Fireworks

This week, people who live in urban areas who do not like loud bangs are in trouble. Because whether fireworks are legal or illegal, somebody will be almost continuously setting off firecrackers, the noisy type of firework with no pretty sparks. Just a sudden, loud disruption of the peace. People who live in the country are used to loud bangs because target shooting is often a local entertainment. But the noise level intensifies as July 4th gets closer. And then on the day itself, things go up for grabs everywhere. Yes, in certain areas there are police crackdowns. Despite that, it’s an American tradition to set off fireworks of some kind on the Fourth of July. When a heroine and a hero meet in a romance, it is often said that fireworks go off. In movies made before sex scenes were allowed, fireworks were substituted for the sex, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s stylish thriller, “To Catch a Thief.” Cary Grant and Grace Kelly start kissing, and then the screen fills with showy public fireworks, the kind that burst high in the air and send a shower of artfully contrived, multicolored sparks shooting in all directions and then falling to the earth. A good metaphor for sex, to be sure. But when a heroine describes fireworks in her body on merely meeting the hero, sometimes I wonder if the author is exaggerating. It all sounds so uncomfortable. And overdone. And too soon. I can understand instant attraction that is physical. It’s more common to men than to women, I was raised to believe. But I don’t know if that is still considered to be the truth. So much of what I was taught about male and female sexual response was sheer hogwash. In fact, if you’d like a laugh, check out any antiquated science book. And for the most absurdities read an old sex manual, or rather, what they used to call a family life manual, one that is at least 50 years old. In them, sex ends with middle age, and women don’t much like sex to begin with, and take forever to have an orgasm or never have one at all. And that’s supposedly okay. How times have changed! Anyway, fine, the fireworks of instant attraction are credible. But not too much of it, please. Not so much that a woman falls all over herself or a man goes berserk. That’s not attractive. And one of the chief tasks of the romance writer is to make sex sound attractive. Because let’s face it, the desire to rut is merely an animal response unless you add some romantic details. And carefully filter them and describe them in attractive terms. It’s not attractive if a man breaks out in a nasty sweat when he sees the heroine. But a romance writer can make it sound attractive. And then there are the blushers. The women (and men) who experience a strong flush of blood to their faces when they feel something. In novels, women get teased a lot for blushing, which they are usually doing while denying that they have any feelings for the hero. Their faces tell a different story. And as for men, they are said to experience an occasional dark flush of emotion. When I was a kid, we had a handsome young hillbilly for a math teacher, a Mr. Brown. If a lady teacher came by the classroom, he would blush and automatically straighten his already immaculate tie. Even at the merciless age of 14, we all thought it was sweet. Teenage students are careful observers of their teachers, and I remember another, fairer-skinned teacher who turned red on occasion. The time I remember best was when he caught me passing a note (forbidden behavior) and swooped down and seized it. And then discovered I had simply folded a blank piece of paper. He went red. Okay, enough about my youthful escapades. My point is that physical reactions can be sexual or they can just be related to temper or embarrassment. Was Mr. Brown hot for every lady teacher he saw? Doubtful. And the other teacher was ticked off for sure. Similarly, most women do not feel gerbils dancing on our spines if we see a hot guy. Of course the problem may be that we seldom see really hot guys except through the cool medium of television. Or is it a hot medium? Marshall McLuhan was the one who claimed that certain media draw us in and others don’t, and he rated them hot or cool. Darned if I can remember how he rated a romance novel or any novel, for that matter. But back to fireworks as a metaphor for physical attraction. If fireworks go off when the heroine and heroine first meet, what happens when they finally kiss? Or when they make love? What’s left? So maybe the fireworks in the first scenes should just be the prelude, the firecrackers of June that lead up to the displays of July. That's a good reason to delay the more emotional and passionate scenes in any story, or even in your life, until the tale has developed to its full potential. Meanwhile, for all you annoyed city dwellers, may I suggest noise reduction earphones?

