Rebecca isn’t Hitchcock’s best film. Not by a long shot. But everything that made him a good director is visible here: the way he frames each shot, his fascination with the transformation of a girl into a woman, his willingness to trust in the strength of the original source material. (I only wish he could have hooked up with Bernard Herrmann before 1955, because a Herrmann score for Manderley would have been both lovely and appropriately eerie. The real score is flowery and over-wrought. Oh, well. ふくすいぼんにかえらず.) He also made several good decisions on the picture: he didn’t cast Vivien Leigh in the role of the unnamed narrator (though oddly enough I always imagine her, when I imagine Rebecca’s character), and he waited until his producer Selznick was away to get the subtler, creepier ending that he really wanted.
The thing that struck me watching the film this time was Joan Fontaine’s nervy, twitchy lead performance. She does all the heavy lifting, which is saying something when her co-star was Olivier. Even Judith Anderson can’t really touch her, except for during a few quiet moments when she’s actually allowed to speak and not simply loom over the set. (That looming is still quite powerful in its silence; I think it informed some of the animation of Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Tremaine, ten years later.) duMaurier’s novel was met with indifference by critics, but Fontaine’s performance really pulls out the discomfort the narrator feels in her new position, and makes the viewer feel it, too. She’s almost grating in the first quarter, which makes the fourth that much more rewarding. Part of it is Hitchcock’s ability to pluck out all the relevant tensions and flay them open: after a discussion about the narrator’s father, Olivier’s deWinter instructs the narrator to eat her lunch “like a good girl.” There are similar moments throughout, but that one tells you everything you need to know. Even before we meet Mrs. Danvers, there’s something intrinsically horrifying about the situation. Then it all unravels, gorgeously, into a story about the vicious competition that can exist between women, and the danger of comparing oneself to an ultimately hollow ideal.
A while ago, I Tweeted this message in reply to Adam Rakunas: “While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion.” The initial conversation was about contemporary science fiction fandom, readership, and our influences as writers. During my teenage years, when I was “supposed” to be reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion. Adam pronounced this statement a big fat “WIN,” and then he made a button out of it:
Adam is in fact such a nice guy that he decided to let me keep any and all cash from this little endeavour. That’s right, me. At $2.45 each, if you buy five you will have bought me a six pack of Tankhouse Ale. If you buy ten, you will have bought me one bar of Pacifica soap and 8 oz of their body butter, just in time for the cruel Toronto winter (Mediterranean Fig scent, so I’ll smell nice for my next con). If for some obscure reason you decide to buy twenty of these puppies, I’ll go really crazy and buy the Mushi-shi boxed set. Or a season of Supernatural. Or, or, or…the mind boggles.
Please, support my frivolous spending. Buy the buttons. Thank you.
This afternoon after picking up my students’ exams (and spending far too much time wandering gourmet food shops in search of the perfect bar of Earl Grey-infused dark chocolate, and then even more time trying on dresses in shops whose soundscapes were punctuated alternately by concrete drilling, poetry slams, and un-medicated raving), I decided to send them a summer reading list. Ironically, I rarely paid attention to such lists as a student. When I wasn’t reading for a project for the next year, I relied on a former teacher for recommendations. He was my teacher in junior high, but steered my reading habits through college, inadvertently assuring that when I started reading SF I did so with a lot of Murakami, Japrisot, Zola, Irving, and others under my belt. Plenty of adults feel (or once felt) the need to “grow out of” their SF readership so they can “move on” to mainstream lit. I have the reverse issue; I grew up reading books about alcoholism and adultery and suicide, and now I really relish my Hugo voter packet.
That little piece of my readerly history rather explains the following list, which is full of things I thought my students might enjoy, and also a few things I thought they might need later on:
I’ve been thinking about natural selection a lot, lately (and not just because I picked up Natalie Angier’s The Canon the other day). Turns out Bruce Cohen explains Darwin’s concept of “fitness” pretty well:
Survival or mortality selection – Organisms that survive at least to the end of their reproductive phase are fitter than those who don’t, because they’re likely to have more offspring.
Mating success or sexual selection – Many species have some form of mate selection process which makes some organisms more likely to mate or likely to mate more often and thus produce more offspring.
Family size or fecundity selection – The more mature offspring (that is, those that live to reproduce themselves) produced by an organism, the fitter it is. This takes into account the two major reproduction strategies:
-produce as many offspring as possible, putting as little resource into each as possible (squids, for instance, do this),
-produce fewer offspring, putting significant resources into each, to increase each one’s chances of making it to reproductive age (humans do this).
I brought these concepts up with my students the other day after watching Radiant City. Among other things, the film argues that the housing developments now sprawling across North America will have an incredibly short life cycle, and that if they don’t prove their own sort of reproductive fitness (ie the ability to sustain a population past a second generation by providing ample resources for growth, like jobs), they will die out and become part of conspicuous consumption’s cookie cutter fossil record. I wish I had had this list handy, at the time.
Also, I highly recommend The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. I know too little about the sciences in general, and recognizing this I picked up the book with a birthday gift card. I’m very happy I did. I just wish I could go back to my undergraduate biology teacher and apologize to her for not being a better student during that hellish winter when I was more concerned with penetrating Immanuel Kant’s murky depths than peering down a microscope. Truly I am sorry. I like this stuff a lot better now, I promise.
