Katherine Murray – Page 5

When Dead People Have Something Useful to Say: Sexuality and Feminism in Neil Jordan’s Vampire Movies

Neil Jordan is best known for ‘The Crying Game’ —aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Neil Jordan is best known for The Crying Game —aka The Movie Where It Suddenly Turns Out That the Main Character is in Love with a Trans Woman – but he also made two vampire movies, and damn if those weren’t kind of interesting, too. Taken together, they show that the vampire genre can be re-invented in all kinds of ways, as long as there’s substance under the biting and blood.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Interview with the Vampire is unusually relaxed about its LGBT content, especially given that it came out 20 years ago, in 1994 (a special anniversary blu-ray will be available soon). It’s a mainstream Hollywood movie about a bisexual man finding the self-esteem to leave an emotionally abusive relationship, and it has bankable A-list actors – one of whom famously sues people for saying he’s gay – in the lead roles.

Yet, it’s not remembered as being especially controversial. The characters don’t have sex – in the Rice verse, vampires are pretty much impotent and only get off on biting – but it’s clear that Brad Pitt’s character, Louis, is in two separate homosexual relationships over the course of the film. Interview was marketed as a vampire movie, though, rather than a gay romance, and the fact that people are biting each other rather than kissing apparently masks all other content.

In fact, “They’re vampires!” seems to mask many of the emotional and interpersonal dynamics in the film, which is kind of a shame, since Interview with the Vampire is a very complicated, well-dramatized story about co-dependency and toxic, emotionally abusive or incestuous relationships. The fact that at least two of these relationships are homosexual is treated as No Big Deal by the movie, and could potentially sail right past you – I guess – because of the fangs.

The female vampire, Claudia (played by a 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst), is literally an adult woman trapped in a child’s body, but she’s also a representation of how her fathers’ infantilizing treatment of her has kept her from becoming independent. When Lestat (Tom Cruise) turns her into a vampire, he does it specifically to manipulate Louis, after Louis threatens to leave him – it’s not about wanting a child, or wanting Claudia, specifically; it’s about wanting another thing to control and another avenue to control what he already has. We find out later in the film that what he’s done is forbidden – that vampires generally feel it’s wrong to create something that can’t survive on its own; a creature that will be trapped with you through its dependency.

Claudia is never allowed to become an adult and, since she and Louis are both victimized by Lestat, they form an emotionally incestuous bond that’s based on his taking care of her, and her being (sort of) his wife. She’s afraid that he’s going to leave her; he feels guilty about what will happen if he tries to strike out on his own.

In the end, Louis finds a new boyfriend, who murders Claudia in order to have Louis to himself and, at that point, Louis realizes that he can’t spend the rest of eternity taking care of people – whether it’s Lestat, or Claudia, or this new guy – and he decides to go live by himself, at which point he discovers that that possibility is not as terrible as he imagined.

“They’re vampires!” certainly adds an extra layer of interest to the story, and creates lots of opportunities for gory, stylized violence, but it’s the all-too-boring, all-too-common human dynamic beneath it that makes the vampire stuff worthwhile. It’s a story that spans centuries and uses fantastical elements like, “Look, this child can never grow up!” to touch on deeper reflections about dysfunctional relationships, boundaries, and self-esteem. The fact that it snuck the idea of two gay/bisexual men raising a child together into popular culture is just an added bonus.

Jordan revisits some of the same themes in his less well-known but more political vampire movie, Byzantium (2012), written by Moira Buffini.

More in-your-face than Interview with the Vampire, Byzantium tells the story of Clara and Eleanor Webb (Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan), a vampire mother and daughter on the run from others of their kind who want to kill them.

Most of the story takes place in the present day, but flashbacks slowly reveal the tale of how Clara (who is Eleanor’s biological mother as well as her vampire!mother) was forced into a life of prostitution by a misogynist naval officer, Captain Ruthven, and later stole the map to immortality from him.

The way we get this information is really ham-fisted, and it’s lacking in any kind of subtlety or emotional weight, but the idea is important. Ruthven comes by the map in the first place because local Nice Guy, Darvell, who thinks of himself as a good person, invites Ruthven to join his Secret Special Amazing Fraternity of Super Cool Dudes, knowing that Ruthven viciously destroyed Clara’s life. He feels sorry for her, but the idea that Ruthven is responsible for doing this to her is in no way incompatible, for him, with the idea that Ruthven is the kind of guy you’d want to be blood brothers with for eternity.

When Clara steals the map to the supernatural cave that turns people into vampires (just go with it), Darvell gets pissed-off and tells her that she ruined everything by becoming the first female vampire. She’s forbidden from turning anyone else, but, when Ruthven attacks Eleanor as revenge for Clara stealing his map, Clara brings Eleanor to the cave and makes her a vampire, too. Nice Guy Darvell spends the next two hundred years trying to kill them because they wrecked his super special brotherhood.

Along the way to driving home this point about women’s equality, Byzantium also explores the uncomfortable dynamic between Clara and Eleanor, where they’re more like sisters than parent and child – partly owing to the fact that Clara was so young when she gave birth to Eleanor – and the uncomfortable way in which Clara keeps resorting to prostitution as a way of making money. (This is maybe the only vampire movie where the vampires are not somehow rich, and you can easily trace it to the lack of opportunity they’ve had as women).

