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Opening Night Re-examines and Refracts the "Aging Actress" Trope

“I’ll do just about anything to make my character more authentic. I always have.” 

John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) is about a woman whose life is dedicated to performance. Myrtle Gordon subsumes herself in her acting roles. She has no children; her romantic relationships are with her co-star and her director; she has no age to which she will admit, lest her aging jeopardize her career. In her latest play, she stars as Virginia, an aging actress. After a car accident takes place outside the theater after a performance and a young fan is killed, Myrtle begins to hallucinate the young girl as she herself descends further into alcoholism and unreality. Myrtle speaks, like Gena Rowlands’ characters in Cassavetes’ films often do and are, like a mad person who believes she is the only sane one in the room. 

She may be the only sane one in a room of occultists preparing for a seance led by the playwright’s psychic, but her proclamations of self-knowledge are as forthcoming and easy to comprehend as they are tragically revealing of Myrtle’s own blind spots. In sacrificing herself for roles - not sleeping enough, drinking, smoking, all to “get into character” - she indulges in the hedonistic pleasures afforded her by the vocation of inhabiting another person. In pursuit of a character’s authenticity, Myrtle has lost herself; she is unable to see the young woman she once was in Virginia, the “second woman.” Because she inhabits every character so fully, Myrtle’s loss of self impedes her acting. Thus, the straightforward trope of the aging actress is reflected back upon itself, exposing the discrepancies between the artistic rendering and the reality. 

Myrtle moves between stage sets and real-life locales constantly, and themes established in the outside world recur in the narrative of the play. In Virginia’s apartment, two enormous black-and-white photographs of an old woman in a headscarf adorn the walls. Her face is etched with wrinkles, the quintessential babushka; the domineering presence of the photographs beats the play’s audience over the head with its theme of aging womanhood while serving as a clear juxtaposition with Myrtle/Virginia, whose “old” age is less obvious, more well-preserved than “decrepit.” We see the fine lines on Myrtle’s face only when she winces as she knocks back a drink in a close-up, a donning of armor before facing the audience. 

Myrtle is not as old as Virginia, and she identifies this to Sarah Goode, the playwright (played by 1930s movie star Joan Blondell, whose own career imbues the casting with the connotation of the washed-up starlet archetype) as a major sticking point in her artistic process. “You have me up there having hot flashes - I don’t have hot flashes!” Myrtle refers to herself as her character, indicating her increasing difficulty with separating the two, and implicitly accuses Sarah of humiliating her by writing such an old woman for her to play. Myrtle’s worries seem vain and ridiculous, like those of so many vain, ridiculous actresses who care more about how they appear than how accurately they portray the character: a variation on Norma Desmond, the butt of the joke. It’s a culturally accepted phenomenon, and it largely lets Hollywood off the hook for the superficial standards of practice that drive women to such hysterics. Myrtle explains it all: if she plays this role convincingly, her fate is sealed as an old actress relegated to old-woman roles. No matter how good this play might be, no matter how complex and rich of a character Virginia is, she is not an ingenue in the traditional sense and Myrtle will never be such an ingenue again. 

The paradoxical lucidity with which Myrtle analyzes her relationship to Nancy, the young fan killed in an accident outside the theater, further distinguishes her from the crazy actress trope while confirming that she is sort of textbook “crazy,” hallucinating the dead girl as a paragon of desirable youth who says things like, “I like to fuck. I like when men look at me.” Unable to let go of this version of herself who probably never was - first eighteen, then seventeen, impossibly young and beautiful and scarily willing to be used by men in ways that many aspiring actresses rationalize to themselves again and again - Myrtle conjures her and tortures herself with the phantom. When Nancy confronts Myrtle, it is the confirmation of Myrtle’s worst fears about her aging self through the eyes of the younger woman she “killed,” perhaps so no one would rise up, All About Eve -style, in her place? 

In the manner of an experimental character study, Opening Night atomizes and comments on the wider tendency of the actress to make everything about herself, the solipsism required by the profession that dramatizes every aspect of life, encouraged and pilloried by the people who want her to perform, who write plays and direct her in them. The car accident has a lingering effect on Myrtle because it is an awful thing that she witnessed and subsequently internalized, but also because the people in the car with her (her husband, Manny, the play’s director; and her co-star and stage husband, played by Cassavetes) tell the chauffeur to keep driving.

Resolutions for the Unresolvable Girl in "Promising Young Woman" and "Little Women"

While the recent PG-rated adaptation of Little Women and the provocative social thriller Promising Young Woman couldn’t differ more in tone and aesthetic, they are products of the same moment in a post-#MeToo Hollywood. The two films reflect a tentative optimism about the state of women in film, as well as an interest in reevaluating past portrayals of women.

Shaped by this climate, Little Women and Promising Young Woman tread familiar ground with fresh perspectives. Though they might hope to celebrate women’s victories, both retain some level of skepticism about the future. For one, they acknowledge that having a voice is not enough; these films not only star women but grapple with the extent they can control their own narratives.

Director Emerald Fennell answered the call for subversive female protagonists with Promising Young Woman, which deals with a familiar narrative — the rape-revenge plot — but only partially delivers on the revenge element.

The film stars Carey Mulligan as Cassie, a med-school dropout who spends her weekends entrapping predatory men. Her main target is Al Monroe, who assaulted her late best friend, Nina. In the final 20 minutes, Cassie tracks down Al at his bachelor party and corners him with a scalpel — but in a prolonged, stomach-turning twist, the groom suffocates Cassie to death with a pillow. For those who hoped for a victory over the patriarchy, this scene is a punch to the gut.

On top of thwarting expectations, this moment is captured with brutal honesty. No visual euphemisms shield us from the horror of Cassie’s death, and the pace slows to a near stop as the camera pulls back to document the event. We witness her struggle in real-time as the camera steadily pushes back in, only to take up Al as its subject. Cassie’s limbs are still twitching as she’s edged out of frame.

Then, the tone shifts drastically: a college buddy discovers the scene the next morning and, moments later, reassures Al of his innocence. Cassie is an afterthought as Al’s buddy pulls him into a hug and kisses his head. The exchange is light, verging on comical. The tonal dissonance reaches a climax as the two men burn her body in the woods, set to “Something Wonderful” from The King and I. Al’s friend comforts him as they stare into the fire. “This is a man who tries,” the song promises us.

The tragedy of this sequence of events isn’t just that Cassie fails; it’s also that Cassie is literally and figuratively silenced, and that the film then moves on. She spends the film trying to get justice for another dead woman, only to meet the same fate. The absent Nina lost control of the narrative a long time ago; following Cassie’s abrupt removal from her own story, the ease with which Al assumes center stage rubs salt in the wound. He progresses toward his own happy ending — his wedding day — and gets yet another second chance.

At this point, we viewers might feel that the karmic laws that govern storytelling have been violated; though this injustice is realistic, it’s still narratively unsatisfying. The film seems to sense our disappointment in its final moments and says, “Fine, my treat.”

At the outdoor wedding reception, Cassie’s scheduled texts come through, and they seem to address us directly:

You didn’t think this was the end, did you?

It is now.

Enjoy the wedding!

We — along with the texts’ recipient, Cassie’s ex-boyfriend — realize Cassie has planned for this outcome, having dispersed the necessary evidence ahead of her death. Cue upbeat ‘80s ballad “Angel in the Morning.” Sirens announce the arrival of the ultimate Deus ex Machina; the police escort the bad guy out of frame. Then, the final texts:

Love,

Cassie & Nina

;)

Fennell shared in an interview that she planned to end the film with Cassie’s body burning, but financiers pushed her in another direction. Without this final scene, we could say with certainty that Cassie’s revenge is a futile exercise. But as it stands, Promising Young Woman ends on her last text — a winky-face emoticon! Did she win after all? Is this catharsis?

I’d argue no: The film withholds catharsis. No one mourns Cassie; the final scenes don’t allow space for it. Cassie must posthumously force herself back into the spotlight. If this is victory, it’s the Pyrrhic kind. Yet Cassie engineers this scenario with precision. When forced to compromise, she ultimately decides that regaining control of her and Nina’s narrative is worth it.

I recognized a similar kind of compromise in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s text reckons with her choice to marry off Jo March; without diverting from this ending, the film plants seeds of doubt that undermine its legitimacy.

After Jo says a final goodbye to Professor Bhaer, she turns around to find her family and friends smiling at her expectantly. “You love him,” Amy tells her — not a question, but a statement. “No, I don’t,” Jo replies. It doesn’t matter; no one believes her. Her sisters plan a carriage ride to intercept Bhaer. The music swells gleefully, and the following scenes in the carriage and at the train station are bathed in warm yellow light, preparing us for romance. If we detect artifice here, we might be able to ignore it.

Then the music abruptly dies as the film cuts to the coolly lit publishing office. Jo and the publisher are discussing the ending of her novel, “Little Women”; Jo’s current ending is unacceptable because the main character does not marry. The prior scenes hint at artifice, but this one confirms it by revealing a divergence between Gerwig’s Jo March and Jo’s fictional counterpart. Jo points out that her protagonist voices her refusal to marry throughout the book — as she does in the film — and defends her choice.

“The right ending is the one that sells,” the publisher says. Jo ultimately concedes, but she wants the copyright.

La Fiancée Hésitante, Auguste Toulmouche

When the soaring music starts up again and Jo and Bhaer kiss passionately in the rain, the image of Gerwig’s Jo begrudgingly accommodating her publisher is still fresh. These two versions of Jo become difficult to reconcile. The excessive romance of this reunion seems less substantial when compared to Jo’s mercenary pragmatism. In this light, Jo’s family’s insistence that she marry Bhaer is less endearing. The film still adapts its source material’s ending, but it understands Jo March’s marriage as a compromise — both on Jo’s part and Alcott’s.

In the final scene, Jo watches the printing and assembling of her book with a nebulous expression. Her smile is slight, fading before returning. A disembodied arm hands her a completed copy. She’s proud, but that emotion is complicated by uncertainty. While the copyright might belong to her, this story is not purely her own.

Despite its effusive joy, Gerwig’s Little Women cannot give its protagonist a true happy ending. Jo’s womanhood precludes her from an uncompromised triumph. Beholden to patriarchy, Jo has limited control over her own narrative, but she can control which sacrifice she makes.

Keeping Jo March in mind helped me disentangle the messiness of Promising Young Woman — like Jo, Cassie struggles against the confines of her circumstances, evading a neat resolution. The reunion with Bhaer evoked a similar sense of unreality to Al’s arrest, which strikes me as too good to be true. The romantic happy ending is so convenient and cinematic that it casts doubt on itself, and I couldn’t help but feel the same way about the last-minute karma of Al leaving his wedding in cuffs.

Cassie’s posthumous texts are certain of this scene’s finality, definitely claiming that the end “is now,” though Al’s fate will be left up to the justice system. It seems that Cassie declares an ending to her own narrative, regardless of Al’s fate.

My first reaction to the film closing on Cassie’s winky-face was disbelief. I felt it was unearned. What is there to wink about? Upon reflection, the wink seems cued into the sick joke of the situation. As minor characters discover the trail of evidence leading back to her corpse to the tune of an 80’s power ballad, Cassie makes herself heard the only way it seems to work. “I told you so,” the wink says. “I told you I would.”

Revisiting "The Social Network"

Spoilers for The Social Network

Over ten years after being lauded one of the best films of its decade, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, with its sleek directing and punchy dialogue courtesy of Aaron Sorkin, still proves an engrossing watch. The Shakespearean-esque drama flashes between the founding of Facebook by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and two lawsuits that occurred a few years later, which respectively accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook, and of pushing his co–founder Eduardo Saverin out of the company.

© Charis Tsevis / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The film’s Mark Zuckerberg is socially awkward but egotistical (never a good combination). The screenplay describes him as “a sweet looking 19 year old whose lack of any physically intimidating attributes masks a very complicated and dark anger.” He wants to be the smartest and coolest in any room, wants to be liked and admired by everyone, but in lieu of affection, he’ll accept their jealousy, to the point of presuming it in everyone he meets. Erica, Mark’s fictional girlfriend, puts it best when she says:

“You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you’re gonna go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

When Erica tells Mark that she just wants to be friends, he tellingly responds, “I don’t want friends.” His inability to connect to others is self–inflicted and he can’t stand it either when those close to him have other friends. In one scene, he approaches Erica while she’s out with friends, invading her night with them and trying to get her alone. Later, when Eduardo reveals that his emotionally manipulative and abusive girlfriend Christy frightens him, Mark unfeelingly replies, “Still, it’s nice you have a girlfriend.”

These slightly sympathetic, painful moments of failed connection are both undermined and underscored by Mark’s ruthlessness. He constantly drags down his friends to his level in an attempt to put himself on top. The film implies that he spread a story that Eduardo committed animal cruelty to discredit him and called the police on his business partner Sean Parker after Sean partied with underage college students. After Erica unceremoniously dumps him, he creates Facemash, a website where undergrads can rate female students’ appearances, judging one girl against another like “barn animals.”

Altogether, the film presents Mark as pitiful but reprehensible. Yet its execution is muddled by its admiration of Zuckerberg’s ingenuity, or rather the ingenuity of his creation. One has to wonder how many men have come out of The Social Network wanting to emulate, not condemn, its main character. Nevertheless, it stands to question if Mark even is the genius of the movie. The idea for Facebook originates after a conversation with Harvard seniors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, the plaintiffs in the other lawsuit against Mark. It is Eduardo who provides the initial funding for the site, his roommate Dustin Moscovitz who inspires the famous relationship status feature, and Sean Parker who attracts investors for it. Even Facemash, the closest he gets to a truly original invention, is inspired by a roommate’s idea and a creation of pure cruelty and childishness that depends upon an algorithm created by Eduardo to work perfectly. Mark may be intelligent but he’s also as unoriginal as he is impulsively cruel.

Mark’s real skill seems to lie in his ability to use and discard the people whose ideas and money he is deploying. Of the entire cast, Erica is the only character who cuts Mark loose before he can do the same to her. She exists as both a voice of reason and a white whale for Mark, framed as the reason he works so relentlessly on Facebook. Like most of the female characters in the film, all of whom are supporting characters, she is subjected to casual sexism by Mark and other men. Most women in the movie are glorified window dressing, background props objectified by the frat guys and venture capitalists around them as an implicit condemnation of these male characters and the toxic culture of the spaces Mark inhabits throughout the film.

Yet the movie is guilty of the same mistreatment and objectification as these men, and not once are any of these women or their experiences with misogyny treated with true gravity. The nearest we get is a seconds–long close–up of Erica in tears after being taunted by some male students for her bra size, which Mark has mocked online.

For all of its slick, masterful packaging, The Social Network’s condemnation of Mark is obscured when it fawns over his intelligence and revels in the toxicity of his ambition. It also stands to mention that the real–life Mark Zuckerberg began dating his wife, Priscilla Chan, around the time of the events depicted — ironic considering Erica’s centrality in Facebook’s creation and the treatment of women throughout the movie.

Mark Zuckerberg at South by Southwest in 2008. © Jason McElweenie / CC-BY-2.0

The film’s last scene further muddies the waters. After a grueling day of depositions retreading his vicious ousting of Eduardo from Facebook — at one point, Eduardo bitterly spits, “I was your only friend,” while Mark glares back, silent — Marylin, Mark’s lawyer, tells him, “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.” Here the film, via Marylin, invites us to sympathize with Mark and his conflicted, boyishly vulnerable expression, despite the reprehensibility we have seen on display, despite the confirmation yet again of how self–inflicted his anguish is.

Yet sympathy does not seem to equal redemption. Or perhaps we’re meant to pity him instead. Left alone, Mark pulls up Erica’s Facebook page and sends her a friend request. In a chilling last shot, the screen fades to black as the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” plays and Mark refreshes over and over, hoping that Erica will accept his overture. Having watched Mark get in his own way every time he neared something resembling human connection for two hours, having watched him refuse what he needs in favor of what he wants, we know better.

Nights of Cabiria: Showing Character Growth (Eric)

Nights of Cabiria (1957), directed by Federico Fellini, features a prostitute who struggles to make a living for herself in post-war Italy. She is extremely poor, yet her financial situation is in better shape than her romantic life. She has an idealistic vision of love, and throughout the film, she is crushed multiple times by predatory or manipulative men. The film is bookended by two scenes which closely mirror each other in terms of action; in each, a man takes advantage of Cabiria. Yet, the manners in which these scenes unfold are visually unique from one another in such a way that both reveals the character arc of the protagonist and establishes distinct tones at the opening and close of the film.

In the opening sequence, we see Cabiria dancing with her boyfriend Giorgio by a river. The camera then tracks Cabiria down to the side of the river, and Giorgio follows her soon after. Giorgio wears dark sunglasses. Clearly, he’s not to be trusted, or at the very least his intentions are unclear. The scene then cuts back to a wider frame, and it’s emphasized how isolated the two of them are. Cabiria is alone with Giorgio when he pushes her into the river and runs up the hill, never to be seen again. In the background there is a small crop of buildings in the largely rural surroundings. Cabiria is ultimately saved from drowning, and once she’s been revived, she angrily tells off the people who have saved her and ventures out to find Giorgio. She is still naive at this point of the film, and the camera is distant from her in the buildup to her near-death experience, choosing instead to highlight Giorgio, his eyes covered as he checks for potential witnesses to the crime.

The final sequence plays out in much the same way, with Cabiria getting swindled. However, the act is not comical as it was in the opening. Here Cabiria walks through the woods with Oscar, her new boyfriend for whom she’s sold her house to start a new life with. They walk towards the edge of a cliff. When they get to the cliff, we see the back of Cabiria as she looks out across the water. In front of her is a vast landscape, even more remote than in the opening sequence. The camera is closer to the actors’ faces this time, and we can see the anxiety on Oscar’s face as well as the fear in Cabiria’s as she realizes she has been manipulated again. While Oscar is present in the scene, the camera is always following Cabiria, and she is often in the center of the frame. The scene then cuts between Cabiria on her knees and Oscar standing and looking nervous. Oscar is shot from slightly above, and the camera does not make him an imposing figure in the scene. Cabiria realizes herself what is happening, and she takes initiative and throws her money at Oscar, and she nearly jumps off the cliff herself. She has more agency here, as opposed to her passivity at the start of the film when she willingly goes to the edge of the river as Giorgio tells her to.

After Oscar takes her money, the camera then follows Cabiria as she walks through dark woods onto a road, where she is met by a parade of musicians. The other actors dance and spin around Cabiria as she walks straight down the road, and the camera tracks her path. The final thirty seconds is a close-up tracking shot on Cabiria’s face, and she smiles briefly at the camera before the film ends. She can deal with what life throws at her. While she might be more careful about falling in love, there’s no implication that she will throw out her original idealism. She literally picks herself off of the ground and emerges from a dark wood and onto a road, signaling her readiness to continue with her journey and the notion that the worst is behind her.

 

When the Camellia Blooms (Yaejin)

    In search of fresh small-screen content, I delved into a realm I have not touched since 2016: Korean dramas. Unlike American television shows, which, if successful, might extend over years, Korean dramas are packed into single seasons with sixteen to twenty-four episodes. The one I chose, When the Camellia Blooms features Dong-baek, a single mom, adjusting to a new town, Ongsan. 

    Initially, my interest lay in the portrayal of single mothers, who in Korea are still socially stigmatized. But in the end, I was charmed by the girl power displayed in the show. There is no self-righteous moralizing message. Every character has grave personality flaws, regardless of gender. Sexism is rampantly apparent. However, ultimately, each person makes a decision for him or herself; people pave their own lives. This is the first time I have seen such true equality in the agency exercised by all characters. This is partly due to the drama’s setting. 

    While most landmarks and cities mentioned in the series actually exist, Ongsan is a fictional town. Located in South Korea, it is rural, known primarily for its marinated crabs. Several blocks and alleys make up the entire perimeter of the town. Because of its size, the community is extremely close-knit. It is almost like a clan; everyone knows each other through some connection. The bookkeeper is the uncle of the butcher’s wife’s second cousin’s best friend from middle school: this is completely made-up but it is an example of just how random each connection is. As one person says, you cannot dent a stone pot at home and expect no one to know about it. As nosy as everyone is, when a random neighbor shows up for dinner, the family puts an extra pair of chopsticks on the table. 

    Adding to its flavor, Ongsan is matriarchal. Run by mothers and grandmothers, restaurants are the greatest source of revenue for this town. Recipes are passed on to daughters or daughter-in-laws, which continues this tradition of power. While the governor and politicians are primarily male, women hold more direct power over the townspeople.  A widow with three adult sons rules the streets of Ongsan; none of the other women can face up to her wisdom and experience. The most educated person is a divorce lawyer, an alumna of the top university in South Korea; she has incredible connections beyond the town. 

    This is where Dong-baek raises her toddler son for six years. Infamous as the Princess Diana of Ongsan, she receives unwanted male attention, stirring the cattiness of her neighbors. Although she runs a successful bar that pays for her son’s tutors and baseball lessons, the townspeople refer to her as a bargirl. Instead of using honorifics, which is expected when speaking to adults in Korean culture, everyone speaks to her using language intended for close friends and children.

    Despite the consistent disrespect and her shy personality, Dong-baek will defend herself. Some highlights include when she informs her wealthy landlord that the price of alcohol does not include the right to her smile, and when she asks the neighborhood women why she should be ashamed of raising her son alone. She is neither holier-than-thou nor a withering, subservient wallflower. She is not a caricature: she is an honest hard worker who speaks up when necessary and cries when overwhelmed. She is often strong and sometimes vulnerable, but she is never weak. She is the feminist character I have been waiting for. 

    

Fury Road: The Car Is a Penis (Eric)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), directed by George Miller, is structured as one giant car chase. The movie begins with Max’s capture and enslavement in the Citadel, a fortress with much needed water and resources in the movie’s wasteland Earth. He’s seen being branded with the skull logo that represents Immortan Joe, the dictator who maintains power by hoarding water in the Citadel. The Imperator Furiosa and a group of War Boys are sent into the dessert to collect gas and bullets when Furiosa suddenly deviates from the path. Furiosa is off to escape to the Green Place, the idyllic town from which she was kidnapped as a child, with Immortan Joe’s many “wives” in tow. Joe and his army immediately go after them, and chase after chase ensues in the hunt for Furiosa and the stolen wives.

When it comes to a car chase’s potential to induce an adrenaline rush, bigger always means better. With more cars comes a higher probability of crashes, and the typical large-scale car chase come in the form of police cars. Fury Road uses the basic idea of multiple cars chasing a single “prey” car and takes it to an extreme. The monstrous cars in Immortan Joe’s army serve specific functions in the hunt, and they are outfitted as such. There are cars fitted with machine guns, cars with people swinging through the air on poles, and there’s a single drummer boy car with a man swinging from wires while playing an electric guitar. Max himself gets dragged into the initial chase as a “blood bag”, and he’s seen chained and muzzled to the front of a car. Mastery of these specialized vehicles is critical to survival in this post apocalyptic environment. Importantly, the titular Max evidences less mastery over these vehicles throughout the film than does Furiosa, and though Max is by no means incompetent, Furiosa is set up as the leader of the pack, which creates some interesting implications.

Furiosa, with her shaved head and the ease with which she fends for herself in this violent setting, is a very masculine character. Indeed, the cylindrical vehicle which she controls for much of the film is the most phallic car out of the whole fleet. It’s also the largest vehicle in the movie. Furiosa stands in stark contrast to the more traditionally feminine “wives” that she’s leading to the Green Place, though even they are tougher than they appear. Despite being clothed in white dresses and shirts, (as opposed to Furiosa’s dirty pants and boots and metal arm), the wives have no choice but to match the fierceness of the men around them in order to survive.

Furiosa’s truck is large enough to fit several protagonists inside, thus giving it the ability to serve as a setting all on its own. The majority of the characters in the film are men, and Furiosa’s truck is an outlier in terms of its personnel. The heroes, many of them female, must work together within the vehicle to fight off the attackers in this dangerous, desert landscape. Furthermore, the creation of bonds and realization of emotions occurring mid-chase works to form character arcs as the action occurs. Ultimately, Furiosa is able to achieve success with the help of her crew, and the display of her dominance and mastery over her environment comes with the orgasmic release of the water that’s been hoarded by Immortan Joe.

   

 

Sex and the Domestic Sphere in Slasher Movies (Charlotte)

One of the most important elements of a slasher movie is its setting. Two of the most iconic slasher movies ever made, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), make great use of their settings, and are defined by their settings. Halloween takes place in suburbia, while Texas takes place in the middle of nowhere. While these two settings are very different, these filmmakers seem to be using these settings to communicate similar messages. Both movies seem to be warning the audience about the danger of disrupting the typical American domestic sphere and specifically the power of female sexuality to disrupt that sphere.

Halloween tells the story of a psychopath named Michael Myers, who kills his older sister, Judith, as a young boy. He escapes a mental hospital 15 years later and goes on a killing spree on Halloween night, targeting a group of babysitters.

Toward the end of Halloween Laurie finds the bodies of her friends in a bedroom. The majority of the movie takes place within suburban homes, and this is an obvious disruption of the domestic sphere—extreme violence in such an intimate space. Another theme that permeates the film is one of morality. Laurie, the only one of these teenagers to survive the film, is also the only one that is a virgin. The choice to put these young bodies in a space associated not only with love and domesticity, but also with sex, is a clear statement. Teen sexuality and premarital sexuality leads to the degradation of the traditional American home.

It is also crucial to mention that Annie is splayed out on the bed, dead and only partially clothed, with the stolen headstone of Judith Myers above her. Michael also killed Judith shortly after she engaged in sexual activity, and while she was still naked. Michael’s murder of Annie is a reenactment of his murder of his own sister fifteen years prior, which, it seems, was itself “punishment” for her teen sexuality. However, even though it seems that Michael is trying to punish these teenagers for engaging in sex, it also seems as though he is sexually fascinated by them. He kills them extremely intimately, and he moves their bodies after he kills them. The way that the bodies are arranged in the bedroom is carefully curated.

Michael then tries to stab Laurie, slashing the sleeve of her shirt. Given how close he was to her at the time it seems possible that he was not trying to stab her, but rather was trying to cut her clothes off. The ensuing struggle can be read as one for Laurie’s life or as one for Laurie’s body.

It is important to note that he uses a kitchen knife as his weapon. He is repurposing a tool from perhaps the most domestic part of the home, the kitchen, the hearth, and using it against the home. That points to how he is disrupting the domestic sphere throughout the film.

Laurie flees to the kitchen—the hearth, the supposed safest part of the home—and locks the door. She struggles to open an exterior door that’s blocked with a rake—yet another domestic tool. It is noteworthy that none of the weapons or obstacles used in the home (with the exception of the gun that Loomis uses) are from outside of the home. In every case, from Michael’s kitchen knife to the rake to the knitting needle and coat hanger that Laurie uses to defend herself, these are emphatically domestic items being turned against their natural environment. This is not a home invasion, but rather a home corruption.

Michael, using brute force, punches a hole through the kitchen door and steps inside. The shot of him entering the kitchen is disturbing. He looks so out of place not only because he’s a violent criminal in a mask, but also because he looks too big. He is taller than the refrigerator. He quite literally does not fit in this space.

Laurie narrowly escapes by breaking a window—by, in her own way, corrupting this domestic space—and we get a long shot of her fleeing the home. Suddenly, this warm, tight-knit neighborhood feels cavernous and abandoned. She screams for help, but no one comes to her aid. The shot is long and without cuts. The camera pans to follow her, but stays fairly still. This kind of camera movement turns the audience into yet another bystander, watching this unfold without helping her.

Their struggle continues. Laurie survives and for a moment it seems that Michael is dead. However, it is important that the movie does not end on this note. We cut back to see that Michael is no longer lying “dead” on the ground. This is followed by several shots of the interior of the house and the neighborhood, accompanied by Michael’s heavy, masked breathing. The implication is that he could be anywhere. These domestic spaces are not safe.

Texas tells the story of two siblings, Sally and Franklin, who travel with a group of friends to visit their grandfather’s grave. On their way back, they decide to stop by their grandparent’s old home and there encounter a psychopathic family of cannibals.

In many ways, Texas is a far more ham-fistedly told story. The corruption of the domestic sphere is obvious, with the cannibals’ home being covered in blood and innards, full of furniture made of human bones and skin, and the dried up, mummified remains of grandparents hidden in the attic. It is difficult to think of a more corrupt home environment. However, there is one less obvious and more subtle aspect of the home that is corrupted. There is no real female figure in the house. While their grandmother is technically present, she is dead and has no agency. This is a statement about what happens when women are absent from the home—men go insane.

The ending sequence of the film begins with Sally trapped in the cannibals’ home being tormented during a kind of “dinner party”. It is a confusing and disorienting series of close ups of the men cheering each other on as one tries to kill Sally with a hammer. This, too, is a weapon found inside the home, but it is more garage than kitchen. It is an emphatically more masculine tool than the knife in Halloween. This is a home that is devoid of the feminine. However, these men seem to be aware of that. During this sequence, Leatherface is dressed up as a woman, in make-up and a wig. He is play-acting the role of the “woman of the house”. It is also possible that the mask he wears is made of the skin of women specifically, in which case he is really trying to embody a woman in the most literal sense. This seems to stand in contrast with all of the anti-women language being used during the attack, such as, “Kill that bitch!” These men seem to have a real hatred for women as much as they have a fascination with them.

Like in so many horror films, the villain here is a visibly terrifying, ugly man who seeks to hurt a young, beautiful woman. It is possible that violence is the only way these men feel they can gain access to a woman’s body, and it is something of a replacement for sexual intimacy. This seems to be the case in Halloween, and certainly seems to be the case here as well. During the attack on Sally, one man holds her arms behind her back. They are crowded around her, physically intimidating her and physically forcing themselves on her. There is a close-up shot of her torn shirt and the bare skin of her back. It is terrifying, but there is a nod to the sexual. It can be read as a pseudo rape scene. It makes sense, though, that this takes place in a dining room rather than a bedroom, because, of course, once she is dead these men plan to eat her. At this dinner party, she is the dinner. This reversal, of turning women who theoretically should be warm, motherly creatures that make dinner into dinner is an ultimate corruption of the domestic sphere. A house without a woman, without a mother, becomes violent and disturbed.

Sally, like Laurie, escapes by smashing a window. She corrupts the domestic sphere further in order to escape it. We immediately get a shot of her hitting the ground, with open land in front of her and all around her. But, this gives the audience a sense of hope and freedom rather than a sense of helplessness. The suburban neighborhood in Halloween felt far more dangerous, because there exists a false sense of hope within it. Laurie is surrounded by people, people she knows, but none of them are willing to help her. Sally is alone, and yet she is the one who finds help.

Sally takes off running, and a truck driver stops and helps her to fight off Leatherface. A man in a pickup truck then lets her jump in the bed of his truck and helps her escape. It is odd that in such an isolated, desolate place, she manages to find help. The film may be arguing that it is best to not trust domestic spaces at all, for it is in a house that Sally is attacked, and it is out in the wild that she finds protection.

While Sally escapes with her life, the film ends on a similar note as Halloween. Sally watches from the truck, hysterical, as Leatherface waves his chainsaw around. He is not dead. He is still out there.

In conclusion, both of these examples of the slasher genre contain compelling commentary about the American home and about the role of sexuality within the home. Both seem to argue that the safety of the home is a myth, and that the domestic sphere is far easier to topple than we might like to believe, especially in the 70s, the age of women’s liberation. The changing role of women in this time scared people, and so it is fitting that scary movies would be made about it.

LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS: What is Female Agency When the Female Body is Gone? Part 2 (Katie)

Two weeks ago I discussed the autonomy and survivability of women in the world of “SONNIE’S EDGE.” I’ve returned to discuss another episode in the action-packed anthology, one which puts a similar but new spin on the way women survive: “GOOD HUNTING.” As a story about a Chinese demon hunter, the colonization of Hong Kong, and the disappearance of old, natural magic in the world, there’s a lot to unpack. Spoilers ahead for the whole episode!

The first quarter of the episode opens with young son Liang, accompanying his father on a hunt to kill a húlijīng—a nine-tailed fox. Allegedly, the húlijīng has enchanted a merchant’s son, and the family hired Liang’s father, the demon hunter, to kill the húlijīng and get rid of the enchantment.

