Oh, Rocky!

Having been a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) for more than 20 years, I was rather looking forward to watching the remake, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (2016). This was especially the case when I read that Laverne Cox was playing Dr. Frank N. Furter. But I was also a little sceptical, as I’m so attached to Tim Curry’s portrayal.

Sadly, the reboot was a disappointment. While the music remains faithful to the original score, fairly successfully delivering those familiar songs, the rest kind of falls flat. The dark, campy flavour of the original film has been erased, giving the viewer a much more stylized movie that seems heavily produced. More so, the sexuality—so crucial to the original film—is largely absent from this reboot. Laverne Cox looks great, she shows that her voice has fantastic range, and she delivers humour and trademark villainous expressions, but she isn’t seductive. And to play Frank N. Furter without oozing sexuality is to miss the essence of the character.

Where is the leching at Rocky when we are first introduced to the scientist’s creation? What happened to the flirtation with Janet? Where is the brazen attraction to Brad? And what about the power Frank has over Columbia?

 

It’s all lacking in 2016 Frank N. Furter. Further, the creepy hints at incest between Riff Raff and Magenta are absent. Since Fox decided to show the film at the family-friendly hour of 8 PM when it premiered on October 20, this could reflect a directorial decision to tone it down for a younger audience. After all, even the killing of Eddie is less gory than in the original film. And the lack of sexual chemistry is not unique to Dr. Frank N. Furter. When Janet sings “Touch-a Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” to Rocky, the scene is comparatively tame as well.

It takes more than putting two attractive people in front of a camera. But this seems to have been lost on the director. Basically, none of the pairings in this film evince sexual chemistry, and without this, the remake of what is undeniably a bawdy film cannot help but fail.

Most catastrophic, in my opinion, is the crucial moment in the plot, when Frank goes to both Janet and Brad in the night, pretending to be each of them, respectively, to seduce them. 

This epitomizes the hedonistic lifestyle that Frank leads, and is punished for, and awakens the sexuality of the square protagonists. And yet, how these encounters play out doesn’t compare to the original.

The sexual acts are replaced with spanking, and while a little BDSM wouldn’t be out of place in this scenario, that isn’t what’s going on. It feels more like naughty humour than sex.

Something else that didn’t sit well with me was Laverne Cox’s performance of the song “Sweet Transvestite”. This is the song that introduces Frank N. Furter to both the viewer and Brad and Janet, but the dramatic entrance that the character makes in the original film is missing here, where Frank enters the room dancing on a platform attached to a crane. What is disconcerting about this scene is that a transgender actress is singing about being a man dressed in women’s clothes. If Laverne Cox herself sees nothing wrong with it, I’m no one to say she’s wrong. But it does seem like it could send a negative message about trans women.

This film could have been a lovely homage to the original if it had used a little creativity to modernize the costumes and setting while maintaining the edginess and lasciviousness of the original, instead of this overproduced, subdued spectacle. It’s worth a watch if you want to feel nostalgic for the original, but you won’t be doing the Time Warp again and again with this new cast.

The Goan Aunty

(Image courtesy Angela Ferrao)

Many of us are likely familiar with the videos and audio recordings that circulate from time to time of some “Goan Aunty” regaling her audience with rantings of the mundane in an exaggerated accent. Indeed, the Goan Aunty trope is so common that most of us probably have a giggle without paying much attention to the message under the surface of these silly portrayals. After all, who doesn’t enjoy hearing that characteristic “Wot, men” that signals the voice of the Goan Catholic? But recently, some videos have been making the rounds on WhatsApp that made me pay closer attention. The character, simply referring to herself on YouTube as “Goan Aunty”*, almost defies description. She is inarticulate and obnoxious. Nothing in these videos is either funny or reminiscent of the Goan women I’ve met in my life. I’m all for self-deprecating humour, and I appreciate one’s ability to laugh at oneself, but this mockery purporting to be comedy is simply insulting. Discussions of the Catholic stereotype are not new (see, e.g., Paromita Vohra’s short film Where’s Sandra), but perhaps the larger subject of the Goan Catholic woman deserves more attention.

