Wild Things

Maurice Sendak, author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” says parents who are worried about the scariness of the monsters in the new film based on his book, can “go to hell.”

Hooray, I say.

Children — and adults — read (and see movies, listen to music, etc.) to have their emotions stimulated, exercised and stretched. Fear is part of being human, and experiencing fear in settings we ultimately know are safe is healthy and normal. Ghost stories have been told around campfires probably since the earliest spoken language emerged.

But some people are afraid of fear. It is the existence of horror stories, whether the full-out gruesome, gory, unsettling adult ones or the more tame, imagination-stretching ones for children, are, that scares them, not their content. It comes particularly sharply when children are part of the audience, because some people do not understand that children are (for the most part) quite capable of enjoying a story as story and not confusing it with reality.

I appreciated some of the comments readers added to the linked article. A sampling:

We need protecting from the people who want to bowdlerise children’s books and create a culture that is insipid, lame and worthless.

The misguided parents who ‘protect’ their children from scary stories are raising a generation of dull men and women who will be afraid of their own shadows.

There’ll be fewer risk-takers, entrepreneurs, explorers, adventurers, rule-breakers and world-changers as a result.

I really think that some adults misunderstand the nature of childhood. Unless you are living in a hellish environment (some kids are, of course) , it’s FUN to feel a frisson of terror, meet monsters, etc in the pages of books, or at the cinema. And it’s also beneficial at a more profound level.

To try and deprive children of such things is the literary/cinematic equivalent of keeping them all indoors because they might trip up in the snow.

“It’s tattooed on the back of their necks…”

I think the approach of Monty Python to religious and moral issues is in fact deeper than they themselves think, by virtue of their fervent and utter rejection of the trivial — which is why their perspective is immensely valuable — despite some of their personal unbelief.    What is interesting about Monty Python in their collective expression of truth and mockery (not by any means mutually exclusive) is how much their actual collective achievement in humor may diverge from any of their “serious”   individual affirmative views.

Here is some background on  “The Life of Brian,”  which is interesting in its own right.  John Cleese,  in this documentary (@ 3:25-3:38) essentially captures that view of their efforts as a kind of via negativa — outlining in stark and sharply mordant terms — exactly what Christianity was not.

G.K. Chesterton, the Clown Prince of Orthodoxy — introduced his 1908 book of essays with a doubled-edged observation that applies to Monty Python:

“I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book.”

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. … It is the mark of religious forms that they declare something unknown. But it is the mark of worldly forms that they declare something which is known, and which is known to be untrue. … But if you read the comic literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides under the bed to escape the wrath of his chattel. This is not the fact, but it is much nearer the truth.”

A joke, he said, is “the truth yet not the fact.” G.K. would have found much to approve in Monty Python’s religious sensibilities as expressed in their art — and just as much to mock of them personally in the supposed “seriousness” of their foibles of  “belief”  or “unbelief.”

Since Christ actually appears in the film in an completely umediated manner, the point has often been lost by the laughably over-reacting religious, that the mockery was directed at the congregation, the clergy, the secular, the squishy, the overly politicized,  the non-believers,  clueless bureacrats,  and mindless authoritarians, all equally:   e.g. —

——————————————

“Why are you always going on about women,  Stan?”

“… And in that time a friend shall lose his friends’s hammer, and children shall not find the things of their fathers,  that he put there only the night before — about eight o’clock…”

“Romanes aeunt domus?!?  What’s this, boy ?   ”People called Romans, they go the ‘ouse !?!’  ”

“I have vewy gweat fweind in Wome called Biggus Dickus.”  ”

“Let me thspeak to them Pontiuth, …”

” Crucifixion? Good.  Line on the left, one cross each.”

——————————————–

But the unfortunate sterility of their Anglican upbringing (the qua-Lutheran Minnesotan Gilliam excepted) seems to be coming full circle,  of late …

“Hullo, Mum. There’s a dead Bishop on the landing.”

“RC  or  C of E ?”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s tattoed on the back of their necks.“

And now for something completely different

I too am watching the Independent Film Channel’s documentary on Monty Python, running in six installements this week, and even though it is a lot of oral history of which I already know a fair amount, it is still fascinating. Python deserves considerable attention.

In fact it was GR who first introduced me to Python, in the early 1980s, with vinyl reocrds they had released featuring sketches from the television shows, a couple of live stage recordings and highlights from their films, interspersed with some new material recorded just for the records. In the days before videotape and DVD, that was the only way to re-experience broadcast media on demand, limited though it was. So my experience of Python lacked a visual element for a number of years, and I imagined them more as cartoon figures than real people until I was able to see them on film.

