FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
Contrary to your suggested complaints, I believe this is the exact kind of restriction that breeds creativity.
Oh I agree, absolutely. I think the hypothetical directors who would complain about no longer being permitted to use child actors will eventually sound as ridiculous to us as directors from previous generations who would complain about not being allowed to endanger, maim or kill animals to get the shot. Photorealistic generative AI is one example of how a creative director could get around this restriction.
That being said
In our world however, modern movies go for maximum immersion. Everything must look as true to life as possible.
I'm not sure if I really agree with this. Modern Hollywood movies don't really look anything like real life. Even when they aren't primarily filmed on a green screen, they tend to use much more aggressive colour grading than the films of earlier decades did. Actors tend to be perfectly made up: it is rare to see a character in a tropical climate who is dripping with sweat (as was done in, for example, Sorcerer). Modern Hollywood films tend to be stylised to within an inch of their lives and drained of weight and tactility.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
I put trash-talking in a different mental category.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
But again, I think this argument proves too much. Having sex with someone where no money changes hands is uncontroversial, therefore there should be no controversy about having sex with someone when money does change hands?
The fact that money changes hands fundamentally alters the nature of the arrangement, creating opportunities for abuse and exploitation that wouldn't otherwise exist. It's true that no child could stand to have his earnings appropriated from him by his greedy parents because he landed the lead role in his school's Christmas play. That's (one reason) why I don't have a problem with children acting in school Christmas plays.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2hr ago
What do you call complete strangers sending death threats to a thirteen-year-old?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3hr ago
Imagine trying to portray the accusations of pedophilia in a way that doesn't make them come off as either indisputably true or slander, but rather something that's likely not true but maybe? How do you do it?
Andrew Jarecki gave it his best shot.
As for the child actors, is there even a problem? We all know of the cases where things go bad because they are reported on by journalists (Jake Lloyd podracing in real life amiright?) but when the child actor goes on to become an electrician who's going to inform you?
Couldn't one make the same argument about any kind of child labour?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
I'm against it. God knows people like Rebecca Black were bullied horrifically by people she'd never met on the other side of the globe because of a silly music video that should never have been shared publicly. See also parents who've faced legal repercussions for playing "pranks" on their children in order to create YouTube content, and these "pranks" functionally amounted to physical and emotional abuse.
Whenever I walk past a pair of preteen girls filming themselves doing a TikTok dance to post on the social network in question (happens about once a week), I have the same thought: do they know that pederasts are watching these videos and masturbating to them? And then they notice that some videos are performing better than others, so they try to optimise their videos by showing more skin. A generation of prepubescent girls is falling victim to audience capture, in which the audience is made up of nonces and the content they're creating amounts to unwitting softcore CP. I don't even know if we have a term for this – algorithmic grooming? I can't fathom why any sensible parent would want their preteen child to own a smartphone.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
There are many things that children want to do which we deny them because it's not in their best interests. I don't claim that acting is a categorical example of that, but it seems heavily correlated/associated with lots of things which unambiguously are (e.g. sexual exploitation by adults working in the industry).
You could also apply this argument to other kinds of child labour. I have it on good authority that the children yearn for the mines, but we don't make an exemption for child labour laws just because a given child claims that he really does want to work in a coalmine.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
I'm not necessarily saying that parents push their children into acting with the expectation that the child will make it big, and they (the parents) will personally profit. The odds of a given child actor making it big are only somewhat better than those for a given adult actor. But there do seem to be a number of cases in which a child actor's career unexpectedly took off and their parents immediately began spending money which rightfully belonged to the child, not the parents, sometimes to the point that the child was left without a penny when they came of age (e.g. Gary Coleman successfully sued his parents for misappropriating his assets). This strikes me as obviously unfair, and should not be allowed to happen.
