#as both a moment of asserting working class masculinity
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actually. SO many conflicting thoughts about the role effy’s gimmick and gimmicks like it play in the professional wrestling landscape. wrestling absorbs other artforms -- it’s mma but its also clown but it’s also soap opera and sometimes it can be burlesque. so by incorporating sexuality it’s swapping out one symbolic physical language for another. but also effy as the exaggerated portrait of homoeroticism provides a foil that reaffirms the heterosexuality of his opponents whether they go along with him or not. like the story of that mox match was the story of a masochist slowly seducing an angry macho straight man in a bar bathroom. Turning Mox into rough trade using beats taken directly from bdsm (the fishnets in the mouth, the cigarette being stubbed out on effy’s skin) while mox sells effy’s affection like it’s hardcore ultraviolence. but also mox can’t win (to win is to escape, in wrestling--the logic of the story doesn’t change until the match ends, so you are trapped in a world shaped by your opponent until the bell rings) until he kisses Effy first. he has to reciprocate, he has to initiate, he has to engage with effy’s language and mean it, he has to leave the world of masculine violence and be there in that bar bathroom in order to follow the narrative to the end.
#but also jesus god the cigarette#as both a moment of asserting working class masculinity#and power#and a punctuation of a sexually charged escalating sequence#like. the symbolic language here.#how much of this is on purpose?#is mox filling that specific archetype intentionally?#does he know what story he's telling?#also there is something that is just so much#about how effy uses physical affection as part of his symbolic wrestling language#in the same way that orange cassidy uses gesture#mox didn't sell the cheek kisses as kisses he sold them as strikes#i wish i'd done more media studies classes so i could have the language to talk about this!!#wrasslin#this is completely incomprehensible 2:30 am rambling but#there is#so much to unpack
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Dr. Holligay Tries Things That Aren't Running: Group Power
So after the immense blow of the slings and arrows of outrageous inability to read yesterday, one might think that I would give up. But no! One week of failure is not a month, and so I pouted for an evening and then got up off my ass this morning to get back into the fray. There are still three more weeks, and while I am less than enthusiastic about losing five stamps worth of work, I'm not going to throw away the whole "getting an overpriced kitchen item" endeavor.
So yesterday, I took the new bingo card and worked out what my schedule would have to look like in order to get a solid bingo by Saturday, starting on Tuesday.
We find ourselves at Group Power.
Group Power reminds me a very important thing, which is that I hate taking group classes. This is not a "I'm antisocial and don't like people" thing, I am a very gregarious person who often enjoys a group activity, but working out is one of those moments where I figure it's between me and the power of my own will and not whatever a late-30s wine mom in ass-sculpting leggings is doing next to me* is doing.
Group Power asks the questions: What if we were doing lifting, which Holligay hates, but what if were doing it all together to a specified beat?
So I want you to picture me standing behind a step, the stack ones like in step aerobics. Now, I've gathered the things I seem to think we'll need for the class like a little robin feathering her nest: My bar, a few plates, a mat.
Then strides in the teacher. It's my boot camp teacher! Fantastic. Jessie--for that's what we'll call her--waves at me, tells me how happy she is I'm here, she's always wanted me to try this class, and then walks into the back and grabs two small plates, tossing them next to my bar.
With a big smile. 'You can lift heavier than that."
IF YOU SAY SO. I'm too weak to argue. I am Group Powerless. I deserve every bad thing that is about to happen to me, and, it is. I add the plates to my bar.
So the great thing about this is, every rep is shouted out. This is a gym class that people imagine in their heads when they think gym class. We are midway through upper body when I realize my bar is overloaded. It is too heavy for how fast I am doing these reps. I am suffering. But I can't stop. I can't stop, because I am weak, and I am in the middle of class, and in order to lower your weight, you have to stop and take the plates off your bar, loudly admitting to the entire class that you, personally and individually, are too weak for the weight you picked.
Because I am stupid, I would rather die than tell this entire class that my bar is too heavy. And I may get the chance, as I head into another overhead press. Is this mild assertion of my masculinity worth possible injury? "It is if you're not a pussy," says the Marlboro man in my head. Overhead press for two, now singles, go!
The whole class is like this! And the worst part is, when she does finally tell the class to lighten their bar, I have the mechanical intelligence, apparently, of a pine cone, and can't quickly get the plates moved off and on my bar. I am sweating over this while they are already starting the reps, and somehow both no one is looking at me and I feel the EYE OF SAURON DIRECTLY UPON ME, and I hold both in equal hands.
AND LIFT! AND SQUAT. TWO MORE!
Jessie comes up to me at the end, as I'm struggling like a tenacious field mouse to get the plates off the bar.
"DId you have fun?!"
I look up at her through my sweaty bangs.
"I'm going for a run."
*Holligay, you're a late 30s wine mom. Excuse you I am a whiskey mom and that means I look like the dyke trash I am when I work out. That Britney the wine mom in leggings can outlift me is both hurtful and irrelevant to the topic at hand.
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Re: the Kristen Stewart Rolling Stone shoot
It's giving JD Samson. I guess even the gays can have a lil Y2K revival.
(I haven't even read the article. I am purely responding to the images before I go to work LOL.)
The #tag comments begging/joking about Kristen going on T, in her response to her own longing for "a little mustache, a happy trail" are very understandable. You all want to push her gender fuckery from fantasy into reality, from metaphor into the concrete, into what Saketopouou calls "the more and more" of gender OVERWHELM and of course that is HOT!!!
But even before Bella starts microdosing testosterone (or maybe she's already started, more power to her!), let us just pause, and fully appreciate this image in this moment. What if we take KStew at her word? What if this photshoot truly is "the gayest thing ever," in the grand tradition of Deep Lez aesthetics and a certain flavor of lesbian gender (which could never be TERFy because it is so clearly distinct from cis women's genders, is a creative response to different kinds of pain points, both fucking with and getting fucked over).
It reminds me of this passage, quoted in Sexuality Beyond Consent:
"I was female-assigned at birth," writes the queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton. "Though [my own sense was that] I was a boy… mistaken for a girl. And though I was, to my mind, the ultimate straight man seeking normally feminine women, I turned out a "lesbian," against my will-though in accord with my desires. As for my girlfriend she grew up, to her mind, normally feminine, as a rural Mormon raised in rural Utah. In her twenties, after her male fiancé died, after she didn't go on a mission, after she walked across the US for nuclear disarmament, she met lesbians and wished she could be one, so cool did they seem to her. But, she figured, she wasn't a lesbian. Long story short: I didn't want the sign ["lesbian"] but was pierced by it; she quite wanted it but didn't think she'd gain it. We have [both] been dildoed by th[at] sign. We've been pleasured by it, as it's come inside us-I've had to try to take it like a man. (2015)
Close up on Kristen Stewart on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. She's rubbing her clit underneath a jock strap. Read Sarah Tomasin Fonseca's essay in "It Came From the Closet" for a little foray into the erotics of jacking off into stolen male underwear. A truly young and otherwise disempowered dyke might steal underwear from a male relative, now we can buy what we like at the store, but the relationality is always there. Although the jock might get the most attention, Kristen is also wearing a pointelle thong in pure white cotton from Cou Cou Intimates, a brand which profits from Millennials sexualizing our girlhoods. They advertise to me on Instagram and I get skin shivers at the ability to choose, buy back and own the thong versions of underpants we wore even before men in AIM chatrooms asked us our bra sizes (when we were 11). And Kristen is wearing this delicate piece of panty in the men's locker room.
Part of the power of dyke sociality and sexuality is exclusivity. A "woman's" right to refusal can mean prioritizing other dykes, and asserting the irrelevance of straight men. And yet, in the realm of the sexual unconscious, we all know about each other. We all must deal with each other. In the words of Avgi Saketopoulou, we are all acting ON each other.
Much as the fetish clothing in the gay male leather scene comes from the uniforms of the armed forces, police, and working class, before it is transformed and inducted into delightful and perverted hiérarchies, Kristen plays with sartorial signals which might have their base in other genders, but which she uses to construct a gorgeous dyke existence.
The juxtaposition with men, not just with masculine trappings or locations, which are more easily taken over, was unsettling for me! I was scared for her! The image of her on the floor, mouth open: She's On Our Backs! But she's not, she's on the cover of Rolling Stone, the largest subscriber base is probably white Gen X men. Kristen on the floor lies in both the power and powerlessness in non-normative dyke sexuality. She's wearing an outfit that might make more sense in a leathermen bar -- decadent black leather vest, exposing jock strap -- in front of an objectified Black man. Who is he, and who is he to her? (Who is he to the dudes who subscribe to Rolling Stone?) He is jacked, with sweat (or more likely oil) artfully dripping down his washboard abs to the visible bulge in his gym shorts. A leather bar is a place to find danger, but this man is not at the leather bar. Together, they are in the men's locker room, a dangerous place for a queer or a woman. However, they seem disinterested in each other and Kristen is not afraid. She's skinny and milky (a weakling in many genders) and sitting like a neurodivergent queer, doing "hysterical clowning" with her knees up and posture hunched in front of a mirror in the men's locker room, next to a faceless white man with perfect posture and impossibly large biceps, and she also doesn't look afraid.
Her bangs have been cut with blunt scissors, messed up and sweaty. Nothing says queer like deliberately fucked up at home haircut. Finger in mouth, which reads submissive in straighter settings, but in queer orality, its giving top (if not dom) energy.
OK gotta go to work now, just wanted to blast off some associations before work!!!
#kristen stewart#rolling stone#dyke#jock strap#little girl underwear#avgi saketopoulou#kathryn bond stockton
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Vicious impotence
A moment is inseparable from the ways in which it is discussed and understood. When people are aware of their inability to affect the material conditions of the moment itself, they become vicious in asserting the primacy of their interpretation of it. Well-compensated and facing neither encumbrance nor threat of censure, they screech before large crowds, bemoaning the fact that no one has listened to them. If only their interpretation had been accepted and agreed upon before the moment had happened, then it never would have happened, or it would have happened differently. They assure their audience that worse moments are still to come and that these, too, will be due to their perspective having received insufficient attention. The more they are listened to, the more they feel themselves ignored. Their inefficacy is proof of the urgency of their methods.
Classification becomes the order of the day. Beneath that--never spoken too loudly, as enunciation leaves one’s beliefs open to clear examination--there lies a churning river of conspiratorial mysticism. This happened because the people who did it are this way, and no one should pay any mind to how being that way made them do those awful things--it just did. When those people are around, these things will happen. They always will. Presence is action and action is presence, which is why we face such a vital imperative to identify presence whenever an action has taken place.
And so within hours of a few hundred psychotic dimwits breaking into the Capitol building, managing to kill a cop and several of their own in the process, our bleak commentariot had published hundreds of articles classifying the type of people who were involved. The raid was a coup, first and foremost, regardless of the fact that at no point was there any risk of the United States government being toppled. It was a coup because it was caused by whiteness, racism, masculinity, a lack of trans-positivity, gamergate, ableism, too few powerful women, too many bad ideas, too much free speech, too many jokes, not enough solemnity, not enough people listening to the things writers had said in the past and were saying now. Whatever you wanted to cause it had caused it, and it all came back to the presence of bad people who, by their nature, cause bad things.
Of course, I am as hapless and internet-deranged as everyone else, and so I made my own classifications. Surveying the crowd, I see a fair representation of the Trump base: racist internet perverts; young libertarian men who read 3 books a year and consider themselves intellectuals; 40-something blonde women who have been ejected from multiple Styx concerts; senior citizens who demand the TV in the Pep Boys waiting area be switched from Family Feud to Fox News because it’s been 25 minutes since they last tuned in and they need to make sure Obama still wants to kill them. The gang was all there, reveling in the strange power of their impotence, moving for the sake of movement, existing for the sake of existence. They had been told, and they believed, that their mere presence affects outcomes. They figured that all they needed to do was break in to where they think power unfolds and just stand around and then, by osmosis, power would be what they wanted it to be.
Like the liberals who despise and define them, the Trump people had confused moments with materiality. Those liberals share the same confusion, and they rushed to insert themselves and their perspectives into the moment. Yes, they said, these people actually did almost destroy Democracy. They had gotten into the building where elemental power is generated. Their particles brushed off into the magic power rays. Such an incursion cannot be allowed to happen again. These people must no longer be allowed to conceptually exist.
The moment trumps the materiality, as we can only influence the former. We are content to let these people wallow about in their homes until they OD or shoot themselves or their lungs melt--that’s their material demise, deserved and unimportant. But in the meantime we must erase their ability to influence the creation of moments. Their bodies can stay, for a while. Their mediated selves must be destroyed.
What are the implications here? To ask an obvious question: how can the Democrats continue to blame the dispossessed working class for their own immiseration if they can no longer tell these people to learn to code, since learning to code necessarily entails enmeshing oneself into the massive electronic surveillance and control mechanism we're now declaring off-limits to anyone whose beliefs fall an inch to the left or the right of the Democrat narrative du jour? And what are the implications for everyone else? Ours is a flimsy society built upon layers and layers of obvious contradictions, sure, but what will things look like when those contradictions are enforced with the viciousness of our carceral state, even as they shift as rapidly as social media demands our perceptions to change?
When I said “Democrat narrative du jour,” I mean DU JOUR. As in, it changes by the day, and one day's narrative will very often directly contradict that of the previous day. This is how all cops are bastards and we should abolish all policing but also we need to give police more resources and leverage to brutalize the people who we don't like. This is how gender is both a meaningless social construct and an innate facet of one's being that is so inimical to their identity it should determine whether or not they receive access to basic social decency. This is why empowered women are every bit as tough and competent as their male counterparts and also they are delicate waifs who should never be exposed to scrutiny or criticism. This is how downplaying race amounts to a racist facade of "colorblindness" and also acknowledging race is a hateful act of dehumanization. This is how a cop can find himself getting beaten to death by a crowd bedecked in Blue Lives Matter regalia.
You can't simply adhere to the rules, because there are no rules to follow. In order to avoid censure, one must stay connected.
So what will become of the digitally dispossessed? If we achieve Democrat Utopia and nothing changes materially but the internet is restricted so only those who adhere to officially sanctioned narratives are allowed to attempt to make sense of anything, where does that leave the masses who were shunted away? Is this going to make them less disaffected? Less volatile? What are you idiots hoping to achieve, here?
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Willow Run | Ch. 2
Summary: On a horse ranch in Texas, life is far simpler than on the streets of Bakubah, but Syverson has a bad habit of taking in strays of all kinds, no matter what demons may be after them.
Pairing: Captain Syverson x OFC
Word Count: 3.3K
Warnings: Nothing in this chapter.
A/N: You guys!!!! Thank you so much for all the love you’ve shown on this fic! It means a lot and I appreciate each and every one of y’all!
CHAPTER 1 |
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Wolf did the trick, and though it took her an extra moment to be convinced, Sasha allowed Syverson to carry her inside, the house blessedly cool thanks to an HVAC system that had been retrofitted a few years prior.
Once inside, Syverson set her onto one of the high chairs that took up one side of the kitchen counter. Like most everything else in the house, the kitchen was bright, airy and spacious. Curiously, the appliances seemed to come straight from the past; the sink, the fridge, even the oven all dated back to at least the fifties in appearance though they had all been fitted with new technology.
"Bathroom's just down at the end of the hall if you need it. Lemme just wash my hands and I'll fix somethin' up real quick," he explained, pointing down the hall before moving to the old farmhouse sink to start washing up.
As he prepped, the sound of two sets of paws grew louder and louder, nails clicking on the hardwood flooring. A quick glance over his shoulder and Syverson's smile grew tenfold, although he quickly took action, blocking the path of the two puppies who were eager not only for scraps, but to find out who the new human was.
"You're not afraid of dogs, are you? I completely forgot, I'm so sorry," he stammered, Syverson starting to herd them back towards his office which was just a few steps away from the kitchen. One of them was clearly the boss as he pushed right past Syverson with an upturned nose, trotted over to Sasha, sat down and grunted as though asking her who she was. Syverson chuckled, a little embarrassed as he turned his attention to the little mastiff, picking him up easily before tucking him into his chest.
"Don't mind the grunting. He does that when he wants something from someone."
The other dog, a hearty little guy, followed his buddy's example and sat down next to Sasha’s feet, looking up at her with curiosity.
"This is Hudson, and that down there, is Goliath," he introduced, each dog making a noise as his name was called. "They're strays. Up on all their shots though. Perks of knowing a vet."
Syverson set the puppy down just as a third set of paws clipped along the ground, the sound much heartier than either of the two pups. Although curious about the newcomer, the older dog simply sniffed at Sasha’s general direction before sitting down in her dog bed by the back door of the kitchen. With age came wisdom, and the four year old German Shepard knew full well her owner never went a morning meal without giving her at least a piece of bacon.
“And this beautiful lil’ lady is Aika. She’s been with me since...For a long time,” he asserted, catching himself before divulging information he wasn’t sure Sasha was ready to hear yet. Given her injuries, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she believed the stereotype of military men being prone to violence. Keeping it to himself was his best option at the moment.
“They’re all so cute!” Sasha smiled, her eyes still bright, every moment that passed leaving her feeling more and more relaxed around Syverson, something she didn’t even notice as she watched the puppies frolic around Aika, who paid them no heed and let them bounce all over her and her very comfy-looking bed.
After making sure the puppies wouldn’t get into any mischief while he cooked, Syverson washed his hands again, drying off before extending a hand to Sasha.
“I never did get your name,” he smiled sheepishly.
“Oh, right. It’s Sasha. Sasha Bettencourt. How ‘bout you?”
“Kyle Syverson. You can just call me Sy, though. Everyone does.” Shaking hands with Sasha, he couldn’t help but let his smile get a little bigger, mirroring the one he was getting from the young woman.
“Sy, can I use your bathroom?” Sasha asked once they’d let go of each other's hands, her own expression slightly embarrassed since she knew just how dirty she was. Given what the house looked like both inside and out, she couldn’t imagine the bathroom being anything less than spotless.
“Of course!” Syverson said, moving around the counter in a hurry, ready to steady her as she got down off the chair. “You alright to make it there on your own?” He asked, the concern returning to his expression as he waited to see if she’d drop like she had outside. “Take your time,” he told her gently, the words spoken not only as a warning not to walk quickly, but as a reminder that she no longer needed to rush now that she was safe and out of the sun.
Testing her legs, Sasha found them working well enough and with a nod, she ambled her way down, relieved to have her body functioning at least somewhat close to normal again. Finding the door easily enough, Sasha closed and locked it behind her, taking a moment just to breathe. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she was surprised Syverson had let her anywhere near his property, let alone inside his house. Gruesome was putting it mildly.
The bathroom was charming and just as beautifully-appointed as the rest of the house. Sasha wondered, not for the first time, if Syverson had a wife who’d done all the decorating. For a man who was so, well, masculine, the house screamed of a woman’s touch. She reminded herself to ask him after she got out.
Though she was only planning on washing her face, Sasha took one look at the sunflower-sized shower head that sat on top of the clawfoot tub and was taking off her dirty clothes without a second thought.
Syverson heard the shower going and couldn’t help but smile; he'd have done the exact same thing. Shaking his head, he began preparing breakfast for two; something he hadn’t done in a long time.
Soon enough, Sy was operating at full steam. Eggs in a skillet, hash browns frying and sausages turning a delicious golden brown. He managed everything with the ease of someone who'd taken classes at the very least and as he worked, he sang an unrecognizable tune, the soft smile never leaving his face. It was easy for anyone to see that the man was at peace in his own home, and that he wasn't the type to sit idly for any length of time.
As the cool water poured over her still-overheated skin, Sasha couldn’t help but sigh in utter contentment, finding her muscles truly loosening and the panic in her veins dissipating for the first time all day. She’d unknowingly walked to a haven, and while she still felt guilty for putting Sy out, especially since he was out there cooking her breakfast, Sasha vowed not to be so hurried to leave if he didn’t want her to.
There was one stark problem that Sasha only realized once she got out of the shower; she had no clean clothes to wear. Feeling stupid for her lack of foresight, she begrudgingly put her dirty clothes back on after quickly shaking them off in the tub, hoping to get at least some of the dust off. Though she felt a million times better, memories of the road still clung to her, leaving Sasha pensive and quiet as she left the bathroom.
“Feelin’ better, mama?” Sy asked with a wry smile, his back still to her as he began to plate breakfast, giving both plates a generous helping of eggs, sausage, hashbrowns and pancakes. Though Sy was known to eat like a horse, he never worried about his portions, knowing he’d work it all off down at the stables.
“I’m sorry. I just...I was so dirty.” Sasha stammered, looking as though she’d stolen something out of the house, even though she’d done nothing of the sort.
Turning, he gave her a bright smile which quickly turned into an impressed look at the visible difference. She was beautiful, even with all the cuts and bruises that marred her otherwise-smooth skin.
"It-It's no problem. Should've told me, I would've grabbed you some clothes to wear while I threw yours in the wash," he answered after coming back to his senses, Syverson shaking his head as though he'd been startled out of a dream.
A closer inspection of her clothes showed that the washer wouldn't do much good. Tattered and dirty as they were, she was better off throwing them out. Syverson knew it probably wouldn't happen though, as girls were attached to their clothing like guys were attached to their cars. Still, he would broach the topic again after they'd eaten.
"Here we go. One Syverson special, on the bar," he grinned at her as he slid her plate in front of her seat at the kitchen counter, Sy setting his own plate down next to hers. Grabbing his coffee, a glass of orange juice for her, and a bottle of his favorite hot sauce, Sy made sure the salt, pepper, syrup, and napkins were all within reach before taking his seat.
“Go on, dig in,” He urged, pointing at Sasha’s plate with his chin, Syverson wondering when the last time she ate was. She was thin, almost alarmingly so, and aside from her swollen belly, there wasn’t nearly enough meat on her bones to be carrying another human. If she stayed, Syverson knew he’d see to it personally that she ate her three squares a day, and that she got as many nutrients as she needed to grow the little one inside her.
Tentatively, Sasha took a bite of the pancake first, hers slathered in syrup the same way Sy’s were, something she thought endearing. Her eyes rolled back and she practically swooned as the familiar taste hit her tongue, Sasha melting a little in her seat.
“This is really good,” she managed to say after swallowing, her face showing nothing but awe that Sy had made it all himself. Where she came from, men were never in the kitchen unless they were getting a beer. It shocked her, to say the least.
“Thank you, again, for all of this. I don’t...I don’t have any way of repaying you,” Sasha murmured after another bite, looking up at Sy with regret. She had to do something in return for all his generosity, she just didn’t know what she’d be able to manage, given she’d left her home with just the shirt on her back.
“There’s no need, honest. I’m not doing this ‘cause I’m lookin’ for something in return. I’m doing it ‘cause it’s the right thing to do. Couldn’t just leave ya to burn to death out there. What kinda animal would I be if I did that? Nah, no repayment necessary, mama. Just...don’t go walkin’ into the middle ‘a nowhere without water and cover again. That’s all I ask,” Syverson replied, biting his tongue to keep from saying what he actually wanted to say, knowing that doing so would spook her. Asking a near-stranger to stay as long as she needed and not worry about lifting a finger while doing so usually didn’t go over well in most circles.
They ate in silence for a bit, Sasha taking in the house and occasionally slipping a bit of food to one of the dogs, making sure Sy wasn’t looking while she did so.
“Your home is beautiful. Looks like it’s straight out of a magazine,” she mused, blushing slightly when she realized how silly she must’ve sounded.
"Thank you. It belonged to my parents, but they've decided to live the high life down in Florida now. Boating, fishing, tanning, the usual retirement stuff. They visit every now and then, but they've got their own little house not far from here, so the place is all mine," he replied with a big smile, Syverson not even realizing that he was divulging so much information in one answer. Despite years of military training on how to keep mum about personal and secure information, at home, Syverson was an open book who wore his heart on his sleeve.
“As for it lookin’ like it’s out of a magazine...Well, that’s ‘cause it’s been in a few. Couple ‘a years back, some hoity toity types came and shot the place. It ended up in a few rags. Mom’s got ‘em all stashed away somewhere.”
Feeling brave when her comment wasn’t met with ridicule, Sasha remembered her question from earlier, a smirk crossing her face as she spoke.
“I find it really hard to believe it’s just you here.”
Sy laughed heartily at the idea of there being someone else on the ranch. Sure he occasionally had help (aside from his two stable hands), especially during foaling season, but that usually just consisted of his friends coming down for a few days.
"It's just me, the dogs, and the horses. I’ve got some guys that help with the stables, but they don’t live here," he assured her, shaking his head in amusement before taking another bite.
“It’s just….Well, it’s so clean and decorated so nice,” Sasha said the words without thinking, instantly looking down and away, fully expecting that she’d offended him by assuming he couldn’t look after himself.
“The place has a woman’s touch ‘cause my mom decorated it and I couldn’t be bothered to change it. As for the cleaning, well, I don’t like livin’ in filth any more than anyone else, so I clean a bit everyday and by the end of the week, everything’s spick and span. It becomes a routine after a while.” Sy chuckled, answering the underlying question of why it didn’t look like every bachelor pad ever.
Sasha grinned, blushing as she nodded her understanding. “I figured you had a wife, but mom works too.”
“Yeah, don’t got one of those.” Syverson shook his head, eyebrows going up comically as he finished his last bite.
