For the Writers, Strippers …and Anarchists

“Stripper power! Go Diablo!”

That’s how my friend Susan, a stripper for 15 years, responds to the news of Diablo Cody’s Oscar for best screenplay. At Desedo.com, a blogger known to me as MHB cites Diablo’s tattoo — “a bikini-clad + rope bound lass” — as a reminder that the screenwriter “was once a stripper.” According to MHB, Juno’s dialog is “strongly rooted in the self-aware and acerbic style of writing oft found in sex worker literature.”

Thank you, MHB. But who is MHB? (Full disclosure: I found Desedo.com because a reader known as Christian Dior wanted to show me the Manhattan Call Girl reference in MHB’s post.)

Not everyone is feeling as excited as Susan. Or myself. Some unfortunate-sounding malcontents have cobbled together a Diablo-dissing parody which was posted at SpoutBlog. Sad!

The go-to guy, if you want historical perspective — and who doesn’t? — is Richard Porton, one of the editors at Cineaste and author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination.

“Even the most successful screenwriters working today are not household names for the general public,” he tells me. “Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges had to become directors to become famous. So it’s great that Diablo Cody is helping to put writers on the map — even as it creates a big backlash and a lot of jealousy.”

I find this rather bracing. The price of writer power?

“There have been famous screenwriters in the past like Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Ben Hecht,” he points out, but they didn’t have Diablo’s kind of visibility. “Of course, they didn’t write during the age of the Internet. That seems to make a big difference.”

Film and the Anarchist Imagination is an excellent guide to anarchist thinking, some of which plays a role in today’s sex worker activism. Richard’s book is also available in Spanish.