Author: Amber Leab

Guest Writer Wednesday: I Want to Establish The Ron Swanson Scholarship In Women’s Studies

This is a cross-post from Worst Professor Ever.
I’m so excited about last night’s episode of Parks and Recreation. In the first place, it was written by a woman (Chelsea Peretti, who’s also written for The Sarah Silverman Program) and directed by another woman (Nicole Holofcener, who’s done actual movies and stuff).  And the feminist cognoscenti have already recognized Leslie Knope as an even greater feminist icon than Liz Lemon.

(Not to toot my own horn, but I was on the forefront of Parks and Recreation gender criticism, showing my gender students “The Hunting Trip” episode as early as 2010, then subjecting them to Boskin’s theory of how playing stereotypes disingenuously is actually good for deflating them — watch as Leslie covers for a co-worker with stereotypical “feminine” excuses.)
Nick Offerman, the man who plays Ron Effing Swanson.
NBC Photo: Mitchell Heath, from the Hollywood Reporter interview.

Lately Leslie’s’ political career has been occupying our attention* but if you were watching my Twitter stream last night, you’ll see that I was seriously geeking out, in real time, about Ron Swanson. I was ecstatic when he said to the camera, “I believe in the value of education.” I was thrilled when he pushed Andy to take challenging classes, rather than going for an easy A. And I just about lost it when it became apparent that while Andy was shopping around for classes, Ron was shopping around for lady professors — and liked the women’s studies professor best, declaring that he would propose to her if she weren’t so opposed to marriage. Yay, Ron!
The beauty of Ron’s character is that he’s manly enough to go for powerful women, as has been clearly established in previous episodes. And his interest in the women’s studies professor (who was talking about the oppressive nature of society) is completely believable given his libertarian beliefs. It doesn’t hurt that the actor who plays Swanson is unabashedly manly himself (read the interview with Nick Offerman) and that he’s married to Megan Mullaly, who is hella funny. I love that the character, the writing, and the directing came together so organically to create such greatness last night.
At the end of the episode, Andy decides to take the women’s studies class but can’t pay for it, so Ron makes Andy the recipient of the very first Ron Swanson Scholarship.
It’s decided, then: if I ever get rich, I am going to establish a Ron Swanson scholarship, for real. And it’s going to be in women’s studies, and it’s going to go to the candidate, male or female, who most represents the values that Ron Swanson stands for.
I think I’ll call it the Ron Effing Swanson Fellowship.
Who’s with me?
*Okay, regarding Leslie and Ben in this episode, I admit I initially had reaction similar to Alyssa Rosenberg’s, with the added concern that we’d fallen down the rom-com rabbit hole. But then I thought, Well hell, what would Don Draper have done? Or any other male character? The same thing, probably, except the other person wouldn’t be his boss. So I decided the writers couldn’t win, generically speaking.

Amanda Krauss is a former professor and current writer/speaker/humor theorist. From 2005-2010 she taught courses on gender, culture, and the history of comedy at Vanderbilt University, and in 2010 was invited to present a course entitled “Humor, Ancient to Modern” at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. While she is focusing on her current blog (Worst Professor Ever, which satirically chronicles issues of education and lifelong learning) some of her theoretical archives can be found at risatrix.com. She previously contributed Rom-Coms Don’t Suck to Bitch Flicks. 


Who’s the "Hero" of the 2012 Oscar Awards?

Billy Crystal: He’s gilded and swooping in to save the 2012 Oscars

I’m one of those old-fashioned people who enjoys watching the Academy Awards every year. Movies, spectacle, the opportunity to throw a party complete with Oscar Bingo and a contest to see who can best predict the winners — I love it for all of these reasons. Even knowing that the awards are essentially a political campaign, in which the studios/production companies/actors with the most money (and thus the most visibility and power) typically win, and even though the films/performances that I’m rooting for are often not even nominated, there’s still something important about the show (I’ve previously talked about why here): it reminds us of the film industry’s power structure and what kinds of films are supposed to be culturally important.
Let me be more specific. The New York Times ran a piece titled “Billy Crystal Is Gilded as Hero of Oscar Night” which discusses the Governors Awards ceremony, held on Saturday, November 12th, honoring the  Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award winner and honorary Oscar winners (which were previously part of the televised ceremony, but removed this year to “to speed up the telecast and give more personal attention to their winners). Because we wouldn’t want to take televised time to honor people who have made a significant contribution to film, or anything, am I right?
But what dominated the piece — and the ceremony, if we can trust what Michael Cieply wrote — is the fact that Billy Crystal is now hosting the Oscar Ceremony. Or, as the article states, he “swooped in to save the Academy Awards.” Um, okay. I imagine it was just like that. 
See, you might have missed it (if you don’t closely follow these things), but the person producing the show this year, Brett Ratner, said some pretty awful things, and when he resigned, the person he’d picked to host — Eddie Murphy — decided he would follow suit and pulled out of the gig. A new producer was selected, and he chose Billy Crystal, who has hosted the show eight previous times. 
Am I old-fashioned, or is that simply how I’m made to feel by the Academy?
Now, I have nothing against Billy Crystal. He seems like an overall pretty good guy, and I enjoyed When Harry Met Sally back in 1989, and thought City Slickers was pretty good back when I was eleven years old. I know he’s been in movies since then, but he’s not really on my personal radar as a Current Film Star. (Neither is Eddie Murphy for that matter, though I think he would’ve proven at least an interesting host, and would have improved on the Academy’s abysmal track record of including African Americans — at any capacity — in the program.) 
Back to that “old fashioned” idea. This year, the Academy at least showed its awareness that younger people were often alienated by the show when they shrewdly hired James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts, a move that backfired, mostly due to Franco phoning it in (I can’t be the only one sure he was stoned) and Hathaway trying her best to make up for her near-comatose co-host. According to the NYT article,

That it should be Mr. Crystal who saved the day met little disapproval from those who gathered on Saturday night, even if it means that the Academy’s quest for youth and a more diverse audience will yield once more to a neo-vaudevillian who is often compared here to Bob Hope, who holds the record as the 19-time host of the show.

Maybe I’m not old-fashioned; maybe I’m stupid for continuing to tune in to programming that doesn’t give a damn whether I watch or not. Or, even worse, maybe they’re just assuming they have “female viewers” (because we’re a silly monolith) because, you know, OMG Pretty Dresses. 
Oprah Winfrey wins the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award
There’s something else, though, that I can’t not notice about the NYT article: In the entire 1,187-word article, only about 200 words (3 paragraphs) were devoted to one of  the highest honors and most controversial moments of the night: Oprah Winfrey winning the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. She’s the first Black woman to win the award (Quincy Jones won in 1995, the only Black man to win it), yet her win has been called “boneheaded” and “a shameless bid for a ratings boost,” largely because her contributions to the film industry are seen by insiders as lacking. Further, according to NWFCC chair Armond White,

Is the Academy kowtowing to the silly complaints that no black actors were nominated this year?” says White. “The Oscars are supposed to be about the works Hollywood admires, not a score-keeping mechanism for ethnic and racial equality. By that standard the Oscars fail Native Americans, Asians, Africans, Scandinavians, and Latin Americans every year. I’m afraid those complaints were just media hype, an attempt by some to hold the Oscars hostage to political correctness.

