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Showing posts with label Susan Sontag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Sontag. Show all posts

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Another Snow White Premiere

A New Confident and Singular Kristen Stewart
An Earlier Premiere


Liberty Ross has made it clear that she wants to shine, to take fashion center stage at the premieres. This is also a resonance from Snow White. Just as the movie Black Swan resonates with Snow White. The jealousy and fury of aging beauty being replaced.
In the Haute Couture world of women there is a comraderie with a bedrock of competitiveness. Women dress for women. They observe each other, notice every flaw, every sign of aging. It is a merciless world that ruthlessly pits beautiful women against each other in socially acceptable ways. 

Kristen has said Oh no, I'm not gonna play that game.

Kristen becomes androgynous

Sontag: 

the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Of course he is sexually attracted to her. And any woman knows when a man is sexually attracted to them. It happens every day. You always know. So yes, Kristen knew. So fucking what! Rain Makes Applesauce to quote a children's book from the 1960's.
The sun came up today.
What else is new.


The camera loves Stewart to such a degree that, after her first few Wild scenes, I started suspecting she probably could have given Lillian Gish or Greta Garbo a run for their money during the Silent’s heyday some eighty-odd years ago as, to misquote Norma Desmond, “They had faces then.”As Tracy, Stewart’s beautiful, unguarded visage manages to convey both freshness and world-weariness, allowing the talented newcomer to project something akin to a jaded purity, which I’ve never seen on screen before.A lovely review of Kristen Stewart in Into The Wild and the entire review is here:  http://littleblogtoo.blogspot....


Monday, September 5, 2011

Kristen Stewart and Michael Angarano and then Rob Pattinson

I am a fan of William Burroughs cut-up technique. This is a variation on it of Kristen Stewart and Michael Angarano. He is bored with her. People that are bored with you are bored with you because they are boring, not because you are boring. I find these pics sad but very instructive. Many young girls are in a relationship with a guy who is bored with them. The girl will dress differently, try to look hot, do different things with her hair, her make-up, work out, try to get Megan Fox's body, do surgery, even acquire degrees and go to graduate school, all in the hopes of interesting him or the new guy, and on and on and on until you get too old to care anymore. One can look at these pics and interpret for pages and pages, and all that does is make you look smart. Interpretation is about Dominance. Who does it better. When you are good at it it is hard to let it go. Foucault takes you through his thinking on it, as does Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, and by the time the two of them finish with your head, you have to give it up. So while I can think of dozens of reasons why Angarano looks so bored with Kristen Stewart, I'm just going to flip that kind of thinking off. (God I wish that baggage would stay in the trash for good. I'm getting better though.)

Bored Again
During this time Kristen Stewart films Speak where she meets Angarano when she is thirteen and begins to go with him at fourteen. She films Cake Eaters at sixteen and Into the Wild at sixteen. Stewart has said she does films that her heart chooses. In each of these three films she is longing and yearning and interested in sex. (She gets raped in Speak, but she is hot in the beginning of the film.) she is in Adventureland just before Twilight and while not so yearning in it, she  begins to look for intimacy. She is lovely in all of them, but   Cake Eaters is a performance she may equal in her career but she will not surpass it. She is that perfect in it. She is luminous in Into the Wild and tragic. She secures the lead in Twilight. The rest is history.


To the left is one of the Twilight premieres. This is Stewart's big night.

Cake Eaters to the left and below it Speak. On the
bottom right a still from Cake Eaters.
More Alive with Rob





 



 Rob Pattinson is interested in her. Rob Pattinson is an interesting person. 

Kristen trying to be affectionate and well.....Michael is just bored.

If you have seen Kristen Stewart in Catch That Kid (can't find the pic I want) she climbs a wall. In this film she has beautifully molded shoulders, strong, lovely, straight.

Now look at her shoulders in the pic with M and K playing at musical instruments, and the rest of the pics with Michael. Her shoulders are slumping, her body is slumping. The Inscription of the Body in adolescence is beginning. Her shoulders turn inward, protecting her, just like Bella Swan's do.

You will see that she is thinking of herself as boring. The subject/object dyad cannot be separated. They are not independent. She is being slowly shaped, her body and her mind into thinking of herself as boring.  Just after Twilight she said that acting was the only thing she could do. This is the secret meaning of Country Strong. When Kelly Canter is not on stage performing, she BORES her husband to numbness. When she realizes that she is only a simulacrum, there is no original Kelly anymore because she is in fact boring when she is not performing, there are only flashes of who she once was, she kills herself. A beautiful beautiful way under appreciated film and a performance by Paltrow unequaled by even herself.


Kristen's Stewart's salvation lay in her marvelous films, and the recognition she received by other actors for her excellent performances: Sean Penn; Robert deNiro; Donald Sutherland; William Hurt; Maria Bello; The cast in Objects of Safety; Jody Foster; and so on.