Earthlings Welcome Here

Episode 2.13 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (SCC)

Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá.
Script by Natalie Chaidez
60 minutes 2008

Lena Headey plays Sarah Connor
Dinah Lenney plays Eileen/Alan Park

Country of finance: USA
Nationality of director: USA
Location of story: USA
Filming location: USA

Synopsis

Sarah, chasing the image of three dots, goes to a UFO convention where she hears about a blogger, Abraham, who has written of the three dots.  She is approached by Eileen who says that she knows about Abraham.  Her trailer contains maps of sighting of Abraham and of UFOs.   At a restaurant, Sarah follows Eileen into the ladies room and demands that she must meet Abraham.  Eileen takes off her wig and confesses that she is Abraham.  Her real name is Alan Park, and as an MIT graduate was employed on a secret project with an unknown metal.  Park fearing for his life went into hiding and disguised as a woman so as not to be recognized.  Park never knew where he worked for he taken there each day in a closed van.  Sarah takes Park to a regression therapist to go over memories of noises etc.  She records the session, and although an assassin kills both Park and the therapist, Sarah is able to deduce the location of the plant.

Who are they?

This is the only episode of SCC directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá.  He has directed episodes for a lot of television serials.

Natalie Chaidez wrote 30 SCC episodes.

Dinah Lenney is in only this episode of SCC but is a regular as Nurse Shirley in ER, and has played small parts in many television series, almost all female parts.

Conclusion

A cross-dressing drama for the cis-gendered.   Passing in gender role creates problems of its own, extra problems that a person hiding from bad guys does not need.  How did Eileen rent a car without a drivers license in her female name?  The script avoids these problems.

• Antonio Cuomo.  “The Sarah Connor Chronicles - St. 2, ep. 13: Earthlings Welcome Here: Recensione dell'episodio Abraham”.  Movieplayer.it. www.movieplayer.it/articoli/05229/the-sarah-connor-chronicles-st-2-ep-13-earthlings-welcome-here/

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20

This, probably the best known of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is central to discussions of homosexuality in Shakespeare.  It is possibly addressed to a cross-dressed young man, or at least a young man with androgynous beauty.

'A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prickt thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.'   

Proposed identifications of the young ‘master-mistress’ include Willie Hughes and Henry Wriothesley, to both of whom we will return.

• “Sonnet 20”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_20

Wanda Koolmatrie (1949 - ) writer.

Koolmatrie, an aboriginal Australian, was born to the Pitjantjatjara people but taken from her mother in 1950 and raised by white foster parents. She finally expressed herself in an aboriginal acting troop. Her 1994 autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, won the $5,000 Dobbie award for women’s life writing.

When she proposed a sequel to the book in 1997, the publisher insisted on meeting her, and it came out that she is the female persona of Leon Carmen (1950 - ) and John Bayley, two white men with a grudge that white men cannot get published. Carmen admitted that he had not ever met an aboriginal woman.

• Wanda Koolmatrie. My Own Sweet Time. Broome WA: Magabala Books 1994.
• John Bayley. Daylight Corroboree: a first-hand account of the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax. Eidolon Press 2004.
• “Wanda Koolmatrie”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Koolmatrie.

Hot Peaches

Here is a video retrospective of the Hot Peaches.

Many persons of interest passed through Hot Peaches, including Marsha P Johnson, Bette Bourne, International Chrysis, Hapi Phace and so on.

Fellini’s La dolce vita

Directed by Federico Fellini.

Script by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi & Pier Paolo Pasolini (uncredited)
174 minutes 1960

Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini
Anita Ekberg plays Sylvia
Anouk Aimee plays Maddalena
Alain Cuny plays Steiner
Annibale Nichi plays Marcello’s father
Walter Santesso plays Paparazzo
Nico plays herself
Dominot and Carlo Musto play transvestites

Country of finance: Italy/France
Nationality of director: Italy
Location of story: Rome
Filming location: Rome & Cinecittà

Synopsis

Marcello is a hack journalist chasing celebrities, religious stories and the local aristocracy.  He encounters Steiner, an established writer with a loving wife and children, and an attractive apartment, all that Marcello aspires to.  Later Steiner kills his children and commits suicide.  

