This video starring Mariko Takahashi (and human actors in poodle costumes with superimposed dog heads) was made by Nagi Noda for the 2004 Athens Olympics as part of Panasonic’s “Capture the Motion” program of short films on the Olympic spirit.

Noda, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 35, wrote in her artist statement that the way poodles’ hair is cut reminded her of the definition of human muscles. The surreal video is a parody of the Susan Powter “Stop the Insanity” Workout and over the years it has become an Internet sensation.

It’s a funny video on its own, one I can relate to personally, but it’s also a clever commentary on the culture of fitness—and I don’t mean the healthy, 30-minutes of exercise five-days-a-week culture of fitness; I’m talking about the insanity of fitness as obsession, as a way of life.

Nagi Noda, “Mariko Takahashi’s Fitness Video for Being Appraised as an ‘Ex-Fat Girl’” (2004)

My first encounter with fitness insanity came in 2005 when, opening a glass office door, I stood facing a pair of perfectly round boobs atop Robocop pecs. The pecs belonged to a person who was possibly a female, but who, after years of workouts and hours of Photoshop manipulation, now resembled a cartoon: microscopic waist, balloons for breasts, sleek muscle and shine, synthetic Barbie hair and a mass of Black-lit teeth.

The cartoon lady adorned the poster cover of a certain fitness magazine, one which built its reputation and popularity on the appeal of such creatures. This was my first day as staffer at the magazine. I was fresh out of journalism school and eager to work at any place that would have me.

The publisher often referred to the magazine as the “fitness bible,” and the banishment of so-called fat was its canon—its religion.

When I watch the “Ex-Fat Girl” video I recall those two years I spent 40-plus-hours-a-week reading and writing about mothers who described themselves as “former big girls,” who would get up at 4 AM to strength-train for two hours before packing their families off to work and school, only to spend another hour concocting fat-free meals in especially designated coolers to lug to their workplace, which they would leave during lunch to do an hour of cardio at the nearby gym, and which they would hit again after work before picking up their kids from school.

The day would end with scribbling in their fitness log about the day’s exercise and their measurements and how badly they have been craving chocolate and how the “cheat day” (when they would allow themselves a sliver of pizza) was, thankfully, only days away.

Their weekends would be spent preparing copious rations of food—low in calories and high in protein—for their special coolers and their six kids and their one husband who is never in the kitchen and probably masturbating secretly, silently, methodically in his basement office to pictures of fat-free women with round breasts and silky hair extensions just like his wife’s.

When I watch the “Ex-Fat Girl” video I think about how we once sat in the office and lamented that one of the last remaining fitness models with natural breasts was going under the knife. (The unspoken beauty standard in the fitness industry is that the bra looks like crap when you pose with only your pecs to hold it. And after years of fat restriction you only have the pecs to show for. So you get implants.)

I also think about the two (or maybe three) special issues of the magazine titled something like No More Chub and Run, Fattie, Run!

I think of how we’d joke about the insanity of it all because if we didn’t joke about it we’d all hide in a fatty closet and eat donuts till we exploded.

I think of a former co-worker who was gorgeous (but?) overweight and who would spend ten hours a day on her computer making very slim women look even slimmer with Photoshop. And of the other former co-workers who happily traded their brains for the treadmill.

I think about myself in the shrink’s office not really wondering at all why the hell my eating disorder suddenly flared up.

I think of that woman with the magazine who lost a lot of pounds and wrote sermonizing editorials about other poor fatties and her own ex-fattiness. Or the guy who once wrote to us asking to be introduced to one of the fitness models because he “didn’t want no girl with fat deposits.”

I think about a beautiful, fit co-worker, the nicest girl the world, who went temporarily insane while training to compete in a fitness event. She was very hungry.

I love how composed and normal the “Ex-Fat Girl” seems, despite the wackiness of her universe.

I saw that look of serenity and superiority during my time at the fitness bible camp. I know that the “Ex-Fat Girl” is okay for now. She’s on the right side of fatness, she’s safe from it.

As long as she continues to over-exercise with her poodle friends, eat clean and keep a picture of her old chubby self as a reminder, she has a chance of staying safe, slim and insane.

- Jowita Bydlowska

Some years ago, I was visiting a friend in another country. We were in a small village chatting under a streetlamp when a man passed us walking his dog.

“ONAWANNAFOUR,” he said, imitating our English.

Since then, “ONAWANNAFOUR” has been a phrase I often repeat to myself. It’s a clue to something I can’t quite get my head around. When the man said it, I saw myself as I appeared to him: foreign. But there’s something else to it, something essential that is impossible for me to totally understand, like the nature of color to a blind person.

