Gaayathri Nair – Page 2

‘Flat3’ is the Little Web-Series You Have Been Looking For

The first season was a self-funded passion project and as it got more popular they managed to crowd fund the second season so that they could pay actors and crew; the girls did not pay themselves. They have successfully secured funding from New Zealand on Air to pay for the upcoming third and fourth seasons that should air sometime this year and I really can’t wait.

I want to tell you about a gem of a web-series that I discovered recently. It is called Flat3 and it is made in a small country in the South Pacific more famous for its big-budget fantasy epics (Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit) than for small, interesting character-driven comedies. Although let us not forget Flight of the Conchords.

How to describe Flat3… It is basically everything I have ever been looking for in a web series. Smart, funny, engaging, a little bit weird, a little bit bleak, and little bit hopeful all at the same time. The show illustrates perfectly that talented Asian women can make a show that is funny and doesn’t rely on painful self-deprecation or crapping on other minorities. Ally, JJ, Perlina, and Roseanne (the director) have said that they set out to make a show that they would want to watch. It isn’t about hitting you over the head with their Asianness, it is about three women whose lives haven’t turned out quite the way they planned and how they deal with that. For me the show really captures the pain and humour of your mid-20s, post-university, now what do I do with my life phase. Think something like what Girls would be like if it was about people you actually knew. There is considerable talent at play here. Roseanne Liang is the show’s director and writer as well as wearing the co-producer hat. She was the first ever Chinese New Zealander to theatrically release a film and her movie My Wedding and Other Secrets was the highest grossing locally made film of 2011. Co-producer and cast member JJ Fong is currently starring on South Pacific Pictures’ Go Girls, one of the highest-rated locally produced shows on New Zealand television.

Ally JJ Perlina 2 — Ally, JJ, and Perlina

The show follows the misadventures of three flatmates–two of whom have graduated with degrees in the creative industries and are trying their best to make it in this recession-heavy world. First there is Lee, the quietest one of the three who is trying to figure out what she can do with a degree in fine art and how to date when you have never really done it before. Next there is JJ, a beautiful promo girl/actress/waitress who is struggling with what it means to be valued solely for your looks and how to be taken seriously as an actress when your big break comes from shilling feminine hygiene wipes. Then there is Perlina, straightforward and upfront yet worried that she is unlikeable and struggling to connect with her work colleagues. In the first episode that centers around her, Perlina spends her time trying to be more likeable and goes to the point of interviewing her ex-boyfriend to figure out what she did wrong and how she can improve. Despite this, it is Perlina who normally saves the day because of her ability to see through bullshit and get to the crux of an issue.

I think what I like most about Flat3, aside from the fact that it is both well-written and well-acted, is that I relate to it. In JJ, Lee, and Perlina, I see many of my friends and parts of myself. They throw awkward house parties where no one turns up and you end up getting drunk and doing stilted skits while your one cool friend looks on in horror because it seems funny at the time. Their relationships seem real to me, not weirdly competitive, just sometimes a bit fucked up with a dash of drama because sometimes people go through stuff and make bad choices, especially in your 20s when you aren’t really sure who you are and what you should be doing. It is female friendship as I recognise it: chatty, supportive, fun, and sometimes complicated.

Sabotage on Flat 3 — Perlina and her friend seeking vengeance on an ex’s underwear drawer

If you have seen Flight of the Conchords you might like this, but I mean that in the generic sense of, well if you like offbeat sort of comedies that are slightly awkward but not so cringe-y that you have to close your eyes for half the episode you might like this, because really that is where the similarity ends. Highlights from the series have included: a post-coital scene that includes the clean-up of fluids (something of a unicorn on television), the line that semen tastes like “a million potential offspring crying out – and then silence,” a hitchhiker who dispenses wisdom and LSD, a fancy dress party a little bit reminiscent of Eagle vs Shark, trust exercises for accountants, and much much more.

The only thing that I actively dislike about the show is the size shaming and the dehumanizing of fat people. It is so so tired for women, especially Asian women on television, to be preoccupied with their weight and the fat jokes seem out of place with the freshness of the rest of the writing. They can do much better than this and they usually do. Fat jokes make up a tiny percentage of the humor on the show (there are many more accountant jokes) and it is not enough to stop me watching but I could certainly do without them, they aren’t funny and they contribute to the marginalization of fat people generally. I am hopeful that the next two seasons will continue to bring the excellent writing and talented acting that we have seen, hopefully minus the boring fat jokes.