The father and son camp underneath the enchanted son’s bedroom window. His moans for the húlijīng ring out over the courtyard. Finally, the húlijīng comes. While Liang’s father and the húlijīng skirmish, Liang is momentarily entranced by the beauty of the húlijīng, and narrowly manages to throw dog’s piss over her body in time. The piss prevents the húlijīng from transforming completely into her fox form, leaving her in a half-fox, half-human state.

Liang’s father tracks the húlijīng to her den at a nearby temple. While they split up to scout for their quarry, Liang discovers one of the fox spirit’s hiding daughters: Yan. She is young, beautiful, and talks to him in her naked, snow-white fox form, emphatically inhuman. Liang is all eyes, even as he cowers, even as she leaps from rock to rock. And in a single argument, she changes Liang’s worldview.

YAN

Why are you hunting us? We did nothing to you.

LIANG

Your mother bewitched the merchant’s son. We were hired to save him.

YAN

Bewitched? He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her alone.

LIANG

That’s not true.

YAN

Once a man has set his heart on a huli jing, she can hear him, no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying, she has to go to him every night just to keep him quiet.

LIANG

No, she lures men and feeds on them for her evil magic.

YAN

A man can fall in love with a huli jing just like he can with a human woman.

LIANG

It’s not the same!

YAN

Not the same? I saw how you looked at me. [4:26 - 5:12]

Immediately after this talk, Yan witnesses the graphic death of her own mother at the hands of Liang’s father.

The opening of “GOOD HUNTING” tells us immediately that this will be a subversive story. Here, the female húlijīng are not the evil, demonic witch-figures that men would paint them as; Yan is as sympathetic as she is inhuman. This is the first argument that “GOOD HUNTING” will make about the agency and power of women: the beauty of a húlijīng is a not a weapon used against men, but men will oppress her for it all the same. They will resent the way they feel about a beautiful húlijīng, and they will blame the feminine fox spirits to absolve themselves.

As the episode reaches its halfway point, Liang’s father passes away. Now a grown young man, Liang lives in a modernizing village: the first trains travel through the countryside, and the colonizing presence of the British Empire looms large over natives’ shoulders. For their last meeting in a long time, Liang and Yan commiserate about the state of the dying earth around them. Yan speculates that the magic is disappearing from the earth due to “iron roads” and “machines that breathe smoke” (6:46). As the magic leaves, so does her ability to change into her “true form” (6:52). Soon, she may lose the ability altogether.

The steampunk twist that “GOOD HUNTING” takes, a sharp veer from its fantastical origins, is another message about female oppression. It is, after all, mother nature that begins to be exploited and mutilated for arrogant white men. All the (literally) magical beauty of the earth, including that of the húlijīng, is slowly suffocated once ambitious men enter the picture.

Years pass. The episode continues to tell the story of Liang. He finds himself extremely skilled at engineering, specifically that of automata; even as a much-hated minority in Hong Kong, he makes himself useful to the British and has a decent living. On a chance encounter, he bumps into Yan. He rescues her from a group of overly eager British men who seek to have their way with her.

As they catch up, Yan tells Liang she has been permanently stuck in her human form: “no claws, no sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty. Now, I live by the very thing you accused my mother of: I bewitch men for money” (9:05). She laments the lack of power and control she has over her life in Hong Kong: “I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt. I imagine my true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace roof until I am at the top of this island. Until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me” (9:40).

The story that Yan presents is that of a loss of agency. When Yan grew up, she had both her human and fox form. Now, she is chained to her human form, and she is forced to use her beauty to survive. This is in direct contrast with how Yan and her mother were treated in China, where they were wrongly hunted for being too beautiful. The world of men has declawed the húlijīng. Not only did men take away her ability to transform into a being with sharp teeth and claws, they made safe the one thing they feared most about a húlijīng: her beauty. Yan’s beauty is now merely a tool for getting by, a plaything for rich, white, colonial masters.

So far, in every aspect of storytelling, “GOOD HUNTING” has depicted a universe in which women are hardy and survivable, but terribly oppressed. Unfortunately, things only get worse for Yan from here.

Yan’s long-time client, the Governor, was only sexually attracted to machines. Naturally, the Governor decided to drug Yan and strap her to an operating table. By the time they were finished, Yan was entirely a machine. The ultimate fantasy for men who lived and profited off automata.

Yan’s non-consensual body swap, and the complete and total murder of her autonomy, needs no explaining. But “GOOD HUNTING” is not without hope. Far from it.

When Yan comes to Liang and tells her his story, she reveals that she escaped the Governor by killing him. One night, she told him no, and it enraged him. He struck her. She struck back and realized how much strength she had gained with her metal limbs: “A terrible thing had been done to me. But I could also be terrible” (12:38).

Yan reassures Liang that she does not want to reverse what has been done to her body. She wants to make the best of it. How? By using what automata parts existed in her, and changing them to become something else entirely.

At the end of the episode, Liang has successfully changed Yan’s machine body—originally made for man’s sexual pleasure and subjugation—into one that, with the right amount of coal and fuel, transforms into a lithe, agile, and beautiful nine-tailed fox. Shimmering under moonlight and padding gracefully on the balcony of Liang’s house, the automata-fox-form of Yan is graceful, dangerous, and dazzlingly powerful. From then on, Yan does what she promised she would do: growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own her.

While the storyline of “GOOD HUNTING” is filled with hardship and oppression for both Liang and Yan, Yan’s story is ultimately optimistic—boldly, emphatically, and rebelliously optimistic. When Yan lost control and ownership of her entire body, she managed to make the best of it and, with the help of another oppressed party, become something closer to her original self. Even though she has been through hell, she persevered, and she was rewarded for it in the end.

But it’s true: Yan suffered terribly for being a beautiful woman, both as a child and an adult, and both in a rural village filled with magic, and a modernized world filled with steam-run automata. Yan had to lose all of her organic body in order to gain the ability to transform into her fox-form—to gain power—again.

Like “SONNIE’S EDGE,” “GOOD HUNTING” also seems to think that the only way for a woman to achieve anything close to true power is to not be a (biological) woman at all. And even then, there is something bleak and grim about that power. For Sonnie, it is having to fight for her life every time she enters that ring. For Yan, it is the complete loss of her actual body and true form before she could return to her fox form again. While women in these sci-fi worlds can survive through oppressive hells, it is entirely unclear whether what lays on the other side was better than what spawned those hells.

There’s still more I want to talk about. Why do Yan’s story and Sonnie’s story feel so similar? What does it mean that all the women in these sci-fi settings seem to get treated with ultra-violence? Why do increasing amounts of modern stories tell us that, when high-tech finds a throne in the world, oppressed groups get jailed into the low life? But these questions must be saved for another time.

Works cited in this text:

“GOOD HUNTING.” LOVE DEATH & ROBOTS. Netflix. March 15, 2019. Netflix.

LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS: What is Female Agency When the Female Body is Gone? (Katie)

I cannot lie: I love a good sci-fi story. When LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS released on Netflix, I made quick work of binging the animated anthology. The first episode I saw (although Netflix has apparently randomized episode orders for this series) was “Sonnie’s Edge,” which had me thrilled and shocked in multiple ways throughout its 17-minute duration. One of the questions the episode asks, at least in my opinion, is what female agency, victimization, or empowerment means when the female body no longer exists.

There are spoilers ahead in my discussion of the short’s plot and implications, and I’m also including a trigger warning for rape due to the episode’s nature. (Seriously, there will unfortunately be a lot of talk about rape in this post.)

Now, onto the plot of “Sonnie’s Edge.” In a futuristic and dystopian society where prize fighters compete in death matches for money, we follow a day in the life of one female “pilot” who is exceptionally skilled at controlling her “beastie.” The beasties are the gladiators in the arena; they are bioengineered monsters made for killing.

As the opening sequence cuts to introduce our main characters, a few things immediately stand out. A notably female-presenting companion, Ivrina, and a noticeably male-presenting companion, Wes, walk in with Sonnie—who looks androgynous, if not far more ambiguous in terms of gender presentation. Her name, “Sonnie,” also evokes a more masculine aura to her character, even though her slimmer and curvier frame denotes some presence of conventional femininity.

The first conflict Sonnie faces is with a rich and corrupt man, Dicko (great naming right there), who wants to rig the next prize fight. He will pay her hundreds of thousands for her to voluntarily lose the next round. When Sonnie tells him to screw off, Ivrina steps in to further defend her from the old man. It is in the exchange between Ivrina and Dicko that we learn of Sonnie’s backstory—and this is a noticeably exposition-y bit of dialogue. When I say noticeably exposition-y, I mean that anyone versed in a little bit of writing will realize just how shoehorned the dialogue feels.

Here’s my transcription of the bit of dialogue, taken from Netflix subtitles, plus screen directions.

IVRINA

[Exhales angrily] Fucking men. It’s cunts like you that fucked her up to begin with.

Bodyguards approach Ivrina threateningly.

IVRINA

[Sighs] Fuck. A year ago, Sonnie got snatched by an estate gang, and when they was done using her, they started cutting, slicing their marks into her flesh. Can you imagine that kind of pain, that kind of humiliation carved into her skin? A lifelong reminder of that day. So when Sonnie steps into the pit, she’s not fighting for pride or status and certainly not for your fucking money. She’s carving up the men who did this to her. [3:30 - 4:11]

See what I mean? At least to me, the dialogue felt like someone writing a background inspired by some erotic fantasy. It was put in purely for the benefit of the watcher, and it was done in a quick and dirty way that seemed to want to titillate or horrify rather than offer meaningful explanation. The exposition appears much like other incidents of rapes of female characters in media nowadays, many of which seem to be written in for no other reason than the shock factor.

I was unimpressed with this bit of writing, but the ending of “Sonnie’s Edge” actually did an impressive thematic reversal on this blatant—and even almost disrespectful—telling of Sonnie’s past.

Later, when Sonnie is having a discreet conversation with Dicko’s female consort, they flirt and talk about Sonnie’s past. (Their conversation is more like foreplay than anything else, with kisses and soft touches included.) Here’s the relevant excerpt:

DICKO’S CONSORT

But that night, the gang, the…

SONNIE

Rape. Yeah. It’s not that. They can’t see past it. No one can. But it ain’t what gives me my edge. Angry little girl, out for revenge. Dicko believes that shit…

Dicko’s consort lightly tugs one strap of Sonnie’s shirt off a shoulder.

SONNIE

… ‘cause he wants to. They all do.

Dicko’s consort slides her dress straps off her shoulders.

DICKO’S CONSORT

[Slowly raising her skirt] Everyone sees what they want to see.  [12:50 - 13:33]

I felt like “Sonnie’s Edge” was calling many of the audience members out, myself included. Once we heard Sonnie’s shocking backstory within the first five minutes of the episode, all we could think about was her history.

Not to mention the fight scene between Sonnie’s beastie, Khanivore, and her male opponent’s beastie, Turboraptor. There’s plenty of forced, penetrative imagery between the beasties that’s rendered a lot more noticeable once you remember Sonnie’s apparent origins—definitely an intended effect.

We only saw Sonnie in light of her rape. We all saw what we wanted to see, even if the episode does reinforce seeing Sonnie in this specific light.

But there’s more to discuss. The twist ending to “Sonnie’s Edge” includes more violence to the female body. It turns out that Dicko’s consort is a bioengineered servant made to execute Dicko’s commands, and she penetrates Sonnie’s skull with Wolverine-like claws from her knuckles right after a kiss. Dicko comes out of the shadows to gloat.

Sonnie is dropped to the floor, and her skull is bashed in by Dicko’s foot. When Sonnie’s voice does not falter, and she does not die, it’s revealed that Sonnie was Khanivore the entire time. Khanivore then kills both Dicko and his consort.

While the explicit logistics aren’t made clear, the gist of the reveal is as follows: Sonnie’s original body was lost after the gang attack; Ivrina and Wes linked her consciousness with Khanivore’s, and Sonnie lives solely in Khanivore. Her human body is just a bioengineered puppet from her uploaded brain, and when she is fighting in the pit as a beastie, she is fighting for her life. That is her “edge.”

There is a lot of complexity to this short episode’s plot. The episode seems to take on a feminist role at the surface, with Sonnie being a character like Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The episode also makes a big deal out of Sonnie being the only female pilot in the beastie ring.

But what about the writing itself? The writers wanted everyone in the audience to think about Sonnie’s rape origin story in every minute of the episode, up till the very end. Much like Sonnie says, we can’t see past it. References to the rape in imagery and small plot points keep the origin story fresh in our minds; clearly, writers want us to be thinking about Sonnie’s rape, even if only as a blind to the real twist.

I found myself asking this question by the end of the episode: if Sonnie survived the rape not as a human woman, but an uploaded consciousness linked to a beastie who literally fights to live, which is better?

As a beastie, Sonnie has unlimited power at her hands. Physically, she is superior to all the beasties in the ring so far; she is mentioned to being on a 17-count win streak. She is obviously superior to every human; she’s a bioengineered monster made for killing. But she has limited autonomy and limited friendship with even her closest apparent friends, Ivrina and Wes. Khanivore, or Sonnie, has to keep fighting in the pit to make a living, and she has an added stake of needing to stay alive while in the pit—unlike every other pilot, her consciousness is directly tied to her beastie’s. Additionally, the implication of Ivrina and Wes finding Sonnie’s broken body and uploading her consciousness into Khanivore means that, at worst, they only saved her as a means of profit, or, at best, out of a desperate lack of other measures.

The picture that “Sonnie’s Edge” paints of female power and agency, then, is bleak. Sonnie, even in her most powerful form as Khanivore, is still subjugated to other forces—whether or not the female body is still intact. These other forces can include the violence of men, or the oppressive difficulty of surviving in a dystopian society. This message is also reinforced in the character of Dicko’s consort. She is completely without autonomy: every one of her acts is in service to Dicko, regardless of her physical superiority to him. (She is a more subtle and organic-looking, but she can be a killing machine, too, as evidenced by her Wolverine-like claws.) There seems to be no hope: Sonnie was raped and apparently nearly killed by men as a human, and when she became Khanivore, her new physical powers were restricted only to the pit, where she faces a greater loss than her opponent if she loses.

Might we be able to say, then, that “Sonnie’s Edge” at least views female endurance and survivability with optimism? Even if there’s no autonomy for characters like Sonnie or Dicko’s consort, even if the only source of happiness for many characters is achieving violence against an opponent, can we at least say that the women in Sonnie’s world can stick through anything to see another day?

Yes, although the optimism is laced with grit. Sonnie’s “edge” is the real, omnipresent fear of losing her life in the ring. She claims she’s always afraid in her conversation with Dicko’s consort, and by the end of the episode, she openly cites her fear as the thing that keeps her alive. It’s admirable, how indomitable Sonnie’s will to live is, even if it may be depressing that she needs the fear to begin with.

Then the question becomes why the framing of Sonnie's backstory needed such a specific blind. Do women in the world of "Sonnie's Edge" require a digestible, plausible backstory in order to go unnoticed by men and the rest of society? Perhaps; Sonnie states that she keeps her story so that men like Dicko can believe it. But it doesn't keep her safe; what keeps her safe is the secret that she no longer has a human body. And that argument is even more bleak: the only way to stay safe as a woman in Sonnie's world is to not be a woman.

All in all, “Sonnie’s Edge” is a visually stunning science fiction piece that falls comfortably into the grim and cynical subgenre of cyberpunk. Besides the thrilling colors, fight sequences, and beautiful animation, I think it plays with storytelling expectations in interesting ways... even if the rape as a red herring may not have been totally necessary or respectful. That’s a question I’ll have to tackle another time.

Works cited in this text:

“SONNIE’S EDGE.” LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Netflix. March 15, 2019. Netflix.

The Inspiring Plot of Captain Marvel: Subverting Expectations (Katie)

March 8, 2019. This day has two particular meanings—not only is it International Women’s Day, it is also the day Captain Marvel (2019) arrives in theatres in the USA, UK, Canada, China, and more nations across the world.

This was certainly intentionally done. It’s no secret that Captain Marvel is about Carol Danvers, a skilled, otherworldly heroine who takes her empowerment into her own hands (much like DC’s Wonder Woman did in 2017). Both official trailers even identify Carol’s femininity and womanhood with her pure heroism (the trailer slogan words, “DISCOVER WHAT MAKES HER,” animate seamlessly into “DISCOVER WHAT MAKES A HERO,” emphasis mine). After seeing the film for myself, I must say that Captain Marvel did a brilliant job in portraying a truly powerful and human female superhero.

Of course, it was a movie done by Marvel Studios, which means a few things. Was it more focused on thrilling action than murky-yet-inevitable and psychologically complex character evolution? Yes, probably. Was there the shoehorned humor that accompanies every Marvel movie? Absolutely. Did it fall into the same formulaic structure that Marvel is notorious for? Of course!

Still, there is veritable merit in having a rote, run-of-the-mill superhero action flick where every important character is a woman instead of a man, especially including women of color—and besides, I would make the argument that Captain Marvel breaks the formula in subtle but meaningful ways. I think Carol’s story is standard-defying and satisfying, and that it does more than the generic Marvel origin movie.

Spoilers ahead for the film!

One of the most remarkable things in Captain Marvel is Carol’s literal and figurative journey to self-realization. When Carol is introduced to the audience, she is a soldier struggling to place the memories that surface in her nightmares. (Hint: they’re from her suppressed past life on Earth.) She has no idea who she was before her arrival on Kree, the warrior-saturated planet led by one artificially intelligent supreme leader. Indoctrinated by her commander and the honorbound, war-oriented society of the Kree, Carol believes the shape-shifting alien race, the Skrulls, are her enemies. She also mistakenly believes the Kree gave her her superheroine powers.

Her (male) commander, Yon-Rogg, is a mentor figure who preaches rational control over her emotions. He criticizes Carol for having a sense of humor, for having anger, and for using her unique super-abilities in sparring and on the field. (I also must point out that women being over-emotional is still a common and unfair criticism of women today.) His eventual reveal as an antagonist makes the journey Carol embarks on all the more poignant.

Why? Yon-Rogg was the one who abducted her from Earth, having witnessed the inciting incident that gave Carol her powers. He believed she was a key to Kree’s success in their war against Skrulls, in one way or another. Presumably tinkering with her mind, and frequently telling Carol that her own memories are nothing worth worrying about, Yon-Rogg effectively brainwashes and continually gaslights Carol to keep her playing her manufactured role in Kree’s society. Even as she rebels against his definition of her place in Kree, she is punished; the supreme leader tells her that what was given to her can be taken away, referring specifically to her super-abilities.

If Carol being forced to play a role that society arbitrarily decided for her sounds too familiar, I can’t say that wasn’t all intentional on Marvel’s side.

As Carol continues to unveil her past—working with humans on Earth who laugh, get angry, and never try to restrict her natural abilities—she reconnects with figures from her old life. (It is notable that her best friend, Maria Rambeau, is a single black mother with a bright daughter, and that Maria flew with Carol in her Air Force days.) Carol learns that the Kree have been brainwashing her, and that Yon-Rogg has been lying to her: the Skrulls are more refugees than terrorists, and the Kree are a conquering, war-hungry society that swallows planets. (It is also remarkable that the Marvel Cinematic Universe changed Carol’s idol and Kree turncoat, Mar-Vell, into a woman instead of using the original man.) Carol makes it her quest to save the Skrulls, betraying Yon-Rogg and the Kree.

This plot is important. Not only does Carol break from the mold that was forced onto her by Yon-Rogg and Kree society, she discovers her true self and true powers because of her break. She discovers that the Kree did not give her her powers; they chose to lie to her as a form of control. When Carol breaks from Kree’s role for her, she finally takes full control of her powers and becomes a truly formidable heroine.

Literally, Carol betrays the Kree, and gained preternatural abilities. Figuratively, Carol breaks free from the restrictions that society forced on her and becomes the best version of herself. In my opinion, the duality of Carol’s journey is not seen in any other Marvel film—and Carol’s journey is especially relatable for women all over the world.

One other way in which Marvel breaks norms with Captain Marvel is in one of its final confrontations. Other Marvel movies involve heroes grappling with their greatest rivals for prolonged amounts of time, bashing each other bloody or fighting until one party is dead. Carol’s final confrontation with Yon-Rogg, surely, must be similar…

But it is not. Not only does Carol display mercy and respect for even her enemies’ lives by the end of the film (at the start, she is much more disposed to the violence that Yon-Rogg and her comrades in arms display), her big fight is hardly even a fight.

Yon-Rogg taunts her by sheathing his weapons and raising his fists, yelling at Carol to “prove herself.” She could never win in her spar matches with him without using her powers, so her moment is now; can she beat him with just her fists? Carol has none of it. She blasts him with her powers and ends the fight immediately.

As she walks up to Yon-Rogg, she says she has “nothing to prove” to him, and offers him a hand. (Yes, she drags him across the desert landscape and back into his ship with a message, but she treats him first and foremost with mercy.) There is no grand, VFX-heavy fight like in all the Avengers films, and even in great solo films like Spiderman: Homecoming or Dr. Strange, no final fight is quite as rife with complex poignance. Besides offering mercy to her enemies, Carol says a lot when she states that she has “nothing to prove.” Not only does she mean that she has given up Kree’s ideals and her old life in the Starforce, she also means that anyone who tries to restrain her, or anyone who puts their expectations on her, can screw off.

And if that isn’t a resonant message with plenty of female members in the audience today, I don’t know what is.

All in all, the writing in Captain Marvel may follow a general standard for all Marvel Studios films, but there is much more in the subtext than I had ever expected it to have. The inspiring changes Carol Danvers goes through in the course of the film mean it works both as a fun, thrilling superhero movie and as a fantasy and ideal that all women watching can identify with and hope for.

Human Roles Revealed in Alien Settings: Female Presence in Sci-Fi Films (Katherine P.)

“First contact” movies – where humanity first encounters beings or intelligence from another world often contain grand themes that are intended to test the limits of what it means to be human.  In the midst of such existential themes, there are three first contact movies that also reflect upon our societal values towards women and reflect our shifting attitudes towards women in general.  Three movies, Contact, Arrival and Annihilation, not only examine fundamental themes relating to humanity’s existence, but also show the rapid evolution of the role of women in our society.  Collectively, these three movies demonstrate the ever-changing perceptions and ideals relating to what it means to be a strong, independent modern-day woman.

Prevalent male and female social forces manifest themselves in all three movies.  In Contact, released in 1997, Dr. Arroway is portrayed as a brilliant scientist, but whose efforts are constantly thwarted by men.  Her male superior (David Drumlin) kills off funding of her project in Puerto Rico, dismissing it as pseudo-science and impractical.  Drumlin later steals credit for Arroway’s discovery of the original messages and is eventually chosen as the initial Earth representative for the journey to visit the aliens who left the message.  Drumlin is chosen over Arroway primarily for political rather than merit-based reasons (because of Drumlin’s willingness to embrace a message of faith/God over Arroway’s message of science).  Another male character, Michael Kitz, the National Security Advisor, is a constant thorn at Arroway’s side, and even turns hostile as the movie ends in accusing Arroway of helping to perpetuate a hoax on the world.  Even Arroway’s love interest, Palmer Joss, turns out to be Arroway’s primary hurdle in that Joss pointed out Arroway’s lack of religious faith as a disqualifying trait to be Earth’s representative.  The main beneficial male character in Contact was a super-rich industrialist S.R. Hadden.  Hadden was the only private party willing to invest in Arroway but he eventually dies in space due to cancer, and is thus unable to help Arroway defend herself when she is eventually accused of fraudulent conduct.  Contact features a strong, intelligent and confident woman, but who is buffeted both professionally and personally by a world that is still controlled by men.  We get the sense that these male-dominated forces eventually dishearten Arroway’s spirit and it is only in the support of Arroway’s male love interest, Joss, that Arroway is able to regain a sense of purpose and resolve.

The theme of male/female conflict and control is also prevalent in Arrival (released in late 2016) but also features an evening out of the playing field.  Banks’ partner in the project (and eventually her husband) Ian Donnelly is a renowned physicist.  Donnelly makes some positive contributions to the deciphering of the alien’s language, but it is clearly Banks who is the driving force in communicating and understanding the meaning of the overall message.  Banks is the one who first approaches the communication from the basic levels and she eventually understands that the message is being communicated from a perspective where time is not relevant.  In developing an understanding of the alien language, Banks herself is able to perceive reality in way that is not entirely time-dependent, which means that she experiences flashes of the future.  This ability allows her to prevent a global and possibly inter-stellar misunderstanding which could have resulted in tremendous negative consequences for humanity.  Arrival presents Banks as not only equal to but greater than in several respects to males.  Arrival does not, however, entirely dismiss male contributions.  It is because of her romance with Donnelly that she feels more complete personally and professionally.  Banks’ daughter, Hannah, is born with Banks pre-knowledge that Hannah would die young from an incurable disease, and Banks still makes the choice to have that child with Donnelly.  Donnelly is unable to cope with the fact that his daughter will eventually die and leaves Banks and Hannah.  This illustrates the choice-driven female strength portrayed by Banks’ character, which is vastly different than the men-ruled world of Contact.

Annihilation takes the male/female dichotomy to an even greater extreme.  Lena (we are not told her last name) is initially portrayed as a doting, pining wife of Kane.  Kane has disappeared for a year, and Lena is going about her duties as a teacher/researcher.  When Kane comes back from his mysterious mission, Lena learns that the nature of Kane’s mission and that she may be one of the few who is able to solve the mysteries of the Shimmer and cure her husband.  The military has deduced that females may be more resistant to the effects of the Shimmer and organizes an all-female team to enter into Shimmer.  While each member of Lena’s team eventually succumbs to the Shimmer (which apparently acts as a way to greatly heighten and splice genetic mutations), it is only Lena who is eventually able to reach the source of the Shimmer (i.e. the lighthouse) and destroy the Shimmer (which in turn helps to restore “Kane” back to full health).  In dramatic contrast to both Contact and to a lesser extent Arrival, Annihilation (made during the MeToo heights of early 2018), males are portrayed as not just powerless, but also as essentially useless and in need of rescuing.  Kane is rescued by his wife, Lena.  However, the real Kane does not, in fact, survive the Shimmer, and only appears as a clone that has some of Kane's memories.  Females are the ones that are necessary to complete the all-important mission – and females are the ones that take on male-dominated roles.  The female team wields the high-powered military guns and kills (or attempts to kill) the monstrous mutations caused by the Shimmer.  Additionally, we see that Lena engages in an affair with her colleague Daniel before Kane decides to take on the assignment to go to the Shimmer, and we infer that it is because of Lena’s affair that Kane decides to leave for the doomed mission. This again reinforces the notion of the power of female action on the male mindset. 

All three first contact movies present humanity’s introduction to alien life in starkly different manners.  Contact, Arrival and Annihilation all present grand themes that force the careful viewer to think about some typically cherished core values.  Apart from such grandiose schemes, however, these three movies also introduce an interesting comparison and contrast to gender themes that are prevalent at their respective times.  One of the best lessons that we can gather from viewing this trio of movies is that our ability to understand the messages from the outside is best understood by examination of the dynamics and implications of the relationships that we internally hold. 

Undressing the Spectral Nature of Human Sexuality in Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl (Mireille)

As society comes to grips with the reality of the spectral nature of sexuality, more and more main stream movies and TV series are being created to depict the lives of individuals who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015) is a film that examines the sexual metamorphosis from man to woman of the principal character, Einar Wegener. Though the film focuses primarily on Einar, Hooper constantly reminds the audience of the fluidity of sexuality that exists for other characters, especially Einar’s wife, Gerda.

Throughout the entirety of The Danish Girl, Hooper reiterates the gender duality theme through carefully crafted mise-en-scène and frame composition. For example, Hooper creates an interplay between the human body and the surrounding geometry. The rigidity of the buildings as well as the harsh vertical and horizontal lines making up the geometry of the rooms in the home where Einar and Gerda live create a sense of restriction and harshness that confine the bodies of the characters in the manner in which the masculine dominated society of the 1920s restrained any attempt at sexual fluidity. At the same time, these geometric restrictions are juxtaposed by repeated shots which emulate impressionistic paintings and are full of the soft pastels of femininity. The resulting effect is a visual duality that mimics the duality of Einar’s experience: a woman trapped in a man’s body.

Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film occurs when Einar stands in front of a mirror and completely undresses himself. Hooper expertly wields the camera moving down the body, never fully showing the male genitalia, but following the path of Einar’s hand. When the hand reaches the location of Einar’s genitals at the same time that the camera does, Einar pushes his genitals out of sight and in between his legs, creating the illusion of female genitalia. The camera lingers on Einar’s full body while reflected in the mirror, and the deception of the form of a woman is compelling. Hooper uses reflection or “mirroring” in another powerful scene when Einar visits a brothel where he watches a prostitute through a glass window as she strips. Einar then begins to emulate her movements in an attempt to learn the female manner of seduction. The woman pauses in bewilderment, but then resumes her seductive poses; however, there is an exaggeration in her movement as she acts and simultaneously watches Einar, almost as if the prostitute knows that Einar’s intent is one of wanting to learn. As a result, rather than becoming an erotic moment it becomes one in which there is a woman to woman connection. 

Hooper also explores the inter-woman connection in terms of the complexity of the relationship between Einar and Gerda. Hooper often shows the couple in intricately framed shots, in which they are divided, but still have a lingering attachment. Hooper frequently uses combinations of shot reverse shots such that Einar and Gerda, despite being in the same film space, are portrayed separately. Even towards the end of the film when Gerda and Einar, who has now become Lili, are arguably closest emotionally, they are separated by a thin veil dividing their bed, yet still have their hands intertwined and enveloped by the same fabric that defined the moment that Einar first became fascinated with women’s clothing. This repetition of Einar and Gerda as separate, but still linked together, leaves the audience to wonder if it is just “love” or recognition of womanhood in each other. As Gerda says when explaining why she married Einar; “It was like kissing myself.”  

Hooper allows Gerda to explore her own uncertain sexuality by allowing her to engage in role reversal. Gerda creates opportunities for Einar and her to switch gender roles. Early in the film, even before it becomes clear that Einar is transgender, Gerda, who like Einar is a painter by profession, asks him to put on some female clothing to serve as a female model for a painting she needs to finish. Then she coaxes Einar into dressing up like a woman to play a joke during a society outing. In another very overtly roll reversing scene, Gerda is completely nude and standing over Einar’s form that is still dressed. Einar’s body image has a strangely feminine allure, and he is also trying to conceal the fact that he is wearing a woman’s nightgown underneath his masculine garments. Gerda takes on the male role of undressing Einar, who has clearly begun to adopt a feminine persona. At the same time, Einar accentuates his femininity by being coy and trying to keep covered up. Gerda’s role reversal does not happen only in Einar’s presence. Hooper utilizes a low angle camera angle or an eye line match with almost all of the male characters that Gerda encounters emphasizing the power position that she has over them. Finally, Gerda becomes successful only when she starts creating portraits of Einar as Lili, suggesting that she is able to express passion only through an expression of the feminine form.

The Danish Girl reminds the audience that the enigma of sexual identity is not a modern concept, but one that is an inextricable part of human nature. Hooper delivers a film that is not only beautiful to watch, but beautifully depicts the inexorable nature of love and human identity.   

Redefining the First-Person Perspective in Film (Jin)

Film calls for a new definition of the first-person perspective. In literature, it is easier to define; the words are arranged so that they mimic the running verbal narratives in our head, and the first-person perspective can therefore be defined as our internal narrator whose role is to identify the visual world via names and labels. Using this internal narration, we attempt to contain and identify our world within one language, our verbal language. However, film carries an ability to transcend from this verbal language into the visual one, thereby also transcending from an absorption of a simple verbal narrative to the experience of a sensory narrative. Therefore, when creating a film in the first-person perspective, we arrive at the question: how does one experience the world?  

The most common way of describing one’s perception of the world is through the consciousness of time. We are, in fact, so conscious of time that it has become a given. We automatically assume that we live in the present by building on the past, looking into the future, and so forth, as though our existence can be carefully partitioned into “the before,” “the now,” and “the later.” When examining the way in which our memories are stored, however, the division of time is not at all central to our stream of consciousness. We do not store our memories as though looking back on certain events from time to time, via some mental filing system. Instead, our perception of the now is wholly interwoven with the past, to the point in which the two are inseparable. We may give labels to our memories (“these are from the far past,” “these are from the recent past”), but our memories, regardless of when they were created, are still inherently in the present.