“What? You have something against the institution of marriage?” Sasha laughed.
“First off, calling it an ‘institution’ makes it sound like a loony bin. Secondly, I have nothing against it. All the women I’ve dated have seemed to hate the idea though, hence no ring.” He explained with a shrug, giving her a wink as he stood and loaded his plate into the dishwasher before leaning against the other side of the counter, waiting for Sasha to finish her own meal.
“I’m gonna go get Wolf, as promised. Stay here where it’s nice and cool, and I’ll come grab ya when I’m back.” Sy explained once she was done, taking her plate and swapping it for a glass of water, the liquid cool enough to make the glass sweat near-instantly. Sasha nodded, the excitement returning to her eyes at the prospect of meeting the horse.
Slipping on his boots, Sy stopped and gave Aika a piece of sausage before giving her the command to stay. Though his eldest dog usually followed him everywhere, he wanted her to look after Sasha while he was gone, if only for his own peace of mind.
Sy took the ATV down to the stables and made quick work of tacking up Wolf, speaking to the horse in gentle, hushed tones the whole time.
“There’s someone I want you to meet, bud. You gotta be gentle, ‘cause she’s hurt pretty bad, okay?” He said once he’d given the straps one last check, smiling up at his Friesian and giving him a good pat to the shoulders. Climbing on, gave the stable a quick check before riding out, going an easy pace until he crested the hill.
Sasha knew she should have waited inside, but curiosity got the better of her and she wandered out, wanting to see Syverson come up from the stables. She wasn’t disappointed at what she saw. With his red plaid shirt, fitted jeans, boots, and baseball cap, he was every inch the modern cowboy and Sasha couldn’t stop the butterflies that filled her stomach even if she’d wanted to.
Sy saw her the moment he got to the top of the hill and with a shake of his head and a beaming smile, he signaled Wolf to gallop, knowing he had plenty of time to slow down before he hit the house. There was no feeling like riding a horse at full speed, and never once did Sy think he’d grow tired of the exhilaration it brought; it was better than any rollercoaster and no one could tell him different.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay inside, mama?” He called as he came within earshot, Sy slowing Wolf with ease and grace, the two coming to a full stop a few steps from the porch.
Blushing but smiling ear-to-ear, Sasha nodded, knowing she’d been caught.
“I couldn’t help it. I wanted to see y’all two coming down the hill.” She admitted, taking slow, tentative steps towards the massive horse and his equally big rider.
“Like you would a dog. Palm up, let ‘im give you a sniff,” Sy instructed gently, patting Wolf’s neck as he watched Sasha approach.
“Hi, Wolf. You’re a very handsome boy,” Sasha smiled, extending her hand and giggling softly when Wolf sniffed at it with enthusiasm. After a moment, Wolf nuzzled first at Sasha’s face and then at her belly, seeming to know that the new person Sy had been talking about was carrying another person with her.
Sy’s smile was sappy as he watched the interaction, knowing for certain that if his favorite horse liked Sasha, then she was good people. Horses never had a reason to feign affection, and they were smart enough to only offer it when the person was right. By Wolf’s account, Sasha was second only to Sy himself.
“He likes you,” Sy murmured, adjusting one of Wolf’s long braids, letting Sasha take her time.
“Feeling’s mutual, isn’t it, Wolf?” Sasha beamed, nodding her head in time with Wolf, laughing happily when the horse let his head slump onto her shoulder.
“Alright, that’s enough there, mister. Layin’ it on a lil’ thick,” Sy joked, patting his neck, his eyes never once leaving Sasha’s smile; he wouldn’t admit to being smitten just yet, but her having Wolf’s approval didn’t hurt matters in the slightest.
“I gotta get the rest of the bunch turned out to pasture. I’ll be back around one for lunch, but until then, why don’t you head on in and have a rest? There’s clean clothes in the laundry room if you wanna change into something a lil’ more comfortable. Pretty sure there’s some basketball shorts in there with a drawstring so they don’t fall off ya,” Sy gave her a wink, “and if you wanna take a dip, the pool’s good to go, though I don’t got a bathin’ suit for ya, unfortunately.”
As he spoke, he turned on a pair of walkie-talkies, Syverson bending down to hand Sasha one. “Keep this close, and just press the button to talk. I’ve got mine on my belt, so I’ll hear ya no matter what. Just lay back and relax. You’re good here, for however long you need.”
By the time he was finished speaking, Sasha had tears of gratitude in her eyes, and giving Wolf a final scratch to his nose, she nodded, managing to give her rescuer a big smile.
“Thank you. So much,” she whispered, not trusting her voice to get louder. Sy nodded, his eyes gentle and understanding. A moment of silent connection passed between them before Sy clicked his teeth and tugged at the rein, turning Wolf with ease.
“No walkin’ out in the sun, mama. I mean it!” Sy called over his shoulder with a wide grin, waving as he nudged Wolf back into a full gallop, the pair making it up the hill in no time at all before disappearing over the horizon, leaving Sasha with a warmth that spread throughout every fiber of her being, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years.
#henry cavill#syverson x ofc#captain syverson#captain syverson fic#fic#deathonyourtongueoriginals#willow run
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Consider: The effeminists
Effeminist—(historical) A member of a male homosexual movement opposing prejudices against effeminate behaviour. —Wikipedia
The next quote is from Jeanne Cordova’s When We Were Outlaws. She was a major figure in the lesbian feminist movement and created the most prominent lesbian newspaper of the time, The Lesbian Tide. This part of her autobiography is set when the lesbians employeed at the gay center (who created some of the first health care programs for women alcoholics, btw) are shoved out of power. Most of the gay male employees at the GCSC were fine with what was clearly manipulative and misogynistic bullshit that would disempower an entire neighborhood of poor, lower-class women. However, one group of men stood by the lesbians:
“In recent weeks a handful of the gay male employees [at the Gay Community Services Center] had begun to support us, calling themselves “effeminists,” a term used by radical left wing of the gay movement. Effeminists glorified in the name “gay faeries” and understood that the straight world mocked them because they as (f-slur) identified with women. They championed feminist principles like lesbian equality in the gay movement. They were usually feminine, rather than butch gay men, and they became our natural allies.” (Cordova 97-98)
The Effeminists’ 1973 Manifesto is below, transcribed from this archive:
The Effeminist Manifesto (1973)
Steven Dansky, John Knoebel, Kenneth Pitchford
We, the undersigned Effeminists of Double-F hereby invite all like-minded men to join with us in making our declaration of independence from Gay Liberation and all other Male-Ideologies by unalterably asserting our stand of revolutionary commitment to the following Thirteen Principles that form the quintessential substance of our politics:
On the oppression of women.
1. SEXISM. All women are oppressed by all men, including ourselves. This systematic oppression is called sexism.
2. MALE SUPREMACY. Sexism itself is the product of male supremacy, which produces all other forms of oppression that patriarchal societies exhibit: racism, classism, ageism, economic exploitation, ecological imbalance.
3. GYNARCHISM. Only that revolution which strikes at the root of all oppression can end any and all of its forms. That is why we are gynarchists; that is, we are among those who believe that women will seize power from the patriarchy and, thereby, totally change life on this planet as we know it.
4. WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP. Exactly how women will go about seizing power is no business of ours, being men. But as effeminate men oppressed by masculinist standards, we ourselves have a stake in the destruction of the patriarchy, and thus we must struggle with the dilemma of being partisans – as effeminists – of a revolution opposed to us – as men. To conceal our partisanship and remain inactive for fear of women’s leadership or to tamper with questions which women will decide would be no less despicable. Therefore, we have a duty to take sides, to struggle to change ourselves, to act.
On the oppression of effeminate men.
5. MASCULINISM. Faggots and all effeminate men are oppressed by the patriarchy’s systematic enforcement of masculinist standards, whether these standards are expressed as physical, mental, emotional, or sexual stereotypes of what is desirable in a man.
6. EFFEMINISM. Our purpose is to urge all such men as ourselves (whether celibate, homosexual, or heterosexual) to become traitors to the class of men by uniting in a movement of Revolutionary Effeminism so that collectively we can struggle to change ourselves from non-masculinists into anti-masculinists and begin attacking those aspects of the patriarchal system that most directly oppress us.
7. PREVIOUS MALE-IDEOLOGIES. Three previous attempts by men to create a politics of fighting oppression have failed because of their incomplete analysis: the Male Left, Male Liberation, and Gay Liberation. These and other formations, such as sexual libertarianism and the counter-culture, are all tactics for preserving power in men’s hands by pretending to struggle for change. We specifically reject a hands by pretending to struggle for change. We specifically reject a carry-over from one or more of these earlier ideologies – the damaging combination of ultra-egalitarianism, anti-leadership, anti-technology, and downward mobility. All are based on a politics of guilt and a hypocritical attitude towards power which prevents us from developing skills urgently needed in our struggle and which confuses the competence needed for revolutionary work with the careerism of those who seek personal accommodation within the patriarchal system.
8. COLLABORATORS AND CAMP FOLLOWERS. Even we effeminate men are given an option by the patriarchy: to become collaborators in the task of keeping women in their place. Faggots, especially, are offered a subculture by the patriarchy which is designed to keep us oppressed and also increase the oppression of women. This subculture includes a combination of anti-women mimicry and self-mockery known as camp which, to its trivializing effect, would deny us any chance of awakening to our own suffering, the expression of which can be recognized as revolutionary sanity by the oppressed.
9.SADO-MASCULINITY: ROLE PLAYING AND OBJECTIFICATION. The Male Principle, as exhibited in the last ten thousand years, is chiefly characterized by an appetite for objectification, role-playing, and sadism. First, the masculine preference for thinking as opposed to feeling encourages men to regard other people as things, and to use them accordingly. Second, inflicting pain upon people and animals has come to be deemed a mark of manhood, thereby explaining the well-known proclivity for rape and torture. Finally, a lust for power-dominance is rewarded in the playing out of that ultimate role, The Man, whose rapacity is amply displayed in witch-hunts, lynchings, pogroms, and episodes of genocide, not to mention the day-to-day (often life-long) subservience that he exacts from those closest to him.
Masculine bias, thus, appears in our behavior whenever we act out the following categories, regardless of which element in each pair we are most drawn to at any moment: subject/object; dominant/submissive; master/slave; butch/femme. All of these false dichotomies are inherently sexist, since they express the desire to be masculine or to possess the masculine in someone else. The racism of white faggots often reveals the same set of polarities, regardless of whether they choose to act out the dominant or submissive role with black or third-world men. In all cases, only by rejecting the very terms of these categories can we become effeminists. This means explicitly rejecting, as well, the objectification of people based on such things as age; body; build; color; size or shape of facial features, eyes, hair, genitals; ethnicity or race; physical and mental handicap; life-style; sex. We must therefore strive to detect and expose every embodiment of The Male Principle, no matter how and where it may be enshrined and glorified, including those arenas of faggot objectification (baths, bars, docks, parks) where power-dominance, as it operates in the selecting of roles and objects, is known as “cruising.”
10. MASOCH-EONISM. Among those aspects of our oppression which The Man has foisted upon us, two male heterosexual perversions, in particular, are popularly thought of as being “acceptable” behavior for effeminate men: eonism (that is, male transvestitism) and masochism. Just as sadism and masculinism, by merging into one identity, tend to become indistinguishable one from the other, so masochism and eonism are born of an identical impulse to mock subservience in men, as a way to project intense anti-women feelings and also to pressure women into conformity by providing those degrading stereotypes most appealing to the sado-masculinist. Certainly, sado-masoch-eonism is in all its forms the very anti-thesis of effeminism. Both the masochist and the eonist are particularly an insult to women since they overtly parody female oppression and pose as object lessons in servility.
11. LIFE-STYLE: APPEARANCE AND REALITY. We must learn to discover and value The Female Principle in men as something inherent, beyond roles or superficial decoration, and thus beyond definition by any one particular life-style (such as the recent androgeny fad, transsexuality, or other purely personal solutions). Therefore, we do not automatically support or condemn faggots or effeminists who live alone, who live together in couples, who live together in all-male collectives, who live with women, or who live in any other way – since all these modes of living in and of themselves can be sexist but also can conceivably come to function as bases for anti-sexist struggle. Even as we learn to affirm in ourselves the cooperative impulse and to admire in each other what is tender and gentle, what is aesthetic, considerate, affectionate, lyrical, sweet, we should not confuse our own time with that post-revolutionary world when our effeminist natures will be free to express themselves openly without fear or punishment or danger of oppressing others. Above all, we must remember that it is not merely a change of appearance that we seek, but a change in reality.
12. TACTICS. We mean to support, defend and promote effeminism in all men everywhere by any means except those inherently male supremacist or those in conflict with the goals of feminists intent on seizing power. We hope to find militant ways for fighting our oppression that will meet these requirements. Obviously, we do not seek the legalization of faggotry, quotas, or civil-rights for faggots or other measures designed to reform the patriarchy. Practically, we see three phases of activity: naming our enemies to start with, next confronting them, and ultimately divesting them of their power. This means both the Cock Rocker and the Drag Rocker among counter-cultist heroes, both the Radical Therapist and the Faggot-Torturer among effemiphobic psychiatrists, both the creators of beefcake pornography and of eonistic travesties. It also means all branches of the patriarchy that institutionalize the persecution of faggots (schools, church, army, prison, asylum, old-age home).
But whatever the immediate target, we would be wise to prepare for all forms of sabotage and rebellion which women might ask of us, since it is not as pacifists that we can expect to serve in the emerging world-wide anti-gender revolution. We must also constantly ask ourselves and each other for a greater measure of risk and commitment than we may have dreamt was possible yesterday. Above all, our joining in this struggle must discover in us a new respect for women, a new ability to love each other as effeminists, both of which have previously been denied us by our misogyny and effemiphobia, so that our bonding until now has been the traditional male solidarity that is always inimical to the interests of women and pernicious of our own sense of effeminist self-hood.
13. DRUDGERY AND CHILDCARE: RE-DEFINING GENDER. Our first and most important step, however, must be to take upon ourselves at least our own share of the day-to-day life-sustaining drudgery that is usually consigned to women alone. To be useful in this way can release women to do other work of their choosing and can also begin to re-define gender for the next generation. Of paramount concern here, we ask to be included in the time-consuming work of raising and caring for children, as a duty, right and privilege.
Attested to this twenty-seventh day of Teves and first day of January, in the year of our falthering Judeo-Christian Patriarchy, 5733 and 1973, by Steven Dansky, John Knoebel, and Kenneth Pitchford.
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I think I'm talking about confidence, I'm not too sure.
I was fifteen when I first saw Great Teacher Onizuka. My friend had lent me the DVD set (as you did when it was 2008) and I was about to spend the day watching it, feigning some illness to get out of school for the day. I needed some time alone, to process everything that had been going on around me.
For context, my parents were in the middle of a divorce. My mum, the most amazing person in the world to me, was not having a good time and I was not at all possessed with the skills to help her cope. Processing the concept of divorce, while trying to mediate the two adults going through it, wasn’t something I could handle. I didn’t know what I was doing. I needed a whole day away from friends and away from parents. While everyone was at their day job, I could think about everything and nothing, uninterrupted.
My attempt at getting out of school worked, however it came with a caveat. Mum had decided she’d take the day off with me. Feeling defeated but still stubborn, I insisted that if she was going to stay home too that we were watching GTO. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.
GTO begins with our protagonist, Eikuchi Onizuka, squatting down by a payphone, trying to stare up the skirts of some high school girls coming down the nearby escalator. That’s a bold open. Two delinquents notice this and attempt to then extort him for cash. He promptly beats them up, forcing them to use all the money they have to buy him some food from the nearby convenience store. This scene establishes a few things straight off the bat: Onizuka is, first and foremost, a pervert and he’s physically strong but not to the point of unfairly asserting dominance over others. Onizuka dreams of being a teacher of all things. He wants to be the teacher he never had, being there for students outside the classroom as well as in. The series showcases Onizuka using his ex-biker gang leader skills and sheer determination to change the attitude of the antagonist students in his class. Each week he solves the reason behind their resistance toward him and they join his team until eventually he really is the Great Teacher, Onizuka.
The first delinquent problem Onizuka solves is that of Mizuki Nanako. Her parents aren’t divorced but they’re not exactly doing well. Ever since her father’s company started doing well and they moved into a mansion, she feels as though her parents just aren’t seeing eye to eye anymore. She blames it on a simple wall separating her parents’ private rooms. Before it got put up, her parents would talk and laugh together, sharing in their joys but also their defeats. Then before she knew it, they put a wall up and stopped sharing anything at all.
So, Onizuka arrives at her house. He’s got a bandana tied around his head, his abs gleaming as he’s smoking a cigarette. More importantly, he’s holding a sledgehammer, ready to demolish that wall. With her parents yelling at him threatening to call the police, Onizuka ascends the staircase and begins to take down that wall. Every powerful swing, shaking the wall and cracking the foundation.
(What a man what a man what a man what a might good man)
It felt cruel watching this scene with my mum. Here we were, two people still trying to process a big life event, opting to spend the day away from the problem. Here Onizuka was, just smashing through the problem with nothing but conviction, stupidity and sheer confidence. I couldn’t quite conceptualise the thought just yet but I think I envied that confidence. I wanted to be able to take a sledgehammer to this invisible problem and fix it. I didn’t know what an actual sledgehammer would solve nor was I even able to figure out what my situational sledgehammer would be, I just knew I wanted to be more like that. I wanted that confidence; I just didn’t know what it was yet.
Confidence. A complete assuredness in your actions. You may not have any idea of the outcome of said actions but you’re certain in the choice you made taking them. Maybe that’s just one definition. I struggle to this day with how to define confidence, I’ve been confident at different times in my life for different reasons. Mainly it’s been something I’ve found as I’ve gotten older though.
I struggled a lot with it when I was younger. I’d struggle to find it and when I did there was someone there trying to take it from me almost immediately. Pink polos were gay, skinny jeans were gay, being interested in anything outside the norm was gay as well. I wasn’t bullied by any means but there was always somebody around to tell you what they thought. I’d fold under that kind of pressure. I remember when I was 10 and we were in music class, I sang a little too loud and the popular girls behind me started pointing and laughing, clipping me before I got too sure of myself.
I got older and I thought I’d found confidence through weight training, but it was just arrogance. I genuinely thought I was better than other people in my creative writing class because I picked heavy things up and put them down. Of course, this had a drawback, whenever I’d meet someone bigger than me, I’d feel pathetic, jealous and inferior. I thought I’d rid myself of this arrogance when I started studying Japanese. My initial study was diligent and excessive. I’d have two Japanese classes a week and spend the rest of my time after work revising. Looking back now it was necessarily efficient studying, but in terms of time put in the hours were there. I believed I was working hard, which led to this arrogance in my abilities. An arrogance that was swiftly cut down whenever I met somebody better than me.
So, I always arrived at this juncture where I’d learn a new skill or hobby and wonder how to be confident in myself without comparing myself to others. I didn’t quite know how to praise myself for doing well at the gym or learning something new in Japanese without immediately comparing myself to others. It meant that I’d occasionally have these emotional highs when I achieved something only to be brought down to earth when I saw that somebody could do it better. I didn’t know how to make my achievements my own. The confidence I had was too fickle, it didn’t come from within and it often led to feeling superior to others based off of a single quantifier.
I was still uncomfortable with myself. I wanted outside validation which led to comparison, boasting and arrogance. I didn’t realise that I couldn’t get any of that from anyone else, it all had to come from within.
It’s taken me 14 years, but Onizuka finally made sense to me. I was watching the incredibly famous (in Japan) live action version of GTO one night, which turned into a nostalgia trip as all the episodes were almost identical to their anime equivalent. As I was watching I was wondering why I still hold this fictional character in such high regard, of all the powerful charismatic anime protagonists I watched in my teenage years, why does Onizuka persevere?
It’s because he’s kind of a dork.
(Get you a man that can do both)
Along with the confidence and strength that being a protagonist in a medium geared towards young boys affords you, Onizuka also has some very human flaws and vulnerabilities. The intense scenes like surprise renovating Nanako’s house or rescuing a whole bunch of kids from a gang are always juxtaposed with him being absolutely wayward in so many other aspects of life. He lives at the school because he can’t afford rent, he’s 26 and never had a girlfriend and his only friends are his students. We are always shown that his confidence isn’t intrinsically linked to how well his life is going, it’s just his feeling and determination in the moment. For all that bravado we see, we’re also shown the more human, relatable aspects. He’s amazing, brave and confident, but at the same time he’s still vulnerable and human.
Yet here’s the thing, I thought confidence meant a lack of vulnerability. I thought one couldn’t be both confident and vulnerable. This isn’t some segue into Boys Don’t Cry or a delve into masculinity. I didn’t believe that vulnerability wasn’t masculine, I just thought that vulnerability meant you had a long way to go before you were allowed to be confident.
(These lines go from bravado to insecurity in an instant, but I still think Tyler is confident as fuck)
I show what I feel to be the pretty vulnerable content on this blog. I write about my doubts and insecurities, the events that shaped me and the times in my life where I really felt at my lowest. I document the struggle I find myself in now, trying to carve something for myself and come to terms with the changes that keep happening around me. I don’t think anybody reading this would have an image of me as an outgoing, confident person. There’s rays of positivity sprinkled in occasionally but it’s generally content that I struggle to tell people in person.
Before starting this blog, I would have imagined that if I wanted to become this confident idealised version of myself, I’d need to erase any form of vulnerability. Delete the Instagram posts with moody lyrics, delete the couple shots and stop caring. I’d need to kill part of myself to become someone different. I couldn’t consciously accept that they were two signs of the same coin, even if I knew it in the back of my mind. The more I’ve been writing the better I’ve been feeling. These fears and insecurities being out in the open don’t make me any weaker, they actually feel like progress. My weaknesses will exist regardless of whether or not I tell people about them, my insecurities won’t disappear overnight. I’ll never be someone I’m not. What I can do is take these things that used to terrify me and put them out in the open. In my last piece I waxed on about making my words my own, by verbalising and bringing these thoughts into the open I feel like they become my own. They’re not completely stripped of power but they don’t hold the same sway over me that they once did.
So that leaves me with confidence. I can air my vulnerabilities and doubts but then where does my confidence come from? How do I then stop it from becoming arrogance?
Let me tell you about Charisma Man.
You know how when Superman goes back to Krypton he’s just a regular person, but on Earth he’s basically a God? Charisma Man is a joke (turned comic) about how Western Men often believe themselves to be Superman on Earth when they move to Japan. Why? You’re basically bombarded with compliments from the get-go. You get told your Japanese is amazing (when it’s not), that you’re so tall (when you’re short back home) and that you’re such a handsome man (when all experiences up until now have led you to believe the opposite). Thus, you create a kind of false confidence for yourself. Or do the people around you do it for you? You yourself haven’t changed but the people around you have, and they’re whispering sweet nothings in your ear.
(Honestly didn't know it was a comic, initially heard of it on a subreddit making fun of other expats in Japan)
Hell, maybe I am good looking? I studied Japanese for a year back home, maybe I am just really good at it? Maybe those people around me back home were just obnoxiously tall and mean. Maybe I am the shit. You begin to formulate this new identity for yourself. You are Charisma Man now. You’ll be making heaps of money, have girls on standby and be loved by everybody in no time.
Except that never happens.
The reality of Charisma Man isn’t so bright. You’re probably an English teacher living somewhere far away from the big city. Your apartment is probably small and old and your salary is half as much as you were making back home. Despite being told about how good your Japanese is, you still can’t turn on the TV and watch a program. You still can’t go to the bank and open an account with your bilingual Japanese friend. You’re still single and you’re probably getting fatter off convenience store fried chicken, if anything.
It’s fake confidence with no merit, built on nothing. You haven’t put yourself out there or done anything to earn that confidence so it always feels foreign to you. There isn’t some feat you perform or some hurdle you cross to get that kind of confidence. You’re not smashing walls with your sledgehammer or confronting your fears and growing. You just get fed compliments until your confidence balloon bursts.
I felt like I was Charisma Man for a hot minute. Separated from everyone I knew, out drinking every night, being complimented left right and centre. I kept trying and failing to keep my feet on the ground. Back then I thought it was new-found confidence, but I wasn’t really coming out of my shell; I was just being obnoxious. After long the facade faded and I realised I was the exact same Elliot I was back in Australia, just with less money and a nicer haircut.
I began to think about my experience. Why was I so confident? Why did it dissipate so quickly? Why was I not the only one that experienced this little phenomenon?
I came to the conclusion that confidence can come from many places. It can come from other people, but then it’s reliant on the praise of others. It’s shallow, fickle and bound to dissipate sooner rather than later. You’re constantly reliant on the praise of others to affirm who you are as a person, you can fool people into giving you praise but that goes away before you know it as well.
It’s a big enough of a struggle to understand yourself, it’s near impossible to understand strangers. Relying on such an unstable form of validation is essentially just inviting mental trauma in the long run.
On the other hand, confidence can also come from within.
After I distanced myself from all that charisma, I began to realise that I felt my best and my most confident when I actually put the work in. I started properly studying, eating well, and writing down my thoughts. It didn’t matter as much if people didn’t say anything, because I went to bed every night knowing that I put in enough work. Nobody said anything about the change, but I felt like I was becoming my own biggest supporter.
