to go from this

to this

?

Morrissey’s always talking about how he can’t go back home. He’s very vague about why. All we know is that it’s not his home, it’s their home, and he’s welcome no more.

George Platt Lynes

Michelangelo’s Isaiah

which have come to obsess the nation. And as I am part of the nation I find I’m not immune to it. It’s not that I’m concerned about the direction in which her career is going, because she seems to have an abnormally strong business head for a celebrity that has mananged to remain top-tier celebrity without ‘selling out’ as yet*. What bothers me are her tits. It’s not their shape or their aesthetic, or the transitions they go through from video to live appearance to video. It’s their referentiality that concerns me. She is bent on doing interesting things with every other part of her body except her tits, which she, in clothing, appears to render up each time in slavish imitation of all female pop stars—-controversial or not—-that came before her. This cannot, nor will not come to good. Will she long be able to distinguish herself from the crowd, or will her tits be the thing to drag her down into the mire?

*For confusion about the term ‘selling out’, see Madonna’s entire career,  or Beyonce’s Nokia campaign.

Better than Fitzgerald is Miller, with his lack of christian intolerance, and the complete absence in his writing of any emotion that is not disgust, exstacy or amused appreciation. Better than Miller is Fitzgerald, with his old-world loyalties and ashamed romanticism, his finger on the trigger of what we would come to refer to as the death drive.

No?

Buffalo Bill (Silence of the Lambs 1991)

Annabelle Serpentine Dance (series, circa 1895)

Does it matter?

1928′s The Passion of Joan of Arc, brought to us by the fabulous Carl Th., seems to think so. In other tellings of the same story it doesn’t seem to be as much about her as an agent of God–perhaps because in other films it’s easy to get caught up in the fact that Joan is played by megababes. Ingrid Bergman, Geraldine Farrar (see C.B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman. On second thought, don’t.) They give an actress a semi-butch haircut and assume it does the job. But not only is Maria Falconetti’s Joan androgynous beautiful, she is androgynous-spiritual–it is made a plot point. The film itself is a study in disorientation. We are told the story almost exclusively in close-up, with no sense of the space in which all this is taking place, and even less of a sense of the context of the tribunal, the actual thing for which Joan is fighting. As a result, it appears to be a film about someone who is judged on the basis of who they are, rather than how politically dangerous they are to authority. Which works, because it’s the Christ narrative, and Carl Th. makes this quite plain. Still the fact that it is the point upon which the action hinges, her androgyny, the fact that she is a face attached to no body, and thus, to no sex, is what seems to martyr her more than anything else.