This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post began as a quick “about me” to help you decide if you’d find the same shows interesting that I do. Then I thought it's probably worth sharing some ideas about right or wrong so we’re on the same page and ideas about how or why drama works so we are not re-hashing the same old stuff every time it crops up because -- yawn.
Naturally this turned into something of a Manifesto including a Manual of This and That. Amongst other things, for example, it seems to me a lot of people don't believe systemic racism exists – no, they are not racists, but few people learn systems theory in school so I try to explain systems in a simple way. And the only reason things like systemic racism or what feminism is about are relevant to reviews is because if drama isn’t actually about anything , then -- yawn.
Having "manifested" so much, it now seems this post needs to be separated into parts and provided with a brief summary of contents -- oops.
Kind regards
Maude
PART 1 (This Post)
The Hippy Shit: God,: Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude; Gender; Sex; Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular & Vibrators; Cultural Identity; Military Forces; Nationalism; Government; Law Enforcement Agencies;
PART 2 (The Next Post)
Non or Anti-Racist? About Sets and Systems; What Does SYSTEMIC Mean? (Systemic Racism) Part 1; What Systemic Racism is Made of Part 2; More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3; People Are Motivated by Needs; Needs and Australian History; Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour; The Me Too Movement; Trial by Media; Feminism; Intersectionality; Systemic Sexism; White Privilege; Race as a Social Construct;
PART 3 (The Post Post)
Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences: Choices; Compulsory Unit; Censorship and the Single Story; Cultural Appropriation; Blackface; White People With Dreads; Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art; The W word and the N word; The Hip Hop Lyric Thing; White Saviour Narratives; White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher; White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid; White Saviour and the Grateful Slave; White Saviour as Anti-Hero; Fact or Fiction; Crossing the Line; Other-Ness.
The Hippy Shit
Let me start with what one (rather rude) friend calls my “hippy shit”. These ideas – ideas about God and Government – seem basic common sense to me. There is nothing radical about these notions and I did not have to be brave to adopt them. In June 1971, when I joined 200,000 people marching in Melbourne against conscription and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, I hardly felt like some kind of odd-ball thinker.
Draft dodgers and mothers of conscriptees alike had been going to jail for years as part of an ongoing, active democratic movement, here as much as elsewhere in the West, demanding an end to the Vietnam War. For the first time in Australia, as the 1960s came to an end, the war we were living through was one we were watching on our TVs at night, not simply hearing about.
The American Civil Rights movement we’d seen unfold in the 60s left us feeling smug about Australia – until we discovered just how systemic racism was in our own country.
And it was a time when many of us realised that being women, for some reason, meant we had less power than men to help change things - no surprise this gave rise to a second wave of feminism.
God
I was raised an Irish Catholic – I first attended an Irish Catholic kindergarten at the age of 3 and then, allowing for family turmoil, continued to attend Irish Catholic schools until I was legally permitted to quit school the day I turned fifteen. I do not, and find I simply cannot, believe in God, nor do I agree with the Roman Catholic church on many or all things. I do, however, value and treasure some parts of the (for want of a better word) “culture” this upbringing provided, because without that I would have had nothing but chaos, anger and dysfunction to guide me.
I have no problem with other people believing in God, but
if there is one thing I can’t stand it’s intolerance
We don’t need some threat of hellfire to remind us to be kind.
Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude
Not Funny. Ever.
Just Don’t.
You don't know anyone's personal life history or personal experiences.
Cultural Identity
Asking people where they are from can be a real obsession in Australia, where it is often assumed anyone with a non-Anglo name is a new-comer, even though Muslims and Asians and Indigenous Peoples have been here since forever (even before white laws banning non-white immigrants) and even though names are formalities.
Similarly, it is assumed anyone who doesn’t “look” Anglo or Anglo-Celtic is a new-comer, even though Muslims and Asians and Indigenous Peoples have been here since forever (even before white laws banning non-white immigrants).
Some people like to think our “cultural” or racial identity can be determined or assessed based on appearance, but this is nonsense. As for asking people where they are from, this is not just rude or even cruel, it’s downright risky. They might answer “Richmond” and then we have to ask if they mean the Melbourne suburb, or Richmond in Tasmania and it just gets messy.
Our identity is often (though not necessarily) decided by the people who raise us, and even that statement assumes we spend our formative years in a relatively stable environment. My father was Australian born but had English born siblings. I was raised an Irish Catholic, but genetically I am only 1/16TH Irish. That’s a measly 6% if you hear what I’m saying.
There is no telling what 6% of someone’s genes
look like in a finished product.
My mother had an Irish first name and Irish surname but was 5TH generation Australian born.
All of her family stories and traditions, her religion and her political prejudices were Irish or Australian Irish. (Irishness remained quite significant in Australia long after colonisation.)
No, not as a child and not now and not ever will I try jellied pigs trotters, not for you or anybody. Float that, not even if it means I might finally be forced up off my fat Khyber onto my feet.
 |
| Jean Butler |
I’m a baby boomer – my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were both war generations and so their living memories of war became mine.
I was raised to believe war was both normal and necessary – but that “we” were never the aggressors. With time and an understanding of history I came to realise nothing is ever that simple. Sometimes one should act to stamp out evil where and when one sees it (not pretend genocide isn’t happening then be all self-righteous about it later – until it becomes inconvenient again).
As a child I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house, and she was fairly easy-going. She had no children’s books so I read whatever adult books were lying around, and I read voraciously and indiscriminately, including some horrific first hand survivor stories of nazi atrocities. I still have some rather gross black and white images burned into my brain of photos from a book about the Nuremberg Trials, which was probably rather heavy stuff for a child of eight already dealing with issues (though nothing like issues people who’d actually experienced the war were struggling with).
