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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/photographing-bruise-catherine-opies-rhetorical-landscapes-regen-projects/"></div>Another closed gallery, another exhibition I can only see online. This time, Catherine Opie’s “<a href="https://viewingroom.regenprojects.com/viewing-room/catherine-opie%23tab:thumbnails%3Bslide-1:14">Rhetorical Landscapes</a>” at Regen Projects. A broad image of the main floor of the exhibition shows a series of beautiful photos of coastal Louisiana’s swamps hung on the walls.  In the middle of the room are a set of large monitors displaying motion collages. You can click through larger images of all of the photographs and see videos of the collages as they form with cut-out pictures falling into place. Opie calls these “political collages,” and you quickly see why: the intent throughout the exhibit is a play on the political “swamp” that Trump vowed to drain — and that he has instead (surprise, surprise) only filled to overflowing with hate and corruption.
A message, yes — a rhetoric, definitely — but more than this. The swamps, the swamps themselves. The unexpected beauty of this coastline. The surprises of color, of texture, of density. An owl blending into the background of white, decaying, moss-covered wood. The stillness of the waters that look like brushed velvet. The scaly ridges of an alligator’s back centering a profusion of rusty weeds and pale green lily pads.
Don’t listen to me. <a href="https://viewingroom.regenprojects.com/viewing-room/catherine-opie%23tab:thumbnails%3Bslide-1:14">Go</a> there.
¤
But, of course, you can’t. Not just to the gallery, but also not to the swamp. I mean, you could, but perhaps you shouldn’t. Yes, some people live there. Some people know how to navigate these backwater byways. Some people can live in an environment that seems at times more fearful than beautiful. Some people appreciate the beauty, and the danger.
What are we doing here, though? What is Opie doing here, having photographed these remote places, places that she herself might not belong?
Susan Sontag once wrote that “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”  She didn’t realize when she wrote, now decades ago, that cameras would one day be everywhere, not just invading our privacy, but colonizing our subjectivity, demanding that we use them to take pictures of others and ourselves, a ceaseless conglomeration of selfies for which we willingly pose and then upload. We’ve built our cameras into our phones — and the technology of reaching out to touch someone else is more often than not the technology of self-monitoring, self-styling, self-display, documentation, and surveillance. We know this.
What does Opie’s camera know?
There’s more than just the exotic locale here, more than the aggressive eye of a prying camera rendering these remote wilds accessible to us. There’s a whispering in the photographs, even digitally offered on my computer screen. Their remoteness, however doubled at this time of closed galleries, cannot silence the susurrus of the silky waters, the breezy swaying of the moss implied in its slanted growth, the hooting of a barely seen owl. Exotic, sure. But something else.
I’m waiting for it.
Sontag again: “Like sexual voyeurism, [the act of photographing] is a way of a least tacitly, often explicitly encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening.” Sontag initially means this negatively; the documenting power of photography might catalog, for instance, atrocity as a way to motivate concern, but latent and implicit in the image taken — in its sheer interest as a photographable subject — is a valuing of what is, of what is interesting enough to photograph, even if, as Sontag puts it, what is photographed is “another person’s pain or misfortune.”  We are voyeurs of damage.
But let’s keep going with this metaphor — “like sexual voyeurism” — a metaphor that suggests other possibilities, other ways of seeing, other difficult pleasures. It suggests, too, something a bit attractive. And also something shameful. In Opie’s case, in her images of the swamps, I can’t help but ask: what about the “status quo” of these starkly beautiful and deadly places? The images call to us to appreciate their muddy beauty, yes, but also perhaps to leave them alone? To look but not to touch?
I hear the susurrus again. I’m waiting for it to become clear, to tell me something I can understand. And then I realize that the aggression of Opie’s camera lies not in her intrusion into these remote areas, but in her photographs’ reminder that we are destroying them.
We are destroying them.
¤
Look up a satellite image of New Orleans and its suburbs, and you will see, in the west, a stark line where the city spread ends. The “civilized” has a boundary, a distinct stopping point, where water begins — a line beyond which it’s not possible to build. People still live in the swamps, some on boats, some in houses built on stilts, but they are few and far between. As they should be. This is not an area capable of sustaining large human settlements.
Now look up satellite images of the Louisiana coastline from two or three decades ago, then find one that’s more recent. (You can start <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/underwater-land-loss-coastal-louisiana-1932">here</a>.) You don’t need to know much more about what coastal erosion looks like. You do need to understand, though, why it has occurred, how climate change raises sea levels, how the funneling of rivers to facilitate trade and commerce prevents the redepositing of silts that replenish the swamps and wetlands. The people who live here won’t survive such changes. The plants and animals, the flora, the fauna — they won’t survive.
