IMPORTANT NOTE: please use a VPN whenever visiting Hextube, or anywhere else on the internet, for that matter. Protect your privacy.

For this Friday Movie Night, first up is Red Beard (1965), a Japanese medical drama from the great master himself, Akiro Kurosawa. The film is in the late Edo period (i.e., 19th century) and starring Toshiro Mifune as a grizzled older doctor who takes a new apprentice under his wing, introducing him to all the unsavory elements of the profession. This is considered one of Kurosawa’s finest works and one of the best Japanese films of all time; it is currently ranked #87 on the Letterboxd Top 250.

After that is Paris Is Burning (1990), a documentary about the 80s drag scene in New York City, mostly its African American and Latino subsets, featuring interviews with many prominent members of the LGBT community of the time, as well as slice-of-life antics from the biggest LGBT hubs. A valuable time capsule. It is universally acclaimed, being currently ranked #3 on Letterboxd’s [Top 250 documentaries of all time. It is the only notable work of director Jennie Livingston; she is a true one-hit wonder.

We’ll start at 8PM EST on Hextube, right here:

https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies

Be there, comrades!

Letterboxd:

  • Red Beard: https://letterboxd.com/film/red-beard/
  • Paris Is Burning: https://letterboxd.com/film/paris-is-burning/

Doesthedogdie.com links:

  • Red Beard: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058888/parentalguide/
  • Paris Is Burning: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/media/16309

CWs for Red Beard:

  • Nudity.
  • Hospital scenes.
  • Suicide.
  • Stabbing.
  • Cutting of flesh.
  • Throat mutilation.
  • Broken bones.
  • Fistfighting.
  • Blood and gore.
  • Disembowelment.
  • Death of parent.
  • Alcohol.
  • Child abuse.

CWs for Paris Is Burning:

  • Child abuse.
  • Drug addiction.
  • Body dysmorphia.
  • Homophobic slurs.
  • Misgendering.
  • Death of LGBT person.
  • Nudity.
  • Discussion of sex.
  • Sad ending.

Links to movies:

  • Red Beard: https://tankie.tube/w/kb97JVzrfQb5cJUyxhY3hA
  • Paris Is Burning: https://tankie.tube/w/wUKM4QTMFq8hTyeyr3LH97
  • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
    ·
    8 days ago

    GOOD post. I am not going to argue hooks is correct on everything (you mention Butler who, I think, really has a good bead on the limits of hooks' argument, but also correctly pegs it as 'prococative'.). Indeed, I just think it's a compelling entry point for all of its flaws.

    It's been years since I watched the film, but the role of whiteness as the ideal still rings true to me (and the thing we shouldn't discard from hooks). This is to say, I don't think it's a dismissal at all when she talks about the "throne of whiteness". Instead, it is the structuring undercurrent of a racist society where drag performers, no matter the motive (trans, gay, etc) adopt personas in the film that are incredibly informed by white femininity, and something to perhaps reckon with. I'd like to think we're better about this now, but scrutinizing the kind of femininity that's privileged in the drag culture that Livingston centers in the film in particular is just a really on point moment.

    I also just love imagining her shouting "what's so funny about this" in the theater, which strikes me as incredibly based. I think a critical approach is very important though, and interventions like Butlers allow us to get into that (and indeed, hooks never mentions Venus Extravaganza, who Butler of course centers for all the reasons you mention above).

    • MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]
      ·
      8 days ago

      Oh for sure, though y'know, I actually want to go back to Venus and Butler for a second here:

      In Gender Trouble, which is one of the early pieces of academic literature that informed Anglo/American queer studies, Butler spends an awful lot of time talking about how drag is this subversive and powerful statement about the performativity of gender as a whole.

      But then they go on to lambast Venus for reifying the gender binary, a critique that erases Venus as a living subject in favour of arguing for drag as symbolic. It's actually pretty close to what hooks was saying but that Butler obviously came around on by the time of Bodies That Matter.

      It's interesting, because the importance of Gender Trouble as a foundational queer studies text meant that a lot of early queer studies was in tension with trans experiences, and led to queer theorists and academics to make arguments that androgyny/gender transgression were inherently subversive, but that "binary transition" was a regressive and anti-feminist/anti-radical "position" (rather than a lived reality, because such theorists often posited identity as a whole as more of a socio-political position than an intrinsic selfhood). This is the kind of anti-trans rhetoric that was quite pervasive in queer theory at the time.

      Edit: I can't recall the exact details of the film (been a while for me as well), however I do want to say that the NY ballroom scene had a very diverse array of femininity, with categories spanning everything from high femme to tomboy, butch, androgynous, leather. Maybe the film doesn't cover that as much, but I don't particularly think it'd be fair to say that the ballrooms were centred around upholding a white femininity.