the same tedium.
Immortalized on the wall [looks at vintage poster of the Chat Noir]. Forgotten on the floor.
When my caretakers step here [sits on a bathroom scale] they feel irate... yet I feel nothing.
They leave tasty snacks just out of reach. [Eyes two birds and a mouse in a cage]. They taunt me mercilessly. I alone feel this torment.
[Another cat, white, wiggles.] The white idiot writhes on his chair, begging for cheeseburgers.
I'm surrounded by morons.
[looks at "beware of cat" sign.] "Pay attention to the cat." Not that they ever do.
Still I have learned the few things.
The whipped cream in the bathroom is not whipped cream. [Tastes and rejects a blob of shaving cream] We cannot escape ourselves. [Gazes at self in mirror] And sometimes the cat door... [runs for the cat door but bonks into it when it fails to open] is closed.
un film de Will Braden.
Another portrait for a client, so I'm only posting a portion of it. [image: detail of the side of a white man's face who wears glasses and is smiling. Realistic black & white charcoal.]
Since it's for a client I'm only showing a portion of the portrait. [Image: the face and neck of a white woman with thick pale hair and glasses drawn in realistic charcoal.]
Since this was for a client I'm only posting part of the portrait. This woman sat for me at the first Farmer's Market of the year (hooray! I love drawing from life!). [Image: shoulders up to forehead of a white woman with long blond hair wearing earrings and a bunched up draped neck scarf. Drawn in black & white charcoal, realistic with sketchier lines for the scarf.]
After I wrote about Hunger Games blogstress Ariel (who totally knows I love to spew opinions) asked me what I thought of The Last Psychiatrist's take on Hunger Games. TLP makes the case that while HG is (apparently) being hailed as a great feminist movie it is in fact anti-feminist in that the plot happens to the female protagonist rather than her taking actions (i.e. kills) and making decisions (i.e. kills), which takes away her agency. TLP likens HG to Cinderella in the sense that it is a fairy tale in which a passive girl is chosen as princess. Mentioning the recent outrage on feminist and anti-racist sites that many hardcore HG fans had reacted negatively when black actors were cast as Thrush and Rue, TLP calls this issue a sideshow meant to distract from the larger problem of Katniss' lack of agency. In closing:
That's why The Hunger Games is such a diabolical
head fake. [...]
It has managed to convince everyone that a passive character whose main
strength is that she thinks a lot of thoughts and feels a lot of
feelings, but who ultimately lets every decision be made by someone
else-- that is a female hero, a winner. [...] in order to allow
you to like an anti-feminist story, it is
necessary to brand it as a vampire story or a female Running Man.
Regardless of how you phrase it, the purpose is to get you to like this
kind of a story. It wants you to think this is the next step in female
protagonists. But it's a trick: nothing has changed since the royal
ball.
That these "adolescent girl" stories-- Twilight and THG--
have women who are essentially lead by men, circumstance, and fate--
whose main executive decision is "do I love this guy or that guy"-- is a
window on our
culture worth discussing. [...] That Jezebel is distracted by
the racial
angle here strikes me as an unconsciously deliberate avoidance of the
larger issue.
Oh, the audience is racist, that's the problem.
This is the kind of criticism that steps back and dispassionately surveys a phenomenon-- my favorite kind. But the big glaring problem with this post is that TLP didn't step back far enough. Again, I saw the movie but didn't read the books; but since TLP's post is mostly about the movie, which stands on its own, I'm going to respond, focusing on how the movie portrayed things.
Many HG fans have already beat me to it in TLP's comment section pointing out that Katniss did in fact make kills: cutting down the wasp's nest while her would-be killers slept below, shooting Rue's killer through the heart, and shooting Cato (depicted as a mercy killing) as he is devoured by mutant dogs. TLP waves these kills aside as not pro-active, as well as waving aside her decisions-- volunteering for the games, suicide berries, affecting love for Peeta so they can both win-- as not really hers to make since the god-like author and Hunger Games officials whisk away consequences for the last two.
