Some soundbites from the Coalition for Marriage

Having recently come across the homepage of the Coalition for Marriage - a pressure group composed of representatives from conservative Christian institutions - I thought I'd dissect some of their soundbites. 'Soundbites', aye: I'll just tackle the stuff on the front page, the barely connected bits that are intended to sway casual visitors the campaigners' way. I'll take them in turn.

'Marriage is unique'

Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.

Unless you count polygamy in all sorts of societies, including the elite of ancient Israel. Or same-sex unions of various kinds. Or concubinage. Or the profound changes marriage underwent in the sixties and seventies, from a system in which (very broadly) a woman was passed from her father's control to her husband's, to one of egalitarian partnership - arguably a more profound revolution than marriage equality. (This is a general problem for advocates of marriage discrimination: if marriage is about partnership not property, patriarchy and legitimate procreation, an essential argument against same-sex marriage falls.) Above all, though, it's an appeal to tradition: lots of institutions (slavery, absolute monarchy, religious intolerance, human sacrifice...) have been traditional without being good.

Marriage reflects the complementary natures of men and women.

Guys, you're not doing a great job of hiding the fact that your arguments come from Christian complementarianism, the hot & sexy new version of patriarchy that conservative churchmen cobbled together from the corpse of the old thing back in the seventies. In that view, men and women are separate but equal have different but equal roles: specifically, the man's role is to be in charge and the woman's is to obey. (How's that different from patriarchy, I hear you ask? Exactly.) The C4M sentence above is, anyway, an unsubstantiated assertion that does not follow logically from the previous statement. No-one has ever been able to explain to us what male and female nature consists of in a way that doesn't just retell nineteenth-century bourgeois European ideals.

Although death and divorce may prevent it, the evidence shows that children do best with a married mother and a father.

Sleight of hand, our old friend! Why, of course if you eliminate single parents and precarious family situations from the equation, you'll find that 'children do best with a married mother and father'. But comparing like with like, there is in fact no difference between opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

'No need to redefine'

Civil partnerships already provide all the legal benefits of marriage so there's no need to redefine marriage.

The right to be married and recognised as such is a legal benefit of opposite-sex marriage, although UK law is otherwise better than some countries'. But: if civil partnerships are equal to marriage in everything but name, why would anyone still push for marriage? Inventing a separate but equal institution for gay people is unfair and frankly mean-spirited, and viewing their state as somehow not marriage has real consequences. Making sure the separate school for black people is just as nice as that for white people does not remove white supremacy.

It's not discriminatory to support traditional marriage.

Another non sequitur, and palpable nonsense too. Declaring that only certain couples should be permitted to marry and others should be excluded is the very nature of discrimination. The C4M's website does nothing but ineffectually make the case for discrimination. If they're scared of being called discriminatory because it sounds nasty, well - doesn't that tell you something?

Same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.

This feeds into the next section and will be dealt with there. For now, I'll refer you to the dire consequences gay marriage will have on your freedom.

'Profound consequences'

If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People's careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. 

Yes, indeed: this paragraph is nought but the guilty conscience of folks who realise that they've destroyed gay people's careers, stopped them from adopting and fostering children, and forced them to listen to offensive views. But, like the racist worried about white people becoming a minority, that guilty conscience turns to aggression: we must hold the gays down lest they do to us what we did to them.

If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?

Sorry, but I'm all non-sequitured out.

'Speak up'

People should not feel pressurised [sic] to go along with same-sex marriage just because of political correctness. They should be free to express their views.

That doesn't actually mean anything. By 'political correctness', these respectable people mean the consensus that being a bigot is a bad thing. And people are free to express their views. Isn't that why C4M is able to broadcast their vitriol freely, rather than having to smuggle anti-gay tracts into the country in potato crates?

That's that, for now. It's a rancid mess of illogical soundbites indeed: the consequence of taking what is preached from conservative Christian pulpits and picking out all the Bible bits to make it more palatable to a religiously plural audience. Turns out that leaves only the flimsiest of non-arguments.

Let me close with the immortal words of Rev. W.A. Criswell, admittedly on the other side of the pond, on our inalienable right to not have to rub shoulders with gay people:

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision... to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made it—a land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh, hang on. Turns out he was talking about racial segregation. Oh well.

I heard that you were a serious man, to be treated with respect

So much ink has been spilt on The Godfather (1972) that a standard plot-direction-acting-technical review would be both superfluous and painfully beside the point. But since that describes much of this blog- er, I mean: having recently enjoyed seeing Coppola's epic at the cinema after years of watching it on the small screen, I thought I'd throw a couple of observations out there. I'm a superstitious man, though, so I'll deal with some standard review points lest this blog become too avant-garde.

The Godfather is often held up as a prime example of auteur-driven seventies cinema, but it didn't spring forth fully armed from Francis Ford Coppola's head. In fact, after snatching up the rights to Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller Paramount first approached Sergio Leone and Peter Bogdanovich before tapping Coppola, then inexperienced at helming epics and $400,000 in debt to Warner Brothers. The 31-year-old had to fight an uphill battle against the producers' distrust of everything from tone to casting choices, but was bull-headed enough to push most of his vision through.

'I believe in America', spoken while the screen is still black: perhaps the most famous first words in cinema. (Coppola seems to have a talent for it: see also 'Saigon. Shit.') Then we see the face of a middle-aged man, Amerigo Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), as he tells the story of his daughter, whose boyfriend attempted to rape her and beat her half to death only to receive a suspended sentence. The camera slowly zooms out, letting us see more of the darkened study and eventually the back of the man behind the desk, who listens patiently before asking what Bonasera wants him to do. After he's told, we get the first cut after a three-minute opening shot, and a face: Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

Well, I know you know all that. But observe the precision in every little moment. Bonasera's monologue gives us a full character, a self-righteous man who wants to be thought respectable, loves his daughter in a paternalistic fashion, and is afraid of and disgusted by the man he is no longer too proud to ask for help. Corsitto, an Italian stage actor who put in his one and only film appearance here, delivers it note-perfect, which would be a problem if Brando were not equally brilliant. Thankfully, he is that and more: so what if he's reading his lines from cue cards?

From the start, the all-round extraordinary physical acting gives The Godfather the feel of well-choreographed theatre with stage directions whose detail would put Tennessee Williams to shame. Brando (slouched posture, shrugs and little hand movements) and James Caan's Santino Corleone (expansive gestures, struggling to contain animal fury) are showiest, but to my mind Al Pacino takes that particular crown - by not doing very much. In the beginning he is relaxed, but as the film progresses and he is hardened by loss and brutality he becomes clenched and tightly controlled, exuding power through impassivity: the scene in which he mollifies and wins over his Sicilian future father-in-law (speaking English because his Italian is limited and a man in his position can't afford to look ridiculous) is not so different from a much later encounter in which he sits still while an enraged Moe Greene (Alex Rocco) hurls insults.