Yes, the Oscars do fail African Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, and many more marginalized groups every year. But it isn’t “political correctness” at work in pointing out these gross injustices. It’s a privileged group of people (members of The Academy) who willfully ignore contributions in film by people of color–especially women of color–and an industry operating with a severe case of institutionalized racism.
The night’s other two winners, James Earl Jones and Dick Smith, got two paragraphs and one paragraph, respectively, in the NYT piece. Jones has appeared in over 50 films, yet is even more of an afterthought than Winfrey.
So, what does this single article tell us about the Academy, the Oscar Awards, and the New York Times?
Do I really need to spell it out?

‘Fire’: Part One of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements Trilogy’

Fire (1996)
Fire is the first film in Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy (Earth and Water follow). Made in 1996, it focuses on a middle-class family in present-day (funny how I still think of the 1990s as “present day,” despite the global changes of the past fifteen years) India.
The film centers around two married couples–Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and his wife Radha (Shabana Azmi), and Ashok’s brother Jatin (Javed Jaffrey) and his wife Sita (Nandita Das)–who run a carryout restaurant and video store, and who share a home with the brothers’ mother, Biji (Kushal Rekhi), and their employee, Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry). Jatin and Sita are newlyweds, but we quickly learn that Jatin loves another woman (Julie, a Chinese-Indian woman who has perfected an American accent and dreams of returning to Hong Kong), and married a “traditional Indian woman” out of pressure from his brother and mother.
The film offers the womens’ perspectives on the conflicts between desire and duty, and between tradition and the realities of a modern India.
As with almost any film centering on family drama and dynamics, we see the tensions simmering beneath the surface as the film focuses on the two women and their lack of fulfillment from their marriages. Mehta, in the DVD’s Director’s Notes for Fire, states,
I wanted to make a film about contemporary, middle-class India, with all its vulnerabilities, foibles and the incredible extremely dramatic battle that is waged daily between the forces of tradition and the desire for an independent, individual voice.
More than 350 million Indians belong to the burgeoning middle-class and lead lives not unlike the Kapur family in Fire. They might not experience exactly the same angst or choices as these particular characters, but the confusions they share are very similar–the ambiguity surrounding sexuality and its manifestation and the incredible weight of figures (especially female ones) from ancient scriptures which define Indian women as pious, dutiful, self-sacrificing, while Indian popular cinema, a.k.a. “Bollywood”, portrays women as sex objects (Mundu’s fantasy).
To capture all this on celluloid was, to a large part, the reason I wanted to do Fire. Even though Fire is very particular in its time and space and setting, I wanted its emotional content to be universal.
Sita learns very early in her marriage that her husband is in love with Julie–he doesn’t hide the relationship from her–and she seeks solace and comfort from Radha. Radha hasn’t been intimate with her husband in 13 years; when Ashok learned she was unable to conceive, he sublimated his desires (and began channeling a good bit of their income) into religious study with his swami. The friendship between Sita and Radha soon evolves into a sexual relationship, and when the women are found out by their family, they must decide whether to obey tradition or follow their hearts.
Radha and Sita
The film explores what traditional marriage has done to alienate these women–particularly Radha–from their own desires. The desire for intimacy and sex, sure, but also the desire to live their lives for themselves, rather than for their husbands. My reading of the film is certainly from a Western perspective, however, and you could argue that the film is about discovering desire (rather than reconnecting to it after a period of alienation), since the traditional, conservative Hindu/Indian culture didn’t allow much–if any–space for individual desire for women. Sita embodies changes in the society, as she comes from a traditional family, but is more critical of the traditional rituals and more in touch with her body and her desires. (When we first meet her, for example, she playfully tries on her new husband’s pants and dances around their bedroom, unashamed of her body.) Sita is also the one who initiates a physical relationship with Radha.
Depicting a lesbian relationship on film fifteen years ago proved hugely controversial, and Fire was immediately banned in Pakistan, and soon after pulled from Indian cinemas for religious insensitivity. Although the film twice passed the Indian censor board–they requested no editing, and no scenes removed–violent protests caused movie houses to stop showing the film. In “Burning Love,” Gary Morris writes,
The reaction of some male members of the audience was so violent that the police had to be called. “I’m going to shoot you, madam!” was one response. According to Mehta, the men who objected couldn’t articulate the word “lesbian” — “this is not in our Indian culture!” was as much as they could bring themselves to say. 

It isn’t only the tangible pleasures of a lesbian relationship that created such heated reactions, though that’s certainly the most obvious reason. This beautifully shot, well-acted film is a powerful, sometimes hypnotic critique of the rigid norms of a patriarchal, post-colonial society that keeps both sexes down.

The controversy surrounding the film may have superseded the film itself–which is beautifully shot, heartbreaking, and even darkly comedic at times. Fire contains so many elements that I love in film: strong female characters, an exploration of complex issues that is never oversimplified and that never leads to individuals being labeled good or evil (although they certainly behave in good and/or evil ways), and immersion into a culture that isn’t entirely familiar to me. Speaking to a Western audience, Mehta has stated that one of her goals in filmmaking is to “demystify India,” its culture and its traditions. Fire complicates our understanding of a traditional patriarchal culture, and throws into sharp relief the ways these traditions impact women in particular.

Again, here’s Mehta on Fire:

We women, especially Indian women, constantly have to go through a metaphorical test of purity in order to be validated as human beings, not unlike Sita’s trial by fire.

I’ve seen most of the women in my family go through this, in one form or another. Do we, as women, have choices? And, if we make choices, what is the price we pay for them?

***

There is a ton of information online about Fire. Here are some selected articles for further reading:

