Off the prompt "cuddles."

Okay so.

I love the Mission Impossible movies.

Look, you don't need to be with me on this, they are purest Velveeta, but I do, I love them dearly. With all sorts of varied caveats but frankly? they keep surprising me by not sucking as much as I was expecting on assorted social justice scales, and actually, that means someone involved is making an effort. Hollywood movies don't do better than average on accident.

These movies are really iffy on Bechdel. (Maybe 4 passes? I'll check when I go again tomorrow, it's possible that there's lines exchanged between the female Agent Carter and the female assassin Moreau that aren't regarding dude Hanaway. Lolnope, Carter and Moreau don't really actually talk at all, despite having screen time together, sigh. But if you toss out the subrule where the female characters have to be named, you could make an argument for MI3, where Julia is informed by a female guest that her sister has arrived, and then where she exchanges greetings with her sister before her sister is like "so you're marrying tom cruise?" And then she also tells her sister that "Mom's dying to see you." Clearly Tom Cruise is not the important part of that conversation for them.) However, there's always a female agent on the team, sometimes more than one, like in the first mission in the first Mission Impossible movie, which had Sarah Davies, Hannah Williams, and Claire Phelps. There's always at least one agent of color--Luther, who appears in all 4 films and is on team in 3 of them, is black, and Jane Carter in MI4 and Nyah Nordoff-Hall in MI2 are multiracial black/white; Zhen Lei in MI3 is multiracial Vietnamese/white.

And the primary villain is never a scary brown person or a woman. The first MI film has some problems declaring who, exactly, its villain is--I mean, you could argue for Max, since she's the criminal trying to buy the list of agent names and assignments, but they make it so hard to dislike her, when she's played by Vanessa Redgrave and helps Ethan out and everything. (And then there's the side issue about Claire which... okay, in my AU, Claire doesn't die. Also she killed Jim. Although it looked like a suicide. Murder? There was no murder here. Whatchutalkinbout. Let's just leave it like that, okay. My AU is an AU with less death, although obviously not no death. Also I saved Lindsey Farris.) But seriously. MI3 tried to fake us out with Laurence Fishburne, but no, actually, every time, the main villain is a white dude.

Right now we are at: way, way better than I ever thought they would be.

I mean, let's be real, the main character is is also a white dude, these things are unapologetic Tom Cruise vehicles, but do I watch them for Tom Cruise? I do not. (Okay, I do a little. I watch them for Tom Cruise getting the shit kicked out of him.) Fun fact about the Mission Impossible movie franchise: it basically exists because Tom Cruise fanboyed at Paramount until they let him have it. And you know, basically fund it out of his own pockets. Other fun fact: Tom Cruise loves stunts. Basically he gets cast and crew and funding together based on A LIST OF BEAUTIFUL LOCATIONS AROUND THE GLOBE WITH TALL THINGS FOR HIM TO JUMP OFF OF and then later on, sometimes as they are shooting, they write a script justifying why he needs to do so. You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Brad Bird, director of the last one, joined fairly late in preproduction, and kept bugging producer JJ Abrams for a script. After several times ducking out of it, Abrams admitted they didn't have a script, they had about six scripts, all different. There is a subplot of the film about a dude Ethan breaks out of prison that they didn't write in until they were shooting at the prison. The two set pieces they had set at the time Bird was bugging Abrams about the script were the Burj and the carpark. Oh Tom Cruise.

Back to not-Tom Cruise features of these films.

Have I mentioned how much I love Luther Stickell? Okay, so it's 1996. You're making an action thriller spy movie. Do you cast a big black dude as a) a demolitions expert b) a hand-to-hand fighter c) a hacker? It is totally against (limited, omg, Hollywood is so fucked up) type that Luther is the hacker. And, just, he's always the one to call Ethan on his bullshit. "That look in your eye is a pain in my ass, you know that, right?" So much heart for Luther.

The turning expectations on their head thing is a thing these movies do a lot. In the part that's strictly the universe, the world of Mission Impossible, that can suck, because it means they made the one carry-over character from the TV series, Jim Phelps, a traitor; in fact three of the four films revolve around someone internal to the agency fucking Ethan over (guys, guys it's not a surprise anymore, what are you dooooiiiing). HOWEVER, in terms of turning standard casting/writing/filmmaking tropes upside down, it's actually... sort of... awesome.

Let's talk about MI:3, and the woman in the refrigerator.

( mostly cut for augh this is painful and not for plot spoilers for a 6 yr old movie, but the plot and film ending will be thoroughly dissected )

But I think this is worth pointing out: good guy characters, all women, most of them of color, in the Mission Impossible films who got kidnapped or shot or otherwise endangered, who I really, really expected to be dead by the end of the film, who got out alive:

--Nyah Nordoff-Hall
--Julia Meade/Hunt (twice, even)
--Zhen Lei
--Jane Carter

I winced, I swore, I said I know how movies work, this will not end well, I braced myself for them to kick it, and they all survived.