It’s both rewarding and daunting when you switch dopamine suppliers. I used past tense in those last few sentences because that particular fountain hasn’t been flowing so well lately. The flip side of not letting other people’s compliments fuel you anymore is that when you’re not doing right by yourself, that confidence tend to dry up pretty quickly.
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Punk’d History, Vol. VIII: This Machine [blank] Fascists
Photo by Richard Young
It has the appearance of a worrisome pattern: any number of punk rock’s founding figures embraced the symbolics of Nazi Germany. Ron Asheton, an original and indispensable member of the Stooges, played a number of gigs wearing a red swastika armband, and liked to sport Iron Cross medals and a Luftwaffe-style leather jacket. Sid Vicious loved his bright scarlet, swastika-emblazoned tee shirt, and Siouxsie Sioux, during her tenure as the It-Girl of the Bromley Contingent, mixed her breast-baring, black leather bondage gear with a bunch of “Nazi chic.” And how many early Ramones songs (inevitably penned by Dee Dee) referenced Nazi gear, concepts and geography? “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” “Commando,” “It’s a Long Way Back to Germany,” “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front,” and so on—for sure, more than a few.
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“Appearance” is the key term. Poor Sid lacked the sobriety and smarts to have much of a grasp of fascism as an ideology. Siouxsie was just taking the piss, and gleefully pissing off the mid-1970s British general public, for much of whom World War II was still a living memory. Asheton and Dee Dee? Both were sons of hyper-masculine military men. Asheton’s father was a collector of WWII artefacts, and the guitarist shared his father’s fascination. When the Stooges adopted an ethos and aesthetic hostile to the late-1960s prevailing Flower Power rock’n’roll subculture, the Nazi accoutrement seemed to him fitting signs of the band’s anger and alienation. Dee Dee hated his father, an abusive Army officer who married a German woman. Dee Dee spent some of his youth in post-war West Germany, in which Nazi symbols were highly charged with anxiety and vituperation. Casual veneration of Nazis was a convenient way to reject the triumphal ennobling of the Good War, and of the military men associated with its traditions. And (as Sid, Siouxsie and Asheton also noticed) it really bothered the squares.
None of that makes the superficial use of the swastika or phrases like “Nazi schatzi” any less offensive — it simply underscores that in the cases noted above, the offense was the thing. The politics weren’t even an afterthought, because the political itself had been dismissed as corrupt, boring or simply the native territory of the very people the punks were striking out against. If that’s where the relation between punk and fascism ceased, there wouldn’t be much more to write about.
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The post-punk moment in England provided opportunities to rethink and restrategize the nascent détournement of Siouxsie’s fashionable provocations. Genesis P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle were a brainy bunch, and their play with fascist signifiers was a good deal more complex. The band’s logo and their occasional appearance in gun-metal grey uniforms clearly alluded to Nazism, with its attendant, keen interests in occult symbols and High Modernist representational languages. TG’s visual gestures were also of a piece with an early band slogan: “Industrial music for industrial people.” Clearly “industrial people” can be read as a highly ironized coupling: the oppressed workers marching through the bowels of Metropolis were a sort of industrial people, reduced to the functionality of pure human capital. TG seemed to impose the same analysis on the middle-managers of Britain’s post-industrial economy, and their uncritical complicity in capital’s cruelties. But it’s also possible to argue that industrial people are industrious people; like TG, industrial people (middle managers, MPs) can get a lot of stuff done. They can produce things. They can make the trains run on time. And what sorts of cargo might those trains be carrying? What variety of conveyance delivered the naked “little Jewish girl” of “Zyklon B Zombies” to her fate?
To be clear: I don’t mean at all to suggest that TG was a fascist band. Like their punky contemporaries, TG traded in fascist iconography in a spirit of transgressive outrage, expressing their hot indignation with equally heated symbols. And other British post-punk acts flirted with fascist themes and images, ranging from ambiguous dalliance (Joy Division’s overt references to Yehiel De-Nur’s House of Dolls and to Rudolph Hess; and just what was the inspiration for Death in June’s band name?) to more assertive satire (see Current 93’s appealingly bonkers Swastikas for Noddy [LAYLAH Antirecords, 1988]). But a more problematic populist undercurrent in British punk persisted through the late 1970s. The dissolution of Sham 69—due in large part to the National Front’s attempts to appropriate the band’s working-class anger as a form of white pride—opened the way for a clutch of clueless, cynical or outright racist Oi! bands to attempt to impose themselves as the face of blue-collar English punk. And literally so: the Strength through Oi! compilation LP (Decca Records, 1981) featured notorious British Movement activist Nicky Crane on its cover. It didn’t help that the record’s title seemed to allude to the Nazis’ “Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude]” propaganda initiative.
Of course, it’s unfair to tar all Oi! bands with an indiscriminate brush. A few bands whose songs were opportunistically stuck onto Strength through Oi! by the dullards at Decca Records — Cock Sparrer and the excellent Infa Riot — tended leftward in their politics, and were anything but racists. But for a lot of the disaffected kids sucking down pints of Bass and singing in the Shed at Stamford Bridge, it wasn’t much of a leap from the punk pathetique of the Toy Dolls to Skrewdriver’s poisonous palaver.
In the States, a similarly complicated story can be recovered:
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In numerous ways, hardcore intensified punk’s confrontational qualities, musically and aesthetically. The New York hardcore scene made a fetish of its inherent violence, which complemented the music’s sharpened impact. So it’s hard to know precisely what to make of the photo on the cover of Victim in Pain (Rat Cage Records, 1984). If inflicting violence was an essential element of belonging in the NYHC scene, with whom to identify: the Nazi with the pistol, or the abject Ukrainian Jewish man, on his knees and about to tumble into the mass grave?
Agnostic Front seemed to provide a measure of clarity on the record, which included the song “Fascist Attitudes.” The lyric uses “fascist” as a condemnatory term. But the behaviors the song engages as evidence of fascism are intra-scene acts of violence: “Why should you go around bashing one another? […] / Learning how to respect each other is a must / So why start a war of anger, danger among us?” That’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who participated in early-1980s hardcore; calls for scene unity were ubiquitous, and the theme is obsessively addressed on Victim in Pain. But the signs of inclusivity most visibly celebrated on the NYHC records and show flyers of the period were a skinhead’s white, shaven pate; black leather, steel-toe boots; and heavily muscled biceps. Those signifiers clearly link to the awful cover image of Strength through Oi! The forms of identity recognized and concretized in the songs’ first-person inclusive pronouns have a clear referent.
Agnostic Front wasn’t the only NYHC band to refer to and engage World War Two-period fascism. Queens natives Dave Rubenstein and Paul Bakija met at Forest Hills High School—the same school at which John Cummings (Johnny) befriended Thomas Erdelyi (Tommy), laying the groundwork for the formation of the Ramones. Rubenstein and Bakija also took stage names (Dave Insurgent and Paul Cripple) and formed Reagan Youth. But unlike the Ramones, there was nothing tentative or ambivalent about Reagan Youth’s politics. Rubenstein’s parents, after all, were Holocaust survivors. The band’s name riffed on “Hitler Youth,” but specifically did so to draw associations between Reagan and Hitler, between American conservatism’s 1980s resurgence and the Nazi’s hateful, genocidal agenda. Songs like “New Aryans” and “I Hate Hate” accommodated no uncertainties.
Still, it’s interesting that Victim in Pain and Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order (R Radical Records, 1984) were released only months apart, by bands in the same scene, sometimes sharing bills at CBGBs’ famous matinees of the period. And while Reagan Youth toured with Dead Kennedys, it’s Agnostic Front’s “Fascist Attitudes” that’s closer in content to the most famous punk rock putdown of Nazis.
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It’s odd what comes back around: Martin Hannett, whom Biafra playfully chides at the track’s very beginning, produced much of Joy Division’s music, moving the band away from its brittle early sound to the fulsome atmospheres of the Factory records, and to a wider listenership. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” similarly addresses a formerly obscure, tight scene opening to a greater array of participants, some of whom were attracted solely to hardcore’s reputation for violence. Like “Fascist Attitudes,” the Dead Kennedys’ song itemizes fighting at shows as its chief complaint, and as a principal marker for “Nazi” behavior. Biafra’s lyric eventually gets around to somewhat more focused ideological critique: “You still think swastikas look cool / The real Nazis run your schools / They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops / In a real fourth Reich, you’ll be the first to go.” The kiss-off to punk’s vapid romance of the swastika (it “looks cool”) complements the speculative treatment of a “real fourth Reich.” Both operate at the level of abstraction. The casual, superficial relation to the symbol’s aesthetic assumes a sort of safety from the real, material consequences of its application. And the emergence of a fascist political regime is dangled as a possible future event. That speculative futurity undoes the “real” in “real Nazis.” The threat is ultimately a metaphorical construct. The Nazis are metaphorical “Nazis.”
Still, it’s the song’s chorus that resonates most powerfully. So much so that the song has found its way into other artworks.
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Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015) is frequently identified as a horror film on streaming services. We could split hairs over that genre marker. The film gets quite graphically bloody, but there’s no psychotic slasher killer, no supernatural force at work. And cinematically, the film is a lot more interested in anxiety and dramatic tension than it is in inspiring revulsion or disgust. It terrifies, more than it horrifies. What’s especially compelling about the film (aside from Imogen Poots’ excellent performance, and Patrick Stewart’s menacing turn as charismatic fascist Darcy Banks) is its interest in embedding the viewer in a social context in which the Nazis are a lot less metaphorical, a lot more real. In Green Room, the kids in the punk band the Ain’t Rights are warned about the club they have agreed to play: “It’s mostly boots and braces down there.” And they understand the terms. What they can’t quite imagine is a room — a scene, a political Real — in which fascism is dominant. Their recognition of the stakes of the Real comes too late. The violence is already in motion. In that world, the Dead Kennedys song provides a nice slogan, but symbolic action alone is entirely inadequate.
OK, sure, Green Room is a fiction. Its violence is necessarily aestheticized, distorted and hyperbolized. But perhaps the film’s most urgent source of horror can be located in its plausible connections to the social realities of our material, contemporary conjuncture. You don’t have to dig very deep into the Web to find thousands of records made by white nationalist and neo-fascist-allied bands, many, many of which deploy stylistic chops identified with punk rock and hardcore. You can listen. You can buy. (And yeah, I’m not going to link to any of that miserable shit, because fuck them. If you do your own digging to see what’s what, be careful. It’s scary and upsetting in there.) It feels endless. And the virulent sentiments expressed on those records are echoed in institutional politics in the US and elsewhere: Steve King (and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, effectively angling for her seat in Congress), Nigel Farage, Alternative für Deutschland, elected leadership in Poland and Hungary. Explicit white supremacist music also has somewhat more carefully coded counterparts in much more visible media (the nightly monologuing on Fox News) and in very well-positioned, prominent policy makers (Stephen Miller, who’s on the record touting “great replacement” theory and is a big fan of The Camp of the Saints). It’s a complex, ideologically coherent network, working industriously to impose and install its hateful vision as the dominant political Real.
Sometimes it feels as if no progress at all has been made. Maybe we’re moving toward the reactionaries. Contrast Skokie in the late 1970s with Charlottesville in 2017. And now if the Neo-Nazis have licenses for their long guns, they can strut through American streets wearing them in the name of “law and order.” It’s even more disturbing that a subculture that wants to clothe itself in “revolution” and “radicalism” is so tightly in league with institutional politics. Say what you will about Siouxsie’s Nazi-fashion antics, no one suspected that her prancing echoed political activity, policy-making or messaging in Westminster.
So what’s a punk to do? It’s certain that a vigorously free society needs to preserve spaces in which unpopular speech can be uttered and exchanged. Punk should pride itself on defending those spaces. But speech that operates in conjunction with an ascendant political power and ideological agenda doesn’t need defense or energetic attempts to preserve its right to existence. In October of 2020, that speech (in this case, speeches being written by Miller, texts by folks who have spent time in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room and songs by white supremacist hardcore bands) has become synonymous with political right itself.
So now more than ever, it’s important to be active in the public square, to stand up to the fascists and to say it, often and out loud:
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Jonathan Shaw
#dusted magazine#punk'd history#jonathan shaw#punk rock#siouxsie and the banshees#throbbing gristle#agnostic front#dead kennedys#green room#mdc
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Ophelia By the Yard
Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood.
Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, leapt from the gothic toy box now joined by a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette that journeyman Italian cinematographers could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else.
When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn't underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman's Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane; it seems that filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were attempting the very same trick on their audiences.
The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre, and when you get to something like Kill, Baby...Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.
Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century -- a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-faced detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism, set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up, dot the film like musical numbers or action sequences might appear in a different genre.
Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider 1964’s Danza Macabra, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women?
The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned the elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterisation to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.
When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace's leaden "shockers." These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more inky shadows. A certain amount of fun, but different from the coming bloodbath because Wallace, despite somewhat fascistic tendencies, is anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, a sadism sublimated in story, a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace's more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer both thrilled and appalled.
The Giallo fetishizes murder. But then, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring — each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. And yet, for the directors who rode most dexterously the Giallo wave, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to find other, more violent outlets for their misogyny. Please enter into evidence the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are inconsequential. Argento’s defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).
Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually apply to their interior design. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.
Like a river of blood, homophobia, in the literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister and gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.
The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity, so they need fictional avatars to cloak their own feverish woman-hating. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce eye from mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).
The Giallo is founded on an unstated assumption: the modern world brings forth monsters. Jack the Ripper was an aberration in his day, but now there's a Jack around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, "propitious rooms." There's the glorious line in Withnail and I: "That's the sort of window faces appear at." But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One needn’t enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare, or perhaps better to say: the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.
Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only assigns misogyny to a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but plays the killer himself in A Cat in the Brain. Though, in another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli are bullshit, always. Criminology and clinical psychology are largely ignored, and Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signaling psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?
A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might just be a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos, but it’s of some interest, perhaps mitigating the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, like this?
Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.
Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and swellegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever admitting it, with the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.
If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), and it is only the women who are mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us. But the sex and the suffering that captivates most sadists is never what registers; no, it is the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face that resonates. Once again, physical interiors become a negative form of emotional interiority, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under trivial headings, either “the visuals” or “color palette” – neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.
Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine, if not psychotic, decor. Before he tortures and stabs her to death, “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic rules The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs – all gulped, swallowed.
About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness – a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to fill the eye somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity.
Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects are supposed to mean. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.
Function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto. Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as color becomes an instrument of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye and then some.
As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (which the Giallo is a sub-genre of, only the psychology has to be deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation.
In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings are interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and somehow makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner, and there are also grotesque incidents with no relation to story whatever: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a solution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, is all but abandoned, replaced by the search for the next sensational set-piece.
Argento’s villains are now witches, but, abandoning centuries of tradition, these witches show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than with worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they’re meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities he dreams of. And inhabit places built for his aesthetic pleasure rather than their own. Following Bava’s cue, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, no naturalistic explanation offered for the lurid tinted hues. Just as no explanation is offered for the presence of a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.
Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations; that Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller – departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” – had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”
Daria Nicolodi
Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization – indeed, the characters barely speak – and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.
by The Chiselers
Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns, Tom Sutpen, and Richard Chetwynd
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Hi! I'd love for you to respond to this, but ONLY if you're comfortable! I'm planning on writing a hetalia fanfic with a trans character. I researched a bit, but I feel that my fic could be read as problematic: my trans character (MTF) is introduced as her assigned gender with a different name, only to be uncovered later. She dates pre transition, but get back together. Is this realistic? You've written fic w/ trans characters before, so can you give any tips of advice? Thank you for reading!
hey dear, thank you for reaching out!
i’m more than comfortable giving advice but remember that i’m just one trans person, so this does not represent a consensus- i encourage you to reach out to a trans friend to do a sensitivity reading, if you and your friend are comfortable with that!
i say this because a lot of people would say this scenario of portraying someone pre- and post-transition is a no-no, but i think it’s doable (i’ve done it myself!) if approached in a sensible way.
and yes i do think it’s possible for a character to date someone, break up for unrelated reasons, transition and then meet that person again and fall in love again. it’s a sweet idea! it’d be lovely to see your character grow and be more content and confident and finally *herself*, and find love as herself :)
plus at least in my experience, a lot of cis partners of trans people do a lot of serious questioning and self exploration when their partner comes out so it can be interesting from the other character’s perspective as well. i’ve seen for example many gfs/wives of trans women realize they’re wlw when they previously never questioned their sexuality. so it can be an interesting journey for both characters to go on and for you as a writer to explore!
my first bit of advice is to read read and read. read what trans people have to say on the subject of writing- i know there’s more than one post floating around on tumblr with advice for cis people on how to write a trans character.
and read the experiences of trans people, how they talk about their own “egg cracking” (if you don’t know, i’d start by searching what “cracking your egg” means- and hint: it’s not always “i played with dolls as a child”), transition and their own past present or their future plans.
and as you read remember that there is no singular standard “trans experience”- transition is not linear, and there’s no such thing as a transition that is “complete” or “incomplete”.
some trans people feel really intense dysphoria, others don’t and are mostly fine with the body they have. some trans people want to start hrt asap and to have every medical procedure available, for others, coming out is enough, in many cases they might want to have surgeries, but hormones are the only thing that’s accessible because of the cost of surgeries and long waiting lists.
keep in mind that everyone experiences gender in their own unique way, so a trans female character doesn’t have to be hyper feminine, and a trans male character doesn’t have to be super masculine to be “good representation”.
also i’d say to read up on harmful tropes to avoid as well, i’m gonna tell you some just off the top of my head and offer advice on how to handle tricky subjects
- portraying trans people especially trans women as violent or predatory/creepy is a big NO (i know this might be obvious to you, but this is also for everyone else reading this out there). there’s nothing wrong with writing negative or morally grey characters but this is a damaging and dehumanizing trope with a long history of being used as propaganda against us.
- on the same note i’d say to avoid portraying your character as easily offended, overly sensitive, quick to anger etc etc. another (more modern) trope used to mock and ultimately harm trans people is to paint us as “special snowflakes”
--> a good thing to remember is that anger can be portrayed as righteous, as it is in this situation, and assertive so that would be a good place to start if you have to write about the character being rightfully angry and sad, upset at discrimination she might experience.
- avoid the dramatic scene in which a character is found out to be trans by undressing them and “revealing” something about their body. also tied to transphobic ideas (trans people “trick” people into thinking they are their gender) and to trans panic defense that legitimizes the murder of trans people.
--> a good way to reveal that your character is trans is... simply to make her come out. have a talk! there’s so many possibilities from it being heavy and awkward, to light hearted and heartwarming :)
- this one is a more complicated thing to handle, because i know some will disagree with me on it... but i’d advise you to steer away or ask for a second opinion/sensitivity reader if you’re gonna write The Sad Mirror Scene TM in which a trans person gazes at their own body in the mirror (or even without the mirror tbh) and points out everything that is “male/female” about it. personally i think it’s bad but in a more subtle way... the focus on our bodies and everything that is considered “wrong” with it can have creepy or outright transphobic implications. also it’s way overdone js
--> instead of the long gazing scene i’d mention those things in passing and incorporate them into her daily life, because it is something we live with every day and not just in all-at-once intense dysphoria sessions: maybe she has broad shoulders, so she wears a cute blouse with a lot of ruffles to conceal that a bit; or maybe she’s out and about, on the way to her laser hair removal appointment, and feels awkward about having a bit of shadow (so she treats herself to buying a new concealer on the way home);
--> also don’t forget about small moments of gender euphoria and trans joy!!! so maybe she gets a new haircut after growing her hair out for a long time, or takes her estrogen for the first time and cries of happiness, or she tries on her fave bra and notices that her breasts have grown a little bit or they feel sore which is a good sign!. etc etc. these are just examples so don’t sweat it :D but showing the happiness that comes with being trans and not just the sadness of it is really important imo for everyone thinking about writing a trans-centric story
- in general i’d be careful for anything that implies trans people aren’t “really” the gender they are, or that deep down we’ll always be our assigned gender. sometimes it’s not the outright essentialist statements but the more subtle things that can go undetected to cis people, but we see them. stuff like: the character deadnaming/misgendering themselves (so for example, when she comes out, no “remember deadname?”, or, “i used to be a man”) equating genitals with gender (even as a joke), or making the cis experience out to be universal (that feel when pms, am i right ladies? :) <-- this kind of statement even in good intentioned fun can feel exclusionary and should be perceived as such by your character), body shaming or implying certain non-conforming characteristics (ex: a strong jawline, broad shoulders, narrow hips, small breasts on a woman) are inherently “bad” or inherent to trans people only (plenty of cis women have all of those above listed things).
--> i know that dysphoria can make these last things appear to be inherently negative to the person, but you might counterbalance this by making her confident about other aspects of her personality, and making your other characters compliment her and paint her insecurities in a new light. for example she might feel self conscious about her height, but maybe her love interest loves her beautiful, long legs; or maybe more simply unrelated to anything she’s insecure about, she’s smart and hard working, she’s a science genius, she’s the best of her judo class and could kick your ass, she has really nice hair, or really striking eyes, or a very pretty color of very chipped nail polish. details are the key!!! and remember that value and beauty are subjective!!!!
and last but most important of all... please write your character as HUMAN!! we trans people are just regular people, like anyone else in the world.
we aren’t just defined by transness, we have lives and passions and talents and our own problems completely unrelated to being trans.
so please keep that in mind while writing your gal! and don’t let everything i’ve typed above intimidate you, most of it is obvious stuff and i’m sure you’ll be fine! good luck with your story!
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Elizabeth Siddel Part 3
Since there is a tendency to focus on the supernatural elements associated with Siddal, she is commonly viewed as a ghostly figure more than a real woman. As this sort of shadow figure, it becomes easy to project rumor and myth onto her and accept them as true.
One of the ideas that persists is that she was the inspiration for the character of Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Some even take it so far as to claim that Stoker was present at Siddal’s exhumation, an impossibility since when the deed took place Stoker was twenty-two and still a student living in Dublin.Bram Stoker lived in the same neighborhood as Rossetti and he was a friend of Hall Caine, who at one time was Rossetti’s secretary. Stoker dedicated Dracula to Caine, with a nickname used by Caine’s grandmother (“to my dear friend Hommy-Beg”). Stoker may not have included the story of Siddal’s exhumation in his notes, but due to his closeness with Caine he had to have heard an account of it at some point and he had probably read Caine’s book Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882).
The belief that Stoker used Siddal as inspiration is bolstered by his 1892 short story The Secret of the Growing Gold. The ‘growing gold’ is the hair of a dead woman, the very tresses that had been her most striking feature in life. Her hair grows persistently and with a purpose; her intent is to haunt her husband and avenge her own death. The similarity between Stoker’s story and the claim that Siddal’s hair continued to grow and fill her coffin after death is unlikely to be a coincidence.
The Secret of the Growing Gold
By Bram Stoker
When Margaret Delandre went to live at Brent's Rock the whole
neighbourhood awoke to the pleasure of an entirely new scandal.
Scandals in connection with either the Delandre family or the
Brents of Brent's Rock, were not few; and if the secret history of
the county had been written in full both names would have been
found well represented. It is true that the status of each was so
different that they might have belonged to different continents-or
to different worlds for the matter of that-for hitherto their orbits
had never crossed. The Brents were accorded by the whole section of
the country an unique social dominance, and had ever held themselves
as high above the yeoman class to which Margaret Delandre belonged,
as a blue-blooded Spanish hidalgo out-tops his peasant tenantry.
The Delandres had an ancient record and were proud of it in their
way as the Brents were of theirs. But the family had never risen
above yeomanry; and although they had been once well-to-do in the
good old times of foreign wars and protection, their fortunes had
withered under the scorching of the free trade sun and the "piping
times of peace." They had, as the elder members used to assert,
"stuck to the land," with the result that they had taken root in it,
body and soul. In fact, they, having chosen the life of vegetables,
had flourished as vegetation does-blossomed and thrived in the good
season and suffered in the bad. Their holding, Dander's Croft, seemed
to have been worked out, and to be typical of the family which had
inhabited it. The latter had declined generation after generation,
sending out now and again some abortive shoot of unsatisfied energy
in the shape of a soldier or sailor, who had worked his way to the
minor grades of the services and had there stopped, cut short either
from unheeding gallantry in action or from that destroying cause to
men without breeding or youthful care-the recognition of a position
above them which they feel unfitted to fill. So, little by little,
the family dropped lower and lower, the men brooding and dissatisfied,
and drinking themselves into the grave, the women drudging at home,
or marrying beneath them-or worse. In process of time all disappeared,
leaving only two in the Croft, Wykham Delandre and his sister Margaret.
The man and woman seemed to have inherited in masculine and feminine
form respectively the evil tendency of their race, sharing in common
the principles, though manifesting them in different ways, of sullen
passion, voluptuousness and recklessness.
The history of the Brents had been something similar, but showing
the causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian
forms. They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their
positions had been different, and they had often attained honour-for
without flaw they were gallant, and brave deeds were done by them
before the selfish dissipation which marked them had sapped their
vigour.
