Brigit McCone – Page 3

‘Viy’: Incestuous Mother as Horror Monster

'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film — *Viy* was the USSR’s first horror film

Trigger Warning: Discussion of maternal incest, paternal incest and the rape of men.

Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol disassociated himself from his 1835 story Viy by framing it as an unaltered “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) folk tale, but it is actually a strikingly original, vividly visual and deeply felt Gothic horror that bears only slight resemblance to folklore. Though Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday is officially based on Viy, the most faithful adaptation is a 1967 Soviet production with effects by stop-motion legend Aleksandr Ptushko. I’m analyzing this classic, not the recent remake.

Trainee monk Khoma Brut “never knew his mother,” while the story’s vampiric witch (she drinks baby’s blood) is introduced in a maternal, housewife role. As Katherine Murray discusses on Bitch Flicks, “the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents.” Gogol’s major source is Zhukovsky’s translation of Robert Southey’s “A Ballad, Shewing How An Old Woman Rode Double, And Who Rode Before Her,” where a monk reads prayers over his cursed mother’s corpse, while demons lay siege to the church. Though not literally mother, Viy‘s vivid witch is the archetype of horror’s monstrous mothers. In 1893’s The Death of Halpin Frayser, the hero blunders into the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!” While struggling with his undead mother in a haunted forest, Halpin dissociates and views events “as a spectator” before dying horribly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 horror classic, Vampyr, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s alluringly lesboerotic Carmilla is reimagined as a menacing, maternal vampire-hag, while in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” (Season 7) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike vamps his mother and she accuses him of sexually desiring her, forcing him to stake her. The event is so traumatic that Spike can be controlled by it, until he defuses his trigger by facing the memory (contrast the show’s dismissive treatment of Faith’s attempted rape/murder of Xander in Season 3’s “Consequences” and Buffy’s violation of Spike’s stated sexual boundaries in Season 6’s “Gone”).

In her discussion of the female Gothic, “The Madwoman’s Journey From The Attic Into The Television,” Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia notes, “while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues. I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other.” Just as Godzilla‘s semi-goofy lizard embodied Japan’s nuclear trauma, so Gogol’s fantasy creations are not necessarily trivial, as unreal displacements of real anxiety. Viy parallels the female Gothic’s allegorical approach to rape, contrasting sharply with unreal yet realist rape fantasies like Murmur of the Heart (flippant maternal incest for shock value), White Palace (Susan Sarandon’s rape of an unconscious James Spader, who refused consent before passing out, as romantic liberation), and Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn’s rape by Isla Fisher as hilarious).

Nikolai Kutuzov's witch transfixes Khoma — Nikolai Kutuzov’s witch transfixes Khoma

The boisterous tone of Viy‘s opening fades rapidly, as three seminary students, lost in the dead of night, draw up to a housewife’s misty gates and are allowed to stay on condition that they sleep separated. Leonid Kuravlyov’s robust and jolly Khoma beds down alone in a stable. His placid chewing is paralleled with the stable’s cow, reducing him metaphorically to livestock. Initially, Khoma views the looming witch as a joke: “It’s getting late, Granny, and I wouldn’t corrupt myself for a thousand in gold. *laughs* You’ve gotten old, Granny.” Gogol’s prose: “the sophomore [lit: ‘philosopher’] shrank back; but she still approached, as though she wished to lay hold of him. A terrible fright seized him, for he saw the old hag’s eyes glitter in an extraordinary way.” Filming the witch’s stare in uncomfortable close-up, the Soviet adaptation achieves a viscerally uncanny effect, intensified for hetero-male audiences by male actor Nikolai Kutuzov’s playing the witch, until the stumbling Khoma knocks the cow’s yoke symbolically onto his own neck. Khoma appears stunned. In Gogol’s prose, his reaction is more clearly tonic immobility, or freeze response: “the sophomore tried to push her away with his hands, but to his astonishment he found that he could neither lift his hands nor move his legs, nor utter an audible word.”

Finally, the witch grasps him and forces herself onto his back. After a dizzying aerial ride, Khoma drives the witch to earth by invoking Christ and beats her with savage anger, until she transforms into a weeping damsel-in-distress, who dies as he staggers away. The sexual dimension of the riding is clearer in Gogol’s prose: “his legs… lifted against his will… a wearying, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling… a demonically sweet feeling… suddenly he felt some kind of refreshment; he felt that his step began to grow more lazy… her wild cries… became weaker, more pleasant, purer.” Gogol uses supernatural paralysis and running motion to allegorically express concepts as crucial to understanding male rape as they are widely disbelieved: firstly, the effectiveness of sexual threat in inducing an involuntary freeze response and, secondly, the possible coexistence of “demonically sweet” arousal with traumatic mental repulsion and violation.

The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witchThe eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witch — The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley’s undead witch

Once dead, the witch can become youthfully beautiful, revealing her aged ugliness as a device to emphasize the unwanted and repulsive nature of the pseudosexual encounter. Khoma is forced to read prayers over the dead witch, as her dying request. Gogol’s witch is as pitiful as she is aggressive, crying a tear of blood and inducing Khoma’s guilt for killing her – “he felt as though those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood” – before demonically rising to violate him again. Khoma is told of Mikita, a huntsman whose infatuation with the witch “completely sissified him” before he allowed her to ride him; he was “burned completely out,” leaving only ashes, proving the fatal seriousness of the riding Khoma has survived. The film’s church scenes are masterpieces of brooding Orthodox iconography, steadily ratcheted tension and jolting jump scares. As the witch rises from her grave, Khoma desperately draws a chalk circle around himself, bolstering its charmed impenetrability by fervent prayer as demons fumble for him.

The frail boundary of chalk serves as a powerful imaginary line of bodily autonomy that the hero desperately defends, and our anxiety over its penetration drives the film’s second half. Khoma is forced to return on the third night by threats and the promise of a thousand in gold (for which he earlier refused to “corrupt himself”), being caught as he tries to flee. After dancing in wild abandon, his macho bravado drives him to return to the scene of horrors, intoxicated, to prove that “Cossacks aren’t afraid.” Khoma thus strives for some sense of control by proactively inviting a seemingly unavoidable threat. This is a common response to chronic abuse. On the final night, gigantic grasping hands grope for Khoma, while a wild assortment of nightmare ghouls crawl out of the church’s woodwork. The witch orders them to bring the Viy, a stumbling grotesque with dangling eyelids, from under the earth. Ghouls raise the Viy’s eyelids, unveiling his glittering stare. Khoma swears he will not look, but cannot resist turning as the Viy’s heavy footfalls approach. The Viy immediately stabs his finger at him, ghouls descend and Khoma dies of fright beneath their grasping hands. In a coda, his friend declares, “If he had not feared her, the witch could have done nothing to him.” As with Spike’s vampire-mother, it is Khoma’s fatal fear of facing the buried monster that is his doom, not the supernatural itself.

A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands

Gogol’s earlier 1832 horror, Terrible Vengeance, shares deep parallels with Viy. Like Viy‘s beautiful witch, its sorcerer is superficially attractive, amusing crowds until a religious icon exposes his monstrous true face. The heroine, Katerina, fears the sorcerer and is ambivalently detached from her father, suffering horrifying dreams that he incestuously desires to marry her. Her husband, Danilo, eventually discovers that the father and the evil sorcerer are one, and are conjuring Katerina’s spirit from her body by night. That spirit’s statement that Katerina “does not know a lot of what her soul knows” remarkably suggests repressed memory and dissociation. Like Khoma’s pity for the weeping witch, Katerina feels bound to liberate her father even after realizing his true nature, yet simultaneously self-loathing for her inability to separate from him. Terrible Vengeance portrays a nightmare vision of intergenerational abuse, where ancestors feed forever on each other’s corpses in a deep abyss. The original sinner gnaws his own flesh and shakes the earth in his efforts to rise, eternally growing and distorting into a buried grotesque like the fearful Viy. In Mikhail Titov’s 1987 animated adaptation, Katerina, maddened by the loss of her husband and child, dances in wild, defiant intoxication, as Khoma does after his night terrors, even drawing a circle of fire to ward off her father, like Khoma’s of chalk. Such profound parallels between the quasi-maternal incest of Viy and the explicitly paternal incest of Terrible Vengeance send a clear message: it’s not about gender. Though Gogol’s sexually monstrous mother-figure has captured male imaginations and spawned imitations in a way that his sexually monstrous father has not, because of the overwhelming male authorship of our culture, yet both images are rooted in a potentially interchangeable empathy for survivors of sexual abuse.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEenjdEp8h4″]

Titov’s Terrible Vengeance. Triggery allegory

For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse. When Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction spooked male audiences, we could have pointed out that her behavior is stalking, experienced by one in six women in the USA, and her attempt to force Dan’s paternity is reproductive coercion, experienced by 16 percent of pregnant women. Instead, Susan Faludi’s Backlash read Alex as representing the demonization of feminism. Yet, Alex is an abuser. As Stephanie Brown points out for Bitch Flicks, you may meet Alex as you progress through life. Society does not technically favor men over women in intimate relationships. It favors abusers over victims, and codes abusive behaviors as masculine. As for bad mothers, Freud’s Oedipal “seduction theory” was created under intense pressure from the psychiatric establishment, as an alternative to his earlier exposure of parental incest’s links to PTSD in “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” So, why do feminists apply Oedipal interpretations, that evolved by mirror logic from rape apologism, to dismiss texts like Viy? Ultimately, whatever nightmares they fuel, bad mothers are neither monsters nor demonically unnatural women. They are flawed humans. By resisting the gendering of abuse, can we evolve human understanding?

The paranoid repulsion towards female sexual aggression that pervades the work of Nikolai Gogol has seen him uncritically labeled a misogynist, by virtually all modern commentators. Yet, renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol formed intense friendships with women like Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, corresponding on philosophical topics with rare respect for her intellectual equality, and addressing her as “drug” (“buddy”). Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol wrote the 19th century’s most psychologically insightful and empathetic portrait of a female experience of paternal incest. Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol understood abuse far better than mainstream feminism. Time to stop dismissing and listen to the boys. Time to face Viy without flinching.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever”

Brigit McCone freely admits to being a Gogol groupie, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and social justice warring.

‘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.

#iamnotavessel: Joss Whedon’s Romantic Reproductive Coercion

Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Ripley, loving her "beautiful, beautiful little baby" — Ripley, loving her “beautiful, beautiful little baby”

Written by Brigit McCone.

The Alien saga offers some of the most powerful images of bodily violation in pop culture, from the metaphorical rape of the facehuggers to the victim’s resulting fatal impregnation. Ridley “Thelma and Louise“ Scott* fostered male empathy by casting John Hurt as the victim of this violation, while Sigourney Weaver’s badass Ellen Ripley defeated the monster. The sequel, Aliens, saw Ripley voluntarily assume maternal responsibility for a young girl, Newt, and fight an iconic battle against the Alien Queen to save her adopted child. In Alien3, Ripley realized she had been impregnated with an Alien Queen, and made a conscious decision to destroy herself and it. Then, in 1997, celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon scripted a fourth film in the series, Alien: Resurrection, which revived Ripley as an Alien/human hybrid clone.

When her identity is challenged, Ripley/Alien smiles, “I’m the monster’s mother,” equating motherhood with forced cloning in a lab. Realizing that Aliens have escaped, Ripley/Alien grins, later clarifying, “I’m finding a lot of things funny lately, but I don’t think they are.” Merging with the Alien has rendered her emotional responses irrational. As Ripley/Alien is anguished at being forced to destroy a room full of fellow clones, Ron Perlman’s pirate snorts “must be a chick thing”, in a franchise founded on transgressive gender-bending. Ripley/Alien weeps openly at the death of the Newborn, an Alien/human hybrid which has already devoured the brains of two people (including the film’s final person of color), which Brad Dourif’s scientist described as her “beautiful, beautiful little baby.” Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Maternity may be forced, but motherhood is always voluntary. An adopted mother is a true mother, as Ripley is to Newt. An egg donor, a surrogate or a clone is not automatically a mother, as Ripley is not to the Newborn. Reducing the complexity of motherhood to automatic biology also implies that bad mothers are unnatural, rather than flawed humans, which aspiring writers may wish to explore in this Theme Week. As for Alien: Resurrection, Whedon’s ending was changed and he claims “they said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do.” However, three aspects of Whedon’s role as author of Alien: Resurrection still deserve scrutiny. Firstly, that it consistently rewrites and undermines the original feminist purpose of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Secondly, that it is only one of numerous dehumanizing portraits of forced maternity in the work of Joss Whedon. Thirdly, that Whedon’s status as a vocal male feminist does not restrain him from perpetuating this trope.

Sixteen percent of pregnant women surveyed by Lindsay Clark M.D. had been subjected to reproductive coercion (the sabotaging of birth control or the use of threat by male partners to force pregnancy). In a survey of women using family planning services, fully 35 percent of those who experienced partner violence had also been subjected to reproductive coercion. Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction is an iconic representation of terrifying reproductive coercion, but I can think of no equivalent portrayal of reproductive coercion by male characters targeting women, despite its staggering frequency in reality. Nobody wants to confront the possibility that a child might be unwanted, especially by their own mother. However, if we can’t admit that an acid-spitting, brain-eating Alien-child might ever, possibly, be unwanted, our denial has become dehumanizing. Male-authored horror, focusing disproportionately on women as victims of supernatural possession, almost invariably implies that women can be drained of selfhood and controlled by reproductive coercion, supporting the ideology of real-life abusers.

