Pillow Talk

I love old movies. On the one hand old movies unselfconsciously mirror their world. Stuff gets on film without the directors intent. We can watch an old movie and be astonished by how heavily every character smokes for example. From the here and now we can spot such curiosities as how a young female smoker never carries her own lighter. An old movie may be full of such entirely accidental comments on the smoking culture of it’s time. The director probably didn’t set out to make a film about smoking but then has in a way.

On the other hand there’s deliberation behind everything that ends up on screen. This is especially true of old movies when even outside scenes are shot in controlled indoor sets. Whatever is on set and in shot and survives editing has been carefully decided upon. If two characters in a scene do smoke they will have smoked the same four puffs in each take of the shoot. A new cigarette will replace the old one and be re-lit if necessary. Nobody is accidentally, or even incidentally, smoking in a well directed film. These are deliberate accidents.

This makes old movies a great way to view cultural attitudes about gender, race and class as well. The woman with no lighter is not only a smoking reference but a gender one. In my favourite example, Humphrey Bogart was considered too short to play alongside Lauren Bacal so they filmed him standing on a box. That wasn’t the point of Casablanca however it certainly wasn’t an accident either. The boxes height was carefully considered. This tells us something quite specific about the ideal male-female couple in this time.

Unfortunately audiences in Humphrey Bogart’s time didn’t know about the box. That’s the trouble with the movies of any time – the tricks are hidden in order to fulfill the fantasies of the paying audience. Usually it’s the casting couch rather than a box that ensures the stars look “right.” However old movies make strangely outdated choices about what looks normal so we notice them more readily. That’s why they can be much more fun to watch. The deliberate accidents of previous era’s films are far more visible to us than those of our own time.

I just re-watched Pillow Talk with my partner. This 1959 comedy features Doris Day and Rock Hudson (love the stage names) alongside Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter. It’s theme is the battle of the sexes which is itself a cultural phenomenon with a lot less conceptual currency today. In the classic battle of the sexes a woman must snare a man as a husband while he must avoid marriage and snare the woman in turn, in bed. In Pillow Talk appropriately there is no genuine friendship between man and woman. Although Tony Randall and Doris Day’s characters come close he still wants to “get” her (albeit differently to Hudson).

The man loses the battle but wins the war when he realizes that he wants to be gotten as a husband– he falls in love and wants sexual exclusivity with one woman as his wife. The woman also wins when she realizes that she wants to be bedded but that is less openly admitted in Pillow Talk. That’s the happy ending, pending matrimony between the main characters Jan Marrow (Doris Day) and Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) and it sounds quite sweet. In fact it may have been received in that way at the time.

What’s fascinating and disturbing is how open allusions to rape feature in this supposedly sweet film. This is the film the director perhaps didn’t intend and the audience in it’s time may not have noticed. For one thing Jan Marrow is physically assaulted by a character who the film portrays as just a foolish boy. She fights him off in his car but she is only able to stop him by threatening to tell his mother. Afterwards his continual refusal to take her home until he can get her drunk enough to molest her is never something she can bring a close to. She just has to wait until he passes out. Then she is “rescued” by Brad Allen whose intent is exactly the same but whose cleverness is far greater. His trick is to pretend to be a gentleman. 

Any doubt that Brad is just another rapist is dispelled when Jan flips a switch in his love nest. We already know that this simultaneously puts on a seductive record, dims the lights and locks the door. Yes that’s right, it locks the door so that it can’t even be opened from the inside (this is even tested in the film). Any woman trying to leave is forcibly prevented at the flick of a switch. What exactly is Brad up to that she might want to escape? Perhaps the record is to cover the screams for help?

The reality is that those screams probably wouldn’t be answered anyway. The reason why Jan never calls the police on the boy trying to rape her is revealed when Brad carries Jan against her will in her pyjamas past a police man. Jan asks the officer to arrest Brad but the officer merely acknowledges Brad by name and makes a joke.

So just to reiterate this. The film climaxes when our heroine ignores our hero’s rapist past, kissing his big rapist lips in his rapist arms. Because all that raping is to the director and the audience and thus to the hero and heroine just what? Dating? Normal masculinity? Something to put up with? As an accidental film about rape in the fifties and sixties, Pillow Talk is quite exceptional.

