Friday Fightday

First, allow me to ruin a modern holiday classic
I was just watering the plants and the line from LOVE ACTUALLY dropped into my head, Emma Thompson telling that actress I don't know to look out for Hugh Grant because "if he was twenty years younger, you'd be just his type", and how that's a joke in the movie because they end up together. Hugh Grant and the actress I don't know. I was thinking about her because I've always admired her eyebrow shape and in this time of massive brows, I'm feeling contrary. I don't think the Hugh Grant storyline is funny anymore, it's basically the exact same storyline as Alan Rickman and the other actress whose name I don't know, but without a wife involved...but the creepy age and power dynamics are still there. And in that one it's clear that it's not okay for them to be together, except the woman is *still* portrayed as eager and totally okay to enter into a relationship with her boss, and that angle is never brought up. The other woman is presented as being motivated by a combination of lust and greed, satisfying herself with an expensive necklace since she can't fuck her old, middlingly-committed employer. We as the audience are invited to ogle her in her lingerie, which is totally okay since she's a thirsty secretary who's enticing a man to cheat. What a bunch of fucked up antiquated sexist morality play bullshit.

Okay but me tho
Since I last wrote I co-founded a creative tech co-op! And today our first project launched, and it got some press.Neat!

...that's all I've really got for you right now. I'm working again, for myself, with Darius. (No, we are not soliciting new co-op members at this time. We are, however, soliciting new clients. :) It feels really good to be doing work for clients I like and care about.

Oh!
I was about to be like "and I don't even care about videogames! [clicks heels]" but then I remembered that whole thing where I'm cursed to be the perpetual Old Man Yells At Cloud of games, because I played Her Story (aka the game everyone I respect is drooling all over) and found it to be a pile of gaaaaaaaarbage. (Note: that link takes you to an archived twitch stream where I talk in spoilery length about what garbage Her Story is. It's like, over an hour. For a much shorter session, you can probably just read this article Laura ended up writing after the stream.)

And Now It Is The Future
I wrote all the above on Friday but now it's Monday because I wandered away and had a weekend, How Dare I, and during the weekend I got to go watch VERTIGO in 70mm. (Either you got real excited reading that, or you didn't, and it's okay either way, and honestly I mostly wanna hang with the latter folks, cause I don't WANT to be the person who cares as much as I sometimes care about ~The Cinema~.) Anyway while walking into the theater I suddenly was like, "oh...oh wait, I think? If I'm remembering correctly from the one time I studied this film in college and watched it over a decade ago...I think this movie has trash in it?" I don't know if it's even possible to spoil a movie made in 1958, but. Uh. Spoilers?

Either I just am somehow drawn to things that are garbage in ways that are specifically Related To Me, or culturally we have a real narrative problem with "Crazy Bitch" as a narrative device. Also I vaguely remember MULHOLLAND DR coming out around the same time as my Hitchcock class, and thus me arguing with my professor that everything after Jimmy Stewart's character is committed to in-patient care is a fantasy of his to try and justify why Kim Novak's character acted the way she did. (MULHOLLAND DR kind of destroyed my ability to watch narrative films for a while, or basically any other film that wasn't MULHOLLAND DR. It was my first Lynch film, too, so when I finally got shown BLUE VELVET I just kept being like "...but this is *actually* happening? In order?! Oh, well, then...kinda tame, I guess.")

Anyway, VERTIGO is another one of those experiences where the first part of the movie internally pretty much hangs together entirely consistently as the story of a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder who, among other things, gets kind of gang-pressed into a relationship with a man old enough to be her father, and which clearly not all of her parts want to be in (you can actually see her sorting through her "fight/flight/freeze/fawn" options in their first scene together when he's got her trapped in his house after he's stripped her, and she finally lands on "fawn" as the way to survive). And then the rest of the movie is the huge yarn of bullshit to try and explain Why Would A Woman Behave That Way Toward Me? As I said in the video above, our society is more into past life regression and alien abduction than it is into believing what those actually are (screen memories of childhood sexual abuse). We love fiction at the expense of reality. It's really frustrating as someone in that reality, especially when people try to roll in and be like "no but it's based on this long illustrious narrative tradition!" and it's like "yes, and that narrative tradition got started and is maintained by liking the fantasy of bullshit more than the actual reality of people's lives, which are honestly way more interesting." The inside of my head is creative enough, believe me.

Ugh, anyway. It's Monday, I'm tired, I'm gonna go watch anime. The more I see people throwing energy away trying to fix other people (eg Emily Short in that last link trying to figure out how SHE can "make" men be less sexist at her, good god), the more I selfishly want to only talk to people who I already like and who make me feel good. Which I mostly already do, and why these come so intermittently. I'm not sure what I get out of writing to the public anymore. I mean..."attention"? Which weirds me out. :/