If you are looking for a fresh comedy that is silly and sometimes awkward then this is definitely the show for you. To watch, head to http://www.flat3webseries.com/ and prepare to be thoroughly entertained!

The Curse of Token Women in Action Movies – Katee Sackhoff in ‘Riddick’

This reveals one of the key weaknesses of incorporating token women in action movies. Token women are not real characters, they exist to tick boxes so that filmmakers can point to these characters and say “See we aren’t sexist, we had a woman and she even punched a dude in the face!” However because these aren’t real characters they end up being almost exclusively objects for the male gaze and to be fair, for Dahl this was not nearly as bad as it can sometimes be. She has a functional uniform not much different from her male colleagues and she is only subject to a couple of minutes of gratuitous nudity.

Action movies are perhaps the worst and most consistent offenders when it comes to failing the Bechdel Test, a depressingly bare minimum for assessing the female presence in a given film or TV offering. Riddick is no exception; like the other movies in the franchise, it is very much a one man against the world sort of scenario. Previous Riddick movies Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick have at least managed to have interesting women characters. Pitch Black even managed to pass the Bechdel Test. Sadly Riddick does not even come close as it falls back into the old action movie trap of only having one named female character in a sea of men.

In Riddick, Vin Diesel once again takes on the titular role. It takes place shortly after the end of The Chronicles of Riddick where Riddick was made the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers after having dealt to the previous one due to the Necromonger law of “You keep what you kill.” Over the course of the previous movie, The Chronicles of Riddick, we find out that Riddick is perhaps the sole surviving member of a race called the Furyians and he becomes captivated with the idea of discovering more about the history and demise of his people. Riddick opens with him convincing a Necromonger general to give him the location of his home planet Furya, so that he can go have a nosey. Unsurprisingly he is tricked and ends up on an extremely inhospitable planet all alone struggling to survive. He soon has an urgent need to get off planet when he realises the rain poses a very real threat and so activates a beacon on an abandoned bounty hunter ship that alerts nearby mercenaries to his location. They appear speedily as there is a massive bounty on his head and it is worth double if he is brought in dead.

As I watched the first 30 minutes, I was all like, “Huh. They aren’t going to have even a token woman in this movie, interesting.” This would have been sad as the franchise has had some interesting women characters, historically. Then they revealed that one of the mercenary ships had a female prisoner on board. She was cut loose because if they captured Riddick the ship would be overweight. I think she probably had under a minute of screen time that ended with her being shot for sport by the captain of the ship. I suppose it was meant to underscore just how big of a douche the mercenary captain, Santanna, was. However the killing of women on screen to emphasise the evilness of male characters has become so routine that the scene was more mundane than horrifying, we knew she was going to die the moment she was set free. Her death also serves as motivation for Riddick, the unnamed woman was both brown and a prisoner, two things Riddick can identify with I guess. After she is shot we see Riddick looking grim and presumably deciding to kill all of these mercenaries for being heartless assholes toward pretty ladies.

Clearly by this point it wasn’t looking great for women in this movie. As the second batch of mercenaries arrive we are soon treated to the fact that one of them is Katee Sackhoff, most renowned for playing the tomboyish pilot and complicated woman, Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. She plays second in command of the second, less vile mercenary ship. Immediately on arrival she is hit on by Santanna in an unsurprisingly crude manner. Her response is to punch him in the face and then tell him that “I don’t fuck guys.” The statement seemed a little out of place and reads as though he is out of line for hitting on her because she is a lesbian, not because it is rude and annoying in a professional context. But OK, I can happily roll with an openly gay heroine on a mainstream action movie even if it is introduced kind of weirdly. Sadly this is as about as good as the character gets. Throughout the rest of the movie she constantly has to use her fists on Santanna, something that actually makes her look ineffectual as a leader, rather than presenting her as an ass-kicking woman as was no doubt intended. Movies seem to have fallen into convenient shorthand where a woman who is able to exact violence on a man is a good female character because she is not a passive victim. This is not the case, a woman can still kick butt (and in this case it is a pretty nominal amount of butt kicking) and still be a terrible female character.

This is reinforced when Dahl is subject to gratuitous shower scene where we see one of her nipples and Riddick leering in from the window; he is trying to steal her toiletry kit, not harm her, but the threat is there. The implication is that he could do anything to her at this point and she would be powerless to stop it. The whole scene serves to underline how vulnerable she is as a woman despite her ability to repeatedly punch Santanna in the face.

