My last post about gargoyles reminded me of Raoul Servais' Harpya (1979).
In this short film, a man falls in love with a bird-woman and takes her home with him, only to become a victim of her ravenous appetite. It's both hilarious and super creepy.
Just take those squidgy shoes off, man. Seriously.
Watching this again made me think about how many grotesque frescoes involve women with wings. When you look, they all do.
As the figure below illustrates in extremis, female grotesque bodies are often reduced to three key features - head, breasts, and wings.
These are not harpies in the traditional sense, though.
Harpies have their origins in Greek mythology. As E. M. Berens explains in A Hand-book of Mythology (1894):
The Harpies, who, like the Furies, were employed by the gods as instruments for the punishment of the guilty, were three female divinities, daughters of Thaumas and Electra, called Aello, Ocypete, and Celæno.
They were represented with the head of a fair-haired maiden and the body of a vulture, and were perpetually devoured by the pangs of insatiable hunger, which caused them to torment their victims by robbing them of their food; this they either devoured with great gluttony, or defiled in such a manner as to render it unfit to be eaten.
Their wonderfully rapid flight far surpassed that of birds, or even of the winds themselves. If any mortal suddenly and unaccountably disappeared, the Harpies were believed to have carried him off. Thus they were supposed to have borne away the daughters of King Pandareos to act as servants to the Erinyes.
The Harpies would appear to be personifications of sudden tempests, which, with ruthless violence, sweep over whole districts, carrying off or injuring all before them.
'Harpy' has also become a more general term for women who behave in an unacceptable manner towards men, who take too much and give too little, who 'harp on' about things.
As the Urban Dictionary's most popular definition puts it, a harpy is:
A word to describe a women [sic] who draws a man into her grasp by pleasing the victims biggest desire only to destroy all that makes him what he is.
Also:
A woman with an unbearable, shrewish, pain in the ass nature. In other words, a bitch or a harridan, especially a somewhat unappealing one.
In her book The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo suggests that women who fly offer a model of deviance that constitutes a potentially transgressive "grotesque" performance. She is particularly interested in female circus performers, acrobats and pilots, whose activities transcend the imagined limits of the female body and mind.
Russo wonders if "instances of aerial leaps and falls may suggest an alternative to the notion of liberation as upward mobility and flight forward," while simultaneously warning that "they end badly" (30). The woman who performs daring stunts, who throws herself off the edges of things and defies gravity, will often crash back down to earth.
I like the idea that stunts and falling are a function of agency, rather than a sign of its failure. As Russo points out, "freedom is often uncritically conceived as limitless space, transcendence, newness, individualism, and upward mobility of various kinds" (50). In contrast, falling involves "a reversal of the usual metaphors." It is downward mobility - a rough, even deadly encounter with limits and universals. Yet it results from attempts to go beyond safe zones, to risk unsanctioned moves and try new shapes. I fancy it is this spirit that infects the winged grotesques, with their ridiculous and impossible bodies.
Perhaps not such a bad thing, then, to be a harpy.
Although eating someone's parrot is going too far. Don't do it, ladies.
Hello strangers. I've been obsessing over this music video for a while now, and thought it worth mentioning here.
(Warning: NSFW)
There are just so many things going on.
The video has an arresting Twin Peaks vibe, with the menacing father figure, the forest and the childlike-but-not-really young woman. The gestures towards Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel really build the sense of threatened innocence, while also shifting the scenario further into the realms of the surreal and fantastic.
For me the switching of the young woman with other, older figures evokes Mikhail Bakhtin's "hags" - the most well known example of his concept of the female grotesque:
"In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body" (Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984, pp.25-6).
The passage doesn't entirely suit the video, but those manic faces (and the dead/living girl) keep reminding me of his argument here. Whatever you think of Bakhtin and his opinions, he knows how to generate a strong image.
All that said, it stupidly took me a few more views to realise why this video grabbed me so firmly. The more I watch, the more it reminds me of one of my favourite thrillers: Don't Look Now (1973). There are some very explicit references to the film in the music video, explicit enough for me to think it is a deliberate homage.
If you haven't seen it, and you enjoy Gothic mysteries and Donald Sutherland, I highly recommend this film. (Yes, there is a famously graphic love scene that pops up - so to speak - in the middle of the story, but we can fast-forward that, can't we? Or not, I'm not judging you.)
The trailer isn't super great, but at least it doesn't give the whole thing away like most do these days. (If you are interested in watching Don't Look Now, I would suggest NOT reading reviews/comments or Googling it - once spoiled can never be unspoiled!)
Finally, the scene with the grasping hands reminded me of a much more recent video; one with rather different, yet equally Gothic, connotations. In Dev's 'In the Dark' the red hands, with their suggestions of sexuality and violence, are replaced by black hands:
Some eerie imagery in this one. The play on exoticism, monstrosity, blackness and whiteness is all a bit unsettling, especially when the white singer is walking through a sea of raised black hands (claws/paws?).
Interesting. Disturbing. I guess that's what they were going for?
I'm really only blogging on weekends now (weak - I know), but when I heard that the Rapture is happening tomorrow I figured I should post a bit earlier. There are also unconfirmed reports of a zombie apocalypse, but I don't want to get my hopes up.