That's the point: The Godfather is all about power. While Puzo's novel was defanged slightly for the big screen, the parallels between the Corleone family and 'legitimate' power are still spelt out. (Michael: 'My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.') Not just any power, but patriarchy, whether it asserts itself in Carlo Rizzi's wife-beating, Sonny's open adultery or Michael's refusal to tell his wife about his business. The film's men genuinely view their authority as a burden rather than a privilege ('women and children can be careless, but not men'), having so insulated themselves against alternative voices that they are blind to the reality and self-serving benefits of their rule.

Power, and power asserted through violence: what better illustration of that point than the men with lupare at Michael's Sicilian wedding? The Corleone family, like all empires, ultimately comes down to men with guns - although, like all empires, Vito knows to dress it up more nicely than that. (Michael lacks his natural charm, but is as ready to spend money on his public image.) The Sicilian scenes in the film's second act may be on the nose and potentially offensive (gee, all the men are dead from vendettas, are they?), but their barebones displays of criminal power form the film's real heart: Vitelli's choice to associate with a Mafia family when Michael treats him con tutto rispetto,  Apollonia's naiveté rendered deadly by the omnipresent infantilisation of women, Fabrizio's opportunism. And they're gorgeous: how could anything filmed on Sicily fail to be?

The heart of The Godfather, I said, and that's true even in the most mundane sense: the Sicily scenes form one half of the film's second act, the most placid of the three even though it covers the phase in which the gang war is fought openly. Rarely, in fact, does a film have three acts that are so distinct, even though all end with defining moments for Michael (the film's protagonist, recall, despite the fact that the elder Don Corleone is remembered better). The film's third act, in which Michael takes over the family business from his ailing father and prepares to strike at the enemies gathering against him, feels much more like it belongs to the world of the film's own sequel - it's set in the fifties, after all - and closes with one of the great endings in cinema, as a horrified Kay (Diane Keaton) watches Michael's caporegimes swear fealty to him before Al Neri (Richard Bright) shuts the door in her face.

It's the first act, in which a single rash sentence by Sonny leads to an assassination attempt on the don and Michael's irrevocable decision to involve himself in the family business, that I've always liked best, though. The reptilian Barzini (Richard Conte) is still in the background, while the visible antagonist is Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), a Sicilian narcotics importer who calls himself a 'man of honour' even after he attempts to kill the don over the latter's refusal to support the drugs business. On the page Sollozzo is an unremarkable baddie, but in the hands of Lettieri (who sadly died in 1975) he's extraordinary: a savvy businessman who would prefer to live in peace with the Corleones, but he is ruthless enough to kill, and constantly alert to any danger (there's a twitch in his left eye that Lettieri works to perfection). I still get upset every time he bites the dust.

Coppola and Puzo's screenplay excises remarkably little of the source material's plot (Fabrizio's fate, Neri's story, Vito's youth which would be adapted in The Godfather Part II). The real change is structural. Puzo's novel is a terrific page-turner, but it mostly just goes on until it ends. With the perfection of the three-act structure, complete with self-contained arcs and moments that rhyme both visually and narratively, the film knocks its source material into a cocked hat. Its excellence as an adapted screenplay is not the least of them, but The Godfather sets a number of records: greatest cast of all time with career-best performances all round, greatest crime drama of all time, greatest anti-Sinatra screed. It made some people angry and made some other people a lot of money, but to us it's a film that keeps on giving four decades down the line.

In this series: The Godfather (1972) | The Godfather Part II (1974) | The Godfather Part III (1990)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence

Russ Meyer is well known as the king of sixties sexploitation. And by 'well known', I mean that until a week ago I'd never heard of the man. That isn't the sort of thing we bloggers are supposed to admit, especially of a figure with Meyer's cult clout, but there you go. For me, 1965's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! served as an introduction both to Meyer's work and a particular strand of exploitation cinema in general.

Faster, Pussycat! is a pitch-perfect showcase for Meyer's idiosyncratic obsession with large-breasted women driving around the Mojave Desert. The film accounts for much of his lasting influence on creators from glam metal bands to Quentin Tarantino. But in some ways it's atypical, too. For one, it isn't sexploitation: it aims to titillate, to be sure, but it's no more explicit in that respect than a Michael Bay film. Neither is it crypto-feminist, pace what Wikipedia claims Jimmy McDonough writes in a book I can't afford.

But it is hilarious. Look no further than the spoof of titillation in the guise of public service that is the gloriously purple prose of the opening monologue. An uncredited John Furlong, clearly in on the joke, chews the scenery like there's no tomorrow:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence - the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora [good word, unlikely to show up in film today] of disguises, its favourite mantle still remains sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn't only destroy, it creates and moulds as well. Let's examine closely, then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained in the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakeable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, at any time, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist or a dancer in a go-go club!

Here, women defined by their direct subordination to male authority (receptionists, secretaries, go-go dancers) hide a wilder side that both entices and frightens the presumed-male audience of exploitation films. The plot proper begins as the go-go dancing trio of oversexed Billie (Lori Williams), vaguely Italian Rosie (Haji) and their violent, domineering leader Varla (Tura Satana) are out in the Mojave Desert. Racing their sports cars against clueless suburbanite Tommy (Ray Barlow) turns to violence in which Varla kills Tommy with her bare hands.

The girls kidnap the man's girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), but their plans change when they observe a wheelchair-bound old man (Stuart Lancaster) at a local petrol station. Informed by the station attendant that the old man and his sons, faithful Kirk (Paul Trinka) and hench but dimwitted The Vegetable (Dennis Busch), are fabulously wealthy but live by themselves in the middle of nowhere. Varla and her minions immediately decide to drive down to the old man's farm, using Linda as their cover, and get their hands on the cash by any means necessary. But it turns out the old man is less harmless - and a great deal less sane - than he appears.

Crazy murderers versus crazy murderers is a fantastic exploitation premise, and it helps that everyone involved gives it their all. B-movie stalwart Lancaster in particular gives an absurdly fun over-the-top performance, making an unhinged, misogynistic rapist and seriously abusive parent the most compelling character in sight. But the actresses who portray the girls aren't far off. Santana's black-gloved evil and propensity for gleeful violence is portrayed in such an entertaining fashion that we go along with her being both protagonist and villain. But she doesn't upstage her companions, particularly the ditzy, playful Billie, who in Varla's eyes is overly distracted from crime by her fawning over every man she sees.

