Granted, most people think I get a pass on this because I have been sexually assaulted. Of course, I spent a good part of the hours after my most recent assault alternating between hysterical crying and compulsive vomiting  and cracking jokes. I got tired really quickly of the quiet whispers and the looks of pity and the hushed voices and the overall funerary air in the room. And then, because the cops and the detective and my friend were all too scared to laugh, I told jokes... jokes that descended deeper into "inappropriate" territory because, if I could mock it, if I could laugh at it  and if I could make them laugh at the absurdity of trying to take a written statement from a drunk, hysterical, projectile-vomiting witness who was singing "Red, Red Wine" under her breath (when she could breathe)  then it wasn't actually The Worst Thing In The World.

You're supposed to laugh at that, although no one does  but if I had been mugged, or had my identity stolen or witnessed a crime, it is funny to picture that Exorcist kid spewing vomit everywhere to a reggae beat while the cops look on in horror and try to protect their paperwork. Why is my vagina some sacred crime scene? But, having told this story to Anna and her husband recently  and having upset Anna's husband, who was too horrified by what happened to me to see that there was humor or absurdity in the situation  I know that it is.

Anyway, the first relatively mainstream rape joke comes, of course, from Sarah Silverman's performance in The Aristocrats.
It's an arc of a performance, that starts with her telling a sweet but sick story of performing in an incestuous sex show and culminates in the heart-stopping, clear-eyed revelation that "Joe Franklin raped me." Except, of course, she's proudly trodding on the landmine of comedy  and, honestly, it's so disturbing, it's funny.


Jessica Valenti's recent piece in The Guardian about female comedians praised Wanda Sykes' now-infamous rape joke from her 2006 comedy special about detachable vaginas.

Valenti says:

Sykes brings a biting comedy to the most controversial topics, throwing new light on issues that are all too easily written off as age-old and intractable: rape, for example.

And she does, but let's break down what she's joking about: she's joking about stranger rape, and she's making light of Kobe Bryant's victim, who was raped after she went up to his hotel room at the ungodly hour of 2 in the morning. In fact, you could argue  and I am  that Wanda Sykes is poking fun of that victim for being, you know, stupid enough to get raped. Is it only funny when Wanda Sykes does it? Many of you would say yes (and, in fact have said that it's never funny to say something like that). Do you still think so?

In fact, Jessica Valenti herself recently wrote, in response to a rape joke shown on The Office "there's never really a funny rape joke, is there?" Well, here's the rape joke she  and many of you, judging by our e-mails  didn't like:
To recap, Kelly claims to have been raped when she is confronted with some office malfeasance  as in, she's only saying it to get out of trouble and it's not the first time she's apparently done such a thing. Is it laugh-out-loud funny? Nah. But is it poking fun of her character and using that kind of hyperbole to mock people who try to use personal crises ("My grandmother died") to get out of responsibility? Sure. Is it, say, less offensive than implying a rape victim was less than smart to head up to Kobe Bryant's room late at night? Technically, I think both are funny, but I have a sick sense of humor.

Which, of course, brings me to the most horrifying of horrifying rape jokes: The South Park episode about Indiana Jones. Although this only has the last two of the three rape scenes depicted in the show, it gives you enough of a sense of what it was about: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are no longer metaphorically raping the Indy franchise, they're really doing it.

Offensive? Yes. Boundary-crossing? Certainly. Horrifying in its detail? Yes. Funny? Arguably so.

Which then, of course, brings it back to the question: when is it funny? And I think the answer is, for a lot of people, when you like or respect the person telling the joke. Which is fine, and it's how most jokes work, but you can't then argue that they're never funny, or they can't ever be funny. Lots of humor comes from the juxtaposition of our civilized collective state of being and the ways in which we betray the lie of that constantly  fart jokes, for instance, are funniest when you really, really should be proper. If we take sexual assault off the table of things we can laugh about or joke about, it's just another way of saying: this is a different crime than any other crime, and so we can and must treat its victims differently than any other crime.

And, you know, fuck that. I got treated differently than any other crime victim once because of the kind of crime that I was the victim of. If I had been mugged, would the cops have been calling my friends and asking them how much I'd been drinking that night? If I had been only robbed, would it have mattered to the cops whether I'd told the guys I was out with that night that I was dating someone? If I had been shot walking out of the bar, would it have been anyone's business if my friend thought that I was flirting or not? And if any of those crimes had been committed instead, would everyone be so horribly offended by me making jokes about it? It's all part of the way in which society wants to treat me differently because of how I was victimized. Let's treat sexual assaults like any other crime and tell some rape jokes. Cool?

Here's mine:

When my victim's advocate called me up the week after I was assaulted, she went over the rape kit results and what I could expect from the process, and asked me if I had any questions. I asked her if they could tell me the name of the man who had been arrested for assaulting me, and I heard her shuffle through papers. His name, she said, was "Hey-zeus" after which I started laughing.

An agnostic, I was raped by Jesus.

Sense And Humour [The Guardian]
The Office's Rape Joke [Feministing]

Related: Rape Case Against Bryant Dismissed [MSNBC]

Earlier: My Sexual Assault Is Not Your Political Issue

I'm not the only one who sees the Indy flicks as dentata dramas. According to one Mr. Cranky on his eponymous website, "The climax of Temple of Doom is the key. The offerings made to the female God include a human sacrifice lowered down a canal into a pit of red hot lava. When Kate Capshaw is tied to the contraption and lowered, Indy's Willie is threatened. His Willie's entrance into the canal equals death, and Indy will have none of that."

Mr. Cranky also points out that Temple of Doom highlights Indy's overwhelming fear of being emasculated. A thread that goes throughout the four films is Indy's fear of snakes. It seems that our big, conquering superhero is threatened by external, slithering phalluses! In the Crystal Skull, at one point, Shia LeBouf's character asks Indy to "grab onto his snake," to get Indy out of a pit of quicksand. Indy is not exactly thrilled about it.

In the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones gets that adorably virile scar beneath his lower lip from whipping himself as an inexperienced teen. Considering all that dentata evidence, I think he got the scar from some other, more sensually barbed exploration.

Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom [Mr. Cranky]

Earlier: Indiana Jones 4: The Kingdom of The Crystal Dull

New York Times:

Dressed in gray coveralls, her hair bobbed and Slavic accent slipping and sliding as far south as Australia, Ms. Blanchett takes to her role with brio, snapping her black gloves and all but clicking her black boots like one of those cartoon Nazis that traipse through earlier Indy films. She’s pretty much a hoot, the life of an otherwise drearily familiar party. Among the other invited guests are Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Shia LaBeouf, who plays Mutt, the young sidekick onboard to bring in those viewers whose parents were still in grade school when the first movie hit. Karen Allen, who played Indy’s love interest in “Raiders,” is here too, with a megawatt smile and a bit of the old spunk.

Rolling Stone:

The good news is that Harrison Ford can still rock a fedora and a bullwhip like nobody's business as the globe-trotting archaeologist. The dark side is that after 19 years of wrangling between Spielberg and Lucas — in a mind-meld with writer David Koepp to craft just the right script for Indy 4 — they came up with this mess. Everything looks raided from the lost ark of the three previous Indy hits. What's worse is that after a smashing opener involving Indy getting captured by Russians in Nevada, circa 1957, the film starts piling on atomic subplots. It's a cliché overload. By midpoint, the movie starts to play like National Treasure meets The X-Files, with a touch of The Goonies, and I don't mean any of these comparisons as a compliment.

Dallas Morning News:

The problem in Crystal Skull is that too many of the set pieces lack heart or visual integrity. They feel random and piled on – witness the aforementioned monkeys – and, subsequently, safe and sterile. Hints of personality emerge in the banter between Mr. Ford, Mr. LaBeouf and Karen Allen, reprising her role as Indy's old love interest Marion, but the fallback pattern always kicks back in. Our heroes are trapped by Russians with guns. Our heroes escape. Our heroes are trapped again by Russians with guns. Mix. Stir. Repeat.

