January 5, 2010 by Susan Hansell.

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds received such a pan from The New Yorker that I thought twice about going.  But I got to see it on the big screen for a buck when it came to the Crossroads 6 Cinema in Tucson, which viewing refreshed my memory regarding both the truly entertaining and exciting nature of Tarantino’s filmmaking, and the curious resentment toward it by certain film aesthetes.

Inglourious Basterds not only held my attention from the beginning but it kept me wondering throughout about what would happen next, and moreover, it kept me surprised about what did.  Critics didn’t agree with how Tarantino “made up” some stuff about WWII history, but I liked this element of the film.  WWII history is so canonical that no “fact-based” film on the period can be genuinely surprising, thus cue the violins and watch the hunt for the last Sullivan brother behind the German lines. And while this one conceit itself was a fabrication, without which Spielberg’s film would not have been the typical fare that it was, the emotional territory covered by the movie is entirely predictable, and its fan-fared outcome can be guessed from the get go.

Because Tarantino “changes” aspects of the main WWII story, his viewer really doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and strangely, or ironically, the real events of the period actually become more gripping.  The horrors, the hatreds, the deaths, and all of the sufferings of that era become somehow more particularized and polarizing, more tensely watched and appreciated, when they are less the depiction of documented events.   When the outcomes cannot be predicted or correctly guessed, a viewer is pulled into the ride of the film, and in my case, left devastated and drained, yet thrilled by the immediacy of it.

I cared about, had family histories connected to, and had even written on commission about, the WWII period, long before I saw this film.  But the film made me feel more of what characters in that period might have felt when going through what they went through their histories.  I already knew what the facts of their experiences were, but the film made me feel what it might have been like to have lived then, and those feelings were terrifying, exhilarating, disgusting, frightening, hilarious, exhausting, revolting, and very very sad.

Something similar, on a smaller scale, happened to me when I watched the fragment of film in From Dusk Till Dawn which is shot from the POV of the child molester/murderer, as he imagines the little girl he has kidnapped flirting with him, and “asking for it” from him.  I found this alarmingly direct experience with such a warped and psychotically justifying mental force both emotionally true and utterly terrifying.  Had it been portrayed more factually faithful, would it have created a more moving effect on me?

I remember reading a required paper about this From Dust Till Dawn filmic event to my classmates in a graduate course at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center for the Arts only to have them label Tarantino an idiot savant, among other things.  This was before the Kill Bill series and Inglourious Basterds, and I’m not sure where those classmates are now or what they would think today.  But what Tarantino reminds me of is how sometimes the things we make up are more evocative than the factual timelines of life, that all art is made from a distillation of the materials with which the artist works, and that this distillation is itself a further fictional process, a process where details are cut or added to punch up its effects, in order to make human beings feel or think or wonder or curse or respond, in kind, in new, oily, ways.  A little Brad Pitt never hurts either.

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September 19, 2009 by Susan Hansell.

In Tucson we can see all the movies we want to see for a dollar.  They’re no longer in their “first run,” but it’s not like people here are running around analyzing the latest thing…  unless that thing is the latest U of A game!

The Crossroads 6 Cinema, a few minutes away from our house, shows movies after they’ve been out for awhile, including indie or foreign films if they’ve done well at the (one) local art house, for a dollar.  We began going to lots of movies when we first moved here in ‘07 (we’re members of The Loft, the art cinema), but we’ve noticed the attendance has really picked up at that dollar house…

So the other night we went to see “Funny People” for a buck and I came home thinking about language again.  Not that I didn’t enjoy the oily-ish portrayals presented by Adam Sandler, et. al., but did anyone complain about “the language” employed in the film?  Of course not.  Am I complaining about it?  No.  What I’m pointing out is the way “such language” can be viewed as “funny” when it’s depicted within a conventional narrative (there’s nothing new about the rich-successful-jerk-who-experiences-a-life-threatening-scare-and-tries-to-change) story, yet identical language is deemed “offensive” when those same words work to expose or question the underlying assumptions that we carry with us in this world about the “way” things are supposed to “be,” and for whom.

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November 16, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Lucky for me that, during the completion of a “terminal” degree near the end of Jack Gelber’s ebullient reign as the head of the playwriting division at CUNY - Brooklyn College, his response, to the response, to my work from most (though not all) of “my” numerous guy-colleagues, (whose own works “seemed” to derive from the hooker-gives-blow-job-to-lead-male-in-the-front-seat-of-a-car “mentality”), was precisely “same old shit” to their whiningly how can she use such language!

Once, in a private tutorial session subsequent to Rollover Othello’s inaugural reading in which the fantasy-writing guys literally jumped out of their chairs in competition to condemn my language, Jack said: “Susan, I’m not saying you’ve written the perfect play, but eliciting a strong reaction isn’t a bad thing; you have to realize that, if what you’re doing on stage is reinforcing what people already feel and think, then you can say ‘fuck your grandmother up the ass with a big fat dildo’ and no body’s going to get upset about anything you’ve written, because essentially, you haven’t said anything they don’t already agree with. The minute you start questioning people’s assumptions about life, and about how life should be lived, then you can’t utter one ‘goddamn’ without people protesting your offensive ‘language’; not because your language bothers them per se, but because the ideas you’ve expressed within your words make the audience uncomfortable; the ‘critics’ thus latch onto those ‘4-letter words’ to avoid you ‘ugly’ ideas.”