In the end – spoiler, spoiler – Darvell finally figures out that he’s being an asshole, and Clara figures out that Eleanor needs to have her own life rather than being a project for Clara to work on.

Byzantium is not a subtle movie, but it’s interesting in that it uses the long life of vampires to trace the social position that women have held in Western culture, over the past 200 years. When we first meet Clara, she isn’t even treated as a person – in fact, she steals personhood from a group of men, and passes it onto her daughter, making her public enemy number one. Flash forward to the present, and it’s ridiculous to suggest that Clara and Eleanor aren’t people – so ridiculous that even Darvell comes around to the idea, in the end.

It’s a very different narrative about vampirism than the one where male aristocrats get to hang out being rich and good-looking, luring women toward them in some kind of magical thrall. It’s a narrative that takes into account that the world looks different depending on whether you’re standing on top, or getting your face stomped in, down below.

Whereas Interview with the Vampire has a more general message that isn’t specifically about being gay, and casually pulls in gay characters, Byzantium is much more overtly political, and much more about articulating an experience that is specifically female. Both approaches are interesting, and both offer something more than “They’re vampires!” to steer the story.

Interview with the Vampire and Byzantium are both movies that use their supernatural elements as a springboard for exploring social and psychological content that’s relevant to the world we live in. Rather than using real-life issues as window-dressing (True Blood), or being purely escapist (Twilight, Dracula), Neil Jordan’s vampire movies (and the source works they’re based on) show how you can re-imagine the vampire in different, less superficial ways, based on what kind of analogy you’re trying to make.

We’re living in a time of vampire saturation, but it’s a (blood) well that doesn’t actually have to run dry. As long as “vampire” is tied to something more than having fangs, I’ll keep watching these movies forever.

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

Maybe She Could Rescue Him: How a Time Traveler Saves 1950 in Showtime’s ‘Masters of Sex’

‘Masters of Sex’ is not a great show. It’s awkward and safe and seems to think that we’re impressed by watching people masturbate. But it’s also this really strange, kind-of cool story all about the masculine ideal and a time traveler who tries to break the cycle of self-hatred that supports it.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Masters of Sex is not a great show. It’s awkward and safe and seems to think that we’re impressed by watching people masturbate. But it’s also this really strange, kind-of cool story all about the masculine ideal and a time traveler who tries to break the cycle of self-hatred that supports it.

Masters of Sex, if you haven’t been watching or hate-watching it, is a fictionalized account of the work done by of real-life sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the late 1950s. Officially, the series is about the study they conducted and the breakthroughs they made in our understanding of human sexuality. Unofficially, it’s a love story, too.

We know from history that the real Masters and Johnson eventually married, and the tension in Masters of Sex isn’t about whether they’ll get together. The tension in Masters of Sex is about whether Virginia can rescue Bill from his sense of self-hatred by freeing him from 1950s gender norms. She is the hero, and that is her quest; if she succeeds – and we think she’ll succeed – her reward will be his love.

Most of what we’ve learned about Bill, so far, has been in service of explaining Virginia’s quest to save him. He’s smart and sensitive and, basically, a good, well-meaning person, but he has a tragic backstory involving an abusive father, and an internalized sense of shame around his own emotions. With his wife – he’s married when he meets Virginia – he acts out the gender roles he’s learned. That is, he treats her kindly, but like something that’s foreign to him; a creature from another planet that he can’t quite understand. He doesn’t feel that he can talk to her about his troubles; he thinks that she depends on him to be a stable presence. He would like her to admire him, and thinks that he would damage their relationship by revealing his true self.

The reality, of course – and this is dramatized well by Masters of Sex – is that Bill’s wife would like nothing more than to be emotionally intimate with him – to know what he’s thinking and feeling, to have a sense that they’re on the same team. Unfortunately, her own ideas about gender are just as antiquated as Bill’s, and she is, in fact, alarmed when he shows signs of strong emotion. She also treats him like something foreign and unintelligible, hiding her own feelings, and acting like he’s more of a guest in their house than someone who actually lives there.

Virginia, just as stereotypes would have it, is the mistress that Bill can be his true self with. It’s a little bit because he looks down on her, a little bit because he respects her, and a lot because Virginia is a time traveler from 2014.

As the character the audience is most invited to identify with, Virginia is the mouthpiece for most of our beliefs. Masters of Sex is awfully proud of itself for telling us things like “the clitoris exists,” but its target audience is people who already know all this stuff. Specifically, the target audience seems to be women like Virginia – smart, single, independent, self-supporting, sex-positive women with liberal values and a soft spot in their hearts for closed-off men. Virginia is us, wearing a dress from the 1950s, and we get to vicariously rescue the 1950s, and Bill, from the backwards social taboos of the time.

It’s a story-telling strategy that’s sometimes extremely annoying, and other times strangely effective.

On the annoying front, Masters of Sex doesn’t usually challenge us. Despite the fact that it’s supposedly about two people who had radical ideas for their time, the show’s pretty safe by today’s standards. It takes the bold stance, for example, that gay people shouldn’t try to turn themselves straight with electroshock therapy. And that women can have careers outside the home. And that people can have sex for recreational purposes. And that you shouldn’t be a dick to someone just because they’re black.

