Female bias, Male Dangerous Vulnerability, Phenomenology of Right (Hegel/Kojève)

Evidence for Intersectional implicit bias and the predominance of target gender: New research (Connor, P., Weeks, M., Glaser, J., Chen, S., & Keltner, D., 2023) provides evidence that people generally have a positive implicit bias towards women and a negative implicit bias towards men, as well as a similar but less consistent implicit bias in favor of people from higher social classes. But the most recent research found inconsistent evidence for implicit biases based on race. The findings shed new light on intersectional implicit bias and have been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Implicit Association Tests (IATs) are a type of psychological tool designed to measure implicit biases (unconscious attitudes) that people may hold towards certain social groups or concepts. These tests have provided evidence that people have implicit biases towards different social categories, like race and gender. But individuals often have multiple identities that intersect, like being a woman of a certain race or social class. The authors of the new study sought to investigate implicit biases in the context of multiple intersecting social identities. “I’ve always been interested in stereotyping and prejudice based on social class,” said study author Paul Connor, a postdoctoral scholar with the Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers again found that gender was the most significant factor affecting implicit evaluations, with female targets receiving more positive evaluations than male targets across all three methods used to measure implicit evaluations. The effects of race were found to be inconsistent, with participants favoring White and Asian targets over Black targets in ST-IATs, and Asian targets over White and Black targets in EPTs, while Asian and Black targets were favored over White targets in AMPs. “Our headline finding was that it was predominantly targets’ gender that drove implicit responses, not race, age, or social class,” Connor told PsyPost. “Specifically, we found that pro-female and anti-male biases explained much more variation in participants’ responses than any other kind of bias.” The study will be publicly available on 05/19/2023 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Source: psycnet.apa.org

Anthony Oliver Scott on quitting as film critic after 23 years writing for the NY Times: "I'm only a little more than halfway through this March 23 podcast but it's a really interesting interview. I grew up with the classics from the golden era. The films from the 1940s are among my favorite ever. Others of my favorite personal films are of the late 90's/early 00's. The problem at the moment is mainly the transition that happened shortly thereafter into brands-as-movies: the churning out of franchise blockbusters that has sucked the air out of the filmmaking industry. There is currently a tyranny of fandom that inoculates the franchises from critical discussion and that puts the "hater" label on their critics. I was a target of the Film Twitter hordes because I didn't champion Everything Everywhere All At Once, for example. I thought there were better movies this year like The Banshees of Inisherin or Tár." Source: www.nytimes.com

Fresh from his Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin, Irish actor Barry Keoghan is turning his attention back towards a dream assignment: a new feature retelling of the story of Billy the Kid. Keoghan’s American Animals director Bart Layton is aboard to direct the feature, produced by Element Pictures and RAW with Film4. “We’ve seen many versions of Billy the Kid on screen before,” Keoghan tells Deadline. “My interest was in trying to tell a version that breaks from the facade of that cool, calm, and collected gunslinger Billy the Kid that we’re all used to seeing. I wanted to humanize him in a way.” The project will lean into the Kid’s Irish ancestry and complicated childhood. Born in New York as Henry McCarty, he was orphaned at the age of 15 when his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. His first arrest for robbery came a year later, and by the time he was 18, he was wanted for murder after an altercation in Arizona. His notoriety escalated from there, and he was 21 when Sheriff Pat Garrett shot him to death. Keoghan, who lost his own mother when he was just 12 years old and grew up in the foster system, says he understood the desperate choices McCarty made along the way. “I remember reading about him as a kid, but as we were digging into the project, there were so many things we discovered about his life,” Keoghan says. “There are so many eyewitness accounts, and lots of different versions of his story that didn’t add up but that contributed to the legend. He was running his whole life. I felt related to Billy in the sense of him being a mummy’s boy, but obviously, I took a different path, turning my circumstances into something positive rather than rebelling against them. Nevertheless, there’s a vulnerability to Billy that I think it’s important to bring, to understand him as a real person rather than the myth that he has become.” Source: deadline.com

In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens, Alexandre Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action, which requires every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing. Perhaps most importantly, what Kojève understood was the extent to which we humans desire to exercise some control over how other people see us differently from the ways in which we see ourselves. According to Hegel, "On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other." Whereas for Hegel freedom rested upon the ability to preserve one's difference, for Kojève it rested upon the ability to preserve one’s own identity at the expense of difference. Kojève’s reading of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic presents another form of contest between oppressor and oppressed, where mastery over another in order to master oneself becomes the means to equality, and ultimately justice within society. Source: aeon.co

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Martin (Barry Keoghan), has formed a father-son relationship with Steven (Colin Farrell) after the death of his own father. Martin’s dad died on the operating table under Steven’s care and it’s implied that such a dynamic formed due to the surgeon’s moral obligation. Martin insinuates himself into the Murphy family and reveals his true motives—to get revenge on Steven by forcing him to kill a member of his own family. Such an act will “balance” the act of killing Martin’s father. Even when he’s being “nice,” Martin oozes a bland sort of affected charm. He knows that Kim is a choirgirl, so one day he presents her with a musical note attached to a keychain. 

Kim succumbs to Martin immediately, instead of thinking that he could be an evil Eddie Haskell. This girl seems to find in Martin a romantic sense she had never witnessed within the sterile confines of her family. Actually, Martin comes to play the gentleman, refusing Kim's sexual offering at her bedroom. Keoghan is eerily capable to show a dangerous vulnerability throughout. Uncomfortable interactions and reveals—Steven’s reaction to Martin’s mother, or Martin when discussing death—are shown from a slight left profile view. Realizations—like Steven saying that Martin has “serious psychological issues” or Kim and Anna noticing that Martin can will them into sickness and health—are shot from a slight right profile view. Moments of guilt are also shot this way, and when characters reveal something, they’re usually shot from behind or largely out of frame. It all creates a spatial loop to disorient viewers. Source: www.brightwalldarkroom.com