Furries

I am not a furry -- I don't long to re-imagine myself as an animal. I don't own a velour suit shaped like a wolf, etc. However, as a kid I watched lots of cartoons and some anthropomorphic cartoon characters I think fueled my earliest inclinations to the damsel in distress fantasy. Here are three I can think of off the top of my head:

Gadget Hackwrench (from Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers). Yeah, a mouse. She was drawn to be captured and imperilled. Love the overalls.

Polly Purebred (from Underdog). A sort of bizarrely drawn Lois Lane of the poodle world. Despite the weirdly big head, I always wished for Riff Raff or Simon Bar Sinister to use her as bait to catch Underdog. Sometimes it actually happened.....

Callie Briggs (SWAT Kats). I don't remember SWAT Kats. I have no idea what the premise was. But I remember Callie. I saw so few episodes of this I don't even know if she was ever a damsel in distress....

BTW, sorry I have not been posting. Partly it's RL, partly it's having nothing new to say for a while. But I am still around.....

Dream casting

Even though I now basically never have time to watch TV -- or go to the movies (not that many appeal to me these days), there are still series that I would love to see turned into movies. On the adaptation front, Hollywood need to atone for the atrocious Avengers it did a few years back (Uma Thurman as Mrs Peel? No way.) I also would love to see cartoons other than trash like GI Joe or the hideous Transformers turned into live action. And before you say, "but Transformers gave us Megan Fox!" I'll just add La Fox to the list requiring atonement. (Sorry, but I find her unbearable -- even more unbearale than Jessica Alba, and that says a lot.)

Anyway, I was originally going to post my own dream casts for a few live action movies that will probably never get made, but it would take me forever to do. So I am making a virtue of my laziness and lack of time by opening it up to all: How would you cast:

Kim Possible -- Kim and Dr Mom Possible?

Josie and the Pussycats -- Josie, Valerie, and Melody?

Totally Spies -- Clover, Alex, and Sam (and Brittany if you're industrious)

What is it about rope?

In most of my RPs and stories, no matter what the circumstances or heroine, I usually end up tyign the damsel up with rope, or something like it. Even superheroines, for whom chains or something less flimsy than rope might be called for, I usually deprive of their powers or else invent some form of rope that is stronger than their powers. In other words, I am a bit of a rope snob. Don't get me wrong -- handcuffs work, and on occasion chains are fun, but I tend to prefer ropes.

There has to be something aesthetically preferable about it. It's not like rope is more effective -- it's easier to escape from ropes than, say, handcuffs, assuming they aren't a size too big. Or maybe it's more that I like the bonds to really fit the form of the damsel -- tape is a runner up to rope. Ribbons and the like also do the trick.

Maybe chains just don't hug the damsel's limbs enough. I don't know. All I know is -- I am a rope snob....

Architecture

Sorry I haven't been around too much on this blog. Part of it is RL busy-ness, part of it is that, at a result, I often don't have too much new to say. I don't feel like I should just periodically signal hey, I'm alive, just for the sake of it. Anyone who really wants to know can just email me to find that, yes, I am still here, etc.

Anyway, now that the holidays are over I have a little more time to be in a peril mood, and I was struck in one particular daydream of how much an influence the actual architecture of the locale in which (indoor) perils has on me.

The actual thought process was: I really like the look of heroines tied up around poles, and I really like them reclining at an angle, but it's really kind of hard to imagine how you could combine those two likes in one situation. Then the idea struck me of the heroine being captured in some sort of contemporary architecture with exposed slanting rafters extending to the floor, and tied to one of them.

I really like moody spaces as locales to distress damsels, but they do not at all have to be old or particularly gothic to fill the bill. They should be distinctive, and menacing in context. The damsel doesn't have to always be in a dark cellar, although that is fine of course. Some of the curvy, swooping public architecture of the last decade (some of which I think is built just to show that it can be) also serves as locales from which a tied up heroine might slide down to her doom. The absurd escalators and tubes of Roissy (CDG Airport) seems to me to have been designed by someone who should have spent his time designing damsel traps. But that's just me...

Just occurred to me that my love of railroad track perils also has this in it -- the repetitive look fo the rails and the cross ties -- much like the stud and joist of a building.....

Double standards

My last blog entry on role models made me think of double standards, especially in the US (if only because I happen to reside in the US, and am more familiar with everyday life here than elsewhere).

Here is another double standard for you – related, I think, to the double standard that allows Jerry Brookheimer to make TV in which I am subjected to a grisly murder (with lots of food colouring and Karo syrup) in the first three seconds before I can even reach the remote to shut the TV off – but in which it is offensive to women to have a plucky female character tied to the buzzsaw.

