The Apatovian as Multi-dudes: A Response to Natalia’s Response

I was going to respond to Natalia’s “Response to Aaron Bady” in the comment box at her blog, but then — as inevitably happens when one writes a ridiculously large number of words — I started to feel proprietary about my text, and so I’m going to post it here, with the caveat that it will remain an open letter, and you should probably read her post before you read mine. At a certain point in the writing, too, it became a bit more self-absorbed than it began as — and if I’ve misrepresented your argument or missed the point of it, Natalia, please let me know — but I found that Natalia’s personalization of the issue (making it a response not to my writing but to me) usefully clarified the extent to which this writing that I do on this blog is, fairly basically, an exploration of me, me, me. And that leads, in turn, to my argument: self-absorption in the pursuit of bloggery is no vice.

Natalia,
I’m glad you wrote this at some length, because it really is helpful for me; many of your comments have been provocative but cryptically brief, and if I’ve misrepresented your claims, it’s because it often has been very difficult to understand what they were. So although this response will, unsurprisingly, take issue with the thrust of your comment, let me preface that by emphasizing that I don’t so much mean to *reject* what you’ve said as think it through, exactly by challenging it. At the very least, I’m concerned that you may be right that a certain kind of critical detachment is enabled (and mis-named) by a kind of privilege which is thereby un-thought, and whether or not we are going to ultimately agree on what that means, it‘s something I hadn‘t been thinking about, but which I now am. So thank you.

Now, on to being disagreeable. Several points need to be made. One is the argument that I am implicitly gesturing towards what is important and that, in selecting what is important, I tend to give short shrift to the misogyny of those texts (and to prioritize the male perspective and predicament). This seems like a fair characterization, actually. But I would say this: because the choice to write about anything is going to be an implicit statement of that thing’s importance, it is difficult to be interested in something without seeming to make the claim of priority for it. And in this case, I’m not making that claim; when you glossed what I had written as “Patriarchy hurts women. But that’s not the point. The point is, it hurts men” you were emphasizing what was, at most, inadvertently implicit in my discourse at the expense of ignoring everything that was actually, explicitly, stated.

To be clear — as I seem to symptomatically keep saying over and over again — these films are, in a few very important ways, very basically misogynist and I don’t mean to downplay that fact. But I think I have a good rationale for bracketing that off, at least temporarily: as with the fact that Jefferson owned slaves, the importance of the fact can sometimes mislead us into thinking that simply pointing it out accomplishes more than it does. I call this Sociological Images syndrome, the tendency to confuse pointing out a text as symptomatic of a naturalized systemic projection of power with neutralizing its power as such. Doing so can have real value, I agree — though I believe we’ve discussed this point before — but while I love Sociological Images (and I think I discovered that blog via you), they have a real tendency to identify and emphasize the misogyny of the images they dig up at the expense of reductively simplifying the constitutive complexity of those artifacts. Of course, they often have good reason for doing so; as a clearinghouse for found images and as a pedagogical resource, their commentary, it seems to me, is largely intended to provoke and to serve as a suggestion for how a discussion could begin. Saying “this image is misogynistic” is, in that context, a prelude to a much richer and deeper discussion that they, there, have the space or intention of having.

I, however, am after something slightly different. First of all, the problem with pointing out the misogyny of the Apatow movies is that it’s so obvious as to make pointing it out not particularly an interesting thing to do: it might be, on a certain level, the most important thing about those movies, it is also true that the film’s themselves recognize their own misogyny, trope on it, and (in the postmodern move par-excellence) do so as a means of re-establishing it as an object of nostalgic attachment, rendered safe for consumption by the very fact that they’ve ironically distanced themselves from it.

This wasn’t exactly the thrust of your complaint, and I understand that. But my point is that because this claim of “importance” is always an implicit one, produced less by anything I’ve said — I think — than from the underlying presumption that a writer chooses to write about the thing that is the most important, holding me to that standard somewhat unfairly puts words in my mouth. And so, it’s worth establishing that when I emphasize, for example, the consequences the “man-cave” has on men over the consequences it has on women, I’m doing so not because I actually think the former is more important, but simply because, I think, the former strategy would constitute the texts as rich and interesting, while the latter constitutes it as very simple, if that; Forgetting Sarah Marshall, after all, has almost nothing to say about the consequences of this on women, which is precisely why I’m not triyng to “applaud male directors for making visible contradictions that feminists — and not just academic feminists — articulated, raised consciousness about, and fought to ameliorate thirty years ago.” Far from it; I am interested in the consequences of the man-cave on men because that is what those movies are about, because they are doing irreconcilably different things than the writers you are talking about. If one is interested in the consequences of the man-cave on women, then one should read the feminist criticism that addresses itself to that question (any suggestions?).  But as one discovers if one sets out to write about female characters in Pixar movies, for instance, there just isn’t anything there; even the women who *do* exist are so purely a function of male fantasy that hating them isn’t even something the movies have that much invested in doing (which is to say, in fact, that their misogyny tends to be blind rather than violent, a distinction I think is at least interesting, but which is still located in the men themselves).

