Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
I love a good lecture.
I think @wintergrey talked about this last year when we were discussing fandom racism bias.
so Tim Kaine is Catholic, and believes that abortion is wrong but that it ought to be legal and access ought to be protected. I talked with someone today who felt very strongly that this is Not Good Enough, that ‘it’s wrong but I’ll let you do it anyway’ cannot possibly be confidence-inspiring for people worried about reproductive rights and that it’s reasonable to insist on Democratic candidates that hold that abortion is fine, not just that it’s a sin one should be not be impeded in committing.
and I have a lot of respect for that perspective, but also I cannot think of any trait more important to me in politicians than the willingness to say “I think that this is wrong and I have no business making laws about it.” There are lots of things that are morally wrong but should totally be legal, because prison is also morally wrong, and our bar for ‘worth outlawing’ should be set very, very high.
So I find it very reassuring that Tim Kaine thinks abortion is wrong and abortion rights matter; it’s from that vein of thought that we will eventually get drugs and sex work legalized and eventually build a society with less of a mass incarceration problem. It is critically necessary to build a society where people who genuinely have deep-seated moral disagreements can actually live side-by-side.
I kind of feel the opposite. Unless he has some weird moral philosophy I don’t know about, the main reason for being pro-life is that you think fetuses are full human beings with souls and minds and that aborting them is literally murder and just as bad as killing anyone else. If you think that an act is murder, but you won’t pass laws against it because it would make you a bad member of your political party, that’s pretty scary.
I don’t know if this means Kaine will always lack the courage of his convictions when those convictions might be unpopular, but it sure sounds like a risk factor.
I think it’s important that you be willing to follow and tolerate laws that you disagree with, but if you’re making the laws, what do you base them on other than your convictions?
Non-emotional arguments for why cultural appropriation is a bad thing.
If the case I hazily recall where some clothing manufacturer copyrighted a traditional Navajo pattern actually happened, it’s wrong because it’s someone else’s art.
yeah, but that’s ‘copyright infringement is bad’.
I hate this term, or rather I hate how the current environment has used it till it’s been stripped of meaningful nuance. But here goes:
Cultural appropriation is the taking of something not of one’s culture and incorporating it into one’s own culture. By definition this is hardly a bad thing, but winning arguments by definition is always an attempt to ignore the connotations or implications that are brought along. There is baggage, there always is baggage.
There are situations where appropriation is good: fusion food (American Chinese food, American sushi, bahn mi, gulai, Korean tacos), fashion (modern cheongsam [1], GuoPei), art (the many Asian adaptations of Shakespeare), to name the Asian ones I know.
There are also situations where appropriation is not good: power imbalances (fetishization of Asian women, desexualizing of Asian men), values dissonance (honoured Native American headgear worn by unearned persons), active diminishment (blackface, yellowface, brownface, hillbillyface).
Background: Culture clash theory
When two (or more) cultures come into contact with each other, they have different trajectories in what could happen.
Syncretism: The cultures A and B merge into new culture C that has derived traits from both, but as a whole is distinct from either. Southeast Asian Hinduism during the 6th to 14th centuries is a good example, though the Hellenistic culture is more well known. True melting pot.
Assimilation: Larger, more dominant culture A remains unchanged; smaller culture B let’s go of their original culture and blends into A, becoming mostly behaviourally indistinguishable typically after 3 generations. This is what happens all the time not just in American, but all over the world whenever immigrants enter a culturally different country (looking at all those Indians with British accents and attend Eton).
Adoption: Cultures A and B take some parts from each other but mostly remain distinct. Switzerland and Malaysia are the best case studies. Salad bowl of intermingling but separable chunks of taste.
Isolation: Cultures A and B remain uninvolved and untouched by each other. Typically happens when nomadic and settled cultures meet. Skittles and MnMs.
In America, the lamentation of assimilation is complicated by the fact that racism occurs on top of the cultural loss that naturally occurs. Many an Asian American friend I know have expressed regret for “forgetting their roots” but also want to distance themselves from these same roots because of the racism they face. And while these minority cultures are demeaned for both embracing and losing their heritage, the majority adopts these aspects and reaps the benefits.
Case 1: [insert non-White] cultural clothing/food/habits
America is not kind to foreigners [citation needed]. The Irish, Polish, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Arabic, Muslim have all had their turn discriminated against. Some of these groups have cultural clothing/food/habits associated with them, and therefore have been used as excuses todemean them. Food smells bad, clothing is culturally backward, habits are weird, why are you so different you don’t belong.