Only the most curmudgeonly reviewer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! could avoid consulting his thesaurus for synonyms of 'fun'. It's a brilliant project that concedes not an inch to reason, taste or reality. Meyer directs with an enthusiasm and panache - see left for a typical heightened contrast in size between two characters, something Sergio Leone would develop into his stylistic signature. At the same time, Meyer is more restrained here than he was in his earlier 'nudies' or post-Hays Code sexploitation flicks. While gratuitous shower and wrestling scenes abound, there is no outright nudity. Faster, Pussycat! does quite well without it.

That leads us to the question of Meyer's portrayal of his central trio, for here we have three active, physically strong women. But that is not at all the same as asserting they are strong female characters. For one, they're fantasies, obviously conceived as different but equally buxom types to cater to various tastes in a presumed-male audience. (Meyer famously preferred buxom women to the petite build characteristic of sixties icons like Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway, but the fact that we can discuss the man's muses in the same terms we might a prize racehorse tells us everything about the male gaze in his films - never more than a funhouse mirror of patriarchal society, grotesquely exaggerated but springing from the same fount.)

They're also shockingly one-note: designed not to appear as full human beings but as dangerous and exotic circus animals, as the prologue's use of zoological language all but announces. The real characters are men. Kirk and the Vegetable actually develop over the course of the film. So any claim for Meyer as a feminist, inadvertent or otherwise, is pretty much bogus. That doesn't diminish the film's achievements, but it helps us subject Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to critical appreciation, not fanboyish whitewashing.

Satan of suburbia

In the month of winterfylleþ, 'the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead'. To honour the run-up to Halloween I'll spend this month focusing on horror films, from esteemed classics to tawdry schlock. Above all that'll mean resuming that Mario Bava series, but I'll find time for other films too.

Today's entry falls firmly on the 'classic' side of the spectrum: so much so, perhaps, that we're inclined to forget it's above all a superb piece of genre filmmaking. Roman Polanski is perhaps the greatest purveyor of genre fare since Hitchcock, whether it's noir (Chinatown), thriller (The Ghost) or Oscar bait (The Pianist). Rosemary's Baby (1968), then, is a perfect paranoia thriller with higher aspirations.

A young couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), move into an apartment building in New York. Rosemary doesn't like their nosy and eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), but Guy soon becomes fast friends with them.

When Rosemary becomes pregnant, it's at first an occasion of joy for the couple. But the mother-to-be soon becomes suspicious. At the advice of the Castevets she has switched to a new obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who refuses to take seriously her concerns over an increasingly draining and troubled pregnancy. What's more, the Castevets seem to have Guy on their side as they move to isolate Rosemary from her friends, give her suspicious drinks in lieu of prenatal vitamins and have her wear a malodorous pennant containing tannis root, a plant associated with witchcraft according to Rosemary's elderly friend Hutch (Maurice Evans). When the previously healthy Hutch falls into a coma and dies after investigating the Castevets, Rosemary begins to suspect that her neighbours are involved in witchcraft and have made a pact with her husband to take her baby from her.

Feminist readings of Rosemary's Baby have pointed out that the film is about a woman constrained by patriarchy. Guy is a patronising jackass from the start, regularly infantilising and objectifying his wife. When she finds scratches on her body, he nonchalantly explains that he raped her in her sleep. Any bodily autonomy is taken away by the Castevets' witches' brews and Dr. Sapirstein's belittling of her fears. In Rosemary's Baby Polanski empathises with his protagonist's anxiety about a living creature growing in her body, and attacks a system that negates women's personhood by reducing them to the role of carrier.

But the film is also a broadside against the bourgeois culture of the sixties, caught between the stuffy respectability of the Castevets and the hip appeal of a younger generation. Early on Rosemary goes for a Vidal Sassoon haircut, in what would be product placement - if every other character did not immediately (and unfairly) opine that it looks terrible. Beyond a veneer of befuddled harmlessness, of course, the honourable personages of the older generation turn out to be members of a satanic conspiracy. Not that that dampens their enthusiasm for housekeeping: in one of the film's finest scenes, Minnie disarms a knife-wielding Rosemary, then checks to make sure the blade hasn't damaged her parquet floor.

It is only in the film's final minutes that the script clarifies whether the all-encompassing witches' coven preying on Rosemary is real or a figment of a disempowered housewife's imagination. Before that Polanski refuses to tip his hand, emphasising the extent to which male domination mirrors the demonic possession of folklore. 'Patriarchal' is decidedly the right word: the film is about the rule of old men more than men per se, be they naturally aged like Roman or only seemingly old, in the way Guy artificially constructs an age difference to his wife by infantilising her.


All of that, and I haven't yet praised Rosemary's Baby as a near perfect example of the paranoia thriller. Polanski makes the most of images of satanism and witchcraft. It's no coincidence that the film provided much of the imagery peddled both by respectable society and rebellious youth culture during the infamous satanic panic of the following decades. Then there is the terrific, terrifying score of longtime Polanski collaborator Krysztof Komeda.

A supremely accomplished horror film, then, and at 96 minutes leaner than most prestige pictures know to be in our decadent age. It set the stage for the explosion of lurid diabolical cheapies at the turn of the seventies (The Brotherhood of Satan, Mark of the Devil), and the slightly more respectable religious horror that followed (The Exorcist, The Omen). But Rosemary's Baby is smarter and more aware than its imitators, and it's as fresh now as it was in 1968.

The patriarchal imagination of Doug Wilson

Trigger warning: this post discusses rape, slavery and genocide apologia.

Last night over at The Gospel Coalition, Jared Wilson posted an excerpt from Doug Wilson's Fidelity: What It Means To Be A One-Woman Man. 'Outrage' is often used to describe the sort of reaction the post provoked, but 'hurt' is just as apt. The Wilsons wounded their brothers and sisters, and when people expressed their hurt they belittled them and told them to 'retake their ESL class'. It's worth quoting that Doug Wilson excerpt in full:

A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.

True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours.

– Douglas Wilson, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 1999), 86-87.

Rachel Held Evans has done a beautiful job of unpacking why this is vile, overt misogyny that does not even bother to hide behind standard complementarian weasel words. J.R. Daniel Kirk, too, gets straight to the point:

[W]hen you sexually conquer someone, this is rape. The connection Wilson draws is too much on target: he has, in fact, described all sex as an act of rape. It is therefore not surprising that he sees such a connection between rape outside of marriage and not finding the sort of satisfaction that he suggests is coming to men in their exploits of power.

