Stuff to procrastinate with

[trinityvixen]

One of my favorite occasional blogs (as opposed to those I check everyday, several times a day), is Tiger Beatdown. Sady Doyle is one of those people, who, like glvalentine, makes absolutely everything fucking funny. It's safe and accessible feminism with humor, thus giving lie to the "humorless feminist" stereotype. That stereotype fucking sucks. It muzzles women. Today, I had to refrain from commenting on a friend's LJ post that was a bunch of sexist drivel made in pursuit of a political point. If you're that friend, you probably suspect it's you. I'll spare you the suspense: it was.

Anyway, Tiger Beatdown has a post up by a dude--dudes who can be feminists!? WHOA-OA. He happens to be gay, which might explain his lack of being cool with patriarchal norms. He has a post about the de-gaying of movie trailers, specifically about the de-gaying of the trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There really is no argument you can make against his thesis.** While Scott Pilgrim has two gay characters and at least one assumedly bisexual character, few of them appear in the otherwise awesome trailer. Coupled with the other examples he cites about Valentine's Day and, more damning, A Single Man, it's hard not to see the trend. Even when the movie is about a gay man mourning the death of his lover, gayness is absent.

It might have behooved him to do a little more research to ascertain that, yes, those characters are in the movie (neither he nor people in the comments seem to realize that). I, for one, am astonished that Wallace wasn't in the trailer given how fully half the laugh-out-loud parts were his doing. That's okay, I forgive him for not doing his research fully: he gave a shout-out to Hollywood Montrose of Mannequin fame. Yes, it is possible to be famous for being in that movie. I'd also like to point out this character to the Hollywood anti-gay-trailer squad: I didn't realize Hollywood was gay until I was in college. I really just thought he was weird. To be fair to me and my obliviousness, he is weird. (He hangs around--voluntarily!--with Andrew McCarthy, for one.) His defining traits have more to do with his outrageous--even for the 80s!--fashion sense and tendency towards hysterics than they do about his being into guys. Notably, however, he does talk about dating men. SHOCK.



**He's right that Wallace is absent, and the authenticity of the bisexual's dual-gendered interests does read as if it's just a fad, not a lifestyle. But he's talking out his ass when it comes to the other gay character, seeing as she's featured fairly prominently in the trailer. Their choice of phrases about the evil exes is also not as he represents. So, really, perhaps Scott Pilgrim was not the best trailer upon which to launch the Bitch Ship.

Comments

[onefishonly.livejournal.com]

I'd seen that post, and had a slightly resistent response re: the Scott Pilgrim discussion in that yes, it's pretty clear that there's a girl among the evil exes - complaining that this isn't highlighted more clearly is like complaining there's no scene in the trailer where Michael Cera says "I'm Scott Pilgrim, a twenty-something slacker in Toronto" (that is, calling it out more explicitly would waste valuable time and insult the intelligence of the viewer). As far as I followed, the blogger's argument was that the trailer was structured such that media outlets reporting on the trailer could/would refer to "seven evil ex-boyfriends," and so SECONDHAND reports about the movie wouldn't mention any gay content. Which seems a slightly specious argument. Since when is the content creator responsible for other people's misinterpretation of the content?

Personally, I'd guess the author had been bugged by this sort of thing and wanted to write about it for a while, and used the timely release of the Scott Pilgrim trailer as a hook on which to hang the rest of the article.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

No, clearly you're right--this is a bone that's gone unpicked and the slightest thing sets it off. Doesn't change the fact that there does seem to be serious down-playing of the gay in trailers. I admit to being caught totally by surprise that there were gay characters in Valentine's Day. I...did not get that from the trailer. (I did get that that movie looked ass-awful, though, so my bullshit instincts are at least working even if my gaydar is being thwarted.)