Rogueish
I Am The Blob: On looking at the TED website →
10/12/12
The main thing that occurs to me just now upon watching this lecture, is how good Americans are at talking…. There seems to be something particularly American about it, something related to the comfort that Americans feel with oral communication.
Was reminded of this when watching Girls but forgot to post it. I’ll be interested to see responses when it starts showing in the UK later this month, because one of the things I think makes the show hard to get into, as a non-American, is how much time the characters spend talking, that is, articulating their feelings and desires into what is or appears to be some kind of coherent narrative. However, the interesting thing that Girls really emphasizes is that this facility with oral communication is not the same thing as comfort, indeed, in Girls talking about interiority often seems to be a nervous way of avoiding having to actually experience it.
06/26/12
Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer’s task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.
— Elfriede Jelinek, quoted in Žižek, Living in the End Times
I almost stopped watching Girls after the pilot, because all the characters, with the possible exception of Hannah, seemed like such flat clichés. Later episodes alter this, but in an interesting way: the characters become more complex without negating the way in which they are clichés. Jessa, for instance, really is a rather unoriginal and pretentious faux-bohemian cliché, but we discover that she’s rather (tragically?) aware of this, but sees no better option to express her own self-awareness than channeling it through this clichéd role. This isn’t quite the same as the flatness Jelinek is talking about, but there is a similarity in that it avoids the idea of psychological depth as redemptive, the idea that real people are “more complex” than clichés. In Girls, people are exactly as complex as these clichés turn out to be.
Let girls wear Primark's padded bikinis | Laurie Penny | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk→
04/16/10
Laurie Penny argues that the ginned-up concern about the supposed “sexualization” of young girls clothing is not only misguided (as I’ve thought for some time), but actively harmful:
The notion of “sexualisation” deserves serious critical unpacking. The term envisions girl children as blank erotic slates upon which sexuality can only ever be violently imposed. This narrow vision of sexuality leaves no room for young girls to explore authentic desire at their own pace, insisting instead that girls need to be protectedfrom erotic influence….
Far from protecting young girls, the “anti-sexualisation” agenda actually serves a culture that shames girls if they have sexual feelings of their own while fetishising them as objects of erotic capital.