The TV show introduced a needed absurdity into a world that was, at the time in the early 1970s, reeling from momentous events. Python sketches sometimes skewered government excess (grants for research into silly walks) or class pretensions, but more often were simply silly, skewed takes of daily life — a shopkeeper trying to avoid refunding the price of a dead parrot, a clinic that specializes in arguments and getting-hit-on-the-head lessons or a travel agency client who launches into a lengthy monologue about the banality of package tours and will not shut up. Add some primitive cartoons, falsetto voices and non-sequitur transitions, and you have a show.

There were moments of important social commentary here and there through the course of the show, but it was later, in their theatrical films, that Monty Python seemed to be actually trying to make a point. 1983’s The Meaning of Life was esentially a sequence of elongated sketches, but there was a throughline. It would do the film a disservice to state its main message in a sentence, but suffice to say, underneath the big questions of life — God, religion, sex, conflict and war, aging, death — there’s meaning to be found no matter what conclusions you reach.

1979’s Life of Brian is often wrongly seen as an attack on Christ, when really it’s an attack on religious silliness. And let’s be honest, there’s plenty of that. The story of Brian, mistakenly identified as the messiah, is a cautionary tale against choosing a path (spiritual or otherwise) too hastily for superficial reasons. It’s also the most consistently funny of the three films, in my opinion, largely because of Graham Chapman’s perpetually befuddled Brian and Michael Palin’s various characters, most memorably the ex-leper and the speech-impeded Pontius Pilate.

I may return to the topic, sooner or later, because books could be (and have been) written about Monty Python and there is a lot to say worth saying. For now, in honor of my friend and his most recent post here, I dedicate this:

“… And Fiercely Proud of It.”

First, a shameless commercial plug for the ongoing retrospective of Monty Python’s rise and conquest of the known world.

In compliance with FTC guidelines I disclose that there have been no freebies, kickbacks, or other under the table inducements, bribes, or emoluments and this plug is utterly uncompensated by them.  The bastards.  Python, I mean.  Not the  FTC, we all love the FTC.   They are all very butch, drive fast cars and intimidate young women,  … er..  date young women,  well, the men anyway,  but not TOO young, the girls I mean or women, sorry, no,  you know,  middling-age women, no, twenty-something, you know, definitely not transvestites wearing dresses, nothing like that. Did I say we love the FTC … ? 😀

Now, with that brief subversive break out of the way, let’s get on to the regularly scheduled subversion — already  in progress…

Demographics is destiny; and desire drives demographics.  I take hormonal biology and the evolutionarily important systems of reproductive perception more seriously.

If we were talking about wild horses this would not provoke comment.  Humans are animals , too.

The effects of those sociobiological issues created by hormonal tinkering go deeper and touch not merely on preferred body types but on selections that go against optimal histo-compatibility in potential mates — points which affect actual lifetime fertility — a point not to be easily disregarded in the oncoming demographic collapse in the civilization of the West –and in the sociological effects of tricking evolutionarily honed mate-selection mechanisms.

Now the question is, has evolution developed mechanisms to get around the imposition of impediments to our optimal mate signaling system?  The answer is,  yes — and one of them is more and indiscriminate mating.

If there is no longer as great a percentage in a targeted fitness peak for reproductive fitness, with mating restraint (monogamy in the limit) and higher investment in offspring,  then the evolutionary default is sheer indiscriminate number or attempts at reproductive success, and little or no investment in offspring.

Mating (or selection pressures for mating — like advertising and other popularly driven imagery) would thus be expected, in purely evolutionary fitness terms,  to occur at points below the thresholds of optimality (age)  — or even disregarding it entirely (same-sex) as well as with greater frequency and number off partners — as happens with our poor friends the fruit flies when their sexual signaling perception is cut off.  Our social warning system in the entertainment industry is doing just fine, we just aren’t listening.

The net widens and even bad opportunities are taken advantage of to maximize quantitative fitness.  The larger question is whether this fitness filter ends up being a race to the bottom of the gene pool.

If Hollywood can take  sociobiology seriously for some laughs — so can I.

My good friend, Michael takes exception to my noting the happenstance of some serendipitous  reporting within a couple of days on some interesting points of sociobiology — and making some correlations more explicit.   While he concludes that my attention to this contraceptive factor is bias-determined and “the reasons are many and varied” — we are provided no argument or discussion of those reasons and why they should predominate .    Instead, he simply inverts the presumed direction of causation — and if confirmation bias is operating —  it is an equal opportunity form of error.  😉

Whilst he seems to have given the two pieces a moralizing slant in his rebuttal, they really were points about the effects on society of biological changes, which have  been widely adopted as matters of social and political policy.   In those nations in which those measures are most widely in effect and  most publicly supported, we see knock-on effects such as the demographic shift that correlates closely with levels of contraceptive use.   The addition of histological incompatibility to the documented effects on visual attraction criteria only adds pressure toward lowered total fertility, and perfectly predictable changes in sociological dynamics that relate to reproductive fitness.