Movie Review: ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
This is a guest post from Carrie Nelson.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is a story told in fragments. Interspersed in the narrative are flashbacks, dreams and hallucinations, so it isn’t always clear what events are happening when, and which ones are actually happening at all. But that’s part of the power of the film – the fragments set an uneasy tone, allowing the viewer to easily slip into the mindset of the heroine as her sense of self and reality slowly unravel.
When we meet Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), she is escaping from a cult in the Catskills. Once she contacts and reunites with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), we learn that she has been out of touch with her family (and ostensibly living with the cult) for two years. The film chronicles Martha’s adjustment to life in a wealthy Connecticut suburb with Lucy and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), all while Martha privately reflects on the traumatic experiences she’s left behind.
Through flashbacks, we learn that charismatic leader Patrick (John Hawkes) gave Martha the name Marcy May when she first visits his wilderness compound. At first, Patrick’s home seems like a harmless hippie commune, with rotating chore lists, sustainable gardening and guitar sing-alongs. Soon, though, the façade disappears, and Marcy May is stuck in an ongoing cycle of abuse. At the risk of giving too much away, I will say that one of the more disturbing elements of the film is watching Marcy May transform from the abused to the enabler of abuse. She buys into Patrick’s manipulations so easily that by the time she realizes what’s happened, too much damage has already been done.
We never learn much about Martha’s life before she became Marcy May, but the lack of information does not take away from the audience’s ability to connect to the character. Through her conversations with Lucy, we understand that Martha spent much of her adolescence without close family ties. Lucy was in college when Martha needed a support system, but the sisters never had a close bond. The viewer gets the sense that Martha did not have much of a plan after graduating from high school – not college, not job prospects, not reuniting with her sister. She was drifting, looking for a purpose, which is how she falls in with Patrick. She has nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to – why wouldn’t she connect with such a group? Though we don’t know the specifics of Martha’s history, she is developed strongly enough that her actions are plausible, believable and even disturbingly realistic.
One of the strengths of the film is the emphasis it places on female relationships. The core of the film is Martha’s relationship with Lucy at home and Marcy May’s relationship with Zoe (Louisa Krause), Sarah (Julia Garner) and Katie (Maria Dizzia) at Patrick’s. Much like Margaret Atwood’s brilliant dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, these relationships take place within the confines of patriarchal communities. In Ted and Lucy’s marriage, Ted is the head of the household. He takes issue with Martha moving in with them, and his actions – and the stress he puts on both Lucy and Martha – strain the already tenuous relationship between the sisters. In the cult, the male members are overtly privileged over the female members. In the opening scene, we see that the women in Patrick’s house are not allowed to eat dinner until the men have finished. Chores appear to be segregated by gender, with the men chopping wood and the women sewing, cooking and childrearing. There’s also an incredibly creepy moment when we learn that the children born on the compound, all fathered by Patrick, are all male. The audience never learns what happens to the female babies, but the insinuation is horrifying.
And still, in both of these environments, bonds between women flourish. Martha and Lucy have their differences, but it is clear that they both want to have a relationship again, and they are determined to do whatever they can to make that possible, even while Ted makes Martha feel threatened and unwelcome. Meanwhile, Zoe takes Marcy May under her wing and eases her into the community; this relationship is mirrored later in the film, when Sarah joins the cult and Marcy May transitions from initiated to initiator. Despite the traumas witnessed and experienced by these women, their relationships stay strong. They share support, laughter and strength in the face of abuse, time and time again. Complex relationships between women aren’t commonplace in film these days, so Martha Marcy May Marlene is a refreshing change of pace in this regard.
I’ve heard Martha Marcy May Marlene repeatedly compared to last year’s Winter’s Bone; both films feature beautiful young blondes in breakout roles, playing tough, dynamic characters, opposite creepy performances by John Hawkes. I love both films, but Martha Marcy May Marlene is sticking with me in a way that Winter’s Bone has not. Though Winter’s Bone is a challenging and emotionally difficult film, its protagonist, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), has closure at the end of her journey. The chilling, ambiguous ending of Martha Marcy May Marlene, however, does not give Martha any sense of closure. No matter how one interprets the ending, it’s clear that it represents the beginning of her horror, rather than her escape from it. The ending of Martha Marcy May Marlene offers no comfort, and its power is still felt long after the credits roll.
I don’t know if Martha Marcy May Marlene can be called a feminist film, per se. None of the underlying messages are inherently feminist or socially progressive; the politics aren’t what make this film interesting. But I do know that this film contains more strong, developed female characters than one typically sees in films today, and the relationships between those women are the backbone of the movie. In particular, Olsen’s performance as Martha/Marcy May is stands out as one of the best I’ve seen this year. Martha Marcy May Marlene is one of the best films you will see this year, featuring some of the most dynamic female characters to appear on-screen this year. Check it out.
Carrie Nelson has previously written aboutPrecious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, The Social Network, Sleepaway Camp, and Mad Men for Bitch Flicks. She is a Founder and Editor ofGender Across Bordersand works as a grant writer for an LGBT nonprofit organization in NYC. 

Guest Writer Wednesday: Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan: Viewers’ and Critics’ Miss-steps in a Dance with a Female Protagonist

Black Swan (2010)

As Mila Kunis’s character descends upon Natalie Portman’s in the (dream) oral sex scene in Black Swan, a college-age young woman in the movie theater audibly whispers, “And this is why every guy in the theater is here.” 

Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 Black Swan is a film about repression, perfection, and letting go. 
It is a film about finding, torturing, losing, and gaining oneself through destruction, much like many postmodern films of the same genre (Fight Club, along with Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler). 
But to too many in that theater and in theaters across the country, it is a sexy, crazy, girl movie about ballet. 
Even though most of the marketing of the film catered directly to the male gaze (focusing, of course, on that oral sex scene, which had nothing to do with sex in the context of the film), it is considered either a movie about a girl, or a movie for girls. Even in the sponsored post on Jezebel (which was heavily promoting the film through advertising), women were supposed to come see the film because of pretty ballet, and shocking scenes—psychological and sexual—all touted in a juvenile, sing-song manner: “Natalie violently masturbates face-down on a mattress under the gazes of two creepy stuffed bunnies. For real.” “Natalie makes out with Mila!” The advertisers seemed desperate to sell a different film to audiences. Females would surely flock to theaters to see ballet, so how could it be marketed toward men (and as seen here, women)? Frivolous lesbian sex. Because certainly men wouldn’t want to see a film about a ballerina (note that these marketing concerns certainly weren’t an issue for The Wrestler). 
The IMDB page describes Black Swan as “A thriller that zeros in on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and a rival.” 
But it’s not. Nina’s (Portman) rival, Lily (Kunis), has almost nothing to do with the central plot and theme of this film. However, the allure of feminine cattiness, jealousy, and competitiveness is much easier to digest than the idea that a film could focus on universal human conflicts with a female protagonist. 
Aronofksy’s 2008 film The Wrestler is described on IMDB as follows: “A faded professional wrestler must retire, but finds his quest for a new life outside the ring a dispiriting struggle. “ 
Personal conflict, inner-struggle, the gender-neutral “quest.” 
In an interview that touched upon gender issues in Black Swan, Aronofsky said, “… to me, if you paint a human character with real emotions and really empathize with them, it doesn’t matter if it’s a 50-something aging wrestler, or a 20-something ambitious dancer, they’re just people.” How unfortunate that we must hear that explanation from a director, instead of simply understanding it. 
Lest the blame of this feminine vs. universal (masculine) protagonist issue be placed solely upon the marketing and audience, the feminist lens must also be properly focused. In Debra Cash’s “Swanday Bloody Swanday: Darren Aronofsky’s Sadistic, Misogynistic New Film,” she refers to the film as a “textbook demonstration of what academics refer to as the male gaze… Aronofsky’s fable portrays female powerlessness on every level—youth, friendship, collegiality, retirement, motherhood.” And that in itself is misogynistic? Should we not portray powerlessness because we want to be powerful? Had Aronofsky been celebrating powerlessness, maybe that argument would hold true, but he certainly was not. Showing how destructive powerlessness is should be viewed as a feminist action. 
Many feminist film reviewers also lambasted the misogyny of the ballet’s artistic director, Thomas (played by Vincent Cassel), even though his character’s inherent sexism (referring to his principle dancer as his “Little Princess,” for example) is essential to the themes of repression and being able to break free from said repression. Jill Dolan, at The Feminist Spectator, says that “As her [Nina’s] relationship with Thomas gets more and more entwined, she begins to suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, idealizing and even identifying with Thomas and his mercurial cruelty.” This is begging the question that Nina is the victim–would we ever assume a grown man in a similar role was the victim? Perhaps we’d glance at the notion, but never give him the simple, passive role of “victim.” Relegating Nina to the role of the victim belittles and negates the larger focus of the film. 
While Thomas’s advice to Nina to touch herself is uncomfortable, it is effective, not purely sexist, in trying to force her to find her Black Swan. What better way to discuss this clearly feminist idea—the female orgasm and the difficulty to attain it due to outside and inside pressures—than in the context of the dichotomy of the White and Black Swans? When she finally does achieve orgasm during the aforementioned dream sequence, it’s clear she can do so only when she has lost herself enough, and lost herself to a point where she can blame someone else for her destruction, that she can let herself (and her Black Swan) free. 
While this literal and figurative climax also serves as the beginning of her perfection and destruction, we can see that the destructive nature of this epiphany relies on the fact that she has not achieved freedom by herself. Dolan presents this scene as if it is a lesbian sex scene, as does Cash. In doing so, these feminist commentators take away the importance of the scene by assuming it’s simply for the male gaze, when in fact it is all about Nina overcoming, or attempting to overcome, the passive social and sexual world that she inhabits, while still striving for perfection. 
This leaves the feminist viewer to wonder what makes a film feminist? Must sexism lose and the oppressed woman break free and live happily ever after? Instead, perhaps the truly feminist film is one that makes the female protagonist represent humanity, not just womanhood. Dolan ends her article with the line: “That’s a message that’s not good for the girls.” This further proves the idea that the message of success through self-destruction cannot be gender-neutral with a female protagonist. 
Aviva Dove-Viebahn, in her Ms. Magazine Blog review “Sex, Lies and Ballet,” acknowledges Aronofsky’s “fascination with the intense humanity and obsessive desires of his characters” in a refreshingly comprehensive review. Dove-Viebahn clearly sees what the others miss—that we as viewers are supposed to be questioning and compelled by Aronofksy’s narrative. 
In the Variety article “Stalking the perfect ending,” Mark Heyman (one of the writers of the film, along with John McLaughlin and Andres Heinz) said about the film’s end: “We wanted it to have some kind of emotional weight and significance and somehow be satisfying, even though it’s tragic… so that it felt like she had achieved something even as she had destroyed herself.” It seems that the writers and the director have a clear understanding of the purpose of the film, and the complicated, yet simple, themes. Why did so many audiences and critics miss the point? 
In Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, he explores probability and the human urge to predict in his Black Swan Theory (typically used to explain world and financial events). He derives the title of the book and theory with the story of the white swan in the “old world”—people had only ever seen white swans, so they assumed all swans were white. The sighting of a black swan was a complete surprise. He says, “It illustrates a severe limitation in our learning from observations or experiences and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans.” The male protagonist is the white swan—the millions of white swans. Aronofsky’s Black Swan—the female protagonist—has shocked the people in our “old” world. We don’t know what to do with it exactly, and are unclear of its purpose. 
Taleb goes on to describe the three attributes of the Black Swan: “it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations,” “it carries an extreme impact,” and “in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” The audiences who quickly categorize Black Swan as a movie for/about women, or the critics who lambast its misogyny, are unable to otherwise grapple with the outlier of a female protagonist who can show us ourselves—male and female. 
Unfortunately, we are still entrenched in a culture where men’s stories are universal stories of humanity, and women’s stories are women’s stories. Until we move past that, and realize that just as we don’t have to be aging professional wrestlers to understand the humanity and struggle of The Wrestler’s protagonist, nor do we have to be young female ballerinas to see Nina as a character that speaks to us in Black Swan, we will continue to be in gendered places in the movie theater, where male protagonists are the norm, and female protagonists are only noteworthy if they are being gone down on.