In The Omen, Gregory Peck’s father must confront and attempt to destroy his demon spawn while, in Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow’s mother gently rocks her demon spawn’s cradle with a tender smile. Paternity is an emotional bond mediated by rational judgment, while maternity inevitably entails loss of the rational self. Some female directors have challenged this trope. In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, a mother’s love is alienated by her child’s sadism, joining the conflicted but humanized mothers of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Kimberley Peirce’s reimagined Carrie. Meanwhile, Roman “Rosemary’s Baby” Polanski, self-confessed rapist, has stated publicly that the birth control Pill “chases away the romance from our lives.” While celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon probably wouldn’t endorse that statement, his romanticized reproductive coercion nevertheless reflects that ideology.

Sady Doyle has praised Whedon’s Dollhouse for its exploration of the sinister implications of reducing women to manipulable male fantasy. As Doyle argues, Dollhouse can even be read as an interrogation of Whedon’s own role, as a writer who converts living actresses into creations of his fantasy. However, Doyle also highlights problems with the second season episode “Instinct,” which suggests that Echo’s being forcibly imprinted, to believe herself a mother, produces a biological response that cannot be erased, even though the woman’s entire personality can be erased, “because the Maternal Instinct has magical science-defying powers of undying devotion which are purely biological and not at all circumstantial” (Doyle’s words). Although the show’s entire point is the essential creepiness of depriving a human of consent, ‘Instinct’ suggests that the maternal instinct is capable of converting forced maternity into a positive experience. Nor is Dollhouse the only example of this.

Dawn, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is conceived by monks reprogramming the characters’ memories and emotions, echoing Dollhouse‘s premise. Since Dawn is an innocent and vulnerable being, Buffy’s decision to protect her is consistent with her established character as a natural rescuer, akin to Ripley’s decision to protect Newt at any cost. However, the show barely allows Buffy five minutes of outrage over the monks’ traumatic violation of her memories and emotional self (without even considering the implications of her fake robot pregnancy in the comics, or Black Widow’s becoming “monster” by sterilization because… dude). Like Echo’s positive experience of forced maternity, Buffy’s maternal instinct towards Dawn effectively cancels out the violation of Dawn’s conception. In the third season of Whedon’s Angel, the evil Darla’s entire personality alters through pregnancy, as she becomes mysteriously infected by the soul of her Prophecyfetus, recalling Ripley’s personality shift through Alien impregnation. Not only is Darla/Prophecyfetus redeemed by an explicitly unwanted pregnancy, but expresses her redemption through self-annihilation, staking herself to allow her baby’s birth.

Self-annihilation is likewise the ultimate expression of Buffy’s maternal instinct, the heroine killing herself for Dawn, her corpse bathed in the hopeful light of a new dawn (subtle). I can’t recall any comparable example of voluntary, fatherly self-annihilation as redemptive in the work of celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon (and even Michael Bay gave us Armageddon). Simon’s sacrifices, as adopted father-figure (and safeword-wielding controller) of sister River Tam, are rewarded with Kaylee’s love in Serenity, while Angel heroically chooses to wipe his son’s memory when paternity becomes too troublesome, and Giles dramatically rejects Buffy when she becomes too independent. Sure, there are complex undercurrents of male self-loathing and idolized female sacrifice going on here, but I can’t see how that actually empowers Whedon’s (routinely mind-controlled) women. As Angel points out in Angel‘s fourth season: “our fate has to be our own, or we’re nothing.” By this measure, Whedon’s women are constantly reduced to “nothing” by maternity.

When it comes to reproductive coercion, nothing beats the treatment of Cordelia Chase on Angel. Already forcibly impregnated by mind-controlling demon spawn in the first season’s “Expecting,” Cordelia agrees in “Birthday” to become half-demon herself, as an act of self-sacrifice to spare Angel from head-splitting visions. She eventually “transcends love” to become an omniscient “higher being” of pure light, but finds herself “so bored” by this power, echoing the vocal dissatisfaction of Whedon’s Ripley, Call, Buffy, Willow, Faith, and River Tam. If Whedon’s superstrong women didn’t all commiserate with each other about the terrible burden of power, they’d barely pass a Bechdel. In Season Four’s opener, Angel is trapped at the bottom of the sea, hallucinating visions of happiness with Cordelia. In one vision, Cordelia pledges her love as self-annihilation, foreshadowing the amnesia inflicted on her when she rejoins Angel, “I can’t remember what it was like, not knowing you”, before Angel vamps and drains her blood. At another vision’s cheerful feast, Cordelia exclaims “kill me now before my stomach explodes,” foreshadowing her next demon pregnancy, in which Cordy’s mind will be possessed yet again by the soul of her Doomfetus, just as Darla/Prophecyfetus and Ripley/Alien were.

Jasmine, the possessing being, forces Cordelia to seduce Angel’s son, Connor, primarily to provoke conflict between the male heroes, but also to conceive Jasmine’s Doomfetus vessel. Appearing in a vision, as the maternal mouthpiece of The Powers That Be, a reproductively purified and ex-evil Darla informs her son, Connor, that the fate of the world now depends on his choice, since Cordelia’s agency has been reproductively annihilated (Darla merely implies that last part). Cordelia is then forced into a coma by the birth of her demon spawn, just as Darla was dusted while giving birth, or Whedon’s Alien Queen decapitated by her Newborn. Meanwhile, Cordelia/Doomfetus has found time to bring forth a Doomsday Beast to destroy the sun (women are great at multitasking), forcing our hero, Angel, to lose his soul for various complex reasons, but mainly to confirm Cordy’s boundless power as mindless maternal mouthpiece. Powerful as she is, Cordelia’s lack of agency nevertheless reduces her, by Angel’s own logic, to “nothing.” Incidentally, Whedon’s treatment of actress Charisma Carpenter did nothing to dispel this impression.

Unmarried, pregnant Cordelia Chase is literally demonized

This feels familiar to an Irish viewer. Our feminine ideal, the “Wild Irish Woman,” gave us warrior goddesses, but never prevented pregnant girls being institutionalized as slave labor (a cultural demonizing of unmarried mothers criticized by Dorothy Macardle and Mairéad Ní Ghráda, before Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters and Stephen Frears’ Philomena drew international attention). Our pirate queen got her nationalist anthem, but our women had their pelvises broken by crippling symphysiotomy until the 1980s without anesthetic, for fear caesareans would encourage use of birth control. We boast history’s second female minister in government, army officer Constance Markievicz, but just last year, a woman raped by the murderers of people close to her underwent forced hydration (she was on hunger strike, becoming suicidal after five months pleading for an abortion) before a coerced C-section (her visa status prevented travel). Believe us, there is no connection whatsoever between celebrating women’s warrior spirit and respecting their reproductive rights. I’m a fan of Buffy. I also understand that teams of writers are involved, though Joss Whedon is ultimately responsible for the content of his television shows. I hate his portraits of reproductive coercion because this ideology repeatedly tortures and kills the most vulnerable women in my country. It’s nothing personal. Images of late-term abortions are commodified by Ireland’s forced maternity lobby, while the faces of suicidal rape victims and the corpses of women who died, denied medically necessary abortions, cannot be shown, ironically out of respect for their personhood; this is why fictional images of forced maternity become a battleground for hearts and minds. Ultimately, this torture of Ireland’s most vulnerable women is also the end goal of America’s forced maternity lobby.

* Yes, I know the rape scene in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is problematic. It’s not like the rapid rise in ass-kicking heroines was matched by a rise in female authorship. Time for a “Microscope on Male Feminists” feature?

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling, ducking and covering in anticipation of Whedonite backlash.

Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Mabel Normand was once known as “The Queen of Comedy” and “The Female Chaplin.” Her name was featured in the title of her shorts as their star attraction, which she soon parlayed into creative control as director. Normand mentored Charlie Chaplin as well as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on to mentor Buster Keaton in his turn. Mabel is, therefore, a cornerstone in the development of the American slapstick auteur, but one whose role is regularly overlooked. Her indirect connection with scandals, from Hollywood shootings to Arbuckle’s sensational trial, was used to tarnish her image and spark campaigns to ban her films, exploited by what biographer Thomas Sherman calls “behind-the-scenes Hollywood power brokers seeking to reshape the existing order.” Because of her early death in 1930 from tuberculosis, Normand is now remembered mainly through portraits by male co-workers, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, rather than her own words.

“Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.” – Mabel Normand (close friend of Mary Pickford)

Normand began her career as a model and bathing beauty. In 1910, she joined D.W. Griffith’s Biograph, where she met Mack Sennett and showed potential as a serious actress in The Squaw’s Love, The Mender of Nets and The Eternal Mother. At the rival Vitagraph, she was mentored in film comedy by the duo of Flora Finch and John Bunny, saying “every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies.” Comedienne Ruth Stonehouse had also been on the scene since 1907, but Normand would become the first director of this cinematic comedienne pack. As Mack Sennett’s lover, Normand left Biograph for Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1912. In 1914, Normand began to direct shorts and starred with her protégé, Charlie Chaplin, in Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length comedy, a fat-shaming extravaganza that nevertheless ends with solidarity between its female rivals and the rejection of their manipulative suitor. Dissatisfied with simplistic slapstick, Mabel strove for emotional authenticity, believing “if you seem to have any idea that you’re playing at something, you won’t get across” and claiming “no director ever taught me a thing.” Such naturalistic theories visibly influence the later aesthetic of Chaplin and Arbuckle. As Normand had in Mabel At The Wheel, Tamara de Lempicka would later use the image of driving to craft an icon of the empowered New Woman.

"Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti" - 1925 — “Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti” – 1925

In 1915, Normand’s engagement to Sennett broke up over his affair, with Normand suffering major concussion when rival Mae Busch hit her with a vase. This marked the end of Normand’s directing career, after less than two years. A male director would surely be assessed for future promise, yet even Normand’s defender, Thomas Sherman, writes dismissively that “she never had pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer.” Roscoe Arbuckle, however, highlighted Normand’s active collaboration, saying “Mabel alone is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture” (see Fatty and Mabel Adrift). Of Chaplin, Normand said, “We reciprocated. I would direct Charlie in his scenes, and he would direct me in mine. We worked together in developing the comedy action, taking a basic idea and constantly adding new gags.”

More than a collaborator, Normand’s biography contradicts claims of her limited ambition. Spurred to leave Keystone in 1916 by difficult relations with Mack Sennett, Sennett lured her back by offering her her own studio. The fact that Normand swallowed her pride, for the sake of her own studio, surely indicates how important creative control was to her. She dismissed three directors before handpicking F. Richard Jones to craft her star vehicle, tomboy Cinderella story Mickey, from a scenario by Anita “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes“ Loos. Normand was involved in every aspect of production. The release of Mickey was shelved for over a year, which Sennett blamed on lukewarm responses from distributors, pushing Normand to sign a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Once released, Mabel Normand’s Mickey became the highest grossing film of 1918, only too late to save her studio.

Normand with Cheyenne co-star and friend, Minnie Devereaux

Mabel Normand was noted for her generosity in refraining from upstaging other performers, and for her insistence on a slapstick equality in which she took a pie to the face as often as she threw one, in shorts like That Ragtime Band. She was the original “girl tied to the train tracks” in Barney Oldfield’s Race For A Life, but rescued her love interest on screen as often as she was rescued. Normand’s slapstick should be appreciated for its pioneering stunt-work as much as comedy. Mabel’s stunts included: leading a lion on a string, piloting a plane, diving off a cliff into a river, wrestling a tame bear, riding a horse bareback, jumping off a second story roof, dangling from a third story roof, being thrown from a moving vehicle, being dragged through mud on a rope, brick-throwing fights, and driving speeding race cars.

Mabel’s Strange Predicament – 1914

“I had nobody to tell me what to do. Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer)

The film that developed Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, begins like later Chaplin films, with the pathos of the disheveled Tramp’s rejection by Mabel’s hard-hearted snob. The focus then shifts to Mabel’s own predicament, locked out of her room in pajamas and falling prey to farcically escalating sexual misunderstandings. Pajamas were considered so provocative that the film was banned in Sweden, explaining Mabel’s panic. Mabel’s own “sweetheart” almost strangles her after finding her under his friend’s bed (hiding from Chaplin’s persistent advances). Her sweetheart’s married friend reveals willingness to harass Mabel, as soon as the two are alone. A wedge is thereby driven between Mabel and Alice Davenport, who sees Mabel as sexual competition. In all this, Chaplin is utterly useless, blindly pressing his own suit. Only Mabel’s dog offers unconditional friendship. This kinship with animals would fuel many set-pieces in Mickey. Despite the film’s flippancy and happy ending, the overall impression is of a Mabel constantly stifled by the possessiveness of others.

By shifting the focus from Chaplin’s scorned heart to Mabel’s predicament, our interpretation of both characters shifts, too. Mabel begins the film as the snooty girl, but ends as the victim of exhausting demands on her affection. Conversely, Chaplin begins sympathetically as the archetypal Tramp – a whimsically drunken, lovelorn underdog – but ends as an oblivious and entitled sex pest. Most accounts agree that Chaplin was infatuated with Normand, fueling tension with Sennett. In Mabel’s Strange Predicament, we understand her beauty as a nuisance and hindrance to Mabel’s liberation, not a mere motivator for men. Perhaps the resulting unflattering impression of Chaplin explains the film’s top-rated IMDb review by Michael DeZubiria, calling it “a disappointment for Chaplin fans, but it is a curiosity piece to see what results when he works under a different, and far less talented, director.” A Cinema History, however, spotlights the skill of the “far less talented” 20-year-old Normand’s dynamic editing, keeping a tight pace with cross-cutting and short duration shots.

