PG02 Progress Blog


Kat Lee Hornstein //  Ravensbourne //  MA Interactive Digital Media
What is This?  


CYCLE 1

Avatars, Accomplices & Alter Egos
September 20 – October 27 2017



Lars and the Real Girl: Thoughts & Additional Research



ABOVE: One of the more precious moments in the film. A well meaning, “tough love” type of woman who is friendly with Lars encourages him to pursue romance. She hands him a pink carnation from the church topiaries, and tells him to give it to someone he likes. (He comically throws it away from himself when confronted with a young woman clearly interested in him.)

ABOVE: Full circle. A Pink Carnation can be seen in Lars’ pocket throughout “Bianca’s” funeral. It’s here you see the groundwork laid for a possible romantic future between Lars and “real” woman, Margo. I believe this is intended to be symbolic of Lars’ personal growth, and his readiness to interact more candidly with humanity.
 

The first time I saw this film was probably around 2010. I was in Undergraduate design program and a classmate had done a project, the prompt of which asked “what is unnatural?” Her piece focused on the highly customizable & anatomically correct “Real Dolls,” and this movie came up in classroom conversation, so a few of us decided to watch it.

Though I loved it at the time, I was a tad more disturbed by the general concept. I was less accepting of the idea that the main character’s delusions might be as innocent as portrayed.

That was not so much the case this time around. Perhaps, I think, being a little older I grasp the real threat of loneliness more than I did at 20. In many ways the film is as much if not more about the love of family, friends, and community, than the more common rom-com material of male to female romance.

And having had more experience now engaging with the various challenges of my own mental health, it’s no longer unfathomable to me that one could develop coping methods to survive, as seen in the film.

The fact that Lars treats Bianca (the doll) with the utmost respect and considers her a person, not a sex object, makes it easier to sympathize with his mental state. In fact he is noticably kinder to her than the other men in the film are to the actual women in their lives. Perhaps the film is commenting that what we deem as “normal” behavior can be less human than some types of “taboo” behaviors. What Lars is doing is seen as strange, but in many ways he is a more empathetic and kind being than the crass men in relationships with real women, who joke about Bianca’s inability to talk being a great benefit, and only want to know from Lars about the sexual acts he performs with her. (It’s clear in the film Lars never has intercourse with the doll.)


They treat the real women in their lives as objects. But Lars respects Bianca, the doll.


After finishing the film, I did additional research on the concept of Real Dolls and watched the below BBC Documentary.

BBC Doc: Guys & Dolls





“...it’s the difference between being alone, and lonely.”


“…(she) is an anchor to me, because I know what to expect.

With women, you don’t really get that.



But for all my sympathy in Lars and the Real Girl, I have to admit, it does still cut deep, to listen to the men in the documentary above talk in a point blank matter, about the ways these objects are more dear to them, more lovable, more trustworthy, than an actual human woman.

Many of them have bruised egos and discuss being turned down in the past.
They discuss “women” as if we are one collective entity, not individuals.
Their privilege, as heterosexual males, is glaring.

They may have esteem issues, claiming themselves to be ugly, or women to be unattainable. Still, on average women face such intense discrimination about their looks, aggressively from all directions, I wonder why these men see their rejection as so abnormal.

For example a week, or even a day, does not go by that I am not disregarded, or disrespected, or have my day disrupted by a male presence in some way, be it slight and accidental, or gross and malicious.
Although I am always wounded, I am also led by a belief that I have been conditioned as a woman to expect and tolerate such abuse and go about my day. To put it bluntly, many of us are just “used to it.” 

Men on the other hand, I think, are taught that this is not the norm. So in some of these cases, when they experience rejection, they seem even more deeply or darkly wounded by the encounters than I might be. They see other men are not treated this way. They expect respect. They feel this lack of positive female attention on a magnified scale, maybe.

I hope to establish deeper, more informed opinions on gender and self throughout my time here. Though gender politics is hardly what my MA course actually is (technically, my course focus is on Interactive Digital Media will for me relate back to the body in real space. Interactive installations, performance, dance, the language of movement and gesture…)  it would be strange I think, if I did not explore further as well, my relationship with my own body, as a woman, as well as humankind in general. 


To feel my own body move grounds me in reality. So to explore worlds where people engage with inanimate objects intimately has me thinking on how it might ground them.