May 2015 – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

‘Pitch Perfect 2’: Tuning Up for an Aca-Trilogy?

Non-white characters get the short end of the stick in other ways, too: Cynthia Rose (Ester Dean) amps up the predatory lesbian angle (an outdated, unfortunate motif); Lilly (Hana Mae Lee) keeps whispering shockers as if that joke never gets old (it does); and the only lines Guatemalan Flo (Chrissie Fit), another new Bella, gets are about how she prefers the United States to her native country. Can you say aca-propaganda? Such political incorrectness is an unfortunate default to early second-wave feminism, which marginalized women who weren’t straight and Caucasian.

This guest post by Lisa Rosman previously appeared at Word and Film and on her website Signs and Sirens. Cross-posted with permission.

Here at Word and Film, we are not in the business of grading movies. But if I were to grade Pitch Perfect 2, the much-anticipated follow-up to the breakout 2012 musical comedy, I’d give it a solid B. As sequels go, that’s not bad, and the film deserves extra points for sidestepping the meta-movie trap into which so many comedic sequels fall. (Here’s looking at you, 22 Jump Street.) But, though I’m a huge fan of its pop-feminism and hip a cappella (no, that’s not an oxymoron), Pitch Perfect 2 doesn’t quite hit the high notes of its predecessor. Chalk that up to a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen plot and a disappointing profusion of micro-aggression.

The film begins as the Barden Bellas, the prize-winning all-female a cappella group from a fictional Georgia college, become a national joke when Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) suffers a spectacular wardrobe malfunction during a concert for the Obamas and Shonda Rhimes. (Insert Scandal joke here.) In order to claw their way back to good standing, the girls have to win the a cappella world title. The problem? No one’s been able to beat Das Sound Machine, a German group led by Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), a sort of BDSM Barbie.

Most of the gang from the first movie is still in place – Chloe (Brittany Snow) is now in her third senior year – and there’s a new Bella, legacy Emily (Hailee Steinfeld, sunnier than we’ve ever seen her), who is bummed the group is in such disrepute. Also still in attendance: commentators John (John Michael Higgins) and Gail (Elizabeth Banks, who now doubles as director). John’s bad-taste humor, a throwback to Fred Willard’s shtick in the dog mockumentary Best in Show, is more problematic in this film, especially at the international competition, where he throws out nearly every ugly stereotype about minorities under the sun. Because Banks has fewer good lines this time around (in the spirit of ill-advised modesty?), John’s racism goes unchecked. The effect, for example when an Indian group leaves the stage, is a tacit endorsement of such comments as “they’re running offstage to take more of our jobs.”

At times, Pitch Perfect 2 is so diffuse and so packed with random cameos that it seems like a mildly funny SNL 40. An underground aca-contest between Das Sound Machine, some (real-life) Green Bay Packers, the Bellas, and the “Tone Hangers” (featuring such comedians as Reggie Watts and John Hodgman) is admittedly hilarious, especially with a Southern-fried David Cross at the helm. But other sidebars fall flat, as they draw focus from the barely there main story: Beca (Anna Kendrick) tries to keep her recording internship secret; Fat Amy and Bumper (Adam DeVine) embark on a surprisingly dull courtship (who knew there could be too much Fat Amy?); and we’re subjected to a super-dull flirtation between Benji (Ben Platt) and Emily, which feels like a sidebar to a sidebar. One plot that gets no screen time this go-round: the romance between Jesse (Skylar Astin) and Beca, which is just as well as their chemistry always seems forced. (Sexually, Beca only perks up when Kommissar comes onscreen; now there’s a plotline that could’ve been interesting.) In general, Beca seems incapable of connecting with others although she’d supposedly cleared that hurdle in the first movie. Kendrick plays this suspiciously convincingly, as if a sequel wasn’t exactly her bright idea.

But sisterhood is still powerful, and it all gels whenever the girls sing and dance together. Despite my misgivings, I teared up when the Bellas performed an original song co-written by Beca and Emily – “Flashlight” is the new “Cups,” trust me – especially when other generations of the group joined the stage; the idea of celebrating an “old girls network” on the big screen is still revolutionary. So maybe it’s good news that, given this film’s blockbuster opening weekend (it edged out Mad Max domestically), we can expect a Pitch Perfect 3 – ideally with those sophomore-slump kinks worked out. Hollywood can always use more ladies-first ladies.

A former labor organizer, Lisa Rosman has reviewed film for such outlets as Time Out New York, Salon, Us Magazine, Flavorwire, LA Weekly, RogerEbert.com, and CBS News. She appears weekly on the NY1 film review show Talking Pictures and writes on film, feminism, and eavesdropping for SignsandSirens.com. Most notably, she once served as an assistant for Elmo on Sesame Street.

I’m Sick to Death of Talking About Rape Tropes in Fiction

Aside from being lazy, careless depictions like this are dangerous. They desensitize people to an issue that is still very pressing. It’s not that rape shouldn’t exist in fiction, but they must be framed responsibly. Fictional female characters are forever being raped as retribution against the ills of the men they’re connected to, or as punishment for not being submissive to the men around them. And this happens time and time again across genres and media. So while the denotative reading of these acts might be that “evil men rape” the connotative interpretation over time becomes “rape is a valid punishment for women.”

This guest post by Cate Young previously appeared at her blog BattyMamzelle and is cross-posted with permission.

I’m sick of talking about rape.

Forcible rape, date rape, grey rape, acquaintance rape, spousal rape, statutory rape and now fictional rape. I’m sick to death of explaining why the callous rape of women and girls in media is a very bad thing for our culture and why we should cut it out. *wags finger*

This Game of Thrones storyline is just the latest in a long line of excuses and equivocations for why the depiction of brutal and gendered violence against women is a storytelling necessity. People are sticking their heels in on both sides but to me the moral position is clear: there is nothing to be gained from lazy representations of rape in a media landscape that already devalues women and reduces them to objects and property.

Now I’ve read the arguments in favour of the narrative value of Sansa’s rape. That it showed that Ramsay was a sadist. That it would help Theon come back to himself and help Sansa escape. That it would motivate Sansa to seek vengeance. But it’s all bullshit.

What did that scene add that we didn’t already know? Did the writers think that cutting Theon’s penis off was too subtle to indicate Ramsay’s sadism? Did they think the brutal murder of her mother and brother were not strong enough motivators for Sansa to want revenge against the Boltons? Could they not conceive of a single other way in which Theon might be able to mentally recenter himself? What about this particular rape scene added such probative narrative value that it had to be transposed from one character to another even as the original victim is excised from the story? All it was is more rape on a show already replete with rape, for the sake of having rape. None of this is new information.

And it’s not that rape should never be represented in fiction. Rape is everywhere. It’s unfortunately an all too real danger of the world we live in. But it’s not as though there is some dearth of rape representation in media. Using rape as a narrative tool is lazy, and especially so when it’s invoked this many times in the same show. We are now at three female characters (all of whom are considered major point of view characters in the novels) who have been raped in the series, two of whom weren’t raped in the source material. It’s just rapes on rapes on rapes up in this bitch…

And then to add insult to injury, the framing of the scene takes the emphasis off of Sansa and her trauma and places it firmly on Theon and his anguish and having the witness the act. That slow close up to Theon’s face as we hear Sansa scream and cry in the background places him and his emotions squarely at the centre of the scene. We see not, Sansa’s emotional turmoil at being humiliated and degraded by her new husband, but Theon’s tortured face as his guilt consumes him. So on top of Sansa being raped in the first place, that violation is used not to make us feel sympathy for her, but for a man who betrayed her and her family. She doesn’t even get to be the subject of the violence that is happening to her. Her pain instead gets used as a device to advance a man’s character arc instead of her own (the perils of which I talked about back in December in this essay about the rape plot in the CW show Reign).

That is a dangerous idea to be spreading.

As author Robert Jackson Bennett puts it in his brilliant short essay on the subject:

“Now instead of raping a buxom, weeping young woman, your Extremely Bad Dude is now raping a terrified six year old boy. Does it still feel like it deserves to be there? To use the usual fictional rape apologist arguments, there’s no reason this scene shouldn’t exist. Child rape exists, and no doubt happens in times of war. It probably happens even more in third world countries that are at war. Historically speaking, I’m sure there have been thousands of child rapes since the dawn of humanity. Maybe millions. Practically speaking, it would be remiss not to include a child rape scene or two, right? It happens. We must be truthful to reality. It’s our duty. Or, wait – is it possible you’re using this horrific, degrading, monstrous act as window dressing?”

Why is it that sexual violence against women is the only kind of violence seen as such an inevitability that not including it raises suspicions?