Last night I watched Adum from Your Movie Sucks's review of Michael, the recent biopic of Michael Jackson starring his nephew Jaafar. I was not surprised to find that he abhorred the film, taking it to task for its hagiographic approach (not only to its principal, but also to certain members of his inner circle, some of whom acted as producers); the way it seems to encourage an unhealthy parasocial relationship between the late Jackson and his most devoted fans, and how it completely avoids mentioning the child abuse allegations which dogged Jackson in his later years. Adum, for his part, remains agnostic on whether Jackson was guilty of sexually interfering with children: he concedes that it's certainly possible that certain of the complainants' parents coerced them into accusing Jackson of misconduct in hopes of securing a generous settlement agreement, but also points out that even some of the behaviour Jackson admitted to (e.g. sharing a bed with underage boys) was certainly questionable at the minimum.
Near the end of the review (timestamped link), Adum argues that, whatever the truth of the abuse allegations launched against Jackson, it's impossible to talk about these and his other strange behaviour (the cosmetic surgery, the Neverland ranch, the time he dangled his child out of a fourth-floor window) without acknowledging that he suffered a uniquely awful upbringing which can only be described as abusive and exploitative. If indeed he was guilty of child abuse, his own difficult childhood would not excuse his conduct, but the former is inseparable from the latter. Adum muses on how odd it is that essentially every Western nation outlawed child labour decades ago – except for child labour in the entertainment industry, where child actors and singers pass without comment. Adum argues that the existence of this loophole actively incentivises abusive, exploitative child-rearing of the kind Jackson suffered, and that this behaviour will continue as long as the loophole is permitted to remain open. He ends the video with a call for it to be closed. No more child stars. No more prepubescent musicians. Cut it off at the root.
I'm old enough to remember when "former child star" was a stock punchline, with tabloid magazines and edgy sitcoms making hay of the incongruity between adorable child actors later becoming burnt-out husks checking themselves into rehab for heroin addiction. After learning what a large proportion of these former child stars went through upbringings comparable to Jackson's in abusiveness and/or claimed to have been sexually exploited at the hands of adult producers, directors or co-stars, it's been many years since I found jokes at their expense funny. (Examples include Coreys Haim and Feldman, Drake Bell, Amanda Bynes, Jennette McCurdy and Joanna Levesque, among many others.) And that's not even getting into the rare instances of child actors being severely injured or even killed on film sets (e.g. the infamous Twilight Zone movie helicopter accident, which in fairness was in direct contravention of multiple child labour laws even at the time). Even leaving aside the most horrific cases of abuse and exploitation, many child actors and musicians cite their abnormal childhoods as underlying causes in their later mental health difficulties and problems with substance abuse. It's a bit unreasonable for, say, Chappell Roan to complain about the downsides of fame, given that she was an adult when she decided to pursue her career in music, and hence old enough to know that being famous is a package deal. I have a lot more sympathy when a child complains about never really having had a private life, often because of decisions made on their behalf by a domineering stage mom. I'm inclined to agree with Adum that I don't really understand why this loophole exists, and think closing it is a good idea.
What would a world without child actors look like? While child labour laws vary by jurisdiction, most allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to work part-time with the consent of their parents. If this law applied to film and TV sets, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who look young enough to pass for thirteen or fourteen would be highly prized, but films with major characters who have not yet hit puberty would be the exclusive preserve of animation. We might allow under-16 actors to make brief appearances in films, but place strict limitations on how large their role can be to prevent the emergence of newly minted child stars e.g. specifying that they can only work a maximum of eight hours every calendar month, or only have X minutes of screentime, or X lines of dialogue. This means that, for example, a short scene in which the adult protagonist of the film says goodbye to his wife and kids before leaving to blow the lid off the Brodsky case is fine; a live-action film in which the protagonist is a prepubescent child (e.g. Home Alone, the Harry Potter films) is not. This is an obvious application of photorealistic generative AI: have the adult characters played by adult actors, and the children played by mo-capped adult stand-ins (perhaps standing on their knees, like Gary Oldman in Tiptoes) who will be replaced by CGI children in post-production.
