Today in angry people on Twitter: My Octopus Teacher and tentacle porn
Aux Features great job internet
So, there’s this documentary. Netflix’s My Octopus Teacher, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, centers on Craig Foster, a filmmaker who forges a bond with an octopus in the wild. And before we get into all the sturm und drang of the thing as it exists on Twitter, take a moment to watch the trailer. First of all, it is very cool to look at because the ocean is, to use a technical term, bonkers. But second, the tone is important here, and before we start talking about octopi and eroticism and stuff we should probably all be on the same page. Go on. Hit play. Enjoy the weepy music.
Welcome back! You may have picked up on an undercurrent of plaintive longing and hushed wonder throughout that video. It’s intentional! The story put forth by the doc is, unabashedly, one of a life-changing connection betwixt diver and octopus. It’s right there in the trailer. You would not be alone in sensing that vibe, probably because the octopus is filmed like she’s in a flashback about a dead wife in a comic book character’s gritty origin story.
Craig Foster was diving, bare-chested, in bitterly cold waters off the southern-most tip of Africa when he saw her—an octopus hiding under a cloak of shells and stones.
Enchanted, he began following this incredibly shy creature, trying to prove he wasn’t a predator by staying very still in her presence. For weeks she evaded him: hiding in her den, camouflaging herself, or pushing her liquid body into the nearest crack to escape.
And then, after 26 days of near obsessive wooing, she reached out and touched him.
[A]fter about six weeks of sea sojourns, he loses track of the colorful creature who has wooed him with her ingenious ways of defending herself from predators and mystical methods of changing color and adapting her swimming style to her surroundings. Foster worries that he’s scared her away with his camera lens.
But after another week passes and Foster learns how to read octopus tracks, he finds his muse and an emotional reunion takes place. The octopus crawls on Foster’s hand and nestles into his chest
“It was absolutely mind-blowing,” Foster recalls as I tear up. “The boundaries between her and I seemed to dissolve.”
Here’s the headline for The Daily Beast’s piece on the film, which calls the relationship an “extraordinary bond—nay, romance” and “a love affair so weird and astonishing that no amount of intrusive filmmaking gestures can quite diminish its wacko power.”
And here’s writer Sophie Lewis, with a Twitter thread that people are Big Mad about:
It is, without question, a lot!
Whether or not Lewis’ read on the film is all that sound is not for us to say—this isn’t a review, much less (heaven forbid) a take of any temperature—but it is worth pointing out that she’s addressing something also addressed in these other reviews, and following that thread to a not-that-surprising conclusion. Because whoa nelly, are people steamed about it:
On both sides!
Somehow in this, our year of hot garbage, it’s the thread about the octopus documentary and eroticism and queer theory and what exactly eroticism and queer theory mean in an academic sense that’s going to tear us apart. Folks! Take a breath! It is a documentary about a man and the octopus he loves in a deep way that may or may not be romantic!
Kate Wagner, The New Republic’s architecture critic, also weighed in, and the two phases of her response seem wholly sensible to us. Phase one:
She then adds that she is “not weighing in on the discourse because as a hetero-married bi woman i am simply not queer enough anymore to speak to what is queer with anything resembling authority.” But then she watched the thing:
Indeed! So we’re asking: Where do you stand on the octopus discourse? Stroll into the comments.
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51 Comments
I mean, honestly it was between this meme or the other one…Edit: oh wait, I had one more
Not the first time someone’s had an…intimate relationship with marine life (TW: Dolphin suicide). It should be worth mentioning that John C. Lilly, the guy who created this experiment, would be the inspiration behind both Day of the Dolphin and Altered States.
I’ll go to my grave insisting that Altered States is one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made.
Wait. The dude doesn’t bang the octopus? Well, this article just saved me ninety minutes of my life.(Also, as someone who went to grad school, I can say with certainty that grad school turns your mind into mush).