No Mush

It has been a month since the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” opened to enormous fanfare. I’m going to assume that you’ve seen it, or else you don’t care. Either way, spoilers ahead. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot about the previous Indiana Jones movies. I remember how tantalizing Harrison Ford was in the first one, playing an intelligent, cultured university professor in some scenes, and a macho adventurer in others. He was the unattainable man, and he was worth attaining because he had a secret identity just like Zorro or a comic book superhero. On the one hand he demonstrated all the refined qualities that a woman could want in a man, and on the other, he could handle himself in a bar fight. A woman likes to know that a man is capable of defending her in a bar fight. Of course, his love interest in that movie, Marion Ravenwood, was quite capable of doing the bar fighting, which was kinda cool. But when he hitched a ride on a submarine, and did that stunt on the speeding truck, I knew the movie was not meant to be convincing or a romance. It was meant to be fun. The two sequels were too violent (“Temple of Doom”) and too lightweight (“Last Crusade”). There was nothing in them that I could even pretend was real romance, even by (metaphorically) squinting. In fact, Jones’ cavalier attitude toward women always grated on me. But then, this whole series was a boys’ adventure fantasy, and in them the hero never is interested in the girl, not really. That would be mushy, and boys don’t like mush. Then why am I even talking about the fourth Indiana Jones movie? The series has never featured a satisfactory romance between a man and a woman. The movies never were aimed at women; they were aimed at men. But so was the first “Star Wars,” and it had one of the strongest and truest female lead characters I ever saw in an adventure movie, Princess Leia. Loved that woman. Loved her sarcasm. Loved Han Solo’s sarcasm right back. Even if at times, Dennis the Menace and his friend/antagonist Margaret came to mind, quintessential child opponents divided by the differing interests of gender. The Indiana Jones series was equally true to the same divide, only it did not sustain a strong female lead character through the series. What were my expectations of this fourth Indiana Jones movie? Lots of action. Hopefully nothing too embarrassing. Harrison Ford had a smoking hot body well into his fifties from all the tennis he played, but those geezer pants he was wearing in the trailer didn’t augur well. Maybe they were hiding a gut he has grown since his second divorce. Dunno, and this movie was so lacking in physical intimacy that I never had to care. Yeah, he’s seen without a shirt here and there. But his pants were big enough for two men. It’s not that the plot didn’t have any possibilities. I thought we were getting them when the FBI guys looking for Commies showed up and got Jones fired. And then started following Jones. But then they simply vanished from the movie, and so did any semblance of an adult, layered struggle. I should have known it when he survived the atomic bomb test in a refrigerator. In this series, the over-the-top action has always clearly signaled that there would not be serious tension, or genuine intimacy, or any depth to characterization. This latest sequel was true to the series, and more. Every scene was a reference to something in a previous Lucas movie. I’ve got news for George Lucas. We don’t all memorize his movies. Even so, once I suspended disbelief (which incidentally is the only way to enjoy Marx Brothers movies, too), it was sheer fun. I thought it was silly and sort of heart-warming. Jones never was a mighty thinker when it came to his personal relationships. But in this movie he does recognize that it’s time to marry Marion Ravenwood, his girlfriend from the first movie, and settle down and be a father and resume his academic career. The adventuring is over. In a way, it’s not much of a romance. But in a way, it’s perfect. His excuse for decades of not committing to any other woman is that they weren’t her. That line can just make a woman melt. It’s enough of a declaration. And how about a mature man actually marrying a woman of his own generation!? Totally cool. It also solved the problem in this boys’ adventure movie that, like most little boys, Jones didn’t want any mush.

My Father, My Enemy

Sons and fathers notoriously have bad relationships. They don’t understand each other. They don’t appreciate each other. One’s too sissy for the other. One’s too macho for the other. They cause the fights at family reunions. They order wives and mothers and grandmothers and daughters to shun the offending other, as if their own anger is so righteous that everyone around should feel it to the same degree. And they keep the estrangements going for years and years, because they’re too stubborn to ever give up trying to prove that they’re right, and too filled with testosterone to make peace. Maybe on a deathbed. But then again, often not. If fathers and sons are so tough on each other, is it any wonder that in romances, fathers and brothers often betray and abuse the heroine? They lose her in a card game, as if she’s an extra pile of something they don’t need around. They barter her in a land deal, as if she’s a tree to be harvested. They enmesh her in poverty, as if their comfort is much more important than hers. And they quite frequently prostitute her. And yet, the estranged son yearns for his father’s openly expressed love. And the betrayed heroine yearns equally for proof of her father’s or brother’s affection. But we know that they are looking in vain. How strange, then, that the romantic hero also knows this and somehow resolves most of this emotional turmoil. Simply by loving the heroine. Sometimes even by being a substitute father figure to a misbehaving brother of the heroine. But what the hero also does is provide the economic rock upon which a new family can be created. Thus, he takes up the father’s basic task. The thing is, both sons and daughters were cash assets to a father in the old days. The father used them to increase his own wealth or save himself from poverty. He saw that as his right, but also as his duty, to keep the family unit as intact as possible. For the son, it might mean a lifetime of slavery to the family business, often a farm. For the daughter, it might mean a marriage to a man she didn’t much like, who might work in the family business or otherwise help it flourish. As sons and daughters have become more able to escape the tyranny of their fathers, largely because our society now offers superior mobility and thus economic independence, have they been able to forge different or better relationships with them? Or is a father still an enemy? It does seem counterintuitive to talk about the negatives of fathers around Father’s Day, another sentimental American celebration of a myth. The myth of the great dad. Who is that father? Have you ever met one? A friend just e-mailed me Ben Stein’s essay about how hard fathers work and how unappreciated they are especially because they don’t whine about the difficulties of their years of labor supporting a family. Okay. Fair enough. But isn’t the lack of whining part of that stubborn refusal to show any emotion that could be construed as a weakness? And why is it a weakness if it is expressed inside the family? Why can’t a father come home from work and say the boss is a jerk and the job is in jeopardy? The children see the father put on his business uniform, much as they see the mother put on hers, plus an extra coating of face makeup for many moms, to armor themselves for the battle. So why is in impossible for the father to relax and admit that he might not win the battle? Or that he’s doing it for people he loves? Or that he appreciates his family members for who they are, not only to the degree that they become pawns or foot soldiers in his war? A father becomes an enemy within if he undermines or openly scoffs at his family. If he tells them they aren’t good enough, they spend their whole lives fighting that pronouncement. So why do it? A lot of people have mixed feelings about their fathers. And even if grown children want to heal breaches, sometimes fathers won’t let them. Sometimes, the only satisfactory conversation with a father is with his tombstone. This Father’s Day, have the conversation with the living father if possible. Because no matter what he is and what he has done, your father is not really your enemy. Just watch out for his famous sucker punch, okay?