Wilson's argument is this: sex ought to consist of men penetrating, planting, conquering and colonising (i.e. rape) and women receiving, surrendering and accepting. When it does not - when it becomes an 'egalitarian pleasuring party' - then men will act out their God-given manhood in unacceptable forms of rape, and women will partake of perverted varieties of sexual submission. This is somewhat at odds with reality, of course. One of the major victories of the women's movement, after all, was the outlawing of marital rape.

The Wilsons' response to their critics is generally not worth the blog space it's written on. They insist that they've been misunderstood, but fail to explain what they mean. They accuse their critics, in the passive-aggressive 'Why do they hate us?' fashion of the faux martyr, of trying to twist their words. Jared, in fact, withdraws to affirming 'marital sex that is mutually submissive' while pretending not to have retreated.* Doug's 'explanation' of his choice of words takes the cake, though:

“Penetrates.” Is anyone maintaining that this is not a feature of intercourse? “Plants.” Is the biblical concept of seed misogynistic? “Conquer.” Her neck is like the tower of David, and her necklace is like a thousand bucklers. “Colonize.” A garden locked is my sister, my bride. C’mon, people, work with me here.

Here we have a response that ignores the existence of non-penetrative sex because it would throw Wilson's argument that sex is necessarily about domination into disarray; that attempts to shame critics by wielding the Bible as a sledgehammer; that makes two references to the Song of Songs which significantly distort the actual trajectory of mutual pursuit found in that wonderful erotic poem. And by feigning incomprehension, Wilson continues men's long and ignoble history of insisting that women who criticise them are irrational or 'emotional'.

It's not just women, however, that Wilson thinks are uppity. In the video at the top of this post, Wilson identifies with the values of the Confederacy, such as states' rights - as if those were more than an expedient to prevent the federal government from interfering with slavery; and he holds that slavery should have been abolished by parliamentary processes rather than war - as it might well have been had the Southern states not seceded and attacked the North precisely to preclude that possibility. Wilson reveals a blindness to really existing institutions of power and privilege, be they patriarchy or slavery, that is born of being a white Christian man and not listening to people who aren't.

What connects Wilson's neo-Confederate tendencies to his rabid pro-patriarchalism isn't just his evident desire to return to the good ol' days of c. 1850. As Grace at Are Women Human? points out, Wilson's apologia for both rape and slavery is linked by his vision of a society in which white men benevolently rule over everyone else. White male domination is thus at the heart of Wilson's belief system. This is not, I hardly need to stress, an orthodox view of Christianity - although some people who think like Wilson use the cross too, usually by setting it on fire.

Wilson's choice of words - penetration, planting, conquest, colonisation - is the naked language of imperialism. He projects the seizure of physical space from indigenous people onto female bodies. Here as there, violence is glorified as the expression of true manliness and justified by 'planting', which has excused occupation and genocide from the Americas to the West Bank. By casting women as a dark continent that must be subdued and made to flourish by white Christian men, Wilson doesn't just other women: he reveals his fear of them. If left unconquered, uncolonised and unpenetrated, they might run amok and threaten his privilege.

It works the other way round, too, for 'penetration' is a metaphor drawn from patriarchal sex that imperialism projects onto the places it wishes to consume and the people who live there. That actual, physical rape occurs in this context is hardly surprising. The language of 'penetration' that robs women of agency and humanity does the job just as well when dusted off and applied to indigenous people and their lands. In gendering to-be-conquered people feminine, imperialist discourse reveals its roots in patriarchal society.

This has, I fear, been something of a long, rambling post. It has not been temperate. It's hugely encouraging to see how many Christians have stood up to Wilson's rape fantasies. We can be confident, I think, that increasingly those who grant the views of Wilson and his ilk shelter - those like The Gospel Coalition - aren't just wrong. They're also in the minority.

*Jared Wilson mostly quoted Doug Wilson approvingly without adding much, and now he is out of this saga.

The country is weak in this one

At the 2010 Academy Awards, Jeff Bridges won an overdue Best Actor Oscar for his performance as an over-the-hill country singer in Crazy Heart. That same November Country Strong, a picture about a country singer in crisis, premiered in Nashville to reactions ranging from indifference to disgust.

Alas, duelling a superior film is the absolute least of Country Strong's sins. No, there was no sudden demand for country-themed media, but the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle might still have been all right had a clunky, clichéd, pretentious script - with a relentlessly misogynistic subtext, no less - and sub-standard music not left a talented cast in the lurch, in ways the describing of which will require minor spoilers.

The heart of the problem is writer-director Shana Feste's extraordinary confusion as to what she wants Country Strong to be. It's a character study - but Paltrow's Kelly Canter is regularly upstaged by her sidekicks' antics. It's a melodrama - but it wears its higher ambitions with pride. It's a study of modern country, whose various strands are represented by the characters - but Feste's attitude towards country seems ambivalent at best and snobbishly dismissive at worst.

Country superstar Kelly Canter (Paltrow) is in rehab after a drugs-and-booze fuelled performance in Dallas that ended in a fall off the stage and a subsequent miscarriage. When her husband and manager James (Tim McGraw) organises a comeback tour, Kelly insists on bringing along her lover, aspiring outlaw singer Beau Hutton (Garreth Hedlund), to open for her. James, meanwhile, enlists former beauty queen turned country pop artist Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) to appeal to a younger demographic.

Taking an addict out of rehab prematurely for televised shows turns out to be as terrible an idea as you'd expect. While Kelly is running high on cocaine and out of control, she must decide between her sanity and marriage on the one hand, and her increasingly desperate attempts to re-establish herself as an artist on the other. James is struggling to reconcile his job as manager with that of husband, while Beau and Chiles's mutual dislike - his attachment to working man's country and roots music, her Nashville glamour - turns into romance.

This all plays out as the tired melodrama it sounds like, with a script decidedly smacking of a made-for-TV film. Since the four central characters are not so much human beings as country-music archetypes, it could hardly be otherwise. Feste's insistence on telling instead of showing makes matters worse. Kelly is given a very good early establishing moment when she improvises lyrics to a song Beau is writing; but when Country Strong turns into the Passion of St. Kelly the fact that her status as a country superstar is constantly talked about but rarely demonstrated becomes seriously damaging.