And for all the people who keep harping on about how much worse Jeyne Poole’s fate was in the novels, you’re missing the point. We’re at the juncture now where the series will likely deviate wildly from what George R. R. Martin wrote in the novels and from what he intends to write in the future. This gives the show’s writers enormous latitude to readjust the moral compasses of these characters. Evil men will stay evil, and good men will stay good. But how evil and good they may be is up to them. I find it very upsetting and frankly offensive that in all the retooling that was done to this storyline, the rape scene was the one thing that just had to stay. We’re literally talking about an entirely different character with a different history and experiences, but she just had to get raped because…. “realism?” It’s amazing to me that we can accept a fictional world where dragons are real and men kill their brothers by shadow proxy, but a world without rape (or even just a little less rape!) is unfathomable to some people’s imaginations.

But when it comes down to it, I’m sick of talking about rape because it’s exhausting. I don’t think the men who are disingenuously barging into these conversations understand how truly exhausting this new cultural trend can be for female viewers. And often they bring up the many, many murders on Game of Thrones as a counterpoint, but that isn’t a 1:1 comparison. For one thing, nothing is preventing men from “making a stink” about the excessive violence of these shows. We as women aren’t required to not care about something that affects us because men don’t care about something that affects them. But I digress…

In our daily lives, murder is not something that most people are actively protecting themselves against. For most men, unless they’re in the people-killing business, getting murdered is not exactly a daily, top of mind concern. But for women? Getting raped is a daily concern. Women have whole routines built around not making ourselves vulnerable to rapists and sexual predators even for a second. Every day we have to think about getting raped. We self-police what we wear, where we go, when we go, how we go, with whom we go, all in an effort to make sure that we’re taking every possible precaution against being raped. And then we’re raped anyway and society tells us it’s our own fault for not having a more effective rape routine.

So for women to then come home, (hopefully having managed to not get raped) and have to watch ALL THE TV SHOWS be about women getting raped? It’s too much. The men defending Sansa’s rape don’t get that this depiction is yet another reminder that rape is everywhere, there’s no escape and that we could be next.

If you really to make a leap, we can see this uptick is the engagement of rape tropes as an element of social control. Because it isn’t just Game of Thrones that’s doing this. From House of Cards to Scandal to Reign, lots of shows are adding rape “for flavour” and it serves as a constant reminder of danger. When we look at it like that, is it really too much to ask that creators are at least responsible with their use of rape in fiction? When you’ve created a scenario where an entire segment of your audience is actively debating whether or not Sansa was even raped because “she chose to play the Game of Thrones” you’re being irresponsible with your craft. These discussions are not fun rhetorical games. They have an active effect on our lives as women. It’s disheartening as a feminist lover of television to find that this is the new status quo. Rape your women, king your men. And watch TV behind your fingers.

I gotta say, I don’t know how many more television shows I can watch while quietly mumbling “please don’t rape her please don’t rape her” under my breath.

Can we please stop raping our fictional women?

I’m all raped out.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

Hollywood Racism: Five Reminders from History and the Recent Past

It likes to think of itself as a progressive, meritocratic industry, but I don’t think any thoughtful person would dispute the fact that Hollywood remains a racist cultural institution. It continues to produce racist films, and it continues to shut out talented people of color. In fact, even those of us who have not bought the myth that Hollywood’s a liberal place full of cool, open-minded individuals have not fully recognized how deeply ingrained its racism really is. Here are just a few sobering reminders from history and the recent past.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Promoting a White Supremacist Ideology

The two most repellent films I have ever seen are Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Both films have been long recognized by film critics and scholars as technically innovative and both prompt feelings of overpowering nausea. Triumph of the Will is a German propaganda film that (re)produces Nazi discourse. Experiencing the terrifying soullessness of Nazi ceremony on display is a simultaneously sickening and numbing experience. Praised by generations of film scholars as a masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation is the most rabidly racist movie ever made in the United States. Set in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, it is, in fact, a revisionist, white supremacist movie that portrays the Klan as the good guys. The story of the The Birth of a Nation’s reception is also astonishing. One of the first films to be screened at the White House, it reportedly received this response from President Woodrow Wilson: “It was like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is so terribly true.” The racism in The Birth of a Nation is of the vilest kind: Black men are portrayed as rapacious creatures fixated with white women while the Klan are celebrated as gallant saviors. Promoting a Fascist racist ideology, the film seeks to normalize ideas of white superiority. Its poisonous impact cannot be overstated. The Birth of a Nation was a huge commercial success and hugely influential. In fact, it was used as a recruiting tool by the Klan. Think about this: this was one of America’s first “great films.”

Propagating Racist Norms and Ideals of Feminine Beauty and Sexuality

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the accomplished directors in cinema history but he has also played a dominant role in constructing and reinforcing Anglocentric norms and ideals of female beauty and sexuality. It is well known that Hitchcock preferred blonde actresses to play his leading ladies–they were part of his sadomasochistic aesthetic vision and the object, it is said, of a quite pathological obsession in his personal life–but I have yet to read any film scholar or critic underscore the director’s essential racism. In an interview with fellow director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock explained, “You know why I favour sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing room type, the real ladies who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.” There is, you can see, a strong linkage between Hitchcock’s racism, sexism, and classism. The director, moreover, espouses a very specific white self-love. Consider the following statement: “I think the most interesting women sexually are the Englishwomen. I feel that the Englishwoman, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and the Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, the Italian, and the French woman. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you, and to your surprise, she’ll probably pull a man’s pants open.” His take on Anglo-Saxon and Nordic women is an expression of his own fantasies but he also advocates here the chauvinistic, Anglo notion that non-WASP European women are sexually vulgar. Women of color are noticeably absent from his misogynistic erotic musings, as they were from his films. Hitchcock’s blonde, WASP female characters–slender blonde women, I should add–typified by Tippi Hedren in The Birds should not solely be seen as fetishistic products of his imagination. They are a product of a racist, sexist, and classist mindset. It could be argued that Hitchcock played a key role in Hollywood in propagating narrow, racist ideals of feminine beauty. The attitudes he propagated have had a toxic, long-lasting influence on the American cultural imagination.

Romanticizing Racist Stars

John Wayne was not only one of the most popular movie stars of his time; he also represented a romanticized kind of robust, individualistic American masculinity. Wayne, indeed, personified the country itself for both compatriots and viewers internationally. Behind the mythic America the star was intended to embody, are, however, the historical truths of genocide and slavery. The icon himself never recognized these truths. In a 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne stated, “I don’t think we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. Our so-called stealing of this country from them (Native Americans) was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” This mind-blowing comment is worth breaking down. Wayne employs a Darwinian justification for the atrocities of his ancestors, an ideology devoid of morality and humanity. It is also, quite simply, as perverse as siding with a rapist calling his rape victim the aggressor. In the interview, he also shifts attention away from contemporary American atrocities in Vietnam, namely the My Lai massacre. On the civil rights struggles of Black Americans, he ever so vaguely acknowledges the anger of his fellow citizens before making this statement: “I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.” Here we have a Hollywood icon clearly articulating white supremacist thinking as late as 1971.

The Utter Indifference to the Deaths of Enemies and Civilians of Color in Hollywood War Movies

You can find numerous illustrations of American exceptionalism and selective empathy in Hollywood movies. The wildly popular, revisionist American Sniper (2014) is only the most recent dangerous example. From The Deer Hunter (1978) to The Hurt Locker (2008), there are many unsettling cases but there is one that I would like to presently highlight–the racism informing Black Hawk Down (2001). Directed by Ridley Scott, Black Hawk Down concerns the 1993 raid on Mogadishu. Like the vast majority of American war movies, Black Hawk Down never attempts to explore war from the perspective of the enemy soldier or civilian. It is solely dedicated to glorifying the sacrifice of American blood. The close of the film perfectly sums up white Hollywood’s absolute indifference to the deaths of enemies and civilians of color. We are told, “During the raid over 1,000 Somalis died and 19 American soldiers lost their lives.” Black African Somali Muslim deaths are solely an afterthought.

Erasing Interracial Relationships

Over the years, Hollywood has done an effective job in erasing interracial relationships from mainstream American culture. The lack of interracial relationships in Hollywood movies not only shows shameful cowardice on the part of the studios; it also reinforces racist norms and denies an increasing demographic reality. Every kind of relationship–sexual, romantic, and marital–has been deliberately obscured. With movies like 5 Flights Up (2015) and Focus (2015), there are indications that this may be changing but current depictions only serve to highlight the shortage. Certainly TV programs such as Grey’s Anatomy have depicted interracial relationships with greater regularity but Hollywood still has a long way to go. At the moment, they are not fully representing intimate human relationships in America.

