Ginger Rogers, actor

I’m still buried under piles of paper, moving boxes, notes to myself about next week’s lectures, and paperwork — you have no idea how much universities rely on busywork and excessive documentation — but my father just sent a lovely short New Yorker piece about Ginger Rogers that I had to share.

To be precise, it’s not an essay about Rogers’ dancing. It’s about her acting.

She’s most famous for dancing with Fred Astaire, of course; but the writer Arlene Croce asks us to set that aside for the moment and think about Rogers as a subtle presence in more than just those films. When she wasn’t wearing white gowns that showed off her beautiful back, or ostrich feathers, or that great dress with the sunflower/starburst pattern from Shall We Dance (1937), she often appeared as working-class girls, women hard on their luck. Like Polly Parrish in Bachelor Mother (1939), or the titular character in Kitty Foyle (1940), or the nose-to-the-grindstone dancer in Stage Door (1937). She was Everywoman for that dark era of the Depression just as much as she was its glamorous ballroom dancer.

Croce argues that her subtlety led her to be underrated as a talented actor, one who excelled particularly in the embodiment of the struggler, the striver, that woman with a sense of humor yet a clear sense of self-worth in the face of difficulties. She was “the fabulous Miss Average, imaginative, unsentimental, the dyed-in-the-wool product of an era and one of its immortal symbols”:

…suppressing her anger, she smiles through clenched teeth. She isn’t going to take his guff, but she isn’t about to lose her temper, either. Manners matter to her. When you don’t have any money — and in the Depression nobody had any — manners, morals, ethics, are coin of the realm. In her continually wounded sense of self-worth and her spirited defense of it lies the drama of Ginger Rogers. It transcends self-interest; it is in essence idealistic, an insistence on the dignity of the individual, the responsibility of the citizen, the honor of the woman she knows herself to be when she’s at the top of the stairs.

What a nice piece of writing. And a particularly nice sentiment for these hot days, as I’m struggling to complete paperwork or deal with my internet provider over the phone. Aren’t we all Ginger, at some level?

 

The crappiness of the guilt reflex; or, micro barriers to feminism

I have a new junior colleague who has recently moved to town, so I work up a small cocktail party to bring her together with some other people I’ve wanted to get to know. Nothing fancy — sort of last-minute and casual and all, but with some good sangria and cheeses and friendly women.

My new colleague emails me back this morning. “Sounds great! The only thing is transportation — you see, I don’t have a car.”

I stare at this email for a good while.

Is she really suggesting I come pick her up? Am I a bitch for thinking I don’t need to spend the 30 minutes before the party driving across town and back? The guilt reflex pokes me in the gut.

At first I remember being in her position myself — a new job, didn’t know anyone, and deathly poor. Back in those days we didn’t get our first paycheck til October 1, so us new professors amassed breathtaking credit card debt on top of the debts we already had from grad school. Maybe she, too, is that poor.

Then I remember she’s not coming straight from grad school, but from Private University where she had a one-year position. Not that one year of that salary would have eliminated school debt, but a year of it plus having no car expenses surely would have taken the edge off.

I email back proposing she catch a cab, and tell her I’ll drive her home afterward — a sort of compromise. Public transportation in our city is sporadic and inefficient, while cabs are plentiful.

She replies: “I’m very sorry to miss your gathering, but I’m sure I’ll meet you next week.”

In short, she has told me that unless I pick her up beforehand and drop her home later, in addition to throwing a cocktail party, she will not attend. Her transportation is my problem.

It’s not just that this makes me want to sit her down and give her a lecture on professionalism and collegiality like the bossy mid-career scholar I am.

The worst thing is that I feel crappy. I feel prickly and taken for granted — and above all guilty and somewhat gobsmacked by her behavior. Guilty enough to let it fester, but confirmed enough not to change my mind about it.

And I think: sometimes the biggest roadblocks in feminism consist of those micro-conflicts between one woman and the next — conflicts over how to behave, how to treat one another.

You are not the colleague I want, we say to each other via email. You aren’t behaving as I think you ought to, as my behavior has clearly called forth from you.

And we arrive at the impasse.

Yup, it’s back to revenge fantasies for me: “Oldboy” (2003)

Hello: perhaps you don’t remember me, as it’s been so long since I last posted. I am the previously-prolific Feminéma who used to blog at length on movies and feminism while also quietly conducting research on leave from teaching. Now I am the cranky Feminéma who’s starting a new semester and dealing with university bureaucracy, and can barely watch a film without falling asleep.

Hence, my return to revenge films. Can you believe I’d never seen Oldboy before?

That’s right! so much for subtlety, literary dialogue, or nuanced character development. Teachers and professors, let me recommend that you soothe your weary tempers by falling into Park Chan-wook’s amazing, twisted, compelling, and occasionally gross-out tale of Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik). Dae-su was kidnapped, brainwashed, and tortured for 15 years only to find himself suddenly and mysteriously released. Filled with fury — not to mention questions about who did this to him and why — he sets off on a crazy, brain-addled quest to avenge his lost years. A female sushi chef joins him in his quest (somewhat inexplicably).

It has the kinetic weirdness of a great Spaghetti Western. If you can stand a few really unwatchable horror scenes (isn’t this why we have hands? to put them in front of our faces?), Oldboy is how to survive the nonsense of the institutions we work for.

