by
Jane Ward
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Another number-one New York Times best seller from this era, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, by the psychologist Susan Forward and published in 1986, took a different and more feminist approach by naming misogyny, rather than codependency or lack of self-love, as the main dysfunction of the tragedy of heterosexuality. The book boldly demonstrated that misogyny was a widespread problem, characterized by men who controlled, devalued, yelled at, threatened, blamed, and frightened the women they claimed to love. These men flew into rages and acted like “hungry, demanding infants” who expected women to be “a never-ending source of total, all-giving love, adoration, concern, approval and nurturing.”60 In a particularly striking passage that echoes William Robinson’s account of heterosexual marriages seventy years prior, Forward acknowledged that readers may wonder about her use of the word “hatred” to describe many heterosexual relationships: “I realize that my use of the word hatred in the context of an intimate relationship is both explosive and controversial. . . . But it is the only word that sufficiently describes the combination of hostility, aggression, contempt, and cruelty that the misogynist exhibits in his behavior toward his partner.” [...]
Exemplifying this kind of broad generalizing about straight women, Kezia Noble announced during her bootcamp, in a salty and mocking tone, “Oh, he was so nice, I just had to have sex with him. . . . No woman has ever said that!” She went on to sing the praises of the bad-boy archetype: “If you are the bad guy, brilliant. He gives women a purpose, a challenge. He shows the world that he’s a big, bad, nasty guy but he shows the woman his good sides. He has a picture of his mother by his bedside table. He has cried in front of her. She wants to save him and melt his icy heart.” As I watched men take notes on this most nauseatingly heteronormative of monologues, I struggled not to roll my eyes with queer repulsion. It was not that I believed her to be wrong across the board; I knew many straight women, and queer women too, who were attracted to this kind of edgy masculinity. But it was the context of heteronormativity—wherein utterly mediocre straight men, including self-destructive, emotionally deficient tough guys, had the power to absorb straight women’s attention, to make women labor to save them, to impress women with the most basic displays of human feeling—that depressed me. Here was evidence of the power and resilience of narratives that repackage men’s deficiencies as enticing challenges for women.
[...] But the thing about heterosexual misery that makes it irreducible to basic human foible is that straight relationships are rigged from the start. Straight culture, unlike queer culture, naturalizes and often glorifies men’s failures and women’s suffering, hailing girls and women into heterofemininity through a collective performance of resilience. For instance, straight women’s suffering, and men’s redemption, played itself out on the national stage in 2016 with the release of Beyoncé’s opus Lemonade, which chronicled Jay-Z’s lying and infidelity and Beyoncé’s rage and ultimate forgiveness. Here again, popular discourse seized on the opportunity to position a Black woman as an exemplar of heteroromantic survival. The Ethiopian American writer Hannah Giorgis, writing for the Atlantic, explains that very little was required of Jay-Z for him to be forgiven:
These issues aside, the above comments from my respondents point to the fact that straight rituals are oppressive on a far greater order of magnitude, because of not only their disturbing content (e.g., throwing a party to announce the shape of an unborn baby’s genitals) but also their compulsory force. Heteronormativity is not a neutral cultural formation organized around a natural, freely occurring sexual preference but an obligatory system structuring many of the world’s societies, a system “that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force.”44 [...]
The queer feminist scholar Angela Jones begins her essay “#DemandBetterStraightSex!” with an experience that a straight woman friend once shared with her. Her friend described sex with her boyfriend, but she was also describing what is now a familiar story about straight sex: he thrusts, he’s into it, he cums, she’s barely present and is thinking about doing the laundry, he gets up, and it’s over. Angela’s friend seems confused: “Sometimes it just feels like he’s raping me. I know he loves me, but why does he have to have sex with me when he knows I don’t want to?”48 Feminist research indicates that unwanted sex inside heterosexual relationships is so common and normalized that it a core part of the scaffolding of rape culture; there’s a thin line between unwanted sex (the kind that many women have with husbands and boyfriends all the time) and sexual assault. [...]
These are promising approaches, and there is no doubt that the gravity of the tragedy of heterosexuality requires a wide array of tactics. And yet my years of teaching and writing about heterosexuality have led me to rethink whether offering queerness to straight people, where queerness is defined as practices of gender and sexual nonnormativity, is the most practical or empathic way of attending to the daily injustices of straight women’s lives or to the material and cultural realities of heterosexual desire. Some straight women I know are structurally bound up in relationships with men that produce resentment but also security and comfort, disadvantage but also privilege. The privileges associated with heterosexuality are amplified for women of color and poor and working-class women, for whom other sources of power are unavailable. Moreover, “straightness” as an embodied desire for the opposite sex is, for many straight people, inseparable from a desire for gender and/or sexual respectability and cultural legibility.5 Straight people can be very attached to being straight, both erotically and culturally.
