Transfert
Is this a blog dedicated to science-fiction? Just to reveal the discussions behind the curtains…is this a blog dedicated to science-fiction, then I can talk or should talk about what I experienced last week as spectator seeing ‘The 25th hour’ by Spike Lee. Just to make a link to my previous post: now I have also in my icones’closet: Edward Norton as Montgomery Brogan (his mother loved Montgomery Clift). Concerned as we are by a feminist-gendered approach, how did this ‘transfert’ of identity happen?
First have look to Amy Taubin’s critique in Sight & Sound review. Because it is a really situated and gendered critique of this story in New York just after September 11. Just one remark, also about the next ‘Matrix’, it is quite impossible to watch American cultural production now that they bombed another country, it is impossible to see them as an open wound, now that they have taken revenge. But at that time, the time of the movie, there is a correlation between Monty, ‘le promeneur’, and New York, the once all-mighty and young one. The WASP, almost, he is Irish, who knows how to play game, how to make money out of this world, enslaving young businessmen if necessary, having the most beautiful girl… But now it is over, Monty has to pay his debt, (as New York did?) He has one last day, before going to jail, and what he supposes and repeats: being raped.We are caught in this story between collective and individual guilt: are the others responsible for what we become, or just us alone. Monty ‘fucks’ the entire world (=NY for him) and then himself, waiting to be ‘fucked’ he fears finally. There are 2 ways out: to become ugly, wounded and avoid being raped, or to fullfill the American dream given as present by his father. Fortunately, Lee’s doesn’t choose the end.
Well that’s doesn’t explain the transfert. There is a terrible scene where the mafia leader explains to Monty how to survive in jail: ‘Choose a man without friends and beat him till his eyes bleed’. Monty chooses this man: again himself, and asks his ‘friend’ (an horrible trader called Slaughtery) to beat him to make him ugly while Jacob the other receives this prothesis virility: Monty’s dog. The 3 of them in a tunnel, the only way out is to suffer the beating, or to beat, to fight. Is this what frightens me: violence and rape in a man’s world, do i have to endoarse their fears? Do they live mine? mine as woman? Is Monty a real man? Besides his angel face (again is he real with sex?), where I became him was when he walks and sits and walks, walking his life.