Hollywood is, as you can see, an industry that has, from its very infancy, regurgitated racist cultural products, as it has shamelessly sought to provide narcissistic identification for white people. If there was ever an industry that needs to face its past and recognize its essentially backward, intolerant nature, it is America’s dream factory.

‘Girlhood’: Observed But Not Seen

‘Girlhood’ starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

When Boyhood was making its victory lap through critics’ circles and award ceremonies, I wasn’t the only person who thought, “I want a film called Girlhood.” We all got our wish near the beginning of this year when the out, writer-director of Water Lilies and Tomboy, Céline Sciamma, gave us the art house US release Girlhood about a French, Black teenager, Marieme (Karidja Touré). The English title isn’t an exact translation of the original French Bande de Filles (“Group of Girls”) which was in production long before Boyhood was released–and perhaps even before that film was called Boyhood: the original title was 12 Years. Still, I was eager to see Sciamma’s film–until I read about its “bleak” ending and some talk from women of color that they found the writer-director’s take on Marieme’s life lacking. When the film played at my local art house as a revival months after its first run, I went to see it. I’m glad I did, but now I understand both reactions: the effusive praise and the cringing.

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls. Marieme and the rest of the team all live in the same neighborhood so after the game they walk home together with each saying “Good night” to the rest as she leaves the group to go home. Marieme is the only one left at the end, making her way up to her family’s apartment, where we see that she and her sister, who is a couple of years younger than she is, (Marieme is 15 or 16 at the beginning of the film) are the ones raising their much younger sister, cooking her meals and doing the dishes while their mother works. Their older brother is a physically abusive, petty dictator who kicks Marieme out of the living room when he comes home, so he can have the computer soccer game she was playing to himself.

Marieme finds out that she is flunking out of school and an unsympathetic counselor won’t listen to her excuses, or allow her to redeem herself. Dejected, she leaves, then just outside the school meets up with a group of three girls about her age, also not attending classes, who invite her to go to Paris with them (the film seems to mostly take place in the Parisian suburbs). At first she turns them down but when she notices the attention they receive from a group of local boys (including a friend of her brother’s she’s attracted to) she decides to go to Paris with the other girls after all.

In the city the girls unapologetically take up space, whether blasting music and teaching each other dance routines in a crowded metro car (with the white passengers turning their backs on them, pretending not to notice) or shaming and shoving a white clothing store clerk who profiles them. Marieme is entranced and becomes a permanent part of the group. She exchanges her long braids for the long straight weave/wig similar to that of the leader of the group Lady (Assa Sylla) and intimidates one of her former football teammates into giving her money that the group pool into a night in a motel room (with extra for food and booze). While she’s partying with her friends her brother calls, but Lady, while taking a bath, instructs her not to answer. She tells Marieme, “You do what you want.” When Marieme repeats the words back to Lady, she says she should look in her bag for a gift, a necklace that spells out “Vic.” “As in ‘victory,'” Lady tells her. We later find out “Lady” isn’t her real name either: it’s “Sophie.”

In another highlight the girls lip sync to “Diamonds” (the Sia Furler song sung by Rihanna) while in the room, wearing the new dresses they’ve shoplifted, dancing (shot stunningly by cinematographer Crystel Fournier) like they are in their own music video. But the high life never lasts–afterward when Marieme, now known as “Vic” returns to the apartment her brother chokes her, telling her to never ignore his calls again.

GirlhoodDiamonds — The girls dance and lip sync to “Diamonds”

By this time Vic’s nearly silent mother knows that she is out of school and has arranged for her to join her at her job cleaning hotel rooms. We see the defeated expression on Vic’s face as she scrubs a bathroom sink but aren’t prepared when, at the end of the shift, Vic grabs the supervisor’s hand, as in a handshake but squeezes and twists it until the supervisor agrees to tell her mother that she doesn’t have a position for Vic after all.

We’re used to seeing teenaged protagonists, especially those who suffer physical abuse at home, turn to petty crime and violence in film, but they’re rarely girls: the only other unapologetically violent, girl-protagonist that comes readily to mind is Reese Witherspoon’s Vanessa in 1996’s Freeway. We see Lady and the others in the group call out insults to other groups of Black girls which sometimes leads to nothing and sometimes culminates in scheduled fights (complete with a crowd of spectators filming the event with their phones). One of these fights leads to a humiliating defeat for Lady and the chance for Vic to avenge it. In Vic’s fight, she not only takes off the other girl’s shirt, as the girl did to Lady, she takes out her switchblade and cuts off the girl’s bra as well. When she comes home, her brother, who apparently saw the fight on YouTube, instead of hitting her (as he usually does when he calls her into a room) invites her to play computer soccer with him.

When Vic sees her younger sister with a group of other girls her age robbing a woman’s purse she ‘s upset. On the train ride home she implies she too will swear off stealing and fighting–only to find her brother waiting for her in the apartment with a beat-down, angry that she’s had sex with his friend (this boyfriend is one of the only Black men or boys in the film who is presented as more than a cardboard thug).

Sciamma is at her best when the girls are alone together (including an early funny scene between Marieme and her slightly younger sister) and also as in her earlier films when her characters seem to be exploring their sexual orientation and gender expression. Unlike every other woman or girl character in a movie, when Vic is in a dress and high heels it’s only until she can change into sweats and sneakers. At one point she wears her hair in short cornrows and binds her breasts, to protect herself as a woman alone on the street, but she continues to wear her “disguise” when she is at home as well. The scenes when she talks to Lady in the bathtub as well as a later dance with a sex worker/roommate have a sexual tension to them that Vic’s scenes with her boyfriend (even as she, just before they have sex together for the first time, objectifies his bare ass) don’t equal.

But during other scenes I felt Sciamma was observing these girls as a sociologist or tourist might, as opposed to truly seeing and understanding them or giving their scenes the same nuance the white male director of Our Song gave to the girls of color who were his main characters. The sometimes careless cinematography doesn’t help; although Touré is photographed beautifully in most of the first part of the film (she’s never lovelier than when, in the presence of the boy she likes, she looks down and smiles) in some latter parts she’s poorly lit (a persistent problem of white photographers and cinematographers with dark skinned actresses/subjects), so we can’t clearly make out her features.

Other reviews made me dread a downer ending. Needlessly degrading or deeming “hopeless” a woman or girl character is one of the biggest clichés writers, especially male ones, have at their disposal and I’m not the only woman who is sick of it. But the last shot of Vic isn’t any more hopeless than the one of another, very famous teenaged protagonist in French film who had also gotten into a lot of trouble, Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. And unlike him, Vic wears a look of determination on her face as she walks purposefully away from us.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AabCFCREVbQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Robin and Patriarchy in ‘Teen Titans’

However, not all of its episodes are comedic, and the show contains a number of adult themes, addressing serious issues both directly and metaphorically. Villains Slade, Brother Blood, and Trigon are patriarchal figures who physically, psychologically, and often (metaphorically) sexually attack, abuse, and assault the Teen Titans, causing them severe and often long-lasting psychological trauma.

Trigger warning for physical abuse and sexual assault.

DC’s comic book superhero team Teen Titans has been adapted and readapted as an animated series in recent years, and has a live action TV pilot in the making. The team gained newfound popularity due to Cartoon Network’s animated series Teen Titans (2003-2007), created by Glen Murakami. The show is rated TV-Y7 (for children aged 7 and up), and contains a lot of silly and, well, cartoonish humor. However, not all of its episodes are comedic, and the show contains a number of adult themes, addressing serious issues both directly and metaphorically. Villains Slade, Brother Blood, and Trigon are patriarchal figures who physically, psychologically, and often (metaphorically) sexually attack, abuse, and assault the Teen Titans, causing them severe and often long-lasting psychological trauma.

(Left to right) Beast Boy, Starfire, Robin, Cyborg, and Raven

The protagonists often internalize this trauma, thereby hurting themselves, and externalize this trauma by lashing out at and causing harm to each other. An example of this is in the episode “Haunted” in which Robin, metaphorically suffering from PTSD and having hallucinations of the villain Slade, yells at his love interest Starfire and hurts her arm. Trauma due to patriarchal figures is also experienced by the villainess Blackfire and anti-heroine Terra, who internalize the abuse, and try to find stability, success, and happiness by taking on patriarchal roles themselves. Blackfire, as queen of a planet and people looked down upon and, as evidenced in “Troq,” called racial slurs by the rest of the galaxy, attempts to force her sister into an arranged marriage for political reasons in “Betrothed.” When Starfire refuses to go along with the marriage, Blackfire physically attacks her. Starfire, and other female characters, realistically face abuse and oppression from male characters, whether strangers, enemies, friends, family, or love interests, as well as abuse and oppression from fellow female characters. It is then no wonder that this abuse is often internalized, such as when Starfire needlessly apologizes to Robin at the end of the first season for having “doubted” him.