Suggested Soundtrack: TLC, “No Scrubz”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5WtaPhTMQo”]

Mabel At The Wheel – 1914

“I hated to be simply a means by which someone else was creating something.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being an auteur)

Mabel At The Wheel showcases Normand’s daring as a stuntwoman, brawling, tumbling from moving vehicles into mud, and racing cars. Its dynamic climax also shows her mastery of parallel editing, rapidly cutting between simultaneous events to build tension, a hallmark of her original mentor, D.W. Griffith. Mabel at the Wheel is the film where tensions with Chaplin exploded, with Sennett restrained from firing him only by distributors clamoring for more Chaplin pictures. IMDb’s trivia suggests that this is owing to Mabel being “quick to dismiss [Chaplin’s] own ideas for more refined comic business,” though her slapstick is visibly subtler and more naturalistic than Chaplin’s at this point. As Mabel at the Wheel itself depicts, when men fight over Mabel, it’s always Mabel who gets hit. Chaplin’s autobiography, My Life In Pictures, and Thomas Sherman both suggest the real problem was Chaplin’s inability to “countenance this girl, years younger than himself, directing him in his films,” despite Normand being his mentor in cinema. The jealous saboteur and shrieking bully that Chaplin plays in Mabel At The Wheel is therefore interesting, not only for contrasting with his later self-authored image, but for reflecting his reported behavior on set.

Chaplin never found a comic partnership to rival Mabel’s with Arbuckle, Margaret Dumont’s with Groucho Marx, Flora Finch’s with John Bunny, Lucille Ball’s with Vivian Vance or Stan Laurel’s with Oliver Hardy. He never again found, or perhaps permitted, a co-star with Mabel’s ability to rival both his physical daring and his emotional range, despite the undeniable spark this gives their interplay. A “Battle of the Sexes” angle, that debates whether Chaplin or Normand is more talented, surely misses the point: couldn’t both have grown to their fullest potential through equal collaboration? Wouldn’t Chaplin have sparked off madcap Mabel, as her naturalist theories inspired the developing emotional depth of his comedy? Wouldn’t Mabel, who had never performed comedy for a live audience, have developed discipline and sharper timing by learning from Chaplin’s years of vaudeville experience? Chaplin’s insecurity is not solely responsible for torpedoing Normand’s directing career, but his support could certainly have saved it.

Suggested Soundtrack: Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuDqb1mp4oo”]

Mabel’s Blunder – 1914

“To make a farce heroine more than a mere doll, you must think out the situation yourself and, above all, you must pay great attention to every little detail in the scene. The little bits of business that seem insignificant are what make good comedy“ – Mabel Normand

Mabel’s Blunder, written and directed by Normand, suffers from Mabel’s lack of a really talented co-star, but further develops themes from her earlier films. As Chaplin does in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Mabel’s boss and future father-in-law finds himself sexually harassing a man who has been substituted for Mabel, making male viewers imagine themselves as the harassed woman. Mabel’s forced smile, while harassed by her boss, pointedly contrasts with her privately expressed disgust. Normand again symbolizes her independence in Mabel’s Blunder by taking the wheel, posing as a chauffeur to spy on her cheating fiancé. Mistaken for a man, Mabel is attacked by a jealous suitor for talking to another woman, once more exploring how jealousy suffocates female freedom. Her cheating fiancé applauds the jealous suitor, exposing his double standards. The pointedness of this gender commentary is undermined, however, by a traditional happy ending in which the “other woman” is harmlessly revealed as the fiancé’s sister, while the implications of his own father’s harassing Mabel are never really confronted. All in all, Mabel’s gender reversals are not as biting as Alice Guy’s, but the two have a comparable comic perspective, a distinctive voice that was suppressed by the exclusion of female filmmakers.

Suggested Soundtrack: Yoko Ono, “What a Bastard the World Is”

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

While Lois Weber and Mabel Normand were helping to shape Hollywood’s cinematic style, back in Alice Guy’s homeland, France, Germaine Dulac was busily birthing experimental film and auteur theory. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone performs stand-up and cabaret, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and slapping sticks.

‘Shallow Hal’: The Unexpected Virtue of Discomfort

Its challenge to fatphobia is covered in fat jokes and gross-out humor, tailored to trigger our prejudices. We can laugh, if prepared to question why. We can sympathize, if braced against an awkwardly half-choked, giggling snort. Humor strikes faster than self-censorship.

"Only a man this shallow could fall in love this deep." — “Only a man this shallow could fall in love this deep.”

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.

We are bad at multitasking empathy. When moved by Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning struggle with his stammer in The King’s Speech, you don’t want to recall cackling at Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda. As you congratulate yourself for noticing the rather obvious sexiness of Emmy-winning Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones, you’d prefer to forget laughing at Verne Troyer in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. It’s more comfortable having your heart warmed by the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, if you ignore that your ribs were tickled by Me, Myself and Irene. It’s easier to feel good about sympathizing with Jared Leto’s Oscar-winning trans heroine in Dallas Buyers Club, if you blank the comedy stripping of Sean Young’s trans villain in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The result is that neither gross-out comedy nor award-winning pathos seriously challenges its audience’s comfort; the comedy, because we’re never asked to sympathize, and the Oscar-bait, because we’re never tempted to mock. In 2001’s Shallow Hal, the Farrelly Brothers took Oscar-winning Gwyneth Paltrow, dressed her in a comical fat suit and demanded sympathy. The result was downright uncomfortable, and I loved it.

Shallow Hal comes with no genre cues or award endorsements to aid in compartmentalizing our empathy. Its challenge to fatphobia is covered in fat jokes and gross-out humor, tailored to trigger our prejudices. We can laugh, if prepared to question why. We can sympathize, if braced against an awkwardly half-choked, giggling snort. Humor strikes faster than self-censorship. The film has the boundless bad taste to remind viewers of their shallowness while daring to make them feel bad about it. The result can be a jarring viewing experience, provoking Rolling Stones‘ critic Peter Travers to declare “something condescending, not to mention hypocritical, about asking an audience to laugh uproariously at the spectacle of a fat person being sneered at and dissed as “rhino” or “hippo” or “holy cow,” and then to justify those laughs by saying it’s society’s fault.” Yet, is it truly hypocritical to remind an audience that they’re hypocritical?

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMLZnY2nLcw”]

The moment we see Jack Black’s Hal and Jason Alexander’s Mauricio hitting on “hotties,” the audience’s instinctive reaction is that they are too short and overweight to be justified in their shallowness. Hal is hypnotized into seeing inner beauty, and the hotties in fat suits and ugly cosmetics are utterly transformed into hotties without fat suits and ugly cosmetics. This premise allows Shallow Hal to become a forensic deconstruction of the fat joke. Do crushed chairs and giant meals remain funny, if acted by slim Gwyneth Paltrow? Or is it only the fat body that’s funny?

Many critics have pointed out that Shallow Hal uses tired, conventional fat jokes, without acknowledging how deliberately it targets thin bodies with those jokes. Left to imagine the fat body of Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) only from bystander reactions and glimpsed body parts, we build a mental image of something hyperbolically monstrous. When Rosemary’s fat self is finally revealed, it is not to be mocked, but to relieve Hal and expose society’s dysmorphia. Of course, the Farrellys can’t control the audience’s response, only confront it. As Katherine Murray says of Chasing Amy and Dollhouse: “the power and relevance of both of these stories comes from the fact that objectifying women is a popular pastime in real life, and not everyone sees the problem with that – the discomfort and uncertainty of these stories comes from the fact that objectifying women is a popular pastime in real life, and not everyone sees the problem with that.”

Paltrow’s sympathetic performance blends spiky defensiveness and vulnerability. Seeing such low self-esteem in a slim, blonde “hottie,” Hal perceives it as “cuckoo.” Of course, it should be equally cuckoo for a fat woman to suffer pointlessly lower quality of life because of irrational stigma. Separating the body and the stigma raises interesting questions. Would it still be a dream to date Paltrow’s slender blonde, if onlookers reacted with the same judging, mocking and disbelieving scrutiny applied to obese girlfriends? Where Louie‘s “So Did The Fat Lady” wallows in the pathos of a fat lady that men won’t hold hands with in public, Shallow Hal questions whether men would feel comfortable publicly holding hands with Gwyneth Paltrow, if she were associated with lower status rather than higher. Or are they, actually, more shallow than Shallow Hal?

Hal progresses through each hurdle of deconstructed shallowness, from defying public judgment to accepting Rosemary’s body in its real form, with “love grows where my Rosemary goes, and nobody knows but me” becoming his anthem of social defiance. Shallow assumptions that short, overweight Hal is ridiculous for chasing girls “out of his league” are equally challenged. Hal can attract conventional “hotties” once his desire is proved more than superficial; it’s just that then he doesn’t want them. Shallow Hal joins gross-out classic There’s Something About Mary, and the non-Farrelly Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, as a romcom that dares to demand of men: “what is it about you that makes you deserve the girl?” It puts its hero through a trial of worth, without the usual, unquestioned entitlement to date whatever hottie the script provides (*cough* Forgetting Sarah Marshall). In There’s Something About Mary, a range of men try to seduce Cameron Diaz’s “hottie” using farcical exaggerations of classic wooing tactics: Matt Dillon’s sleazy Healy eavesdrops to discover and embody all her fantasies, Lee Evans’ emotionally blackmailing Tucker fakes a disability and an English accent to out-vulnerable the most vulnerable Hugh Grant fop, Chris Elliott’s stalking Dom manifests a passion so intense and persistent that it brings him out in hives, and hunky Brett Favre combines athleticism, wealth and fame. But it is only Ben Stiller’s continually humiliated Ted who, while making every technical error imaginable, loves Mary enough to place her happiness above his own desires, meaning he alone passes the film’s trial.

Conversely, the clients of Deuce Bigalow are farcical exaggerations of female anxieties: the narcoleptic fails society’s demand for women to be attentive; Amy Poehler’s Tourette’s violates expectations of ladylike behavior; the giantess is manly and intimidating; Fluisa is obese and unfit. Only by honoring the humanity and femininity of each of these extreme archetypes, and passing the final test of fully accepting his “hottie” girlfriend’s prosthetic limb, can Deuce prove himself worthy to be accepted and loved in his turn, as a flawed being. The shockingly honest self-scrutiny in gross-out comedy is one of the genre’s central pleasures. Farrelly Brothers movies are elevated above mean-spirited imitators (*cough* Norbit) by their dedication to conjuring and confronting anxieties on a path to purification. Though I didn’t include the Farrellys’ crude and absurdist Me, Myself And Irene in my survey of cinematic portraits of psychosis, and though it was slammed by mental health organizations, I must admit the film recognizes the psychosis of Jim Carrey’s Charlie Baileygates as his own responsibility, while allowing him to be a romantic and sexual being, which is as rare as it is refreshing. Since my psychotic break was flamboyant, I appreciate the Farrelly Brothers’ defiance of the respectability politics that plague mental health activism, just as Shallow Hal acknowledges and even exaggerates Rosemary’s overeating, while still challenging her dehumanization.

Crucially, Shallow Hal does not confine itself to the hypothetical thought experiment of imagining conventionally attractive actors as obese or cosmetically ugly, but introduces genuinely nonconforming bodies, including launching the acting career of Rene Kirby in a prominent supporting role. This tactic confronts viewers with the humanity behind the metaphor. Think of the audiences who empathized with Boris Karloff’s cosmetic monster in Frankenstein, but were appalled by the genuinely nonconforming bodies of Tod Browning’s career-destroying Freaks. Shallow Hal dares to sit Frankenstein and the real “freaks” at the same table, where all are celebrated as “one of us.” Does its casual conflation of fatphobia and ableism disturb some fat acceptance activists? The intense identification with nonconforming bodies that gay director James Whale showed in Frankenstein, or Oscar Wilde showed in “The Birthday of the Infanta,” faded from the camp aesthetic as gay rights advanced. The identification with Frankenstein shown by crossdressing director/star Ed Wood in Glen or Glenda, and transgender creator/star Richard O’Brien in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is fading from today’s trans* rights movement. Is the fat acceptance movement fighting to end body stigma, or merely to separate fat bodies from that stigma? Must every step of progress be accompanied by an act of exclusion?

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G2X8QBt5m4″]

Fat acceptance?

The 1948 “race film” (that is, a Jim Crow era film with an African American cast, targeting African American audiences), Boarding House Blues, opens with Dusty Fletcher bringing a capering monkey into the boarding house to join his act. The monkey claims Dusty’s bed and forces him to sleep on the floor. It also bears a remarkable resemblance to King Louie, who would be talking jive and aping Louis Armstrong as the beloved “King of the Swingers” in Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book, fully 42 years before 2009’s The Princess and the Frog introduced Disney’s first Black princess (and, despite its jazz-age New Orleans setting, had less of Armstrong’s sound in its Randy Newman score than the ape did in 1967). It is uncomfortable to watch “King Louie” side by side with Dusty Fletcher, as it is uncomfortable to see Gwyneth Paltrow’s fake stigma side by side with Rene Kirby. It becomes even more uncomfortable when “King Louie” removes his head and reveals that he is another African American man, forced into a monkey suit to hustle a living. Good. Let’s be uncomfortable about that.

