finishing stories...
Nov. 27th, 2017 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakPhew. All three tales of Yuletide done. This year, my assignment and one of the treats were in fandoms I've never written before, and the other treat was from a fandom of old. It's odd, in some years I can detect a common theme, as when I wrote about Marie and Skyler from Breaking Bad in one story, and Connie Corleone and her brothers from The Godfather in the other (dysfunctional siblings ahoi), but this year, I can't. They were all fun to write, though. Brushing up on the canons also invoked the urge to write meta, but I have too much rl stuff to do for that to happen right now, not to mention that it would give away the game. Maybe post Yuletide.
Meanwhile, check out an intriguing article about John Ford, John Wayne and the creation of a certain idea of masculinity that was artificial from the stort. Choice quotes:
"masculinity (like the Western) is a by-product of nostalgia, a maudlin elegy for something that never existed—or worse, a masquerade that allows no man, not even John Wayne, to be comfortable in his own skin.
And:
From Stagecoach through Liberty Valance, their last Western together, Ford rode Wayne so mercilessly that fellow performers—remarkably, given the terror Ford inspired—stepped in on Wayne’s behalf. Filming Stagecoach, Wayne revealed his inexperience as a leading man, and this made Ford jumpy. “Why are you moving your mouth so much?” he demanded, grabbing Wayne by the chin. “Don’t you know that you don’t act with your mouth in pictures?” And he hated the way Wayne moved. “Can’t you walk, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?”
Masculinity, says Schoenberger, echoing Yeats, was for Ford a quarrel with himself out of which he made poetry. Jacques Lacan’s definition of love might be more apt: “Giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Ford was terrified of his own feminine side, so he foisted a longed-for masculinity on Wayne. A much simpler creature than Ford, Wayne turned this into a cartoon, and then went further and politicized it. There was an awful pathos to their relationship—Wayne patterning himself on Ford, at the same time that Ford was turning Wayne into a paragon no man could live up to.
And also, some fanfiction, Orphan Black this time.
the eve of your labours: remember season 3, when Delphine, temporary in charge of Dyad, tried very hard to out-Rachel Rachel while Rachel was slowly recovering her speech and movements but was mentally all there (and ready for mindgames)? This story takes that to it's ultimate conclusion.
we'll still be running at the break of dawn: post-series encounter of Sarah and Rachel, the two clones who find it hardest to adjust to a time of peace.
Black Sails:
Give me a chance: Betsy the Walrus ship cat doesn't show up post s1 anymore that I recall, but fanfic sees no reason to follow suit, so every now and then a writer does something with her. In the case of this priceless little vignette, this results in Silver and Flint having one of Those Conversations. No, not the later season intense dark ones. One of the early season point blank hilarious ones. :)
Meanwhile, check out an intriguing article about John Ford, John Wayne and the creation of a certain idea of masculinity that was artificial from the stort. Choice quotes:
"masculinity (like the Western) is a by-product of nostalgia, a maudlin elegy for something that never existed—or worse, a masquerade that allows no man, not even John Wayne, to be comfortable in his own skin.
And:
From Stagecoach through Liberty Valance, their last Western together, Ford rode Wayne so mercilessly that fellow performers—remarkably, given the terror Ford inspired—stepped in on Wayne’s behalf. Filming Stagecoach, Wayne revealed his inexperience as a leading man, and this made Ford jumpy. “Why are you moving your mouth so much?” he demanded, grabbing Wayne by the chin. “Don’t you know that you don’t act with your mouth in pictures?” And he hated the way Wayne moved. “Can’t you walk, instead of skipping like a goddamn fairy?”
Masculinity, says Schoenberger, echoing Yeats, was for Ford a quarrel with himself out of which he made poetry. Jacques Lacan’s definition of love might be more apt: “Giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Ford was terrified of his own feminine side, so he foisted a longed-for masculinity on Wayne. A much simpler creature than Ford, Wayne turned this into a cartoon, and then went further and politicized it. There was an awful pathos to their relationship—Wayne patterning himself on Ford, at the same time that Ford was turning Wayne into a paragon no man could live up to.
And also, some fanfiction, Orphan Black this time.
the eve of your labours: remember season 3, when Delphine, temporary in charge of Dyad, tried very hard to out-Rachel Rachel while Rachel was slowly recovering her speech and movements but was mentally all there (and ready for mindgames)? This story takes that to it's ultimate conclusion.
we'll still be running at the break of dawn: post-series encounter of Sarah and Rachel, the two clones who find it hardest to adjust to a time of peace.
Black Sails:
Give me a chance: Betsy the Walrus ship cat doesn't show up post s1 anymore that I recall, but fanfic sees no reason to follow suit, so every now and then a writer does something with her. In the case of this priceless little vignette, this results in Silver and Flint having one of Those Conversations. No, not the later season intense dark ones. One of the early season point blank hilarious ones. :)
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Date: 2017-11-27 09:46 pm (UTC)My favorite Ford/Wayne is The Long Voyage Home (1940), which might be cheating because it's my favorite John Ford and also one of my favorite movies full stop, but it's worth noting that it's a Ford picture where Wayne is not just allowed but cast and directed to be sweet—a dozen years older than the goose-herding kid of Mother Machree, but similarly innocent and treated with the same kind of protective tenderness by the script and by the characters, not any kind of masterful masculine icon at all. No one in that movie is; they're all lost souls and fuck-ups, doing their best to do one good thing, which has to do with Wayne's Ole. (I get unreasonable about this movie, but I console myself that Eugene O'Neill felt the same way.) I am willing to believe the overall drift of the article, but I am not sure it was as programmatic as the author claims.
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Date: 2017-11-28 09:24 am (UTC)(And now I'm pondering what my favourite John Ford picture might be...)
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Date: 2017-11-28 05:44 pm (UTC)What are the options?
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Date: 2017-11-28 06:23 pm (UTC)...I think I’m going with How Green Was My Valley.
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Date: 2017-11-28 06:25 pm (UTC)If I had a Roddy McDowall icon, it would go here.
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Date: 2017-11-28 01:02 am (UTC)I studied these films in undergrad. And prior to that watched them on the television set each Saturday night with my parents. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, we only had five channels. One of which showed old Westerns on Saturday nights.
It also reminds me of an interesting discussion that my father and brother had once regarding masculainity or the macho view. My brother was annoyed by it.
He's not macho, and in many ways has embraced his feminine side, as I've embraced my masculain side (neither of us are LGBTQ). But he takes exception to the machismo put forth by Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway -- which my brother doesn't feel is quite real and more of a construct. Some of what he said was very similar to what was said in that article.
What I also found interesting was how Ford stood up to Cecil De Mille. Ironic, because it ran counter to the rest of the article regarding Ford. Showing how complex he was. And I think Maureen O'Hara may have been right regarding his sexuality. At that time, it was dangerous to be LGBTQ, particularly in Hollywood. Although a lot of people were.
From what I've read about the actual John Wayne, Marion Mitchell Morrison, he was feminine in many ways. Nowhere near the presence he put up on the screen.
Like Carey Grant, Wayne created an on-screen persona that followed him in life. Henry Fonda and James Stewart tried to back away from it a bit more, although I'm not sure Stewart was as successful. Rock Hudson similarly put forth a presence that was not real. He created himself on screen. Now, actors do it less, they separate themselves more from their on-screen personas. But back then...the way they ran things, you created a persona and pretty much lived it, with varied results.
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Date: 2017-11-28 09:28 am (UTC)Oh absolutely, and it was a good final twist to end the article on, keeping Ford three dimensional. (It also qualifies as a rl heroic moment that couldn't have been better written or staged in the movies.)