Spun With the Wind

[absolutedestiny]

So earlier this week I posted my Gone With the Wind video. I made this video several months ago and it premiered at the Club Vivid show at this year's Vividcon. Reception of the video as a video has been largely positive which, of course, makes me very happy. There is, understandably, a certain amount of hesitation over some of the more politically charged implications of the video from source choices right through to execution. I think there are a lot of interesting ideas that people have been talking about and I want to work through some of them here.

I've not been keeping up to date on all the issues as I've been travelling but I'm hoping what I'll write will touch on a lot of stuff that people have questions about and possibly concerns with.

Let's start with the basic premise of the video. It's a Gone With the Wind (movie) video and it highlights Scarlett O'Hara's life in the South before during and after the American Civil War. In particular, the video's primary concern is how Scarlett uses men for her own gains - rightly or wrongly at various points in time - and how her emotional attachment to Ashley Wilkes becomes her undoing. The source is very shiny, there's excellent cinematography and the actors and their costumes are stunning to look at. Much of the pleasure of the video lies in reaction shots and melodrama, focussing heavily on people's responses to Scarlett and the epic crumbling of the world around her. The idea was to entertain with Scarlett's actions while underpinning them with emotional problems and ending the video on an image of Scarlett having a moment of realisation that for all her gains she has lost something dear. The video is not intended as a total criticism of Scarlett's supposed gold digging, but the voice of the video (the song) certainly approaches from a very particular perspective. Let me talk about that for a moment.

The song choice is potentially controversial on all kinds of levels. One level I was struck with straight away was the misogyny. Throughout the video, the voice of the video (our narrator) is frequently talking trash about our strong-willed Scarlett. Ideally, I'd have liked the voice of the video to have the POV of a specific character but the lyrics of the song prevented this and instead the POV shifts around a little - mostly shifting positions from being Rhett Butler's POV and the general POV of the male dominated society portrayed in the movie. This is intentional, not because I want to glorify the misogyny or attack Scarlett for not being some dainty silent wife who just sits around knitting and making babies - instead I wanted the video to act as a mirror of the society that is being portrayed and, in a sense, connect it to our own society where the issues aren't really all that more clearly addressed. The mashup where a modern song is mixed with classical provided, for me, a way to play around with these themes while hopefully keeping a certain distance from them in terms of my own perspective. You can decide for yourself whether that distancing was in any way successful. Certainly, as an individual, I sympathise more for Scarlett than I do the voice of the video and I'd like to think that despite the video's voice there are some stunning Scarlett moments shown in the video, but this video is about Gone With the Wind, not my own positions on gender roles.

Of course, the song can be controversial for more reasons than misogyny. There is the race problem. The movie, for obvious reasons, has a considerable amount of racial concerns and the majority of them are for the most part trivialised within the movie and set aside. Not being a video directly about race, I decided to not to focus on the race issue per se... this isnt a video that says "I ain't saying shea white supremacist..." Of course, by using hip hop and by using a song that in its original incarnation had repeated use of the word "nigga" there is always going to be a race element in the song that the viewer will have to deal with. Now, I do have to admit, when I first considered the song, I didn't give the race question a lot of thought. I was really just thinking of it as music in the general way that I listen to most music. It was only when I started playing around with the sources that I started to consider how the race issue could influence the reading of the video.

I think it's a very complex problem and honestly I don't think I did a lot in terms of my editing to try and nudge the issue one way or the other, I was after all character focussed rather than looking at the larger themes as a whole. It could be considered incredibly poor taste to combine this song with this source, that's certainly one reaction that I could see from it. Giving these racist characters West's voice and perspective could be seen as quite a slap in the face. It could also be considered a very radical statement on the music itself and the culture described by the music - equating, in a direct way, West's "gold diggers" to Scarlett (a slave owning racist) is a very problematic position and could also be very offensive. On the other hand it could provoke interesting thoughts on how Scarlett's struggle with status in GWTW has a correlation with the struggle for status described in West's song. That reading could suggest that there has been some social progress but not nearly enough - that West's "gold digger" now has the status problem face by Scarlett who was a second class citizen in her society... that's an interesting idea for sure when you consider how far below Scarlett the slaves were. I think that, on the whole, I found the racial implications of this video to be too complex for me to really frame them well so instead I focussed on the character studies in the source and used the music much like I'd used other music pretty much left it at that. I do have some intentional comparisons of racism and misogyny with the hideous "we want pre-nup" men but I don't dwell on the particularities of the race problem. To me it's an economic status video and the race issues add complexity to how we contextualise it ourselves.