Who are they?

Marcello Mastroianni (1924 – 1996) acted in 143 films.  La Dolce Vita made him famous.  He was married to Flora Carabella from 1948 until his death.  He famously had an affair and a daughter with Catherine Deneuve.  He died of pancreatic cancer.  It is also rumoured that he was the young boyfriend of Giovanni Montini (1867 – 1978) whose stage name was Pope Paul VI.

Nico (Christa Päffgen 1938 – 1988), related to the Päffgen brewery in Cologne, went on to appear in the Morrisey-Warhol film Chelsea Girls and to sing with The Velvet Underground.  She died aged 40 after a minor heart attack while cycling.

Dominot continued as a female impersonator and performer and has his own club in Rome.

Carlo Musto is otherwise unknown.

Steiner was based on the novelist Cesare Pavese(1908 – 1950) an anti-fascist and award-winning novelist who committed suicide.  Co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli had gone to school with Pavese and felt that he had become burnt out.

Religious aspects

The film divides into seven episodes, which reflects the seven hills of Rome, the seven sins, seven sacraments, seven days of creation etc.  See the Wikipedia article for details.

The film opens with a parousia, an arrival of Jesus as a statue carried by a helicopter.  It ends with a parousia of the sea monster that can still look at you after being dead for three days (the fish symbolism of Jesus is hinted at here).  Both the opening and the ending have a non-communication because of distance or of noise.   Thus like Mark’s gospel the end reflects the beginning.  Click here for an essay by David Ulansey comparing the beginning and end of Mark’s gospel.

The centre of Mark’s gospel is the transfiguration where Jesus goes up a mountain to gain an epiphany.  At the centre of La Dolce Vita Marcello goes up to Steiner’s apartment and finds that what he believed in does not exist.  Steiner says: "Sometimes at night the darkness and silence frightens me. Peace frightens me. I feel it's only a facade, hiding the face of hell".

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano condemned the film as a parody of Jesus’ second coming.  The film was banned in Catholic Spain until 1981 after the death of Franco.   The Vatican also disliked the film for its portrayal of Rome’s aristocracy which of course is very dynastically intertwined with the Church hierarchy.

The trans bits

The famous sequence of bathing in the fountain was suggested by Giò Stajano (who became Maria in 1983) who had himself done the fountain thing, and had written novels about the café society scene in Rome, of which La Dolce Vita can be seen as a sequel.  His novels, of course, have a lot more gay characters.

When Marcello’s father visits and they go to a nightclub, he tells of his visit to Paris where he saw a stripper who revealed herself to be a man.  Probably he had been to Le Carousel, but it is not named.

In the last party scene, optimistically called an ‘orgy’ in some accounts, there are suddenly two young men who change upstairs, come down in drag and do a dance routine.  The others refer to them with male pronouns.  IMDB lists three transvestites:  Domino, Carlo Musto and Antonio Jacono (uncredited).  Close watching of the film fails to reveal a third transvestic character, but the mystery is resolved when one discovers that Domino’s birth name was Antonio Iacono.

Sexual politics

La Dolce Vita was made between two great scandals.  The heterosexual  Montesi Affair of 1953 began with a dead young woman washed up on a beach near Ostia (a second hint from the sea monster at the end of the film) and expanded into police and political cover-ups and tales of drugs and orgies.  The gay Ballete Verdi scandal, 1960 came right after La Dolce Vita opened, and unlike the Montesi Affair included no murder, but like it expanded to include celebrities.

• “La Dolce Vita”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita
• Philip French.  “Italian cinema’s sweet success”.  The Observer.  17 Feb 2008.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/feb/17/features.worldcinema.
• Darwin porter & Danforth Prince.  Hollywood Babylon: It’s Back!.    Blood Moon Productions, Ltd. 2008: 161.

Barbarian Venus by Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879 –1940) painted this in 1921.