Robin, Cyborg, and Beast Boy struggle to define their own masculinity after experiencing patriarchal abuse for themselves, but particularly upon witnessing patriarchal abuse of their female teammates. This is especially true of Robin and Beast Boy after recognizing their own abusive behavior toward Starfire and Raven, respectively, and apologizing for it. As Robin is the team’s leader and is arguably the main character, his character arc is one of the most developed, and much of the show’s commentary on patriarchy is done through Robin’s storylines, which most often put him in opposition to Slade, especially in the first season.

Before Slade, Brother Blood, and Trigon, another patriarchal figure affected the five Teen Titans, due to having trained their leader. Batman is often alluded to in the story, though never mentioned by name. Robin, who is White, male, and able-bodied, has privilege over the other superheroes in the show due to Batman having taken him under his (bat)wing. Though Robin would still have been talented without Batman’s help, Batman provided him with a level of intense training and real world experience in crime fighting that his other teammates lack. This extra training and experience made Robin the most qualified of the team to be its leader, and he becomes a patriarch due to the privilege afforded him by a patriarch.

Starfire, Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Raven dressed up as Robin.

Robin struggles with this patriarchal identity, and as the team becomes more experienced and Robin learns to deal with his control issues, the team becomes more of an ensemble with less of a hierarchy. This change in Robin’s leadership role and his relationship to the rest of the team is particularly examined in the episode “The Quest,” in which Robin feels confident enough in the team’s abilities to leave them for a time while he goes on a personal mission. While he is gone, all four remaining team members dress up in Robin’s extra uniforms and act out their envy of Robin’s “cool” position as their leader, taking turns on his motorcycle and referring to each other as “Robin.” When Robin returns and catches them in the act, they at first fear punishment, but Robin instead sits down and joins them in eating pizza together, which greatly surprises them.

In the first episodes of the series, Robin doesn’t give the team enough leeway or support, sometimes treating them more as tools or his own personal soldiers, as opposed to individual people. The team needs Robin’s leadership, due to his training and experience, as evidenced in “Final Exam,” when the team thinks they have lost him. However, it is Robin’s over-controlling personality and his emotional distance that almost leads members of his team to quit. In order to keep Cyborg, his second-in-command, from leaving the team in “Divide and Conquer,” Robin has to apologize for his actions and relinquish some of his patriarchal (and White supremacist, as Cyborg is Black/Biracial Black and White) control. In the next episode, entitled “Sisters,” Robin has to show respect for Starfire, an orange-skinned immigrant from the planet Tamaran, in order to keep her on the team, connecting with her on an emotional and personal level. Due to these changes in Robin’s leadership style, the team becomes more cohesive and functional in their crime fighting, and more supportive of each other as friends. The show continues to promote integrationist values throughout the rest of its run, sometimes challenging White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but often supporting heteronormativity.

Later in the first season, particularly in the episodes “Masks,” “Apprentice Part 1,” and “Apprentice Part 2,” it is clear that Robin still struggles with arrogance and a lust for power, control, and independence, often feeling that the team holds him back from reaching his full potential. The villain Slade taps into these desires and weaknesses for his own gain. Slade, an adult man with an army of robots, immense resources, and incredible influence and privilege, tells Robin that he sees his “potential,” and offers Robin the position of his “apprentice,” claiming he will be “like a father” to him. Robin responds that he’s “not interested,” as it would mean betraying his friends and siding with a known villain. However, when Slade threatens to kill Robin’s friends/teammates by putting his destructive “probes inside their bodies,” Robin is forced to accept Slade’s offer.

Many of the scenes between Slade and Robin have a distinctly sexual and predatory vibe, with Robin being metaphorically raped by Slade and then internalizing the trauma due to Slade insisting that Robin “enjoy[s]” the abuse. In battle, Robin lowers his stun gun when Starfire confronts him. This angers Slade, who tortures her and the rest of the team with his “probes inside their bodies” until Robin physically harms her himself. Thus, a patriarchal figure forces a patriarch-in-training to enact violence against a young woman, who is arguably coded as a Woman of Color. Enacting this violence shows Robin’s loyalty to Slade/patriarchy, and Starfire becomes “the ball” in what media critic Anita Sarkeesian has said is “the game of patriarchy.”

In order to defeat Slade, Robin claims he will find a way to “get [the] controller” of the “probes” away from Slade. This shows Robin’s desire to have control and power, as he does not want to destroy the controller, but to own it himself. Much to Robin’s chagrin, Slade notices this, and points out his and Robin’s patriarchal similarities. Robin eventually realizes that the only way to save his teammates from torture and eventual death is to give up the protection, privilege, and power over others that he has under Slade. Robin puts the same torture devices that are inside the rest of the team inside himself, and Slade is forced to stop the torturing of everyone in order to spare Robin, whom he calls “ungrateful.” The Teen Titans then, for the most part, defeat Slade as a team. The episode ends with Robin admitting that he and Slade are “a lot alike,” though, unlike Slade, who is “alone,” Robin is happy and thankful that he has friends. Though this arc reinforces heteronormativity, often through Robin’s budding relationship with Starfire, it also addresses capitalist patriarchy and its view of people as obstacles, tools, and possessions, a subject which the rest of the show’s seasons continue to address.

While Robin, a White male character, was offered a position of power and privilege by Slade, Slade does not show the same respect to other characters, even including his second apprentice, Terra. Terra, who debuts in the second season in the episode aptly titled “Terra,” is a skinny White girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. While Slade referred to Robin by name, he often addresses Terra by her position of “Apprentice,” especially in “Aftershock Part 2.” This shows how Slade ignores her identity and personhood, even though he empathized with Robin’s. The episode also creates an even clearer metaphor for sexual assault than the show did earlier with Robin. When Terra learns that the uniform Slade gave her allows him to control her body with his own body, causing her pain and controlling her movements, she tries to rip it off, and starts to cry when she can’t. When Beast Boy finds her like this, he asks Slade what he did to Terra, and Slade claims that he didn’t do anything to her that she didn’t “want [him] to.” In a particularly disturbing moment, Slade lifts a seemingly unconscious Terra by her breastplate.

Slade only respecting fellow White men is a trait he shares with other villains. In the third season, Cyborg, who is Black/Biracial, is seen as a “machine” and not a “man” by the villain Brother Blood, who is White. In the fourth season, the demon Trigon sees his daughter Raven as a “vessel” and not a human being. In the fifth and final season, the team faces the villain The Brain and his Brotherhood of Evil, who see everyone as tools, or pieces in a game of chess. Robin learns to respect and support his teammates throughout these storylines, and develops an especially close friendship with Raven, who can arguably be interpreted as being coded as a Woman of Color. The series’ strongest metaphor for sexual assault occurs in the fourth season in the episode “Birthmark,” in which Slade, who is revealed to be working for Trigon, rips off Raven’s cloak and much of her clothing. Robin, a fellow survivor of assault from Slade, supports Raven, and keeps the rest of the team from asking her invasive questions.

This storyline breaks down many barriers in media. Two fellow survivors of rape and assault support each other. A male rape survivor is shown and not shamed. A close platonic friendship between a young man and woman is also incredibly rare. A White young man is also being respectful of a (coded) Woman of Color, supporting her on her own terms, allowing her agency in what she feels she does and does not want to tell him and the rest of the team. Whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity are still praised and privileged in Teen Titans, but hopefully future media, especially the coming pilot of the live action Teen Titans, continue to address patriarchy and the issues that the animated Teen Titans addressed.

WIGS’ Flagship Series, ‘Blue,’ Offers a Surprisingly Powerful Look at Sexual Violence

‘Blue’ is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was part way through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl,’ has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Blue is either an amazing bait-and-switch or (more likely) a series that changed its mind about what it was partway through. Either way, what began as an inferior, online version of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, has grown into a powerful, subtle, and well-acted drama about the long-term effects of sexual abuse, and the shadow that misogyny and the threat of violence casts over women’s sexuality in general. It’s also a big achievement for the WIGS channel, whose mission is to create more female-led programming.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Blue – I hadn’t heard of it until CTV starting promoting it as part of its online video service this winter. The series began life in 2012 as a group of short webisodes on the WIGS YouTube channel, before switching to an hour-long format and moving to Hulu in its third season (in Canada, it’s now on CTV Extend, along with several other WIGS series).

WIGS, in itself, is pretty cool. It’s a free, online channel that offers original programming, focused on female leads. In addition to Julia Stiles, who plays the title role in Blue, WIGS has produced shorts and web series led by Anna Paquin, Jenna Malone, and America Fererra, among others. Blue seems to be the one that’s got the most traction, and it’s fair to say that it’s WIGS’ flagship show.