My ire was actually ignited several months ago, when I was looking for articles about Braz and Yvonne Gonsalves. Braz is a well-respected musical legend, so one can easily find news content devoted to him. His wife Yvonne is also a brilliant performer, who continues to sing with various ensembles in Goa. I heard her live for the first time a couple of years ago in Saligao and was enchanted by the tone of her voice. But you won’t find a single article about her. Instead, what you will find are brief mentions of her as the doting wife in the articles about her husband. It was, in fact, a Goa Streets article from 2015 that incensed me. In the paragraph devoted to acknowledging the musical talents of the Gonsalves family, Yvonne is not mentioned at all. When her name does come up, it is to emphasize her support for her husband:

Braz’s wife Yvonne keeps a neat file of magazine and newspaper clippings documenting her husband’s life work. She speaks approvingly of the “hotels and night clubs (in India) that supported jazz music.”

A more recent search retrieved more of the same from an article published in The Times of India in 2011. Braz Gonsalves’ performance at Kala Academy in Panjim is described with the following passing mention of Yvonne:

Gonsalves’ wife Yvonne didn’t let a fracture [an audience member heckling Louiz Banks] dampen the spirit. She walked with support and belted out a jazz gospel hit, before the musicians took over with ‘Culture Shock’, ‘Sweet Shakti’ and ‘Enchantment’. (Emphasis mine)

These descriptions of Yvonne Gonsalves as the devoted wife, disregarding her status as an accomplished musician, exemplify what Fátima da Silva Gracias wrote in the Introduction to her book, The Many Faces of Sundorem (2007): “Generally, whenever women are mentioned in the Indo-Portuguese Historical literature it is usually in the traditional and subordinate role of a daughter, wife, mother, mistress or dancer.” She was referring to the past, but what has changed in recent times? 

(Lorna performing in Bombay in 2013: Photo mine)

How many times have you heard a Goan man talk about the legendary Lorna Cordeiro and say, “She would have been nothing without Chris Perry”?

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard this, and it has come from both diehard Lorna fans and guys who aren’t that into Konkani music. So, even some who hold the Goan Nightingale in high esteem can’t find it within themselves to simply acknowledge her talent. They must give Perry—a man—not just credit for discovering her and helping her find her musical niche but all the credit for who she became.

But interestingly, I hear very few people reflect on Lorna in her younger days.

The one exception that comes to mind is in Jason Keith Fernandes’ review of the film Nachom ia Kumpasar (2015), where he describes Lorna as follows:

Lorna is an icon of Goan culture not merely for the songs she gave, and continues to give, life to, but for the kind of sexuality that she embodies. Her voice does not contain the sickly saccharine and shrill sweetness that marks so much of Hindi film music and embodies virginal, self-effacing purity. Her voice is an earthy one that can roar if there be need for it. The woman that her voice gives life to is conscious of her sexuality and vocal about her desires.

By contrast, the discussions to which I am accustomed to hearing about Lorna the woman tend to focus on her alleged drinking and her appearance today. As for the former, for the sake of argument, if one wishes to credit Chris Perry for everything else related to Lorna, why not also for breaking her heart? After all, substance use (and abuse) is often used as a means for coping with pain. As for the comments one hears regarding her physical appearance, it is as if she deserves to be punished for aging.

  (No matter her age, Lorna’s still got it! Photo mine)

This ridicule of the aging Goan woman brings us back to the image of the Goan Aunty. You know her: She’s the one with the enormous boobs and bum, who nags and talks any rubbish in her quaint, provincial accent, often uttered in a shrill voice.

YouTube sensation Aunty Maggy offers an example of this, complete with padding to amplify her breasts, stomach, hips, and rear, and a somewhat discordant voice.