Sorry if I’m bastardizing here, Jack: R.I.P. (A/nother tangent: Why is it that The Living Theater, under the ‘history’ page of its website, cites The Connection but not Jack Gelber by name?)

In other words, in other worlds, my work is uglier than a hooker blow job? Okay! Okay to the fears of the teacher who submitted her high school writers’ works to SLM’s inaugural issue, yet would not give the accepted contributors their copies of the issue without filing parental sign-off notices and waiting until school was officially “over” for the year. Had these kids never heretofore heard any such “offensive language”? I guess they never go to the movies! But then, that (following Gelber’s analysis), would be a use of “words” in situations canonical to what we “all” know, and about which “we” all “agree.” Right…

How luckily wonderful to have another conversation with Jack, in which I would ask him if he thought that: The “load” was on me to edit my language down, to try and preclude ideas from being willfully obscured by a “bad language” critique, or if any cutting-off-at-the-pass was even possible, let alone desirable. Maybe he would tell me not to be surprised by the onslaught of continuously unconscious subterfuge. Okay then. Bring it on.

Because I trust that neither Jack nor I would ever suggest a writer uncouple language from its manifest presentation (of ideas) in characterization, action, and outcome/s. And the salience of his/my observation (and experience), with how an audience turns its own discomfort into a distorted discourse on the “ugliness” of the “thing” about which it is uncomfortable, informs my still-developing disappointment, and my continuing willful insouciance, I suppose, regarding how the uncomfortable-issuing literary step-sister gets made into the arty but nonetheless ugly-duckling.

We know how “those” stories end up:  Long live Swan Road!

Stay strong, ugly ducklings: Never let the audience-rejection, or perhaps worse, the no-audience, become the society-wide audience of self-censorship.

So whatever happened to Rollover Othello?

Neal Storrs placed it in Oasis (and lost a subscriber for doing so); the play then got picked out of a stack of unsolicited Samuel French scripts (the artistic director of Love Creek called me and enthused about how the play’s language flew off the page); it was scheduled for a 1998 or 9 production on 42nd Street, then abruptly canceled during rehearsals, ostensibly because the company actress playing the lead refused to say the words in the play, due to…

“Language considerations,” naturally. Oil! Oil? Oil.  Lucky lucky me.

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August 12, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

Anybody watch the 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, a little feature called “The Departed” which I among many found rather entertaining? Anyone hear or read even one critical attack on “the language” of that film, language which, in just the first five minutes, contained mucho many uses of cunt, fucking cunt, mother fucking cunt, what r u anyway a cunt, etc. etc., all of which words were used “literally,” as insults, insults spoken towards characters by other characters, all of whom the film encourages the audience to identify with as “real” people who “really” talk that way, and perhaps, therefore, “such language” is “understandable” thus “okay”? The words of the film go by, and the audience laughs or whatever, but does anyone think about being insulted by this so-called artistic use of the way so-called “real” people talk to each other, this supposedly real use of the supposedly beyond-the-pale “c-word” now used as the so-called new (yawn!) banal-insult-supreme of these “real” blue-collar “types”? As in, if the Scorsese cops say it, it’s okay, it’s PG-something-or-other, but if an/other writer lifts this word, or any word, up, out of it’s place, out of it’s context, and plops it into sudden, vast relief, then, THEN it’s obscene? Because we suddenly hear it? Because suddenly The Word is not iterated by a canonized “authority” but instead by One who might be questioning said authority, that very authority which may have assigned some of us the moniker cunt in the first place, allowing some Others of us to be/come the users-of-the-word-cunt-as-”literal”-insult, which “means” it’s only “obscene” when we DON’T know exactly who we are, who we’re NOT, and what it’s all supposed to MEAN? If you’re following me, Dear Reader, I think you’ll agree, (and thank you, by the way), that I’ve made a “pretty” “good” sort-of-an-oil-free-point, for now! To Be Continued…

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August 1, 2007 by Susan Hansell.

If I had a penny, or more like a hundred million bucks, for every time I’ve been beaten with The Language Stick, well, Christ, perhaps I’d be the richest woman in our solar system, quien sabe? (Or the sorest!) But since no one person’s ever paid me while he or she was busy being judgmentally or (worse) violently outraged by my literary uses of the American vernacular, I’m as poor as I ever have been. Rats!

I finally have some time, however; and in that department I am gaining stock! (Yay me!) So in the next few months on this post, I plan to address an assortment of bouts, both recent and past, with people who have either been “shocked” by MY “language” or shocked by the people who have been shocked by my language! (I love the latter!) And I plan to name names (some famous!), and give dates, (only literally; I reserve the figurative Ones for my husband!); but do come back throughout the weeks, my Readers, if you, you wonderful YOU, are out there, to share in the pain (I mean, the joy!) of the 4 letter Word!

What’s all this about Oil?

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