The Dish

Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, is based on the memoir of Maziar Behari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested while covering the 2009 elections in Iran. Behari spent 118 days in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison. Michael O’Sullivan calls Stewart’s film “an impressive and important piece of storytelling,” and David Edelstein agrees:

In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless — something you’d watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror. The heart of the movie is the Kafkaesque relationship (if that’s the word) between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and the interrogator-torturer whom Bahari dubs “Rosewater” (Kim Bodnia) for his distinctive scent. What happens between them has a dramatic fullness that’s rare in political filmmaking.

Other reviews are more mixed. Esther Breger questions “whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker,” writing that the film is at its best when it employs humor:

The scenes between Behari and Rosewater also allow Stewart to do something he’s very good at—be funny. The interrogation process is both grueling and surreal, and Stewart has an eye for those absurdities. Behari’s “Sopranos” DVDs are treated as pornography when he’s taken into custody. Trips to New Jersey are automatically suspicious. And who is that Anton Chekhov mentioned on your Facebook profile? Midway through his confinement, Behari begins to distract Rosewater by appealing to the man’s prurient side, concocting deadpan tales of Western decadence and erotic massages. For his next film, Stewart should take things a little less seriously.

Thomas Hachard differs, suggesting Stewart “may have been too tasteful” in sticking to “predictable knocks against the kinds of insular interrogators and government officials that wouldn’t be able to recognize the Daily Show’s satire.” He criticizes the film’s disjointed narrative:

When Stewart features news footage of a debate between Ahmadinejad and one of his main challengers, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, or real video of the violence against those protesting the contested election results, the most serious concerns surrounding Bahari’s arrest come into view. But in other moments, Stewart takes a more dismissive approach, treating Bahari’s interrogator, for example, as an unappreciated buffoon looking for recognition from his superiors. In those moments, Stewart seems to want to turn these men into trifling figures, refusing to give them even the benefit of serious treatment. There are times, too, when the film takes a more broadly inspirational tone, addressing itself to Bahari’s resolute spirit — itself an allegory, it would seem, for Iran’s quelled opposition.

One can imagine a film that combined these various approaches into a cohesive story, but in Rosewater they’re blindly tossed together, and the result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari’s incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Brett McCracken agrees the movie fails to find a focus:

Stewart’s film champions the important role of journalists even as it laments the degradation of the profession. Are traditional journalists even necessary in a world of citizen reporting and organizing via cell phone and social media? Rosewater nods in this direction, but doesn’t take up the question thoroughly. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the film is that it doesn’t have clear focus or commitment to going deeper into one particular question. Is the film about Iran? Torture? Family? Journalism? The cyclical nature of war, terror and violence? Rosewater is about all of this, but it may have been stronger had it chosen just one or two of these areas to more profoundly ponder.

And Rob Hunter zooms out:

Stewart’s film is attractive, well-acted and “important,” and his stylistic touches of visible hashtags and other social media shorthand make it very much a film in the now. But is it a film that will be remembered in a year’s time? Bahari’s triumph is real, impressive and relevant. Rosewater is a pleasant feature debut.

For his new documentary Do I Sound Gay?, which opened the NYC DOC festival this week, director David Thorpe filmed his investigation of the “gay voice”:

The film starts on a clever and fun note, with Thorpe clearing his throat before reading the credits out loud and then staging, in very low-tech manner, the Friday-night train ride to Fire Island that made him realize he disliked people with gay voices — which includes not only practically all his fellow passengers but also himself. Over 40 and newly single, the insecure Thorpe wonders if there’s something that can be done about his voice, so he goes to see a speech therapist, who has him working on his nasality and long vowels.

In a review, Rich Juzwiak calls the movie a “bold documentary that derives its momentum from Thorpe’s seesawing between self-loathing and acceptance”:

I related to Thorpe’s hyper-consciousness over his voice and his attempt to alter it. … Past encounters may have taught us that if we sound gay, we won’t be taken seriously or that we’ll put ourselves in some kind of danger or that other guys who are similarly obsessed with the construct of masculinity won’t want to fuck us. In some instances, it’s impossible to refrain from internalizing this. Part of your responsibility as a considerate human interested in communicating is evolution.

At the same time, and where do we draw the line at improving ourselves, and who dictates what constitutes improvement? If we historically deferred to majority opinion, we’d be closeted and attempting to twist our soft dicks into a point to fuck our wives. Because sexuality involves not just the internal but also the external, there will always be people arguing that being gay is a choice. And it is, insofar as one chooses to live his or her life fully, pursuing happiness to the best of his or her ability. One chooses to reject traditional narratives and cultural expectations and whatever external shame lurks, for the sake of just being. Do I Sound Gay? explores the complications that arise once you’ve settled into a life of just being. For a lot of us, just being is an aspiration itself. Even as adults, even in 2014.