Therefore, when creating a narrative that is entirely from an internalized perspective of one character, it would not make much sense to have a linear progression of time and a singular building of events. Rather, the narrative becomes a mix of the perception of the present moment via sight and hearing, and the memories that are inherently linked, brought forth by sensory stimuli. Furthermore, the coherence of the plot becomes less significant than the creation of a system of logic specific to the simulated world. It is just as how, when we think, our own thoughts may make perfect sense to us while being entirely nonsensical to others; each of us creates an isolated, internalized system of logic through which we individually interpret our world. Similarly, a film narrative can be created so that, when logically pried apart, the plot may not make much sense, but the viewers, in the moment of viewing it, can make sense of it, because they experiencing from the protagonist’s perspective.

A first-person film could thereby be defined as a combination of this internalized system of logic with the visceral processing of the present, and ultimately, the visual and audial expression of this combination as a cinematic experience. Most films, whether or not attempting to create this first-person perspective, only succeed in accomplishing one of the two components. They can therefore be separated into two categories: films that sustain themselves on an internalized system of logic and films that mimic our visceral processing of the world.

Alma & Elisabet in Bergman's Persona

Bergman’s Persona is an example of a film suspended within the very specific system of logic created by two protagonists, Elisabet and Alma. Elisabet, the mentally ill patient and actress, is under the care of Alma, a nurse, and their two personalities begin to fuse in a series of surreal interactions. These interactions are expressed via specific instants in which the two characters’ physical and mental realities overlap: Alma takes the place of Elisabet when suddenly shown making love to Elisabet’s husband, and Alma’s and Elisabet’s bodies seem to meld when standing side by side or their ghostly faces overlaid over each other. The film is not driven by a chronological progression of events but by an extreme psychological violence expressed within a very systematic exchange of emotional energy. One cannot describe the characters’ twisting relationship as logically comprehensible, but they form their own logic through an association of images: of Elisabet drawing away from Alma in fear, of Alma breathing across the neck of Elisabet who is asleep and subdued, of the two women constantly exchanging roles of the dominant and submissive. The viewers cannot escape from this visual logic that suspends the two characters, and the extent to which the film is imbued with their psychotic internal presence is near suffocating.

The second category of first-person film, the film which mimic our visceral processing, is best observable in experimental films like those of Stan Brakhage. Brakhage most heavily relies on the metaphor of the “untutored eye,” his idea of seeing the world primarily through pure perception. He employs flashing images, repetitive movements, and an intent focus on singular details such as swirling leaves or a swaying cat’s paw to evoke a sensory experience. By isolating physical elements within a tightly woven rhythm of cuts, he awakens a new consciousness of our physical reality without turning it into an incomprehensible abstract. The trembling close-ups of human flesh, the reoccurrence of blurred lights and wavering reflections, are not dense symbols but keen details of the real; they provoke an awareness rather than an obtuse contemplation of what is symbolic. Each of these details are innately tied to a certain sensory feeling, whether it be taste, touch, or sight, and each elicits our own memories that echo such sensations. Brakhage leaves room for us to perceive our own world via his, and his films are like visualized memories inviting us to accept them as our own. 

If Bergman's and Brakhage's works represent two forms of a first-person film, what would it mean to combine the two styles to make one whole? Could one successfully create a film that both sustains the viewers in an internalized system of logic, while also mimicking the sensual perception of the physical world? For us, this reconciliation of two parts is innate; our perception of the present moment and our self-sustained logical interpretation of it are the only true constituents of our consciousness. To have these two parts simultaneously work together within a film would be to create a pure first-person experience and to truly grant the film a real human consciousness.  

What's Your Favorite Movie? (Tori)

My sophomore year at Hopkins will be tied to a lot of different things.  It’ll be tied to my double in McCoy, meals at Nolan’s, and long rehearsals of Spring Awakening in Swirnow Theater.  It’ll be tied to my friends here, new and old, and the moments we’ve shared together.  It’ll also always be tied to film blogging.  Film blogging has been an integral part of my sophomore year.  I have been constantly on the lookout for films to watch and concepts about which to write.  This post will bring my film blogging to a close, so I knew I had to choose something epic and rich in order to end the year on the perfect, exciting note.  I looked directly to Alfred Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock has completely transformed my relationship with films.  I, like many others, I’m sure, detest being asked what my favorite film is.  My cinematic preferences are constantly changing based on my mood; when I’m frustrated I’ll want to watch something very different than when I’m elated.  But if I were forced to choose—a gun drawn to my head—Rear Window might be the one to slip out due to its emphasis on some of the themes I find most interesting in the world like metacinema, voyeurism, and the male gaze.  It’s one of those films you can watch a million times and still not pick up on all the themes and techniques employed by Hitchcock to tell the gripping story.  Obviously, I am a big Hitchcock fan.  Yet, shockingly, I had never gotten around to watching perhaps his most renowned film, Vertigo.  Until now.  I decided it was fitting, for my exciting final post, to write about what is known as one of the most epic and rich films to ever be created.  I was not disappointed.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

As our protagonist, ex-detective Scottie, is about to enter the church at the end of the film, he states that there is: “One final thing I have to do…and then I’ll be free of the past.”  Throughout the film, I picked up on a preoccupation with time and the contradictory feelings of both nostalgia and disdain for the past.  Characters grapple with the question: is it possible to ever be free of the past?  Near the beginning of the film, Gavin Elster, an old friend of Scottie’s, discusses San Francisco, the setting of the film: “Well, San Francisco’s changed.  The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast…I should have like to have lived here then.  The color, the excitement, the power, the freedom…”  He is clearly sentimental about the way San Francisco used to be, yet it seems that is a distant memory. 

When researching Carlotta Valdes, the woman it seems has possessed Elster’s wife, the bookstore owner explains: “So [Carlotta’s husband] kept the child and threw [Carlotta] away.  You know, men could do that in those days.  They had the power and the freedom.”  Once again, we are reminded of the power and freedom people had in the past, but this time the sentiment of nostalgia is complicated, as power and freedom are tied to the mistreatment of Carlotta by her husband.  Scottie, throughout the film, is set on doing away with the past; he desperately wants to “stop being haunted.”  But perhaps this is a lost hope.  Scottie puts together the different aspects of his deceit by Elster and his mistress, Judy Barton, who was pretending to be Elster’s wife the entire time.  He realizes that Elster was the mastermind behind everything and now has access to: “all of his wife’s money and all that freedom and power.”  Again, we hear these words “freedom and power,” but now in a very different context.  Elster has succeeded in becoming that free and powerful man of the past.  Additionally, he abandoned his wife just as Carlotta’s husband abandoned her long before.  What is more, Judy’s death transpires in the same way the real Madeleine’s death did; they both fall out of the same church window.  All Scottie wants is to stop being haunted—by the death of the police officer at the beginning of the film, by his vertigo, by Madeleine after her death, but it is no use.  Vertigo suggests that the past is not something one can ever escape.

It is crucial to understand this idea of “freedom and power” in relation to gender in Vertigo.  Do any of the women in this film have any freedom or power?  At the end of the film, Scottie interrogates Judy about Elster’s use of her in his grand scheme: “He made you over just like I made you over…Did he train you?  Did he rehearse you?  Did he tell you exactly what to do—what to say?”  The men of Vertigo are consistently controlling the women.  Like Carlotta’s husband controls Carlotta and Elster controls both Judy and his wife, Scottie similarly controls Judy when he implores her to change her appearance to look more like Madeleine.  The idea of the male gaze is incredibly prevalent in this film.  Just as Jeff becomes interested in Lisa after she has become the subject of his voyeuristic gaze, Scottie becomes interested in Madeleine solely after watching her.  In this way, he is introduced to her less as a person and more as an object to be observed.  It is true that Scottie is manipulated by Elster, but I would argue that the women of Vertigo are the ones truly being controlled.

Upon further reflection, I probably could have written about a different aspect of Vertigo for every single one of my blog posts this year; it’s the kind of film that clouds your mind with thoughts.  However, one thing is absolutely clear to me: I think I have a new favorite movie.  

It's Tough Out There for a Broad (Madison)

Well, folks, this is it. As I am posting this, the final week of classes is winding to a close; exams are being prepped for, parties are being thrown, summer plans solidified. Spring Fair has come and gone; the library is packed with students in the throes of an end-of-semester panic; your timelines are undoubtedly inundated with invitations to oddly-themed a cappella concerts. This spring--the last of my undergraduate career--has been marked by a series of bittersweet benchmarks I can’t help but notice as they pass (far too quickly) by.

 

 

Oh, I found myself thinking the other afternoon, I just skipped the last lecture of the last science course I ever plan on taking (Sorry, Professor Rawlins). And after wrapping up a class on American Women Poets, I was struck by the realization that I might never again have cause to be in room 138 in Gilman hall (and that, drafty as it is, I’ll miss it). I learned, just today, the trick to getting free drinks from the vending machines in Hodson, only to remember that I won’t have time to test out the method.

I am forced, in confronting these Lasts (and the capital L feels proper, here), to turn, also, ahead: if these are the things that I am leaving, what am I heading toward? On the one hand, the answer to this question is simple: I’ll be making my way to grad school in Iowa City (home to an amazing bookstore, plenty of cornfields, and a natural history museum which features a replica of a 10-foot-tall prehistoric sloth). Still, on the other, I have no idea what the next few years will look like.

 

For the first time, I’ll be paying for my own insurance. For the first time, I’ll be more than a two-hour drive away from my mother’s house. For the first time, I’ll be living in a place that is very unlike my hometown (a bit of relevant trivia: the population of Philadelphia is 1.3 million; in Baltimore, it is 623,000; and in Iowa City, the population hovers around a miniscule 73,000).

As I often do when I am forced to forge into unknown territory, I turned to television for answers (answers, of course, that come with a heaping side of escapist fantasy). There are plenty of movies and shows, these days, that explore what it means to be a young woman trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in the world (however you might feel about Lena Dunham, her Girls did pave the way for the moment we find ourselves in now, in which a plethora of lovably-struggling femme millennials fill our screens).

 

I’ve sampled many of them: 2 Broke Girls is a bust for me, feeling somehow stale and forced; New Girl is charming, silly, and consistently entertaining, even if its glory days are somewhat behind it; Jane the Virgin has its appeal, even if it borrows a bit too much from the telenovela to help me navigate my own, admittedly more mundane, life. On the silver screen, Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012), Tiny Furniture (another Dunham offering, this one from 2010), and Adventureland (Mottola, 2009) are worth a watch (Legally Blonde, too, qualifies as a post-college film, in my view!)*

Still, among all these offerings, one show has become my far-and-away favorite, the one I watch over and over again, the one that makes me feel entertained, reassured, and vaguely aroused (a joke), and the one I binged (again) in preparation to leave the Johns Hopkins nest: Broad City.

 

The Comedy Central hit began as a web series in 2009, when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the show's creators, stars, and writers, met in New York City while taking classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade; it made its way (with the help of one Amy Poehler) onto television in 2014. It has run for three seasons, with a fourth and fifth upcoming (not soon enough, of course; season 4 isn’t scheduled to run until this August--I am in agony).

In part, my love of the show comes from my identification with Abbi Jacobson. Both she and her character (also named Abbi) grew up on the Philadelphia Main Line, ten minutes away from my childhood home. She went to the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) for her undergraduate degree, which, as most of you know, is only a very short bus ride away from the Homewood campus. She’s not good at public speaking and hopes that her career as an artist will “blow up any day now!” In my preemptively-nostalgic, pre-graduation phase, this is enough to make us soul sisters. Watching her navigate what everyone tells me is the hellscape of your young twenties gives me particular comfort, as if I’d sent a body double ahead of me to test the waters; she seems like she’s doing well--maybe I can, too. 

 

Of course, the appeal of Broad City is much deeper than hometown pride. The show is hilarious; in one episode, Ilana becomes latched onto a garbage truck after trying to wear an industrial chain as a belt; in another, the duo is kicked off of a plane when their MacGyver’d tampon is confused for a bomb. It’s also oddly sweet; it’s clear that Ilana would do anything for her best friend Abbi, including grilling potential one-night-stands about their sexual health, mothering her after the removal of her wisdom teeth, and spending hours tracking down a stolen cell phone.

 

And for all its fluffiness, the show is smart, too, with a feminist sensibility that is always present but never pedantic: the leads are two Jewish women who share a friendship that would make even the best bromance movies jealous, and who talk frankly and frequently about their active sex lives—and not in an I-had-another-steamy-affair way, in an I-just-peed-out-a-condom/I'm-looking-at-my-labia-in-a-Topshop-dressing-room/a-guy-asked-me-to-peg-him kind of way.

It matters to me, too, that Ilana is bisexual, and shows no signs of being killed off. Her liaisons with women are never fetishized, or even addressed as unusual. There is no moment of coming out, no older, predatory lesbian seducing her, and no sense that her friendship with a straight girl is strange or suspect (admittedly, one of the quirks of the pair’s friendship is Ilana’s oft professed love for Abbi—this, though, feels more like a running gag than a comment on the impossibility of friendship between queer and straight women). It is the kind of representation one seldom gets, as a bisexual woman. To see oneself rendered likably and fully on screen, not tokenized or tortured, is an opportunity that is hard to come by; even as Broad City makes me laugh, it gives me the chance to feel real, to take a delight in my queerness that can be otherwise difficult to maintain in the current political climate both at home and abroad. 

Beyond all this, Broad City has a surrealist bent that allows it to stand out amongst other shows of its ilk. The use of non-diegetic sound, fantasy sequences, and absurdist humor make each episode a surprising one: you’re never sure when a giant Bingo Bronson (a stuffed blue cartoon toy) might make an appearance, or when a piece of particularly shocking news will be accompanied by the sounds of a bomb detonating (complete with aftershock and ringing in the ears). It is equally likely that the girls will find themselves at a swanky rooftop cocktail party as in a subway car filled with Hasidic Jewish men or human fecal matter.

 

There is something about this show that defies description; it's difficult to explain why it feels like the suitable topic for my final CinemAddicts post. After all, what can I tell you I’ve learned from watching Broad City? I’m still scared to leave my friends and Baltimore behind; I’m not any closer to understanding how to do my taxes; and it’s true, it isn’t my dream to work as a cleaner in a fitness center or as a temp at a failing startup, so there isn’t much in the way of inspiration to be found in that arena. I suppose, though, I have learned some things: how to sneak an offending BM out of a toilet and into a trash shoot if the power is out and the man I’m crushing on is stopping by for a visit; that “for every ten pounds a man loses, he gains a visual inch”; a recipe for a s’more made with marijuana.

 

I can see, as I’m writing it, how insufficient this list may seem. What I did not include on it, for fear of being sentimental, but what I hope I've made clear throughout this post, is this: Broad City allows me to imagine myself, one, or two, or five years down the line, living a wonderful life. Ok, Abbi and Ilana are messy; ok, they don’t have dream jobs; ok, they live with crummy roommates. But their friendship—the most convincing and compelling female friendship on TV today, in my opinion—is not only enough to sustain the show, but to sustain them through all of the absurd drama of their not-yet-figured-out lives.

So, I’ll finish this Last—my last post on this blog—with a question. Do we have any readers in Iowa City? I’m looking for an Ilana to my Abbi. After all, I hear it’s tough out there for a broad.

 
*I’d like to recognize that this list is hugely incomplete, and (for the most part) only presents a selection of white, straight, middle-to-upper class stories. If you have any recommendations that escape these pitfalls, I’d love to tune in!

Who Rules This Domain? (Tori)

    

    Followers of my posts must be acutely aware, at this point, of my love of theatre in addition to my love of film.  So, unsurprisingly, when I saw a class offered this semester called “Stage and Screen,” I added it to my cart immediately.  We started the semester by diving into some Shakespeare, and a few weeks ago we watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which is based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear.

    I could easily devote multiple blog posts to this one incredibly rich film.  In class we primarily discussed how an epic tale like King Lear can be adapted for the screen, taking into account factors like the storm, the madness of Lear, the massive-scale battles, etc.  What I was most interested in, however, was one particular character in the film whom we discussed briefly in class but whom I want to explore further.  What better place to do that than in a blog post?

    One of the most thought-provoking discrepancies between Ran and King Lear is a major gender-swap that occurs.  Instead of the king dividing up his kingdom amongst his three daughters as he does in the play, Hidetora divides his kingdom amongst his three sons in Ran.  When we initially discussed this modification before watching the film, I was apprehensive.  There is definitely some justification for making this choice.  Ran is set in Medieval Japan, in which men held immense power over women.  Yet I still found this choice problematic, as the daughters are so central to my vision of anything remotely based upon King Lear.  Additionally, the other Kurosawa films I’ve seen, Seven Samurai and Rashomon, are also both male-dominated, and I was frustrated by the fact that Ran, with this gender-swap, looked like it was moving in the same direction.  However, my frustration did not last long.  Ran definitely is dominated in quantity by male characters, but Kurosawa actually does give authority to women through his implementation of a female character who I would argue is an extremely powerful and intriguing character.

    Lady Kaede is the wife of Taro, Hidetora’s oldest son.  From her very first appearance in the film, we become aware of the extreme power she has with words.  It is after Taro has moved into the First Castle in the kingdom to assume his position as head of the house of Ichimonji that we first meet Lady Kaede.  Hidetora has just made the announcement that he will be dividing his land among his sons due to his old age, yet he will keep his title as king.  We encounter Lady Kaede sitting on the floor in the middle of the throne room, staring into space.  The different levels in this scene stand out immediately; Kaede’s positioning almost makes her look subservient in the presence of Taro, who stands.  She immediately inquires as to the whereabouts of a banner that used to hang in the throne room.  This banner is in the possession of Hidetora.  Taro explains that he gave the banner to his father’s men when Hidetora gave Taro the First Castle.  Lady Kaede says simply “My Lord, it belongs with the head of the house of Ichimonji.”  Taro responds: “But Father is keeping his title and insignia.”  Kaede explains: “Without [it], you are a shadow.”  Taro answers, confused: “What do you mean?  He made it clear that I am now in command.”  Kaede answers, “In that case, behave as if you are” and swiftly leaves the room without another word.  Taro remains, and it is clear that Kaede’s words have resonated deeply with him.  Upon Kaede's exit, he quickly stands up and runs from the room to give the order to his men to seize this banner from his father.  It does not seem as if Lady Kaede would have any authority in this scene.  She sits throughout and is thus situated in the very bottom corner of the frame; she takes up almost no space.  Additionally, she makes no eye contact with her husband at any point; she merely stares into space.  Yet, it is her words that set the entire story in motion.  It is only after this moment that Taro becomes power-hungry and begins to take away the little power Hidetora left for himself upon the division of his territory.  And this is only Kaede’s first scene. 

    In subsequent scenes, her masterful way with words only grows; she blackmails, maims, and seduces her husband’s brother and slowly usurps the entire Ichimonji family.  She functions as a sort of Lady Macbeth character within this King Lear narrative, yet I actually think her character is more fully developed than Lady Macbeth because of the clear motivation for the evil acts she enacts.  We learn throughout the film that Hidetora killed her entire family; thus, her motivation is to enact revenge.  Towards the end of the film, she is beheaded, but she has done what she set out to do.  Though again only occupying a small portion of the frame, she forcefully declares her final words: “My sole desire was to avenge my family by watching the house of Ichimonji fall and seeing this castle burn.”

    Ran is a very long film, and Kaede does not get very much screen-time as the trials of Hidetora are explored.  Then, when she is onscreen, she often takes up only a small portion of the frame, and she is almost always shown sitting.  She is even sitting when she is killed.  Yet she still manages to achieve immense power over the men in the film through her words.  As a general says at one point in the film to Taro’s brother: “Who rules this domain?  You or Lady Kaede?”  Though Ran is, once again, a male-dominated film in terms of quantity, this film proves that women are capable of being powerful, even in the immensely patriarchal society that is feudal Japan.

My first, and favorite, female superhero (Madison)

The superhero is having a moment. Some readers of this blog might say that this particular moment is lasting a little too long; one can’t throw a stone without hitting a spandex suited savior these days, on both the big screen and the small (e.g. The Avengers, Supergirl, Batman vs. Superman, Daredevil, to name just a few). The genre is well on its way to feeling stale, and has long been plagued by (rightful) accusations of sexism (where, where, where is our Black Widow movie?!) and racism (the whitewashing of Asian characters has been particularly relevant of late, with Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell emerging on the scene). And one has to wonder; does Hollywood have anything new to offer us?

Yet, for all of this, we keep tuning in (the season 1 finale of Supergirl garnered 6.1 million viewers; The Avengers grossed $1.52 billion at the box office). I’ll admit, I love a good superhero flick; if I’m cynical of Hollywood’s heroes, I’m also under their sway (I was one of the 6.1 million watching Supergirl).

So, when I found myself without anything to watch, I turned to what might be one of the foundations of today’s obsession, and the first superhero I remember from my childhood; Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is different than the heroes we see on screen today; indeed, some might not call her a superhero at all (where is her costume? Where are the spaceships, the ray guns?) But when I was a kid, she was TV’s woman of steel. I was born too late for Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, and the more fully rendered heroines of recent media—Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch—were a long time coming. Buffy (whose show ran from 1997-2003) was part of the cultural landscape I grew up in, and made a space for complex female heroes like Jessica Jones to fill in the years following.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was both too young and too cowardly to really follow the show when it was playing (I was only two when it premiered; I was frightened by an episode of Hey Arnold that featured a cartoon vampire). But Buffy was a presence in my life; my best friend in middle and high school watched it obsessively, and I recall many a sleepover spent with my head under the covers, cowering from the demons on screen. And when, a week ago, I asked a friend what series I should start watching she said, without hesitating, “Buffy. You’re a feminist; it’s basically required.”

Even beginning my viewing as a woman in 2017 who has watched (dare I say endured) a surfeit of superheroes, I’m captivated by Buffy Summers. In a week I’ve seen 26 episodes, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule. I have been thinking about what makes Buffy such a cultural cornerstone. It’s not the special effects (the 90’s era CGI is quaint at best, painful at worst, making the monsters less threatening than they might be), nor, admittedly, the show’s sense of pace; the episodes often introduce seemingly apocalyptic obstacles, worry over them for thirty-five minutes, then wrap them up with two minutes of hand-to-hand combat, sending their heroes back into the halls of Sunnydale High to reflect on their latest sweethearts or homework assignments. A sense of suspense is often noticeably lacking (particularly when one doesn’t have to wait a week between episodes, a fault of my own consumption rather than of Joss Whedon’s direction).

Yet there is something compelling about the fast-talking, stake yielding Buffy (played with panache by Sarah Michelle Gellar) that is worth watching, even if one has wearied of world-savers. Part of the appeal is that the stakes (hah) feel real, here, in a way that they don’t in the sanitized world of Disney’s Marvel universe or the CW’s National City. The violence, while often aimed at monsters we know to be less-than-human, is almost always shown rather than implied. The heroine even, at times, takes a perverse pleasure in causing pain (Season 2, Episode 11 sees Buffy giving a vamp a protracted beating after having walked in on her mother making out with a slimy new boyfriend; she enthusiastically slices into a 7-foot-tall praying mantis long after it is dead Season 1, Episode 4).

When a villain is killed, they are not whisked off-screen; they are stabbed to death in front of us. It’s true that they dissolve into ash, bloodless, but the camera takes a fierce joy in the moment a ghoul is staked. Each fight scene is the delaying of that gratifying moment when our heroine snaps some sign post in half and plunges it into her enemy’s chest.

The self-conscious sexualization of the protagonist also makes this series an interesting watch. Buffy has undoubtedly become a feminist icon—and Whedon intended her to be, wanting to subvert the trope of the blonde slasher-film victim—but she is also a conventionally attractive (slim, white) woman performing roundhouse kicks in high heeled boots and mini-skirts. That is, she performs normative femininity while embodying a masculinized form of power (namely, physical strength and a preternatural ability to kick ass); this is no witch, that icon of feminine power, nor is her gift one of shapeshifting or laser vision. What she does is go blow for blow in fist fights with the undead. It’s an emphatically physical power, perhaps more masculinized even than Superman’s—after all, Buffy isn’t immune to bullets, and she can’t fly. She’s super merely by merit of her grit and her ability to square up. And she does it all with a fresh coat of lip gloss to boot.

If Buffy smacks of a man’s fantasy girl it’s because, in a sense, she is. Her creator, Joss Whedon, is quoted by Patricia Pender in her book I’m Buffy and You’re History as saying, “I definitely think a woman kicking ass is extraordinarily sexy, always… if I wasn’t compelled on a very base level by that archetype I wouldn’t have created that character.” And it can’t be ignored that some of the combat has erotic undertones; Buffy is repeatedly choked, tied up, threatened with sharp teeth against her exposed, lily-white neck.

This is one of the more uncomfortable parts of watching the slayer: after all, she’s just a girl. More of a girl, even, than our modern Supergirl (today’s Kara Zor-El comes with an office job and well-furnished loft). Buffy is sixteen at the series’ beginning, a sophomore in high school. The pleasure viewers take in watching her lithe fighter’s form is complicated by the fact of her youth; and when she starts dating a 250-year-old vampire, we naturally feel a little strange about it.

Yet her girlishness is also part of the series’ appeal; Buffy’s charm lies how relatable the eponymous lead is. She isn’t the sunny, saccharine Supergirl, nor is she the brooding, tortured Batman; she’s more or less an average sixteen-year-old. She is unaccountably moody sometimes; she gets jealous when her best friend starts hanging out with someone new; she bickers with her mother. For the first time, with the advent of the Slayer, a typical teenage girl is cast as super. It is enough for Buffy to be just who she is, and occasionally kill a vamp or two. The series developed a cult following, and retains its place in the cultural lexicon, because it allows teenage girls to see themselves on screen and in power.

And I know I’m only scratching the surface; soon, I’m told, there will be lesbian witches, advice on leaving an abusive relationship, and a guide through the grieving process. But halfway through season 2, I’m already sold. If the superhero is having a moment, let it linger. And if you’re disenchanted by the current offerings, I suggest taking a look behind you; Buffy won’t disappoint.

Let the Games Begin! (Madison)

I spent the last several weeks of the summer in a small town in upstate New York called Lake Placid. Those of you who are familiar with the place know that it is hard to be there without being keenly aware of the specter of Olympic competition; the village hosted the winter games in both 1932 and 1980 (hockey fans will remember the "Miracle on Ice" from the 1980 games, where the underdog American team beat the Soviet Union in a surprising upset.) I have seen the silver cauldron where the Olympic torch burned; jogged on the clay colored track at its feet; walked long stretches of the old bobsledding run; and blanched at the top of the ski jumps that sit five minutes outside of town, and which are still used as a training facility for some of the world's best athletes today. I've done all of this not because I am a naturally athletic person, or even because I am a passionate follower of sport—in fact, the opposite is true—but rather because it is hard not to be excited by the relics of some of the greatest games on Earth. 

This year, though, I was not only thinking about the ghosts of those former, frigid Olympics; I was also, as I'm sure almost everyone was, tuning in to the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The night of the opening ceremonies, I sat on the couch for nearly four hours (my computer struggling to connect to the slow, log-jammed wifi) as athletes from 206 countries--including two of our very own Blue Jays, Pilar Shimizu representing Guam and Ana Bogdanovski representing Macedonia--filed through the Maracaña Stadium to wild applause. During the course of the games, I was able to watch bits and pieces of my favorite events; swimming, diving, gymnastics, and volleyball, among others. 

It's hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly suited for the screen than the Olympic games. They have it all: high-budget camera equipment, beautiful scenery, unfathomably fit athletes, an audience of millions, and the weight of God and country to back it all up. The stakes at the games are undeniably high; taking home a medal is a matter of national pride, and losing can mean the frustration of a lifetime's worth of training. It surprised me, then, that there wasn't a glut of movies about the games. I did pick a few, though they do not by any means constitute a complete list, or even a well-rounded one (if anyone knows of a good place to watch non-Anglo Olympic films, let me know!) I started with Chariots of Fire (1981) dir. Hugh Hudson, moved on to the less critically acclaimed Stick It (2006) dir. Jessica Bendinger, followed by the charming Eddie the Eagle (2016) dir. Dexter Fletcher, and ended with the recently released Race (2016) dir. Stephen Hopkins. 

In watching these films I was interested in a few key elements: how does the gaze of the camera approach the body of the athlete, considering the games as the ultimate expression of physical perfection? How do these films handle the role of the press in Olympic competition, considering the experience of competing in the games as the experience of being watched by an audience of judges, peers, and fans? How much does the interior life of the athlete inform their sport, and how much does their national background, considering the games as being played on behalf of both the individual and their country? How have the games changed since the first modern Olympics in 1896, considering the current games as the seat of the latest in sports technology? Really, what I am asking is: how can these movies explain why we care so much about the Olympic games? Because this is somehow the greatest mystery of all, to me; what is it about this quadrennial competition that make sporting seem so noble, so much more than, well, games?

 A lot of these questions have to do with how the movies are shot. The three biopics, Chariots of Fire, Eddie the Eagle, and Race, featured male athletes (Harry Abrahams and Eric Liddell, Eddie Edwards, and Jesse Owens respectively); that is, they featured the type of body that is less often exploited onscreen than that of the female athlete (as Stick It seemed to corroborate.) I noticed, though, particularly in Hopkins' Race, a close attention to the athlete's body: in one scene, Jesse Owens (played by Stephan James) stands shirtless in the locker room, hips wrapped in a low slung white towel, as the camera leers at him from amongst a team of jeering football players; in another, as he stares down the track before his race begins, there is a slow pan up his legs before he bends to the start and fully enters the frame; often, the camera looks up at him as if perched on the ground, so that his proportions are exaggerated and he seems taller, stronger; and throughout, James glimmers with sweat, indelicate and emphatically physical. While it would be a bit of a reach to call this gaze sexual, it still seems a notable exception from most feature length films, which allow the body of their leading men to be quietly beautiful; here, the strength and grace of the male form at its physical prime is on full display.

One wonders if this close gaze is somehow permissible because the man in question is black (i.e. a more acceptable target for objectification and physical scrutiny), though to avoid being too contentious, I won't say much more about that. I will note, however, that compared to Race, the treatment of the body in Chariots of Fire seems almost chaste (though it would be unfair of me not to admit that this does seem to be in keeping with the historical period of the film, which is set in the 1920s.) The British team runs in a plain white (dare I say virginal?) costume of tee shirts and long shorts, sometimes even in suspenders, and rarely without a shirt on. Eric Liddell, the most moral character in the film, wears his brown overcoat over his running clothes until the very moment he has to kneel at the start.

Eddie the Eagle, the only film on my list that is about the winter Olympic games, treats its affable main character as something of a much-loved younger brother. Eddie (played by Taron Egerton) has an unassuming shape, with a slightly softened waist; he wears Fair Isle sweaters and neoprene ski suits, and carries a tin lunchbox. Indeed, the film uses the exposed male figure principally as a vessel for comedy; in one scene, Eddie finds himself in a sauna with the Norwegian ski jumping team, all of whom are nude. Egerton’s eyes shift nervously behind his fogging glasses as he sits swaddled in a white towel, trying to make polite conversation with men whose athletic prowess allows them an arrogance, here demonstrated by their proud nudity. Indeed, Eddie Edwards is so naïve as to be nearly asexual, standing in stark contrast to his troubled coach Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), who compares ski jumping to climaxing during sex (again, Eddie is unsure of how to react—the film seems to celebrate Edwards in spite of his body, not because of it.)

Stick It, a young adult comedy about a juvenile-delinquent-turned-elite-gymnast, is much less hesitant to flaunt the bodies of its athletic stars; the film is a bouquet of bright, sugary color, with a heaping serving of tan, toned muscle to boot. Most of the scenes take place in the gym, where a cast of young (mostly blonde) women flip around in skin-tight leotards or sports bras. The main character, Haley, enters in a baggy tee shirt and shorts to signal an attitude of non-conformity and defiance, but as the film progresses begins tying her shirts in knots to expose her stomach, and in the end, wears a bright orange leotard with a flame streaking up the side, exiting the gym in a close-fitting white tracksuit. The exposure of these women's bodies cannot be said to be merely the appreciation of peerless athletic physique; pieces of dialogue draw attention to the gymnast's body in a sexual light, as when Haley's sidekick says of another gymnast, "You don't think she's hot? I think she's hot... she has an apple butt"; or when Haley remarks, looking at a girl kissing her boyfriend, that the only thing that girl has that the gymnasts don't is "boobs." 

