We all have art that we enjoy as art, but deplore as ideology. This sometimes creates a serious cognitive dissonance that I refer to as the Kipling Effect.
I cite Kipling because he’s such a clear example. He was, legitimately, a brilliant writer. He was also, observably, extra-super militarist, imperialist, and racist, by the standards of Victorian England. That’s like having pretty short hair for a Marine. That’s like being too skinny for a runway model. That’s like the other hosts of Jackass turning to you and going “Dude… poor taste.” I read his stuff and I’m constantly whipsawing back and forth between “My god, that’s gorgeous” and “You miserable prick, I’d like to punch you in your stupid fucking mustache.”
For example, “The Female of the Species” is perhaps the most eloquent and charming phrasing of “Bitches be crazy, y’know?” that I’ve ever read. His foamingly pro-military stuff was a major recruiting aid, and helped send unknown numbers of British boys to their deaths, enacting their own gender roles to the last. I am not even going to touch on “The White Man’s Burden“.
And yet “The Man Who Would Be King” is still my favorite Victorian adventure story, and I grew up on the Just So Stories like everyone else, and I can’t read “Epitaphs of the War” without choking up, and neither can you. (Incidentally, “A Dead Statesman” from that collection needs to be tattooed on Dick Cheney’s fucking forehead. Just saying.)
It’s not just Kipling, of course. It’s a million things. It’s Chasing Amy. It’s Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. It’s Eminem. It’s all of Stan Lee’s work from the 60s. Sometimes it’s even small moments, like that appalling two seconds in Casablanca where Ilsa refers to Sam, who’s twice her age, as “that boy playing the piano.”
I’m sure that a lot of you reading this know the sensation I’m talking about, where you’re bopping along enjoying the music and suddenly go “Wait… did he just say that?” or you’re happily reading and go “Ooookay, I’m just going to pretend I don’t know the broader societal context for this scene, so this book and I can still be friends.” And then you just go right on enjoying it, because it actually is good. What are some of your favorite Kipling Effect works, and what about them does it for you?
Doug S: I think Orson Scott is a bit correct about that. Many women, esp. young ones fit that pattern. Some older ones never grow out of it, just like some guys never stop considering only the physical aspects of a woman. There are a few things I think conservatism is useful for, and one of those things is telling girls the difference between Mr. Right Now and Mr. Longer Term. There’s nothing wrong with choosing Mr Right Now, but many young gals do confuse him with Mr. Right and telling guys they are imagining that and its all in… Read more »
I have a sort of reverse-expiration date for these things, where I will tolerate much more from Kipling and Tolkien than from OS Card and Craig Thompson. CS Lewis is in an uncomfortable middle range somehow. The one Kipling Effect moment that I always forget about, damn near every single time until it cues up again, is from the Beatles’ Getting Better. You know the one. I used to be cruel to my woman/ I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/ Man I was mean but I’m changing my scene/ And I’m doing the… Read more »
Not to geek out too hard (oh wait, I guess it’s too late for that…) but Doug S., you’re totally right. The southern part of Mordor, around the Sea of Nurnen, is fertile agricultural land. In RotK (book, obv.), King Elessar gifts those lands to the slaves who had worked them throughout Mordor’s rule. Originally I read that as a total slap in the face (“wow, thanks, a smoking wasteland!”), but closer examination of the Appendices made me figure out the whole “Breadbasket of Mordor” thing. …Which gives me visions of the Mordor version of a housewarming gift, and I… Read more »
Apparently, there were regions of Mordor which actually did contain plenty of fertile farmland; Frodo just wasn’t traveling through those parts of it.