There are many other observations about gender that could be made out of this film. One female alcoholic (Jan’s maid) is told “that she needs to find a man to look after” so she doesn’t have time to get so drunk. Helped to her feet by her advisor she replies “How strong you are!” hinting at another rescuing relationship.

The maid, Alva, played by Thelma Ritter is the one who defines Jan Marrows situation as a live-alone career woman as broken. (“If there's anything worse than a woman living alone, it's a woman saying she likes it.”) Alva establishes that Jan Marrow is essentially being rescued from what she doesn’t even know she’s missing. Cheekily I don’t think the film means feminity and homemaking here at all. I think it means sex. Jan needs to be rescued from her “bedroom problems” as Brad puts it. Brad replies faux sympathetically with “too bad” when Jan defends herself with “Nothing is bothering me in my bedroom.”

There is a critical moment when Jan scoffs at the idea that a woman could properly inspect Brad for sexual deviancy.  She refers to the idea as “like sending a marshmallow to put out a bonfire.” In this way Jan actually distinguishes herself from the category woman. She’s not a woman because she can resist Brad’s charms. She’s not wanting to be raped by an attractive and sophisticated man so she must be something else.

Brad however is feminised by his character shift to the extent that at the end of the film he is comically dragged off after being mistaken as a pregnant man. This is touted as an advancement of modern science. It’s a fitting conclusion to a film that might have seemed edgy in its time but now reads as deeply stereotypical and traditional.

There are other comments about race, class and sexuality in the film. I’ll leave them to your own discovery though. I think it adds to the film that we know now that Rock Hudson was gay. I urge you to look out for the scene with Perri Lee Blackwell on piano singing “You Lied.”

Honestly although it’s a massive treatise in favour of rape I want to encourage people to watch Pillow Talk. It shows us something about relatively recent assumptions about women’s right to safety and women’s desire. It certainly helps to de-romanticise the 1950’s ideal and produces in me a gratitude for the changes since. All that and it is tightly written, well paced and expertly acted throughout with the gorgeous colour of the era. Hopefully it doesn’t trivialize the gender politics to say so but the costuming alone is enough to commend this film. Amazing work.

Lastly let’s not fool ourselves that we live in the culmination of history. Today’s films will be old films one day too. The more we can try and see the deliberate accidents of our own times’ films the more we can notice our own immediate cultures as they are produced. The hope after all is to get ahead of the game a bit – maybe even to make culture rather than be made by it.

The Good Bits

First day on the job and I could have expected this. My supervisor saw the opportunity to retell the tales every other employee knew by heart. 

“History is fascinating,” he moaned in an affected voice, “You’ll never be bored.”

“That’s what they told me before I signed up. So I became a field officer, part of a team responsible for correctly dating the invention of the wheel. I was specifically responsible for 5238 BN [i]  to 5230 in Northern Africa.

“I should have paid more attention to the unsettled personality of my predecessor. I relieved him quickly and he didn’t mind being rushed on his way. Me, I was just excited to get started.”

The old guy spun on his heel like a dancer and looked straight at me, “Nothing happened. Not a thing for eight years. I took to drawing circles in the sand to see if they got the hint. I heard some woman got the prize eventually.”

“But she was eventually stripped of it after it came out she spent three years rolling round rocks down hills. Now we’ll never know.”

He turned around and resumed walking. I kept pace.

Over his shoulder he continued, “I learnt that actually history is dull, most of it at least. For every fight over a grand ideal there are a hundred thousand spats over what’s on the v.t.[ii] That’s why we came up with The Good Bits, history without all the nothing.”

He came to a door with an actual physical data entry device. Flipping through several keycards on a long chain he found the right one and swiped it in the dusty old reader. He didn’t have to explain The Good Bits to me. The Good Bits was just “everything worth knowing” as the slogan went.