It does get worse though. When Riddick is captured by the mercenaries, he makes a few predictions, the first is that Santanna will not live for more than five seconds after he is free and the second is that he will end up “balls deep” in Dahl but only after she asks him “real pretty like.” This is pretty gross, but not really surprising in an action movie that revolves around a single hyper-masculine protagonist. What transforms it from pretty gross to slimy homophobic misogynist bullshit is later, when Riddick is stranded on a rock surrounded by many creatures who want to kill him, he is rescued by Dahl from a transporter in a safety harness. He grabs her ass and she says to him, “I have something to ask you, real pretty like…” At the end of the movie Riddick says, “Tell Dahl to keep ‘er warm for me.” This is basically embracing with open arms the myth that every lesbian just hasn’t met the right man. This myth is not only demeaning of a woman’s sexuality, but it is dangerous, it is at least partially responsible for the fact that the incidence of rape for lesbians by men is higher than for women generally. I’m sure people could argue that they are simply joking, but I don’t think that flies in the context that Riddick says to her while making a series of predictions that all come true with grave consequences.

It is hard for me not to wonder, is a token woman in an action movie worse than no woman at all? At least then we would not have to deal with the casual objectification and reinforcement of dangerous myths. Of course that isn’t really the answer–women shouldn’t have to choose between shitty representation and no representation at all. A token woman in an action movie is never a real character; she exists as a box ticking exercise, a device by which we can learn things about male characters and to provide fodder for the male gaze. Obviously not every character in every movie can be fully realised but more often than not these two dimensional parts are the province of women and/or people of colour. Riddick was no exception to this except perhaps in that Vin Diesel is not really read as white. I hope that the next movie will return to the roots of the franchise and provide us with female characters of substance and complexity.

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Gaayathri is a writer currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, although this is set to change soon. She is the child of diaspora two times over and is passionate about all forms of social justice. She likes to travel and prefers television to movies; however, she feels a strange compulsion to watch all movies that have fish-eating people in them, no matter how terrible they are. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Auckland and she has spent her formative years working at various types of feminist organisations from the community to the regional in both New Zealand and around Asia. Her work has been featured around the feminist blogosphere including Flyover Feminism, Feministe, and Leftstream as well as in United Nations and NGO publications. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.

Sex Workers Are Disposable on ‘Game of Thrones’

When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.

While Game of Thrones is frequently problematic, one of the things it does well is having a wide range of interesting female characters. Despite this, there are some women on the show who fall into the roles that are normally reserved for women on film and television; that is, to tell us things about dudes. This is particularly true of the female sex workers on the show. A perfect example of this is Ros. Interestingly, Ros is a character that does not exist in the books. She is an invention of the television show’s writers and producers. It is likely that she takes the place of two other sex worker characters who are women of colour.

Ros is the first sex worker we see on Game of Thrones. She is masterfully acted by Esme Bianco who does wonderful things with the limited material she is given. Her portrayal of Ros allows us to view her as intelligent, witty, ambitious, and pragmatic. At first Ros manages to avoid most of the traditional sex worker tropes that exist such as the disposable sex worker and the hooker with the heart of gold. She makes no apologies for being a sex worker and does not consider herself to be a tragic victim of her circumstances. She is simply making money in the most efficient way she knows how.

The very first time we see her she is entertaining Tyrion Lannister at the Winterfell brothel. Their interaction serves to inform us that Tyrion is both famous for being a philanderer and generally a good hearted person who is nice to people who exist on the margins despite his great wealth and power. Next up there is Theon Greyjoy Ros helps reveal to us as the audience a number of things about him. Firstly, that he has a chip on his shoulder about his status in Winterfell. Secondly he is basically a hostage living with the Starks because of his father’s traitorous actions. She helps to reveal his particular insecurities as well as expose some of his backstory, all without any clothes on – handy. In fact Ros basically spends the entirety of season one with her clothes off allowing men to tell her things about themselves. Littlefinger gets to fill in some back story while she is naked on screen. Joffrey reminds us of just how evil he is (again) by forcing Ros to brutally beat her friend and fellow sex worker when Tyrion buys a night with them for Joffrey as a present. On and on it goes.