Erasure is too often the politically correct alternative to discomfort. By cutting blackface and Stepin Fetchit routines from classic films, we retain the sentimentalized self-image of racists, while erasing uncomfortably visible reminders of their racism (and groundbreaking African American stars, as collateral damage). Boarding House Blues also stars Moms Mabley, a middle-aged woman (and the major pioneer of stand-up comedy, whose taboo-busting routines were tamed for film). Today, her role would be played by Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence or Tyler Perry in drag and a rubber fat suit. How would Murphy’s Rasputia hold the screen against Mabley’s real deal? Doesn’t the safety of our laughter at Rasputia depend on Mabley’s substitution? One more star of Boarding House Blues deserves attention: Crip Heard. Crip is a dancer with one arm and one leg. Entering on a crutch, he tosses that crutch aside with a flourish and dances unaided. It is hard to imagine this celebration of Crip’s resilient body appearing in even the blaxploitation film of the 1970s, let alone the modern mainstream. Where could Crip dance today? If you’re honest, you know the answer: in a Farrelly Brothers movie.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qSklDMBnQM”]

There is no question that fatphobia is a vile, irrational and bullying stigma. But the commonly repeated mantra that it is the “last acceptable prejudice” is demonstrably untrue. From physical disability to mental illness to trans* status, there are numerous acceptable prejudices in today’s comedies. As Kathleen LeBesco points out, the Farrelly Brothers have “more than any mainstream moviemakers working today, fought hard against the devices of concealment, cosmetic action, and motivated forgetting, and as a result thrown into question the reassurance that public bodies are flawless bodies.” The runner-up? Jackass, of course. So, are we ready to embrace the anarchic Farrelly vision of squirming confrontation and broad-based solidarity? Or must our body politics become respectability politics?

See also at Bitch Flicks: When It Seems Like The Movie You’re Watching Might Hate You

Brigit McCone admits to having a thing for Jack Black and Rob Schneider. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

“Men’s Vows Are Women’s Traitors”: Helen Mirren Runs the Chastity Gauntlet in Shakespeare’s ‘Cymbeline’

After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin'. — Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin’.

Written by Brigit McCone.

Plots were not Shakespeare’s strong point. He borrowed most from history or other authors, before illuminating them with psychological insight and philosophical depth. One of his final plays, 1611’s Cymbeline, is particularly jarring because the Bard is actually plagiarizing (“reimagining”?) himself: King Cymbeline (King Lear) becomes enraged and imprisons his only daughter, Imogen (Desdemona/Cordelia), for daring to marry “poor but worthy gentleman” Posthumus (Othello), who is exiled and meets cynic Iochimo (Iago), provoking Posthumus to bet that Iochimo can’t seduce super-chaste Imogen. Iochimo fakes proof of Imogen’s infidelity, being Iago and all, so Posthumus flies into Othellish rage and orders Imogen killed. Imogen discovers the order and flees in drag (she’s also Portia and Viola) as “Fidele” (she’s faithful, get it?), taking a death-simulating drug along the way (did I mention she’s Juliet?) There’s a wise woman and a cryptic tree prophecy that comes true unexpectedly (unless you’ve seen Macbeth). We’re one suicidal Dane short of a Greatest Hits album here.

After five or six more annoying coincidences, the plot somehow resolves. But hang in there because, as ever, there’s human truth lurking in Shakespeare’s narrative tangle, and Cymbeline is probably his most feminist play. In theaters now: a radical new version with Ethan Hawke, that aims to prove the play really is interesting, by burying its interesting exploration of female fidelity and male double standards under guns! Bikers! Testosterone! And soldiers! If you watch the trailer closely, you may briefly glimpse Dakota Johnson, playing Shakespeare’s lead:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulaGT6b8tgg”]

Grit! Shakespeare! Guns! Blank Verse! Testosterone! Manpain! Grrr!

Centering the woman is admittedly a dramatic weakness of Cymbeline, though not as dramatically weak as its plot. The crushing double standards of Shakespeare’s age demanded purity from a heroine, unstained by the fascinating flaws of Lear, Othello, Hamlet or Macbeth. Imogen is, honestly, a little dull. Shakespeare’s good servant, Pisanio, pointedly calls Imogen “more goddess-like than wife-like” in her endless forbearance. But crucially, jealous Posthumus repents his rage before discovering Imogen’s innocence. Where murder was the conventional response to female infidelity, at least on stage, Shakespeare has his hero turn on the audience, while still believing his wife guilty, and demand, “you married ones, if each of you should take this course, how many must murder wives much better than themselves for wrying but a little?” (Screw biker gangs; where’s Deepa Mehta‘s update confronting arranged marriage and honor killing?)

Though Shakespeare is limited to absolute chastity in his heroine, he subversively tests the play’s men with Imogen’s dilemmas, demanding female fidelity be equated with male. Luckily for Bitch Flickers, there’s a 1982 BBC adaptation smart enough to cast Helen Mirren and let her rip. Mirren breathes full-blooded life and passion into Imogen, adding conflict and doubt to her dull purity. Her Imogen is faithful, not by natural chastity, but by choice. From the opening, Shakespeare evokes possessive claustrophobia, with Posthumus gifting Imogen “a manacle of love. I place it upon this fairest prisoner.”

Posthumus' manacle of love — Posthumus’ manacle of love

For her loyalty to Posthumus, Imogen is condemned as “disloyal thing” by her father, King Cymbeline, who demands that she marry his royal stepson, Cloten. Yet, when Cymbeline hears his own wife’s deathbed confession that she never loved him, only “affected greatness” (wanted his rank and wealth), he gasps: “but that she spake it dying, I would not believe her lips in opening it.” King Lear’s expectations clash with Othello’s. Imogen’s conflicting loyalties are embodied by Pisanio, a servant forced to swear loyalty to two masters, who justifies choosing the heart over vows: “wherein I am false, I am honest. Not true, to be true.” Compare Lady Macbeth: though stereotyped as a scheming manipulator, her inner monologues are devoid of personal ambition and filled with her need to fulfil her husband’s desires, taking the burden of his guilt upon herself. In her sleepwalking, she feels Macbeth’s victims sticking to her hands, even those of which she had no warning. Lady Macbeth ruins her husband, not out of selfishness, but out of a love so selfless that it sacrifices her moral judgment and her very identity. If only she had known when to be “not true, to be true.”

Imogen: "what is it to be false?" — Imogen: “What is it to be false?”

As Iochimo claims Imogen has cheated with him, our “worthy” Posthumus seems eager to believe the oath of this stranger over his wife’s vows, even when reminded by bystanders that the proofs are not absolute. Convinced of Imogen’s guilt, Posthumus launches into a misogynist rant, revealing paternity fraud as the root of his anxiety – “we are all bastards!” – as well as scapegoating male flaws on women – “there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part.” But his bet’s true motive is rather suggested by Iochimo: “he must be weighed by her value.” Imogen’s virtue is Posthumus’ status symbol, while Iochimo himself seems driven to prove the falsity of all womankind, as if the mere possibility of female loyalty would imply Iochimo’s responsibility for provoking past disloyalty. As objectifying is a classic strategy for denying your own impact on another, so Iochimo longs to “buy ladies’ flesh” in some way that will guarantee its not “tainting.”

This insecure craving for guaranteed affection becomes the counterproductive engine of his repulsiveness. Robert Lindsay’s Iochimo is like polished igneous rock: the hard, glittering bitterness of a cooled eruption. As he smuggles himself inside Imogen’s bedchamber, to memorize its decorations and the moles of her body as proofs of infidelity, Iochimo even peers into her bedside book, finding “the leaf’s turned down where Philomel gave up.” Philomel was a mythical Grecian heroine raped by her brother-in-law, whose tongue was torn out to prevent her testifying, an image central to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Lindsay’s choked gasp makes it clear that his character interprets Imogen’s reading matter as rape fantasy. Is she reading Philomel’s story as a cautionary tale, or has the pressure of stifling chastity really provoked “hot dreams” (Iochimo’s words) about the release of imaginary ravishment? Is it any of our damn business?

Iochimo, wearing Imogen's stolen manacle while being a creeper — Iochimo, wearing Imogen’s stolen manacle while being a creeper

Though restraining himself from rape, Iochimo’s compulsive need to test and “prove” Imogen’s virtue is itself a violation. By referencing Philomel, Shakespeare reminds us of Imogen’s vulnerability, which the 1982 production underlines by Iochimo’s hovering shirtless over her as she sleeps, monitoring her every sigh. We must remember that our noble hero, Posthumus, has given letters of recommendation to this total stranger, along with a hefty bribe to rape his wife (theoretically, “seduce” her), because Posthumus is willing to accept proof of sex (not of consent) as evidence of Imogen’s betrayal. Though Posthumus swears the deepest love for Imogen, his underlying misogyny (“there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part”) has driven him to betray her utterly, ironically to test her faithfulness. As Imogen howls, when she discovers his suspicion: “men’s vows are women’s traitors!” Posthumus’ vow of love betrayed Imogen into believing herself exempted from his misogyny. But conditional pardons are no security. As Mirren mutters, ripping up love letters, all his scriptures are turned to heresy. There are many ways to break faith.

Tragically, Imogen lived before the invention of chocolate chip ice cream

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest… meet Belarius, Cymbeline’s bravest soldier who, maddened by false accusations of treachery, kidnapped the king’s infant boys and raised them as his own. This apparently irrelevant subplot introduces the idea of unjust suspicion avenged by paternity fraud, just as Pisanio voiced Imogen’s divided loyalty. Belarius’ motive, “beaten for loyalty excited me to treason”, equally justifies Imogen in infidelity, by masculine logic. When his sons are returned to Cymbeline, the king asks if they are indeed his. Belarius does not answer “yes,” but “as sure as you your father’s.” Shakespeare proposes that no-one, male or female, can ever truly be verified. At least, not by the objective measure that Iochimo aspires to. Trusting their hearts alone, Imogen and her long-lost brothers love each other, without knowing their kinship.

Belarius, meanwhile, proves his “honest” courage fighting Romans, rallying fleeing Britons by yelling that only deer should be slaughtered while running away: “Britain’s harts die flying, not our men.” The pun is appropriate. Male culture promotes valor in warfare, but justifies defensive cowardice in love, provoking the very ruin it most fears. Britain’s hearts die flying, like its harts. Bayonets, bullets or biker gangs, they’re still metaphors for sexual insecurity. As in the battle, where some were “turned coward but by example” and needed only a rallying cry to regain courage, so Posthumus’ blistering “you married ones…” speech rallies Shakespeare’s audience to a more courageous love, where chastity is a faithful heart, not a flaunted status symbol: “I will begin the fashion, less without and more within.”

In a blind chaste test, 3 out of 4 women preferred Posthumus — In a blind chaste test, three out of four women preferred Posthumus

Shakespeare not only explores the hypocrisy of chastity testing and daughterly duty, but the exhausting demands of unwanted attention. Imogen’s suitor, Cloten, seeks to win her by conventional expressions of love, serenading her with music to make her obligated. Tellingly, he describes this wooing as battle – “I have assailed her with musics” – urging his fiddlers and singer “if you can penetrate her with your fingering, so we’ll try with tongue too” to emphasize the violation of his unconsensual serenading. If she yields, Imogen betrays Posthumus. If she remains silent, her silence will be taken for yielding. Finally, she is provoked into telling Cloten that she hates him, that if every hair of his head were a man like him, she would prefer Posthumus’ rags to the lot of them. Cloten takes this insult as provocation to plot the rape of Imogen. There’s just no escaping the bind of his manacle of love. At least, not until he tries that arrogant attitude on a man, and gets his head lopped off. Gotta love Will. A fiery Helen Mirren dominates, as she battles through Shakespeare’s chastity gauntlet. If only her exasperated “but that you shall not say I yield, being silent, I would not speak” felt less familiar to today’s woman.

By the finale, the Queen and Cloten, heartless plotters of murder and rape, are dead. But what of Posthumus, whose insecurity would enable a stranger to rape his wife? What of Cymbeline, shocked at his own wife’s lovelessness, but demanding loveless marriage for his daughter? What of Belarius, honest warrior but paternity fraudster? What of Iochimo, self-loathing “tainter” of womankind? Forgiveness is their punishment, conscience their natural judge. Though Iochimo stole Imogen’s “manacle of love” as false proof of her infidelity, he accepts his heart must bleed in its trap. Karma’s a bitch. Britons make voluntary peace with Romans. King Cymbeline declares: “pardon’s the word… to all!” After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Aren't double standards some bullshit, for sooth? — Aren’t double standards some bullshit, for sooth?

Brigit McCone can rant for days about how misunderstood Lady Macbeth is. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and working “a breach in nature for ruin’s wasteful entrance” into everyday conversation.

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood In ‘Nanook of the North’

Maggie Nujarluktuk as "Nyla the Smiling One" with "Rainbow" — Maggie Nujarluktuk as “Nyla the Smiling One” with “Rainbow”

Written by Brigit McCone.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“the Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges, Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

“I stuck with the seals” – Tanya Tagaq

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

Looty Pijamini's monument to the "relocation" — Looty Pijamini’s monument to the “relocation”

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq. When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Indigenous Siberian artist Konstantin Pankov blends nature with rhythmic vibrations

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “my father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tagaq in concert with Nanook of the North (sample)

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red‘s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red‘s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

Jane Ash Poitras' "In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit" — Jane Ash Poitras’ “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit”

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists. Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Mute the sentimental soundtrack and slap this on for a flavor.