None of these are radical ideas by today’s standards, and we’re invited to look backwards at the 1950s with a sense of satisfaction about how much things have changed. At least so far, there’s very little attempt to examine racism, sexism, or homophobia from an angle that would highlight ongoing problems today. It’s all done retrospectively, like, “Can you believe what people were like?!?” And we share Virginia’s bewilderment and exasperation. She’s essentially A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with a social rather than technological advantage. If we identify with her, we might enjoy the sense of feeling forward-looking and superior, but we don’t learn very much about ourselves.

Masters and Johnson’s actual research, as presented by the show, isn’t exactly a bag of surprises, either. We watch all of the characters freak out over discoveries like, “women can have multiple orgasms” and “people curl their toes during sex.” Were you aware that not everyone who has sex does so in the missionary position? Or that sometimes they think about something other than the person they’re having sex with? If so, you won’t learn anything new, here.

In some ways, this backward-looking orientation is most frustrating when the show is just barely unable to address information that’s actually useful today. There is, for example, a really topical B-plot about cervical cancer that can’t communicate the most important fact we now know about cervical cancer – that it’s caused by HPV, and that there are vaccines for that. The bitter irony of leading the audience to think about cervical cancer each week, without telling them the one thing they might need to know, is almost too much to take. Instead of learning something that might be of actual use, the audience is invited to feel good about the fact that pap smears are now a common practice.

We’re generally invited, through the benefit of hindsight, to see 1950s America as misguided and conservative, and to see Virginia as a hero who’s fighting a noble battle to achieve the future. We know that, in most cases, history is on her side, and we see that she faithfully represents our values. Somehow, she hasn’t internalized any of the bullshit in her culture. That makes her annoying, sometimes, but it’s also what makes her the perfect champion for Bill – she stands outside of everything that makes him hate himself, and offers the perspective that only a (highly improbable) outsider can give.

The root of Bill’s self-hatred is the masculine ideal. The cornerstone of any really excellent/terrible patriarchy, the masculine ideal is the notion that there is only one really desirable Way for a person to Be. Women are automatically excluded from being that Way, but so are most men. In the USA, and cultures like it, the masculine ideal of the 1950s required things like: heterosexuality; skill in physical combat;

avoiding the outward display of any emotion except, perhaps, anger; and courage in the face of physical danger. Trying to meet the requirements of that ideal – trying to be a “real man” and win approval from one’s peers – could lead to aggression, misogyny, homophobia, and the construction of a private emotional prison where normal feelings like sadness, embarrassment, grief, loneliness, uncertainty, and fear could fester until they got twisted.

The 1950s – the era that present-day conservatives harken back to when they talk about the good old days – is really a peak in the backlash against equal rights for people who weren’t straight, white men. It was a doubling down on rigid ideas that we now understand can hurt everyone – even the straight, white men who supposedly benefit from them.

Virginia, as a time traveler with values from the future, can give Bill something that nobody else – including his well-meaning wife – can deliver. She can give him a space where it’s safe to let go of all of the things he’s been taught about who he should be, and find out who he is underneath. It’s like Idina Menzel on that mountain.

“Fight,” the series’ best and most critically lauded episode so far, is nothing but a really heavy-handed treatise on this point. Bill and Virginia meet to have sex in a hotel, and a hugely symbolic boxing match on television leads Bill to confess, for the first time out loud, that his father used to beat him as a child and that his only form of protest was to take it “like a man” by not allowing himself to reveal how much it hurt him.

Virginia, who is horrified by this, tells Bill that she won’t raise her son to think that that’s the way to be a man.

The episode uses boxing as a metaphor for several other things, but the point it eventually drives at is that the ability to be vulnerable in front of other people is a strength. This is an idea that’s decidedly 2014, where we’re starting to understand the cost that comes from raising people to suppress their feelings, and shifting to a greater emphasis on mental and emotional health.

The idea that a woman can “save” a man by teaching him to talk about his feelings has become a cliché in the genre, but it’s one that makes sense in this setting. Virginia is the spokesperson for a future where feminists have already largely succeeded in challenging the masculine ideal – where everyone has benefited from discovering that there is more than one right Way to Be. Bill’s anguish and emotional isolation are a reminder of why no one should want to go back to the so-called golden era where men were “real men.”

The informative part of the series – “this is how anatomy works!” – isn’t telling us anything new, and the social values it promotes aren’t very challenging, but, if there’s something relevant buried deep within Masters of Sex, it’s the pointed view it takes of masculinity. It shows us how rigid notions of gender hurt everyone, not just specifically women, and highlights not just the distance we’ve traveled, but why it’s important to go there.

The series’ discussion of gender is the rare instance where its visionary characters have a vision that extends into our future. One where we stop feeling nostalgic for the 50s, and look forward to what we’ll become when we’ve let that all go.

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

’22 Jump Street’ is That Awkward Moment When You Want to be Progressive and Don’t Know How

’22 Jump Street’ alternately endorses and makes fun of the idea that we should be sensitive, tolerant people, but it isn’t mean-spirited or offensive – it’s just sort of harmlessly dumb.

Written by Katherine Murray.

22 Jump Street alternately endorses and makes fun of the idea that we should be sensitive, tolerant people, but it isn’t mean-spirited or offensive – it’s just sort of harmlessly dumb.

The premise of 22 Jump Street is that the characters from 21 Jump Street — two undercover cops played by Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill – have to do the exact same thing they did in the first movie, but with a bigger budget, and in a slightly different setting. I’m not being sarcastic – that’s actually the brief they get from their Captain at the start of the movie, because 22 Jump Street is one long, self-referential joke about making a half-assed sequel.

