Legacy Thread

[basserdan]

Kunstler: Transparently

By James Howard Kunstler
November 20, 2017

As long as sexual hysteria is the order of the day, there was juicy item stowed on the back blue pages of The New York Times this morning. They report that actor Jeffrey Tambor is leaving the title role in Amazon’s hit TV series Transparent after two women on the set accused him of sexual misconduct.

One was “actress” Trace Lysette (notice The Times reverting to the antiquated gendered term when the new correct mode is to use “actor” for all on-camera persons). The other victim was Mr. Tambor’s on-set assistant, Van Barnes.

“My back was against the wall in a corner as Jeffrey approached me,” Ms. Lysette said in her statement on Thursday. “He came in close, put his bare feet on top of mine so I could not move, leaned his body against me and began quick, discreet thrusts back and forth against my body. I felt his penis on my hip through his thin pajamas, and I pushed him off of me.”

Mr. Tambor was only accused of “groping” Van Barnes. We’re informed near the end of the story that both victims are transgender women, that is, men who went through some kind of medical procedure to present as women.

Hollywood was especially proud of the transgressive series for pioneering TV programming into the new frontier of transsexual manners and mores, something America really needed to know about. The show was showered with awards. Its creator, Jill Soloway — who “identifies as non-binary,” and refers to herself with the pronoun “they” in their relations with the media — has said that they hope to use the series to explore ideas of gender identity through a “wounded father being replaced by a blossoming femininity.”

Well, I guess that sort of does say it all about the fundamental state of American culture these days. We are living in the land of the wounded father. The nature of his wound is not quite specified, but if one were to guess, one might venture that something happened to his testicles. Cut off? Shot off? Industrial accident? We’re not informed. But the remedy for that misfortune is to turn into a woman, or at least act like one.

An interesting angle on all this from, say, a zeitgeist point of view, is that the archetypal father is not missed. Society does not need him. Rather we need him to go through the mystical passage to become a tragic-comic mother figure, a harmless old vessel full of rueful wisdom and comic relief. Of course that is the message that has been coming through loud and clear in the cultural scripts of recent days, with all the carping about cis-gender white folks (i.e. men) being responsible for all the woes of humanity.

My own meta-take on this whole business is that the archetypal father is secretly rather sorely missed in the USA. The mental inversions of the Progressive intelligentsia tell me that, deep down, the Left is in a state of deranged anguish over it. Trump has inflamed them especially because he fills the role of national father so badly for them with his vulgar incoherence. Nothing he does reassures anybody. They are desperate to shove him off-stage. He only reminds them how badly they miss a real and proper daddy. And their rage about it prompts them to destroy anybody else who reminds them of a bad daddy, by any means necessary — sexual misbehavior being a very convenient means in a culture that celebrates its lack of boundaries.

Lately, male authority in America has gone along with this script, perhaps (I have to guess) because they have screwed up public affairs so royally — especially the financial management of the national household — and they are deeply ashamed. So they have been willing to submit, at least, to a certain amount of symbolic castration to avoid having to act differently, or actually accomplish anything on the nation’s pretty long to-do list.

This psychodrama is not going to continue indefinitely. At some point the men in this country who are not Trump are going to rediscover that they have a purpose and even an obligation to act like men. But it will be interesting to see how the Transparent TV show continues into Season Four minus the character that is its reason to exist. The fact that the producers seem to think they can just carry on as if nothing happened tells us a lot about the delusional thinking of Hollywood.

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