film – W. R. Bywater

Today I listened to minisode 2 of the podcast Literary Friction and Octavia and Carrie’s discussion was about literary characters they have a crush on. The basis of their debate was that one of them (I can’t remember which, Carrie I think) had to dig really deep to find a literary character she had a crush on, whereas the other could list them indefinitely. I thought it was an interesting discussion; they related it to styles of reading, with the former discussing how there is a critical pane of glass between herself and the literary world she reads about and she finds it difficult to visualise fictional worlds, whereas the latter reads visually and is very much ‘within’ the text. I thought I’d come in and share where I stand on the matter.

I’m personally a reader who very rarely crushes on literary characters. In fact, I struggle to think of a single character I have a crush on. I think it’s important to define exactly what a ‘crush’ is here, because I think there’s a risk of equivocation if it’s not pinned down. I think ‘crush’ operates on two levels: it is romantic and sexual. Although they touched sometimes on the sexual, I think Octavia and Carrie were mainly discussing crushes in terms of romantic attraction, or they were in some way assuming a link between the two.

This distinction is an important one to make, I think, especially in terms of my own identity. I feel romantic attraction very rarely – I can probably name on one hand the number of people IRL that I’ve had a crush on – whereas I feel sexual attraction all of the time. So when I probe to think about literary crushes it is not really a surprise that I struggle to come up with anything, because how I think of ‘crush’ is closely linked to the romantic and the sexual, and since IRL I don’t feel strong romantic attraction it follows that the same would be true of literature. But then I got to thinking about different media, and I realised that I do tend to crush on men in more visual media quite a lot. For example, I think it’s fair to say I have a crush on Bradley Cooper’s character in A Star Is Born, and I do have crushes on celebrities quite a lot (I think celebrities are a certain kind of fictional character, but that’s a discussion for another day). And so I think it must be something to do with the literary text in particular – rather than fictional worlds in general – that makes it difficult for me to connect to.

Let’s unpack this a bit further. I think it must be something about the lacking visual element of the literary text that leaves me indifferent to the characters, because I don’t read in a very visual way. Let’s take Jackson Maine from A Star Is Born as an example. I find him physically attractive, not just aesthetically but in the way he moves, the small inflections of his character, as well in his emotional vulnerability. There are certain crucial aspects of this which are missing from the literary text as I experience it while reading. I think I erect a critical screen between myself and a text and I think of characters in the abstract rather than as real people, unlike in a film where I do consider the characters real people. It’s strange how a visual element can change how I relate to characters – it would be interesting to read a literary version of A Star Is Born and see whether my opinion on Jackson is different. For myself attraction is a very physical thing and so I suppose it makes sense that I would be more attracted to characters in film than fiction; I find it hard to have a crush on something I consider abstract.

At the same time, I find some texts to be very sexually stimulating. I think that desire can be a linguistic phenomenon as much as anything else. I read Hollinghust’s The Swimming-pool Library at the start of 2019 and I found it to be a very arousing text which was successful in its depiction of gay male sexuality (even if some of its encounters were problematic – I’ll probably touch on this in another post). I was very turned on when I was reading the novel, something which I don’t think I’d much experienced before and I found reading the text quite liberating. It gave me a new understanding of pornography, which I had only understood as visual; I’d never thought that I could be much stimulated by text. But having said this, it would be wrong to say that I had a crush on Will or on any of the characters in The Swimming-pool Library. I might have found the actions they performed sexually arousing, but who was performing them was irrelevant. The sexuality they expressed was what attracted me. Perhaps a crush, at least for me, requires a strange combination of physical and emotional attraction, and although literature can capture elements of both it fails to cohere them in a single character, and so pales to film in this regard. (Not that I prefer film, mind; literature is definitely my preferred medium. But I don’t read books to find crushes, so it’s not a massive failing for me.) I’m not saying that I’ll never fancy a literary character, but it doesn’t really seem likely with what I’ve read before.

Another idea to throw out there: maybe it’s to do with sexuality. A lot of the books I’ve read have been in an educational/academic context, and so they have tended to focus on heterosexual romantic encounters. Maybe my inability to crush on literary characters comes from the fact that I’ve been reading heterosexual relationships, and since I don’t see myself in them it follows that I wouldn’t share in their articulations of desire. I’ve not read that much fiction about gay men and so perhaps that’s where my crushes are. But Jackson Maine isn’t queer, so maybe sexuality has nothing to do with whether I fancy someone or not. In the podcast they mentioned that literary crushes can transcend gender and sexuality, so maybe literature is a space where it is about feeling rather than the identities of those involved. As an unromantic person I may be excluded from this system altogether.

I think it’s interesting to think about the relationship between sexuality IRL and in fiction, because I think fiction opens up a kind of fantasy space where you can fancy whoever you want. It operates like porn in that regard. I think there’s a very special relationship between literature and porn, and literary representations of porn are certainly something I’d like to study further. Both in some way seem to dictate the kinds of sexuality that we are capable of feeling.