The present head of the family-if family it could now be called
when one remained of the direct line-was Geoffrey Brent. He was
almost a type of a worn-out race, manifesting in some ways its
most brilliant qualities, and in others its utter degradation. He
might be fairly compared with some of those antique Italian nobles
whom the painters have preserved to us with their courage, their
unscrupulousness, their refinement of lust and cruelty-the voluptuary
actual with the fiend potential. He was certainly handsome, with that
dark, aquiline, commanding beauty which women so generally recognise
as dominant. With men he was distant and cold; but such a bearing
never deters womankind. The inscrutable laws of sex have so arranged
that even a timid woman is not afraid of a fierce and haughty man.
And so it was that there was hardly a woman of any kind or degree,
who lived within view of Brent's Rock, who did not cherish some form
of secret admiration for the handsome wastrel. The category was a
wide one, for Brent's Rock rose up steeply from the midst of a level
region and for a circuit of a hundred miles it lay on the horizon,
with its high old towers and steep roofs cutting the level edge of
wood and hamlet, and far-scattered mansions.
So long as Geoffrey Brent confined his dissipations to London and
Paris and Vienna-anywhere out of sight and sound of his home-opinion
was silent. It is easy to listen to far off echoes unmoved, and we
can treat them with disbelief, or scorn, or disdain, or whatever
attitude of coldness may suit our purpose. But when the scandal came
close to home it was another matter; and the feelings of independence
and integrity which is in people of every community which is not
utterly spoiled, asserted itself and demanded that condemnation
should be expressed. Still there was a certain reticence in all, and
no more notice was taken of the existing facts than was absolutely
necessary. Margaret Delandre bore herself so fearlessly and so
openly-she accepted her position as the justified companion of
Geoffrey Brent so naturally that people came to believe that she
was secretly married to him, and therefore thought it wiser to hold
their tongues lest time should justify her and also make her an
active enemy.
The one person who, by his interference, could have settled all
doubts was debarred by circumstances from interfering in the matter.
Wykham Delandre had quarrelled with his sister-or perhaps it was
that she had quarrelled with him-and they were on terms not merely
of armed neutrality but of bitter hatred. The quarrel had been
antecedent to Margaret going to Brent's Rock. She and Wykham had
almost come to blows. There had certainly been threats on one side
and on the other; and in the end Wykham overcome with passion, had
ordered his sister to leave his house. She had risen straightway,
and, without waiting to pack up even her own personal belongings,
had walked out of the house. On the threshold she had paused for a
moment to hurl a bitter threat at Wykham that he would rue in shame
and despair to the last hour of his life his act of that day. Some
weeks had since passed; and it was understood in the neighbourhood
that Margaret had gone to London, when she suddenly appeared driving
out with Geoffrey Brent, and the entire neighbourhood knew before
nightfall that she had taken up her abode at the Rock. It was no
subject of surprise that Brent had come back unexpectedly, for such
was his usual custom. Even his own servants never knew when to expect
him, for there was a private door, of which he alone had the key, by
which he sometimes entered without anyone in the house being aware
of his coming. This was his usual method of appearing after a long
absence.
Wykham Delandre was furious at the news. He vowed vengeance-and
to keep his mind level with his passion drank deeper than ever.
He tried several times to see his sister, but she contemptuously
refused to meet him. He tried to have an interview with Brent and
was refused by him also. Then he tried to stop him in the road, but
without avail, for Geoffrey was not a man to be stopped against his
will. Several actual encounters took place between the two men, and
many more were threatened and avoided. At last Wykham Delandre
settled down to a morose, vengeful acceptance of the situation.
Neither Margaret nor Geoffrey was of a pacific temperament, and
it was not long before there began to be quarrels between them. One
thing would lead to another, and wine flowed freely at Brent's Rock.
Now and again the quarrels would assume a bitter aspect, and threats
would be exchanged in uncompromising language that fairly awed the
listening servants. But such quarrels generally ended where domestic
altercations do, in reconciliation, and in a mutual respect for the
fighting qualities proportionate to their manifestation. Fighting for
its own sake is found by a certain class of persons, all the world
over, to be a matter of absorbing interest, and there is no reason to
believe that domestic conditions minimise its potency. Geoffrey and
Margaret made occasional absences from Brent's Rock, and on each
of these occasions Wykham Delandre also absented himself; but as he
generally heard of the absence too late to be of any service, he
returned home each time in a more bitter and discontented frame of
mind than before.
At last there came a time when the absence from Brent's Rock
became longer than before. Only a few days earlier there had been
a quarrel, exceeding in bitterness anything which had gone before;
but this, too, had been made up, and a trip on the Continent had
been mentioned before the servants. After a few days Wykham Delandre
also went away, and it was some weeks before he returned. It was
noticed that he was full of some new importance-satisfaction,
exaltation-they hardly knew how to call it. He went straightway to
Brent's Rock, and demanded to see Geoffrey Brent, and on being told
that he had not yet returned, said, with a grim decision which the
servants noted:
"I shall come again. My news is solid-it can wait!" and turned
away. Week after week went by, and month after month; and then there
came a rumour, certified later on, that an accident had occurred
in the Zermatt valley. Whilst crossing a dangerous pass the carriage
containing an English lady and the driver had fallen over a
precipice, the gentleman of the party, Mr. Geoffrey Brent, having
been fortunately saved as he had been walking up the hill to ease the
horses. He gave information, and search was made. The broken rail,
the excoriated roadway, the marks where the horses had struggled
on the decline before finally pitching over into the torrent-all
told the sad tale. It was a wet season, and there had been much snow
in the winter, so that the river was swollen beyond its usual volume,
and the eddies of the stream were packed with ice. All search was
made, and finally the wreck of the carriage and the body of one horse
were found in an eddy of the river. Later on the body of the driver
was found on the sandy, torrent-swept waste near Tasch; but the body
of the lady, like that of the other horse, had quite disappeared, and
was-what was left of it by that time-whirling amongst the eddies of
the Rhone on its way down to the Lake of Geneva.
Wykham Delandre made all the enquiries possible, but could not
find any trace of the missing woman. He found, however, in the books
of the various hotels the name of "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Brent." And
he had a stone erected at Zermatt to his sister's memory, under her
married name, and a tablet put up in the church at Bretten, the
parish in which both Brent's Rock and Dander's Croft were situated.
There was a lapse of nearly a year, after the excitement of the
matter had worn away, and the whole neighbourhood had gone on its
accustomed way. Brent was still absent, and Delandre more drunken,
more morose, and more revengeful than before.
Then there was a new excitement. Brent's Rock was being made ready
for a new mistress. It was officially announced by Geoffrey himself
in a letter to the Vicar, that he had been married some months before
to an Italian lady, and that they were then on their way home. Then
a small army of workmen invaded the house; and hammer and plane
sounded, and a general air of size and paint pervaded the atmosphere.
One wing of the old house, the south, was entirely re-done; and then
the great body of the workmen departed, leaving only materials for
the doing of the old hall when Geoffrey Brent should have returned,
for he had directed that the decoration was only to be done under
his own eyes. He had brought with him accurate drawings of a hall in
the house of his bride's father, for he wished to reproduce for her
the place to which she had been accustomed. As the moulding had all
to be re-done, some scaffolding poles and boards were brought in and
laid on one side of the great hall, and also a great wooden tank or
box for mixing the lime, which was laid in bags beside it.
When the new mistress of Brent's Rock arrived the bells of the
church rang out, and there was a general jubilation. She was a
beautiful creature, full of the poetry and fire and passion of the
South; and the few English words which she had learned were spoken
in such a sweet and pretty broken way that she won the hearts of the
people almost as much by the music of her voice as by the melting
beauty of her dark eyes.
Geoffrey Brent seemed more happy than he had ever before appeared;
but there was a dark, anxious look on his face that was new to those
who knew him of old, and he started at times as though at some noise
that was unheard by others.
And so months passed and the whisper grew that at last Brent's
Rock was to have an heir. Geoffrey was very tender to his wife, and
the new bond between them seemed to soften him. He took more interest
in his tenants and their needs than he had ever done; and works of
charity on his part as well as on his sweet young wife's were not
lacking. He seemed to have set all his hopes on the child that was
coming, and as he looked deeper into the future the dark shadow that
had come over his face seemed to die gradually away.
All the time Wykham Delandre nursed his revenge. Deep in his heart
had grown up a purpose of vengeance which only waited an opportunity
to crystallise and take a definite shape. His vague idea was somehow
centred in the wife of Brent, for he knew that he could strike him
best through those he loved, and the coming time seemed to hold in
its womb the opportunity for which he longed. One night he sat alone
in the living-room of his house. It had once been a handsome room in
its way, but time and neglect had done their work and it was now
little better than a ruin, without dignity or picturesqueness of any
kind. He had been drinking heavily for some time and was more than
half stupefied. He thought he heard a noise as of someone at the door
and looked up. Then he called half savagely to come in; but there was
no response. With a muttered blasphemy he renewed his potations.
Presently he forgot all around him, sank into a daze, but suddenly
awoke to see standing before him some one or something like a
battered, ghostly edition of his sister. For a few moments there
came upon him a sort of fear. The woman before him, with distorted
features and burning eyes seemed hardly human, and the only thing
that seemed a reality of his sister, as she had been, was her wealth
of golden hair, and this was now streaked with grey. She eyed her
brother with a long, cold stare; and he, too, as he looked and began
to realise the actuality of her presence, found the hatred of her
which he had had, once again surging up in his heart. All the
brooding passion of the past year seemed to find a voice at once
as he asked her: -
"Why are you here? You're dead and buried."
"I am here, Wykham Delandre, for no love of you, but because I
hate another even more than I do you!" A great passion blazed in
her eyes.
"Him?" he asked, in so fierce a whisper that even the woman was
for an instant startled till she regained her calm.
"Yes, him!" she answered. "But make no mistake, my revenge is my
own; and I merely use you to help me to it." Wykham asked suddenly:
"Did he marry you?"
The woman's distorted face broadened out in a ghastly attempt
at a smile. It was a hideous mockery, for the broken features and
seamed scars took strange shapes and strange colours, and queer
lines of white showed out as the straining muscles pressed on the
old cicatrices.
"So you would like to know! It would please your pride to feel
that your sister was truly married! Well, you shall not know. That
was my revenge on you, and I do not mean to change it by a hair's
breadth. I have come here to-night simply to let you know that I
am alive, so that if any violence be done me where I am going there
may be a witness."
"Where are you going?" demanded her brother.
"That is my affair! and I have not the least intention of letting
you know!" Wykham stood up, but the drink was on him and he reeled
and fell. As he lay on the floor he announced his intention of
following his sister; and with an outburst of splenetic humour told
her that he would follow her through the darkness by the light of
her hair, and of her beauty. At this she turned on him, and said
that there were others beside him that would rue her hair and her
beauty too. "As he will," she hissed; "for the hair remains though
the beauty be gone. When he withdrew the lynch-pin and sent us over
the precipice into the torrent, he had little thought of my beauty.
Perhaps his beauty would be scarred like mine were he whirled, as I
was, among the rocks of the Visp, and frozen on the ice pack in the
drift of the river. But let him beware! His time is coming!" and
with a fierce gesture she flung open the door and passed out into
the night.
***
Later on that night, Mrs. Brent, who was but half-asleep,
became suddenly awake and spoke to her husband:
"Geoffrey, was not that the click of a lock somewhere below
our window?"
But Geoffrey-though she thought that he, too, had started at the
noise-seemed sound asleep, and breathed heavily. Again Mrs. Brent
dozed; but this time awoke to the fact that her husband had arisen
and was partially dressed. He was deadly pale, and when the light
of the lamp which he had in his hand fell on his face, she was
frightened at the look in his eyes.
"What is it, Geoffrey? What dost thou?" she asked.
"Hush! little one," he answered, in a strange, hoarse voice. "Go
to sleep. I am restless, and wish to finish some work I left undone."
"Bring it here, my husband," she said; "I am lonely and I fear
when thou art away."
For reply he merely kissed her and went out, closing the door
behind him. She lay awake for awhile, and then nature asserted
itself, and she slept.
Suddenly she started broad awake with the memory in her ears of
a smothered cry from somewhere not far off. She jumped up and ran to
the door and listened, but there was no sound. She grew alarmed for
her husband, and called out: "Geoffrey! Geoffrey!"
After a few moments the door of the great hall opened, and
Geoffrey appeared at it, but without his lamp.
"Hush!" he said, in a sort of whisper, and his voice was harsh and
stern. "Hush! Get to bed! I am working, and must not be disturbed. Go
to sleep, and do not wake the house!"
With a chill in her heart-for the harshness of her husband's
voice was new to her-she crept back to bed and lay there trembling,
too frightened to cry, and listened to every sound. There was a long
pause of silence, and then the sound of some iron implement striking
muffled blows! Then there came a clang of a heavy stone falling,
followed by a muffled curse. Then a dragging sound, and then more
noise of stone on stone. She lay all the while in an agony of fear,
and her heart beat dreadfully. She heard a curious sort of scraping
sound; and then there was silence. Presently the door opened gently,
and Geoffrey appeared. His wife pretended to be asleep; but through
her eyelashes she saw him wash from his hands something white that
looked like lime.
In the morning he made no allusion to the previous night, and
she was afraid to ask any question.
From that day there seemed some shadow over Geoffrey Brent. He
neither ate nor slept as he had been accustomed, and his former
habit of turning suddenly as though someone were speaking from behind
him revived. The old hall seemed to have some kind of fascination for
him. He used to go there many times in the day, but grew impatient
if anyone, even his wife, entered it. When the builder's foreman came
to inquire about continuing his work Geoffrey was out driving; the
man went into the hall, and when Geoffrey returned the servant told
him of his arrival and where he was. With a frightful oath he pushed
the servant aside and hurried up to the old hall. The workman met
him almost at the door; and as Geoffrey burst into the room he ran
against him. The man apologised:
"Beg pardon, sir, but I was just going out to make some enquiries.
I directed twelve sacks of lime to be sent here, but I see there are
only ten."
"Damn the ten sacks and the twelve too!" was the ungracious and
incomprehensible rejoinder.
The workman looked surprised, and tried to turn the conversation.
"I see, sir, there is a little matter which our people must have
done; but the governor will of course see it set right at his own
cost."
"What do you mean?"
"That 'ere 'arth-stone, sir: Some idiot must have put a scaffold
pole on it and cracked it right down the middle, and it's thick
enough you'd think to stand hanythink." Geoffrey was silent for quite
a minute, and then said in a constrained voice and with much gentler
manner:
"Tell your people that I am not going on with the work in the hall
at present. I want to leave it as it is for a while longer."
"All right sir. I'll send up a few of our chaps to take away these
poles and lime bags and tidy the place up a bit."
"No! No!" said Geoffrey, "leave them where they are. I shall send
and tell you when you are to get on with the work." So the foreman
went away, and his comment to his master was:
"I'd send in the bill, sir, for the work already done. 'Pears to
me that money's a little shaky in that quarter."
Once or twice Delandre tried to stop Brent on the road, and, at
last, finding that he could not attain his object rode after the
carriage, calling out:
"What has become of my sister, your wife?" Geoffrey lashed his
horses into a gallop, and the other, seeing from his white face and
from his wife's collapse almost into a faint that this object was
attained, rode away with a scowl and a laugh.
That night when Geoffrey went into the hall he passed over to
the great fireplace, and all at once started back with a smothered
cry. Then with an effort he pulled himself together and went away,
returning with a light. He bent down over the broken hearth-stone to
see if the moonlight falling through the storied window had in any
way deceived him. Then with a groan of anguish he sank to his knees.
There, sure enough, through the crack in the broken stone were
protruding a multitude of threads of golden hair just tinged with
grey!
He was disturbed by a noise at the door, and looking round, saw
his wife standing in the doorway. In the desperation of the moment
he took action to prevent discovery, and lighting a match at the
lamp, stooped down and burned away the hair that rose through the
broken stone. Then rising nonchalantly as he could, he pretended
surprise at seeing his wife beside him.
For the next week he lived in an agony; for, whether by accident
or design, he could not find himself alone in the hall for any
length of time. At each visit the hair had grown afresh through the
crack, and he had to watch it carefully lest his terrible secret
should be discovered. He tried to find a receptacle for the body of
the murdered woman outside the house, but someone always interrupted
him; and once, when he was coming out of the private doorway, he was
met by his wife, who began to question him about it, and manifested
surprise that she should not have before noticed the key which he now
reluctantly showed her. Geoffrey dearly and passionately loved his
wife, so that any possibility of her discovering his dread secrets,
or even of doubting him, filled him with anguish; and after a couple
of days had passed, he could not help coming to the conclusion that,
at least, she suspected something.
That very evening she came into the hall after her drive and found
him there sitting moodily by the deserted fireplace. She spoke to him
directly.
"Geoffrey, I have been spoken to by that fellow Delandre, and
he says horrible things. He tells to me that a week ago his sister
returned to his house, the wreck and ruin of her former self, with
only her golden hair as of old, and announced some fell intention.
He asked me where she is-and oh, Geoffrey, she is dead, she is dead!
So how can she have returned? Oh! I am in dread, and I know not
where to turn!"
For answer, Geoffrey burst into a torrent of blasphemy which made
her shudder. He cursed Delandre and his sister and all their kind,
and in especial he hurled curse after curse on her golden hair.
"Oh, hush! hush!" she said, and was then silent, for she feared
her husband when she saw the evil effect of his humour. Geoffrey in
the torrent of his anger stood up and moved away from the hearth;
but suddenly stopped as he saw a new look of terror in his wife's
eyes. He followed their glance, and then he, too, shuddered-for
there on the broken hearth-stone lay a golden streak as the points
of the hair rose through the crack.
"Look, look!" she shrieked. "It is some ghost of the dead! Come
away-come away!" and seizing her husband by the wrist with the frenzy
of madness, she pulled him from the room.
That night she was in a raging fever. The doctor of the district
attended her at once, and special aid was telegraphed for to London.
Geoffrey was in despair, and in his anguish at the danger of his
young wife almost forgot his own crime and its consequences. In the
evening the doctor had to leave to attend to others; but he left
Geoffrey in charge of his wife. His last words were:
"Remember, you must humour her till I come in the morning, or
till some other doctor has her case in hand. What you have to dread
is another attack of emotion. See that she is kept warm. Nothing
more can be done."
Late in the evening, when the rest of the household had retired,
Geoffrey's wife got up from her bed and called to her husband.
"Come!" she said. "Come to the old hall! I know where the gold
comes from! I want to see it grow!"
Geoffrey would fain have stopped her, but he feared for her life
or reason on the one hand, and lest in a paroxysm she should shriek
out her terrible suspicion, and seeing that it was useless to try
to prevent her, wrapped a warm rug around her and went with her to
the old hall. When they entered, she turned and shut the door and
locked it.
"We want no strangers amongst us three to-night!" she whispered
with a wan smile.
"We three! nay we are but two," said Geoffrey with a shudder; he
feared to say more.
"Sit here," said his wife as she put out the light. "Sit here
by the hearth and watch the gold growing. The silver moonlight is
jealous! See it steals along the floor towards the gold-our gold!"
Geoffrey looked with growing horror, and saw that during the hours
that had passed the golden hair had protruded further through the
broken hearth-stone. He tried to hide it by placing his feet over
the broken place; and his wife, drawing her chair beside him, leant
over and laid her head on his shoulder.
"Now do not stir, dear," she said; "let us sit still and watch.
We shall find the secret of the growing gold!" He passed his arm
round her and sat silent; and as the moonlight stole along the floor
she sank to sleep.
He feared to wake her; and so sat silent and miserable as the
hours stole away.
Before his horror-struck eyes the golden-hair from the broken
stone grew and grew; and as it increased, so his heart got colder
and colder, till at last he had not power to stir, and sat with
eyes full of terror watching his doom.
***
In the morning when the London doctor came, neither Geoffrey
nor his wife could be found. Search was made in all the rooms, but
without avail. As a last resource the great door of the old hall
was broken open, and those who entered saw a grim and sorry sight.
There by the deserted hearth Geoffrey Brent and his young wife
sat cold and white and dead. Her face was peaceful, and her eyes were
closed in sleep; but his face was a sight that made all who saw it
shudder, for there was on it a look of unutterable horror. The eyes
were open and stared glassily at his feet, which were twined with
tresses of golden hair, streaked with grey, which came through the
broken hearth-stone.
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The Sweetest Confinement - Chapter 3
AO3
---
Wei Ying woke up slowly. It took her a moment to work out where she was (not her bed – not her dorm room – not home – not Lan Zhan’s dorm room – Lan Zhan! She was at Lan Zhan’s home!). But once she did, she couldn’t help but smile as she let her eyes wander over the beautiful, though ascetic interior of Lan Zhan’s rooms. Everything was quiet and Lan Zhan was not in bed; the sun was shining through the blinds, painting beautiful patterns against the walls and the floor of the bedroom. Lan Zhan must have gotten up hours ago.
Wei Ying struggled out of the all-too comfortable bed, yawning as she did, and left the bedroom. She found Lan Zhan immediately, seated at a low wooden desk, immersed in writing. She looked beautiful in the morning light, her long hair flowing down her back unrestrained, dressed in a simple white hanfu ensemble that looked neither masculine nor feminine, but rather like something that could be worn by any gender. It looked extremely good on Lan Zhan. She looked regal like this, elegant and accomplished.
As Wei Ying watched her write, Lan Zhan herself became aware of Wei Ying’s presence. She looked up, and her face softened, almost seemed to smile when she caught sight of Wei Ying.
“Good morning,” Wei Ying said, finding herself to be in a light, teasing mood. “Did you have a good rest?”
“Hn,” Lan Zhan agreed in her usual reticent way, and Wei Ying laughed.
“I’m glad,” she answered with a grin. “After I took such good care of you yesterday.”
The tips of Lan Zhan’s ears turned bright red, and Wei Ying laughed again. God, she loved Lan Zhan’s reactions to her teasing. She couldn’t get enough of it. She had been so confident while they were doing all manners of erotic things yesterday, too. Why she was shy about it now, Wei Ying didn’t know.
“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” she sing-songed as she walked over to the desk. “Don’t get all embarrassed on me now!”
Lan Zhan said nothing, but she reached out for Wei Ying as soon as she was close enough, and Wei Ying willingly let herself be pulled down, seated almost in Lan Zhan’s lap. Lan Zhan’s arms found their way around her waist, and she melted against Lan Zhan’s warm skin and silky robes. Lan Zhan smelled so good, of sandalwood and something that was uniquely Lan Zhan. She wished she could bottle that smell and carry it with her all the time.
“Good morning,” Lan Zhan said quietly, and gave Wei Ying a soft kiss against her temple.
Wei Ying’s heart squeezed tightly. She snuggled closer, as close as she possibly could, determined to stick close to Lan Zhan as long as she was allowed.
“Say, dearest, most beautiful Lan Zhan,” he teased again, knowing that her words would refresh the blush in Lan Zhan’s ears. “Is there maybe some breakfast to be had for me somewhere?”
“Hn,” Lan Zhan agreed, and reached for her mobile phone. “It will arrive soon.”
“You truly know how to get a girl,” Wei Ying replied, and gave Lan Zhan a kiss on her cheek.
Lan Zhan sent her an unfathomable look, but didn’t reply.
---
Breakfast was delicious, though rather more plain than Wei Ying was accustomed to. She amused herself by feeding pieces of fruit to Lan Zhan, who, after drawing back at first, seemed to warm up to the idea of being fed by Wei Ying rather quickly. Wei Ying loved the look on her face whenever she carefully plucked another piece of fruit from Wei Ying’s fingers, chewing it properly, swallowing, and then eyeing Wei Ying expectantly, all thoughts of eating on her own forgotten. It was both endearing and sexy at the same time.
“So, what are our plans for the day?” Wei Ying asked eventually, once they had finished their meal.
“We will study in the morning,” Lan Zhan replied. “I have promised to give a guqin class in the afternoon.”
“Oooh, are you going to show the little chicklings how it’s really done?”
Lan Zhan frowned at that. “I’m not giving classes to assert my superiority.”
Wei Ying laughed. “I know that! You’re the last person who’d ever do that. But you’re so good, the children no doubt admire your skills.”
Lan Zhan’s ears turned red once more.
“I don’t know about that,” she said humbly.
“I’m pretty sure they do. Can I watch?”
“It might be boring for you.”
“Watching Lan Zhan teach?” Wei Ying asked, putting her head into her hands and leaning forward. “I’m sure it will be very interesting.”
Lan Zhan elected not to answer. Instead, she cleaned the remains of their breakfast away and told Wei Ying to go get her books and notes, so that they could study together.
Wei Ying left Lan Zhan’s residence and returned to her own room to pick up all that she would need for a study session. As she did, she also changed her clothing, choosing something appropriately modest. She was really grateful to Lan Zhan. Not only that she had provided Wei Ying with a place to stay, but also that she seemed perfectly fine with Wei Ying sticking to her, spending time with her, distracting her with her very presence.
She tried not to think about it, but the present situation worried her. Both Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng had assured her that everyone in the family was fine, but she couldn’t be sure. Her sister had little A-Ling to take care of, and A-Ling was still so small, if he got sick… And they were all so close to where the new virus had first been confirmed. It would have been so easy to cross paths with an infected person. What if the isolation order had already come too late?
Her own thoughts were driving her mad. She was almost glad that she had no means of actually getting there, making sure that her family was okay, because she might have just tried to do so if that had been the case, lockdown or no. She would probably end up arrested.