Leigh Kolb is an English and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri, and has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. She lives on a small farm with her husband, dogs, chickens, and garden, and makes a terrible dinner party guest because all she wants to talk about is feminism and reproductive rights.

Preview: The Iron Lady

The Iron Lady (2011)

One of the questions I always ask myself about new movies is this: Why this film at this particular time? While movies are always a blend of art and moneymaking, they don’t rise up in a vacuum. They are informed by the culture surrounding them, by the political landscape, and by the consumer demands of the time.
The Iron Lady stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first and thus far only prime minister. The film bills itself as a story of gender, class, and power–and specifically the price Thatcher paid for obtaining her power. But there are clearly lines to be drawn–in the US, at least–between her time as PM (1979-1990) and our current political climate, between her conservative attacks on unions, deregulation, and privatization and what’s happening in states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 
Watch the trailer:

It’s also interesting to think about the film in the context of women in politics–again, I’m thinking primarily of the US–and what it takes for a woman to be successful. At the beginning of the trailer we see an emphasis on her appearance and her voice (which reminds me of The King’s Speech, last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner–the similarity is likely no accident), and the importance of maintaining an image of leadership and power. Our culture is obsessed with image, and we see how closely scrutinized female politicians are–from Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and alleged cleavage when she was running for president in 2008, to Michele Bachmann’s french manicure and shoe choices this year, the media tears down Women who Want to Lead.
Thatcher is, of course, a very controversial figure, and it’ll be interesting to see how the film actually deals with her political decisions. Just as I was skeptical about Oliver Stone’s film W (about the rise of George W. Bush), I’m skeptical of a biopic about another living (and conservative) politician. We’ll have to wait and see how this one turns out.
The Iron Lady opens in the US on January 13th and in the UK on January 6th. Are you planning to see it?

On Entertainment Weekly’s "42 Unforgettable Nude Scenes"

This morning I found myself reading old NYT news-alert emails, surfing Facebook, and, finally, browsing a slideshow from Entertainment Weekly called “Bodies of Work: 42 Unforgettable Nude Scenes” which was published earlier this month. (It was a productive morning, see?)
We talk a lot at Bitch Flicks about female bodies in films (and especially in film marketing, as evidenced in our posters series), and how bodies are offered up for viewers’ consumption. There are a few things that strike me about the scenes that EW highlights. I haven’t seen every film mentioned, so there may be more complexities in some of the examples, but there are certainly identifiable trends.
I recommend looking through the slideshow before you continue reading, but you can always go back and look through it afterwards. There is very little nudity in the screen shots from the scenes, so I’d label the slideshow safe for work.
Uma Thurman in The Adventures of Baron Munchenhausen
1. Male bodies are comedic, female bodies are sexy.

There are, of course, a few exceptions, but this is overwhelmingly the case in these scenes. Photo after photo reveals male actors in comedic situations. Whether it’s the odd object hiding genitals (Ryan Gosling with Steve Carell’s head in Crazy, Stupid, Love; John Cleese with a picture frame in A Fish Called Wanda; Peter Sellers with a guitar in A Shot in the Dark) or the uncomfortable display of homophobia (Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat; Ed Helms in Cedar Rapids; Tyler Nilson in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), the naked male body is often played for laughs. At the same time, a majority of the female actors are shown as beautiful objects to look at, including women showering (Jessica Alba in Machete; Beverly D’Angelo in National Lampoon’s Vacation; Phoebe Cates in In Paradise) and women revealing themselves for a man (Kate Winslet in Titanic, or, as the article states “in almost anything”; Uma Thurman in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; Halle Berry in Monster).
This tells us something we likely already know: the female body is most often presented for male viewers’ consumption, yet the male body is also being presented for male viewers–most often in a comedic way that reinforces heterosexuality. This emphasizes the notion that Hollywood employs the male gaze, and that films are being made for a (white, heterosexual) male audience. Which leads me to my next point…
2. “Unforgettable” bodies are white bodies.

There is a lot of tokenism going on in EW‘s piece. There is one Asian man (Ken Jeong in The Hangover II), one Black woman (Halle Berry), one Hispanic woman (Jessica Alba)–and every other person on the list is white. Let me say that again. Out of 42 scenes, there are 3 people of color. Three. Uno, dos, tres. Oh, there’s also Bart Simpson, who is yellow, but also a cartoon. (Update: I left Jaye Davidson of The Crying Game off the list, so there is also one Black man–who is, incidentally, not the person prominently shown in the image for that film/scene. Thanks to reader Soirore for pointing this out to me.)
This speaks to the cultural desirability (and also the perceived comedic potential*) of bodies belonging to people of color. Although people of color are often objectified and exoticized for consumption, none–or very few–of these incidents have been deemed “unforgettable” by the fine folks at EW. On one level, it’s good that we don’t see the vulgar objectification of people of color here, in a piece that is essentially based on objectification (or, EW might argue, celebrating memorable nude scenes), but it also peculiar and disturbing that the list is so damn white.
*I also want to note that for nude bodies to have comedic potential, those bodies have to have a certain amount of cultural privilege. We can laugh at the white male body because laughing at the white male body poses no threat to men, precisely because white men have the privilege and power to laugh and be laughed at.
David Kelly in Waking Ned Devine
3. Male bodies are active, female bodies are passive. Thus, men are active and women are passive.