In an interview, Thorpe and Dan Savage (who is featured in the film) talk about why they think the topic provokes so much interest:

Thorpe: The gay voice is a symbol—of homosexuality, of femininity—and symbols are very powerful. So it was important for me to address the gay voice as something larger than the gay voice and something representative of gayness, of femininity, and how it can provoke homophobia and misogyny. It seems like a small thing, but the disruption it causes is enormous. I would liken it to holding hands with your lover or kissing in public: it’s a very small act but if you kiss someone of the same sex in a room like this [a public restaurant], you know people are watching you and the temperature of the room changes. So a small act like speaking has enormous consequences.

Dan Savage: It’s also homophobia. It’s the hatred of gay people by non-gay people, but also the self-hatred that so many people struggle with. Like, what’s wrong with sounding like who you are? Some people have a real issue with that. There are straight people that want to live in a world where they can pretend gay people don’t exist and then there are gay people who so struggle with self-hatred that’s been pounded into them so that they policing themselves for any traits that might give them away. If you’re the kind of gay person that has a very identifiable gay voice, a lot of gay people will say it’s like you’re coming out all the time.

Check out my thoughts on the subject here, and read the long-running Dish thread here.

In a review of Vivienne Westwood, a new autobiography co-written with Ian Kelly, Bee Wilson considers how the punk ethos influenced the designer’s career:

The key to Westwood’s enduring success, apart from her brilliance at ‘making’, seems to be her almost unnatural sense of her own charisma and authority: her sense that wherever she was, those were the barricades at which everyone else should be fighting. At fifty, she admitted that she thought any man who didn’t desire her more than everyone else in the room was ‘mad or stupid’. In 1989, she famously posed for the cover of Tatler dressed as Mrs Thatcher, complete with pearls, cravat and tailored jacket. The power of the image is in the uncanny facial similarity between the two: how can the woman who helped invent punk look so like the Iron Lady? But for Westwood herself, it wasn’t a stretch. All she had to do was ‘put a little doubt’ in her eyes and she looked just like Thatcher. It’s worth dwelling on the implications of this statement: the real Vivienne Westwood looks like a less self-doubting version of Mrs Thatcher.

It was self-confidence that allowed her to leap from safety-pinning the queen’s face on the King’s Road to emulating the monarch’s dress sense on the Paris catwalks.

The only person she ever tried to please, she said in 2003, was herself. It didn’t bother her when the business nearly went bankrupt in the mid-1980s. Nor is she now awed by the immense wealth generated by her brand today. ‘Our Vivienne’ was always in her glory, long before the world caught up. In 1987, Westwood did her Harris Tweed collection, inspired by the idea of ‘debutantes going to balls but with a Barbour flung over their ballgown’. She declared herself inspired by pomp and circumstance and Norman Hartnell. John Lydon has attacked the way she turned her back on her punk past, switching to making posh frocks ‘for Ascot’. Seen as part of the larger history of the Dowager Empress, however, the punk years were just one phase in her longer quest to find a more ‘interesting life’ through clothes. In any case, as Westwood herself recognises, the swagger of punk could point in more than one political direction. It could be part of an anarchist rejection of the establishment; or it could be a proto-Thatcherite form of extreme individualism.

In another review of the book, Jane Shilling adds:

Westwood has always seen the catwalk as an extension of the literary and political salon and vice versa. Her co-writer, Ian Kelly, argues that her importance as a cultural figure resides in “her conviction that clothing can change how people think. Fashion as agitprop.”

Irksome in short quotations, the vaguely hyperbolic tone is less irritating once you get used to it. Although the biography is written in the third person, Westwood’s trenchant voice and her superlative sense of self-belief rise pungently from the page. She is now 73, but, like that other iconic figure whom she once mischievously parodied, she shows every sign of going on and on.

(Image of 1989 Tatler cover via Dazed)

Is it important for a fictional character to be “likeable”? In an essay exploring the question, Edan Lepucki gets feedback from her fellow novelist Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers:

I … think there’s a big difference between a character being unlikeable (whatever that means) and it being unpleasant to spend time reading about them. I have put down many books because I didn’t like the experience of reading them, but that has nothing at all to do with whether or not the characters in those books seemed like people I would want to hang out with. That’s my question, I suppose, for the people who keep bringing this horseshit up. Are they complaining about not enjoying the book, or that they don’t want to have tea with the characters? Because if it’s the former, for godssake, stop reading!

Lepucki goes on to comment:

Traditionally, the Unlikeable Character in fiction is created with authorial intention. You, as the reader, recognize the cues that the person you’re reading about is alienating or reprehensible, and it’s clear that such characterization is part of author’s aesthetic project. (Unreliable Characters, a la the infamous butler in Remains of the Day, are also traditionally revealed this way). But what if a character isn’t Unlikeable, but unlikeable?  What if you just didn’t like him or her? That’s a valid personal response, and certainly a good a reason as any to stop reading.  But it’s such a personal response that it’s irrelevant to the critical gaze.

Previous Dish on the subject here.