Baby steps. And still.

Today one of my coworkers asked me if I'd heard about the Weird Al-Lady Gaga thing and I said, yes, I had, and I deeply regretted reading the comments on Weird Al's blog enry because it just pissed me off that his readers got homophobic and transphobic right off the bat. Then my coworker voiced the popular opinion I've seen on the internet that Lady Gaga was lying about a manager having said she said no when she hadn't seen or heard anything. Only he said Lady Gaga was a "c" who was lying.

I. don't even.

"Also misogynistic," I said. "Not really down with that."

I cannot believe he said that to me. Like, my disbelief was so enormous that I walked out of the office and didn't really think about it again until just now. I kind of want to do SOMETHING to educate him and I can't figure out actions available here would teach him the lesson that "cunt," even if you shorten it to "c," is a gendered insult and disrespectful to all women and not just the woman you're trying to insult, rather than the lesson that you shouldn't say the seven dirty words to coworkers who could complain about you. Or to you. I just.

Argh.

I'm making this vid, right? And I noticed my canonical source gives me a foothold to mount any goddamn meta message I want.

So um.

Would anyone care to suggest favorite moments in visual media (film, tv, music video) that address:
--claiming of identity (pref female, and/or possibly queer--still arguing with self about intersectionality of this vid--protagonist)
or
--objectification of women (ie they--they!--are clearly identified as Other than the protagonist)(or um, if that's too commonplace--then say, a female protagonist experiences and hopefully rejects objectification? That would be SUPER AWESOME actually)

I'm contemplating using a segment of Bad Romance; that only leaves like twelve other slots. *ponder* I'm not a huge Buffy fan, but was there a pivotal moment where she laid claim to her Slayerness? Which would be, gosh, an identity and an Otherness all wrapped up in one.

Wow, I really wish I had some footage on the Young Wizards books. HOW DO I KEEP WANTING TO VID BOOKS.

/me contemplates DVD shelf. Hmm: Serenity, Mirromask, Witchblade, Tin Man, Alice....

And. hmm. Places where identity is also tied to technology would be useful to me. Off the top of my head, things I haven't seen that you folks might have a bead on good scenes from: Sarah Connor Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica. Others?

Okay, I also really want iconic imagery that would be recognizable to people outside of fannish circles.

And um. It would actually be SUPER hilarious to hit the 80s hard, as a completely different thematic element than I've examined so far... Ooooh. Labyrinth.

The floor is open. Suggestions?

Well, that sucked.

Make-up class still does not believe in cold cream, which I swear to god is the only way to get stage make-up OFF, so I didn't take my bruise make-up off before I left class, and in fact, class encourages you to go out with your make-up on, which, the more I think about it, the more it pisses me off, because in a class that's 90% women, sending us all out with bruises and scrapes on our bodies and bragging about how previous students have successfully fooled people--well, great, let's go on and normalize the idea of violence against women some more! *headdesk*

Right, so I went home, where I still can't find my cold cream nor about half my kit, and because I didn't want to go out still looking beat up I washed off with oatmeal soap, and I am not colors anymore but my skin feels wrong and I really want some goddamn cold cream and how I wish the department would buy into COMMON KNOWLEDGE OF THE THEATRICAL WORLD and get some damn cold cream.

I went ego-deliciousing last night and found someone had written a blog entry about fan works as transformative, listing my Dollhouse vid She Walks as feminist critique and putting me in the company of a couple of vidders whose work I love and admire. So, you know, good things! Blushy good things!

By the way: if you left me a comment on She Walks and I never answered it, I apologize. I looked at that entry and realized I never answered any of the comments. I've never been in a place where I was at peace enough with that vid to converse about it much even to the extent of thanking people for feedback. I know it's like, five months later? But thank you.

I am currently trying to beat down the urge to make a second Dollhouse vid; I don't know that I have enough anger left in me. I do have backburnered a different, more hopeful vid that was going to be the spiritual successor of She Walks without being a Dollhouse vid at all; though "more hopeful" is sort of relative, since the source is all filmic dystopias and is meant to represent modern American society. But it's to be a vid about that moment when you get out. So maybe. I hope to finish that one someday.

