Zulawski orgy roundup part 2: By the light of the silvery moon

(Image: Panopticum)

(My previous entries on BAM Rose Cinema's Andrzej Zulawski series can be found here and here.)


Anybody who takes the time and trouble to be an enthusiast in any field has their holy grails, their tantalizing unattainables. It's like the grown-up geek's version of an ever-receding Christmas morning, where the anticipation of getting is in some ways better than the actual thing. Maybe it's the out-of-print live album, or the uncensored first publication; the baseball card with the misspelled name, or the suppressed and unfinished Polish religio-mystical science fiction epic nightmare.


To cut to the chase, last month I finally saw On the Silver Globe (1977/1988), nine years after first reading about it in Film Comment. And it was only somewhere between 30 and 40 percent a disappointment. That would be the tediously and pretentiously talky part. The other 60 to 70 percent is the surreal, synapse-frying kinda-masterpiece I was promised. Which is more than enough to make it worth seeking out if getting synapses fried is your thing.

Boys, girls and swords

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark (Image: HBO & Stellar Four)

Let me lay my bias on the table right away: I'm a huge fan of George R.R. Martin's series of doorstop-size fantasy novels collectively titled A Song of Ice and Fire.  And no big-screen cinema event this year eclipses, in my mind, the unveiling last Sunday night of HBO's new ten-episode, small-screen adaptation of the first volume, A Game of Thrones.  For the most part, it did not disappoint me - more on that in a few weeks when I put up a fuller review, after I've absorbed the initial installments. 

So clearly, I'm far from objective when evaluating criticisms of the series - especially the significant number of accusations floating around in the online chatter, from professional critics and blog commenters alike, that the grim, graphically violent and sexual show is misogynistic.  A pretty representative sampling includes pop culture columnist Whitney Matheson at USA Today ("a 13-year-old boy's wonderland"); an articulate-if-enraged Salon reader going by the handle of Setsuna777 ("Sexually violent, sexist, nauseating"); and, to a lesser extent, critic Ginia Bellafante in an already semi-notorious New York Times pan that didn't explicitly address issues of misogyny but dismissed the entire fantasy genre, and GoT in particular, as "boy fiction" that no woman she knows would bother with. 

My own pre-formed opinions notwithstanding, I think I'm on solid ground when dismissing these complaints, almost (but not quite) entirely - and I say that with full awareness that, given the pervasive sexism that still exists in contemporary entertainment, a feminist is well justified in approaching what she watches with some skepticism.