In this particular case, the cops, who went undercover as high school students in 21 Jump Street, are now undercover as college students. There are jokes about college, jokes about movies, and jokes about how the characters look really old, but the dominant theme in the movie is that it, and its characters, try really hard to be not homophobic, not sexist, not racist… and don’t always figure out how.

The most obvious example of this, and the one that’s been discussed the most often in reviews, is that the friendship between Tatum and Hill’s characters – Jenko and Schmidt – plays out as if it’s a romance. Jenko becomes friends with a football player, making Schmidt jealous, and leading them to fight about whether they should split up and “investigate different people.” There’s a sad musical montage while they think about how much they miss each other, before they agree to team up again as “a one-time thing.” When they reconcile, in the end, Jenko’s football player friend looks on with a mixture of joy and regret, declaring, “That’s who he should be with!”

Despite their cover story being that they’re brothers, and the fact that Schmidt starts dating a woman, other people mistake them for a couple, too. A school counselor makes them hold hands and attend couple’s therapy; some drug dealers think they’re having oral sex during a bust.

The movie is trying hard to be not homophobic – there’s even a part where Jenko, who’s forced to take a seminar on human sexuality, explains why you can’t use gay slurs – but, when you boil it down, the joke is still, “They seem gay, but they’re not!”

After a long period of time where movies couldn’t allude to homosexuality at all, and a shorter period of time where they could only do it in a derogatory or pejorative way, we’re now in a place where mainstream movies are totally cool with joking that their leading men are gay… as long as it’s clear that they don’t have gay sex. It’s a step forward, for sure, and you can argue that 22 Jump Street is just making fun of the homoerotic subtext that’s already present in buddy cop movies, but the joke is still based on the idea that actually being gay is a bridge that can never be crossed.

This kind of humor has gotten more and more prevalent as public acceptance toward the LGBT community has increased. Homosexuality is no longer something so taboo that we can’t even talk about it – and it’s no longer a career killer for heterosexual actors to play a gay character, or to joke about their masculinity. “They seem gay, but they’re not!” has shown up in R-rated comedies, and most of the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations – including the Robert Downey Jr. movies, House, and, most notably, BBC’s Sherlock – and the punch line is always the same: “Ha ha ha. This looks gay, and we’re fine with looking gay – and doesn’t it reflect well on us, that we’re not afraid to look gay – but, just so you know, we’re not gay.”

If you were watching a movie or TV show about a man and woman who really, really acted like a couple, and people mistook them for a couple, and there were constantly jokes introducing the idea that they should be a couple, chances are they’d end up as a couple. Usually, the point of making those sorts of observations in the early part of a movie or series is to plant the idea in the audience’s mind that the characters should get together, and introduce tension about whether or not they will. It’s the same principle as We’re the Millers, where Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis pretend to be married as part of con, but end up falling in love. Or the second season of Orange is the New Black, where Larry and Polly are mistaken for a couple, and it makes them realize that they should be one. Or even the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Buffy and her mortal enemy, Spike, fall under a spell that makes them act like they’re in love, which leads to them actually falling in love.

With 22 Jump Street and its contemporaries, we’re under no illusion that the story will resolve itself that way. In fact, part of the point of the joke is that we take for granted that it won’t. That’s what makes it a “safe” joke to tell. That doesn’t offend me, and I understand that joking about things in a non-judgemental way can be a step toward acceptance. The movie just isn’t as progressive as it seems to want to be.

Speaking of things that aren’t as progressive as they seem to want to be, 22 Jump Street, intentionally or not, dramatizes the same type of struggle in Schmidt. While the movie is awkwardly trying to avoid homophobia without being sure what to do, Schmidt awkwardly tries to avoid being sexist or racist, with mixed and confusing results.

There’s a running joke in the film where he tries to suck up to the Captain (played by Ice Cube) by saying what he clearly thinks are appropriately sensitive things about race. When the Captain flips out and starts yelling for the waiter in a restaurant, Schmidt defends him by saying, “He’s black! He’s been through a lot!” When the case is initially explained to him – that a black woman died after taking drugs sold to her by a white man – Schmidt comments that’s it’s refreshing to have a black victim, and that the fact that she’s black makes him care so much more. Jenko corrects him that he means to say he cares equally, but Schmidt’s adamant that he cares more.

In both cases, everyone else in the scene is confused or annoyed by his comments, and the joke seems to be that he’s trying too hard to seem sensitive without knowing how to go about it. (In the second case, the joke might also be that people who criticize casting decisions in movies are similarly misguided about it).

Schmidt’s also confused about how to relate to women. One of the antagonists in the movie is his girlfriend’s roommate, Mercedes (played by Jillian Bell). Her idea of conversation is to crack deadpan jokes about his age, even when they’re in life or death situations (which is funny), and, at one point, they get into a fistfight, where he’s not sure if it’s okay to hit her. She yells at him that, if he saw her as a person, he’d punch her in the face, and he does it, but he feels really awkward and uncomfortable. (There’s also an improvised moment where they become confused about whether they’re going to kiss during the fight.)

