I'm watching the Hairspray musical movie again, and even though I can still enjoy parts of it as a seperate thing from the original, I keep doing contrast and compare in my head and getting disgruntled. One of the things that changes with the Disneyfication of Hairspray is that the sex is taken out. Without the sexual element, Link's attraction to Tracy becomes about her soul, not her body--there's even that line in I Can Hear the Bells about how "he can see inside of me". Remember that whole scene where Tracy and Link and Seaweed and Penny run around the city looking for someplace they can make out? They totally wanted to fuck, not just love with their souls. Tracy and Link don't even kiss! They hug! Seaweed and Penny's relationship is slightly more sexual--they actually kiss, and Penny starts singing and dressing more like an adult than a little kid once she meets Seaweed--but that's problematic for both race reasons and fat reasons.

One of the things I do like is that the shiny surface leaves the opportunity for racism to break through in really startling ways--like, rather than just accepting segregation as part of the world that it takes place in, that's just how it was back then, etc., it points out how everything can seem totally fine but have this jarring undertone of racism. Like, in the very first scene where they're singing about being "the nicest kids in town", and Corny points out that they're "nice white kids!" It totally breaks the idea there is in movies that white kids are just the default and it totally has nothing to do with race. And the little moments where even the main, sympathetic characters indulge in racist behaviors--Link wondering if they're going to be safe in the black neighborhood, and Penny saying she's very "excited and scared" to be there, especially when it's countered with Mabel saying she'd be way more unsafe in their neighborhood.

I am a little disappointed by anti-racist hero Tracy, though. One of the things thats so awesome about the original movie is that a lot of Tracy's anti-racist action is self-motivated and based on the idea that being black is so cooool, and you get lines like "I wish I was dark-skinned" and "our souls are black, even though our skin is white!" To Tracy, blackness represents sex and danger and coolness and the future--she's well-meaning but objectifying in her identification with the black dancers. It makes her a more realistic character, and it also means that she's not the white hero liberating black America. In the original, the black dancers were protesting long before Tracy joined the show, and they were angry. In the remake, the only protest is fronted by Tracy and Edna, after Tracy has already made an integrationist remark on the show, and Tracy runs away when she's in danger of being
arrested--and the black protesters create a wall between her and the police so that she can. All the black characters react to racism with a knowing "oh, when will the white people ever learn?" attitude rather than anger, and despite their music being stolen by the white producers, Seaweed tells Tracy to go ahead and use his dance moves to impress Corny Collins. Also, Inez winning the dance competition at the end makes it seem like the world really was ready for integration, and that one studio in Baltimore was the only holdout, which is pretty troubling.

IDK. I don't really have a conclusion to all this, just, you know, thoughts. Also Travolta is still hideously miscast, and I still feel bad for Amanda Bynes in that last scene, trying to dance even though she can't move her body above her knees.

In other news, I'm a flesher, and

1. Friendship is based on trust, and if you don't trust your friends not to talk shit about you, either on bandflesh or in email or on AIM or under a filter, you should probably defriend them. I trust all of you not to do those things, and hopefully you feel the same about me.

2. I think bandflesh is being used as a scapegoat for people's feelings of paranoia and their trust issues.

3. I don't have a problem with people using their feeling words (I feel hurt by something that was said at bandflesh, I feel angry that my friends would hang out at a place where I've been bashed) or at people questioning the validity of anon memes; I do have a problem with being called a shitty human being, a cunt, and a piece of slime. I've seen a lot of posts and comments saying, "well, if you belong to a comm where people are sometimes bashed, you shouldn't be surprised that people will be hurt/question the validity of anon/etc," but that's not what I personally am surprised or hurt by or defensive about. The original post that started this has been deleted, so you can either take irradiatedsoup's word that it was a post in which monkeycrackmary expressed her discontent with aspects of bandflesh [and] was them subsequently dogpiled by angry bandfleshers, or take fleshers' word that it was a post where fleshers were called shitty human beings and vicious cunts and compared to Charles Manson after basically saying "I'm sorry you feel this way." Both of us are equally biased due to our emotional involvement in this wank, so believing either point of view is perfectly valid, but the latter version of events is what I saw and what I feel hurt by.

4. Anonymity creates a situation where your friends may or may not have said some hurtful things about you, bringing us back to that whole trust thing, but in generalizing the behavior of some bandfleshers to that of all bandfleshers (ie, everyone who posts at bandflesh is a cunt, everyone who belongs to bandflesh is a piece of slime) some of my friends have definitely said hurtful things about me. This would be why my issue is with saying hurtful things, and not with anonymity. If some anon says something bad about me, I generally assume that it's not one of my friends, because see #1. I also assume that just because my friend is friends with someone who dislikes me, it doesn't also mean that my friend also secretly dislikes me. Bandflesh is not the hive vagina, and just because one flesher says something doesn't mean everyone there agrees with her, the same way that I don't agree with everything that's said on my friendslist, and the same way that I comment at icecreamhdaches while disagreeing strenuously with Ashlee-haters. This of course is a YMMV situation, but my main point is, I feel hurt because some of my friends have said hurtful things about me, not because I'm against the idea of discussing whether or not anon comms are valid. That is where my lol sensitive is coming from, and I'm guessing it's where the lol sensitive of some of the flesher posts is coming from as well.

5. I debated with myself for a while as to whether or not I would reference monkeycrackmary's original post. She's since deleted her journal, and so a) people can't see it for themselves and b) she can't publicly speak up for herself (unless she chooses to anonpost with her name attached, which she is free to do--anon comments are allowed in my journal), and also, I know that she was very deeply hurt by this whole thing. I hope that she isn't more hurt by this post. In mentioning her post, as well as the posts and comments of other people who have made generalizing comments about bandfleshers in the "they're all assholes" vein, I'm not trying to direct hatred her/their way. But it is the post that began this entire thing, and it's also the post that I felt the most hurt by. Since Mary believes in claiming your statements once you've made them, I hope she won't mind me referencing statements that she and others have made. She has my email address, and is free to contact me at any time.

I also brought it up because what everyone seems to agree about is that shit-talking is wrong. Saying vicious, hurtful things about your friends, or anyone, is wrong. Again: for me the issue isn't about whether or not there's a name attached to the shit-talking--in fact, the shittalking is actually more painful with a name attached, because I don't have to wonder if my friends are talking about me, I know they are. And while a lot of posters/commenters are saying that they are anti-anon, they aren't bringing up anon love comments, but anon hate comments, which makes me think that it's the hating that's their real concern.

When people make blanket statements about fleshers, they're not just hating on the anons who said mean things about them. They're hating on their friends, the people who defended them, the people who said nice things about them/their fic, and the people who weren't even there when those mean things were said. If the issue is hating, then why is this not a problem? Why is this okay? If the issue is anon, then why isn't anyone concerned about anon loving? Seriously, someone should step in and warn fox1013, because people anonymously love her, and this is seriously a problem.

I don't have any big important concluding points, and it's very late, and I have to leave for a final in about half an hour, so just, yeah. These are my thoughts.


Feel free to respond to just the Hairspray stuff, or just the bandflesh stuff, or both, or neither. I have finals today and tomorrow, so if I don't respond to comments right away, I'm not ignoring the discussion, I'm at school/studying/sleeping the sleep of the dead.