A couple of friends emailed me in response to the last message. Who knew I had to write about sex to actually get them to say something? One comment was a quotation from G.K. Chesterton:
"The thing about brown paper art is that it forces one to remember that white is also a color."
And last week, a different person, in response to the email I sent out on the same subject, asked:
Now here's a new angle: what is the significance in associating uninspired or repetitive sex with whiteness? Is there a racial implication here? Do non-Caucasians have more fun?
Both of those comments point to a misconception: that whiteness is the absence of colour. My last message definitely invoked that misconception, and I should have pointed out that there is a fallacy buried in there. I doubt it's a coincidence that white paper and white skin (even though it's really pink) are considered the default; therefore, it's probably no coincidence that white (vanilla) sex is the default position as well (pun fully intended). But the point that both of my friends' comments make is that white is a constructed default, just as much as certain positions/sex acts are.
My response to the specifically racial connotation is still only half-formed. All I can think to point out is that race/ethnicity does, absolutely, function as its own kind of fetish in the porn industry. Black or Asian or Latino women are rarely in porn, unless it's racially-themed porn, like Ebony Babes or Oriental Beauties or something like that (NB: those titles are made up; I cannot quote actual porn titles off the top of my head). When the exotic is fetishised (or 'exoticised' as the post-colonialists might say), then the familiar is normalised, by the very same operation. And this leads me to the other comment I received, specifically in response to the blog (as opposed to the email-out last week):
I've more often seen vanilla referred to as non-kinky than as non-queer. I wouldn't blink at hearing a guy say "my boyfriend and I are usually quite vanilla in bed". Actually, I would be more confused by vanilla being used to mean strictly straight sex, although it might make sense in context as a subculture-spread way to refer to "the normals."
The opposition implied by the construction of 'vanilla' as a concept is that kink and queerness are the 'other,' just like non-whiteness is the 'other,' above. But of course, that othering doesn't stand up to either simple logic or the practises of the very sub-cultures we're talking about, the kinky and the queer, which I will hesitantly describe as two different groups with incidental overlap, just like straight/kinky, or for that matter, White/kinky, Black/kinky, Asian/kinky, etc.
I heard the word 'vanilla' used in reference to sex a couple of times last week, and though I've certainly hear it before, it got me thinking. Specifically, it got me feeling. There was a sensation, in my gut, that I didn't like what I was hearing and I wanted to figure out why. I thought about it, came to a conclusion, and then, out of curiosity and out of a not-quite-unconscious desire to confirm what I'd already decided, I asked some of my friends what they thought. My gut reaction to 'vanilla' as sex slang is that it refers to sexuality that is not, to be reductive about it, either queer or kinky. That statement in itself says a few things.
NB: more discussion on this oh-so exciting topic is happening on Girl-Wonder.org.
There is an ill-defined 'norm,' here, against which both vanilla sex and kinky sex are measured, though 'vanilla' is also, itself, the measure of that norm. When I asked my friends, the specific descriptions of vanilla were things like missionary position and heterosexual/heteronormative, and I'd add that it's not though to involve toys, props, or various clothes that are loosely (perhaps erroneously) categorised as 'fetishwear.' The implication of that binary--vanilla vs. queer/kink--is that queerness is inherently kinky, that these two things are essentially similar in some way.
Whether it's also implied that kinkiness is inherently queer, I'm not willing to claim. I think a woman who really gets off on whipping men, or vice-versa, is probably not going to be described as 'queer' unless we're talking about her taking on a typically masculine position, but then the queerness has little to do with the kink, assuming we're calling whipping kinky, which I think I can. (Part of the problem here, for me, is that I don't have much of a perspective on the lived experience and practise of kink, so a lot of this is speculative.)
I think the most overt implication of the vanilla/kinky divide (to set queerness to one side, for now) comes from the words themselves. I'm not going to go into the imagery of the word 'kinky' except to point out that it can't be coincidence that the spatial/formal metaphor is the lexical opposite of 'straight,' even though I've never heard gay people referred to as 'bent' or 'curvy' (at least not in reference to their orientation; there are certainly curvy, queer women out there, much to the delight of a lot of other gay women, I'm sure, but I digress).
It's 'vanilla,' and the implications of that particular word that I started with, though. 'Vanilla' says to me, colourless, boring, the default, mass-produced and mass-consumed, "this flavour which is not one" as it were (with apologies to Luce Irigaray). It's unimaginative, uncreative, chosen out of habit and marketing, perhaps the convenience of abundance, rather than genuine desire. These implications match up, sadly, with the attitudes of some people toward those whom they would call 'vanilla.'
I haven't often encountered that attitude among my friends and colleagues, but it has reared its ugly head on occasion, and usually in a hauty, self-assured, and frankly arrogant fashion. The assumption is that being 'vanilla' is the result of a lack of choice, a lack of action, a lack of enlightenment, a lack of willingness to experiment, a lack of courage, things like that. It's funny. Now that I think about it, all of those things imply choice, even though one of the major pillars of gay rights is that it's not a choice, and social commenters, people like Dan Savage, are quick to treat kinkiness, specifically fetishes, in much the same way. "You are what you are. As long as you're not hurting anyone, just enjoy." I pretty much agree with this, but I find it curiously at odds with the idea that to be 'vanilla' is to have failed to choose to be otherwise. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, here.