“Your job was once to guard The Good Bits. Those were exciting days. All sorts of hackers and wackers would try and get into its files. It was usually people who wanted to insert histories that they thought were important. Sometimes it was people who thought we got something wrong. It was amazing. You’d go to bed and by morning everything worth knowing would be completely different. Monkeys on the moon. No monkeys on Mars. It was hilarious.”

His voice dropped low theatrically, “And dangerous. Not everyone restricted themselves to cyber attacks. Things got physical. There were bombs.”

In a lighter tone he said “So we instituted The Good Bits version two. Your job is a lot different. You just police glitches in the system now. Meanwhile in order to access The Good Bits people have to log on. When they log on we match The Good Bits to their particular affiliations and inclinations. Everyone sees the history the want to see. There are no conflicts.”

“You see it was never about the truth so much. It was much more about the kids. People just didn’t want kids learning things they didn’t think was good for them. The truce is that everybody gets to decide what’s best for their own kids but leaves the other kids alone. So far it’s holding.”

The way he put it I felt very important. I had thought of it as a nothing job, just a way to pay for my body transplant, but now it felt like I was preventing World War two or something. The title wasn’t bad either.

I wired myself in for my first day as Head Librarian.

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[i] In an attempt to make history more accessible for young people the notation BN for “Before the Net” was adopted in, about 60 BN. Younger readers may only be familiar with the BV, BG or BO notations introduced for similar reasons more recently.

[ii] V.T. or Virtual television was an anachronism even in my own time. We just called it V.

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Chocolate sex.

I want to write. Oh boy do I want to write.

I am full of thoughts about the idea of a small god (whose power is not assured) and the connection between such worship and non-violence.

I am also partly through a piece about my purpose in doing philosophy. It's also going to explain why I do theology or as I think of it the philosophy of how we reconcile what should be (which you can call God) with what we've got.

The frustrating thing is that I'm not ready.  I'm not just saying I have to learn before I can speak. That process is endless and if I wait to learn 'enough' before I blog again... It aint gonna happen. 

 Probably a "serious" philospher would learn the common language around what they're blogging about. Maybe my blog on a weak God should be a discussion of Jack Caputo's work. Where I'm going with the purpose of philosophy re-reading Satre is probably worthwhile. However if I need to research it then it's not that common a language anyway. Really I'm just not that kind of writer. Name dropping does not make a case. Or maybe I just can't stand postmodern writing conventions while liking postmodern ideas.

But I do need to show some respect for the people who have put what will be early thoughts for me into actual practice. I have to listen to their stories, their frustrations, their motivations to keep trying or their dissatisfaction with those thoughts. I might be happy to ignore the thinkers/talkers/bloggers who precede me, but the activists are a different kettle. Like listening to mothers before I blog on motherhood, it's essential.

I also think I ought to put some of these thoughts into practice myself or atleast consider how it all might be applied by me in my situation. I mashed out the last two blogs in a frenzy after a decent break. I could do with balancing the do with the talk. Nothing like wearing a philosophy for a while before you claim its wonderful.

Aaagh. Writing is like chocolate sex to me though. I don't want to hold off on it. That's why you've got this. Soft warm chocolate sex. There's nothing else I want to do today. Reading, cooking, walking, gardening, bah. I want to write.

I hope you don't mind. You probably wanted to read words but an open acknowledgement of an author with a hunger and a lust to write for you could seem a little pervy. We could pretend the words just landed here from space. That's how we read many newspaper articles -as if there weren't an author at all. Someones first ever byline and someones last go unnoticed.

Mind you, this is a blog. Blogs put the author on show a lot. So it's expected I'll include my desire to write. And the approapriate way to do that is to be altruistic. That's not untrue. I do want you to be happy. I want you to be alive, in this world, awake and wonderful. I want you to stop (right now) hurting yourself and others. I put that want into my writing. It's why I write what I write.

It's just not why I write at all. It's not why I write instead of cooking. I'm just not being honest if I don't admit to the pleasure of writing philosphy and theology, the sheer ecstacy of ideas, and the particular delights of phrases and words. Its not making love, it's making sense and sometimes feels even better. It's chocolate sex. Soft, warm, over roasted nuts and vanilla icecream, with a chilli afterburn, chocolate sex. Thought porn?

