Issue #352: How's being clever working out for you?
As a writer, I think most would call me reasonably productive. Over this year, I wrote about a 3rd of my dissertation and revised 2/3rds. I write the newsletter every week, with or without motivation or inspiration. But I am sometimes neither motivated nor inspired. I like writing. Hell, I would say I love it. But there are moments where I feel the urge to write without any sense of direction. I have too many ideas and can execute too few. How do I go from vague notion to incisive critique or clear line of argument? I write intuitively, using mimicry and repetition as key tools to polish my prose. I’m not sure I have improved as a writer over the past few years. In fact, I feel like I’ve gotten worse.
One idea has animated my thoughts this week as something I want to get across. It’s a simple point, ripe for the challenge of expressing in a compelling way. Ventriloquist dummies are scary. The idea these could be anything but threatening is absurd. They are not like clowns, which can signify in a variety of ways, Gacy be damned. No, nothing about these monstrosities are at all friendly.
In the history of fiction, there have been a lot of scary ventriloquist dummies. My first encounter was probably Night of the Living Dummy, the 1993 book from the Goosebumps series. Fair to say the cover artist cooked with this one.
To speculate idly, it feels as though the idea of their paralyzed affect combined with the snappy commentary creates a bizarre disjunction. The movement of the mouth, too, as the signal of emotive activity, is woefully incomplete without the other facial movements that make up the non-verbal element of communicative speech. The dummy is also associated with the id, often making lewd or otherwise inappropriate comments with the comic pretending to share in the offense rather than being the one who is, in fact, making the joke.
From (2022) has been going downhill after a few strong episodes in the third season, but they have retained an intriguing element: a scary ventriloquist dummy named Jasper.
There are plenty of other examples between Goosebumps and From. Child’s Play (1988) evokes it, though I think it would be scarier as a true dummy instead of an ostensibly friendly children’s doll (also, before Goosebumps). There’s Dead Silence (2007), the doll in Saw (2004). Now that I think about it horror film could stand to lean into this more.
Quick hits:
I am on a work trip to Santa Barbara and writing some portion of this newsletter on minimal sleep after a long day of flying
where am I supposed to go in Santa Barbara? Let me know newsletter warriors
Young Thug is free
He has some good tweets
I dressed like the Breakdown alien for Halloween
Erin gave unsuspecting children Smarties
Got the first Sugi book covering illustrations from the earliest part of his career… unreal
Started reading Shuumatsu no Valkyrie (2017) again, it’s good
I watched St. John’s Wort (2001), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Vertigo’s (1958) new 70mm print last week
Started watching The Diplomat (2023). I didn’t realize it was one of those quip heavy “prestige” dramady shows
Something new and something old in the video game arena: I have been playing and loving Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven (2024) and experiencing childhood joy all over again playing Chex Quest included as a mod for the new DOOM + DOOM II collection released this year
Maybe more writing on some of these bullet points next week, maybe not
If you are one of the gift recipients leading the paid subscriber high life, try out your new privileges by leaving a comment
The “Clever Girl” in Woman of the Hour
I watched Woman of the Hour (2024) this past weekend and didn’t enjoy it much. It’s not all bad and it was certainly interesting, but my Letterboxd review felt about as uncompromising as I can be about a film before considering not publishing the review at all.
My negative assessment comes down to the quality of the script. It is poor, chock-full of truisms, corporate feminist wish fulfillment, and bizarre presentism. But I also found the movie profoundly engaging for some of the ideas it deals with. Woman of the Hour advances the idea that “knowledge is power” and makes agency commensurate with knowing something.
The situating of knowledge and its vicissitudes within a text is always something that engages me. For some, like Nietzsche, knowledge has a debilitating or diminishing effect. He, of course, follows from the treatment of knowledge in the Bible, equating it to original sin, as well as Pandora’s box. Knowledge might not be as bad as all that according to Nietzsche, but he writes:
Cast away your burden!
Forget man Man forget!
The art of forgetting is divine!
If you want to fly,
be at home in the heights;
Throw your heaviest weight into the sea:
here is the sea, throw yourself into the sea!