The dangerous beauty of these swamps won’t survive the world we have remade in the image of capitalist accumulation.
We are destroying them.
¤
I look back at the pictures. Opie’s photographs surprise me with their colors. I was expecting soaked greens, sopping and stringy grays, muddy browns of still water — and they are there.
I was not expecting the ruby reds, the sparkle of blue-greens, the rustiness of the pale pinks.
The suggestion of purple, the hint of a bruise.
¤
I grew up in New Orleans. I’m not going to lie: I hated Louisiana. I hated the way my body felt in the heat, in the humidity. I hated walking outside in the summer and immediately being covered in sweat. I hated the bugs, the mosquitos, the wasps.
Mostly I hated myself in Louisiana. I hated myself because I was taught to hate myself — a young, odd-looking, gangly, cross-eyed, porto-queer kid. Too femme. Insufficiently masculine or sporty. A readily identifiable faggot. South Louisiana in the 1970s and 80s — not a good place for a little gay boy like me.
The place and my place within it merged into a miasma of bad feeling — a self-loathing that I steadily projected outward as a defense mechanism. This place just sucks. It’s awful. It’s not meant for human habitation.
It is destroying me.
I was partially right. It wasn’t meant for habitation for someone like me. But was it — is it — meant for anyone?
I only developed different feelings for Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina, watching family, friends, others all but abandoned by a government that didn’t care about the poor. And the area is, indeed, full of the poor. I was one of them. I started to identify with the abandoned. I began to see my connection to this place, even if I felt I had to leave it all those years ago. So few at the time I grew up in Louisiana thought that I was worth preserving. So few thought the people who lived there in the aftermath of Katrina worth preserving.
As with so much of her work, Opie’s camera registers the bruise, the damaged, the abandoned: this time, the landscape, the ecologies, the natural systems — the sparkle of blue-greens, the rustiness of the pale pinks — the swamps that have been abandoned from care because so few have thought them worth preserving. They have been abandoned to wealth, to commerce, to shipping, to the fast flows of capital trumping the slow movement of muddy waters.
What becomes precious to you when you realize others want to throw it away?
Opie’s pictures are whispering in my ear. Are we paying attention? Are we paying attention to the people and places around us, to how our actions impact them, to how what we do or fail to do is consequential for the world around us, for where we live, yes, but also for people and places we cannot see and may never visit — people and places affected by our decisions, by what we buy, but what policies we support, by what values we enact?
Are we listening to the swamps?  Can we hear them in Opie’s pictures?
¤
The pictures are already aesthetically beautiful. Their proximity to the motion collages makes them rhetorically demanding — posing questions, addressing us, requiring response.
In one motion collage, guns rain from above, piling up one on top of the other, machine guns, automatic weapons, pistols, and then a torn and tattered American flag gently falling and crowning the heap of guns. In another, a range of images — hot dogs, an upside down ice cream cone, a flag-draped rocking chair, a raised fist, the US women’s soccer team, a MAGA-capped white boy shutting the door to his home, a poster with the motto “science is real”—all speaking to the contradictions and incommensurabilities of our culture. Another: images of the devastation of climate change; a Barbara Kruger “I shop, I am” sign; a man bound; an atomic explosion. In yet another: images of political figures from the current presidency, along with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, requiring us to reconcile them with the pictures of natural beauty on the walls surrounding these collages.
The statements on the Regen Project website suggest that the monitors on which these collages play look like giant iPhones. In a way, then, Opie’s collages are selfies of our collective soul. To me, at my digital remove, the screens seem like those large monitors one encounters in airports, displays promising direction, guidance. But to where?
Photos do not, by themselves, change anything. Again, Sontag: “What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.” The collages provide that consciousness. They are the necessary complement to the dangerous beauty of the swamps. They are reminding us that we are destroying the swamps.  They are shouting at us: you are destroying these swamps.
Meanwhile, the photographs continue whispering.
¤
I sit in the mornings with one of these photographs, with one of these collages, silently watching. Every morning, for two weeks.
I hear something. I think I hear something. A susurrus. A pink noise. A bruise. A call to leave some things alone.
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Photographing a Bruise: Catherine Opie’s “Rhetorical Landscapes” at the Regen Projects