Kelly never loses our sympathy, though. That's up to Beau, the weakest of a sorry bunch of characters. Country Strong wants us to adore Beau. He is, we are told and not shown, a sensitive, talented singer-songwriter. He's less a person than the archetype of a fuzzy notion of 'authenticity'. His constant bullying of Chiles does not trouble that image since, Feste assures us, Chiles is on the way that leadeth to destruction. Country Strong's odd mixture of ignorance and snobbery takes a turn towards the laughable in the following exchange:

JAMES: The Austin Statesman's saying that you're the next Carrie Underwood, and he's the next Townes Van Zandt.
CHILES: Who's Townes Van Zandt?
JAMES: He's a singer-songwriter.
CHILES: Was he famous?
JAMES: In some circles. But not as famous as Carrie Underwood.

Feste wants people who prefer Townes Van Zandt to Carrie Underwood to like this bit of dialogue; it's intended to make them feel smug they're part of the authentic, underground 'circles' that get the reference. Whether naked pandering is the best way to satisfy the roots crowd is one question; just what on earth 'the next Townes Van Zandt' would be is another. The real-life Van Zandt - a manic-depressive genius who 'spent much of his adult life living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, drinking himself to death' - defies pigeon-holing, but in Country Strong he's reduced to a placeholder for alt-country: a highly-authentic ghost. In that framework, it hardly matters that Beau doesn't resemble Van Zandt in any significant way.

In the light of his supposed authenticity, it's interesting to note that Beau is the only character about whom we're given no biographical information at all; he's but a cardboard cut-out of the things Country Strong wants us to like (but does not know anything about). Hedlund is powerless against the awfulness Feste has conjured up for him. He acquits himself well, for what that's worth, and so do his cast-mates; if Country Strong was an embarrassment for Paltrow it wasn't on account of her performance.

McGraw, the only non-professional actor, is the best of the bunch, giving a subtle, effective performance as the venal James Canter. It's an excellent portrayal of an abusive husband, if that's what Feste's script intends (sadly, it's hard to be sure). James has all the power in the relationship, controlling and manipulating the fragile Kelly by withholding affection and imbuing her with a sense of guilt to pressure her to drop out of rehab and attempt a premature comeback. His feigned concern - throughout, he argues that the tour is necessary to prevent Kelly from relapsing into obscurity - barely masks the psychological abuse he dishes out.

All things considered, Country Strong might be an acceptably tranquilised time-waster, but its enthusiastic misogyny makes it a thing to be abhorred. The subculture archetypes it dabbles in are blatantly gendered: country-pop is silly, frilly and glitzy, and its avatar is of course a woman. Meanwhile, in the honky-tonk roots culture men can still be men, without suffering the neutering Beau feels threatened by. Chiles, 'the new Carrie Underwood', is patronised by Kelly, publicly humiliated by James and mocked by Beau. Eventually, she learns - in a heartwarming lesson to women everywhere - to avoid the punishment that is her rightful due by giving up on her career and becoming an accessory to her man.

In real life, of course, alt-country teems with female artists, while country-pop has its share of Brad Paisleys and Kenny Chesneys. That Feste insists on a strict gender pattern reveals more about her than about the scene she's caricaturing. As a piece of workmanship, Country Strong is merely flat: the direction is of the point-and-shoot variety, while the music is competent but hardly rousing. Where the film really fails, and fails unpleasantly, is in its smug pretension. Country Strong dismisses country-pop and sides with an imagined authenticity, but it is itself nothing but movie-of-the-week fluff.

John Piper is wrong about women

American pastor John Piper has come under criticism for saying that God gave Christianity a 'masculine feel'. Piper's assertions (which gender important virtues male, among other things) have been thoroughly refuted all over the blogosphere. In the slightly older video above, Piper discusses the question of domestic abuse (beginning with an ill-advised chuckle). He ends up suggesting that women should endure verbal abuse 'for a season' and endure 'being smacked' for one night, before taking the problem to the church.

These remarks are, of course, despicable. The fact that Piper seems to mean nothing by them makes it worse: his ignorance suggests that he lives in a subculture so male-centred that he is insulated from listening to women at all. Most of all, Piper seems to be totally unaware of the strong association between patriarchy and abuse. As Women's Aid put it:

Domestic violence against women by men is "caused"* by the misuse of power and control within a context of male privilege. Male privilege operates on an individual and societal level to maintain a situation of male dominance, where men have power over women and children. Perpetrators of domestic violence choose to behave abusively to get what they want and gain control. Their behaviour often originates from a sense of entitlement which is often supported by sexist, racist, homophobic and other discriminatory attitudes. In this way, domestic violence by men against women can be seen as a consequence of the inequalities between men and women, rooted in patriarchal traditions that encourage men to believe they are entitled to power and control over their partners.

Violence is typically the assertion of male control, not the loss of it in a fit of rage. Male rule - for which 'godly male leadership' is but a euphemism; it's difficult to imagine what besides rule Piper means by 'leadership' in concrete situations - sets the context in which women suffer violence. The belief that Christianity is chiefly masculine relegates women to second-class status, appendages of their husbands whom they are obliged to obey. This puts women into the impossible situation of choosing between their own safety and well-being (by seeking help, which may involve leaving their husband) and obedience to Christ.

Short of situations in which we are ordered to disown Jesus, that dilemma is false. We follow a Lord who was and is eternally human, who mourns with those who mourn, who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smouldering wick. Never forget that He began his ministry like this (Luke 4:16-21):

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
    "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
   because he has anointed me
   to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
   and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
  Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

It's horrifying that End Violence Against Women, for example, need to advise visitors how to cover their tracks to prevent their abuser from finding out they're seeking help. So much for the 'Christian foundations' of 'western civilisation' supposedly under threat: Piper's assertion that 'the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families that have this masculine feel' is comprehensively refuted by two thousand years of church history.

Of course, as Piper says, the church can play a part in tackling abuse by running women's shelters or by excommunicating known abusers. But in its present form the church is ill-equipped for these tasks. It cannot honestly claim innocence from abuse until it abandons male rule. You cannot both deplore violence and argue for the continuing existence of contexts in which violence occurs: something has to give. Because white rule was the root cause of lynchings, the answer could not be a more benevolent form of white rule; it was and is the abolition of white rule itself. Isn't it time we said the same of patriarchy?

*The inverted commas signify the FAQ's insistence that it is ultimately the abuser who is responsible for violence, and that social context does not abolish responsibility.

Metal on metal

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I became a metalhead, but as for so many young men of my generation my gateway drug was Linkin Park.

Within the metal scene this is not considered a cool thing to say, to put it mildly. These days I merrily dismiss nu metal as nothing more than gentrified grunge mixed with hip hop, a bunch of whingeing poseurs ripping off Rage Against the Machine with none of the revolutionary politics or musicianship.