But this leads me to my second point, the claim for objectivity. Again, I take your point that the staging a choice of subjects as an intervention makes it seem as if I’m claiming a kind of privileged critical status and asserting a kind of objective claim about the materials I’m writing about. But while I can accept this as an unintended consequence of the rhetoric I‘m using — and I can thank you for making me aware of it — “objectivity” is the last thing I would actually consciously claim for myself. To be as blunt as possible, this is a blog, and while I have a great deal of respect for the medium (obviously), it isn’t because I want it to be like other forms of writing, but because I think the ostentatiously and unavoidably situated nature of its rhetorical subject positioning opens up a variety of powerful rhetorical options. No blog post is ever finished — and this is only partially a function of the comment box — while the “online diary” ethos of the form also completely permeates it, however subtly, reminding us, always, that these are not disembodied words floating through the ether, but are, rather, the voice of a speaker imbricated in space, time, and subjectivity. In this sense, while I can understand why I would be read as claiming objectivity, I certainly don’t mean to, nor do I think I should be.

Parenthetically, of course, this is an excellent illustration of how privilege works: one doesn’t have to actually claim it to enjoy the benefits of it. But, for me, this is then a double bind; if even the fact that I vigorously foreground the first person pronoun in my writing can’t dispel the claim for objectivity, then what am I to do? In this sense, I’m not rejecting your argument, so much as looking at it as a useful provocation without, I think, having a clear solution except for what you (quite properly I think) disclaimed the intention of doing, the prescriptive demand that I write in a certain way. But this is exactly the problem: because white male privilege isn’t a function of what one does, it is a mistake to think that what a white male like me does or does not do has any impact on the kinds of privilege a WM like me is able to enjoy. This, I think, is why a project like this one (thanks Phoenix Complex) is interesting but somewhat misguided: while it is certainly true that being “racially conscious” is something that white people have the option of doing without sacrificing their ability to benefit from the systemic structures of racial inequality that exist, their choice to do so also has no practical effect on those systemic structures, nor does attacking the hypocrisy of the gesture.

However, this is still a parenthetical, and I want to talk about the double indemnity post to show why. Though it was written quite a long time ago in blog time — frankly, I blushingly regard it as blog-juvenilia — I do see what you mean with respect to it, though I think your characterization of my “tendencies” are far more applicable to that post than to the stuff I’m writing now. But still, to call it a “double indemnity post” is to misrepresent it, since the closest thing to a thesis in the whole piece would be this one:

“I guess my point in all this is that there seems to be a real continuity in the ways I’ve been trained to respond to the sexual ignorance of hicks, the ways I’ve learned to laugh at people’s own ignorance of what they themselves are doing as a way of illustrating that I, as urbane sophisticate, do understand what they’re doing.”

Not only is that not at all a far-reaching claim — in terms of either objectivity or importance — it also seems to me to be fundamentally circumscribed by the subjective terms in which it’s couched, and should be regarded as such. Or at least that’s what I aspire towards, and while I can accept the critique that I don’t always stick to it as a guiding principle (and can benefit from that perspective on my work), I’m still going to claim that it’s the guiding ethos of my writing, and should be. It’s why I blog. I have a dissertation, after all, and that’s where I explicitly pretend to be objective and important, yet the advantage of the blog-form, both its attraction and its limitation, is that it doesn’t do this at all, that it can be a solipsistic playground, a work-bench, and a scratchpad, and that one is freed from the burden of being more than that. Play, of course, is a deeply important thing, but isn’t the same thing, for example, as work.

In this sense, let me say what I have been trying to do: I’ve been trying to think about why I, Aaron Bady, am so interested in these Apatow movies, and I do so with a very fundamental focus on my own subjective desires. I confess, if confession is necessary, that I find these movies compelling in ways that sometimes surprise me; they are comedies, of course, but laughter is truth, on a level that I lack the ability to articulate except by approaching them slant, as I have been. Which is not to say that I am learning from them how to behave, but something quite different: they formalize thoughts, emotions, desires, and fears that I recognize as already existing in myself, and thereby allow me the detachment to think about them. This makes them an interesting site for interrogation, I think, but only as long as it is recognized that the subject, from beginning to end, is me. And while that’s certainly a limitation, I don’t think it’s a problem; as one of the first great bloggers puts it, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

At this point, too, I have more questions than answers about this genre which I’ve been calling the Apatovian, which is exactly why I’ve been blogging about them: they are comedies of masculinity in a style which is, I think, quite significantly different from any other cinematic tradition I can think of (as well as being quite contemporary), and while I don’t yet know how or why in any deeply theorized sense, I feel there is something there that is worth teasing out. In this sense, approaching each one separately is part of a larger project, but a project which is still quite exploratory, still defined far less by a thesis (which I might objectively claim) than by a kind of subjective desire, an urge to understandwhy I find them compelling. And this is, in fact, the opposite of a claim for their objective importance: it is an interrogation of my subjective investment which begins from the premise that my perspective is not universal.

