PLEASE GENDER-SWAP EVERYTHING, BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TERRIBLE YOU ARE YET

THE LAST OF US

The world has been overrun with zombies, as usual, and the only people who survive are rugged individuals and bands of armed mercenaries.  You play as an ordinary tween girl, El, tasked by a boy you love and trust with protecting a headstrong middle-aged man, Joely, who may hold within his delicate body the key to human salvation.  For the first half of the game, you must use your skills to keep him safe, though eventually you trust him enough to give him his own pistol and he assists you during fights.  You grow to bond with your grizzled middle-aged companion through a series of incidents, while stubbornly denying that he is nothing more to you than a surrogate for your own father.  When you are gravely injured, Joely feeds you and brings you medicine, but while he is on his own he is captured and held by the tween leader of a cannibal cult, forcing you to torture and kill the cult members you capture before mounting a raid on their compound to rescue him.  

In an innovative twist, you are briefly allowed to play as Joely (though admittedly only while El is incapacitated by injury).  The writers have gone out of their way to present the men in this game as having their own agency and goals, a laudable change from the passive wriggle-and-squeal tropes of men in video games.  Also refreshingly, no one suggests that the cannibals will abuse Joely sexually (perhaps because of his age), only that they are likely to eat him.  The violence, however, is still quite shocking: especially when you play sidekick, the animations have you stabbing girls many times in the eyes, neck, and groin to disable them.  The context cues of the game ensure that whenever El kills a girl, you know you are killing a human being with personal relationships to her sisters-in-arms, and one of the last human survivors of the apocalypse--all the more distressing because the game frequently requires you to kill all the girls in an area before you can progress.  

The visuals, writing and music in the game are all top-notch, but it suffers from being mired in a survivalist fantasy that has always been about honoring and privileging feminine skills at the expense of masculine ones.  The world of The Last of Us is designed to make technological consumerism, lawn-mowing, and high-shelf-reaching look like ridiculous, obsolete skills; mending, cooking, conflict resolution and child-rearing are the valued skillsets of the post-apocalyptic age.  It gives me pause that so many of our modern fantasies are about this type of world.  It seems to presage a generation of women dreaming about a world where they can be respected for their base animal qualities, without having to worry about male concerns or social pressures.  I shudder to think about the position of men in such a world.  

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

Mannequins with Kill Appeal

"It only got a 30?!  You're shitting me."

There's nothing for it: I've got to stump for the redemption of the film version of Silent Hill.  This is a movie, and I can't stress enough how unusual this is for me, where I had put it on in the background while I gazed into the internet but then found myself more and more drawn to the film and actually put the internet to one side altogether so I could watch it closely.  After it finished, I returned online again to look up the reviews, which I vaguely recalled being bad.  I was wrong: the reviews of this movie eviscerated it.  They are literally worse than Gothika.

I don't know if it had been a disappointing summer and all the critics were hot and angry or what, but there are far more deserving targets that received an indulgent pass while Silent Hill was getting its neck stomped.  I daresay there was an aspect of revenge in it: TriStar refused advance screenings, to mitigate an expected poor response, and critics clearly jumped at the chance to punish this behavior.  Horror is not the genre to work in if you're hung up on critical acclaim in any case, but when 28 Weeks Later, Shadow of the Vampire, and THX 1138 get scores in the 70s on Metacritic while Ravenous, Final Destination, and Saw have scores in the 40s, some metric other than quality of filmmaking is clearly being drawn on to evaluate them. 

I must say, first, that I have never played through a Silent Hill game, because they are scary and I get scared.  I can't, therefore, relate to some people's experience of the film as a betrayal of the franchise, comparing it against the film that should be there.  I have the luxury of only being able to evaluate what is there.

I NEED AN ADULT

I don't mean to argue that Silent Hill is a very good film, heavens no.  I'm quite comfortable losing that argument.  It just has much to recommend it and is, though this is faint praise indeed, a standout among video game adaptations.  The critical perspective I draw on which rewards me richly when I watch Silent Hill is a feminist critique, something that's still fairly thin on the ground in movie review circles.  It's very much a women's picture, if such a thing still exists: all of the characters save those inserted at the behest of execs are women; the horror is that classically feminist style, body horror; it doesn't use women's suffering primarily to titillate a presumed male gazer, as Gothika does; and, as in Aliens, it's not so much big dumb guns as motherhood that saves the day.  As far as I'm aware, no marketing to a specifically female demo was attempted: the trailers just about reproduce Sean Bean's role in full, the way the marketing for Scream was cut to suggest that Drew Barrymore survived the credits. 

The storyline is a regular ghost one, revenge/justice for a female victim of patriarchal violence and social ostracism, here with heavyhanded religious overtones that do little besides absolve the viewer of responsibility for the mistreatment of women unless they're a member of a Christosatanic cult.  The town and its horrors are explicitly manifestations of the psyche of this ur-victim.  Frankly, I'd rather have it that way than how supernatural elements are manifest in most horror films, where characters devised specifically to treat a protagonist's experiences of non-materialistic phenomena with skepticism are then punished for their disbelief with grisly death.  Here the grisly death is distributed much more impartially, which is always refreshing. 

The main thing going for Silent Hill outside of its feminism is its atmosphere.  All the exteriors are dampened in a gray-white mist where black ash falls from the sky like snow, and all the interiors have the perfect quality of urbex in a dying steeltown.  The town itself is based on the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, but I can't help but think Roger Avery missed a trick (one of, you know, many) not writing it as a more explicit portal to hell.  The monsters have been designed from the principle of the uncanny valley, and I can't think of an instance where it's been used more pitch-perfectly, except maybe Gore Verbinksi's version of The Ring, another female-focused atmospheric horror. 

