Film challenge, April.

This month, there wasn’t really a “film challenge”, because I only watched one movie intended as part of the challenge, “The wizard of Oz”. Yikes. Real life will sometimes get in the way like that…

I did, however, wind up reading two books that tackle one particular subject from very, very different perspectives. The books were “Twee: The gentle revolution in music, books, television, fashion and film”, by Marc Spitz and “Bad Feminist: Essays”, by Roxane Gay. And the particular subject was mainstream pop culture of the twenty-first century. 

Take, for instance, Spitz and Gay’s analysis of the HBO series “Girls”. Where Spitz sees something whimsical if a tad irresponsible with it’s dogged persistence on ignoring any perspective that isn’t that of privileged white people, Gay sees a sincere but willfully ignorant life perspective transplanted to a highly-financed TV show. Both writers are quite aware of the show’s virtues and flaws, and the controversies it has been subject to. But one can afford to be more detached than the other, who every day lives with the resulting exclusion. 

Both authors want to believe in a kinder present that will surely lead to a gentler tomorrow. Spitz tries to frame his misgivings as the result of being from an older generation. But Gay is part of the younger generation, and knows that there is a huge difference between knowing that the world is dangerous, knowing it as a purely intellectual notion, and LIVING those dangers in the flesh, every day. Both are intellectuals that also gleefully embrace pop culture artifacts, and both strive for achieving a balance between personal tastes and objective study. Both authors are quite aware that no human person can ever be completely objective, particularly when the subject of study is itself subjective by nature. 

These two books, then, offer not “two sides of the coin”, as it would be easy to believe, but rather remind us that reality is not an easy thing to grasp or comprehend. The world is complex because we all live in it, and we all carry our own views on it, be they good or bad or whatever they are. 

And then they actually do line up nicely with the movie. Just like the movie, if properly studied, shows us that the line between “reality” and “fantasy” is much blurrier than we like to think (*was* Oz just Dorothy’s fever dream? Even in the movie, several details can bring this conclusion to question, such as the “real” equivalent of the Witch being strangely absent by the ending and the menace she represented completely forgotten), these books propose that the limits between the objective and the subjective are much less clear than we usually think.