To put this another way, the critical agenda with which I approach these movies is less political than personal: I wept while watching one of them — not the one you’ll think though — and I want to understand why, what it is about these ostensibly silly movies that affects me as deep as that. And while this perspective is not completely divorced from politics — since all life is political — the difficulty, then, is that when I — a man — write subjectively about the things that concern me, as a man (among other things), that necessarily male subjectivity becomes almost automatically a claim for the objectivity, importance, even priority of that perspective. I’m not accusing you or anyone else of doing this, you understand; again, this is what privilege is and I can concede that it happens (and can thank you for pointing it out to me) but that’s not the same thing as showing there to be a clear solution to it (or even of showing that blindness to be the problem itself). After all, “white male” is a big part of the interpellated subjectivity I live through, and I’d be lying if I pretended it wasn’t: to say that being male is a difficult and vexed thing is not to say it’s more or less difficult than being a woman or being an anything, but it is true, and since it’s the position I occupy, it’s going to define the things I find compelling on a very basic level.

There is much leeway in thinking through that position of course; the whole point is that what “male” represents is much more amorphous that we often imagine it to be, and I would speculate that part of the power and appeal of the Apatovian is that they seem to understand this, at least a little, or at least to inadvertently render it visible. But while I can critically regard the fact of my being a male, I cannot transcend it, nor do I particularly think it’s something I should try to do: it is precisely the claim to have transcended the subjective, in fact, that allows “white male” to stand in for universal in all sorts of silently oppressive ways. Which is, by the way, is why I call this blog “zunguzungu”: my goal is not to pretend that I’m not an mzungu (or to struggle to not be one), but to think about what kinds of mzungu it’s possible to be.

With regard to these movies, I’m specifically interested in thinking about how to be a better male, which is something I think the Apatow movies are, in some ways, quite interestingly innovative about trying to do, and sometimes quite disappointingly not. But this isn’t a thing one does by trying to reject one’s socially determined subject position; instead, it’s a thing one does by acknowledging the complexity, contradictions, and textured nuance of that subject position, the way there are a multitude of different ways to be male (if Walt Whitman were Judd Apatow, he would be large and contain multi-dudes) but also the ways these differences get articulated in contradiction, uncertainty, and awkwardness.

One of the glaring absences in the Apatow movies, of course, is empathy for women. They will, as I argued with reference to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, occasionally recognize that glaring lack, but they almost never transcend it (I’m still unsure whether Freaks and Geeks does that, as SEK suggests). And you can and should criticize them for this, as I have: these movies would be so much more interesting if they could figure out a way to make hetero-sociality a part of their narrative structure; observe, for example, how a director as limited as Kevin Smith almost inadvertently made Chasing Amy an interesting movie simply by introducing the idea of a male-female relationship that doesn’t ultimately reduce to heterosexuality. I say “almost” because he could only do so by making it as a failed heterosexual romance, but still, the fact that it ends with the two main characters emotionally linked without being romantically linked is huge, and still incredibly rare. If the Apatow movies could do something like that, they would be much much better movies, and it‘s disappointing that they seem to be moving in the opposite direction from that.

Empathy, however, isn’t everything. In fact, while empathy is a deeply important thing, it also has its limitations and this is, I think, one of the many reasons why the brouhaha about Sotomayor’s “empathy” misses the point. After all, the point of diversity on the court isn’t that a Latina justice will be, because of the benefit of subalterneity or something, more wise, but that she will be differently wise, and that a court filled with different perspectives will almost definitionally be better than one defined by a singular type, any type. This was her original point, in fact, and the reason why the right and the media had to decontextualize that statement to make it say something else: while Sotomayor probably will be more “empathic” in an important sense, and given the choice between nine Latina judges and nine Wasps, I would choose the former, I don’t really want either of those homogeneities. It would be a dangerous trap to select for a particular ideal type — any type — and would miss the more important argument for diversity on the Supreme Court: we need a diversity of perspectives on the court precisely because empathy has its limitations, and we are all hemmed in by the limitations of our subjectivites; every justice needs to strive to overcome their subjective position and see from as many perspectives as possible, but it’s the fact (I think) that we can only ever be partially successful in doing so that makes it necessary to have other perspectives actually there, both to point out when we’ve fallen short and to take the lead when our own subjectivity prevents us from doing what is necessary.

To return to the substance of your response, then, my point is that is that when you write that my reading “doesn’t go very far, because, as you have readily pointed out, these internal dynamics of an oppressive system are not explored in a way that can even countenance, much less suggest a path toward, a genuine refusal of that system,” I can more or less agree with your analysis without agreeing with the implied imperative you’ve slotted me into. There are several reasons for that; one of them is a fairly basic reluctance to think that it is the job of “theorists” to imagine new forms of practice that we can thereby follow. I don’t think it works that way, and I think there’s a kind of implicit logo centric fallacy in imagining that the word always precedes the deed; in point of fact, I think much more often it’s the reverse, that theories are a practical function of practice.

But the more important reason is simpler: the Apatow movies lack empathy with women, but I continue to be interested in them because, at their best, they manage to say something interesting about the extent to which the subject position of “male” is formed precisely by this very lack of empathy — if not as a defining trait, then as a problem to be struggled with — and does so in ways which allow us to think about the kinds of limitations that people have in recognizing and dealing with those aporias. The most powerful moment in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, for example, is not only Sarah Marshall’s rebuke of Jason Segal’s callow callousness, but the contrast between her articulation and his inarticulate inability to respond. That worldessness speaks volumes, both about why he cannot answer (why no response to what she said is possible for him, at least then) and how that silence comes to be part of his path towards recovery. But the important thing is not that it seeks to step outside the social structures and life-worlds that constitute us (as a feminist theorist might do); it simply narrativizes them, subjectivizes them, particularizes them, allowing us to view them, objectively, as subjectivities.