The art of forgetting is divine! (Nietzsche’s Last Notebooks 209, adjusted translation) (originally quoted in Paradox Newsletter #299)
In Nietzsche’s view, it’s forgetting that is more essential to human subjectivity than accumulating knowledge.
Hitchcock repeatedly uses this trope and lays it out in a film title he returned to twice, first in 1934 and again in 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much. One of my favorite remarks on the question of knowledge comes from Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York (1961):
You might even be happy if you are the kind of a person who doesn’t look too closely and ask too many questions; if you are more or less insensitive to what happens to others and how the other half lives. You might even be happy in Washington, D.C. (119)
Knowledge can be petrifying, painful, or even deadly. The Woman of the Hour has a more optimistic, or naive, view of knowledge, however. For the purposes of the film, the outward display of cleverness and the possession of substantive knowledge are synonymous. Sheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick), Amy (Autumn Best), and Charlie (Kathryn Gallagher) all frustrate killer Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) with their gendered forms of cleverness. Though Charlie dies, Bradshaw and Amy both escape Rodney using a particular kind of feminine intuition transformed into knowledge — or so the movie would suggest. Their constant imperilment as women gazed upon by predatory men gives them a particular form of knowledge that is, counterintuitively, universalizing. These three women wouldn’t be able to transmit their knowledge systematically, but they all share a collective experience that underpins what they know about masculine behavior.
The particular form of knowledge, quippy cleverness, is explored in plenty of other works. One that comes to my mind often is Fight Club (1999). In the narrator’s (Edward Norton) first conversation with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the narrator talks about “single serving friends,” people with whom one strikes up a conversation with on an airplane ride. Durden calls into question the value of cleverness when he asks the narrator, “how’s that working out for you? … Being clever”:
Fight Club positions knowledge differently because, as a work, knowledge is powerful. But cleverness is superficial, covering over and prohibiting the acquisition of true knowledge, though the knowledge that the film valorizes — knowledge of self outside of the financial and bureaucratic machinery that defines a contemporary citizen — is not the knowledge Durden offers to the narrator as a replacement for the clever subject position he can no longer occupy after all his “smart” housing decorations are blown to smithereens.
If there’s an opposition between Fight Club and Woman of the Hour, it is at the level of sex/gender. Fight Club is read as a work of machismo tailor-made for so-called “film bros,” but Tyler Durden is an illusory phantom of masculinity that shows just how corrosive and impossible the masculine ideal is to achieve in its most primal form. Regardless, “cleverness” as part and parcel of feminine jouissance is dismissed in favor of some other more “enduring” forms of knowledge, unlikely the knowledge of credit card debt which is erased in the same way as the narrator’s cleverness in the face of Durden’s life on the margins.
Sheryl Bradshaw, though, knows something that is indicated by her cleverness. She is the paradigmatic “clever girl,” a line oft-repeated in cinema history because of the association between cleverness and femininity.
One could read Durden’s prodding of the narrator as particularly sexist reading his question as not “how’s being clever working out for you?” but as “how’s being a woman working out for you?” Fight Club never seeks to resolve the question. Woman of the Hour, however, suggests that being a woman works out very poorly regardless of how clever one is. But cleverness can prolong one’s life and give them some measure of power in the face of misogynist violence.
Where Woman of the Hour falters, though, is in the ideological and uncritical embrace of cleverness-as-knowledge-as-power. Following the film’s ideological underpinning, a woman can only exercise agency after sufficiently knowing something. Otherwise she is vulnerable to violence. Looking at Charlie, one of Alcala’s victims, and who by no accident has an androgynous name, her death in the logic of the film is a result of her not knowing enough.
To condition agency on possessing knowledge is not an uncompromising feminist statement. Instead, it narrows the capacity of feminine subjectivity and asserts that women’s time is best spent learning how men could hurt them. And, to throw another wrench into the symbolic logic of the film, Alcala also attempts to seduce and kill a man with whom he works, although he fails. As far as I know, Alcala the man exclusively murdered women. The specificity of the misogynistic tenor of his killings is lost in this historical revision.