I appreciate if people do read this differently, and I do genuinely apologise if I have offended anyone but certainly I am very keen on there being more discussions on how the race issues can manifest themselves in these sources. I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues. If that is presumptuous, then I am sorry.

I find all the implications fascinating but I really don't want to push any one point. I focussed heavily on the movie from its own point of view and added in a modern twist. Along came all kinds of interesting gender and race issues and I'm totally cool with that being talked about. As for some nefarious authorial intention, well, who knows. Perhaps it is impossible for me to escape my own privileged perspective and that is the ultimate downfall of videos like this but I'd like to think that things can be learned from these videos that can expand our understanding of the myriad of problems we face.

Comments

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I grin at you a little! I like your reading a lot less well than I like my own! *g* For me, its much more problematic if you see West giving voice to the white men, because of the embedded power dynamics; it's the David and Goliath problem. If David beats Goliath, he's a hero. If Goliath beats David, he's a bully; there's no equality possible between them: it will never be a fair fight. In my head, West owned his own voice; as a black man, he has a standing to critique Scarlett and the South in a way the white men don't; in fact, one can almost see him critiquing Scarlett on behalf of black women, who get slammed with all this racist stereotyping all the time: well, lookee here, the queen of the White South is no better. I'm afraid it does matter to me tremendously whether the POV belongs to the white male image or the black male voice.

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Yes, I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed your reading of it. I hadn't considered it before you mentioned it and it really does tickle me quite a lot :)

and I'm certain that the POV will be an important factor for people but I can't imagine how to control that, nor do I think I really should :) I have mine, you have yours, it's all about the way the texts interplay and some parts will be deliberate and others will be happy accidents.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

LOL. I kinda like your reading better than both mine *and* Ian's :D I wish I could fully embrace it :D (Like Ian, I do see the pov being the white male's, and like you, I find that particular approach immensely problematic!)

Ian, thank you for your nuanced and sophisticated analysis of your thoughts--I was a little unsettled at your initial wholesale dismissal of Scarlett in comments to my post, but this reading is one I can understand quite a bit more. I still think that your attempt to simply exclude race is simply not possible (at least it isn't for me), because the source texts are so heavily overdetermined and intricately bound up with it.

If nothing else, however, the vid has certainly raised immensely interesting issues about mashing, juxtaposing, appropriating, and the ethics and aesthetics thereof...

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry about that. I realised quickly that I was on zero-brain after the con so waited until now to collect my thoughts on it.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Nonono..that's totally OK. It must have been odd to have a stranger friend you only to read her scathing review so to speak :) I'm glad you engaged and even glader you wrote your thoughts...even if I don't agree. After all, we wouldn't have a job if art only ever meant one thing!

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Hey at least you offered me that courtesy *glares at all the private criticism where nobody learns anything*

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

I can't really control how people respond to the source texts, I can just take my inspiration from how I respond to them. For me, not growing up with GWTW, not being American and not really seeing it as anything other than cinema and being as racially problematic as anything else in its time, I was able to separate it. That's not to say I don't see it, that would be beyond naivety, but it doesn't have any *special* resonance for me as a text about race (the movie... I've never read the novel).

I'm fine with other people bringing additional elements to it and I'm more than happy to talk about those. I can only hope that I haven't been so insensitive to make anything but enraged discussion be the product.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

And I have a lot of sympathy for that, given that I'm also not American and didn't grow up with the specific issues relating to the South (though I did grow up with GWTW and, like Laura, was affected by its underlying ideology for far longer than I ought to have been).

I think a lot of your "colorblindness" of wanting to bracket off the race even as you invoke through the song could be read as privilege. Moreover, I wonder whether the recent intense debates on race within fandom (though on the writing rather than the vidding side, of course...I do remember your frustration with the way many of us subsume one under the other :) made me and maybe others more sensitive???

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

Certainly I havent been following *any* of the FoC and CoC debates at all. I know they have been going on but... yeah. I'm not really in fandom. While I vid, I don't vid to the primary fannish aesthetic either, so I exist as a subset of that too. My communication issues are numerous and they aren't all because of my white male privilege.