 

Setting aside concerns of the sexualization of female athletes, I will say that the film rejoices in the highly visual, artistic nature of gymnastics, with a series of kaleidoscopic overlays of the athletes performing their routines, all in different colored leotards. The movie takes an evident delight in the sport, spending minute-long stretches on the women’s routines in almost every scene; here, the body becomes as important as the plot, making the movie a whirlwind of kinetic energy.

Stick It gives its audience something else that the two more critically acclaimed films (Chariots and Race) don’t; we are invited to watch a woman in the process of becoming an athlete good enough to qualify for the Olympics. That is, we see her fall, and fall hard. We see wipe outs, bruises, and ice baths, while in the other two films, training is covered in a brief montage, with an upbeat soundtrack playing in the background. Stick It does what even the real Olympics can't quite manage; it depicts the painful, difficult process, not just the fantastic, medal-worthy results. 

With so much attention being paid to Haley’s journey towards the games, it might not be surprising that Stick It places a greater emphasis on the individual than on their home country, which cannot be so easily said of Chariots of Fire and Race. Although the place of the individual is paramount to all three stories, for the men, concerns of country seem equally urgent. Their games are used, respectively, to symbolize European values being upheld in the face modernization and professionalization of sport, and to protest the racial hatred propagated by Hitler’s regime; the male athletes in these films feel a pressure to prove something about their particular in-groups, be they national, ethnic, racial, or religious. To win a race is to justify the existence of whole populations, who are either persecuted (as in the case of Owens, and the Jewish racer Abrahams) or perceive themselves as dying out (as in the case of the conservative Liddell, and the deans of Cambridge University.)

In Chariots of Fire, a priest says to the runner Eric Liddell, trying to convince him to train for the Paris Olympics, “What we need now is a muscular Christian to make people sit up and take notice”; the head of the British Olympic Committee remarks that the games gather delegates “from every civilized nation on the face of the Earth.” The implication is clear: the ability to send athletes to the Olympics signifies a certain amount of class, wealth, and prestige; the ability to best those other countries in sport signifies the supremacy of one’s cultural and national values. This can be seen in Race, too, when an American builder petitions the United States Olympic Committee to allow athletes to participate in the Berlin games on the basis that, “the American people need champions to remind them what they’re capable of.”

Sport becomes a vessel for cultural dominance as well as cultural exchange. This becomes all the more clear as technology begins to play an important role in the games; the teams with the equipment, the professional coaches, the time and resources to devote to training full-time, have the advantage on the field, as well as a stage to promote themselves to millions of viewers. While watching the Rio games I was struck, particularly during the synchronized diving, by how many times and at how many angles one saw the dive; once in real-time, then again from the side, from a bird’s eye view, in slow motion, and once from a camera placed at the bottom of the pool. This seemed especially striking in comparison to the sports technology depicted in several of these films; Eric Liddell and Jesse Owens run on dirt tracks, where they use small silver trowels to dig out footholds for themselves. Jesse Owens’ family listens to his race on the radio; Liddell and his teammate Abrahams research other athletes by studying grainy, black and white photographs of them clipped out of newspapers; even in the 1988 games depicted in Eddie the Eagle, the crowds are smaller and the race footage blurrier, and Eddie’s jumps are recorded in a ledger with a ball point pen.

Race had the difficult task of depicting the first Olympics to be televised; the ’36 games, held in Berlin, were filmed by German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who pioneered many techniques in sports cinematography. On screen, Riefenstahl (played by Carice van Houten) remarks to a controlling Goebbels that “[These may be your games] but this is my film. Without it, your games will be forgotten in a year.” This line, perhaps more than any other, feels as if it is cutting to the heart of why we care so much about the Olympics; here, there is a film being made, carefully crafted and rehearsed (Riefenstahl has Owens return to the track to recreate his record-breaking long jump so she can catch it from several angles; she zooms in on his competitor, Luz, shaking Jesse’s hand in an act of political defiance), but with the reassuring guarantee of reality behind it, the human narrative that we find so compelling.

Although what we see of the Olympics is just as crafted as any film—and just as full of product placement—there is also the undeniable body in front of us, the real person who is accomplishing something that is, for most of us, unattainable. The experience is something close to uncanny; it seems both as if anything could happen, and as if the results could never have turned out differently once they are revealed. There is real risk, with all the editing, polish, and beauty of the television and films that we see day to day, and it’s all happening in real time.

With the 2016 summer games long over, and another two years to go until we can watch the winter Olympics in PyeongChang, I will have to content myself with the occasional inspirational sports film or biopic to get me through; still, I plan on going back to Lake Placid soon to get my fix. Even when the torch goes out and the cameras leave, something miraculous lingers on those old Olympic sites. I can’t quite help but get sucked in, every time.

How to Be a Villain (Treva)

As a junior in the middle of my spring semester, I’ve had to start thinking about my life after college recently. My career path. And, as a junior in my spring semester, at Johns Hopkins, I am very overworked and desperate to avoid anything actually resembling adulthood. So my thoughts have been turning, inevitably, to one ideal career: Disney Villain.

But how? How to set myself up as the perfect Villain(ess)? Well, I am a junior at Johns Hopkins University, and a humanities major to boot, so in order to answer that question, I set out on a research quest. Mostly through video clips of signature villain songs, because those are the best part of being a specifically Disney villain.*

My exhaustive research has led be to two basic conclusions: the strength and impressiveness of a true Villain, and their song, is based on power and social deviancy.

Also, darkness. All the best Villains have dark clothing and dim lighting. But that’s such basic analysis that I feel it almost goes without saying. Lower chords in the music also help, and minor keys.

In support of my claim, I shall compare two famous musical scenes: “Bibbidi-Bobbiti-Boo” from Cinderella (1950), and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid (1989). It’s an interesting comparison because they actually have a number of key points in common, including some notable Villainous qualities. In each, an older woman uses magic to manipulate the environment and transform a young woman—so, in fact, she can go meet and marry a prince.

The use or even just implication of supernatural forces is a hallmark of Villainy, falling under the category of social deviancy—this is the supernatural. It’s abnormal, and thus dangerous. In Little Mermaid, magic is actually a more neutral thing, used also—indeed, first!—by King Triton, an antagonist but not a villain. (Though he does use it for the purpose of destruction, of the human objects that approximately represent Ariel’s hopes, ambitions, and individuality.) Ultimately, however, he uses the same magic to give her the life she dreams of, on land with the humans. It’s much more common for Villains to either introduce or even be the only ones to call on the supernatural. Dr. Facilier, the villainous witch doctor, is the first to use magic in The Princess and the Frog (2009), explicitly evoked in his song “Friends on the Other Side.” In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), a movie otherwise completely without magic or occult effects—save the living gargoyles who provide comic relief, and whom I for one have never thought fit tonally with the rest of the film—Bishop Frollo’s “Hellfire” is full of supernatural effects. Red hooded figures appear from nowhere to chorus and shame him, and his imagination summons a dancing image of the gypsy Esmeralda in the fireplace. The sound effects suggest that his hand motions are manipulating the flames.

As suggested, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother actually follows the “only one affiliated with the supernatural” trope more than Ursula does. She not only uses magic, but she specifically affects the protagonist with it, spelling Cinderella into a dress and her mouse friends into horses and a footman. Such an overt exhibition of power and domination is reminiscent of when Ursula not only turns Ariel human but first gives the show of her abilities with the simulacrum: “This one longing to be thinner, that one wants to get the girl / and do I help them? Yes indeed.” Or when Scar (The Lion King, 1994) kicks the hyenas around in “Be Prepared”, or Dr. Facilier concludes his song by literally turning Prince Naveen into a frog. The power expressed in physically manipulating the environment and, better, the protagonist, is another key habit of true Villainy.

The Fairy Godmother, however, is not a Villain, or even an antagonist. Why? And not just as demonstrated in her motives, to help rather than hinder or entrap. How does the film, in animation and effects, express those motives?

For one thing, though they similarly use magic, the Gofmother conforms to society’s expectations in a way that Ursula does not. The Fairy Godmother resembles nothing so much as a kindly grandmother, while Ursula, though white-haired, acts the part of a sensual temptress. Her bright lipstick and eye-shadow pop out of her face, her tentacles are shaped like a low-bodiced, jet black evening gown—with attention drawn to the chest by a dangling gold locket—and she’s…on the plump side, debatably “fat” by model-standards of beauty, particularly relative to Ariel’s lithesome sixteen-year-old self. But she’s also curvaceous, and her body language—and that make-up—positively screams confidence and “look at me!” Remember the exaggerated undulation on, “And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” Whereas the fairy godmother is covered head to toe in loose robes of pale blue and pink, including a hood and a large pink bow at her neck. She’s gently unfashionable, non-sexual, and the colors suggest calm and comfort. She’s even shorter than Cinderella: totally non-threatening. Ursula’s aggressive sexuality is startling to the point of scariness, particularly in an older woman who insists she’s being grandmotherly, helping “poor, unfortunate souls.” It’s arguably the “otherness” of it that makes her scary rather than the actual sexuality—she also has bruise-purple skin where all other mermaids are fairly pale, or at least human-colored, and octopus tentacles instead of a fish tale. It’s similar to how Scar is the only dark-furred lion (was Walt Disney racist? Well, probably) or Governor Radcliffe in Pocahontas is taller, broader, and more richly clothed than all the other settlers in Pocahontas (1995). Villains are those who don’t fit in.

Despite this deviancy—or perhaps because of it, and which of those options is scarier?—Ursula obviously has power. Supernatural power, and power expressed in blocking, and even in the tempo of the song. It’s fast. It’s aggressive. It actually picks up speed as the song goes on, and Ariel’s choice becomes more immediate. “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” has not only a slower tempo, but also significantly less range in its notes and energy in its delivery. Ursula belts notes low and high—though generally lower, menacingly. She moves around, often to literally above Ariel’s head—a simple indication of power by blocking. She draws the focus of the scene and demonstrates her sheer drive. A true Villainess isn’t afraid to commit real effort to her world domination plans. The Fairy Godmother stays on Cinderella’s ground level throughout her song, moving little more than to broadly wave her wand.

So what have I learned, if I want to pursue a career of Disney-style Villainy? Here are the big takeaways:

• Dark clothing
• Own my sexuality, particularly if I’m not expected to. Be unexpected, and confident in it!
• Move around. Speak loudly. Don’t necessarily pay attention to others’ implicit pleas for personal space.
• Try to acquire a unique talent.
• Above all, stand out and carpe diem!

…Or I could continue spending Friday and Saturday nights alone in my well-lit bedroom, wearing pajamas and watching Disney clips on YouTube. Yeah. I might do that. At least I have cool socks.

.

* For reasons of copyright law, I can share neither screencaps nor links to where one might watch such clips. But I’ll admit that I, acting as a private citizen unaffiliated with JHU, have found several on the web. If you’re interested.

Reproductive Rights, Camera, Action: Abortion on the Big Screen (Madison)

Some of you may know that the Supreme Court will be hearing a landmark abortion case, Whole Women’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, this March, one that will consider the constitutionality of a Texas law imposing restrictions on abortions in that state.  I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to do a little research on this case, and lend your voice to the conversation. My own interest in it inspired me to write a post on movies featuring abortion; today’s list includes Juno (2007) dir. Jason Reitman, Vera Drake (2004) dir. Mike Leigh, Citizen Ruth (1996) dir. Alexander Payne, and Obvious Child (2014) dir. Gillian Robespierre.

It is not my intention to get too political on this site—after all, this is a film blog, and I’m here to talk to you about movies. Still, with this legal action pending, my mind has been very much on women: their bodies, their rights, and the way conversations about what they should or should not do are framed. Films provide a helpful and often critical lens with which to view our society; this, of course, includes the political issues that so sharply divide us.  

It occurred to me, watching these films, that there are two ways to make a movie about abortion: you can either make the audience cry, or make them laugh. Most of the films I watched in preparation for this post chose the latter. I wondered, why is it that these directors chose comedy to speak on such a serious topic? And what is different, cinematically, between a somber abortion film and a comedic one?

It might seem silly to even write the words “funny abortion film”; still, I can’t deny that I laughed out loud at these movies. In Obvious Child, Donna Stern, the main character, opens the movie with a joke about her panties “[looking] like they army crawled through cream cheese” by the end of the day; the punk-y receptionist at the Women Now clinic in Juno says “[these condoms] make my boyfriend’s junk smell like pie” with a deadpan sincerity; Ruth, in the eponymous Citizen Ruth, shrieks at a smiling nurse at an emergency pregnancy center “Are you people fucking deaf?! I want an abortion!”

These moments of humor are often, somewhat necessarily, uncomfortable—or at least, they deal with the realities of womanhood in a way that most movies shy away from; they are surprising simply by virtue of being presumed inappropriate. It is the candidness of these moments that makes them so funny. The women in these films speak with an almost alarming frankness that occasionally verges on un-likeableness (particularly in Citizen Ruth); it seems to me that, in this way, the women very much are the movie. That is to say, no film can successfully deal with abortion without being honest, and that honesty is almost always coming directly from the mouth of the woman whose body forms the contested political ground.

 

 

To briefly say more about the body: I noticed that the camera and its gaze had a complicated relationship with the female form in these films. In some, the women are put on display: Donna in Obvious Child dances in her underwear; in Citizen Ruth, Ruth bends over the sink as the camera pans over her bottom, landing on the thong peeking over the edge of her sweatpants. Of course, this gaze is fairly neatly subverted shortly after we are treated to it: we see the underwear Donna danced in crumpled up on a pillow, dirty now; the same night Ruth bends over the sink, she huffs spray paint and faces the audience with her mouth and chin covered in black pigment. The convention of objectifying the female form (through partial nudity, the segmenting of the body into sexualized parts, the slow pan that mimics the erotic gaze) is used, certainly, but also mocked and worked through; these films are fluent, it seems, in the cinematic technique of blockbusters, but repurpose them to tell women’s stories in a funny and revolutionary way.

On the other hand, films like Vera Drake don’t use or subvert the (normative, sexualizing) gaze of the camera at all; indeed, the main character in that film bustles around in housedresses, or else swathed in her green coat. It is made clear to us that power, for Vera Drake, does not come from anything close to nudity: in fact, one of the lowest points in the film takes place when Vera is symbolically disrobed, and asked to remove her wedding ring upon entering her jail cell. Perhaps this is one of the differences between a comedy about abortion and a drama about abortion: sex, in the former, is still on the table. The woman’s body, while the site of struggle and stress, is also a place for pleasure and levity.

It is interesting to note that the leading women in these films don’t look the way we necessarily expect our movie stars to look. One is a homeless woman, often shown onscreen with paint on her face, dazed and red nosed from getting high; another is a well worn, middle-aged, working class woman; one is unabashedly Jewish (and no, her main concern is not getting a nose job); and one, of course, is pregnant, with her belly button popping out and a 64 oz. blue slushie in her hand.

 

 

It would be unwise to ignore that these women are not necessarily part of the demographic that is deemed normatively attractive. This is not to insult the actresses, who are all beautiful; rather, I want to make the point that these movies, which aim to tell female stories, cast a wider variety of women than we see in most box office films. This is a space where the woman’s body cannot merely be a sex object; it has to be made real, seen, understood as vital to the plot, which often means it must be flawed, or at least rendered convincingly, with all its attending oddness.

I would also like to point out that these films create a unique opportunity to depict communities of women. I will take a moment here to say that the movies I watched for today are flawed in that they only represent the white, straight, cisgendered female experience; I was disappointed to see that there were so few women of color cast (indeed, I can only recall two: one, who goes unnamed in Vera Drake and appears only briefly, later referred to as a racial slur; the second, Su-Chin in Juno, is onscreen for all of thirty seconds and gives the impression of being rather stupid.) Still—and this is not to push away concerns of whitewashing, merely to say that there is a positive among the negative—the films did bring women together in convincing, moving ways.

 

 

Be it Donna climbing into her mother’s bed in tears to hear about the illegal abortion she had in the 60s; or Vanessa holding Juno’s stomach in the midst of a Midwestern mall; or Vera comforting a panicked young woman by telling her that she will be “right as rain”, it is clear that the women in these movies care for one another in an important, even radical way. They are not depicted as rivals, as is more typical in film, but as companions. The love they have for one another seems to be uniquely feminine, not by nature of their biological characteristics, but because of the deep sympathy and compassion they have for one another as people trying to make it in a world that can be at best androcentric, and at worst nakedly oppressive.

Truthfully, it is a little misleading to group these movies together and try to speak about all of them at once; even amongst the comedies there is a wide variation in style and message. This could be due to the directors; men directed three of the four films I watched for today (I’ll refrain from commenting further, and allow you to conduct your own analysis of this bit of trivia.) The fourth film, Obvious Child, directed by Gillian Robespierre, is the one that seems to me the most blatantly political of the comedies. It manages to be funny, but also informative; Donna asks if the procedure will hurt, if her friend regrets getting an abortion, how much it will cost, etc. The goal of that film, it seemed to me, was to allow abortion to appear in mainstream conversation, rather than be relegated to women’s bedrooms to be spoken of in shamed whispers.

 

 

The other comedies didn’t necessarily share that sentiment: in fact, Citizen Ruth casts an equally scathing gaze on both pro-life and pro-choice parties. Both become caricatures fighting what they call a “war”, which includes acts of elaborate costume and deception, armies of followers standing on opposite sides of a barbed wire fence, and expensive (dare I say military grade?) private transportation (see Jessica Weiss’ helicopter, Blaine Gibbons’ private jet.) That film concludes with Ruth escaping a women’s clinic through its bathroom window, walking right through a crowd that has gathered outside, ostensibly to speak with her. None of them see her, even as they shout her name and wave signs; both groups are rendered utterly ridiculous.

Juno, too, is funny without taking a firm political position. On the one hand, the women’s clinic Juno visits is a dark, dirty place with lazy employees, and Juno seems to find abortion immoral; on the other, she is able to speak freely and openly with her friends and parents about her reproductive health and planning, and the decision to have the baby then give it up for adoption is her own.

I will note one last, important detail before I conclude this post (I’m afraid I’ve gone on a bit long already); one of the greatest differences, in my opinion, between a funny abortion flick and a sad one is its relationship to place and setting. Vera Drake is shot almost entirely indoors: in bedrooms, hospital rooms, jail cells. The farthest outside we go is the tenement block. Films like Juno, Citizen Ruth, and Obvious Child, on the other hand, chose not to maintain that internal focus and brought the viewers out to face the landscape: Juno bikes under blue sky and flowering cherry trees; Donna walks through the bustle of New York city; Ruth drives down a snowy, unvariegated Midwestern plain.

 

 

The movies that refused to be sad were the movies that allowed their women out of doors and into the real world, that confronted the tradition of domesticity and broke their characters out of it. This isn’t to suggest that the women’s relationship to the outside world is uncomplicated, by any means; I merely want to bring attention to the physical space these women are allowed to inhabit.

I will leave my considerations there, for now. It is hard for me to conclude this post; to do so seems to suggest that I have said everything I wanted to say about abortion, and about the way it is pictorialized, which is not the case. Still, I can only hope that this post has encouraged at least some of you to find more: more films, more articles, more passion (and, probably, more arguments.) Abortion is something that, however uncomfortable, however political and divisive, needs to be spoken of, particularly in the weeks ahead. I hope you take a look at some of these movies; and then, I hope you take a look past them, and into the lives of real women. I think it will be an eye opening experience. 

Motherhood and Sacrifice (Helena C.)

A good mom is hard to find in film. I probably don’t need to tell you that the majority of films that feature mothers feature heterosexual white women. But even these on-screen mothers are two-dimensional at best (pick one: loving and anguished or evil and manipulative). So, in honor of my mother’s birthday (and Mother’s Day!) next month, I’ve decided to dedicate my last blog post to moms on the big screen, focusing on mother's who make sacrifices for their children.

 

The mothers I’ve chosen to examine are: Hana in Wolf Children (dir. Mamoru Hosoda, 2012), Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1974), and Precious’s mother and Precious herself in Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (dir. Lee Daniels, 2009). I tried to choose films that celebrate mothers who are both diverse and complex, films that challenge ideas of motherhood, and hopefully make us appreciate and understand our mothers a little bit more.

* * *

Hana in Wolf Children is probably the most traditional mother character of all the ones I’ve decided to discuss today, despite the strange premise of the film. Following the death of her werewolf husband, Hana must raise her two werewolf children in the countryside. The story is about her unconditional love for her children, and her relentlessness in trying to make ends meet in order to provide for them. Though some may say that the movie is too idealistic, I think the unconditional kind of love that the film proposes is exactly what makes it so emotionally punching.

 

This is Hosoda’s ode to motherhood, he wants to show the viewers (through absolutely stunning animation, I might add) the sacrifices that mothers make to raise their children. In the end, we get so emotionally invested in these characters, but there’s no pay off. There is no fanfare, no celebration of her success in raising two very demanding and unusual children, not even a thank you. Instead, it’s just Hana, alone in the mountainside house she worked so hard to build into a home.

 

On the other side of the spectrum, Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right are far from being traditional mothers, but they are equally willing to sacrifice for the sake of their family. The film follows a lesbian couple raising two kids they each had from the same sperm donor. The kids find their biological father, Paul, and chaos ensues between the couple when Jules has an affair with him. Moreover, the film does a good job of denying heteronormativity; Paul does not end up connecting with either of his children, and the couple resolves their differences. These mothers too, sacrifice, acting in ways that they do not necessarily want to act, because it is in the best interest of their families.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, complicates this idea that being a good mother means sacrifice. Alice follows Alice Hyatt a recent widow who searches across the southwest U.S. to find a better life for both herself and her eleven-year-old son. She gets a temporary job as a waitress in a diner, telling herself that this is a temporary stop in her plan to move to Monterey and pursue her life-long dream of singing. Although she never reaches in Monterey, she ends up pursuing her dreams while staying in Tuscon, where her son has found his niche.

 

 

In researching movies for this post, I had difficulty finding films that portrayed black mothers in a positive light. In fact, I had difficult finding films about black motherhood period. It seems ridiculous that there are no films that come to mind with a black mother who isn’t some combination of abusive, poverty-stricken, uneducated, and addicted to drugs. While I think that Precious is revolutionary in the way that it tackles issues of body image, Precious’s relationship with her mother, Mary, isn’t particularly radical (Though Mary’s hatred of her daughter is later revealed to be complex and deeply psychological).

What is refreshing about this film is Precious’s relationship with her own children. Precious really tries to be a good mother, but she doesn’t give up her education to do so. All of Precious’s moments of great motherhood are supplementary (maybe even secondary) to her individual journey in finding a place where she can get the love she knows she deserves. She continues her education and decides to raise all her children by herself. Unlike Hana, Precious is both a mother and a real person; her motherhood is not all that she is, but it is still an important part of her.

* * *

Good mothers are always underappreciated, both in film and in real life. So this mother’s day, I encourage you to sit down with your mother and watch one of these films. More than just entertainment, I think they all propose more complex and nuanced portraits of motherhood than what we’re used to seeing at the movies. Most importantly, I think these films show us the ways in which mothers can be defined and imagined as real people both through and outside of the sacrifices that they make for their children.

Bon Appetit! Food in Film (Madison)

Growing up, I lived ten minutes away from my Pop-pop, an Italian chef who built his career in Philadelphia, working in restaurants and hospital kitchens. He wore newsboy caps and had a hatred of undercooked pasta, microwave dinners, sauce from a jar… and, well, anything he hadn’t made himself. Every Sunday, my mother, father, brother, and I would go to Pop-pop’s house for dinner; or, at least, what we called dinner, although it usually started around 3 in the afternoon. I can still remember the way his house always smelled of cooking oil, bacon fat, tomato sauce: his beige carpet had turned black after years of spills and the footsteps of dinner guests and family.

I shudder to think what Pop-pop would have said had he seen me eating lukewarm ravioli out of a can as I watched the films I want to discuss today. I’ve chosen five films that place a focus on food and cooking, ranging from light-hearted comedies to magical realist dramas, to answer the questions that brought me to this project: why do people want to watch movies about food? Why do people make them? What is so attractive about watching someone prepare a meal that you will never taste, and what is it that makes film an effective instrument with which to examine food?

The following are the films I salivated through in preparation for this post: Like Water for Chocolate (1992), directed by Alfonso Arau; Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), directed by Ang Lee; Julie and Julia (2009), directed by Nora Ephron; Romantics Anonymous (2010), directed by Jean-Pierre Améris; and The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra. Each of these films is in a different language, and each (with the partial exception of Julie and Julia and Romantics Anonymous, which are both concerned with French cuisine, though the former has as much to do with American cooks as it does French) are concerned with different styles of food and take place in different cultural contexts. By discussing an international sampling of films (although it is by no means exhaustive) I am hoping to demonstrate the universality of what food signifies; although the meals and the tables at which they are eaten may change, people from all over the world want to watch films about food for similar reasons.

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So, let’s start where most great meals do: in the kitchen. A great deal of the appeal of these films is watching chefs at work: in Julie and Julia, a film about a woman making every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking,we see raspberry jam being folded into white cream, red beef patted down in paper towels and seared in an orange frying pan, a chicken perfectly browned and emerging from the oven; here we are reminded of how beautiful food is, the truly engaging and surprising ways in which food resembles art, resembles painting, how delicately and artfully each ingredient is paired to another, and the visual play between parts of a meal. 

In The Lunchbox—a film set in Mumbai about a man who accidentally receives another man’s lunch, and strikes up a relationship with his wife, Ila—we hear the sizzle of dough fried in oil, the clicking of a stove as it’s being turned on; we are invited aurally into a woman’s kitchen, hearing sounds that are familiar even to those of us who don’t cook (who, like me, don't even have an oven). Our senses are engaged in more than just a visual way; we hear the food as music and we think of how it would smell, the frying oil, the gas from the stove, the aromatic sauces and spices. We recall how food engages the entire body as we see Ila slowly stuffing peppers with rice, when we watch her eat with her hands or dip her palm into a sauce to test it. Sound serves to more fully immerse us in the musical, corporeal pursuit of cooking, reminds us that a film about food is more than a picture on a screen, it should be an experience that stimulates all of our senses. 

 

In Eat Drink Man Woman—a film set in Taipei, about an aging master chef living with his three adult daughters, all of whom are struggling to figure out what they want—we watch Mr. Chu carve warriors onto the skin of a watermelon, or break a fish’s neck and debone it so carefully that a perfect skeleton emerges, and we see the care it takes to prepare food, the precision that great cooking requires. There is something oddly life-affirming about watching a man slice tofu into millimeter thin strips, or chop a root vegetable into perfectly even segments; the kitchen is a place of control, detail, exactitude. It is beautiful to see a person work so carefully at a pursuit that is entirely nutritive, that will be shared with others, and that, although it will be eaten and digested and entirely gone soon, for the moment deserves complete attention.

 

In Romantics Anonymous Anglique, a woman with crippling social anxiety, spreads melted chocolate across a cool metal counter, and her colleague whittles a perfect Eiffel Tower out of a block of chocolate, and we understand more than just texture (another means of engaging the viewer’s bodies with a filmic experience), we understand how cooking is therapeutic, how precision in the kitchen is more than just carefulness: to Anglique, who is typically a nervous wreck, the care and exactness of her profession allow her to heal, to exert power and demonstrate competency. Cooking is more than just ‘feeding work’, more than supplying fuel for a body; its intentional nature also does the ‘emotion work’ of improving the chef’s internal condition.

In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita, a young woman from a conservative Mexian family, in love with her sister’s husband, kneels on the floor she grinds corn for a tortilla, and we see her bare shoulders, a flash of her breast, the sweat on her neck: the film is deeply erotic, and we see how cooking becomes a means for Tita to express her sensuality in a socially acceptable way. Although she lacks power and agency in her life, controlled as she is by her mother, when she cooks she is free to use her body, to be passionate; she engages with her body erotically, and cooking becomes a way to end not only literal, but also sexual hunger.

 

In all five films, among these other images and sounds, there is the perpetual billowing of steam from pots, an ethereal presence in the kitchen that reminds the viewer how ascendant the process of making a meal is. Steam is the closest any visual can get to the otherworldly: it is a literal, visual means of communicating the mystical, of indicating that something if not divine, then at least fantastic is happening.

 

And food does allow fantastic things to happen: in The Lunchbox, two strangers pass notes along with bowls of paneer and rice, and start to fall in love; as the man eats Ila’s food, his life and hers become more aligned. She swats a fly away from her face at the same moment he swats one from his; as he reads her description of a fan slowing down and stopping, the fan whirring above his head slows and stops.

  

 

Even in Julie and Julia, a fairly down-to-earth film, two women who are separated by a span of sixty years are brought together by Julie Powell’s project to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes: in the film, scenes of Julie’s modern life are woven in between scenes of Julia’s in late 1950s Paris (in one scene, a room Julie is looking at in a museum literally becomes a scene from Julia’s life, as the camera zooms in and the light changes, and Julia Child bustles into the kitchen with her husband), and Julie constantly talks about feeling Julia’s presence in the kitchen as she cooks. Although this is not precisely ghostly, there is something magical about one woman being so connected to another (who she will never meet) through her recipes.

 

Another important and related thread connecting these films is the idea that cooking is a way for women to claim power, to reassert control over their lives and become meaningful, contented people: and, although there is a part of me that wishes cooking was not the only way women in these films could prove themselves (after all, who isn’t tired of the phrase “get back in the kitchen!”), there is something empowering about them. Although cooking is seen as a feminine pursuit domestically, the professional world of food is still male-dominated: seeing women enter that space is actually quite radical and feminist.

 

Still, it should be noted that even when women aren’t entering cooking in a professional sphere, food allows them to connect to others, to express things that they are forbidden to in regular life: through the lunches Ila prepares in The Lunchbox, she connects to a man who appreciates her, and eventually gains such a feeling of self-worth that she leaves her unfaithful husband (and not for another man, but for herself!—she remains single at the end of the film); in Like Water for Chocolate Tita pours her emotions into her food, causing those who eat it to weep if she is sad, to kiss if she is feeling sexy, to throw up if she is angry: she becomes powerful in a very literal way.

 

Food, too, creates a network between women: Julie learns to cook from Julia Child, Tita learns from her nanny Nacha and cooks with her friend Chencha, Ila borrows ingredients and gets advice from her “Auntie” in the upstairs apartment: cooking connects people, connects women, in a way that empowers them, draws them together and gives them strength.

 

Food is such a meaningful part of our lives, whether our parents made us dinner, or our babysitters, or our Pop-pops did, whether we eat out every night or make mac and cheese in a microwave. It is important both as something we experience every day out of necessity, and as something we use to mark special occasions, to pass on cultural values, and to bridge distances (both personal and temporal) that might otherwise be insurmountable. Food is a lens through which to view female agency, sexual politics, romantic and filial love, and internationalism; and, most basically, it’s fun. People (or, most people I know) enjoy eating, especially when the food is good, just as people (at least, all the best people) enjoy good films. So, I invite you all to make yourself some popcorn (with extra butter!), and dig in to all of the movies in this post; I promise you, you’re in for a real treat.  

Sex, Politics and the Second Act (Taylor)

I’ll begin my final blog post for CinemAddicts with a hopefully not too gratuitous personal update: I have recently committed to a masters program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. As such, I was hoping to review a political show set in Georgetown in order to get my mind right for my educational second act. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one, but the Georgetown connection that I did end up finding is perhaps even better: The Good Wife, which centers on protagonist Alicia Florrick, a tough as nails defense attorney, mother of two teenage children, wife of a corrupt Chicago politician, and a graduate of Georgetown's law school. 

The CBS hour-long drama focuses on the life of Alicia Florrick in the aftermath of a very public sex and corruption scandal that implicates her husband Peter, a former Cook County state’s attorney. In order to provide for her children, Alicia must return to her old job as a litigator after taking 13 years off to be a stay-at-home mom.