And then, bindis and saris and curry and yoga become popular, the very things that some were made fun of are now acceptable and trendy. This hurts. This is cultural appropriation #1: when the originators were once mistreated for their culture, now the culture is embraced but the people have been damaged. This also applies to blacks (hip hop music and street dancing) and Native Americans (kill the Indian save the man) by the way.
Case 2: Ignoring Value
The Native American Headdress is a symbol of honour and valour. Imagine if you went around wearing a Purple Heart Medal of Honor, or pretending that you’re a Knight, or PhD. That’s a terrible thing to do, you’re lying about your achievements and cheapening the value of those who have rightfully eared these. But that’s exactly what you’re doing when wearing a Native American Headdress. Cultural appropriation #2: stealing value.
Case 3: Diaspora dissonance
The bindi is a marker of marriage. Now people wear it to coachella. Except in India, bindi as fashion is also a thing. So Indians in India are wondering why Indian-Americans are making a big deal out of it, because there isn’t much meaning to it anymore. Except to Indian-Americans, they have suffered #1, the meaningfulness of bindis was forcibly taken away from them.
It is well known that Japanese in Japan are very happy to share their kimono [2] and tea ceremony and everything really. The Chinese in China (and Hong Kong etc) largely don’t care about slutty cheongsams in America, they do it themselves anyway. The very different attitudes towards these cultural signifiers blurs the line between appropriation and appreciation, especially since from outside of America, any interest taken up as exposure may help a dying industry of traditional clothing or craft. Cultural appropriation #3: appropriation to those who suffered is appreciation to those who haven’t.
Case 4: Jay Chou
What you are seeing here is a blatant displaying of what Taiwanese (and much of the world) would identify as symbols of Americana: Red White Blue, Native headdresses and dreamcatchers, cowboys, hippies, driving vintage cars in the desert. These images are imprinted upon the rest of the world, and the co-opting of these images to convey a sense of Americana makes complete sense to me as a foreigner. Cultural appropriation #4: Accuracy is beside the point, it’s the evocation from the imagery. Some people rehash the “respectful and with permission” perspective, but that has historically been rare.
Consider now what he is doing is actually what the West has been doing to other cultures for a long time.Orientalism, especially Japonisme, is the same thing, but the cultural flow is in the opposite direction. Sometimes it’s respectful of the traditions and sometimes it’s not. But the point is that the evocation of the popular memes and tropes has been occurring since forever, and the only reason America has been so sensitive about it is #1 and #2. Is Jay Chou in the wrong for using a Headdress? Yes, very little, but yes. He’s committed #2, but he’s not participated in any of #1. It’s not his fault that America was mean to people, and if the headdress was not actually related to valour he’d be completely faultless.
Case 5: Iggy Azalea, Macklemore, and non-African-American Rappers
Hip hop and rap originated from the street culture of oppressed African-Americans, as a vehicle for expression and symbol of resilience through struggle. The strength of the people was expressed through thoughtful and defiant lyrics and beats. Which is why Iggy has always been accused of inauthenticity, because she grew up white and therefore comfortable. Compare to Macklemore, who is actually using rap to express thoughtful things (sometimes) (ok maybe only that once), or German hip hop as immigrant unifying rally cry, or Nigerian hip hop for class struggles.
But more commonly she is accused simply of co-opting black imagery, the act of which is supposed to be problematic in itself. Jazz was stolen, rock-n-roll was stolen, RnB was stolen, up next was hip hop. (Macklemore is not exempt from this criticism too, but Iggy is a stronger case.) Iggy is from Australia, where there is literally no history of African slavery (but instead they have blackbirding from surrounding islands). Her co-opting for profit is exactly #4. If I can forgive Jay Chou, I can forgive Iggy’s inauthentic participation in African-American culture. Should I? She’s been confronted on these issues and remains willfully ignorant, so I can’t say in good conscience that she can be forgiven.
Racist structures in the entertainment industry has allowed #1 to continue, such that #4 benefits Whites over Blacks for the same forms of expression. When Lily Allen or Taylor Swift’s backup dancers twerk, they are using a situation where they as White women can playfully use black imagery and be celebrated while black females cannot. The best sentiment to come out of the whole Iggy debacle is (unfortunately [3]) from Azealia Banks: its funny to see people Like Igloo Australia silent when these things happen… Black Culture is cool, but black issues sure aren’t huh?
