An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.

On Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People