The series starts the way that all well written and exciting narratives should start- in medias res. The very first moments of the pilot episode are heart racing. Alicia and her husband Peter stand in front of a mass of flashbulbs. At the podium, Peter admits to sexual misconduct but denies political wrongdoing. Alicia stands behind him, humiliated and ashen faced. From a writing standpoint, it’s a bold and attention grabbing first move, but certainly isn’t one that we haven’t seen before.

In fact, thanks to politicians like Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Jonathan Edwards and Bill Clinton, (among many, many others,) there is an extensive Wikipedia page devoted to listing political sex scandals in American federal politics. The list is formatted chronologically, and begins in 1796, going all the way to present day. It seems like as long as humans engage in both sex and politics, the two will periodically mix to produce disastrous results. And lost in the fray of gossip, media chaos and political drama, you can typically find a blindsided spouse who is left to pick up the pieces of a marriage, a family, and most egregiously, the political career of a philandering partner.

And that’s what is so fascinating about The Good Wife. It begins where, for the most part, media attention ends; life after the sheen of tawdry bedroom intrigue fades. The show follows Alicia and her fundamentally corrupt but deeply charismatic husband Peter, as they orchestrate a comeback, a return to normalcy, and ultimately, a second act.

Thematically, I really enjoy the attention that this show is paying to reinvention. In America, you can create a second life and purpose for yourself despite where you have come from or what you have done in the past. Alicia begins the show by evolving out of the necessity of scandal, but by the third season, she’s evolving for internal reasons- she sees the horizon of her potential, and she’s going for it.

The Good Wife has also succeeded in evenhandedly portraying political corruption and moral ambiguities. Typically, shows will idolize or satirize political conduct, but rarely do they portray characters as realistically flawed as Peter, Will (one of the partners of the law firm and another graduate of Georgetown,) and even Alicia. Television has lately been fixated on the antihero, and the main characters on The Good Wife almost seem like less extreme versions of Walter White. Alicia is a defense attorney after all, and the writers do not shy away from conveying the moral ambiguities of that job, or any other for that matter- politician, parent, litigator or spouse.

Watch The Good Wife. Don’t be turned off by its network location. It may not be HBO, but it is on par with any cable show in storytelling, acting and production. On the surface it may be a procedural, but the writers have found a way to blend procedural format with elegant, longstanding plot lines and dynamic, emotionally complex characters. And I’m not just saying that because I have to support my fellow (albeit fictional) Hoyas.

 

Spin-off is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: the Evolution of a Young Norman Bates in the TV series Bates Motel (Helen)

(image licesensed for use in accordance with WikiMedia Commons)

 

    A year ago A&E launched their ambitious television adaptation of film’s most notorious killer, Norman Bates. Fifty-three years after the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic thriller Psycho (1960), the concept of the television prequel was met with mixed reviews. The beloved film already suffered three sequels and one truly awful shot-for-shot remake, starring none other than Vince Vaughn. When I had first heard about this television adaptation I was reluctant to watch another ham-fisted attempt at tapping into the original thrill of unraveling the mystery of the Bates Motel. What these sequels failed to do was to get at the heart of what made Psycho interesting: Who/or what made Norman Bates kill? The real terror of the film that lingered long after the credits was not the murder, but the maddening question of the interrogation. Why?

 

    The series begins with a seventeen year old Norman Bates and his young attractive mother Norma, leaving their home in Arizona and Norman’s recently deceased father, for the sleepy town of White Pine Bay and the newly branded Bates Motel. The setting remains intentionally ambiguous in time in the beginning of the pilot, toying with our sensibilities opening on a black and white film on Norman’s television and later transitioning to Norma’s vintage Mercedes. Although it becomes a clear that it's a modern adaptation as soon as Norman takes out his IPhone at the bus stop. This was my first pause for concern. A modern adaptation that was also a prequel for Psycho seemed unnecessarily complex, and perhaps a forced attempt to distance this story from the inspiration. The show similarly has a love-hate relationship with references to the Hitchcock classic. From similar shot compositions, hiding the first casualty of the show behind the shower curtain, to an otherwise pointless dialogue about taxidermy, there seems to be a conflict between a transparent appreciation for the original film and the audience expectation for not-so-subtle homage. Although, that is a somewhat forgettable aside given the very uncomfortable and distasteful sexual assault that occurs between Norma and the disgruntled previous owner of the motel in the pilot. Norman is shaped in part by witnessing the event as well as participating in the murder and subsequent cover up. While I understand the intention of this story arc which drives the first season, the scene in question was one of the most horrific things I've seen on cable television.

 

    The storyline takes a very distinct turn from the film in the second episode when Norman’s older estranged brother Dylan is introduced. His abrupt hatred for his mother seems fairly unbelievable at first, but the complexity of his character and the tension between him and Norman builds as the show progresses.  The first episode struggles with its identity but it comes into its own by the third and develops into a Twin Peaks-esque thriller beyond the coupling of the Bates family to a greater mystery of a seemingly white-picket town with very dark secrets. The general idea of the show seems to be that Anthony Hopkins’ “Norman” as we know and love was not just a product of an overbearing mother and a violent sexual perversion, but of an entire community that indulges in a hidden sex trade among other transgressions. Violence towards young women is not an original motif in murder mysteries on television by any means, but it does add a logical stepping-stone to Norman's progression into the madness that is Norman Bates. Although a secret Chinese sex slave trade in a seaside Oregon town seems somewhat unbelievable, the frightening resonance of sex and violence within the walls of the Bates Motel works surprisingly well with Norman's story arc.

 

    The greatest strength of the series is the strange and often Oedipal relationship between Norman and his mother. While this is the main explanation given for Norman’s behavior in the film, the way it plays out in the series is wonderfully surprising at times. She is controlling and alluring, but also very warm and oddly reasonable most of the time. Perhaps, I like Norman, am easily manipulated by her charms, but I found myself never feeling entirely pulled out of the show by her behavior. Also the uncomfortable sexual chemistry between Norman and his mother is very subdued, which makes it almost creepier. Every time Norma dismissingly utters, "Norman, I'm your mother" in response to a mildly tense interaction between the two of them it makes me shudder. The show straddles the line between a closeness between mother and son that have suffered a mutual trauma, and a protective and possessive behavior mixed with a displaced sexual tension that both fascinates and repulses. The lurid town of White Pine Bay and its cast of unsavory characters ultimately pale in comparison to the engrossing Bates family drama in the center of it all.

The Bates Motel is finishing up its second season with the season finale premiering on A&E on May 5th, 2014.

 

 

The Post 9/11 Homeland (Taylor)

    It has been over twelve years since the towers fell on 9/11. But while the consequences of that terrible day have profoundly permeated and altered the American psyche, they have yet to be satisfyingly addressed by one of our most prominent cultural barometers: the television series. That is, until Showtime’s hour-long drama Homeland aired in 2011.

            Homeland takes place ten years post 9/11. It centers on Carrie Mathison, a young but brilliant CIA operative living with bipolar disorder and an acute sense of guilt over her failure to prevent the attack. Her investigations primarily concern Sgt. Nicholas Brody, a POW held captive for eight years in Iraq by members of Al Qaeda.  Carrie and her mentor, agent Saul Berenson, fear that Brody has been turned into an anti-American terrorist during his time in captivity.

            In my opinion, this show finds tremendous strength in its depiction of post 9/11 consciousness and the very real psychological strains put on those who are, in some way or another, living through the war on terror.  (Which, unfortunately, is everyone.)

            During the first season, Sgt. Brody struggles to integrate himself into family life after spending eight years in a dark hole as a prisoner of war. This storyline brings to light a problem that oftentimes is swept under the rug. Namely that for many soldiers, their most difficult battle begins once the war is over. The VA estimates that in America, a veteran dies of suicide every eighty minutes. Many more veterans live out the remainder of their lives in painful psychological turmoil, as Sgt. Brody does on Homeland. Tragically, the families who’ve endured the horror of having their loved ones returned home from a warzone in a box are not always the only ones who lose a spouse, a parent, a sibling or a child to war.

            Another poignant thematic pillar of Homeland is the depiction of America as a surveillance state. In this aspect, Homeland has been all but clairvoyant in its virtual prediction of the Edward Snowden/NSA revelations. The plot points and tone of the show do much to capture the current national dialogue of privacy rights and the moral ambiguities associated with domestic spying in the interest of “homeland security.” In fact, Carrie’s incredibly invasive surveillance of the Brody family induces borderline repulsion as she secretly watches his most private encounters, from a first dinner at home with children who barely know him, to several failed attempts at making love to his wife. The writers have successfully captured the complexity of this very real dilemma by at once evoking feelings of indignation and paranoia, while also causing viewers to root for Carrie’s continued surveillance so that the perceived “bad guy” might be caught.

    However, for all of Homeland’s successes, there are a growing number of unanswered questions, absurd plot twists, and factual errors that should be cleaned up in the writers room in anticipation of the upcoming fourth season. First of all, who exactly is Carrie, within the construct of her supposed job at the CIA? Homeland has taken a liberty that many spy shows and movies have taken before it, blending together the role of a hands-on operative and the role of a desk analyst in order to speed up the action. This combination isn’t necessarily a problem. Combining the position of operative and analyst makes for more interesting television, and I’m sure there are some real-life examples of jack-of-all-trades agency employees. But going into the second season, if the writers were to pare down her position, it might help to give the runaway train-like plot some much needed structure and focus. If she’s going to be an operative, then send her to Turkey, eliminate some of the emotional drama that has been clogging up the plot in the last season and a half, and let her (and the rest of us) see some action in a dynamic foreign sphere.

    Furthermore, I think the biggest overall failure of Homeland based on the last three seasons is a lack of research during the creation/pilot phase of the show. There are some big factual errors that have unfortunately, been written into the very fabric of the show.

    First is the mental illness factor, and the rabbit hole of emotional drama (including dating a known terrorist) that it has led her down. Although it is a massive part of her character now, it is highly unlikely and borderline impossible that the CIA would allow someone with severe mental illness and a tendency to go rogue to handle such a sensitive case. In fact, she probably wouldn’t even have landed a job at Langley in the first place, because the CIA makes all prospective employees go through a mental health evaluation. Additionally, because the problem is taking place inside the country, it’s actually outside of the CIA’s jurisdiction and would likely be handled by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. Perhaps these are subtle errors, but I think they take away from the credibility that such a topically relevant and thematically important show deserves. 

    Right now these problems are big ones, but they can absolutely be fixed. Moving Carrie’s activities to the CIA base in Turkey, (which was hinted at during the Season 3 finale,) would put the narrative back in the clear in terms of agency jurisdiction. And although mental illness has been written into her character already, taking away some of Carrie’s erratic behavior and emotional drama would seriously help restore Homeland’s initial credibility. Ironically, it seems as though the writers of Homeland may not be following some of the CIA’s cardinal rules: stay focused, do your research and don’t start dating known terrorists. 

Political Satire and Veep (Taylor)

   

     It’s spring break here at Hopkins, so I’ve decided to lighten up with a little bit of political satire in the form of Veep, an HBO half hour comedy series created by Armando Iannucci and inspired by his previous political satire, the British comedy show, In The Thick of It.

    Veep, which premiered in April, 2012 with an eight-episode first season, followed by a ten- episode second season, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, a harried and blisteringly foul-mouthed fictional Vice President of the United States. Veep has garnered lots of acclaim for its humorously critical take on the current state of affairs in our nation’s capitol, receiving several Screen Actors Guild and Critics' Choice awards as well as two Emmy nominations.

    One of the first smart observations made by the show is that in politics, there is no real work-life balance. The lion’s share of scenes take place in Meyer’s offices, and staff members must lie and exaggerate their way into time off.  Her Director of Communications, Mike McLintock, lies about having a dog in order to go home at a reasonable hour every day and even keeps a fake photo of the dog in his wallet as “proof.”

    The show has also made a humorous habit out of lampooning the absurdity of lobby interests and politicians’ tendencies to grovel for approval from big business leaders. During the pilot episode, the Veep finds herself in a hilarious pickle involving her motion to replace plastic utensils with eco-friendly cornstarch ones in all federal buildings. Before she can implement the utensil shift, the “plastics lobby” catches wind of it and chaos ensues. Support for Meyer’s initiative evaporates, and seconds before she is meant to give a speech on her cornstarch aspirations, she receives an unofficial gag-order from the White House.

    “We can’t talk about utensils. Utensils are politicized,” McLintock says urgently.

    “That’s the entire speech, O.K.?” Meyer says frantically, “What’s left here? I have ‘Hello,’ and I have…prepositions.”

    As a Hopkins student, I would be remiss if I didn’t also highlight another episode during the first season, when Vice President Meyer participates in a publicity outing at a frozen yogurt store in order to meet and mingle with ordinary people and show her support for local business owners (with a reporter and photographer present, of course.) The shooting location of the D.C. frozen yogurt store is none other than Dominion Ice Cream on North Charles Street in Baltimore, across from Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. The  Charles Commons Dormitory can be seen in the background of many shots. Much of this episode is concerned with her staff members deciding what flavor of frozen yogurt the Veep should eat in order to convey the right message. They conclude that mint chocolate chip conveys freshness, trust and traditional values, while a swirled flavor promotes racial diversity and willingness to cross the aisle.

    Other jokes include an ongoing off-camera presence of the President as a constant obstacle. During every single episode, Meyer’s enters her office and optimistically asks her staff if the President has called. The answer is always no. During another episode, Vice President Meyer and her college-aged daughter decide to adopt a dog, but are thwarted when the President’s staff hears about it, because the FLOTUS has, herself planned to adopt a dog.

    “The first dog, or FDOTUS, has been planned for weeks. We certainly can’t have your canine overshadowing the FDOTUS,” says Jonah, White House liaison to the Vice President.

    Overall, Veep is an enjoyable watch, with enough satisfying one-liners and guilty-pleasure crudity to hold attention. It is not, however, the kind of satire that satisfies on an emotional level. Truly great satire is meant to vindicate; to speak truth to power and to redden the cheeks of establishment. It’s humor, to be sure, but it’s humor grounded in realism, intelligence, and in the best cases, indignation and rage. Ricky Gervais did it with The Office, Tina Fey did it with 30 Rock, and Stephen Colbert continues to do it on The Colbert Report. So what’s falling short with Veep?

    It pokes fun at the bureaucratic political process, highlights the historical impotency of the Vice Presidency, and uses the basic ineptitude of politicians as a springboard for plot, but it is  a political satire lacking  heart and teeth. The problem with Veep is that it’s lightheartedly cynical when it needs to be angry. But it’s spring break, so this week let’s take a break from being angry, and lighten up with Veep.

    The 3^rd season of Veep is set to premier on April 6^th, with the tagline, “Boldly running for president. Proudly standing for everything.”

 

“A Leader, Not a Politician”: Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way (Ingrid)

             This past Wednesday, the Film and Media Studies Program hosted a screening of Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way. Directed and produced by Ferraro’s own daughter, Donna Zaccaro, the documentary offers an intimate insight into the life and legacy of the first woman ever to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate. Zaccaro was among the screening’s attendees, along with Maryland senator, Barbara Mikulski, who appears in the documentary and was a close friend of Ferraro. Mikulski, a trailblazer in her own right, being the first independent Democratic woman to enter office, joined Zaccaro in a Q&A session following the screening.

            The film paints a more complete and humanizing portrait of a figure that was both idolized and misrepresented by the public and by the media. Guided by interviews of her family and childhood friends, by political affiliates and even adversaries, and by Geraldine Ferraro, herself, the documentary uncovers sides of Ferraro that stayed out of the limelight of fame and popularity.

            Ferraro, who points to her father’s early and untimely death as the impetus for her self-motivation and diligence, grew from a difficult and underprivileged childhood in New York. Her scrappy and hard-working character earned her a scholarship and success at Marymount College. She continued her academic career at Fordham Law School, where she graduated in the top ten percent of her class. After joining the D.A. office in Queens County, she went on to make a name for herself as a hardy and determined prosecutor. Ferraro’s entrance into the political scene came at a time where the female representation in Washington consisted of sixteen women in the House and only one in the Senate. I think it’s difficult for our progressive minds to fully understand the set of expectations and limitations she faced. Regardless, she quickly navigated the ranks of the House as the representative for New York, proving herself a smart and formidable presence. Before long, she caught the attention of many other leaders, including her future running mate, Walter Mondale.

            “You can do whatever you want to do. You can be whoever you want to be,” says Ferraro about her personal beliefs. Coming from anyone else, this statement would sound impractical, absurd, and delusional, but when it came out of Ferraro’s mouth, I found myself sincerely believing it. The intrigue of her story lies in the realistic realization of the American Dream. The vice-presidential nomination in 1984 did not simply fall into her lap, and it wasn’t simply symbolic. Her achievement was undeniably hard-won and wholly well-deserved.

            Ferraro took a fresh approach to feminism—one that traded confrontation for savvy and charisma. In effect, she reinvigorated the agency in women across America. It’s for this reason Nancy Pelosi calls her “a leader, not a politician.”

            By the end of the documentary I was stunned to feel tears forming at the corners of my eyes.  When the credits began rolling everyone in the audience held their applause. It was almost as if we all collectively took a moment a silence to honor this truly magnificent figure in history. Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way is a powerful and moving tribute to a woman whose impact will continue to be felt in generations to come.

The Sexual Politics of Borgen and Commander In Chief (Taylor)

By now, political tv shows have covered it all. A renaissance of political television has touched on subjects like media culture, race relations, partisanship and globalization. But there is one subject that remains woefully underrepresented in the fictional world of the American White House: that is, the fairer sex as the leader of the free world.

  I suppose it makes sense that the glass ceiling of real life, present day political power structure is naturally reflected in those of their on-screen female character counterparts. Indeed, America remains one of the final democratic countries in the world without a single female leader to boast of. And in the case of both real life politics and television, that isn’t to say we haven’t tried.

 In 1985, ABC dipped their toe into feminist waters with a 30-minute sitcom called Hail to the Chief. The show, cancelled after 7 episodes, depicted a woman’s attempt at balancing the demands of the presidency with the obligations of family life. ABC made a second attempt in 2005, with an hour-long drama titled Commander In Chief.

 Commander In Chief focused on the administration of Mackenzie Allen, where   Allen ascends to the Presidency after the sitting president dies due to a cerebral aneurysm. The show dealt with issues of sexism in politics, and explored the likely triumphs and pitfalls of a woman undertaking the presidency. However, despite its best efforts, Commander In Chief fell flat with both critics and audiences and was also cancelled after just one season.  

 Since then, no American television network has taken on the main premise of a female president. Interestingly however, we can look to Europe and our friends in Denmark to fill this thematic void.  Enter Borgen.

 Borgen is a Danish one-hour drama series that tells the story of charismatic politician Birgitte Nyborg who unexpectedly becomes the first female Prime Minister of Denmark.

 Ostensibly, Borgen and Commander in Chief contain many similarities in premise. Like CIC and its protagonist President Mackenzie Allen, Borgen navigates the world of coalition politics wherein Birgitte copes with the pressures and demands of life in office as a woman. Both protagonists superimpose a strong maternal image, each having a family that is swept along on the wild ride created by the often-impossible conflicts between the roles of mother, wife, and World Leader. Both “First Gentlemen,” Rod Calloway (CIC), and Phillip Christensen (Borgen) are intelligent and capable former career men who struggle to adjust to the role of stay-at-home parent. Both Mackenzie and Birgitte’s children struggle to adjust to their new roles as the children of chronically occupied, famous, politically powerful moms.  

 However, despite all of these plot similarities, there is one significant difference between the two shows: Borgen has enjoyed massive success, winning many awards, enjoying a large viewership, and becoming a hit in both Denmark and the UK, while CIC has not.

 So what has elevated Borgen to critical acclaim and commercial success, leaving Commander in Chief in the dust? It may be that European sentiments and acceptance toward women in positions of power are different from those in the US, but I personally think it all comes down to the writing. In fact, Denmark’s first female Prime Minister was elected in 2011, two seasons into Borgen. Compared to Borgen’s complex depiction of politics and female leadership, the problem is that CIC seems to fall flat.

 The main focus on CIC is not the presidency, but rather the effect that it has on a family. And although this could be a valid angle to take, the simplistic characters- the emasculated “First Gentleman” father, the sullen teenagers, the wide-eyed ten-year old- seem gimmicky against the backdrop of a shallow and half-baked political landscape. Furthermore, CIC’s political oversimplification lessens both the challenges, and the possible solutions and outcomes, giving viewers a less cathartic final payoff.

 Another possible issue with CIC is its lack of realistic villains. Mackenzie Allen’s main antagonist is meant to be Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton.  From the outset, Templeton’s character, a sexist caricature, is reprehensible beyond belief. Eighteen minutes into the pilot, he makes a menopause joke, and by the end of the first episode, he says,  

“She’s a woman. And it’s so easy to deal with women once you remember that they aren’t men.”

I worry that the inclusion of these borderline cartoonish bad guys in a groundbreaking show about the first woman president risks propagating the caricature; generalizing, and stereotyping the subject matter as a whole.

 In sharp contrast to CIC, Borgen’s success seems related to the more serious depiction of Brigitte and the rest of the characters as anything but caricature cartoons. Everyone has their attributes and flaws, including Birgitte, who is prone to making mistakes and needing advice from her staff members, who are mostly men. It’s a teamwork setup, instead of CIC’s us against them scenario that would never play out in real world politics.

The writers also take great care toward not over acknowledging the obviousness that their protagonist is a female prime minister, to the show’s benefit.

Another strength of Borgen is that it refuses to be a one trick pony. During the pilot, the main plot point is that the first female Prime Minister has been elected to Denmark. It is acknowledged as groundbreaking, but isn’t fetishized or treated with too much overt attention.

When it is referenced, it is done so in a subtle way; quietly referencing the pressures put on females in any walk of life, not just the Prime Ministry. As Birgitte prepares for a television interview for example, she becomes distressed because she has gained too much weight due to the stress of the election and none of her clothes fit.

 Gradually, the subject matter rises above the basic novelty of a female prime minister, and the show blossoms into a complex landscape of politics, compromise, ambition, family values, and yes, even feminism. Another main character that helps to accomplish this development is Katrine Fønsmark, a beautiful young news anchor in Denmark. As the episodes progress, Birgitte and Katrine are set up as polar characters in both career moves and life decisions. Early in the first season, we see Katrine go through an abortion because she feels too much pressure to pursue her career; while Birgitte does everything she possibly can to put her family first despite her new role in Denmark. By the end of the first season, Birgitte has made a long list of personal compromises while Katrine quits her job in order to maintain journalistic integrity and have a life she is proud of.

 During the last episode of season 1, Kasper is shown jogging around Borgen while he listens to Kennedy’s inaugural address, known for the line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” He is looking to this for inspiration for a speech he is writing for Birgitte. The choice of the Kennedy inaugural address is of course ironic. On the cusp of divorce and the deterioration of her family, Birgitte has done everything for Denmark.

But I think this choice of speech is symbolic on another level as well. Later on in the episode, Kasper is talking a secretary through the 3-stage rocket that is Kennedy’s repeated use of the phrase, “Ask not…” He explains that the rhythm and repetition make you feel something not just in your head, but also in your gut and your heart too.

And I believe that is where Borgen finds success. It is a rocket among airplanes; dynamic, complex, emotional, and ultimately explosive. It is the kind of political television that America needs, and hopefully soon we’ll get it. American rights to the series were purchased by NBC in 2011, and Borgen creator Adam Price told the Press Association that “It’s in consideration at HBO and it’s actually BBC Worldwide who is going to produce it.”

Although I look forward to America’s answer to Borgen, I am concerned that already, the remake has fallen into the old pratfalls of America’s former attempts at depicting the female president.

“It will be the story of a political widow,” Price told the Daily Telegraph of its Anglo-Saxon remake, “She was married to a politician who dies, and it is her story of trying to follow in his footsteps.”

To this I would caution that females in politics and television, as well as the viewers at home, are tired of women following in the footsteps of shoes that likely do not fit them. The time has come for them to lead.

 

 

Female Objects of Perversity in Phillip Kaufman's Quills (Yasmine)

Phillip Kaufman’s film Quills (2000) takes place in France during the Napoleonic Era in the early 19^th century and focuses on the activities of the Marquis de Sade, a historical figure infamous for his practice of sexual sadism. Having been committed to the Charenton asylum for his “sexual deviancy,” the Marquis publishes salacious pornographic literature to escape the sexual repression forced upon him by the kindly priest, Abbe de Coulmier, and the sadistic asylum physician, Dr. Royer Collard, who both represent a morally oppressive society. Despite depicting sexually liberal women in his books, the Marquis’ intends his female characters to be used and dominated. When describing the acts of sadomasochism, the women are on the receiving end of perversity—merely serving as a device to actualize the Marquis’ devious fantasies. Through his work the Marquis de Sade reveals “the great eternal truths that bind all mankind,” or what the Abbe de Coulmier calls the “worst of man’s nature,” in order to expose the underlying perversity of society and the woman’s role as the object of that perversity.

The opening of the film featuring the beheading of the female aristocrat juxtaposed with shots of the Marquis scribbling words on parchment indicates a correlation between society’s cruelty toward women and de Sade’s fictional works. In a succession of images, the blood of the beheaded aristocratic woman becomes the ink of the Marquis’ pen, indicating his exploitation of female suffering as he turns the aristocrat’s execution into an erotic fiction. The way the Marquis verbally abuses his wife, whom he thinks must “hold [her] tongue, hoist her skirts” and “put her mouth to its one pleasurable use,” further elucidates his own misogyny but also suggests that women must be silent and submit themselves to humiliation. The erotic tales depicting the abuse of women are an exaggerated reflection of the ways in which the Marquis’ society abuses women, binding them and depriving them of their dignity and freedom. In a similar fashion the Marquis’ impromptu play, “Crimes of Love,” intentionally sheds light on the cruel fate of women in a patriarchal society, by poking fun at Dr. Royer Collard’s scandalous marriage to Simone, a girl young enough to be his granddaughter.

The demonstration of Dr. Collard’s domineering behavior towards young Simone gives evidence to the objectification and marginalization of women in 18^th century France who, as the Marquis’ stories suggest, possess little sexual agency while at the disposal of men’s desires. When the film first introduces Simone, the picture of virginal purity in a white dress, her attention to the statue of the Madonna and her look of content suggest that she finds her life in the cloister gratifying. Dr. Royer Collard, a dark and foreboding figure in his black attire, corrupts this sacred and peaceful space with his imposing figure and requests to take his bride who “has not yet come of age.”  Simone’s desires are literally overshadowed by Royer Collard’s purpose for her. By asking the contractor to make Simone’s bedroom door lockable from the outside and to place bars outside her window, Dr. Royer Collard exercises his control of her—caging her like a pet. The following scene in which Collard rapes Simone, Collard forces his expectations on Simone to engage in sexual acts thereby reinforcing an aggressive stereotype of masculinity. Though the people gossip about Royer Collard “pretending to be a God fearing man” and the disturbing age gap between Simone and the Doctor, no one attempts to dispute the union, not the seemingly pious nuns who cared for her or even the Abbe de Coulmier himself. Given that Dr. Royer Collard symbolizes cultural values of restraint, his indiscretion regarding his lecherous and violent desire for Simone as wells as his apparent pleasure for the pain and torture of his patients’ exposes the deviance buried beneath cultural mores.

The Marquis’ play “Crimes of Love” satirizes the duality of societal customs and what he believes is the ineffectiveness and inanity of religious institutions. To play the part of the nun in his play, de Sade employs the acting talent one of the asylum’s most delusional and simple-witted occupants, which signifies the Marquis’ contempt for religious institutions. In the tale mirroring Simone’s journey from the nunnery to her new station with Dr. Royer Collard, the character representing the Doctor publicly violates the inmate playing Simone in numerous ways, and yet the sophisticated audience laughs without empathy. The levity with which the people view the facsimile of Simone’s humiliation contrasted with their eventual disgust again draws attention to the dichotomous nature of a society torn between an interest in depravity and the suppression of such interests. Dr. Royer Collard’s disruption of the performance denotes society’s reluctance to examine its flaws once brought to light—keeping them hidden to maintain a façade of unquestionable uprightness.

 

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The Male Gaze in Kill Bill (Ingrid)

    More recently, I’ve become increasingly aware of how my filmic interpretations are informed by my gender. As a female viewer, I often perceive the so-called, “male gaze,” in Hollywood films less from feelings of identification (as a male audience member would perhaps experience), but more so from literature I’ve read, films I’ve studied in class, and general societal observations I’ve made on my own. The topic of the “male gaze” in film is a sensitive one; but I think sometimes people are unnecessarily quick to condemn films for female objectification, subordination, and vulnerability. I also believe female objectification is often overemphasized or mischaracterized as being sexually demeaning; I do not think that is always the case. Moreover, the possibility for a “female gaze” is rarely touched upon.

    In re-watching Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003), I found that my understanding of the “male gaze” was complicated. The film follows the vindictive mission of a strong female lead, The Bride (played by Uma Thurman). After waking from a four-year coma caused by a bullet to the head on her wedding day, The Bride vows to find and kill every last member of the assassin squad that betrayed her. Though the cinematic portrayal of the Bride, particularly towards the beginning of the film, suggests male dominance with many tightly framed fetishistic shots, the narrative is one of female empowerment. The Bride also progressively achieves command of the camera.

    The film opens with the most disturbing of diegetic sounds—the uncontrollable panting of a female. Reminiscent of the start of Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), the heavy, ragged breathing of a petrified female protagonist is one of the most visceral and disarming sounds in cinema. Overlaid with the opening credits on black, the female protagonist, who we later realize is “The Bride,” is first introduced to us by her pained gasping. Faceless and voiceless, her character is diminished at the start of the film. The scene then cuts to a black and white shot of the Bride. The harsh, high contrast lighting in the close up of her agonized expression is unflattering. Her face is glistening with inky blood, beads of sweat, and streaks of tears. Following this is a tracking shot of cowboy boots, striding towards the wounded Bride; the Bride’s whimpering is ever-present in the background. When the shot switches back to the Bride, her close-up is intruded by Bill’s boot in the bottom-right corner. Cower as she may, we presume Bill is hovering over her sadistically, with locked eye contact, observing his violent work. He proceeds to patronizingly wipe the blood from her face while apathetically explaining the motives for what he is about to do—shoot her, point-blank, in the head. Pinned to the ground by her sustained injuries, the Bride is unwillingly but completely subject to Bill’s brutality.  

    However, as the film progresses, we encounter a divergence. Along with the developments in the narrative—the Bride has embarked on her vengeful mission—we also see a distinct change in the shooting style. As exemplified by many of the kung-fu sequences, the formidable Bride demands control of the camera, and engages the audience in an awe-inspiring way. The film, which focuses a great deal on professional violence, in particular that of the martial arts, becomes a celebration of the human body. In these blood-gushing, horrific fights sequences, the Bride is superhuman. Wearing a distinct yellow jumpsuit and armed with a lethal samurai sword, she is transformed into a weapon; her agility and rigor are unparalleled. After slaying O-Ren Ishii’s entire horde of protectors, she stands over them victoriously on the railing of the upper level. In a low-angle full shot, she pronounces, “Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you! But leave the limbs you have lost. They belong to me now.” She is empowered by the shot; her stature is overbearing and omnipotent. Here, Tarantino shows us how there are instances where the spectacle of the female body is not sexualized, but revered.

    Kill Bill offers a fascinating take on the male gaze in cinema. While the Bride, especially towards the start of the film when she is injured or in a comatose state, is often confined to the pressuring rectangle of the frame, truncated and expressed as parts of her body, she retains control of the camera and restores her agency in many of the impressive kung-fu sequences. The male gaze is undeniably present in Kill Bill, but can be decoded to either uphold, contest, or qualify its standard interpretation.

Diseased Love: The Perils of Codependency in William Friedkin’s Bug (Yasmine)

The ideal romantic relationship involves mutual understanding, interdependence, and personal growth. However, to love is to risk one’s own identity, for loving another is often a transformative experience.  Those willing to fall in love may find their sense of self so thoroughly entwined with another’s, their own wants, needs, and aspirations become secondary to their partner’s. In William Friedkin’s psychodrama, Bug, a lonely waitress and former victim of domestic abuse named Agnes becomes romantically involved with Peter, a brooding, intellectual war veteran whose unconventional thoughts and behavior gradually alter Agnes’ view of the world.  Prone to codependency and wanting to escape her world of loneliness and fear, Agnes allows Peter’s ominous obsession to subsume her own identity.