I actually accept TLP's argument waving aside these kills-- the movie did portray them as non-proactive which is status quo dramatic female protagonist behavior (see my criticism of the American Dragon Tatoo's plot twist [SPOILER] where Lisbeth pulls out a gun to shoot the baddie in the end but-- whoopsie-- the car bursts into flame on its own. Such killing-but-not-really tactics remind me of boobs with the nipples blurred out: they are now somehow different and acceptable cause they're not technically explicit... but we still get to see boobs, or as per the analogy, violent revenge). But pro-active killing is MURDER. Is that what TLP would prefer? Would that make the movie more feminist? A major goal of feminism is that we're able to lead our lives apart from the see-saw of coercive domestic / institutional violence and our reactions to it.
Another major goal of feminism is to treat women not as pseudo-children or pawns in the game of Men, but as a vast assortment of autonomous people whose decisions to each live as she sees fit are unremarkable to the rest of society. But unfortunately every decision a woman makes in the public eye is seen as an invitation for scrutiny-- a much higher level of scrutiny than for (white) men. From tabloids to cliques, from churches to offices, women are subjected to a special public opinion poll-- should she have done/said/worn that? Would you have done it differently? What did she do wrong? How could you improve her? How does her behavior serve others? Not only is this directed at women from men, but also from other women-- known as "internalized misogyny." It can be a problem even among groups of Feminists. Leaving aside legitimate complaints of failures to include marginalized groups of women from within the movement, feminists tend to hold each other and their allies to an extremely high level of expectation of perfection. Even while Rush Limbaugh and other outsiders call women who use contraception "sluts," special ire is reserved for those within the movement. But because there are as many ways of being a woman as there are women and thus many ways of interpreting and advancing feminism, each feminist (or ally) tends to have his or her own idea of what other feminists should be doing. So the goal posts are always changing, the flame wars are raging and women are picked apart-- just like in the rest of society. Considering that people and their ideas are flawed this is bad news for celebrating feminist icons, organizing, blogging, and legislating. This isn't intended as a take-down of feminism, which has been pretty damn effective in its time, but rather a critique of how internalized misogyny can play out within the movement. And therein lies the problem with the post: TLP didn't step back far enough to consider this.
Rather, the possibility of imperfect feminist activity seems to raise a flag and pique TLP's inner critic; they have done it wrong. HG has depicted a teenaged girl surviving, something that has clearly rung true for thousands of teens who actually don't have that much agency, a tactic employed by centuries of oppressed wives, prostitutes, daughters, workers, slaves and moms. But to TLP that is the wrong way to do womanhood. HG has chosen to examine oppression, coercion and lack of agency, to present a girl as a complicated character who sometimes fails, -- but for TLP it is not feminist unless we see a perfect woman in a choice-y utopia. HG offers Katniss a chance to use traditionally feminine skills-- networking, empathy, childcare, physical endurance and beautification-- while remaining mainly androgynous, to subvert an arena valuing brute strength, competition and violence, and bring it to a grinding halt (as opposed to using her feminine wiles and skills to achieve dominance or approval within the Patriarchy *cough-LegallyBlonde-Evita-GentlemenPreferBlondes-cough*). Despite the starkly coercive nature of the rules of the Hunger Games rendering both the decisions to kill and to flee as void of agency, TLP would have preferred Katniss succeed on masculine terms of the arena-- on TLP's terms.
Consider the reactions if the film weren't associated with women. Harry Potter similarly "lacks agency" by being acted upon and saved, constantly. Likewise conscientious objectors have been depicted historically as having made that decision, with draft-dodging being a choice. The Shining was about a man lacking agency (being sort of possessed). Good Will Hunting featured a guy buoyed by fate and outside pressure, his only decision being to fall in love. No one asked, "What is Will teaching boys?" Because "girls" en masse are the ones in danger of being narrowly pigeon-holed by negative media messages. And because of this they must be shown only a narrowly prescriptive version of themselves on-screen. Wait, huh?
While these criticisms of HG could have broadened the discussion if they'd come from a place of respect toward other women and feminists, TLP's critique is not an empathetic one for the feminists at Jezebel, the young HG fans or, tellingly, women in general:
That's the system, it wants you to participate in your own
marginalization so you don't dare unplug. It's exhausting being a
chick. I mean girl-- woman. Jesus. (5)
Though this is an
example of the feminist agency problem, you should note carefully that
the "society" that forces this false choice on women is actually other
women, not men, and it starts with the overly invested way mothers
reproach their daughters to "dress like a lady." Certainly the
original energy for this madness comes from men, from "the patriarchy",
but if every man was executed tonight nothing would change tomorrow.