But speaking purely in sociobiological terms, there is a coherent system, with teachings contrary to those noted, which has survived the near complete demographic collapse of the society all around it, and inherited the remnants, not once, but twice, (three times, if you count the end of communism – but really, we are still in the middle of that one) —  and retained both a fractious diversity and yet a continuous set of uninterrupted global mediating institutions, including the longest continuing elective office in the world.   It has jumped every cultural and language  barrier yet found.   One doesn’t need a moral judgment to assess such a system.  Such a system would be deemed,  in sociobiological terms, extremely fit.  It seems likely to repeat this pattern again.

But, after all —  what do I know?

Shining a Light Under the Bed

Hello. Michael here. I am taking the extra step of identifying myself because our chosen blog template, while ideal for our purposes in most respects, doesn’t display the authors of posts.

GR and I started Shaping Water to be a vehicle for discussing the larger themes of popular culture. I had not really planned for it to be, nor wanted it to be, a forum for debates between us. However, he has forced me into the position of either responding directly to two of his recent posts, or else by silence run the risk of appearing to agree with the argument he makes in them. I have, after some reflection, chosen to respond. And rather than leave it a brief reply in a comment thread, I am devoting a full post to it because the topic is complex enough to demand the space.

The posts to which I am responding are “Blood and lust: Oh what a tangled web …” and “Lord of the Flies?”

PART I

GR sums up the thesis he is trying to prove early in that second post, as follows: “[C]ontraceptive culture in the sexual revolution has measurably changed the distribution of sexually attractive body images among both males and females, tending to make them both more sexually ambiguous.  Sexual attraction in popular stereotypes has trended toward body types that appear the less and less physically mature, or of less determinate male or female character. Those changes  correlate to increased incidence or acceptance of various outlier sexual types — toward same-sex behavior, more ambiguous sexual ideals, and sexual attractions toward the less mature human form.”

The birth control pill, introduced in 1960, shares the brunt of the blame, he argues, because it chemically changes the measures of attraction.

This is, of course, absurd. To the extent that such changes have happened at all, the reasons are many and varied, and the contraceptive pill is the least of it.

Lord of the Flies ?

Continuing our Hallowe’en Hollywood sociological horror run-up — let me recap the Bloodlust thread:  contraceptive culture in the sexual revolution has measurably changed the distribution of sexually attractive body images among both males and females, tending to make them both more sexually ambiguous.  Sexual attraction in popular stereotypes has trended toward body types that appear the less and less physically mature, or of less determinate male or female character.    Those changes  correlate to increased incidence or acceptance of various outlier sexual types — toward same-sex behavior, more ambiguous sexual ideals, and sexual attractions toward the less mature human form.

— And then this appeared:

No, not that thing —   This:

Scientists create ‘sexual tsunami’

They discovered that when the [flies’] pheromone was removed, it created a “sexual tsunami” where the bugs proved attractive to one another, regardless of sex. The research found that male fruit flies with no history of homosexuality attempted to mate with their pheromone-free males, according to the research published in journal Nature.

Even flies of a different species were interested, according to the research team.

“Lacking these chemical signals eliminated barriers to mating,” Prof Levine said.

OK — if you are so with us so far — remove the sexual signalling system cues for flies — and they go sex-mad and indisriminately sexually haywire in their predilections .

Then the other shoe dropped:

He conceded however that although pheromones play a key part in the human mating game, ours is far more complex than that of fruit flies.

“We may rely more on the visual system, and we may have a more complex way of assessing other individuals and classifying them and determining how we’re going to relate to them than a fly does.”

The hypothesis for testing then — in some mad scientist’s version of the  grand “forbidden experiment”– would be to alter a biochemical trigger that controls visual sexual attractiveness, perhaps by introducing (in some evil, dastardly and utterly inconceivable way) a substance which changes the attractiveness of these visual cues in human beings.

The mad scientist’s hypothesis would be falsified if there were no changes in sexually attractive body types  that correlated with the lowering or loss of former barriers to sexual activity.   Imagine that.   The very idea — changing a person’s sexual attractions  to other people by artificial means.   Don’t they know that people’s sexual attractions are a sacrosanct and inviolable part of who they are and what they are meant to be?   EEEEVILLLL!!!!!

