Things To Do Instead of Smoking, Part 1

Consider how this PJ Harvey song stands in response to this poem by D.H. Lawrence. Look, here's a YouTube clip so that you can listen to it from this page:



(I tried to find a live performance, but no luck. There is a clip of a woman singing it to her baby! EMBARRASSING.)

Anyway, here's DH, in part:

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She'd been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn't had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won't let us forget it.

Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord's indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won't keep.
Ripe figs won't keep.
Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won't keep, won't keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into self-assurance?
And bursten figs won't keep?

One thing to love about PJ is how well-read she is, and how little she flaunts that. I've heard bands called "literate" simply because they have wordy lyrics, or cite authors by name; PJ, on the other hand, is literate - smart enough to base a song around this poem, for example, or to quote David Mamet and Flannery O'Connor in her lyrics - but in an unassuming, unpretentious sort of way. She puts in the references (high or low, trendy or not) and lets her listeners do the work. She knows what a Sheela Na Gig is, but she's also seen South Pacific and Carrie, and can touch on all three in the space of one song. So, the songs themselves tend to expand and take on new meanings over time, as you become familiar with her reference points.

Another thing to love about her is how she plays with gender. She tends to write songs around extreme, archetypal characters - the macho, violent gender-fuckers in songs like 50 ft. Queenie ("you bend over, Casanova") are balanced out by the whimperingly passive, victimized women in songs like Hook ("my love made me gag, call him Daddy"). This song is trickier. DH has a pretty basic point: women need to stop their yapping if they know what's good for them. PJ's take on it, though, is nearly impossible to get a bead on. She's dancing back and forth, agreeing and contradicting, subverting and supporting. It's a song about ambivalence: opening herself up is going to make her happy, but it's also going to cause some bloodshed. There's no clear resolution.

Oh, hey! Did I mention that she also wrote a song about dumping a dude because he won't put out? Well, she did! Here it is:



Bursten into self-assurance, indeed.

Powers of Horror: Gore, Gender, & Abjection

Here is something you probably shouldn't try: defending that movie Irreversible. Yeah, you know - the rapey one. Unfortunately, nobody warned the AV Club, and their resulting examination is about as incoherent as you might expect.

As you can imagine, I got a wee bit testy after reading this piece and the resulting conversation. I will spare you the spiel about gendered violence, and appropriation, and about how artists laying claim to experiences they are protected from in order to show how edgy or deep they are is fucking Privilegetard 101, and about how said artists usually manage to demonstrate that they know nothing about the topic at hand in their Great Masterpieces. I want to blow past all this, and bring you to my only positive thought inspired by this article, which is as follows:

In My Skin is a damn fine picture. Seriously, it is! How many horror movies have inspired you to revisit Julia Kristeva? Probably very few, unless you've seen In My Skin.*

For those who have not seen it, here is a brief rundown: it centers on a woman, Esther, who rips her leg open on a shard of metal at a party. She doesn't feel the injury for some time. When she finally does notice it, it fascinates her; she becomes obsessed with cutting herself up, and she studies, plays with, or eats the parts of herself that she's cut away. Her body is not her any more: it acts without her permission, and she can't feel its pain as her own. Her relationships fall apart. (In one scene, she explains her compulsion to her boyfriend, and he decides to fuck her sane, saying, "can you feel this?" She says no.) She finally takes her body away to a motel room, and carves and eats it in front of a full-length mirror, in a scene that can't help but be sexual - a protracted and bloody jouissance.

It should be clear by now that this is a disturbing movie. I saw it with a man who loves gory horror movies, and it upset him to the point of nausea and tears. I think that In My Skin's capacity to sicken and disturb is one of its virtues; shock can be a valuable tool, as long as it makes you think about why you're shocked in the first place.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva sets forth her theory of abjection. The abject which is anything that violates the binary of me/not me, or subject/object: shit, blood, filth, injury, death, madness, and our mothers, because we were part of them once and are not any more, among other things. We feel a special sort of terror and revulsion when we encounter the abject, because it threatens the foundation of our identities. We create rules, rituals and taboos in order to deal with that terror; we separate the "clean" from the "unclean" in order to experience ourselves as stable and fixed subjects.

It could be said that every woman lives in a state of abjection. Think about how we bleed and grow other bodies within our own bodies, or all of the products and procedures designed to ensure that women, and especially women's genitals, remain "clean," or the persistent identification of women with madness, both in art and mythology and in more current ideas of "hysteria" or period-related "craziness" or "irrational" behavior. Fear of the mother becomes fear of all women, because all women are perceived as mothers or potential mothers themselves. There is a reason that we eroticize women who look as if they've never reproduced.

Moreover, it can be said that every woman experiences her own body as abject. Say what you like about the theory of the male gaze, but the fact is that women's bodies are presented as Other and object in most art and discourse, simply because the people who have produced art and controlled discourse for most of recorded history have not inhabited female bodies. Women internalize this, and therefore live in the uncomfortable position of perceiving our bodies as objects while also having our subjectivity inextricably bound to them. Lots of female trouble arises from this predicament - anorexia, inorgasmia, many complex and varied forms of shame and self-loathing - and so does In My Skin.

Someone on the Internet called In My Skin the female version of American Psycho. While I think that's limiting, I do agree with it, in a sense: if American Psycho is about the masculine prerogative of establishing everyone and everything as Object, with oneself as the supreme Subject, and about taking that premise to its logical extreme, then In My Skin is about the female experience of being embodied as both subject and object, and about the logical extremes of that position. The question is posed, not only by the movie, but by the way in which it was made: Marina de Van, who wrote and directed the movie, also plays Esther, and I'm told that she actually did cut herself at times to save money on special effects. I don't know if that's true - if it is, it raises a host of other questions - but I am fascinated by how she plays with being the woman who creates the image and the woman who comprises the image, the watcher and the watched.

In My Skin isn't about self-mutilation as we understand it. It's never clinical or therapeutic (in the vulgar sense) in how it approaches Esther's behavior. It's got more in common with certain Cronenberg movies than it does with Girl, Interrupted. (While we are on the subjects of abjection and gender and body horror in film, here is a great scene from a so-so movie: Jude Law, in Cronenberg's eXistenZ, explaining to Jennifer Jason Leigh that, "I just have this phobia of being... penetrated." Jennifer tries to convince him that it's great, it's fun, everyone does it, he should let her stick it in. He gets very prissy as he explains that just because everyone does it, there's no reason he has to do it, too. He's trying to keep himself clean! This scene, in context, has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and I love it very much.) In fact, Esther's boyfriend stands in for the concerned audience, and functions as a way to dismantle their preconceptions: as he tells Esther to think of herself, or think of him, or be for God's sake a little bit rational, the audience is brought to the uncomfortable realization that he has no clue what's going on.

Esther doesn't hate herself or her body; she simply doesn't identify self with body any more. She's puzzled by the body, and she wants to figure it out. The AV Club review quotes her as saying, "If I am no longer my body, what am I?" Here is another way to phrase that question: if your body is no longer you, what is it? Meat, project, enemy, lover? When Esther has answered these questions to her satisfaction - or at least taken her investigation as far as it can go - she puts her clothes on and walks away.

*Or, you know, Alien. Forced male pregnancy, ahoy!