Zero Bland Thirty

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

After a mind-numbing two and a half  hours of Zero Dark Thirty last night, I came away with a single piece of information:  Jessica Chastain has amazing hair.

chastainThat red mane stays toss-worthily silky even in the deserts of Afghanistan.  The dust clouds raised by helicopters landing right in front of her can’t dull her plastic glossiness.  Nor can the sight and sounds of torture alter the uncanny blandness of her expression.

The movie’s much-talked-about scenes of torture are peculiarly sanitized:  shown, but not shown.  There is no real sense of agony or degradation.  The chief torturer’s lines are a bunch of clichés straight out of the Hollywood B-movie playbook.  And the effect of torture on both victim and perpetrator?  So far as this movie is concerned, non-existent.

And this is what’s being touted as some kind of breakthrough for women?  It’s hardly news that there are women CIA analysts, or women movie directors.  And after seeing the infamous photos of Private Lynddie England at Abu Ghraib in 2004, do you really want to join the chorus of “Wow, look, a woman torturer!”

Zero Dark Thirty is a movie with zero point of view.  It has no engagement with any of the political and ethical issues it indicates but never explores.  Despite its subject matter, it is, in the end, a movie as bland as its star.  Its “reality-TV” lens on the slow accretion of intelligence work is merely confusing.  And I suspect director Kathryn Bigelow knew this, interspersing moments of ham-fisted emoting to keep her audience from nodding off.

All of which raises the question of why this movie was made at all.  A question whose answer apparently lies in the swell of orchestral music toward the end, signaling American triumphalism.

But my reaction was more of a shrug.

“We” killed bin-Laden, true.  And…?

Filed under: ugliness, US politics, war, women | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Mary: No Illusions

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

First, ignore the cover, which makes it look as though Colm Tóibín’s new novel is the usual sentimental rehash of the familiar Virgin Mary story.  I have no idea how Scribner’s could have gone with this cover.  Or why Tóibín allowed them to do so.  Because The Testament of Mary is quite the opposite.  It’s bitter, it’s angry, and it’s profoundly moving.

What Tóibín has done is what I would have loved to be able to do in my book Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography.  In fact when I finished that book, I did play with the idea of writing a gospel of Mary.  I’m glad Tóibín’s done it instead.  Far better a writer than I, he has made her so achingly human that even as you read, mesmerized, his clear, cold-eyed prose makes you want to weep.  I have no idea how he does this, but I’m glad he does.

He writes in the voice of Mary as she looks back, her own death nearing. You could say it’s the voice of a disillusioned Mary, but this woman has never had any illusions. Instead, she’s transcendently clear-eyed.

Among many other things, this short, almost terrifyingly lucid novel is a brilliant commentary on how “history” is constructed.  Mary watches in dismay as the disciples set about creating their own version of her son’s life and death.  They “interview” her as a matter of obligation, but can’t hide their frustration when she refuses to endorse their manufactured memories.  She sees them as almost threatening presences, enforcers of their constructed view of things.  She feels “the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief,” along with “their efforts to make simple sense of things that are not simple.”

But what carries this novel above all is the sheer beauty of the writing — the extraordinary voice, the lambent clarity of it.  You find that you want to read it as slowly as possible.  You start marking passage after passage.  Like this on the first page:

I cannot say more than I can say.  And I know how deeply this disturbs them and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.  I have no further need of smiling.  Just as I had no further need for tears.

or this, which is kind of perfect for this time of year, at least in the northern hemisphere:

Now that the days are shorter and the nights are cold, when I look out of the windows I have begun to notice something that surprises me and holds me.  There is a richness in the light.  It is as if, in becoming scarce, in knowing that it has less time to spread its gold over where we are, it lets loose something more intense, something that is filled with a shivering clarity.  And then when it begins to fade, it seems to leave raked shadows on everything.  And during that hour, the hour of ambiguous light, I feel safe to slip out and breathe the dense air when the colors are fading and the sky seems to be pulling them in, calling them home, until gradually nothing stands out in the landscape.

Like that light, this novel is extraordinary.  It has a luminous quality that I can’t quite explain.  But if the sentimentalization of faith sometimes makes you ache for the disillusionment of atheism, read this book.

Filed under: art, Christianity, women | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

A Tale of Two Countries

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Compare these two news reports from October 26.  The first, from France:

The lower house of the French parliament voted on Friday to fully reimburse all abortions and to make contraception free for minors from the age of 15 to 18.  France’s national medical insurance pays for abortions for minors and the poor, while other women are reimbursed for up to 80 percent of the procedure’s cost…  Contraception is partly reimbursed.  The bill now goes to the Senate, where it is likely to pass. [AP]

A safe bet:  with free and easily available contraception, there’ll be far fewer abortions in France.  And with free and safe abortions, there’ll be far fewer unwanted children born into poverty and negligence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Republican party sees any form of national health insurance as some kind of dire Communist plot against America, and plans to scrap Medicare.  Its official platform calls for a ban on all abortion except in cases of incest and armed rape (and there are a ton of Republicans who want to ban it even then), and it is intent on shutting down the country’s largest provider of contraceptive advice and services:

Planned Parenthood filed a new lawsuit on Friday over a Texas rule that bars its clinics from a state health program for low-income women because the organization performs abortions…  In the past two years, conservative Republicans in more than a dozen states have taken steps to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. [UPI]

What puzzles me about the French bill:  why it seems to exclude girls under the age of 15.