This is very close to the first conclusion highlighted above, but it’s worth separating because it’s so prevalent in our culture and in this piece. Two comedies–The Full Monty and Calendar Girls–exhibit the divide perfectly. Both films play the nude body as comedic, but also subvert the comedy and allow for some moments in which bodies generally not considered desirable by mainstream standards are both sensual and wanted. However, Calendar Girls features a group of older women who are photographed for a (nude) calendar (read: the female body as a static, passive object), while The Full Monty shows a group of men performing a stage show (read: the male body in motion, in action). 
It’s not just these two examples in the list, either. You have a man riding a motorcycle nude (David Kelly in Waking Ned Devine), a man running down the street nude (Will Ferrell in Old School), a man riding a horse nude (Russel Crowe in Hammers over the Anvil), a man fighting (Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises), etc. 
4. EW has an interesting definition of the word “scene.” They actually mean “person.”

It seems that the piece is mistitled, and that the word “person,” or even “performance” more accurately describes their interest. Nearly every picture features a single person, even if that person isn’t the only nude one in the scene, with only a few exceptions: Sandra Bullock & Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal; Mike Meyers & Elizabeth Hurley in Austin Powers; “The Old Gals” in Calendar Girl; “The Men” in The Full Monty; and Julian Sands, Rupert Graves & Simon Callow in A Room with a View (probably the most subversive example in the piece, as the scene features the three men frolicking together, comfortably nude, in a lake).
Thus, “unforgettable” images of nude bodies are ones that are generally individual people, for the viewers’ consumption, and there is very little interest in portraying (or viewing) sensuality or healthy sexuality.
There are a lot of other things I could say about this collection of nude scenes. There’s certainly something interesting about violence and the male body, and it can’t go unmentioned that there is only one example (from The Crying Game) or maybe two (if you include the scene from A Room with a View) that is not explicitly heteronormative.
What else do you notice about the scenes and/or bodies offered up in EW’s slide show? 

Also, we can play the same game as EW: What unforgettable scenes are missing from the original list?


Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

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“Leave Kim Alone!” by crunkista for The Crunk Feminist Collective

“Sugar in the Raw Delivers a Sweet Insult” by Larkin for About-Face

“BEV talks to Andrea Arnold about her latest triumph: Wuthering Heights” by Rachel Millward for Birds Eye View

“Pop Culture Really Does Tell You a Lot About How Screwed Up Americans Are” by Amanda Marcotte for Pandagon

“Fanboys, Feminism, and Frank Talk About Wonder Woman” by Tricia Barr for Fangirl, the Blog

“Ricki Lake Delivers Maternal Health Awareness” by Eleanor Goldberg for Huffington Post

14th Annual African American Women in Cinema Film Festival — New York City, Nov. 17-19

“Mom & Pop Culture: McGender: Unpacking the Happy Meal” by Avital Norman Nathman for Bitch Media


Leave your links in the comments!



‘Pray the Devil Back to Hell’ Portrays How the Women of Liberia, United in Peace, Changed a Nation

 

Written by Megan Kearns.

Men often dominate the debate of war, negotiation and even peace. Only one woman had ever won the Nobel Peace Prize. Until now. Last month, three women won the prize, including Leymah Gbowee and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (along with Tawakkul Karman in Yemen) who fought for women’s rights and helped achieve peace in war-torn Liberia.

We often think we can’t make a difference in the world. We’re just one person. How can anything we do matter? But the activism of the women of Liberia should inspire us all to realize that we can impact change.

In the 2nd installment of the Women, War & Peace series, director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail E. Disney, and WWP series executive producers and co-creators, create a Tribeca Film Festival-winning documentary. Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the powerful and uplifting story of the Liberian women, including activist and social worker Leymah Gbowee, who joined together and peacefully protested, helping end the civil war ravaging their country.

For almost 15 years, beginning on Christmas Eve in 1989, two civil wars plagued Liberia. Warlord and former president Charles Taylor resided at the center of both. He overthrew the regime during the first civil war and committed war crimes and human rights atrocities while president during the second civil war. Taylor recruited soldiers as young as 9-15 years old. With his private army, the dictator controlled the finances and terrorized the country.

“Life was bad. People…couldn’t even afford a cup of rice.”

Everyone in Liberia lived in a perpetual state of fear. Gbowee told how she trekked to her parents’ house, walking for 7 hours, while 5 months pregnant with her two young children. Her 3-year-old lamenting that he just wanted a piece of donut to eat. She said:

“Liberia had been at war so long that my children had been hungry and afraid their entire lives.”

Many pundits and journalists claimed ethnic conflicts spurred the civil war. But Gbowee elaborates:

“Some say war was about the gap between rich and poor. Some also say it was about the hatred between the different ethnic groups. Others say the war was to control natural resources. Power, money, ethnicity, greed…but there is nothing in my mind that should make people do what they did to the children of Liberia.”

Gbowee shares the inception for her radically simple idea for peace:

“I had a dream and it was like a crazy dream. Like someone was actually telling me to get the women of the church together and pray for peace.”

She rallied women from the surrounding Christian churches. Comprised of “ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters,” Gbowee and other women started the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative.

Asatu Bah Kenneth, Assistant Director of the Liberian National Police, attended a meeting of the Initiative, the only Muslim woman in the church. Inspired by their work, she reached out to other Muslim women, encouraging them to get involved. Kenneth formed the Liberian Muslim Women’s Organization to work towards peace. Kenneth said:

“When I sold the idea to them, they were more than excited.”

Initially divided by faith, the Christian and Muslim women soon came together. The two peace groups united to form the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Vaiba Flomo shared:

“But the message we took on was: Can a bullet pick and choose? Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?”

While the women were organizing, Taylor’s opponents prepared to go to war. The warlords wreaked havoc on the country, giving boys guns and intimidating civilians. Just as in Bosnia (and often happens in war), rape remained a constant threat for the women of Liberia. Journalist Janet Bryant-Johnson said:

“They can rape you in front of your children, they could rape you in front of your husband…And they just do anything because they had guns.”

People were forced to enter displacement camps. Not only did they live in “abject poverty,” people, especially children, died each day. The Liberian women went to the camps to see how people were faring. Their hope amidst tragedy inspired Gbowee:

“These women had seen the worst of the wars something that I had not seen but they still had that vibrancy for life. And just being able to help them, to sit and hold their hands, and to hug their kids and looking at people who had lost everything and still having hope, I think that was where I got baptized into the women’s movement.”

As the war progressed, the women wanted to take more drastic measures. Inspired by their faith, the women donned white garb to declare to people they stood for peace. Thousands of women protested at the fish market each and every day, a strategic location visible to Taylor. Carrying a huge banner stating, “The women of Liberia want peace now.” It was the first time in Liberia’s history where Christian & Muslim women came together.

While all of the women worked together, Gbowee’s indomitable will buoyed the women’s spirits. “Desperate for peace,” the women decided to engage in a sex strike from their husbands. As they protested, the women knew they had to be brave. Flomo declared:

“We were not afraid. My mother was like, “They will beat you people, and they will kill you.” And we said, “Well if I should get killed, just remember me, that I was fighting for peace.”