The interest in these cultures should ideally not just be skin deep, when appropriation should be appreciation, understanding the plight and being good helpful humans in a community, we’re in this together, should stand up for one another. If appropriation #1 is causing hurt, we still can’t stop it from occurring (since most of it is baggage from the past), but we can address the issues now and create more opportunities for appreciation. Which starts from understanding where the line is, why there is hurt to redress, and who gets to arbitrate the gatekeeping.
—–
[1] The modern cheongsam was heavily influenced by Western ideals, especially since it was developed in Shanghai during the Roaring 20s. The showing off of the silhouette is a Western feature, taken from the Flappers and adapted to the qipao. It was a female liberation movement, with cutting hair short, the abandonment of foot binding, showing off of the figure as empowerment, and young women swept into the fashion. During the 50s, the cheongsam continued to develop outside of China as it was deemed too bourgeois and a political offence.
[2] There was the very unfortunate 2015 Boston Museum of Fine Arts incident. The MFA put on an exhibit that was very popular in Japan, a Monet and commissioned kimonos resembling the one in the painting for visitors to wear and take pictures as an effort to learn more about the traditional garment. A protest sprang up. A counter protest sprang up. The MFA is upset and relents. Japanese are confused. Nobody gets nice things. See here, here, here.
[3] I say unfortunately because Banks is clearly unintelligent in all other accounts. But hey, credit where credit is due, broken clock right twice a day, wise words from fools are still wise, etc. She’s so abrasive that I couldn’t find the original tweet anymore, her account has been blocked. There are of course screenshot images floating around.
oh my god. Imagine being Whoopi and hearing that though.
Well,
when I was nine years old Star Trek came on,“ Goldberg says. “I looked
at it and I went screaming through the house, ‘Come here, mum,
everybody, come quick, come quick, there’s a black lady on television
and she ain’t no maid!’ I knew right then and there I could be anything I
wanted to be.” – See more at: http://www.startrek.com/database_article/goldberg-whoopi#sthash.gKeuf3XI.dpuf
That’s three generations. Nichelle Nichols to Whoopi Goldberg to Leslie Jones.
Who cared that, in reality, every
U.S. astronaut was white and
male at the time? [Mae Jemison] looked no
further than the USS Enterprise.
After all, right there on the
screen, week in and week out,
who could miss Lt. Uhura, the
starship’s stylish, self-assured
communications officer – and a
black woman, no less. For little
Mae, a child of the ’60s, the
make-believe image was more
potent than any dispiriting fact
of real life.
“Images show us possibilities,”
the Stanford graduate says.
“A lot of times, fantasy is what
gets us through to reality.” – “Shooting Star” by Jesse Katz.
Looks like it IS up! I could do without the sensationalized clickbait title and they pushed pretty hard for a lot of the stereotypical canned trans tropes (makeup in the mirror etc. – I absolutely drew the line at trying on different outfits as if that’s how I actually spend my day) but they managed to get a little substance in there. Just be aware that the interview has been heavily edited and cut down from something like 4 hours.
Also, my face was still swollen from surgery. Just sayin.
Reblogging this because Alana is great and more people should know her ^^
Charles Kinsey, 47, a behavior therapist from South Florida was shot in the leg three times by the police in North Miami while laying on the ground with his arms up and trying to help his patient with autism who had run away from a group home.
It all started when someone called 911 and said there was a man walking around with a gun. However it was Kinsey’s patient who was sitting on the ground cross-legged, playing with a toy truck.
Charles got shot by police despite telling them he was only trying to help his patient.
The police shot him, handcuffed him and left him on ground bleeding.
North Miami police have not released much information at
all. They haven’t released the officer’s name, they haven’t given us an update
on the investigation. However, they did say that the state attorney is now a part of
this investigation.
Except for me, who seems to work the other way around, mostly: my logic will put the gun to my emotions, and my emotions won’t dare make a fuss about anything, and then I’ll pick the thing my logic picked and eventually be at a complete loss wondering “huh, why am I not happier about this thing, this was the thing I wanted…?”
okay @chigrima@silvysartfulness I need you guys to help me out: what are the actual Swedish phrases AND WHAT DO THESE MEAN?!
@chigrima is probably replying to this as I type, but that only means you get twice the swedesplaining, @speculativexenolinguist
. u.u
– now you’ve shat in the blue cupboard
Actual phrase: Nu har du skitit i det blå skåpet.