The fistfight scene stands out as one that captures Schmidt and 22 Jump Street’s dilemma pretty clearly – as a reasonably progressive straight, white guy, he wants to do the right thing and not be racist, sexist, or homophobic, but he has no idea what he is and isn’t supposed to do and say. The absurdity of a situation where, in order to be feminist, you have to punch a woman in the face sums up the conflict pretty clearly – in this brave new world we live in, well-meaning people still get confused about how they’re supposed to behave.

The film also has less thoughtful sequences. Schmidt hooks up with a woman named Maya, and we’re supposed to laugh at the idea that he wants to have a relationship while she’s looking for a one night stand (because women are supposed to want relationships, and men are supposed to want one night stands, get it?). He does the walk of shame in the morning, where it appears that he’s the only man among a group of women, and a later scene in the movie follows this up by showing us that Schmidt is now on a first name basis with the same women (implicitly because he’s done this so often that they’ve all gotten to know each other).

The joke “Schmidt makes friends with the other people doing the walk of shame, because he does it all the time” is funny in itself, but Jonah Hill, for some reason, adopts a more effeminate posture and delivery during those scenes, making the joke more like, “Schmidt’s become one of the girls!” Which is funny because… it’s emasculating? Like being gay?

I honestly don’t know.

22 Jump Street exists in a sort of no-man’s-land where we don’t want to be bigoted or hateful, but where even the least homophobic person in the world can reach for a gay slur in anger, and where, even a movie that’s trying to be progressive can reach for jokes that tacitly confirm the same stereotypes it’s opposing. It’s a snapshot of where mainstream culture is, now, where we want to be better, and thoughtful, and kind, but we haven’t dismantled the language that came before. We’re in a transitional stage between the generations that would find this movie offensively tolerant, and those that will find it offensively backward.

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

Love It or Hate It, Emotions Served Raw in the Music of ‘Les Misérables’

Ugly singing; ugly make-up. ‘Les Misérables’ is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But, isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?

Written by Katherine Murray.

Ugly singing; ugly make-up. Les Misérables is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?

Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables is either an exercise in profoundly committed, sincere expressions of raw emotion, or a hammy, emotionally manipulative attempt to win Oscars. In fact, it’s probably both of those things at different times, but it stands out due to Hooper’s unusual choice to record the actors singing live.

Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.

That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in. When the cast list was announced, it seemed strange, because many of the actors were not really known as great singers, but the movie isn’t about singing an ear-pleasing song. It’s about letting the actors emote in the moment, having their voices sync up with the other acting choices they make in the scene – the result is something that seems so authentic and raw that it starts to go the other way and seem manipulative again.

The standout number in the film, and the one you would cite, were you trying to convince someone it’s awesome, is, of course, Anne Hathaway sobbing her way through “I Dreamed a Dream.” She won an armful of awards for it, including an Oscar, and deservedly so. There’s something beautiful and unselfconscious about the way she just lets herself go in that scene – a kind of emotional nakedness, where we believe the despair that she’s feeling. We can see that she’s let herself disappear inside the character, and invited us to see her in this dark, vulnerable moment, without any fear that she’s going to look stupid. That’s rare, and it displays a type of courage and skill as a performer that should be rewarded.

It’s also reminiscent of Jennifer Hudson’s standout performance of “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls. That performance similarly made the whole movie, and led to an Oscar win for the woman screaming her pain to the camera.

Hudson doesn’t go to the ugly place in Dreamgirls. The studio-recorded track sounds beautiful, and the makeup department isn’t trying to make her look diseased. What makes the scene stand out, though, is still the amount of raw emotion she pours into it. A more gifted vocalist than Hathaway, she uses her voice to convey a torrent of rage, despair, and desperation, which she then telegraphs through her body language and facial expressions on screen.

We’re drawn into her performance, and it conveys the most important emotional truth of the scene – that, even though her character’s words sound powerful, they’re being shouted from a place of total loss. She says, “I am telling you,” but there’s no one to tell. She’s lost her partner and her friends — she stands alone on a darkened stage without even the audience she hungered for. And, into the darkness, she orders, “You’re gonna love me, yes you are!”

It’s a powerful moment, and Hathaway’s performance in Les Misérables is like that, with the additional layer that Les Mis is so proud of her suffering.

Whereas Dreamgirls is a pretty standard and standardly-shot movie musical – enlivened by outstanding vocals from Hudson and co-star Beyoncé — Les Misérables is really reaching for the brass ring. It has a take-no-prisoner’s approach to engaging with the story’s pathos, and an awkward kind of delight in making everyone seem plague-ridden and miserable.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Les Misérables. I had low expectations, but I was less than ten minutes in before I felt that special shiver of delight that tells you you’re watching a kick-ass movie. I would much rather watch a film where everyone really goes for it, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

At the same time, I completely understand why some people found it annoying.

The annoyance comes in part because you’re watching people who do not live in poverty pat themselves on the back for how poor they’re willing to make themselves look, and how deeply they’re willing to crawl inside the suffering of others. The ugly singing and the ugly makeup can be read as self-congratulatory – “Look how much I’m willing to debase myself for art! I don’t care if I look pretty; I just care if I’m authentic.” After a certain point, it comes across as trying too hard – of actually being inauthentic, since the attempt at authenticity feels so calculated.

