As we fall into sequence
and we’re eating our young
remain silent and still for modesty
When the splints have been broken
and they can’t help you now
do you pray with your eyes closed naturally

Follow me into nowhere
Woven with the utmost care

- Celestica, Crystal Castles

Brownie points for the Brits who recognize the person in this drawing. It’s Richey Edwards, the M.I.A lyricist from Manic Street Preachers! I drew this for CF as a part of his Christmas present since the band is one of his favorites. [Click to see full size so you can appreciate the hours I spent on this when I should have been job searching.] He brought it along with him to their concert when they came to play their first America concert in about a decade and got it signed by Nicky Wire! I was stoked to hear that Nicky liked it.

Applesauce by ~ariokh

Lucy Lawless (left) & Zoe Bell (right)

I recently rewatched Kill Bill 1 & 2 and remembered why I love Zoe Bell so much. Zoe Bell is a professional stuntwoman who is best known for doubling Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill series and Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess. I first heard of Zoe Bell in my “Action Heroine” class, taught by Professor Steimer who was a hard ass and intimidated me into behaving on a weekly basis with threats of flunking the class and expulsion (and I loved every moment of it and always came back for more). Because of her high standards (and the ominous looks that I swear she sometimes gave me), I ended up learning all the class materials by heart and thoroughly enjoying the process. After putting us through burning hoops, she decided to be nice and gave us a lecture on the great Zoe Bell as a treat for surviving midterms.

We watched Double Dare, directed by Amanda Micheli, a documentary about stuntwomen, starring Zoe Bell and her mentor, Jeannie Epper. Now lemme tell you a little something about Jeannie. Jeannie comes from a long line of stunt actors and her father is actually the famed jumping horseman John Epper.

Jeannie Epper (left) & Lynda Carter (right)

She may be an old-timer on the film, but back in her prime she was best known for doubling Lynda Carter of the 1970s Wonder Woman television series. Just picture this, for all of those cheesy takes where Wonder Woman seems to be leaping off with her high heels onto the very big spaceship, it is actually Jeannie Epper jumping backwards from the top of the very big spaceship onto the ground while wearing high heels so that when they play it backward it looks like an impossible superhuman leap forward.

Zoe Bell is Jeannie’s protégé. Now Zoe is one of those genuinely sweet people who just exude positive energy and others are naturally attracted to her because funnily enough she has a very easy going personality despite the intense stress and high risks that she faces on a regular basis due to her chosen profession. Born in New Zealand, she hopped on board when the Xena crew hired her to be Xena’s personal body double. She got to do a bunch of wire work as can be seen by the trademark style of fighting featured on the hit television series involving a lot of leaping, jumping, cartwheels, and overall an impressive chunk of “air” time. During a shoot while Zoe was doing some wire work, the hook wasn’t set right and it ended up snatching her back too fast and fracturing the vertebrae in her back.

A neat thing to note is that if Zoe does a stunt involving higher risks (like say being burned alive – which actually happened while she was filming for one of the later seasons of Xena), then she gets a little bit more pocket money. All in a day’s work.

After Xena wrapped up, Zoe decides to make the move to America in order to find more opportunities and better paying work. Here, Jeannie graciously tucks Zoe underneath her wings and introduces her to the creepy Quentin Tarantino, legendary fan/director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. She auditioned and went on to become Uma Thurman’s body double in the Kill Bill series where she had to learn the wushu style of fighting. So remember all of the fancy sword work and kung fu footwork that awed and humbled you when you watched the Kill Bill series? That was all sweet little ol’ Zoe Bell.

From her work with Tarantino, she got her foothold in Hollywood and went on to win 2 Taurus Stunt Awards for “Best Overall Stunt by a Woman” and “Best Fight” for her doubling of the knife fight with Angela Meryl in Kill Bill: Volume 01, and was nominated for “Best High Work” for her 200 feet jump, which she did while doubling as Halle Berry in Catwoman. I have to restate that Zoe Bell really is a prodigy. She is what Professor Steimer would call a star laborer: an actor with a spectacular bodily disposition whose training is apparent in the way she comports herself. Watching Zoe prepare for that fall, and then watching the way she positions her body while falling straight to her doom really is a spectacle that makes you hold your breath when you realize that it’s a real person up there, not just Halle Berry in a sexy Catwoman suit about to bomb the box office with her tragedy of a blockbuster.

Quentin: “Worth it!”