Significantly, when I decided to write this piece, I typed “Goan Aunty” into Google’s search field, and was shocked to see that most of what the search engine retrieved were links to what appeared to be pornography. A similar search on YouTube generated the same results. From this, I can only assume that when the Goan Aunty isn’t being derided, she’s being fetishized.

On that note, why is it that Mario Miranda’s cartoons have mostly escaped criticism for their depiction of women?

While I’m a fan of his work, some of it makes me uncomfortable. He undeniably started a trend among Goan artists of exaggerating the assets of the Goan woman to sexualize the young and poke fun at the old. One piece that I find particularly disturbing is Cool Jazz, where the bass player is groping the singer with his right hand, instead of plucking the strings of his bass, and the saxophone player is blowing up her skirt.

In addition to depicting this woman’s sexual assault, it reinforces the aforementioned examples of the woman being placed in a subordinate position to the man. Mario Miranda certainly devoted space to both men and women in his art. But similar to a surface-level viewing of the Goan Aunty parodies, when one probes a little deeper into Cool Jazz specifically, the question arises as to what exactly is going on. A band is a collective of artists who play, and sometimes also write, music together. They’re colleagues and collaborators. So, to see the singer—the individual fronting the band—objectified by her own band-mates is shocking. What is a musical group without a good singer? So, one expects the musicians to have some respect for their singer. This image, however, shows utter disrespect for the only woman in the illustration.

I see a similar lack of respect for women in the trope of the Goan Aunty. When I think of a Goan aunty, I picture a proud, well-turned out lady in her dress at church. I picture an assertive woman who confidently shares her opinions in mixed-gender conversations. I picture a woman who likes to sing and dance and enjoy life.

(Still from Nachom-ia Kumpasar)

(Image courtesy Angela Ferrao)

I picture the woman who taught me to cook dishes like pulao and pork vindalho, passing on the tradition of delighting the family’s senses with lovingly prepared food.

The Goan woman is more than a caricature. It’s time she got her due.

________
* The "Goan Aunty" on YouTube now goes by the name Succorine Bai.

(Revised versions of this piece have appeared in The Goan Review, vol. 28, no. 1 [Jan–Mar 2017] and The Joao Roque Literary Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 [https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/the-goan-aunty-by-christine-russon])

Masculinity revisited

Some of you may recall my previous piece asking who gets to define masculinity, in which I argued that men who do not necessarily live up to Western standards of macho-ness are just as “manly” and physically attractive as their more conventionally masculine counterparts. As someone who opposes patriarchy, I find the rigid standards it imposes on all of us abhorrent, but for now, I want to discuss a particular way in which this system harms cisgender men. It is because of patriarchy that men are taught that they shouldn’t express emotion, that they should be hypersexual beings who objectify others, that they should dominate others, that they should assert their physical strength rather than their strength of character… and the list can go on forever.

But the horrific definition of manliness that patriarchy imposes goes much deeper. It seems to me that patriarchy upholds white masculinity as an ideal. That is one reason why, for example, Black and Latino men are fetishized, and Asian men are regarded as androgynous or asexual.

Consider the character of Raj Koothrappali on The Big Bang Theory.

Kunal Nayyar is, in my opinion, the best looking actor on the show—I’d go so far as to argue that he is the only attractive actor on the show—but his character has consistently been stereotyped and desexualized. For several seasons, he was incapable of speaking if a woman was even in the room, unless he consumed alcohol. 

In addition, there have been homophobic jokes throughout the series about his close friendship with Howard Wolowitz and his comfort with his female friends.

After Raj finally got a girlfriend, Emily, I have very few recollections of them being shown together in an affectionate or sexual manner. What I do remember are the following two instances of Raj being shown in a post-coital scenario: (a) when he wakes up next to an obese woman after a drunken night and (b) when he wakes up next to Penny, again after a night of heavy drinking, and he admits that they didn’t have sex because he ejaculated prematurely.

