knocked up

Knocked Up was written and directed by Judd Apatow, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the director of photography was Portland native Eric Edwards. It’s a beautifully shot film, and it’s been getting enthusiastically positive reviews (especially at sites like Reviews for Guys and Movie for Guys).

All that press may have made the storyline familiar, but here it is in brief. Alison (played by Katherine Heigl), has just been promoted from behind the scenes to doing on-air interviews with celebrities. Out dancing with her sister to celebrate, she meets Ben (played by Seth Rogen), who’s out with his stoner slacker roommates. They spend the night together and she’s clearly alarmed in the morning (he asks, did we have sex?). But, as it turns out, she’s pregnant, and with little discussion of her options, she decides to continue the pregnancy and try to develop a real relationship with Ben.

A number of critics have suggested that the emotional center of the film lies with Alison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete, played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The film is more interesting if we understand the Alison and Ben pairing as a kind of projection of the feelings of someone in Paul’s position (or Apatow’s).

At least one critic has suggested that the obvious thing for pretty, successful, upwardly-mobile Alison to do is the terminate the pregnancy and move on.

The problem is not that Knocked Up is “liberal” because it’s about casual sex and having a baby out of wedlock. The problem is that it is horribly conservative about embracing and enjoying an adult version of sexuality that has moved beyond dorm-room-esque groping. One night with some guy you don’t even know does not mean you must tie yourself to him for the rest of your life... unless you think that women must be punished for sex. Oh, but it’s not punishment: you get an adorable baby out of the deal! And you get to “train” a man!

Another observes that

It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.

The pro-natalist position is implicit; we never hear anything about Alison’s possible religious or moral scruples. But we know little about her character. Aside from her job and family, she seems to have no life, no friends, no interests, no psychology.

Clearly the movie is a Guy Fantasy that the gorgeous successful blonde will fall for the crass loser; that's pretty much the central joke. Comments on some blogs have been far more scathing:

first of all, the woman gives up her hope of love and compatibility. face it, it's a trade up for him, a trade down for her. second of all, when the woman's mother suggests she get an abortion, the woman digs her heels in for daughter rebellion. the guy writer obviously can't have a powerful older woman giving the gal advice. third, the woman has no women friends except bitches. Another guy fantasy. And the woman rejects her friends in favor of the guy. Another guy fantasy. Lastly, the guy gets to command the woman's sister to leave the birthing room because she doesn't belong there. Another guy fantasy - telling off the sister. . . . The message is - abandon all your friends and sisters and your mother for the chubby guy. Of course, he gets to keep his friends. Does anyone see how hateful that is?

The World Socialist Web Site notes that the film is very narrowly focused, entirely concerned with individual choices and relationships, and that despite the superficial lewdness, its values are conservative, signs of an "inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life":

At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book....

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

It’s perhaps worth acknowledging that the hedonistic idle life of Ben’s friends and roommates could be understood as a resistance to capitalism and the protestant work ethic, and that may be part of the appeal of those sections of the film, but surely there are better means of resistance.

kitteh sez

from I can has cheezburger

the pain of our inner troops

Earlier this year, the mainstream press discovered that there are problems with veteran’s health care. The scandal of dilapidated buildings and untreated soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center led to a series of firings and resignations. But, as even the commercial press is aware, being a veteran is still no guarantee of access to health care.

Stories reflecting on this fact imply that veterans have an extra claim to medical attention. Perhaps they do, but we should be wary of suggesting that there is anyone who doesn’t have a right to health care.

Let’s review. According to Cesar Chelala, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, “The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no health insurance coverage during 2005, an increase of 1.3 million over the previous year. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. According to the Children’s Health Fund, 9 million children are completely uninsured in the United States, while another 23.7 million - nearly 30 percent of the nation’s children — lack regular access to health care.”

Last month the Commonwealth Fund released an update of their report comparing the health care systems of the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. They found that “the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage.”

Susie Day, who writes for Monthly Review zine, is one of the lucky ones. Last week, she reported on a recent call to her Doctor in a piece titled "U.S. Troops Out of . . . ME":

Hello, Doctor? Thanks for taking my call -- it's an emergency. I've been infected. Well, medically speaking, I guess you'd say I'm not so much infected as occupied. My symptoms? They're hard to describe. A cough, maybe.

Like today, I'm walking down the street. Big, shady trees, leaves bright green . . . twittering birds, everything oxygenated and sparkling. And I see an old gentleman in a baseball cap and suspenders, struggling to heave his grocery-filled shopping cart up the stoop to his apartment. My first thought is to go over and help him lift the cart. Simple enough.

Then I get a scratching in my throat and this weird, fearful sensation. "WHOA," I say to myself. "Instead of being grateful, this guy could take out a .357 Magnum and blow my head off." I notice a blockage; I cough. I think, "[Forget] you, old man, you ingrate, I was only trying to help." I'm now shaking and feverish. I think, "To make sure you don't kill me, you bum, I'm going to run a steak knife into your guts and drive a tank over your pitiful geezer body."