The saddest part about Ros is that while she mostly exists as a plot device, there was always potential there for her to develop as a character. She had many traits that would have made her very interesting to watch as the story unfolded. However that is not to be, because those who make the decisions decided that Ros had outlived her usefulness. She had proven just how terrible Little Finger and Joffery were and the final flourish was her death. Ros turned out to be a disposable sex worker after all and the way that she is killed off proves it.

It was her compassion for Sansa Stark that is Ros’ downfall. She tells Varys details that only she could know about Littlefinger’s plans for her and despite Varys promising to protect her he finds out and she ends up dead. Her death is graphic and horrifying. We do not see her die, we are just treated to a vision of her corpse as Littlefinger tells Varys that one of his investments had betrayed him and therefore had to be disposed of. We are treated to a vision of Ros tied to Joffery’s bed, semi clothed with arrows piercing her body including her genitals. The camera lingers over the gory details. The idea is clear, as we look at Ros’ ravaged body we are meant to think about Littlefinger and what a horrible person he is. Ros’ death is a simply a footnote in the stories of the great men who she fucks.

Interestingly, Esme Bianco mentioned in an interview that she argued for having less nude scenes so that she could have cool costumes like the other characters on the show. Perhaps due to her self-advocacy, her character ended up with no nude scenes in season three, and it seemed as though she was very much on the verge of becoming a proper character, one that is fully realized and has their own plot. Before that could actually happen, she was killed off as if she didn’t matter at all.

There are many things I enjoy about Game of Thrones, but there are perhaps just as many things that I find problematic within it; their treatment of Ros is definitely one of them. The excuses that Game of Thrones is set in both an extremely patriarchal and extremely violent culture do not fly. I think they are cop-outs. The show has beaten us over the head with the evilness of Joffrey and Littlefinger. I personally feel that the scene where he takes Ros aside when she starts crying in front of one of her clients after the baby of her friend is killed in front of her, is much more chilling than the gruesome horror of her death. Subtlety is obviously not something the show is interested in. At the end of the day, the Game of Thrones treatment of Ros simply reinforces dominant societal narratives about sex workers, i.e. that their humanity is unimportant and that it is a dangerous occupation that women should know better than to take up. This is disappointing from a show that is often progressive in the way that it handles female characters.

Gaayathri Nair is a writer currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, although this is set to change soon. She is the child of diaspora two times over and is passionate about all forms of social justice. She likes to travel and prefers television to movies; however, she feels a strange compulsion to watch all movies that have fish-eating people in them, no matter how terrible they are. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Auckland and she has spent her formative years working at various types of feminist organizations from the community to the regional in both New Zealand and around Asia. Her work has been featured around the feminist blogosphere including Flyover Feminism, Feministe, and Leftstream as well as in United Nations and NGO publications. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.

Highlights from Season One of ‘Masters of Sex’

The first season of Showtime’s ‘Masters of Sex’ concluded in December last year. The show was well-received, both critically and popularly, and it has been great to see series find its stride over the course of the season. It would have been devastatingly easy for a show that is ostensibly about the study of female sexuality to turn into a series that highlights white male gate-keepers, however Masters of Sex has managed to avoid this pitfall admirably. Michelle Ashford, the show-runner, put together a largely female writing staff, seemingly as a result the show has some of the best, most fully realized, three-dimensional female characters on television today. Below are some of the things that I have personally found to be highlights of the season.

The first season of Showtime’s Masters of Sex concluded in December last year. The show was well-received, both critically and popularly, and it has been great to see series find its stride over the course of the season. It would have been devastatingly easy for a show that is ostensibly about the study of female sexuality to turn into a series that highlights white male gate-keepers, however Masters of Sex has managed to avoid this pitfall admirably. Michelle Ashford, the show-runner, put together a largely female writing staff, seemingly as a result the show has some of the best, most fully realized, three-dimensional female characters on television today. Below are some of the things that I have personally found to be highlights of the season.

1) Virginia Johnson

Lizzy Caplan has sparkled on the screen as Virginia Johnson. Virginia has been such a great character because she is everything that you never expect you will get to see a woman be on television. She has sex because she wants to have sex, not because she needs a man or because her life is empty without one, she seeks what she needs and makes no apologies for being who she is. She is also smart, ambitious and driven; over and over we see how Virginia wants to do great with her life. She wants to leave her mark on the world and is willing to put in the work to make that happen. At the same time she suffers from self-doubt, exhaustion and confusion just like we all do, but she sets her boundaries and sticks to them and manages to maintain her professionalism despite the extremely trying circumstances in which she constantly finds herself. It is nice to see the difficulties she has with juggling her children and her demanding job, dealing with a flakey ex-husband and watxhing her sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and trying to make it all work.