But those of us in our mid-twenties now headbanging to blast beats? We liked Linkin Park. We liked Korn. Some of us, God help us, listened to Limp Bizkit. On this now famous graph, we all started on the far left. When I was fourteen, nu metal was the heaviest, angriest music I'd ever listened to.

Of course, that's because I didn't yet know the real thing. I came across 'The Wicker Man' by Iron Maiden by sheer chance, picked up The Number of the Beast and Brave New World, and the rest is history. Maiden opened the floodgates: from there, I discovered Rammstein, In Extremo, Metallica, Slayer, Avenged Sevenfold (another old shame) and eventually Black Sabbath, Sabaton, Manowar, Helloween, Finntroll, Arkona, Forefather, Falkenbach, Nachtmahr, Saxon, Nachtmystium...

The point is that I can't possibly approach Metal: A Headbanger's Journey neutrally. Thankfully, director Sam Dunn doesn't just recognise that: he comes from the same place. Dunn got into metal with Metallica, Maiden and Slayer in the eighties, and has been a metalhead ever since. His film is thus openly, enthusiastically partisan: just like the genre, it wears its heart on its sleeve in a big, proud and sometimes embarrassing way.

Dunn travels the world to speak to metal musicians and producers as well as attending Wacken in northern Germany, the world's largest metal festival. The interviews are almost entirely delightful. Dunn himself - an immensely likeable, gentle man who nonetheless likes some of the heaviest music on this middle-earth - has a lot to do with that: he's a sympathetic but smart interviewer, always giving his subjects room to breathe, never cutting them off or leading them.

Anyone still clinging to the aggressive, even brutish image associated with metal will be flummoxed by the sheer friendliness of the musicians - from Tony Iommi to Alice Cooper - that Dunn talks to. The tiny, wonderful Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and Dio) and Iron Maiden's warm, articulate frontman Bruce Dickinson stand out, but for my money Rob Zombie is especially baffling. Here's someone who's directed some of the nastiest horror films in existence, and he seems like a great chap to have a pint with. (The gentlemen of Slipknot, who put forth intelligent, well-argued viewpoints while wearing horror masks, are another highlight.)

There are two interviews which are not what you'd call successful in ordinary terms, and both are with black metal musicians. First, Dunn tries to talk to Mayhem at Wacken, and only succeeds in provoking Necrobutcher to a profanity-laden drunken tirade against... something, while Blasphemer just sits there peacefully. The second odd encounter takes place in Norway, where Dunn speaks to Gaahl, then vocalist for black metal band Gorgoroth. The interview is worth watching:

DUNN: What is the primary ideology or primary ideas that fuel Gorgoroth's music?
(Pause.)
GAAHL: Satan. (takes sip of wine)
(Pause.)
DUNN: What does Satan embody, what does he represent?
(Pause.)
GAAHL: Freedom.

This is theatre. Gaahl is controlling the scene by the setting, his Pinteresque pauses and laconic answers. He's presenting Dunn with the most evil man in Norway. (Wish to hear Gaahl discuss fashion and art? Here you go, provided you read German.) What I can't figure out is whether it's a serious performance - a genuine attempt to impress the ideology of black metal on Dunn - or whether he's pulling the film crew's leg, contemptuous of the media's feeble attempts to comprehend the scene from the outside and thinking he might as well have some fun.

Whether Gaahl's technically accomplished performance in this scene is effective depends on whether you find the ideology of Norwegian black metal compelling. I for one haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and Alice Cooper gently pokes fun at the Norwegian bands' constant attempts to be more evil than everyone else in their rather serious devil-worship. (Gorgoroth split up at least in part because of theological differences between Gaahl and Infernus, the latter insisting Satan is a real, divine being, not a symbol of the self.)  But there is a more serious point, evident when Dunn asks about church burnings. Says Gaahl:

Church burnings and all these things are, of course, a thing that I support one hundred per cent. It's something that should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace [of] what Christianity and the semitic roots have to offer this world. [...] Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and to become the superman. Every man who is born to be king becomes king. Every man who is born to be a slave doesn't know Satan.

As Rolf Rasmussen, an assistant Lutheran minister at a church attacked by people associated with the black metal scene in the early nineties, points out, this is an uncomfortably elitist proposition. Though Gaahl is no fascist, the extreme individualism, worship of strength and associated contempt for other human beings associated with the scene help explain why there is a vocal neo-Nazi substratum in black metal.

Dunn rightly insists that outside the Norwegian scene, metal musicians have used satanic imagery primarily because it is transgressive and shocking, not because of any actual belief in the occult. (In Dunn's new television series Metal Evolution, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are wonderfully frank about the use of occult symbols as a marketing ploy.) But I already knew that, and hence I was much more fascinated by Dunn's exploration of gender in metal.

Dunn observes that musicians and fans have historically been overwhelmingly male, but he doesn't stop there. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says, metal has tended to be both grotesquely macho and intensely homoerotic. (In all-male environments homophobia, machismo and anti-effeminacy often go hand in hand with all-out homoeroticism: watched 300 lately?) Rob Halford's leather outfits - generally preferred by metalheads to seemingly effeminate glam garb - originated in gay culture. Metal, Snider points out, creates a space in which men can still be men, by having another guy shake his nether regions at them.

But to say that metal is male is to ignore the women who've made their way into the culture over the years. Pamela Des Barres, 'the world's most famous groupie', rejects the claim that she was 'powerless' and 'objectified' because 'they're exactly where they want to be' - which may be true but nonetheless shows us the face of patriarchy. (Imagine the groupie gender-flipped.) Perhaps more positively, Dunn interviews Doro Pesch as well as members of Girlschool and Kittie on the pressures they've faced to be 'more feminine' and emphasise their looks.

Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy states that her tough stage persona as a death metal vocalist is important to her and has inspired young women. This is great, but I think Dunn is being a little too pat here, moving on to the next subject while leaving us with the impression that the gender divide has broken down. He observes that ultra-masculinity is associated with freedom, which should be the start of a debate - why is freedom gendered male? - rather than its end. As I see it, gender archetypes in the metal scene are still strong, with women encouraged to like symphonic metal and similar genres considered 'softer', while extreme metal is still overwhelmingly male. There's progress yet to be made, people.

A lot of time is devoted to the mainstream media's maligning of metal, the attempt during the eighties to brand the style as satanic and likely to inspire teens to foul deeds. While the footage of Dee Snider's testimony before congress is quite wonderful - and it's worth recalling a Gothic cathedral contains more images of demons, death & doom than any Cannibal Corpse cover - , my issue with this stretch of the film is that Dunn doesn't acknowledge that institutional attempts to suppress metal effectively ended in the early nineties. But the notion that metal is marginalised outsider music is hugely important to fans' and musicians' self-image: metal's counterculturality is constantly (re-)constructed, and those mechanisms would be deserving of their own documentary.

Dunn concludes that metal 'confronts what we'd rather ignore; it celebrates what we often deny; it indulges in what we fear most'. I think he's right. Metal shares that with horror (a reason, no doubt, why Rob Zombie is drawn to both genres). It deals with the ugly and abject, often transgressing boundaries and inverting established values: reckless abandon over the careful composure that would help our CV, aggression in a society that has monopolised violence. There is thus a countercultural core to metal: it is the Jungian shadow of a carefully maintained status quo, the garish reflection of societal aggression.

The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.

Viva Bava, Part 2: Women in refrigerators

After Mario Bava first gained fame outside his native Italy with 1960's Black Sunday/The Mask of Satan, three years passed before his return to the horror genre. Not, mind you, that Bava was idle in those years. On the contrary, he directed, shot, co-directed and salvaged no fewer than five pepla in 1960 and 1961 (Esther and the King, The Last of the Vikings, The Wonders of Aladdin, Hercules in the Haunted World and Erik the Conqueror, since you ask).

This breakneck pace was not unheard of in the rough-and-ready boom days of the Italian film industry, but it could only be achieved by rushing production and releasing films in short intervals (the last three on the list above all hit cinemas in a timespan of just five weeks). Thus we have no Bava films from 1962, but he hit the ground running, and February 1963 saw the release of The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo).

By that time, cinema at the intersection between horror and murder mystery wasn't what it had been just three short years previously. Psycho had changed the rules of the game forever, introducing a focus on the lurid, female victims and disturbed psycho-killers that was immediately copied across the pond.

Granted, Hitchcock's tour de force had actually come out six weeks before The Mask of Satan, but if you expect copycats to appear that quickly I think you're overestimating even the great Italian rip-off machine. A few years on, though, Psycho's mark on Italian cinema was indelible. The Girl Who Knew Too Much is, therefore, above all a homage to the master of suspense (some have called it a spoof), referring to his work in its title (a play on Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much) and its camerawork. But it's also already something else: the prototype of a new subgenre, the first of the gialli.*

Nora Davis (Letícia Román) is an American visiting her sickly aunt Ethel (Chana Coubert) in Rome. During the night Ethel dies, and Nora is walking to the hospital to notify them of the death when she is mugged and knocked out on Piazza di Spagna. When she regains consciousness, she sees a woman staggering towards her before falling over dead, a knife in her back, and being dragged away by a bearded man. Nora faints again and is revived with brandy by a stranger, but the good Samaritan flees at the approach of the police - who, of course, will not listen to Nora's ravings, believing her to have been drunk, grief-stricken and delusional, especially since no body has been found.

Our heroine is still unsure if she's imagined the whole scene but gladly accepts when the late Ethel's neighbour, Laura (Valentina Cortese) offers her her house while she leaves the city for a few days. Nora explores Rome with the late Ethel's doctor, Marcello Bassi (John Saxon), but soon discovers that what she saw fits the profile of a murderer who killed three young women whose names began with consecutive letters of the alphabet ten years previously. Since her surname begins with a 'D' and she Knows Too Much, Nora fears she may be next.

It's almost as if Bava knew he was making the first cinematic giallo: The Girl Who Knew Too Much is positively awash in explicit references to that post-war Italian genre of cheap paperbacks that blended crime, horror and titillation. One of the very first things the voiceover narration (which would not become a trope of the genre) tells us about Nora is that she is an avid reader of libri gialli, 'yellow books', the full meaning of which is not quite conveyed by the 'murder mysteries' as which the subtitles translate the phrase. Later, our heroine uses skills gleaned from her reading to ward off the killer.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much is the first time the giallo made the jump to the big screen, but it's also Bava's last feature filmed in black and white. As such, it marks his highest mastery of monochrome both as a director and as a cinematographer. Bava may not have thought much of his lead actress ('it could have worked with James Stewart and Kim Novak, whereas I had...oh, well, I can't even remember their names'), but he sure made the most of Román's skin and blonde hair by throwing shadows on it, for delightful and spooky contrasts:

So even if Román's performance isn't all it could be (while John Saxon seems a bit lost, she looks uncomfortable, as if the on-set experience wasn't altogether pleasant), she certainly has the face to carry off a giallo. I don't subscribe to blanket condemnation of exploitation films as misogynistic: while they do have ingrained and often actively nasty patriarchal structures, they can also perform gender in surprisingly transgressive ways, as Carol Clover and others have shown.

But Ramón's character pioneers the 'type' of woman gialli would keep going for - young, beautiful, blonde - and the fact that the victims are women at all. Unlike the American slasher, which killed both sexes, though in heavily gendered and stereotyped ways, gialli almost always preferred female victims. The film's Italian poster says it all: if slashers are Dead Teenager Films, gialli have to strain not to be Dead Woman Films - hence the post title.

Bava's direction consciously borrow from Hitchcock - witness his use of signature zooms and pans - but in speaking its own visual dialect it sets up the giallo's most distinctive characteristic: in contrast to their sometimes brutally artless brethren across the pond, gialli are stylish. As such, you pretty much trip over moments of extraordinary visual flair like this shot in which Nora, lying in bed, finds herself menaced by a dark silhouette on the other side of the window:

The dramatic musical cues (lots of strings, à la the screeching climax of Psycho) and the editing by Mario Serandrei both betray Hitchcock's influence and mark the new subgenre (a cutaway on a crescendo is particularly effective). The outsider, often a foreigner, who's in the city where he witnesses a crime only for a limited period of time - another giallo distinctive - is also introduced here. (It survives in fossilised form in Black Christmas and subsequently disappears in North America.)

All in all, The Girl Who Knew Too Much seems like a sign of things to come. An emphasis on style (not, as yet gore) rather than plot; a list of female victims to be stalked and killed; crimes that (mild spoiler) are ultimately senseless and not rationally motivated; a knife-wielding murderer, though not yet masked; the presence of John Saxon, he of Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street: why yes, I think we're in proto-slasher territory.

At the same time, that teleological perspective is massively problematic. Reducing the giallo to the precursor of the slasher - even viewing The Girl Who Knew Too Much as nothing more than the first giallo - risks engaging in presentism and papering over the very real differences between genres and films.