Recently, I discovered Adriano Celentano’s 1970 song, “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” which is pretty much the fifth dimension of my ONAWANNAFOUR thoughts. The song, Celentano said, “means nothing,” but to me it sounds a lot like he is mimicking English (and apparently playing out an elaborate Bob Dylan fantasy).

Adriano Celentano, “Prisencolinensinainciusol” (1972)

It’s hard for me to listen to this without trying to make it intelligible. I keep latching onto “words,” trying to arrange them into some meaning (I’m sure he’s telling someone to hurry up and get to the shoe on time). I’m just not content to stay on the surface—at the ONAWANNAFOUR level—as I’d surely be able to if I had passed that man in the village, talking to his dog. It’s too much like English, too close to home.

My secret wish has always been to become a translator—to navigate tenses and stretch vocabularies all day long. I love hearing about the logic of unfamiliar grammars and trying to bend my own in similar fashion. It’s a way of testing my Anglo ideas of time and space. Like how Germans must wait until the end of the sentence to find out what the verb is, so that the movement of things is always just about hanging off a cliff. Or how in biblical Hebrew, there was apparently a prophetic tense which described not so much a possible future but how “things are unfolding as expected”—a mind-boggling collapsing of “will be” and “is.”

In a way it is like the fable of the blind monks who, encountering an elephant, each touch one part—a tusk, a leg, the trunk—and describe the elephant accordingly. English is only one part of the elephant. By learning about other languages I can just maybe connect trunk with ear, stretch my fingers a little further and come closer to an idea of the whole animal.

But then the Celentano song convinces me we can’t unthink ourselves out of our own language enough to perceive the shape of it. We need someone from another language to show it to us.

Probably no-one mimicked these aural surfaces better than Marcel Marceau:

Marcel Marceau, “Marcel Marceau Speaks” (1971)

I would have liked to hear Marcel Marceau mimic English, but even more I would have liked to hear him attempt French in the same sort of nonsense way. I wonder if it would have been possible for him. It would be a bit like him trying to imitate Marcel Marceau, or one of the blind monks describing his own face.

At least there is a hint of something in “Prisencolinensinainciusol.” If nothing else, it reveals to us that English is a land of pure exuberance. As soon as the “school kids” begin their language lesson, they are transported to a flashy, cool-as-can-be reality, their bodies stretched out like emphatic “I’s,” their hair tossed about in a space where accents don’t exist, their intonation rising and falling as steady as jazz snaps.

To Celentano, we’re almost the embodiment of Futurism, a glittery variant of the species, flaunting our poses, chanting in leotards and moving in unison, doing our best deadpan in a hall of mirrors … looking in on ourselves, but not completely seeing.

- Kelly Dignan

Olympics Men’s Hockey Final, Salt Lake City (24 February, 2002)

Hockey fans? You’ll remember that other gold medal game. Gretzky’s lucky loonie planted under center ice. Victory for Team Canada on American soil.

This time the Americans were in Vancouver, ostensible underdogs, but looking more than capable of an upset. They hadn’t trailed in any game in the tournament, and but for their quarterfinal against Switzerland, wrapped up wins early on. The Canadians wobbled, with only narrow victory over Switzerland and Slovakia after a round-robin loss to the United States.

Would the young American team panic if they went behind? Would the Canadians inexplicably collapse if they got into the lead as they did against Slovakia?

All has been answered: Zach Parise of the US tied up the game with only 25 seconds to go. A few minutes into extra time, Canadian Sidney Crosby tucked it away from a tight angle. Victory! Canada’s earlier 5-3 defeat to the US avenged, their fiasco in Turin forgotten.

Crosby: “It doesn’t feel real. It feels like a dream. It just feels like dream.”

Olympic Men’s Hockey Final, Vancouver (28 February, 2010)

Oh Canada!

- Ryeberg

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Cast of “Glee” singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey

If you’re on this site, you probably like “Glee.” I’m just guessing. It’s that kind of show. It’s a kind of hybrid of irony and sincerity, the sort that acknowledges its cheesy fundamentals while not only fully exploiting them, but embracing them as well. Post post ironic, maybe?

There’s probably a good word for it, something coined in the first half of the 18th century when the same thing happened somewhere, probably.

It’s also likely you like it because it’s got a gay guy, a nice jock, an Asian girl, two Jews—one stereotypical (a way of saying there’s nothing wrong with that), one really not (unless you count the Israeli military stereotype, which US television mostly does not)—a black girl, fat and proud, and a nerd in a wheelchair. If the characters weren’t so filled out, with ample storyline given to all, they would seem a lot more like what they are: an affirmative action checklist.

But what gets me about it is a thing that is so culturally invisible, it never has nor likely ever will make it on to one of those lists.

Look at that still once again. Look at our Asian girl. She’s not just Asian. She’s got a tummy.