Lan Zhan kept her thoughts from circling endlessly, and for that, Wei Ying was grateful. Lan Zhan kept her sane.
Once she had picked up everything she would need, she returned to Lan Zhan’s residence, and they studied for the rest of the morning.
Studying with Lan Zhan was excellent, and Lan Zhan was very good at keeping Wei Ying focused, if one disregarded the fact that Lan Zhan’s very existence was already distraction enough. Still, it had been so easy to fall into the habit of studying in Lan Zhan’s room rather than in her own. In Lan Zhan’s room, there were no distractions, ample snacks, and, most important of all, Lan Zhan herself. And here, seated at her desk, it was even easier. She could simply sit down and not worry about anything else, Lan Zhan right beside her, her steady presence a balm to Wei Ying’s nerves.
Eventually, Lan Zhan put her book away and told Wei Ying that it was time for lunch. They ate with Lan Huan and Lan Qiren again, and apparently, this time, Lan Qiren had come prepared. Wei Ying was showered in questions about her education, childhood, and plans for her future.
Because she was still nervous, however, she slipped up and said something that made it clear that Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan weren’t her actual parents, but her adoptive parents. As if the name wasn’t hint enough already.
Lan Qiren immediately frowned and pounced on this tidbit of information.
“You are not with your birth parents?” he asked, and Wei Ying could immediately read the tone of that voice. He was asking if Wei Ying had done something that had got her in trouble in the past.
She swallowed and tried to manage her anger.
“My parents died when I was six,” she said coldly. “I was homeless until I was nine. The Jiang family took me in because they believed that every child deserves a home, even a lice-infested, dirty, emaciated one. I am very grateful and have thought of them as my family ever since. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
Only when Lan Zhan took her hand and carefully plied her chopsticks out of her fingers, she realized that she was gripping them hard, and her hands were shaking.
“Uncle,” Lan Zhan said, her tone severe. “That is enough.”
When Wei Ying looked up, she saw Lan Huan look at her with a shocked expression on his face. Lan Zhan and Lan Qiren, meanwhile, were staring at each other, seemingly communicating entirely through looks.
“Excuse us.”
Taking Wei Ying’s hand, Lan Zhan pulled her from her seat and left the table, the dining room, and headed back towards her own residence. She maneuvered Wei Ying into a seat there, and then sat down next to her.
Silence hung over them for a moment.
“I am sorry,” Lan Zhan eventually said. “My uncle was out of place.”
Wei Ying swallowed and tried to calm herself down.
“Haha,” she laughed hollowly. “No worries. People always wonder about that. It’s no surprise that they assume I’m a runaway or a youth offender, looking at me. Actually, I ran away a few times when I was living with the Jiang family. So technically that makes me a runaway.”
“Do not joke,” Lan Zhan said, her tone more impatient than Wei Ying had ever heard it. “It is no laughing matter. You lost your parents. You lost your home. None of these experiences are things to laugh about.”
“But if I don’t laugh–” Wei Ying swallowed again and blinked the tears in her eyes away.
She would not cry. Her parents had been dead for more than ten years already, and there was no reason to cry over her loss anymore. She hardly even remembered them at all. Why cry about something she couldn’t even remember?
“You are allowed to grieve.”
“Lan Zhan…”
“You are allowed to grieve,” Lan Zhan repeated with more insistence. “You are not required to shoulder your struggles without reprieve all the time.”
She took Wei Ying’s hand into hers, and stroked it gently.
“I will be here if you wish to unburden yourself for a while.”
Wei Ying closed her eyes. Lan Zhan was entirely serious, as she always was, and it was more than Wei Ying could bear. For a moment, she crumbled. Lan Zhan caught her. Without really realizing how it happened, she found herself stretched out, her head in Lan Zhan’s lap, Lan Zhan’s hands carefully stroking her hair.
Lan Zhan was too good to her. She was going to get spoilt, and then she would never function without Lan Zhan again.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice wobbling.
Lan Zhan hummed, and kept carding her gentle fingers through Wei Ying’s hair. It was a strange feeling. It had been many years since Wei Ying had actually felt taken care of by someone, and Lan Zhan did it so easily, so naturally, that it felt like something inside of her was shaking loose. Lan Zhan was so incredible, so good. Wei Ying felt like she was going to cry. Lan Zhan took care of her as if she wasn’t a burden.
She sighed and let herself drift for a while, calmed by Lan Zhan’s touch.
“When I was young,” Lan Zhan quietly said after a while, “we were not allowed to see our mother often. We would visit her once a month. I would always look forward to these visits. They were everything to me.”
She fell quiet for a moment, but Wei Ying said nothing, waiting with bated breath for Lan Zhan to continue. She had never heard Lan Zhan speak about her past. Wei Ying knew a lot about the present Lan Zhan, but before she came to Cloud Recesses, she had only known that Lan Zhan’s home was close to the university, and had assumed that her family was wealthy due to the way she dressed and acted – a true young lady.
Lan Zhan continued, letting Wei Ying’s hair fall through her fingers. “I was told that I would get to see my mother again if I was a good child, so I was always on my best behaviour. I wanted to see her. I wanted to be with my mother. I loved her, perhaps even more so because I was kept away from her. But one day, Uncle came and told me that there would be no more visits. I was in shock. I thought it was my fault. That she refused to see me because I had been a bad child. I waited for weeks, for months, I did everything I could to atone, to see her again. It took so long for me to understand that she had left forever.”
Lan Zhan’s voice was calm and composed as she said that, but Wei Ying could hear the undercurrent of unabated pain. She understood what Lan Zhan must have felt; how much she must have blamed herself, thinking that her mother would be there if Lan Zhan had been better. If she had done everything right. If she hadn’t been selfish.
“Are you still waiting for her?”
“Sometimes,” was Lan Zhan’s whispered reply.
Wei Ying wriggled around until she was in a position to wrap her arms around Lan Zhan’s middle, squeezing her and pressing her own face into Lan Zhan’s stomach.
“It’s not your fault, Lan Zhan,” she said. “I’m sure you did absolutely nothing wrong.”
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she felt Lan Zhan’s breath hitch, just once.
“Thank you, Wei Ying.”
“There’s nothing you have to thank me for. I’m just speaking the truth. Lan Zhan is a very good person, there’s nothing for you to feel bad about.”
Lan Zhan traced the shell of Wei Ying’s ear with her finger. Wei Ying shivered a little, always welcoming Lan Zhan’s touch.
“I am not always a good person,” Lan Zhan said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You are the best person I’ve ever met.”
And she meant it. Lan Zhan and she might clash sometimes, with Lan Zhan’s tendency to stick to the rules even when the rules were stupid, but Lan Zhan had a clear innate sense of justice and fairness, a caring spirit that would always stand out in any situation and in any crowd.
With a sigh, Lan Zhan detached Wei Ying from her middle and lifted her up, until Wei Ying was properly seated in front of her.
“We should continue studying. My guqin class will be soon.”
“Probably,” Wei Ying said, not really enthusiastic about the idea. “They’re probably already trying to figure out ways to punish us for slacking off. But,” she smiled a wicked smile, sticking out the tip of her tongue for a moment, “tell me, Lan Zhan, do you want me to offer a little reward tonight to make work easier?”
Lan Zhan caressed her cheek and stoop up.
“Wei Ying,” she said, and it was her warning tone again, at odds with her gentle gesture just now. “I told you I am not expecting anything.”
“But how can I figure out if I like it or not, or if I’m good at it, if I don’t try?”
“Work,” Lan Zhan said strictly, sitting down at her desk and directing Wei Ying to her seat with her eyes. “Everything else can come later.”
Wei Ying sighed. Fine, fine, she figured. She could always work on Lan Zhan later.
---
Wei Ying had been determined to try and seduce Lan Zhan into Wei Ying giving her first try at cunnilingus that evening, but it turned out that Lan Zhan was much slier than she had ever suspected her of being. She somehow artfully strung Wei Ying along, distracting her with the guqin class, dinner, and other things until it was suddenly bedtime. Lan Zhan dressed Wei Ying in one of her own deliciously soft and silky pyjamas, tucked her in, and went to sleep herself. Wei Ying only realised far too late how excellently Lan Zhan had in fact played her.
She had wanted to have fun! And figure out if Lan Zhan would go just as wild when Wei Ying put her tongue to good use. Instead, she found Lan Zhan lying next to Wei Ying, Wei Ying’s head carefully tucked under her chin, her arm around Wei Ying’s waist, and out like a light. Disappointment didn’t even begin to describe Wei Ying’s feelings.
She was nervous, of course, because there were so many things that she had no experience with, so many things that she still didn’t know, had never had the chance of learning. But she had Lan Zhan with her. That changed everything. Lan Zhan wouldn’t make fun of her or laugh when she bumbled along, and she certainly wouldn’t be unkind. Lan Zhan would be patient.
To be able to experience these things with Lan Zhan for the first, she could think of no better person to share the experience with. She wanted it to be Lan Zhan. Always.
With a sigh and a promise to herself that isolation had only just begun, and more opportunities of the erotic kind would arise in the future, she let herself fall asleep in Lan Zhan’s arms. She had never slept better than there, safe in the knowledge that Lan Zhan was with her.
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Jill Fields, "Where my dreidel at?": Representing Jewish Identity in Orange Is the New Black, 13 J Jewish Identities 1 (2020)
The Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black ranks among the most watched shows available for streaming online or on cable. In June 2016, the first episode of Season 4 drew 6.7 million views in 72 hours, making it second in viewership only to HBO's popular Game of Thrones.1 It also garnered critical acclaim, receiving a Peabody Award in addition to many Golden Globe, Emmy, and Screen Actors Guild nominations and awards.2 The series is based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, who served thirteen months in a minimum security women's prison in Danbury, Connecticut after her conviction on a drug-related offense she had committed ten years earlier. Created by Jenji Kohan, the series is a "dramedy" that mixes comedic touches with poignant stories based upon Piper's prison experiences and those of others she lived with and worked alongside while incarcerated. When the series debuted in 2013, it was lauded for its diverse female cast—in terms of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities—and for its sympathetic depiction of the plight of the primarily poor women who serve time behind bars.3 Orange Is the New Black (OITNB) clearly broke new ground in representing women who are rarely seen in mainstream cultural texts, especially in prominent roles. Kohan revealed in an NPR interview that she used the character of the blonde Piper—whose last name was changed to Chapman in the show and who labels herself a WASP in both her memoir and on screen—as a "Trojan Horse" in order to sell the series to Netflix executives, who green-lighted a project that began with Chapman as the lead, but quickly evolved in an inclusive direction by elevating women of color to co-starring status.4
Academic assessment of OITNB has celebrated aspects of the series, but also critiqued ways in which the show upholds stereotypes about women of color, lesbians, transwomen, and older women, and how it draws upon women's prison film conventions that objectify incarcerated female bodies, albeit at times self-knowingly.5 Less noted thus far by scholars is the prominent attention the show gives to its Jewish characters and themes.6 Though the series deserves praise for shining light on diverse female experiences, its treatment of Jews draws upon long-standing tropes. The show deploys, for example, the classic construction of the interfaith relationship, seen for over a century in American culture; the enduring American television tradition of covert rather than openly Jewish identity; and reliance on the conversion narrative in portraying Jewish beliefs and rituals. These mechanisms highlight, yet also displace, the depiction of Jewishness on the series and the contributions of its Jewish creator, writers, directors, and actors.
Studies of Jewish representation in American popular culture have addressed both the presence and absence of Jewish characters and narratives. Documentation of the Jewish presence in film and television has produced assessments and generated debates about whether particular portrayals draw upon or challenge antisemitic tropes, provide realistic depictions of the Jewish-American experience, or sidestep considerations of what it means to be Jewish.7 Over time, and in tandem with emerging trends in feminist analysis and cultural studies, investigations of the representation of Jews in film and television began to also consider how particular narratives construct Jewish identity, especially in regard to gender, and explore contradictions embedded in mass cultural texts that reference Jewish experiences. Though ire, fear, outrage, and appreciation continue to motivate some research and give it urgency, analysis questioning assumptions about claims to authenticity, acknowledging diversity within Jewish communities, and drawing parallels in addition to contrasts with how a range of minorities are represented both in front of and behind the camera has provided new insights and opened up new ways of thinking about larger frameworks as well as specific texts. Nonetheless, asking whether products of the culture industry such as OITNB are "good for the Jews" remains relevant even when also taking into account a range of Jewish experiences and practices, the potential instability of identity formations, and possibilities for conflicting interpretations.
Important Jewish characters in OITNB include Piper Chapman's fiancé Larry Bloom, inmate Nicky Nichols—who I assert is a crypto-Jew through Season 5—and African-American inmate Cindy Hayes, who converts to Judaism in Season 3. It is significant as well that a number of actors, writers, and directors employed by the show in addition to series creator and producer Kohan are also Jewish. In what follows, I explore relevant aspects of the source material—Kerman's memoir—with a primary focus on how the fictional characters and their stories create Jewish moments in series episodes. I also suggest ways in which the representation of Jews connects with the show's Jewish cast and crew. Moreover, the contrast between the show's groundbreaking status and its employment of practices that date back to earlier periods in the history of television reveal the persistence of problematics for including fully realized Jews and their narratives on the small screen.
Larry Bloom, Masculinity, and Jewish Betrayal
Piper's Jewish fiancé Larry Bloom appears in the first episode of Season 1 and remains in the series through Season 2.8 The real Piper's real-life Jewish fiancé (now husband), who is a successful writer with the far less iconic Jewish last name of Smith, is in Kerman's memoir supportive and loving throughout Piper's prison ordeal, as are his equally wonderful parents. Larry Bloom of the series, an aspiring writer who struggles to get a paying gig, is initially kind and defends Piper to his awful Portnoyesque parents, who try to get him to dump his shiksa girlfriend. Larry has internalized his father's view of the blonde gentile woman as exotic and uses the term himself when proposing to Piper after she is sentenced. "Why would I want a felonious former Lesbian WASP shiksa who is about to go to prison to marry me? Why? Because this underachieving, underemployed Jewboy loves her."9 Larry Smith describes meeting Piper in similar terms: "Piper was pretty by anyone's standards, but blonde, blue-eyed, Waspy girls are catnip for hairy Jewish guys like myself." He further describes "classic Piper: steely and self-contained. I grew up with a different window into the world of women, one where they are a little neurotic and a lot needy."10 This well-worn construction of Jewish women has appeared in a range of media and texts, including interfaith marriage narratives depicted in such films as The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Along Came Polly (2004), and in the 2015 comment by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump calling Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz "crazy" and "highly neurotic."11 In OITNB, Larry further demonstrates his assimilationist impulse by preparing roasted pig for the couple's last meal together before Piper's self-surrender at Litchfield prison; their first snack in the prison visiting room is pork rinds.12
Larry is played by actor Jason Biggs, who has portrayed Jewish men in films such as American Pie (1999), though not Jewish himself.13 Soon after OITNB debuted, articles such as "Does Orange Is the New Black Have a Jewish Problem?" expressed concern about yet another iteration of Jewish masculinity as having "that tortured, brooding, nebbish quality we've come to associate with Woody Allen."14 Moreover, as other characters are humanized via flashbacks that reveal their difficult personal histories and draw viewers' sympathies, Larry's weaknesses become more apparent as the narrative unfolds and he draws viewers' disgust. A 2014 article, "A Guide to The Internet's Love of Hating Larry Bloom From 'Orange Is the New Black,'" concluded Larry was so detested he was the object of "world-class hatred."15
Larry's multiple betrayals of Piper propel his development into—or revelation as—a despised, nebbishy Judas. His first step down that path is watching episodes of Mad Men alone, after promising Piper he would wait to watch them with her after her release. To do so guilt-free, he turns over a framed photo of the two of them on his coffee table. As one critic called it, "Only a truly terrible human being would go against his loving girlfriend's wishes and watch their show without her. But turning the frame over? That's just cold-blooded."16 Larry's initial betrayal leads to more. When his only chance to get paid for writing an article requires detailing the prison experiences that Piper has shared with him in phone calls and visits, he goes ahead without her permission.17 She finds out about his New York Times "Modern Love" column from her prison counselor and, after viewers see Larry excitedly buying up copies of the newspaper, we find out that he has revealed information that endangers the tenuous relationships Piper has been building and needs to survive prison.18 In a subsequent episode, despite Piper's distress, Larry cozies up to an NPR reporter he meets at a Thanksgiving dinner, which results in a radio appearance sharing similar stories. Again, Piper only finds out about this after the fact, and listens in horror as Larry further humiliates both her and inmates she knows.19
The real Larry did write a "Modern Love" column about his relationship with an inmate, though it was published well after Piper's sentence ended, and a month before the 2010 publication of her memoir. Likely timed to promote Kerman's book prior to its release, the column most importantly does not betray her or her prison friends. Instead, Larry focuses on his devotion to Piper throughout her incarceration and the men he met who were also visiting their wives or girlfriends. The column ends with claims that his consistent visits and phone calls were not testaments to his character but instead prove how wonderful his fiancée is.20 In contrast, Netflix Larry's multiple betrayals reach their ultimate conclusion when he sleeps with Polly (Maria Dizzia), Piper's married best friend and business partner, and then dumps Piper for her. Larry and Polly even move in together and are shown enjoying their comfortable New York City lives as Larry and Piper used to do.21
Expressing dismay about how the show transformed Larry's character by drawing upon familiar tropes that denigrate Jewish men and Jews generally, and identifying differences between the two portrayals of Larry, is a fair, but ultimately narrow criticism. After all, adapting books into movies or television shows, whether fiction or non-fiction, requires alterations. The real Larry, for example, explains that translating Netflix Larry into what he calls a "schmuck" made the show more interesting.22 Another way to frame that transformation is to ask what purpose the nebbishy Judas/Jewdas performs in the OITNB narrative. I would argue that Larry's betrayal not only relieves the show from an unexciting story of a reliable boyfriend, but also displaces questions about possibly exploitative aspects of Kerman's best-seller and hit series onto the despicable and feminized Jewish man. This narrative turn burnishes the author's—and series creator Kohan's—celebratory claims to tell rather than sell the stories of incarcerated women who will not profit from their commercial dissemination.23
Kohan's OITNB cookbook, which features "Larry's Orange and Black Peppercorn Pulled Pork," is suggestive of her commercial goals and conflicted take on just how seriously the show and the discourse it has generated consider prison conditions.24 In addition, Kerman's former girlfriend, Cleary Wolters, who facilitated Kerman's criminal involvement in the drug trade, states in her memoir that she was never contacted by anyone connected with the book or the series prior to their release. In OITNB, her fictionalized character Alex Vause ends up in the same prison with Piper and their relationship is a central story line. When the Netflix series debuted, Wolters was out of prison and working and, though her employers knew the broad outlines of her criminal past, she had not shared details nor come out as gay at work when outed by the series. Wolters feared for her job security, aware of her tenuous status as an ex-felon. Within one day of the series release, the identity of the "real Alex Vause" was posted online, which caused her anxiety that former inmates might track her down. Ultimately, however, Wolters felt grateful that the success of OITNB allowed her to also share in print the sobering lessons of her criminal past and prison experiences.25 Nonetheless, the risks provoked by Wolters's inclusion in the memoir and series raise the question of exploitation, a charge against the show conceptualized as "trauma porn." Ashleigh Shackleford popularized the term in her assessment, shared by a number of African-American critics, that the show depicted "bleak narratives about the experience of people of color for the entertainment of those who have never lived those experiences."26 Such critiques provide further evidence for reading Larry's many betrayals as a displacement or hedge against similar charges directed toward Kerman or the series creators. As a long-standing trope, Jewish betrayal is easily identifiable and works to distract or absolve others of incriminating behavior.
The Jewish Inmate Problem: Levy
The treatment of a woman who, like Wolters, appears in the memoir but who has drawn less attention because she did not become an easily identifiable character in the show, provides an additional avenue for exploring Jewish identity in OITNB. Kerman's descriptions of Levy, a Jewish inmate, suggests the translation of Larry into a Judas can be indeed identified as a "Jewish problem," and one that originated in the memoir rather than the series. Consideration of the memoir is uncommon in studies of the series; Hilary Malatino's analysis is an important exception that provides a point of comparison below.27 A French Moroccan Jew, Levy is the only inmate whose behavior and demeanor Kerman derides repeatedly in her memoir. Levy is a true "other" in prison. As Kerman explains early on:
When a new person arrived their tribe—white, black, Latino, or the few and far between "others"—would … get them settled and steer them through their arrival. If you fall into that "other" category—Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern—then you got a patchwork welcome committee of … women from the dominant tribes.28
Levy thus falls outside or in between even the "other" category, but her status as a Member of the Tribe without a tribe and the impact her singularity might have had on her ability to in fact "get settled" is not considered by the otherwise compassionate Kerman. Described in the memoir as "tiny," Kerman scorns Levy for being "totally useless at electrical studies" despite "preening about her Sorbonne education."29 She is also criticized for her decision not to allow her children to come visit her because she does not "want them to see her in prison," despite Kerman noting without judgement others who "did not want their people to see them in a place like this."30 Kerman even positions Levy below guards in likeability: "'Zey have no class,'" sneered Levy. I didn't like prison guards, but she was insufferable."31 This excerpt is also an example of how Levy is singled out by Kerman, who reproduces her accent in the text to a greater degree than any other prisoner's. Levy is also ridiculed for crying more often than Kerman deems appropriate, though Kerman writes that when seeing an inmate cry after visiting hours are over, "you smiled sympathetically or touched their shoulder."32 Together, these comments justify Levy's status as:
the unifying factor in the [electrical] shop: the rest of us united against her. She was insufferable, crying daily and complaining loudly and constantly about her measly six-month sentence, asking inappropriate personal questions, trying to boss people around, and making appalling and loud statements about other prisoners' appearance and lack of education sophistication, or "class," as she put it. … Most of the time she was nervous-verging-on-hysterical, which manifested in dramatic physical symptoms; an astonishing hive-like swelling made her look like the Elephant Man, and her always sweating hands made her particularly useless for working with electricity.33
Though we do not learn the specifics regarding the cause of Levy's incarceration, Kerman mentions Levy was "whisked away to testify against her chiseler ex-boyfriend."34 However, the worst offense committed by Levy, according to Kerman, occurs after her release when she is interviewed by the Hartford Courant in September 2004, just before Martha Stewart's incarceration. Kerman reports the "Camp freaked out" that Barbara, as Levy is referred to in the newspaper article, describes the prison as a "big hotel" with "an ice machine, ironing boards," "two libraries" and "amazing food," and that she says she enjoyed not having to cook, clean, drive or buy gas. Kerman responded to the article in her memoir by "pictur[ing] Levy, swollen with hives, looking like the Elephant Man, crying every single day over her six-month sentence and sneering at anyone she thought was not 'classy.'" Though Kerman states the "reporter got many minor facts wrong," she and other inmates who "are outraged by the false claim that [they] could buy Haagen-Dazs ice cream" at the commissary blame Levy for the error. The prisoner in charge of the kitchen, Pop in the memoir and Red in the show, is upset and confused:
Piper, I just don't understand it. Why would she lie? You have the opportunity to get the truth out there about this place, and instead she makes up these lies? We have nothing here, and she makes it sound like a picnic.35
Kerman then explains to her readers that Levy lied because she "didn't want to admit to herself, let alone to the outside world, that she had been placed in a ghetto, just as ghetto as they had once had in Poland." Kerman here assumes that she understands the Jewish ghettos of World War II-era Poland better than Levy. She continues:
It was too painful … for Levy and others (especially the middle-class prisoners) to admit that they had been classed as undesirables, compelled against their will into containment, and forced into scarcity without even the dignity of chosen austerity. So instead, she said it was Club Fed.36
Kerman uses the ghetto metaphor to help her readers understand the "revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system" in the United States and the difficulty of escaping either.37 However, Kerman, in collapsing distinctions, overlooks differences between Nazi ghettos and those she references, and also ways in which targeted communities form alliances based in shared histories of pain and oppression. Moreover, she does not consider the possibility if not probability that Levy has family members who perished, or who suffered and survived the Holocaust in France and Morocco. In a comparable critique, though one focusing on gender identity, Malatino finds Kerman "lacks a framework for understanding trans subjectivity," and uses "classic othering strategies … [that] serve to de-authenticate transfeminine gender expressions."38 Kerman similarly lacks intersectional frameworks that could account for Levy's status as both wielding middle-class privilege and experiencing her subjectivity as an isolated and vulnerable minority.
