the naked gaze 肉眼

The Perfect Man

LCC, in some very interesting comments to my preceding post, notes that “romantic comedies over the past two and a half decades have developed a common device of an applauding audience inside the film at the end - the 'big kiss' is doubly and self consciously a spectacle: from the factory workers in Officer and a Gentleman, to the office workers in Working Girl...” (LCC also cites the use of the same convention in Anger Management and Love Actually).

One common element shared by all of these movies (with the possible exception of Anger Management) is that in each case the romance is transgressive in some way, often cutting across generational and/or class boundaries (virtually all of the romances in Love Actually, for instance, are with subordinates or employees). Seen in these terms, the convention of the embedded applause is (over)compensatory, eliding over the unseemliness of, say, Paula (Debra Winger), in An Officer and a Gentleman, simply waiting for a promising Navy pilot (Richard Gere) to swoop in and rescue her from a humdrum, working class existence.

Master of my Domain (2)

[Many thanks to Le Colonel Chabert for an eloquent follow-up this morning to some of the issues raised in my preceding post. Building further on some related points, I, too, return to the intersecting themes of mastery and domination in the forthcoming movie, Click]

Michael Newman, Adam Sandler’s aptly-named character in the forthcoming Click, tries to use his newly acquired universal remote control to reinvent himself and restructure his life—in effect, to become a “new man.” While the gadget (which allows him to literally fast forward, rewind, or pause time) does initially provide Newman with increased freedom from the overbearing time constraints of his architecture job, it quickly leads to an even greater loss of control when Newman finds the remote control overriding his choices and making decisions on its own. In this way, the universal remote represents an ironic conjunction of the fantasy of absolute autonomy and complete control over one’s own environment, and the inverse nightmare of being embedded within a panoptical network (or “matrix”) within which one’s every action is carefully scrutinized and (remotely) controlled.

Master of my Domain (1)

In Click (Frank Coraci), the new Adam Sandler movie opening next month, Sandler plays Michael Newman, a junior architect who rarely has time for his family because he is constantly putting in long hours at the firm, hoping to be made partner. After growing  frustrated one day after being unable to figure out which remote will turn on his TV, Newman ends up going to what is clearly the “Beyond” section of Bed, Bath and Beyond, where is sold a new-fangled universal remote. As described in the synopsis on the official Sony Pictures site,

Soon Michael is master of his own domain, turning on every appliance with the click of a button.

But the device has other, more startling functions. It can somehow muffle the barking of Sundance, the family dog—and even more astoundingly, fast forward through an annoying quarrel with his wife.

However, the delight at this newfound ability to control his world turns to horror as Newman finds the remote using its powers independently of his control (“You wanted a universal remote control. That remote, controls your universe….”).

Barbaro and Bonds

Back in the 1980s, there was a Doonesbury strip in which a woman recalled the tumultuous events of the early 1970s (i.e., a quagmire of a foreign war, a corrupt executive branch overstepping its authority, oil shortages and record oil prices, etc.…. sound familiar?), and noted that Secretariat’s winning of the Triple Crown in 1973 had “restored [her] faith in mankind.” [The Thoroughbred Times similarly anthropomorphizes the colt, saying that, “He was also, as one might say, human.” ]

Secretariat was not the most recent Triple Crown winner  (Seattle Slew and Affirmed won it in 1977 and 1978, respectively, though few people remember either of them now), but perhaps the Doonesbury character had a point, insofar as the chaotic events of the period which made it necessary for people to find a hero, if only in a horse (of course, the fact that there had not been a Triple Crown winner for more than a quarter of a century preceding Secretariat had certainly helped fuel the appetite for a new winner among a nation of Mr. Ed fans). 

The Doonesbury cartoon has been on my mind the past few of days while reading about the response to Barbaro’s breaking his leg just 50 strides into the Preakness on Saturday.

Hymen Reconstructions

Yesterday’s NY Times notes that the charges against long-time Chinese journalist (and current NY Times researcher) Zhao Yan 赵岩 which had previously been dropped before president Hu Jintao’s visit to the US last month, have now been reinstated. The Times speculates that the decision to reinstate the charges may have been a result of China’s indignation at the mistreatment of Hu Jintao during his visit. Another possibility, however, is that the original decision to drop the charges may have been merely an instance of diplomatic window-dressing, wherein “the Chinese may have decided to take Mr. Zhao's case off the docket before the visit to Washington and simply resumed the prosecution once Mr. Hu had returned.”