The premise of the Knocked Up post was that the kind of desire which the man-cave represents is a false choice, and although nothing in my effort to understand what makes that desire work necessarily suggests a desire to step outside of it, neither does it suggest a desire to occupy it (in fact, I pretty explicitly stated the opposite). But it isn’t because I don’t want an alternative to this oppressive system that my intervention wasn‘t geared towards finding one; the fact that an alternative would be a good thing doesn’t make it the *only* good thing. More pertinently, I don’t have an alternative: it’s easy to say that we want something that isn’t patriarchy, but actually creating it is the real trick, right? By comparison, my goal is awfully more humble. I just want to understand how that movie works, and why I find it compelling. So to note that my reading “doesn’t go very far, because [I don’t] suggest a path toward a genuine refusal of that system,” is true without being, I think, particularly damning: if you expected me to solve misogyny, to be blunt, you’ve been reading the wrong blog (here at zunguzungu, after all, we only solve the problems of capitalism, imperialism, and racism).

But it does make me think, and I don‘t want to make my disinclination to be convinced by your argument seem like a disinclination to continue to hear it and be provoked by it. The opposite, in fact; it’s precisely because my agenda in these posts has been solipsistic self-absorption in what it means and could mean to be a dude that I’m most in need of the provocation, from whatever quarter, to think outside that framework (or rather, to situate that framework within a larger one). This may be why I have a tendency to seem like I‘m doing one thing when I’m really not, but I emphasize my own perspective precisely because I‘m aware of (and interested in) its limitations. Which is, in fact, quite Apatovian: after all, while the Apatow movies might be flawed in their gender politics, they are also very basically structured by their need to respond to the problem and the opportunity that feminism poses for dudes. Which is simply to say, whether or not the answers they give are any good, they register by their engagement with the problem that women pose for men (or the ways that fantasies of “women” prevent men from ceasing to be boys and how that problem relates to lived experience with women) the fact that this is a question that needs to be answered, and is answered, in lots of different ways, and they model for us many of the ways in which living human beings answer them. I hope my answers are better, of course, but I find them powerful because I recognize most of those characters (for better or for worse) as manifestations of my own inner multi-dudes. And this also might be a way to address J.’s question about why they’re comedies: maybe I laugh because I register the fact that the questions they ask and the problems they raise have not been satisfactorily answered or solved, by them or by me.

Africa Whirled

Winslow, Biryanilady, this isn’t an attempt at a serious list, but when I set myself the task of naming one great album by my ten favorite African musicians that aren’t named Franco, Fela, Mapfumo, Oumou, Mtukudzi, Youssou, or Toumani, this is what I came up with. I did it that way because you can’t go wrong with that first list; if you haven’t heard the Mande Variations, or Immigres, or Egypt, or Ndega Zvangu, get thee to a cd store! And if you have, then you can move on to the next level:

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba — Segu Blue
Gigi — Gigi
King Sunny Ade — Juju Music
Mayra Andrade — Navega
Number One de Dakar — Touba Auto K7
Sam Mwangwana — Galo Negro
Gangbe Brass Band — Whendo
Vusi Mahlasela — Guiding Star
Ba Cissoko — Electric Griot Land
D’Gary — Horombe

“bah-du-du-dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah DUH ”

I guess I never really got Michael Jackson, and that’s part of what makes me sad. When he was in his glory period — judging from the parts of his oeuvre that others seem to have been most affected by — I was too young, and then later I was just not really very much into that kind of music. Growing up, I first took my cues from my dad’s Beatles records, which expanded to 60’s guitar rock, then, later, to Bela Fleck and the neo-bluegrass I found through him. These days, I hardly listen to anything that isn’t African, though Glenn Gould’s 1981 Goldberg Variations continues to convince me (like Dante) to put aside my secular apostasy every time it has me in its clutches.

Yesterday, I flew across the country on a Virgin Air flight. It was a long flight, and when I found myself, in the wee hours of the morning, walking the long dark existential road that separates my home and resting place from El Cerrito plaza, I found myself thinking about music. A long flight will do that to you. In fact, just to emphasize that there ain’t no banality like an inflight banality, I saw a thunderstorm from my window. Thoreau spent a lifetime trying to find words for the spectacle of such things, and it’s not my thing; I will only say that watching that play of light and darkness — so alien, so mute, so vast — was the sort of thing they invented the word “sublime” to make a virtue out of failing to capture. I was awed.