Of course,  good thing ain’t no way no one could, no one would,  never, not EVER sanction such a grand “forbidden experiment”.  Not no way, not no how!   NO ONE would ever possibly go along with such an experiment on unknowing individuals and whole human societies,  would they?  There’s absolutely no way anyone could possibly be duped by their own basic visceral desires into falling for such a mad, dastardly, intricate scheme!   Altering who people are sexually attracted, unknowingly,  with chemicals?

How horrible!  How inconceivable!  How …

What part of “Creepy Unforeseen Applications” did you not understand ?!?!

Strangely,  …  Not Comforting.

No, no …. nothing could ever go wrong with THAT….  Blobs AND Robots

Blood & Lust – Oh, What a Tangled Web …

Youth,  maturity, sex, reproduction, predation, blood and immortality.  Yes,  Hallowe’en is nearing again.

And with it the tales of vampires and the sexual innuendo that its mythological image screams.   Reproduction and immortality, the seduction of death and of  sex, the profoundly disturbing and yet enticing images of blood,  virginity,  seduction,  youth and initiation into maturity.  But these images have subtly changed culturally — following a biological pattern that has also changed in ways now writ large in our society as whole.   Seductive deceits of love,  living and immortality are not limited to vampires — though vampires speak of them in deep mythic terms.

Regardless of one’s theological proclivities — Mother Nature does not brook deception without deep consequence — which people — being people — do their level best to ignore as long as possible — whistling past the graveyard all the way.   But we know graveyards — deep down there is no fooling us, and putting pretty cover on it doesn’t help — in fact it may makes things worse and even more troubling  …

Studies show that the advent of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s’ has altered the way that men and women choose their mates.  This has been most noted in the trends of leading men’s appearance  in film and the distinct change of physiognomy from the strong secondary sex markers of very masculine to more boyish men.   The mechanism of sexual selection on both sides seems to be implicated from male detection of fertility indications that are also in play  in altering women’s own sexual perceptions or preferences.  Thus, instead  of the chiseled-jaw image of Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Sean Connery and Steve McQueen; we have the much more boyish faces of Johnny Depp,  Christian Bale,  Leonardo diCaprio and too many other to list.   A similar trend however also exists from the opposite perspective — from the earlier popularity of very womanly figures to the more sexually ambiguous girlish waif-types.  We have seen  a marked change from images of desirable leading women at the box office and in pinups — from the buxom and shapely Betty Grable, Betty Page, Jane Mansfield, and Marilyn Monroe to the waifish-girlish looks of Rachel Weitz, Winona Ryder, Keira Knightley, Cate Blanchett, Kirsten Dunst, etc.

However, while the shift at the center of the distribution has been quite noticeable — it has not been so terribly great — certainly within the normal range of human body types.   The problem lies, as with all things, at the margins — the outer ends of the distribution of social behaviors and tendencies — the darker and equally repellent and seductive areas of human experience.  To these areas — our tales of vampires both point and warn — with oddly repelling and welcoming arms.

Forget, for a moment, that we are intelligent, rational creatures and remember that we are also lustful, often predatory, irrational primates.  What does this trend mean on the outer margins where the sweet light of reason and temperance shines but dimly — if at all.    Think in socio-biological terms.   If the more obvious secondary sexual maturity markers are missing or diminished and reproductive success is the driving factor, then waiting for optimum fertility,  which is now largely concealed is a loser’s game.  The winning strategy is early (in maturation terms) and  frequent attempts at reproduction, so as to maximize chances of success.   That would suggest a hypothesis that in addition to the preferences for secondary sex characters shifting to a less “mature” profile we should also see overt sexual behavior increasing toward the actually sexually immature or barely mature.  And indeed,  this is what has happened, statistically .

The rate of first intercourse at age 15 has risen from 5% in 1970 to 26% in 1988.  For age 17 the rate has climbed from 32% to 51%.  In terms of stability of social arrangements the age shift toward immaturity is correlated to other changes.   In 1960 5% of births were to unmarried women; in 1975 14% and by 2002 34% of births were to unmarried women.   These changes are similar in proportion in the U.S ( where net fertility is stable, and population growth is slightly positive ) and in western European countries (where net fertility is negative, and populations are actually beginning to shrink).   These changes correlate also to greater incidents of predatory sexual deviance toward the young and sexually immature or barely mature, a problem that, while hardly non-existent, was not a major societal hazard much heard of sixty years ago and yet actively, and universally  feared now.   The change in popular taste for images of sexual predators has likewise changed.