By now, I'm coughing hard. The birds continue to twitter and the leaves are shimmering in the breeze -- while I am picturing myself annihilating this old guy. But that's the price you pay, right -- kill them before they kill you? Just then, I retch; I double over and cough up . . . a tiny American soldier.

I'd call that a symptom, wouldn't you, Doctor? Anyhow, it lands in my hand, all tricked out in little fatigues and a bayonet. I can tell right away it's dead. So I panic . . . and run home and phone you.

I think it's obvious, Doctor: I've become contaminated by U.S. foreign policy. I calculate, according to the last Democratic sellout vote, that I have at least 147,000 U.S. troops stationed in my Persian Gulf, er, body. Plus all their equipment.

How was I infected, you ask? This is embarrassing, Doctor -- I, uh, didn't take precautions. I must have exchanged bodily fluids with a peace activist or something. Some commie pervert who believed that all humans are "created equal." I admit I've jumped to this conclusion once or twice, watching the news -- that the beings who have died by the hundreds of thousands in Iraq are, in fact, human -- that their lives matter as much as yours or mine. Naturally, in America, I couldn't live, knowing this. So in came the troops. That's right, Doctor: the government sent them. To protect me.

Even now, I can feel my inner troops. Drilling, playing cards, writing letters home, making sure I am terrorist-free. They won't tell me if they had anything to do with the siege on Fallujah, or if they hooded detainees for interrogation. They say a lot happens that doesn't make the news. They say they're just doing their job.

Kids, mostly. Came to see the world, feed their families, get a college degree, defend democracy. But they're stuck now and scared. They hate it and, knowing they are hated, they kill. They belong to me. . . .

But here's the thing, Doctor. With all due respect to my troops, I don't want them. Although they do allow me to cope with post-9/11 reality, they won't let me dream of happiness. For example, I'll be thinking of a quiet, sun-filled room, tulips in a vase on the piano, a puppy playing with a fallen petal and -- blam!, a combat boot kicks in the door and stomps everything to death. This is unacceptable, Doctor: I cannot live on a planet where innocence is a constant deterrent to survival.

So I need fast relief. What would you prescribe -- a stomach pump, chemotherapy, exorcism? This isn't some little ailment where you say, "Click on two MoveOn.org petitions and call me in the morning," this is serious. In fact, I suggest a radical troop-ectomy to actually remove our military from Iraq.

Lots of people could assist you in this operation, Doctor; me included. Then, of course, we'd have to get the troops out of the troops. They're occupied, too, you know.

restoring the constitution?

Someone in Washington must have finally taken to heart the bumper sticker that says, “Ok, joke’s over. Bring back the constitution” because there’s now a bill in both houses called the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.”

Its provisions are less ambitious than its title, but it would repeal many parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by, among other things, banning the use of coerced testimony, and restoring the right of detainees to seek a writ of habeas corpus.

The phrase habeas corpus is Latin for “thou (shalt) have the body” –in court, that is. Also called the Great Writ of Liberty, and other things in Latin, a writ of habeas corpus was originally used to require the custodian of a person detained without charges to bring the body of that person before a judge for a determination of whether the person is being held for legal reason, or else should be released from custody.

The Military Commissions Act was passed in response to the Supreme Court decision in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, which last year determined that the Guantanamo military commissions provided for in the PATRIOT ACT are illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.

So, in a twist on checks and balances, when the Supreme Court asserted that the executive administration's initial plans to try detainees using military tribunals were illegal, the legislative branch passed a law declaring it legal: Military Commissions Act of 2006. “In doing so,” as the ACLU puts it, “they cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. They also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture.” There was no mention in the Commissions Act of the Geneva conventions it undermined.

In February of this year, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited provisions of the Military Commissions Act in ruling that Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

But the Hamden decision followed an earlier ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In the Hamdi case, the government contended that it could hold Hamdi, an American citizen, indefinitely without charges, and without the right to stand trial. In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that Hamdi had been denied due process and should receive a meaningful opportunity to contest the facts allegedly underlying his designation as an “enemy combatant.” Faced with the obligation to defend its detention before an objective decisionmaker, the government agreed to release Hamdi.

But as Jennifer Van Bergen puts it in a 2004 article on Counterpunch dot org.

While saying Hamdi had the [habeas corpus] right to challenge his detention, the Court eviscerated that right by the applying a "balancing test" used in civil cases--a test that in fact originated in the context of the deprivation of welfare benefits. Rather than requiring the Government to supply probable cause of criminal activity in order to detain Hamdi, Hamdi has to somehow prove that he isn't what the Government says he is. The Court pointed out that the lower court "apparently believed that the appropriate process would approach the process that accompanies a criminal trial."
Well, yes, a person being held in custody has the right to be charged with a crime or released. But the Court rejected this approach, [though] it is hard to see why the Court would refuse to apply criminal procedural protections to challenges to the detention of persons who have claimed innocence. Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be our standard.