At the end of the quarter, as a reward for reaching the finish line Professor Steimer actually got Zoe Bell to come to our class as a guest speaker. And she was every bit as sweet and funny in person as she is in front of the camera. During the Q & A, some smartass was ballsy enough to ask her if she had ever… encountered Tarantino’s infamous foot fetish. She laughed and said, “Funny you say that. I got this splinter once and I was sitting there trying to tweeze it out of my foot. Then Quentin comes along and he’s like, ‘What are you doing there?’ So I showed him my splinter and he offered to help me get the splinter out. Now, I’m used to my family giving me foot rubs so I didn’t think anything of it. Quentin was really gentle with me, and he eventually got that splinter out. Afterwards, I mentioned how cool he was because of what he did for me to a crew member, and they gave me that look. I was like, ‘What?’ And that’s how I found out.” I just about died after that.

So you caught me. This whole entry was just an excuse for me
to post a picture of myself with Zoe Bell.
Blogosphere, eat your heart out.
I got to be the Asian midget standing next
to the freakishingly tall white woman… and you didn’t!

Iron Man is a modern day fairytale about a prince who lives inside of his high-tech castle. Robert Downey Jr. took his role and transcended it by shamelessly flaunting all of his character’s idiosyncrasies. What sets Iron Man apart from all of the other super heroes is that Robert Downey Jr. stepped outside of the tragic hero figure and appealed to our modern sensibilities by flaunting his flaws, flamboyancy and indulgences as a multifaceted human being. Funnily enough, it was his role as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder that really made me sit up in my seat and pay attention to him as an actor. After all, who else could have pulled off such a ridiculous and mind-boggling role as an American portraying an Australian who was method-acting as a black man?

Gwyneth Paltrow was rather disappointing, but that’s not so much her fault as an actress as it is the script, which didn’t allow her to be much more than the placeholder for a love interest. Her role basically consisted of her nagging at Tony Stark for being himself, and at the end of the movie she just magically fell into his arm as they shared the romantic kiss that concludes all cliché romances. Scarlett Johansson did surprising well with what she had to work with. I loved her epic fight scenes, which gave the movie a refreshing human element in a world that was dominated by robots and technology. That and how the camera just loved to linger on her curves and gorgeous features. Maybe I am giving Scarlett more credit than she deserves, but after all she has done her time with independent film making back when she was the indie-queen with Ghost World and Lost in Translation (both wonderfully nuanced performances).

But the best actor who really shone through in this blockbuster has got to be Sam Rockwell, the tour-de-force who carried Moon on his back. Typically, secondary villains are hardly worth mentioning. But Rockwell played his role with more than a little flourish and charm. Who could forget his fancy footwork at the Hammer expo? Or the way his striped suits fit him just oh-so-perfectly? Or how he always delivered his lines with so much cheese and grease that you could almost choke on it? I certainly hope that this will not be the last of Sam Rockwell that we will see in the Iron Man series.

The dialogue is one of the best aspects of the film. Fast-paced, witty, and always sassy, Robert Downey Jr.’s repartee with the other characters had my sides splitting all throughout. The special effects for Stark technology really pushed the limits of modern cinematic technology and produced sublime imagery in which the world of Tony Stark is a man-made utopia of sweeping neon colors and atomic orgasms. Unfortunately, some of the action sequences were poorly directed and lasted a bit too long to hold my interest. Bad camera work and horrible focus made it very hard to follow along at times and somehow the climatic battle just didn’t really deliver the spectacle as much as the marketing hyped it up to be. Overall, Iron Man is still one of the best blockbusters and super hero movie that I have seen in recent years.

Now to switch from the amateur movie critic to the cynical critical analyst. Iron Man 2 is a glorified dick-waving contest involving an arms race between the government and private business. It’s no coincidence that the main villain is a Russian physicist whose grudge against Tony Stark’s all-American father fuels his burning rage against Iron Man. Does this storyline sound familiar to anyone? Back during the Cold War, when complete annihilation was a possibility that was suddenly surfacing in the collective conscious, all of our anxieties were concentrated into xenophobia and an obsession with technological advancement. Now, decades after America emerged as the winner of the chicken race, technology has become our new drug of choice.

Tony Stark is the prodigal son whose genius inventions have landed him in the center of the world’s stage functions as a metaphor for America, whose self-consuming narcissism is perfectly nailed down by Robert Downey Jr. A lucrative business man who is able to work the crowd and manipulate the media, Tony Stark is the mirror image of the modern American man. While I was grateful that Iron Man 2 didn’t bother with the redemptive narrative, I’m not sure if I should praise it for fully indulging in Tony’s consequence-free hedonism. The scene in which he celebrated his birthday must have been inspired by something out of a bad reality TV show (Jersey Shore?).

