Media I've been Consuming

Things I've read and watched on me holidays - just some quick thoughts written as stream of consciousness.

Films

Ocean’s Eleven (new): Enjoyable fluff, iconic soundtrack, rom-com for men.

Terminator II: I feel like I owe Jim Cameron an apology. I spent years ducking his films due to a deeply felt dislike of the Titanic and Avatar. It’s only recently that I’ve actually come to appreciate the rest of his oeuvre.

Sarah Connor must be one of the great female characters of blockbuster cinema. While Arnie is the face of the Terminator franchise, Connor is the driving heart, propelling the narrative forward with such intensity that at times the ostensible messiah John Connor fades into the background. Sarah is tough, but not to the point of cliche. She has been hardened by circumstance and duty, but enough of her personality comes throuhg that she is not a one dimensional bad-ass, of the kind found in any given Michael Bay movie.

Watching this I”m struck by Linda Hamilton’s evident muscularity, we seem to have gone backwards in allowing women to display serious conditioning on screen. With all the discourse on pressures male action stars are under to run extreme HGH cycles to get screen ready I wonder where all the anavar barbies are?

Books

Erica Jong - How to Save Your Own Life

I’ve gone about reading Jong’s work backwards, as I have yet to read her influential debut novel “Fear of Flying”. Such is life when your primary source of books are battered paperbacks picked on impulse from second hand shops.

Jong is perhaps best known for developing the term “zipless fuck” - a pure sexual encounter with no strings attached or power games involved. This would go on to be a defining concept of the women’s sexual liberation movement, alongside burned bras and the birth control pill. I was surprised to discover that while Jong coined the term, it has been radically decontextualised from her work as a whole. While she may have inspired thousands of women to leave their husbands in “Fear of Flying”, when we meet her in HTSYOL she is still with Bennett, albeit unhappily. Really Jong’s writing depicts the impossibility of a true “zipless fuck” - sexual relations between men and women will never be free of the inherent power dynamics and baggage of male/female relationships until society as a whole is. Within this book (and presumably the latter also) she manages a clear-eyed characterisation of the very issues which would ultimately undermine the sex positive feminist movement of the 2000s. Namely that until men are safe to fuck, a true zipless fuck is both impossible to achieve, and in the worst of scenarios outright harmful.

As much as I enjoyed HTSYOL I found it incredibly depressing to read such a book and realise that not only did it feel entirely contemporary, in many ways it feels like we’ve slipped backwards. Where Jong describes a cast of women who express mostly the same frustrations and anxieties around men and relationships many of their contemporaries have, she also describes a prevailing discourse where the financial, emotional and sexual liberation of women was at the forefront of most educated women’s minds. Something which feels in stark contrast to the current pre-occupation with being seen as “just a girl” and trad-wife aspirationalism.

High-Rise - JG Ballard

To say that Ballard was a prophetic writer is practically cliche by now. So much of what he wrote about has now come to pass. In reality I think it is more accurate to say that Ballard was an excellent analyst of what had already come to pass, and what was going on around him. When reading “High-Rise” his novel on social decline within the confines of a middle class tower block, he was not writing about some imagined future, but something he had in fact lived through - the fall of Shanghai in 1937 which he would write about in “Empire of the Sun”. His precise understanding of the maelstrom lying in wait underneath the veneer of polite society is a recurring theme throughout his work, one could even say that it is the common thread through all of his novels.