Since Bram Stoker first popularized the sexual predator as the seductive, immortal blood-thirsty killer, there has been a strong element of sexual predation in the vampire tale, changing in similar ways as the social data.  This trend is seen in the intermediate mode in Frank Langella’s 1979 Dracula, neither old nor young,  and yet not as craggy or manly as  Lugosi or Christopher Lee (1931 and 1958 , respectively).   The ancient-to-young transition is actually given an express  role in one film,  the later version of Gary Oldman’s  1993 Dracula, who was magnificent in an otherwise mediocre vehicle.

The more recent resurgence of  Vampire  tales and films continues this trend.  In Anne Rice’s work, especially,  the haunting image of the tragic and eternally frustrated child vampire “saved” from her deathbed, and yet played in both the novel and in the film with simultaneously paternal and pedophilic overtones which “disturb our calm.”   Buffy of course, brings an insurgent sisterhood to the fore in the face of angelic two-faced demons.   They are played in ways that fully deserve their mutual love and our impassioned admiration and fully warrant a yet gut-wrenching revulsion.   And lately in Stephenie Meyer’s work now making it into film the teen angst and struggle to protect by abstention in the face of such a deeply hungry lust is writ large in the vampiric motif  — and most recently  in the (much less worthy, and yet to be fully evaluated)  “Vampire Diaries” television series.

Similarly, the trend toward less obvious secondary sexual maturity markers as  sexually desirable renders the human form much more sexually ambiguous.    This one would expect to correlate to an increase in the incidence and/or toleration or acceptance of same-sex behaviors, which were formerly less prevalent and/or more proscribed.  And so it has, in so many ways both cultural and legal.   The choice of  (the boy-men, again) Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, as a sublimated sexual pair was a particularly telling change in the older hetero-vampiric trope.   Additionally, in older versions of the tale the emphasis was on the timelessly mature and ancient power of the Dracula figure.  But in Interview the closest equivalent in the ancient vampire, Armand, is played by the (also boy-man) Antonio Banderas.  As an added twist, his magnificently played role perversely imitates  and inverts the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass in a church turned theater in a voyeuristic murder qua gang-rape — for polite entertainment value.  That scene alone is quite striking in its subtley and profound provocation — and mostly lost on the theologically ignorant.

In short, it appears that playing with natural processes of human biology is not merely a “lifestyle” preference, but a fundamental alteration of the fabric of human society with far-reaching social consequences.  Whether we are talking about these things in open conversation or not, their consequences in terms of larger numbers of  “outlier” sexual types range from the impact of the ambiguous sexual signals of youthful bodies — a merely uncomfortable or unfamiliar prevalence or wider tolerance for same-sex behaviors — to the far more disturbing and threatening proclivities  — of child sexual predators and exploitation of children in pornography.  Whether we make those explicit connections a topic of reasoned debate or not, our collectively selected cultural images are speaking to them and changing to reflect how we are changing as a result of our decisions to tell Nature or her God that we know better.  Our willful deceits of nature are deeply dangerous — and we know it — though we will not speak of it lest the party be ruined.  These fears and dark seductions play out in our mythic and popular images of sex, seduction, predation and desired immortality.   To see the momentous scale of the changes in our world, revealed in image alone,  one need look no further than the movie marquee or your Internet screen.

Elegy

At its heart, the beautiful film Elegy is about a barrier — a self-made barrier that permits in many of love’s cheap substitutes, but not love itself.

On the surface, it’s the story of an old man (David Kepesh, played by Ben Kingsley) and his young student (Penelope Cruz as Consuela Castillo), and their torrid, lusty affair. Kepesh, a professor and theater critic, was divorced 30 years ago and has maintained a distance with women every since. He has his regular, detached paramour in Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), and he has apparently seduced many a student, but he has not allowed himself to truly love in three decades.

Consuela begins as just another conquest, but there is something unsual about her that begins to awaken stirrings in him. But, rusty from years of disuse, his emotional muscles misfire. Instead of protectiveness, he manifests possessiveness. Instead of a healthy desire for commitment, he comes up with jealousy and suspicion.

There is much more to the film, and it really must be seen to be appreciated, but here is its core: For the young, time is always made up of what is past. Those who are old measure time by the closeness of death. (Paraphrased from The Dying Animal, the Philip Roth novel upon which Elegy is based.) Consuela’s life is ahead of her, David’s is mostly behind. Trying to match up on anything other than a superficial level brings this incongruity into sharp relief, and rather than face it, David settles for the comforts of sex and casual affection.

Elegy is not a perfect film. The second half in particular renders some false notes, when Consuela comes back into David’s life after a couple of years apart. But it is powerful all the same, and revelatory.