Straight men have already made it loud and clear that many of them are in it for the sex and free labor, so their work is not to acknowledge this but to recognize it as an utterly incomplete mode of desiring women—a feeble version of what heterosexuality could be. For straight women and men, accountability means piercing through the fantasy we’re all sold about the natural ease and happiness of heterosexuality and instead learning to recognize the structural and cultural conditions that have produced, but also stunted, their heterosexuality.
'Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle!'
David Lynch
B: 1946 / N: American
To source ideas and images for his films, David Lynch plunges into the pool of his subconscious via transcendental meditation. What makes his work so exceptional - and idiosyncratic - is a willingness to share the fruits of these interior deep dives and make sure they are largely unadorned and uncensored. It is the life of the mind writ large, and it has meant that, as a modern behemoth of cinematic creativity, Lynch has been able to perch in that liminal space between traditional romantic genre cinema and full-bore experimentation that sometimes borders on the abstract. One moment that remains emblematic of his project is the breathtaking opening sequence to 1986's Blue Velvet, in which a hauntingly manicured vision of provincial America is punctured with scenes of a man suffering a stroke while spraying his lawn, followed by a delve into the grass, where we experience the sub-aural thrum of an ants' nest. We run the gamut between ethereal beauty and nauseating dread in record time. In the mellow pageant of American life, Lynch sees beauty and horror not so much as opposite sides of the same coin, but as a singular entity that can permeate everyone and everything simultaneously. His formidable 1977 debut Eraserhead looked at birthing and parenthood through a surreally baroque lens, while later works, such as Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), danced on the precipice where raging, intense love tips over into splenetic violence.
What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time.
Andrei Tarkovsky
B: 1932 / N: Russian
Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky made films about why life is worth living and why death is worth dying. He took up the mantle of locating meaning in the evanescence of existence, whether through confirming the presence of an obscure, spiritual higher power (1966's Andrei Rublev), speculating on our complex relationship with the untapped cosmos (1972's Solaris), or merely reflecting (as in 1979's Stalker) our collective desire to find a secret place of infinite knowledge and understanding that will allow us to answer the one true question: why? In his later films, he shifted away from contemplating matters metaphysical to focus on stories that emulate human memory and our perception of time (1975's Mirror and 1983's Nostalgia). In his 1985 book Sculpting in Time, he drilled down into his creative impulses and waxed philosophical about the power of the camera as a piece of heavy machinery that can be used to make art through minutely calibrated (and intellectually invested) montage and framing. All his later inspirational and aesthetically dazzling achievements were foreshadowed in his 1962 debut proper, Ivan's Childhood, a deceptively conventional drama about a 12-year-old boy acting as a messenger on the Russian front during World War II. From its opening dream sequence onwards, Tarkovsky daintily chips away at time with his trusty arsenal of tools, obsessed by the fragility of human consciousness in a world rife with torments and reasons to lose faith in it all.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ISABEL SANDOVAL
'I feel like the best films are essentially a Rorschach test!
You're interested in something you refer to as 'sensual cinema' - could you define what that is?
For me, sensual cinema is really about desire. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we go and watch films, or experience art. We are drawn to something that elicits that feeling of desire within us. The making of films is essentially a way for the creators or artist to project or translate the desire that they feel into something visible that can be experienced by spectators. I think it's also part of my personal evolution as both a person and an artist - especially after my transition. After my transition I've become more comfortable and more open about sensuousness and sensuality in my work, in that it's now no longer shrouded in a feeling of shame or guilt. I was born and raised a Catholic in the Philippines, and I think my transition and the psychological and emotional process that I went through helped me to overcome that. With desire, and tackling desire in art and on film, our experience with the art transcends rationality because desire is rooted in something more primordial, even biological. I would consider a film that I make to be successful if it allows viewers to experience desire beyond rationality. Where someone realizes they like or love a film, but can't pinpoint the reason why.
[...]
For me, the most sensual films are actually about desire being repressed rather than being satisfied or consummated. I think that repression and actively yearning is a more realistic human experience than physical gratification. The films that give you the ending that you want and that sense of closure are energy expended. You can go back to your life and routines and everything is fine. But it's the ones that got away that linger within us. If Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love [2000] ended happily, then no one would still be talking about it.