The humour, for example: The Girl Who Knew Too Much is funny in quite a few scenes, and terror sometimes resolves into comic relief - something that is unheard of in at least the first wave of North American slashers, which seem to come from a darker, more brutal place. Even the film's outrageous final twist - which reveals either the protagonist's or the writers' ignorance of the psychoactive properties of marijuana - is ambiguous. We can't switch off hindsight, but The Girl Who Knew Too Much really does feel like Bava had discovered a potent formula - and there was more where that came from.

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much was released in a truncated cut in the US, as Evil Eye. This review is based on the original Italian version.

Meet the ur-slasher

Lest this blog be accused of lacking Christmas cheer, I decided to do what I do best: watch a low-budget slasher film. But not, gentle reader, any old dead teenager flick. No, nothing but a Christmas-themed horror picture would do, because if the stylish slaughter of innocents is not the reason for the season, I don't know what is. (Jesus is. It's not Herodmass, after all.)*

Black Christmas isn't just yuletide-friendly, though.  It's also an important film, after a fashion: released on 11 October 1974, Black Christmas is the first North American slasher film, predating Halloween by four and Friday the 13th by five and a half years. That's how long it took for the template the film pioneered to catch on - which may have something to do with the fact that the first, glorious flowering of this most American of horror subgenres was produced in Canada.

It's shortly before Christmas at the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house, somewhere in the northern US (portrayed by Toronto). The girls' Christmas party is interrupted by an obscene phone call from a man the sisters have dubbed the moaner for his fondness for gurgling, screaming, and animal noises. Foul-mouthed Barb (Margot Kidder, of Superman fame) shouts at the caller, causing 'professional virgin' Clare (Lynne Griffin) to worry about provoking someone obviously unhinged. She's right to fret since, while packing in her room, Clare is asphyxiated in plastic foil by an unseen assailant.

The next day Clare's father, Mr Harrison (James Edmond) arrives in town to pick up his daughter but finds that the house mother, Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman) hasn't seen her of late. (Mrs Mac, by the way, is an alcoholic spinster, and I'm never quite sure whether to be grateful or appalled that screaming stereotypes tend to die early on, as this character does.) Meanwhile, Jess (Olivia Hussey, who shot to fame with Romeo and Juliet) meets her boyfriend, highly strung music student Peter (Keir Dullea, of 2001: A Space Odyssey), to tell him she is pregnant but will have an abortion. Peter takes this badly, and the two part without agreeing.

Mr Harrison and the concerned sisters report the threatening calls to the police. There, Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon, who later played a similar authority figure in A Nightmare on Elm Street) decides to put a tap on the house phone. (The specifics of telephony - rather different in those primitive days - are rather important to the plot, and are thankfully well explained.) Before long, the police discover the shocking truth: the calls are coming from inside the house.

As a horror film Black Christmas is extraordinarily satisfying: suspenseful and, well, scary - a less common trait in the genre than one might suppose - it towers over its lesser brethren. That's in no small degree thanks to having an unusually threatening baddie in the Moaner (voiced by Nick Mancuso and director Bob Clark himself). Most slasher villains are not actually insane: sure, Michael Myers spent most of his life in an asylum and his madness is frequently asserted, but for all practical purposes he's a functioning guy who just really enjoys stabbing teenagers to death. The Moaner, on the other hand, is frakking psychotic, and the psychosexual menace in his calls ('Let me lick your pretty piggy cunt!') makes your skin crawl in ways simpler murderfests cannot muster.

It can't be denied, unfortunately, that Black Christmas is filled to the brim with padding - although at the time many superfluous subplots seem like they'll lead to something, and I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. For example, the search for a missing teenage girl keeps Jess, Phyl (Andrea Martin) and Mr Harrison occupied during the film's second act, but ultimately peters out. At least they're always diverting, thanks to the well-written script by Roy Moore. (My favourite moment occurs when Phyl's boyfriend Patrick (Michael Rapport), dressed as Santa Claus, glumly mutters 'Ho ho ho shit... ho ho ho fuck' into his fake beard.)

It's well-acted, too: Margot Kidder as the hard-drinking Barb, who enjoys shocking people with tales of her promiscuity to hide her lack of meaningful relationships, is perhaps the best, but Olivia Hussey comes close despite being hampered by an unsteady accent. Then there's the undeniable fact of the film's feminist subtext - surprising in a subgenre generally known for its vicious misogyny. Like many slashers, Black Christmas is in no small part about a man violently reasserting control over women; unlike some of its brethren the film problematises the patriarchal murder spree rather than celebrate it.

That feminist edge is present in our Final Girl, too. Jess, you'll recall, is pregnant out of wedlock and determined to have an abortion, and yet she's a fully drawn, rounded human being. Her let's-get-married-and-have-the-baby boyfriend, with his obsessive need for control, is clearly the less mature of the two. I'd argue, in fact, that the old 'sex equals death' cliché conceals the fact that survival in a slasher film is not primarily about virginal purity but about level-headedness and maturity - qualities exhibited by the nonvirginal Jess and the virginal-by-lack-of-opportunity Laurie of Halloween, but not by their promiscuous friends. Seen in that light, Black Christmas is a far less heterodox slasher than it seems at first.

Bob Clark's direction is far too eager to waste time with gratuitous shots from the killer's point of view but is otherwise good: the best scenes, for my money, are a slow close-up pan over the girls' faces during the moaner's first call and an eeriely beautiful murder committed with a crystal unicorn statue, in the film's most Italian moment. Black Christmas never hides the debt it owes to the giallo: the telephone subplot is cribbed from Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), as is what Tim Brayton has termed the uncovering of the tableau, the scene - present in most slashers and gialli - in which the Final Girl discovers the bodies of her slain comrades.

These characteristics lead me to identify Black Christmas as the first slasher film, despite the fact that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released ten days earlier. Tobe Hooper's violent fantasy grew out of the very American countryside-revenge film typified by Deliverance (1972) rather than the giallo, and the series has retained that genre's tropes - incestuous, unhygienic hillbillies, a rural, Southern setting, a group or family of killers rather than a lone murderer - to the present day even as it's been intertwined closely with the true slasher.

If Black Christmas still feels like a giallo in places, it has already transcended that genre and created something new - new in 1974, that is: after the Friday the 13th series set to churning out braindead paint-by-numbers slashers, its originality is easily missed almost four decades on. Many of the tropes it introduced - the lone, unseen killer, the meat whittled down one by one, the Final Girl, the crucial role of the telephone - form the bedrock of the genre to this day. Black Christmas is not, however, only the archetypical slasher. It's also one of the very best, and has lost little of its raw creepiness.

*And now I find myself wishing someone would do a slasher adaptation of the Christmas story, with Jesus as the Final Girl.