Directors and producers might complain about their creative freedom being unduly curtailed by regulations of this type. But this objection reeks of status quo bias to me. The famous "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer is barely fifty years old. I'm sure if the American Humane Society had existed at the time Ben-Hur was being made, the directors would have complained that their creative freedom was being compromised by the insistence that they not intentionally kill upwards of a hundred horses in order to produce suitably exciting cinema. Eventually, we collectively decided that no artistic statement justifies pointless animal cruelty on this scale: it's only a movie. Sufficiently talented directors managed to find creative solutions for how to film movies without being gratuitously cruel to our four-legged friends. In the future, the "no animals were harmed..." disclaimer might well be followed by another reading "no child labour was exploited...".
If outright banning child actors and musicians isn't yet a practical possibility, an interim solution might be to have all compensation they earn from their performances paid into a trust that they (and only they) can access, and only when they come of age. The only compensation their parents could receive directly would come in the form of reimbursements for e.g. travel expenses, acting classes, music classes, accommodation etc. Many film studios are understandably reluctant about paying children their acting fees directly, fearing that they might squander their earnings; on the other hand, there have been enough cases of parents financially exploiting their children (and the child consequently ending up empty-handed when they come of age) that I'm not convinced paying a child's fees into a bank account to which their parents have access is a viable solution. If parents were unable to directly financially profit from their children's labour, that would also work to disincentivise the most egregious forms of abuse and exploitation. (A Google informs me that similar legislation has been on the books in California since 1939.)
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
13hr ago
Hmm. I think "manchild" refers to men who are immature, whereas to me "spinster" denotes a woman who failed to land a man. I think the closest equivalent in modern slang is "femcel".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
17hr ago
Notice anything?
mf couldn't even put the toilet seat down jfc
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
My good man, I'd have expected nothing less from you.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
My fiancée just asked me what's the distaff counterpart to the term "manchild".
I told her that there isn't one, and that this lexical gap Says A Lot About Our Society.
Joking aside, any proposed neologisms to fill this gap? "Womanchild" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I've heard that Worm is obscenely long. How long did it take you to read, roughly?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I find listening to Slavs or people from post-Soviet countries speaking English quite endearing. "Why you have to be mad? Is only game!"
On Monday evening I finished The Matriarch. Not the sort of thing I'd usually read, and the narrative was a bit digressive and all over the place, but I found it engaging enough to read it to the end. Interesting, 7/10. Curiously, my edition states it was first published in the fifties, but it's primarily set in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Given that it's a family drama following several generations of European Jews, I interpreted it in a wistful light, with the author looking back from a post-WWII perspective on a more optimistic era in which Jewish integration among European Gentiles seemed a live possibility. But consulting the author's Wikipedia page, it seems it was actually published in the mid-twenties, and that made me sad: it was written by a woman who had no idea how bad things were going to get for Jews.
The same day, my copy of INCEL by Arx-Han arrived in the post. It was unusually warm and sunny on Monday, so after work I spent a few hours sitting in the park reading. By Wednesday evening I'd finished the book, and I have thoughts.
I first encountered Arx-Han when I stumbled across his Substack, specifically an article called "The problem with modern fiction is that most writers lack artistic courage". In the article, he argued that the current generation of Anglophone novelists are cowardly, systematically refusing to articulate uncomfortable truths that might land them in hot water on social media. Specifically, he took Tony Tulathimutte to task for pulling his punches throughout his second book, Rejection. I was under the impression he was setting himself up in opposition to Tulathimutte: "unlike Tony, I'm telling it like it is, saying the things the establishment doesn't want to hear, so much so that I had to go the self-publishing route because no traditional publisher can handle the truth!" This unavoidably coloured my expectations of INCEL going into it. Reading the post again, I'm surprised to find that I'd remembered it incorrectly, and he openly cops to being even more of a coward than Tulathimutte.
And he's right. If INCEL was meant to be a more daring and honest take on similar subject matter as that tackled by Tulathimutte, it must be judged a failure.