It's on autopilot. Case in point: this story of a girl robbed of agency
was written by a woman.
or
Of course, if this racism was attached to a Transformers movie you can be sure that Jezebel would pronounce all of the Transformers audience racist. But in this case, it's only some of the audience who are racist, because progressive Jezebel likes The Hunger Games,
and they're not racist. How can they be? They're post-feminists,
i.e. the racism for Jezebel is merely an opportunity to criticize the
bridge trolls who live in Central Time, just in time for the elections.
[...] What's
interesting is how Jezebel seized on the racial controversy, but
completely avoided the one bludgeoning them in the face for two hours:
this is a book for females, written by a female, with femalist themes,
gigantically popular among females, yet is more sexist than a rap video.*
The "feminist/antifeminist" either/or trap is a tricky one when critiquing movies or fiction. What is a feminist movie, anyway? If the filmmakers break silence to present women facing realistic difficulties this can be immensely valuable to many women. But for others the film is antifeminist because it punishes the female characters for their actions. Or a film could present a female character as a fully realized character who is interesting because of her own struggles rather than her relevance to men. But such a flawed character is often critiqued as a poor role model. And a perfect role model is often critiqued as a flat stereotype. Or a character could be a kick-ass superhero-- but she'd be thoughtlessly written as a "man with boobs." (This last category is supposedly about positive "kick-ass" role models for girls but I don't see how aspiring to prosecutable violence and impossible superhuman abilities is any more realistic than aspiring to be a princess. Fun, yes. Useful, no.) A film could manage to walk the line perfectly-- but it features only straight white people.
Sure, when people claim some absurd thing is feminist because it's "empowering," you've gotta raise your eyebrows and raise your voice. When feminism is co-opted by the status quo it's galling. Feminism allows people to make choices but not all choices are feminist, it's true. However TLP's view of what is feminist is so narrow that it crosses the line into authoritarian.
*I find it pretty short sighted of TLP to imply that the racism is a minor disingenuous distraction to the real problem of the movie not catering to TLP's idea of feminism. Both issues seem to be on the same level of slap-in-the-face-but-not-the-end-of-the-world, so why would the racism not be a real issue for feminists of color? Or every feminist? It's not like women of color don't care about racism until it can be used to throw wrenches into the works of mainstream feminism.
[!!!!!!!V E R Y M I L D S P O I L E R A L E R T!!!!!!!!]
I saw Hunger Games with my friend who is involved in both Twilight and HG fandom. So when he invited me I guess I was expecting another Twilight. I knew next to nothing about the books except that middle-schoolers liked them a lot and it took place in an imaginary world and somehow involved gladiator-children. I don't like horror movies (mostly), I don't like sci-fi or fantasy genres (unless Harrison Ford, Andre the Giant or Stanley Kubrick is involved) and I'd like to see nothing less than children fighting each other to the death. Basically I wasn't expecting much.
The posters for Hunger Games. I loved how the advertising was so in sync with the film, not working against the idea like that stupid topless Dragon Tattoo poster. The characters are presented just as the kids are presented to the wealthy crowds in the movie: as fighters with a score rather than people. [Image: a collection of 8 similar posters, each with a black background featuring a character's head and shoulders in profile, lit from the side so you only see a sliver of them, like a waning moon. In the black space where their ear would be is the movie logo. Each faces left with the exception of the main character.]
OMG y'all, it was AWESOME. It's a Hollywood movie, to be sure. It's got all that good stuff like action, romance, classic hero plot and production value that makes a movie... easy and dazzling, I guess. But it was unabashedly political too-- and not in a remotely hidden or apologetic way. I left the movie feeling revolted with consumer culture, angry with the rich/poor divide, with a visceral aversion to luxury goods and lifestyles that has lingered, so far, two days after leaving the theater. It is the perfect time for this movie, with Occupy Wall Street, the rising popularity of the derogatory term, "the 1%," the recent spotlight on poverty and labor abuses in the production of luxury Apple products, and rioting from London to Egypt.
