romance, romance
May 18, 2005
Recently, I had occasion to watch Oxygen's Mr Romance competition (http://www.oxygen.com/mrromance/video.aspx for a list of contestants and associated video footage). I didn't set out to watch it; I was just channel surfing. Our particular cable lineup is a bit odd in how things are grouped, so the scenes passing in front of me that day went something like: BET, news, news, more news, NASCAR, baseball, something schmaltzy on Lifetime Movie Network, something with Meredith Baxter on Lifetime, some other movie on Women's Entertainment, a bunch of white women groping a very muscular, extremely scantily clad and sopping wet black or Latino guy on Oxygen, repeat of Iron Chef on Food Network, home shopping and ...
Wait, what was that one a couple channels back?
It was, in fact, an ad for the then-upcoming episode of Mr Romance. They were just starting a repeat of the first two episodes of the series. There seemed to be a lot of eye candy, so I decided to see what the show was. (Yes, I can be shallow.) By the end of the first episode, I was hooked.
Oxygen and Harlequin coproduced the Mr Romance Competition. The winner would appear on the covers of many of the books published by Harlequin and its imprints over the next year, and make appearances at book stores and romance conventions (yes, there are such things). He would also get $50,000, apart from the book cover contract and appearance fees. To determine the winner, the final 12 competitors would be required to stay in the Romance Academy for some indefinite time (it looked to be at least a couple of weeks, and maybe longer, but it was very unclear) and engage in various competitions. At the end of that, two people would be eliminated, and the final ten would advance to the staged pageant finals, wherein Mr Romance 2005 would be chosen.
The executive producer of Mr Romance was (wait for it .....) Gene Simmons. Yes, the guy from the metal(ish) rock band with the big hair, way too much makeup, and the scary yet intriguing tongue. THAT Gene Simmons. (Dear god in heaven. The man is trolling for groupies past on his website! For a tell-all book of celebrity encounters! Egad! But I digress.)
Oh, the cheese, people. The pure unadulterated CHEESE of it all! There was no depth of cheesiness to which they would not sink. Some of it was unintentional, some of it was deliberate – for example, the sight that originally caught my eye was the “Goddess Grope” in which the contestants flexed their physiques for the judges' tactile evaluation. And I'm pretty sure that there was a rider in all the contracts that stated, "All contestants will be at least shirtless during 60% of their time in the competition." There was the de rigeur off-air discovery that one of the contestants had once posed nude. Then there was the final pageant itself, which included an opening Dance-off (no, really, a dance-off!) in which they quite literally ripped their shirts off to stand nipples to the wind! Men in Skirts as an official competition section! A near-kiss competition, in which one of the contestants clearly did not get the “NEAR-kiss” memo. (The person whom he actually sort of kissed was not expecting it, and was not terribly happy about it, I think.)
The show did have a very peculiar tendency to equate any strong emotion (aside from anger) or any friendliness between the contestants with being gay. Understand: we're not even talking locker-room jocks butt-patting friendly; we're just talking “sitting around talking trash about the other contestants” friendly or telling people how to make the most of their assets friendly or laughing together at some godawful joke friendly. The former centerfold talking to his girlfriend on the phone was spliced together with footage of host Fabio to make it seem like they were vaguely propositioning each other. None of the men escaped, and it was clearly done in a sort of “we're all poking fun at everything to do with this stuff” spirit. Nonetheless, it was very strange to see.
The competition produced a genuinely shocking (albeit truly deserving) winner. To be sure, Randy Ritchwood, the winner, shocked me because I frankly never thought that Harlequin would put a dark-skinned black man on the cover of several books published over the next year, as the contract requires. Mr Ritchwood does not look even a little like previous Mr Romances. That said, Randy was one of the three guys in the competition who really, genuinely seemed to understand how to present a romantic image. (The judging panel wound up being mostly unaffiliated with Harlequin, so they were free to pick the best person, which they really did. It also turns out that Harlequin publishes a line of romances specifically designed to appeal to black women, so they maybe can finesse the issue somewhat. On top of that, according to a TVGuide.com interview with Randy and Andrew Larson, the People's Choice Mr Romance, Harlequin may be committed to as few as three book covers for Randy, which seems rather paltry. On the other hand, they do have to work all this in with the rest of their lives, so maybe the time it would take is just too much. About.com's Reality TV section also has an interview with and pictures of Mr Ritchwood. Oooh la la...)