Lacking fuller consideration of Levy's multiple facets, Kerman also did not mention that Levy in the interview lauded her fellow prisoners as "classy" and defended them against charges that sexual assault was common. For Levy, "The worst part about being there was being counted. They count you like an animal." Whether intentional or not, her emphasis on this aspect of prison life being exceptionally difficult for her evokes the experiences of Jews in Nazi camps during the Holocaust, an allusion that escapes Kerman. The Courant also sympathetically reported Levy's decision not to see her children, which Levy states was the hardest part of her stay, and an effort to maintain her dignity.39
Levy indeed may have been annoying. But that alone does not explain why Kerman devotes so much attention to her. In assessing what work she performs in the narrative, I argue Levy serves several functions. First, she is a vehicle for the middle-class Kerman to distance herself from those of her own class and to legitimate her claim that she accepts her shared status with poor undesirables, which other middle-class women prisoners like Levy do not. Second, she confirms the view of Jewish women as needy and neurotic, a dominant caricature even promulgated by Kerman's real-life Jewish husband. Levy thus also is a vehicle Kerman uses to elide her possible association with reviled Jewish femininity via her relationship with a Jewish man. Third, Levy translates into Netflix Larry as they are both Judases who in self-interest betray the experiences of incarcerated women in mass media forums. Levy-Larry are categorically unable to truly understand who those women are or identify with them, unlike the transcendent Kerman. Thus Levy-Larry is the mechanism by which Kerman and by default Kohan distance themselves from assessments that they are profiting from the ordeals of women who do not have similar professional opportunities to do so.40 Moreover, the construction of the justifiably hated if not abject Jew that results from Levy's transgressive behavior and Larry's increasingly despicable acts creates more possibilities for the diverse female inmates to be viewed sympathetically by readers and viewers.
OITNB and Television's Crypto-Jews
The portrayal of Jewish identity on the television series OITNB contains further complexities, as Jewish elements beyond the Bloom stereotypes are depicted from its earliest episodes. A mechanism for simultaneously including and excluding Jews in television is the long-standing practice of the crypto-Jewish character. Leslie Fiedler first used the term in 1964 to describe the phenomenon of characters whose Jewish identity is hidden, like the original crypto-Jews, Spanish Jews forced to convert in 1492 whose Mexican and Mexican-American descendants maintained Jewish practices for centuries typically without knowing the origins of their family traditions.41 Fiedler deployed the term critically in analyzing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and other characters penned by mid-twentieth-century Jewish-American writers such as Paddy Chayefsky, Bernard Malamud, and Norman Mailer. Fielder deplored the effect of "characters who are in habit, speech, and condition typically Jewish American, but who are presented as something else—general American," as "pseudo-universalizing." As a result, "the works … lose authenticity and strength" and constitute a "failure to remember that the inhabitants of Dante's Hell or Joyce's Dublin are more universal as they are more Florentine or Irish."42
Jewish Studies media critics such as Jeffrey Shandler, David Zurawik, and Vincent Brooks found the crypto-Jew concept useful in describing television characters whose Jewish identity is ambiguous, hidden, or suppressed but hinted at through narrative gestures, personal qualities, or physical features and often by being played by a Jewish actor. These critics explain that the crypto-Jew phenomenon was born of concern largely on the part of Jewish television executives that shows that appeared "too Jewish" would not appeal to most Americans and would make them vulnerable to charges of Jewish control of the media. The practice emerged in television's "Golden Era," after the popular radio and then television show The Gold-bergs ended its twenty-six-year run in 1955. The Goldbergs depicted an observant Jewish family of modest means comprised of immigrant parents and America-born children living in New York City. Matriarch Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) was a beloved mass culture icon known for her down-to-earth wisdom and endearing malapropisms. Despite its broad appeal—Berg won the first Emmy awarded for Best Actress in 1950—Jewish television moguls such as William Paley, who headed CBS, made it clear that no new shows with Jewish leading characters would be aired. This attitude has been attributed to television executives' fears that Jewish programming would bring unwanted attention and therefore problems to Jews working in the medium. Occasionally, Jewish characters appeared in Jewish-themed episodes of shows from westerns like Rawhide (1959–1965) and Bonanza (1959–1973) to procedurals such as The F.B.I (1965–1974). However, the maxim "write Yiddish, cast British" became the rule through the 1970s. It was implemented most famously in network discussions about what became The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966). Created by Carl Reiner, who planned to star, the sitcom was based on his life as a television comedy writer and head of a Jewish family living in the suburbs. Innovative in depicting both its main character's home and work life, CBS agreed to put the show in the prime time schedule if Reiner, et al. would step aside for a "less ethnic" cast. The one exception in the final ensemble was supporting character Buddy Sorrel, played by Morey Amsterdam, though his Jewish identity was rarely referenced.43
In the 1970s, "write Yiddish, cast British" remained a guiding principle on network television, though popular shows such as Barney Miller (1974–1982) and Welcome Back Kotter (1975–1979) featured lead characters with familiar Jewish identifiers, such as their New York City origins and speech patterns, and who were played by Jewish actors. Nonetheless, such characters remained crypto-Jews, as story lines never referenced or confirmed their Jewish identity. Rhoda (1974–1978), a spin off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show starring the non-Jewish Valerie Harper as Mary's Jewish friend Rhoda Morgenstern, was an exception, a sitcom about a Jewish woman. Even after the late 1980s and 1990s saw the return of the Jewish female lead in The Nanny (1993–1999) and Will & Grace (1998–2006), and the Jewish leading man in dramas thirtysomething (1987–1991) and Northern Exposure (1990–1995), the crypto-Jew remained an important creature of network television. Crypto-Jews of this era include George Costanza, Kramer, and Elaine on Seinfeld (1989–1998) and Rachel Green, Monica Geller, and Ross Geller on Friends (1994–2004). In an echo of the decision to recast what became The Dick Van Dyke Show, NBC executives insisted the Seinfeld characters, who were created as Jews, not remain so. Only Jerry Seinfeld remained identifiably Jewish, which was unavoidable as his character was based on the already known Jewish comedian's real persona.44
Despite this decades-long context and an emerging self-referential and fearless Jewish sensibility in twentieth-first-century cable programming personified by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson's Broad City, and by the Amazon series Transparent, celebrated as the "Jewiest show ever," all of which found broad audiences, Orange Is the New Black features crypto-Jews among its diverse cast.45 Jewish actors in the series in recurring roles that began in the first season include Yael Stone, Constance Shulman, Barbara Rosenblatt, and Natasha Lyonne. Constance Shulman's character Yoga Jones's potential identity as a crypto-Jew is tipped off in a visual cue. As the inmates prepare for the December holidays by decorating the prison, Jones tapes a two-dimensional dreidel decoration to the wall upside down. Whether this indicates ignorance or a sign of Jewish distress (or Jews in distress), like the meaning of flying the American flag upside down, it is significant that this moment precedes, and perhaps precipitates, the scene where Jones's back story is revealed in flashback. Though nothing in the character's background particularly suggests she is Jewish, that she becomes a Buddhist after her conviction for mistakenly shooting and killing a neighbor's child when protecting her remote marijuana crop might be, as so many American Buddhists are Jewish, they are known as "JuBus." Jones's story also evokes the television character Dharma Finkelstein of Dharma & Greg (1997–2002) whose father is a Jewish hippie and befuddled pothead.46
Drug offender Nicky Nichols is the most prominent and clearly identifiable crypto-Jew on OITNB throughout its first five seasons. Yet a case can be made as well for Yael Stone's Lorna Morello. Stone, for example, was originally considered for the part of Nicky Nichols, but instead was cast as the working-class Italian-American Lorna Morello. This cultural slippage between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans has been long noted. In 1964, for example, Leslie Fiedler cited Paddy Chayefsky's Italian American Marty as a Jewish American being "presented as something else."47 More recently, Dominique Ruggieri and Elizabeth Leebron in their research on Jewish- and Italian-American women on television conclude that ever since Mama Rosa debuted in 1950, shortly after the transition of The Goldbergs from radio to television, both Jewish- and Italian-American women have been portrayed as:
selfish, pushy, materialistic, domineering, manipulative, assertive, loud, shallow, whiny, demanding, man-hunting, weight-conscious, high-maintenance, shopping-crazed bargain hunters, possessive, controlling, unmarried, success-oriented, food-oriented, asexual, and unattractive. Physical qualities that epitomize these characters include large noses, big hair, a dark complexion and issues with their bodies. The positive characteristics linked to these ethnic portrayals include strong family orientation, loyalty, and devotion as mothers.48
In addition, several prominent Italian-American television characters, such as Dorothy Petrollo-Zbornak on The Golden Girls (1985–1992) and Marie Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005) were played by Jewish actors, Bea Arthur and Doris Roberts respectively. Some Jewish media journalists have gone a step further and declared the entire Barone family Jewish because the show's Jewish creator, Phil Rosenthal, infused the series with storylines based on his own family.49 Similarly, crypto-Jew Costanza from Seinfeld, who is ostensibly Italian American, is played by a Jewish actor, as are his parents. It works both ways; Italian-American actor John Turturro has played Jews in multiple films.50 Moreover, on OITNB, the connection between Nicky and Lorna is part of the narrative. In the first episode of Season 1, we are introduced to both characters along with Piper, who discovers them having sex in the shower. The amorous relationship between Nichols, who is a lesbian, and Morello, who identifies as heterosexual, continues through the fifth episode, when Morello breaks it off to save herself for her fiancé. Nonetheless, their relationship maintains an emotional and at times physical intimacy. Furthermore, Lorna later reveals her fiancé is Jewish, and decides, "If I marry him, I'll be Jewish too."51
On her own, drug offender Nicky Nichols personifies the typical television crypto-Jew. Natasha Lyonne neé Bronstein's thick, wavy long hair and New York accent are key physical markers. Nicky, an articulate, insightful, and wisecracking lesbian, was raised in Manhattan by her professional, well-to-do, divorced mother. Nicky complains about and blames her mother's absence in her life for some of the psychic distress that undergirds her addiction. Flashbacks depict their difficult relationship; however, as her back story progresses, we see Nicky is an incorrigible addict who uses her smarts and sarcasm to manipulate her mother, who eventually throws up her hands. Nicky's mother's characterization is not stable in the show and there is no evidence to suggest she is a crypto-Jew herself. For example, she is not played by a Jewish actor. Perhaps then it is Nicky's truly absent father who is Jewish. After all, her last name mirrors jokester Joey Nichols, who is Woody Allen/Alvy Singer's father's friend in Annie Hall. As Joey's cultural descendant, Nicky's comedic abilities are more fully evolved: in another marker of Jewish-American identity, she performs stand-up during the prison holiday talent show.52 Moreover, Lyonne makes her own Jewish identity clear in interviews and in the extra feature "Getting to Know the Cast" on the Season 3 DVD, where she talks about living in Israel in the 1980s, and provides the wittiest responses to many of the questions she and the other actors are asked. Nicky is also the first character to use Yiddish words in the series and the first to term a gang of white supremacist inmates as Nazis.53
In critical readings of the show, Nicky has been noted for her non-normative lesbian body, i.e., she is perceived as non-conforming to dominant standards of beauty. Such critiques either laud the show for depicting Nicky enjoying her sexuality despite not being thin and "attractive" or find fault in that the white lesbians with leading roles, Piper and her girlfriend Alex (Laura Prepon), uphold and thus perpetuate these oppressive standards.54 Furthermore Nicky's (crypto-Jewish) hair is unruly, and she does not attend fully to grooming and behavioral practices associated with femininity such as being neat, tidy, and controlled in appearance or speech. Nicky's presentation thus can be seen as conforming to the view of Jewish women as unattractive. Nonetheless, Kyra Hunting finds that:
often it is not Piper, marked by the politics of respectability who is the moral center for the group of white women but drug addict and promiscuous Nicky—whose appearance and lascivious language has rough edges but who consistently provides the most rational advice to other inmates.55
In addition, Nicky articulates incisive feminist critiques. For example, in regard to Lorna's obsession about her future marriage to her fiancé, Nicky comments on "the wedding industrial complex and society's bullshit need to infantilize grown women." Though Nicky demonstrates the benefits of her college education in such comments, she does not use her well-honed analytical skills to assert her superiority in the same manner as Piper's displays of knowledge sometimes do and for which other inmates call her out.56
Claiming Nicky as a crypto-Jew opens up further possibilities for considering her within the genealogy of "tough Jews," who defy stereotypes of Jews as weak, passive, victims or brainy yet nebbishy nerds. Scholars and commentators have deployed the term "tough Jew" to describe a range of real and representational Jewish men, from early twentieth-century Jewish-American gangsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Holocaust resistance fighters the Bielski Brothers, to the muscular Zionists and Israelis who forged a Jewish state and aim to protect the Jewish people. Nathan Abrams in The New Jew in Film extends the category to include the "tough Jewess with Attitude" seen in a number of turn-of-the-century films such as Miller's Crossing (1990), Homicide (1991), and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Though Nicky engages in illegal activity, she is not a gangster in the Lansky mold, nor is she a righteous member of anti-fascist resistance. Instead, her brand of Jewish toughness is born of her defiant lesbian identity, rough street life as a junkie, and willingness to speak her mind. These attributes are essential components of her prison survival skills.57
The tough Jew is posited by Abrams as a one-half of a binary paired with the queer Jewish male. In regard to Jewish women, he explains:
the tough Jewess with Attitude not only rebels against stereo(typical) gender roles, demonstrating that she can perform the same roles and tasks as the Jew, but also questions the duality of gender in the first place, confounding both the general and Jewish binary logic.58
As Nicky is queer and tough, she confounds stereotypes about Jewish women's representation on television, and, as I discuss further below, the representation of Jewish women in OITNB. Perhaps Nicky's status as a crypto—rather than "out" Jew—is thus overdetermined because not only does she defy categorization, she is categorically defiant. However, the popular cultural presence of well-known Jews with histories of substance abuse such as Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Hillel Slovak, and Amy Winehouse—and that Natasha Lyonne's own struggles as an addict inform Nicky's narrative—raises additional questions about the reluctance or apparent impossibility of presenting Nicky as Jewish.59
Like many of the inmates, Nicky is not only tough. She displays vulnerability, particularly in her relationship with her prison mother Red (Kate Mulgrew). Yet even crypto-Jew Nicky engages in a Judas betrayal by sharing with a corrupt prison guard her prison mom's secret method of getting in additional culinary supplies. He plans to use the information to smuggle in drugs. This will lead to Nicky's downfall, as she later is found with drugs in her possession and, early in Season 3, gets sent to the nearby higher security prison. The dispatching of Nicky underscores the tenuous status of the television crypto-Jew, whose identity both articulates and avoids representations of Jewishness. Crypto-Jews provide gestures of Jewish representation, however reified—such as physical features, names, personal qualities, comedic sensibilities and intellectual insights—that convey a sense of Jewishness detached from historical contexts and specific experiences. Thus, a crypto character's Jewish attributes can be assigned or withdrawn at will, evading narrative demands for continuity or follow-through. The tattoo of a cross Nicky sports on the inside of her forearm, for example, thus neither confirms nor denies her Jewish identity. Instead it speaks to the shifting construction of the crypto-Jew as both trope and pastiche.60
"Where my dreidel at?" Kosher Food and Conversion Narratives
It is telling that it is only shortly after Nicky leaves, that the first "out" Jewish inmate shows up. Or at least, the first inmate who asks for a kosher meal. It turns out she is not Jewish, but requests kosher meals to get better food. This is a real phenomenon in US prisons. According to a 2012 Forward article, just one-sixth of the 24,000 prisoners receiving kosher meals in America are Jewish.61 On OITNB, the quality of the kosher meals is quickly noticed by other inmates, particularly Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore), who is among the first to request one. By the next episode several other African-American characters whose back stories have been previously highlighted are also eating kosher. However, it is Cindy who most embraces the potential of claiming Jewish identity. When she is accused of not being Jewish, she replies, "You think you know my life? Shabbat Shalom, bitch!" And as one Jewish popular press article on the topic notes, Cindy's "quest for edible food" leads her to other Jewish references, "including 'Shanah tova and hava nagila. It is good to be chosen.'" In response to someone asking if a seat is taken, she replies, "Yeah. We're saving it for Elijah." Cindy pursues her desire to learn more about Jewish culture by checking out Fiddler on the Roof and a Woody Allen movie from the library, which is humorous yet also a self-referential gesture to the importance of popular cultural texts in disseminating information about what it means to be Jewish.62
Up to this point in the series, Cindy's character has largely served as comic relief. She is depicted as a fool and an immature petty thief who is in prison because she abused her position as a TSA officer to steal passengers' belongings at the airport.63 When a rabbi is brought into the now privatized prison to determine if prisoners requesting kosher meals are motivated by "sincerely held beliefs"—an actual legal standard employed to determine the validity of prisoners' claims to kosher meals—his interviews are relayed in a montage of inmates sharing both goofy ideas about what it means to be Jewish and some well-worn stereotypes that are played for laughs: "I think y'all are doing a wonderful job controlling the media. I mean we. We are doing a wonderful job;" and "I call my mother a lot, like every day, and, love a bargain." When asked whether she was raised Jewish, Cindy claims she was "born and bred," and recounts plot points from Annie Hall and Yentl. This strategy fails to keep her on the kosher meal list and Cindy decides to convert, ending the episode with its title question, "Where my dreidel at?"64
In the next episode we discover there actually are Jewish women inmates held at Litchfield; Cindy has sought them out to prepare for her conversion. One is Ginsberg (Jamie Denbo), who sheepishly reveals she has been convicted for money laundering when asked. This is an odd exchange not only because it is rare for a prisoner to be asked that question by another inmate, especially when they have just met, but also because Ginsberg's gesture when revealing the basis for her conviction conveys shame at having been caught both in the crime itself and in a crime that evokes the antisemitic association of Jews with money. However, that same information reassures Cindy that Ginsberg is indeed Jewish, as she was skeptical due to Gins-berg's blonde hair and blue eyes. In the commentary on the episode by its credited writer, who describes herself as an Irish Catholic, she explains that Kohan rewrote Ginsberg's monologue describing the inmate's upbringing. Ginsberg's experiences thus appear grounded in those of Kohan's herself, as when Ginsberg demonstrates she knows her Jewish chops by talking about her bat mitzvah and her Hebrew name, Shayna Malka.65
In the last episode of Season 3, Cindy, with Ginsberg and another Jewish inmate, Rhea Boyle (Yelena Shmulenson) by her side, meets with the rabbi. Rhea opens the conversation: "Why you want to go from a hated minority to a double-hated minority is beyond me," before turning to the rabbi, and vouching for Cindy by asserting, "she's for real." Cindy has chosen the Hebrew name Tovah—"which means good and it's all good now"—and explains she has traded granola bars with Ginsberg and Boyle for Hebrew lessons. The rabbi then asks, "What is this for you?" Cindy's reply, written by Kohan, is conveyed in a truly moving performance by Moore.
Honestly, I think I found my people. I was raised in a church where I was told to believe and pray. And if I was bad, I'd go to Hell. If I was good, I'd go to Heaven. And if I asked Jesus, he'd forgive me and that was that. And here y'all saying there ain't no Hell. Ain't sure about Heaven, and if you do something wrong, you got to figure it out yourself. And as far as God's concerned, it's your job to keep asking questions and to keep learning and to keep arguing. It's like a verb. You do God. … I want to learn more and I think I got to be in it to do that. … Can I be a Jew?
Cindy is ecstatic when he and both witnesses say yes, until she finds out she must also experience ritual immersion in a mikvah to make her conversion official. Ginsberg consoles her by explaining that although she is not a Jew yet, she is "Jew-ish."66
A miracle ensues for all the inmates when the guards go on strike and a construction crew accidentally rips open a hole in the fence, allowing everyone to take a dip in the lake on the other side. Most prisoners run in to enjoy their momentary freedom. Cindy finds Ginsberg, who recites the blessing as Cindy immerses her naked body in the water. Conversion complete, Gins-berg congratulates her with a "mazel tov" and Cindy is all smiles in a closeup shot depicting her deep expression of her new found source of joy. Cindy's transformation during a season in which all sorts of religious identities and meanings are explored is remarkable for her as a character and also for the way it explains the meaning of Judaism, and most importantly, the difference of Judaism, which the show affirms and upholds. Furthermore, the sensitive treatment of her conversion story creates opportunities to depict Jewish community within the prison, and allusions to Jewish community outside it. In so doing OITNB incorporates significant Jewish content that a focus on individuals, especially when occurring in fleeting moments or signaled in quips, cannot accomplish alone. I would argue the brief depiction of Jewish community on the show reveals the fissures of representing Jewishness without that larger communal context, and the potential for greater narrative depth when included.
African Americans and Jews by Choice
Cindy's conversion is credible as a personal journey that concludes the series' prison kosher food narrative, and also because it resonates with the experiences of other well- and lesser-known African-American converts—whether real or imagined—to Judaism. These "Jews by Choice" join a diverse Jewish community: a 1990 study conducted by the Council of Jewish Federations concluded that in the United States 2.4 percent of "self-identified Jews list their race as black," and "about 100,000" additional African Americans "reported having 'connections' to Judaism." In addition, African-born Jews comprise 14.6 percent of Israel's Jewish population.67 Popular entertainer and Rat Pack member Sammy Davis, Jr. was the most well-known African-American Jew for many decades following his 1960 conversion, which occurred after years of study and consultation with Reform rabbis in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He and his Swedish fiancée, actress May Britt, "formally converted a few weeks before their wedding."68 Other well-known African-American converts include writer Julius Lester, actress Nell Carter, writer Jamaica Kincaid, and rapper Shyne. Convert Alysa Stanton became the first African-American woman rabbi in 2009. She decided to convert when in her twenties, explaining her choice in similar terms voiced by the fictional Cindy, "For me, Judaism was where I found a home." After overcoming initial hesitancy upon her hiring, she ultimately led the Congregation Bayt Shalom in Greenville, North Carolina to great acclaim.69
Fictional African-American Jews have also previously appeared on television. In an episode of the 1970s situation comedy Sanford and Son entitled "Funny, You Don't Look It," patriarch Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx) is told by a genealogist that he is a descendant of Ethiopian Jews. His initial reaction trades in stereotypes in a similar vein to Litchfield inmates' attempts to assert a legitimate claim to their kosher meals, such as articulating his new-found desire for his son to become a doctor. However, like Cindy, Fred then explores more deeply the meaning and history of Judaism and its rituals. When it turns out he was misinformed about his Jewish roots, he celebrates what he learned and appreciates his Jewish teacher's perspective that "Jews and blacks … have a lot in common," hoping that "the similarities will bring us closer together."70
Sammy Davis, Jr.'s conversion was also motivated by sentiments about connections between the two minority groups, in addition to spiritual connections he felt after a 1954 car crash in which he lost one of his eyes. He had become familiar with Jewish teachings and practices after working closely with Jewish entertainers such as Eddie Cantor, whom Davis credited for giving him his first big break. Davis particularly admired and was inspired by the Jewish people's ability to survive adversity.
These are a swinging bunch of people. I mean I've heard of persecution, but what they went through is ridiculous! … They'd get kicked out of one place, so they'd just go on to the next one and keep swinging like they wanted to, believing in themselves and in their right to have rights, asking nothing but for people to leave 'em alone and get off their backs, and having the guts to fight to get themselves a little peace.71
Despite the lengthy period during which Davis considered conversion, when accomplished it was met with some skepticism and criticism. Ribbing from his Las Vegas Jewish comedian friends was to be expected, but he was also the object of charges from some African Americans that he converted to advance his career, and escape from his blackness. Such accusations may explain his 1980 statement in Ebony that "My people are my people and my religion is my religion. My people are first. I happen to be a Black Jew. I am Black first and the religion I have chosen is Judaism."72
African Americans who become or are born as Jews challenge static notions of black and Jewish identity. Popular cultural renditions can further evoke the fluid terms that construct identities generally. African-American inmate Cindy, in OITNB, seeks and finds a spiritual home by converting to Judaism. Moreover, African-American Jews, both real and imagined, create spaces for plural Jewish identities. Yet questions remain about the benefits, costs, and consequences of such transformations, and their meanings in cultural representations.
In Lovesong, Julius Lester's 1988 memoir, he explores his path to conversion and the many dimensions of his Jewish identity. In the book's preface Lester states, "I am no longer deceived by the black face which stars at me from the mirror. I am a Jew."73 This expression of tension between his identities as black and Jewish is articulated by other African-American converts as well. Assumptions when attending services at an unfamiliar congregation that one is a curious visitor and not Jewish, and accusations from African Americans that conversion to Judaism represents a desire to escape blackness and become white, are both common experiences of black Jews by Choice. However, among other diverse Jewish populations, African-American Jews open up conceptions of what an American Jew looks like and point to limitations regarding assumptions about Jews and whiteness. In OITNB, Cindy's character also points to more flexible understandings of Jewish-American identity. Cindy's turn to gospel music after an African-American inmate's death—"I may be a Jew now, but times like this call for some Black gospel no matter what"—is a tribute to the power of that musical form and an expression of her own dual moment when she articulates both her black and Jewish identities. Asserting Jewishness as American in this case is also related to African-American cultural expression. Moreover, as Terry Shoemaker points out, Cindy shows she "is capable of being both Jewish and African American."74
OITNB's deployment of an African-American character's conversion to Judaism to convey Jewish values and depict Jewish rituals without inclusion of a fully realized recurring Jewish-American character and community underscores the problematic representation of Jewish identity in American popular culture. Though Cindy in OITNB tells the visiting rabbi in Season 3 she has "found her people" when professing to the sincerity of her quest to become a Jew, Season 4 depicts her prison experience largely as before, living among and hanging out with her African-American friends, with sparse attention to her new found faith and its meaning for her. Despite her new mezuzah, the Jewish inmates who assisted her conversion have not become a part of her life and no longer appear on the show. Moreover, Cindy's Jewish identity flattens, expressed primarily by her and other inmates in articulations of stereotypical if not antisemitic Jewish avarice. Conflicts with Alison, a newly arrived African-American inmate who is Muslim, wears a hijab, and is assigned to the bunk next to Cindy's, lightly spoof tensions between the two groups, yet mostly at Cindy's expense. In one episode, Alison hopes to trade access to her contraband cell phone for some of Cindy's commissary-purchased tampons during a prison sanitary napkin shortage. When Alison references a Biblical admonition, "If there are poor among you, do not be selfish or greedy towards them" to make her case, Cindy rejects this view as Christian. In addition to demeaning Cindy by showing her to be ignorant of the shared basis of the Abrahamic religions, which Alison understands, the one-dimensional focus on stale jokes about Jewish greed that dominate Jewish references in Season 4 prevents Cindy from articulating deeply-held Jewish values—for example in this moment of potential tzedakah—as she had during the previous season's focus on her conversion.75 Thus, the show's sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faith, values, and identity is short-lived, and its reliance upon an African-American character who converts to convey the authenticity of the Jewish experience most fully proves unstable.
