{"id":328,"date":"2020-11-17T20:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-17T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=328"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:20:59","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:20:59","slug":"director-dudes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2020\/11\/17\/director-dudes\/","title":{"rendered":"Director Dudes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week I went on an accidental Charlie Kaufman binge.\u00a0\u00a0Accidental because it wasn\u2019t until watching\u00a0Synecdoche, New York<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Being John Malkovich<\/em><\/a>\u00a0back to back that I realized they were directed by the same person.\u00a0\u00a0At that point I was on a roll so I went ahead and continued with Kaufman\u2019s newest film, an adaptation of the novel\u00a0I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0I wouldn\u2019t recommend a binge like this, partially because all that melancholy building up in your system can\u2019t be good for you, and partially because you start to notice patterns \u2013 and not always good ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do like to watch movies and even the occasional \u201cfilm\u201d but I don\u2019t think I really know enough about film history and culture to be a \u201cfilm person.\u201d I did consult a film studies grad I matched with on Tinder for this, so hopefully there\u2019s some weight behind what I have to say here.  Not being a \u201cfilm person\u201d means I don\u2019t know many people who write and direct the kind of films I like, which are surreal, beautiful, cryptic things.  This leads me to dig deeper and deeper into the directors and writers I do know which are pretty much all white straight men.  This is fine if I don\u2019t think about it but the more I watch the more I     t h i n k    about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is where I ended up after watching all these Kaufman movies.\u00a0\u00a0I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the fact that pretty much every one of his films has some version of a manic pixie dream girl who is fun and quirky and more or less in love with the sad-sack depressed artist protagonist.\u00a0\u00a0And weirder than that, most of them tend to have reddish curly hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Clockwise from the top left we have Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich<\/em>, Jessie Buckley in I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things<\/em>, Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em><\/a>, and Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, New York.  <\/em>I like Kaufman\u2019s style a lot.  He blends the surreal with the mundane to great effect and his honest and heart wrenching portrayal of depression, anxiety, and human emotion is moving, but the semi-autobiographical-working-through-your-heartbreak-by-writing-a-film thing has its drawbacks.  Kaufman\u2019s women characters seem to have this therapeutic cast to them: they have their own nuances and character developments but ultimately the are The Woman That Doesn\u2019t Understand and The Woman Who Leaves. Kaufman also often writes The Unfeeling Woman, played by Katherine Keener in Being John Malkovich<\/em> and Synecdoche, New York<\/em> (Keener\u2019s character in the second film is tellingly named Adele Lack<\/em>), and by Meryl Streep in Adaptation<\/em><\/a>.  This is a woman who despite being completely justified in wanting to live her own life, is branded permanently by the sin of turning away from the protagonist\u2019s affection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Lynch, whom I also love, is his own can of worms.\u00a0\u00a0Lynch has his own symbolic language which is loads of fun to unravel, but the way he incorporates women into it raises more eyebrows than I currently have on my body.\u00a0\u00a0Specifically, David Lynch likes to show binary opposition (not very queer of you David) by casting a dark haired actress as a foil against the primary blonde actress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here we have, from top to bottom Lara Flynn Boyle and Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks, <\/em>Sheryl Lee playing both Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddy also in Twin Peaks,<\/em> Judith Anna Roberts and Charlotte Stewart in Eraserhead, <\/em>Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mullholland Drive,<\/em> and Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern in Blue Velvet.<\/em>  Like, I get it, it\u2019s all cryptic and symbolic \u2013 there are points where a dark haired character will put on a blonde wig and vice versa but it\u2019s also pretty fetishistic.  Like in most cases both foil characters are in love with the same man, usually the protagonist, and the dark haired character usually has an air of erotic foreign-ness and is ALWAYS subservient to their blonde counterpart which, if the racism bells in your head weren\u2019t already going off that should ring them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could read any number of sexual fantasies and Freudian bullshit into these choices from Lynch and Kaufman, but I think it ultimately boils down the fact that these are two heterosexual men putting every single artistic brain cell together to figure out what women are.  I imagine them at their typewriters being like \u201cdo women with different hair colors have different personalities?\u201d  \u201cAre women that aren\u2019t attracted to me inherently evil?\u201d \u201cCan a woman be anything but white?\u201d  Seriously it\u2019s time for the Cast A Black Person Challenge boys.  Even the lesbian plotlines in Mullholland Drive<\/em> and Being John Malkovich <\/em>are shot for the pleasure of the male viewer, the latter being literally watched from the sadboi protagonist\u2019s viewpoint while he is trapped behind the eyes of a young girl like some kind of torture porn.  For me, it\u2019s all just a couple shades away from \u201cAnd then she breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings me back to my central issue: I don\u2019t really know many directors, and in an industry that continues to be dominated by white dudes I\u2019m not sure what to do about it.  So if you find yourself in the same boat, here are some films and other things I\u2019ve found by folks who aren\u2019t men:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Natasha Lyonne is just so fucking amazing.  She has this short film Cabiria, Charity, Chastity<\/em><\/a> I watch all the time.  It stars Maya Rudolph speaking made up Italian and scratches my every itch.  I guess it\u2019s better when you get all the film references she\u2019s making but I still love it as an ignorant plebian.  Also Russian Doll<\/em><\/a> SLAPS if you haven\u2019t already watched it.<\/li>
  2. Janelle Mon\u00e1e has been here writing \u201cemotion pictures\u201d for our eyeballs for a full decade.  Dirty Computer<\/em><\/a> still rocks my world a year and a half later.<\/li>
  3. Solange Knowles, who is excellent at literally everything she does, put the director\u2019s cut of When I Get Home<\/em><\/a> on YouTube and it makes me want to move to Texas which is not something I would say without a really good reason.<\/li>
  4. The Wachowski\u2019s have been making the queerest existential sci-fi your brain can even handle, Sense8<\/em><\/a>and Cloud Atlas<\/em><\/a> are sexy and humanist and inspiring.  People also have been re-watching The Matrix<\/em><\/a>as a trans allegory, and though I haven\u2019t personally done that it sounds like a worthy pursuit.<\/li>
  5. I\u2019ve mentioned her here before but I love Niki Lindroth von Bahr.  You can watch her short film Bath House<\/em><\/a> for free.<\/li>
  6. Rebecca Sugar is an icon and you should just watch Steven Universe<\/em><\/a> without asking any questions okay?<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Happy watching! Here\u2019s a pic of David Lynch with Bonnie Aarons on the set of\u00a0Mullholland Drive<\/em>\u00a0that always warms my heart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter Last week I went on an accidental Charlie Kaufman binge.\u00a0\u00a0Accidental because it wasn\u2019t until watching\u00a0Synecdoche, New York\u00a0and\u00a0Being John Malkovich\u00a0back to back that I realized they were directed by the same person.\u00a0\u00a0At that point I was on a roll so I went ahead and continued with Kaufman\u2019s newest… Continue reading Director Dudes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22,17,26],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digestable","tag-culture","tag-fiction","tag-queer","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}