As far as a I know, this one dates back to ye olde times, where you’d store the night pot in a cupboard by the bed. In the kitchen area, you had another fancier cabinet (blue, for example, is fancy, maybe some flowers painted on there, pretty stuff) where you kept the “china” to eat on. So to say you’ve shat in the blue cupboard means you’ve made a huge mistake – like using your dinner china for going poo-poo in.
– the taste is like the butt (divided)
Actual phrase:Smaken är som baken – delad
Literally means that just the way the butt is split into two ass-cheeks, so peoples’ tastes and preferences may be divided. The last part of the idiom is often left out since everyone knows what it is.
– there’s no cow on the ice
Actual phrase:Det är ingen ko på isen.
A cow that’s gotten lost from the pasture and wandered onto the frozen nearby body of water is bad. You may end up with drowned cow. So as long as there’s no cow on the ice, whatever you need to do isn’t really in a hurry. If there WAS a cow on the ice, you’d be in a rush to fix it before it got worse, though.
– i sense owls in the marsh
Actual phrase:Jag anar ugglor i mossen
It means to suspect foul play (fowl play, ha, see it works in English, too), that something’s not quite right. Since I didn’t know how it originated, I’ll leave you with the wisdom of Wikipedia – it’s originally a Danish idiom where the owls were actually wolves (which makes more sense, something creepy’s about) that got mistranslated into owls because apparently unbaptised children who died out of wedlock turned into owly marsh-spirits-… you know, that’s fucked up creepy, too. That, and I now feel a very strong urge to incorporate cursed owl-featured child-zombies of the marshes into like ALL my original stories. Anyway. Moving on.
– to walk like a cat around hot porridge
Actual phrase:Att gå som katten kring het gröt.
Circling but evading an issue, being reluctant to bring something up. Porridge was often served with butter and milk, which were tasties for cats. But the porridge was too hot, so the cat would just slink around, waiting for it to cool down. So evading something until, preferably, someone else brings it up or it goes away. Like the heat of the porridge.
– don’t paint the devil on the wall
Actual phrase:Måla inte fan på väggen
This is so visually poetic. It means you shouldn’t invite trouble, or borrow misery. Things might just work out fine, so if you start painting up vivid scenarios of everything that COULD go wrong, you may end up screwing things up for yourself. Don’t.
– to be out biking
Actual phrase: Nu är du helt ute och cyklar
Means to be completely and utterly wrong, way off topic, making no sense. Like being out biking and getting yourself utterly lost. Which happens faster if you’re biking than walking? Or something.
– cake on cake
Actual phrase: tårta på tårta
Literally means to stack one cake on top of another. Ie doing something to extreme excess, exaggerating, too much of any one thing. Is often used about language taking a turn for the purpler – you needn’t describe the polar bear to be furry and white, it’s a polar bear, they’re ALWAYS furry and white, kinda thing.
Finally, because no post about Swedish is complete without it, I shall add on my very favourite Swedish insult: Skitstövel. It literally means shit-boot, and I think that’s beautiful.
Hold up – you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
I mean, his doctrine of radical individualism is a sham that ultimately reduces his followers to faceless conformity. This isn’t deep metatextual wankery – it’s the literal text of the film.
How do you see the film and not get that?
My ex didn’t get this. He loves Tyler durden. I’ve never seen fight club so I DIDN’T KNOW.
Yeah, in the film he’s a total con-man. His grand speeches sound good if you don’t think about them too deeply, but they’re not meant to be insightful – they’re meant to be a snake-oil salesman’s patter, calculated to bamboozle dumb, angry young men into doing his bidding.
Trouble is, they’re sufficiently well-written that apparently they work on the dumb, angry young men in the audience, too.
I’ve actually written about this academically! There’s a really specific genre I call bro cinema that includes fight club, all of kubricks work, some Scorsese, and Tarantino (all of which I love TBH.) These directors don’t explicitly condemn toxic masculinity and instead trust the audience to have COMMON SENSE and realize that Alex from A Clockwork Orange or Tyler Durden or Travis Bickle are horrific misogynists. But without the film telling the audience how to feel about these characters, men misinterpret the objectivity as glorification. Fight Club is about how shitty masculinity is, but it’s been warped by men grasping for justification for their misogyny
The real issue here, I think, is the passive consumption of media, and moreover, creators and critical viewers underestimating just how passive the average audience member is in their consumption of media.
In the book Nurture Shock, which is a child psychology book that identifies common parenting mistakes, the author spends a chapter on children’s television. The author specifically talks about how media designed to teach morals often backfires – children who watch morality lessons express *more* behavior problems and become *more* cruel.
