Monday, May 24, 2010

Gigi

yesterday I was watching TV, and I watched Good Night and Good Luck again, and also this old musical Gigi.



Gigi was about a French girl being trained by her grandma and great aunt to be a courtesan. It was a look into early 1900s French society, which was interesting because I don't know anything about it. I had no idea being a courtesan or mistress was such a profession. It's more like being a professional girlfriend.

Both of these movies had some moral contradictions. On the one hand, Gigi and her family of courtesans are wholesome, but on the other hand, she is being trained to be a girlfriend and sell her body. Gaston is a gentleman, but also kind of a sexual predator in another lens. Then again, I guess all women are trained to be girlfriends and then wives, and nowadays people divorce when they tire of each other, which is like changing mistresses.

In Good Night and Good Luck, it's not really that ambiguous since McCarthy's methods were really ridiculous. At the same time, I think it turned out that perhaps some of the people on his list, perhaps maybe even a majority, did have some ties to Communism, although that doesn't mean they were a security threat. In the case of Annie Lee Moss, there is evidence that actually she probably did join the Communist Party briefly inadvertently, although it's unlikely she did anything to help. At any rate, it was a very interesting episode of public opinion vs. news media vs. politicians vs. corporate interests.

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