WRT privilege, it's a problem that I always return to but feel utterly crippled by. My position of privilege is going to inevitably mean that I will create flawed and sometimes contentious works. All I can see for me to do is to talk openly about it, be transparent about the ideas and accept the problems as inherent and hope to learn from them later.

It is clear that while I wanted to talk about "status" as a concept in the video (whether it be gender or race or whatever) and how that's defined by money (which in turn doesn't bring you happiness) for both Scarlett and Kayne, the race issues alone carried weight I wasn't expecting and my idea couldn't withstand that. I can't say "race isn't the point, money is the point" when in the greater scheme of things the problem is far more complex. That is something I have definitely learned to appreciate.

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

sorry, there was supposed to be a smilie here:

"My communication issues are numerous and they aren't all because of my white male privilege :) "

I don't mean that statement in an accusatory way :)

[heresluck]

This vid gave me massive cognitive dissonance when I rewatched it, partly because of the issues you're discussing here.

Taken straight, the lyrics apply very well to Scarlett; she is, among other things and for various reasons, a gold digger. (She's also wildly deluded about Ashley, but that's not really the story the lyrics are foregrounding in the vid.) So in this way there's almost total alignment between song and subject matter.

But then there's the gap between Kanye West's voice and Rhett Butler's (I didn't pick up on the subtleties of POV that you elaborate here), and that gap is interesting and disconcerting to me. The lyrics actually fit Rhett's knowing cynicism pretty well, but the delivery in a black idiom (linguistic and musical) in the context of this movie is... well, it's a little head-spinny for me.

This is why I really like cesperanza's reading -- the notion of an external commentary on the whole thing -- but I didn't get there on my own, largely I think because vids have so trained me to look for a POV character with which to align the voice of the song. Every now and then a vid can break me out of this (Jo's "Wind That Shakes the Barley" is an example from this year's Premieres show), but it has to really whack me over the head or I miss it.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Now that I think of it, it was easier to make my reading from the dance floor--dance being an embodied place, a female place, a black place. It was, literally, my theoretical platform. I think if I'd seen the vid in a vid show, or as user did, at home, I might have been more tempted to look for a strict POV. But I saw this while dancing. I was with West! West was with ME. We were both of us distanced from the old south just by our movements, which were--you know, that black music, that rock and roll. *G* Very difficult to ally with white male values when you're shaking your hips.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Sigh. That user is catheyxs, above--

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's really interesting. I think our first (and primary) divergence is, after all, where we situate the center so to speak, the unmoving interpreting pov...and I can totally see how DANCING that was clearly the song...in particular, the hip hop rather than the classical aspects. *nods*

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

FWIW, that was my reading too, which is why the vid didn't especially bother me during Club Vivid. I felt like the voice of the song was coming from very, very far away from the visuals, allowing me to feel a (very convenient and, naturally, privileged) separation from the race and gender issues.

I haven't done a living room rewatch yet, and having read all the extremely interesting criticism about it, I'm a little afraid to. (: Not that I'll let that stop me!

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

At heart the video was made with the lyrics in mind much more than the vocalist. I found the race and gender concerns interesting enough to play with a few elements in the video but for me it wasn't a strong enough part of what I was doing in making the vid to do anything but be somewhat playful. Clearly this was an under-appreciation of the sources I was using in many ways. I under-estimated the distance and recontextualisation that can be gained through appropriation though honestly I believe the same is true of a lot of my audience.

Perhaps that is the most revealing of all.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Well, coming from a family where GWTW is a huge (and sadly unexamined) part of our family culture -- I have three relatives named after actors and characters from the movie, it took me until well into adulthood to fully appreciate the horrific racism in both book and film, beyond what we think of as "typical of the time". There was a time when I could've been playful with it as a vidder, but I'm not there anymore.

I get where you're coming from on it, because I've been there. This might be a case where the AMV audience is distinctly different from the vidding audience (or at least, the vidding audience at this particular moment), but having taken a step back from the vid's premiere on the dance floor, it looks an awful lot like you were playing with fire, not just unaware that you were wearing asbestos body armor, but equally unaware that everyone else wasn't. (:

[/tortured metaphor]

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

There's a conversation I've posted below on how the race issue changes the text and whether it can ever be truly bracketed off, I'd be interested in any thoughts you might have on the matter.

