[lbo-talk] Avatar: The Exquisite Horror of The Strange Stranger

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Jan 8 15:50:51 PST 2010


At 05:30 PM 1/8/2010, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>Just as H'wood's feminism -- represented in pop culture artifacts as
>the slovenly, clueless guy vs. the relentlessly organized, robotically
>perfect woman -- is one example of the feminism of fools.

I'm not so sure it's feminism as an old cultural trope that has been increasingly exploited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Up_Father

Which naturally (!) brings us to Judd Apatow's work which subverts pop-culture feminism and puts men back on top in the same way as the colonialist fantasy running throughout Avatar: http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar

In Apatow's case, there's the slovenly clueless guy and the perfect woman who, like Sully, is missing something - alienated, lonely, loveless. She is redeemed by the fuck up. Against her "better," class striving judgment, she ends up hooking up with the guy in one way or another. He civilizes and humanizes her in the same way. She "goes native" and loosens up a bit, learns to let go, learns to lower her standards to find the right guy there all along: the fuck up.

The fantasy here is that it's the poor fuck up white guy who was, like the Native Americans in Dances With Wolves, actually oppressed: barred from perfect beautiful women because of their fuckup ways.

As you say, it's an anti-capitalism, anti-striving uppermiddle class culture of fools. shag

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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