I grew up with a very strong sense of global brotherhood; a sense that some things are simply wrong, and that our obligation to help other people does not end at a border, because borders are notional, impermanent things.
If my own country were being invaded and people I cared for were threatened I might be happy to take up arms, but each case on its own merits, I say.
I was born after the end of the Korean War. I don’t believe Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war was justified. Nonetheless, Australian soldiers who went to Vietnam did so on my behalf and deserved to be treated as my agents, not murderers, and more in that vein.
We cannot pick and choose those parts of our national history
we are willing to own or disown.
we are willing to own or disown.
The notion of the military as a source of employment is abhorrent in principle because it effectively requires us to sell our conscience for the guarantee of a regular income. That requires a massive investment of blind trust in government – a ridiculous proposition.
Nationalism
A bizarre proposition. Yes, there is some “rational” argument that people should pool resources via taxes and have assets in common and this would then require a sense of ownership. Protection of those assets in turn requires borders… but the assumption that one person is worth more than another, or more moral than another, simply because of the random accident of where they were born is untenable. Nationalism requires unconditional acceptance of a package of values over which one has little practical control.
When we look at the track records of nations and governments throughout history, blind nationalism is hard to justify.
Government
Democracy, like Christianity, is one of those things that sounds like a good idea… but seriously, it is equally fair to say “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”. All communities at some point suffer diseconomies of scale; similarly, all governments are defective, some are more defective than others. Australia’s system of government is a particularly defective and offensive one.
Law Enforcement Agencies
These are only marginally more acceptable than Military Forces, and then only because they are generally more responsive and more accountable to public opinion (in theory), and the personnel who populate them have more freedom within them to follow their conscience. Their moral acceptability varies from nation to nation and state to state within those nations, and the variables impacting accountability are numerous. They should be treated with suspicion, as their primary function is to enforce laws created or supported by governments which are themselves suspect.
Gender
 |
| Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
a) Mind your own f***ing business – literally.
b) I don’t care what consenting adults do in private.
Key concepts here are “consent” and "adults" and “private”.
Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular, & Vibrators
True story – Graham goes into a pub one night and discovers there’s this bloke at the bar who is celebrating his 90th birthday. “How old do you have to be before you start worrying when you will next get a bit?” asks Graham. “You’ll have to ask someone older than me,” says the bloke at the bar.
I’m nowhere near 90, and I don’t think I'm a prude, but it seems that in many movies or dramatic series, the sex bits are badly done. Talk of women’s orgasms in particular and especially vibrators is not always entertaining, which is why I'm going to talk about the topic (but only briefly).
There is an episode of Orange Is The New Black where one of the characters confides to a friend that she had seven orgasms the night before, and her friend replies “that’s just excessive”. The response was witty and appropriate for the context, and the context was appropriate which is to say brief in a drama that is so not all about the sexual preferences and performance of the spoiled and rich.
Whether seven orgasms in one night is excessive or not for a woman is irrelevant, it stands in sharp contrast to the patter of a female stand-up who laboured - and I mean laboured - to explain what hard work it is for her boyfriend to make her happy twice a week. I cringed, I pitied, and I fast forwarded through a lot of it, but mostly it all just left me puzzled for a dozen reasons.
I didn’t need to hear any of it, but watching somebody die on stage is compelling - like watching a murder scene from a movie play out in slomo. And then afterwards you realise you are covered in virtual splatter as a result.
What astounds me is not that people’s bodies are all different but that writers sometimes believe all women are the same – worse, that audiences will somehow find endless detail about women’s orgasms or sex toys fascinating.
Quite frankly, if people are just going to be tedious I do wish they'd stop banging on about it.
When MacDoesIt, one of my fave YouTubers learned that he supposedly turned gay because tap water is a gay bomb he concluded suddenly "it all made sense" - not his fault if one minute he was in the bathroom washing his hands and the next minute fisting his neighbour - no wonder gays like bathrooms!
MacDoesIt’s sex talk was clever: he was quick to draw his conclusion, he was entertaining about it and what he said had a context that wasn’t contrived.
Let me re-phrase “I really don’t care what people do in private” - I don't want to know what people do in private. When MacDoesIt spoke about the gay bomb he generalised - I hadn’t felt compelled to watch a movie in my own imagination of someone doing something I would not want to watch them doing in real life. If writers must share I wish they wouldn’t leave me wanting to tear my eyes out.
Sex is not a fracking competition. Everybody’s body is different. And just as everybody’s body is different, preferences and tastes differ. How much and what sort of sex is in a movie or episode of a series should reflect the premise, and not every movie or episode of a drama needs to include a one hour sex-ed segment. What is erotic or stirring to some can be decidedly un-appetising to others.
And if producers must include sex-ed segments in their tours of local potteries, first they should be sure they are reasonably competent at sexing.
I’m not demanding censorship, just hoping for good writing. Writers write sex stuff cos people do sex stuff. But we don’t need to see or hear everything people do – people also defecate and pick their noses.
If you are telling a story and a scene does not advance
the plot or reveal character, cut it.
Them's the rules.
the plot or reveal character, cut it.
Them's the rules.
There is a reason, too, the average person’s hand reaches their groin quite comfortably, and that is because good old fashioned bio-degradable flesh was around long before plastic props powered by planet-destroying battery-packs.
 |
| Yes folks, some shows leave me with nothing more than unhappy thoughts of a dump full of dead dildos |
Sadly, this lack of imagination is evident in too much script-writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment