More violent movies from WG.

[icarus]

WG brought home another action flick. It starred Bruce Willis and had the usual hail of bullets with hostages being killed, not so bad. I rather liked the one hostage-taker's brother (we were meant to) who got tangled up in it by mistake, and the plot was complex.

Then that character was thrown off a three-story balcony, crushed on the ground below, twitching with convulsions as his spine had been snapped while his brother helplessly cradled his head in his lap. Completely gratuitous violence. Even WG was surprised.

Okay. That's enough. I walked out.

I've been considerate. I've picked sci-fi action flicks that I know we'll both enjoy. But I've had it with him picking movies for his own enjoyment with no thought for me.

I'm now picking movies I want to see regardless of whether or not he'll like them. My taste in movies, where it doesn't intersect with his.

I have in my hand Muholland Dr, Casablanca (which I've never seen), and I want to get Gosford Park. I've wanted to see Kenneth Branaugh in Henry V but I knew WG would whinge. Tough titties now, kiddo. Also there's a cult classic version of Hamlet where "Denmark" is a corporation that I have my eye on.



Speaking of gratuitous... what is it with slash fiction that every author has to reach for rape if they want some shock value? I'm not talking about And Just Plain Wrong where the whole point of the stories is a sort of lurid fascination with rape (which I don't share). I mean the sort of situation where if your character has to have a "tragic past" where another character has "empathy" for him, a lot of authors seem to reach for rape as a standard feature and salt it in like so much hamburger helper. It's become a staple.

First, the way it's written, it often feels like feminization. I know men get raped. It happens all the time in prison and I happen to know two boys who were raped as kids. But you know what? Guys don't react the same way as girls. When a guy's been raped and he shares his story with someone (which, by the way, most guys go to the grave without telling a soul) he feels worse. He's judged. There's a sense that a woman can be the helpless female but if a guy is helpless, he doesn't get the same empathy. There's something wrong with him, he's somehow weak. If he tells a women, most react to it with a sense of smugness believe it or not. They don't say it, but there's a sense of "oho, the shoe's on the other foot now, is it?"

Which may be why rape has become (or has been) the slash staple, with women projecting their own experiences onto men. Or maybe writers are just lazy.

The response among men... well, guys just don't tell other guys. But generally men who hear of it (if it wasn't in prison) react to it with a sense of shocked disbelief. They just go blank. Because it's not supposed to happen to guys, and they don't know what to think of a man who let that happen to him. Yes, let it happen to him. People blame the rape victim when it's a woman, but it's twenty times worse with men.

So they start fishing for excuses for their friend, "Well, you were just a little kid" or "Hell, it was dark" or "That's a pretty dangerous part of town" -- but the excuses ring rather hollow because if a man is raped, he's less a man and they both know it. The excuses are as humiliating as the admission.

Not exactly the warm empathy you can expect (sometimes) as a woman who tells her story to other women, where chances are good you'll find others who've been through the same thing, or women who know someone who's been through it, or who can imagine it happening to themselves.

Second, it's a little dull. I'm sorry, it is. All the rapes are pretty much the same, and they're always done by complete or near strangers (which is unusual in the world of sexual assault). Tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted by [fill in random Death Eater/bad guy/Slytherin/Voldemort], yawn.

If you need a wounded dove for your fic, why there's a vast panoply of types of abuse available to you that can seriously fuck up your character without resorting to the same old, same old. Emotions and human relationships are complicated. Parent-child relationships can mess someone up. One can have authoritarian issues. A bad relationship with a crazy ex-boyfriend or girlfriend can do some real damage. There's neglect, unpopularity, physical problems, politics, horrific job situations, and in the wizarding world there are magical options to screw up your character as well (Ron fears spiders because the twins turns his teddy bear into a spider). Just once I'd like to see a character recovering from Imperius. Heck, we have a war on in Harry Potter. Wars are great for screwing people up.

I know, I know, this involves a greater depth of thought about your characters and is not as easy as a one-time event. It may take valuable time away from the healing process if we have to have a complicated problem as well.

I note that (despite the blame-the-victim reaction to it) rape might seem more sympathetic because it's beyond your character's control. There may be some fears that a character might not get as much empathy if some of his troubles are of his own making. But fear not. Most of us create our own problems and empathy we'll have for your character is the empathy we have for ourselves.


Well, off to school. I've a test today.

Comments

[theemdash]

Casablanca is oh so wonderful. And so is Gosford Park. Gosford Park is so deleriously understated and just wonderful. You're making me want to watch it again. ;)

That version of Hamlet is interesting, but not something I'd really recommend. I can't quite remember if I even finished watching it. Of course there are times when I'm not in the mood for Shakespeare . . . Honestly, it's like 1 day out of the year.

