Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Author's Note: On Teased Panthers, and the Like

Sadly, No peanut gallery member and newly minted Simply Left Behind coblogger TruculentandUnreliable wrote the following about the infamous "panther teasing" scene in the work being satirized on this blog:

So, what I don’t get is why the lady just didn’t sleep on the dude’s couch like a normal person. This would greatly reduce the likelihood of panther-teasing.

In the world of modern genre-fiction (especially thrillers), the male protagonist has to be a hypersexual hetero hero- there's no room for a girly-boy or an ansexual introvert in a whiz-bang (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) adrenaline fest. The problem Beck and his ghost writer face in this situation is his audience's superficial (and possibly hypocritical) social conservatism. They must navigate the strait between genre convention and audience expectation. This is the same dilemma faced by authors of Christian romance novels. In the case of our "teased panther", the authors must show that he is a sexual volcano, barely tamped down by his pure moral character. At best, if his houseguest were to sleep on the couch, the friction between temptation and moral rectitude would be shunted off to the side, robbing the authors of an opportunity to hammer home a none-too-subtle point. At worst, relegation to the couch, and the resultant lack of sexual tension could imply that the male protagonist is eun or queer.*

The protagonist is much like Ray Davies' David Watts: "And all the girls in the neighborhood try to go out with David Watts, they try their best but can't succeed, for he is of pure and noble breed." Of course, while Ray Davies is playing the whole thing for laughs, Beck has to display his typical sham sincerity. His hero has to evince a paradoxically prurient prudery, best described as machastemo.

* They lyrics websites render this as "lewd or queer", but I'll stick to my teenage misinterpretation of a song first heard on vinyl.

6 comments:

  1. Oh, hey, that's me!

    I thought maybe it was because he thought the phrase "tease the panther" was amusing and wanted to incorporate a scenario where he could use it. Buuuut I don't think Beck's that self-aware.

    It must be rough living in such a testosteroni universe with the dictate from god re: no boning before marriage. Which is why, of course, bitches should NEVER EVER tease the panther.

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  2. Which is why, of course, bitches should NEVER EVER tease the panther.

    It's central to the machaste worldview.

    Thanks for giving me an "in" for this entry.

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  3. Oh, you're welcome! I'm happy to tease your rhetorical panther, so to speak.

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  4. although Huffpo (and M. Bouffant, stealing from the bigs) reports that the book is largely written and recycled from the crappy novel written by somebody else.

    Likely Beck never even read that phrase, let alone wrote it.

    I'm not sure if that makes it more or less funny.

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  5. although Huffpo (and M. Bouffant, stealing from the bigs) reports that the book is largely written and recycled from the crappy novel written by somebody else.

    Oh, they must mean The Turner Diaries.

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  6. "If you don't want my peaches, don't shake my tree," as we used to say down south.

    (No, I dunno who "we" are in this case.)

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