But the Dollhouse vid bunny that's eating my brain now is actually threatening to become a full-on Jossverse critique, evil dead lesbians and crazy broken supergirls with protective father-figures and all. The song I've bunnied on would make it pretty much a direct missive to Whedon, with the "I" and the "you" and the repeated question. My main complaint about this is damn it, this is not what I do, I refuse to be the vidder who tries to make vast sweeping statements about vast sweeping canons. I will not follow up History of Trek Fandom vid with History of Jossverse vid nor with History of Whoniverse vid nor with More Than A Century of History of Fans Asking This Question: Holmes and Watson, Doin' It or Not? vid. I have vid bunnies for all of these concepts. Goddamnit I have learned my lesson, I will not be that vidder.

The thing is, I don't know how to address some of the problems in Dollhouse without pointing out that they're repeating patterns in Whedon's work. Maybe no one will notice BECAUSE ALL THE ACTORS ARE THE SAME FOREVER AND EVER? Ahem. Not that I want to mock his casting choices either.

I want to make my points... more pointed. No more grand, sweeping vids, as much as they eat my brain. So the Sherlock Holmes vid will not be the history of everything, it will be about the cannibalization and reinterpretation of the source under female gaze WHICH IS NOT GRAND AND SWEEPING AT ALL I promise you.

*headdesk*

eta so apparently I will be feminist critique vidder for oh, the next six billion years. Jeez. The last time I tried to make a classic slash vid it turned into a classic slash fandom vid. Hello, my name is Juls, and I have a problem with meta.

There's a patch of my scalp that's a little tender right now, because I was bleaching the hell out of my streak (I'd let the roots get out a couple of inches) to re-dye a new shade for the wedding. I'm only using 30 peroxide, not anything rougher and tougher and salon strength, so getting my hair bleached enough to take cool colors takes a few runs--the first go gets me from dark black-brown to vibrant orange; the second to a paler orange, around where I can drop a magenta or red on it; the third bleaching gets me to a light gold that can slide under violet, though I'd probably twitch at trying to get it under blue, because blue will green out on you. (Two or three more runs gets it to proper platinum, but I don't so much do that all at once--it's just what happens with the length of the streak when I'm working on the roots.) So all told I spent a cumulative two hours with bleach in my hair tonight, and yeah, my scalp is sore.

Beauty is pain, right? /irony

(In an ideal world I would just naturally have a white streak up front like Rogue or Sam Beckett, and when I felt like dyeing it an accent color to go with my dress and my mood as I periodically do, I wouldn't have to bleach it first.)

My mother likes my streak bleached but undyed; she says I look like a marbled cake with blonde and brown hair. I did that look for a while when I first got up the gumption to bleach the streak--and it took gumption; when I told my mother on the phone, because I was away at college at the time, my lead-up made her think I'd gotten a tattoo or something permanent, because I really thought she'd disapprove like crazy. Maybe that's why I didn't finish the job with the dye, then, and yeah, it felt unfinished, the bleaching's always just to make a canvas for the color. But I really did feel that my mother wouldn't get it, would make me feel guilty about it--not for doing something non-conformist with my hair, no. For using beauty products, for falling prey to societal pressure to do things that are bad to my body to try to look pretty.

I think I'm the wannabe punk child of a wannabe hippie flower child.

Growing up, I absorbed from my mother that: make-up is a waste of time and clogs your pores and by the way, lipstick is to make your mouth look like labia; leg and pit hair is natural and women in Europe don't shave it off, so why should we; that mustache ain't going anywhere no matter what you do to it (this was probably my mother's longest hold out in the vanity department, she was bleaching her mustache long after she'd called it quits on a lot of other regular beauty work); heels will screw up your feet and back; Barbie is not a natural shape and not one to aspire to--I nearly added it's okay to be fat, but that one didn't quite stick, because my mother did pressure me to diet with her all the time. By the way, we're both still fat. I think she still tries to lose weight. Eventually I got her to leave me out of it. My stance is I don't want to work specifically to be thin; if I lose weight because I'm working my ass off, then yay, but I'm not going out of my way for it. This seems to me to be the natural extension of everything else she taught me about rejecting society's urges to prettify, tempered with an acknowledgement that all false images of what health is aside, I am actually fatter than is healthy.

So there's all of that. The anti-pretty, where pretty is defined by glossy magazines and Hollywood movies. Except that on some level, I do still want to be pretty, even though I know how false all of that is. The first time I acted in a theatre show in college and the director showed us how to put on make-up, not street make-up, pancake make-up, but you know, with cheekbone shaping rouge and eyeliner to make your eyes big and dark, everything exaggerated for stage--I looked in the mirror and thought, "I'm pretty," and I hadn't known that was possible, I hadn't ever thought of myself as pretty before.