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Vintage Viewing: Lois Weber, Blockbusting Boundary-Pusher

Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors.

Written by Brigit McCone.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

“No women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber” – film historian Anthony Slide

Lois Weber: social justice warrior

The career of Lois Weber demonstrates the importance of mentoring between women; entering Gaumont Company as an actress in 1904, Weber was encouraged by the original film director, Alice Guy, to explore directing, producing, and scriptwriting, while Weber mentored female directors at Universal like Cleo Madison and Dorothy Davenport Reid. Weber’s career also demonstrates the importance of precedent: elected to the Motion Picture Directors’ Association and the highest paid director in Hollywood, her success inspired Universal to promote female directors such as Ida May Park to replace her when Weber left to found Lois Weber Productions. Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors. The only survivor into Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dorothy Arzner, was great for transmasculine representation, but an indicator of how exclusively masculine-coded directing had become.

Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber and Jeanie MacPherson — Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber, and Jeanie MacPherson

For her first feature film, 1914’s The Merchant of Venice, Weber chose a Shakespearean classic whose brilliant female lawyer, Portia, resolves the plot’s dilemma. Her 1915 feature, Hypocrites, is a lush epic. Made the year before D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Hypocrites parallels the medieval past and the present in a moral allegory, anticipating Griffith’s most admired film. Weber’s Hypocrites criticizes mob mentality and organized religion, as a medieval monk creates an icon of truth as a naked woman and is murdered by a mob for lewdness. Using innovative traveling double exposures and intricate editing, Weber constructs her naked star as a disembodied phantasm, who confronts congregation members with their own urges for money, sex and power, bypassing slut-shaming to examine society’s fear of the naked woman in the abstract. Fact mirrored fiction, as audiences flocked to Hypocrites for its nudity, before Weber faced a backlash of hypocritical outrage. Weber’s film also features vast canvases and landscapes, using mountains with interesting silhouettes and the highly reflective surface of lakes to compensate for the low light-sensitivity of early cameras. Film critic Mike E. Grost points out that this pictorial quality is associated with the cinema of John Ford, who started his directing career working for Weber’s employer, Universal, in 1917, two years after Hypocrites. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJBJvEEPegI”]

Extract from Hypocrites, showcasing Weber’s pictorial allegory

In 1915, Hypocrites was banned by the Ohio censorship board, as was the racist The Birth of a Nation. The all-male Supreme Court’s judgement in Mutual vs. Ohio, that free speech protections should not apply to motion pictures, centers sexual “prurience” as their concern however, not hate speech. By 1915, female directors Alice Guy and Lois Weber had explored gender role reversal, gay affirmative narratives, social pressures fuelling prostitution, the evils of domestic abuse, and the hypocrisy of male censorship of the female form. The following year, Weber would condemn capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe, while the Supreme Court’s decision enabled widespread censorship of films by Weber and Margaret Sanger advocating birth control. By the time free speech protections were extended to film, with 1952’s Burstyn vs. Wilson decision, female directors had been eliminated from Hollywood’s studio system.

More than just social propaganda, Weber’s films were equally noted for her talent at drawing out effective performances, shown in this extract from 1921’s exploration of wage inequity and the credit crisis, The Blot. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ttuOKdPC4″]

Margaret McWade‘s dignified humiliation in The Blot (extract)

Though most of Weber’s films are credited to the husband and wife team of Weber and Phillips Smalley, Weber was the sole author of their scenarios. She went on to write and direct five feature films after her divorce from Smalley, while he never directed again. Nevertheless, film historian Anthony Slide claims that her productivity declined post-divorce as she could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband. Her drop in productivity actually parallels most of her female peers, with outside investors playing an increasing role in 1920s Hollywood and preferring to back male productions. Despite setbacks, including the bankruptcy of Lois Weber Productions, Weber entered the sound era with lost film White Heat in 1934, depicting a plantation owner ruined after discarding his native lover and marrying a white society girl. This echoes Weber’s 1913 short Civilized and Savage, in which a heroic native girl nurses a plantation owner and departs unthanked. Though Weber’s brownface performance in Civilized and Savage, and her use of “tragic mulatto” clichés for White Heat‘s martyred heroine, can be criticized, both films are theoretically anti-racist. Weber died of a ruptured gastric ulcer, aged 60, in 1939, dismissively eulogized as a “star-maker” rather than a distinctive artist with her own voice and politics.

Suspense – 1913

“The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it.” – Carol J. Clover

In Carol J. Clover’s influential study Men, Women, And Chain Saws, she expresses surprise at finding feminist enjoyment in horror, where majority-male audiences are expected to identify with a female protagonist. But slashers were not the male creation she assumed them to be. Gothic horror was popularized by Ann Radcliffe, writing from the perspective of a vulnerable yet resilient heroine. Radcliffe’s Final Girl was raped by Matthew Lewis’ Monk, parodied by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and made lesboerotic by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, but her role as the conventional protagonist of horror was fixed, her impact discussed by Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia. Male artists obsessively sexualized the Final Girl, but didn’t create her.

In Lois Weber’s 1913 short Suspense, the Final Girl crosses into cinema, now unsexily a wife and mother. Ideologically, Suspense is not radical: Weber’s middle-class heroine is a damsel-in-distress, shrieking and clutching her baby as she’s imperiled by the house-invading “Tramp,” waiting passively for her husband to rescue her. What Suspense brilliantly achieves is a cinematic language of the female gaze, inducing male viewers to identify with the heroine. From the mother spotting the Tramp from an upper window in dramatic close-up, to the Tramp’s slow ascent, viewed from the woman’s position at the top of the stairs, to Weber’s close-ups of the mother’s terrified reactions, Suspense demonstrates that identifying with the imperiled woman is essential to produce… suspense.

Weber’s split screens, and the dread she builds by allowing the Tramp to initially lurk in the background, were also innovative. From George Cukor’s Gaslight to Hitchcock’s Rebecca to John Carpenter’s Halloween, directors would use Weber’s techniques of female gaze to induce the male empathy that they required for their suspense effects, creating the accidental feminism of horror that Clover celebrated. Though often remembered for her moralism, Weber mastered the craft of popular entertainment, scripting the original 1918 Tarzan of the Apes, and being drafted to recut the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera after initial versions tested poorly, successfully crafting it into an acknowledged classic. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wkw5Fr_I8″]

Where Are My Children? – 1916

“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.” – Margaret Sanger

“Must She Always Plead In Vain?” by legendary feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers, 1919

A Cinema History slams Weber’s influential 1916 film with the claim that “even more strongly than D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, this film defends the superiority of the white race… the film is in the first place defending eugenics.” It is true that Weber’s film invokes eugenics in her courtroom defense of birth control, but her case studies are of impoverished white families in circumstances unsuitable for children – abusive relationships, overcrowded homes and ailing mothers. Weber’s argument, “if the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out,” actually anticipates research by popular book Freakonomics. The irony of Where Are My Children? — that birth control and abortion are available to women who can afford children, but not to the poor — mirrors current realities in Ireland. Though the activism of Women on Web has reduced the number of Irish women driven overseas for terminations over the last decade from over 6,000 yearly to around 3,000, the law almost exclusively impacts institutionalized women, illegally trafficked women, asylum seekers, homeless women, hospitalized women and victims of reproductive coercion – that is, groups most at risk of sexual exploitation.

Like Weber’s choice of a white actor for the Tramp of Suspense, and her argument in Civilized and Savage that civilized values are independent of race, her choice of white families as negative case studies in Where Are My Children? dodges eugenics’ racial aspect. To understand why she is using eugenics, one must appreciate the philosophy’s widespread acceptance before its adoption by Nazism, shaping US debates on immigration and converting celebrities George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill in the UK. Weber covers her bases by invoking religion as well as pseudoscience, using Calvinist concepts of election as a metaphor for the “predestination” of planned parenthood, with cherubs representing pregnancies that were unfilmable at the time.

The prosecution of Margaret Sanger inspired the film’s Dr. Homer. A Cinema History questions Weber’s feminist cred by demanding, “Why did Lois Weber turn this positive female character into a man?” Why A Cinema History considers eugenicist Sanger “a positive female character” while criticizing Weber is a mystery, but here’s why Dr. Homer’s a man: the success of Where Are My Children? emboldened Weber to make The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, starring Weber herself as a woman on trial for advocating birth control. The film’s original title Is A Woman A Person? echoes Ireland’s #iamnotavessel. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle was censored across the Northeast and Midwest, and is now lost.

Alison Duer Miller, sarcastic suffragette bitch (in a good way)

The suppression of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle demonstrates the necessity of Weber’s patriarchal approach to Where Are My Children? (including remaining uncredited to obscure its female authorship), as classic deliberative rhetoric. Weber harnesses popular horror of abortion to present birth control as the only alternative to “stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of unwilling mothers.” The hero, Walton, fails to consult his wife on having children, driving her to secret abortions which render her unable to conceive, punishing him with permanent childlessness. In a Dirty Dancing twist (another female-authored blockbuster), the housekeeper’s daughter dies by tragically botched abortion, blamed on the wealthy “wolf” who seduced her without consequence.

Though A Cinema History claims the film shows “how moral values have shifted since the 1910s,” their interpretation of Weber’s frankly depicted unwilling mothers, as “refusing motherhood out of pure selfishness,” rather suggests little has changed. Where Are My Children? is not a free expression of Weber’s eugenic or anti-abortion views (whatever they were), it is calculated propaganda for an age when advocates of birth control were prosecuted by male juries, under obscenity laws created by legislatures for which women were not yet entitled to vote. Watching Where Are My Children?, you see our foremothers going to the mattresses for freedoms we (even me, thanks to Ireland’s Contraceptive Train) now take for granted. Despite its outdated imagery, or precisely because of how that imagery reflects Weber’s anticipated audience, Where Are My Children? is a milestone in the struggle for reproductive rights.

Suggested Soundtrack: Joan Baez, “Baez Sings Dylan”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwrkAyH0-8A”]

See also at Bitch Flicks: Erik Bondurant reviews Where Are My Children

Lois Weber was only one of many actresses who took creative control over their films by moving into directing in the silent era. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female artists (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).

#Filmherstory: Six Royals Objectively Cooler Than Another Bloody Henry 8th

In honor of Henry’s wives and the #filmherstory campaign, here are six Royal women overdue the Hollywood treatment. To help with your visualizing, I’ll even toss in a pitch, director, and star.

Damian Lewis smirks at me from a magazine rack under the caption “Damian Lewis Makes Henry VIII Sexy!” Déjà vu. Clearly, I’m missing the exciting difference between Wolf Hall‘s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII and Eric Bana’s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl, which rewrote Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII in Fifty Shades of Tudors (OK, OK, Natalie Dormer did rock), which updated Richard Burton’s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days, which critics agree was sexier than Charles Laughton’s Oscar-winning sinister-but-lovable Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII. It would be easy to make this a feminist issue, considering that chronic womanizer Henry VIII executed two wives for infidelity, despite having won the right to divorce them. However, 18 actresses have immortalized Queen Elizabeth I on screen, earning Oscar nominations for portraying the woman who presided over campaigns of religious persecution and expansive colonization as heroic, or sinister-but-lovable at worst.

Nowadays, we theoretically agree that colonialism was a bad idea. Our conquering heroes have become conquering antiheroes. Yet antiheroes actually command empathy as effectively as heroes. A study by Chippewa researcher JoEllen Shively found that 60 percent of her Sioux focus group, viewing Western The Searchers, identified with John Wayne’s viciously racist (and misogynist) Ethan Edwards. While conflicted, “half breed” sidekick Martin Pawley is cited as evidence that the film is “morally complex,” according to Shively, “the Indians, like the Anglos, identified with the characters that the narrative structure tells them to identify with.” Tokens represent no-one, only their author’s urge to appear liberal, while vicariously identifying with conquerors. Meanwhile, today’s White Saviors admirably rescue natives from evil colonizers, thereby ironically reinforcing the colonialist assumption that white heroes should control the destinies of the colonized.

Women of the Third and Fourth World are doubly marginalized; they are the damsels-in-distress for the natives-in-distress for the White Savior: #filmheranticolonialstory. Here in Ireland, our anticolonial icons remain unfilmed, apart from Irish director Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, but entry to the EU Colonizer’s Club has entitled our Mr. Rhys Meyers to play colonial icon Henry VIII (progress!). So, while I would love to see Fiona Shaw as Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley, storming fortresses and sailing to London to confront Elizabeth I (thereby nailing the elusive Royal Bechdel), it matters more to invite audiences to identify with female leaders of the Third and Fourth Worlds. In honor of Henry’s wives and the #filmherstory campaign, here are six Royal women overdue the Hollywood treatment. To help with your visualizing, I’ll even toss in a pitch, director, and star.

Ava DuVernay’s Nzinga

The plot: Queen Nzinga Mbande fought and maneuvered in 17th century Angola. Serving as diplomatic envoy for her brother, Ndongo’s King, Nzinga personally negotiated a peace treaty with Portugal, sitting on a willing follower when denied an equal seat by their governor. Taking the throne in 1626, Nzinga forged alliances with African neighbors and Portugal’s Dutch rivals, scoring a victory against the Portuguese at the 1647 Battle of Kombi, and personally leading troops in battle until the age of 60. Building her base, Matamba, as a strategic trading port, the abolitionist Queen resisted the Atlantic slave trade and foreign rule throughout her lifetime, dying peacefully in 1663.

