Nigerian Prince
I’m still pretty sad. I’m doing different things than previous weeks. Maybe it will have different outcomes. Or maybe nothing will ever change.
Shanda has been injured, which always makes things harder. There are more chores and more care and more accommodation, and less support while it happens. Someday maybe I’ll be human enough to have alternatives, but I haven’t worked that out yet.
I presented a project idea to my boss this week. Something to keep me entertained and to claim as my status item, and that I can attach my name to for extra political credit. Something to sooth their anxiety about managing me. They liked the idea and agreed it was important and then suggested handing it off to someone else. It’s like they saw me as a woman or something. I think they’re feeling time pressure about an unrelated thing and are afraid to lose my capacity 1Or maybe my longer hair after my leave reads femme. You never know.. I’m fine doing their project first, but I’d rather they didn’t give mine away just because they’re busy being afraid on behalf of some rich dude.
We watched Coming to America (1988) in preparation for watching Coming 2 America (2021). Which I think is worth the extra 90 minutes if you can spare them; the second movie stands alone but it’s better in context, and the first one stands up fairly well for 80s content.
The first movie has a large model forest, very good costumes, live baby elephants, and I think more black people than worked in all other films between the first and second one. I don’t just mean it’s almost all black actors, I mean there are a lot of people in the movie. Lots of costumed extras, lots of big names, lots of non-actor performers, lots of above-the-line staffing. I assume that’s a big part of what keeps the old film from being quite so terrible decades later.
The first film has solid plotting and a somewhat fantastical story. Murphy is charming while he sells a very male-centric take on feminism, and the story genuinely supports his world view so it’s easy to buy. It doesn’t quite live up to its own standards on being progressive, but that’s hardly a surprise from a studio film.
The second film is somewhere between Blues Brothers 2000 and Romeo + Juliet – it’s a musical stage show with lots of nostalgia and some younger big names, but set in a Baz Luhrmann hyper-real story. It’s serious enough to be emotional, but also almost a cartoon when it comes to plot points.
It’s mostly good fun. It’s got better and more dancing and non-acting performances than the first one. It got such good hair. The first film looked like they couldn’t do hair for anyone. This one has runway hair for the leads and plenty of extras with good hair.
But it also has a story based around male-rape as comedy. The victim is not only held responsible for their own assault by everyone in the film, including the friend who intentionally facilitated this rape – but he is asked to justify his monogamy to his now wife, about his rape in the weeks before they met. The film doesn’t dwell here, but this ret-con plot point is added like it’s a funny joke, and is played repeatedly as a plot point.
It’s somehow less feminist than the one made in the 80s, and less class aware too, despite both of those being a larger part of the text of the movie. It’s like someone was told the themes of the first movie and just had the characters say dialog about them instead of incorporating them into the story. There’s less subtext available in the high-energy world of the second film, but it’s also less carefully used.
The second film scores much higher on queer vibes. There are obvious issues with the first one – Hall dresses femme, flirts with masc self, is disgusted by femme self, femme persona credited as “Very Ugly Woman”. This one isn’t perfect, but there’s space in the world for queerness – there’s literally space for queerness in some of the costumes – and it’s easy to read the oldest daughter as queer. The text doesn’t reflect any of that though, so I’d credit it to production, not writing.
If you’re not from the 1900s there’s nothing here you need to see in the first one. It was very popular – Murphy was very popular – so it has cultural relevance and is funny. But it’s not important. The second one stands alone or as a sequel, and I really like some of the performances and visuals in it. But it’s built from nostalgia and doesn’t offer much more than spectacle.
So don’t, unless you want to think about how racist movie production is. Or at least put it in the same slot in your list as Blues Brothers or Austin Powers.
My new therapist is not terrible yet. Which doesn’t seem like a high bar, but my experience is that most people have clearly expressed some limit in their willingness or capacity to pay attention to me by now. So that’s encouraging. We’re still mostly doing backstory though, so we’ll have to see how real work goes.
This time through my backstory I’m trying to come up with some narrative that explains how my life worked between ages 7 and like 13. There are facts about that time I could recite, but not a lot of story.
One piece I can feel spanning that time is repeated disappointment in myself for being non-human. All the milestones that lead to me getting (even) less support or attention didn’t apply to Alex. That was hard but I cooked up excuses for it. It hit different when Ben was passed those same milestones too, without any change to their support. It proved there was something different about me in particular, because other people got different protections and responsibilities. Beyond the rejection it meant I was in charge of many things the Kids couldn’t safely do – things that were often also not safe for me – but that I had been doing for years and was required to manage for myself and the Kids. That eventually lead to a lot of resentment, on top of the isolation and neglect, which I still burn off in large quantities today.
I’ll have to poke around and see if I can gather any other threads. It would be useful to have more accessible memory of that period. Somewhere in there I more or less ended my sexual and physical abuse. I have a feeling about using disgust and intimidation respectively to make that change, but I don’t really have a story to attach to it. Somewhere in there I was a child seperate from PIC, but I don’t have access to any memory of that person.
So thar should be fun, prodding about in some ferral 6-year-old’s emotional wounds and long-abandoned identity. I’m sure my depression will appreciate that sort of stress.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
Stars for Later
| ↑1 | Or maybe my longer hair after my leave reads femme. You never know. |
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