[killabeez.livejournal.com]

This is so interesting to me. It never occurred to me to choose a POV character for this vid, and I completely read it as an external (West's) POV. I thought it was entirely intentional (and masterfully done) on Ian's part. I think you're right, that I might have read it differently if I'd been watching at home on my computer. (Also, I wonder if leaving off Rhett's voiceover at the end might change things for people who perceive him as the POV character.)

Still think it's brilliant, though, as did my S.O. and the friends I played it for the other night. I'm not good at articulating these things, but I loved the way the music both jarred against and flowed with the source (thanks to amazing editing) in the same way that Scarlett jars against and yet only makes sense within the exaggerated, melodramatic context of the South as portrayed by Mitchell.

Obviously, I need to watch it some more and give it more thought.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Now that I think of it, it was easier to make my reading from the dance floor--dance being an embodied place, a female place, a black place.

Unless the racial makeup of VVC changed radically this year, I have a real obvious problem with this statement.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Sorry; this comment is piggybacking on another thought that articulates disco, and the disco dance floor, as a place which in the 1970s articulated black, female, and queer values (as I said elsewhere, this is a lot of what was being rejected by the white boy cry: disco sucks.) While I certainly wish we had a more diverse racial composition at VVC, I don't think that a dance floor has to be literally full of black people in order to articulate subversive values, especially vis a vis the importance of the body. And white women dancing to black music was seen as a particular threat; unladylike, unrestrained, animalistic; women weren't supposed to have that sort of strength or stamina. So I do think that music, as it controls gesture, has power; that being said, its not a substitute for other forms of diversity!

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

[23:27] <~AbsoluteDestiny> well, lets imagine, for sake of argument
[23:28] <~AbsoluteDestiny> that the song was actually performed by a white guy
[23:28] <~AbsoluteDestiny> how would the two readings of the vid differ
[23:30] <@heresluck> Well, I would probably have an even harder time applying Cesca's "ironic outside
commentary" reading, because the slippage between voice and character wouldn't be so striking for me.
[23:31] <~AbsoluteDestiny> but you wouldnt need to because you could then go back to your cynical gold
digger criticism reading, right?
[23:31] <@heresluck> probably
[23:32] <@heresluck> and I would probably pay more attention to gender stuff because trying to puzzle out
racial implications wouldn't be taking up so much headspace
[23:32] <~AbsoluteDestiny> what I'm arguing is that I initially came from a racially agnostic position when it
came to the music, that's where I vidded from. What I'm interested in is how the vid reads when you
don't take that perspective.
[23:32] <~AbsoluteDestiny> and there is a lot of talk of it being problematic, which yes, it would be
[23:32] <~AbsoluteDestiny> but I'd like to know the *ways* in which it is problematic
[23:33] <~AbsoluteDestiny> what kind of vid does it become
[23:33] <~AbsoluteDestiny> what does it have to say about the situation
[23:33] <~AbsoluteDestiny> it's possible the vid becomes unreadable because it's at odds with itself
[23:34] <~AbsoluteDestiny> but if the vid does have some clear message that is applied when the race
card is played, I'd like to know what it is
[23:34] <@heresluck> well, that was certainly part of my experience -- I just get sort of conceptually
stuck.
[23:34] <@heresluck> I think -- and bear in mind that I haven't seen any of the conversation in cathexy's
LJ -- that one thing that may be tripping some folks up is that there's NOT a clear message.
[23:35] <~AbsoluteDestiny> on the race front or in general?
[23:35] <@heresluck> on the race front.
[23:36] <@heresluck> there's just a lot of variables there -- for me, though apparently not for you --
that I can't simply bracket off.
[23:36] <@heresluck> and that leaves me saying "I don't know how to parse this"