Good luck with the movies. I have a tough time getting Nick to see through my artsy films, but at least we agree on the other stuff (and he'll watch the artsy stuff if he has to).

[ella-bane.livejournal.com]

Gosford Park and Kenneth's Hamlet are both wonderful.

[cheshyre]

Branagh's Henry V has battle sequences in it; it's rather grim & gritty (he removes many of the funnier bits from Shakespeare) but good. The Hamlet you're referring to stars Ethan Hawke.

Re:fanfic, a related rant is abused!Draco. Dad's a villain, so the boy must be catamite to him and his Death Eater buds. Uh-hunh. It can be done well for effect sometimes, but too many writers just follow that trope unthinkingly.

[ajuxliapose.livejournal.com]

Just tell me about it. I have sat there and watched a bloke get a poker through the neck in Troy for my boyfriend and he wouldn't even go and see Pride and Prejudice with me. There were many tantrums. Heck, that film even has Keira Knightley in it and he's got a crush on her too! *grumbles*


I agree with you about the slashing rape bit too. There's not just the bloke stuff where there are deeper issues, like the shame and it's more complex than character A saying that they feel ashamed and dirty. How are they responding to it with their behaviour. It's a show, not tell issue I think in some ways. It's just a great big let's put the person back together again and do it by the love of Snape/Harry/Ron/insert male character fest. Love alone will not heal a person.

[singtoangels.livejournal.com]

You need to rent Orlando with Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane. Then he'll be disturbed. But I think that you, however, would really enjoy it.

Sing

[marauderthesn.livejournal.com]

I read a book once about a teenage boy who was raped; I think that any slash writer who's considering writing m/m rape should have to read this book before they write it. The author did a really good job with a lot of factors that I would never have thought of but that seemed realistic; for example, the boy was sixteen, tall, and strong, so there's the unspoken thought that he should have been powerful enough to fight off the guys who tried to rape him. (They pulled up along the sidewalk to supposedly ask for directions, and when he came over to help them they threw him in the back of the car and tied him up.) He also starts questioning his sexual orientation and feels like no one could ever find him attractive again, and he doesn't know if he even wants them to.

I would have given up on the gratuitous violence movie too.

On an entirely different note, I'm going to re-proofread In A Time Of Uncertainty and send it to you for the Percy archive. :)

[ex-crystalle432.livejournal.com]

I agree with you 100% about the slash rape. Then again, I don't do hurt/comfort. *shrugs* But it is a common occurance in the fandom and dare I say turning into a cliche? Maybe it's the only way the author can make sense of making a particular character gay; most men would also feel that a man who had been raped by another man has homosexual tendencies, although that is definitely not true (the opposite, really). I would much prefer that the characters are gay not because of something that happened to them in the past, maybe not that they're really gay except highly attracted to a particular man. I hope that makes sense.

:)

[dphearson.livejournal.com]

Gosford Park and Hamlet are wonderful- perfect for rainy days and nights an dplenty of hot tea or chocolate.

See, I like action flicks,and i like to see things go 'BOOM', but sometimes I get more than a little tired of ethnic slurs and loving closeups of people being torn apart.

agreed with you on rape and fanfic.

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

You know, reading this rant-thing made me realize just how much good writing is lacking in most fics. I know that when I first started writing, and probably still now, my characters are affected by the other fics I've read, which influences my characters. In the end, only the rare few constantly write stories all their own. And more often than not, the writers are women who don't understand the male attitude. I feel like a lot of people just assume that 'gay guy' is the same as 'woman.'

[vichka.livejournal.com]

Hi sweetie!
It was great seeing you today, too bad our encounter was cut short. I hope we get to meet some time again soon and talk some more :) I miss your intelligence!
Also, I am sorry for making your head spin, and if I violated you in any way I am sorry for that too. Next time I will ask for your permission first :) But I was just so excited to see you!!! <3<3<3<3
Love. Vica.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't think I did that for Tragic Past. The parental violence I can even cite as canonical, given the Pensieve scene... and the Lucius/Severus chan, while it could have been PROSECUTED as rape, was presented more in the light of "I was a child, I was in love, it was wrong and you knew it" rather than any sense of violence.

And if you ask Severus, even now, he'll insist that although of course it was wrong of Malfoy to do it, he wanted it, dammit.

Because that makes him feel like it was at least slightly under his control.

I tried, you see.