But I'll have to wait.

Chapter 13. The Point of Fiction - In which our character blogs again.

Recently I read “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain. Writing about it is a thousand times harder for me than responding to an argumentative text like The Prodigal God, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea or The End of Faith (all featured in previous blog posts). In this post I want to unpack why. It turns out to be harder than I imagined.

Firstly fiction has had a profound impact on my opinions and ideas. Brave New World by Aldoux Huxley pretty much turned my intellectual life around. Prior to that text I was reasonably confident that problems (social and personal) had neat solutions just waiting to be found. I figured I’d contribute to that search. Brave New World turned me on to existentialism. Brave New World made me realise that people couldn’t be squeezed into my solutions but deserved the means to find their own.

Despite this today, my partner not I is the household reader of fiction. I borrow from a different section of the library. In fact I have acclaimed fiction books on my shelf waiting my attention, The Slap by Christos Tsolkias for one. It feels as if my reading purpose is to proceed with certainty of each step beneath me, up the ladder of wisdom. If one of those rungs is fiction then my ladder collapses. Or perhaps collapses is too harsh. I will have to repeat that step though in some more systematic way (by reading it again in a non-fiction book). It hasn’t truly been climbed if it’s only been climbed in fiction.

Bizarrely my bias against fiction overflows to affect anything that reads like fiction. What is the What by Dave Eggers has been neglected for years although I know the author is great and the subject matter is the biography of a refugee who effectively co-wrote the book. There seems to be no sense to my attitude. Surely this true tale is a reliable enough rung? Yet somehow I doubt that it is and subsequently leave it alone.

Proving that I am completely being a wanker about all this I am prepared to read biographies and histories which don’t “look like” fiction. How do I distinguish between these and “What is the What” by Dave Eggers? Partly it is the authors’ history (Dave Eggers is a fiction writer) and partly it is the subject matter and introduction where the book is placed inside a body of work about a famous person. It doesn’t feel right to say that what I’m looking for is a sort of peer reviewed credibility though. Instead I think I’m actually looking for something that doesn’t emphasise telling a great story.

One reason for this is that after finishing a great story I have a mess of sensation and emotion (joy particularly after Huckleberry Finn). I have none of the clarity of thought reading a nice analytic argument gives me (especially if I disagree with the author). If I try and explain to you what I got out of Huckleberry Finn I can almost only really say “Read Huckleberry Finn”. I can’t easily extract what I want to tell you.

This is because whatever wisdom is in great stories is experiential. The simplest stories won’t do that very well. They may just have characters that argue their points or their worlds are purely set up to present their moral. That kind of fiction I can easily disagree with and respond to. The best novels however don’t even seem to set out to inspire and challenge the reader. They merely tell a story that the reader inspires and challenges themselves with. They are like environments in which we live for a while potentially building (or degrading) our character. Mark Twain reminds us of this in a notice before chapter one of Huck Finn;

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

By order of the the Author.

Per G.G., Chief of Ordinance.

Given that Huckleberry Finn has been considered North Americas’ finest novel in regards to its characters, moral and plot it’s easy to conclude that Mark Twain, the consummate humourist, is having fun with us. However he is making an excellent point. It is not fair to the story of Huckleberry Finn to take an element of it out of its story and turn that into some kind of proposition that can be argued against or for. It’s also not fair to turn the events of Huckleberry Finn into arguments for or against any point of our own. There is something chaotic and purposeless to Huckleberry Finn. Essentially Huckleberry Finn the character doesn’t make choices for the writers’ purpose but for his own. That’s what makes it real.

What I don’t get is why this means I don’t read fiction. Take a look at my post on Gay Marriage and you’ll see that this kind of non-clarity is exactly where I think we should philosophically live.  I’m sceptical of this world of abstract arguments that are distinct from stories. I certainly don’t hold them to be realer than real (in that Platonic sense of the true forms).  Consider an argument such as “God can’t exist because of the problem of suffering” as one example. Although it can be false (by God existing) how can that argument ever really be true? If God doesn’t exist any becauseness of that non-existence is just an invention of our own. It’s not even a story we have told about it. It’s not like God was existing and then because of suffering She vanished. This thing we call an argument is fairly nebulously clinging to meaning let alone reality. You could even call it nonsense.

