In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment or abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of that eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a woman or a man simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.
As for the La Leche League, they are hardly prepared to take up the cudgels in the bruising culture wars. Awash with the milk of human kindness, they are probably stuck in nurturance mode. Naturally, they snap to attention at the sound of squalling babies, no matter what their age. It’s up to literature professors and writers to defend the integrity of English, which like all languages changes slowly and organically over time. But with so many humanities departments swallowed up in the post-structuralist tar pit, the glorious medium of English may have to fight the gender commissars on its own.
* [Jonathan V. Last, interview, “Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror,” interview with Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, www.weeklystandard.com, June 15, 2017.]
28
MOVIES, ART, AND SEX WAR*
It’s open sex war—a grisly death match that neither men nor women will win.
Ever since The New York Times opened the floodgates last October with its report about producer Harvey Weinstein’s atrocious history of sexual harassment, there has been a torrent of accusations, ranging from the trivial to the criminal, against powerful men in all walks of life.
But no profession has been more shockingly exposed and damaged than the entertainment industry, which has posed for so long as a bastion of enlightened liberalism. Despite years of pious lip service to feminism at award shows, the fabled “casting couch” of studio-era Hollywood clearly remains stubbornly in place.
The big question is whether the present wave of revelations, often consisting of unsubstantiated allegations from decades ago, will aid women’s ambitions in the long run or whether it is already creating further problems by reviving ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, volatile, and vindictive.
My philosophy of equity feminism demands removal of all barriers to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women in the workplace. Treating women as more vulnerable, virtuous, or credible than men is reactionary, regressive, and ultimately counterproductive.
Complaints to the human resources department after the fact are no substitute for women themselves drawing the line against offensive behavior—on the spot and in the moment. Working-class women are often so dependent on their jobs that they cannot fight back, but there is no excuse for well-educated, middle-class women to elevate career advantage or fear of social embarrassment over their own dignity and self-respect as human beings. Speak up now, or shut up later! Modern democracy is predicated on principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.
The performing arts may be inherently susceptible to sexual tensions and trespasses. During the months of preparation for stage or movie productions, day and night blur, as individuals must melt into an ensemble, a foster family that will disperse as quickly as it cohered. Like athletes, performers are body-focused, keyed to fine-tuning of muscle reflexes and sensory awareness. But unlike athletes, performers must explore and channel emotions of explosive intensity. To impose rigid sex codes devised for the genteel bourgeois office on the dynamic performing arts will inevitably limit rapport, spontaneity, improvisation, and perhaps creativity itself.
Similarly, ethical values and guidelines that should structure the social realm of business and politics do not automatically transfer to art, which occupies the contemplative realm shared by philosophy and religion. Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, as I demonstrated in my first book, Sexual Personae, the impulse or compulsion toward art making is often grounded in ruthless aggression and combat—which is partly why there have been so few great women artists.
Take director Roman Polanski, for example, whose private life has evidently been squalid and contemptible. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded as a guardian of industry reputation in 1927, would be perfectly justified in expelling him. But no sin or crime by Polanski the man will ever reduce the towering achievement of Polanski the artist, from his starkly low-budget Knife in the Water (the first foreign film I saw in college) through masterworks like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown.
The case of Woody Allen, who began his career as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian, is quite different. Polanski’s chilly world-view descends from European avant-garde movements like Surrealism and existentialism. In a sinister cameo in Chinatown, Polanski sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose with a switchblade knife. Allen, however, in his onscreen persona of lovable nebbish, seductively ingratiated himself with audiences. Hence the current wave of disillusion with Allen and his many fine films emanates from a sense of deception and betrayal, including among some actors who once felt honored to work with him.
It was overwhelmingly men who created the machines and ultra-efficient systems of the industrial revolution, which in turn emancipated women. For the first time in history, women have gained economic independence and no longer must depend on fathers or husbands for survival. But many women seem surprised and unnerved by the competitive, pitiless forces that drive the modern professions, which were shaped by entrepreneurial male bonding. It remains to be seen whether those deep patterns of mutually bruising male teamwork, which may date from the Stone Age, can be altered to accommodate female sensitivities without reducing productivity and progress.
Women’s discontent and confusion are being worsened by the postmodernist rhetoric of academe, which asserts that gender is a social construct and that biological sex differences don’t exist or don’t matter. Speaking from my lifelong transgender perspective, I find such claims absurd. That most men and women on the planet experience and process sexuality differently, in both mind and body, is blatantly obvious to any sensible person.
The modern sexual revolution began in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, when African-American dance liberated the body and when scandalous Hollywood movies glorified illicit romance. For all its idealistic good intentions, today’s #MeToo movement, with its indiscriminate catalog of victims, is taking us back to the Victorian archetypes of early silent film, where mustache-twirling villains tied damsels in distress to railroad tracks.