The premise of Blue (and it’s not a great premise, so bear with me for a minute) is that Stiles’ character is a single mom who sometimes resorts to prostitution in order to make ends meet. All of the commercials and advertising for the show feature a clip from the series’ first webisode, where Blue, in sexy lingerie, explains to a client, “I gotta provide.” During the early episodes, there’s a sense that Blue is going to play out a lot like Secret Diary of a Call Girl – that is, it seems like the point of the show is to voyeuristically peer inside a middle class version of sex work. We watch Blue interact with a wide range of clients who are all set apart by peculiar habits and fetishes, and we watch her cagily hide this part-time job from everyone else in her life. It seems, at first, like the only major conflict the show’s setting up is a love interest slash frenemy of Blue’s who learns the truth about her job, and might spill the beans to her family. Otherwise, the story doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere until late in the first season, when suddenly it goes everywhere – to places I haven’t seen many shows go at all, let alone in such an honest, thoughtful way.

Late in season one, after some foreshadowing has prepared us, we learn that Blue was sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends when she was in middle school, and that there’s a good chance that guy is the father of her son. That revelation cracks the story wide open and, from that point forward, Blue is a lot less about watching Julia Stiles be sexy, and a lot more about watching her struggle with the long term effects of trauma – the way it interferes with her relationships, the way her lack of boundaries shapes the dynamic she has with her son, the way she blocks things out and dissociates under stress.

Blue is a series that builds up slowly, over time, rather than dropping everything on us at once. The complex social and psychological dynamics between the characters are like sediment, accumulating layer by layer, until the third season feels like a careful, complex dissertation on human behaviour.

When Blue’s abuser returns to the picture, it’s disturbing that she doesn’t stand up to him – that he still has so much power over her – but it’s also realistic. So is the way he explains, with no trace of shame, anger, or guile, that he didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s the real victim, because she’s let other people convince her that he’s a bad person, when they both know the truth is different.

The show also takes its time in revealing how Blue’s own memory of these events is fragmented and hard for her to access. In one scene, she’ll struggle to remember anything about her childhood, and come up short on details when someone asks. In another, she’ll have a sudden emotional outburst, as she remembers that her mother betrayed her trust by leaving her alone with the man who raped her. After that, she’ll forget the outburst happened, and wonder why her son suddenly seems to be so careful and delicate about her feelings.

Depicting a character who doesn’t have a constant sense of self and doesn’t understand her own feelings, or remember her own experiences consistently, requires a great deal of patience and restraint on the part of the writers, directors, and actor. Julia Stiles has always been a pretty understated actor, and it works for her, here, as a character who’s built a protective shell so strong that it separates her from her own emotions. Blue never tells us how to interpret the characters’ feelings, but it has a keen eye for detail in how trauma can be expressed through words and behaviour, and there’s at least one sequence in which sound and video editing are used to create a pretty convincing impression of dissociation, which no explanation needed.

In the third season, Blue expands its view of female sexuality through two new characters: Blue’s sister Lara, and Lara’s girlfriend, Satya. Season three is a winner on all counts, but the introduction of these characters allows the show to add a few more layers to its sediment, and flesh out the themes that are already there.

Satya, played by Canadian singer-songwriter Alexz Johnson, is a bad news musician who systematically leaches off her partners in lieu of getting a job. When we meet her, she’s leaching off Lara (which means leaching off Blue, by proxy), and trying to track down a lowlife who owes her some money. The most terrifying scene in the show comes where Satya and Lara confront the lowlife’s friends, looking for the money he owes them, and realize too late that they’re in a locked apartment with guys who want to rape them. The scene is a lot more low-key that what you’d get on HBO, but that’s what makes it scary – a normal conversation suddenly tips into something more sinister, and, before anyone makes a move toward them, Lara runs to the door and starts screaming for help.

It’s a moment that’s powerful and disturbing, and underscores the threat of violence that runs underneath interactions between men and women. When I started writing this review, I was going to say, “Blue is bad at being a show about prostitution, but it’s good at being a show about sexual violence” – in retrospect, I think maybe it’s good at being a show about prostitution because it’s good at being a show about sexual violence, and presenting a world where no one’s choices are ever fully disentangled from the misogynist threads in our culture.

There’s an argument that says, in order to be sex-positive people, we need to stop stigmatizing prostitution, and challenge the idea that women only get into sex work because they’ve been kidnapped, coerced, or abused – that we instead need to promote the empowering idea that women can be sex workers because they choose to be, in an utterly untroubled way. And, while it’s true that some people get into sex work without any trauma or exploitation and, while I’m happy for them if they have a positive experience, the reality is that, at this point in history, most prostitutes don’t enter the profession because things are going so well in their lives. While it’s fine to have Secret Diary of a Call Girl – while that’s a legitimate experience that can be explored – it’s also important to keep telling stories like this – stories that highlight how even sex work that looks, on the surface, like it’s voluntary, is still an artefact of the same culture in which women are disproportionately the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Sex work doesn’t exist in a separate reality where none of the other bullshit about sex and gender affects what goes on.

On a less ideological level, Blue also pulls off a pretty risky narrative feat by building up Satya’s talent all season long – telling us that she’s this amazing musician, who’s obviously special, and captivates you as soon as you hear her play – and then delivering on that promise, when Johnson sings a song that she wrote for the show in a clear, strong voice that instantly shows us why all of these characters see something special in Satya. That doesn’t seem like such a hard thing to pull off, but look at all the times Smash and Glee tried to tell us that someone was good at singing, and see how that turned out.

If you are intrigued by complex characterization, explorations of sexual violence, or convincingly good singer-songwriter stuff, you can catch up on Blue at the WIGS website, on Hulu in the United States, or on CTV Extend in Canada.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Why You MUST Go See ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

I would extend this – the film actually details how EVERYONE is enslaved by patriarchy – yes, the women are the sex slaves whose bodies are raped as well as forced into producing breast milk to feed male troops, but the male minions are also enslaved to the dystopian war machine and turned into heartless warriors and slave-laborers.

This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Skirt Collective and is cross-posted with permission.

Much has been made of the call by Aaron Clarey in his piece “Why You Should Not Go See Mad Max: Feminist Road.” As many pieces have discussed Clarey’s ridiculous, hyper-macho douchery (as here, here, here, and here), I will instead offer a counter call – instead of “mancotting” the film as Clarey begs “real men and real women” to do, I urge you to GO SEE IT! Go now!

Here is part of Clarey’s original call for a boycott of the film:

“[D]o yourself and all men across the world a favor. Not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible. Not all of them have the keen eye we do here at ROK. And most will be taken in by fire tornadoes and explosions. Because if they sheepishly attend and Fury Road is a blockbuster, then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn’t contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism.”

In response, here is my counter feminist call to action:

Do yourself and others a favor – See Mad Max: Fury Road and tell as many humans as you know to see the film, to discuss it on social media, to decry the Men’s Rights Activists aiming to make the world a hyper-patriarchal dystopia where heterosexual macho types horde all the power with their weapons of choice, namely violence, oppression, rape, enslavement, and hatred.

Not all people will recognize the importance of supporting this film, many may go for the special effects and the popcorn, but even if they don’t attend wearing “This is what a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirts, they will still be treated to a great action movie which enacts feminism in both content and form. Those who see the film will help to pave a future where real humans can enjoy movies that reflect the real world, which is made up of women AND men, boys AND girls, where gender is a continuum and, NO, romance and baby-making is not the be all and end all of life.

See Mad Max: Fury Road. See it as soon as possible.

See it because Charlize Theron is amazing, Tom Hardy is a new and improved Max, because the action is breathtaking and achieved with very little CGI, see it to piss-off the nay-saying Men’s Rights Activists and calling for a boycott of “feminist propaganda.”

See it because director George Miller happily proclaims: “I Can’t Help but Be a Feminist” and believes women are capable as actors and directors and are essential to telling imaginative, important stories – something that is all too rare a belief in Hollywood, where in the last several years, women directed fewer than 2 percent of top-grossing movies.

See it because it was edited by a woman, Margaret Sixel.

See it because Eve Ensler led workshops about violence against women with the cast and crew.

See it because, as MRA Clarey readily admits (perhaps his one correct point), Hollywood DOES condition us. As Carolyn Cox of The Mary Sue puts it,

“By admitting they’re threatened by Charlize Theron…Clarey and his commenters are also agreeing that the media we consume and the stories we tell are hugely important.”

See it because while Clarey worries women might be conditioned to want to be like Imperator Furiosa rather than Sophia Loren (I know, WTF???) we can use the conditioning that is part of entertainment to feminist purpose so that, as Melissa Silverstein puts it,

“a little girl can dream of being a hero just as much as a little boy can because she sees multiple examples of heroic women.”

