Monday, May 25, 2009

An Open Letter to Catholic Churchgoers

Dear Catholic Churchgoer,

How many children will need to be raped by priests before you stop giving your support to the Catholic Church? I would not want to be associated in the slightest with an organization that has for years hidden pedophiles within its ranks, never holding them accountable, but often enabling their vile sins. By not speaking out, by attending mass, by supporting the Catholic Church, you are condoning its actions. Shame on you.

For the sake of children everywhere, and for the sake of your own soul, I'm asking you to stop attending mass and to stop giving money to the Church until the Vatican makes a full apology and details a program to correct its actions. I am not asking you to give up your faith. Pray and read the Bible at home. Attend masses of other denominations. You can even start a Sunday morning worship group. Do anything but support the Catholic Church. After all, do you really want to take spiritual advice from an organization with a documented 60 year history of "endemic" child abuse? The current Catholic leadership cares more about its reputation than your children. How can you trust them with your soul?

Read on...

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Suspension of Disbelief

Most movies require some level of suspension of disbelief (SoD), and I'm fine with that. Fiction is fiction, and I don't expect all fiction to look exactly like reality. Where's the escape in that? Sci Fi should have fantastic technology, fantasy deserves its magic, and we call all use a little extra serendipity once in a while. But relying on SoD to explain mundane situations that would never happen in those circumstances - that's just lazy.

This is a pet peeve of mine. I tend to think about the movie I'm watching, not just absorb the entertainment. Unfortunately, that makes it a bit harder to enjoy your average movie. I understand that SoD is a key part of most story telling, but there are some places where its use just makes the storyteller look stupid or lazy. I'll use the last two movies I watched to illustrate my point.

The directors cut of Kingdom of Heaven, released in 2005, runs just over 3 hours, and is split into two DVDs. Watching the first DVD convinced me not to watch the second. Orlando Bloom stars as a blacksmith (again) who goes off to Jerusalem during the crusades seeking redemption.

  • Body type isn't something I usually notice, but my spouse pointed it out, and I had to agree: Bloom is not built as a blacksmith. He doesn't look like someone who has spent his entire life in grueling manual labor. He made a fine elf, but he shouldn't be cast as a blacksmith.
  • Bloom's character, I forget his name, learned to wield a sword, and subsequently survived a gory battle, in about an hour. After that, he was pretty much an expert, besting many more experienced men in battle. This is common enough that I'm usually fairly forgiving, but it is annoying.
  • As a blacksmith that has never been a mile from his birth place, Bloom knows how to read... Latin. Please. Peasants can't read, peasants don't know Latin, and peasants certainly cannot read Latin.
  • Guess what else he knows how to do: run an estate, dig for wells and build an aqueduct system! Yea, that makes sense... kind of... if you don't think about it... at all.
So we didn't finish the movie. Instead, we watched Iron Man (2008). I've discussed the absurd portrayal of Stark's sex appeal elsewhere. Here, I'm just going to focus on two things: the situation with the war lords and Stark's glowing heart device. As usual, I wasn't bothered by most of the technology. The main driver of the story is a super-powerful suit, so that's a freebee. When they power their subplots on SoD, that's when it gets annoying.

Stark gets a soup-can-sized cylinder cut out of his chest. What happened to the vital organs and bones that were supposed to be there? How did a doctor manage to do this with little-to-no medical equipment, in a cave? How is Stark still alive? I understand there was supposed to be a magnet there to collect shrapnel and keep it away from vital organs. I don't understand why his heart was apparently removed, and how he was kept alive. Or was his heart underneath the cylinder? Then why did he collapse when the cylinder was removed? They didn't lead us to believe he had internal bleeding from shrapnel. And what was the device plugged into in his chest, anyway?

The war lords demand that Stark make them a state-of-the-art missile. They plan to take over unarmed villages with it. They could have accomplished their conquest with the ample AK47s that they already had. The movie could have made it a little bit more believable by saying these war lords were fighting other war lords, i.e. the Taliban. They didn't. It was just unarmed villagers.

These are little things, but they add up. They weren't vital to the story. They could have been explained, but they weren't. That's lazy storytelling abusing SoD.

Read on...

Lechery is a Vice

And it should be treated as such in popular media. Often it is not. Point in case: Iron Man.

I hope to see the day when promiscuity in men is treated the same as women, when sexism is as universally offensive as racism. Instead of the hallmark of dashing heroes, womanizing should be treated as a vice, like smoking, or beating a dog. In Iron Man, Stark is supposed to be irresistible to women, and he takes advantage of this trait at every chance. We've seen this before to a lesser extent in James Bond movies, and it was offensive there, too, but what really makes the lechery in Iron Man so revolting is the way it's portrayed. Stark treats every woman he meets as a sex object - and they like it! I'm sorry, no. If a man asks a woman for sex who is just trying to maintain a professional relationship, she's going to slap him, not screw him. There is the possible exception of groupies and their idols, but that's not what we saw in Iron Man. The reporter from Brown wasn't a fan, but she screwed Stark because... um... he's just that irresistible? Or maybe he paid her, but if so there's no hint in the movie. It's not just unrealistic, it's misogynistic. Stark screws them and throws them away. He doesn't even stick around to say "thanks," or "good bye," but has Pepper "take out the trash."

That brings me to Pepper Potts - the perfect little personal assistant. Feminine, dainty, obedient, submissive, and accommodating of Stark's exploitative lifestyle. She wears high heals and skirts - pretty, not practical, as she can barely run when it's her turn to be the damsel in distress. Oh, and when Stark comes on to her at the art benefit, it's not sexual harassment, it's just sexy. Even though she knows he's probably got more STDs than a crack whore in Tijuana, and that he'll just toss her out once he's had his fuck.

Allow me to put the bigotry of Iron Man in perspective. Suppose that instead of being a lecher, Stark had a reputation and flair for manipulating black executives into shining his shoes and calling him "Master." If the studio even had the gall to release the movie, it would have gotten protests and boycotts. Where were the protests? Where was the condemnation? What saddens me most about this movie is not that it was released in this form, but that no one even notices how misogynistic it is, or if they do, they don't care. Iron Man got rave reviews in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Variety. Of the three, only Rolling Stone even bothers to mention the fact that Stark is a lecher. I only found one mention of Iron Man and misogyny in mainstream media, and the purpose of the article is to point out the lack of women-driven films in 2008 and 2009.

Sexism is so pervasive in the country that we don't even notice it most of the time. I barely thought about it before taking a course in gender and media. Now that it's been pointed out to me, I can see it everywhere, which is one of the reasons I dislike so much of popular media. (Of course, sexism abounds in classical literature, as a reflection of attitudes of the time, but it wasn't discussed in any of my classes.) They say that the first step to recovery is to acknowledge the problem. Sexism in the USA is real. If we can't even see womanizing as a vice, then we have a very big problem indeed.

Read on...