One of the few concretely useful skills I learned in grad school was the ability to distinguish between clever arguments and genuinely good arguments. Like, yes, OK, great job playing with words, but it doesn’t really get at the substance of the issue.Relatedly, and more relevantly to the story, distinguishing between very educated, erudite arguments and genuinely good arguments.“That man had a kind of sex with that octopus!”“I mean, no, he didn’t? Like, at all?”“Aha, but if you conceptualize ‘sex’ and ‘erotic’ in more expansive ways that take into account the unique lived experiences of queer individuals -”“Nope. Didn’t have sex with the octopus.”
I don’t mind reading some Michel Foucault or Judith Butler now and again, but it really bugged me to see classmates engage in that self-satisfied theoretical language when it mostly served to just cover up obvious or downright stupid arguments. And these people should at least recognize how dumb that theory-heavy language sounds on a place like Twitter.
I can accept that there are still people out there acting like grad students sucking up to Stanley Fish 30 years after it became an embarassing cliche. I mean, have some self respect, but whatever.But at least take a look at what happened to Fish. He couldn’t even manage to be more than a guy writing takes in the NY Times that shared 90% of the DNA of a Tom Friedman column.
I always try to be careful in these discussions, because there’s a lot of value to dense, difficult-to-read texts, and I don’t want to be the “big words bad” guy (and I know you’re not saying that either, to be clear). And I had a lot of fun in grad school — you sit in a room with people who are smarter than you are and you talk about interesting things. It’s pretty great.But some people are happy spending their entire lives sitting around a table talking about the nature of reality and the subjectivity of perception and how nothing is truly “real,” and those people tend to become successful academics with long, productive careers. And I can have that conversation for a while, but eventually I just start pounding on my head on the table and saying, “See? The table is real. Can we move on?”
You need to pound the other person’s head into the table, while saying, “Is it real now? Is it real now?”
Ok, cool your jets, Sam Johnson.
Yeah, but, like, academics also use Twitter to talk to each other. I don’t see why they shouldn’t, and I don’t see why non-academics can’t just recognize that before jumping in and getting mad that academics speak like academics.
The vitriol poured over the post was a little much, but it’s the internet. And besides…
https://media.giphy.com/media/26gR1wYpogPiJQuwo/giphy.mp4
Right, he may have metaphorically or symbolically had sex with the octopus. And the limits and facets of his relationship with the octopus may bear some resemblance to some queer relationships. But that doesn’t mean he had sex with the octopus. Because he didn’t. He cuddled with an octopus and developed a deep emotional bond with her.
Could I ask you to clarify a little? Maybe I’m missing a step in your rhetoric. I am having trouble seeing how a “genuinely good argument” here is just a yes/no determination of octopus sex, if that’s what you’re saying. Like, isn’t that actually the opposite of a good argument—namely because it doesn’t permit for any significant further discourse one way or the other? I guess for me, good = fun, and reducing things to a yes/no answer doesn’t really allow for that. I also don’t think couching this entire drama in terms of how academic discourse is a distraction or mystification is entirely helpful. Like, at a very immediate, “non-intellectual” level, I think we all know that there exists a whole range of “kind of sex” things between sex “proper” and not-sex. And this range of pleasurable feelings, acts, and styles is basically what we mean when we use the word “erotic.” For example, whenever we say, however jokingly, that eating some kind of food is “better than sex”—we are comparing different kinds of erotic experiences. And if that food is meat… well, that means that like it or not, you have an erotic relationship to an animal. That doesn’t mean you’re having sex with an animal, but it does mean that what we take to be pleasure is anything but simple. It doesn’t seem to me that Sophie Lewis has mystified the substance of the issue. (Maybe you’re not saying this about Lewis but other people on Twitter?) Lewis seems to have been clear that her interest was not simply about whether it was sex or not, but rather in that interesting space in between. It seems to be everybody else who has mistaken the substance to be simply that of yes/no octopus sex. Sorry if I’m misconstruing what you’re saying here. I just don’t think Sophie Lewis was out to make a clever argument. She just wanted to celebrate what in her reading seemed like an interesting erotic relationship? And I feel like we can all agree that what might to one person seem like an un-erotic relationship can to another seem quite erotic, and that such a disagreement doesn’t disqualify either side. The disagreement should merely push us to inquire further into why such determination is important to each side to begin with—which Lewis has, on her own end, done, I think.
