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deathpixieSo, there's a couple of links on my friendslist this morning regarding this article by Gina Bellafante in the New York Times Arts Beat section, in defence of her 'review' of the HBO series based on George R. R. Martin's book A Game of Thrones. Ms. Bellafante apparently received a lot of negative feedback to her article, spurred by her perception/assumption/declaration that fantasy novels are "for boys". Her second post continues to push that assumption, with the following quote:
As I wrote in the review, I realize that there are women who love fantasy, but I don’t know any and that is the truth: I don’t know any. At the same time, I am sure that there are fantasy fans out there who may not know a single person who worships at the altar of quietly hewn domestic novels or celebrates the films of Nicole Holofcener or is engrossed by reruns of “House.”
Ms. Bellafante doesn't like the Fantasy genre - fair enough. But where she went wrong was in assigning gender preferences to particular genres and declaring that never the twain shall meet. You're either a Nerd and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy (probably from your mother's basement and in lieu of personal hygiene, the implication is) or you're Popular and like Sex in the City and romance novels (easy to read during spa treatments or when you're waiting to get your nails done). She categorises people are one or the other and refuses to countenance that there's a possibility of any kind of cross-over. In two articles, she manages to not only insult women by insisting they only like "girly" genres but also geeks of all stripes with the assumption we're all escapists from reality.
Back in high school, I discovered Stephen Donaldson and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Heavy stuff, especially at fifteen in a country town, with its themes on personal morality, punishment and the means as a way to the end. I loved it, since it gave my ever-hungry mind something to chew over. On the school bus one day, one of my friends saw what I was reading and said, kind of disparagingly, that fantasy was all "escapism", that it wasn't "real". I pointedly looked at the book in her hands, a typical romance novel and asked her if her type of fantasy - romantic fantasy - was any different. She kind of turned red and mumbled something and we went back to our books.
And I wonder why I didn't have a lot of friends in high school. *wry*
Any way, the point is, fictional works, by virtue of being fictional are all fantasies. They're the product of people's imaginations, creating a plot, characters, dialogue, interactions. The plot of a romance novel is no more likely to happen than the plot of a science fiction novel; an episode of House, with its complete disregard for how hospital protocols actually work is no more real than an episode of Buffy. Writers twist the world to fit their creations and to assign value to any genre as being more "real" than another is kind of naive. CSI, Law and Order, Sex In The City, Jersey Shore... they are all just as unrealistic as the worlds created by Tolkein, Lucas or Gaiman. DNA testing takes at least ten working days to be done. Murders can take months, sometimes years to get from crime to sentencing. People first thing in the morning look dishevelled and untidy and have morning breath and smudged make up and finding "the one" doesn't mean happily ever after (oh, don't get me started on that one!). And while there may be people like the inhabitants of teh Jersey Shore house, they're almost certainly being encouraged to play up their 'roles' to the hilt in order to provide more drama. Even my beloved The West Wing is fantasy - real government just doesn't work that way, as much as we want it to.
Oh, and professional wrestling is totally scripted. Sorry,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mike_smith. ;)
The end point of all this is, besides the fact that Ms. Bellafante is a lazy critic and obviously didn't actually watch the show she was supposed to review, is that the line between 'realism' and 'fantasy' is a lot less distinct than the stereotypes assume. And Ms. Bellafante's stereotypes and assumptions, like all stereotypes and assumptions, fail to reflect the shades of grey that is the true human experience in an effort to delineate an "Us" vs. "Them", in order to make the debate as simplistic as possible. To have a right and a wrong. The problem is, the world doesn't work that way, and Ms. Dellafante's worldview winds up looking as based on fantasy as the genre she's criticising.
Fiction is entertainment and to that end, fiction must also be unrealistic. Otherwise no-one would be entertained, would they?
***
Finally, to her credit, Ms. Bellafante did post some links to rebuttals to her review which are pretty good. Therefore, I share:
Ilana Teitelbaum's response in the Huffington Post
Salon's Mark Soller Zietz's response (apologies, I can't actually open this one from work, so it may suck. I'll have to check it at home after work)
Regina Thorne of the Heroes and Heartbreakers site (another one I can't open, sorry!)
As I wrote in the review, I realize that there are women who love fantasy, but I don’t know any and that is the truth: I don’t know any. At the same time, I am sure that there are fantasy fans out there who may not know a single person who worships at the altar of quietly hewn domestic novels or celebrates the films of Nicole Holofcener or is engrossed by reruns of “House.”
Ms. Bellafante doesn't like the Fantasy genre - fair enough. But where she went wrong was in assigning gender preferences to particular genres and declaring that never the twain shall meet. You're either a Nerd and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy (probably from your mother's basement and in lieu of personal hygiene, the implication is) or you're Popular and like Sex in the City and romance novels (easy to read during spa treatments or when you're waiting to get your nails done). She categorises people are one or the other and refuses to countenance that there's a possibility of any kind of cross-over. In two articles, she manages to not only insult women by insisting they only like "girly" genres but also geeks of all stripes with the assumption we're all escapists from reality.
