Grrr! Lost Knowledge Behind Fashion Artifacts

Sometimes I get so mad!

As I have reported, I spend a lot of time on the website DeviantArt.com, which is a website for artists to show their work to each other, and to fans.  It attracts lots of youthful artists who contribute what is called Fan-Art, which is essentially artwork paying homage to Japanese popular art (from Anime, Manga, computer games, TV, movies, etc).  Often, of course, this artwork depicts superheroes, gods, goddesses, aliens, mutations and so forth, so that the characters in these derived works look weird and sensational, and are shown doing things with their enhanced powers and physical attributes.

So far, so good; the fantasies of young people these days are inevitably fueled by the entertainment that is available to them, so many of the characters they like to draw are goddesses, ghosts, magicians (like Harry Potter and co.) and even vampires and zombies.

Vampires and zombies are laughably hokey to the greater part of the population, but there are enormous hordes of people who are able to suspend belief to the extent that the doings of vampires and zombies are of urgency and concern to them.  Oh, how cruel of X to do that to Y!  And he (or she) had been so patient and so loving, etc, etc.

There are some things, however—things I have mentioned often in the past, I believe (I'm too impatient with the subject to go look whether I have mentioned these things often)—which make absolutely no sense.

I must have mentioned stilletto heels.  Platform shoes.  But let's not forget banana clips, barrettes, and nipple piercings, and similar things that only make sense for ordinary ladies, 9-5 folks, or perhaps denizens of the night to sport.  Why would a goddess, who normally lives in the Astral Plane, have such low self-esteem as to adopt platform shoes and stilletto heels, and so on, which are usually associated with human mating rituals?

Then there are stockings, and garters (or garter tabs; I'm not too sure of the latter).  Some younger girls may not know, and guys may know even less: garters are intended to help keep up the stockings girls wear, especially if they wear shorter than ankle-length skirts or dresses.  Stockings, meanwhile, are intended to smooth out the appearance of the lower legs, and to provide a little warmth in cool weather.  A goddess, who can smooth out the appearance of her legs with sheer effort of will, does not need stockings, and certainly not garters to hold them up!  And, in any case, for whose benefit is this supernatural being wearing these appearance-enhancing equipment?  Imagine you're a goddess.  Would you go to the trouble of obtaining garters and stocking to impress your secret sweetheart, or would you simply influence her mentally with your god-like powers? 

Most recently, I have noticed the details of the lip color that the immortals who are depicted in Anime-style artwork wear. 

A few decades ago, it became common for professional makeup artistes to slightly enlarge the lips of their clients, by applying lip color slightly outside the line of the lips.  This was very effective in enhancing the lips of women in show-business who might have needed the enhancement.  Then, of course, women began to use collagen injections to enhance their lips, sometimes with disastrous effect.  But can you imagine a goddess enhancing her lips by painting on color outside the lip line?

Push-up bras, open-crotch panties—you name it, these goddesses do it.  Well, of course they might have a sense of humor, and do it just to make us laugh.  But that sort of defies reason. [When the artist comments on his or her creation, it is usually something on the lines of: "I just felt like doing that!  Haha!  Sometimes I think Xxyzzy needs a little something extra, you know?"  Of course, Art needs to make no excuses!

What we have here is a crisis in imagination.  There are a few authors who are true innovators in how they conceive their immortals to appear, and what characteristics (read: super powers) those immortals have.  Then, the fans love those protagonists so dearly, that they are unable to conceive of any new super characters (gods, goddesses, fairies, aliens, you name it) that are entirely different from those.  Even their names are derived from classical names of heroes, sometimes declined or inflected in painful ways. 

I suppose Western mythology has been tremendously influential on the youth culture for more than a century.  Many of the stories that young Japanese and Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese people love best are derived from Greek and Roman myths and legends, and Norse and Irish folk tales, and when a young person of today wants to invent a monster, for instance, nothing is more natural than that she or he should create a name from a Norse root, juxtaposed with an Indonesian suffix.  (Forgive my murderous way with linguistic objects, but I hope the essential ideas are coming across.)

Take away the—to my mind—embarrassing missteps with clothing and accessories, and even the outsized swords and guns that Manga protagonists choose as their weapons, and you're left with some really innovative artwork.  I did not mean to demean the quality of the art; it is just that some of these young artists take what I'm going to call anachronistic styles and accessories completely for granted; they don't hesitate for a moment in drawing a character wearing leather armor, sporting both a knife and a laser weapon.  My word anachronistic is a hold-all for all pairs of accoutrements that combine any sorts of objects whose use together makes no logical sense, whether or not it has to do with temporal issues.

I also have a problem with females with super-large breasts.  This is a cultural issue; both young boys and young girls imagine their heroines with ponderous breasts, it seems.  Meanwhile, since a large number of users of the DeviantArt website are models and cosplay artists, it is clear that about half the girls who put up nude photographs on the site are well-endowed, while the other half is very slim.  I'm not sure whether it takes a great deal of courage for a girl to show herself in the nude, if she has AA-cup breasts; at any rate it must be the braver ones who put up their self-portraits, and nine times out of ten, they are lovely.  I suppose that betrays my personal taste.