So where I got in my little meditation on the word was that I don't think I like what it inevitably means. I can see the use value in having a term that differentiates that sex which we socially designate as "the norm" (a complex and problematic concept in itself, mind you) and that which we designate "kinky." We already have language for orientation--gayness, queerness, straightness--and even though it probably starts as many fights as it resolves, the words are useful.
But the specific word that was chosen seems to me to be inherently dismissive of non-kinky sexuality as something practised only by the stupid or the cowardly; I put that phrase in deliberately blunt terms, by the way, to highlight that even when the word is used in a respectful way, as Dan Savage does, to explicitly say "that's what they do, and that's fine," it still retains implications of inferiority and narrow mindedness. It's kind of like when Schwarzenegger, way back in the 70s, said that he "really didn't have a problem with the fags." Yes, he was specifically expressing a positive message of toleration, which we like, but the word he used carried its own message.
I find myself reaching this kind of conclusion more and more, but I've decided that instead of using that all-too-convenient short-hand for "default, non-kinky, straight sexuality," I'm just going to say "default, non-kinky straight sexuality." Convenient short-hand words, especially to designate social groups, tend to lead to normative implications, and I'm not a fan of those.
I'm turning comments back on for this post because there are some, in many ways far more informed, friends who I think would like to comment. Have fun!
My apologies for stealing that title, by the way, but if you're going to steal, you might as well steal from smart people. In this case, The World in a Frame, by Leo Braudy, is about film theory, whereas I want to talk about a different kind of frame, and I think you know what kind already. Ever since I read that interview with Mark Smylie I've been thinking about what it might mean to talk about comics in terms of mise-en-scène and montage, and then I even ventured into collage. But I've had another thought about mise-en-scène specifically.
When a film is montage-centric, the formal aspect of it that conveys the most content is the cutting itself. The images you see aren't necessarily the most important, but rather the abstract connections between those images are what's at issue. For Eisenstein, this was crucial to cinematic expression; for McCloud it is the "blood in the gutters" of comics. Eisenstein seems particularly interested in the most abstract possibilities of this so-called dialectic juxtaposition, while McCloud spends most of his time, in Understanding Comics, on the more chronological, narrative, and causal possibilities contained within montage, or what McCloud calls 'closure.'
To be fair, 'montage' is an inappropriate word to use in comics, because it's just the French word for 'cutting,' literally cutting celluloid film into a movie. Comics aren't 'cut' together in that way. As Bernard and Carter point out in "Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Confronting the Fourth Dimension" (ImageTexT 1.2, 2004), the comics page is markedly unlike cinematic imagery in that two pages worth of panels are not only available to, but unavoidably in the reader's field of vision at all times. It's ironic that Soviet montage-like effects are arguably more readily available to the comics artist; by McCloud's description, they're the life-blood of the medium, the way that it "just does" function.
Panels are not the same as 'cutting' in the cinematic sense of jumping from one image that occupies your field of view to another that now occupies your field of view. Aside from splash pages and two-page spreads, comics panels are simultaneously visible and take up a very small part of your field of view. They're not 'cut,' with that word's implications of separation, although I've never been entirely comfortable with McCloud's word, 'closure,' with its implications of a closed system, one that is definite and has no potential to mean alternative things than the obvious causal/chronological/narrative implications, or even more damning, "what the artist intended" (if we put it to him like that, I'm almost certain that McCloud would readily, even enthusiastically, admit that artistic meaning is always open, but his language doesn't necessarily reflect that belief).
What I really want to talk about, and have been trying to talk about for the last couple of hundred words, is how we might think about how we view what Smylie calls his mise-en-scène layout style, in which every panel has the same dimensions and they're all placed regularly on the page, as in Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, or Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith's Fell, which Ellis specifically conceived of as a strict, nine-panel book as a way to keep the page count low, and thereby keep the price low (below US$2). I have previously, in the context of Michael Avon Oeming's fantastically chaotic panels, and extensive use of negative space, talked about what I think the 'gutters' signify to a reader, but a new way of looking at them (literally) occurred to me today.
In that entry, I thought of the white background that panels sit "on top" of as signifying less reality because they appear like pictures sitting on a piece of white paper. It occurred to me, though, that that holds only if we are paying attention to the blank spaces. If instead we mentally block them out--zoom in with our minds, as it were--then the blank space disappears and we are all the more concerned with only the panels and what's inside them (hence the literal sense of mise-en-scène: what's in the image). This layout style potentially heightens, not realism, but willing suspension of disbelief, by 'hiding' panel transitions in a formulaic, predictable pattern. More unpredictable panel patterns, whether they include negative space or not, force the viewer to pay attention to the page as a formal element of the medium, and though that formal element can signify all kinds of emotional or narrative information, there is marginally more conscious interpretation involved in extracting that information, and thus the viewer must work just that much harder to suspend disbelief.