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

[23:36] <~AbsoluteDestiny> to me, by not including the race issue in the vid there is no race issue in
the vid. To others, it can't be removed from the source and furthermore the audio would add it back
in anyway.
[23:36] <@heresluck> and, you know, I LIKE being able to parse vids, and not being able to is a rather
itchy feeling.
[23:38] <@heresluck> see, and my point is that for me and presumably a lot of other viewers, you can't
just say "there is now no race issue here, because I don't want there to be." I mean, you can, but
we can't go there with you.
[23:38] <~AbsoluteDestiny> But isnt that the same argument you were making for RayV? [This is in relation to the notion that 'Out Here' ignores the importance of the other Ray in Fraser's life]
[23:38] <~AbsoluteDestiny> that because he wasnt there, he wasnt there
[23:40] <@heresluck> ahahah
[23:40] <@heresluck> good point
[23:40] <@heresluck> let me see if I can think this through
[23:41] <@heresluck> I guess for me the difference is partly between story and theme.
[23:42] <@heresluck> The source text in this case doesn't really want how we feel about race to be a
central issue either; it wants to just take that for granted.
[23:43] <~AbsoluteDestiny> I think for me, I was just continuing the characters' own ignorance of the
race issue, vidding from within their perceptions.
[23:43] <@heresluck> but for me, race is not an issue that be bracketed off from the text.
[23:43] <@heresluck> whereas Vecchio is a character who CAN be bracketed off from Fraser's relationship
with Kowalski
[23:43] <@heresluck> and so part of the slippage with "Out Here" is the extent to which one reads it as a
character vs a 'ship vid
[23:43] <@heresluck> as a character vid is is inherently incomplete
[23:44] <@heresluck> as a 'ship vid it is also incomplete (no Victoria -- canon, no Vecchio -- arguable),
but more coherent
[23:45] <@heresluck> and, you know, I don't disagree that the vid would be frustrating for somebody who
wanted to see Vecchio in there; I disagree that I should have to vid to their specifications, but I
can't undo their wanting it.
[23:46] <~AbsoluteDestiny> However, if race was something that couldnt be bracketed off from GWTW,
you'd never be able to do a GWTW vid that didnt deal with the race issue, and I disagree on that
point
[23:46] <@heresluck> Similarly, I am not saying that you should have vidded this vid any differently than
you did
[23:46] <~AbsoluteDestiny> I think it was only an issue because of the black male vocals
[23:46] <~AbsoluteDestiny> or at least, only a major issue
[23:48] <@heresluck> well, fair enough
[23:48] <@heresluck> It's certainly what threw me
[23:51] <@heresluck> maybe one way of articulating my reaction to your vid, Ian, would be that the vocals raise race as an issue and then the vid doesn't deal with it in an easily parsed (read: comfortable) way, and that unnerves me. That's not necessarily a problem -- I don't feel that vidders are obligated to make me comfortable -- but it means that I cannot get to neutral. I am happy to accept that as my issue.

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Bracketing race off of a treatment of GWTW would be a very tough sell for large portions of an American audience.

The American Civil War is not a distant historical event. It is the central defining moment of our society and is very much in the present tense. Unfortunately, it left a lot of issues completely unresolved that are still unresolved - most of which center on race.

When I am experiencing art, I bring my American identity and all of its associations to that experience. When I see the woman in the big hoop dress, I know that there is a maid somewhere who had to squeeze her into it. Whether she is physically depicted or not, I can't help but see her. It won't matter to me who is singing the song, the maid is always going to be there.

I can't generalize that reaction to everyone. As far as I can tell, the negative reaction is the minority view and my own negative reaction is very much about confusion over possible meanings and associations with images and not so much about actually taking offense at anything clearly in the vid.

And, you know? This comment was much more coherent when I wrote it last night before the power went out just as I was about to hit the "Post Comment" button. I had even managed to fit in a reference to Cromwell! : )

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I think heresluck's final point is the critical one -- that the song choice insists on bringing race to the forefront regardless of whether it's central to the story you're trying to tell as a vidder.

But given the reactions I've encountered from FOC when I've mentioned GWTW in the past, I have to wonder if it's possible to make a GWTW vid without a fair number of people being bothered by race issues, whether they were relevant to your story or not. Even with a white singer, hell, even if you used freaking "Danny Boy" for your song, I'm not sure you can get away with it. Race is way, way too problematic in the source text for any GWTW vidder to be able to escape it. I mean, *maybe* if your audince was composed entirely of white people who were not particularly experienced with confronting white privilege. Maybe. But certainly not with the audience we (currently) have. Maybe this is a good thing.

With regard to parallels to "Out Here", I think it's similar in one sense: within DS fanom, the Ray wars are still a sufficiently touchy subject that unless the audience is entirely Kowalski-leaning folks who have never been exposed to the Ray wars, some percentage of viewers willb be bothered. But IMO it trivializes racism to try to compare fannish shipwars to the slavery apologia that is GWTW. I'm not chastising your or h.l. for bringing it up, because I see how, as artists, you want to try and sort out what is and isn't possible WRT anticipating audience reactions to a given work, but the comparison makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Side note: Heart of Funkness had the same effect on me a Beethoven's Fifth of Gold Digger: uncomplicated squee at Club Vivid, increasing discomfort after the fact. In that case, though, I think Apocalypse Now itself problematizes race sufficiently that it's less squicky in the vid -- there's more of a sense of intentionality (yours and Coppola's) to the issue. I still can never watch that poor cow being killed, though.