The tummy got some play in “Pulp Fiction,” but only from a waif who thought she might like it, and even then, only one like Madonna in her “Lucky Star” phase. That is, more an absence of obvious abs than the presence of a tummy.

Madonna, “Lucky Star” (1984)

But look at Jenna Ushkowitz (yup, that’s her real name). That’s a tummy. We’ve become fine—maybe we always were fine—with fat and black. And Roseanne and John Goodman made fat and trashy visible in a way that didn’t actually make fun of the fat. But we’re usually fine with extremes in visual culture. Ushkowitz’s tummy isn’t extreme. It’s the tummy of someone who either doesn’t care too much about the world of flat, or simply eats what she likes and doesn’t pay for it with the sort of exercise whose main goal is expiation.

This is a normal person’s tummy, a normal girl’s tummy. And it’s on TV. And it’s in a tight tank top. I don’t foresee banners and documentaries. But I am more impressed with this than I am with “Dancing With Myself” (which I loved).

Kevin McHale of “Glee” singing “Dancin’ with Myself” by Billy Idol

I think this is a breakthrough, this new form of reality TV. Bring on the next tummy.

- Bert Archer

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The plan was for my gang to celebrate the new year with a Caribbean-themed party, and someone linked this vid in a group email, to get us revved up for the island-riddims.

It made me think of something the playwright Edward Albee said last spring, in an interview at UCLA. An audience member asked what kind of art Mr. Albee likes. He said he likes art that is “useful.”

“Art is useful when it teaches you about yourself, consciousness, and gives you a fuller experience of life.”

Ok, so this vid is not art, nor is it useful, but it is funny.

But I am also interested in online videos that meet Mr. Albee’s criteria.

Therefore, I invite you to balance out the Vybz Kartel with Jill Bolte Taylor’s inspiring story about the stroke that allowed her to transcend her left brain. It occurs to me now that the euphoria she describes could be akin to what it feels like to be a teenaged superfan in the front row of a Vybz Kartel concert.

- Liane Balaban

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972)

The message read: “Do not ever watch your torture porn in my house again.” Sitting in my living room, watching Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” with a friend, I received the enraged text from my boyfriend, glowering at the kitchen table.

A couple weeks previous we were in this same conflicted configuration—on opposite sides of the house—as I watched the first two episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980).

Fassbinder and von Trier are my boyfriend’s oft-cited examples of the kind of soul-destroying filmmaking he thinks I am exclusively—nay, pathologically—interested in, nothing but pure emotional cruelty or, to borrow from his colorful text message, “torture porn.”

Lars Von Trier, “Dogville” (2003)

Less than a year into our relationship, we went through a similar showdown after attending the Montreal premiere of von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in 2000. Arriving early to get prime seats, I ecstatically endured—foolishly, with boyfriend in tow—its sacrifice of poor, cute, blind Björk (as Selma) on the alter of von Trier’s small-town American life, a steel trap where the weak destroy the weak and “simple” values engender the greatest monstrosities.

The packed theater was wracked with tears by film’s end, following possibly one of the most gruesome scenes in cinema: Selma’s hanging.

Lars von Trier, “Dancer in the Dark” (2000)

Deeply satisfied with the gut-wrenching piece of cinematic brilliance I’d just witnessed, I gathered my coat and bag and left the auditorium. Boyfriend, however, was immobile: crippled by sobs, weeping openly in a messy, messy way.

The story goes that I looked at him with great disgust, and asked incredulously, “are you ok?!” The ugly crying continued down the street to the Metro station and, combined with my stoic WASP discomfort, created a volatile context for a heated discussion about emotional investment in cinema.

I should note that this heated debate flared up again a week later, when I very stupidly dragged boyfriend to see “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), chosen by Empire as the #1 most depressing film of all time. He stormed out of the theater during the memorably nauseating climax that cross-cuts shots of amputation, electroshock and degradation. Oops.

Ensconced in a haze of self-satisfied superiority, I pride myself on my capacity to both be sincerely emotionally affected by a film and maintain a cold, intellectual gaze on it at the same time. This is partly the spoils of several years of academic film studies, where one learns that no matter how disturbing or debased a film may be, each is an object worthy of critical engagement.

While a practicing art critic, my boyfriend is incapable of watching any film about the Holocaust—even the comedies—or any film that is overly upsetting, particularly unflinching portrayals of physical or emotional abuse (with the exception of Hollywood blockbusters: the famed cock-and-ball-torture scene of “Casino Royale” (2006) for example is A-OK).

A recent, particularly vicious fight over “Synecdoche, New York” (2008)—which boyfriend defined as “pure misery” and I found mesmerizing—seemed to get us closer to the heart of the matter. My defense was that the film’s formal experimentation was so dazzling and labyrinthine that it transcended the incredible despair suffered by all the characters. Basically, in my mind if the on-screen suffering is for some sort of greater good—an aesthetic achievement or ethical provocation—it is worth enduring.