What is it about revenge tales, and why is Park so good at telling them? This is the second installment of his Vengeance Trilogy (preceded by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and followed by Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, which I quite liked back when I was grading an awful lot of papers a couple of years ago). Is there something to be said here about South Korean culture and politics and the way these brilliant vengeance tales strike a particular chord?

They certainly strike a chord with me. The revenge narrative seems so cathartic because it so often features a protagonist who’s helpless to prevent something bad from happening — so, in response, he/she undertakes a strict regimen of physical and mental training to be ready to exact revenge. That single-minded pursuit, and the clarity of the vengeance motive … oh, I can’t tell you how gratifying it is for those of us who spent an hour on hold waiting for some university administrator.

But it’s not just the actual vengeance; it’s also the ragged edges. The fact that Dae-su is going crazy in his cell as his hair grows longer and frizzier. The fact that exacting revenge is fraught with ambivalence and new revelations about himself and his enemy, revelations that affect his mental clarity.

You see? The vengeance movie shows you that revenge is madness, and perhaps even unsatisfying or soul-destroying. Which is just what I need at the end of a long week, when I looked quite similar to that image of Dae-su, all crazy hair and teeth.

Ordinarily I would have cared more that the female role of Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong, above) is so lackluster, but hey, that would take some feminist ire that I’ve suppressed to get my full intake of vengeance vitamins. Maybe I’ll muster more bile for the Spike Lee remake of the film, reportedly starring Samuel L. Jackson. I promise you, friends, I have not lost the bile; it’s just a question of administering it to the truly deserving.

In the meantime it’s back to lecture-writing and making the longest to-do lists known to humankind. As much as I do love those regular wages, I tell ya: professoring really tests one’s capacity for institutional bullshit.

The void of moving, and a footnote on “Footnote” (2011)

Considering that moving house has demanded so much of my attention during the last 20 days, it really ought to be more interesting. It’s not. Nor has it left me any energy to watch and/or think about film, especially because the Olympics sucked up what tiny portions of my brain space were left over from those daily visits to hardware stores. (A former student of mine won two gold medals!)

In short: moving necessitates that you enter a mental void. And now writing the syllabus has likewise become engrossing yet utterly, impossibly, boring.

Worse, it’s hard to get back on the blogging horse. My RSS feed contains so many hundreds of unread posts such that I’m considering just marking them all as “read” and starting afresh. My thoughts on the wonderful Beasts of the Southern Wild haven’t cohered yet; and I’m so late to seeing Public Speaking, the terrific documentary about Fran Liebowitz (truly the modern-day Dorothy Parker; she makes me scream with delight at some of her statements) … do I really have anything to add?

Last night despite my exhaustion I actually made it through all 103 wonderful minutes of Footnote, the Israeli black comedy about a father and son, both Talmudic scholars in the same department at Hebrew University. The son’s success and popularity as an intellectual — and his father’s deep-seated competitiveness and rage at being overlooked for prizes and academic rewards — were perfectly captured and utterly cringe-making. Anyone who wants to enter a Ph.D. program should see this film and consider themselves warned.

The film shows not only the supposed philosophical debates that often undergird animosities between academics, but also the ways those debates lead scholars to exact revenge on one another in the meanest, most petty of ways. The film’s director, Joseph Cedar, captures that awfulness with such precision that I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out whether he’s an academic himself — only to learn that his father was a biochemist at Hebrew University.

Which makes me think: considering how many wonderful satirical academic novels there are (James Hynes’ Publish and Perish, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, David Lodge’s Small World, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Jane Smiley’s Moo, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel: A Novel (P.S.), Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, and so many others) — why aren’t there any satirically academic films about the horrors of professorial life? Footnote is the only one I can think of.

Okay, back to moving boxes. And taking some trips to the very cool LGBT thrift store to drop off boxes of stuff we shouldn’t have brought with us. And resisting the impulse to buy things at this very nicely stocked thrift store.

Electra Woman Wednesday

I am moving house, and there’s nothing much to say about it except I reckon this is the 6th big interstate household move I’ve made (and probably 6 more temporary/ year-long moves to take fellowships).

Honestly: I feel overwhelmed with gratitude because moving isn’t stressful anymore in the way other life events cause stress. But I do feel the need for distraction. Thus, the opening sequence for the 1976 show, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl!

I don’t remember this series at all; it was a 12-minute part of The Krofft Supershow and featured these Diedre Hall and Judy Strangis as magazine writers by day, caped crusaders in a crisis. And check out those Electra-Coms on their wrists.

I love the low budget costumes, the Wonder Woman ripoff, the way all their gadgets begin with “electra”: the Electra-Change, which allows our heroes to change clothes instantly (handy!); the Electra-Strobe, which speeds up their thoughts to 1000 times normal (handy again!); the Electra-Vibe, which “creates a localized sonic field that can shatter glass or disorient an opponent who is not equipped with earplugs”; and the Electra-Degravitate, which performs the obvious. There are many more.

Which reminds me to dream of the Electra-Transport, which moves your entire house instantly and without the use of boxes, movers, and packing tape. But in the meantime, it’s back to the boxes for me.