Tulathimutte's "The Feminist" was a brave story, presenting an incel character as sympathetic, three-dimensional and capable of articulating his worldview in detail. The most daring thing about it was how viciously and relentlessly it skewered the stock piece of advice inevitably offered to sexually frustrated men by feminist women: "if you can't get laid, it means you don't Respecc Wimmen enough". Sure, Tulathimutte lost his nerve at the end by having his protagonist jump off the slippery slope, but up until that point you'd be hard pressed to find a better example this century of a fiction writer arguing that some sexually frustrated men really do have legitimate grievances and aren't just entitled manchildren. Braver still was Tony writing the story in such a way that it could easily be taken as (semi-)autobiographical, with its unnamed, bookish protagonist who's implied to be a Thai-American (so of course when it came time to republish the story as part of Rejection, Tony lost his nerve and retconned the character into being a white guy named Craig). But in its original incarnation, "The Feminist" was genuinely daring.
(See also Will, one of the four protagonists of Tulathimutte's debut Private Citizens who is Thai-American and a perverted pornsick loser, and probably the least sympathetic of the four. Again, that takes a certain amount of guts.)
Now compare the unnamed protagonist of INCEL. Unlike Arx-Han, he's a white American, and in his internal monologues constantly rants about his superior genetic heritage relative to people of other ethnic backgrounds. Very little attempt is made to make him seem like a real person, and he's more of a one-dimensional caricature. Essentially no effort is made to make the reader sympathise with him: per the laboured, obligatory allusions to Fight Club and American Psycho, we know from the outset we are reading a novel from the perspective of a fundamentally unlikeable character. (Aside from Tulathimutte's oeuvre, the work it most reminded me of was, for some reason, the Maniac remake starring Elijah Wood.) The novel's ostensible premise ("if I can't get laid by my 23rd birthday, I'm going to commit suicide by cop PoC: locate the biggest black guy I can find, and call him The Gamer Word until he beats me to death") is underdeveloped to the point of feeling like anti-woke clickbait: if Arx-Han had included a countdown at the beginning of each chapter, the device might have had more impact. I can only assume he included this device to lend a sense of narrative momentum to what would otherwise have consisted of a series of largely self-contained vignettes. At no point in the novel did I seriously believe it was going to end with the protagonist's death, and sure enough, the ending is so meek and milquetoast that I felt cheated.
I don't know what Arx-Han would consider a brave and daring artistic statement, but I have a hard time imagining it would amount to "incels are a bunch of privileged, entitled white manbabies who can't get laid because of their reactionary politics and because they think of women as sex objects rather than people. The solution to their problems is to stop being racist and Be More Empathetic". No one in the West would get in trouble for claiming as much. The reason Arx-Han self-published INCEL isn't because it was too daring and subversive for a traditional publisher to touch: this is the work of an aspiring provocateur. Even leaving aside its punch-pulling, this compulsively readable and not particularly long book (less than 300 pages in the edition I read) is crying out for an editor. One chapter of cringe comedy wherein the protagonist cold approaches a girl in public and makes a fool of himself is plenty; by my count, there are at least four. One might have thought such a devotee of Chuck Palahniuk would have internalised the value of economy.
I dunno. I expected more. Even when Arx-Han admitted to being less brave than Tulathimutte, I thought maybe he was being self-deprecating, or holding himself to an unreasonably high standard ("I was brave, but not brave enough"). But he was right on the money: he's less brave than Tulathimutte, less willing to step on progressive pieties, and not as funny, and less concise, and his characters aren't as believable. The poor man's Tulathimutte, alas.
Started on the third book in the Neapolitan quartet.
I don't mind listening to Indian women speak English with heavy accents, but I must admit I can't say the same of Indian men. (Apologies to @self_made_human.)
That being said, if I may be permitted to stretch the definition of "foreign" a bit, Multicultural London English (that mish-mash of Pakistani, Afro-Carribean, Arabic and Indian accents and slang spoken by urban youths throughout the Yookay) is verbal sewage. "Wha' you lookin' at bruv? I wiw fucking kiw you bruv! Watch yourself, innit." Give me a thousand "don'd dell me whad do do"s over that. Unlike the former case, there's no gendered element to it: I honestly don't think I could bring myself to have sex with an otherwise attractive woman who spoke with this accent.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
True. I meant writing in the sense of writing fiction.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
How's your luck?
Non-existent. Congratulations, though!
At least two of them were considered serious enough to warrant investigation by the Anaheim police department. @The_Nybbler
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