Watching the show, a few things became clear:
Romance basically comes from two sources: character and story. You need compelling, interesting characters, and they need compelling, interesting storylines. The guy who won was the guy who managed to combine his character with a compelling enough personal story that people wanted to know about.
Posted by iain at 12:29 AM
revenge of the nerdish
May 13, 2005
Apparently, comics are more important in our culture than we'd like to admit, even to ourselves.
ONE of the few memorable moments in Chris Rock's bridge-burning turn as host of this year's Oscar broadcast was his observation that while Russell Crowe is a bona fide movie star, Tobey Maguire is "a boy in tights." This remark was taken, and was probably to some extent intended, as a cruel put-down of a fine young actor, but it nonetheless illustrated a basic axiom of popular culture that has nothing in particular to do with Mr. Maguire's masculinity or Mr. Crowe's clout. Simply put, a superhero is not a movie star, and vice versa. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that as a cultural figure, the superhero is the opposite - the nemesis, the secret alter ego, the evil twin, the Bizarro-world double - of the movie star. And in their battle for world domination, notwithstanding Mr. Rock's mockery (though implicitly reflected in it), the superheroes are winning.
Their ascendancy in Hollywood is a triumphal chapter in a 70-year epic during which comic books have moved from the disreputable, juvenile margins of pop culture to its center. And not only pop culture, but upper-middlebrow literature, too, as young middle-aged novelists like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem have found in the realm of boyhood fandom a rich store of ready-made myths, mysteries and moods.
The cachet of comics - and I mean the old, cheap, pulpy kind, not "comix" or "graphic novels" - is all the more remarkable given that for most of their history, they could count on provoking the disdain of literary intellectuals, the panic of moralists and the condescension of mainstream show business, which saw them as fodder for cartoons and campy kid shows. The days when a film critic could wish that comic books would just go away - as Robert Warshow did in a brilliantly ambivalent 1954 essay on his young son's fandom - are long gone. The superheroes demand to be taken as seriously as they have always taken themselves.
For one thing, they command some very serious money. The ostensible point of Mr. Rock's riff was that only a handful of certified movie stars can guarantee box-office success, and that the studio executives should bear this in mind when casting their would-be blockbusters. But the numbers tell a somewhat different story, since the movies featuring Mr. Maguire in tights, "Spider-Man" and "Spider-Man 2," had two of the biggest opening weekends in movie history and have outgrossed Mr. Crowe's entire catalog so far. Credit for those huge numbers, needless to say, belongs more to Spidey than to the person in his costume, and it is the web-slinger and his ilk who currently dominate the box office. [...] Comic books are the foundation of a fan culture once derided and now celebrated as the province of nerds, misfits and losers - young men, like their idols' alter egos, who could compensate for their social marginality by coming to the rescue of the society that had spurned and mocked them. Their origin stories are tales of shame, victimization and abandonment overcome by lonely discipline and endless self-sacrifice. (Batman, the orphaned heir to the Wayne fortune, and Spider-Man, a working-class orphan from Queens, share not only secret identities but also a penchant for solitude and melancholy.) Stars, on the other hand, are the society's most cherished winners, congratulated for being themselves, drawing attention in the way that the masked, disguised and anxious supermen never do.
Or so we're told. Within the confines of their narratives on page and screen, the superheroes will be perpetual underdogs - the paradox that has kept them going throughout their history. But as any comic book reader knows, their victory is never final, and the vanquished movie stars will never vanish altogether....
On the one hand, it's likely that if Spiderman keeps making money, in the near term at least, Tobey Maguire will make considerably more money per picture than Russell Crowe, Oscar or no Oscar. On the other hand ... if what Maguire wants is to be seen as an actor rather than as a star, then he's in a somewhat problematic position. In the end, he might rather have something that looks more like Russell Crowe's career, but that's not going to happen for him for a long time.