[absolutedestiny.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to suggest that the weight of the arguments were comparable, far from it, more the principle of being able to vid selectively which I'm sure you get. If your argument is that the weight is the deciding factor, then of course I can agree. Things are not equal when it comes to portraying problematic issues. The question is where a line is drawn and if there is any artistic value in crossing that line.

I'm not sure to what degree one can ever understand an audience to that extent and whether or not it's always desirable to cater to them (in general I mean, not necessarily wrt the issue of race). That's an issue that is quite critical to a lot of the recent discussions and for me it's going to be something I will continually have to deal with in my work (given my tendancy to recontextualise).

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to suggest that the weight of the arguments were comparable, far from it, more the principle of being able to vid selectively which I'm sure you get.

I do get it; I had thought I indicated above that that was a discussion I can understand and empathize with as a vidder. I never thought you were equating the weight of the issues, but it was something I felt needed to be pointed out.

Personally I find it fairly easy to understand and anticipate audience reactions to my vids just by being plugged into that audience. Within the VVC crowd and the other people I would estimate make up my regular viewership (large portions of my flist), I feel about 90% confident that I can predict how they'll respond to any given vid I'm making. Perhaps this is an absurd degree of confidence to have, but experience suggests that I have rarely been wrong -- unless everyone's dissing my vids in private chat (oh, that fannish paranoia will get you every time *g*). I stay current on meta issues that sweep through fandom in general and at least glancingly familiar with the topics that dominate discussion in the fandoms I'm in. So I know, for example, that there's a huge market for a kickass Martha vid among the people who watch my work, and that if I tried to posit in the vid that Martha was a better companion for the Doctor than Rose, many of those people would eat it up with a big spoon. Likewise, if I sent that same vid out into the wider world of DW fandom, it would be lambasted by the Doctor-Rose shippers (who are legion). These are things I know just from paying a general sort of attention.

I do not think any artist has a responsibility to promote only those viewpoints that will be comfortable (or even just plain popular) for her audience. The only responsibility I feel an artist has is to communicate intelligibly. The rest is gravy. Having said that, though, I am keenly aware of what I want from fandom as a vidder, and while I am not afraid of controversy, I also don't want to spend my fannish time in a defensive posture. My happy place includes political discourse, but it doesn't include rage. So I pick my battles, and will not be making the two incredibly seductive vid ideas I've come up with that would get me tarred, feathered, and run out of fandom on a rail. (:

[counteragent.livejournal.com]

This is a very interesting read.

I can't add anything to the overall debate on source material and race, but I would like to thank you all for being so thoughtful and allowing us to witness such an interesting discussion.

I would like to give absolutdestiny kudos for taking the time to make such a thought-provoking (and technically brilliant) vid.

I'd like to think that despite being a white middle-class male, I can attempt to present a complex and emotional work which depicts misogyny and racism and be able to prod at it critically from a distance and learn from the experiences of those more intimately connected with the issues.

I suppose some might call it "presumption." Seems a lot like bravery to me.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post -- and of course the vid that it's about!

I've been rewatching your vid, and looking back at the earlier discussion -- wondering whether my love for the vid is blinding me to problems with gender and/or race. And I keep walking away thinking that I'm not left with problems, but rather questions that the vid raises about the sources (film & song) and their juxtaposition. And questions are good! As a viewer, I like that the vid forces me to ask them but won't answer them for me.

I got to a different place with the POV issue. Part of this is probably because I always have trouble with vids constructed around a particular character's POV -- for whatever reason, it's hard for me to hold onto that when I'm watching. But I think this vid opens up some interesting possibilities for me if I set aside the desire to fix a specific POV.

So much of the film source is about people looking at Scarlett, but she's not completely trapped by their gaze -- she looks back, she resists, she defies them. I only see two, maybe three brief clips where she seems to be looking out at the (vid) viewer -- but nobody's gaze/POV is strong enough to contain her, not even Rhett's although he arguably sees her most clearly. At the same time, her image and story is not totally under her control. It's framed by Kanye West's voice and lyrics, which first provide a commentary on her, and then in the last stanza directly address her.

