Untouchable Lovers Ep 1

[Ma Layssard]

OliverStone's new film, Savages, sounds as if it should be a guilty pleasure. Its pretty young heroine, Blake Lively, and her two lovers, Aaron Johnson-Taylor and Taylor Kitsch, live in a beachfront menage trois in Southern California. They fund their blissful existence by growing the world's best cannabis, a multimillion-dollar enterprise that attracts the attention of Salma Hayek's Mexican cartel. When Johnson and Kitsch refuse to do business with Hayek, she negotiates by kidnapping Lively and promising to decapitate her if her boyfriends don't sign on the dotted line. Kitsch, an Iraq war veteran, favours a guns-blazing response, and Johnson, supposedly a peace-loving hippie, soon comes round to his way of thinking.

Spending time with such a detestable bunch was never likely to be very edifying, but Savages could, at least, have been a good, old-fashioned orgy of sex, drugs and mindless violence. Unfortunately, it seems that Stone was smoking too much of his characters' own product, because his bloated film drags on and on without a scintilla of urgency. While we wait for the action to get started, we have to sit through endless, waffling conversations, and far too many inconsequential scenes featuring the most minor of supporting characters. I can only assume that every member of the cast had a contract guaranteeing them a certain amount of screen time, because why else would Stone make us watch Lively wandering around a shopping mall for what feels like hours?

You might not think that a dying teenage girl could be as obnoxious as the tripper-happy drug pedlars in Savages, but Dakota Fanning manages it in Now is Good, adapted from the teen-lit hit Before I Die. Adopting a not-quite-English accent, and suffering from one of those rare strains of terminal cancer which don't make you look ill, Fanning has a petty list of experiences she wants to tick off before her death (including shoplifting and becoming famous), but most of this bland, Brighton-set comedy-drama concerns her banal romance with the hunk next door (Jeremy Irvine).

A hymn to adolescent self-absorption, Now is Good may go down well at 14-year-old girls' sleepover parties, but my sympathies were with Fanning's divorced parents (the excellent Paddy Considine and Olivia Williams), not just because their daughter is about to die, but because she's such a stroppy, narcissistic know-it-all in the meantime.

Untouchable is based on the true story of the friendship between a wealthy quadriplegic Parisian (Franois Cluzet) and the Senegalese ex-con (Omar Sy) he hires as his carer. It was a huge hit in France, but it's fundamentally a conventional, soft-centred odd-couple comedy: Cluzet teaches Sy about modern art and poetry, while Sy introduces Cluzet to marjuana, call girls and such cutting-edge contemporary music as Kool & The Gang. The film's only surprises are its lack of conflict, and its refusal to make any political points about the two men's vastly different backgrounds. Still, it's slick and engaging, with a brace of lovable performances. This week, that's the best you'll get.

Masculinity, once considered too politically charged to be alegitimate source of academic inquiry, has produced a second entireessay collection in the Chaucer Studies series. The previouscontribution, edited by Peter Beidler, appeared a decade ago and tookthe entire range of Chaucer's writings as its field. Out of Beidler'sseventeen essays, three focused on this Chaucerian work, all ringingvarious changes on the theme of Troilus's emasculation at the hands ofCriseyde and/or courtly love. In the last ten years, the theoreticalconception of masculinity has become more nuanced, as this newcollection's introduction indicates, having run into and throughJudith Butler's theories of performativity and embodiment, and into amore multivalent understanding of what it means to be male both insociety and in oneself. This collection concentrates solely onTroilus and Criseyde and approaches masculinity from a varietyof more complex and nuanced perspectives than were available ten yearsago. Characters other than Troilus, such as Hector, Pandarus andCriseyde get treatment as well, and challenge the standard assumptionthat Troilus is, necessarily, feminized in the poem.

The essays appear in pairs covering everything from gaze theory tocontemporary politics. The first two consider the poem's reach intocritiques of sovereignty. John Bowers's article, "Beautiful asTroilus: Richard II, Chaucer's Troilus and Figures of (Un)Masculinity," argues that the young king was deliberately compared toboth Troilus and Absalom as a backhanded slight to the king's impotentreign. Robert Sturges's essay considers the meaning and uses ofsovereignty in the poem delimited in his essay by Giorgio Agamben'sconcept of 'bare life'--sovereign power as that which decides whoselife falls inside the protective power of the state, and whose fallsoutside that boundary (29). Hector, Troilus and Diomede are brought upfor comparison in their abilities to grant or protect this limit ofsovereignty both to Troy and Criseyde.

