Ma Vie En Rose through the lens of Schiavi and Irigaray

One scene in director Alain Berliner's "Ma Vie En Rose" that really stuck with me after the viewing was the scene in which Ludovic disassociates from himself following the mock wedding he puts on with the neighbor boy. In the face of his mother's ire and the neighbor's fainting, Ludovic adapts a trick his grandmother taught him and closes his eyes, imaging the world is as he wishes it to be. This finds him flying, away from the troubles and up and out into the air... where he looks down and sees himself, being hauled across the lawn by his angry mother. He is promptly thrust back into his own body.

What is the significance of this scene?

For me, this image in "Ma Vie En Rose" was very powerful. We are witness to a division of self, a multiplicity of identity: Ludo's "idealized" self gazing down at the self, the identity, generated by his parents and the rest of the neighborhood. This "Ludo as spectator" looking down on "Ludo as spectacle" highlights the way in which Ludo is, as Michael Schiavi writes, "the object of perpetual observation" (9). It also begins the period described by Pollack in the Schiavi text in which "boys become extremely watchful, carefully monitoring how other boys act" (10). Ludo does this, watching his brothers closely and trying for a brief period to mimic them (even practicing in the mirror, what Schiavi calls a "Lacanian sketch") but when it fails, he quickly rejects this period which Pollack describes as so crucial. Because Ludo has no desire to be a boy: this crucial boy stage for him is nothing more than a phase.

What is the significance of this in light of Irigaray's "The Sex Which Is Not One?"

"'She' is indefinitely other in herself," writes Irigaray, describing the plight of the woman, a plight which Ludo is familiar with. Irigaray writes of women's use of language being not exactly what they mean, of discourse as disconnected from their true selves as a function of a gender role premised on an inherently flawed sexual role. Ludo's frustration with this phenomenon he cannot explain is evident in his neologism: after a biology discussion with his sister, he coins the term "girlboy" to describe himself. Yet even this term is a case in which the woman "steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished" (29). Ludo cannot just express his gender identity without addressing a role already assigned to him, one he is powerless to negate (Even in my post, lade with masculine pronouns) and therefore must account for in his linguistic attempts to establish a gender identity.

Farther and Farther From Heaven

"The greatest obstacle to making sense of Far From Heaven's relation to the present is its seemingly banal treatment of race and sexual orientation." -Salome Skvirsky



what is the significance of this banal treatment of racism and homophobia in Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven?

i think that the banality Skvirsky addresses, rooted in "displays of racism and homophobia and the surface-level injunction to tolerance and color-blindness" functions as a font of absurdity. the audience recognizes a certain lack of believability in these scenes: they aren't "genuine," and they don't resemble the far more subtle and insidious forms of racism and homophobia we all must unfortunately regularly encounter in our own lives. when the young black boy enters the pool and everyone clears out of it, we the audience are left to gape in disbelief at the sheer absurdity, and absurdity is ever the most useful implement of that great, Swiftian-style satire. Paeans to colorblindness and tolerance, outmoded ways of addressing racial and sexual difference in modern society, seem at best like the idyllic dreams of foolishness, concepts worth considering but ultimately impractical in addressing racism and homophobia. I see the film suggesting that as horrible as the attitudes of our society may have been in the fifties, our "solutions" were equally untenable.

what is the significance of this sort of criticism?

as Skvirsky notes, "the interest of Haynes' film lies in the way it questions the ability of the moralizing mode of melodrama to address the social issues of the contemporary historical moment," but i think it goes further, to perhaps call into question the ability of narrativization to in some way affect the social issues. Haynes doesn't really do anything in his re-imaging of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows to try to dispel the regrettable social blights of homophobia and racism. He fails to offer us a reasonable alternative: in fact, he seems to be purposefully presenting us with an unrealistic and untenable alternative in the form of implausible "colorblindness" and the regrettable concept of "tolerance", now rightly regulated to its proper status as an unacceptable capitulation in a failure to achieve true acceptance. Here, we seem to have a nihilistic dichotomy: society can either consume itself with its prejudiced bigotry, or with its insufficient means of dealing with said bigotry, and no part of the narrative seems to help provide an answer. We are left in the same state as Cathy Whitaker: crying as the train pulls away from the station without us aboard.

bjork meets marx: dancer in the dark

"The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man stands to himself, is first realized and expressed in the relationship in which a man stands to other men" -Marx

What is the significance of the hand-held camera in Dancer in the Dark?

I found the hand-held camera to be one of the most crucial elements of the film, directed by Lars Von Trier, as it determines the relationship between the viewer and the other characters. The hand-held camera erases the illusion of detachment, and renders the viewer as a character of sorts: a silent character, unnoticed by the other characters, yet a character nevertheless. When we see the protagonist, Selma, tediously navigating her way home via the train tracks because of her blindness, we stand witness beside her friends Kathy and Jeff, similarly powerless to help her, aghast at the spectacle of her looming lack of sight. On the gallows before Selma is hanged, we stand shaky beside the other nervous guards as she strapped to the board and hanged in mid-song.

The fact that we, the viewers, are rendered into these passive witnesses makes us very much a part of the story and facilitates the establishment of a relationship between ourselves and the other characters in the film. And the true horror of Dancer is that we are mute witnesses, impotent to straighten out the misunderstandings, right the wrongs, prevent the tragedies. In a way, we are the opposite of Selma: we can see everything that she can not see, and yet where she is constantly affecting the lives of those around her (some for the better, like her son, and some for the worse, like Bill, the cop she kills) we are unable to affect anything, but simply to watch the plot play out.

What is the significance of this neutered relationship, as it relates to Marx?

In the Marxist formulation, encapsulated in the quote above, we are all estranged from each other. And we see this in the film: Selma's refusal to let Jeff give her a ride, the perversity of Bill's crime against Selma, Kathy's inability to reason with her friend Selma, the reduction of factory works and court sketch artists to their roles, deprived even of a name. In a similar fashion, Trier's film condemns our own distance from Selma, holds us accountable for the way we go about our lives. The final words of the film, occupying a sudden silence, read like a epitaph, honoring Selma in death despite our inability to help her in life.