It's that last part that really opened up the gender & race stuff for me in a different way. We see a story between (primarily) white men and a white woman; we hear a black man addressing (presumably) other black men, and then shifting to directly speak to a (presumably) black woman. So there's a certain conversation between white people across gender, paralleled by a conversation between black men, and then a black man speaking to a black woman. But the juxtaposition between film and song means that Kanye West also implicitly starts out speaking to white men, and then implicitly addresses a white woman.

So -- if you step away from the idea of a singular POV -- there's all of this criss-crossing, a mix of alliances and critiques, across gender and across race and across both. And that's incredibly interesting. Where it's problematic is that black women are spoken about and spoken to, but don't speak and make only fleeting appearances in the imagery. I can imagine ways that the vid might have addressed this -- say, by foregrounding Hattie McDaniels' character more -- but I'm not sure, given the sources, how far that could have gone. It may be a problem that's impossible to resolve within the terms of the vid.

That's not at all to say that this problem means that the vid is hopelessly flawed -- actually, in the spirit of hip-hop, I'd love to see it spark an answer vid with a response/rebuttal from a black female POV (not necessarily using GWTW -- though that would be interesting -- but challenging the 'gold digger' theme with appropriate music and images).

At any rate -- thanks again for this post and for participating in discussion, and I know I'll be rewatching your most excellent vid many, many times (I only just caught the Usher joke in my last viewing!).

[elz.livejournal.com]

This is a great discussion, and I'm particularly intrigued because while I thought the vid was very well done and very apt, I wasn't sure how to respond to it myself. Especially watching it along with a number of feminist-critique vids and in the wake of a lot of fannish discussion about race. The lack of a clear POV/message *is* unsettling, and I'm not sure there's any way around that. It's great to see people discussing all these issues passionately, though, and coming at the vid from different perspectives.

[mranderson71.livejournal.com]

The instant I heard about this video & then finally watched it, never for one second did I ever think it was trying to make some sort of statement about racism or misogyny.

I simply saw it for what it for was to me....parody. Mixing the old with the new to create something hilarious.

I try not to look too deeply into these sorts of things if the obvious intent of the creator is merly to entertain & be humerous. The way its cut & clips choices didn't really say that you were trying to make some sort of statement about the above issues. I take any form of rasicm quite seriously but it never once entered my mind that this video would be classified as such even if you yourself were conscious of it at the time of creation.

It disturbingly seems to be a current trend these days to read into things which in 90% of cases that simply aren't there. Ive heard retards try to convince people that Transformers reeks of racism. Geez guys, wake the fuck up...its just a movie about robots from outer space beating the shit out of one another...nothing more. I just finished watching the first series of The Boondocks which is quite obviously parody but has also been contorversial. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boondocks

But it makes fun of all races, and thats why I watch it...because I find it funny & entertaining. I love to take the piss out of both myself & the things I love and I think I will always continue to do so. But if people want to read into those creations with some sort of sinister underlying meaning...then theres nothing I can do about it, its in the nature of some humans to do so. But they are the ones who are missing out, not me - because they haven't recieved what Ive presented in the spirit in which it was intended. And thats purely as a bit of entertainment.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey.

[mranderson71.livejournal.com]

The soap box was starting to crack a little under the weight of my comment.

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

This vid gave me massive cognitive dissonance upon first watching. I guess you could say I completely failed as a vid watcher there at Club Vivid: the vid did not work for me at all, and I couldn't see the artistry or the technical skill (that I saw in other vids that night, and that I saw in this vid after I watched it at home), and I suspect that's because the cognitive dissonance kept me from processing it at all. (Significantly, I talked with someone through the last half of the vid - it couldn't hold my attention. Equally significantly, we weren't talking about the vid, but about the sources - about GWTW and the mashup and the song as separate entities. This is definitely a sign that the vid hadn't gelled for me at all, and it's possible that it hadn't for her, either, since she was engaging on the same level I was - i.e., not with the vid as a coherent work at all, but rather with the components of the vid.)

The night of Club Vivid, I categorized this vid as - um, to be blunt, and sorry, absolutedestiny, this is a lousy thing to say in the comments on your journal, but I'd feel worse saying it anywhere else - a mediocre vid that tried and failed. I gave it a mental label that I use a lot in my random vid-watching: REG. Reach exceeded grasp.