Imagine how bummed this lady octopus was when she realized this guy doesn’t even have a hectocotylus.
The octopus was truly us the whole time…
You’ll need to wait for the making-of documentary, The Dick Stays In the Cephalopod.
I feel like there must be some sort of logistics principle regarding the ever-increasing levels of hypocrisy over people getting mad over somebody caring too much about something; if you care so much about what another person caring about something you shouldn’t be concerned over, you be a hypocrite. I also feel I’m more of a hypocrite for getting annoyed at those annoyed over a person having the 10,987,865th hot take on Twitter. THE HYPOCRISY, IT COMPOUNDS, YOU SEE.
From the Twitter thread:“Implicit, for me, in Srinivasan’s essay – full of disgusted quotes from bros like Aristotle & Victor Hugo reacting somatophobically to the bodies of octopuses – is the intrinsic queerness of octopus epistemology-cum-embodiment.”Never been so glad my education stopped at a BA.
Before the coming of Twitter, I was always aware that people like this said things like this, I just never had to suffer it directly.
I’d like to think I’m pretty well educated with a BA and JD, but I have no idea what this means
Ugh I hate that I took enough literary/art theory classes that I’m actually able to parse it:All she’s saying is:“I read an essay with quotes from male writers about how oct0pus bodies are gross and weird – but that made me think about how the way that an octopus uses its whole body to learn about the world is ‘queer’.” Which is a fairly uninteresting point that she dressed up with a lot of big critical theory terms, not because they are more precise or informative, but because that’s the way theory people are “supposed to talk”.
This has been my biggest personal stumbling block in applying to PhD programs. Especially in my field, which is film. I have an MFA but that’s an *applied* terminal degree. Not that we didn’t dip our toes into semiotics cuz we for sure did but our purpose was always practical. Once you start going down the pure theory road it certainly feels like the vocabulary turns into its own language. Because I understand the theory I generally grasp WTF academics are driving at. It just also feels like piss-poor actual communication.
The only defense I can offer is that usually the most jargony words are used because they allude to a previous reference that lends a lot more depth or associated ideas (especially philsophic concepts) that the author doesn’t have time to spell out in the current essay.
So here, “somatophobic” basically means “bodies are gross” but it also loops in the long tradition of mind-body duality (especially with the ideal being superior to the corporal) and it does it through a term that was coined by a feminist philospher who has already done some of the legwork to help build an argument that there is an intrinsic queerness to it.
Sentences like that are why I got a JD instead of a liberal arts PhD. But turns out law can be a whole bunch of bullshit, too. Just less flowery.
The fact that I am the first on the AVClub to make this joke means I am disappointed in you all
Please, Nilus, I just ate a whole plate of dingamagoo.
— I thought you said he was dead?
— No, I said he sleeps with the fishes.
“Hot damn, I’m going to Sea World!”
If you go into a movie looking for transgressive queer subtext, chances are you’re gonna find it.
Especially if you’re a self-absorbed moron tripping on acid.
“One of the things that keeps popping up is about “subtext.” Plays, novels, songs – they all have a “subtext,” which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know.
But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious?
They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?”
I for one am not enjoying this era of “HERE IS AN OUTRAGE YOU SHOULD NOT WATCH” porn where people build social media clout based on a show nobody’s seen.
normalize female octopi + man friendship
I can’t be the only one who legitimate thought My Octopus Teacher was goint to be the title of an anime about a school girl and her tawdry affair with a cephalopod?
Can I?
Well never mind, then.
Pretty sure Samuel L. Jackson thought the same too.
I’m legitimately struggling with the concept that there isn’t an anime called ‘My Octopus Teacher’. Basic logic just tells me it should exist.