As for the comic book characters, the article may only be partially correct. For characters that spend most of their time masked, it may well be that anyone can play them; in that case, the mask may be what's important. For other characters, however, you may wind up with a different result. Both George Reeves and Christopher Reeve struggled throughout their professional lives with being indelibly associated with Superman -- and if he's any good at portraying the character, I'd wager that Brandon Routh will run into the same problems. It may work to start out without a recognizable name or image, but you'll wind up with one pretty quickly, and then spend a good deal of your career trying to shed it. Similarly, although it's not quite the same, it would be difficult to imagine anyone but Ron Perlman playing Hellboy; they just seem meant for each other. (And if there's really going to be a Hellboy 2, then Guillermo del Toro had better get a move on and start making the damn thing. Ron Perlman may be in absolutely incredible shape, but he's still 55, and it may not be long before he's too old to make the character work on the big screen, heavy red makeup or no.) And I'd be willing to bet that unless they start rotating actors into the characters, certain of the people in the X-Men franchise are going to find it difficult to deal with type casting and people's mental associations as well.
Or, to put it all more tersely: it might work best for the role to cast an unknown, but what works best for the actor if the role makes them a star?
Posted by iain at 06:37 PM
missing white female alert
May 9, 2005
A year ago yesterday, May 7, Stacy-Ann Sappleton took a taxi to Queens, N.Y., from LaGuardia, bound for the home of her future in-laws. She had flown in from Detroit to complete a few tasks for her planned September wedding.
She never made it. Her fiancé, Damion Blair, his parents and Sappleton's mother spent a frantic weekend searching before they learned of her tragic demise.
Never heard of her? Neither has most of America.
Like runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Sappleton was missing for three days. Like Wilbanks, Sappleton was young (26), middle class and planning a wedding.
Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton's disappearance didn't receive 24-hour cable news coverage, complete with breathless speculation by celebrity pundits, or banner newspaper headlines. Unlike Wilbanks, Sappleton was black.
The frenzy surrounding Wilbanks' disappearance once again highlights a peculiar feature of early 21st-century American culture: a fixation on pretty, young, middle-class white women. While tens of thousands of American adults disappear every year — some eventually turn up, safe and sound; some are never heard from again; some are recovered as corpses — only a small sliver get the Wilbanks/Laci Peterson/Lori Hacking treatment.
After Sappleton's battered, bullet-riddled body was found in a trash bin in Queens, about five miles from the home of her future in-laws, her fiancé angrily refused to talk to reporters. "When she first disappeared, we tried to contact the media, and they wouldn't help us," Blair told The New York Times.
(Print and broadcast reporters from New York City and Canada — Sappleton lived in Ontario — covered her disappearance, but newspapers did not display the story prominently. There was little, if any, coverage from national news outlets.)
Heaven knows, my industry ought to come in for a heaping dose of criticism for the sensationalist coverage given to one small drama — the Wilbanks disappearance — without broader societal implications. But the fact is that the runaway bride soap opera, like the tragedies involving Peterson and Hacking, attracted loads of interest from readers and viewers.
As American news consumers, we are discriminating about the sort of victims worthy of our concern. Pretty, middle-class, young, white — yes; old, ugly, poor, black, brown — apparently not....
Missing white female alert
Why won't the media cover missing minority women?
By Douglas MacKinnon, press secretary to former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole from 1998 to 2003
Published May 8, 2005
Note to the news media--with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.
Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.
The latest missing woman to dominate the airtime of the cable networks was Jennifer Wilbanks, from Duluth, Ga. Like Dru Sjodin, Chandra Levy and Elizabeth Smart all before her, Wilbanks is young, white and attractive. Wilbanks, as it turned out, ran away of her own volition from her impending marriage. As a Maryland police official told me after Wilbanks turned up in New Mexico, "the media's non-stop focus on the possible abduction of Wilbanks forced the local officials and police departments to spend thousands of dollars they would not otherwise have spent."
Define racism. One could certainly make the argument that the cable networks that continually focus on these missing white women, to the virtual exclusion of minority women, are practicing a form of racism. The racism in this case, however, while predicated on color, does not concern itself with the color of one's skin. Rather, it is based on the color of money, ratings points and competition. Would an African-American woman who went missing days before her wedding receive the same (or any) coverage as that of Wilbanks? Not likely.
The cable networks, which can certainly be considered centers of journalism, are also business centers with a harsh bottom line. The ratings for the cable networks are generally measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than the millions of viewers the major networks attract. Therefore, cable stations are constantly on the lookout for any story that may spike and then hold the ratings. Stories like those of Wilbanks, Sjodin, Levy or Smart seem to fit those requirements. [...]
