There's been something bothering me about the YUSU FemSoc furore which I've been finding it hard to put my finger on. It's mostly blown over now, but my troubled mind still mulls. I think, now, I have a rough idea of what has been niggling so.
A lot of the arguments have centered around questions of what the Women's Committee and Feminist Society are each for. This is based on the principle that if their purposes are too similar, there is no need for the second body to officially exist.
The main defences to these points have been:
1) The purposes are very different and
2) The principle that if they are similar the second shouldn't exist is a) bad and/or b) not even in the rules
Neither of these rebuttals quite capture the anger I felt about YUSUs argumentation. For me, the more telling point is the deeper question, which is about who decides. I was angry because YUSU had presumed to decide both what WomCom's and what FemSoc's purposes were. Apparently without even thinking about it particularly, it had defined them however it pleased: in particular defined them in such a way as to prevent the latter from being ratified. It was a power-grab, and a particularly nasty one. The power that YUSU was saying it had, was attempting to exercise, was a power over the identity of these groups.
Now I personally don't care that much about ratification per se. Financially there are some benefits, but it also involves a lot of hard work and many societies and groups have thrived sans ratification, like Wholly Folk, CU and early days SCOOP, to name but a few. What I do care about is having a union that helps people get on with the things they want to do, instead of getting in their way. And a union which presumes to dictate what the essence of a group or an individual is, that is a union I can't agree with.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Seven Super Psychopaths
What do Seven Psychopaths and Super have in common? Well I watched both of them last weekend, and they are both highly deconstructive. I don't want to give too much away about either of them, since both films thrive on surprise, but I'll be sort of specific at the same time.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
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