It’s the same criticism that’s followed Anne Hathaway, herself. Whereas Jennifer Hudson came across to us as a spirited American Idol reject, who made good on her big dreams of stardom by signing her heart out in Dreamgirls, Anne Hathaway has been criticized for coming across as fake during public appearances. In fact, the backlash against Hathaway reached a fever pitch just as she was accepting her slew of awards for Les Mis.

No doubt, there’s a sharp contrast between the vulnerability she shows in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and the polished, eager-to-please persona she throws on in public. (Though I hasten to add that a lot of celebrities seem self-conscious in managing their public personas; for people who want to be liked, there’s nothing better or worse than having millions of people stare at you).

The general reaction to Les Misérables seems to fall along similar lines. The raw, ugly, emotionally intense performance is either touching because it seems authentic, or it’s disgusting because it seems crass and manipulative. We all agree that the emotions, like the vocals, weren’t cooked and seasoned before they were served, but we don’t agree about whether that’s fresh and exciting, or lazy and self-involved.

Like Anne Hathaway, the movie is trying hard. Like Jennifer Hudson, it’s screaming, “You’re gonna love me,” into the darkness. One cannot dare to be loved without risking rejection, and Les Misérables invites both love and rejection from its audience – but, isn’t it beautiful to see – and to hear – someone try?

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

“Terrors of Intimacy” or No, ‘True Blood’ is About Who You Want to Have Sex With

‘Softcore Porn Roulette with Vampires’ is entering its final season and, while it’s never been good, it embraced being bad with such glee that I’m a little bit sorry to see it go. With that in mind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the awkward, sometimes hilarious, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes kind of offensive journey we’ve taken with the show that was nothing but humping and gore.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Softcore Porn Roulette with Vampires is entering its final season and, while it’s never been good, it embraced being bad with such glee that I’m a little bit sorry to see it go. With that in mind, let’s take a moment to reflect on the awkward, sometimes hilarious, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes kind of offensive journey we’ve taken with the show that was nothing but humping and gore.

Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape/assault.

The Gay Stuff
True Blood’s original show-runner, Alan Ball, is an openly gay man who has done very good things for the representation of LGBT people in popular culture. His previous HBO series – and maybe his greatest work – Six Feet Under, still stands tall as being one of the only shows – and one of the earliest shows – to depict a nuanced, complicated relationship between two gay men, who were multifaceted characters, on par with their heterosexual counterparts. On the whole, the gay and bisexual characters on True Blood, be they ever so shallow and underdeveloped, are on the same playing field as the shallow, underdeveloped heterosexual characters (though there’s sometimes some weirdness about physical intimacy). For the most part, nobody on the show really notices or minds if anyone else is lesbian, gay, or bisexual, which, in itself, can be seen as a positive thing. The range of male sexuality is better represented than the range of female sexuality, but, compared to its contemporaries, the show is still unusually open to the idea of depicting something other than heterosexuality on screen.

Where things get weird is when vampirism is used as an awkward metaphor for homosexuality. Vampires “come out of the coffin” by announcing themselves to humanity. They’re persecuted by religious zealots holding signs that say “God hates fangs.” Two of the series most memorable (and intentionally hilarious) villains are/were leaders of a Christian hate group called The Fellowship of the Sun that targets vampires just a real-life hate groups have sometimes targeted homosexuals – one of the villains later decides to be true to his own identity and proudly comes out as “gay vampire-American.”

Going into the final season, the vampire population is dying from a disease called Hep-V, which, despite its name, has been presented in ways that are much more analogous to HIV and to the AIDS crisis in North America (where gay and bisexual men are disproportionately likely to contract the virus). The speech that Pam gives Eric in episode three, about how there are treatments that can help him lead a normal life, and how people are working to find a cure, could be ripped from any drama about HIV.

In this context, the hatred and prejudice that some of the characters exhibit toward vampires comes across as analogous to the bigotry that’s sometimes directed at the LGBT community… except that vampires, unlike homosexuals, want kill your whole family and feast on your blood. So maybe there’s a good reason to be wary of them.

The fact that vampirism doesn’t map very neatly onto the LGBT rights movement has already been discussed in great depth, and Ball, himself, has described the vampire/LGBT analogy as “window-dressing that makes [the story] contemporary.” For the most part, vampires and other Sups on True Blood seem to be a general representation of the Other, with the (awkwardly delivered) message being that we should judge people as individuals, based on the decisions they make, personally, rather than what group we think they belong to. We’re all just people in the end, etcetera.

In principle, though, it’s really True Blood’’s shallowness, rather than any concerted attempt to argue for tolerance, that’s brought so much lesbian and gay content to the fore. The show employs a less ambitious version of Torchwood’s “everybody’s bi” philosophy where, if there’s a possibility that two actors will look hot together, nothing else – including gender – is even a concern.

Which leads me nicely to the Tara stuff.

The Tara Stuff
If there’s one character the writers don’t find hot enough, it’s Tara. I mean, yeah, she was funny in the first season, and she seemed smart, and she had all this complicated stuff going on with her alcoholic mother, but that’s not enough to earn a real plotline on this show. Ever since season two, Tara’s been shoved into one troubling situation after another, with the final insult being her off-screen death in the first five minutes of season seven.