The visual tone established in the first few scenes that introduce Agnes’ character reveals her loneliness and vulnerability. In an aerial shot the camera gradually glides over a vast and empty landscape before honing in on a small motel isolated in the middle of the desert. With the exception of the occasional car driving on a nearby road, the area seems to be devoid of human life until Agnes’ tiny figure becomes more visible. A subsequent wide angle shot of her standing alone outside of her motel room, further emphasizes her isolation. The overwhelmingly empty surroundings, the trees surrounding the motel, and the building itself seem to obstruct Agnes’ connection to the outside world. A blue neon light envelops the entire area including Agnes’s body, setting a somber tone and signifying her unhappiness. Extremely small compared to other elements in the frame Agnes’ faceless form seems insignificant and devoid of an identifiable self. While leaning on one of the motel’s columns, staring up at the sky she gives the impression that she lacks the ability to stand on her own. The dark sky above and the ground below which dominate the frame imprison in this desolate reality. After entering her small living space, Agnes she is plagued by passive aggressive phone calls from her violent ex-husband, who only breathes on the other line. Agnes’s inability to ignore these messages and the increasingly tight framing of shots which ultimately becoming extreme close-ups focusing on the terror in her eyes demonstrate Agnes’s fear, lack of agency, and susceptibility to manipulation. Undoubtedly in need of rescuing and a resurgence of self-esteem Agnes invites Peter and mysteriously dark presence into her life, body, and mind.   

When Agnes is introduced to Peter for the first time, the shifting proximity of the characters illustrate the hasty development of their relationship, while the dark atmosphere foreshadows a foreboding union between them.  Initially, Agnes makes her mistrust of Peter apparent when she says she “[doesn’t] know him” and that “he could be an axe murderer.” A succession of shot reverse shots between Agnes and Peter accentuate the personal distance between them, as neither character shares the same space. By the time Agnes and Peter do share space in the frame, Peter stands in the background a blurry, enigmatic figure bathed in the blue light of the motel exterior, while Agnes stands in the foreground, untouched by the blue light, far away, and seemingly oblivious to his presence. Agnes’ progression toward Peter in the medium two shot places her in the blue light, marking the beginning of their emotional connection. Peter admits that he wants to see Agnes again after they have both moved to a secluded and dark area obscured by trees. In this moment the high contrast lighting shrouds Agnes in darkness while casting large, harsh shadows on Peter’s face, suggesting that Agnes is literally in the dark about Peter’s mysteriously ominous disposition. The abrupt cut from a close-up of Peter’s face to a painting in Agnes’ motel room indicates a relationship between Peter and picture. This painting at first glance seems to depict a sun setting on a house by an ocean with beautiful flowers. However, closely examining the picture, one might notice that the ocean is full of sharks and in context appears to be blood red rather than sunset-colored. As Peter says, the painting “has hidden stuff in it” very much like his own seemingly quiet and withdrawn persona. Unfortunately, Agnes does not take the time look hard enough, and invites Peter to stay with her, having known him for less than a day.  

The juxtaposition of shots in the film’s only love scene between Peter and Agnes fuses the characters together in a bizarre way and exhibits the beginning of their shared obsession. Flashes of flesh and overlaid shots of limbs superimposed on top of each other appear disturbing rather than sensual, accentuating the construction of Peter and Agnes’ shared identity. Peter’s hands are a dominating force, which manipulate Agnes’ movement and most importantly the placement of her head, alluding to Peter’s power over her mind. An overhead fan, overlaid on top of the lovers’ joined bodies, whirls in a circular, choppy motion as though it is both blending and cutting Agnes and Peter to pieces. Their minds and lives are now irrevocably intertwined. The love scene ends with an extreme close-up, a non-diegetic insert of an insect emerging from a cocoon, indicating the birth of Peter’s obsession with “the bug” and his parasitic attachment to Agnes.  Having established their relationship, Agnes sees what Peter wants her to see, a world of paranoia and fear.The development of Agnes and Peter’s bizarre romance insinuates that love can be a contagious disease binding two lovers in a dark and twisted reality.

 

 

From Mother to Monster: The Burden of Motherhood and the Perversion of a Household in An American Crime (Yasmine)

The film An American Crime (2007) portrays the horrific abuse of sixteen-year-old Sylvie Likens by her temporary caretaker Gertrude Baniszewski in a small Indiana town circa 1966. Although it dramatizes testimonies from the actual court case reflecting on the events leading up to Sylvie’s torture and murder, the depiction of Sylvie’s anguish, though potent, does not propel the story forward. Instead the film focuses its lens on the middle-aged Gertrude, examining her evolution from an overburdened mother to a monster. Though the 1960s “was a time of deep cultural changes altering the role of women in American society”^[1] the primary goal of a mother was to assume the role of caregiver to her children, cultivating an environment of emotional stability and security for the members of her household “amidst the pressures of modern life.^[2] Gertrude’s frustration with her deteriorating household and inability to escape the unfortunate circumstances of poverty and single-motherhood in her homebound life are evident in the film’s mise-en-scene and manifest themselves in her megalomania which ultimately leads to the captivity and degradation of a helpless girl.    

The confining atmosphere surrounding Gertrude throughout An American Crime illustrates her imprisonment within her role as a single mother and within the physical manifestation of the home sphere. In the midst of a chaotic and shallow living space—children running around, bills scattered next to bottles of pills and alcohol—Gertrude tirelessly irons in the corner of the room denoting an unstable home life as well as a constant struggle of working without the regular support of an archetypal male breadwinner. Whether she is managing her seven children, supporting her twenty-something-year old ex-lover, Andy, or doing menial housework to make a living, Gertrude rarely occupies the outside world, signifying the ways in which her daily routine binds her to the house. Even when outside the house, Gertrude’s presence often seems crowded by the multitude of children who tend to occupy more physical space in the composition than she does in several shots. Andy also serves as a contrast to Gertrude’s limited lifestyle as he seems able to traverse between home life and the freedoms of the outside world; though he may on rare occasion visit Gertrude’s world, his visits are brief, destructive, and lacking the responsibility indicative of an ideal father figure.

The tight framing of Gertrude’s close-up shots and the way in which her clothing blends in with the peeling wallpaper and dingy furniture further emphasizes her inseparable connection to her house, which has become central to her identity. A high-angle long shot in which Gertrude lies crying on the couch, partially consumed by darkness and dwarfed by the furnishings in her home, reveals the hopelessness of her situation. In essence, Gertrude has few options and her life does not belong to her; instead she belongs to her household, for which she sacrifices everything to keep her tentative home life from ruin. Though the house may be Gertrude’s prison, it is also the realm in which she can maintain an illusion of order and control.

 The ambiance inside the Baniszewski house darkens as Gertrude's fears of inadequacy and helplessness reach a peak. Gertrude’s monstrous transition becomes apparent as her face is increasingly obscured by the deep shadows and she transforms into a tyrannical, dark force.  Only after she percieves Sylvie to be a threat to her dysfunctional family and most importantly to her facade of control, does Gertrude makes it her mission to subdue Sylvie's agency.In a scene moments before she intensifies her abuse of Sylvie, Gertrude looms above her in a two-shot and asks her children “Who’s in charge?”—a rhetorical question meant to affirm her dominance. Gertrude is no longer the picture of frailty and despair, but rather the judge and jury of her household. The children prove their acquiescence to Gertrude's sovereignity in a reverse shot, with their undivided attention, staring unblinkingly at their mother. Whereas Gertrude limits the mobility of her children using verbal commands and intimidation, she treats Sylvie as little more than an object, pushing and pulling her about the house. By contrast Gertrude’s mobility increases as a previously static camera follows her about in a more loosely framed tracking shot, indicating that she draws strength from Sylvie's oppression and the children’s submission.

When Sylvie is tied up and confined to a dark room, where she endures a long process of dehumanization--literally becoming a fixture of the house--she loses posession of her life in the same way that Gertrude has. With every mark of Gertrude's discipline Sylvie's body becomes the canvas of  Gertrude's shame and failings as a mother.  Ironically, the violent and oppresive means by which Gertrude “[keeps] her family together” and “holding [their] heads high,” secretly shames and pervert her household with monstrosity unbefitting the ideal structure of family life. 

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[1] “The 1960s: A Decade of Change For Women” U.S. News 12 March 2010

[2] "Marriage and Family" American Decades: 1960-1969 Ed. Vincent Tompkins. Vol. 7. Gale Cengage 1994  eNotes.com 8 Sep, 2013 

Maya Deren's first film (Nour)

Maya Deren is an Ukrainian-American filmmaker who died in 1961. She is often associated with avant-garde filmmaking and particularly the feminist avant-garde . Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was her first film. She was twenty six  years old when she made it, living in Los Angeles. She was married toAlexandr Hackenschmied. It is hard, if not impossible, to know exactly what was going on in Deren's mind when she made the film, yet there are some interesting historical developments from 1943.

Of course, WWII has not yet ended, and a number of battles took place in 1943. In early '43 bread is rationed in US. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto happens on January 19^th 1943, etc. Many developments are certainly meaningful in trying to reconstruct the socio-economic and political environment in which Maya Deren has worked. One development, though, is of particular relevance. The All-American Girls Softball League, then baseball league, came into existence in 1943. Among other similar developments in women's lives during the war, this type of expansion in women's engagement with society can only point toward a new social consciousness; particularly among young women at the time.

Several issues come to mind when thinking about Meshes of the Afternoon in relation to a newly discovered female consciousness toward the environment, society. Yet, I'll focus on just one: Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon  significantly blurs the line between the inner and the outer, the private and the public.

The film is a non-linear narrative about a woman who falls asleep in an armchair and dreams. She has a dream in which a character with a mirror as a face features repeatedly. Deren plays the role of the woman who falls asleep. The film repeats the act of entrance into the house again and again. Right before the woman enters for the second time, however, we see her observing her sleeping body, then looking outside the widow at the character with the mirror face, all dressed in black, and at herself speeding away from the house. The very famous Maya Deren portrait (below) comes from this scene.      

             MAYA DEREN. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.1943.

(Right after the frame from which this still is taken, the film cuts to the woman herself running after the character with the mirror face. )

This scene is a good illustration of how Deren blurs the line between the inner and the outer and attempts to merge the two spheres. In this scene the woman is both inside the house sleeping,  and outside the house running. Of course the mantra for second wave feminism was "the personal is political" which also blurs the distinction between the political/ the public/the outer and the personal/ the private/ the inner. Deren does seem to engage with this public-private binary, while attempting to situate the female within it. The woman, in this scene, appears as if she is both looking at herself running outside and looking at herself sleeping inside. She knows. She is offered a frame of reference from which she could take a distance and theorize about her position. 

The claim that she  could theorize about her position is problematic though. Looking at the still above, Deren, on the threshold looks, arguably, like a  mime. She can only gesture but not speak. She is able to point but not use language. Her allusion to mime acting helps emphasize her deep involvement with, if not entrapment within, her  body. There lies a paradox. She can look at herself, but at the same time cannot distance herself from her body. It is hard for me to make sense of what this paradox might mean, yet perhaps it is only meaningful within the context of the fantasy or  dream. The film might be postulating that distancing herself from her body, which seems to be a hindrance, is a female dream.

The female body is here situated on the line between the inner and the outer, making it the site of the struggle, or negotiation, between these two spheres. Although something similar could be said about all bodies it is especially true of  the female body which is often considered a matter of public discourse as females are the mothers who are traditionally seen as responsible for the propagation of the species. One could argue, therefore, that the dream of running away from the house in the above referenced scene is in fact a dream of breaking free of her body—a position to which the ending of the film gives credence.

This movement  outside of the body might mean a movement into a plentitude that exists outside of it —a space similar to that which the film creates in which even the law of gravity can be broken . Or if one emphasizes the process of movement toward an outside,  instead of the destination, Deren seems to be deliberately  bringing the public and private (the political and the personal) into dialogue. She is ultimately, thus, a dialectician. Woman is a dialectician. Her capacity to create and inhabit between seeming opposites, merging them within herself, to allow for the synthesis of something in can account for why Deren ensures that the woman observes herself both sleeping and running.

Meshes of the Afternoon has been read and re-read in so many different ways. Partly, perhaps, because in the many years after it was made and till now people, and particularly women's, experiences changed and therefore people saw different meanings in the film. This is one of its particular strengths as a text of course—it ages well. So for example tying the reading to second wave feminism is not an attempt to say that Deren foresaw the movements mantra or whatever. Instead it is an attempt to situate Deren within a larger historical tragectory.  

The Language of Cinema (Nour)

When I went back and reread my last two blog posts here, I discovered that they (severely) lacked in methodological clarity. I will therefore use this post to provide a more explicit sense of  direction and uncover the standpoint from which, and the  presuppositions and mechanisms through which my last two posts are more meaningful.

The first blog post was about Ehky ya Scheherazade  a film in which women are reduced to their image, appearance, exterior. Although the film professes to show women fighting back, presumably by telling their version of the story of the oppressive patriarchal  order, they are in fact denied access to the realm of the symbolic—they are still to use L. Mulvey's distinction "bearers of meaning" and not creators of it. The stories they tell are told through the language of patriarchy. It is important to add that the film also dabbles into discussions of class. The relation between gender and class is complicated. However, as my blog post, albeit obliquely, has suggested the language of the film is best understood as one resting on sexual desire and not desire for material gains or upward social mobility. I will not argue extensively for this point, but I will point out that the women who "tell their story" in this film, although belonging to different socio-economic strata, display no interest in either moving away from their own strata or in critiquing the very structure which allows for and maintains the division of society into well-defined socio-economic  strata. 

The second blog post was about Run Lola Run. This film posits some difficulties when the critic (any type of critic) conceives of its language as one which rests upon visual sexual desire, the desirous look(ing). One important thing that the seminal Mulvey essay "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema" has done is that it has shifted the focus from an analysis of the images of women exhibited on the cinema screen to an analysis of the mechanisms which condition and even necessitate certain modes of seeing which are detrimental to the woman. With this in mind, Run Lola Run's complexity comes to occupy two levels. First it provides an unorthodox image of the woman, and second, it allows for a visual, or more generally cinematic, grammar this is radical. We often understand radicalism through an opposition to the mainstream and not by focusing on an act by itself. I will go with this folk notion to define the radical.

(By way of a side, I was speaking to a friend earlier about Mulvey's essay and with a dismissing hand gesture she pronounced the essay old and irrelevant. She could not have been more wrong. Although feminist film criticism has gone beyond the argument in "Visual Pleasure," this essay is still a force to be reckoned with and assertively a foundational text that cannot be irrelevant and old.)

When reading Run Lola Run as part of this language of desire, the film becomes radical in two ways at least. The woman is the ultimate creator of meaning and in fact of the whole world order. She is wrapped in time and space, hence her uniqueness as a singular woman is preserved. Lola's appearance emphasizes this point further as you cannot really see Lola as belonging to the deep blue sea of women about whom predictions can be made. Lola remains mysterious to the on-looker. A skeptic critic reading this post might say: "Ahah! There. Lola is essentially Woman. She is the other. The position of the signifier is still male." Of course, this critic will build a more elaborate argument, which will be most likely valid. I am offering another reading and not discarding one which upholds the language of desire as understood within a patriarchal framework.

To be more direct, in the blog post on Run Lola Run I was suggesting that the center of the cinematic grammar in this film was not exactly the voyeuristic, fetishinzing, and scopophilic phantasy look. Instead it was a look that is more sadistic. If it takes pleasure, it is because it witnesses suffering and pain. The language of desire which Mulvey has suggested involves the creation of an ideal ego (a hero) on the screen, one whom the spectator can desire to be like, one who seduces the spectator.  It also involves assumptions about the isolation of the individual members of an audience in a movie theater looking from a point of safety, indulging in the pleasure of looking. A pleasure which to Mulvey stems directly from being the voyeur.

This type of mechanism is possibly part of Run Lola Run but again this film seems to assume more of its spectator so that moving beyond the appetitive desires become a possibility when watching Run Lola Run. Successfully, or unsuccessfully, the film tries to appeal to the mind and not to the body. The film starts with a narrator saying something close to:

  Mankind, probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of open questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why  do we believe anything at all? 'Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an  answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following  question and so on and so forth. 'But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?'  Security guard  Schuster: 'A football is round, a game lasts 90 minutes. That's for sure. Anything else is merely  hypothetical. Off we go!

If the film aims to direct the 'looking' onto the patterns of action rather than the bodies in action, then it could be the case that it is attempting to provide a cinematic experience that is less gendered. In other words, the position of spectator is assumed to neither be female nor male. Instead, only a rational mind is assumed to occupy this position. The film is appealing to the faculties of reason and cognition (I hope the beautiful and sublime distinction in the title now makes sense: Kant, "The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment").

The language of desire is not the only language available to cinema. Nor is it the only organizing force behind story-telling in general (this is a bit problematic, but I'll hazard to say it). Yet, it is so hard to elude the grip of such language without some avant-garde techniques. Tykwer turns Lola into an animated cartoon at some points in the film. He turns her into a supernatural hero at other points. What this implies is a split between content and mode of production (the difference between form and matter or content). This break 'activates,' so to speak, the spectator. Mulvey writes in the book Visual and Other Pleasures that the "[s]plits in the cinematic sign (the film essentially) allow ideas to interact with finction and thought with fantasy." ¹  Tykwer is putting his film in opposition to the conventional, traditional, or mainstream. He is opposing the past and the history of cinema. 

My next blog post will be about two avant-garde films that are made by women directors and that are of particular interest to feminist film critics. I will write about Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Chantal Akerman's News From Home  (1977). This next post will try to dabble into the radical aesthetics movement through the works of two increasingly influential feminist avant-gardists.

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¹Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

 

The Beautiful and the Sublime: a distinction revisited (Nour)

 Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) is a Tom Tykwer film, produced in 1998 and released in the USA in 1999. Tykwer's film career is fascinating, yet, this post is concerned with only one of his earlier films, namely Run Lola Run. In doing this film, Tykwer was director, screenplay writer and composer. Needless to emphasis, he had a considerable degree of artistic freedom in relation to this project. A probable line of inquiry is perhaps to discover how the film relates to Tykwer as an artist, director, and generally as a thinker (he studied philosophy). His relation to the film can certainly propel a lot of insightful discussion, but is not the subject of this post. Instead, these following questions are the starting point: What is the role of pain, as an emotion, in this film? Is pain related to passivity in Run Lola Run?

 Manni, Lola's boyfriend, needs to find 100,000 DM in twenty minutes or else he might be killed. Lola is set on a run by a phone call at 11:40. She has till noon to find the money and deliver it to Manni. Lola has of course, as anybody who has watched the film would know, a striking appearance and an unusual physique. Her hair is flaming bright red, she is in army boots for most of the film, and although she is constantly running, rarely looks tired. Lola can also shatter glass with her scream, this is her most prominent superhuman physical quality. As she runs, the film reveals the anxieties and pains involved in running for survival. In fact, the pains caused by this running. It is significant to ask why Lola  runs, as opposed to ride a motorbike for example (although the plot gives reasons for this, one can question the filmmakers decision).

On the surface level, Lola runs to save Manni's life. However, one can also argue that it is, to a significant extent, her own life that she's attempting to salvage. When Lola  is dying in the very first chain of events, she remembers when she had told Manni that it is possible she would decide soon about their relationship—in other words, whether they would continue together or not. When she's about to die, she says "but I don't." The wish to have acted differently in the past, to have said something else, to have done something nicer to another human being, if allowed to dominate one's existence, becomes a life defeating force. The past, time in general, is oppressive in this sense—it is beyond our reach in its entirety.  Lola might be attempting to salvage her own existence by standing up against the most oppressive force—time. Lola is in a race against the clock.

This is an avant-garde film thus one cannot say it is concerned with a realistic representation.To put it differently, it is hard to claim that Run Lola Run belongs to realism (as a school of representation), but it has a relation to reality. It might be said to re-presentation that, which to its filmmaker, lies at the heart of human existence. Run Lola Run  features time, causality, a version of the infinite-recurrence in the Nietzscheian sense, and suffering. This last feature is perhaps the most important one if a claim about the relation of Run Lola Run to reality can ever be grounded. Just refer to, for example, the scene when the security guard tells Lola that all people have bad day as an attempt to comfort her. The expression on her face reveals a lot. At this point in the film she has just discovered that her father is not her biological father. Any human being put in this position, while on a time-bomb so to speak, could be reasonably assumed to have felt pain. He, on top of all this, refused to help her calling her a freak. Lola had to continue running though. The physical act of running eventually becomes a metaphor for pain and even suffering.

This is markedly a new attitude to past philosophical interpretations of pain. Pain  has often been associated with passivity—like for example when Lola receives the news about her real father—but in making running a metaphor for it, pain no longer signifies passivity. The consequences of this shift in perspective might be very profound. Because it takes-on complex questions about human existence, this film is multi-layered. It would not be surprising, as critics have often done in the past, to pose questions about reality, the construction of it, and the reality of this construction in relation to the film Run Lola Run. All this have been very meaningful lines of investigation.

One more idea can be added to the present thread. In a NYT article about Tom Tykwer, published in 2011, the author Dennis Lim states that Tykwer has previously emphasized the "value of distraction" in his work. Distraction implies a challenge to human perception. Run Lola Run  certainly causes an adrenaline rush, mostly because the film over-stimulates the sense: Lola with pounding boots, the images saturated with colors, Lola's flaming hair, and shattering scream. Pain and suffering as they bring us closer to our bodies and the physical, material, realm allow us to see differently. So does the over-stimulation of the senses in this film. The relation between the pain and suffering put on the screen, and their mode of representation in this avant-garde film allow for a claim like this one. When in pain we might not be as passive as once assumed because we can use pain to reinvent our world. Lola uses suffering as a motivation to run, and her running cases different chains of events--the world order thus changes.

Écriture féminine or not really... (Nour)

    Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Youssry Nasrallah, 2009) is an Egyptian feature film which explores problems faced by women in contemporary Egypt. The title of the film makes an explicit reference to One Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells Shahryar, the king, stories in order to stay alive. Indeed, storytelling is a prominent narrative tool within the film. Even more, the connection to One Thousand and One Nights suggests that the women in the film had to tell their stories in order to stay alive. The film uses the talk show as a vehicle for women to publically discuss their concerns. Hebba—the lead character who is a TV hostess—invites a number of women to her show, all of whom with their particular stories to share. Stories about the search for a husband, women's sexual restraints, and the social traditions which propelled them to seek refuge in marriages they did not really desire, among other concerns.

    A reasonable question to ask at this point is: Does the film belong to women's cinema? Typically women's cinema is concerned with a set of problems and issues which help identify it as such. To this extent, the film is a women's film. It is concerned with problems similar to those picked up by the so called women's cinema. Nonetheless, only one thing is really certain about this film. Ehky Ya Scheherazade (Tell me a Story Scheherazade) has a dominantly female cast. Thus, an alternative way of approaching the connection to One Thousand and One Nights is to think of the film itself as a Scheherazade narrating in order to save the society it depicts from further damage. In this view, women are the boat-rockers. They, perhaps because of their status as shown by the film, are more likely to demand social change.

    Yet, what is the nature of their status?  In this article in Salon, Prof. David Jacobson, a sociologist from the University of South Florida, made a linked women's "sexual" struggles to the more encompassing struggle "over the nature of self." Women, as depicted in the film, seem to undergo a search for selfhood, or feel a need to recreate such self. In this light, the complexity of Ehky Ya Scheherezade is better understood. Through storytelling, these women search for who they are, and who they wish to be. As the narrators of their own stories, they have the freedom to rewrite the parts of their history that they wish to reinvent. The film is a universal journey toward self-discovery and freedom. The film starts inside Hebba's nightmare. She wakes up gasping for breath: "there are no doors" she says. She is trapped because, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that she is not offered the chance to recreate her past through the medium of storytelling. As the one who does not tell her own story until the very last scene in the film, she is given the least creative power. Her story is essentially told by the camera and not herself (the film even closes before Hebba tells her story).

    Hebba is hidden behind a glamorous façade. In a scene where her husband Kareem attempts to scare her away from visiting poor neighborhoods (ironically by citing rape) he is shown painting her lips with a bright red lipstick. He is maintaining the façade with which he is comfortable. Although it is true that Hebba sometimes uses this pretty façade to manipulate others, mostly her husband, it does not seem to be a philosophical choice. In other words, she is not intentionally thinking of her appearance as a means for achieving greater freedom (even if freedom just means achieving the ends she desire). Instead, Hebba is trying to maintain a particular appearance for reasons other than freedom. If I am to describe this appearance, I will say neat, tidy, well-kempt.

    Kareem—her husband—provides further insight. Kareem is a journalist who works in a daily newspaper. He is anticipating a promotion. More importantly, he thinks that the only way he would get the job he wants is by pleasing the "right people." Although Hebba does not seem to realize it, she is a lot like Kareem. They both feel a need to noticeably belong to one group and not the other(s). At a basic level, she maintains an image that separates her from a group(s) of people. The motivation behind this need to belong to one group and not another can only be explained through the benefits associated with belonging to either group. Without attempting to negotiate which groups Hebba aims to belong to, it is clear that such motivation to belong or not belong to any particular group is mediated by a clear recognition of social values and social value systems. Hebba, as is Kareem, does not seem to be able to construct a notion of self away from society, its traditions, norms, etc.              

    Expectedly enough, Hebba likes to be noticed. She dresses to be noticed. Thus far, she could be compared to the film itself. She is dependent on the act of looking—the observation of her audience, her fans, the lustful looks of her husband, and the disdainful looks of the poorer women on the subway. Like Hebba, some of the film's images seem too polished, neat, hyper aestheticized. Yet, in relation to Hebba this hyper aestheticization of the frames gains a greater meaning. In the case of Hebba, one can argue that she is maintaining a façade. In relation to the film, however, maintaining a facade becomes maintaining control over the images on the screen. This film is consciously a controlled environment. This control of the frames draws the viewers' attention to the boundaries within which the women--and men as well--search for their individual selves. Within this boundaries such search is not only acceptable, but also less disturbing to a watching audience.

    The film is a controlled unit where true freedom cannot really be achieved. "Gender war in Egypt: a film about women who fight back" states the film's poster, but what is the nature of this fighting back? Are women really boat-rockers or are they put in situations where even their "fighting back" is pre-mediated by society—controlled by social traditions, structures, norms and orders. Is their mode of resistance real fighting back? If this film is indeed showing a gender war, who has the upper hand ? The struggle seems to encompasses both genders, indeed all human beings in modern societies. The filmmakers chose to create a restricted space in which the stories told by the women do not upset the established order. Rather, these stories and their narrators all fall in place as calculated parts contributing to a greater whole that is restricting to all individuals within it.

   This film depicts a controlled struggle. Ehky Ya Scheherazade is a women's story, but one not told by the voice of women. It is told by the voice of that who/which controls women (and men for this matter). Order is created, maintained by and for the camera—not challenged by it. The camera moves from space to space showing individuals each carrying out his/her designated role. Even those who seem to rebel are playing out a role to which they've been assigned. The relation that this film has to women's cinema is not straight forward. Assuming that the film is a Scheherazade, the audience is the king. The film seems to negotiate the relation between the two. Even if by the end of the film the women do not seem to have fought back, the film (by offering a frustrating narrative) allows for a kind of resistance.  

 

Once Upon a Time: Disney for the Ones Who Grew Up (Sophie)

I am not often a fan of giant media conglomerations, but for ABC's Once Upon a Time, I have to make an exception. The ABC network is owned by the Disney Corporation, and never has this relationship worked out better for the prime time viewer. The show was billed as a fantasy-drama based on classical fairy tales, but it takes much of it's core characters from Disney's animated features and borrows from them to an extent that would be difficult for anyone forced to navigate the "enchanted forest" that is Disney copyright law. The show is by no means made for children, and is often violent and heartbreaking. Still, it is mindful of the themes of the fairy tales (and is some cases Victorian children's stories or other story classics) it is based on. Family, the battle of good verses evil, and true love are not only paramount thematic issues, but actual forces of power, both magically and when enacted through character motivation. By keeping this fairy tale grounding, the show is free to morph the content and characters, enhance the nuance, and add complications, still while maintaining something that feels authentic at least to the versions of these stories we as viewers are most familiar with.

The result to anyone that grew up or raised children in the age of the Disney Renaissance (Late 1980's to 2000) is a show that seems like an updated, more mature version of these now classic animated films. Obviously, some things are different because of format - a television show demands a cast that is more interconnected and recurring than discrete films. It demands a new twist, a mystery or conflict that bridges the various individual stories and drives the characters, and thus the show, forward in a new way. The show accomplishes this in the form of a new curse put forward by the Evil Queen (from Snow White) to transport all the fairy tale characters to our world, oblivious to who they are, forced to live as she dictates: without their "happy endings." As the main narrative unfurls from this plot point, the show also reveals the actions of the past, in the realm of fairy tales. These stories, are focused on individual sets of characters and are paired up with relevant events in the forward flowing plot, so they are told out of order. Slowly, as the show progresses, the past gets woven together and drops hints as to the events of the future.

In this, the show succeeds wonderfully. The balance between hints that pay off and misdirections, for those readers bouncing theories around in their head, is very satisfying. The show never feels like it is fooling with you just for the sake of convolution, nor does it come off as predictable and boring. Similarly, the show doesn't become a detective puzzle that forces the viewer into hunting for clues, for those viewers who are content in letting the mysteries unfold without trying to guess which well known character might show up and what role they might play, or what betrayal or alliance might come to light next. The overall plotting, and the way the various fantasy stories interweave is done elegantly.

Unfortunately, the writing that is so stellar at the drawing board doesn't always translate into the dialogue. Some of the scenes fall into saccharine or maudlin sentiments, often at the same time sounding like generic and stilted dialogue for a scene of tension, revenge, passion, or some other standard story book fare. During scenes that take place in the fairy tale realm, the writers operate under the added complication of trying to use a kind of folktale mode of speaking. Fortunately, as season 2 progresses the kinks seem to be smoothing out.
 
Part of this fault may lie with the actors as well, especially because TV drama is a medium where the writer of each episode varies and the problems in the writing are much more apparent consistently in some characters than others. In television, the actor becomes more of a constant for the character than the writer, and they become vital in bringing the lines to life. In Once Upon a Time, it's the villains (primarily the Evil Queen Regina, played by Lana Parrilla, and Rumpelstiltskin, played by Robert Carlyle) that outshine their cast-mates.

But they have help from a story that does work hard to challenge the classical fairy tale ideas of evil, while maintaining that true good and true evil exist. It isn't moral ambiguity so much as a deep, pervading sense of sympathy. The show does not hesitate in illustrating true evil and then showing its tragic, sympathetic motivation. This is one way that Once Upon a Time updates its source material for an older audience. As adults, the flat evil-for-evil's sake villains that dominate the Disney canon don't pass for believable characters.

Another update of note the show made is to the roles and ideals of gender. Snow White is turned from the 1937 house-wife princess in distress to a survivalist-princess on the lam who rescues her prince as much as he rescues her. But it isn't just about de-feminizing her role. Snow, in her updated fairy-tale life and in her modern world is powerful as a mother, a lover, and a teacher as well as being one of the most capable fighters on the show. The core cast of Once Upon a Time is, in any given arc, at least half female, and though romance (what with the theme of true love) definitely plays a part in the show, it is far from the only driving motivation.

Briefly, no account of the show is complete without a comment on the aesthetic. As costume designer Eduardo Castro said “We didn’t want it to look like a Renaissance Faire, we wanted it to look like an Alexander McQueen show.” The costumes and styles, aside from certainly being grown up, provide insight into character, future plot points, and clues to morality and timeline. Above all else, they are exquisite.

For anyone familiar with Disney's Masterpiece Collection, Once Upon a Time is a wonderful chance to relive and re-meet childhood classics in a new, more age appropriate way. Even for those who haven't, it's a great way to get to know classic characters in an exciting, innovative way.