Lanier Graham says:

Barbarian's Venus by Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most "barbaric" Androgyne images of the era.  She is a Venus with a penis. Klee was not a member of the Surrealist circle, but sometimes exhibited with them. He was associated with Kandinsky and Marc in Munich in 1911 and 1912, then took from Cubism and Orphism the concept of fluctuating planes. Klee was thought by some to be an Alchemist when he discussed the Absolute, Nothingness, and the Ground of Being. His students at the Bauhaus (only half in jest) called him "Heavenly Father." He was one of the first modern artists to explore Androgyny in tribal art. 

The painting is owned by The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, but is not currently on view.  They describe the painting:

This androgynous Venus, with her direct gaze confronting and challenging the viewer, displays both female and male organs, thereby engaging us by flaunting her dual and "barbaric" sexuality.

• Lanier Graham.  “Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context”.  Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.  January 2002.  www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/articles/graham/graham5.html 
• www.nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_title.php?id=P.1953.062

Elémire Zolla’s The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female

Elémire Zolla (1926 – 2002) was born in Turin to an Italian-French father who was a painter and an English mother who was a musician. He was raised in Paris and London, but then settled in Italy.

In 1956 he won the Strega Prize for his first novel, Minuetto all'inferno. He married a poet, Maria Spaziani, 1958, but they were divorced in 1960. From 1966 to 1978 he was Secretary of the Istituto Accademico di Roma and from 1970 to 1973 Director of the Istituto Ticinesi di Alti Studi in Lugano. In 1970 he wrote an introduction to the Italian version of Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. He was the long time director and editor of Conoscenza Religiosa, a leading Italian journal in religious studies. He taught Anglo-American and comparative literature at La Sapienza University in Rome and at the University of Genoa.

The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female, which was published first in English and only later in Italian, is an intriguing book that covers many of the aspects of the Androgyne in myth, but also features some items that readers may be puzzled about, such as decapitation and plunging into water.

Zolla proposes two paradigms of androgyny:
(1)
a) Suitors are slighted or a goddess is offended or mating is hindered, the hidden meaning possibly being that an esoteric use is made of sex;
b) A plunge is taken into transforming waters. Or contact is made with serpents. The currents of subtle inner energy may be alluded to in either case;
c) There follows a succession of switches in sex; one's self-reflection pivots on its axis of symmetry. In Tantric sex the two opposite currents are usually stimulated in turn;
d) The consequence is a loss of sight leading to the acquisition of spiritual or prophetic insight, or the granting of the gift of music, the mastery of rhythms. In the Narcissus myth the explicit discovery of the self-delusive quality of maya takes the place of the loss of sight. Tales such as Hermaphroditus, Teiresius and Narada fit into this paradigm, as does the Genesis tale of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, and the Buddhist tale where a chaste youth closes his ears to a woman's entreaties and she has him blinded out of spite.

(2)
a) A cosmic cavern or tree or anthill;
b) inside is concealed the androgyne, the Primal God, or the God who assumes the sex opposite to that of the worshipper;
c) violence of love blinds, bisects or beheads the androgyne;
d) The severed head or lost eyesight becomes a cause of trouble; a sacrifice has to be made;
e) Balance is restored, the androgyne made whole once more, the land healed.

His other books are: The Eclipse of the Intellectual, 1968. The writer and the shaman; a morphology of the American Indian, 1973. Archetypes: The Persistence of Unifying Patterns, 1981.

• Elémire Zolla. The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female. The illustrated library of sacred imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1981. London: Thames and Hudson, 96 pp 130 illustrations 1981. L'androgino: l'umana nostalgia dell'interezza. Arte e immaginazione, 8. Como: red edizioni, 1989.
• “Elémire Zolla”. Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera. it.wikipedia.org/wiki/El%C3%A9mire_Zolla.
• www.elemirezolla.org.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The application of any of this to real-life trans persons is not at all obvious; nor if this is indeed androgyny, what should a person do who wishes to be androgynous.  Nor do I perceive any system in Zolla’s archetypes of Androgyny.  Surely by emphasizing different myths of androgyny, one could arrive at different archetypes. 

Unlike Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade, Zolla’s approach is neither that of a scientist nor of a mythographer, but that of an artist.  You relate to his presentation or you do not.  But there is no dialectic or doxy that will accept or reject it.