For those of you who don’t know, VIZ is best known for their anime and manga licenses. They hold some of the big-name titles, like Bleach and Death Note. Now they’re investing in bringing over Japanese SF novels to English-language audiences. And the first few books are targeted at younger audiences. No word yet on whether they’re accepting titles from all over the world or just Japan, but any news about fresh investment in the publishing industry is good, especially when the target is a youth market. I’ve been saying for years — as I listened to authors and fans mourning the loss of young readers — that the kids who once read SF are now reading manga and watching anime. It seems that VIZ came to the same conclusion.
During the holidays, I promised myself that I would write about the books I gave at the end of 2008. They ranged from manga to cookbooks to hard sf to satire. I had no idea I’d get to brag so much about the books I got, too. (Spook Country needs its own post, because it’s just painfully good. It’s rare that I sit and ponder the simple beauty of a given sentence, but Gibson’s latest makes me sit up straight and pay attention like I’m back in catechism.)
Books Given:
Claymore, v.1, by Norihiro Yagi This series can never get enough love, in my opinion. Not only does it refuse to pull its narrative punches, but it’s unafraid of setting genuine limits on the abilities of its central characters. Moreover, the women of Claymore never dissolve into exhausted stereotypes of either bubbly beauty or mousy intelligence. These are hard women who do a tough job for little reward, because they think it’s the right thing to do. As is the case in many professions, their greatest competition comes not from outsiders, but from within their own community. (Also, there’s a lot of truly awesome demon slaying going on.)
Super Natural Cooking, by Heidi Swanson I keep up with Heidi’s latest at 101 Cookbooks, but I’d never given her any funding in exchange for the hours of domestic and gustatory pleasure she’s given me. So when Christmas rolled around, I jumped at the chance to send this book my parents’ way, as they’re interested in learning more about whole ingredients and how to incorporate them into their daily meals. Heidi’s writing has taught me so much, and I’m sure it’ll do the same for them. (Her Thai-spiced Pumpkin Soup is so good that my friend phoned me up after surgery to tell me how much he enjoyed his care package.)
Most of you know that I’m at work on a Master’s thesis. This thesis involves anime, cyborg theory, and fan culture. It involves reading a lot of Henry Jenkins, Donna Haraway, Susan J. Napier, and other big names. Having finally finished my chapter on FMA and cognitive narratology (not to my satisfaction, but that’s another story), I have begun gathering resources and drawing up outlines for the next — which is on anime fandom and the spectre of Orientalism.
Last year I took a great course on the making of Asian Studies, and it contained a fantastic book by Robert Young called White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. My university library has a couple of deadwood editions of the book, and one electronic version. How long can I download the book for?
THREE. DAYS.
Yeah. Three days. Because grad students can get all their reading and citing done in that amount of time. Right.
Not only is this an especially unrealistic expectation, it’s an unfair one: if I march all the way to the library and reserve a pulp copy, my grad student status grants me a six-week hold. That’s a hell of a lot longer than three measly days. If the school insists on DRM, why not grant me use of the file for the same amount of time that I would be allowed for the use of a paper copy?
I really don’t know how Troy knew, but hard sf YA? Thanks, buddy. Feed (by M.T. Anderson) has “bubble bath” written all over it.
Also, irony: Toronto!David gave me The Best of the Spirit, and Seattle!David gave me a “Ladies of The Spirit” trading card set (with a temporary tattoo!). He also gave me Spook Country, which I can’t wait to get into. And what’s up with the giant photo on the back of all Gibson’s books, now? He looks like a strangely hot soccer dad, the kind who jumps at the opportunity to drive you home because “it’s late” and “it’s dark.” (Note: I would totally get in his car. Actually, it probably wouldn’t even be a car, per se, but a carbon graphite origami structure that ran on the chemical energy released by degrading algae skimmed from the top of the family fish tank. Either way, I’m so there.)
Someday I’m going to do a post on all the books I gave people this holiday, but I’m not quite done yet, and judging by how much these books are tempting me right now, I won’t be any time soon.
There’s something magic about watching rotten, rusty barns and roll by and eating nigh-frozen sushi while listening to this song. (It’s even better after the snow has been and gone.)
This is my favourite of all the things written this weekend:
“Don’t you ma’am me, mister. I’m only seven years old.”
“Hey, in cat years, you’d be menopausal.” He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the vaulted ceiling hung with community service pennants for recycling and gardening and book drives. It was a good school. Amy liked it. It had been a good year, for her. “You could be one of those really hot cougar women, the kind all the paperboys want.”
“What are paperboys?”
“Kids who used to deliver newspapers. You’re too young.”
…I should hasten to add that the youngest speaker in that conversation is post-Singular. Just so you don’t get confused. Because while the story may end in some rather Shakespearean family violence, it’s not that kind of story.
Also I finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami remains, as far as I can recall, the only writer who can move me to tears. You’d think a book about being a runner and being a novelist wouldn’t be exactly moving, per se, but there’s something about Murakami’s ability to humbly forgive himself for being what he is, for accepting himself with all his flaws while still maintaining a rigorous set of personal and professional standards, that always undoes me inside.
...is a science fiction writer, grad student, おたく, and immigrant. She has lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, where she is now a member of the Cecil Street Irregulars and a contributor to both Tor.com and WorldChanging Canada. Her fiction has been published in Tesseracts, FLURB, and Nature.