Despite their limitations, a century of cultural texts from The Jazz Singer to OITNB have served as vehicles for disseminating information via mass culture about Jewish practices, values, family life, and community concerns to gentile audiences. Such exposure serves an ongoing need, as African-American actress Yvonne Orji recently demonstrated when she said, "I know what Shabbat is by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm."76 Yet the apparent impossibility for OITNB, despite its well-deserved reputation for inclusivity, to incorporate a Jewish-American inmate, or an ongoing Jewish prison community, however small, for Cindy to continue to interact with, suggests Jewish television creators and writers are still struggling with a revised, contemporary version of the "write Yiddish, cast British" mandate. One expression of that dilemma occurs early in the series when a posted list of religious services is shown to include Catholic, Wiccan and Muslim, but omits a Jewish option.77
Nicky and Cindy: New Information and Missing Connections in Season 6
Six years into the series, Nicky's crypto-Jewish identity resolves via a flashback to her fraught bat mitzvah. Her parents are divorced, squabbling, and more concerned about superficial and materialist aspects of the event than their daughter's achievement. As the second pair of Jewish parents depicted on the show, they are far worse than Larry's, who, however misguided, at least cared about their son's well-being. The bat mitzvah plays out as a teenage revenge fantasy, as Nicky strays from her prepared Torah commentary to excoriate her parents in front of the congregation. Yet the additional details provided about Nicky's self-absorbed and neglectful parents, whose behavior has been referenced previously, though not as Jews, do not further humanize Nicky nor serve to explain in a compassionate manner her drug addiction and criminal behavior because her parents, like Larry's, are one-dimensional. As one reviewer assessed the season, "Nicky Nichol's bat mitzvah is a train wreck with some good laugh lines, but it does not feel like an indispensable part of this show." Rolling Stone's Season 6 review similarly found only one of the season's flashbacks—about two other characters—"worth the bother," and did not mention Nicky's at all.78
The bat mitzvah flashback comes after Nicky, who is facing significant additional prison time in the aftermath of a prison riot, has contacted her father for legal assistance, and he comes through. Themes of Jewish betrayal become central as he urges Nicky to betray Red—again—to save herself. She does, though Red in a Stella Dallas moment of maternal self-sacrifice grants her permission to do so.79 Moreover, Cindy faces a similar high-pressure situation. She contacts her conversion rabbi for legal assistance, which he facilitates. Here too, her lawyer advises her to betray her best friend.80 Though wracked with guilt—a "Jewish thing" another inmate explains—she does.81
Though Cindy asserts the primacy of her Jewish identity in this season by using her Hebrew name when she becomes co-host of a radio show within the prison, she must do so repeatedly to her gentile friends. Other audiences apparently also need convincing; it is interesting that in the closed captions for the show, she is always referred to as Cindy, not Tovah.82 Furthermore, though there are parallels to Nicky's and Tovah's story lines, they seem to exist, like these characters themselves, in separate worlds within the prison. They appear briefly together in a prison wedding scene, where Nicky has donned a yarmulke and prayer shawl to officiate, though the couple, Piper and Alex, are not Jewish and there is no Jewish content to the ceremony. The Jewish objects, which also include a chuppah, add an exotic vibe that liven up the dreary setting, but like Nicky and Tovah, do not connect in any meaningful way with their Jewish character, identity, or values. The cross tattoo on Nicky's forearm is prominently displayed in another indication of her continuing ambivalent status post bat mitzvah flashback. In a measure of the irrelevance of the Jewish components depicted at the wedding, many reviews of the episode do not mention them at all. Thus, the Jewish elements of this season's important final episode—that includes a classic TV series ratings magnet, a wedding—provide color or comic effect, detached from ritual and cultural significance.83
Conclusion
In OITNB's final, seventh season, Nicky retreats to her crypto-Jewish identity. Despite having a loving relationship with a lesbian Egyptian inmate held for an immigration violation, a seeming set up for jokes and storylines like those created for Alison and Cindy in Season 4, there is bupkis about Nicky's Jewishness in any of this season's episodes. In regard to Cindy, the brief references to her being Jewish in Season 7 are few and far between. Though her rabbi comes through for her again in writing an employment reference letter, which secures her a job, he is mentioned only in passing, and Cindy is never depicted interacting with other Jews. These retrenchments once again point to the instability of the crypto-Jew and convert in reliably relating Jewish identity, practices, and sensibilities in television narratives. Erasure and marginalization of Jewish perspectives also appear to be facilitated by the absence of depictions of Jewish community.
Over its seven seasons, OITNB's shifting representations of Jewish identity move from the Bloom stereotypes and crypto-Jew Nicky Nichols, to the inclusion of Ashkenazi Jews in minor supporting roles that are essential in supporting the conversion of higher profile character Cindy. In Season 4, the reversion to stereotypes about Jews accompanies the return of crypto-Jew Nicky, who has been transferred back from a higher security prison. Perhaps the series' success in featuring the stories of women of color, lesbians, and transwomen, and in building a fan base for its diverse cast, created the possibility for the open exploration of what it means to be a Jew, if only temporarily. Nonetheless the instability of Jewish identity in the show may suggest tensions and uncertainties surrounding the relationship of Jewish subjectivity to those more clearly understood as marginalized. Thus it is significant that the character with the most screen time who voices the most endearing and sympathetic Jewish perspective is a convert who expresses her Jewish identity through the lens of her experience as an African American. When Nicky is revealed to be Jewish in Season 6, it makes little difference, as her Jewish identity and that of Cindy/Tovah's typically find expression only in passing verbal quips or visual jokes. These indications are underscored in Season 7, the series' last, in which the Jewish identities of these characters are rarely referenced or elided completely. Like other television shows that only explore Jewish identity in the apparently safer context of interfaith marriages and relationships, Jewish identity in OITNB is most fully realized when linked with someone who is not, at least initially, Jewish, and whose struggles as an incarcerated African-American woman have been depicted previously in the series, though no Jewish inmate's story receives similar treatment. Moreover, the troubling treatment of Levy in Kerman's memoir finds an echo in references to Jewish identity on the series that mine well-worn stereotypes without addressing the consequences, for example, of antisemitism in similar ways that the series addresses racism and homophobia. Yet importantly, Cindy converts and becomes a Jew who is accepted by the Jewish inmates who supported her religious transformation and by the rabbi who authorized it. Her conversion narrative provides opportunities for compassionate expression of Jewish values, conveys information about Jewish rituals, and challenges static notions of Jewish identity.
Though OITNB incorporates if not champions the experiences and perspectives of a range of minority groups, portrays incarcerated women sympathetically, and aims to critically depict the prison-industrial complex, and deserves praise for doing so, the significant Jewish presence on OITNB still bears consideration as simultaneous displacement through deployment of familiar stereotypes, crypto-identities, and conversion narratives. As Malatino also finds in regard to trans issues, "the show subverts certain tropes," yet also relies on "stereotypes."84 Cindy's struggles to be recognized as Tovah are emblematic and suggest that a Jewish problem—the problem of Jewish representation—remains a forceful shaper of narratives and character development on episodic television and streaming series.
Notes
Michael O'Connell, "Nielsen Says 6.7M Watched Orange Is the New Black Premiere in 3 Days," Hollywood Reporter, June 29, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/orange-is-new-black-ratings-907390; Daniel Holloway, "TV Ratings: Orange Is the New Black Premiere Numbers Revealed by Nielsen," Variety, June 29, 2016, http://variety.com/2016/tv/ratings/tv-ratings-orange-is-the-new-black-premiere-nielsen-1201805991/, accessed December 4, 2016. OITNB is the "most-watched show" on the streaming platform according to Netflix executive Ted Sarandos. Dana Birnbaum, "'Orange Is the New Black': Jenji Kohan, Cast Talks Season 4, Diversity, Binge-Watching," Variety, January 17, 2016, http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/orange-is-thenew-black-season-4-jenji-kohan-1201681782/, cited by Sarah Artt and Anne Schwan, "Screening Women's Imprisonment: Agency and Exploitation in Orange Is the New Black," Television & New Media 17:6 (September 2016): 468.
Suzanne Enck and Megan Morrissey, "If Orange Is the New Black, I Must be Color Blind: Comic Framings of Post-Racism in the Prison-Industrial Complex," Critical Studies in Media Communication 32:5 (October 2015): 303. Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black (New York: Random House, 2010). See also Internet Movie Data Base, which notes over 250,00 reviews and an overall viewer rating of 8.1, www.imdb.com, accessed March 14, 2019.
Numerous articles laud the show's diverse cast, even those finding fault with how specific individuals and groups are represented. See for example, Roxanne Gay, "The Bar for TV Diversity Is Way Too Low," Salon, August 22, 2013. Gay notes, "You can't blink without someone celebrating the show's diversity," accessed March 10, 2019, https://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/the_bar_for_tv_diversity_is_way_too_low/.
“Orange Creator Jenji Kohan: Piper Was My Trojan Horse," Fresh Air, National Public Radio, August 13, 2013, accessed December 4, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2013/08/13/211639989/orange-creator-jenji-kohan-piper-was-my-trojan-horse. See also Jason Demers, "Is a Trojan Horse an Empty Signifier? The Televisual Politics of Orange Is the New Black," Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Études Américaines 47:3 (2017).
For essay collections with a range of perspectives on the series and how it represents particular groups, see Shirley A. Jackson and Laurie L. Gordy, eds., Caged Women: Incarceration, Representation and Media (New York: Routledge, 2018); April Householder and Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, eds., Feminist Perspective on Orange Is the New Black (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016), and Television & New Media 17:6 (September 2016), special issue, ed. Sarah Artt and Anne Schwan.
Analysis of religion on the show that discuss Jewish themes include Terry Shoemaker, "Escaping Our Shitty Reality: Counterpublics, Orange Is the New Black, and Religion," Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 29.3 (Fall 2017): 217–229, and Terri Toles Patkin, "Broccoli, Love, and the Holy Toast: Cultural Depictions of Religion in Orange Is the New Black," in Shirley A. Jackson and Laurie L. Gordy, eds., Caged Women: Incarceration, Representation and Media (New York: Routledge, 2018), 227–238.
Foundational texts in Jewish television studies include Jonathan and Judith Pearl, The Chosen Image: Television's Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1999); Vincent Brook, Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003). For a critical assessment of the field, see Michele Byers and Rosalin Krieger, "Beyond Binaries and Condemnation: Opening New Theoretical Spaces in Jewish Television Studies," Culture, Theory & Critique 46:2 (2015): 131–145. Some studies incorporate consideration of both television and film. See for example, J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Paul Buhle, ed., Jews and American Popular Culture, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007); Joshua Louis Moss, Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love (Austin: University of Texas, 2017); Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, eds., From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2017).
OITNB, www.imdb.com
"I Wasn't Ready," OITNB season 1, episode 1, Netflix, July 11, 2013. Piper tells Larry not to inform his father about her predicament because "he already hates me."
Larry Smith, "My Life with Piper: From Big House to Small Screen: The Other True Story Behind Orange Is the New Black," Medium, July 14, 2014, accessed December 4, 2016, https://medium.com/matter/my-life-with-piper-from-big-house-to-small-screen-592b35f5af94#.t5josbg1p.
Jeremy Diamond, "Trump: DNC Chairwoman 'Crazy' 'Neurotic Woman,'" CNN, November 2, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/02/politics/donald-trump-debbie-wasserman-schultz-crazy-neurotic-woman/index.html; Miriam Levine, "Am I That 'Crazy Neurotic' Jewish Woman Donald Trump Is Describing?" Forward, November 3, 2015, accessed December 4, 2016, http://forward.com/sisterhood/323877/the-crazy-neurotic-jewish-woman/
"I Wasn't Ready," OITNB season 1, episode 1.
13. Biggs also portrayed American Pie character Jim Levenstein in American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and American Reunion (2012).
Sigal Samuel, "Does Orange Is the New Black Have a Jewish Problem?" The Daily Beast, July 18, 2013, accessed December 4, 2016 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/18/does-orange-is-the-new-black-have-a-jewish-problem.html.
Ashley Burns, "A Guide to the Internet's Love of Hating Larry Bloom from Orange Is the New Black," Uproxx, June 30, 2014, accessed December 4, 2016 http://uproxx.com/tv/aguide-to-the-internets-love-of-hating-larry-bloom-from-orange-is-the-new-black/3/.
Ibid. See also Kimberly Potts, "Orange Is the New Black: You're Not the Only One Who's Not on Team Larry," Yahoo TV, June 20, 2014, accessed December 15, 2016, https://www.yahoo.com/tv/orange-is-the-new-black-youre-not-the-only-one-96478890565.html.
"WAC Pack," OITNB season 1, episode 6, Netflix, July 11, 2013; "Blood Donut," OITNB season 1, episode 7, Netflix, July 11, 2013.
"Moscow Mule," OITNB season 1, episode 8, Netflix, July 11, 2013.
"F … sgiving," OITNB season 1, episode 9, Netflix, July 11, 2013; "Bora, Bora, Bora," OIT NB season 1, episode 10, Netflix, July 11, 2013; "Tall Men with Feelings," OITNB season 1, episode 11, Netflix, July 11, 2013.
Larry Smith, "A Life to Live This Side of the Bars," New York Times, March 28, 2010, accessed December 4, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/fashion/28Love.html. He wrote an earlier "Modern Love" column about proposing to marry Piper that did not mention her recent prison experience. Larry Smith, "Hear that Wedding March Often Enough You Fall in Step," New York Times, December 26, 2004.
"Comic Sans," OITNB season 2, episode 7, Netflix, June 6, 2014; "Take a Break from Your Values," OITNB season 2, episode 11, Netflix, June 6, 2014.
Smith, "My Life with Piper."
See for example Yasmin Nair, who states, "White women like Kerman leave prison with book contracts, while others keep moving through its doors, fodder for the expanding Prison Industrial Complex." Idem, "White Chicks Behind Bars," In These Times, July 18, 2013, accessed March 10, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/article/15311/white_chick_behind_bars/. The term "trauma porn" emerged to signal concerns about the show's exploitative aspects. Ashleigh Shackelford, "Orange Is the New Black Is Trauma Porn Written for White People," June 20, 2016, accessed March 10, 2019, https://wearyourvoicemag.com/culture/orange-is-the-new-black-trauma-porn-written-white-people.
Jenji Kohan, Tara Hermann, Hartley Voss, and Alex Regnery, Orange Is the New Black Presents: The Cookbook (New York: Abrams Image, 2014).
Cleary Wolters, Out of Orange: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), 4–8, 300–303.
Shackelford, "Trauma Porn;" Keah Brown, "Season Four of Orange Is the New Black Has a Race Problem," June 30, 2016, accessed May 14, 2019, https://medium.com/the-establishment/season-four-of-orange-is-the-new-black-has-a-race-problem-159a999dc66c.
Hilary Malatino, "The Transgender Tipping Point: The Social Death of Sophia Burset," in April Householder and Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, eds., Feminist Perspective on Orange Is the New Black (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016), 95–110.
Kerman, Orange Is the New Black, 49; see also "WAC Pack," OITNB season 1, episode 6.
Kerman, Orange Is the New Black, 90.
Ibid., 91, 111.
Ibid., 94
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 199.
Ibid., 200.
Ibid., 200–201.
Kerman writes: "Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world [sic], a place where the US government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. … t." Ibid.
Maltino, "Transgender Tipping Point," 101.
Lynne Tuohy, "Don't Worry Martha, It's Like a Big Hotel," Hartford Courant, September 19, 2004. There are Holocaust references in the series; for example, inmate Red refers to Anne Frank in "Blood Donut," OITNB season 1, episode 7.
See for example, Nair, "White Chicks;" Shackelford, "Trauma Porn;" Brown, "Season Four"; Cate Young, "On Orange Is the New Black and the Destruction of Black Bodies," July 14, 2016, accessed March 10, 2019, https://medium.com/the-establishment/season-four-oforange-is-the-new-black-has-a-race-problem-159a999dc66c.
For earlier use of the term, see for example, Lucien Wolf, "Crypto-Jews under the Commonwealth: A Paper Read before the Jewish Historical Society of England on Re-Settlement Day, February 4th, 1894," (London: Jewish Chronicle Office, 1894).
Leslie Fielder, "Jewish-Americans, Go Home!" in Leslie Fielder, ed., Waiting for the End: The American Literary Scene from Hemingway to Baldwin (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), 91. See also Henry Popkin, "The Vanishing Jew of Our Popular Culture: The Little Man Who Is No Longer There," Commentary, July 1952.
Jeffrey Shandler, "At Home on the Small Screen: Television's New York Jews," in J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 244–257; Zurawik, Jews of Prime Time, passim, 51–54; Vincent Brook, Something Ain't Kosher Here: The Rise of the "Jewish" Sitcom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Pearl and Pearl, The Chosen Image, 73–4, 155.
Zurawik, Jews of Prime Time, chapters 4 and 6; Brook, Something Ain't Kosher. Also notable is the Jewish family depicted in Brooklyn Bridge, 1991–1993.
Jon Stewart debuted on The Daily Show in 1999; Curb Your Enthusiasm launched the next year. Transparent began streaming in 2014, the year after OITNB's first season. Debra Nussbaum Cohen, "How Jill Soloway Created Transparent—the Jewiest Show Ever," Forward, October 21, 2014, cited by Roberta Rosenberg, "The Importance of Jewish Ritual in the Secular, Postmodern World of Transparent, Jewish Film & New Media 5:1 (Spring 2017): 98.
"Fool Me Once," OITNB season 1, episode 12, Netflix, July 11, 2013. See for example, Emily Sigalow, American JuBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Fielder, "Jewish Americans," 91.
Elizabeth J. Leebron and Dominique G. Ruggieri, "How TV Portrays Jewish and Italian Women," Television Quarterly 34: 3/4 (Spring 2004): 41; Dominique G. Ruggieri and Elizabeth J. Leebron, "Situation Comedies Imitate Life: Jewish and Italian-American Women on Prime Time," The Journal of Popular Culture 43:6 (2010): 1266–1281; 1269. The article cites a 1998 study by Hadassah of portrayals of Jewish women in the media that found similar qualities.
Ellen Sandler, "Raymond Barone, Crypto-Jew?" Jewish Journal, January 24, 2002, accessed December 15, 2016, http://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/5412/; Tom Teicholz, "The Heroes of Jewish Comedy," Jewish Journal, July 4, 2003, accessed December 15, 2016, http://jewishjournal.com/news/16/the-heroes-of-jewish-comedy/.
Turturro plays Jewish characters in such films as Mo' Better Blues (1990), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), and Quiz Show (1994). In The Truce (1997), he portrays Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. It is also worth noting that Jason Biggs is three-quarters Italian American, and Jewish actors James Caan, Henry Winkler, and Edward G. Robinson have portrayed Italian Americans (Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, The Fonz in Happy Days and Rico in Public Enemy, respectively). See Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
"Fear and Other Smells," OITNB season 3, episode 8, Netflix, June 11, 2015.
"Can't Fix Crazy," OITNB season 1, episode 13, Netflix, July 11, 2013.
See for example, "Take a Break from Your Values," OITNB season 2, episode 11; "It Sounded Nicer in My Head," OITNB season 4, episode 7, Netflix, June 17, 2016.
Sarah Fryett, "'Chocolate and Vanilla Swirl, Swi-irl': Race and Lesbian Identity Politics," in April Kalogeropoulos Householder and Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 16.
Kyra Hunting, "All in the (Prison) Family: Genre Mixing and Queer Representation," in April Kalogeropoulos Householder and Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 120.
Sarah Gibbons, "'Can't fix crazy': Confronting Able-Mindedness," in April Kalogeropoulos Householder and Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 213.
Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Abrams, The New Jew, 132.
Ben Stiller played Jewish writer and heroin addict Jerry Stahl in the 1998 film based on his memoir Permanent Midnight. "Fool Me Once," OITNB season 1, episode 12.
"Friends in Low Places," OITNB season 4, episode 8, Netflix, July 17, 2016.
Naomi Zeveloff, "Kosher Prisons in U.S. Spend Millions on Food for Non-Jewish Inmates," Forward, April 30, 2012, accessed December 15, 2016, https://forward.com/news/155363/not-just-jews-eat-kosher-food-in-prison/.
Linda Buchwald, "Orange Is the New Black: The Best Jewish Moments from the New Season," Jewish Telegraph Agency, June 15, 2015, accessed December 15, 2106, https://www.jta.org/2015/06/15/arts-entertainment/orange-is-the-new-black-the-best-jewish-momentsfrom-the-new-season. "Ching Chang Chong," OITNB season 3, episode 6, June 11, 2015; "Tongue-Tied," OITNB season 3, episode 7 Netflix, June 11, 2015; "Fear and Other Smells," OITNB season 3, episode 8.
"Comic Sans," OITNB season 2, episode 7.
“Where My Dreidel At?" OITNB season 3, episode 9, Netflix, June 11, 2015.
"A Tittin and a Hairin'," OITNB season 3, episode 10, Netflix, June 11, 2015.
"Trust No Bitch," OITNB season 3, episode 13, Netflix, June 11, 2015.
Nora Rubel, "Chicken Soup for the Souls of Black Folk: African American Converts to Judaism and the Negotiation of Identity," Social Compass 51:3 (2004): 335–347, accessed June 22, 2018, http://www.academia.edu/5543962/Chicken_Soup_for_the_Souls_of_Black_Folk_African_American_Converts_to_Judaism_and_the_Negotiation_of_Identity_English_Translation_.
Rebecca Davis, "'These Are a Swinging Bunch of People': Sammy Davis, Jr., Religious Conversion, and the Color of Jewish Ethnicity," American Jewish History 100:1 (January 2016): 40.
Amanda Seigel, "Celebrating African American Jews" New York Public Library Blog, February 11, 2016, accessed June 22, 2018, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/02/11/celebrating-african-american-jews; Dina Kraft, "Rapper Finds Order in Orthodox Judaism in Israel, New York Times, November 10, 2010, accessed June 22, 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/arts/music/11shyne.html?pagewanted=all. Stewart Ain, "Pulpit of Col-or," The New York Jewish Week, May 20, 2009, accessed June 22, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20110615044723/http://www.thejewishweek.com/features/pulpit_color.
Pearl and Pearl, The Chosen Image, 82–83.
Sammy Davis, Jr., Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 246–247, emphasis in original, cited by Rebecca Davis, "'These Are a Swinging Bunch of People': Sammy Davis, Jr., Religious Conversion, and the Color of Jewish Ethnicity," American Jewish History 100:1 (January 2016): 36.
"Becoming a Jew Gave New Meaning to Davis' Life" Jet, June 4, 1990, 29. The entire issue was devoted to "Sammy Davis Jr., World's Greatest Entertainer, 1925–1990."
Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Arcade Books, 1988), 1, cited in Adam Meyer, "Gee, You Don't Look Jewish: Julius Lester's Lovesong, an African-American Jewish-American Autobiography," Studies in American Jewish Literature 18 (1999): 41–51.
"Toast Can Never Be Bread Again," OITNB season 4, episode 13, Netflix, June 17, 2016. Shoemaker, "Escaping Our Shitty Reality," 225.
"Power Suit," OITNB season 4, episode 2, Netflix, June 17, 2016; "We'll Always Have Baltimore," OITNB season 4, episode 5, Netflix, June 17, 2016.
Sonaiya Kelley, "Yvonne Orji on Dating, Virginity and Playing Sexually Liberated Molly on 'Insecure,'" Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2017.
"The Chickening," OITNB season 1, episode 5, Netflix, July 11, 2013.
"I'm the Talking Ass," OITNB season 6, episode 4, Netflix, July 27, 2018. Kathryn VanArendonk, Orange Is the New Black Season 6 Is Aimless, But Still Compelling," July 18, 2018, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/orange-is-the-new-black-season-6-review.html; Alan Sepinwall, "Orange Is the New Black Season 6 Review: Maximum Security, Medium Payoff," Rolling Stone, July 25, 2018, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-reviews/orange-is-the-new-black-season-6-review-701476/.
"Who Knows Better Than I" OITNB season 6, episode 1; "Sh*tstorm Coming" OITNB season 6, episode 2, Netflix, July 27, 2018; "Look Out for Number One," OITNB season 6, episode 3, Netflix, July 27, 2018; "I'm the Talking Ass," OITNB season 6, episode 4.