As American as Apple Pie

Recently there were some lengthy debates at another romance-oriented site about race and ethnicity in romances. What I realized from reading and contributing to them (yes, I put in my two cents) was that things have changed a lot in romances since the Big Change. As almost everyone knows, about 30 years ago, modern American romance writers finally got a voice. They’d been stifled and locked out by progressively less relevant girl-next-door stories from American publishers that completely ignored the sexual revolution, or by harsh, sexist melodramas that British Mills & Boon (Canadian Harlequin) could sell all over the world to women with fewer freedoms than American women enjoyed. There has been no looking back since then. The voices of American women have strongly impacted the romance publishing scene, and, to the degree that American-written romance gets reprinted in other countries, the world. Romance writers have branched out into many different territories that previously were considered taboo. And then created new paradigms, newly acceptable standards. It’s pretty amazing. Romances are continuously developing. But there still are some topics that are being avoided. Either writers don’t write about them, or editors don’t buy stories about them for fear the published book either won’t sell well or will cause a controversy. Publishers only like controversy if it sells more books. This doesn’t usually happen with genre writing. Instead, the book that offends gets pulled from stores, maybe somebody gets sued, and the rest of the world doesn’t notice. Contrast that to the controversy that sells political memoirs, for instance. The wild world of epublishing has given many hot topics a place to be aired. That discussion about race and ethnicity cited any number of romances, mostly epublished, that feature interracial couples as the main characters, for instance. The traditional print publishers have lagged behind. Meanwhile, over the years we’ve seen some additions to the romance marketplace, chiefly romances by African-Americans about African-American heroes and heroines. And more recently, romances written by and about Latinas. (I don’t count Native American romances because to my knowledge they’re still being written from the point of view of a white woman meeting a hot Native American guy, in other words, they are stories about the fallout of colonial conquest.) But sometimes authors who write about a specific ethnic group have been expected to use ethnic-sounding pseudonyms, as if a person whose name does not sound Latina can’t write a Latina romance. What is this? Reverse discrimination? And whose idea is it? The romance readers’? Or the editors’? Most American romances still ignore the vast, very mixed ethnic heritage of our citizens. This is deliberate, to appeal to the widest possible romance audience. And I think the part that bothers me the most is the blandness of the characters’ names. Everybody is Matt or Jessica, and they all have essentially middle-of-the-road, vaguely Anglo-Saxon last names. There are a few exceptions here and there, but mostly these exceptions prove the rule, because the “unusual” name indicates an unusual cultural heritage that’s going to be important to the plot. Never mind that in any phone book of any major city in America you can find all kinds of names; in romances, you don’t. If a character has a Spanish name, he or she is going to be Spanish. If, as in the case of a couple of romances that I’ve read, the names are clearly Jewish, then they’re in the diamond trade. A lousy cliché. The only Armenian I’ve seen in a category romance was a rug dealer. Sigh. And so it goes. Yes, we’re seeing more feisty Italians from big, noisy families. The Godfather movies brought Italian families—well, not quite the type one sees in romances—into national prominence. And yes, there are the Irish. But 150 years after being despised immigrants, the Irish are considered more charming than ethnic in this country. They have assimilated to the point that having an Irish character doesn’t mean that the heroine’s brother is a priest and her sister is a nun. Yet in romances written 100 years ago by and about Irish-Americans, those types of characters were common. Chick lit, which is women-oriented fiction but is not considered technically romance, has definitely broken the name and ethnic heritage barrier. Lots of chick lit heroines are Jewish, or Italian, or Latina, or Eastern European. And they revel in their multicultural heritage and aren’t cliché types. Do we need more? Of course. Do we need to cross ethnic boundaries and delve into conflicts arising from ethnic differences? Why not, if it makes a good story? But first, romance writers can start small, by daring to use names for their characters and pseudonyms as authors that proclaim something other than a whitebread cultural heritage. Let’s see Polish and French and Korean names. And let’s see another enduring cultural heritage, ethnic food. Have the otherwise bland heroine long for the oil crust apple pie made by her Pennsylvania Dutch great-grandmother. Allow characters to enjoy eating a kosher hot dog from Nathan’s in Coney Island. Make it a plot point to have the hero bring Russian Easter bread to a gathering. America is full of interesting people with interesting family heritages. Instead of trying to turn romance characters into clones of each other who resemble some bland American ideal that is stripped of any ethnic roots, romance writers need to find the individualism of their characters and help show the world that it is appealing. It used to be a cliché that first-generation Americans were ashamed of their parents’ foreign accents and odd ways. Not enough respect is given to these people who had the courage to flee poverty, war, and oppression to start at the bottom here and make a good life for their families. Can a romance writer make it all sound glamorous? Yes. A romance writer can make a name like Zbigniew Brzezinski sound sexy, too.