For all that I essentially agree with Mr MacKinnon on some points -- the news focus on missing white women can be extraordinarily obnoxious in the ways and intensity with which it occurs -- there is one point that he elides ... or rather, he seems to misplace responsibility.
[...] I have a number of friends at the cable networks (or at least I did), and I have spoken to some about this very subject. While all professed disgust with the underreporting of missing minority women and young adults, most were very uneasy with the thought of shining a spotlight on their own management to ascertain an answer. "Besides," one of them told me, "you've already figured it out. We showcase missing, young, white, attractive women because our research shows we get more viewers. It's about beating the competition and ad dollars."
Tragically, but not shockingly, in the spring of 2005, it seems the color of one's skin can determine the worth of that individual to some in the media. Journalism, as a profession, must be better than this.
Bold emphasis above added.
In this case, sadly enough, the news media is reactive. They're not determining the worth of these people to society; they're simply responding to a determination that society has already made. Young white women are more valuable, more newsworthy, when they go missing than others are. After all, if society had not already made this determination, then the ratings would not go up more when they cover this issue than when they cover other missing persons.
Compare and contrast:
BY ANNIE SWEENEY
Crime Reporter
Chicago Sun-Times
The Far South Side site where skeletal remains were unearthed in recent days was quiet Sunday, with excavation done for now, but it could be another week before the Bradley family finds out whether the bones belong to either of their missing girls.
Tionda and Diamond Bradley, two young sisters from the Bronzeville neighborhood, disappeared in July 2001, touching off a worldwide manhunt. Because the unearthed remains, including teeth, are believed to belong to a girl, there's suspicion it could be one of the Bradley sisters.
"This is the closest scare,'' said Shelia Bradley-Smith, a great-aunt to Tionda and Diamond. "We're hopeful we can find them, but nobody is hopeful that they find their children dead. I do feel a little more anxious than usual.''
Smith said she spoke with the girls' mother, Tracey Bradley, over the weekend. Smith said her niece was distraught.
Meanwhile, investigators cautioned that there was not much to report about Thursday's discovery of the bones at 130th and South Indiana. A forensic expert is expected in Chicago this week to examine the bones, which appear to be those of an adolescent girl, a source said. It was also confirmed teeth were recovered from the remains and would be tested, as well....
One of the reasons this case is oddly noteworthy is simply because it has remained oddly noteworthy. Tionda and Diamond Bradley are just two of many young black girls that disappear each year. One of the reasons that they remained worthy of note is that they disappeared together, which is odd regardless of their race. Without that odd factor, they'd likely have faded completely from view. Even so, for all that there was a "world wide search" for the girls, there was scarcely the major brouhaha that ensued over Wilbanks' disappearance, despite the fact that there were two of them. Even locally, after a relatively brief flurry of news stories, they simply fell off the radar.
Meanwhile, in the past few months, according to Illinois Team Amber Alert, several other children have gone missing in Illinois, almost completely without notice.
The question is, to what extent do we think that the media merely reflect society, and to what extent do we think that the media should try to shape society? For all that the coverage seems misplaced, it seems both unfair and unwise to blame a money-making business for responding in ways that will enable it to make more money. The question of whether news coverage should be a money making operation or whether or not there should be some way of handling it as a social good will be left is another issue; that said, how on earth could that be done?
It may be, ultimately, that simply asking the question may help. The media may at some point decide that it should not look as though it's trying to decide who exactly the valuable members of society are, and that its coverage will become more evenhanded.
But until society itself stops asserting that these people are more valuable than those, it's not very likely.
Angelitos Negros
(written by: M. Alvarez Maciste / A. Eloy Blanco)
Pintor nacido en mi tierra,
Con el pincel extranjero,
Pintor que sigues el rumbo,
De tantos pintores viejos.
Siempre que pintas iglesias,
Pintas angelitos bellos,
Pero nunca te acordaste,
De pintar un ángel negro.
Pintor si pintas con amor,
¿por qué desprecias su color,
Si sabes que en el cielo,
También los quiere dios?
Pintor de santos de alcoba,
Si tienes alma en el cuerpo,
¿por qué al pintar en tus cuadros,
Te olvidaste de los negros?
Aunque la virgen sea blanca
Píntame angelitos negros,
Que también se van al cielo,
Todos los negritos buenos.