I think that Fassbinder and von Trier seem like the worst of the worst to boyfriend because they stylize human misery to extreme degrees and to allegorical ends. They both advocate for emotional cruelty as revelatory and potentially curative, with the image of one individual soul tormenting or destroying another the most visceral metaphor for greater political or existential conflicts.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, interviewed by Peter W. Jansen (1978)

Somehow I can’t accept that his feelings are facts (why else, gentle Ryeberg readers, would I be forcing you to read about our private spats in this very post?). Maybe despite my proclaimed atheism, I’m still carrying Catholic baggage that sees suffering as somehow redemptive. Maybe I get off on my righteous highbrow outrage at his over-sensitivity. Maybe I’m just more of a masochist than he is…

- Jon Davies

Ryan Gosling & Rachel McAdams, MTV 2005 Best Kiss Award

This is perhaps the most self-assured public kiss I have ever seen from two movie stars. I know, I know, I am far behind and millions of people from all over the world have already seen the kiss. But I only just saw it today.

At the time of this win, they were a couple. But they are also a couple of actors. Naturally, any couple winning an award would want to kiss to celebrate. But is a kiss by actors who are celebrating a win—before an audience—actually a kiss between a couple, or is it a performance kiss? Is it an authentic kiss?

I watched the clip twice to find out, but couldn’t. It’s certainly a very sexy, slow, well-orchestrated kiss, and both Ms. McAdams and Mr. Gosling seemed to know that she would stay on his hip as he walked to the award table.

Of course, the question of authenticity is all out-of-whack. For of course actors are actors, and so a kiss between actors that is acted is deeply authentic: it is perhaps more authentic for two actors to act a kiss when before millions, then to actually kiss.

If this is an acted kiss, then, but acting requires drawing on real feelings—and sometimes, in rare moments, produces them—a more bewildering question might be: are they, in acting this kiss, drawing on the feelings they had kissing each other in real life? Or are they drawing on the feelings of kissing other people that they drew on to kiss each other when they first started kissing while shooting the movie? Or are they drawing on the performance-kiss feelings of kissing in the movie, to mask what might be their real-kissing feelings in their moment of victory?

I like that last possibility best: that this kiss is a squelching of a real kiss for the sake of good ole showbiz.

When they kiss later, for real, will they—as actors always do—be stepping back from themselves and saying to themselves, “Remember this kiss, what it feels like to be kissing”—so they can use it again?

- Sheila Heti

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railroad33, the Kyle Railroad (Kansas to Colorado)

Evoke an emotion to match the power of a moving train. How do you do that? Maybe it’s an ambition too big for American movies, wherein too often it feels like the first rule for an actor is to be cool. Maybe it’s because the Method does not instruct you to match the power of a locomotive. Or maybe it’s just because our poor language, once the language of Shakespeare, now gets droned and compartmentalized by serious business-minded people all over the world.

Here’s a pop quiz though: If you want to make your American movie as relentless as the train that moves across its landscape, what do you do?

Well, you could dub it into another language for a start.

Andrei Konchalovsky, “Runaway Train” (1985)

Are these not great performances? Eric Roberts with snot all over his face? Jon Voight, finally getting to show the world in 1985 what a glorious asshole he is? Rebecca DeMornay, playing a doe-eyed innocent too soon after “Risky Business” for one concupiscent teen to properly appreciate? A Russian director of an American movie with a script by the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (himself the primo director of the greatest, most outsized actor of the 20th Century, Toshiro Mifune): Language becomes secondary in a film like this.

Dubbing though. What a cheat. What a cheap shot. I’m so sorry. You can’t even understand what they’re saying. (Don’t be surprised: Even the English sounds dubbed.) Still, the scene feels elemental. And look at that: We’ve already got our American movie (full disclosure: it’s one of my favourites). But something doesn’t seem quite right about it. It feels too foreign or something.

So what else could you do? Well, really, maybe the easiest thing would be to give up and move your movie away from America. And if you want your language to be as large as your train then set it to music and sing it.

Mani Ratnam, “Dil Se” (1998); Song: A.R. Rahman, “Chhaiyya Chhaiyya“

Language is secondary in a movie like this too. Or maybe not, since I don’t understand what they’re saying. But why is it so stirring to see singing and dancing atop a moving train? Could it be because it shows how we really move on the surface of the earth? Getting up to all our business of courtship while all the time whirling through space at 108,000 km/hr? Not to mention the fragility of those soft forms clinging to that rolling satellite of ore. They’re like rain dancing on the window of a moving car.

Still, this wouldn’t be right for our American train movie. It’s way too big for a non-CGI project. It’s like an asteroid. There’s such force at work here, Bruce Willis might have to quietly step in and blow it up.