Kenneth became the women’s “spy,” keeping them abreast of developments. An international call for peace talks “emboldened the women.” Taylor initially refused to negotiate. But the women created a decree “demanding…not appealing” the Liberian government participate in the peace talks. Taylor finally decided to stop ignoring the women and meet with them, “the moment Gbowee had lived for.” The women marched to Taylor’s mansion to present their document. As they walked onward and chanted, groups of women joined them. When they reached Taylor’s mansion, Gbowee read their statement aloud:

“With this message that the women of Liberia…We are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand to secure the future. Because we believe as custodians of society tomorrow our children will ask us, “Mama, what was your role during the crisis?”

Taylor succumbed to the women’s demands and attended the peace talks in Ghana. Some women traveled to Ghana to protest. Gbowee said:

“We are their conscience, sitting out here. We are calling to their conscience to do the right thing. And the right thing now is to give the Liberian women and their children the peace that they so desperately need.”

As violence erupted in Monrovia, Liberia, some of the women remained in Ghana at the peace talks. Despite missiles and stray bullets, the other Liberian women risked their lives, continuing to protest each day at the fish market, singing and praying.

After 6 weeks, peace talks went nowhere. For the warlords, sleeping in lush accommodations and removed from the fighting, it was “like they were on vacation.” Frustrated, the women sat in the hall where the peace talks were held. “Seizing the hall,” the women locked arms and wouldn’t leave until a peace agreement was signed. Gbowee, accused of obstructing justice, passionately declared to the media at the conference:

“What we’ve done here today is to send up a signal to the world that we the Liberian women in Ghana, we are fed up with the war. We are tired of fighting, the killing of our people. We can do it again if we want to. And next time, we’ll be more than a thousand…We can do it and we’ll do it again.”

Two weeks later, they finally reach an agreement, including Taylor’s exile to Nigeria and the implementation of a transitional government until democratic elections held. As the women returned home, they were met with hugs and children chanting, “We want peace, no more war.” They knew their work wasn’t over as “peace is a process; it’s not an event.”

The women believed they couldn’t achieve peace until they attained democracy. So they campaigned for presidential candidate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. With the “Iron Lady’s” election, President Johnson Sirleaf (who has helped erase the national debt, built schools, improved roads and increased access to healthcare) became the first elected female president in Africa. She acknowledged the Liberian women’s brave accomplishment:

“It is the women who labored and advocated for peace throughout our region.”

Despite the horrific subject matter of war, the uplifting documentary exudes optimism. The women achieved something “unimaginable.” The beauty of the documentary lies in director Reticker showcasing the Liberian women. With no narrator, she lets their voices speak for themselves.

The Liberian women’s unity brought about peace. Community activist Etweda “Sugars” Cooper admits:

“If we had not had different women from different walks of life, banding together, we may not have been able to solve the problem.”

Gbowee believes the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell has lasting impact and can inspire women to realize their power and mobilize:

” … This documentary is like a landmark or something that tells other women, ‘People did it before we came, we’ve done it, and they can also do it,'” she said. “So it’s not a fluke. It can happen. People just need to rise up and rise above the politics that so deeply divide us as women.”

The women’s tenacity, resilience and unity will amaze and inspire you. Social injustices plague the world; the staggering number of problems can overwhelm. But one person can make a difference; a powerful reminder that we each matter. We need to put aside our differences to combat injustice and reclaim peace. One voice can inspire others, triggering disparate voices to harmoniously come together; a symphony of voices can change the world.

Watch the full episode of Pray the Devil Back to Hell online or on PBS.

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Kids Are All Right (for 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Man Men (for Mad Men Week), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for Emmy Week 2011), Alien/Aliens (for Women in Horror Week 2011), and I Came to Testify in the  Women, War & Peace series. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Welcome to Twin Peaks.



This is a guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King and Stephanie Cawley.