The pitch: Elizabeth: The Golden Age in Africa.

The star: Lupita Nyong’o is an internationally celebrated African star, noted for her regal style on the red carpet as well as her Oscar-winning acting. Playing an actual queen is the logical next step.

The director: Ava DuVernay’s Selma shows she can find interesting humanity in inspirational icons. In her hands, Nzinga could be a pragmatic political player, juggling conflicting alliances, more than a romantic ideal, and shed light on African colonial history from a fresh angle.

Ang Lee’s Cixi

The plot: Chinese historian Jung Chang‘s biography of Empress Dowager Cixi highlights her role in industrializing the country, opposing foreign rule, banning torture and foot-binding, educating women, establishing a free press and initiating China’s transition to parliamentary democracy. This semi-literate concubine forged a stable alliance with the Emperor’s wife (another Royal Bechdel), loved and lost a palace eunuch, whose execution was ordered by her own brother-in-law, faced down continual threats to her power and was driven by European encroachments to back the devastating Boxer rebellion. Not forgetting a Japanese invasion, a rebellious Emperor’s gay love affairs and Cixi’s final decision to prevent her reactionary adopted son from undoing her reforms by poisoning him. Drama!

The pitch: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets The Last Emperor.

The star: Michelle Yeoh should be in everything. From her delicate portrait of repressed longing in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to her commanding turn in The Lady, Yeoh is the natural choice.

The director: With a heroine forced by convention to rule from behind a silk screen, this demands a director like Taiwan’s Ang Lee, who can make gripping drama out of restraint.

Deepa Mehta’s Lakshmibai

The plot: Though Rani (Queen) Lakshmibai was the heroine of India’s first technicolor epic, 1956’s Jhansi Ki Rani, she deserves Hollywood stardom and a grittier reboot. After her Maharajah husband died, Lakshmibai’s claim to rule, as regent for her adopted son, was denied by the British East India Company to justify their annexation of her state, Jhansi. Learning martial arts in childhood, Lakshmibai became a major leader of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, training women to fight in her ranks. Her role in a mutiny that massacred British forces at Jhansi’s fort remains unclear. Fighting off invasions by two neighboring rajas, her city finally fell to British heavy artillery. Lakshmibai fled in male disguise with her infant son, joined the rebel army of Tatya Tope and died fighting in the battle of Gwalior.

The pitch: Ashoka the Great meets Braveheart. For girls.

The star: Shriya Saran, who played Parvati in Mehta’s Midnight Children, showed the determination to prepare for her role by working for two months in Mumbai’s slums, and has an athletic body trained in Kathak and Rajasthani dance, with the striking beauty that even her British enemies admired in Lakshmibai.

The director: Deepa Mehta has tackled epic narratives of India’s Partition in Earth, taboo sexuality in Fire, the cruel treatment of widows in Water, and the diaspora experience in Heaven on Earth, but never explored British colonial rule. Like Sam Mendes directing Skyfall, putting Mehta in charge of an action epic could bring psychological depth to its high-octane clashes. Lakshmibai is so iconic in India that she is almost saintly, but Mehta has the guts to give her human flaws and delve into the brutal dilemmas of warfare.

Shonda Rhimes’ Ranavalona

The plot: “I will rule here, to the good fortune of my people and the glory of my name!” Ranavalona I has been labelled the “Mad Queen of Madagascar” for overseeing religious persecutions, inquisitions under torture and sweeping purges of political enemies, just like sinister-but-supposedly-sexily-sane Henry VIII. Rising from a commoner’s background, marrying the king and seizing absolute power on his death in a masterful coup, Ranavalona murdered the father of her child for his infidelity (*cough* Henry VIII), and harnessed French lover Jean Laborde to oversee Madagascar’s industrial revolution. Her later years were marked by excess, with numerous Malagasy dying to construct a road for her buffalo hunt, but Ranavalona foiled all plots to overthrow her (including ex-lover Laborde’s) and kept Madagascar free from colonial rule. There was method in her madness.

The pitch: The Tudors meets Shaka Zulu. For girls.

The star: Angela Bassett’s Emmy-nominated voodoo queen, Marie Laveau in American Horror Story: Coven, shows she can be commanding, scary and sympathetic in turn. Ranavalona is the role she was born for.

The showrunner: Ranavalona’s journey to the dark side deserves a Tudors-style series to fully develop. In Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, Shonda Rhimes has proved that she relishes antiheroines and moral ambiguity. Ranavalona would take Rhimes into the lush historical epic, too long monopolized by white royalty.

Steve McQueen’s Nanye-hi

The plot: After snatching the rifle of her dead husband and rallying Cherokee warriors against their Creek rivals to win the 1755 Battle of Taliwa, Nanye-hi was elected Ghighau (Beloved Woman), heading the Women’s Council and sitting on the Council of Chiefs (OK, the Cherokee were too advanced to technically have royalty, cut me a break). Nanye-hi, also called “Nancy Ward” after marrying settler Bryant Ward, was a political moderate juggling extreme pressures, alerting settlers to Cherokee plans for a massacre, saving a white woman from burning at the stake and personally negotiating the peace treaty of 1781, but strongly opposing the sale of Cherokee lands and petitioning against plans for removal, which would culminate in the Trail of Tears after her death. Nanye-hi would showcase Indigenous traditions of “petticoat government” that inspired the first suffragettes, within a tense drama of compromise and resistance.

The pitch: Princess Kaiulani meets Borgen.

The star: If you’ve seen her powerful performance in Blackstone (lucky American readers can catch up on hulu), you know Michelle Thrush should be in everything that does not already star Michelle Yeoh (actually, I just had a great idea for a buddy cop movie). She’s a natural choice to capture the strain of Nanye-hi’s political conflicts.

The director: I haven’t yet seen Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, so I can’t suggest any Native American women to direct. However, Steve McQueen’s treatment of the Irish Troubles in Hunger, and American slavery in 12 Years A Slave, prove the British director is unafraid to tackle controversial history with an outsider’s fresh eye. Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar, for her first major film role, also shows his talent at coaxing raw performances from his actresses. Disney’s Pocahontas this would not be.

Timur Bekmambetov’s Khutulun

The plot: Mongols were pretty imperial, what with the largest land empire in history. But Central Asia’s absorption into the Russian/Soviet sphere has made it invisible, with Sacha Baron Cohen selecting Kazakhstan for Borat because “it was a country that no one had heard anything about” despite being the ninth largest in the world and launching the first man into space. Played by the physically slight Korean actress Claudia Kim, as a supporting character in Netflix’s Marco Polo, champion wrestler Khutulun deserves solo stardom. Excelling in battles against the armies of her cousin Kublai Khan, this Mongolian princess demanded that suitors beat her in wrestling, or forfeit 100 horses. She acquired 10,000 horses before making a politically strategic match of her own choosing. Nominated for khanship after her father’s death, Khutulun reportedly backed her brother Orus’ bid in exchange for being appointed Commander-in-Chief of his army.

The pitch: Mongol for girls.

The star: Mongol actress Khulan Chuluun was mostly stuck in the love interest role, but showed flashes of stubborn spirit. With a director like Bekmambetov, known for making action heroes of character actors like James McAvoy, could she train up and become an icon?

The director: Kazak director Bekmambetov’s talent for tongue-in-cheek, inventive action would be perfect for the unbelievable legends that have grown up around Khutulun. Witness his wild portrait of his namesake, Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane (Timur) in the opening of Day Watch. He’s also a great director of women, from Galina Tyunina’s scene-stealing Olga to Angelina Jolie’s tough-but-fair Fox in Wanted. Movie, please.

So, who would be your historical (anti)heroines? For the Soska Sisters to realize their dream to film Bathory? Michelle Rodriguez in Robert Rodriguez’s Malinche, as a punk survivor of sex trafficking who wants to watch the world burn? Gong Li as Zhang Yimou’s Wu Zetian? Kerry Washington in Fanta Régina Nacro’s Mama Yaa Asentewaa? Saoirse Ronan as a young Countess Markievicz for Juanita Wilson? Iman as Hatshepsut? Join the conversation – #filmherstory.

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female leaders (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).

‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’: Bollywood Hurts Men, Too

By supplying excuses all around, ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ upholds the status quo while venting its resulting frustrations; the performances lovingly celebrate female feistiness, while the plot constantly punishes and suppresses it in favor of traditional ideals of self-sacrifice and emotional martyrdom. Cue predictable feminist outrage. You already know everything I would write. So instead, I’d like to focus on another aspect of the film: its utter contempt for male agency. Yes, male.

"Love is friendship" — “Love is friendship”

Written by Brigit McCone as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

In our conversation about the sexism of “friendzoning,” it’s easy to forget it is a traditionally female institution. It is women who are expected to be passive in romance, and to express sexual desire indirectly through friendship. When the word “friendzone” was coined in a 1994 episode of Friends, it was the comically feminized Ross who was dubbed “Mayor of the Friendzone.” The rage of many friendzoned men expresses their resentment of romantic rejection, but also their frustration at feeling feminized by their failure to conquer; conquering neither the girl nor their emotions, they remain stranded in a typically feminine limbo. It is women who are supposed to naturally play “beta chumps.”

Traditionally, female portraits of friendzoning were fantasies of eventual victory through silent emotional martyrdom. Fanny Price, of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, encourages both her love Edmund and his love Mary to confide in her, while stewing inwardly about how “deceived” Edmund is in Mary, before using Mary’s trust to passive-aggressively poison Edmund against her. At no point does Fanny consider taking an active role by expressing her feelings. When Edmund’s brotherly love turns to romance, Austen makes clear he is on the rebound or “exactly in that favorable state which a recent disappointment gives.” Critic and Booker Prizewinner Kingsley Amis has branded Fanny “a monster of complacency and pride” who dominates “under a cloak of cringing self-abasement,” which is just about the perfect summary of the friendzone-moaning “Nice Guy.”

The friendzoning of “quiet worth,” in favor of spirited charm, also crops up in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, whose heroine is obviously based on Anne herself, but named after her beloved Weightman’s real-life love, Agnes Walton. The fictional Agnes, too, spends time stewing and resenting her rival, in one of literature’s most wincingly honest portraits of unrequited love, before Weston (the fictional alias of Weightman) improbably reveals that he loves “Agnes” after all. In Some Kind Of Wonderful, Mary Stuart Masterson plays a girl friendzoned because of her tomboy qualities, like Doris Day in Calamity Jane, rather than the classic “quiet worth,” but Masterson is classically self-sacrificing and passive as she waits for the hero to “come to his senses.” Later friendzoned women, from Kristen Scott Thomas in Four Weddings And A Funeral to Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding (side note: was I the only one on Bitch Flicks who loved that deliciously acid satire?), have been forced to admit romantic defeat as punishment for such passivity, rather than passively rewarded for emotional martyrdom. But India, a country popularly viewed as more traditional in its gender roles, offers a classic, female friendzone fantasy of tomboy rejection in Bollywood’s own answer to Some Kind of Wonderful, 1998 smash hit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

"Men seldom make passes at a girl who outclasses" — “Men seldom make passes at a girl who outclasses”

The film divides neatly into two halves. In the first half, tomboy Anjali (Kajol) is romantically dismissed by her buddy, Rahul (Shahrukh Khan), in favor of a more conventionally feminine and sexually confident rival, Tina (Rani Mukherji). Poor Anjali is a short-haired frump, you see, in the She’s All That tradition of luminously gorgeous women with faintly unflattering and (*gasp*) masculine fashion sense. In the second half, Rahul and Anjali meet again after Tina’s death, when Anjali has transformed into a saree-wearing, long-haired and conventionally feminine beauty, and they fall in love.

In the first half, Anjali constantly beats Rahul at basketball. In the second half, her feminine saree and hair get in her way, she is distracted by her sexual attraction to Rahul, and she loses, to chants of “girls cannot play basketball.” Indeed, the film tells us, girls cannot play basketball, but only because they want boys to like them. In the first half, Anjali is assertive and outspoken, only failing to tell Rahul of her feelings because he is in love with Tina by the time she realizes them. In the second half, Anjali is shy and passive, allowing her final fate to be decided by her fiancé, Salman Khan, playing a slimier spin on the thankless “Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle” role. The plot gratifies female viewers, reassuring them that they are perfectly capable of beating men, but are forced to play the passive role by unjust, anti-tomboy romantic discrimination. It equally gratifies male viewers, reassuring them that they have the romantic power to discipline women into unthreatening beauties. By supplying excuses all around, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai upholds the status quo while venting its resulting frustrations; the performances lovingly celebrate female feistiness, while the plot constantly punishes and suppresses it in favor of traditional ideals of self-sacrifice and emotional martyrdom. Cue predictable feminist outrage. You already know everything I would write. So instead, I’d like to focus on another aspect of the film: its utter contempt for male agency. Yes, male.