Doug: In the on-going quest of finding a definitive definition of Nice Guy (TM), I want to point out that the passage you quote is, IMO, *not* Nice Guy-ish. As it looks to me, it’s a banker looking at bikers who are successful with the ladies, saying “women want dominant males; but they think Bikers are dominant, while in reality bankers LIKE ME are the *real* alpha males women should want!” The Nice Guy (TM) stance is more like a dreamy poet seeing those two other kinds of men, saying “women want dominant males; they should want sensitive little me,… Read more »
*le sigh*
I know Tolkien specifically was sculpting an anti-industrial argument of how industrialism actively destroys an environment and isn’t sustainable.
For Tolkien and probably most fantasy works I’ve read, the racism bothered me less than the classism, ‘manifest destiny,’ and concepts of property rights extending down to descendants several generations removed. Also, a bit of an odd issue with sexism, all the evil races seem to lack women (or any sort of feasibly sustainable relationship with their ecology for that matter. I know Tolkien specifically was sculpting an anti-industrial argument of how industrialism actively destroys an environment and isn’t. Still, how does Mordor feed so many freakin’orcs? Can they live on a diet of rocks and depressing allegories?) Props to… Read more »
I had forgotten about Orson Scott Card. In addition to the “Empire” series (which I haven’t actually read, and which started out as a work-for-hire for a company that wanted to make a computer game about a second American Civil War), Children of the Mind contains “physics” straight out of Mormon theology, which works to the book’s detriment because Card is a better writer than whomever it was that came up with the material in the first place. And Homebody, despite being a pretty good book otherwise, contains a textbook Nice Guy[TM] rant: Some women were drawn to a little… Read more »
@BlackHumor: You seem to assume that my fantasies are about being on the “giving” end. They…aren’t. >.> @Ella: Narnia and Archenland being all-white is explained in-canon as being the result of events in The Magician’s Nephew: Frank and Helen, the first humans to make Narnia their home, were white. It specifically says that their descendants rule in both Narnia and Archenland. Also, considering that the Telmarines came from a portal on a desert island, it’s not too far-fetched to consider that some of the Calormenes may also have come from somewhere else. The Tisroc himself would still be of Archenlander… Read more »
Lytton Strachey,
I really enjoy ‘Eminent Victorians’, especially the essay of cardinal Manning. But while I enjoy Strachey’s style, entirely too much of his ‘analysis’ is nasty, bitchy insinuation, unsupported by any real evidence, whatever you think about his subjects.
@elementary watson: On another note, Tom Jones’ songs from the 60s/70s. “She’s A Lady” has one of the weirdest compliments about a woman I ever heard
She can take what he dishes out and that ain’t eeeeasy! (rhymes with “please me” of course)
I know what you mean, bothered me even as a child, but I did not have the words to explain why. But lots of girls I grew up with aspired to be THAT KIND OF WOMAN — one so cool, she could never be rejected or treated badly. Ugh.
One songwriter I really enjoy is Jim Steinman, but man, does he write problematic lyrics! He’s the man who made Bonnie Tyler describe the man she’s longing for must be strong and fast and fresh from a fight. He wrote the most epic song about the old issue of “young men, beware of getting lured into marriage by the hot chick you want to have sex with”. He wrote a song about a man whose friend is abusive to his (the other man’s) girlfriend, who gives him an ultimatum of “hand your girl over to me, or else!” One song… Read more »
Ach, Kipling is such a complicated character. The thing I always think when I read The White Man’s Burden is that it’s such a sad, forlorn poem. It’s not triumphalist, like we might expect of the Empire; it’s self-sacrificing to the point of passive-aggressiveness. “People will hate us for this, but what else are you going to do?” The Man Who Would Be King echoes this. Yes, he seems to say, we can give these people so much, so easily… but greed will be our undoing. In the end, of course, his warnings were futile. You can’t put some people… Read more »
Kind of a minor example because it doesn’t involve any real life cultures or even humans but, in World of Warcraft theres a repeatable quest given by the “good guy” Tuskar in which they require you to sneak into the villages of their enemy the Wolvar and **kidnap their children**
And these are the supposed “good guys” doing this. >.> …and yet, I’m stuck doing this quest over and over again because it’s the only way to get my penguin pet.