It’s bonkers to me that young people without much money pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for an opportunity to practice bad, very muddled writing. Hey, writing is communication! If yours is not intelligible, it’s not good writing. Right? I mean, am I crazy for wanting clarity in my writing?
For good or ill I think it’s mostly a form of intellectual gate keeping. Which I generally see as a bad thing, though sometimes I despair for how low the standards for critical analysis and discourse have fallen. There should be a balance in good academic writing between populist ease of understanding and specialized vocabulary of the field.
I mean, am I crazy for wanting clarity in my writing?In your writing? No. In all writing? Yes.Some writing (especially writing that uses jargon, shorthand, or allusions to other, thick texts) that is not clear to you will be clear to others (who are familiar with the jargon, shorthand, or textual references). In academic writing, it is important that there is a level of writing that doesn’t always begin from square one, that doesn’t appeal to wide audiences, but only audiences with similar familiarity or else introduction paragraphs would need to be book-length. It is crazy that all writing be clear to whomever picks up the text, though many unclear writers would be the first to admit that their writing could use some extra work.
On the other hand there is writing that is technically (that is grammatically and logically) extremely clear, but also so incredibly dense that it would not be clear initially. As an example, I’m thinking here of Adorno, whose writing I never fully understand on first read, but mostly because he doesn’t throw in a bunch of overtures to guide the reader through his writing. After a few reads, however, it is clear that there isn’t a single word that is superfluous or meaningless, and that is a sort of clarity in itself (though an opaque one).
I don’t mean so much specialized writing that assumes you’re familiar with its references and so isn’t expository. I meant more the ease and fluidity of the sentence so that even if you don’t understand the specific jargon, you can at least have ease of reading, which helps greatly in understanding and appreciation. Basically, writing that isn’t muddled and unclear if it doesn’t need to be. I believe no prose needs to be. And as for the jargon—yes, if there is a better term for something why create a difficult one? I guess this is going into defining more and more concepts, maybe concepts that don’t need to be defined when a better sounding to the ear and looking to the eye way will do.
Every reader started with books they liked reading. I guess I mean, you have to write in a way that I like reading it and wish to continue doing so. If I don’t, why wouldn’t I stop, defeating the purpose of the author writing something/communicating it? There is no law that says academic writing can’t be entertaining and interesting, even to non-specialists. Even the specialists want to read something that won’t make their eyes glaze over.
I don’t know how “serious” the discourse from Sophie Lewis is but I remember the nerdy glee of imposing a reading on something and then finding that it is at least arguably supportable in a parallel dimension. And then once in a blue moon you do that and you’re like “shit that’s what they meant, that’s really what they meant!” Like the first person to play Dark Side of the Moon and Wizard of Oz (if somebody hadn’t told them to do it)…it’s like when you start to worry if you’re schizophrenic so you ask somebody to verify your findings…or, if you’re a QAnon you go buy a(nother) gun and start a cult immediately.
My dog fell asleep with his head in my lap while we were watching this last night. I don’t even want to know what kind of furry/hentai fetishes that qualifies me for.
Depends on how you feel about dog appendages being called legs, and octopus appendages being called arms, and where the twain shall meet.
Why on earth would you try to have a conversation like this on Twitter? It is profoundly not the place for intellectual discussion on pretty much anything. It just makes academia look ridiculous (more ridiculous that it already is) and exposes how little education or nuanced thought your average human possesses.Save this shit for your academic journals or book clubs or whatever. Also, Twitter is trash.
This reads like a far-right blowhard’s idea of both academia and queerness. I wouldn’t be surprised if that whole thread came out of a troll farm.
Wagner’s response is pretty much how I feel about all fucking fan shippers.CAN TWO CHARACTERS JUST BE FRIENDS AND NOT HAVE TO FUCK?
People cuddle with their pet dogs and cats (and other animals) and people don’t usually say they’re fucking.
Man, the inclusion of the word “usually” there makes me just so uncomfortable.
“…the brutality of a love, between a man ………………… and an octopus.”