See it because, as Peter Howell says, “Hollywood doesn’t often let females star in its big ‘tent-pole’ films” because “Male-dominated movie studios don’t believe female action movies make money.” See it because we need to remind Hollywood and MRAs this is false (as Hunger Games, Insurgent, Alien, Terminator and so many other films prove).

See it to disprove Neanderthal thinking on the part of Marvel Comics CEO Ike Perlmutter and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton who in a leaked email correspondence “proved” female superhero films don’t make money by naming three such films while ignoring the many female-driven films that have made money and ignorning just how many male led superhero films have tanked.

See it because Clarey’s assertions are laughable, and contrary to his claim that “feminism has infiltrated and co-opted Hollywood,” we still have a Hollywood machine driven by a privileged male elite who don’t seem to want to give up their own little version of the world, their very own MRA movement – the “Men Rule Art” hold on the entertainment machine.

See it because there is a culture shift happening in media, a wave that includes GamerGate, calls to stop online harassment (#StoptheTrolls), an evergrowing feminist blogosphere, and a growing call to Hollywood to wake up and smell the feminism.

See it because while some see MRAs as a non-threatening fringe, they DO warrant attention because they consistently and vehemently offer sexism as the answer and their websites and organizations garner thousands of followers. (For some truly horrifying evidence about MRAs beliefs, you need look no further than David Futrelle’s piece on We Hunted the Mammoth which documents some truly horrifying comments running the gamet from espousing beating one’s wife to denouncing one’s daughters if they dare to have college aspirations.)

See it because, as noted by Nicole Sperling in her piece on the film for Entertainment Weekly, it is “one glorious, relentless assault” that may make us “never look at action movies quite the same way again.” As Sperling notes, the film “challenges our perceptions about women and freedom, heroism and extremism.” However, while Sperling claims the film focuses on the “slavery endured by all women,” I would extend this – the film actually details how EVERYONE is enslaved by patriarchy – yes, the women are the sex slaves whose bodies are raped as well as forced into producing breast milk to feed male troops, but the male minions are also enslaved to the dystopian war machine and turned into heartless warriors and slave-laborers. And see it because it does not pit “the matriarchy against the patriarchy” as Ty Burr claimed in his Boston Globe review, but rather brims with relevant political undertones about oppressive political regimes, rape culture, access to clean water, the end of oil, and the ways we are bleeding our planet dry.

See it because Furiosa is not a “degendered…eunech warrior” (as claimed in the Sperling review) but rather a gender-queer, disabled, bad-ass feminist hero who proves that heroism has no one gender, no one body type, no one sexuality.

See it because it suggests it will take collective action rather than one lone (male) hero to save the future. In the film, it takes Furiosa, five female “breeders,” a group of badass gun-toting grannies, as well as Mad Max and other males turned to the feminist cause, to bring down the likes of Immorten Joe – the villain at the heart of this iteration whose names speaks to the fact patriarchy is not “immortal” nor is the concept of your average (macho) Joe a thing to espouse.

See it because we are all on this tiny spinning planet together and only together can we find the “Green Place” espoused in the movie where the water will be clean and people will not be oppressed.

See it because if you have ever doubted the acting chops of Charlize Theron, this movie will convince you of her incredible talent. She is absolutely fierce as Furiosa. In a movie with very little dialogue and limited characterization, Theron is able to exude an intensity of will and palpable strength of character that is on par (if not exceeding) other female heroines such as Ripley and Sarah Connor.

See it for the grannies with their mad survival skills, for the fierce “Breeders” who refuse to be sex slaves; see it for its championing of the one-armed sharp shooter Furiousa. See it because how often do we see women portrayed as better survivors, snipers, and drivers than men?

See it because it is the best feminist road movie since Thelma and Louise. See it because Furiosa’s story is so much more powerful than Black Widow’s. See it because we need to prove Hollywood big wigs wrong and make Clarey and his MRA minions STFU..

Finally, see it to piss off MRAs and show them feminists will not be stopped by their testicle-clutching pleas of superiority. See it for their daughters, and sons, and partners, who can hopefully grow into a world free of their “Immorten Joe” mentality.

See it because, yes, movies matter, and if we want more feminist-friendly blockbusters, we have to prove there is an audience willing to support such movies.

Natalie Wilson teaches women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Seduced by Twilight and blogs for Ms., Girl with Pen and Bitch Flicks.

“I Want to Name My Daughter Furiosa”: The Feminist Joys of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

But don’t let the buzz mislead you into thinking ‘Fury Road’ is some sort of feminist watershed, a 21st century cinematic ‘Feminine Mystique’ with monster trucks. I would have enjoyed this flick even if it had typical gender politics, because I love car chases and over-the-top action sequences and the sort of high camp that yields a vehicular war party having its own flamethrower-enhanced metal guitarist. If you don’t love those things, you probably don’t want to see this movie. But if you are into that kind of action flick, this is a really good one that has the bonus of a thick layer of sweet, sweet feminist icing.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' — Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in *Mad Max: Fury Road*

This review contains some minor spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road.

Thank you, MRAs, for calling for a boycott of “”feminist piece of propaganda” Mad Max: Fury Road. You certainly got this feminist fired up to see it opening weekend, and I loved it just as much as you promised me I would.

But don’t let the buzz mislead you into thinking Fury Road is some sort of feminist watershed, a 21st century cinematic Feminine Mystique with monster trucks. I would have enjoyed this flick even if it had typical gender politics, because I love car chases and over-the-top action sequences and the sort of high camp that yields a vehicular war party having its own flamethrower-enhanced metal guitarist. If you don’t love those things, you probably don’t want to see this movie. But if you are into that kind of action flick, this is a really good one that has the bonus of a thick layer of sweet, sweet feminist icing.

If you like double-neck guitar flamethrowers, you'll like 'Fury Road' — If you like double-neck guitar flamethrowers, you’ll like *Fury Road*

Even though it is his franchise and his name is right there in the title, Max (Tom Hardy) is really the sidekick to Fury Road‘s true hero, Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Furiosa is the one with the mission and the character arc, Max is pretty much just along for her ride. He ends up feeling like a gender-flipped version of the Hot Action Chick, a Studly Action Dude of sorts. Now, Furiosa isn’t the most well-rounded character you ever did see, but there’s precious little downtime between bouts of vehicular warfare for serious character development (though Charlize does put her acting chops to work in the moments she has). But she is 100 percent glorious badass, the kind of female action star I could never get enough even if Hollywood didn’t churn out only a couple every decade.

And what sets Furiosa apart from her cinematic foremothers Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor is that she is surrounded by other strong women. She was raised in what appears to be a matriarchal community, and the women we meet from her home are, like her, fearsome warriors. The plot (other than “cars explode”) of Fury Road concerns Furiosa smuggling out the “wives” (sex slaves/”prized breeders”) of evil warlord Immortan Joe. These five beautiful women (supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and perfect genetic specimen Zoë Kravitz among them) wear strategically placed strips of white fabric, and are the only people in this universe with access to soap, hot wax, and hair brushes.

In a lesser movie, the wives could be an embarrassing cliché of damsels in distress. But in Fury Road, they are women with agency, choosing their own liberation as they experience a feminist awakening (when one considers going back, she’s reminded “we are not things”). They’re not as capable as Furiosa or the other women from her homeland, but they don’t shy away from the fight either. I was surprised to see one (several months pregnant) become a causality of war, not killed off in a particularly dramatic fashion. It’s strangely humanizing to see a pregnant woman be killed among the hoards of other victims in a movie where countless cars crash and things blow up. (However, I did not think her dead son being cut out of her dying body added anything to the film, and suspect it would trigger some people in the audience.) But that death underscored that women are people in Mad Max: Fury Road, not just plot constructs: because people can get killed in a tornado of violence, even if they’re eight months pregnant.

And ultimately, Fury Road is a parable about bringing down the patriarchy, which makes all of its orgiastic destruction a thoroughly satisfying outlet for feminist rage. I saw the movie with a mixed group of male and female friends, who all loved it, but it was the women who walked out saying things like, “I’m so pumped up I could run home right now” and “I might name my daughter Furiosa.”

So is Mad Max: Fury Road going to bring us equal pay, sexual liberation, a woman in the White House, and ladies’ jackets with inside pockets? Probably not. In fact, it’s probably better news for women that Pitch Perfect 2, a film by, about, and marketed to women, soundly beat Fury Road at the box office (HT to my friend @MattMarcotte to pointing this out to me). But a teenage boy leaving the theater behind me shouted that Fury Road was the “MOST F***ING AWESOME MOVIE EVER!” He might not have realized it was about women destroying male power structures, but I can rest easy tonight knowing that he enjoyed his experience with this feminist piece of propaganda. I hope he gets to see many more.

Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who was in an improv troupe with one of the stunt performers in this movie. DROP. (Hi, Anneli!)

‘Blackstone’: Stoney Women And The Many Meanings of Sovereignty

The most remarkable feature of Ron E. Scott’s Canadian drama ‘Blackstone,’ apart from its blistering probing of Kellogg’s “ugly facts” of demoralization, is how closely it links gendered oppressions with other exploitations.

(No spoilers in the comments past Season Two please, deprived Irish viewer here.)

“It is a cause of astonishment to us that you white women are only now, in this twentieth century, claiming what has been the Indian woman’s privilege as far back as history traces.” – Laura Kellogg

The writings of pioneering suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton reveal that the political status of Iroquoian (Haudenosaunee) women inspired her vision of gender equality. The early 20th century Oneida political activist, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, also highlighted Benjamin Franklin’s acknowledged debt to the Five Nations’ (Iroquois) Great Law in inspiring distinctive features of American democracy. Kellogg: “have you not pauperized and debauched a whole people who were not only the richest in possessions, but whose native character has inspired those of your arts and literature which contain national distinction?”

As we in Europe benefited from peace-building through federal government, and from female emancipation, those very qualities were stripped from the civilizations that birthed them. Diverse Native cultures were reimagined as a patriarchal monoculture, iconically represented by the Plains Indian Chief, while female diplomats and political activists were reinterpreted as sexualized Indian Princesses, or silenced as “squaw” drudges. Native democracy itself was destroyed by a system of wardship, that subordinated its people to a Euro-American Bureau of Indian Affairs which Kellogg slammed as a “school for sycophants.”

Chief Andy's Boys' Club — Chief Andy’s Boys’ Club

“If I did not believe enough of you remain staunch to our ancestral standards of truth, to stand the ugly facts that concern us now, I should not speak.” – Laura Kellogg

The most remarkable feature of Ron E. Scott’s Canadian drama Blackstone, apart from its blistering probing of Kellogg’s “ugly facts” of demoralization, is how closely it links gendered oppressions with other exploitations. Bad government is represented by the chuckling boys’ club of Band Chief Andy Fraser, who hold meetings at the Roxy Rolla strip club, joke about screwing each other’s wives, and dismiss female opponents with gendered slurs like “cow” and “bitch.” The takeover by Leona Stoney and Victor Merasty therefore represents not only a return to idealism, but to gender-balanced leadership. Blackstone explores the toxic legacy of abuse within Canada’s residential schools, in which Irish religious orders played a major role, replicating our own traumatic legacy of institutional abuse and even perpetuating linguicide and colonial stigma, despite their demoralizing impact in Ireland. “Falling under the spell” of priests in his residential school shaped Tom Fraser’s bitter resentments and resistance to taking responsibility, which he has passed on to his son, Chief Andy (who, my God, is such a better portrait of Charlie Haughey than the recent Irish biopic. Period end). Blackstone also acknowledges the crushing impact of mainstream Canada’s indifference to the “fucking waste of time” of “this Indian bullshit,” but suggests that renewal must ultimately come from within. Its villains have internalized the colonizer’s gaze to the point that they reflexively worry “this looks bad” rather than acknowledging and tackling problems, perhaps anticipating criticism of the show’s own negative portrayals.

Just as the exaggerated domestic dramas of soap operas and telenovelas offer their mainly female audiences an important forum for processing their own frustrations, so the condensed and intensified social problems of Blackstone‘s fictional reserve are not simply a negative distortion of reality, but a basis for developing discussion and self-advocacy. The series’ opening sets the tone: over confrontational images of teen drug-taking, an elder tells a creation story, evoking nostalgia for the “real Indian.” But the elder, Cecil Delaronde (Gordon Tootoosis), challenges the disconnect between theory and practice: “if you look around you, culture is on display every day. Family violence, alcoholism, drug abuse, incest, suicide, corruption… that’s our culture now.” The show’s English title grows out of black roots in Cree, embodying both continuity and linguicide. Connecting political sovereignty, mental sovereignty and bodily sovereignty, Blackstone centers women in its hopes for renewal. Stoney women are the community’s bedrock.

Chief Leona Stoney

“More schooling than usually falls to the lot of an Indian woman and more contact with Caucasian artificiality and insincerity have graduated me into what might be called a polite Indian, and the process, I sometimes think, has taken a lot out of me” – Laura Kellogg

Leona Stoney is the daughter of a deceased chief. After sobering up from youthful addictions, her father entrusted the nation’s treaty pipe to her, representing her duty to lead. Leona lives off-reserve and works in addiction counseling with urban kids that her white boyfriend, Chris, charmingly calls: “kids who are ready. Ones who’ve escaped Blackstone.” Chris voices the defeatism that Leona must confront inside herself. Like historical allotment schemes, Chris associates redemption with assimilation into the white mainstream and “escape” from an irredeemable culture. As Chief Andy’s wife, Debbie, snarks to Chris, “it’s not easy being a chief’s wife, is it?” the show implies that his patriarchal pride is as threatened by Leona’s leadership as his Euro-American culture. In herself, Leona embodies the recovery narrative that the reserve needs: she has taken responsibility for her actions, she has integrated respect for traditional culture with adaptable openness to modernity, and she has cultivated compassion.

Her off-reserve status and white boyfriend are repeatedly used to question her right to lead, but Cecil Delaronde, representing the community’s conscience, affirms “we do need someone like you. A healer, someone who’s been elsewhere.” Leona’s fictional chiefdom recalls Wilma Mankiller’s legacy (see The Cherokee Word For Water), though Leona is overwhelmed by a nightmare reserve combining issues from across Canada. Her status as an educated activist for territorial sovereignty, with one foot off the reserve, also echoes the relentless activism of Laura Kellogg, who once sarcastically described herself as “a product of almost every institution on the outside except the insane asylum and Tammany Hall.” Leona applies an addiction recovery narrative to self-government: “we can’t keep blaming Ottawa for all our problems, it’s a flawed system we have to navigate.” Faced with a revelation of child abuse, however, her defensive reaction is tragically typical: “I’ve known that man since we were kids,” before growing into a real ally for justice (sexual violence is a major theme, handled with refreshing emphasis on victim/survivor impact, though Scott’s filming of the strippers is predictably male-gazey). Leona’s struggle to keep faith with the reserve is embodied in her painfully personal struggle with her elder sister, Gail.

Gail Stoney

“If the American Nation… charges to the Indian all the demoralization it has brought upon him as his inheritance, it has heaped upon him not only plunder and outrage but the stigma of inferiority.” – Laura Kellogg

Gail Stoney is a chronic alcoholic. Where Leona embodies the reserve’s recovery narrative, Gail is Blackstone: “it’s where I belong.” Gail is sharply intelligent, sarcastically cynical, fundamentally generous and warm-hearted, with a resilient will to live, but she is also a selfish addict who combines paranoia with deeply internalized negative self-image. Michelle Thrush’s raw performance adds layers with every episode, growing into the heart of the show (plus, I would watch Michelle Thrush read a laundry list). As Leona despairs of turning the reserve around, Cecil asks, “in your counseling experience, does an addict make a turnaround overnight?” By embodying the renewal of the reserve in the personal journey of an addict, Blackstone illustrates that the perseverance to withstand setbacks, and the fortitude to resist instant gratification, are key to the entire community’s recovery. It is Cecil who most empathizes with Gail’s solitary struggle for sovereignty over herself: “please do not self-destruct… if you look really deep inside, you will find that you have your father’s strength and determination. I know it,” implying that all of her father’s qualities as chief are equally needed in this personal struggle. Whenever Chief Leona approaches Gail with assumed superiority, she is resented and rejected. Conscious of her public image, she tries to censor Gail’s problems: “everybody is watching me right now, I need you to make an effort,” which only drives Gail to give up on herself: “I quit. Save you the embarrassment.”

In moments like this, Leona’s silencing and dismissive attitude to Gail almost echoes Chief Andy’s treatment of the entire reserve. Leona also struggles to take her own advice and forgive her alcoholic mother. Complexities like this elevate Blackstone above a simplistic battle between good and evil. The enemy is within, and right next door. Leona is urged to neglect Gail by sympathetic characters, because she has “bigger problems”. Yet, if a community is a collection of individuals, what problem can be bigger than any individual’s deepest crisis? As Leona is praised for her counseling skills, she says, “there’s a lot of need for it here. Our previous chief didn’t see it as a priority,” before the show cuts to Gail’s secret drinking, that Leona herself cannot see as a priority. As Gail collapses in a ditch, the song “I Won’t Be There For You” plays. Saving Gail requires nothing but the deepest love and solidarity, to believe that Gail is capable of saving herself. Gail demands that onlookers face her pain and loss, leaving the noose which hung her daughter, Natalie, to confront Andy “every time he drives by in his fancy truck.” As Leona counsels, over a montage that includes Gail’s hospitalization and Andy’s painful relationship to his father, “what we’re trying to do here is to locate that point of brokenness. Start to find a connection to ourselves again. So we can start to be who we were truly meant to be.” Keeping faith and believing in Gail’s potential is an emotionally bruising challenge, but it is the heart of the show’s opening season.