In fact if we look for “truth”- verifiable, definitive accurate statements – we are most able to see it in descriptions of event, people and surrounds. Basically empirical statements have at least “truthiness” to them. They can be more or less verified, defined and contradicted. And it’s these empirical statements that ultimately compose a story. Analytical and argumentative texts are far more likely to be removed from direct observation. In fact observation and storytelling are so neatly connected as to be almost the same thing. We tell stories automatically whenever we observe. Exposure to stories is closer to reality than any alternative.

Hmmm... Closer; perhaps this is precisely it. Perhaps this is the source of my distrust of fiction. Fiction is so like observation that the best fiction can convince us that we have in fact experienced something. The better the storyteller the more pronounced the effect. I am a little haunted by the memory that I once knew all about the justice system from television. The reality, in particular the deceit and deal making and the collusion between defence council and prosecutors shocked me when I faced it myself. There are people who I’ve encountered who learnt their streets are not safe and cops need to be more brutal, from fiction. And because they learnt it from fiction if you call them on it they can only say “You don’t get it.” What they mean is “You have to absorb the whole story as I did.”

I should add by the way, I watch a lot of fiction – movies particularly. I think that seeing actors performing their roles and also the relative brevity of a movie compared to the time it takes me to complete a book radically diminishes the effect. The exception to this are those movies which I’ve watched numerous times. The hours I’ve spent watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” probably add up to finishing a book. I’d say that particular film has had a correspondingly pronounced teaching effect on me. My favourite film from my teenage years “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and the favourite from my twenties “Some Kind of Wonderful” are also in this elite category. It’s possible I’m being wilfully naive here - I might be exempting my movies from my bias against fiction to protect my enjoyment of them – but honestly I don’t think my screen time is generally anywhere near as influential as my reading.

I began this blog intending to praise fiction and damn my prejudice. As I write I can see my prejudice has a point. As a source of learning fiction overshadows non-fiction in my life. Maybe that’s not such a good thing though. Below is a list of ten things I believe, in no particular order that I learnt from my time in fictional worlds. Do you think they are sound? Is it not a little concerning that they come from “experiences” simulated by great story telling rather than my own life?

·         Religions are ways of shaping society that get out of control. (Dune Trilogy)

·         Heroes are found in unlikely guises. (Master of the Grove)

·         Adults are people too. (Mom the Wolfman and Me[i])

·         The Meaning Of Life is up to you. (The Plague)

·         Don’t be a dick – especially to the elderly. (The Pigman)

·         Utilitarianism misses a lot. (Brave New World)

·         We can all be blind to our blessings. (It’s a Wonderful Life)

·         The stuff we make up matters. (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant)

·         Everything is transformed by a show tune ending. (Rocky Horror Picture Show)

·         You gotta be willing to be wicked to do right. (Huckleberry Finn)

Looking at these “teachings” I realise that these are opinions that have been reinforced by real life experiences either before or after the fictional source. Maybe that reinforcement is the real basis for my belief. Maybe I’m overstating the importance of fiction because anything it teaches that doesn’t bear fruit in the real world withers and dies anyway. On the other hand I don’t think I can deny that fictional experiences act as reinforcement themselves. Even if one fictional experience is worth a tenth of a real world experience it still contributes to my conclusions. And I’d say it feels more like 50%.

Furthermore it’s also necessary to remember that these are only the lessons I can identify. As I stated above the very best stories leave you with the least easily identifiable wisdom. I wonder what I’ve learned from some stories that I can’t even tell you. It may well be that Pride and Prejudice has been my biggest fiction influence for its subtle, deeply lived morality springing from an intelligent humanistic Christianity. The fact I can’t give a lesson it taught me in a sentence is part of its brilliance and perhaps the problem. All I can say is read Jane Austen.

Oh, and read Huckleberry Finn. It’s hilarious.

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[i] I read this obscure book an insane number of times when an adolescent. Please, please comment if you know it.