campion's the piano and feminism
Tonight I was reminded why I have historically been frustrated by academic feminism. I checked out the film The Piano from the library and decided to watch it, and by and large I really thought it was a beautiful movie. I was too young when it came out to bother with it, so it was my first time seeing it. I love Jane Campion's visual aesthetic, and I thought the performances were incredible. I liked best the parts where issues of identity and connection sneaked in past the love story part--those parts were very well done. And the love story wasn't bad.
When I went to look up some more information on the film I discovered that there's been quite a feminist controversy over whether or not Campion's work is feminist, or whether it reinforces the patriarchal structure. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--Campion is, after all, a woman, so of course the politics of her position are going to become an issue. The most notable thing I found was an essay by bell hooks that frankly made me want to hit my head against the keyboard. hooks is a smart lady, but it felt to me like she watched the film with her dander up already, bent on seeing the parts of it that reinforced something she already knew about the white colonial narrative. While I agree with her that parts of the love story are troubling, I just felt like there was all this stuff she didn't see about the movie. She claimed that the piano was Ada's erotic self, that once she got some dick she didn't need it anymore and that's why she pushed it overboard, that her muteness represented some part of her oppression.
For me, the muteness was an interesting literary device because it rendered Ada unknowable. The movie worked because she as a character was this intense, hard to comprehend, willful person with a completely hidden internal self. As the story unfolded it occurred to me that it was less a love story and more a story of connection, the impossibilities of knowing someone fully, and the mysteries of why or why not a connection is possible between two people. When she pushed the piano overboard it wasn't because she had gotten laid. It was because she was so miserable, in that moment, that she wanted to die from her disfigurement. She changed her mind, and in the end that decision was mysterious to everyone, including herself. Of course, when the movie came out 10 years ago everyone was shitting themselves over the profundity of the love story. Maybe a lot of the criticism has to do with having that idea shoved down their throats; maybe the critics of the movie would see it differently if they didn't have to hear a million people gushing over the eroticism that in my viewing played second fiddle to the other parts of the film.
For a long time (when I was younger) I avoided labeling myself a feminist, because I didn't want a political rhetoric to limit the stories I could tell. I'm over that these days--I am much more politically critical than I used to be (I'm no hard-core revolutionary but there's plenty to be pissed off about). But I reserve the right to let my imagination function in any of the millions of ways it wants to. Imagination isn't just a way to come up with how the world should be (although it can be that, and that is one of the things I like about bell hooks--her imagination of a more equitable world). Sometimes it's a way of crafting form from something murky and dark in ourselves, or a way of imagining how someone completely unlike you feels, or a way of getting that word or image that sticks with you out in the world. Or any number of other possibilities. Overly simplistic political critiques of things bug me because it's a reductive way of seeing something that came from someone's rich world of experiences. Sometimes things sit inside of us and they aren't pretty and they don't make sense and they don't agree to be articulated according to some political manifesto they don't jibe with our ideologies but they are there...what do we do with those?
If you're too focused on "Campion as woman" or "Ada as woman" you miss "Campion as auteur" or "Ada as character." Not that those are inextricable--but they're part of a holistic whole.
Maybe I should be talking to
te_amo_azul about this. She's so much more literate on this topic than I. And she has awesome taste in movies.
When I went to look up some more information on the film I discovered that there's been quite a feminist controversy over whether or not Campion's work is feminist, or whether it reinforces the patriarchal structure. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--Campion is, after all, a woman, so of course the politics of her position are going to become an issue. The most notable thing I found was an essay by bell hooks that frankly made me want to hit my head against the keyboard. hooks is a smart lady, but it felt to me like she watched the film with her dander up already, bent on seeing the parts of it that reinforced something she already knew about the white colonial narrative. While I agree with her that parts of the love story are troubling, I just felt like there was all this stuff she didn't see about the movie. She claimed that the piano was Ada's erotic self, that once she got some dick she didn't need it anymore and that's why she pushed it overboard, that her muteness represented some part of her oppression.
For me, the muteness was an interesting literary device because it rendered Ada unknowable. The movie worked because she as a character was this intense, hard to comprehend, willful person with a completely hidden internal self. As the story unfolded it occurred to me that it was less a love story and more a story of connection, the impossibilities of knowing someone fully, and the mysteries of why or why not a connection is possible between two people. When she pushed the piano overboard it wasn't because she had gotten laid. It was because she was so miserable, in that moment, that she wanted to die from her disfigurement. She changed her mind, and in the end that decision was mysterious to everyone, including herself. Of course, when the movie came out 10 years ago everyone was shitting themselves over the profundity of the love story. Maybe a lot of the criticism has to do with having that idea shoved down their throats; maybe the critics of the movie would see it differently if they didn't have to hear a million people gushing over the eroticism that in my viewing played second fiddle to the other parts of the film.
For a long time (when I was younger) I avoided labeling myself a feminist, because I didn't want a political rhetoric to limit the stories I could tell. I'm over that these days--I am much more politically critical than I used to be (I'm no hard-core revolutionary but there's plenty to be pissed off about). But I reserve the right to let my imagination function in any of the millions of ways it wants to. Imagination isn't just a way to come up with how the world should be (although it can be that, and that is one of the things I like about bell hooks--her imagination of a more equitable world). Sometimes it's a way of crafting form from something murky and dark in ourselves, or a way of imagining how someone completely unlike you feels, or a way of getting that word or image that sticks with you out in the world. Or any number of other possibilities. Overly simplistic political critiques of things bug me because it's a reductive way of seeing something that came from someone's rich world of experiences. Sometimes things sit inside of us and they aren't pretty and they don't make sense and they don't agree to be articulated according to some political manifesto they don't jibe with our ideologies but they are there...what do we do with those?
If you're too focused on "Campion as woman" or "Ada as woman" you miss "Campion as auteur" or "Ada as character." Not that those are inextricable--but they're part of a holistic whole.
Maybe I should be talking to
te_amo_azul about this. She's so much more literate on this topic than I. And she has awesome taste in movies.