Over the course of the season it has become clear that it is she, not the cold, forbidding, and seemingly emotionless Bill Masters who is able to separate the work from her personal life. This is made clear when Bill suggests that they should participate in the study with each other. She is interested in the data, proving conclusions and ensuring the success of the study. She will do anything to ensure that it is successful including being filmed masturbating and having sex with Bill so that they can explore certain hypotheses before deciding to study them with regular study participants. However, when Bill does something that she feels is demeaning, paying her for the times she has participated in the study as if she was any other participant she understands quite clearly why he has done it, he has feelings for and is trying to assuage his guilt and distance himself from them when he finds out his wife is pregnant. She maintains her dignity by doing what she believes is right, resigning from her work with him and going to work with Dr. Lillian DePaul, someone who she believes is also on the verge of doing great things, even if they will not cause the stir that the sex study will.

2) Margaret and Barton Scully

It came out mid-season that Barton Scully is a deeply closeted gay man who meets with sex workers in cars. His story becomes ever more nuanced over the course of the season. Bill uses his knowledge of him to black mail him into allowing the study to remain at the hospital, he gets stabbed by some homophobes just for parking his car in a known gay pick up spot and decides to seek treatment for his “illness” of homosexuality after his wife catches him meeting a sex worker at a hotel; something he decided to do after deeming that meeting in cars was too dangerous after the stabbing.

We become privy to how the nature of his marriage with Margaret is a hollow shell despite their deep tenderness and mutual regard for one another. After chatting with her friends over Mah Jong Margaret hears about the study and how it has reinvigorated a mutual acquaintance’s life. She decides to sign up because she is long tired of waiting for her husband to come to her bed, the scene that follows where Virginia and Bill question her about her sexual history and it becomes clear that she has never had an orgasm is near heart-breaking. It is impossible not to cheer for her when she begins an affair with the handsome and fickle Dr. Austin Langham.

The whole storyline is a sensitive portrayal of how deeply damaging stigma and homophobia is. Barton married Margaret because he needed to be perceived as “normal” in order to fulfill his career ambitions. As a result of those ambitions and not wanting to live on the margins both he and Margaret have been robbed of a full life. This is one of the few storylines have seen on television that covers homosexuality and homophobia in a period drama in a way that neither sensationalizes it or objectifies the characters involved, but instead is a nuanced look at how it hurts people.

This arc has also resulted in one of the best monologues about stigma and sexuality that I have ever seen on television. When Barton asks Dale, the sex worker that he has being seeing, to participate in his aversion therapy, saying that he will pay him to sit across from him while he takes an emetic to make himself feel ill. Dale responds by elaborating the ways in which his life is difficult and how he often wishes he could change but ending with the line “there’s only one person who gets to be sickened by me, and that’s me. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.” The whole sequence elucidates the complexity and pain of being queer in a straight world.

3) Dr. Lillian De Paul

Dr. Lillian De Paul is one of the characters on the show that is completely fictional and not based on a real person. Initially it seemed as though she was going be a sort of female misogynist, a Margaret Thatcher type who makes it to the top and then instead of helping to break down barriers uses her position to shit on other women. Over time it became clear that De Paul’s coldness towards Virginia was in large part defensiveness based on the slog she has had firstly to become a doctor and secondly in trying to crack into the old boys club in order to get her project, free or low cost pap smears available for women in order to detect cervical cancer while it is still treatable, funded. She is deeply frustrated because she knows the profound impact her project can have on women’s lives and health with comparatively little cost.

She provides an interesting counterpoint for Dr. Masters as they share many character traits but their reception could not be more different. They are both aloof, lacking in charm and awareness of social niceties. In Bill these qualities are perceived as being unsurprising in a brilliant doctor. In Lillian they are simply more evidence of her freakishness and unwomanliness. As a character she explodes the notion of the female harridan superior because we see the struggles that she has had to deal with, and just why she has become the closed off and defensive person that she has, because almost anything else is construed as weakness by her male colleagues. Over time she comes to respect Virginia after realizing that she is not simply using her womanly charms as a substitute for hard work and their growing relationship has been interesting to watch.