The next four essays revisit Troilus's masculinity, particularly inhow to read his fainting episode and the experience of love. GretchenMieszkowski's essay convincingly calls scholars to reconsider the oldchestnut that Troilus's faint would have been read by Chaucer'scontemporaries as 'feminizing'. Drawing from a host of analogues,Mieszkowski argues that male literary characters fainting were a notuncommon motif, that had no discernible effect of softening orcompromising their gender. For example, Chaucer's Arcite from TheKnight's Tale and the hero of the Prose Lancelot both faintwithout any seeming repercussions imperiling their gender.Mieszkowski concludes that since the courtly love scenario rewardedmasculine passivity, Troilus's faint in fact marks him out to be asuperlative courtly lover.

Marcia Smith Marzec's essay, "What Makes a Man? Troilus, Hector, andthe Masculinities of Courtly Love," compares Hector and Troilus andthe appeal they may have held for Criseyde. Criseyde turns to Hectorfirst, seeing Hector, as Marzec argues, in the same way Chaucer'sliterate contemporaries would have, as a paragon of knightly prowessand wisdom. As the perfect knight, however, Hector is untouchable bywomen--even Andromache and Hecuba falling at his feet and pleadingfail to stir him from his epic-warrior lines. Troilus, on the otherhand, second only to his brother in knightly prowess, represents thecourtly love form of masculinity, or, at the very least, representsthe limitations to masculine performance that the courtly lovetradition imposes.

James Paxson's "Masculinity and its Hydraulic Semiotics in Troilusand Criseyde" considers Troilus's subterranean journey toCriseyde's bedchamber as a complex allusion to King David's emergencefrom the tzinor to conquer the Jebusites, recasting Troilus'sjourney into one of conquest, and penetration, rather than sewer-crawling. Paxson weighs the possible translations of thetzinor, connecting Chaucer's fascination with the episode toChaucer's own occupation and pre-occupation with waterways and guttersas Clerk of the Works in the 1390s.

Pugh and Holly Crocker collaborate on the next essay, "Masochism,Masculinity and the Pleasures of Troilus." This essay argues thatTroilus's suffering in love is not contrary to masculinity and notfeminizing in the least. Instead, the lover's pain not only does notdiminish masculinity (being a chance to demonstrate fortitude underpain), but Troilus enjoys the suffering that love brings him. Jesus isinvoked as an archetype for masochistic suffering without gender-diminishment. Jesus suffers in a similar silence, offering an exemplarof masculinity made entire by his pain, as well as inverting thestandard conception of the masochistic power dynamic. The sufferer(Jesus) is in control, and following from that, the lover (Troilus) isas well: the lady does not so much wield power over her lover (asnormally conceived) but merely serves as a modality through which thelover can attain further suffering. Unlike others in the poem who usewomen either as pawns or markers of their own power and masculinity,Troilus's relation to Criseyde removes him from the interrelationshipsof power with other men, leading smoothly to his 'transcendence' atthe poem's end.

The next pair deal with how Criseyde contributes to or detracts fromTroilus's masculine construction. Kate Koppelman's "'The Dreams inWhich I'm Dying': Sublimation and Unstable Masculinities in Troilusand Criseyde" invokes Zizek's conception of subjectivity as astruggle against the symbolic structures imposed upon one by theother. In studying the work through this lens of subjectivity,Koppelman argues that Criseyde demonstrates a larger "ethicalsubjectivity" than Troilus, because she acknowledges her position aspinned-down subject against and through which Troilus (and others)demonstrate their own gender. The text's refusal to delve intoCriseyde's thought process push her to the position of the opaqueobjectified other, though her choices throughout the poem hint at agreater understanding and compassion toward the others similarlyobjectified. Angela Jane Weisl's essay considers Criseyde's choicesfrom another perspective--the complications a courtly lady may face inchoosing and rewarding certain manifestations of masculinity. Sheattempts to utilize "masculinized power and privilege, and herinability to maintain her reputation while doing so, point(s) out boththe limitations of and access to masculinity" (126).

Gaze theory is the focus of the following two essays: one, MollyMartin's "Troilus's Gaze and the Collapse of Masculinity in Romance,"re-investigates the power of the gaze through the medievalunderstanding of optics. Instead of the more modern and conventionalconception of the gaze as demonstrating and granting subjective powerto the gazer, Martin argues that in Chaucer's time, the gaze wasunderstood to be a recipient of outside stimulus--the object reachesin via the portals of the eyes and affects the viewer. In Troilus'scase, this gaze afflicts him with love, rendering him powerlessagainst the gaze's ability to control his moves. This gaze, ratherthan enforcing his masculine prerogative, effectually disempowers him.

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