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Come Together: Queer Art in a Time of Social Distancing

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/fantasy-lands-black-panther-call-name/"></div>Friday opening night of Black Panther and my husband and I sit in a jam-packed IMAX theater, the buzz around us excited and eager. Seeing this film seems a momentous occasion: a Marvel Studios product with a predominantly Black cast, directed by an extremely promising Black director, and featuring a powerful African nation full of technological wonder and beautiful people — all in the middle of Black History Month. And indeed, the film largely will deliver, despite some uneven pacing and CGI work. Black Panther is a thoroughly enjoyable movie in so many ways, and Hollywood has certainly been way overdue — reprehensibly so — in producing a major motion picture with a substantial Black cast and one substantively about racial issues.
And yet, I walked out of the theater, my Latino/Native husband at my side, and started to worry over what we’d just seen. For all of the justifiable hoopla, something nagged at me. We’d just seen a similar kind of film with a similar history, the story of young gay love in Call Me by Your Name. In some ways, for sure, you couldn’t get two more different films. Black Panther is based on a comic book superhero and is set in a fantastical world where technologically- and magically-enabled super powers drive much of the action; car chases and shoot outs are key ingredients. Call Me by Your Name is an indie film, and focuses on the late adolescent romance in northern Italy between an artsy and precocious 17-year-old and the 24-year-old graduate student his father hires for the summer to help him with his archaeological work. Yes, very different films.
But what unites them is that these are both “hybrid” efforts, with different folks across different identity positions coming together to make media about two of our culture’s more controversial issues: race relations and the specter of queer love. Black Panther’s source material comes from two white guys (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), was directed and co-written by two African-Americans (Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole), and produced by a white guy (Kevin Feige) for Marvel Studios. Call Me by Your Name comes from source material by a straight man (a novel by André Aciman), with a screenplay written by a gay man (James Ivory), and was directed by a gay man (Luca Guadagnino) for an international team of producers. I list these contributions fully recognizing that film is inevitably a highly collaborative medium, with many different kinds of hands assembling the final product. But the writing, directing, and producing of these films from people very differently situated in terms of their identities is particularly salient to me given the subject matters treated: race and queerness. These are films that both self-consciously and very publicly have brought together diverse peoples to consider issues of diversity. And for me, that is precisely what makes the films noteworthy and important. It’s also what might contribute to how they both ring just a tiny bit false.
For sure, Black Panther and Call Me by Your Name offer much that is good and pleasing — and even culturally necessary. Black Panther revolves around the troubled transition of power in the African kingdom of Wakanda, which seems to the rest of the world to be a poor and somewhat backwards nation but is actually a technological marvel. Wakanda sits on the planet’s largest deposit of vibranium, a fictional super substance that is the strongest material know to humanity. (Captain America’s shield is made out of it). Vibranium has allowed the Wakandans to build a remarkable city and culture, full of techno wizardry that other powers would likely wage war to access. But the Wakandans have kept all of this hidden for centuries, and therein lies the rub: some Wakandans want to arm other oppressed Africans, particularly those in the diaspora, with their super weapons so they can rise up and overthrow their oppressors. Other Wakandans, including the film’s hero, T’Challa, want either to keep their country and culture safe from outside involvement (and hence possible interference) or, perhaps, more peacefully influence the workings of the world by slowly revealing Wakandan capabilities. Black Panther thus plays out a theme we see in other Marvel storylines, such as that of the X-Men, whose villain Magneto argues for the use of mutant power to subjugate the bigoted humanity that persecutes mutants, while Professor Xavier urges a softer, gentler, and practically assimilationist approach to integrating mutants into other human cultures. These are obviously not the only two paths to deal with the challenge of difference, but they are the ones we’re offered in the Marvel Universe.
Black Panther, to its credit and likely due to the creative screenplay authorship of Coogler and Cole, really finesses this plot. The putative villain, (deliciously played by Michael B. Jordan), cuts a rather attractive figure. His backstory (a tortured plot involving family intrigue) provides motivation for him to want to seize control of Wakanda and start arming his fellow Blacks. But he’s also not unjustly motivated by outrage at how Africans have been enslaved and abused, the resources of their continent and their own bodily labor exploited by others across the globe for centuries. It’s hard not to like him — and agree with his position. And while the villain can’t be victorious, he’s given the softest exit I’ve yet seen in a Marvel story.
Admittedly, Call Me by Your Name doesn’t have the political and international intrigue of Black Panther. Its story is much slower and gentler, featuring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in the roles, respectively, of professor’s son and graduate student who stumble and fumble their way toward romance over the course of the film’s two luxurious hours. And the film is luxurious. While Call Me doesn’t stage a global (but still largely family) struggle, it fetchingly offers us the struggle within a young man’s heart to open himself to intimate relations with another man. And open up he does (although I was disappointed that Armie Hammer doesn’t eat the peach). While Call Me ends with the graduate student leaving and then, as we learn through a phone call half a year later, planning to get married and thus breaking the heart of young Elio, we still thrill with nostalgia to the painful beauty of first love, universalized so that it doesn’t matter that these are two young men exploring and experimenting with one another.
