Daily Archives: September 26, 2011

Quote of the Day: “Women who — like Vulcans and Mothra — do not exist in real life”

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The red-band trailer for Bridesmaids

Mindy Kaling, who writes for and plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office, in this week’s New Yorker lays out her love of romantic comedies by way of “the female archetypes”:

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life.

The types Kaling goes on to describe in detail are:

“The Klutz” (“The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things”)

“The Ethereal Weirdo” (also known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.”).

“The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All” (“Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to ‘relearn’ how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something.”).

“The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead” (“If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man.”).

“The Sassy Best Friend” (“You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.”).

“The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting” (“If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.”).

“The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery” (“The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: ‘He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!’”).

Read the entire thing here.

Levant, Harper and “Ethical Oil”

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EthicalOil.org’s campaign against Saudi Arabian oil with a message that is very simple: Muslims bad, Alberta good. This ad began appearing last week. 

Frye in “The Present Condition of the World” (1943) observes that North America is “a happy-hunting-ground of all forms of advertisement, propaganda, and suggestions. Advertising and ‘publicity’ are based on the fact that sense experience is involuntary and on the assumption that the mind does not possess enough selective power to resist a large number of repeated impressions.” (CW 10, 212)

As an illustration of the continuing relevance of this principle, Stephen Harper has taken to referring to Alberta’s tar sands as “ethical oil,” which also happens to be the title of a book by Ezra Levant, as well as the name of the oil advocacy group responsible for the television ad above.

Ezra Levant is a well-known right-wing activist with a connection to Harper dating back twenty years. Levant has been the subject of a number of lawsuits for libel. Most recently, he repeated in a column in the Toronto Sun a long-disproven slur against Holocaust survivor and wealthy liberal advocate George Soros. Sun Media was made to retract and apologize when confronted with the possibility of yet another Levant-centred libel suit. Levant is, moreover, a protege of Koch Industries, an oil production conglomerate which, among many other things, bankrolls global warming denialism.

His book, Ethical Oil, is morally idiotic. In it he makes the argument that the tar sands produce “ethical” oil because it comes from a nice place like Alberta, rather than from a nasty and unethical place like Saudi Arabia. The promotion of the idea of ethical oil is demagoguery that trades on resentment and ignorance while conveniently leaving out every other consideration, including a noxiously hypocritical self-interest, as well as the fact that, whatever else happens, we’re still going to be doing business with the dirty Arabs the ad above demonizes. Even so, the term has been adopted by Stephen Harper personally, and at just the time that the Keystone XL pipeline is awaiting American approval.

You can read David Suzuki’s review of Levant’s book here. A sample:

If this is the most “ethical” source of oil we can find, we need to ask other questions about the moral purity of our intensively processed bitumen. For example, if we sell the oil to countries with poor human-rights records, like China, does that affect the product’s “ethical” nature? And how “ethical” are the companies operating in the oilsands: for example, Exxon Mobil, well-known sponsor of climate-change disinformation campaigns; BP, responsible for last year’s massive oily disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, or PetroChina? There’s also the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our children and grandchildren, which to me is an intergenerational crime.

It is distressing to see this dangerous notion being intravenously introduced into the public discourse by what seems to be a carefully-timed, co-ordinated effort. That Harper would use his office to shill so openly for it makes it that much more alarming.