So what would you do? Well, you could keep your Indian setting, bring your Americans there, and throw in a cobra.

Wes Anderson, behind the scenes on “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007)

Or, if you’re Lars Von Trier and you want to make your American movie, you could keep the singing and restore the English, but cast second-languagers and slow down the train a bit.

Lars Von Trier, “Dancer in the Dark” (2000); Song: Bjork, “I’ve Seen it All”

I mean, after all, English is a great language for trains. More train songs have been written in English than any other language, no? The straw men say there are no more epics, but try singing this list back to back. It would take a Homer. Take that, straw men. Take that, Shakespeare.

But you still haven’t answered the pop quiz. You’ve got an outsize American/ international movie called “Runaway Train” and you want to make it more palatable for a normal, business-minded, English-speaking American audience. You want an American movie with American actors speaking American lines in an American setting. What do you do?

What do you do?

Well for one thing, you hire a Canadian to write it. And get rid of that fucking train. Who wants a vehicle with an alternate energy source anyway? That’s just boring.

Jan de Bont, trailer for “Speed,” written by Graham Yost (1994)

Conclusion: Railroads are not to be trusted in America. They’re Stalinist. Always telling you where to go. Further, anyone who pals around with train cars should be exposed as a Socialist entity as well. Like, for example, the English language itself. Or perhaps not the language as a whole but certainly its complex usage. And here’s the proof, straight from that hotbed of American Communism: “Sesame Street.”

Bob Dorough, “Conjunction Junction” (”Schoolhouse Rock,” 1973)

No wonder Obama wields the language so well. Looks like he’s going to grow that Hitler mustache for real in no time.

You betcha!

- Sean Dixon

James Taylor, “Fire and Rain” (1971)

I guess it’s true, as Elton John says, that “when all hope is gone, sad songs say so much.” When I was in my 20s, if I heard a song like James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” or Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”—even muzak versions in a department store or public transportation hallway—a heavy, intense melancholy would cover me. I’d get a lump in my throat and be on the verge of tears. I’d have to get away from the music.

Although I’m a lot less sensitive to sad music these days, I have to admit these are pretty sad songs. Sad enough that they could still, on occasion, throw me into a brooding gloom!

Back then, my companion would laugh and tell me that if a song is sad, melancholy, or otherwise mood-altering, it ought to be embraced until it becomes comforting. With a measure of distance, the music could bring on needed catharsis.

Yet it only made me feel terrible. If I wasn’t already in a melancholy mood, I’d quickly step down into one.

Harry Chapin, “Cat’s in the Cradle” (1976)

Since then I have grown more accustomed to and less fearful of hearing sad music. Over many years I have cultivated tolerance and appreciation. A middle, semi-blue period saw me able to listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Still, even then I couldn’t brave songs from the “Blue” album.

Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now” (1970)

Now I find some music sad but not intolerably so, like Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album. I believe I’ve achieved the level of cool aesthetic appreciation for the sad that my long-ago companion kept trying to encourage.

Jackson Browne, “Love Needs a Heart” (1978)

I never understood it then, but now listening to Browne’s “Love Needs a Heart” and “Rosie” I realize I’ve made peace with poignancy. I can even manage to listen to these songs of love and loss from beginning to end.

Jackson Browne, “Rosie”

Whatever’s in my heart—pathos, longing, hurt, despair, regret—these songs bring it out.

Maybe they’d be good for what ails you, too.

- Nyla Matuk

I could have titled this piece something a little subtler, but that would be a disservice to my subject.

* Sexually explicit * Please note the the website advertised in this clip has, most unfortunately, expired.

How can I follow that up? What else can I say that hasn’t already been said, in the most grotesque and colourful vocabulary?

Alexyss K. Tylor was first introduced to me by an artist friend, and so I assumed, at first, that she was a performance artist of some kind (let the record show that the first thought that entered my freshly blown mind after having sat through “Two Faced Dick” was, “well, if this woman is a performance artist, she’s just ended performance art.”)

In fact, Miz Tylor is the host of her show on black women’s sexuality, “Vagina Power.” It used to be aired on Atlanta public access television until a “very vocal constituent of ‘Black Women’” (note the scare quotes) forced the cancellation of the show. But Tylor lives on—she apparently published a book in 2006 (although I can’t find a trace of it)—and still speaks her truth (thank God) on YouTube.

* Sexually explicit * That’s her mother with her on stage, by the way.

And what the hell kind of truth is she speaking? Tylor is possibly the best monologuist I’ve ever seen. No pauses, hiccups, or ums and ers; none of the inadvertent repetition, awkward nervousness or lack of preparation that’s usually the hallmark of amateur TV.