I re-watched the vid with Best Beloved as soon as I got home (along with, you know, the rest of the DVDs), and then again a couple more times, because I was seeing something different on each viewing. The cognitive dissonance dissipated somewhat for me on the first re-watching, enough for me to see the vid as a vid, rather than less than the sum of its parts. I think the technical skill that's obvious in the editing is what meshed it together for me, what eventually forced me to engage with it.

Once the vid coalesced for me, I had my first actual opinion of what it was trying to say. See, I love the song Gold Digger and adore the mashup of it used in this vid, and yet my mental summary of Gold Digger has always been, "Black women can't win." Sure, there's irony in the song, but there's also blatant misogyny, and it's not like the irony cancels the misogyny for me, so - yeah. Black women can't win. When I re-watched the vid the first time, I thought the message was, "White women can't win, either." And I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

After multiple re-watchings, though, I started to see it as a fascinating example of using song as direct criticism, sort of like what cesperanza outlines above: Kanye West criticizing Scarlett O'Hara. (In other words, I saw it as an entirely external PoV vid, which I loved, because it's rare.) Which worked for me better than my previous readings, and made me really enjoy the vid for the first time. I suspect I got that in part because I gave so much more weight to the song (a beloved mashup of a song I love!) than to the visual source. West's voice predominated, and in a way, it took the sting out of the misogyny of his song, because in the vid, he seems to me to be criticizing Scarlett O'Hara specifically, rather than a whole category of faceless, voiceless women. And that element - Kanye West criticizing Scarlett O'Hara - took a bit of the sting out of the racism of GWTW, too, at least for me.

I still can't see the vid as from the PoV of the male characters of GWTW, see the male characters of GWTW co-opting West's voice. Multiple re-watchings don't help at all. But I'm not really sorry about that; if I could see it that way, that would probably re-introduce cognitive dissonance on a pretty high level, and the vid would fall apart for me again. So when I watch this, I don't see the vid you made. But, well, I do see a vid I like. Call it a draw?

[bop-radar.livejournal.com]

Oh, interesting. I wasn't aware that your vid had sparked criticism, though I was certainly conscious of the racial and gender politics when watching it. It worked for me because I'm not exactly a fan of either the song or Scarlett. ;) But laughing at both (and how well they fit one another) is totally fun! I guess the idea of a modern-day black male looking at Scarlett and seeing her as manipulative princess with an exaggerated sense of entitlement isn't that offensive to me. And I never conflated the singer with any of the male protagonists in the movie.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is all fascinating stuff! I downloaded the vid at home almost as soon as it was available and hadn't heard any of the VVC gossip yet, so I had no idea that I was seeing it so differently from how some other people did.

For me, it was immediately an external POV vid, from the moment the first words came out of Kanye's mouth. As you've probably figured out now, Gone With The Wind is really spelled R-A-C-I-S-M here in the U.S. Put Kanye West anywhere near that movie and his race becomes the most salient thing about him. For his identity to be erased and his voice co-opted to represent the white men in the movie would be pretty intolerable (and so dissonant that my mind never even went near there).

So I heard Kanye commenting on Scarlett, each of them outside the economic power structure in different ways, and that's what made the vid so fascinating to me: it sets up these three variables, gender, race, and change over time, and then lets us play with them without prescribing any answers. (Also, while dancing!)

I'm imagining this vid if the song had been sung by Eminem instead, and man, that would be ghastly. It would feel more misogynist to me because it *would* feel much more like it was coming directly from the POV of the film's white men, and I would also be really offended that a vid for this movie that glorifies horrific racial oppression would be set to a song by a white man who's earned millions by appropriating a black style of music. Wow, that would be bad.

Actually, I have similar feelings about Heart Of Funkness, as well. The fact that the song is by black musicians helps highlight the racial/colonial issues in the film, rather than trivializing them. I wouldn't enjoy the vid nearly so well if set to a song by a white artist.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

I've been waiting to watch the vid until I could see it on the reasonably big screen of my television, with other fans around; tonight I watched it with slinkling (coincidentally a longtime GWTW fan) and the_star_fish.

Like many others, I interpreted Kanye's voice as a commentary on Scarlett, and on the problematics of her drive for social standing. So I'm finding this thread really intriguing...