why i love pop culture

[emchy]

feminist review of grindhouse
comments rock as hard as the review
mostly - i love where this is taking my brain - whether or not i agree with everything written

http://pandagon.net/2007/04/15/thats-why-its-called-go-go-not-cry-cry/


i just love the layers and the ways to look at things.

Comments

[borggrrl.livejournal.com]

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW!

The other thing he does is dismantles the strict dichotomy in these movies between the femmes who die and the tomboys who live. Carol Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chain Saws is basically the Bible on this, and she details out how slasher films will make huge distinctions between these two categories of women, especially how the femme group is sexual and the tomboy heroine is usually a virgin. Tarantino establishes the division, with there being a group of women who are sexy party time girls and a group who are Hollywood stunt women, but he spends the entire film subverting this dichotomy, mostly through dialogue.

When viewed that way, the lengthy dialogue-heavy scene in which the three women are driving to the diner feels a lot less unnecessary now than it did when I was actually watching the movie. It establishes that these are sexual women, not the virgin cliche that the Final Girl is so often portrayed as.

I have mixed feelings about the end of Death Proof. On one hand, I was all "Yay! The women kicked the bad guy's ass!" On the other, it bothers me that they had to resort to extreme violence and murder (?) to do so. (Especially since they weren't avenging the death of one of their own and had no idea that he'd killed other women in the past.) Would it have been better had they just wounded him and dragged him down to the police station? I dunno. Because that outcome carries with it the possibility of sending the message that women are ultimately less-violent and more good than men, a view which I don't think is wholly true.

Man, I love geeking out on movies with my friends. :)

[postmaudlin.livejournal.com]

i kind of wish any of them had read clover or creed or even freud, and worked past literal interpretations of gender. haraway, too, would be useful here in light of the cyborg permutation! (and i mention them here not to name drop but to add points for further consideration...)