Anyway, I had been watching you tube videos of Jackson in the airport, but when I got down to the business of making a playlist to listen to during the flight — Virgin provides in-flight music to listen to through your headphones — I didn’t listen to any of his music. I’m sure they had some, but I couldn’t even tell you for certainty that they did; it didn’t even occur to me to check. Instead, I listened to Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Frank Zappa, Norah Jones, Dave Matthews, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Sarah McLaughlin, Beatles covers, Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin. “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations” were a revelation, again, as was the live version they had of “Thunder Road.” I forgot how moving McLaughlin’s “Angel” is; Al Green’s voice makes me want to sing like that and Arcade Fire makes me want to only listen to that song in the dark with headphones, or while watching a thunderstorm. “Bodysnatchers” somehow wasn’t what I remembered it being, though I found Amnesiac more compelling than the last time I heard it. And somehow “Peaches en Regalia” didn’t do it for me last night — I think I was needing faith that evening, and Zappa’s faith is buried in the kind of angry cynicism that only a kazoo can properly capture — but I bet that “Filthy Habits” or “Re-gyptian Strut” from the Lather album would have struck the right tone, had they been available. Whats Going On just plain wrecked me, and may I just say, early Aretha Franklin, goodness. My goodness.

I had a book on the plane, but I didn’t read it much; listening over headphones to that music, that heavenly, heavenly music, transported me. It transformed those songs — some of which I own — into something they hadn’t been before, or rather, it allowed them to transform me. I closed my eyes and I was gone.

When Johnny Cash died, I and my compadres found ourselves at the Friendship Heights orders, where we purchased Folsom Prison Blues and we later drank shots while listening to it. I wonder why we did that. Not that it wasn’t appropriate to do so, but we had to go to Friendship Heights because, between the four of us, we didn’t own any Johnny Cash but the American IV cd. And yet his passing struck us, collectively, in ways his life apparently hadn’t; I can’t really explain, but ever since then, he’s meant something to me that he clearly hadn’t meant before he died. Even the American IV cd gets its real power from the fact of encroaching mortality; songs like “Hurt” or “The Man Comes Around” are the real heart of that album, enjoyable as “Danny Boy” or that “damn your eyes” tune. might be. But it took his death for Johnny Cash to suddenly mean something to me in ways I can’t articulate. But he does.

While I’m moved by Michael Jackon’s passing, it isn’t really as a performer, it isn‘t the spectacle of “Thriller” that I suddenly find myself clutching. I can’t lose that, because I never had it. And part of it has nothing to do with his music at all. Knowing that this human being is dead, this tremendously flawed, damaged, and agonized human being who was held up to a bizarrely warped and warping magnifying glass and standard for the entirety of his life, I find myself moved, less by the performer than by the prison that performer trapped himself in. It’s hard not to wonder, in fact, whether it was simply his time. If it was hard to imagine him being fifty years old, it was hard to imagine him still alive at all; just looking at him, and knowing what he once was, makes me want to look away. I wonder what he saw when he looked at himself. And I hope without hope that he’ll find some comfort, wherever he is.

But that’s a small part of it. Because I never got him, in the way other music gets me, part of it is simply that I feel that loss all the more now that it suddenly seems irrevocable. I can see from watching youtube, for example, that Michael Jackson was something unique as a dancer, and as a performer, and I can respect it, but it doesn’t grab onto me, it can’t  — as the very faintness of my praise indicates — however much I’ve always wished it would. I didn’t see MTV until I was in college, so the only Michael Jackson video that brings with it an associational memory is that weird sci-fi video he did with Janet and that memory isn‘t all that good. And maybe it’s simply because the idea of a musician as performer, as a spectacle of sound and movement, is something that I didn’t grow up understanding, and came to so late, and still find interestingly foreign. Listening to music with my eyes closed is how it transports me; I saw a Phish performance on the inflight tv, but I turned the contrast down until the screen was dark so I could simply listen to the music, and I closed my eyes. They looked so white standing there, so awkwardly conscious of their bodies and yet so unwilling or uninterested in emoting through them, in exactly the way you can see Michael Jackson thrived.

I’m a very white person too, you know, and I never learned to dance until college, was never willing to emote through my body until I heard and heard Parliament Funkadelic and that certain moment in R&B that just happened to happen in the late nineties when I was ready for it. But it occurs to me now that one of the songs that burst onto my consciousness then, one of those songs that meant that to me, not because I heard it in headphones but because I only heard it through my body at parties, was the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” And especially that piano riff, that preposterously extended “bah-du-du-dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah DUH ” that somehow demands to be danced to. I remember dancing to it in college, and since, and I will again.

“Bearings in a Whirlwind,” and wearing green blindfolds

I started reading Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge when watching coverage of non-violent marches in Iran suddenly made me want to pull it off the shelf (I read the first two volumes and ran out of steam some time ago). This section of a letter from Stanley Levison to Martin Luther King struck me as making an apropos point:

“…Non-violent direct action was proven by Selma to have even greater power than anyone had realized…We would be at fault if we believed our own propaganda that Selma was a terrible expression of brutality and terrorism. Considerable restraint was exercised by the authorities. The degree of violence was shocking and startling, but not extensive.”