Whatever the reason, the decision to reinstate the charges against Zhao Yan is curious because, although Hu Jintao’s visit has indeed concluded, issues of press freedom remain very pertinent as China continues to prepare to host the 2008 Olympics. For instance, just last week the International Olympic Committee completed a three day inspection of Beijing, during which issues of press freedom were apparently a central concern (after the visit, inspector Hein Verbruggen fairly gushes that

he was happy with assurances from the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) that media would be able to operate freely.

"We have a guarantee in the host city contract that journalists would be able to operate as they do in other Games in other countries," said Verbruggen.

“It's a very important part of our discussions, a very important subject because the media is the largest group of people we're going to have here.")

The developments in Zhao Yan’s case, however, raise serious questions regarding the sincerity and reliability of these sorts of commitments, suggesting that they (like the initial dropping of the charges against Zhao Yan) may perhaps be little more than cosmetic adjustments to achieve an immediate end. This theme of cosmetic adjustments in preparation for the Olympics, in turn, is elaborated hilariously in the latest novel by Yu Hua 余华, entitled Brothers 兄弟 (2006), which contains an extended sequence featuring a virginal beauty contest (explicitly compared to the Olympics) in which virtually all of the contestants have surgically reconstructed hymens (in fact, the winner is found to already have a child). Reminiscent, perhaps, of China’s pre-Olympics make-over, these reconstructed hymens are literally cosmetic adjustments designed to create an impression of purity and innocence, and erase a more sullied past. They raise important questions (albeit in a parodical way) about the workings of power, the limits of privacy, and the role of the media in mediating between the two.

Hyper-orthodox Orthographies

[Update--Helmut at Phronesisaical has a very interesting response-post to this one, addressing issues of national language and the implications of productive disruption for intelligence.]

(Thanks to Woman of Color and KC Sheehan for your nods and comments on my earlier post on Akeelah, which inspired to go back and elaborate on some points I wasn’t able to touch on in the original post.):

There is a phenomenon wherein minorities (linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or otherwise) find it useful or necessary to prove themselves by exemplifying a hyper-correct mastery of the dominant language or culture. We see this, for instance, in the virtuosic use of language by such “minority” authors as Nabokov and the Malaysian-Chinese Li Yongping 李永平 (who take pride in their mastery of English and Chinese, respectively, which far exceeds that of most “native” speakers of the languages).

Part of this is clearly pragmatic—the need overcome prejudicial assumptions by demonstrating that one is not only as good as, but even more orthodox than, the putative hegemonic norm. There is, however, empirical evidence indicating that, under certain circumstances, these sorts of marginal figures actually have an advantage in mastering a dominant language. For instance, a few years ago Nonie Lesaux  published an interesting study demonstrating that, under appropriate pedagogical conditions, young children who are not native speakers of English can actually learn to read faster and better than their native-speaking counterparts. As Lesaux explains, these ESL students are

much more tuned into language than the other kids. In many ways, they were doing a lot more work around language than the monolinguals, for whom language is much more unconscious.

A similar phenomenon, meanwhile, is arguably at work in Doug Atchison’ Akeelah and the Bee  (2006), as we see, over and over again, the three young minority protagonists—Dylan Chiu (Sean Michael Afable), Javier Mendez (J.R. Villarreal) and of course Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer) herself—appearing before tables of predominantly white judges and demonstrating their near-perfect mastery of standard English spelling.

Three Times a Charm

In a memorable scene late in Three Times 最好的时光 (2005), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢 remarkable triptych about love and memory, the photographer Chen 震 (Zhang Zhen 張震) receives a couple of e-mails from his new lover, the punk rock singer Cheng Jing 陳靖 (Shu Qi 舒 淇), and finds an S&M-ish photo of her with her mouth literally taped tightly shut. Accompanying this image is a description of how she had been born prematurely, and consequently suffers from a number of physical ailments, including epilepsy as well as having a literal “hole in [her] heart” 心脏破洞 (in addition, she is also going blind in her right eye). This self-description then concludes with the remark that she has “No past, no future, just a hungry present.”