WRB

This is a weird one to start with, because 1) literature is the medium that I’m the most familiar with, not film, and 2) issues of race are something I’m always wary about discussing. But I figure it’s always better to talk about an issue, providing it comes from a place of respect, than to shut down all discussion because errors might be made.

First, some general comments about the film: I really enjoyed it. The aesthetic of the film is really strong in terms of camera shots, the weird motifs (the deer, the tea cup) which recur throughout, and the portrayal of middle-class whiteness in the Armitage household was done really well, in my opinion. I thought it was aware of itself as commenting on an important issue, but it wasn’t overdone so as to make it inaccessible to a white audience; but neither did it seem to titillate a white audience too much. I found it didn’t last too long, it wasn’t overcomplicated, but the somewhat simple plot was very powerful and so it didn’t lose anything because of this. (You can probably tell that I’m not accustomed to commenting on films. Hopefully I’ll get better in the future.)

Now, the big issue: blackness. I’m white, and that makes it difficult to talk about being black. What I think the film showed really well was the frustrations that occur when black and white people interact; it showed that although different races ought to interact, not all interaction is good when it comes from a place of ignorance, and not all attempts from white people at including black people are noble in their own right. Example: all white people mentioning a black celebrity (usually Barack Obama) that they like, as if to prove that they are racially enlightened. Obviously I can’t know exactly what this is like, but I think my position as a queer person makes it possible for me to understand this frustration. I think the point is that when you occupy a position taken as universal (i.e. white), everyone is able to discuss that culture because it is accessible to everyone, in comparison to occupying a marginal position in which people who claim to understand the culture do so on a very superficial level, so you end up discussing the same handful of topics again and again.

What is to be learned from this? I’m thinking about whether it tries to be didactic. Is it trying to teach white people how to interact with black people? I think that would be doing the film an injustice. I think it was more a tongue-in-cheek recognition of these frustrations of attempts at interaction; white people seek to show how socially conscious they are by engaging with black people, but in doing so reveal how out-of-touch they are with the experiences of black people. White people and black people cannot relate to one another on the basis of race, so it is not necessary to do so.

I’m noticing myself kind of struggling to express myself here, and I think it raises important issues about white people talking about race. I don’t consider myself ignorant, but I’m encountering this difficulty in articulating myself because the issue is such a contentious one. But I think it’s important to talk about this stuff. I was in a tutorial today on Americanah, and the class is such that the majority are white, and there was not very much productive discussion of race. How, as white people, are we supposed to approach these issues? I think the first step is to take a back seat. All I can really do is use the voices of others because it is not a voice I have myself. Part of me wants to try to find ways in which I can relate my own experiences of oppression to oppression due to race, and I think that can be a useful way to conceptualise what it is like to experience racial discrimination, but it is also necessary to acknowledge the ways in which each ‘category’ of oppression operates differently, in different locations and in different ways. It’s somewhat reductive to try and relate everything to one’s own experience, but I think it is kind of required because as human beings we are limited to our own experience and this is how we view the world. I don’t think there’s much productive to be said for a white man discussing race; I’m not bringing anything new to the discussion, and no one is going to take me as an authority. But to exclude white people from discussions of race is not useful either, because black and white people are always going to interact with one another, and discussion of contentious issues is important. Adichie has spoken of the western world’s obsession with comfort; we feel discomfort when approaching contentious issues, and so refrain from getting nearer to them. Maybe it’s better to say something harmlessly useless than to say nothing at all. I don’t know. It’s difficult.

Back to the film: the other main thing that I found interesting was its metaphor of hypnotising and brainwashing. I think it literalised the idea of how subject positions are conditioned by ideology, how people are made to think and behave in certain ways by institutions of power. So the powerful whites are able to brainwash the powerless blacks into adopting a white consciousness. As fiction it was extreme, but I found it an extension of how this can be a reality in the real world. It’s image of white supremacy was horrifying but not too much of a stretch. I’m not sure how useful the ending was: it seemed to position white and black people in positions of violent tension, and didn’t seem to offer a way out of this. But perhaps it’s worth remembering that Chris was not fighting all white people but rather white supremacy, and his triumph was over that, which perhaps makes the ending make sense. And it is as much the job of white people to eliminate white supremacy. It is easy to watch the film as a white person and feel like, I’m not one of those white people, it isn’t speaking to me. But I think all of us are to some extent those white people; it’s not a extreme state, there are shades of white supremacy. Perhaps it’s about recognising the problematic supremacist parts of the self that stem from being white.

I’ve likely missed a lot of important things from the film – there are no doubt interesting discussions to be had about its relationship with cloning, for example. But these are the thoughts that I had.

WRB

Tag: film

Literary Crushes

Get Out