Get Your S*** Together, Girls (Natasha)

    A lot of people have been talking about her, the girl with the upper arm tattoo.  But Lena Dunham is more than just a person who should always wear sleeves; she is a very endearing woman with a pretty awful vision of the lives of young women in New York.  Her new HBO series Girls is neither terrible nor excellent; it is sometimes good and often bad.  Three episodes have aired so far, and while plot points have emerged, nothing has really happened.  Even with the issues of financial instability, job hunts, abortion, dead-end relationships and the occasional horrifying sexual partner pervading each episode, I as a viewer have not really been fazed by any of it because the eponymous girls haven't been fazed either.

    All these "not really" qualifiers point to the show's great weakness: all four girls seem to be stagnating in a muddy puddle of drab furniture, unflattering clothes and profoundly unsatisfying professional, romantic and sexual lives.  These girls are languishing in apartments they deem too impermanent and transitional to decorate; they are entertaining the whims and inappropriate behavior of their first bosses to much too great an extent; they are pseudo-pursuing or passively staying in relationships that do worse than just fail to satisfy them--they further diminish what little joie de vivre these particular girls can occasionally muster.  Yet they seem to believe they are self-possessed, independent, worthwhile young women who have inexplicably been thrown into situations they must sigh and shrug their way through.  They do not pursue opportunities, they let themselves be led. They never demand anything, never even show an interest in making their desires known.  They graduated from college, hopped in their car and followed the traffic towards the road to adulthood, but then their tire blew out.  No one can figure out how to use the jack, none of their contemporaries is stopping to help and none of the girls had the foresight, the capital or even just the autonomy to become a member of AAA.

    These girls fail to entertain me because they themselves do not actually do anything, entertaining or otherwise.  Things happen to them and they barely react, they merely acquiesce.  There is no private torture of the dependent, the confused, the hopeless; there is no public outrage of the oppressed, the overzealous, the aggressive; there is only the blank-faced displeasure of the unmotivated, the uninterested, the utterly passionless.

    It infuriates me to hear female critics call this show an affront to womankind, because I believe we should not allow these girls to represent womankind.  They certainly do not represent the kind of women who deserve immense respect and appreciation.  If you allow yourself to be sexually subjugated time and time again and continue to pursue your subjugator, that is entirely your fault.  Men, particularly awful men, do not have absolute power over how women are treated; women have to command respect and never stop.  The onus is on her to demand proper treatment--the choice is hers to discard, punish or educate the wrongdoer who treats her poorly.  We are not natural victims, and we should put no faith in women who act like they are. We don't go back to some creepy guy's apartment day after day, playing into his perverse desires and indulging in the wrongheaded but popular notion that all men are terrible.  There are countless situations in which being a woman works against you, but that is not one of them.

    On another character's note, you don't stay with the effete and overly wholesome boyfriend you can no longer stand and with whom you have terrible sex just because you have been together for four years.  To revisit the driving metaphor: you actually have to try to free your wheel from a rut, you can't just sit in your car with your head in your hands and wait out the rest of your life.  So, as I said:  Girls, get your s*** together. There are plenty of women who have.

 

 

~ Natasha Hirschfeld

 

Many thanks to Lucy Bucknell for the above image and for the chance to write this blog.

Clever Kids: The Depiction of Precocious Children in David Slade's Hard Candy. (Yasmine)

As a child I got a thrill out of watching movies that featured kids outsmarting adults. I could never forget the ingenuity of Macaulay Culkin’s character in Home Alone (1990) or how his spectacularly booby trapped house and quick thinking foiled the plans of two hardened (albeit dimwitted) criminals taking advantage of the Christmas season. I also loved watching Lindsay Lohan take on a dual role as twin sisters swapping lives and sabotaging their parents’ affairs in The Parent Trap to the point where I had to watch the movie almost every weekend.

With the exception of films like Home Alone and The Parent Trap—family friendly movies whose plot focuses on crafty children—most films give children a secondary role. Sometimes children bridge the emotional gap between two prospective lovers in romantic films; other times children are seen but not actually heard, serving no greater purpose than to be part of a family unit. For this reason, even now as an adult, I am still drawn to films that show children asserting their authority or even films that capture the brilliance and a child’s awareness of the world. A film that truly alters the balance of authority between child and adult is David Slade’s Hard Candy (2005).

Hard Candy, a film about a 14-year-old vigilante who confronts and psychologically tortures an unsuspecting man, whom she believes to be a pedophile, demonstrates a non-adult character taking charge and behaving in an atypically mature manner. The film plays on the audience’s preconceived notions about children being helpless without supervision. When I first watched the movie (having been completely clueless about Hard Candy’s premise), I assumed I was going to be sitting through a film about some unfortunate girl enduring a traumatic experience at the disposal of the villainous pedophile Jeff. The opening scene plays up the young girl Hayley’s supposed naiveté in order to make her control and maturity more effective later in the film.

The façade of Hayley Stark’s innocence begins with a close up of an inappropriate chat dialog between a 39-year-old photographer Jeff aka “lensman319” and Hayley. Neither character is seen but the nature of the conversation is cause for concern. Hayley’s suggestively promiscuous yet childish screen name, “thonggrrl14” coupled with her flirtatious comments make her seem like the stereotypical teenage girl who carelessly draws attention to her age while trusting a complete stranger with her inner thoughts and personal information. While reading  lensman319’s texts insisting that he and Hayley “finally hook up” and Hayley’s suggestion that he “film [her] with [his] vidoecamera” before “doing it,” I could not stop myself from wondering if she either had ever seen Primetime or was just plain stupid. Needless to say, after seeing Hayley’s character for the first time, I was thoroughly convinced that she would fall into the trap of

In the subsequent scene, the first meeting of Hayley and Jeff, Hayley is the epitome of puerility, and Jeff the calculating and personable pedophile.  If I wasn’t already disturbed by this little girl so eager to get in a stranger’s car and drive to the man’s house alone, the intimacy established with back-to-back close-ups of Hayley’s and Jeff’s faces made me extremely uncomfortable.  The first shot of Hayley is a close-up in which she turns around; her soft features, round face, round eyes as wide as a baby’s, and slightly confused expression as she asks, “Jeff?” give evidence to her apparent youth and naiveté. A close up of Jeff follows; his smiling face and open demeanor are inviting to Hayley even as he inspires suspicion in the viewer. Even though Jeff is rather attractive –with his stylish hair, chiseled face, and boyish charm— his predatory looks, the way he undresses Hayley with his eyes, and his wolfish grin make him seem like a lecherous old creep.

The cuts between Hayley and Jeff ‘s close-ups reveal the difference in their height since Hayley’s head is almost always tilted up and Jeff’s is always at a downward slant.  A long shot of Jeff’s tall figure is a startling contrast to Hayley’s petite frame and size.  This difference in stature symbolizes Jeff’s authority and draws more attention to Hayley’s childishness. Just as Jeff typically dominates the frame in his non-close-ups, he seems to be entirely in control of the situation. As is typical of his type, he engages Hayley in conversation making sure to only speak about topics that interest her, boy-bands and teen novels—things that would be trivial to any grown man. For a brief moment a flier with the face of a smiling girl and the word MISSING come into focus, standing out on the wall just opposite of where Hayley and Jeff decide to sit. The appearance of the missing girl’s photo led me to believe that a similar fate would befall Hayley. Everything suggested Hayley’s eventual demise, and I had no way of knowing how wrong I was until everything takes a strange turn at Jeff’s home.  

After Hayley manages to get Jeff drunk in his own home, her demeanor becomes sadistic. With Hayley’s childishness sentiment exchanged for a cold mask of indifference and sadism, Jeff becomes the target of the viewer’s sympathy.  While the close-ups are still a factor in this scene, Hayley’s eyes are no longer round and her mouth becomes a thin disapproving line, proof that she was putting on a face the entire time in the café. Having tied Jeff up in a chair she insults him for believing she would be dumb enough to “chase him to the next drink.” When Hayley says, "Just because a girl can pretend to be a woman doesn't mean she's ready to be a woman," she let's both Jeff and the viewer know that her logic is sound and she's aware of how things should be. Her verbiage becomes more complex and less moronic as she explains her true intention to discover what secrets Jeff may be hiding in his home.

 Hayley proves her intelligence as she admits to intentionally behaving like a trusting young girl, who would foolishly believe that “anyone could know so much about her.” The balance of power has clearly changed. The few long shots, show Jeff—his height stolen by the low position of the chair—now appearing shorter than Hayley who stands confidently before him with her hands on her hips.  This reversal of stature is also apparent in the close-ups with  a discombobulated Jeff, staring up at Hayley with a confused expression and Hayley looking down at Jeff.  Jeff’s growing uncertainty and anxiety comes out in his voice as he asks Hayley, “What are you going to do to me?” Overwhelmed by the drastic change in events, I couldn’t help but see the irony in Hayley’s response, “Anything I want!” With Hayley’s dubious nature revealed, and the ambiguity of Jeff’s involvement with the missing girl, Jeff becomes the prey and Hayley the predator. 

 

GINGER SNAPS and Hell in a Handbasket (Lisa)

As the decades keep ratifying the truism, “High school is hell,” filmmakers too continue to find adolescence a rich playground for the supernatural. The cinematic landscape of the new millennium is positively rotting with juvenile gore and romanticized horrors. But perhaps one can extract a modicum of truth out of such teenage populist delights this Halloween. John Fawcett's 2000 film Ginger Snaps, for one, makes a bloody lycanthropic mess out of feminism. The film is equal parts teen comedy and camp horror, exploiting the werewolf metamorphosis as a metaphor for puberty.

Meet Ginger and Brigitte, sisters on the precipice of adulthood. Hobbies include making suicide pacts and slideshows of their gruesomely staged deaths in their dungeon of a bedroom – clearly humor tempered by a thousand paper cuts. Late bloomers, the two dread the thought of menstruation for it would mean yielding to conformity and venerated womanhood. Menstruation disgusts and embarrasses them but also threatens their sense of identity as misanthropic outcasts, which they gladly play up as students. When Ginger finally gets her first period, a werewolf attacks her the same night to make the transformations run parallel. Ginger begins to take on masculine qualities, becoming sexually aggressive and physically abrasive, sprouting a tail in the process. She learns how to wield her newfound sexual confidence to disrupt the the social hierarchy at school and racks up a body count along the way. Consequently Ginger comes to resemble the archetype of the monstrous femme fatale, which in turn is the manifestation of the historically male fear of being overtaken by a woman; she might as well have sprung fifty feet.^[1]

The title of the movie itself is a pun of a binary opposition between femininity and masculinity, wherein the domesticity evoked by baked goods is contrasted with the machismo Ginger develops once she “snaps.” Qualities of feminine power – being nurturing, tender and positively aggressive – are seemingly rejected in this story by Ginger's dubious transformation, but subtly reaffirmed by her mother and younger sister. It is, after all, the gleefully ignorant mother who takes to investigating the girls' behavior and actually discovers the truth. Brigitte, the more introverted sister, also demonstrates power through her unwavering devotion to Ginger. Overcoming her social inertia, she even enlists the help of others to save her sister. Indeed, it is through her triumph that those growing pains of youth finds the most cathartic articulation.

____________________________________________________________________________

¹ See 1958 cult classic, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Image courtesy of the author.

From a Whisper to a Scream: On the Artaudian Cruelty of LA PIANISTE (Lisa)

Emerging from her “cage” at the Vienna Conservatory, Erika Kohut now enters a prison of a different make: the apartment she owns with her mother. They have a confrontation over what forty-something Erika has done earlier in the night – namely shopping for frivolous clothing – and hair-pulling and ugly histrionics ensue before mother and daughter reconcile to take their nightly place in the bed they share. In this title sequence, director Michael Haneke presents the microcosm of their relationship, bipolar and incestuous in all but deed. Adapted from the novel by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) carries the fragrance of an old novel, but the film's motifs of ritualized sexual violence and voyeurism come across as a contrarian gesture. Marrying the contemporary and classic in an incisive study of brutalized passions, Haneke explores man's urge to direct his own suffering.

Isabelle Huppert inhabits the eponymous part of Erika, a woman whose personal and professional lives are thoroughly dedicated to control and the pursuit of perfection. Huppert has a history of playing self-contained women and here she is in fine form as a Viennese specimen of severity whose transgressive desires seethe underneath a mask of icy poise. Operating on the principles of classical tragedy, Haneke paints two distinct and opposing artistic tendencies within her, worrying the tension between the chic and the abject.^[1]

The film chronicles her suffering, which begins with small acts of rebellion in the form of sexual compulsions. Erika's identity is fractured by disparate roles; At home, she simultaneously plays the infantilized daughter and the surrogate husband for her mother. Outside of her conservatory and home, she is a lurker, a voyeur with latent violence directed towards others and herself. Indeed, Erika is something rarely seen in cinema - a beautiful female pervert. This uncomfortable tension is acknowledged even within the film, at a sex shop on one of Erika's furtive excursions where her very presence disturbs and shames the male customers and breaks them out of the fantasy. Erika is seemingly repulsed by her femaleness, cutting her sex as a hobby. Thankfully Haneke doesn't predicate our empathy on the provision of backstory. One simply reacts to the shocking but plaintive truths of what she's doing and to the questions of why or why not. The character cannot be so easily consumed by the viewer, who must activate his or her fantasy in the detangling of her motivations. It is not clear, for example, whether Erika, the middle aged piano teacher, has fallen below expectations of fame and fortune because she lacks the talent or because she has purposely thwarted her ambitions out of spite for her mother. One does get the sense her artistic drive has curdled when she browbeats her admiring students. Her self-loathing in this respect perhaps manifests most clearly in a subplot where she sabotages the potential career of a female student with an equally domineering mother.

Haneke, in his infinite perversity, sets up the love triangle between Erika, her mother, and the rakish student, Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel). While Walter's eagerness provokes Erika, Freudian principles of transference help explain why Erika cannot feel or respond to the latter's conventional expressions of love.^[2] He even changes a public performance of a Schönberg piece to one of Schubert's just to impress her (and that is quite a difference – jumping from the Modern discordance to Romanticism).^[3] Walter pursues her ardently, initiating a game of seduction meanwhile failing to (or refusing to) recognize her bizarre symptoms of illness. For an instant he is a paragon of mythic muscularity, the white knight to liberate the repressed heroine but, alas, the film is decidedly anti-love.

For Erika has an uncompromising idea of love, in which art is to be confused with real life. Music is the predominant metaphor for love in the film, and the recurring scenes in which Erika gives rigorously precise note-by-note analysis of a piece of music serve as reminders of the fact. Walter, while attractive to her, is not the perfect lover because he does not play music they way she expects, which is to say with complete dedication to the art. Walter uses music to seduce Erika, who does not want to be seduced and possessed in the same way she is possessed by her mother. Her rigid rules for sexuality in turn convey the Romantic paradox of applying Apollonian order to Dionysian emotions. “Feelings won't defeat my intelligence,” Erika states to Walter after an unconsummated sexual encounter. Later she gives Walter explicit “instructions” by letter expressing her desires to be beaten and gagged. Alternatively infuriated and disgusted, Walter is curious enough to keep playing. Subtextually, Erika controls Walter's pleasure in the same way the director controls the emotions of the viewer. Haneke is a formalist and he shoots meticulously, so his presence is felt less in the stationary camerawork and more in the actions of the characters. Haneke identifies with Erika and projects those active, masculine characteristics onto her, but Haneke does not turn her into feminist statement. Erika is not so much aware of her behavior as she is reacting defensively to protect her selfhood.

When Erika's wishes are granted in the traumatic climax, the scene is devoid of sexual gratification. Walter's transformation from the precocious admirer to the abusive savage is shocking. “Not as you imagined?” Walter mercilessly posits, and with this statement Haneke seemingly implicates the viewer seeking vicarious thrills from a movie about sadomasochism.

In the end, life goes on and the contemptuous young man abandons the broken older woman as the viewer similarly walks away from the film. With Huppert's indelible parting look of agony and her final tragic gesture, Haneke draws back the curtain over his theatre of cruelty.

---

[1] Refer to the Apollonian-Dionysian axis. " Fredrich Nietsche, Raymond Guess, Nietsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

[2] Freud describes transference as "...re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in…earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of…childhood." Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

[3] For curious minds, the two pieces in question are Schönberg's Opus 33b and Schubert's Scherzo from the Sonata in A Major.

Image courtesy of the author.

The Works of Satoshi Kon, and the Impossible Pursuit of Perfection (Katie)

Fans of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan would find watching Satoshi Kon's 1998 animated film, Perfect Blue, something like a case of retro déja vu. The similarities between the films are not a coincidence – Aronofsky was not only aware of Perfect Blue, he had even purchased the rights to it when making Requiem for a Dream, in order to exactly re-create the bathtub scene for his film. While Black Swan is not a remake of Perfect Blue, it draws heavily from the same themes – duality, madness, and the desire to reach a stage of impossible perfection.

 Perfect Blue is the story of Mima, a pop idol who wishes to leave her idol profession and branch into acting. This seems to please no one – her ex-pop idol manager is extremely protective of her, and disapproves of the roles she is offered and how she is treated by the directors of the television show Mima is cast in. The one most upset is Mima's number one fan, who stalks her every move and runs a website dedicated to Mima. In order to succeed and distance herself from her idol past, Mima agrees to appear in a violent rape scene, and then to pose for nude pictures – which brings her both success and misery.

 As she questions whether she is following the right path, she begins to hallucinate a double of herself – the Idol Mima, still fresh-faced and innocent, who taunts her for her mistakes and insecurities. Mima begins to sink into delusions and madness – she begins to read the blog on her website (which are not even written by her) in order to remember what she did that day. The scenes from her television show begin to merge with her real life. The Idol Mima pops up everywhere she goes. When the photographer from her nude photo shoot is stabbed to death, Mima can't remember whether or not she is the murderer.

Mima struggles with the duality of her image and her self, unable to reconcile her past as a pop idol, and her future as an adult woman in charge of her acting career. But unlike Nina in Black Swan, who destroys herself in order to achieve perfection, Mima finds that she is the victim of her manager, Rumi, who has been living vicariously through Mima. The climactic ending sequence is a grotesque and physical battle of the Mima's – and while it is revealed that Rumi was heavily manipulating Mima's life, it does not explain away how Mima continues to see Rumi as a ghostly specter of herself. In the end, it is implied that they are both disillusioned – but Mima has been able to reconcile her personality split, while Rumi could not.

 In the search for her identity, reality for Mima becomes mutable and fluid, a jungle of mirrors and images, a cobbled-together world of illusion, constructed experiences, false narratives, and deception.

 Satoshi Kon continues to play with the theme of distorted reality and narrative in his 2001 film, Millennium Actress. The film follows the life story of Chiyoko Fujiwara, an actress whose career spanned for decades in Japanese cinema, as she is interviewed by her biggest fan, Genya Tachibana. A scene towards the opening of the story is an early hint of the merging of reality and film that is to come – the audience watches as a young Chiyoko climbs into a spaceship which begins to liftoff. The camera then cuts out to reveal the scene is actually a video that Genya is watching, and as the spaceship rumbles into space, the room around Genya begins to shake. For a brief moment the film world and the real world are one – until it is revealed that it isn't the spaceship shaking the room, but an actual earthquake.

 The merging of reality and narrative continues as Chiyoko tells her story to Genya and his cameraman, and the flashbacks become not only her interior reflections, but an interactive experience. Genya and the cameraman become part of the flashbacks, watching and commenting on Chiyoko's actions and experiences. Yet there are even more layers to this constructed reality, as her recounting of her life becomes the recounting of her film roles, with no distinction between the two. The narrative becomes an epic of not only her story, but the story of Japanese cinema, of Japanese history, and Japanese history as told through cinema. She journeys through time and space in order to achieve her goal – to reunite with a painter, in order to return a key he lent to her with a promise to meet again.

It proves impossible for her to meet her painter again. Yet the story of Chiyoko's chase is more thrilling and fulfilling than any outcome where she and her beloved painter could be reunited. The narrative of her life story is what gives it meaning, even as it seems to be foolish to chase an impossible goal. On some level, Millenium Actress and Perfect Blue are both about the same thing – the impossible pursuit of perfection, and the toll it takes on an individual. Perfect Blue presents a pessimistic outcome – the complete fragmentation of Mima and Rumi's identities. Millenium Actress is more optimistic, presenting the impossible pursuit as more personally enriching than the goal itself. Both films present challenging and complex narratives, and are excellent examples of animated films that are not just for children. 

Women in Television: Lovers, Mothers, and... Oh. Take 2. (Yelena)

As I wrote last semester, Fox's Fringe is a sci-fi procedural following the investigations of the FBI Fringe unit. Made up of Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), a half-mad scientist named Walter Bishop (John Noble), and Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), Walter’s genius son with a history of petty crime, the Fringe team look into crimes of the strange and fantastic. Essentially, picture a quirkier X-Files, with parallel universes rather than aliens. Each of the three seasons has thus far twisted the show in an intriguing new direction, but while season 2 seemed to be where the show found its rhythm and established Olivia as a complex character and independent agent, season 3 has since fallen into tired and unoriginal gendered tropes.

While by no means a feminist utopia, seasons 1 and 2 of Fringe establish Olivia as a pivotal actor. Take season 1's “Ability,” where she must come to terms with her own superhuman mental abilities in order to stop a bomb, or season 2's “Jacksonville,” where she must do the same in order to save a building full of people. As William Bell (Leonard Nimoy), the head of Massive Dynamic, states, Olivia is the “guardian” of our universe, a gatekeeper and protector. While this position is in many ways established by her history as the test subject of two powerful men, Bell and Walter, she nevertheless holds a key position wherein she must act, and she does so over and over. In season 2, Olivia is the only one to have heard William Bell's warnings and is thus the only one capable of acting on them. When it comes down to a a choice between catching the season's Big Bad or saving Walter, Olivia is the one who decides.

Olivia's characterization further establishes her as a multifaceted person who acts, rather than a female object merely acted upon. Yes, the show brings in a sister and a niece to feminize her. Yes, her story starts off revolving around a man. But that is not where her story remains. Olivia spends much of the first half of the second season coming to terms with injuries from a car accident and a trip across universes, a condition based not in her gender but in her humanity. Later, when a building in New York is about to be pulled to another universe, Olivia is the only one who can find it, and in order to do so, she has to confront not her past as a little girl but her past as a test subject. This is not to say that Olivia's portrayal is absent of gender essentialism. As “Brown Betty,” an episode near the end of season 2, demonstrates, the writers conceive of Olivia as someone who fights for this universe because she cares for others, with true love as one of her primary motivations. Granted, this episode is essentially a fairy tale told by a very under-the-influence Walter, but the key themes echo the character interactions in the rest of the show. Olivia starts as a girlfriend first, using her professional skills in support of that role, and at the end of season 2, she partners with other child test subjects to bring them to the parallel universe—to get Peter back to be with him. This motivator, however, while stereotypically female, remains merely a facet of Olivia's character rather than the key aspect.

For the first third of season 3, Olivia is a prisoner in the parallel universe with the alternate Olivia having taken her place in ours. Gender-wise, this season unfolds much like the previous one in that both Olivias do their jobs and do them efficiently, with family and love as aspects of their characters but not the aspects. Olivia has visions of Peter but these are to tell her that she's in the wrong universe; the alternate Olivia develops a relationship with Peter, but she does so as part of her infiltration into our universe.

And then both Olivias return home.

I titled my first blog entry here, “Lovers, mothers, and... Oh” to draw attention to the fact that, no matter what else women in television may have going for them, they are almost always eventually reduced to someone's girlfriend and/or mother.

Apparently, Olivia Dunham is no exception.

After being kidnapped, tortured, and convinced by powerful drugs that she's the other Olivia Dunham, Olivia returns to our world and has a difficult homecoming—not because of the various traumas she's endured, not because she just left a mother dead in our world, but because Peter undertook a relationship with the other Olivia. With the exception of a single episode that at least acknowledges the disconnect she feels from her own life, Olivia spends a good five episodes pining after Peter and wondering how he feels about her. Of course it's possible, even probable, that she continues to have trouble readjusting, but we never see this. We never even see her sister or niece. Remember “Ability” and “Jacksonville”? Contrast that with season 3's “6B,” where she and Peter avert a similar disaster by appealing to romantic love and loss. Now that Olivia has a vibrant romantic interest, that is all her character becomes.

Things are no better for the other Olivia. After spending two months on a stressful undercover mission in a completely different world, she comes home in love with Peter and pregnant with his child. Although this pregnancy is potentially lethal for her and she almost aborts, a kidnapping and accelerated pregnancy come together to take that choice away from her. In a climactic birthing scene, she begs another male figure in her life to do anything to save this child, including sacrifice her, and it is pure luck that both child and loving mother survive.

Even Olivia's role as protector of our universe is undercut. It doesn't actually matter what Olivia does, we learn. Rather, Peter is destined to step into a doomsday device, and the Olivia he chooses will be the one whose universe survives. From this point forward, Olivia is no longer an actor in the narrative. She is an object for Peter to take or reject, and the idea that one or both might not even want to be with him becomes unthinkable. That Olivia, after all, would destroy her universe. And with so much of the story devoted to this love triangle, it seems unlikely that the show would suddenly swerve in another direction.

There is no will here for these two women, not on a narrative level. There is a woman, lover and mother, but an independent and fully developed character? She got lost somewhere around the episode where, ironically enough, a young woman's dead body became a literal marionette for her male admirer.

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There is nothing wrong with a woman who loves her partner or a woman who has a child, and there's nothing wrong with such a storyline. When it becomes a problem is when these plotlines are taken for granted. Women want love, women want babies—the thinking goes—and so women do these things, without any attention to how this particular character might react to that situation while, simultaneously, to the other situations in her life. Such a reduction not only makes for offensive television, it makes for boring and recycled television. I've seen this plot, I know how it goes, and so have the millions of other viewers slowly trickling away from Fringe's plummeting ratings.

Over the course of the first two seasons, Olivia Dunham developed into a complex character with a life, with family, with a history, with her own personality. I miss that Olivia, rather than the one who smiles at Peter over corpses. I miss that Olivia, rather than the one who wonders not how to reconnect with her entire universe but, rather, only whether Peter loves someone else.

Deconstructing the Geisha: Hollywood vs. Mizoguchi (Katie)

Who are geisha, these women of the floating world, whose image is so often associated with femininity in Japan? In the west, geisha are often mistaken for high-class prostitutes – which is a misconception even some Japanese continue to have. Geisha are entertainers, thoroughly trained in traditional arts such as music and dance. The world of the geisha is a complicated web of money, social responsibilities, debts, relations with men, relations with women, and the art of being living, breathing entertainment. The individual's struggle to keep all of these complications in balance makes the geisha's life an inherently fascinating, and cinematic, story. Japanese cinema has a long history of portraying geisha on film, and Hollywood has even taken an interest, cashing in on the appeal of the exotic in the 2005 film Memoirs of a Geisha. 

Memoirs of a Geisha was directed by Rob Marshall, and was adapted from the novel of the same name, written by Arthur Golden. The story follows Sayuri on her journey from being a servant to becoming an accomplished giesha. The film obsessively follows the details of Sayuri's training – her dance lessons, her music practices, the art of dressing in a kimono – and revels in the exoticism of the geisha experience. When Sayuri first gets her hair done up in the traditioanl style, she must sleep on a special propped up pillow surrounded by a circle of rice. When she wakes up, her hair is covered in rice because she fell off her pillow, and her hair is ruined. The film makes a great deal of the pain and preparation of becoming a geisha to emphasize to the audience how strange and foreign these practices are. Yet these glimpses are merely surface level – never is the audience truly brought into Sayuri's inner world.

This is the problem with Memoirs – the struggles of its characters are all surface-level, or flimsy external constructions. For a film so obsessed with the exotic in Japanese culture, the conflicts brought upon its subjects are decidedly Hollywood. The opening scene shows Sayuri and her sister being bought from her family and carted away from their hometown – only for Sayuri to be sold to the okiya, the geisha house, and her sister to be sold to a whore house. Instantly, the life of a geisha is equated with slavery and forced labor. Being a geisha is not something a girl chooses to do, but is forced into.

Sayuri fights against this fate at first, but her perceptions rapidly shift when she meets Chairman Iwamura by chance on the streets of Kyoto. She instantly falls in love with him, and sees that becoming a geisha will allow her to grow closer to him. Thus, she throws herself into the diligent studies needed to become a geisha. Here a love story is substituted for any kind of self-actualization or reflection for Sayuri. She exists to become the perfect woman for the Chairman, and to become that woman she must become a geisha. There is no concept of being a geisha so that she can be a financially independent woman, or so she can support herself. The film does not explore the questions of what happens when personal and professional boundaries are crossed. Sayuri at one point is sexually harassed by a patron, but the film does not venture deeper into the concept of the systematic objectification of women that geisha can fall prey to. These are not the conflicts the film is invested in – it is invested in the love of the Chairman and Sayuri, and the dramatic external forces, like World War II, that keep them apart.

There is one scene which suggests that there is more to Sayuri than just her persuit of the Chairman. When her mentor suggests that Sayuri take on a patron because it is her best choice for supporting herself, Sayuri refuses and shouts back, “I want a life that is mine!” Here is the idea that is unexplored in the film – the opportunity to build a private identity within the structure of the geisha lifestyle.

The work of Kenji Mizoguchi delves into the conflicts inherent in these social structures. In his 1953 film, Gion Bayashi (A Geisha), Mizoguchi portrays two geisha – one an older, established giesha, Miyoharu, who takes in a pupil, Eiko. Unlike in Memoirs, the geisha of Gion Bayashi are not portrayed as slaves or women cut off from any family connections. Eiko's mother was a geisha and was friends with Miyoharu, thus why Eiko saught Miyoharu out after her mothers death. Eiko is not forced into becoming a geisha – she begs Miyoharu to train her. She longs to become like the maiko (young, elaborately dressed geisha)she sees on postcards from Kyoto.

After Miyoharu takes Eiko under her wing, she is quickly trained and then brought into society as a maiko. It is here where the tangled webs of loyalties and monetary transactions become entangled with Miyoharu's and Eiko's personal priorities. Miyoharu and Eiko are pursued by two business men, Kanzaki and Kusuda, who both desire more than just artistic entertainment from the women, in exchange for financial security. On a disastrous trip to Tokyo, Kusuda tries to force himself onto Eiko – and to protect herself, she bites and severely wounds his face. Hearing her screems from a room close by, Miyoharu runs to Eiko's aid – and finds her dazed, her face covered in blood, her hair and kimono askew. The image of the immaculate maiko that Eiko so coveted is now shockingly destroyed and subverted.

Eiko's image of the geisha is further complicated and tarnished in the ensuing difficulties surrounding this incident. They find themselves blacklisted from all of the tea houses they used to frequent, because of Eiko's supposed misbehavior. Miyoharu becomes desperate to keep themselves from being swallowed by debt, and agrees to become Kanzaki's mistress so that she may protect Eiko's integrity. Eiko is disgusted by this idea, but can see that Miyoharu saw no other way out of the situation.

What Gion Bayashi lacks in the glamor and gloss displayed by a film like Memoirs of a Geisha, it makes up for tenfold in its fearlessness in portraying the dichotomies inherent in the geisha world. Geisha depend upon each other, and the bond between Miyoharu and Eiko is ultimately the most important one – yet they also depend financially on the support of their male patrons. Miyoharu especially struggles with having to protect Eiko, keep them financially stable, and still maintain her self dignity – which in the end proves to be a nearly impossible task. Gion Bayashi, in contrast to the flashier Memoirs, shows that the conflict in a film does not have to evolve from a forced love story and a world war. 

 

Girl, Interrupted - An Exploration of Mental Illness and its Treatment (Yelena)

Girl, Interrupted is one of those movies from the late ‘90s that stays with you. Based on a memoir by Susanna Kaysen, this film tells the story of a fictional Susanna, played by Winona Ryder, and her stay in Claymore, a psychiatric hospital. It is a film not so much about the process of recovery as it is about what makes a person choose to recover (or not), about all the factors surrounding that process rather than the process itself. Although sensationalized, the film nevertheless provides a worthwhile exploration of mental illness and the effectiveness of the mental health care system.