Back in high school, I discovered Stephen Donaldson and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Heavy stuff, especially at fifteen in a country town, with its themes on personal morality, punishment and the means as a way to the end. I loved it, since it gave my ever-hungry mind something to chew over. On the school bus one day, one of my friends saw what I was reading and said, kind of disparagingly, that fantasy was all "escapism", that it wasn't "real". I pointedly looked at the book in her hands, a typical romance novel and asked her if her type of fantasy - romantic fantasy - was any different. She kind of turned red and mumbled something and we went back to our books.
And I wonder why I didn't have a lot of friends in high school. *wry*
Any way, the point is, fictional works, by virtue of being fictional are all fantasies. They're the product of people's imaginations, creating a plot, characters, dialogue, interactions. The plot of a romance novel is no more likely to happen than the plot of a science fiction novel; an episode of House, with its complete disregard for how hospital protocols actually work is no more real than an episode of Buffy. Writers twist the world to fit their creations and to assign value to any genre as being more "real" than another is kind of naive. CSI, Law and Order, Sex In The City, Jersey Shore... they are all just as unrealistic as the worlds created by Tolkein, Lucas or Gaiman. DNA testing takes at least ten working days to be done. Murders can take months, sometimes years to get from crime to sentencing. People first thing in the morning look dishevelled and untidy and have morning breath and smudged make up and finding "the one" doesn't mean happily ever after (oh, don't get me started on that one!). And while there may be people like the inhabitants of teh Jersey Shore house, they're almost certainly being encouraged to play up their 'roles' to the hilt in order to provide more drama. Even my beloved The West Wing is fantasy - real government just doesn't work that way, as much as we want it to.
Oh, and professional wrestling is totally scripted. Sorry,
mike_smith. ;)The end point of all this is, besides the fact that Ms. Bellafante is a lazy critic and obviously didn't actually watch the show she was supposed to review, is that the line between 'realism' and 'fantasy' is a lot less distinct than the stereotypes assume. And Ms. Bellafante's stereotypes and assumptions, like all stereotypes and assumptions, fail to reflect the shades of grey that is the true human experience in an effort to delineate an "Us" vs. "Them", in order to make the debate as simplistic as possible. To have a right and a wrong. The problem is, the world doesn't work that way, and Ms. Dellafante's worldview winds up looking as based on fantasy as the genre she's criticising.
Fiction is entertainment and to that end, fiction must also be unrealistic. Otherwise no-one would be entertained, would they?
***
Finally, to her credit, Ms. Bellafante did post some links to rebuttals to her review which are pretty good. Therefore, I share:
Ilana Teitelbaum's response in the Huffington Post
Salon's Mark Soller Zietz's response (apologies, I can't actually open this one from work, so it may suck. I'll have to check it at home after work)
Regina Thorne of the Heroes and Heartbreakers site (another one I can't open, sorry!)
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no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 07:55 pm (UTC)Pretty much ANY incest ANYWHERE, no matter how hot, just makes me not want to watch something.
INCEST!!! WTF?>WQE!#RJ
no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 10:26 pm (UTC)That's good writing.
Also, incest. AAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
And the review was lazy and dumb.
A
no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 09:40 pm (UTC)Oh, and professional wrestling is totally scripted. Sorry, [info]mike_smith. ;)
You're telling me? Somewhere around 2000, they started a reality show where they teach rookies how to fake it, and they kick people off for not faking it hard enough. Then they hire the losing contestants anyway, so the contest is rigged on top of that.
But to take it a step further, I don't think you need pure fiction to achieve escapism. I've been watching Mythbusters a lot lately, and I find it rather compelling to imagine what it'd be like to work in a place where you have seemingly unlimited resources, and you can weld anything to anything else. Sure, they edit footage to make the experiments go faster, but I'd still like to spend two weeks sorting Legos or chopping cars in half.
I've seen posts like these a lot over the years, where some author or critic or whatever makes some sweeping generalization about demographics, and they invariably take flak for it on the internet. I don't understand why people say stuff like this in the first place. Even if there were any truth to it, I'd still want to double-check before I say something as broad as "only girls like Mexico" or "dogs hate bananas". You're just begging someone to come along and knock that over.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 09:40 pm (UTC)You fool! The wrestling tax accountant and the wrestling cannibal REALLY hate each other, and if you can't see that you're blind!
no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 10:13 pm (UTC)She might not watch House or Sex in the City but she tends to like a lot of the main stream things.
But my mom and I had a ritual that lasted until I was at least 13 in that she'd read out loud to me from whatever book we picked together.
And for the most part, my mom read me Tolkien and Terry Brooks, both fantasy. In fact, we made it through most of Brooks Magic Kingdom series - and when I moved out, that set of books were the only ones that I thought were mine that she claimed (pretty fiercely) as hers.
The Tolkien book that she read from had belonged to my dad when he was 17 years old. But it was my mom, not my dad, that I cuddled next to on the bed or the couch. It was in my mom's voice that I first hear the words Nazgûl, hobbit and Gandalf.
Generally, fantasy isn't my mom's thing but it was just as much her as it was my dad who set me down the path to reading and enjoying fantasy. And that's what makes me angry about Ms. Dellafante's limited world view - she completely dismisses my story about my mom and any other woman's story about their introduction to a genre that she doesn't like.