Ian McDonald’s script equates cleverness with mastery. To master one’s world, one must know it first. This is a comforting idea, but unfortunately not an accurate representation of the capricious and random universe. By over-investing itself in a particularly gendered form of knowledge, Woman of the Hour misrepresents how women are imperiled by a misogynistic society and fails to capture the true tragedy of the Alcala killings. The women Alcala killed were stalked, targeted, and murdered in part because they were women. Their position of relative vulnerability comes as a result of a social structure that divests women of power. Knowledge may ameliorate that power imbalance some of the time, but it is Alcala’s twisted appropriation of masculinism, as shown in the film, that makes him the perpetrator he is.
During the dating game performance where Bradshaw and Alcala meet, Alcala says all the right things to suggest he is a “feminist ally” when in fact he is only trying to secure another victim. He works to create conditions under which he can kill, taking advantage of those who society fails to protect. No amount of knowledge would protect Alcala’s victims in the film, nor is there likely to be some other counterfactual outcome for the women he actually killed. The only person who is responsible for Alcala’s victims is Alcala himself, he was the agent who carried out the killings, the women who he targeted didn’t imperil themselves. Nor should they have to be accountable for evading the traps Alcala sets. It is society’s responsibility, however, to change the conditions that make Alcala’s actions possible, not women’s responsibility to learn enough to evade him and others like him.
Movie Theater Soda Fountain Scene Report
Believe it or not, I have been off high fructose corn syrup for the better part of the last six months. Between May and now, it has slipped into my diet only in the occasional limited edition Mountain Dew or fountain soda from a restaurant or movie theater. I used to love an extra large Coke with my gigantic popcorn at my local AMC, but it’s not worth it. Coke Zero is pretty good though, so I started to switch to that. But two weeks ago seeing Mobile Suit Gundam III: Encounters in Space (1982) I went with a wild card: Pibb Zero.
Pibb Xtra, as it’s now known, has undergone a lot of revisions. First it was “Peppo,” which occasioned a lawsuit by Dr Pepper, the drink with which Peppo was introduced to compete. From this unholy congress between capitalist proliferation and corporate litigiousness, Mr. Pibb was born.
Supposedly the change from Mr. Pibb to Pibb Xtra (which happened in 2001) was a total overhaul of the soda instead of just a name change. I don’t know about that. I also have memories of drinking actual Mr. Pibb much more recently than 2001, but that’s a case for Underunderstood.
Pibb Zero doesn’t include the weird “Xtra” suffix, which makes it a little more dignified as a drink. It’s sweetened with the same sweetener as Coke Zero, aspartame and acesulfame potassium. I have always found that combination of sweeteners to be sharp and almost spicy. It’s a pretty good complement to Pibb’s flavors.
Getting into drinking Pibb Zero is just asking to get invested in a product that will inevitably stop being distributed. I always complain that the food and drinks I like get discontinued, but I do it to myself by enjoying the soda that probably gets refilled 1/10th as often as anything in the Coke Freestyle machine other than Minute Maid.
But for now, I am embracing the Pibb Zero lifestyle.
Weekly Reading List
Jim Davis gives some interesting insight into tournament preparation for serious competitive Magic players. When I was preparing for tournaments back in high school, my “testing house” was the Miami Subs on Tennessee St.
Good song.
Good song.
Substack recently started sending out some emails regarding gift subscriptions you can opt into if you are an active reader. These are not something I am sending out myself. Substack is trying to increase adoption of their app and increase their subscription revenue (since they get a cut of every sub). My understanding is that if you opt into a gift sub, I will actually make $4.50 or whatever, so it’s much appreciated. If you are getting bombarded by these emails from Substack, however, I apologize for that.
But now is a great time, as always, to consider if you have it in your budget to subscribe. I think this newsletter is worth something. I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t. And I am hoping that even if you are satisfied with what you’re getting for free, you might feel some inclination to support my work based on the principle of its value rather than to get past a paywall. Think of it as a tip. As you saw a few weeks ago, though, I am going to be doing more and more paid exclusive newsletter segments.
Thank you for supporting whether it’s with your eyeballs or your dough. Paradox Newsletter merchandise also makes a great Christmas gift:
https://paradoxnewsletter.bigcartel.com/
Until next time.
Oh man, Chex Quest - what a nostalgia hit