Aurelia Rinkelle ✧ 31 ✧ she/they ✧ webcomic artist! ✧ i am an amalgamation of all the media i've ever consumed, this blog is a hot mess of all my interests ♡ ✧
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if you see this you get a gold star, idk if anyone views tumblr on desktop anymore
honestly sometimes I forget who all is following me so when I log back in after a while and start reblogging and see certain names in my notes I start freaking out a lil bit
I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like “this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol” when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every “classical” looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad
In case you’re curious here’s what I mean.
Renaissance(distinct lines, stability and the individual man):
Baroque (bold, chaotic, dramatic):
Romantic(romanticize the simple hard working life):
My problem is that they look like duck-faced beavers, so I expect them to *be* the size of beavers.
Beavers are *huge* – about 35 to 65 lbs (16 to 30 kg) and 3 to 4 feet long.
See, I always thought platypi were tee-tiny–like, the size of your hand–so the first time I saw one in the zoo, which happened to be a two-footer, I was like THEY ARE GIANTS NO ONE TOLD ME
I was not ready for that zoom out and size comparison oh my gods!!! SO SMALL
The misuse of the “insult to life itself” quote from Miyazaki on AI burns my yams so bad bc the original context is being disgusted with how a characters movements are dehumanizing to disabled people specifically bc of his empathy for a disabled friend and it’s such a sadly rare sentiment, this cognizance of how we casually inflict indignity upon disabled people and how he finds it disgusting, I hate seeing it obfuscated
In the video he sees character animation where the presenter comments on how the AI can be used to model “grotesque movements humans can’t even imagine.” And Miyazaki immediately mentions that he thought of his physically disabled friend, who struggles with movement, with the implication being that what’s “insulting to life itself” is the degradation of people like him to grotesque monsters. Regardless of my feelings about AI art I don’t think it’s worth obscuring this humane thought process to have a rhetorical weapon
when people are like “he’s not even attractive you could find a guy that looks like him at any gas station” i’m like….. well you see there’s beauty everywhere actually
Oh yeah there was a lot of “Hayes Code be damned, all of us making this film are queer/friends with queers and we’re going to have some fun with gender identity” in this film. That’s why it still holds up. It’s not a story based around getting a laugh out of dressing men up as women so they can be clowns - there’s an integrity to the cross-dressing. Daphne is an identity Jerry realized he had when he put on a dress. Every time he chooses to keep his wig and outfit on and maintain his feminine mannerisms while alone with Joe, it shows his comfort in this identity, and it elicits laughter from the audience through the dialogue, ie. the audience isn’t laughing at the fact that a man is in a dress, but at the characters as fleshed out characters and human beings. The laughter comes from the situations the characters are put in and their reactions to them, not from a parody of womanhood presented through a male perspective. Similarly, Osgood’s classic line at the end of the film is an affirmation that he likes Jerry as he is, even if he’s Daphne. It’s a way of getting the audience to say, “this is fine, we’re comfortable” through laughter to something socially unacceptable in its time.
Joe’s masculine identity, meanwhile, is used to highlight his misogyny and force him to understand it (and the same with Jerry, but as he’s less of a womanizer, there’s less of a point to be made with him). In a world where men and women often had separate social circles that overlapped only when romance was on the table, putting a man like Joe in a female space where he’s privy to the conversations and emotions that his actions elicit gives him a lot to contend with and understand because he can see the consequences of his actions as raw pain and secondhand, instead of as anger being spewed directly at him. Again, the joke isn’t that he’s a man in a dress, or that he’s parodying womanhood, it’s that as a selfish misogynist he’s put in situations where he’s forced to empathize with the experience of womanhood in order to convincingly enact it for his own safety.
There’s a whole lot more to unpack in the metaphor of these two men having to pass as women because their lives are at stake if they don’t.
Okay so for one of my screenwriting and film studies sections I wrote a paper comparing the language of clothing and feminism from Wilder in two of his films, The Apartment and Some Like it Hot.
Now I am not going to spew out a wall of text on the subject or anything, but I did want to point out that he did not just “sneak things by” the code, he actually deliberately REFUSED to abide by it at all for this film, he willfully refused to even apply for the certification, he knew it wouldn’t pass, and he knew he wouldn’t bend to let it pass.
He and the studio took a gamble that a Wilder-Curtis-Lemmon-Monroe flick would do box office and get play without the “seal of approval” from the code folks.
Aurelia Rinkelle ✧ 31 ✧ she/they ✧ webcomic artist! ✧ i am an amalgamation of all the media i've ever consumed, this blog is a hot mess of all my interests ♡ ✧