Cynthia’s take: 
Why do I like Twin Peaks?
I remember dialing through Netflix Streaming back in May of this year as a way of breaking up the cooking of several chopping-intensive dishes. The show was totally unappealing to me when it came out and I was in high school. But this year, for the first three episodes or so, I could take it or leave it: adultery and hysterics and murder with the occasional bright spots of Dale Cooper being absurdly smug about the quality of cherry pie. 
Slowly I paid more attention to the idea of intuition present in Cooper’s scenes. I felt more indifference about its postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities: fifties diners, women who all wear bright lipstick and clingy sweaters, a revolving door of high school types, baddies and inscrutable parents. 
Then, I saw the clip in which Agent Cooper dreams he is old, a little person talks to him backwards in a red room (redrum! redrum!) as does Laura Palmer who then whispers the name of her killer in his ear.
What.
And by the light of the next day, Cooper makes everyone go out in the middle of the woods, whispers the name of each murder suspect to a successive series of rocks in his hand and well, I’m not going to say more, but I was like what kind of bizarre Jungian Joseph Campbell version of the Trickster versus the Intuition is going on here? 
I love these parts but the over-the-top violence constantly involving the women characters wore on me. Because even as satire, Twin Peaks always asks you to recognize that if not at that moment, you once felt real emotion for characters like this, you fell for it, and it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes, then splashing the cold water of flip logic and optimism in your face.
And over and over until about the beginning of the second season, I felt an edge of incredulity in myself: How could this have been on network television? How in the world did this happen? 
What did you like about it Stephanie? 
Stephanie’s take: 
What do I like about Twin Peaks? The Log Lady, the stoplight, the giant and the room service guy who brings Cooper his milk, every second of Angelo Badalamenti’s walking double bass, when Lucy says, “most of his behavior was asinine,” Ben and Jerry Horn stuffing their faces full of brie sandwiches, Audrey Horn’s saddle shoes, Nadine’s glorious silent drape runners, my unflagging belief in Agent Cooper. So many strange, wonderful things to marvel at in this show! You hit some of my favorite scenes, and the scenes that most stuck out to me on my second time through the show: the donut table at the stone-throwing divination and the first dream in the Black Lodge.
What I love about Twin Peaks, and Lynch in general, is his strange intensity and earnestness. What you called “postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities” I actually see as Lynch making some kind of weirdly authentic invocation of the past or a spiritual core of America through the kitschy trappings of Twin Peaks. I don’t think that Lynch sees cherry pie and creamed corn and prom queens as truly “good” or the “true America,” the way that politicians might conjure apple pie and pick-up trucks to signify some idealized version of America. But I think Lynch uses these images and stock characters as potent cultural symbols that he can shuffle and reconfigure, but that carry strong psychological and cultural associations. As you said, I think that Lynch really is trying to wrestle with good and evil with Twin Peaks, using these cultural signifiers, and this is something I kind of love about it, even if it gets messy and maybe fails at making any kind of coherent statement. 
Though it seems strange to say, another thing that I like about Twin Peaks is that the violence is actually visceral and horrible. Lynch takes these symbols, especially the prom queen girl-next-door All-American sweetheart and perverts them to the extreme. As you say, “it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes,” though I would also argue that the violence is of a very different quality from so much other violence in contemporary movies or TV shows. 
Violence in Twin Peaks is delivered in a way that is emotional and intense, not so much about cheap bait-and-switch jumpiness or the porno gore splatter, but the horror of the moment of the attack. The horror of violence as an action, as a depraved tunnel that swallows up everything we like about the world. We get so much of humanity being bright and good in Twin Peaks—Cooper, Harry, Andy, Lucy, etc.—but we are also forced to witness and even participate in the spectacle of unspeakable violence. 
(Spoiler alert) The scene when Leland/Bob kills Maddy is one of the most intense sequences I’ve ever seen on little or big screen. The clicking of the record player, Sarah Palmer’s bony hands, the glare of the lights as Maddy and Leland/Bob wrestle, their slow-mo distorted voices. My stomach is clenching just thinking about it. This scene is vivid and visceral, very different from the many horror movies or TV crime shows in which bodies, especially women’s bodies, are violated and disposed of with ease, with almost a wink to the viewer. I think that through scenes like this Lynch forces the viewers to confront violence in a serious way and thus to identify more thoroughly with its victims.
Of course, the victims are mostly women. In fact, violence against women is literally at the core of Twin Peaks. I’m not sure what my question to you is, but this is the thing I am trying to figure out—what to say about all the dead and victimized women?
Cynthia’s take:
What to say. What to say. So much victimization. So many women! I agree that Maddy’s murder is the worst violence I’ve ever seen in television or a movie. And I agree that it’s at the core of the story, and different in its tone than almost any other kind of violence against women in television. There’s no wink, as you say. But I think I read the good and evil in a different way than you do and the more I talk to people about Twin Peaks, the more it feels as if the show’s violence gets taken several ways depending on the viewer. 
I like all the good characters, so to speak, they are bright, but they don’t risk pure earnestness. They all have a crazy quirk to balance out the sincerity. Nadine’s insane eye-patch and youth. Andy’s inappropriate weeping. Cooper’s hanging upside down in his gravity boots while he dictates notes. It could be delight in life, it could be Lynch’s wish to burden us with quippy or awful silences. I can’t help but like this, but at the same time, it’s part of a problematic equation: The killer gets to say, “It was Bob who made me do it,” and can say he’s not responsible for any of this violence. Oops, he didn’t mean it, and in the world of demon possession, well, he’s telling the truth. No one is responsible for the murder of women. We dads just can’t help it and we’re inconsolable too.
I read this scene when the killer is in prison as a way for Lynch to be responsible, to critique this hands-off, “the devil made me do it” stance so prevalent in the way America does, well, everything. In a system of good and evil, it’s powerful that this (spoiler alert) is the close relative of the murder victim. But then my friend Kyle Thompson said, “No, no, no, it’s an apology, it’s not a critique.”
And I would say that he, as a man, may have a way of reading all of these shuffled signs (I love that you said that) in a way we do not and could not. 
Since it is pretty much the worst violence, the most operatic violence towards women I’ve ever seen, in the end I suppose all the dead and victimized women are the thing that kept me from not entirely liking the show up until I realized the show was about intuition, good and evil as you said in a way nothing else was. Twin Peaks flies in the face of our culture in so many ways it’s hard not to want to go apologist for Lynch’s apology. Which isn’t where I want to be. You’re right, it doesn’t have the kind of moral note that stems from sentimentalizing those we oppress – the wink – another-body-in-the-bank-attitude. It’s not network television crime show violence, though I feel it has some hem of magazine shows about murdered women in it, the way it wants to invoke gossip and pity with an old trope, familiar people, manufactured sensationalism. What’s important to me is that Lynch is saying, this is what it looks like close up.
I’ve met so many people who feel this is the best thing they ever saw on television. How accessible do you think the satiric aspect is for yourself or for anyone? Like Mad Men, I wondered if Twin Peaks re-inscribed racist/sexist notions until it started simultaneously to treat violence as serious and mocking us and soap opera for how enthralled we are by story. 
It’s the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks. Why does it still work?
Stephanie’s take: 
I am really not sure about how accessible the satiric aspect of Twin Peaks is to today’s viewers, myself included, because of the current TV/media climate. So much TV today, especially reality TV, has this bizarre tone that is slightly self-mocking but is simultaneously dead serious about its extravagance. This is actually kind of similar to the tone of Twin Peaks, but I don’t think it’s that intentional or meaningful today. And I don’t even know if the general audience reads this kind of tone as satire, or as a particular form of humor, or if they just read it straight. After all, there are apparently conservatives who seriously believe Stephen Colbert is on their side, and there is a website of screencaps of people posting The Onion articles on Facebook and commenting as if they were serious news. And I sometimes find myself having to explain to my high school-aged students that the word “literally” does not mean “figuratively.” What I’m saying is basically that I don’t really know, but that today’s viewers might either be better or worse equipped to navigate the slippery nature of Twin Peaks, I just don’t know which! 
I think you’re definitely right that Twin Peaks is wide open for many interpretations, and I want to be able to read the killer revelation as a critique, but I just don’t think that it is. I similarly want to be able to read all the gender imbalance in the Twin Peaks landscape as a critique because I really do love so much about it, but I just can’t find enough to back me up on that reading at all. I just don’t think Lynch was thinking about gender that seriously. 
We have both admitted to fondness for the more fringe female characters like the Log Lady, Nadine, and Lucy, but they, and all the other women, really only exist according to their relationships with men. We find out the Log Lady, holder of mystical truths and wearer of incredible flannels, is a kind of Miss Havesham, that she only is the way she is because her husband died on their wedding night. Similarly, Nadine is the way she is—batty and amnesiac and eye-patched—because of husband Ed. And all of Lucy’s energy gets sucked up into a boring pregnancy and paternity subplot, though her pluckiness does seem to exist regardless of her poor taste in men-who-are-not-Andy. 
And the list continues. Audrey’s character arc consists of her moving from virgin with daddy issues to non-virgin with slightly different daddy issues. Donna does some intrepid sleuth-work, but spends most of her time dealing with her sappy relationship with James. Maybe only Katherine can be said to have a personality and take actions that are not based around her relationships with men, but her wiliness really depends on her ability to use sex as a form of manipulation. 
Meanwhile, Agent Cooper and Harry and Ed get to go out and fight for all that is righteous (though they also all have love lives), and Windham Earl and Leo and Ben Horn get to be menacing and threatening and powerful. Even Leland gets to be infected by demons at least! I would like it so much if any of the female characters were at least worthy of demon possession. 
At the risk of sounding like feminist criticism is about score-keeping or, as you said, playing apologist for Lynch, I think I could sort of “forgive” the horrific violence against women if the women characters were actually fully drawn and able to participate in the storylines in an equal way to the men. Since you bring it up, I think this is how Mad Men succeeds (though not with regards to its handling of race, ugh) in depicting a brutally sexist world and some seriously misogynistic characters in a way that is not sexist or misogynistic itself.
That said, I still pretty much love Twin Peaks. My boyfriend and I affectionately dubbed our apartment “The Great Lodge” because it has 70s wood-paneled walls, a fireplace, and is surrounded by pine trees. The Log Lady was my Facebook profile picture for a while. But fangirlishness aside, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and I’m hard pressed to think of any that are as interesting and strange and ambitious as Twin Peaks.
But I think part of its allure is also in its unfinished-ness. Shows that are canceled unjustly in the eyes of their fans gain a kind of cult following and fervor they might not otherwise have if they were allowed to run their course and possibly collapse or devolve into sloppiness or repetition. Many of these shows, Twin Peaks included, are legitimately brilliant, but still benefit from the extra glory that our culture loves to tack on to things (or people!) that come to an untimely end. So, when we think about Twin Peaks, we necessarily think of the disappointing and horrifying and thrilling lack of closure at its end.
Cynthia’s take:
I can’t believe there’s five years of Mad Men and only two of Twin Peaks. Argh.
I like what you’re saying about the degree of gender critique in Lynch. It’s kind of like when my former classmate Kirk Boyle saw Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch and couldn’t read the cultural critique in it – Is it about Clinton? he asked me once. I was struck by how we can look for these systems of meaning out of habit and it makes me wonder right this second if there’s some blind spot in this. It seemed the movie was about a good death, lawlessness in the American vein, and immortality and that can be undetectable to an eye looking for allegory. Maybe allegory is the case here.
I agree with you about the little power of the women in this show, their silly or violent struggle. But I’m not on the same page with you about Audrey Horne. She does some pretty unbelievably audacious moral acts. She looks for Laura’s killer when in fact she had no deep friendship with Laura. She just knows something’s afoot with her father and the murder so she sleuths her way into being hired at the brothel—looking pretty fierce until the moment her father knocks at her door and she’s in a teddy ready for sex work. And doing better work in some ways than Cooper. She takes over her dad’s business by sheer will, but not after clearing out the entire meeting of Scandinavian investors by moping slyly about her sadness at the violence. She liked undermining her dad so that he would pay attention to her power, and in the end saved his business (and notably, threw off Bobby’s advances so matter-of-factly). To me she represents an m.o. something like, “We’re all playing a role in a power-play; at least I’m choosing my role and making it work for me.”
I guess my final word on the series would be that I like how Lynch holds a serious mirror up to our faces about how much we look for the violence and what it really is like. What’s your final read?
Stephanie’s take:
I still haven’t seen Dead Man and I feel like you’ve mentioned it to me before! In my queue. Anyway. 
I do think I was being a bit reductive in my characterization of Audrey. She is one of my favorite characters and that scene in the brothel is one of the most unsettling scenes of the show (and on a show that is deeply unsettling so often, that is saying something). I guess I’m just a little hung up on what happens with her storyline with the rich guy in the late second season. But I think I’d prefer to pretend that much of what happens in the late second season doesn’t really happen. 
To me, one of the testaments to Twin Peaks‘ greatness is that we’ve had this long exchange about it and could probably still keep going. More than once, I have found myself writing in big, aimless circles when trying to articulate what I think. The show can be read so many different ways, and as you’ve noted, it seems that everyone can bring their own particular interests and concerns to bear upon the show. It fails to resolve neatly, but I think this is what makes it so intriguing, so worth watching and then talking about. For all the interesting, quality TV shows we get to watch today, there is still nothing, to me, that is quite like Twin Peaks. 
My last words on Twin Peaks? Everyone should watch it and then invite me to Twin Peaks-themed murder-mystery dinner parties. I’ll bring the cherry pie. 