An
official event where tributes (kids age 12-18) are chosen to
participate in the Hunger Games. They're being shown a patriotic film
while they wait to see who among them will be sentenced to battle for
their life and probably die. The glamorous hostess is so breathlessly pleased, her
attitude reminded me of the headmistress at my old school whenever we
had groundbreaking type ceremonies honoring a wealthy donor. Only this
woman is surrounded by the collective dread of children yet is completely unaffected, coming off as clueless and cruelly indifferent. The attitudes of the rich regarding the poor were so. well. done.
[Image: view from about 50 feet above and behind the audience showing
the stage flanked by guards and a humongous monitor to the right, with a big
grey deco building as backdrop and a red official flag hanging above
the stage while the audience stands. It looks like Walker Evans' Appalachian poor showed up in their Sunday best to a Nazi rally.]
It addressed so clearly and simply so many things: how marginalized people instinctively understand that when those in charge say citizens, peace, freedom, our country, they are implicitly excluded, and that their exclusion simply does not occur to the dominant class (what people in social justice call being aware of "privilege." It doesn't mean being a spoiled brat, it refers to the advantages one has because of belonging to any dominant class [white, male, straight, rich, able-bodied, etc] even though one never asked for those advantages and one is usually completely unaware that they have those advantages at all. For example, having access to a computer. Or walking through a parking lot without the thought occurring to take precautions against rape. Or Hollywood always catering to your demographic. It's one of the most difficult social justice issues to explain, point out and accept, and Hunger Games did it effortlessly.) Husband remarked that when we left the theater the movie made real life seem more real.
Stanley
Tucci as talk show personality Caesar Flickerman who hosts the
pre-Hunger Games fanfare, sort of a cross between Regis Philbin and
Oprah. Here he is in a fake ad for Smile Away toothpaste. If you think
you're never seen this actor you're wrong. He's been in everything and
is so amazing you don't even know it's him. The film used his
character's TV show (or whatever it is in the future) to explore the way
celebrity and glamor is used to distract, oppress and tell lies. It's a
simulacrum in full sail (only MORE SO!!) and something that makes this movie much more modern and relatable than, say, 1984 or other classic socio-political dystopian sci-fi. [Image: a glamorous slick advertisement
featuring the head and shoulders of a white man with blue pompadour in a
frilly cravat and suit smiling a cheesy bright-white smile in front of a
sparkling blue background that suggests flashbulbs or stage lights.
Beside his head text reads, DAZZLING! DAZZLING! DAZZLING! and underneath
is the photo of a toothbrush with the words Smile Away: Caesar Flickerman. There's more text but it's too small to read.]
*Can't wait to see what other ppl write about re: Hunger Games and racism, sexism, etc.
Edited a week later to add: Other people have, of course, written awesome stuff about Hunger Games. Here's some of what I couldn't wait to read about: s.e. smith's take at TigerBeatDown and Arturo R. García at Racialicious.
I'm a little surprised that these writers who highlighted race and disability--and many other bloggers-- ignored the military implications of the movie. Sacrificing our teenagers to keep the entrenched hierarchies secure and treating war like entertainment we can all rally behind seems an obvious parallel. It made me think back to the Liz Miller piece I wrote and my ultimate conclusion about her Picturesque Evacuation Ploy installation (if you can make it that far into the post). Maybe everyone's just sick of writing about war?
This portrait is for a client so I'm only posting a detail. [Image: realistic black & white charcoal drawing of a dog showing only its eyes and pointed, perky ears].
For those unfamiliar with myotherpostspointingout alternatives to the gallery system and generally griping about the art market, this guy will fill you in. His granddaughter recently found his lecture notes in a suitcase and published them, and Murdock Pemberton's complaints from the 1920s sound depressingly contemporary.
Because of the art market capitalism on display last week in NY, the Occupy Museums people decided to protest the New York Armory Show by inviting all NY artists to show up outside the Armory and exchange artwork with other artists, the Armory visitors and the public. They requested that artists eschew profit in order to trade or give away artworks. They posted a few videos of the embarrassing public nuisance event on their site [note to Trumpet Guy: you are not helping!]. I do enjoy an equitable artistic trade but it's often not worth the social risk, in terms of rejecting an offer of my own piece for a, frankly, far inferior piece of someone else's. Also bartering is still treating art as a physical commodity. Why not simply exhibit the work?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles performs "maintenance art" at a museum, 1973. [Image: black & white photo of a young white woman cleaning a glass case with a cloth.]