Montage-style comics, then, are the ones that have panel structures that defy predictability and upset expectations, regardless of the use of negative space; they can communicate a great deal of information through the 'codes' contained in panel shape, size, and placement. Mise-en-scène-style comics have regular, predictable panel size and placement; they draw the eye away from blank spaces an into the panels themselves, placing more implicit importance on the 'content' than the 'form,' though it's important to remember that it was a 'formal' structure that lead the eye in that direction to begin with, so once again the form/content dichotomy breaks down and becomes, possibly, a kind of dialectic in and of itself.
Perhaps I'm just wrapped up in the idea of expressionism lately, but the last episode of Battlestar Galactica really got me thinking. We know that Ron Moore has a bit of a taste for non-narrative filmic techniques; the season opened with a very non-linear montage sequence that he reportedly had to fight for in the production meetings. He insisted that their audience is mature enough for it, and his comrades in arms thought they should start in more of a solidly narrative place (Hollywood continuity editing), and then work their way into montage. Thank gods he won that argument because the opening sequence of season three was spectacular. The seemingly non-narrative montage slowly builds into several different narrative threads that all cast light on each other. The sequence communicates an incredible amount of plot detail in an astoundingly beautiful way.
Given the kinds of serious cinema jollies I got from that sequence, you can imagine how joyous I was to watch the Basestar sequences of episode 5, "Torn." Half of the episode takes place on-board on a Cylon Basestar and is edited in a distinctly different style. The scenes are, first, subject to rapid dissolves that leave the plot hanging in time, as it were. Though events happen and time passes, there's no indication of how much time passes between them, and very little sense of how much time they take to occur. The story is focalised through Baltar, as he tries to figure out the Cylon world, so his confusion is our point of view.
In the episode commentary, Moore said that this was kind of a trick, that he couldn't think of a way to dress up the Basestars in such a way that was within budget and would satisfy the audience's curiosity. There's nothing he could have done that would be as fun as the mystery, he said (in so many words), so instead, he made fairly standard, TV-science fiction sets: a room and a couple of hallways. To maintain the mystery, however, he edited it in the style I mentioned already, and he had music made specifically to support the effect. The music is just some classical piano, a sound-alike version of Mozart, but it's notable because it has no sense of rising and falling action, no discernable beginning, middle, and end, no sense that the music could guide you through the story being told. It's amazing how powerful an effect music has on a scene.
But the last piece of the puzzle was a bold-faced exposition from Six, who specifically says that Cylons "project" most of the time. That they can simultaneously work within the fairly mundane confines of their world and project whatever imagined environment they want. To illustrate the point, we briefly see Six's world, a green forest instead of sterile hallways. This leads to a panicked discussion between Baltar and 'Head Six' about whether he's a Cylon, too, since he seems to be able to project into fantasies with her (this dialogue occurs while Baltar and a red-bikini-clad Head Six lounge around on a sun-drenched beach).
But the real point that I'm trying to get to is that the Cylons are expressionist creatures. Their world is somewhat expressionist in cinematic terms; it's a projection (there's that word again!) of their colours and moods into the sets. They're supposedly machines, so the walls are steel-coloured. They're associated with the glowing red eye, so that eye motif is on the walls, too. They're mysterious, so their environment is hard to understand. It's pretty basic set dressing, really, not particularly expressionist, as science fiction goes, but that device is used a lot in sci-fi in general, so it's not unfair to say it's present here, too. The real crux of it, though, is that they specifically do "project" their mental states, their chosen mental state, into the way they see the prefer to see the world. It's realistic only in so far as they see the world in a way that reflects how they "really" feel.
I am spending probably a half-hour every day just deleting the junk mail that fills up the comments on this blog, and I just can't deal with it anymore. I don't get many comments anyway, but if you have anything to say about one of the entries on this site, then those of you who know me are free to email me. I can almost guarantee that I will respond to your message on the blog. But I'm done with actual comments. It's too much of a pain in the ass.
To enjoy this series, you have to ignore any real understanding you might have of evolution and just take the cue from the show: evolution works totally differently in that universe than in our own. That's fine with me. I have no problem with that. However, some have said that Dr. Mohinder Suresh's narration has a touch of intelligent design (i.e., creation) about it, but I think that's a very limited way of looking at the very concept, and practice, of reverence.
Mohinder's narration does have a very metaphysical feel to it, but that kind of prophetic discourse isn't by any means limited to creationists, Christians, or even the religious. I've heard people speak about science in those kinds of hushed, reverent terms. It takes a special kind of mind to see the beauty and meaning in what others would regard as stark, cold science. Those minds can find almost spiritual significance in the slow progress of evolution or the complexities of mathematics.
I don't have that insight, myself, but I know that it exists and I respect that any intellectual exercise can take on a personal or social significance such that it becomes practically holy. Look at the nigh-worship of American history, the reverence we have in the West for Ancient Rome, or even, if we stretch ourselves, the devotion of 'fandom.'
So, yes, the actual science on the show is hogwash, but the ability to see metaphysical implications in the way that science works is both similar to religion, in that it seeks to understand the universe and live by that understanding, but also very different, in that a scientific reverence doesn't have to equate to actually being religious.