Or does it? The particular locales of these narratives become crucially important in setting the stage for the kinds of stories they tell. Set somewhere in northern Italy (we never know precisely where), Call Me shows us a separate space, even a somewhat separatist space, where issues of identity can be hashed out amongst insiders. Set in the early 1980s and during a summer vacation, there are no school bullies to torment the sensitive piano-playing Elio, and no threat of AIDS, or even any mention of sexually transmittable diseases. The parents, particularly the academic father, are extraordinarily (even unbelievably) accepting, with the father offering a deeply moving speech to his heartbroken son about how he, when younger, had had a chance to have an affair with a boy but didn’t have the courage his son had in pursuing it. Gay men across the country often sobbed during this part of the film, our collective longing for just such an accepting parent finally realized on film. Call Me’s idyllic Italian locale recalls another intergenerational homoerotic romance, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. But while there’s still heartbreak, there’s no death this time. Similarly, part of Black Panther’s historical interest is that Wakanda represents the kind of Afro-centric separatism that was circulating at the time of the creation of the original characters. Like Call Me’s northern Italy, Wakanda is a space where Black people can be fully Black people, developing their own culture, their own nation, their own way of being in the world — a spectacular “what if” scenario. And in both films, the beauty of difference in these spaces is on full display. Black Panther showcases striking African designs and figures against the technological wonders of Wakanda, while Call Me by Your Name draws our gaze languorously over the bodies of two beautiful young people as they strip down to swim in the golden Italian sunlight. These movies are as much about the sensual experience of culture and identity as anything else. Moreover, these films stage spaces that allow us to focus attention on the issues at hand, without potential interference from other concerns. We can, with the characters, attend to how an empowered and powerful Black family considers how best to represent itself and distribute its own resources, and to how two young men navigate and negotiate erotic interest that is pure, playful, and untroubled by any other issues.
These are fantasies, then. And I will admit to thrilling to them. My husband, a person of color, often cried openly during Black Panther, moved by the powerful spectacle of an African people’s control over their own destiny. I too was moved to tears during Call Me by Your Name, delighting in the budding romance and the film’s attention to the sensuality of male bodies. Surely both films’ fantasies take risks: Black Panther names colonial oppression as colonial oppression, identifying a white ally as a “colonizer,” even though he’s trying hard to be an ally. And Call Me pushes boundaries and comfort zones, particularly with the age discrepancy between its lovers, which, while technically legal in Italy, has still generated much criticism amongst more conservative parties in this country. But such spice only adds to the films’ interest and topicality.
In many ways, Blacks and queers need these fantasies. We deserve beautiful things. We have waited a long time for a public art, a mass art, that honors the splendor of our lives while also paying attention to some of the issues still facing black and queer peoples and cultures. Both of these films offer such beauty and splendor, and in pushing some boundaries they acknowledge not only our humanity but also how the presence of our lives critiques the dominant order. Things don’t have to be the way they are. We offer some intriguing — and often spectacularly gorgeous — alternatives.
That said, these films don’t go quite far enough for me. In offering such fantasies to a large viewership, they also gloss over the realities of many Black and queer lives. Characters in Black Panther mention several times the oppression of Black people across the globe, but we never really get to see it. The closest we come is a well-lit basketball park in Oakland. White audiences are treated to the splendor of Afro-centered Blackness while getting a pass on visual reminders of how Europeans enslaved and exploited Africans for centuries. This pass extends even to one of the primary plot details that motivates the action: the fantastical substance vibranium. This strongest of metals, incredibly flexible and durable in its properties, stands in for the millions upon millions of enslaved Black bodies that were stolen from African to fuel Western imperial ambitions. Of course the Wakandans want to safeguard it. But vibranium’s metaphorical capacity falters just as it removes viewers’ gazes from the torturing of Black bodies for profit. And then, at the end of the film, addressing a nearly all white audience of world leaders, the Wakandans announce that they will reveal their true power and join the world stage not just as equals but as potential leaders. On one hand, this plot move seems a belated recognition of the value of African and diasporic peoples. On the other, it plays out yet again a favorite Hollywood trope: the helpful Black person, now extended to an entire country of Black people. Help us, Africans. We’ve made a mess of this world. We need your help. And we’ll also need your help in the next installment of this franchise. I worry that Black Panther, for all of its remarkable and even groundbreaking work, plays at times like a white man’s fantasy of Black people; they’re really wonderful folks, and look what they would’ve done if left to themselves; let’s offer them a beautiful representation of themselves while asking them to still serve us.
Call Me by Your Name plays out a comparable fantasy that eschews the realities of homophobia. Who wouldn’t want Elio’s incredibly accepting family, not to mention the seemingly safest of spaces in which to explore “forbidden” intimacies. But there’s the fantastical rub: they aren’t forbidden at all. Instead Elio and Oliver are surrounded not just by a family so accepting and welcoming but also by ancient statuary of finely chiseled male bodies that practically demand that you desire them. The academic father even points this out in case you, as a viewer, missed this point. This is a world in which you can’t help but be queer. I can attest, as can many other faggots who grew up in the early 1980s, that while we might appreciate this representation now, we can also affirm that the overwhelmingly vast majority of our lives bore no resemblance to it at all. And the film’s final scene, holding our gaze on a crying Elio who realizes that Oliver won’t be coming back, might be poignant in many ways, but many queers will remember their own similar scenes; we weren’t called in to a consoling dinner but instead contemplated the value of our lives in a bathtub with a razor blade on the rim. Not all queer boys made it out of those bathrooms. Put most harshly, Call Me seems like a straight guy’s fantasy of gay love: a summer dalliance free from any worldly consequences and ending with the gay boy pining for the straight boy.
Films are inevitably collective endeavors, and mass market films suffer the most from needing to address the needs and concerns of too many different and varied audiences. Fine analyses, critical insights, and difficult positions are often washed away as plots, characters, sets, and representations maneuver for maximum appeal. That Black Panther and Call Me by Your Name have appealed to as many as they have is an indicator of how far our culture has come in honoring the lives of Blacks and queers. And some of us have needed these fantasies to help imagine and reimagine our worth and value. Now it’s time for the media that will not turn away from the harder work. We deserve the fantasies, yes. We also deserve some honesty.
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Fantasy Lands: Black Panther and Call Me By Your Name