GAH.... I really want to be excited about #OccupyMuseums but they need to get their shit together and provide, or at least propose, some real alternatives to the for-profit gallery system. I mean really, they want me-- a broke artist-- to produce art at my own expense (time and money, no matter how you slice it), then show up on a cold street-corner and hawk it to strangers who don't appear to want it anyway? I can do basically the same thing at a gallery, plus indoor heating and personal safety.
I think the thing that really irks me about the #OccupyMuseums people is that they don't pay their respects to the decades of art activists, cooperative galleries, critics, scholars and communities that have already been exploring this issue, the institutional critiques of feminist performance artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles or curatorial artists such as Fred Wilson (Mining the Museum, 1992). No acknowledgement or building upon what has already been tried and suggested in terms of critiquing the gallery system. No only that but no critical, art historical recognition of art movements such as conceptual art that re-interpreted art as something other than a physical object to be traded or sold, or media such as video and computer-based or web-based art that are poised to operate completely outside the market of physical art objects. In fact the contemporary art world is bursting with artists, cooperatives, organizations and even gangs seeking to subvert, critique, re-invent, or obliterate the world of galleries, museums and the art market.
Detail of Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum (1992), showing "Metalwork: 1723--1880." [Image: photograph of a display of an ornate silver tea service with a pair of iron slave handcuffs.]
So after many of the greatest talents of the contemporary art world have devoted entire careers to the issue, why is #OccupyMuseums trying to reinvent the wheel? Because they are ignoring and dismissing the work already done, or because they never bothered to look into it in the first place before swooping in to rescue us all? Additionally, as Murdock Pemberton pointed out a century ago, artists tend to act individually while bristling at collective action, which makes the Occupy movement a particularly bad fit for the role of art intervention.
I would love to see #OccupyMuseums join with artists, connect the financial critiques of OWS with institutional critique, use their networks to educate and excite ordinary people and protesters about what artists are already doing today in this realm.
I received my invitation to the 2012 Re-Nude show benefiting Planned Parenthood, which will be Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm -10:30pm at REDUX. I wrote about it last year here, here and here, and I can't wait!
[Image: flier for Re/Nude event. Reads, "Re/Nude: Celebrate the Body / Support Charleston Planned Parenthood." To the right and underneath the text are the silhouettes of a thin woman with longer hair showing outlines of her head, upper arms, hips and calves, in purple/pink. Resting in front of her shins is a reclining thin male silhouette showing outlines of his feet and legs, torso, arms and head, in coral pink/orange.]
Around the time I received my invite I read this post by Twisty Faster. To sum up, a young Egyptian woman named Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude photos of herself on her blog as a big old Fuck You to the Salafis, who are a strict fundamentalist Islamic party that seems to have come out on top following the Arab Spring. Her actions, and the considerable risk she's taking, have sparked attention and controversy a few months ago in Egypt, the Western media and feminist blogs internationally. To support Elmahdy a group of Canadian feminists assembled a nude calendar featuring a "nude revolutionary" each month with the proceeds benefiting something-or-other related to Elmahdy's cause.
Twisty compares and contrasts the contexts of Egyptian and Canadian female nudity and questions the efficacy of a feminist nude calendar within the Patriarchy. To those unfamiliar with Twisty's blog she advocates a hard-line radical feminist rejection of Patriarchy-- that is, the system of dominance, objectification and hierarchy embedded in every element of our global society: misogyny, racism, classism, and so on. (Spoiler: she finds the Canadian nude revolutionaries ineffective at challenging Patriarchy).
So when I go see the artistic representations of nudity at Re-Nude this March they will be on display in the context of the Patriarchy. I will be viewing them as a feminist and an individual person but I will also be taking into account the context of the Patriarchy. And here is where I'm torn.
Being realistic about the limitations of empowerment through nudity in a Patriarchy, refusing to gloss over capitulation to the Patriarchy, refusing to pretend a nude portrayal of a woman exists outside our tradition of oppression, pornification and objectification, is a feminist act. However valuing my own experience and POV as a woman, learning to think outside the confines of Patriarchy, and really listening to other women is also profoundly feminist. In the context of nude art created with at least some input from women and shown in a gallery for the general public, I am stuck. Ambivalent.