Newsweek:

It's hard to say which audience will be better suited to this latest installment. Established Indy fans may find nostalgia clouding their ability to accurately judge The Crystal Skull in the context of the first films, but young viewers who are unfamiliar with the first three will miss a lot of the jokes and may wonder what the fuss is about, especially compared to more sophisticated fare. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Indy is still big; it's just that, in the new world of movie franchises, The Crystal Skull feels smaller.

Chicago Sun-Times:

The Indiana Jones movies were directed by Steven Spielberg and written by George Lucas and a small army of screenwriters, but they exist in a universe of their own. Hell, they created it. All you can do is compare one to the other three. And even then, what will it get you? If you eat four pounds of sausage, how do you choose which pound tasted the best? Well, the first one, of course, and then there's a steady drop-off of interest. That's why no Indy adventure can match Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But if Crystal Skull (or Temple of Doom from 1984 or Last Crusade from 1989) had come first in the series, who knows how much fresher it might have seemed? True, Raiders of the Lost Ark stands alone as an action masterpiece, but after that the series is compelled to be, in the words of Indiana himself, "same old same old." Yes, but that's what I want it to be.

The Hollywood Reporter:

This film feels like work, whether it's poor Harrison Ford straining to keep pace with his younger self or Spielberg and writer David Koepp piling on the thrill-ride acrobatics that have only scant connection to the plot.

Los Angeles Times:

…Given its Saturday matinee genre nature and the fact that star Ford, creator Lucas, director Spielberg, composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn, among others, have all returned, it was inevitable that this film was going to fall within a very narrow range in terms of quality. It was either going to be a worse- or better-than-average Indiana Jones film. It turns out it's one of the better ones and everyone involved can breathe a sigh of relief.

Entertainment Weekly:

The skull may be transparent, but the plot is murky as hell.

Ain't It Cool News:

I also believe that each of the Indiana Jones films are about different things at their core. Raiders is about BELIEVING. Temple Of Doom is about TRUST. Last Crusade is about abandoning obsessions and choosing to live. And that leads us to The Crystal Skull… What is it about? Well, that I’m literally just 40 minutes from having seen it at this point – I’m going to say I feel the film is about letting go of the past and choosing a happy future. It’s LIFE. It’s also… like the Indy’s before it… A SHITLOAD OF FUCKING FUN! There’s silly shit here – but it’s FUN SHIT. But it’s loaded with classic bits.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens today

I read the Karen Allen interview over the weekend and was thinking about the lack of roles for mature ladies when I read this NY Times 'Sunday Styles' piece about why people hate the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. It was far from revelatory, but this quote from a Slop residente stuck out: “Hipsters and people who don’t have kids are terrified of becoming grown-ups and parents, which is what Park Slope has come to represent." But it's not just hipsters who are scared to grow up  it's everyone born after 1945.

Think about it: Dennis Hopper is using his bad-ass, drug-using, motorcycle riding cred from the 60s to shill for retirement planning, despite the fact that he's over seventy. Baby boomers are the ones currently running the studios, and they're terrified of aging, of being seen as adult. Because men's roles in film aren't based so much on aesthetics, they're allowed to act like teenagers in grown up, paunchy bodies. But since women, particularly in Hollywood, are not really allowed to age, they're forced to act like girls until they're forced off the screen entirely.

But it's just a theory. Maybe it's much more simplistic; maybe, as Rush Limbaugh said about Hillary Clinton, America is simply afraid to stare at an aging woman.

Remember Karen Allen? Steven Spielberg Did For 'Indiana Jones' [Los Angeles Times]
Park Slope: Where Is the Love? [NYT]

Earlier: Woman-Girl Syndrome: Hollywood's Latest Malady