Damn you Blizzard! You’re all sick!
@ Hugh
“She is a jerk, but I don’t think we’re supposed to sympathise with her jerkiness.”
Are you supposed to sympathize with her?
“She is a jerk, but I don’t think we’re supposed to sympathise with her jerkiness.” I honestly dunno *what* we’re supposed to do with the jerkiness, if anything. The fandom mainly spends time drooling over her legs (I’m kinda guilty of this too, actually). What usually happens when I personally watch the show is that I end up feeling like Rory should just DAPA (Dump Amy Pond Already), which is maybe not how I’m supposed to feel considering they are main characters? New Who also has a tradition of changing characters drastically to fit plotlines–Rose’s boyfriend did a kinda schizo… Read more »
“Ami Pond wants to have sex and they’re honest about that–but she’s also a total jerk to Rory. ”
She is a jerk, but I don’t think we’re supposed to sympathise with her jerkiness.
Also? FIGHT CLUB. I have probably watched the Fight Club movie a bajillion times. It has amazing visuals and I could relate to so much of the stuff about pain and fighting and reaching the bottom and still keeping on. I saw it as a kind of fantasy story set in modern times more than anything else, cuz even though I was alive back when Ikea was considered something new and awesome I wasn’t really old enough to appreciate it. Then I read the book, a bunch of critiques of it, a bunch of stuff about gender roles, and then… Read more »
For those interested in Narnia and people’s reactions to it, a book I very much enjoyed and would recommend was “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” by Laura Miller. Lots of good background on the books and discussions with other authors on them as well as Miller’s own thoughts, which keep it from seeming too self-indulgent.
Nobody invokes this effect more for me than Orson Scott Card. I first read Ender’s Game as a bright kid floundering in a public school which had recently cancelled the gifted program because not all of the students were able to participate (forgive my poor little head, but isn’t that the entire purpose of a gifted program?). As such a book that treated bright children as people and not as small loud things to be shut up so as not to annoy the adults was a welcome escape for me. I still have the same copy of the book, it… Read more »
Jack Harkness is omnisexual. He is attracted to everyone, and the Doctor thinks that Jack is chatting up anyone he even speaks to (the thing is, he really is chatting up everyone).
Almost all of New Dr. Who gives me the Kipling effect. Ami Pond wants to have sex and they’re honest about that–but she’s also a total jerk to Rory. The BBC is more racially diverse than a lot of American TV–but the black characters often get the short end of the stick storywise. I find myself screaming with joy for, say, “the thin/fat gay married Anglican marines” and yet find myself sulking that, besides Jack Harkness, gayness is still often a cameo rather than part a full-fledged character in the Whoverse (that was maybe not the best sentence but my… Read more »
@Leo Salloum re: Tintin In The Congo – I don’t know that you can entirely blame Herge for that one. Or rather, he later apologised for it and saw it largely taken out of production. Not that it’s not pretty awful in a modern context, just that (unlike, say, Kipling) Herge pretty much tried to disown it. I had the same problems with Southrons, Haradrim and Wicked Men in the Lord Of The Rings as mentioned above too. In fact, that one struck me as “off” as a kid. The thing about women didn’t bother me as much, as it… Read more »
But of course, people on your side never object to anti-male attacks directed at feminist men, do you?
Ampersand, for that line, all is forgiven. 🙂 (kisses)
I wrote a whole post about this, some time ago! I could never count them all! I often find it terribly embarrassing, since I love old movies, and consequently, I tend to think of it as the GONE WITH THE WIND effect: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2009/03/vivien-leigh-and-hattie-mcdaniel-in.html Sorry that the OLIVER videos (in that post) are long gone… I found another one though (below), that you can try instead. As I said in the blog post, it’s antisemitic, but Ron Moody (Jewish actor who won the Academy Award) defended the character of Fagin and made no apologies for playing the role. His dancing and… Read more »