I didn't start wearing street make-up. I don't do that for everyday life. There are occasions when I'll do measures of it for performance, and I don't necessarily mean stage performance, because not all performances are the official kind. Part of my rebellion and part of my queerness is that I don't do that performance for men--the most frequent occasions are Club Vivid at Vividcon, which has an overwhelming majority of female attendees. But pretty isn't who I am on a day to day basis, and though pretty still gives me a little surge of guilty pleasure, I am content to look like what I actually look like here in real life.

Except for the hair.

Here's another thing about my hair: getting my hair braided, especially braided in some fancy, intricate way by someone else, is a guilty pleasure for me. I don't know why; braiding doesn't fall under the same stigma of pretty in most cases for me--I braided my mother's hair when I was a kid, and it's not load-the-chemicals-on alteration of self that she taught me to rail against. But there despite that sanction, I still feel like a pretty, pretty princess when someone does my hair, and feeling like a pretty, pretty princess is a guilty feeling for me. Ironically, it's an act of defiance against my (personal/familial instead of societal) norms to ask for it.

And then there's the bleach and the dye. It has been eight years since the first time I bleached my streak in; I have been inconsistent about maintaining it (see also: a couple of inches of roots) but it's been part of my self-image ever since. I guess that's an act of defiance against my personal/familial norms too, but one specifically designed to be outside the conventional definition of pretty too: unnatural colors, and just the one streak, not the whole head of hair. But it makes me hugely uncomfortable on a philosophical level that I have to buy into artificial beauty products to do it. I have this tender patch on my scalp right now, reminding me that everything my mother taught me to resist in the idea of hurting yourself to look different than you are because society thinks you should. There's a push-pull of how I want to look and how I look without alteration and how I want not to look specifically because the world says I should want to look that way. It's hard for me to sort out. I can't quite solve it; the contradiction is rooted somewhere primal in the construction of my personality.

I have a whole hell of a lot of identity tied up in my hair. The other day at work I said something about being butch, regarding my badassery at moving boxes of books--mostly in jest, because the butch/femme binary is not quite synonymous with my issues and not really how I think of myself. My boss said I'd need to cut my hair off if I wanted to look butch and my automatic answer was No. I also said that short hair is not a requirement for being butch and it's an attitude more than a look and that my boss was being reductionist and on some level I believe all of that and on some other level, that was all rationalization for that instant answer, No. No, my hair's not going anywhere. There's too much me there.

But a me I need to manipulate, to alter. Why is that? What is it about me that I need to look different from what I am?

The official description of the Bechdel show niqaeli and I put together for vividcon is:

In 1985 in the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel gave us this test to evaluate gender equality in a movie: 1) it has to have at least two women in it who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. This vid show is about the spirit of the Bechdel Test, showcasing vids about two or more women interacting and relating with each other, in ways that don't have anything to do with men. Femslash optional.

A fairly dry definition of the Bechdel Test, in case anyone didn't know; "femslash optional" was our wry comment on what we thought most vids-that-passed-Bechdel would be about. We were thrillingly shocked to find that vidders had found and shown and celebrated female characters having an incredible range of relationships and conversations. This is a show full of vids about: friendship, family, sisterhood, mothers and daughters, adopting each other, finding your place in the world, making your place in the world, being part of something bigger than yourself, death and grief, history, identity, societal roles and how to break out of them and the extent to which that's possible--and also, kicking ass, taking names, robots, cheerleading, rocking out, and hot lesbian sex.

( the playlist )

( discussion questions )

Watching any vids about women I can get my hands on is depressing. I have had to use to phrase "there's too much rape in this one" far far too often. WTF, fandom. WTF, Hollywood. WTF, modern society.

vividcon is looking for suggestions for themed vid shows! More specifically, we, your exalted VJs, are looking for suggestions for our themed vid show, The Bechdel Test.

Here's the official blurb:

In 1985 in the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel gave us this test to evaluate gender equality in a movie: 1) it has to have at least two women in it who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. This vid show is about the spirit of the Bechdel Test, showcasing vids about two or more women interacting and relating with each other, in ways that don't have anything to do with men. Femslash optional.

This is awesome, right? Girls, girls, girls! We are all about the ladies! We want your mother-daughter, sister-sister, student-teacher, best buds, archenemies, lesbian lovers vids!

We welcome all suggestions! We welcome vids you've seen, vids you've made, vids you are inspired to make just for us! We would really really love to see that, actually, to see people making more vids about women for this show, and for the celebration of women in fandom. What women in your fandom need your loving vidding attention? Would you, could you, premiere a vid with us?

To suggest a vid, go here: http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Important dates to know:
--ETA: April 23rd date correction!/ETA: suggestions end! So run go suggest stuff now!
--June 1st: all themed show vids are due, so if you're gonna make one for us, this is when you have to turn it in!

Go! Suggest! Vid! http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Your loving VJ sisters,
jmtorres & niqaeli