The threat of nuclear annihilation from other countries was quickly dismissed at the beginning of the film when Tony Stark played the hilarious clips of the Iran and North Korea’s mockup versions of the Iron Man armor going haywire. The message is that America does not feel threatened by these foreign powers because they are light years behind American technology and the weapons that they currently have in their possession are laughable. The real threat comes from Ivan Vanko, who represents Russia, America’s historical enemy from the years of the Cold War. Ivan (played by Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler fame) is portrayed as a misguided madman whose zealous grudge against Tony’s father leads him to instigate yet another arms race in which he and Tony compete to see who can manufacture the ultimate armor suit. The problem here lies in the glorification of weapon technology, or to be more specific, the process of arms building. The sequence in which Tony creates a wholly new element to be the centerpiece of the Iron Man armor shows him putting that elbow grease to good use all in the interest of preserving the peace.

But that’s the irony here, isn’t it? That in order to maintain peace, we must produce these weapons of mass destruction so that we can henpeck others into behaving. And worse yet, the winner of this arms race is private business, not the government. The government is portrayed as a group of bumbling fools whose deep pockets sponsor the true geniuses of the film, the private businessmen. Funnily enough, America’s government has been nothing but accommodating toward private business in its policies of de-regulation and privatization. That is until recently, as Obama has a financial reform bill in the works that threatens to put its foot down Wall Street’s ass. So now those fuckers on Wall Street are getting up in arms and crying violation of the 1^st amendment. Just so we’re clear, a corporation is not a real corpus and therefore does not have any rights and should be regulated and disciplined by all means so that big business can no longer colonize the human resources of 3^rd world countries. But that’s just my opinion. I’m sure most people would rather go back to slapping Tony Stark on the back and praising him for being a son of a bitch and getting away with it all. After all, Tony Stark doesn’t outsource workers, or set up sweat shops, or ruin the environment by depleting all of the earth’s natural resources. No, he’s a HERO. Too bad his sentiments aren’t reflected in reality, where businessmen are – for the most part – the worst soul-sucking parasites in this here United States.

So while some of my more refined colleagues over in the English department were raised on Shakespeare and Chaucer, I spent the better parts of my adolescence pouring over the goodies on fanfiction.net. Predictably, I started out in the Sailor Moon section and then quickly realized that it wasn’t exactly my crowd (poorly written yuri lemons). I then blitzkrieg right on through Pokemon (which turned out to be a hotbed of bestiality – though to be fair I should’ve seen that coming what with Misty having a tentacool and that X-rating…) until I finally arrived at what would hold me captive for the rest of my adventures in the world of fan fiction: Naruto.

Okay, that’s a lie. I’ve also dabbled in Inuyasha, Shaman King and Harry Potter. You can say that I pride myself on being an avid reader of sorts, although I’m sure some of my more traditional-minded professors would be scandalized to know that one of their A-students was nurtured by the hedonistic tits of fan fiction.

Honestly speaking though, I’m not ashamed to say that I was brought up on what other people would deem “low culture.” I owe a lot of my personal philosophies and literary capabilities to fan fiction, a medium that has taught me to read and write critically. Because beyond the limitations of fan fiction as appealing to the lowest common denominator in its readers, there is something more to the stories than just the virginal (sometimes freakishly ritualistic) sex, or the violence found in the massacring of spelling and grammar, or even the shabbily constructed plots that merely function as a bad excuse for said sex. What it comes down to is the person sitting behind the computer screen typing up the fic.

The world of fan fiction allows its members to actively engage with the media that continues to haunt them long after the burn of the screen has faded into black. Have you ever watched a really good anime, but found its ending somewhat lacking or unsatisfactory? Or have you ever rooted for an unconventional couple that you know will never be able to consummate their relationship in the canon? Has an anime or manga ever inspired a train of thought in you that could be worked into an alternative discourse?

Yes, yes and YES? (Okay, that last one might just be me.)

Fan fiction is a medium that allows the fan-author to alter, develop, deconstruct, or subvert a plastic world that was once perfectly packaged in order to facilitate their own desires, dreams, and dynamic understanding of that world, thereby challenging the technophobic myth of the consumer passively absorbing any media that is presented to them. The very existence of fan fiction is proof that we are not merely victims of media and technology, but we are capable of channeling our own creative energies through an active engagement with the fantasy that is being sold to us.

For example, in the Naruto section over on FF.net, one of the biggest compilations of fan fics is categorized under yaoi fics mainly involving the pairing of Naruto and Sasuke. While admittedly, Kishimoto did give a nod and wink to a certain segment of his fan base with subtle references to the obsessive-bordering-on-butt-rape nature of the friendship between the actual Naruto and Sasuke of canon, an explicit yaoi reading of Naruto is simply impossible to establish. However, all that the fans need is that subtle nod and wink gesture, (although a lot of fandom shippers jump the gun just for the sake of variety without the need for any kind of ambiguity or gesturing) before they bite the bait and take off to their keyboards. In fact, the growing number of yaoi shippers is as substantial as their members are loyal to the pairing, but perhaps this devotion is stubbornly maintained in opposition to the fact that these yaoi pairings will never be confirmed in reality thereby allowing for exclusivity and personalization in their own fan niche.