The heavily-endowed girls are also quite attractive (though I don't particularly admire them), but I get the impression that they're not automatically favored over the slimmer girls.  So there are subtleties with how audiences like their breasts.  It is difficult to understand this trend towards super-large mammaries (a word that I dislike intensely, but which I'm using to avoid saying 'breast' too many times).

I suppose I must just get into the habit of skipping over the artwork that annoys me.

Kay

Little Women (2019)

Just a warning: This post has little or nothing to do with my books on Smashwords.

L-R: Beth March [Scanlen], Jo March [Ronan],
Meg March [Watson], Amy March [Pugh]

A few nights ago, I watched Little Women starring Laura Dern, Saoirse Ronan, Meryl Streep, and numerous others.

First of all, I have read Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, the main books that form part of a single connected story, and read them often, and so I know my way around the narrative extremely well.  Bear that in mind, when I wax critical about this latest movie.

First and formost, I see numerous matters that concern the author, Louisa May Alcott.  Anyone, with any sort of observation and sensitivity who lived at that time--even without the history of the world since that time to illuminate their thinking--could have had similar concerns:

* The status of women, who were under the control of their menfolk.  Many women--if not all women--could see the unfairness of this state of affairs.  But especially in times of war, it was more glaringly obvious that men, and male politicians and legislators made matters worse than they already were, though there may have been a few wonderful leaders of the masculine gender.

* The fact that women were consigned to certain tasks and responsibilities, which kept them out of the running in tasks and responsibilities that were far more important, which were jealously controlled by inept men.

* The fact that no matter how brilliant, a typical woman had no access to higher learning, no matter how well fitted she may have been to have the world of knowledge opened to her.  Women needed access to knowledge both in order to make a difference in the social and political sphere, and also in order to follow their instincts and their thirst for knowledge in any area.

* The fact that women had to subject themselves to often quite unreasonable demands of their husbands to bear large numbers of children.

* Alcott was painfully aware of the sorry plight of poor immigrants.  Whether or not this was a central concern of hers I do not know--reading her personal papers could tell us the answer to that--but she certainly brought up the matter in Little Women, and presented the death of Beth March as a direct consequence of the lack of medical care available to the Hummel family.  Another factor was:

* The poor state of public health practices at the time, and sanitation standards.  It is hard to tell whether Alcott was sufficiently far seeing to imagine what would be possible in the future.

* The limitations of poverty.  The March family, while certainly better off than the Hummels, still looked upon the Lawrences next door, and their Aunt March, with envy.

A unifying theme in the context of all these concerns, is the powerlessness of women, even if it does not have a direct bearing on every single one of these items.  Certainly being a woman made everything so much worse, if you had to have a connection between, say, the Hummels and female powerlessness.  It seemed that the Hummels were a family headed by a woman, and such a family would usually be worse off in every respect than a family led by a man.

However, I think that, to make Little Women a monothematic piece of work would be to do it an enormous disservice.  Directors with a vision often think that, in making a movie out of a book, it is impossible to convey more than a single important point.  I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the main driving force behind the Little Women (2019) project, Greta Gerwig, subscribed rather too enthusiastically to the belief that Louisa M. Alcott's governing concern was feminism, which seems to have resulted in a very heavy-handed use of the flashback technique.  Never before in the history of mankind has so much flashback been resorted to, with such confusing effect.  To follow what was going on, you had to have known the story intimately already, and you had to keep track of what the lighting was, how long someone's hair was, and so on.  Ms. Gerwig may have succeeded in elucidating the motivations for various actions by backing them up with flashbacks, so, OK, motivations in this movie might have been a trifle easier to understand than in earlier Little Women movies.  But the thread of the story really suffers.

There were brilliant moments.  Beautiful visuals, gorgeous costumes, scenes improved by realistic acting.  But it was difficult to follow the thread of the story; and I fear that only those who knew the story, and were desperately trying to salvage something from the temporal confusion, would have made the effort to thread their way through the spaghetti.

An interesting turn of events is that Professor Bhaer, the gentleman who eventually wins the heart of Jo March, has only a few minutes on screen.  This is explained by presenting the happy ending to the story (the consummation of the love affair of Jo and Bhaer) as being an unwelcome result of undue pressure being brought to bear by the publisher.

I suppose I'm too much of a lover of the original stories, and the author, L. M. Alcott, in my own superficial way, I suppose, to appreciate the deconstruction, and the painful reconstruction of the story by Greta Gerwig.  If there had only been two time periods between which the camera switches, it might have worked.  But sometimes Gerwig switches between three, or more.  I have a horrible suspicion that the actual flashback she wanted was between the scene at the publisher's office, and Jo's scramble to intercept Bhaer before he leaves for New York; all the other flashbacks were (I believe) merely a means to convey legitimacy on that final one.

I should talk.  I have wielded flashback ruthlessly in my stories.  But I freely confess that it was due to my ineptness as an author.  Well, perhaps one day, a Director's Cut will be made available to us, where the flashbacks are handled more delicately, or hopefully, eliminated.

Kay