Lost and looking

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–from Masha Tupitsyn’s book Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film

A friend of mine and I were recently discussing what makes something a critique of something else. If a game or film portrays a patriarchal society in which women suffer and the player or viewer is meant to feel bad about the fact that the women are suffering, is that enough to make the game or film a critique of systems that marginalize and victimize women? Not if it’s presented unquestioningly, as if this is simply the way things were/are/will be, without interrogating or challenging the systems that support these situations. Tupitsyn’s book Laconia is giving me a lot of food for thought with regard to these questions.

I love Tupitsyn’s observation here (using the work of the late Robin Wood as a starting point) that so much drama in contemporary films and television is manufactured by the characters’ completely unnecessary refusals to communicate with each other. This used to infuriate me about the television show Lost. It seemed to me that practically all of the interpersonal “drama” on that show was generated by having characters refuse to communicate. One character would ask another character an extremely important question, and the other character would respond with something like, “It doesn’t matter.”  

I felt like this was incredibly artificial, a facile and phony way to drudge up tension between characters who were barely characters at all. But maybe, as that parenthetical in Tupitsyn’s tweet #762 hints, maybe it’s not quite as absurd as I wanted to think. Certainly “people in real life” often don’t know how to talk to each other, what to say to each other; we hold back things that we shouldn’t. But then maybe just as often some of us say too much, or if not too much, we say things in the wrong ways, to the wrong people (or to everyone instead of someone in particular); we put things in the wrong places; we let things spill over and carry other things away. That’s a source of dramatic tension I’d find more interesting; not an island populated by people, none of whom know how to openly communicate with each other at all, but an island populated by people, some of whom don’t know how to open up enough and others who don’t know how to not be too open.