In season two, Tara and one of the only other Black characters on the show, Eggs, are held captive and forced to serve a magical white woman while they wait for another magical white woman to free them. All season long, they’re under a spell that makes them subservient and, in one scene, they punch each other in the face for their captor’s entertainment. They never manage to turn the tables or get their own back. Once they’re free – once they are freed by someone else – a deputy wrongfully shoots and kills Eggs, and the crime is covered up by the Sheriff. Nothing ever comes of that except that the deputy feels kind of bad.

In season three, Tara’s taken prisoner by a rapist vampire in a storyline that’s alternately played as serious and comedic (WTF). At one point, she’s held captive in an old plantation house, and it appears that she kills her kidnapper and escapes. We later discover that the kidnapper survived, and ultimately has to be dispatched by the same deputy who shot Eggs. Which, I guess, is supposed to make up for shooting Eggs? Somehow?

Other awful things happen, too – one of the worst is Tara taking a bullet for her awful, often absent bestie, Sookie, and dying on the kitchen floor during the last few moments of season four – but what’s even more telling are the two attempts the writers make to reboot the character and make her more interesting.

In the first reboot, Tara (who, up until this point has been exclusively heterosexual), becomes a lesbian cage fighter with super straight hair and more fashionable clothes. We see her girlfriend (maybe) twice, cage fighting never becomes important to the story, and all she does all season (before dying) is stand around awkwardly as the hostage of another magical white woman while waiting for magical white Sookie to come save her again.

In the second reboot, the recently dispatched Tara is turned into a vampire by fan favourite Pam. She uses her new abilities to become a pole dancer, wears corsets and belly-baring tops, and starts a lesbian relationship with Pam. Then she goes back to wearing her normal clothes and meets the true death in season seven.

Both attempts to reboot the character, and make her more relevant to the show, are pretty transparent in their intentions of making Tara seem sexy. It’s also clear that being sexy is your key to having something to do on True Blood. I mean, the werewolf plotlines are probably the most unnecessary ones in the series, but they persisted for a long time, because werewolf Alcide looked good with his shirt off. It really seems like production didn’t like Tara with any of the guys they paired her with, so they started pairing her with other women. Then, they didn’t like her as a human, so they tried making her a vampire. When all of that failed, she died.

I would actually be a little bit happy for Tara at this point, if it seemed like she was going to rest in peace, but the first three episodes have suggested that she’s in some kind of tortured, ghostly state, calling for help, waiting for someone to save her, powerless to save herself – that seems more like True Blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the last five minutes of the series, they find a way to send her from purgatory to hell.

The “Let’s Just Give Up On Plot All Together, Now” Stuff
Every storyline on True Blood is treated as an opportunity for sex to happen. A witch comes to town and starts an orgy. Fairies show up because they want to mate with us. Scientists prepare for genocide by watching vampires get it on through one-way mirrors. Eric has amnesia so he and Sookie have sex in Narnia.

Ball – who half-jokingly names “the terrors of intimacy” as the theme of True Blood – is correct in reminding us that vampirism has often been tied up with sex. Most vampire stories involve some element of hunger, desire, and/or seduction that’s reminiscent of sex, and the act of biting someone and ingesting their blood can easily be seen as a sexual one. That doesn’t entirely explain why so many of the plotlines on True Blood sound like they could be awkward summaries for x-rated fanfic. Like:

Sookie learns that a magic, unbreakable contract promises her to the evil fairy, Warlow, for marriage. When Warlow comes to town, looking for his bride, Sookie is surprised by her attraction to him, and no one can believe what happens next.

(They experiment with bondage while they have sex in a graveyard).

Let’s be real, you guys. True Blood is not telling us something deep and meaningful about the nature of desire. It’s not exploring human sexuality in a way that teaches us something about ourselves – this is straight-up entertainment where every situation is a sexual situation, and every problem is a problem involving sex, and every plot point becomes an opportunity for the characters to have sex in a place, or a configuration, or a way that we haven’t seen yet.

Sometimes it’s uncomfortably voyeuristic – as when we have to watch real-life couple Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer go at it. Sometimes it’s WTF – as when vampire Bill has sex with vampire Lorena and twists her head 180 degrees. Sometimes it’s actually a little bit sexy, and sometimes it’s just like, “So what?”

The only time it’s really a problem – if we accept for the moment that having gratuitous sex on your show is not necessarily a problem, sex being neither dirty nor bad – the only time it’s really a problem is when the show does something like mistaking rape for sex, mistaking rape for comedy, and mistaking rape as an acceptable way to shock us as viewers before brushing it off completely. I think it’s totally fine for True Blood to fill up its time with sexual situations that mean nothing and go nowhere – the show will not go down in history as a brilliant work of art, but not everything has to. Unfortunately, I also think that throwing sexual violence in, either as an accident, or a joke, or a cheap surprise, has been more of a problem.

One of the most offensive storylines on the show takes place in season four, where Jason Stackhouse, a human character, is kidnapped by a group of hillbilly werepanthers (they’re like werewolves but they stupidly change into panthers) and then tied to a bed and raped by several of the werepanther women. It isn’t clear whether the show understands that this is a problem, and Ball and the director made some unfortunate comments at the time, to the effect that it was funny or ironic for Jason, a fairly promiscuous character, to be placed in a situation where he didn’t like having sex.

As already mentioned, there’s a lengthy plot about Tara being kidnapped by a rapist that’s alternately played for laughs and drama. Sometimes this is a traumatic experience, sometimes they’re the odd couple on vacation. The actors don’t seem to agree about which level they’re playing it on, but the tone seems muddled over all, with the writers turning the rapist into a comedy villain. After he’s dead, the show briefly acknowledges that something significant happened, by sending Tara to a support group meeting, but then the story gets shoved down the memory hole with everything else.

