Breakfast at Tiffany's and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

It was 1961. Blake Edwards directs Audrey Hepburn who plays an American geisha based on a story by Truman Capote. For Hepburn, it is a defining role, for the other players, like George Peppard, Buddy Ebsen, and Martin Balsam, it would be one of their best roles before moving on to the new upcoming medium of TV.

Blake Edwards who had funny ideas about what is funny, had asked Mickey Rooney to pretend he was Japanese, created a typical surreal party scene, and later regretted and apologized for the former and repeated the latter with Peter Sellars playing an Indian gentleman in brown-face.

Detail from Dancer - copyright 2014 - A. Barake

Despite all the Hollywood crassness and foibles and the watering down of the very moving story, the movie is a classic, and is moving. Some scenes are exactly true to the book, and their power undiluted. The undercurrent of tragedy is always there, the sadness of men's lust for youth, the hurt of youth abused, and the exploitation that derives from these circumstances is played though the central character.

The pattern of a party girl that knows that sex is power yet that feels trapped by it and yearns for something more permanent than the puppet strings that the pull of Eros provides is classic. Marilyn's appeal comes from there. That Hepburn was able to transcend it while still providing the sadness is genius.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, although ostensibly playing with Chandler themes, does provide a nod to the same story (to be fair, so did Chandler in his own misogynistic way in "The Little Sister"). There is the sad back story of childhood abuse, and the party girl in Hollywood plot line, and the sympathetic "friend" who wants her but cannot "have" her.

The pattern of friendship that becomes love is a Hollywood staple, watered down in Doris Day - Rock Hudson movies, and used and abused even today. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang hints at it, but the boy and girl do not get together, the boy finally admits to not being good with girls. It plays all the cliches and then twists them into something that says "I know all about this bullshit".

Breakfast at Tiffany's could not do that. It was shot on a budget of $2.5 million and earned 15. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was shot on a budget of $15M and made 16. Draw your own conclusions on what sells.

Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.