Rahul does not become reunited with Anjali by chance. As tomboy Anjali takes a train out of Rahul’s life, to avoid interfering in his relationship with Tina, her eyes tearfully meet Tina’s on the platform. She passes her scarf to Tina, as though to leave a piece of herself with Rahul, recalling Anne Brontë’s fusion of friendzoned and beloved in her fictional “Agnes.” In that moment, Tina narrates, “Anjali’s silence told me everything.” Tina realizes that Anjali is entitled to Rahul, not because of Rahul’s feelings for Anjali, but because of Anjali’s feelings for Rahul. After consciously choosing to bear Rahul a child, knowing that she will die in childbirth and withholding this knowledge from him, Tina commands Rahul to name their daughter “Anjali” and leaves that daughter a series of letters to open every birthday. The final letter, on her eighth birthday, is the one that narrates the story of Tina, Rahul, and the original Anjali, instructing child-Anjali to reunite Rahul with her namesake. This “letters from beyond the grave” trope echoes P.S. I Love You, in which Gerard Butler’s husband writes a series of letters for his wife to open after his death, guiding her through her grieving process before giving his blessing to her finding new love. I was no fan of that film’s leprecorniness, but can we take a moment to admit how boundless our feminist outrage would be, if P.S. I Love You featured Butler writing to the couple’s 8-year-old son and instructing him to “fulfil his father’s dream” by manipulating his mother into a relationship with a lover of Butler’s choosing? Not to mention that, since Tina died shortly after giving birth, she had absolutely no knowledge of her daughter’s character, emotional maturity or tactical skill.

Shahrukh Khan: less capable of running his life than an utterly unknown eight-year-old — Shahrukh Khan: less capable of running his life than an utterly unknown 8-year-old

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai even underlines the cruelty of this maneuver: the camera pulls in on Rahul’s moist eyes as he admits that child-Anjali has “got something which even I don’t have. Her mother’s letters.” The film glorifies Tina’s noble self-sacrifice, paralleling her martyrdom with the goddess Durga‘s feminine ideal, but is this truly admirable? Tina deprived Rahul of any say over risking her life; she wrote detailed instructions for Rahul’s romantic future to an eight-year-old, but didn’t prepare a single letter for her supposedly beloved husband. Each of Tina’s unselfish actions serve to hurt and exclude Rahul, stripping him of his agency and undermining the dignity of his love, though it was deep enough to resolve him on never remarrying after losing Tina. Luckily, though, Rahul does turn out to have subconscious romantic feelings for Anjali, despite all behavior to the contrary. Phew. It would otherwise be distinctly awkward to raise a daughter whose very name is a constant reminder that your true love really wanted you to hook up with your college friend, even before that daughter is brainwashed that it is her sacred duty to “get Anjali back into [her] father’s life.”

Writer-director Karan Johar admits, in the DVD’s special features, “I always know a woman better, actually, I’m more comfortable with a woman’s character than a man’s.” Kuch Kuch Hota Hai succeeds in spite of this bias towards female entitlement, due to infectious music and romantic chemistry between its actors. Kajol and Shahrukh Khan recapture their spark from smash hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Kajol brings extraordinary emotional transparency and rawness to her role, utterly fearless of looking foolish. We cringe for her, but it is this whole-heartedness that makes her sympathetic. Tomboy Anjali deserves Rahul; she is the only character who respects his will. When she discovers his love for Tina, the soundtrack sings, “You did not remember me, there’s nothing more left to say,” signaling her tearful resignation. Advocating abandoning your college education, because of romantic disappointment, is hardly a good model for girls, but this decision dramatizes Anjali’s willingness to respect Rahul’s relationship with Tina. She is also the only character who honors his vow never to remarry.

When Anjali and Rahul are finally reunited, at his daughter’s summer camp, there is a particularly lovely scene on a bench at night, perfectly capturing the awkwardness of re-establishing intimacy after long estrangement. Yet the scene ends with child-Anjali popping up and shaking her head, her assumed entitlement to monitor and manipulate her father’s romance going utterly unchallenged. The genuine chemistry between Kajol and Shahrukh, as well as their characters’ shared innocence of the matchmaking conspiracy, make it easy to overlook the narrative’s justification of romantic interference.

Kajol: so luminous, you'll forget how creepy this plot is — Kajol: so luminous, you’ll forget how creepy this plot is

The concept of indirect female power is nothing new, nor is it particular to India. Ever since Salomé danced for the head of John the Baptist, femme fatales have achieved their goals indirectly by influencing men. Lady Macbeth becomes an “unsexed” monster out of ambition for her husband alone; her soliloquies never mention any personal desire to be queen. Tendencies in Indian culture to justify matriarchal manipulation have been satirized by director Gurinder Chadha, particularly in her black comedy It’s A Wonderful Afterlife. What makes Kuch Kuch Hota Hai interesting is how clearly it shows the link between suppressing direct power and promoting indirect power. The film’s first half punishes the heroine’s direct assertiveness; its second half relieves female frustration by glorifying passive womanhood’s power over men. It is Rahul’s mother, a pious and traditional Indian matriarch, who leads the conspiracy. She declares, “the way we think and the things we say have a deep impact on our children” to set up a joke about her granddaughter learning the word “sexy” from Rahul, yet unquestioningly endorses that granddaughter’s matchmaking interference, whether child-Anjali is praying to delay weddings or emotionally blackmailing Rahul with calculated crying. This grandmother teaches that “men are very weak,” pressuring Rahul into remarrying because his child “needs a mother.” The way we think and the things we say have a deep impact on our children. Alongside its touching romance, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai portrays the indoctrination of a very young girl into a culture that normalizes the manipulation of men, as compensation for its suppression of women.

Hobbies: beating up boys, irritating granny and reading mom's letters. — Hobbies: beating up boys, irritating granny and reading mom’s letters.

I highly recommend Kuch Kuch Hota Hai as an introduction for the Bollywood beginner, boasting excellent performances, acutely human moments in the midst of its melodrama and slapstick, and catchy tunes. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll forget that the film’s underlying assumptions about gender roles are fundamentally counterproductive for both sexes. But whether it is her fiancé’s final control over the heroine’s decision or the female conspiracy to determine the hero’s choice, there is only one word for Karan Johar undermining his characters’ autonomy this way: deewana (bonkers).

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QoZ8QcveC8″]

Brigit McCone did not allow her slight crush on Shahrukh Khan to bias this review. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

‘Trainspotting’ Is ‘Pretty Woman’ For Boys

From the ‘Bitch Flicks’ that brought you “‘Birdman’ Is Black Swan For Boys” and “‘Fight Club’ Is Pride And Prejudice For Boys,” comes the thrilling conclusion of our Filmic Forced Feminization Trilogy: “‘Trainspotting’ is ‘Pretty Woman For Boys”! No, really.

Written by Brigit McCone.

From the Bitch Flicks that brought you “Birdman Is Black Swan For Boys” and “Fight Club Is Pride And Prejudice For Boys,” comes the thrilling conclusion of our Filmic Forced Feminization Trilogy: “Trainspotting is Pretty Woman For Boys”! No, really.

Consider the openings: Renton runs down the road to the voiceover of the iconic “choose life” monologue, before colliding with a car. The camera shares the perspective of the car’s occupants, stalled in their protective shell of metal, as this threatening creature of countercultural anarchy peers in at them. And laughs. Now consider our camera sharing Richard Gere’s perspective, stalled in the protective shell of his luxury vehicle, as the threatening prostitute of countercultural anarchy peers in at him. And laughs.

Vivian is an antidote to the stale marital maneuverings of mainstream culture. She flaunts her lack of pantyhose to scandalized elderly couples. She tells matchmaking materialists that she’s simply using Edward for sex. She regards the hypocrisy of mainstream respectability politics with undisguised contempt. Our assumptions about the inferiority of a prostitute’s life choices are challenged by the defiant anthem that plays as she struts: “things you only dream about, wild women do.” Just as Trainspotting dignifies its hero’s autonomy by openly acknowledging the attraction of heroin and the logic of his choice, so Pretty Woman openly acknowledges the attraction of sex work as social rebellion, financial autonomy and independence. Vivian might as well have her own monologue about the pressure to “choose wife.” Why would she want to do a thing like that?

Renton and Vivian laugh at your respectability.

Of course, the film ends with Vivian choosing wife, just as Renton finally chooses life, but they choose it on their terms. I’ve written before about how the supposed antifeminism of “whores” and “white knights” has blinded us to the politics of autonomy in Pretty Woman. Scratch its candy-coated surface, or scratch the edgily aggressive snarl of Trainspotting, and you reveal a shared approach to the challenges of stigma raised by prostitution and drug addiction. Such as…

The Failure Of Paternalism

The remarkable results that Portugal has achieved by decriminalizing drug use and treating addiction as sickness rather than crime, mirror the impressive achievements of New Zealand’s decriminalizing of sex work. Our urge to discipline and punish individual choice has been ineffective in preventing “vice,” sustaining organized crime and social inequality in the process. Trainspotting and Pretty Woman reflect this reality. Renton’s initial decision to come off drugs is presented as a spontaneous choice from his inner resolve. Later, his parents attempt to enforce a cure by locking him in his bedroom to go cold turkey. The legal system attempts to enforce a cure through the courts. Neither of these paternalist pressures are shown to be effective. Similarly, Vivian consistently refuses Edward’s attempts to treat her as an object of pity or a mistress, preferring the independence of sex work to the subordination demanded by paternalist savior narratives. Only by admitting his own need to be rescued, and offering full romantic equality on Vivian’s terms, can Edward persuade her to mainstream.

More than ineffective, each film presents social stigma as actively counterproductive. It is while independently trying to come off heroin, without medical support, that Renton must make his iconic dive into the crap-filled Worst Toilet In Scotland for his suppositories. It is when trying to mainstream that he becomes mentally vulnerable to the condescending pity and judgmental attitudes of others, driving his relapse. Likewise, it is when attempting to mainstream that Vivian must endure the metaphorical crap of the Worst Boutique On Rodeo Drive and it is while passing as respectable that she becomes mentally vulnerable to the humiliating judgments of Stuckey, where a prostitute’s uniform would make her feel defiantly “prepared.” Both Trainspotting and Pretty Woman argue that social stigma fuels defiance and deters mainstreaming. Though each film freely acknowledges the hazards of the lifestyle portrayed, from Pretty Woman‘s dead hooker in a dumpster and assault by Stuckey, to Trainspotting‘s dead baby and AIDS casualties, they remain firmly opposed to the hypocritical righteousness of dominant culture. Witness their choice of Begbie and Stuckey to represent mainstream ideology.

Begbie and Stuckey: Dominant Hypocrites

Phil Stuckey is a cunt, in the utterly unreclaimed, gender-neutral, Scottish sense of that word. He is a man who will eagerly solicit prostitutes, yet defend his right to hit them with a superior snarl of “she’s a whore!” In this, he mirrors Trainspotting‘s Begbie, who is content to profit from drug deals while righteously sneering over an addict’s choice to “poison their body with that shite.” Both Begbie and Stuckey have a toxic combination of arrogance and insecurity, a continual need to prove their status at the expense of others. The suppressed violence in Stuckey’s craving for the corporate “kill” erupts in his assault on Vivian, after being denied financial satisfaction. Begbie is chronically violent, craving the adrenalin of a brawl as much as addicts crave their drug of choice. In short, in remarkably similar ways, Begbie and Stuckey are deeply unpleasant cunts. It is into the mouths of these cunts that each film places the judgments of dominant society. Begbie expresses dominant opinions about drug addicts and trans* women. Stuckey expresses dominant opinions about sex workers. Both are depicted as dominant, domineering, and thriving.

Trainspotting and Pretty Woman choose to use the repulsiveness of Begbie/Stuckey as the spur that finally decides Renton/Vivian on mainstreaming. A classic savior narrative would use a righteous role model to represent the attraction of mainstream values; Trainspotting and Pretty Woman instead use the nauseous vileness of their representatives as catalyst. As an addict, Renton is forced to fill the pockets of the world’s Begbies. As a prostitute, Vivian is forced to service the ego of the world’s Stuckeys. By presenting mainstreaming itself as an act of resistance to mainstream exploitation, both films are able to realistically acknowledge its health and safety benefits without sacrificing their raised middle finger to mainstream righteousness. They resist the narrative of the mainstream’s moral superiority, not only through the repulsively mainstream Begbie and Stuckey, but through the lovable, marginalized Spud and Kit.

Spud and Kit: Performance Anxiety

With God's help, they'll conquer this terrible affliction — With God’s help, they’ll conquer this terrible affliction

The triumphant Renton is separated from Spud, and the triumphant Vivian is separated from Kit, not by their moral superiority but by their superior ability to perform socially. In Trainspotting‘s court scene, Renton effortlessly convinces as a clean-cut “pretty addict” (the kind you’d like to meet) as he plausibly swears “with God’s help, I shall conquer this terrible affliction,” avoiding jail. By contrast, Spud is nervous and inarticulate. He lacks Renton’s presentation skills and faces jail as a result. Kit suffers similar anxiety. Where Vivian effortlessly adapts to luxury clothes, Kit is afraid to hug Vivian in case she wrinkles her. She seems defensive in Edward’s hotel, taunting the clientele. Kit could not fake the respectability and “class” required from Edward’s escort. By pairing Renton with Spud, and Vivian with Kit, both films expose the nature of respectability as essentially hypocritical performance.

Admirably, neither Spud nor Kit ever punish their friends for their success. Spud allows Renton to steal the group’s drug money, knowing that Renton will be harshly punished if the alarm is raised. Kit appears genuinely delighted at Vivian’s good fortune for meeting Edward, and roots for her to find lasting happiness with him. In many ways, both Spud and Kit are morally superior to the protagonists. This moral worth is recognized and rewarded financially by both heroes: Vivian gives Kit a share of Edward’s payment and Renton leaves Spud a share of the drug money. Will Kit be able to become a Renton of recovered addiction and a Vivian of romantic success? Will Spud? We are only able to root for Kit and Spud’s success because Trainspotting and Pretty Woman present a world in which doom is not inevitable and good fortune is possible.