Consider that her lengthy diatribes—which wade through the deepest muck of sexual abjection, enumerating with a kind of De Sade-esque glee all the possible linguistic permutations of licentiousness, veering into unheard of metaphors and similes (government cheese?)—are entirely off-the-cuff.

Unlike, say, a professional comedian or motivational speaker, she has no written material to fall back on; once she’s on a riff, it’s just her and her alone, and Tylor dishes dick and pussy with the verve of a Baptist preacher. She gets in her groove and she’s a woman possessed (by what, I couldn’t begin to imagine), and she just lets fly a constant passionate onslaught, the burning gospel of Vagina Power. Just listen to her; listen to her iterate the words “penis” and “vagina,” stretching her mouth around the intricacies of their pronunciation—“peuyy-nuss” and “vaj-EYEEEE-nuh”—as if she’s exorcising some sick (I accidentally typed “dick” just then) demon.

Tylor claims kinship with Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey and Sojourner Truth. I only wish that her platform were as large and as public as Angelou’s and Winfrey’s. Tylor could redress the profound schizophrenia of American public sexual discourse.

In re-watching these clips for posting here, I couldn’t help but think of my recent exposure to the Twilight phenomenon (I just watched the first movie a few weeks ago, out of curiosity and the desire to see cute boys shirtless). This book and movie franchise, all sprung from the prudish imagination of a Utah Mormon, seems to want to teach kids that good girls shouldn’t want sex, and even if they do, even if they beg, good boys won’t touch them.

As a private romantic fantasy that’s perfectly fine, but “Twilight” is now a multimedia empire, and so its sexual metaphors and messages assume the scale of mass media propaganda. And given the general context of the furor over sex-ed (abstinence-only education has to be the most ludicrous oxymoron I’ve ever heard), Meyer’s priggishness-for-teens is nothing short of damaging.

If someone were going to sermonize to people about sex, I would take the balls-out-down-and-dirty realness of Reverend Tylor than the genteel, anti-feminist falsehoods of prissy Stephenie [sic] Meyer any old time. Tylor is even queer-positive! Speak truth to power, woman!

Can I get an amen?

- Sholem Krishtalka

A still frame from Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” (1987)

I first watched Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” on a TV a long time ago with three older, heavy drinking and masculine roommates. I picked it up from Jumbo Video down the street and convinced them that viewing it on a Friday night on the sole television in the house would be a good time.

Nearing the end of the movie, I was the only one still awake or in the room and I was completely captivated by the final scene. It consisted of a long shot of Woody Allen quietly cutting a film in a New York studio. It was a surprise to see him and it was an unusual image of Allen—not smiling, not talking. He was concentrated, relaxed and very serious. And somehow, as usual for the end of a Godard film, the scene was mysteriously full of hope.

I thought of this scene for some reason recently and wanted it to keep me company while I was doing a bit of banal work on my computer. I couldn’t find the clip at first, but found a video of a conversation between Woody Allen and Godard that took place just a year before “King Lear.” It was made by Godard and was titled “Meetin’ WA.” I opened a small window for it among other open files on my screen and listened while I worked.  There were no other sounds.

The two men sit across from each other in a hotel room. It is 1986. The camera shows the back of Godard’s head and is  primarily focused on Woody Allen’s face. They talk quietly back and forth, and eventually come anxiously to the subject of video and television. Godard leans in and asks Woody Allen,

“Do you have the feeling that something has really changed?”

Like his appearance in “King Lear,” Woody Allen here doesn’t smile or joke around. But he does look a bit nervous. He seems slightly alarmed by Godard, who is kind of playing with him. He says he is worried about the pettiness of the small image and the tragedy of young people seeing great films for the first time on their television sets. Godard is worried about the confusion of too many perspectives – too many channels coming in. They are having trouble communicating.

As I leaned closer to their little window (though as flandersfails points out in the video’s text comments, “this interview is kind of bad actually”), I started to have the feeling that I was from the future: exciting but worn-down computer gadgets surrounding me. My worries are very different from theirs, my head is nearly five times as big as Allen’s and three times as big as Godard’s, and they have no idea that I both learned of and opened their conversation in practically the same moment, and that it took me one second to slide an arrow beneath them so that I could hear them discuss, again, the possible dangers of televisual radiation.

They have no idea where in the world I am. They have no idea what kind of a monster I am, that I saw most of their movies before I was 18 on a small television in my mother’s basement, that my viewing habits were random, indecipherable, and included quite a lot of television, that there were no guardians or curators bringing them to me other than the kids at the local video store. Or that, at 18, I had yet to see one of Godard’s or Allen’s movies on film, in a city, or even to understand that anyone needed me to.

Because I didn’t know anything about the fear involved in this small screen business, their movies have always been completely mine. I have loved and owned them and they have affected my life. I appreciate very much that they managed to reach me in the places where I happened to grow up. I always understood this to be a combination of generosity and accident.