Orthographic Orthodoxies

For the 22 Uygurs currently imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay (discussed in my preceding post), the question of repatriation is particularly problematic precisely because the very notion of a homeland has, for them, been brought into question. The prisoners hail from China’s “Xinjiang Uigur autonomous region,” and are accused of being affiliated with militant separatist groups. Therefore, they are currently caught in a somewhat paradoxical bind wherein Beijing is demanding that they be repatriated to a county (China) whose legal jurisdiction over them they themselves renounce.

These intersecting issues of homeland and political sovereignty are also reflected in the twentieth century orthographic history of Uygur (also spelled  “Uighur,” “Uigur,” “Uighuir,” “Uighuir,” “Uiguir,” Weiwuer,” 维吾尔, and ئۇيغۇر; ). Between the 10th and the 15th centuries, the ancestors of present-day Uygurs and related ethnic groups gradually adopted an Arabic script, which then remained standard until the mid-twentieth century. As Arienne Dwyer discusses, Cyrillic was then officially adopted in Xinjing in 1956 , abandoned in February1957, and readopted a year later. In the 1960s, however, some Xinjiang schools started to experiment with a script using the Roman alphabet, which was then formally adopted in August 1976. In the 1980s, however, there was a return back to an Arabic script, with significant modifications (to accommodate Uygur’s Turkic phonemes) in both 1983 and 1987. As a result of these shifts in language policy, therefore, it would be quite possible for each generation in a contemporary family of Xinjiang Uygurs to have each been schooled in a different script (Arabic, Cyrillic, Roman, and modified Arabic).

A similar intersection of orthographic orthodoxies and generation gaps, meanwhile, is explored in Doug Atchison’s recent film, Akeelah and the Bee.

"Cruel and Inhuman"

It was announced last week that five of the twenty two Uygur Chinese currently imprisoned in  Guantánamo Bay would be released and sent to Albania. The 22 Uygurs who were among the suspected terrorists “swept up” by US forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan falling the overthrow of the Taliban government, and have been held at the US prison (without formal charges) in Guantánamo Bay ever since. The Washington Post reports that two years ago,

The State Department said lengthy investigations showed they were not a risk to U.S. security and were no longer of any "intelligence value" to interrogators at Guantánamo Bay. U.S. officials, reclassifying them as refugees, cleared them for release.

The Bush administration, however, would neither let them settle in the US, nor would accede to the PRC’s demands that they be returned to China, “citing fears that the Muslims might be tortured or executed.” As a result, all 22 men have instead languished in prison for an additional two years while the US attempted to find a country whose interest in currying favor with the US exceeding their fear of invoking China’s wrath.

The irony of this situation, of course, is that that all indications suggest that the conditions at Guantánamo Bay  (where there has been an established tradition of torture and other “cruel and inhuman” interrogation techniques, where there have been numerous suicide attempts, where the US has explicitly argued that the Geneva Convention accords do not even apply, where the detainees have no access to lawyers or other legal appeals—and, indeed, none of the 22 Chinese Moslems has even been charged with a crime) are possibly scarcely better than what the men might perhaps expect back in China. Out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire.

Obscene Images (2)

In 2001, there was a small scandal when images appearing to depict a Chinese man eating a human fetus began circulating on the internet. The excitement surrounding the images—shocking enough in their own right—was further fueled by claims that they depicted a cannibalistic delicacy served in certain Taiwanese restaurants. Eventually, the furor died down, in part because it was ultimately revealed that the images had been taken out of context—that they actually depicted a performance art work by Beijing-based avant-garde artist Zhu Yu 朱昱 (of course, Zhu Yu’s claim that he was consuming an actual human fetus for the piece is just as shocking as the original claim that human flesh was being served in Taiwan restaurants, but it does not appear to have received the same international attention). (For further discussion, see here and here.

A similar scandal unfolded recently after John Dower’s and Shigeru Miyagawa’s course page and research project “Visualizing Cultures” was featured on the MIT home page on April 23rd. A vociferous protest developed among some Chinese groups on campus (protests which quickly spread, via the internet, far beyond the physical campus itself) about the use of these images, focusing in particular on the inclusion of a woodblock print of a war-time decapitation of Chinese soldiers by the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese War.