Cassavetes fanvid

[seekingferret]

I premiered a new vid at wiscon_vidparty this weekend. Meanwhile, I was at Balticon, and it was Shavuot, so I had no access to any information about how it was received, which was a weird combination of nervewracking and relaxing. Probably better than actually attending the con. brainwane says people seemed to like it! and I am choosing to trust her judgement.

It's an Iron Man vid to Le Tigre's "Cassavetes", which is a song about struggling to enjoy and have conversations about our enjoyment of problematic media. Tony Stark is a fascinating and frustrating man to be fannish about, because his personal struggles are so relevant, but he also lives such a charmed life that he literally gets away with murder.

I think my summary of the song is useful because those are two different things-enjoying problematic media and having conversations about that enjoyment- and I think having conversations is much harder, especially if I want to step outside of cliche. And the thing that is great about "Cassavetes" is that it doesn't step outside of the cliches, but tries to harness both positive and negative cliches as if stacking them on top of each other could reach toward some calculus of criticism. Punch in the magnitude of his genius, subtract his misogyny, factor in his alcoholism, and somehow you determine the value of Tony Stark, as if it weren't a fully emotional response to an artistic creation that was prompting this analysis to begin with.

I need to move away from value judgement to make sense of Tony Stark and the reasons I love and hate him. Okay, fine, he's an alcoholic, but what is it about his experience of addiction that speaks to me? Okay, fine, he's a misogynist, but what is it about the evolution of his relationship with Pepper that I find fascinating to explore? Okay, fine, he embodies the worst excesses of the American military industrial complex, but doesn't he also embody its noblest virtues?

But these are unanswerable questions, or at least, I don't have the vocabulary to really seriously have that conversation, so instead in this vid I just gesture toward the conversation I want to have by making fun of how ridiculous the conversation I am capable of having is.

Thank you to sanguinity and franzeska for betaing.

Title: Cassavetes
Vidder:seekingferret
Responsible for the lack of consistent title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Content Notes: Flashing colored lights, depiction of addiction
Length: 1:36
Song: "Cassavetes" by Le Tigre

Subtitles SRT Download

Comments

[starlady]

I think that using less commonly used shots is the mark of an interesting Iron Man vid, and you have definitely done that and brought out an angle to Tony Stark that I don't think I've seen so far. Great stuff. I wish I could have been there to see it live!

[seekingferret]

Thank you!

Enjoyment

[brainwane]

I enjoyed seeing this at the vid party premiere, and I've enjoyed rewatching it several times since then. During the vid party discussion, I originally suggested that -- unlike, say, Laura Shapiro's "Only a Lad", which uses a sarcastic song to critique fandom's attraction to violent antiheroes -- "Cassavetes" takes an ambivalent stance, choosing neither to call Stark a misogynist alcoholic nor a genius messiah. But I soon changed my mind, since others, including my friend Beth, saw deeper than I: the vid is saying "both/and", not "none of the above" or "who can tell". It's critiquing the reductionist binary, the pressure to Take A Side. And now that I've rewatched it a few more times, I've particularly noticed the shots of Stark blinking or shaking or otherwise, with body language, saying, "wait, hold on, let's try this again, what?" And I've noticed the first few seconds, in which we and Rhodes flip through a few differently colored lenses, different ways of looking at what Stark is doing and the man he is making himself into.

Re: Enjoyment

[brainwane]

(And thank you for trusting my assessment that people at the party liked it!)

Re: Enjoyment

[seekingferret]

Thank you!

Yeah... "Cassavetes" is certainly not in any kind of opposition to "Only a Lad". I present direct documentary evidence that Stark is both a misogynist and an alcoholic, and as much as is possible in a vid as simple and short as this one, I tried not to shy away from showing the harm that both of those things cause. But so often that's all we say about it: "I don't like Tony Stark because he's a misogynist." And I think it shortchanges us out of all the interesting conversations. I have no idea how to talk about my sense that Tony Stark is a misogynist at the start of Iron Man 1 and he's a misogynist at the end of Iron Man 3, but he is a very different sort of misogynist. I don't know what words to use to have that conversation, because the only conversations we do have are so shallow and oppositional.

And the reason I particularly love Tony Stark as RDJ plays him is because of exactly what you noted about his "let's try this again" body language. Tony Stark knows he's a misogynist! He knows he's a completely broken person and the movies are about him trying to fix himself and failing repeatedly. And the things he gets better at? He gets better at apologizing for fucking up. He gets better at listening when people tell him he fucked up. He gets better at trying to think before he tries to fix something he fucked up. (Avengers 2 aside). He gets better at accepting that he can't fix everything he fucked up. And yet he still keeps fucking up. This is the stuff that shouting Genius! Misogynist! at each other from across the room misses.

[sasha_feather]

I really enjoyed this vid! We had a good discussion about it on the vid party panel.

[seekingferret]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it, glad it sparked good conversation.

[morbane]

One thing I like about this vid is that it could work from within the universe just as well as it could from without. It's not too great a stretch to imagine some media clip show in the America that Tony Stark lives in creating something that juxtaposes all his images just as (on-the-surface) flippantly and asks the viewer to weigh in.

Like brainwane, I notice all the images in which Tony Stark himself is paused, uncertain, considering - himself providing the bridge between modes, as is right. In between these attitudes is the person who inhabits them all.

I feel as though even in the first movie, it's not that Tony doesn't understand when he's screwed up, it's that he thinks he can redeem it instantly with whatever he does next. He's the king of spin and what have you done for me lately. His way of dealing with screw-ups and bad press is a relentless next, next, next. Self-discovery is, perhaps, not so much about knowledge as it is about pacing: living more fully and honestly both his triumphs and his disasters.

[lokifan]

This is so interesting and cool! Especially how the images on "messiah" are none of his self-sacrificing moments but increasingly violent - on the one hand I feel that kind of stacks the deck, but given how many chills I get off his whole militiary-industrial complex deal I like it. And the uncertain body language, and that you went for that final long shot - just one version of him while the song asks us the question. Really effective meta.