Inevitability vs. Agency

It is fundamentally dehumanizing to suggest that a group in society is inevitably doomed. We know that our own lives are at the mercy of luck and chance; our rewards and punishments are uneven and not proportional to what we deserve, if deserving can even be measured. We make choices, from moment to moment, and we struggle for our own happiness as best we can. To deny someone that choice, that chance and that struggle is to deny our identification with them, as well as any possible support of them. If their doom is inevitable, none of us can be held responsible for failing to prevent it, or even for causing it. Which helps to explain the disposable hookers of Grand Theft Auto.

Renton’s doom is not inevitable. He stood the same chance of contracting AIDS as his fellow addicts; some were lucky, others were not. Likewise, a prostitute who climbs into the car of a slick, suited yuppy could be finding love and fortune with Pretty Woman‘s Edward, or facing gruesome death at the hands of American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman. The difference is in film genre, not life choice. Here’s an interesting point: have you ever heard anyone point out that Trainspotting depicts heroin use as the direct result of hetero-male sexual failure? Renton and Spud are both shown relapsing after humiliating failures in their attempts to connect with women. Tommy turns to heroin after a bad break-up. Yet, somehow, no causal relationship is assumed between a man’s sex life and his choices. So, why is it so impossible to imagine a prostitute as a survivor of sexual abuse, without the dehumanizing implication that this has mindlessly predetermined her choice to do sex work? Trainspotting‘s Sick Boy and Renton are equally allowed to be haunted by their failures in childcare, and Renton to hallucinate an accusing baby, without being judged “babycrazy” as Ally McBeal. Why is Vivian a “tart with a heart,” yet Renton can show scruples over underage sex and give cash gifts to Spud without being a “magic addict”?

Though Hollywood no longer has a Hays Code demanding punishment for characters who break the law, films still enforce that convention for both sexes. Stuckey’s devastating corporate “kills” are socially acceptable; Vivian’s provision of sex acts for a mutually agreed fee is not. Therefore, it is Vivian that we are conditioned to expect to see suffering consequences, until Pretty Woman flips that script. According to cinematic convention, stealing a bag of drug money should be the beginning of a No Country For Old Men-style thriller of inevitable doom. In Trainspotting, it is the hero’s happy ending. By offering its heroin addict a chance to evade all consequences for his actions, and to claim the prosperity and respectability that is supposedly the social reward for virtue, the film calls our bluff. If we truly pity the tragic fate of society’s doomed victims, we should rejoice in Renton’s lucky escape. However, as Oscar Wilde puts it: “anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it takes a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.” Spud and Kit might have that very fine nature, but do we? Mark Renton has no time for your puritanical need to see him punished for his life choices. Renton is going to blend in with the mainstream and become indistinguishable from all the other hypocrites. Renton was born slippy, and he’s going to get away with it. Because Renton has secretly been Cinder-fuckin-rella all along.

What more proof do you need that Trainspotting is Pretty Woman for boys?

Brigit McCone always thought Vivian should have chosen Barney the hotel manager, but recognizes he’s probably married. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and irritating Fight Club fanboys.

Reading Mae West’s ‘Sextette’ as a PUA Manual

Watch and learn, average frustrated chumps

Written by Brigit McCone.

PUA (pick-up artistry) is a strange beast. Its core technique relies on teaching men to dehumanize women as “targets” in order to numb themselves to rejection, making it psychologically easier to approach larger numbers of women and therefore, statistically, to enjoy greater sexual success, though at the cost of emotional connection. PUA thus represents the art of maximizing sexual success by minimizing sexual satisfaction. Mae West’s 1978 film Sextette is also a strange beast, and a fascinating film. When I say that it’s fascinating, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s good. Sextette is a car crash of a film, a head-on collision between a lavish MGM musical and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It is a perfect candidate for interactive midnight screenings and ironic appreciation, which should be mandatory at every festival of women’s film.

The usual responses of male reviewers label Mae West as “delusional” and “grotesque” for her iron conviction in her own seductive power at the age of 84 (minimum). West was Billy Wilder’s original inspiration for the aging, predatory narcissist Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd., while reviewer Nathan Rabin says of Sextette, “stick in a coda revealing that the whole thing was a ridiculous fantasy by an impoverished washerwoman nearing death, and the whole film would take on an unmistakably bittersweet, melancholy dimension.” Yes, the guy who invented the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” label, to criticize self-centered male sexism, suggests that female fantasies of lifelong desirability are only valid if they are affirmed to be impossible in real life. The irony. It burns.

Real life, however, differs from such critics’ expectations of “realism.” Far from ending her life as a sex-starved, “impoverished washerwoman,” Mae West actually had a flourishing relationship with the ruggedly handsome wrestler Paul Novak, almost 30 years her junior, who remained devoted to her for 26 years in one of show business’ greatest romances, nursing her at her death but discouraging her from including him in her will.

We may squirm at Sextette, to see an 84-year-old lady claim irresistible attractiveness without the apologetic, self-deprecating irony that we demand of older women’s sexuality, but Mae’s claims are securely grounded in her proven track record of seduction. If you will it, Dude, it is no dream. If Mae had listened to dominant culture’s messages about the female sell-by date, she would never have dared to play a sex-bomb in her late 30s, her age in her Hollywood debut, or selected a much-younger and undiscovered Cary Grant for her co-star. We owe Cary Grant’s career to Mae’s “denial,” while her selection of a young Timothy Dalton for the leading man of Sextette shows a similar eye for star potential, the film prophetically comparing him to 007.

I don’t necessarily recommend Mae West’s narcissistic seductress as a role model for all women, but I strongly recommend her as Laverne Cox’s definition of a “possibility model”; Mae is a reminder that we define our own roles and culture is created partly by our consent. Mae West’s Sextette is the most perfect illustration that the values of dominant culture depend on its male authorship, while female authorship (Mae insisted on writing or co-writing all her films, dictating to directors on set) can just as easily create images of octogenarian vixens commanding the lustful worship of entire “United States athletic teams” of half-naked musclemen, and brokering world peace through their irresistible sexual power (why haven’t you seen this film yet?). Sextette uncomfortably tears down the curtain and reveals the balding wizard behind the Great and Powerful Oz of cinema’s “realism,” just as Singing In The Rain exposed the artificiality of Lina Lamont’s glamour by swapping the sex of the voice behind the curtain. Here lies Sextette‘s true countercultural anarchy, and the reason it deserves midnight screening immortality. But the film also represents, as we shall show with our trusty pualingo.com, a classic PUA manual.

Abundance Mentality

Abundance mentality is defined by PUA lingo as “the belief and life perspective that there is no shortage of hot girls to meet in any man’s lifetime.” This principle is continually reinforced within male-authored culture, from the female disposability fantasy of James Bond to the geriatric desirability dreams of Woody Allen, which influential New York Times critic Vincent Canby might have considered “a poetic, terrifying reminder of how a virtually disembodied ego can survive total physical decay and loss of common sense” if he hadn’t already said that about Sextette. Conversely, our culture constantly depicts narratives of female anxiety over their “biological clocks” and their “last chance for love,” reinforcing a scarcity mentality whose psychological impact is dramatized with wincing accuracy by the desperation romcom of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Mae West, however, modeled an abundance mentality throughout her life, in defiant immunity to cultural pressures. Though acknowledging her life partner, ruggedly handsome Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, was a “good guy,” she quipped in her mid-80s “course there’s 40 guys dyin’ for his job!”

The filmmakers originally intended West’s character, Marlo, to weep over Timothy Dalton’s abandonment, while goth-rock legend Alice Cooper (with tangerine tan and poodle perm, naturally. Why haven’t you seen this film?) serenaded her with piano ballad “No Time For Tears,” but Mae insisted that her character would not cry and forced Cooper to perform the jazzy, uptempo “Next, Next” (“he blew his chance with you! Next, next! Lost you to someone new!”), maintaining her character’s positive vibing so that the film’s advocacy of abundance mentality would not be compromised. West and Dalton’s final reconciliation suggests that this was only a soft next on Marlo’s part, however. Male critics interpret such abundance mentality as delusion, in a woman who resembles a macabre apparition and the monster from beyond time, but West’s track record of sexual success suggests that such protests be understood as token resistance.

Midnight screening suggestion: bring a loud buzzer to hit before yelling “next!”

DHV: Demonstration of Higher Value

Marlo's target, acknowledging her higher value — Marlo’s target, acknowledging her higher value

While male sexual value peaks between the ages of 21 and 30 (as clarified by Sextette‘s “happy birthday, 21!” anthem and Mae’s criticism of Tony Curtis as an unsuitably elderly screen lover, only 30 years her junior) and is largely dependent on the man’s rugged looks and muscle-tone, a woman may increase her sexual market value (SMV) at any age by a canned routine of humorous quips, positive vibing, displays of wealth and willingness to walk away or “soft next,” as Mae demonstrates throughout the film. The best technique for a DHV is to avoid direct bragging (which can actually read as desperation, and thus a demonstration of lower value, or DLV), through the use of wings to praise you on your behalf. In Sextette, the role of “Marlo’s wing” is played by Everyone Who Is Not Marlo. Before the central couple arrive, Regis Philbin brands Marlo “the greatest sex symbol the screen has ever known,” while an obliging crowd sings her DHV anthem “Marlo! The female answer to Apollo! As lovely as Venus De Milo! A living dream!” the press corps laugh at her every word and even ex-husband Ringo Starr shows willingness to wing for her: “You know when your wife was my wife? Your wife was some wife!” Such consistent DHV naturally provokes Timothy Dalton’s target into the production of expensive diamonds as well as verbal IOIs, in this clearly approval-seeking ballad (click. I dare you). Claims by male reviewers that this moment is like “gazing upon one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, something so momentously and unimaginably monstrous that even perceiving the edges of it threatens one with madness” are best interpreted as manifestations of their bitch shields (BS).

Midnight screening suggestion: wing for Marlo by wolf-whistling and dangle bracelets of sparklers whenever she mentions being turned on.

NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming is the art of conditioning the target‘s responses through ambiguity and anchoring. In an NLP context, ambiguity is the use of normal, innocuous words that sound like sexual terms, to unconsciously stimulate a man’s sexual senses. Mae West reveals herself a grandmistress of this art, with statements such as “I’m the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night,” referencing her busy schedule as an actress, but subconsciously suggesting sexual stamina to the receptive male mind. “Everything goes up for Marlo!” literally refers to a pink cassette trampolined into a statue’s mouth (don’t ask) but on a deeply subtle and subconscious level could be regarded as sexually suggestive, while “when I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m better” might conceivably be associated with a sexual “bad girl” rather than with theft or arson. After this ingenious technique has made all men uncontrollably aroused by the octogenarian West, she is free to select her targets at will from their superabundance. Next!

Anchoring, meanwhile, is the art of associating gestures with emotional states through their repetition. In Sextette, Mae uses her anchors, such as trademark hair-patting, to elicit Pavlovian arousal by evoking her earlier performances, while groping her own breasts is a classic point to self (PTS) to anchor her feeling of success. A related art is kino, the regular touching and stroking of the target that prevents octogenarian actresses from ending up in his friend zone, which Marlo can be observed demonstrating on Ricky, the 21-year-old team mascot, throughout Sextette‘s gym scene. When male commentators describe the film as “like watching your grandmother at a gangbang,” the key is to reframe that observation, for example by cocking an eyebrow and purring “does that excite you?”

Midnight screening suggestion: Recognize NLP Ambiguity by clicking fingers and barking “you’re under!” in the style of Little Britain’s Kenny Craig, while all PTS maneuvers should be mimicked.

Peacocking

By wearing something showy, like a huge feather headdress or semi-transparent gown, a PUA is able to differentiate herself from her competition. Peacocking is a term derived from the biological behavior of peacocks and from Darwinism, not from the ginormous plumes crowning Mae West like a kooky cockatoo. Peacocking lures the PUA’s targets into starting conversations with her, offering her openings such as “what is that thing on your head? You look like a kooky cockatoo!” By wearing something completely ridiculous, the PUA also opens herself up to shit tests from men, such as New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s claim that Mae resembles “a plump sheep that’s been stood on its hind legs, dressed in a drag-queen’s idea of chic, bewigged and then smeared with pink plaster.” By demonstrating that she can deal with this social pressure, Mae shows her irresistibly alpha characteristics. It must be admitted that, in the striking costumes of legendary, eight-time Oscar-winner Edith Head, Mae looks like a damn chic sheep dressed as sexy lamb.

Midnight screening suggestion: the most ridiculous feather boas and fascinators you can get your hands on, for regular stroking throughout the screening.

So what’s the moral of this study? Should we be inspired by Mae’s conquests of the screen and of ruggedly handsome wrestler, crowned Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, to endorse the indomitable positivity of PUA philosophy (go West, young woman)? Or point to the reactions of squirming male viewers to finally prove that PUA is creepy, once and for all? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between, in cultivating a confident independence and immunity to cultural pressure, while still respecting the consent of others? Who knows? Only one moral is certain: never, ever play a drinking game in which you do a shot for every sex pun in this movie. Seriously. You could die. [youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_j-DNJwZA”]

The trailer alone would get you bombed

Brigit McCone over-identifies with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns out of the corner of her mouth.