The preformance of Freak

While we discussed good ol' MJ in class, as well Gaga. Here is one of the critical articles I read regarding Gaga's videos:


http://onlywordstoplaywith.blogspot.com/2010/03/lady-gagas-telephone-observations-and.html

It's an interesting read, that's for sure.
Now though, I'd like to explore the preformance of Freak - as well as the average person's prefomance of normality.

Now Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga are extreme examples, and they carry the argument of Freak quite far. MJ looked like a strange creature - a white woman with a bad nose job. However, his calcualted actions and the ways in which he appealed to the entertainment industry via his oddities is at once magnetic and repulsive.

All people preform though. We change the ways in which we talk, walk, and interact with others based on our situation - and thus we preform normality.
What is normal with our grandparents is not quite normal with our friends or significant others. What we talk about to our professors is not the same things we would discuss with a barista at a coffee shop.
We all preform - it's part of our nature.

What is interesting, what is the most intriguing - is that these two preformers chose to act opposite to how we would act - and that makes them freaks.

A Wrinkle in Disbelief

My main reaction on seeing the Wrinkle in Time movie in class was to do two things:

1. Laugh - for long periods of time
2. Cry - for long periods of time.

I have the backing of the novel for understanding the film, but for those poor souls who must have sat down ready and expecting to encounter a classic movie to enjoy forever - I say this: It's Okay. I understand.

What is it about adaptations that almost always fail to live up to their print counterparts?
Is it imagination?
No - it can't be that. Not really.
A substantial amount of disappointment stems from the fact that our vision and the vision of of people who make the movies are different.
I guess what makes the freak is our own imagination.

Cloning debate recap and thoughts.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a warning letter to the future of science.

How can we deal with the consequences of cloning, it asks, and adjust to the idea of a world in which people are no longer divided ethnically, but genetically.

We discussed in class the pros and cons of cloning, and while the pro side was mostly scientific reasoning, facts and calculations, the cons was emotional. How could we take another’s life? How could we (and yes, this was becoming ‘we’, for the Pros side was now being addressed as if outside of a hypothetical situation) live in an immoral world?

Easy.

Morals are subjective to what is needed. Morals are constructs of society, and as such are going to change as society changes, and society itself is changed by technology. Technology constructs interactions and relationships, pure and simple –and if one day they created a human eye for blind people, we’d be okay with that. If they made lungs and a heart, that’s totally fine. But once they make a human, or something in the shape that we call human, well hold the phone because (and pardon the language) shit is going down.

Now don’t get me wrong. I personally am hard pressed to harvest organs from living species. Deathbed donations are totally fine, they aren’t using them anyway – but organ farming, that’s a whole new bag of cats.

But I defended my side of pros, and yes, with science, because science is relatively objective. Debates fuelled by emotion end up with someone angry at someone else. It’s easy to defer your debate – to say: I don’t believe in this, so I don’t know how to talk about it, but the truth is we all do. We know the pros, and the cons, and it’s just easier to side with emotion. Emotion is necessary for being human, emotion is needed for continuing to have a society full of helpful taboos so we don’t eat the flesh of our family, or marry the wrong cousin.

So let’s look at cloning differently - What if they made people who could carry two sets of organs – two hearts, two sets of lungs, ect.

And then, they would just harvest the extra organs from the person?

The clone doesn’t die, and they’re still in full retention of what is necessary to continue living. Easy, right?

But the cloning debate is more personal. It’s empathising with the clone and asking what if that was you?

And that brings it back to the Freak.

In my last post, I stated that the reason the Freaks were upsetting was because of the possibility of us being a Freak is so conceivable as to be frightening. Being a Clone is even more so.

There is nothing otherwise identifiable about Clones, and in a strange Truman twist, we could be living our clone lives – waiting without knowing for our own donations.

So to sum up:

Yes, I believe that Cloning has the potential to better the lives of people

At the cost of a good life for clones, if an Ishiguro world comes about.

Freaks

For this blog I feel more up to having a discussion with myself than actually doing a mock essay intro style. So let’s do that.

The black and white movie Freaks is as disturbing a probe into the mind of man as it is twisted and terrifying.

Why the fear? The effects are poor, although black and white storms seem the most dramatic no matter what medium. The ringmaster said it best at the opening (paraphrased): Shudder in fear because you could have been them.

So this fear, this revulsion from seeing Freaks is because of an altered form of Xenophobia, right?

Well, yes and no. The movie takes great pains to give the Freaks sympathetic characteristics, posing them in ways that highlight their humanity, only to use the last ten minutes to show us what Arty meant when he said that they were the nightmares for the norms.

