When I was in college the film Metropolitan came out, and I saw it with a bunch of friends. It's a extremely vivid rendering of my teen years: that is, being an outsider amongst NY private school kids and the folks that go to the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Coming out of the theater, one of my friends said she had been amused, but it was all so fake -- no one really lives like that. Well, actually they do.
Metropolitan, despite being a well-made, funny and engaging film about essentially true things, did nothing to provide her insight into that experience. Yet, I've been able to simply explain that class experience in a way that was personally resonant for others through, for example, Harry Potter.
Just because something isn't real, doesn't mean it's not full of truth. Or allegory. Or mere usefulness.
I don't define myself by my gender. Or by what I read or watch. But I do partially define myself by how those things fit on me and how I engage them in turn. Literary fiction and its disection of modern work/life conflicts, heteronormative neuroses, the burdens of family legacies and quests for personal identity in the face of strip-mall culture, aren't things I need or want to wear, hich doesn't make many of those books less artfully rendered, it just makes them not terribly useful to me.
At the end of the day, I think it's ridiculous that this discussion always comes down to you asking me or Kali or whomever is engaging this dialogue with you to justify our tastes, to justify -- to link this back to Kali's original point -- our desires.
Desire is interesting as a subject for its variances and discomforts; it's not an experience of neatness. I don't know why you keep asking it to be.
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and continued
Date: 2009-01-15 02:25 pm (UTC)Metropolitan, despite being a well-made, funny and engaging film about essentially true things, did nothing to provide her insight into that experience. Yet, I've been able to simply explain that class experience in a way that was personally resonant for others through, for example, Harry Potter.
Just because something isn't real, doesn't mean it's not full of truth. Or allegory. Or mere usefulness.
I don't define myself by my gender. Or by what I read or watch. But I do partially define myself by how those things fit on me and how I engage them in turn. Literary fiction and its disection of modern work/life conflicts, heteronormative neuroses, the burdens of family legacies and quests for personal identity in the face of strip-mall culture, aren't things I need or want to wear, hich doesn't make many of those books less artfully rendered, it just makes them not terribly useful to me.
At the end of the day, I think it's ridiculous that this discussion always comes down to you asking me or Kali or whomever is engaging this dialogue with you to justify our tastes, to justify -- to link this back to Kali's original point -- our desires.
Desire is interesting as a subject for its variances and discomforts; it's not an experience of neatness. I don't know why you keep asking it to be.