If there is some kind of divine or supernatural event, I doubt it will effect Perth. We seem to live in a self-contained biodome here. Or perhaps an alternate reality. Or maybe it's just me.
Anyway, I found an article today called The Top 7 Grotesque Girls in Gaming on the now dormant Gamer Girl website. Quite a mixture of ladies are featured on this list, including:
[A female Orc from WOW]
[Medusa from God of War]
[Gruntilda Winkybunion from Banjo Kazooie]
[Sheeva from Mortal Combat]
Nikole, who compiled the list, comments on how difficult it was:
"this was the hardest list I've ever attempted to write. All of these girls are villains in some way, with exception of the Horde. It was a ridiculous quest to find a female in a video games who wasn't attractive. And not just attractive, drop dead, unrealistically gorgeous. I hate to ruin a simple list like this, but why? Why are there no normal to ugly looking females, let alone fat ones. I mean I hate to break it to you people, fats real. People are bitching about how they are treated on XBL and in the gaming communities, but what about how women are portrayed in games. It's never bothered me before that women were often desirable in games, but every single one, that seems excessive to me. So I say bring on the fat people, I want to see some imperfect characters in games."
Although this article was written in 2008, her point still stands. It's a challenge to find female characters in video games who aren't attractive and/or slim.
In general terms the 'good girls = pretty/ bad girls = ugly' equation is hardly new, and continues to do its work in all forms of media. [There was that one movie where Christina Ricci had a pig-snout, but she looked kinda cute so I'm not counting it.]
[Wendy Coopa from the Mario games]
Back to the article: I'm intrigued by the use of 'grotesque' to describe female characters who are "fugly" or "crazy bitches." It seems to participate in the frequent union of grotesqueness and femaleness that Mary Russo comments on in The Female Grotesque. Whether this convergence is positive (in an emancipatory sense?) or negative (in a derogatory sense?) or something else entirely seems open to interpretation.
Some women actively seek the label grotesque. Eg: Countess Grotesque adopts the mantle of grotesqueness when presenting her eerie work:
"revolves around a cluster of issues chief among which are sexuality, death, identity, abjection, the monstrous feminine and loss. Despite the universal importance of these issues her work remains firmly grounded in the specifics of her individual experience.
Using unconventional materials such as offal and parts of dead animals she makes props which she then incorporates into video and photographic works where the body is of primary concern. Her intent is to turn the body inside out and subvert the role of the meat making it an attachment to the outer body in order to evoke feelings that something is habitual yet out of place and threatening.
Also, her aim is to create work that is simultaneously seductive and repellent and engages with the viewers desire to gain access to the subject through symbolization."
Cool hat.
The women/meat equation is not a new thing in art and academia (or popular discourse, for that matter, judging from the number of times I've read the phrase 'treated like a piece of meat') but I do find it interesting to see the different ways in which individual artists work through the idea for themselves.
The pic above reminds me of Daikichi Amano's squid pictures:
Not posting any more of those. You can go find them if you like, but I take no responsibility for trauma caused.
I suspect this post falls into the category of 'stream of consciousness' blogging, or 'things that remind you of other things that remind you of other things.'
Starting with:
A. The Single Woman.
I recently read Jill Reynolds' The Single Woman: A Discursive Investigation. It was quite interesting, although there weren't really enough (any) monsters or grotesques in it. Which is pretty much a requirement these days.
Specifically the episode below, where the aspiring models are covered in blood for a horror themed photo shoot.
And all of the above surged into my head today while watching this:
F. Agatha Christie's Poirot.
I caught the end of an episode, where Poirot and Hastings are discussing the successful resolution of a case. The mystery was solved when Poirot revealed that two characters, the dowdy nurse and the stunning blond, were in fact the same person.
Hastings is deeply disconcerted. If a beautiful woman can make herself look drab, surely a drab woman could make herself look beautiful? Think of the ramifications! Poirot replies that this realisation is "the beginning of wisdom."
If you were to Google image search vagina dentata (and I'm not suggesting you should, so don't blame me) you would find this pic making a regular appearance:
I can't think why. It is the Sarlacc pit from Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. I, for one, am very impressed by George Lucas' creativity in this scene.
Always interesting to observe the grotesquification of the female anatomy in pop culture. This particular incarnation seems to give the woman involved a fair bit of power in relation to the predatory males she inevitably encounters.
I don't have very high expectations of our newspapers here in Perth. Even less the 'health and beauty' style articles, which inevitably revolve around what products I am required to purchase in order to fight off the daily scourge of pimples/age/hair/life in general.
But this made me choke on my bran flakes.
That's right. Not only does disgusting fat coat the outside of women's bodies, it fills us up from the inside as well. Secretly. Insidiously. Internally.
Even skinny girls are fat; are literally made of fat. Women are so gross.
I had to laugh at the juxtaposition of these pages.
Paging Dr Hypocrite!
And there is more, since we are on the subject. All in the same 'body and soul' lift-out.
Mind, body, face. Even our ears are grotesque. Ritual cleansing time!
[A female Orc from WOW]
[Medusa from God of War]
[Gruntilda Winkybunion from Banjo Kazooie]
[Sheeva from Mortal Combat]
[Wendy Coopa from the Mario games]