Anyone who has watched the show over the years might recall that many female characters have said that they find Raj physically attractive, including Howard’s wife Bernadette; yet the message from the writers contradicts this. Basically, more than making Raj an asexual character, the writers seem to have gone out of their way to mock any insinuation that Raj might be a virile heterosexual man. Meanwhile, Leonard and Howard have consistently been shown in the opposite light—often being depicted as oversexed. As the writers of the show are overwhelmingly male, one cannot argue that it is women imposing such ideas about masculinity on men; it is a patriarchal mindset that first and foremost influences how men view masculinity.

Sticking with the sitcom theme, consider the short-lived series Selfie.

This show was entertaining, and it was an important series because it featured an Asian actor as the romantic lead—something that remains unfamiliar on American TV. John Cho, known primarily for his roles in the Harold and Kumar movies and the contemporary Star Trek films, played a charismatic, successful marketing executive.

While the show seemed to have a following on social media, ABC chose to cancel it after 13 episodes. The show was very modern, as the title suggests, the writing was good, the acting was good; so what was the problem? There was even a petition to rescue the show. Sadly, Selfie’s fans had to let go before Henry and Eliza could officially get together.

So, once again, I question what this culture values in men. In my previous post, I had said that I’d never questioned Prince’s masculinity. He was certainly a pretty man, his mannerisms were perhaps not what one usually expects of a straight, cisgender male, and his art definitely suggested that he was sensitive.

Nevertheless, his testosterone and sexual attraction to women were palpable, no matter how he looked or what he was doing. It is common to hear that he “transcended gender”. He himself professed something similar to this in the song “I Would Die 4 U”: I’m not a woman; I’m not a man; I’m something that you’ll never understand. But what does it really mean to transcend gender? In my mind, this would imply truly embodying both femininity and masculinity, to the point where people don’t want to label you male or female but accept that you are something else that encompasses both or that so defies what we think about gender norms that it seems like neither. Where Prince was concerned, there was absolute consensus that he was a man. Reinforcing his identity as a heterosexual male, his desire for women was central to his music and stage performances. Here, his sensitivity was also apparent, as even when he sang about sex, he did not objectify women. 

The song “Gett Off” immediately comes to mind. In addition to highlighting consent and body positivity, it focuses on mutual pleasure. Indeed, Prince does not merely express a desire to get off but to get someone else off as well. The song is, thus, both literally and figuratively music to a woman’s ears. This message is diametrically opposed to the patriarchal idea of focusing on catering solely to the penis.

In my opinion, his gender bending was part of his identity performance. There was something far more political going on: Prince was challenging what we think a man is supposed to be—and, importantly, he was doing it as a Black man. This is something that seems to get overlooked in much of the discussion surrounding Prince’s persona, despite the fact that his activism is well-documented. Thus, to focus solely on his defiance of gender norms would do him, and us, a great disservice. When he adopted the unpronounceable “love symbol” as his name in the 1990s, it was an act of protest against his record label.

Warner Bros owned his name, so he changed it in a defiant assertion of his autonomy in an industry that loves to make money off of art created by Black people without actually valuing their blackness (and many of the consumers of said art feel much the same way). 

He would even appear on stage with the word “slave” written on his face to reinforce the constraints imposed on him and lack of respect from his record label.

Therefore, it would be wrong to focus solely on the gender neutrality of this symbol, which he abandoned as soon as his contract was up in 2000, and overlook all that he stood for—this proudly Black, unapologetically sexual, political, and beautiful man. 

Although we must always be careful not to idolize our stars too much, for what they choose to show us is marketed for us so we keep their career afloat, Prince was different from most of the capitalists working in his field because he challenged several dominant, oppressive systems.

Every achievement of anyone who doesn’t fit into the so-called mainstream is a revolutionary act. As part of the fight against patriarchy, let us be aware of, and denounce, insidious Eurocentric notions of beauty and gender that tell racialized people they are inferior.