Cynthia Arrieu-King lives near Atlantic City but her cat Kenny lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes poetry and grades a lot of papers. On Sundays at 11AM you can hear her and Stockton students Jenna McCoy and Laura Alexander do a talk show about local and visiting writers,The Last Word, at WLFR FM Lake Fred Radio wlfr.fm.

Stephanie Cawley lives in Philadelphia with her cat, Vincent van Gogh. She writes poetry and reads a lot of comics. 


Swiffer Reminds Us that Women Are Dirt

We’ve all been here before: watching a television show, cut to commercial break, and on comes that particular ad that you absolutely loathe. You switch the channel, mute the TV, or just rant through the entire thing…again (I’m not the only one, right?).
Not too long ago, I wrote about the spate of “man up and drink a manly beverage” ads (Dr. Pepper Ten specifically), which certainly qualify as loathe-worthy. But there’s another ad campaign that just annoys me to no end: the Swiffer Wet Jet ads that feature women as dirt and show these different varieties of “dirt” falling in love with the cleaning product that gets rid of them so well.
Here’s the one I’ve seen most often — “The Film Star:”

Here, we have a dramatic actress portraying the “film” left behind after mopping, and when the Swiffer mop comes after her, she throws herself at it, clearly lusting after the mop pad that will sweep her away. The ad pulls back and shows a woman satisfied with her freshly-cleaned floor.
Taken alone, the ad is silly and obnoxious, and just about as regressive as your typical gendered ad for cleaning products. The fact that dirt is personified as a woman is disturbing, the fact that she lusts after a mop to essentially destroy her is bizarre (and suggests some deeply fucked-up sexual politics), and the fact that a woman’s enemy (a filmy floor–oh no!) is another woman plays into the typical trope that says women are naturally enemies.
If you look at the other ads in the campaign, however, it gets worse. Here’s “The Mud Lady” (note: this is embedded from YouTube, so if it gets removed, you can likely find the ad somewhere else with a simple search):

Again, we have a woman personifying something you mop up–mud, in this case–and here the woman even claims she’s “not easy” before (literally) throwing herself at the mop pad. Again, the camera pans out to a woman happily mopping her floor. Just as the dramatic actress behaves stereotypically, this woman has a “Valley Girl” (is that term still in use?) accent and quickly contradicts what she says with her actions.
There’s another one featuring an elderly woman as yet another variety of dirt, which I can’t find online (if you know of a link, please let me know and I’ll update!) and she’s unhappy that no one’s given her any romantic attention in a while. Once again, enter that irresistible mop and the woman throws herself at it. And yet another woman mopping is pleased that her floors are now so clean.
These three ads are the only ones in the campaign that I’ve seen on TV here in the U.S. When I went to the official product website, there were some ads I’d never seen that feature men in lust with the mop pad. As a matter of fact, there are two ads there featuring women, and two featuring men (perhaps they’re attempting to thwart accusations of sexism there, but I doubt the ones featuring men are in rotation as heavily as the others)–although all of them show women doing the actual cleaning.
It’s remarkable how different the portrayals of the dirt people are: the men-as-dirt ads show a Crocodile Dundee-esque character (also stereotypical) and two buddies lamenting the state of their romantic lives, while the women-as-dirt ads always show a lonely, solitary woman desperate for the kind of attention provided by this wonder mop.
I’m less interested in equal-opportunity offense here: men as dirt is disturbing, too. But for me, there’s something particularly insidious about these women-as-dirt ads. This isn’t the first time Swiffer has been accused of sexism in their ads, either. In 2008, The Hathor Legacy called out the bizarre ad campaign featuring women in relationships with their cleaning tools:

Swiffer has a whole line of commercials featuring women breaking up with their old mops and brooms to hook up with Swiffer, or the rejected cleaning tools sending flowers in an attempt to woo back their former owners. All the commercials frame women’s relationships with cleaning tools like relationships with boyfriends who are/aren’t meeting their needs. Some of them have involved the woman and the mop in couples therapy, too.

I mentioned in my Dr. Pepper Ten post that I actually like that company’s product, and I feel the same way about Swiffer. And although my husband usually cleans the floors in our home, I’m still the one who buys a majority of the products we use. Swiffer has succeeded in pissing me off and alienating me with this ad campaign to the point that I’m basically finished with their products. It’s yet another example of a company’s humor gone wrong, outdated gender roles, and the assumption that customers will just accept sexism as the norm. Nope. Not here. It doesn’t take much effort to replace a company’s product that has no respect for its customers (and that just makes horrible ads).

Question of the Day: Favorite Female Filmmaker?

One of my favorite kinds of posts to write–although we haven’t posted very many of them yet, and very few people ever comment on them–is the Director Spotlight. (If you haven’t already, check out spotlights on Allison Anders, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Tanya Hamilton, Nicole Holofcener, Deepa Mehta and Agnes Varda.) While the posts themselves are fairly cut-and-dry, I always enjoy focusing on a woman who makes (or who made) movies and learning about her filmography.
Though most of the women we’ve profiled are already fairly successful, I also believe these posts do a service: more female filmmakers should be household names (think for a moment about all the male filmmakers who are), and by calling attention to them, maybe a few more people will know them as such.
We can all agree that if more women make films, and if these women get more attention, depictions of women in all forms of media has a chance of improving over time. So, in the spirit of celebrating women who make movies comes today’s question:

Who are your favorite female filmmakers?