Instead, Levison argued that (as Taylor Branch paraphrases):

“the violence of Birmingham–let alone the spectacle lynchings of recent decades–was much worse, and that the power of Selma rose from the cumulative inspiration of the method itself. Nonviolence evoked courage. When sustained and crafted, it built political engagement almost inexorably. ‘Someone asked a Negro if he thought they would win,’ Levison informed King, ‘and he responded, “We won when we started.” This is profound.’ (At Canaan’s Edge, “Bearings in a Whirlwind,” p200-1)

It’s worth remembering, here and elsewhere, what a protest march is and isn’t; Levison’s point cuts in several different ways, but one of them is that the pictures of protesters being beaten — and the martyr narrative in a general sense — isn’t what it’s about, nor the spectacle of riots and crackdowns as examples of violence. Which is not to preclude optimism about what is happening in the streets. We should, I think, be very skeptical about the leaders who are trying to ride the passions of the citizens in the streets; after all, as Lila Ghobady has pointed out, (h/t)being the candidate who isn’t named Ahmadinejad doesn’t necessarily make Mousavi a champion of democracy:

“Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran in the 1980s when more than ten thousand political prisoners were executed after three-minute sham trials. He has been a part of the Iranian dictatorship system for the past 30 years. If he had not been, he would not be allowed to be a candidate in the first place. In fact in a free democratic state someone like Mousavi should have gone on trial before becoming a presidential candidate for his crimes against thousands of freedom-loving political prisoners who were killed during the time he was Iran’s Prime Minister.”

But that’s not really what’s important, is it?  The difference between the last election in Iran — widespread voter apathy and boycotts — and those green hands in the streets now is pretty striking, and has to be a lot more important than the political leaders themselves. Iran has always had an incredibly vibrant civil society but a huge part of the story of the Iranian revolution was the tragedy of how a single faction within it took control of what had begun as an unruly heterogeneity of many different people with many different reasons for wanting the Shah gone. And seeing that unruly heterogeneity exert itself now is exciting precisely because it gives us occasion to hope that something strange and unpredictable and even wonderful might be happening as people forget, for a while, that politics is hopeless, and might even give us license to think that maybe Levison was right and that when people gather themselves in non-violent movement, they “inexorably” transform the relationship between government and the people. But that, of course, has little or nothing to do with Mousavi or the election, or anything we here in America or Twitterland can really know or think. And it’s good that it does. It’s happening there.

But if the question of what America is supposed to do is still unavoidable, a comparison Mahmood Mamdani made between the Save Darfur movement and the anti-war movement in the 60’s and 70’s is worth putting on the table. For him, the most important point to remember is that almost all American mobilization on the issue of the Darfur genocide — the Save Darfur group in particular — has been focused on military intervention, on trying — to put it most bluntly — to start a war for peace. And he not only deplores it as a tactic, but he notes the striking difference between Save Darfur’s disinclination to actually know anything about Darfur and that leitmotif of the anti-war movement, the “teach-in” (another idea inherited, by the way, from the civil rights movment (SNCC, I think), who first used the term).

“For the antiwar movement back then, the world was a classroom,” he remembers. “The signature activity was the teach-in. The movement’s entire endeavor was to bring its student constituency face to face with scholars, and to learn about Vietnam: its people, history, politics, about the history of colonialism and de-colonization.”

The Darfur movement is very different: “If you look at Save Darfur, there is no interest in education, no interest in scholars. For them, the world is an advertising medium. They are after showbiz personalities, and name recognition. The leaders are like Pied Pipers, trying to get the children to follow them.”

If all you want to do is start a war, then you don’t need to know much; in fact, the less you know the better, which is to say, you want to know the right kind of non-information. And while the “Teach-in” was about knowledge, it was, after all, also about commitment not merely to knowing, but to the humble realization that you needed to learn more (the very opposite of the worst Save Darfur types, who so often reduce the people of Darfur to props). In that vein, in fact, I vaguely fear the kind of information (and illusion of information) that’s being passed around on twitter; nothing can be more perniciously misleading than welding the appearance of authenticity to the context-less brevity of a text message and soldiering it all together with a media narrative about technology bringing the revolution (especially when there are so many neocons chomping at the bit to make the imbroglio in the streets into an American cassus belli). Or maybe I’m just grumpy about the 140 character limit on twitter (and I definitely am grumpy about that). But what makes me hopeful — and sort of reverently awes me — is the prospect of things we don’t know anything about being the things that make all the difference, the movements in the streets and the unspoken decisions made by humans in the presence of other human beings.

In that vein, I take Levison’s faith in the “inexorable” power of non-violence to bring about change less as signaling some magical power intrinsic to the practice (as if not committing violence were an incantation) or even as a faith in God or progress than as simply an acknowledgment of the presence and priority of immanent forces, subjectless and inarticulate, in the movement itself in the fact of people throwing off apathy, something we can neither understand, nor control. And that it’s sometimes the better thing to humbly recognize that we can’t and not to try, especially when we are not the people in  question.

Six Months and something or other

Apatovian Ethics: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Especially since watching The Hangover, I’ve been mulling over what I wrote about masculine responsibility in my post on Billy Bragg. Plus, when Natalia pushed me on that comment thread to articulate why the idea of the man-cave is attractive, I started wondering whether the same kind of fear that makes The Hangover such a nightmarish dreamscape — the fear that pleasure has consequences and that sex necessarily implies being imprisoned by domesticity — isn’t exactly why so many Apatow movies seem caught between a rock and a hard place when they try to think about what it means to be a man.