Generally the film is about mothers and daughters, which may explain the low level of sexualization experienced by the cherubic Radha Mitchell as main/final girl Rose.  Her companion for most of the film, Laurie Holden's Officer Cybil, has a cop-appropriate blatant lesbian image.  She's sexualized, but as a sleek muscular object along the lines of Robert Patrick halfway through unmelting himself in T2.  The rest of the film's sex is tied up in Pyramid Head, here a straightforward avatar of rape, and the mannequinesque nurses, whose forest of bared cleavage Rose has to cautiously pick her way through lest she be torn to ribbons.

"I would have liked more time with the cleavage nurses
and less with the religious fanatics."

Now, I think Tycho's a hundred percent correct when he says that the style of the film evokes the style of video games.  I've seen just about all the video game movies, and I've played a fair amount of survival horror, and I've seen a fuckton of cutscenes.  And the quality of cutscenes is this: they contain a lot of bad, clunky exposition, and they contain a lot of visual spectacle.  Their function is to provide a break in the action which briefly suspends the player's control in the interest of advancing the plot.  Silent Hill retains the cutsceneness closely enough that I kept feeling like I ought to be pressing X.

I don't put much stock in the idea of faithfulness as a measure of the quality of an adaptation--who wants to hear a cover of a song identical to the original, anyway?--but I have love for films that have love for their source.  Christopher Gans spent years trying to obtain the rights to Silent Hill, going so far as to create his own fan-film scored with the Silent Hill soundtrack and send it to the game's creators.  Aided by this purity of feeling, he's produced something that expresses the spirit of, if not the games themselves (for how can I judge that), the medium and the genre they spring from.  The whole idea of survival horror is that you are resource-poor and nearly powerless in a landscape designed to do you harm, and from themes to sets to characters, the movie carries this idea through wonderfully. 

I can't say I don't feel a little hurt that Silent Hill was panned so especially badly, because the symbolic language it used was so close to my own experience of feminine terror, and so keenly expressed.  When I read through mainstream reviews, I can see that none of that has come through for most reviewers, and as usual with an adaptation (especially from a devalued medium), a number of them have felt free to just make shit up to pretend familiarity with the source, like when Roger Ebert wrote that the brilliant colors of From Hell closely evoked the graphic novel.*  Fans of the game are also very angry at the ways in which it differed from the movie that happened in their minds, but that kind of bitching has been easier to write off since Watchmen.  When I look at amateur reviews, such as this one from the Bechdel Test site, though, I get the feeling that I'm not the only one who sees the value in it. 

"30, though!  What the fuck."

*Maybe I am conflating him with a different critic, but I swear that someone said this, and Ebert is a critic I have no real issue with slandering in a post that touches on gaming. 

As my friend whom I’ll call Sam says, “I’ve dated women with everything from an A-cup to a D"

Every day or so I spend on the internet, I come across one of the five to six hundred iterations of this article, on what women can stop doing to attract men.  It's always written from the perspective of someone whose sole claim to authority on the subject is that they are a guy, which mystifies me: can there really be women who have no male friends or acquaintances that would bloviate rapturously on what they believe would most please a man?  In any case, all these articles boil down to a variation on the sentiment, "It's important that you be well-groomed, but I want you to stop spending time on grooming so that we can have more time to do things I like, such as touching a boob."  There is some kind of disconnect in these men's brains between cause (grooming) and effect (groomed) that probably also makes them Libertarians. 

Anyway, if men would like to take my big-ass gametes as qualification to tell them what all women think, and if they would like to stop doing something which completely fails to impress me, they could stop pretending to give a shit about sports.  I know, some women may claim to enjoy sports or like the company of men who do, but because they disagree with me, they're unrepresentative.  I suspicion that all the women who say they like sports don't really but are just pretending in order to attract men.  I am myself constitutionally incapable of enjoying sports and generally distrust the motives of anyone who does, but that shouldn't affect how totally right I am about this. 

Men, I think, only profess to like sports because if they don't other men will relentlessly hound them with accusations of homosexuality.  In men, I judge liking a thing which is inherently unlikeable to impress men to be understandable, and pitiable in a sympathetic way.  In women, I judge liking that unlikeable thing to impress men to be a contemptible betrayal of one's authentic self.  This double standard is my stake in the ground, now let's pretend it's the Daily Show and go to the part of the tape where I contradict myself utterly. 

So, video games.  I am strongly attracted to video games because for the past twenty years they've had the exciting, disreputable sheen of The Next New Media, with regularly-scheduled moral panics providing a rebellious charge to liking them.  And, if I'm honest, because the boys I always liked always like gaming--the weird boys, the boys with the D&D books and the graph paper and anime porn.  Though they could stop with the anime porn, frankly.

Now, I am fucking shit at video games.  I have terrible reaction time and I am emotionally devastated if I can't beat a level on the third or fourth try.  I can't play against people because I get upset if they win too much and worried about what they think of me if I win too much, and if I have any difficulty at all I'll be fighting the urge to wander off and never finish. 

It's clear to me that games, even more than films or books (but maybe not as much as music), serve as mile markers in the lives of the people who love them, bound up in memories of where and who they were when they played Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock or Chuckie Egg.  Nostalgia is such a powerful force in the industry because gaming is so experiential: when you play something that touches you, you're really stitching it into your life in the strongest way possible without actually parachuting into the jungle and fighting Russians while feeding on tree frogs.  And my favorite thing is to hear people articulating their memories, to know what they love and why it animates them.  But ideally without reference to the infield fly rule.