Natalie Stoney

“They don’t know us; they don’t know what it means to be killed alive.” – Laura Kellogg

Natalie Stoney haunts Blackstone, as Laura Palmer haunts Twin Peaks. For her mother, Natalie represents the guilt of Gail’s neglect, as well as her own possible doom. Natalie’s ghost becomes the taunting voice of Gail’s negative self-image, as Tom Fraser will be for his son Andy, or as boyfriend Chris voices Leona’s urge to abandon Blackstone. For Leona herself, Natalie’s suicide is her catalyst to submit to the duty of leadership. Leona fights to challenge the social narrative that victims like Natalie are inevitably doomed: “they are not ghosts. They are children.” As a ghost, Natalie makes the trope of the “vanishing Indian” into a visible presence to be resisted. As played by Roseanne Supernault, star of Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes For Young Ghouls, Natalie is as smart, fundamentally sweet and sarcastic as her mother. Though rape was the catalyst for Natalie’s suicide, her filmed interview with Victor, before the rape, points to deeper issues. As Victor approaches, a drugged-out Natalie slurs “you wanna fuck me too?” already understanding sexual exploitation as her only value, or her inevitable treatment. When asked about her dreams for the future, she mumbles “what future?” Her rape was an unjustifiable assault on her bodily sovereignty, but her suicide is a choice to surrender that sovereignty, inspired by this internalized sense of futurelessness. Believing that any group is inevitably doomed, whether that belief is triumphalist or pitying, is an act of psychological violence against them. Chief Andy may try to appropriate Natalie’s silenced body, to point the finger at “victimization by an apathetic, indifferent administration in Ottawa” in his neverending search for funds, but on Blackstone, Natalie will speak for herself.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Osr4GmPsmQ”]

Acing the Bechdel, confronting rape apologism, modeling female leadership… in just the trailer

Blackstone is available to watch on hulu

Brigit McCone is mad that hulu is unavailable in Ireland and hopes Blackstone gets a distribution deal with TG4. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

The Women Pull No Punches In Fiery, Feminist ‘Mad Max’ by Mandalit del Barco at NPR

Mad Max: Fury Road: George Miller’s Feminist Answer to His Own Franchise? by Sasha James at The Mary Sue

Even a Stuffed Bear Gets More Respect than Trans People by Leela Ginelle at Bitch Media

ACLU Goes After Hollywood’s Gender Gap by Anita Little at Ms. blog

Chaz Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Widow, Set to Produce Emmett Till Biopic by Deonna Anderson at For Harriet

Melissa McCarthy on Hollywood sexism: ‘It’s an intense sickness’ by Sara Vilkomerson at Entertainment Weekly

Cannes Review: Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol’ is a Masterful Lesbian Romance Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara by Eric Kohn at Indiewire

Watch: Samantha Bee is “Female as F-ck” and Crashing the Sausage Party That is Late-Night TV by Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

Watch Trailer for Powerful Upcoming Documentary, ‘A Ferguson Story’ by Sergio at Shadow and Act

Box Office: ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ Pulls ‘Dark Knight’-Style Coup With $70M Weekend by Scott Mendelson at Forbes

Stars Of TLC’s ‘Curvy Brides’: All Curves Are Beautiful by Karen Grigsby Bates at NPR

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘Bessie’: A Mainstream Portrait of Black Queer Women by a Black Queer Woman

The difference between ‘Bessie’ and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles: she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

In some ways writer-director Dee Rees’s Bessie (showing tonight on HBO) about “The Empress of the Blues” singer Bessie Smith, is a story we’ve seen before, complete with feathers, spangles, and bootleg liquor as the action meanders through the 1920s, but a script (written by Rees, the late white playwright Horton Foote, plus Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois) about a queer Black woman (Smith was bisexual) by an out queer Black woman who also directed is unusual, especially on a platform as popular as HBO. The only other recent example I can think of is Rees’s last film, the theatrically released, indie, coming-out drama, Pariah.

The difference between Bessie and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles–she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

We see Bessie mentored by the slightly older blues singer Ma Rainey (also the subject of one of August Wilson’s most famous plays) and with Mo’Nique in the role we get a taste of the complex interplay of Black women we saw in Pariah between the main queer character, Alike (played by Adepero Oduye) and her homophobic mother (Kim Wayans). Rainey (Mo’Nique is terrific in the role and made me wish she were in more films) at first is a mother/teacher figure showing Smith that she should deliver her songs teetering at the front edge of the stage as she explains, “If you not riskin’ nothing, neither will they.” She also instructs her to find people in the audience to focus on and sing to, “The blues is not about people knowing you. It’s about you knowing people.”

With these two characters Rees is, again, one of the few filmmakers showing an audience one queer Black woman (Rainey, though she had a husband who was also her business partner, was as out as one could be in those days, singing, “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends/They must’ve been women, cause I don’t like no men”) offering guidance to another (we see Smith in multiple scenes with a girlfriend, Lucille, played by Tika Sumpter). When the two singers are relaxing in a saloon, Rainey is openly affectionate with her girlfriend and when she notices Smith nervously looking around, afraid to be seen in public with her girlfriend, Rainey tells her she shouldn’t care what other people think. Rainey and Smith are both presented as sexual, desirable beings (Latifah in one non-sexual scene reminiscent of Viola Davis in How To Get Away With Murder, removes her wig and makeup while also topless) in spite of both Latifah and Mo’Nique being over 40 and neither possessing the model-thin body type that is the default for most modern-day actresses.

But as Smith develops her stage presence and her great voice (we see the performers don’t have microphones, a condition which favors those who can easily reach the back row with no amplification, as Smith, and later in musical theater, Ethel Merman, did) we see Rainey look warily at her and eventually demote her from a starring role in the revue. Smith with her brother strikes out on her own and eventually outshines her mentor, both because of her talent, but also because of timing. The peak of her popularity as a live performer was just right for the nascent recording industry, which made better quality records of Smith’s work than of Rainey’s.

We see that Smith is reluctant to release “race records” because of the racist imagery used to promote them. But when she fails to be “respectable” enough for the Black nationalist record company during her audition (after a fawning invitation letter the very light-skinned president of the company signs “Yours in negritude”), she makes records for Columbia, a white-owned company, which offers her a flat fee, but no royalties, and features her photo, not a caricature, on the covers. The records become so popular, the Black farmworkers in the fields all stop their work to wave to her train car as it makes its way from town to town for live shows.

Smith grew up in a violent household (like many children of that era) and we see that she doesn’t hesitate to use her fists or a makeshift weapon at hand if she needs to. When we first meet her she receives a scar from one of these fights and we see it throughout the rest of the film, to remind us of these beginnings. I could have used fewer flashbacks to violent incidents when she was a little girl, especially since, unlike the at times violent mother in Pariah, Smith’s abusive older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander) is neither as nuanced in the script nor in her performance as Kim Wayans’s Audrey.

We also see Smith’s relationships with men (even as Lucille remains a member of her revue as well as Bessie’s girlfriend, a portrait of, for a time, fairly happy polyamory) including her husband Jack Gee (played by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams, his distinctive facial scar perfect for this volatile character) who becomes her manager and, because of his propensity for violence, her sometime protector in the business deals that commonly cheated Black performers. We see both how she should get far away from this man and how his presence works to her advantage–and that she may very well have seen this paradox too.

I wish the film had used more period music (as well as more music that includes Smith’s voice, not Latifah’s) instead of the score which could have been lifted from pretty much any movie covering any era, the orchestra always intruding, telegraphing to us what we should be feeling instead of letting us feel. The last time I heard a score that distracted and irritated me to this extent–while still being completely forgettable–it was by the same composer: Rachel Portman. I know we need more women composers in film, but I much prefer the work of innovators like Mica Levi. I also wish the film had made its center the relationships with Rainey and Lucille (the publicity for the film, especially that targeted to queer women makes these two roles seem much bigger than they turn out to be). We’ve seen the story of the abusive husband-manager before (though Smith’s was probably one of the earlier examples) and the performer whose fortunes fall as her popularity does as surely as we haven’t seen complicated relationships between queer Black women, especially not on HBO.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FhmzwXfgz8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]