The problem, I think, is that if you aren’t careful, responsibility can look a lot like patriarchy, in its bad sense. After all, in the conservative head-space, “taking responsibility for your actions” can actually mean “be a father,” and — depending on what that “fatherhood” implies — one can seem to quite logically deduce an ethical responsibility to follow a very basically reactionary agenda.

I’m thinking specifically of Knocked Up, the very least good of the Apatow movies, because it not only completely ignores the question of the mother’s choice (she decides, implausibly, to have the baby more or less to irritate her mother, thereby rendering the entire idea of choice a dead  letter), but it also does this in order to make the narrative about Seth Rogen’s growth to maturity: he becomes an adult by learning to take responsibility, and the way he takes responsibility is — surprise, surprise — by dominating his mother in law and taking possession of his baby mama. Which is to say, the movie offers us two options: be an alpha male or be a child.

In reality, these aren’t the only two options, but then, that’s exactly the point, isn’t it. A text like Knocked Up doesn’t simply model a particular kind of behavior for us to emulate, but rather does something even more pernicious, defining the terms and categories through which we determine what kind of options are available to us and then foreclosing any alternatives by refusing to imagine them. It maps out what David Scott calls a “problem-space,” a  mental geography in which we are free to choice and act, but by which we are constrained in what choices are available to us. To put it another way, this kind of imaginative text doesn’t so much demand that we give a certain answer to a given problem, but rather, does the reverse: it defines the problem in ways that limit the “thinkable” to a particular set or type of answer.

The point of my post on Billy Bragg was that, I think, he was working to articulate a different kind of problem-space than is offered in Knocked Up: he wants to think through a way for males to take responsibility for their actions — which is only to say behave in an ethical manner – without being impelled to do so by dominating women. But the reason he does this is not because such a thing is fundamentally unimaginable — indeed, I would wager that most men actually do imagine it quite successfully — but because the false choice of Knocked Up is so powerfully and pervasively suggested in dominant culture as the only options, boy or brute.

There’s was something sneaky in that claim, and I want to admit it forthrightly: I’ve managed to say both that “dominant” culture powerfully influences us, and also that it doesn’t. But I think that’s true; which is to say, rather, that as powerful as a “dominant” culture can be, hegemony is a famously leaky thing and texts like Knocked Up are interesting not because they control our minds and tell us what to think but because they register the underlying conflicts through which ideology is articulated, showing us both the leaks and the attempts to shore them up the compose popular discourse.

For example, a brief tangent. I‘m struck by the moment in Say Anything where what’s her name tells what’s his name something along the lines of “Don’t be a guy. The world is full of guys. Be a man!” It’s a fascinating line. But the language used to express that distinction contains the reason why the distinction needs to be asserted: while there is a recognition that being a guy is not the same as being a man, the insufficiency of being a guy only seems to register by reference to a more full adulthood. For while “guy” doesn’t exactly mean boy-man, the implication is still that, in moving from “guy” to “man,” male people complete the process of growing up, a growth thereby charted not in the ethical terms which non-men could share, but by reference to an ethics of becoming a man. But such a formulation makes ethics a function of masculinity rather than the reverse: rather than understanding what it means to be a man by reference to ethics — a man is an ethical male — we understand ethics by reference to masculinity, and have, therefore, an ethical responsibility to become men.

Which is where the man-cave enters the picture. Say Anything is a good point of reference because the film’s ethical heart is in John Cusack’s desire to opt out. As he puts it with a kind of callow Kafkaism, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.” Instead, his desires and his ethical imperative are precisely to not be a man according to the model offered by John Mahoney’s fabulous character. For him, being masculine is definitively the opposite of making enough money to provide for another man’s daughter: precisely in place of a job, he wants have “being with your daughter” as his job. He wants to have as his job: not a job.

Ultimately, of course, the movie’s resolution is to recover a kind of bourgeois social order by displacing it onto her: Cusack remains untainted by commercial society by pioneer the new sport of Kickboxing and sponging off her in England (reaping the dividends of her father’s buried crimes). But not only is this necessary because the movie recognizes — as does Cusack’s Clash t-shirt — that there is something deeply corrupt about the kind of society represented by Mahoney, but it articulates its ethics of opting out by reference to the need to resist that kind of corruption. One opts out, in other words, because while it is necessary to be a man (not a guy), the available options for being a man kind of suck.

Say Anything was a movie of its time, as was Knocked Up. But I want to suggest that what the “man-cave” represents in the Apatovian is the same kind of desire as The Clash t-shirt represents in Say Anything: a sort of quietly desperate dissatisfaction with the cultural options presented for American men. Which is to say, while Rogen in Knocked Up ultimately chooses to be a real man by getting a soul crushing job, reproducing, and dominating women, the movie is less a misogynist and reactionary fable about how abortion is wrong and bros are rad — my first impression — but is, rather, caught between a rock and a hard place, a choice with no alternatives between being a real man or being a man-child.

