Women call for more violence
Bespoke kind of violence, though.
December Notebook, final items:
No, this must be the most insufferable Toronto-based film this year
Women who cheer on murder
Do I need a fiction intervention?
Some people are too sacred to be fictionalized
Sook-Yin Lee, former MuchMusic VJ, CBC Radio host and protagonist of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, has her own movie out next year. It is about, well, herself. And her first and most special partner, cartoonist Chester Brown, their life in a house in Kensington Market, and how their relationship fell apart when they opened it up. A lot of it is based on Chester Brown’s graphic novel memoir Paying for It, which documents how, the awkward aromantic that he is, he ended up paying to have sex with prostitutes while his nominal partner he shared a home with dated (and slept) around.
This could be your thing or not (here’s the trailer). The interview that the pair gave to the increasingly clueless former film critic of the Star, Peter Howell, however, is plain insufferable.
Sorry, what? How is this about “queer rights” or “people of colour”, oh the two straight people opening up their marriage? Howell doesn’t ask. Important in the story, though, is that Lee cast real sex workers in the roles of sex workers. Did she fear the wrath of the (sex trade) activists for casting actors to play them, therefore depriving them of income? It’s all about rights, you see. Somehow.
A friend texted me the other night from the opening night of a play at Buddies in Bad Times involving drag queens. “These people can’t project, they can’t say their lines!” she cried over email. Turns out the actual drag queens have been cast in a play about drag queens. Not actors. So never mind years of schooling and working on the craft. If you’re the actual thing, we can put you in a highly artificial theatre situation and you’ll fit right in. Right?
Wrong. But I realized: some life forms, some demographics, are becoming too sacred to be fictionalized. They are so important that they can’t be given a fictional double. They can not be performed by strangers. The performance must one hundred percent coincide with the factual.
Some of you will remember the hoopla a few years ago around Scarlett Johansson wanting to produce a movie about Dante Gill, a woman who lived as a man and ran a bunch of massage parlours in the 1970s America. In other words, a female pimp who assumed a male name, probably for the same reason that women pretended to be men in previous centuries too: it opened doors to jobs, income, freedom to roam, sartorial choices, and ways of life which would otherwise remain verboten. In the last few years, the transactivist rewriters of history proclaimed Gill a trans man and her life as part of the “history of trans rights”. (Similar has been attempted with Joan of Arc, proclaimed in an English theatrical production “nonbinary”.) It’s this group of activists who went berserk upon hearing the news that ScarJo, not a trans person, would play a “trans character”. After some months of this, she dropped out of the project.
Some people are too sacred to be fictionalized. This has been true for some time now about anything to do with indigenous character of any kind. Harry Somers’ estate removed, after some academic-activist-media pressure and shaming were applied, one of the most beautiful and technically challenging arias in his opera Louis Riel, the Lullaby, which was loosely, very loosely based on an old Nisga’a lament. Therefore it was “stolen” wasn’t it, and then applied in the context of a wrong indigenous group, and it had to be abandoned, and the item recomposed by someone of the right ethnicity. As this piece of arts journalism helpfully explains,
If Louis Riel the opera were ever to be remounted - and I doubt this will ever happen because there will be demands to cast Metis opera singes in the dastardly difficult roles of Riel and his wife - a new and very different musical material will be heard as the Lullaby, composed by a Metis composer, Ian Cusson.
The wrath of gods avoided, desacralization ducked. Phew.
Women and their bloodthirsty Twitter personae
I’ve written here before about the topic of (left and liberal) women being extremely accommodating to anticolonial violence and resistance, as it’s one of my pet fascinations.