A Catholic backlash to Norma Shearer’s free love frolics and Mae West’s wicked double entendres finally forced strict compliance with the infamous studio production code in 1934. But ironically, those censorious rules launched Hollywood’s supreme era, when sex had to be conveyed by suggestion and innuendo, swept by thrilling surges of romantic music.
The witty, stylish, emancipated women of 1930s and ’40s movies liked and admired men and did not denigrate them. Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Lena Horne, Rosalind Russell, and Ingrid Bergman had it all together onscreen in ways that make today’s sermonizing women stars seem taut and strident. In the 1950s and ’60s, austere European art films attained a stunning sexual sophistication via magnetic stars like Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig, and Catherine Deneuve.
The movies have always shown how elemental passions boil beneath the thin veneer of civilization. By their power of intimate close-up, movies reveal the subtleties of facial expression and the ambiguities of mood and motivation that inform the alluring rituals of sexual attraction.
But movies are receding. Many young people, l
ocked to their miniaturized cellphones, no longer value patient scrutiny of a colossal projected image. Furthermore, as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.
Endless sexual miscommunication and bitter rancor lie ahead. But thanks to the miracle of technology, most of the great movies of Hollywood history are now easily accessible—a collective epic of complex emotion that once magnificently captured the magic and mystique of sex.
* [“Camille Paglia on Movies, #MeToo and Modern Sexuality: ‘Endless, Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead’ ” The Hollywood Reporter, February 27, 2018.]
LITERATURE
29
THE UNBRIDLED LUST FOR BLURBS*
Two pressing ethical issues need to be addressed by the publishing industry. First is the solicitation of advance blurbs for new books, a corrupt practice that chiefly afflicts the United States and that has grown wildly out of control over the past twenty years. This, in turn, has led to extravagant over-reliance on sending out costly unsolicited manuscripts.
Pre-publication endorsements have long outlived their usefulness. No informed person takes them seriously because of their tainted history of shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole. A string of breathless blurbs on a book is ultimately counterproductive, since it betrays the publisher’s lack of confidence in the project, as well as the tin ear and general ineptitude of the publicity department. And the luminaries who turn out inflated blurb after blurb are hacks who give prostitution a bad name.
As an unknown and unpublished writer with a long, quirky manuscript, I had little power to influence the elegant production of my first book, Sexual Personae, released by Yale Press in 1990. I did make my feelings known about the loathsomeness of advance blurbs, but I don’t know whether that affected the press’s decision to use just a single dust-jacket endorsement—from my dissertation director, Harold Bloom. What I find objectionable is log-rolling and influence-peddling among a network of cronies whose personal associations aren’t honestly revealed in blurb or text. In the case of Sexual Personae, the very first words of the acknowledgments page explicitly cite Bloom for his support through two decades of career disasters.
Thanks to the success of Sexual Personae, I am now able to demand that my book contracts contain a clause forbidding the use of advance blurbs. I appeal to other authors and their agents to do likewise. Advance blurbing is legitimate, in my opinion, when the endorser is paying homage to some longstanding artistic or intellectual influence. Publishers’ use of excerpts from book reviews in the public domain for ads and paperback editions is, of course, both desirable and proper.
The unbridled lust for provocative advance blurbs has led to a second horror—the dunning of potential endorsers with an avalanche of promotional mailings. Since my relatively recent arrival on the scene, I have become all too aware of the maniacal internal engines of American publishing. Because my work touches on so many subjects, I have had to fight back mountains of sometimes tediously inappropriate material, which has overwhelmed the limited facilities of my small university and generally made life hell.
A recent exasperating incident was the last straw. After a harried morning of teaching, I stopped by my office to find a gigantic package from a major New York publisher enthroned on my chair, an unsolicited manuscript so massive that it had pierced the packaging, scattering its ashy innards all over the rug. Furious, I immediately called the editor and vice president who had sent it and denounced him for his intrusion into my professional life, as well as for his thoughtless exploitation of staff, his and mine, who must do all the actual copying, packing, and transportation of these monstrous parcels, dispatched at the whim of an impractical literary elite.
Slamming the phone down, I then called the company president and left a heated message condemning this folly and extravagance. In a period of economic constraints, unsolicited manuscripts are a criminal waste of publishers’ assets, which should be diverted instead into authors’ royalties and appallingly low staff salaries. A letter of inquiry containing a return reply postcard can cheaply determine whether someone wants to review a manuscript or not. Unsolicited manuscripts kill trees, choke the mails, infuriate recipients, and swell landfills.
Smart, shrewd publicity does not rely on phony or extorted blurbs. I am fortunate to have had three bestselling books produced by a brilliant collaborative team at Vintage Books. When there is a shrinking audience for serious books, it is vital for publishers to attract, develop, and support a cultivated and sophisticated staff. Too many publishers lurch between sloth and frenzy in their quest for the big, splashy bestseller. But there is no substitute for taste, imagination, scruples, and good old-fashioned common sense.