Its failure, in other words, is a failure not of politics but of imagination. And I say this because, just as Say Anything betrays its own darkness by pretending that you can just fly away from an intractable dilemma — that you can spend corrupt money and not be tainted by it — it is in Knocked Up’s willingness to entertain its own darkness that it rises above the banal. After all, Knocked Up can’t ultimately admit the impossibility of its choice; it would be, as Marlow puts it “too dark altogether”* to openly acknowledge what the movie ultimately seems to conclude to be the case, that American men are presented with a choice between the quiet desperation of bourgeois adult life and the shameful immaturity of perpetual childhood, and that they have an ethical responsibility to choose the less personally satisfying but more socially acceptable alternative.

In this sense, Seth Rogen’s choice to be a drone in preparation to taking responsibility for his child is, like the desperately pathetic last gaze between Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad: not so much glorified as something which is torturously necessary, a choice without alternatives. In Superbad, the real heart of the movie is the bromance, obviously, but the way the heteromance maps onto that is instructive: they want to have a summer of sex not simply because they want it, but because they feel they need it in prelude to the challenge that awaits them in college (to be good at sex in time for college girls). They are about to be forced to be more grown up than they feel able to be, and sex will be a desperate stab at holding off that inadequacy. They do it, in other words, because they have an ethical responsibility to be men, and they think this is what that implies. 

For the same reason, I think, Knocked Up is doggedly enamored of Seth Rogen’s life as a stoner loser. This was, by the way, my original complaint about the movie: it so glamorizes the man cave that Seth Rogen lives in with his various terrible roommates that it doesn’t even make the most token of efforts to argue that Rogen would be, on any level, a good option for the mother of his child. This is why he has to leave it, of course, why he has to become a drone and do all the things Cusack in Say Anything refused to do. Like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, it understands that one can be in a relationship only by making yourself correct first; Rogin has to detach himself from his man-child man-cave life of pot and pornography before he can take responsibility and be a father. But while it does this as a way of narrating the difference between immaturity and maturity — the difference between being a guy and a man — I think it registers a deep and basic dissatisfaction with these options, for while it doesn’t ever transcend them, its pathos is that being a man really, really seems to suck: being a man apparently means taking responsibility for a baby you never wanted, marrying a woman who you have nothing in common with, and doing a job you hate. Since it lacks the imagination to imagine an alternate pathway, it ultimately does what it has to do, but its advocacy of putting aside childish ways is still both deeply dishonest and not even vaguely heartfelt. Rogen’s conversion is therefore not only basically unconvincing, but Paul Rudd’s narrative only underscores the point: marriage is hell, but you do it because what else is there? The best you can hope for is that occasionally — like once a week, maybe — you can escape your wife and play poker with the boys.

I still don’t like Knocked Up; as I said, I think it’s the least good of the genre. But I think looking at why it’s bad helps illustrate the vexed way the “man-cave” registers in these films, as an object both of nostalgic desire and as a trap. I think it registers — in response to something being rotten in the state of manhood — a refusal to be an adult male out of a desire to avoid the patriarchal violence that being an adult male seems to imply, through the lens of the false choice it lacks the ability to step out of. In other words, I want to suggest that while it’s important to assert that there are more than two options — that being an ethical adult male does not necessarily imply being father knows best — we should also try to understand why, in the face of this false choice, the option of not being a man at all persistently becomes as attractive as it is.* This is not to say that opting out isn’t still presented as an attractive possibility. It is. But in each case, I’m going to claim, the attraction of the man-cave is significantly less a function of the man-cave’s intrinsic desirability than of the even greater repulsive force of the only other options seen to be available.

In this sense, while I’m still skeptical about Natalia’s claim that even deconstructing the idea still implants it as an object of nostalgic desire, even if I were to grant the point I would still make this claim: in every Apatow movie I can think of, the option of opting out is always presented as coming at significant social and personal cost, and the bulk of the narrative investment in the idea is always on that cost. This is, finally, what makes the execrable Zack and Miri Make A Porno so completely and utterly not a part of the genre, for by carefully and conveniently plotting out a situation in which making and starring a porno comes at zero social cost (since our heroes conveniently have no relatives and nothing to lose), all the interesting questions that the Apatow movies at least ask melt away.

* Bonus Conrad content for Horatiox.

Six Months and Four Days

Six Months and three Days

Humanity

It almost makes me ashamed to know I share a species with the people who, having long championed turning Tehran into a glass parking lot, now have the gall to declare solidarity with the Iranian protesters.

In writing about “The ‘Bomb Iran’ contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People” Glenn Greenwald points out that:

“Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country — actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran.  The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz entitled “The Case for Bombing Iran,” and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he “hopes and prays” that the U.S. “bombs the Iranians.”  John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol — with typical prescience — hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected.  Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program. Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way — just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least.  

Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is.  Advocating a so-called “attack on Iran” or “bombing Iran” in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many — obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives.  The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it’s some abstract decision in a video game.”

On the other hand, this make me almost proud to be a human being.

Peter Levine: ”In this remarkable video from Italian TV, Iranian motorcycle police attack a group of peaceful protesters. The protesters respond with stones and manage to turn at least one motorcycle into a flaming wreck. You can then see them escort the lightly wounded police officer to safety and give him water. The informal rule that seems to have developed is: Hurt the machines, love the human beings.”

Six Months and Two Days