What is mental illness? What is mental health or normality? In the world of Girl, Interrupted, the answers aren’t as clear-cut as one might expect. For one thing, the film questions idea that mental illness even exists. Set to the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the whole world outside of Claymore seems to have gone crazy. As Susanna’s draft-dodging boyfriend says, “Everything’s changing, man. What the f--k do they know about being normal?” Repeatedly, Susanna questions the validity of her diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, and at the end of the movie, even after she has taken advantage of the services available at Claymore, she reiterates that she still does not know what her diagnosis or even mental illness mean. One possible interpretation of these plot points, however, is that Susanna, like the rest of the world, is simply different from the others at Claymore. At first glance, the film does seem to create a dichotomy between Susanna (‘sane’) and these others (‘crazy’). This is true not only at the start of the film, when she first enters a psychiatric unit of women behaving bizarrely, but is continuously reaffirmed. The head nurse (Whoopi Goldberg), for instance, explicitly differentiates Susanna from those who are actually “crazy.” In contrast to them, Susanna is “driving herself crazy.” Similarly, Susanna’s psychiatrist tells her that, for her, “sane” and crazy” are “courses of action” that she must choose between. Together, these scenes seem to imply that some people are just fundamentally mentally unstable, while others are not (but can choose to be).

To a large extent, these statements are undermined by the events of the film. Susanna is only in Claymore because of a suicide attempt, and she delivers a heartbreaking soliloquy about just how much emotional pain it took to get her to that point. It seems doubtful that she chose to be that way any more than anyone else would choose to experience debilitating suffering. Rather than a black-and-white crazy-or-sane world, what Girl, Interrupted portrays is a spectrum of mental health, with mental illness on one end and mental health on the other. Interpreted differently, Susanna’s psychiatrist’s words sound less like an affirmation that she is not like those others but that she rests somewhere in the middle of this continuum, with more opportunity for recovery but not necessarily as someone fundamentally unlike her peers. The film also attempts to provide hope even for those at the far end of this spectrum. Even Lisa (Angelina Jolie), the diagnosed “sociopath” who feels no sympathy or guilt after Daisy’s suicide, breaks down after being called “dead inside,” and the film implies that she may yet recover. “Crazy,” Susanna says in her final voiceover, “isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified.” In the world of Girl, Interrupted, those who are mentally ill and those who are perfectly sane are fundamentally the same.

Even as it provides a less than straightforward depiction of mental illness, Girl, Interrupted’s portrayal of the mental health care system is even more ambiguous. Not only is Susanna’s diagnosis consistently questioned, but so is the process of psychiatric care. Susanna’s first psychiatrist, for instance, sleeps during one of their therapy sessions; incompetence thus becomes more than just an implication, but a fact. Even the idea of recovery is brought into doubt. While Susanna does ‘get better’ and leave the hospital, the idea that one cannot recover from mental illness, that all that’s required to escape Claymore is to lie, is brought up time and again. When Daisy (Brittany Murphy) is released from Claymore, for instance, she is clearly not recovered or healthy, and she engages in numerous self-destructive behaviors before committing suicide. Overall, the film appears to criticize the mental health care system for its vagueness, inconsistencies, and incompetence, even as it acknowledges that psychiatric care can be beneficial for at least some people.

Girl, Interrupted is a film about mental illness and its treatment, created over a decade ago, set in the late 1960s. While both of these facts date it to some extent—particularly in the treatments portrayed—the movie remains relevant in its exploration of mental illness, mental health, and psychiatric care. Are “crazy” people really all that abnormal or different from the rest of the population? Is psychiatry legitimate? Can treatment work? The questions are still pertinent, and the film’s answers—that those with mentally illnesses aren’t that much different from anyone else, that the system can help but has fundamental problems—continue to resonate.

Mexican Women in Salt of the Earth and Biutiful (Shauna)

On a superficial level, there is very little in common between Salt of the Earth (1954), a bare-bones narrative of labor unrest in an arid, desolate New Mexican mining village dubbed Zinctown, USA, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s vivid, saturated, and jarring portrayal of contemporary Barcelona, entitled Biutiful (2010). Iñárritu addresses a distinctive socio-economic underbelly in Spain, filtering experience through a single Mexican protagonist, Uxbal (Javier Bardem). But he suggestively exposes broader demographic and immigration changes underway across Europe.

Javier Bardem in Biutiful. Creative Commons, by Cinema Davar.

At its core, Salt of the Earth is a decidedly local film. It employed neorealist techniques and was subjected to a variety of constraints imposed by Cold War politics. Political pressures helped to mold a particular atmosphere and imparted an unrehearsed quality to the film. According to Rosaura Revueltas, the actor who played Esperanza Quintero, “[The cast] never saw any rushes. The film was shot blindly. Scenes were never repeated. During filming, helicopters flew overhead in order to protest…”[1] Salt exudes a spontaneity that pervades even the most didactic scenes. This natural quality reinforces Esperanza’s radical and incisive soliloquy. In it, she articulates the crux of the conflict with her husband, Ramón: Anglo employers undermine and antagonize the Mexican miners, yet Ramón is complicit in discrimination, debasing his wife by discouraging her political engagement. The dismissive nature of his responses (“You’re talking crazy!” and “Will you be still!”) betray the truth in her words.

 

Biutiful represents an essentially global film, in which characters from developing nations are linked to each other and to Europe in a tightly wound economic network. This is not to insinuate that Iñárritu disregards the local environment. With the utmost care, he conveys textural and chromatic details of Marambra’s (Maricel Alvarez) apartment, the dank sweatshop housing Chinese laborers, and the living quarters of the Muslim Senegalese. Still, a nascent internationalism emerges, with Barcelona functioning as a hub for émigrés, human trafficking, and other illicit activity. The resulting social universe is exceedingly complex, and the wealth of visual information contained within each frame only compounds that impression. Iñárritu’s filmic precision approaches hyperrealism. His style proves expressive and photogenic, if at times unsettling.

Interspersed throughout the film are supernatural moments, which call to mind the magical realism of Latin American literature. Those moments function as visual breaths, which alleviate the slightly claustrophobic and suffocating experience of material poverty. In one sequence, two massive swarms of birds dance in flight over city. For a moment, they exist not as birds, but as abstract entities. Uxbal fixates on this display, which is at once bizarre and extraordinary.

  

Calatrava Bridge, Barcelona. Creative Commons, Zio Fabio.

Stylistic distinctions between the two films reflect their unique historical contexts. Salt of the Earth was produced under tremendous political pressures. Actual workers participated in the production process, lending a greater degree of authenticity and making  Salt slightly more astonishing than if it had relied purely on professional actors. In some ways, Salt of the Earth and Biutiful represent polar opposites; in terms of scale, stylization, casting, sound, and complexity of the mise-en-scene, the films could hardly be more different. Yet, both films convey a particular experience of Mexican transplants, engaging issues of male anxiety, gender equality and inequality, and the adverse consequences of free-market capitalism. They occupy separate parts of the temporal and geographic spectrum (1950s United States, and present-day Spain), yet the films address a number of related cultural questions. A full comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this entry. Instead, I will outline the construction and experience of women in the Mexican émigré culture.

 

Salt of the Earth may be considered groundbreaking for its apparent foray into feminist activism. It subverts, or at least challenges, an established gender order in post-War America, and does so rather obliquely. When Esperanza articulates her condition, it is without flourish or euphemism. Early in the film, she shies away from politics and tacitly accepts her domestic identity. For instance, she asserts her ambivalence about entering the union meeting with the other women. Moreover, it is Consuela (Angela Sanchez) who proposes the women’s auxiliary branch for the miners’ union. In the wake of the meeting, Ramón brusquely acknowledges, “At least you didn’t make a fool out of yourself like Consuela.”

The formation of the auxiliary, and its ultimate effectiveness in maintaining the picket line after a court injunction prohibits future miners’ strikes, reflects a morality in the filmic universe of Salt, which contends that men and women are essentially the same. Although tensions exist between husbands and their wives, a mutually beneficial partnership gradually emerges in the film. Ramón even invokes unity between “brothers and sisters” in the aftermath of the attempted eviction. Still, feminine acquisition of a labor relations discourse, and the subjection of women to physical violence (in the form of strikes and imprisonment), runs contrary to many of the entrenched gender norms espoused by the men.

In one of the most memorable dialogues in the film, Esperanza asserts Ramon’s total reliance on her involvement in the negotiations: “You can’t win this strike without me. You can’t win anything without me.” He responds with a threatening gesture, but it elicits no spasm of fear; rather, it spawns her complete renunciation of “the old way.” Esperanza’s final instructions, “Sleep where you like, but not with me,” convey the transformative potential of her political engagement in realigning power dynamics within the home.

Interestingly, Biutiful presents a far more ambivalent picture of the Mexican female. In Salt of the Earth, men occasionally adopt a feminine perspective, as when Ramón hangs the wash to dry and wonders why indoor plumbing had not been a major union demand from the beginning. But masculine and feminine perspectives in Biutiful seem nearly irreconcilable. Uxbal’s wife Marambra is presented as rather wretched and manipulative, even if these traits are beyond her control and likely symptomatic of her mental illness. Whereas Esperanza is indispensible to Ramon, Marambra seems only to sap Uxbal’s energy: her alcoholism and apparent bipolarity, her incessant need for sex, and her total economic dependence add up to a woman who resembles a child more than a spouse. Marambra also actively undermines Uxbal’s attempts to create and maintain order in the household. His exertion of control is not coercive, but rather intended to establish much-needed boundaries for his children, Ana and Mateo.

Nowhere is the fissure between male and female perspectives exemplified more clearly than in a late sequence in Uxbal’s brother’s strip club. Whether Iñáarritu intends to communicate something about Mexican, Spanish or European attitudes towards women is not entirely clear. What is evident, however, is that objectification of the female is rampant, and the audience’s limited exposure to such imagery prior to this scene merely reflects Uxbal’s relative dignity within the film’s dubious moral spectrum. Perhaps what is more shocking than the seedy costumes, inflatable decorative flesh, incessant pounding music, and seizure-inducing lights, is the exchange that occurs between Uxbal and a young woman (whom his brother boasts he has slept with). Their physical proximity only amplifies the sense that she and Uxbal are separated by a lifetime of experiences. Her youth underscores his impending death, seemingly accelerated by his drug and alcohol-induced intoxication. When she asks why he isn’t dancing, he responds, “Because I’m dying.” It is unclear why he is doing what he is doing – perhaps it is a defensive strategy in this grotesque and demeaning atmosphere. A profound sense of isolation and male anxiety settles around Uxbal at that moment. It is a loneliness that no female presence can attenuate.

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[1] Esteve Riambau and Casimiro Torreiro,“This Film is Going to Make History,” Cineaste 19 (1992): 50.

The Myth of Economic Opportunities for Women in Osaka Elegy and Flowing (Katie)

Kenji Mizoguchi's Naniwa Ereji (Osaka Elegy) and Mikio Naruse's film, Nagareru (Flowing), are films that seem to speak to each other across the divide of time. Osaka Elegy came out in 1936, while Flowing came out in 1956, and so the films sit in history on either side of World War II. While the films were made nearly exactly twenty years apart from each other, and by different directors, both star the actress Isuzu Yamada, and both are deeply invested in exploring the condition of life for the women in their respective eras. Elegy and Flowing are inherently different films – they differ in their frames of reference, their directors, and subject matter. Yet both films provide commentary on the pre-war and post-war economic and social opportunities for women.

In Osaka Elegy, Isuzu Yamada plays Ayako Murai, a young working class girl who embodies the popular idea of a modern girl, or moga, that was Japan's answer to the flappers in American youth culture. Modern girls were presented as sexually promiscuous, financially independent working girls who were uninterested in politics or social concerns, and only in themselves and their affairs. Ayako is Mizoguchi's answer to the popular image of the modern girl – but he simultaneously subverts the image as he creates it.

By the end of the film, Ayako does become the image of the modern girl – finely coiffed hair, stylish accessories, western clothing – but she is styled in other images first. She is first dressed very simply, in Japanese style robes with her hair pulled into a modest bun. Ayako is the picture perfect obedient daughter. When her father is about to be arrested for embezzlement, she becomes the mistress of her boss – donning a more expensive kimono and the elaborate hairstyle of a bride. When she finds that the only way of supporting herself and her family is to continue to be the mistress of older men, Ayako dons the western look of the “modern girl.” In her patriarchal society, this modern girl is viewed as a threat because of her ability to provide for herself and choose her her sexual partners. But for Ayako, its just a costume for a roll she must play in order to survive.

When her former coworker, Susumu, who also had proposed marriage to her previously, comes to visit her at her own apartment, the dramatic nature of Ayako's costume is acted out. She greets him in one half of the room, and they sit down to a western style table and chairs, and she seems the master of this lavishly decorated apartment. Yet as she confesses to Susumu what she has done, becoming a mistress to support her family, she moves into the other half of the apartment – which is decorated in a very traditionally Japanese style. She becomes more defeated as the scene goes on, retreating further into the room – the illusion is revealed, and the audience and the actors have all been brought backstage. The illusion of the modern girl is destroyed, and economic mobility is confirmed to still be under the rule of patriarchal authority.

In Mikio Naruse's Flowing, Isuzu Yamada now plays Otsuta, the head geisha of a struggling geisha house. Here, the post-war outlook on economic authority for women is even more bleak. In Flowing there is barely even the illusion that it is glamorous or an option for the women to be the masters of their own money and destiny. The life as a geisha is not shown as an existence floating above the world, a sequence of delightful parties and merriment - but one of debt and duty, resentment and resignation. The world of the geisha is collapsing in around Otsuta, who strives to keep her house together, as being a geisha is what she is most suited to.

The Tsuta house seems to be a place of dead ends for the women who live in it. Otsuta is a middle aged woman long separated from her husband and father of her grown up daughter, Katsuyo. Once a renowned geisha, Otsuta has fallen on difficult times and has few junior geisha to support her house. Katsuyo, although brought up within a geisha house, never had skills for the arts, and feels unsuitable to ever be married. Someko is a senior geisha buried in debt, who is later abandoned by her much younger boyfriend. At the start of the film, the house takes on a new maid, Oharu, a widower who has been rejected from other households for being considered too old to do maid's work. For each of them, they have nowhere to go but the Tsuta house, and depend on its functions for their livelihood - even as the geisha profession is becoming less profitable. Their confinement to this lifestyle is absolute, unless they marry out of it – an option each of them has found is not for them. The film even rarely strays from the setting of the house, only occasionally going to the neighboring streets and stores. Economic and social mobility is not even an illusion for Otsuta anymore.

Even with the bleak outlooks portrayed in both films, their endings show that neither Ayako or Otsuta are defeated by their social confinement. The last sequence in Osaka Elegy shows Ayako in profile striding down a dark street – and then instead of just fading out, the camera swings around to see a closeup of Ayako walking straight towards us. The audience is forced to look at her, and on her face is not a look of resignation. She is walking straight ahead into the future.

Likewise, the women in Flowing do not give up on the geisha house. In the last sequence, Otsuta is singing and training young geisha students along with Someka. Katsuyo is practicing sewing in a room above the shamisen rehearsal. Outisde, the river continues flowing, and life continues on.

 

Black Swan and the Hazards of Female Autonomy (Yelena)

In many ways, Aronfsky’s award-winning Black Swan is a film about femininity and repressed womanhood. Following the struggles of Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, to master the lead role in Swan Lake, Black Swan focuses on the pressure on women not only to reach perfection but to be perfect. In this respect the film’s message is clear. This pressure is destructive, leading to the main character’s breakdown and ostensible suicide.

When it comes to more nuanced notions of gender and repression, however, Black Swan becomes much more thematically murky. For purposes of this post, I will focus on the issues of female adulthood, independence, and sexuality in our protagonist, Nina. Through its depiction of her journey to self-destruction, Black Swan delivers the clear message that a free woman is a dangerous woman, perhaps less miserable than the trapped girl but certainly more devastating.

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The primary female influence on Nina is her mother, Erica Sayers, played by Barbara Hershey. A failed ballerina who gave up her career for her daughter, Erica lives vicariously through Nina. At the same time, Erica keeps her daughter in a consistently infantile state. Nina’s room is pink and filled with stuffed animals, and her bedroom door is perpetually open. When Nina gets the lead role in Swan Lake, her mother buys her a cake and, after Nina refuses a large piece, almost throws the whole thing out. The proper balance is restored only when Nina relents, if only a little, and Erica feeds Nina some frosting off the tip of her finger as one might to a baby or a pet. Even Nina’s sexuality is strictly corralled. Erica sometimes spends the night in her daughter’s room, explicitly preventing Nina from exploring that part of herself. This mother-daughter relationship, clearly, is not a healthy one, and it is one that explicitly keeps Nina from entering into adulthood, much less taking control of it.

This is the Nina we have at the start of Black Swan, a young woman trapped in a child trapped in a woman’s body, and this is the Nina who is perfect for the innocent White Swan but not so for the dark and sensual Black Swan. This is the woman the head of the ballet company, Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy, casts as the Swan Queen.

When we first meet Thomas, he is stalking through a room of ballerinas, appraising them, touching them as a mark of who gets to audition for the Swan Queen and who does not. This scene oozes male dominance, male ownership, over the female, and this impression is affirmed when Nina visits his office in order to ask for the role. She knows to do her hair and put on lipstick, to put on a sexualized feminine presentation. And Thomas notices, Thomas points it out, and Thomas grabs her and kisses her.

To the film’s credit, this scene is portrayed as the assault it is, and when she bites him and runs away we see his behavior as horrifying, sexist, and unfair. Nina’s talent should win her this role, not Thomas’s decision to take sexual advantage of an employee.

But it is this scene—or, more accurately, her willingness to fight in a sexually aggressive situation—that lands Nina the part.

Repeatedly, what can be described most accurately as sexual harassment or all-out assault from Thomas is depicted as disturbing but overwhelmingly necessary or justified, not only to get ahead in the ballet industry but also for Nina’s personal growth. Intrusive questions about Nina’s sexual habits, an order to masturbate, and even a physical seduction are Thomas’s methods for teaching Nina to become the Black Swan, and this harassment sparks Nina’s sexual awakening. Nina even develops feelings for Thomas. Repeatedly the film tells us that Nina is repressed, infantilized, shut in by herself and her surroundings, and while Thomas is certainly not the good guy for what he does, his role as sexual gatekeeper blurs what should be a morally clear-cut issue. It’s no coincidence that the director states, “That whole scene with Natalie when he tells her to go touch herself, it's really not that out of line” (Source). For the director and for the film it isn’t, because the end product is justified by the means.

The product here being a woman crafted into the perfect Swan Queen, the means an aggressive male authority figure forcing his sexuality on a female employee, something the rest of us might call a crime.

One must be careful, however, to note that Nina’s sexuality is not depicted as a particularly good thing. In keeping with tradition, the dark and even the murderous are sexual in Black Swan. Perhaps because that which is repressed must be released in an equally violent manner, Nina’s sexuality is destructive and a marker of her own moral degradation. Her growing independence is treated in a similar manner, and develops alongside this sexuality.

Take Mila Kunis’s Lily, the embodiment of everything Nina has buried deep inside her. Free in her dance, in her consumption, in her speech, in her manners, in her sex, Lily acts as Nina’s foil, both for the character and for the audience. She is also the one to lead Nina into autonomy, especially sexual autonomy, first by a visit to a club and then through oral sex. Lily literally takes Nina away from the controlled environment of her mother’s apartment, but even then, she spikes Nina’s drink. This free spirit is deceitful and dangerously so, and as Nina becomes more and more confident and sexually aggressive, performing a mind-blowing performance as the Black Swan and kissing Thomas in front of the other dancers, she becomes more violent and morally questionable, killing “Lily”/herself and attempting to cover up the crime.

Also notable is that, during their sex scene, Nina is not actually with Lily but with the dark version of herself, Lily simply a hallucination. (I could go into the theme of female homosexuality as something dark, forbidden, wrong, and tantalizing here, but that’s a topic for another post.) After reaching orgasm, Nina is literally smothered by her own doppelganger, this sexual release leading to a sort of breakdown and death.

By repressing all of these aspects of her adulthood and womanhood, what could be healthy is blown up to unhealthy extremes—one can’t help but wonder, though, just what would healthy extremes be? In Black Swan we only see unhealthy femininity, unhealthy sexuality, unhealthy womanhood. Healthy limits are never defined, and it is in fact left questionable whether these even exist, especially for women.

By the end of the film, Nina can be considered an independent actor. She has broken away from her mother and calmly convinced Thomas to give her the role of the Swan Queen. She has even gained control of her own sexuality, as seen in her kiss of Thomas. At the same time, however, we have actually seen her physical metamorphosis into the Black Swan—a hallucination or delusion, perhaps, but no less a symbol of transformation into something dark and unnatural. After all, escaping her mother involved breaking her mother’s hand. The relationship with Thomas was never a healthy one, and so even this expression of her desires is darkened. Perhaps most importantly, reaching this stage in her adulthood has literally cost Nina her moral and physical life. In order to keep the part of the Swan Queen Nina has committed murder, if only in her mind, and in actuality she has stabbed herself.

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In Black Swan, we follow what is in many ways a coming of age tale. Nina, a sexually innocent young woman, is infantilized by her mother and surrounded by figures of an aggressive and developed sexuality, and in order to play the role of the Black Swan, she must force herself to grow up, and she must do so quickly. At every stage of this process, however, she is either revictimized or must victimize others, including herself, in order to reach any sort of autonomy. It is tempting to read this negative portrayal as a scathing criticism of a sexist culture, but there is scarce evidence for such a reading; not in a world where even Lily, the closest thing Nina has to a friend and the film to a positive portrayal of female sexual independence, is cruel enough to spike Nina’s drink in a club. If this is how friends help friends, I’d hate to see how they hurt each other.

Black Swan is a fairy tale of broken womanhood. It is a world where mothers are wicked and little girls might be unhappy at home but at least they’re not stabbing themselves with broken glass. Black Swan is a world where women can’t win and not necessarily because of their circumstances, a world where men hurt women and this is bad, yes, but to some extent justified because it seems there is something fundamentally twisted about female sexuality anyway.

It is a world where, the moment you let the women free, they’re more than capable of destroying themselves.

And Introduction to Mikio Naruse with When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Katie)

    Amongst film directors from Japan, there are three that are the most internationally recognized: Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Each of them has a certain claim to fame. Kurosawa, for his sweeping epics of samurai and sword play. Ozu, for his immaculte depictions of every day life for the common family, and the delights and dissapointments that are brought on with the passage of time. Mizoguchi, both for his vivid period films and stirring contemporary films focused on the difficulties of women in society. 

    Outside of Japan, Mikio Naruse is relatively unknown compared to these three, although he is often considered as just below them in prestige. Naruse was a contemporary of them, and directed around 80 films in his lifetime. Naruse even was trained at the same studio along with Ozu, and the two are often compared together for their thematic focus on the Japanese family in transition as the culture was rapidly becoming urbanized. Yet Naruse's films have a much bleaker viewpoint, with none of the transcendence or light comedy of Ozu's. His filming is less stylized and not as recognizably "Japanese" as his contemporaries, although the content and heart of his films were completely relevant to the society. These features may be why Naruse has been long overlooked in international film studies. Naruse's storytelling, however, is just as finely crafted as those of his contemporaries. With films centering around strong female characters, Naruse's stories are rich with emotional depth and clarity. The strengths that lie at the heart of his films are exemplified in his 1960 film, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. 

    When a Woman Ascends the Stairs follows the story of Keiko Yashiro, played by Hideko Takamine, an aging widow working as a bar hostess in the glittering nightlife district of Ginza in Tokyo. She was married at a very young age to her true love - who died in a truck accident, leaving her with nothing. Now, after turning to hostessing to support herself, Keiko is too old for her line of work and finds her future prospects closing in around her. 

    In the first ten minutes of the film the audience is shown how Keiko can escape her life as a hostess. In the opening scene, the other hostesses from her bar are celebrating the marriage of one of their former co-workers. Marriage is one way out. After being scolded for poor sales by the owner of the bar, Keiko wishes she could open up her own bar and be her own boss. Investing and becoming a self-employed entrepreneur is another way out. Naruse then presents the darkest, and most extreme alternative - as Keiko returns to the bar, a crowd of hostesses gather around a stretcher being rushed into an ambulance. A hostess from another bar has committed suicide. Death is another way out. These are the options available to Keiko, each confining in a different way. Marriage would permanently make her dependant on a man, and owning a bar would commit her to a business that she despises. Death would be completely giving up, proving that she was unable to handle the difficulties forced upon her. 

    Keiko's obstinence, and her absolute refusal to humiliate herself for anyone else's gain, demonstrates Naruse's attention to the emotional realities of women. The entire world of the Ginza bar is not seen from the customer's perspective - an entitled male perspective - but from the worker's behind-the-scenes viewpoint. The film shows how they approach their work, and is not the narrow portrait of the giggling and charming hostess only there to serve her patron. Even if the other hostesses are not as emotionally burdened as Keiko, they each have their own emotional core and physical reality that their actions stem from. For each of them lies the struggle of earning a profit, maintaining self respect, and preserving the outward image of a woman who is self-reliant. Yuki, the owner of Keiko's rival bar, buys a car even as she struggles to cover her dept. Keiko struggles with debt as well, as she can barely  
afford her appartment and a new kimono. For these women, the physical demands of reality are 
innescapable. The glitz and glam of Ginza nightlife is not the reality for them, it is the image they are bound to uphold for their customers. Keiko's reality is one of dissapointments, debts, and self compromise. 

    Naruse's outlook is bleak, but the attention he gives to telling the lives of his characters is absolute. His insight to the struggles of women is as illuminating as it is grim. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is an excellent introduction to the richness of Naruse's storytelling, and a film that can hopefully draw more viewers into Naruse's world of strong female characters. 

Girls and boys, and the daddy who got away (Yelena)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved her father very much. One sad day, her father went away never to return, leaving behind a very sad little girl who grew up into a very brave, very smart young woman who never stopped her missing her daddy. One day she stumbles into a strange new world and, in a quest for independence, a quest chasing after her father, she discovers him only to lose him again, and only to discover herself. In the end, she returns home.

This is the story, and it is repeated over and over again. Interestingly, two recent uses of this storyline occur in the Syfy channel’s Alice miniseries and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (AiW) film, both adaptations of Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Although sexuality and Alice’s father barely figure in the original novels (if at all), they become vital components of both modern works, resulting in a female adulthood that revolves around a choice between men.

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Syfy’s Alice can be considered a sequel to and modern reimagining of the original story. Once again run by a tyrannical Red Queen, Wonderland has become a futuristic city of people dependent upon tea made of human emotion, extracted from kidnapped victims from our world. This is a world on the brink of collapse. It is a world in need of saving.

And who better to save it than a young woman named Alice?

In Alice, when Alice was a little girl, her father disappeared, and ever since then, she has been searching: with maps, online, and even in relationships. “Just because Daddy left doesn’t mean they all will,” Alice’s mother tells her, and here we have our first major difference between the two Alices: in the novel, she is a child first, an essentially asexual being driven by curiosity and a sense of adventure. But as a young woman, Alice’s gender and sexuality cannot be ignored; she has breasts, she has a past, and she has boyfriends.

All of a sudden, growing up has taken on a whole new romantic and sexualized meaning, one dependent on her relationships with others. As this quote tells us, a dichotomy exists between Alice’s father, the figure who presides over her childhood, and her (male) romantic partners, those who preside over her current life. This Alice is consistently caught between men, with her choices and motivations dependent on these figures. Consequently, this Alice’s trip to Wonderland is not driven by a strange white rabbit but, rather, a man with suspiciously rabbit-ear-like hair kidnapping her boyfriend, Jack.

After Alice arrives, she finds her way to a tea shop, run by the Hatter, only this Hatter is not particularly mad. He is attractive, charismatic, and a member of the resistance against the Queen. Unresolved sexual tension abounds, until such time as Alice is captured and reunited with Jack.

Jack Hart, that is—the Queen’s son, already engaged to another woman. Another member of the resistance, he came to our world with a purpose, you see: to find the daughter of the brainwashed man who makes tea shops possible. Alice’s father, you see, no longer remembers his old life, and he is now the lead scientist responsible for emotion extraction.

At this point, Alice remains in Wonderland not to rescue Jack but to rescue her father—the parent who left, the parent who drives her forward, the parent who does not keep her safe and comfortable as her dinner-cooking mother does. Although Alice is still reeling from these revelations about Jack, her journey now revolves around becoming daddy’s little girl once more.

Eventually, Alice does meet her father, but no amount of stories about his past can seem to make him remember. Only after Alice begins to cry, infantilizing herself back into that little girl, does he get some inkling of his memory back. Alice’s father comforts her with her old childhood nickname.

The moment quickly fades, however, as the Queen’s guards storm the area. Alice is once again taken prisoner, as is the Hatter. Ultimately they escape and soon find themselves in a room full of prisoners from our world, zombie-like figures with their emotions being drained from them. “Wake up!” Alice yells, and on the other side of a video feed, watching the commotion, her father remembers.

In the end, it is not infantilization but an act of adult agency that brings Alice’s father to her, and after a decade of separation, the two share a poignant reunion.

His death should come as no surprise.

By this point, Alice is no longer a little girl. She no longer trusts Jack, a man clearly wrong for her, but does trust the Hatter. Once daddy’s little girl, Alice has become a leader urging others to save themselves. This Alice, all grown up, has no need for daddy anymore. Having matured, it is now time for her to let go of her father, to let go of childhood, to defeat the Red Queen and leave Wonderland, and move on.

Once Alice is home, though, the story is not yet over. It can’t be, because that would leave her alone. Just as she finishes packing away her map of potential father-locations, Hatter arrives, and the two share a passionate kiss. In this way, an exchange of women reminiscent of Elizabethan-era plays is finalized: Alice moves from a strange limbo between two men, an absent father and a very present boyfriend, to the new “right” significant other. Although seemingly a self-driven character, her motives and storyline remain tied to the men in her life, and most actions are motivated by, or symbolically tied to, these characters.

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Although a very different reinterpretation, AIW shares many thematic similarities with Alice. Set in the 1800’s, the film follows the original Alice’s return to Wonderland, years later. Notably, AIW begins not with Alice, but with her father. He is discussing a business idea when a young Alice, frail and frightened, emerges. She has had another dream about her first trip to Wonderland and needs her father to comfort her. “Do you think I’ve gone round the bend?” she asks him.

Gravely, he answers, “You’re mad, bonkers, off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

Even after his death years later, Alice’s father continues to dominate the narrative of her life. When Alice’s mother reacts badly to one of her daughter’s jokes, Alice’s immediate response is, “Father would have laughed.” When the Mad Hatter asks if he has gone mad, she repeats her father’s words nearly word-for-word: “I’ll tell you a secret,” she says. “All the best people are.” Even during the climax of the film, when Alice must defeat the Jabberwocky, it is her father’s philosophy that leads her to victory; he believed in “six impossible things before breakfast,” and by recounting her own mad adventures, she saves the day.

Alice’s father, in other words, is responsible for the person Alice is and becomes, creating a curious and precocious young woman who cannot conform to the societal standards her mother both stands for and enforces. Similar to Alice, while her mother represents a drab and ensnaring domesticity, Alice’s father represents the adventure and independence of Wonderland. It is this mindset, in combination with a fear of being trapped in domesticity with a truly atrocious suitor, that leads Alice to chase the white rabbit down the rabbit hole one more time.

In the end, having recovered the “muchness” she lost just as she lost her father, Alice returns home, now an adult with a particular life in mind. After turning down her suitor, she decides to follow her father’s business dream and co-founds the East India Trading Company.

As tempting as it is to construe this ending as Alice taking control of her own life, however, her father’s profound influence makes another interpretation necessary: namely, that Alice chooses her father, rather than herself. After all, this business venture was her father’s idea. The movie begins with him proposing it, and it is always discussed in regards to him.

Although the final shot of AIW of Alice sailing into freedom at the head of a new economic empire, she nevertheless does so while chasing her father’s dream.

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In both of these modern interpretations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice’s life consists of two domains: a domestic sphere of comfort and even stagnation, represented by a mother, and a public sphere of growth and adventure, represented by a father. Unlike in the original novels, however, these Alices are young women on the cusp of adulthood; they are now women first. For both the Alice of Syfy’s Alice and the Alice of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, growing up thus becomes about a choice of men: whether to stay with father or to stay with Hatter, whether to marry or remain daddy’s girl. Other options are never even brought up in the script, much less considered by Alice.

Although supposedly self-driven, these Alices are not their own people, not really. They do not even seem aware that they could perhaps choose, as they once did as children, to follow solely themselves.