Paul Fussel and Susan Sontag on men (and women) in black uniforms and black skins

 Featured Articles  No Responses »
Oct 172010
 

Fussell, Paul. Uniforms: Why we are what we wear Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Fussel is a snob, a crank and a square (he refers to “skate-board enthusiasts and other pseudo-degenerates”), and he would probably agree with all those adjectives assessments. He fully admits that his book is about surface impressions, but that’s what a uniform is: a surface, a membrane between the world and the self. It covers up the flawed individual and makes the wearer represent an ideal. Fussell contends that, despite the status accorded to individualism, people like wearing uniforms, even lowly ones. However, one of the first thing people do when given uniforms is to customize them for comfort, utility or style. In extreme cases, this produces the paradox of the unique uniform; WWII-era leaders, like MacArthur, Patton, Montgomery, Hitler and Eisenhower, had distinctive uniforms made for them.

Continue reading »

Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro”: Somewhere, Jean Genet has an erection

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jun 162010
 

“Alejandro” is the second time Lady Gaga has visually referenced The Night Porter (dir. Liliana Cavani, 1974) in her videos.

The first time was in the “Love Game” video, in which she wore the dark pants, suspenders and officer’s cap look Lucia wore in that iconic scene. This seemed to be gesturing towards the early 70s, post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS downtown New York City scene as an image of sexual freedom and adventure. However, the video doesn’t engage with the implications of the source image. It’s just a bit of early 70s nostalgia, bereft of any particular meaning for Gaga’s primary audience who wasn’t even born when The Night Porter came out.

The video for “Alejandro” does address the themes of the source material: the militarism, the eroticism, etc. There’s a problematic connection drawn between fascism/militarism and homoeroticism. The nun imagery at the end seems to suggest that the only way Gaga’s character can be acceptable to a fascist man is to become an asexual image of virtue, nun-like.

There’s something a bit paint-by-numbers in this, particularly considering the similarities to Madonna’s videos. Homoeroticism? Check. Fascism? Check. Bra with gun barrels? Check. Swallowing rosary? Check. Latex nun uniform? Check. It’s pretty easy to generate 15-minutes of controversy with this kind of material, without sparking any particular debate or getting people to change their minds about anything. There’s certainly a long (if not always noble) history of anti-clerical agitprop, but whether that has actually made any difference is another question.

It put me in mind of MIA’s notorious “Born free” video. (Not currently on Youtube.com) Mia’s video employs the simple strategy of depicting pogroms and ethnic cleansing, but targeting red haired men. It’s a simple inversion strategy, one that generates shock, but doesn’t necessarily spark any deeper understanding or change attitudes. This is what the philosophers and poets in the late 1700s/early 1800s did when they tried to imagine themselves into slave bodies. I don’t know if this had any direct impact on the debate over slavery, but it did eventually contribute to the evolving form of BDSM porn.

Liliana Cavini’s The Night Porter

 Celluloid Dungeon, Featured Articles  No Responses »
Jun 232008
 

The Night Porter, 1974, dir. Liliana Cavini IMDB, Wikipedia

If there’s an image that epitomizes 1970s kink, it’s Charlotte Rampling in the Nazi-exploitation classic The Night Porter: topless, wearing an SS officer’s cap, trousers, boots and suspenders, singing something in German to soldiers. It’s an iconic image, perhaps echoing Marlene Dietrich’s equally memorable turns in male and military drag. It’s also rather disturbing, suggesting a kind of fascist chic that no doubt had people making crude theories about the link between deviant sexuality (i.e. fetishism) and deviant politics (i.e. fascism).

Continue reading »

Every fascist adores a woman (?): Laura Frost’s Sex Drives

 Featured Articles  No Responses »
May 142008
 

Frost, Laura Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Cornel University Press, 2002

I once interviewed an elderly French woman who had been a courier for the Resistance in occupied France. In Paris, she was captured by the Milice, French fascist collaborators, tortured without divulging anything and held prisoner for months. A Milice officer named Cornet would visit her cell and point her out, saying, “That one didn’t talk. She has courage.”

One night, Cornet and she drove to a nightclub for Miliciens and German soldiers, the Green Parrot, which she soon realized was also a brothel.

Continue reading »

The dialectic of history and pornography

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 062007
 

Oh, this is interesting. From Fleshbot:

…there’s few examples of the collusion between porn, popular culture, and history stranger or more disturbing than the series of pornographic comics produced in Isreal during the early 1960s known as “Stalags”, in which testimonies of Holocaust survivors were used as the inspiration for graphic tales of hot female Nazis, sadism and sexual torture.

Filmmaker Ari Libsker drew from his own exposure to these works for a new documentary film that examines this “distinctly Israeli genre” of porn: “I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women … We were in elementary school. I remember how embarrassed we were.” While they were ostensibly based on actual first-person accounts by survivors of concentration camps, Libsker contends that the stalags were a “popular extension” of works by the writer who gave the first account of the Holocaust in Hebrew…

This ties in well with the thesis that what is taboo becomes eroticized: slavery, domestic service, fear of AIDS. I wonder what the aftermath of the Iraq war or 9/11 will produce?

There are plenty of interesting links at the bottom of the article.

 Newer Entries