Valentine Road

HBO is showing a documentary  this month on the 2008 murder of Lawrence King, a gender-nonconforming* kid from Oxnard CA. Thanks to the wonder of HBO On-Demand, I was able to get an early preview of it.

As a former journalism student, I understand objectivity, and the need to show reality in all its unflinching ugliness, but Valentine Road was hard to watch without becoming viscerally angry. The bigotry of some of the school officials is laid bare. The most prescient scene is one where some of the former jurors in the murder trial move from talking about Trader Joe's wine to their sympathy (!) for Brandon McInerney, the fourteen-year-old who shot King at point-blank range. Listening to these three white, (presumably middle-class, cis-and-heterosexual) women, it's hard not to draw parallels to the Trayvon Martin case from earlier this year.

I've read so many positive things about this documentary, I feel as though I was watching an entirely different story -- there were so many things that could have been explored more deeply like the intersection of race (King was biracial) and sexuality, femmephobia, misogyny, cis supremacy, and a million other vocabulary words those outside the social justice world aren't privy to. And this documentary is for them, the mainstream audience who is unfortunately going to see a lot of victim blaming and rationalization of a hate crime.

*This is how the media referred to King.

Nora Ephron and "chick flicks"

Writer and filmaker Nora Ephron died earlier this week at the age of 71 from complications from leukemia.



She's most known for movies like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, and most recently, Julie and Julia, single-handedly popularizing the mocked, and reductively titled,"chick flick" genre. The Atlantic's Eleanor Barkhorn says :

"Though Ephron was a prolific essayist and wrote several best-selling books, she's best known for making films that appealed to women. And they did: Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, Julie & Julia, and, most especially, When Harry Met Sally are romantic-comedy classics, movies women watch over and over, either alone or together, because they say something familiar and true: The Empire State Building is romantic; long email chains about books and music are thrilling; tackling—and conquering—a new recipe is satisfying; and, yes, it is very, very difficult for men and women to be just friends."

What Ephron really had the gall to do was create three-dimensional, and often flawed, female characters on for a mainstream audience. She was a master at putting women's narratives front and center. Not that her films were completely free from problematic elements: her characters were more often than not white, middle-class, educated, and attractive (though a lot of that can be attributed to the Hollywood machine itself). Because of that, I hate to use words like universal, but in an industry where female characters are hyper-sexualized, lacking agency, or just plain non-existent, I'm glad Nora Ephron's films existed. R.I.P.

Links and Bits: 8/19/11

Patti Smith is turning her memoir, Just Kids, into a film.

The 2012 Presidential Candidates and Where They Stand on LGBT Issues

The Crunk Feminist Collectives discusses "The Help"

Sarah talks about the stealthily feminist R&B of 80s and 90s.

Emily from Popdust lists ten pop culture connections in Lady Gaga's new video, You and I.

Hey Lloyd, We're Ready to be Heartbroken

I guess I should be handing over my "child of the 80s" card: I've never seen Say Anything, at least all the way through. Sure, I've watched a few minutes here or their, piecemeal, but for whatever reason I've never made it through the entire movie.

I have no idea why this movie never really appealed to me, outside its better-than-average soundtrack. (Fun trivia: the song in the boombox scene was originally supposed to be the Replacements' "Within Your Reach," which is used elsewhere in the movie.) Something about the whole Lloyd Dobler mystique bothers me, but I can't put my finger on why. In his book, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman talked at length (and with uncomfortable amounts of gender essentialism) about the cult surrounding Say Anything's lead character and its effect on women of my generation desperately trying to find their own "Lloyd Dobler." I dunno. The "sensitive guy" trope is all too familiar to those of us who came of age in the 80s and 90s, and yet, Lloyd was a pretty nuanced character. (Or, quite possible, a male "manic pixie dream girl.") A few years ago, C.L. Minou for Tiger Beatdown  wrote:

Say Anything proves to be most effective as a meditation on what it means to be a “good man.” Not to take anything away from the marvelous Ione Skye’s Diane Cort — wonder of wonders, a woman in a studio movie who is smart, without being unattractive, unpopular, or unpleasant — the movie is centered mostly on the various modes of contemporary masculinity. What makes Say Anything different from just about every movie about masculinity today (and to be fair, a large chunk of movies from the ’80s) is that it sides against the Path of Greatest Jerkiness.

Should we be rewarding "non-jerkiness?" I mean, not being a jerk should be the default.