"Who Knows Better Than I" OITNB season 6, episode 1; "Sh*tstorm Coming;" OITNB season 6, episode 2.
"Well This Took a Dark Turn," OITNB season 6, episode 11, Netflix, July 27, 2018; "Double Trouble," OITNB season 6, episode 12, Netflix, July 27, 2018.
Cindy asserts her name as Tovah in season 6 episodes, such as episode 6, "State of the Uterus;" OITNB, Netflix, July 27, 2018; episode 7, "Changing Winds," OITNB, Netflix, July 27, 2018; and episode 9, "Break the String," OITNB, Netflix, July 27, 2018.
"Be Free," OITNB Season 6, episode 13, July 27, 2018. VanArendonk, "Season 6 Is Aimless"; Alana Altman, "Alex and Piper's Wedding on Orange Is the New Black Season 6 Was A Bright Light," July 27, 2018, https://www.elitedaily.com/p/alex-pipers-wedding-onorange-is-the-new-black-season-6-was-a-bright-light-9869449; Isabella Silvers, "Here's what the Orange Is the New Black Cast Thought About That Surprise Wedding," Cosmopolitan, August 7, 2018, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a22666213/orange-is-the-new-black-season-6-piper-alex-wedding/. All accessed June 7, 2019.
Maltino, "Transgender Tipping Point," 95.
#jews#jews in entertainment#cultural depictions of jews#orange is the new black#the goldbergs#television#conversion#stereotypes#religion#religion in entertainment#crypto-jews#narrative#character development
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MEET DAMIAN
1. Full Name?
Damian Elliot Fitzgerald.
2. Preferred Names or Nicknames?
Damian doesn’t have any nicknames and he’s not really the type to go by one.
3. What does their name mean? Does it have any significance in their family? Do they like their name?
Damian means “to tame”, chosen by his father who took inspiration from St. Cosmas and Damian -- the patron saints of pharmacy and medicine. Context: the Fitzgeralds are a hoity toity family full of doctors, at least on his dad’s side. Elliot is his father’s name. Damian very much enjoys his name and likes to think that he’s very special and great things are meant for him because he carries his father’s name. (Unlike his ridiculously perfect older brother who is only named after their grandfathers, ha!)
4. Age and Date of Birth?
He is 18 years old and his date of birth is April 19, 2001.
5. Gender and Pronouns?
Cis Male. He/him.
6. Hometown?
Boston, MA.
7. Does your character fit into any well known archetypes or tropes?
The Chief? The Gentleman? I’m bad at archetypes. He’s also a very stereotypical Aries dude. (Me, pretending I know anything about zodiacs.)
8. How long have they been at Broadripple?
Damian has been enrolled at Broadripple since Freshman year.
9. What led them to apply to Broadripple? Was it a decision made by them or by their parents/guardians or somewhere in between?
Before his father even graduated from Broadripple, he planned that his children would attend the academy. They’re a staple there; it’s tradition and the Fitzgeralds are all about that.
10. Whether they’ve been at Broadripple four days or four years, do they enjoy it? Do they like Broadripple?
Damian absolutely adores Broadripple. He’s been fed stories about house Fenwick and the academy since he was old enough to understand words. Growing up, he fantasized about Broadripple the way some kids fantasize about attending Harvard or Yale. Every school he’s attended prior to Broadripple was just a stepping stone as far as he’s concerned.
11. What house are they in? Do they care very much about their house?
Fenwick. And abso-freakin’-lutely. He treats the house like he’s their dad and often refers to its members as his ‘Fenwick family’. He tends to go out of his way to befriend and develop close bonds with them, whether or not it seems like they’ll get along. Damian fully believes that the best kind of leadership is respect-based, so he’s relentlessly proactive -- always trying to take care of and encourage his Fenwickians with the hope that all of his hard work and toil will pay off in the long run. He 100% intends on winning the Clary Cup and getting his name engraved on the Clary shield before graduation so it’s important to him that his ship is always tight and out of trouble. #fenwickpride
12. Who do they share a dorm with, or are they on their own for the moment? What are they like to live with? Are they clean or messy? Early risers or night owls?
Damian shares a dorm with Connor Roberts, who he decided he quite likes so he’s been making an effort to develop a friendship with him. Damian likes to consider himself a very good roommate -- an ideal roommate even. He’s always mindful that his side of the room is tidy, with everything in its place and that his bed is always made when he’s not sleeping in it. He sleeps early and rises early. Since the start of November, he’s been a little restless for obvious reasons so he’s gotten a bit... nitpicky. If he sees something of Conny’s that’s on the floor or seems out of place and Conny’s not there, he’ll pick it up and put it where he thinks it belongs. He’ll also like, fluff a pillow if he thinks it looks a little flat, smoothens out the sheets if it looks a lil creased. You could leave your books open to random pages all over your bed and leave, and when you come back, they’re all neatly stacked on your desk and bookmarked and Damian’s just like :) I hope you don’t mind. You might have wanted to rest on your bed upon return so I took the liberty of tidying up for you. He’s just a little more intense than usual since Izzy’s disappearance.
13. How is your character’s dorm decorated? Is it bare or bursting at the seems with personality? Any particular sentimental items from home?
It’s very classic and masculine. All of his desk accessories are matching and made of tan leather and accented with brass. His mattress is fitted with fancy white Hotel™ bedding but his duvet is deep red because #fenwickpride. There’s a large monthly planner that adorns the wall that his bed is pushed against so he can review what’s in store for him tomorrow/for the week before he falls asleep. A bi-fold picture frame sits on his desk. One half holds a photo of him, his sister, and their parents. (Where is Joseph? We just don’t know.) The other half holds a photo of the 3 Fitzgerald beagles looking cute as hell bc obvi. Everything clearly has its place except these 3 photos that are stuck to the wall in front of Damian’s desk with tape (gasp!). One of the God Squad being pure having a picnic somewhere, one of Alpha being cute just because, and one of him and Eliza that he took that she doesn’t like because her face is in it and she’s laughing and that obviously isn’t allowed but like it’s Damian’s favorite so sucks 2 suck.
14. What is their favourite subject at school? Do they even have a favourite? Why?
Of all of the classes he’s taking right now, Damian’s favorite is World Culture. He likes learning about other cultures and ways of life; he thinks it’s interesting.
15. Are they involved in any clubs? Which ones?
He’s been a member of the Buddy Club since his second half of his Freshman year. He’s Vice President of the Student Weekend Activities Team. He’s also the secretary for the Student Council.
16. How does your character feel about Broadripple’s Unofficial Clubs? Do they know about them? Are they a part of any of them?
Damian thinks the Broadripple Boys Club is childish and in poor taste. He avoids associating with them if he can help it but he’s civil with them for the most part even if he thinks they need new hobbies other than destroying property, lives, and their livers.
He’s a member of the Unofficial Chastity Club because celibacy is important and you should always leave room for Jesus. 👀 (It's also a very good reminder that he shouldn’t listen to his hormonal teen body no matter how incessant.)
He doesn’t know about Broadripple Unsolved but if he did, he’d think it was a waste of time.
17. Does your character participate in any sports? If so, what made them join the team?
Damian is Swim captain and a member of the Cross Country team.
The Fitzgeralds think it’s important that their children grow up involved in at least one sport because the physical/social/mental benefits are far too great. Swimming just happened to be what Damian naturally gravitated toward and was best at, so it was no-brainer that it’s the team that he wanted to join upon arrival four years ago. (It may have also been about wanting to assert dominance since he’s been swimming competitively and kicking ass since the age of 8.)
As for Cross Country, Damian’s parents have always encouraged a healthy lifestyle. They’re the type of parents that jog in the morning and make the family run a 5K every year. It was familiar. He also just wanted to be able to workout and not worry about becoming a prune.
18. What afternoon activities does your character do? Do they just do the one mandatory one or are they involved in multiple? Why?
Damian is an animal shelter volunteer. He’s a big dog lover and he cares a lot about the city’s furry friends so it was the obvious choice. He’d honestly do more than one if he had the time -- he was a nursing home volunteer during his Junior year and he loved it -- but considering his involvement in literally everything else, he decided to stick with just one.
19. Do they miss their home when they’re at Broadripple? Do they often go home for the weekends or do they only go home during holiday breaks?
Funnily enough, not really. Damian isn’t the type of person to miss places. The person he would miss the most from home is his sister, Eliza, and since she attends Broadripple with him so he doesn’t really ‘miss home’. He does go home every weekend though unless there’s a SWAT outing planned because he misses his dogs and his parents think it’s nice if the family sits and has a meal together at least once a week. Also often, there’s a schmancy event the Fitzgerald kids need to show up at so their parents can boast of their achievements and show off what good parents they are, so :)))
20. Did your character know Izzy De Santis or Maggie Monroe?
Yes. They were all part of the same Bible-loving group of buddies that the Weekend Warriors cleverly dubbed the God Squad. Izzy was also Damian’s best friend and right-hand man, so he’s terribly saddened by the sudden hole the Melleray Senior left in his life. And while he wasn’t as close with Maggie, Damian does feel quite disturbed by her sudden departure as well. He just finds it rather difficult to keep in mind that her disappearance is just as important as Izzy’s when Maggie wasn’t the one who spotted Damian at the gym every other day.
21. Has your character heard of Edith Lynch? Do they know the story?
Yes and yes. It was a topic of conversation at the dinner table once and never again because his parents think it’s that ridiculous that people have made it some ~haunting tale. His parents, having both attended Broadripple, described it as a ‘terrible mishap that people have blown out of proportion’ and that’s exactly how Damian chooses to describe it if he hears anyone speak of it and need his two cents on the matter.
22. How does your character feel about Nighmore? Have they noticed the recently closed shops yet?
To Damian, Nighmore is just your everyday quaint little town. He doesn’t see anything wrong with the fact that they’re all very friendly and always willing to engage in a bit of conversation. He just thinks it’s good manners. He would even go as far as to say the rest of America needs to be a little more like Nighmore.
Yes, he’s noticed they’ve closed down. Though, he’s more bothered by The Kettle being closed than Hill’s Wholefoods. He was a really big fan of their lattes so it’s a bit disappointing to him that he can’t enjoy that product anymore. He quickly got over it though and hasn’t paid much of a visit to Nighmore since then.
23. Have you made any aesthetic Pinterest boards/WeHeartIt collections for this character? Or playlists? Anything you would like to share!
Pinterest / Playlist / Musings / Schedule
#listen i've been meaning to do this for 2342 years but things get away from you when you have one brain cell ok#smack that like button and i'll boop you for plots 🎉#bahq:task1#damian ; musings#bahq:task
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Characteristics of Patriarchy
From CADTM.org
cw// violence against women, r*pe, sexual violence
Male domination cannot be reduced to a sum of individual acts of discrimination. It is a coherent system that shapes all aspects of life, both collective and individual.
1) Women are “overexploited” in their workplace, and in addition, they perform many hours of housework, but housework does not have the same status as paid work. Internationally, statistics show that if both women’s paid professional work and their housework are taken into account, women are “overworked” compared to men. The separation in terms of household chores and family responsibilities is the visible face (thanks to feminists) of a social order based on a sexual division of labor, that is a distribution of tasks between men and women, according to which women are supposed to devote themselves first and foremost and “quite naturally” to the domestic and private sphere, while men devote their time and efforts to productive and public activities.
This distribution, which is far from being “complementary”, has established a hierarchy of activities in which the “masculine” ones are assigned high value and the “feminine” ones, low value. There has in fact never been a situation of equality. The vast majority of women have always performed both a productive activity (in the broad sense of the term) and various household tasks.
2) Domination is characterized by the complete or partial absence of rights. Married women in 19th century Europe had almost no rights; the rights of women in Saudi Arabia today are virtually non-existent (generally speaking, women who live in societies in which religion is an affair of the State have very limited rights).
The rights of Western women have increased considerably, partly under the influence of the development of capitalism, which needed them to work and consume “freely,” but even more, as a result of their own struggles.
Women have continued to struggle collectively for more than two centuries to gain the right to vote, work, unionize, exercise their motherhood freely, and to full and total equality in the workplace, family, and public sphere.
3) Domination is always accompanied by violence, which can be physical, moral, or in the realm of ideas. Physical violence may be conjugal violence, rape, or genital mutilation: this violence can go as far as murder. Moral or psychological violence may be insults or humiliations. In the realm of ideas, violent acts are represented in various ways, such as in myths and various forms of discourse. For example, among the Baruya (an ethnic group from New Guinea) where male domination is omnipresent, women’s milk is not considered to be their own product but the transformation of male sperm. Obviously, this representation of milk as being a ‘by-product’ of sperm is a form of appropriation by men of women’s power to procreate. It is also a way to codify the subordination of women in the representation of the body.
4) Relationships based on domination are often accompanied by discourse that represents social inequalities as natural. The effect of this discourse is to make people accept these inequalities as an inevitable destiny: they have natural origins, and cannot be changed.
This type of discourse can be found in most societies. For example, the Ancient Greeks referred to the categories of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, and ‘dry’ and ‘moist’ to make a distinction between “masculinity” and “femininity”. Aristotle offers the following explanation: "The masculine is hot and dry, associated with fire and a positive value; the feminine is cold and moist, associated with water and a negative value (...).” It has to do, he says, with a different nature in their aptitude to ‘cook’ blood: women’s menstruations are the incomplete and imperfect form of sperm. The perfect/imperfect, pure/impure relationship Aristotle establishes between sperm and menstruations (and therefore between the masculine the feminine), has its origins in a fundamental biological difference.
Thus, a form of social inequality codified in the social organization of the Greek city-state (women were not citizens) is transcribed as being natural, through the representation of the body.
In other societies, other “natural” qualities are associated with men and women, also resulting in a hierarchical ordering of the two genders. To cite one example, in Inuit society, the cold, the raw, and nature are associated with men, whereas the hot, the cooked, and culture are associated with women. Just the opposite is true in Western societies, in which man is associated with culture and woman with nature. We can thus observe that with different “natural” qualities (cold and hot for women, for example), the ultimate result is always a hierarchical social order of men and women, and whatever the “natural” quality may be, it is always less good in women.
My goal is not to deny that there are biological differences between men and women; however, observing a difference does not mean automatically accepting that there is inequality. Likewise, when a set of “natural differences” is exaggerated in a society, not between various individuals but between social groups, we must suspect that there is a social relationship of inequality hidden behind the discourse of difference.
This discourse of “naturalization” is not specific to the dominance-based relationship between men and women; it may also be used to refer to the situation of blacks. For example, some discourses have justified the various forms of exploitation and oppression of blacks by referring to their congenital “laziness”. A similar assertion was made about workers in the 19th century: at that time, their inability to escape from poverty was explained by the fact that in was in their “nature” to be drunkards from father to son.
This type of discourse tends to transform the individuals involved in social relationships into “species” with definitive “qualities.” As these qualities have natural origins, they cannot be changed, which justifies and legitimates the inequality in relationships of exploitation and oppression.
5) If there are no social struggles, discourses based on “naturalization” can be easily internalized by the oppressed. For example, as far as women are concerned, there is the commonly held idea according to which it is because they bear and give birth to children, that they are “naturally” more gifted than men for taking care of them, at least when they are young. However, young women are often as unprepared as their spouses in the first days after a child is born. On the other hand, they have often been prepared psychologically (through education and the norms that permeate society) for this new responsibility, which is going to require them to learn new skills. This distribution of tasks concerning young children (which means that women are almost exclusively responsible for the actual care given to babies) is not in the least bit “natural”; it is a question of social organization, of a collective choice made by society, even if it is not explicitly formulated. The result is well known: it is mainly women who must do what they can to “reconcile” professional work and family responsibilities, to the detriment of their health and professional situation, whereas men are deprived of this continuous contact with their young children.
This naturalization of social relations is unconsciously (subtly) codified in the behavior of the dominant and the dominated, and pushes them to act in accordance with the logic behind these social relations: in Mediterranean societies, for example, men must obey the logic of honor (at any moment, they must be ready to prove their “manliness”), whereas women must adhere to the code of being discrete and docile while serving others.
The result of this discourse of “naturalization”, expressed by the dominant, is that individuals of both sexes are labeled, assigned a single identity, and in some cases persecuted or at least mistreated, in the name of their social origins, the color of their skin, their gender, sexual orientation, etc. In Western societies, the white, middle class, Christian, heterosexual man has been and is still to a large extent the reference model. Only a person with these types of characteristics could (can) pretend to be a complete individual who can speak for humanity. All the others - black people, Jewish people, g*psies, gays, immigrant workers, and their children, and women (who can, in fact, be burdened by several of these “afflictions” - had to, and must still today, justify themselves to enjoy the same rights as the dominant group.
#feminism#capitalism#patriarchy#history#parentsnevertoldus#parentsnevertoldme#nevertoldus#queer sex ed
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Theoretical Frameworks in Alien (1979)
TW: Sexual assault, sexual themes
Alien (1979) is a film rife with sexual subtext. Swiss designer ‘Hans Rudolf Giger’ known better as ‘H.R Giger’ designed each set and character with a function, a certain practicality but also an overt sexuality. Giger’s work is macabre, it’s mechanical yet deeply sensual. The sexual underpinnings of the Xenomorph design extend to ‘LV-426’, the moon that our focal characters venture onto. As a result, the sexuality of Alien’s design philosophy imbues the film with distinct references to Freudian theory; namely, the uncanny.
Freud, in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, describes the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” (Freud, 1919) Alien subverts expectations in a way that evokes the feelings and fears associated with the uncanny. It twists the conventions of male sexuality and repurposes them as the basis of its horror. Freud himself attributes castration anxiety in men to the idea that the vagina presents an uncanny form of the penis and Giger employs vaginal imagery in specific areas of the alien spacecraft found on LV-426 to evoke this.
The doors of LV-426 resemble the labia majora whilst the opening of the facehugger’s probe is designed to resemble the vagina. The facehugger’s probe is also phallic in nature and is the introduction to the persistent source of phallic imagery throughout the film – the lifecycle of the Xenomorph.
Part of the genius of Alien’s narrative is that it requires no exposition nor supplementary explanation. The viewer is exposed to the lifecycle of the Xenomorph directly as the story progresses and the three stages of life present sexuality imagery intended to attack the male audience.
Initially, the audience is presented with the Xenomorph egg as Nostromo crew member Kane ventures out to contact the alien ship. The opening of the egg resembles the labia.
Directly following this, Kane is attacked by a facehugger. The probe of the facehugger is phallic in nature and features an opening that resembles the vagina. The function of the facehugger also evokes fear of the uncanny via its reproductive mechanisms. The probe enters Kane’s throat, symbolising the brutal assault of rape, during which he is forcibly impregnated by eggs. The action is deeply sexual but also serves to inverse the conventional concept of pregnancy by making a man its host. The process of penetration resulting in impregnation is the basis of most reproduction amongst animals and humans alike and yet its presentation in Alien is perverse, invasive and attacks the male masculinity to evoke fear.
Next, the chestburster ruptures from Kane’s chest cavity. The form of the chestburster is phallic but this process continues to use an uncanny representation of pregnancy and birth as a source of terror. The bloodied chestburster resembles the fetus, birthed by a man and symbolic of his loss of the penis. Kane has lost his penis, and thus his masculinity, as a result of being overpowered and impregnated by the facehugger.
The final stage, the famous Xenomorph, presents a much sultrier depiction of the uncanny. The previous stages repurpose the male sexuality in ways indicative of body horror but the form of the Xenomorph is aesthetic. With a phallic head and sleek body, the serpentine movement of the Xenomorph provides beauty. It’s intriguing, it’s feminine and it’s perverse. It attacks the male sexuality by inviting men to engage with the seductive nature of the Xenomorphs’ form and contrasting this with a grotesque danger. H.R Giger describes his methodology when designing the Xenomorph and how he rejected the concept of an ugly monster “(The Xenomorph) can move gracefully, it can be sinuous.” (Williams, 2016)
Every stage of the Xenomorph’s birth cycle subverts the male sexuality to create the uncanny.
Conversely, the character of Ellen Ripley works to empower the Hollywood depiction of women by employing feminist perspective.
Anneke Smelik, film researcher at Radboud University, describes feminist film theory as criticizing “classical cinema for its stereotyped representation of women.” Smelik, Anneke. (2016).
As a warrant officer, Ellen Ripley is in a place of authority. The attempted invalidation of her authority is the catalyst for the events with the Nostromo. After Kane is assaulted by the facehugger, the other crew members attempt to recover him for placement on the ship. Ripley denies this request on the basis that this action could cause contamination due to the alien lifeform latched to Kane. Ash overrides this denial and allows for Kane to be brought onboard the Nostromo and, as Ripley had asserted, these actions introduced contamination and results in the eventual destruction of the Nostromo and its crew. This subverts the expectation of male authority and the male savior figure that is commonplace in films of its era.
This is compounded by Ripley’s direct comparison to another female character ‘Joan Lambert’. Lambert embodies the problematic female stereotype in a variety of ways throughout the film. She’s hysterical, she’s helpless and she’s callous. With the pressure mounting as the Xenomorph continues to ravage the dwindling crew, Lambert suggests escape via the ‘Narcissus’ with complete disregard for the fact that the remaining crew could not be accommodated. Lambert’s problematic traits result in the death of fellow crew member ‘Parker’ as he could not use his flamethrower on the Xenomorph in fear of killing Lambert who was paralyzed with fear. Overt femininity and dependence on a male savior are facets of a commonplace fantasy in male gaze cinema but, in this instance, it results in the death of the man. It’s a harsh critique on the nature of chauvinistic desires for female helplessness and submissiveness and Hollywood’s overdependence on the male savior complex.
Ripley embodies opposing traits; she’s independent, she’s determined and she’s in an administrative role where she has a voice. These are the traits that lead to her survival in the film as the ‘final girl’.
‘Final girl’ is a horror trope, most commonly associated with slasher films, wherein the character to overcome all odds and defeat the threat is a woman. Typically, this woman casts off femininity in favor of more male-applicable traits so as to appeal to the male audience. In her book, ‘Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film’ professor of film studies Carol J. Clover discusses male identification regarding the ‘final girl’ trope “At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification.” (Clover, 1993)
In addition to surviving against all odds, Ripley subverts sexual expectations also. She’s six feet tall, broad-shouldered and donning the correct uniform. Her body-type is not the curvaceous and voluptuous vessel of conventional beauty, as is often the case with male gaze cinema. She’s taller than her male counterparts and the final moments of the film subvert the voyeuristic pretenses that it originally constructs.
Ripley, having finally escaped the Nostromo, is undressing in preparation for cryosleep, a term used to describe being cryogenically frozen to allow for feasible transport across lightyears. She’s wearing a short vest top and underwear, white as a symbol of sexual purity, and the camera is distanced from her. It’s filmed in such a way to suggest that we are unseen spectators to Ripley’s undressing and the voyeuristic undertones are evident.
As we pull closer to Ripley, the moment is abruptly discontinued when the Xenomorph makes a surprise appearance aboard the Narcissus escape pod. Ripley is under threat once more, but the moment is more invasive and sexual. The Xenomorph draws closer to Ripley, unsheathing the phallic form of its inner mouth. Ripley opens the emergency hatch, allowing her to fire the harpoon gun at the Xenomorph and finally be rid of the threat. Ripley’s victory comes in the form of donning a phallic object and penetrating the Xenomorph with it. In that moment, she has taken the power and subverts male sexuality and asserts herself as an independent woman in control of her own sexuality.
The final moments of Alien also feature maternal abjection as a core theme. The brain of the Nostromo is a computer called ‘MU-TH-UR 6000’ but referred to only as ‘mother’ by the crew. The crew’s reliance on the computer called ‘mother’ establishes the theme of maternal abjection from the beginning. The computer being the core component of the ship is part of the theme of this abjection. The Xenomorph has the innate ability to become one with its environment and the presence of the threat’s symbiosis with the mother figure is literally driving the crew away; it represents the corruption of the paternal figure as it casts away those who seek its safety.
In addition to this, Ripley’s escape plan involves forcing the ship to overload via MU-TH-UR’s terminal. Upon trying to reverse these effects, once Ripley has extracted the coolant, the computer defies her and continues the self-destruct protocol regardless. Ripley’s frustration compels her to refer to MU-TH-UR as a “son of a bitch”. This represents a dichotomy of mother and daughter. They have both rejected one another and casted one another out.
Alien has always attracted academics to its subtext. It’s a classic horror film and papers cite its core themes to be Freudian or based on humanism or a depiction of otherness. Barbara Creed, professor of film studies, asserts that the chestburster scene is indicative of ‘primal scene’ and of “a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” (Creed, 2019) This is featured in her book on the topic of similar theoretical frameworks ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’.
This is just one of many interpretations that exist to excite the minds of viewers. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino discusses the abstraction of intention and reception regarding the meaning of art in a 2013 interview with Terry Gross on NPR “I mean, of course "King Kong" is a metaphor for the slave trade. I'm not saying the makers of "King Kong" meant it to be that way, but that's what, that's the movie that they made - whether they meant to make it or not.” (NPR, 2019)
Viewers will interpret art subjectively and, with studious justification, is it fair to say that any given interpretation can be deemed incorrect? Through the lens of society and psychology, these theoretical frameworks provide the literary basis for filmmakers to create and for film critics to critique - whether these frameworks were ever consciously included or not.
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