Now the author says it’s because of how these programs are structured. First they depict bad behavior, and then they explain why the behavior is bad, showing consequences, and tying up the program with a moral.
Small children aren’t smart enough to understand the moral. Small children learn by emulating behavior they see. They see a bad behavior and they learn the bad behavior. Just exposing children to bad behavior is enough to make them internalize that the behavior is something lots of people do, and therefore something acceptable for people to do to do.
If you try to explain to them after the fact that the behavior is harmful and to be avoided, that message is too complicated and goes right over their heads. You can’t tell little kids “do as I say, not as I do.”
Now the author of this book says “small children aren’t old enough to understand the moral.”
But honestly? Adults have the exact same problem.
Tyler Durden loses in the end. That’s the moral of the movie. Unfortunately that moral is too complicated for the vast majority of the audience. The typical adult audience member does not think critically enough about film media to process this moral.
A critical viewer thinks – the point is that Tyler is wrong! The point is that Tyler is doomed by his own hubris! HOW CAN AUDIENCES HAVE MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT IF THE MOVIE?!?!?
Easily, considering the movie only really devotes 5% of its screen time to explicitly denouncing Tyler’s behavior, and that explicit denouncement only arrives at the very end of the film.
The other 95% of the screen time is spent watching Tyler Durden jerk off.
Look – you can’t film two hours of bareback sex followed by a five minute tutorial on how to correctly use a condom and a 30 second montage of miserable teen parents changing diapers, then call your film a safe sex PSA.
You did not make a safe sex PSA.
You made a porno.
You can try to argue that the bareback sex is an ironic subversive metaphor, and that the “real point” of your film is proper condom usage and an anti-teen pregnancy message, but the fact is, the majority of your audience is going to change the channel the moment the cumshot finishes.
Audiences, outside of our special little corner of fandom discourse, are by and large just straight up lazy. They can’t be bothered to think that hard about the media they consume.
This is why I loved Fury Road so much, and also what I felt was so profoundly revolutionary about the movie. Fury Road is a movie about women escaping violent misogynists. Yet editor Margaret Sixel had the SHEER BRILLIANCE and AUDACITY to cut all the footage of misogynist violence out of the movie.
Mad Max: Fury Road proved that it is possible to denounce misogynist violence without depicting it.
Mad Max: Fury Road showed that refusal to depict misogynist violence isin and of itself a denouncement of misogynist violence.
We don’t need to show what victims went through to make victims sympathetic. In fact, voyeuristically depicting acts of cruelty only further objectifies victims. George Miller and Margaret Sixel understand this.
Similarly, George Miller made a point of using telling his videographers to use camera angels that focused on the action of the scene, instead of voyeristically zooming in the female castmember’s breasts/asses/legs – because he understood that when the camera ogles the female characters in an objectifying manner, the audience, who views the movie through the camera’s lens, is forced to ogle and objectify. George understood that sexist camera work creates a sexist perspective, and a sexist perspective tells a sexist narrative.
The thing is that the narrator is always sympathetic. Intimacy and familiarity breed sympathy. The audience is primed to feel sympathy for the narrator simply because they are speaking more than any other individual character.
No matter how unreliable, or morally dubious you make the narrator, they are still the hero or the story. Every villain is the hero of their own story. And when the villain is the narrator, the audience is hearing the version of the story in which the villain is the hero, and the audience is moved by that perspective.
We can give Fight Club the benefit of hte doubt and look at Fight Club as an intellectual experiment to see whether or not it’s possible to tell a story from the villain’s perspective and still denounce the villain’s actions.
But the fact is, the experiment didn’t work. It was a statistical failure. The vast majority of the audience did not recognize the film as a criticism of toxic masculinity, but rather, a romanticization of it.
Perhaps the author’s goal was for Tyler Durden’s death to be interpreted as a cautionary tale, but the author failed in that goal. He failed. Because by the time Tyler Durden dies in the movie, he has already been painted a hero in the eyes of the majority of the audience, and heroes don’t become cautionary tales when they die; they become martyrs.