Fantasy Lands: Black Panther and Call Me By Your Name

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/blinded-donald-trump-slowing/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jonathan-alexander">Jonathan Alexander</a>
So my title will need some explanation, if only because I hope to walk the fine line between the literal and the metaphoric.
Let’s start in January with a trip to an ophthalmologist. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/blinded-donald-trump-slowing/#more-3802" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Blinded by Donald Trump, or, Slowing Down

Jonathan Alexander is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 22 books, including the Creep trilogy, which consists of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award); Bullied: The Story of an Abuse; and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir. Other recent books include the memoir Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot and the scholarly work Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing. Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.

Jonathan Alexander

Sex and Social Isolation: The Writing Sex Series During COVID-19

Writing Sex

Writing Sex: Pamela Sneed

Writing Sex: Eric Nguyen

Writing Sex: Torrey Peters

Writing Sex: Daniel Lupo

Writing Sex: Michael Lowenthal

Writing Sex: Juliet Jacques

The Ideology of Masturbation

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

Writing Sex: Jenn Shapland

Writing Sex: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Writing Sex: Micah Nemerever

Writing Sex: Doron Langberg

Jonathan Alexander is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 22 books, including the Creep trilogy, which consists of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award); Bullied: The Story of an Abuse; and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir. Other recent books include the memoir Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot and the scholarly work Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing. Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.