Pop Smart – Why Pop? Something of a Column Manifesto
Like any other self-respecting proto-emo, counter-culture, pseudo-intellectual Gen Y-er, I was addicted to miserable movies in my formative years. I watched with perverse pleasure, tears streaming down my face, revelling in the much-needed catharsis, as Björk was hanged for shooting a thief in Dancer in the Dark, as Jennifer Connelly performed degrading sex acts for drugs in Requiem for a Dream, as Marina De Van ripped off and played with bits of her own flesh in Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin). People would ask, “How can you watch that stuff?” and I’d grin wildly, blow Marlboro Light smoke in their face and say, “That’s life, man.” Unlike most of my generation, however, there was a more insidious reason for my attraction to this stuff – I had an undiagnosed psychological disorder – and in the years that followed, as my life became more and more like Lars Von Trier and David Lynch got together and brainstormed an existence for a fat girl from Yorkshire, I found sad films harder and harder to watch. I became a television junkie. My particular poison of choice was either highbrow drama – Six Feet Under for example – or my true addiction, the dark secret of a literature graduate, urban fantasy. I devoured season after season of anything involving Joss Whedon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer saved my life. It did not lack that same misery I was trying to avoid but for every horrifying incident – murder, rape, suicide, addiction – we got a reason and we got a resolution. Speculative fiction, in particular the episodic kind, became a lifeline for me. It taught me real lessons, it asked question and answered them, it showed me ways out and ways in and ways to not want to kill myself.
This brings me to the focus of this column – popular culture. Not art, not politics, not academia, not literature – although many of the things I will discuss could be described by fans like me as artistic, political, academic or literary. This column is about television, music, film and fiction. It is about me looking at those things from my queer feminist perspective and ranting/musing thereon.
Last night I went with my local feminist group to see Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, a British indie drama about a man struggling with rage and a woman who tries to help him but ends up needing his help instead. It was an experience that reminded me exactly why I have avoided such films for the last few years and it left me wondering what purpose films like this serve and if a depressing film is just, well, a film that depresses you. Do films, especially depressing ones, have the same power to educate, inspire and entertain that television shows, especially fantastical ones, do? A film runs two hours, give or take, and is consumed in one sitting. A television show runs about twenty hours – and that’s just the first season! – with breaks between episodes. We get to know characters and settings over time. Things go wrong and lessons are learned and put into action. We get to see that life can be awful at times, but nothing is insurmountable. Shows like Six Feet Under depict a lot of extremely heavy shit, but it unfolds over time and we get to see people deal with it. If a film resolves everything by the end, unless it is very artfully done, it will not ring true. For a dramatic film to be realistic it almost must end on a downer.
As I walked out of Tyrannosaur I felt sick, angry, disturbed and most of all, impotent. I felt like I had been attacked, like I had been the victim of something horrible. This is probably the reaction Considine hoped for. The film is well directed, perfectly paced, extremely well acted, and is obviously going for intense realism. It would be easy to assume that writer and director Considine hoped to outrage his audience, to galvanise the nation against the injustices committed by men against women. This, in fact, is what it did do for some of the members of my feminist group. I don’t think this was his intention, however, and the aim seemed to me to be to make a more complex, academic point about the essentialist assumption that violence is synonymous with maleness. I think that Tyrannosaur aimed to highlight the capacity we all have to act on feelings of rage and powerlessness. From a feminist point of view, this made it interesting and thought-provoking. We all had a good old-fashioned debate in the bar afterwards. But as a human, as a body and a mind that sat in that seat and stared at that screen, and then had to go home and live her life, I wish I had never seen it. Without going into anything spoilerific, I can’t really convey just how harrowing the film is. Luckily this article isn’t really about that. It is about the fact that this gritty, political film made me want to walk out of the theatre. It made me wish I had never had sex in my life and made me feel ashamed and guilty and just really uncomfortable.
Those who still like to watch the miserable movies I now avoid like the plague would disagree with me here. They would say that we are on this earth to learn about the atrocities that go on and try to stop or even prevent them. They would say that it is the responsibility of everyone on the planet to know what is going on in the world and what they can do about it. I say I’m on this earth to survive. I say movies like Tyrannosaur don’t help me do that.
As this column goes on, you will come to see that I am not attempting to speak for any community. I am queer. I am a feminist. I am a penniless writer. I am a fat beautiful mess. My experiences have shaped who I am and how I see the world, just like any other human being. I don’t hope for feminists to all get on the same page or for us all to dance to the monotonous beat of one drum. I want to encourage individual expression and the unsilencing of voices. For many who view Tyrannosaur, it will have a positive effect. They will have the internal resources to compartmentalise, to process their feelings about the film in a healthy way. I, and I don’t think I’m alone, lack those resources. I am going to stick with pop.