They were scary, covered in mud and appearing from the shadows in the dark of the night. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to have to run into them either, when they’re like that.

But – and this is worth noting – they were so normal, that yes, I could have been one of them with just an extra chromosome.

We’re afraid of the diseased because our reptile brain tells us that they’re contagious.

We’re scared of dark places because something might be hiding there.

We’re afraid of spiders because they’re disgusting and creepy. Oh, and yeah, they were probably poisonous.

The dilemma is we aren’t scared of what we don’t understand. What terrifies us, what shakes us and forces us to seek comfort in light is this: we understand our fears all too well.

That could be me – and yes, in Freaks, the norm, the scheming woman, becomes one of them.

Perhaps, if the end had been different. If she had wilfully become one of them, the film wouldn’t have been so scary. IF she had been given the choice, or at least had transmogrified in a non-aggressive manner, the horror of the situation would have been dulled. We could have seen her going about her business, hanging laundry with her feathered hands, clucking cheerfully as she waddled on – but instead she’s unaware of her situation. She’s been so altered and warped by what has been done to her that she seems utterly dead inside.

And worse yet, what if she did become one of them, but the kind of ‘them’ from the end - the predatory creatures that slink through dark spaces and rend limbs?

The fear of Freaks isn’t just a fear of becoming – it’s a fear of becoming a monster. To have lost everything that identifies you as human, going so far as to commit unspeakable acts upon others for satisfaction.

There are Freaks in the movie, but really, they only showed up in the last ten minutes of the film.

Carnivalesque and Commodification

The Freak on Display

An interesting aspect of dealing with Freaks in literature is the constant desire for them to be part of a display, as well as the necessity that comes with showing their consumption and the base actions.

In Geek Love, Oly and her family are part of a travelling freak show, their deformities and anomalies are constantly in the spotlight emphasising their otherness. Early on, Arty would swim around the tank and leave behind excrement, trailing like a goldfish to disgust and amuse spectators. The Twins began to entertain the idea of prostitution, and Miranda aroused and confused spectators at the Glass House.

The image of sex and in fact, the attention drawn to the whole lower body seems to emphasise this consumption. However it isn’t just the physicality of these Freaks that are consumed, but their image – the idea of them. Their very existence is displayed in order to commodify them. This can also be seen in Nights at the Circus, where Fevvers exhibits her wings from an early age. Fevvers is consumed with the desire to be seen – and to emphasise the act of being seen. She wears over the top costumes, false eye-lashes of massive proportion. Her return to London sparks a Fevversmania – although a Fevvers Fever would have been more apt a description. Garters and Posters, baking soda and tickets are all bought. By purchasing products that are intimately associated with Fevvers’ image, the people at least in part- become part of the act - a necessity for the carnivalesque to take place.

Discussing Disney Movies

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thedudette/nostalgia-chick/12823-mulan

Nostalgia Chick reviews Mulan with a bit of Feminist reading.

The Relativity of "Normal"

I have found throughout my perusal of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and interesting binary within the text. This binary is the definition of normal. Not what is normal, but how is it defined in the context of the novel, how this definition applies to us as readers, and in a wider context as a society. It is a terrible faux pas to refer to a concept with anything so broad as the term ‘society’, but I think it is necessary to look at the giant amorphous mass that is our western civilisation and apply a GIL reading.
We have of course, Oly as one of our providers of definition, Arty as an extreme view, the Nuns which raised Miranda as well as Mary Lick as the other extremist, and Miranda.
These characters can be arrayed on a scale of definitions of normality, with Arty on the far left end, demanding that others must conform to his form or normality, Oly is to the left of the middle, Miranda to the right of the middle, the nuns to the right midway, and Mary Lick to the far right.

I-Arty-------------Oly----------I------------Miranda-----Nuns-----------Lick-I

So Arty, what do you think of them norms?
“Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”
And Oly?
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born."

For the Nuns, we know that they try to persuade Oly to have Miranda’s tail removed, insist that she would be happier, and more normal. That she’ll be able to fit in.
Miranda, now she’s a harder nut to crack. As a child she prayed her tail would disappear, but as she grew older she came to enjoy it, and how it set her apart from others.
Mary Lick is quite a mirror image of Arty, although on the reverse side. While both she and Arty use their power, Arty his oratory skills and Lick her money, Lick urges the women to change what is natural about themselves to make them normal to a normie viewpoint – even to the degree of disfiguring them.

Now how does this reflect on us – and I say us as a western society comprised of normals -looking in on the freaks as we would a P.T. Barnum exhibit? Are we the true freaks, as Arty thinks, or should all freaks be made into Normals, as Lick would have us? Is there room for deviation, and is Oly in the right for denying Miranda a “normal” childhood?