I bet both directors, especially Godard, would be sort of happy to know how many young monsters like me there are in the world. And I would bet that out of all the directors I can think of, these two would probably be the first to tell me to watch other respected directors’ films on a big screen, but that my mother’s basement would have been just fine for watching their work. I would tell them that it’s magic to be a giant monster in a tiny little theatre. And I would tell them that somehow, even though there are now more channels than we can imagine, things are mysteriously beginning to make quite a lot of sense.

I know that this video is being offered for viewing, but I will warn you that mirella99 concurs with flandersfails initial warning (mentioned above) and adds that it “is like a badtrip.” okuhfesa most recently adds, “Mwahahaha.”

But here it is if you are curious:

Jean-Luc Godard, “Meetin’ WA” (1986)

And here is another video that I highly recommend, a too short outside-in-the-bad-weather dancing video from an eighteen-year old, from who-knows-where:

princeofdreamz, “Umbrella Girls” (2007)

- Margaux Williamson

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James Cameron, “Avatar” Trailer (2009)

“Avatar” is a racist film. Or at least this has been the persistent allegation ever since its release in December 2009.

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief at io9.com was among the first to label it “white guilt fantasy,” another story where the “white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of colour, and become leaders of the people they once oppressed.”

David Brooks of The New York Times went further, calling it “a racial fantasy par excellence” which “rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic, and that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades.”

Should the ‘White Messiah’ accusation be taken seriously? I am not alone in wanting to dismiss if not ridicule all this fuss over the politics of a silly and predictable Hollywood movie (visually enchanting though it admittedly is). That is until I begin to think of just how many Hollywood films have shown various peoples of color (minorities, colonial subjects, the Third World poor) struggle against various social ills (poverty, authoritarianism, imperialism) only to be swiftly arrogated by white men (and, from time to time, white women).

Other than being infuriatingly patronizing, such misguided cinematic altruism is dangerous: it reinforces pernicious stereotypes of the ethnic ‘other’ as disorderly, meek and stupid, only to undermine the hard-won voice of marginalised peoples of color and justify their continued marginalization.

Arguably, the more popular the film, the more the potential for harm.  “Avatar,” now the highest grossing movie of all time and multiple Oscar nominee, may prove a particularly weighty addition to this irritating genre.

The examples are many: Brooks names “The Last Samurai,” “Dances with Wolves,” “A Man Called Horse” and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” One can add to this inventory “Red Corner,” “City of Joy,” and David Lean’s multiple Academy Award-winning epic, “Lawrence of Arabia,” widely considered to be the classic of all ‘White Messiah’ films.

Lawrence, an officer in the British army, appropriates the dress as well as the struggle of Bedouin tribes in their fight against Turkish aggression and British imperialism. Lean’s anti-imperialist message, if there is one at all, is fully submerged by his consuming interest in the persona of Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole in the prime of his youth).

Besides being sinfully handsome, Lawrence is brilliant, just and brave; resolute in his determination to “give freedom” to the ‘Arabs.’ Though unaccustomed to guerrilla warfare and Arabia’s harsh terrain, he takes extraordinary risks, like charging fearlessly through the dreaded Nefud desert.  Here he rushes into storms of bullets.

David Lean, “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)

At first glance, “Avatar” is nothing more than the extraterrestrial version of this tired ‘white guilt fantasy.’

It is 2154.  Jake Sully, a former US Marine, is sent to Pandora to befriend its indigenous population, the Na’vi, so that his current employer, an American mining corporation, can more easily access the planet’s rich stores of Unobtanium, a mineral with “exotic properties” worth “twenty million a kilo.”

“Killing the indigenous looks bad,” Jake is told. “Find a carrot to get them to move, or it’s going to have to be all stick.”

Throughout the film, Cameron is clear about whom the Na’vi represent.  They are repeatedly referred to as “indigenous,” “aboriginal” and “savages,” and the lead Na’vi characters are played by Black or Aboriginal actors (Zoe Saldana, Laz Alonso and Wes Studi).

Jake (played by Sam Worthington) plunges into the Na’vi’s midst as an ‘avatar,’ but soon comes to neglect his mission, falling “in love with the forest, the people,” and predictably, with Neytiri, a Na’vi chief’s daughter.  Neytiri teaches Jake her people’s ways because she senses in him a “strong heart”—a good investment, it turns out, as Jake’s “strong heart” guides him to oppose the corporation, and its hawkish security chief, Colonel Quaritch, who later accuses Jake of “betraying his race.”

Though Jake describes himself as “just another dumb grunt,” we learn that he is extraordinary well beyond his “strong heart.”  He quickly adapts to Pandora’s “savage terrain and fierce creatures,” and to Na’vi society, learning their language with enviable speed and matching their physical prowess.