What puzzles me about the American elections:  how any self-respecting woman could even conceive of voting Republican.  Or any man with a conscience.

Filed under: US politics, women | Tagged: , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

‘Legitimate Rape’ – The Video

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Remember how Todd Akin thinks you can’t get pregnant if you’re “legitimately raped“?  Best comment yet is this satire on TV pharmaceutical ads for “feminine products.”  Presented with a megawatt Republican smile.

(Do read the small print at the end.  This idiocy isn’t just Akin’s;  the whole Republican party has gone totally Neanderthal.)

Worst comment yet:  Polls show Akin currently trailing in the Missouri senatorial race by 1%.  Yes, all of one percent.  Way to go, Missouri.

Filed under: absurd, fundamentalism, sanity, women | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Neanderthals in D.C.

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Don’t you just love it when politicians say: “I mis-spoke”?

Republican congressman Todd Akin’s breathtakingly Neanderthal assertion that women’s bodies automatically prevent pregnancy if they’re victims of what he calls “legitimate rape” — his argument against allowing abortion even in cases of rape — has brought suitably righteous wrath down upon him.  Today he says he “mis-spoke.”  Though he doesn’t say exactly how.

So here’s what I’m guessing is Akin’s’ un-mis-spoken version:

Look, we all know that women lie.  Jesus Christ, they lie all the time.  What’s a guy to do?  So she’s a little drunk, okay, and she’s saying ‘No,’ okay, but you know she doesn’t mean it, because women never do, so you give her what she wants and then the next morning what does she do but cry rape?  That, my friends, is what I mean by illegitimate rape.

To be legitimate, it’d damn well better be violent.  At knifepoint or gunpoint.  And those Wahhabi or Taliban types or whatever they call themselves out there in Afghanistan and whatnot have a good point:  either you’ve got four witnesses that she was violently raped or forget it, she’s just covering her ass by lying.  And she’s a little whore to boot.  Serves her right, is what I say.

Fact is, if she gets pregnant, you can be just about one hundred percent sure she wasn’t really raped, because I know some wonderful doctors who assure me that women’s bodies are like that:  you know, they’re such conniving bitches, they can control whether they get pregnant or not.  If they don’t want, they just shut down.  Something in their bodies just switches off.  Factory’s closed, know what I mean?

No I haven’t checked their medical credentials, and I can’t tell you their names off the cuff, but I can tell you they’re God-fearing Christian doctors, all highly recommended by one of the one hundred pastors who’ve endorsed my campaign for senator for this great state of Missouri — pastors like that good man in Florida, Terry Jones, total victim of the Muslim-loving bend-over-backwards politically-correct liberal east-coast media elite.

These doctors, they’ve got Christian ethics, so they’re not about to let some hysterical woman who went and got herself pregnant worm her way out of it with an abortion.  They know that if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she doesn’t.  If she does want to — well, there’s lots of guys out there who can testify to having been tricked into marriage by some bitch who went and got herself pregnant.  Am I right or am I right, guys?  Hey?  Y’know what I mean?

What’s that?  The Centers for Disease Control say that over 32,000 women a year get pregnant as a result of rape?  Well there’s big government for you.  The CDC will be one of the first government-funded institutions to be abolished when my pals Romney and Ryan get into the White House.  We’ll close that bunch of liberal pseudo-scientists down.

So yeah, those woman who really are raped — legitimately raped — I guess one or two might have their bodies let them down and somehow get pregnant.  But hey, nobody asked them to go and get raped.  And we can’t go allowing them to have abortions like a get-out-of-jail-free card.  That’d be wrong, my friends.  Wrong in the eyes of the Lord.

Goddammit they’re gonna have those kids and raise ‘em, whether they want to or not.  And don’t let them think we’re gonna help them.  We’re going to shut down all those programs that allow single mothers to freeload off decent hard-working Christian citizens of this country who have the good sense not to and get themselves raped.  We’re going to bring decency back to America, my friends.  We’re going to bring ethics back to America.  God bless America.

Filed under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, ugliness, US politics, women | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

“Do You See Religion on my Chest?”

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Am running this because this woman is dynamite.  Am running it because I so admire her dignity and guts and warmth and honesty.  Am running it because after seeing this video, I am in love with her.

It’s a superb response to the whole miserable outing of the Susan G. Komen Foundation (the pink ribbons and pink teddy bears breast-cancer-cure people)  as patently anti-women.  Komen’s directors revealed the astonishing scope of their hypocrisy (and fraud) when they decided to defund Planned Parenthood’s breast-cancer screening — a decision made for clearly right-wing religious-political reasons.   Under the pressure of public disgust, they have since said they’ve reversed their decision — but for this year only.)

“Do you see religion on my chest?” Linda asks in  this video.  “Do you see politics on my chest?”   And she concludes with the perfect last line.

Filed under: Christianity, sanity, women | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

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