Some of you may be familiar with Philip Pullman’s sort-of children’s book series called His Dark Materials. The first book of the three was published in the UK as Northern Lights and in the US as The Golden Compass (also the title of the movie they made of it). The books are a little controversial because the author is a self-avowed atheist, and the books are seen as anti-religion in general and anti-Catholic in particular. I have my problems with some aspects of the books – having read the first one – not because he is anti-religion, more because his hostility to organized religion is so adolescent, so fundamentally trivial for all the gussying up.

But I digress. Small parts of the last book in the series were censored in the US because of references to the central character’s (a girl on the edge of puberty) emerging sexuality. Now, before we go all gangbusters on an anti-censorship rant, let’s admit that free speech has some limit, even if the right is very broad. We don’t want graphic porn in the hands of little kids, for example (well, I don’t).

But Pullman is hardly porn. So even though I really disagree with this particular example of censorship, it’s on the lack of merit of this case, rather than a general (and empty) platitude of “censorship is wrong.”

Now at the same time, this being close to Hallowe’en, one can go to any mall in my area and find specialty seasonal stores selling costumes and props for Hallowe’en for kiddies and grownups. Have you seen what they make for little kids these days? I don’t mean 18 yr olds, or even 13 year olds. I mean have you seen what they are selling for 6 year olds? Let’s just say things that in my view are highly age-inappropriate. Stuff with the same creepy tinge as the sort of outfits you’d find in very disturbing JonBenet kiddie beauty pageants.

So let me get this straight: it’s OK to dress up my first grader like a whore from the Emerald City of Oz, but it’s not ok to let my adolescent daughter read something true and accurate about her first sexual feelings. Right. And I am weird for liking damsels in distress?

Role Models

One of the hoariest reasons for the decline in DiD scenarios in mainstream media is that the role is inconsistent with female empowerment, out of touch with today’s societal roles, etc.

This is bunk. Women are still treated badly in today’s media. The only change is that they are treated far more brutally than they would in a classic serial – that’s Hollywood “realism” for you. Apparently it’s better for women in movies and TV to be horrifically murdered than imperiled and saved. Right.

Frankly, I have not had time for TV for years – and I find most of it unwatchable. It’s gruesome for the most part. And it’s not any “faster” than before. It’s actually slower – but more visually kinetic, which is something else entirely. I can process it visuals just fine –it’s not that I am an old slow geezer, and besides, I can, if needed, play video games as fast as anyone. But TV is so often just motionless vibration – and it makes me seasick to watch.

Back to roles. Women still have drastically truncated opportunities in mainstream media. How else do we explain the rise of a Megan Fox? Sure, she’s “hot” – but what exactly does she do? Even La Fox has pointed out that Michael Bay films are not exactly about the craft…..

No, girls still get killed, raped, tied up, drowned, tortured. They are either whores, or arm candy, or “bitches,” and they disappear at 35, only to reappear as wise/benevolent grandmas at, oh, 45. Yes, there is a parallel trend of Meryl Streeps et al who are making a go of it longer than other women – but in action films? Tentpole productions? TV? Forget it. How is this better than the damsel in distress as the centre of attention?

Why then is a DiD role condemned as limiting? If you look at early serials, the women were very independent and capable. Pearl White – I’ll say it – was a proto-feminist in Perils of Pauline, doing things women of the time could usually only dream about. Tell me Lois Lane is not a full, juicy character -- unless portrayed by a humourless bad-school feminist like Margot Kidder. (I am not trying to start a political debate about feminism, I am making a point about Kidder’s treatment of a great role.) The political correctness kills the character, and when you’ve turned a living, breathing character into a poster for any ideology, you’ve disenfranchised not just women, but the human spirit as a whole.

No, I think the problem with old-time DiD scenes is their escapist feel at a time of a cultural fetish of “realism” and authenticity. Even preposterous series like Lost still need to be grounded in a visual and metaphorical language of signs that are easily digestible for a docile public – visual soma. What keeps us from DiD is not the (non-existent) insult to women. It’s that it’s too hard for modern audiences to understand a female action character on TV who isn’t a cartoon.

Someone who needs the treatment...

...maybe just treatment. But no, "the treatment" would do her a lot of good. Tightly trussed up, gagged, and in an old melodramatic trap.

For those of you lucky enough to live outside the zone of US cultural imperialism (a true empire of idiocy) the photo above is a non-fake one of Kim Kardashian, whose slender claim to fame (she's the daughter of part of OJ Simpson's defence team -- er, the first one) has been parlayed into a baffling omniprescence. Since she's not much good at anything other than filling out a jumpsuit, I say we give her her own ""Perils of Kim" TV series.

Sorry for the long absence. RL has been very hectic. I hope I am around to blog more, but can't promise it near term.