Jake is also a skilled military strategist and negotiator.  He inspires the various Na’vi clans to join forces against the “sky people,” and even subdues the fierce Toruk, a giant bird-like creature that only five Na’vi have ever managed to tame.

Jake prances through the last quarter of the film with fist thrust in the air, showering the Na’vi with stirring calls to action, swooping down on Quaritch’s troops on the newly obedient Toruk, and basking in the warmth of Neytiri’s devotion: “I was afraid for my people,” she coos. “I am no longer afraid.”  In an early version of the “Avatar” script, Jake becomes the leader of Neytiri’s clan.

Despite the many eye-rolling moments, in the end “Avatar” doesn’t neatly follow the expected narrative.

In ‘White Messiah’ films, the native’s world, even when romanticized, is marked as clearly inferior. In “Lawrence of Arabia,” the ‘Arabs’ have rather barbaric ideas of justice, and it is evident they’ll have trouble managing on their own once Lawrence is extricated from their midst. The native, though noble, is backward; wanting in various aspects of ‘civilization.’

Not so much in “Avatar.” For one thing, the Na’vi’s lush habitat is profoundly more beautiful than the humans’ “dying world.” We are told that this “strange, bewitching place” with a “dreamlike landscape reminiscent of a Magritte painting” represents “hope for our race, for our planet and future of all living things.”

James Cameron, “Avatar” (2009)

The Na’vi’s pantheism, community solidarity and oneness with nature (the “symbiotic relationship between all things Pandoran”) are celebrated wholeheartedly, while the American way of life—now associated with corporate greed, ruthless individualism and misappropriated science—is squarely and unambiguously condemned.

The US Marines, give or take a few, are depicted as a warmongering and boorish horde (yes, the real Marines are upset about the film too!).  They kill thoughtlessly and hurl demeaning jeers at the disabled, wheelchair-bound Jake (“meals on wheels”).  Towards the end of the film, any thought that the Na’vi are “savages” seems utterly preposterous.

It’s clear that the Na’vi need nothing from Jake’s ilk, not their promise of ‘development’—“medicine, education and roads”—or their “light beer and shopping channels” or military technology. The Na’vi may lack the coarse firepower of American bombs and guns, but they have “arrows dipped in a neurotoxin that can stop your heart in one minute.” In fact, it is with these instruments of precision that Neytiri ultimately kills Quaritch. Yes, it is she who saves Jake.

Finally, in a fundamental departure from the ‘White Messiah’ narrative, Jake “goes native” in a total, self-incinerating way.  The Na’vi perform a ritual that permanently transforms Jake’s human body into his alien avatar.

So “Avatar” is a curious film: it follows the ‘White Messiah’ model faithfully, but then ruptures it at critical moments.

I’m hesitant to subject “Avatar” to prolonged philosophical analysis—after all, Hollywood movies are known for being inconsistent.  Yet the film’s hybrid narrative is not without significance.  It reflects how multiculturalism, environmentalism, feminism and indigenous struggles have shifted conversations about culture and imperialism while leaving every economic fundamental unchanged.

Indigenous movements, in particular, have issued powerful critiques of imperialism, condemning not only the cruel mechanics of colonial rule, but also their devastating cultural impact via the reification of science, rationalism, and industrialization.  The demands of indigenous movements stretch beyond inclusion and space in dominant ‘white’ cultures to equal regard for difference, marked as this may be by oral traditions of knowledge, communitarian political structures, and spiritual systems based in ancestor worship.

How remarkable that the radical multiculturalism of indigenous struggles is reproduced in “Avatar,” a thoroughly mainstream production.  No wonder that Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first fully indigenous head of state, has praised the film for its “profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defence of nature.”

Morales’s pithy tribute left me wondering if behind the racism allegation lie deeper anxieties about the film’s glib indictment of modern notions of progress, including monotheism.  Telegraph blogger Will Heaven—who wrote a scathing review of “Avatar’s” “racist subtext” in December—recently defended a Vatican spokesman’s concern that “Avatar” will turn environmentalism into a “new divinity.” Heaven declared: “He’s right to be worried.”

Perhaps if Cameron had foregone the economic logic of casting Worthington in the lead, he would have made a ridiculously subversive film, one worthy of all the fuss.

But the point is that he didn’t. And as the possibilities of genuine dissent unravel into a confusing carnival of their cooptation, the racism charges stick.

Cameron delivers his anti-modernity, pro-indigeneity and deep ecology parable through the most advanced of cinematic technologies and the body of a handsome white man.

We get to revel in our equal regard for Na’vi culture from the safest distance possible—4.4 light years from Earth to be precise—while adjusting our 3D glasses and munching on overpriced popcorn. Cameron has it both ways, knowing that we do too.

-Mitu Sengupta

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