Or maybe something else is happening here. Naruto presents a world completely dominated by patriarchal figures wherein valorized ninjas cultivate future skilled killers all the while inflicting their psychological trauma on each other through the art of sword and elemental mastery. With so much machismo and testosterone suffocating the atmosphere of a dramatic stage, there is bound to be an erotic tension underlying the driving force of the series. And that subtle homoeroticism finds its source in the relationship between Naruto and Sasuke. The relationship functions as a double-edge sword in being simultaneously Naruto’s source of strength as well as his Achilles’ heel. We measure the dramatic success of Naruto based on the developments of the relationship: Will Naruto ever be able to redeem Sasuke from Orochimaru’s corruption? Is he going to be able to fulfill his promise and bring his friend home?

Whatever your interpretation of the nature of it is, it is undeniably the heart of the series. In contrast, the female characters in Naruto are jokes. Tsunade, Sakura, and Hinata each fit a specific stereotype (the sex-pot mother figure for the common man with the Oedipal complex, the tsundere, the shy and quiet girl who’s always lurking in the corner) in order to fulfill that personality type in the harem fantasy of fan boys. In fact, the only kinds of meaningful relationships found in the manga are those between men. So how you can honestly expect the female fans of the Naruto franchise to identify with these cookie-cutter women who are merely foot notes in a male epic? Yaoi fan fiction is a curious phenomena wherein the female writers drag out the implicit homoerotic tensions in the original media and renders explicit the consummation of sexual deviancy as they superimpose their own transgressive desires onto the original narrative. Although there certainly is a significant number of heteronormative fan fics circulating around the fandom (ain’t nuttin wrong w/ that), Naruto is known for its yaoi fan base which finances one of the largest and most developed yaoi doujinshi market out there. Rather than resigning themselves to identifying with a 2-dimensional character like Sakura, who amounts to little more than a cheerleader for the boys, fan girls opt to cultivate a fantasy wherein they can identify with a male character and derive pleasure from a relationship that isn’t hindered by gender hierarchies. Yaoi, as a genre, allows female consumers access into the otherwise exclusive realm of men and grants them agency in seeing the unbridled fulfillment of their sexual fantasies.

I think fan fictions are fascinating pieces of work because of their personal nature. Some of the fics read like personal diaries where under the cover of a pen name you can write out your darkest and most debauch fantasies for others to consume and critique. For me, the best fan fictions are the ones that remain close to canon (staying true to the original character personalities and working within their limitations) while still offering up a subversive reading of the original. In other words, the best fan fictions are the ones that do not resort to utilizing a Mary Sue. Not because the author is inserting a version of herself into the writing, but because of the idealizations that go into the character makeup. One of the great banes of my existence is a female protagonist whose sole purpose is to be the perfect martyr (for love, for honor, for family, etc.) Martyrdom as an idealization is a tricky glorification of female disempowerment and it absolves others from taking responsibility for their own actions. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with an author inserting herself into her fan fic as long as she is honest about her flaws and explores them in a way that keeps the readers’ interest.

After all, what impossible level of objectivity would it take so that one can manage to avoid impregnating her creation with some parts of herself, unintentionally or consciously? Fiction is a product of the author’s beliefs, desires, insecurities, and values – and in turn reflects not just an individual’s character, but also the social context that fashioned this author, which then points to a bigger picture of that society. So even the worse fan fics, one that plays on the horrible cliché of the helpless maiden who always needs saving from the cruel, cruel world (which characterizes 99%25% of the fan fics out there), can tell us a lot about the author and her place in a patriarchal society that structures its gender hierarchy to relegate women to the lower rungs.

Without the pressure of having to appeal to the masses, fan fics often feature more personalized narratives dealing with nuanced issues of morality, sexuality, and political agency. My favorite authors have all brought their own specialties to the table in offering up their own reading of a text. bk11 interprets Harry Potter as an allegory of genocide and revolution with a special focus on race and gender politics. Ronsard treats her Naruto fics as aesthetic manifestos in the fashion of T. S. Eliot. Resmiranda writes Inuyasha as character studies in loss and trauma. I wish their works could be published so that more people would have access to them. I would even go so far as to say that in my humble opinion, the fics written by these women are even better than the original works.

While it distresses me to read so many fan fics written by teenage girls and young women that render the female characters as merely victims of convenient circumstances, I am hopeful that the readers are critical thinkers who will reject and overcome these cliché of patriarchy. After all, I eventually did grow out of wanting to be Sailor Moon (a magical girl who is capable of enacting transformation and change in a self-contained fantasy that lies completely outside of reality and is therefore not threatening to the hetero-normative power structures of reality) into a wholesome blogger of multimedia…

kind of.