Timer

Directed by Jac Schaeffer

Capewatch Pictures

I love a romantic comedy. Throw in some magic realism–even better. Jac Schaeffer's Timer ticks both of those boxes, but, unfortunately for a film that explores people’s fears about missed opportunities, this film missed a few opportunities itself, and lost me as a fan in the process. (It bills itself as sci-fi but I say magic realism–there is new technology, but it’s never fully explained. I call that magic. More on this later, though.)

The concept is great: a company has created a wrist implant that counts down to the moment you will meet your soul mate–but only if that person has also bought an implant from the company. Obviously, this service is incredibly popular, leading to new phenomena in the dating world: some desperate types insisting every new person they date gets a timer implanted to make sure they’re "the one," others only dating those with timers in the first place, last-hurrah flings as the timer counts down its final days, and even technophobic hold-outs who don’t trust this newfangled stuff (with parallels to social networking). The consequences of having the timers could have been explored further though. Things were briefly touched upon-class issues, young love, bigger questions about fate and chance. The ideas all had loads of potential, but as I watched, I kept feeling like Schaeffer tried to go too far down each road, without taking the opportunity to wrap up every angle.

Because of all of the above, including my desire for more closure, I really wanted to like this film, and came very close to liking it. A few other things rankled, though. This may seem petty, but it struck a nerve with me: One of the opening shots of the film was of the logo of the company that created the timers–the silhouettes of a man and a woman, yet we briefly see later in the film that the company caters to couples of all sexualities. I don’t generally care what sexualities the main characters of a romantic comedy are, but it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to come up with a logo that was slightly less heteronormative. I mean, surely it would have been better advertising for the company itself within the confines of the film.

Which brings me back to the world of the film. It was quite shallow–poke at it too hard and it was clear that there were a lot of unanswered questions: How did the technology work? How did the implants work? Why hadn’t anyone tried to hack the system? What if people’s bodies rejected the devices? Were they only available to wealthy westerners? Again, what made for a less than satisfying film could yet pave the way for a great series.

When it comes to the Bechdel Test, this film almost succeeds, but focuses just too hard on the guy-chasing and glosses over the other aspects of the relationship between the two main characters. Timer’s website purports to put across the message that you can escape your fate, but the message I got was these women needed to define themselves through their romantic relationships.

Great concept, but ultimately I was dissatisfied.

Review by Chella Quint

Theology of the Body

By Donora Hillard
Gold Wake Press

In Theology of the Body, Donora Hillard employs a variety of styles and structures to present a complicated picture of the body, desire, and heterosexual relationships. She makes use of the language of theology and an unrelenting physicality in order to create a sense of faith not beyond the body, but through it of a human divinity that is also at once diabolic. It is no accident that the opening epigraph comes from William Blake.

Within this sequence, Hillard manages to portray women with threatening sexualities as well as women who have been made victims. In portraying women’s surprising and, to some, disturbing strength, she does not erase the brutality. With the lines "You can see muscles/ in my legs from running/ after men like you," “Pursuit” is followed by “Remedy,” which concludes with a literal punch that the tight lines and simple imagery of the first two stanzas allow to have a particularly strong impact on the reader. Reading the last verse for the first time, I jerked back a little as if I had been punched. (This isn’t the only place where I reacted so strongly: take that as a trigger warning.)

The only thing that separates these two poems is a line from Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, taken out of context in order to be made into an opportunity for poetic production and imagination. “Remedy” and the other poems interspersed with lines from this same source do more than dramatize or respond to the line which precedes each: poems and statements interact, forming machines that produce new possibilities for the spirituality of the body. The possibilities, no doubt, would have been heinous to the Pope from whom Hillard so skillfully appropriates. The spirituality of the body, after all, is really just the body and living in it. No need for robes, psalms, or Churches: "Every woman, by virtue of the nuptial meaning of her body, is called in some way to be both a wife and a mother."

This quote from the old Pope is followed by a poem that changes the meaning of the final two terms beyond anything he would have recognized. “Wife” opens, "My husband was a shotgun made of candy./ I wanted to kill his former lovers, especially/ the Strawberry Shortcake-looking one." The only allusion to motherhood made comes a few lines later, "On our anniversary,/ we made love in a kiddie pool full of sugar/ and afterbirth."

This strange and joyful sweetness, interrupted by scars and knives with uncertain intents goes beyond the bounds of traditional and restrictive theologies. In doing so, it represents (particularly since it blends sweetness and at least potential pain) the peculiar strength of Hillard’s theology, whether you take it as a theology or not.

Review by Elizabeth Switaj

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Privilege: A Reader

Edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber
Westview Press

A historian once said that the more one can know about something, the more you can control it. Michel Foucault was specifically talking about the control of psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and people's sex lives, but we can certainly extend his thoughts to a plethora of other examples. What Foucault did not say, however, was how exposing and learning about power and dominance can lead to their dismantling.

After more than two decades since his passing, the inheritors of Foucault's ideas make an appearance in a handsome new book that explores the invisible power of privilege; namely the privilege of being White, heterosexual, and middle class in America. Privilege: A Reader is a collection of essays compiled and edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, both scholarly experts in masculinities and ethnic studies respectively. The book takes on a welcoming and accessible feel with essays that come a personal place, many written from a first-person perspective by heavyweights like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Tim Wise.

Some, like Allan Bérubé's experience as a gay rights activist brings to light the complications of being White in anti-racist gay rights movement. Not being White, I found Bérubé's angst about pointing out the Whiteness of influential gay groups in the U.S. an eyeopener. For White people, it seems, it was convenient to remain racially invisible and to depend on the unspoken rules about keeping that Whiteness unchecked. Awkward silences, defensiveness, and hostility form the repertoire of White discomfort when the racial gaze is turned to Whiteness.

In Michael A. Messner's piece on "Becoming 100 Percent Straight," he raises questions that heterosexual people rarely ask: how do we know for sure we're straight? And what made us straight? Messner's question is interwoven in a study of his own sexuality that touches on his memories as a young man who was infatuated with a male classmate and friend. In repressing this infatuation, he belittles and rejects his friend—a process Messner calls the heterosexualisation of his masculinity.

With every chapter I am reminded of the discomfort the topic of privilege raises and how important that it should remain unsettling. I learn that Black men and working class White people, as privileged groups, are highly contested categories in the face of institutional racism and poverty. And dishearteningly, I discover that the gateway to social mobility undermined by the unearned privilege of being accepted to Ivy League colleges by virtue of having parents who are alumni.

Kimmel and Ferber's book takes us on a journey of self-reflection, of deconstructing the power of invisibility, and asks us some difficult questions about our many roles in maintaining oppression. But it does not try leave us beset with racial or class guilt. Rather, it invites us to pursue, both on a theoretical and practical level, ways of recognising the overlapping nature of social privileges and overcoming differences in the name of solidarity against oppressions.

Though Privilege: A Reader could be a more comprehensive, far-reaching catalogue of dominance, both insidious and overt, if it had taken on board the narrative of privilege from other non-White experiences and interrogated what being able-bodied and cisgendered mean. The absence of trans, disabled, Asian, and Native American voices speaks, ironically, of Kimmel's and Ferber's privilege of omitting these important experiences that are key to dismantling the edifice of privilege.

I praise Privilege: A Reader nonetheless, for its courage to speak from a place that prefers to remain silent, for raising attention to a things that want to stay hidden, and its overall critique of life's many taken for granted experiences and “common sense.” I'm sure Foucault would be proud of that.

Review by Alicia Izharuddin