Madame X

This photograph is online at: http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=8&FP=46801092&E=2K1KTS6URHS5K&SID=2K1KTS6URHS5K&New=T&Pic=2&SubE=2C6NU0CVNJC3

It is exhibited at Toulouse, musée d'Art moderne et contemporain, les Abattoirs.

The author is Joël-Peter Witkin (1939 – ).

Title: Madame X.

While, of course it is a riff on the Venus de Milo, I think that it captures well the ambivalence of the male gaze with regard to androgyny.  The fact that it is a modified photograph, and thus more ‘realistic’ than a statue, that it combines ‘hermaphrodite’ in the art sense with body mutilation that accidentally happened to Greek and Roman statues over 2,000 years.   Wasn’t it the 1953 Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz with Marlon Brando, that featured armless statues of the Venus de Milo type as if the Romans actually created them like that?

The films of Candy Darling

See the biographical entry on Candy.

 

 

Flesh 1968 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women in Revolt 1972

There are no clips online from Women in Revolt.

 

Ricardo Parker (1867 - ?) emigrant.

The tale goes thus:

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette, on route from Britain to Australia, stopped for supplies in Madeira on June 2nd. Whilst there, Otilia Ribeiro, an orphaned flower seller, tried to sneak on board with the intention of getting to Australia. This resulted in Richard Parker, the junior member of the crew, hitting her on the head with a boat hook, and the captain rescuing her from drowning. The captain, Tom Dudley, refused her passage, but gave her a contact address in Sidney.

It was just as well for Otilia that she did not secure passage on the Mignonette, for on July 5th, in the south Atlantic, it sank in a storm. The crew members escaped in its dingy, and survived for twenty-four days before being picked up by a ship, only because they killed and ate Richard Parker.

Two of the others were put on trial, Regina v Dudley and Stephens, as an example, found guilty and sentenced to death, and then granted a royal pardon because of the extenuating circumstances.   This is a much cited legal precedent.

Tom Dudley then emigrated to Australia with his family to start anew, without the stigma of the conviction.   He ran a ships chandler shop in Sydney.

Otilia, calling herself Ricardo Parker, and as a man, travelled via Luanda and Goa and turned up in Sydney in 1887 to visit Tom Dudley. She and Dudley had an affair and an adventure on a Barrier Reef island.   Donald McCormick admits that this last part is “imaginative reconstruction”.

Dudley died of the plague in 1900.  

A co-incidence that was noticed at the time is that Richard Parker is also the name of the castaway sailor who is selected by lot to be eaten in Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which had been published in 1838.  This became known again in 1974 when Arthur Koestler ran a competition in The Sunday Times to find the most striking co-incidence, and the two Richard Parkers, suggested by a relative of the historical one, were declared the winner.

A great story.  The sinking of the Mignonette, the cannibalism, the trial and the co-incidence of the name are all true.  The major problem is that the only source of the Ribeiro/Parker thread is McCormick’s book.  He cites no sources, and in the early 1980s when Simpson asked about sources, he could not produce one.  However he did write to The Sydney Morning Herald in July 1961 seeking information about Ribeiro/Parker in Australia. 

We have met Donald McCormick before.  He cited (or is that invented) a reference in The Ochrana Gazette that identified Vassily Konovalov (otherwise known as Alexei Pedachenko) as Jack the Ripper.

Paul Metcalf later retold the tale as his own.

• Donald McCormick.  Letter to The Sydney Morning Herald.  July 25, 1961.  http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19610725&id=c1oVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=--UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4119,5784254
• Donald McCormick.  Blood on the Sea.  London: Miller 1962.
• Leicester Cotton. “Cannibal in Sydney”.  The Sydney Morning Herald.  Sept 29, 1962.  http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19620929&id=6VoVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EeYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4428,8489711
• W. Brian Simpson. Cannibalism and the Common Law: the Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise. The University of Chicago Press. 1984: 44,144, 292-4.
• Paul C. Metcalf. Collected Works. Minneapolis, Minn: Coffee House Press, 1996: Volume II: 284-8, 299-312.