* [“My Say,” guest editorial, Publishers Weekly, June 3, 1996.]
30
TEACHING SHAKESPEARE TO ACTORS*
Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? An actor. No aristocrat, such as Sir Francis Bacon or the earl of Oxford, could have produced these nearly forty plays, which show such intimate knowledge of the demands and dynamics of ensemble performance. When Shakespeare was active in London, theater was borderline disreputable, denounced from the pulpit by Puritan preachers. Because of issues of public hygiene and crowd control, municipal authorities eventually forced the theaters outside the city limits—to the South Bank of the Thames, where Shakespeare’s company built the Globe Theatre. While aristocrats attended plays and even sponsored theater companies, they could never have inhabited and learned from that brash underworld, from its cramped, ramshackle back-stages to the volatile streets and seedy inns and taverns. Shakespeare was a popular entertainer who knew how to work a crowd. His daring shifts in tone, juxtaposing comedy with tragedy; his deft weaving of a main plot with multiple subplots; his restless oscillation from talk to action to song and dance: this fast pace and variety-show format were the tricks of a veteran actor adept at seizing the attention of the chattering groundlings who milled around the jutting stage of open-air theaters.
My approach to teaching Shakespeare departs from the norm because most of my four decades as a classroom teacher have been spent at art schools—first Bennington College and then the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, which became the University of the Arts after a merger with its neighbor, the Philadelphia College of Art. Many of my students have been theater majors, some already with a professional resumé. In the United States, Shakespeare is usually taught as a reading experience, but my Shakespeare course is closer to a practicum, even though students neither recite nor perform in it. I approach the plays from a production angle, with stress on the range of interpretive choices available to an actor in each speech or scene. More academically structured universities have often offered Shakespeare as a large lecture course breaking out into weekly seminars led by graduate students. Students would be generally expected to read a play a week, thus sampling a third of the Shakespeare canon over one semester. That forced-march syllabus may be useful for English majors, but it does not work for actors, who must engage with the text on a far more concrete level. In guiding actors through Shakespeare, the teacher operates like an auto mechanic, taking an engine apart and showing how it goes back together again. Each internal function and connection must be grasped tangibly, as a sensory datum and not just a mental construct. Thus five Shakespeare plays have proved to be more than enough in my course, and it is still a struggle to cover them adequately. My goal is to give the actors a portable system for engaging with any of the plays, should they have the good fortune to encounter them in their careers. After two opening lecture classes, where I survey the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in art, science, economics, and politics, I turn to sequential line-by-line analysis of the plays, which occupies the rest of the semester.
Though they may have read one or several Shakespeare plays in high school, most young American actors basical
ly come to Shakespeare cold. He is an import, trailing arty clouds of glory. In Great Britain, in contrast, Shakespeare represents history and tradition, stretching a thousand years back to early medieval kings and warriors. Many of his characters, from Lear and Macbeth to Richard II and Henry V, step straight out of royal annals, though Shakespeare enlarged, invented, and re-imagined at will. Despite ominous slippage these days through competition from mass media and video games, most British audiences know Shakespeare’s plays well, having seen and performed in them at school and town events since childhood. Sophisticated theatergoers in Britain are finely attuned to every innovation, even the fleeting shading of a syllable. In the United States, no Shakespeare production, even on a college campus, can assume that more than a fraction of the audience is thoroughly familiar with the play or understands most of the dialogue. Hence the American actor has an immense responsibility for communication to the audience—a task hampered by the possibility that he or she may never have seen a live performance of Shakespeare. There are three major areas that deserve special attention from actors studying Shakespeare: language, action, and politics.
LANGUAGE
Confronted with students of widely varied academic backgrounds, a teacher must break through the sometimes paralyzing reverence that surrounds Shakespeare in the United States. His often archaic vocabulary, encrusted with editorial footnotes, can be intimidating, especially to young actors working out dialogue. Thus one must stress that Shakespeare was writing at the dawn of modern English, when the language was still in flux. He was making up words and usages as he went along, so successfully that many of them ended up in dictionaries, when those were first codified in the eighteenth century. What this suggests is that much of Shakespeare’s audience too may have had only a dim idea of what was happening onstage. His actors conveyed thought and emotion through tone, rhythm, and gesture. It was a period that valued virtuoso shows of verbal facility for their own sake; characters in Shakespeare are sometimes seized by torrents of words so urgent and turbulent that the speaker seems possessed. Furthermore, Shakespeare often engineers lively and at times comic effects by bouncing plain, blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables off the fancy polysyllabic vocabulary, derived from Greek and Latin, that had been brought to Britain by the Norman conquest.
Provocations Page 22