It’s been 10 years since we first started taking the Hobbits to Isengard. I mean, it’s been way longer – the Hobbits could have fucking walked there, back again, managed to get served several times at the downstairs bar in Doggett’s and got a Southeastern train service all the way to Charing Cross since Tolkien put pen to page. But (and believe me, this is deeply unusual for me) let’s put J R R aside in this.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is kind of… well, both too faithful (total lack of critical interrogation of Tolkien’s absolutely awful concepts around race, gender, etc.) and not faithful enough in that it appeared to miss all the points your correspondent’s teenage self managed to find in the series. Specifically, where Lord of the Rings is an obsessively detailed but ultimately quite modest and traumatised epic, a huge amount of which is two small, starving creatures crawling around in mud having moral dilemmas, the Jackson films take themselves as seriously and grandly as the books came to be and as I suspect their author probably never did.
Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, on the other hand, is a pure and perfect work and I will hear no ill spoken of it else ye never receive a pint in a round bought by me again.
It takes as its base the Hovis-theme-ripping-off music from The Shire – the small-worlded part of the films, before any grandeur is truly injected into the bloated beastie that is the trilogy. The Hobbiton theme is supposed to be homely, reassuring, quaint – like anything that succeeds at that, it sounds fucking amazing played on an airhorn.
The simplicity of the Shire’s theme is what allows it to so naturally accept the kitchen-sink style auditory ornamentation that is ‘a donk’. A classic staple of rave, it needs no introduction even in a world as apparently dislocated from two WKDs and a honk on some poppers as the miruvor-quaffing pipeweed fiends we see here.
As a lyrical piece, Taking The Hobbits is discursive – like many of the very best pieces of pop. One only has to consider the sweet, sweet tension of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain or Brandy and Monica’s iconic The Boy Is Mine to recognise that dialogous pop is, when it works, a particularly sublime genre.
It doesn’t matter that the lines are, ostensibly, orphaned from their original place in the script – from the eponymous ejaculation to Gollum’s hissed What did u say??? they’re all perfectly addressing each other in the sort of gloriously confused cacophony usually reserved for a misunderstanding-based brawl outside a kebab shop at 3am.
I remember the first time I heard Taking The Hobbits To Isengard. It was quite a momentous occasion because I still had dial up, so it took roughly the length of a decent pop song to load and it was very difficult to tell if it was deliberate or a bandwidth-related glitch remix for at least 30 torturously disrupted seconds. I’d imagined it would be a fairly quick joke – most internet video based things were, at the time, but no; a fully fledged song. That just kept going.
The initial air horns! These are funny, yes because we remember them as the Shire theme, which isn’t even the music for this bit. The stuttering sample of the original line! Which sustains itself as Sheffield Dave-style shout out far better than it should, given it’s old seriousface Elf ears himself yelling off a horse.
(In retrospect, should have equated that with Sheffield Dave earlier)
Then there’s …polka bit. Few pop songs manage to maintain a polka interlude – Bohemian Rhapsody springs to mind but Taking the Hobbits To Isengard manages to repeatedly insert it without losing coherency around its original rave premise. If you don’t think ‘Tell me where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him’ delivered over a little eurodance handbag bit is not both extremely funny and excellent pop, I can’t help you.
Taking The Hobbits To Isengard would score reasonably at Eurovision. Not because Eurovision is actually the home of comedy trash but because if France (and it would probably have to be France in order for the Elven analogues to take themselves seriously enough*) scooted in on an artpop platform and wanged loads of fucking airhorns round the stadium it would be entirely in keeping with European sensibilities of solemnly considering the totally whimsical due to our inherent reservedness about experiencing joy.
(The slightly older and wiser part of me has to question the repeated use of Gollum’s ‘stupid, fat, Hobbits’ which makes sense in the context of what he is but isn’t as inherently funny as a bass-intoned ‘Balrog of Morgoth’)
The great thing about Taking The Hobbits To Isengard is it actually gets funnier the more it goes on. Like Star Trekkin it not only sets out to commit to a fairly one-note premise but to hammer that note until it falls out through the piano and becomes a transcendent free agent, cascading through the strings.
It takes a premise; that the Lord of the Rings films, in their overblown format, are very, very silly and runs with it extremely, deadly seriously. This is the core of not all but a fairly substantial chunk of really good pop, as well as an excellent manual for life. All things are here – a manic sense of imminent implosion, troubling past associated with racist ideologies, handcarts, hell, what did u say???
Very seriously; Taking The Hobbits To Isengard is a superb piece of fan work and it has substantially enriched my life to listen to it on loop for the past 45 minutes whilst watching a parliamentary debate on mute. Creators of this piece: thank.
I ONLY FUCKING POSTED THIS TO THE WRONG FUCKING BLOG DIDN’T I?
this is the post I needed, the post I wanted
reading this post has lowered the value of every other post on this site
Omphaloskeptomai 