In an essay titled “Guantanamo and the New Legal Order,” in the May 2005 Monthly Review, Jean-Claude Paye writes,

The “war against terrorism” has provided all executive branches of the leading Western governments with a perfect opportunity to make some deep adjustments to society. These changes are so far-reaching that they approach a shedding of the old political regime. We in the West are witnessing a reversal of the role of criminal procedure right across the board. Its usual function—to guarantee fundamental freedoms and cap the powers of police and government—is morphing into the opposite, a suspension of constitutional order. By extending exceptional proceedings to all stages of the criminal process—from inquiry to trial—private life is being invaded and the expression of public freedoms chilled. . . .
These measures are common to all nations, but the United States goes one step further. It has set about reorganizing its penal system by making outright violence an integral part of the legal system. Such action affects foreign nationals accused of terrorism or U.S. citizens labeled as “enemy combatants” by the Pentagon, and whose constitutional guarantee that they would not be deprived of liberty without due process of law has been suspended ….
In the state of emergency the extent of the powers magistrates have at their disposal is a direct result of the suspension of laws limiting their privileges. The extraordinary powers of both the executive and police stem from diminishing the mechanisms that protect fundamental freedoms. The state of emergency is a state without law.

As Paye notes, the move toward centralized rule by executive decree is part of a large-scale political shift. But we can also see an attempted small-scale version of this move in the city of Portland, Oregon. Ballot Measure 26-91 would transform Portland’s committee-style government, giving greater power to the mayor, currently former police chief Tom Potter. And as Dave Mazza reports in the May 2007 Portland Alliance, the charter revision campaign has been financed chiefly by big business.

Ballots have gone out to voters in Portland. The Center for Constitutional Rights has an online resource and action page for restoring habeas corpus, and the ACLU has an online petition that will be delivered to legislators on June 26th, the one year anniversary of the ratification of the Military Commissions Act.

Finally, though, it’s worth remembering that, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us in a 2005 essay in The Progressive,

Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. …
[T]he most important job citizens have […] is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system.

kiss me deadly

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.
For more on femmes fatales and film noir, listen to the Old Mole Variety Hour tomorrow (April 23), or check out these links.



http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/rc1fr10m.htm
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/rr0600/cfrr10b.htm

queer morality

Last month, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members by saying that "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” He apparently did not comment on the morality of, say, invading a country and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of approximately 655,000 individuals.

That evident contradiction, according to which gay love is bad, but killing is good, is addressed by Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in a recent column in Truthdig:

"The radical Christian right . . . has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement’s chain of command. . . .

This hypermasculinity, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their blind obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. The images of Jesus often show him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors. Jesus’ stoic endurance of the brutal whippings in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ presages the brutal, masculine world of this ideology. . . . Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: “Christ was a man with muscles,” he insisted. Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God’s enemies.

The unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. . . . Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination that men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside the home.

This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to [this] rigid [. . .] model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled."

Successful challenges to this movement are unlikely to come through legislative reform alone, any more than an end to racism came though the 1964 civil rights act outlawing racial segregation and discrimination. But legal recognition and rights would certainly be a step in the right direction.

You have a chance to participate in such steps this very evening, Monday April 9, 2007, when the Oregon House Elections, Ethics and Rules Committee holds a public hearing on two gay rights acts: the Oregon Equality Act (SB 2) and the Oregon Family Fairness Act (HB 2007). Hearings will be held at 5:30 PM today in Hearing Room E at the Capitol in Salem.

The House Family Fairness Act would provide for civil unions between same-sex partners. The Senate Equality Act would provide gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people with protection from discrimination in employment, housing, access to public places and other areas.

While antidiscrimination law seems a no brainer (though the exemptions for religious groups raise thorny questions, and have been the subject of much negotiation), civil unions are more complicated.

Bonnie Tinker, writing in this month’s Portland Alliance, asks,

“How can I support a bill that treats same-sex partners as a separate class and asks us to wear the pink triangle of civil unions? On the other hand, how can I oppose a bill that intends to make things better for lesbian and gay families?”

She suggests,

“Go to the hearings on HB 2007 and demonstrate outside, or testify inside from a neutral position that they have given us the wrong choices. We need a choice that offers equality.” And Tinker propses several further actions: those in other sex relationships can refuse special rights and wear “the pink triangle of civil unions” along with queer couples; those in legal marriages can testify to the privileges they receive; on forms that ask for marital status, queers in couples might check the box that says “married”; those in legal marriages might check “single” in order to reject special rights.

Tinker concludes, “Our acceptance of the caste system of legal marriage rights is a reflection of the depth of heterosexist conditioning in society. It is no longer acceptable. As with any oppression, the first step toward changeis to pay attention ot unconscious and unstated privilege. The next step is to negotiate for change. We are now ready for the next step: non-violent direct action to resist the inequality of legal marriage.”

passive voice and other crimes

From today's NYTimes:

Quotation of the Day

"I acknowledge that mistakes were made here."

-ALBERTO R. GONZALES, the attorney general, on the dismissals of federal prosecutors.