As a final example, in season two, there’s this horrible moment right at the end of “Release Me” where one of the Fellowship of the Sun guys tries to rape Sookie to punish her for sleeping with vampires. There is an absolutely sickening shot of her screaming into the camera while he pulls her backward, and then a new character, vampire Godric, shows up to save her. Obviously, somebody at HBO (correctly) decided that it would be too disturbing to end the episode without reassuring us that Sookie escapes, but there are better ways to convince us that Godric’s a good guy than setting up a gratuitous rape scene.

In all of these examples, the show isn’t trying to say anything about sexual violence any more than it’s trying to say something the rest of the time. However, unlike with consensual sex, or vampires turning into puddles of goo, I’m not sure it’s appropriate to treat rape as something frivolous, or as an easy way to shock the audience, leading into a cliff-hanger. That’s the flipside of telling such a shallow story – the show isn’t equipped to broach topics requiring more serious treatment, and it ruins the fun when one of those topics crops up.

I find myself in the strange position of wishing that True Blood had been less realistic, less engaged with contemporary social issues, and more of the pure escapism it was intended to be. I’m down with a show about who we want to have sex with, and True Blood is best when it doesn’t aspire to (or accidentally stumble upon) anything deeper than that.

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

Respect is the Watchword: ‘Orange is the New Black,’ Season Two

The second season of ‘Orange is the New Black’ is all about respect: how you get it, how you keep it, whether it’s something that someone can give you, or something you hold for yourself. Anchored by a standout performance by Lorraine Toussaint, this season is darker and richer than its predecessor, but still extremely fun to watch.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The second season of Orange is the New Black is all about respect: how you get it, how you keep it, whether it’s something that someone can give you, or something you hold for yourself. Anchored by a standout performance by Lorraine Toussaint, this season is darker and richer than its predecessor, but still extremely fun to watch.

To recap: Orange is the New Black is that insanely popular Netflix series about a minimum security women’s prison. The second season went online earlier this month, and it ranks about the same as the first season, in terms of being very entertaining and slightly uneven. If there’s one reason to watch it, though, it’s for the pleasure of seeing Lorraine Toussaint knock it out of the park as this season’s new villain, Vee.

Toussaint, whom you may remember from a very long list of acting credits (I remember her from Ugly Betty), brings so much presence, intensity, and commitment to this role that she steals every scene she’s in. You can’t take your eyes off her – and that’s part of the point.

Vee, who’s introduced to us as Taystee’s foster mother, is an actual sociopath who somehow slipped into minimum security. She’s supposed to be magnetic, charismatic, and charming in a way that draws people to her despite the fact that she’s obviously going to murder them. The performance succeeds not only because it creates a memorable character, but because it allows the audience to experience the same draw — it’s clear from the start that Vee’s an awful human being, but we want more of her, all the same.

Maybe in response to criticism of the first season, or maybe just because this is a natural evolution, the second season of Orange is the New Black is less focussed on Piper (who served as the first season’s protagonist), and more focussed on the other inmates of the prison. The A-story, this time, concerns Vee’s arrival at Litchfield, and the way she lures some of the other characters into her web so that she can use them to smuggle in drugs. This puts her in conflict with Red (who normally corners the market on contraband), and creates a rift between Taystee and Poussey, who’ve been BFF this whole time.

While flashbacks have never been this show’s strong suit – they’re heavy handed, and they over-simplify complex situations by boiling them down into ten-minute narratives – this season throws roughly eight-hundred million our way, as a means of explaining the motivations of the major players in the season finale. In general, the flashbacks are not very good, but one thing they do nicely is lay the groundwork for the dynamics we see play out between Vee and the group. The flashbacks involving Taystee explain why she’s loyal to Vee – Vee may have been a lousy foster mother, but she’s the only real family Taystee has. There’s one really good scene that shows Taystee, her foster brother, R.J., and Vee, sitting down to a normal family dinner; you can tell from the expression on her face – and a nice bit of acting from Danielle Brooks – that this is one of Taystee’s best memories – a moment of real happiness in an otherwise difficult life.

The flashbacks also impress upon us that Suzanne (a.k.a. “Crazy Eyes”) feels rejected and like an outsider – something Vee immediately exploits by love bombing her in an obvious way – and that Cindy needs to prove herself as an adult. (Janae already got a flashback in season one, and we know she’s pissed off because she keeps going to solitary for no real reason.) More importantly, though, the flashbacks show us that Poussey, who seems like she was pretty rad on the outside, is an independent thinker who’s willing to fight for her relationships. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of conflict between Poussey and Vee, and the strongest emotional story line of the season is about Taystee being caught between them.

There are several other story lines this season – Dayanara and the idiot guard who impregnated her are still trying to figure things out; Rosa, the cancer patient, is quickly getting worse; a new inmate named Soso goes on a hunger strike; Pennsatucky has new teeth – but, like the A-story, most of them revolve around respect.

Daya wants the idiot guard to come clean and take his lumps so that they don’t have to lie for the rest of their lives (so that they can respect themselves by living truthfully). The idiot guard experiments with being a hard-ass in order to win some respect from his boss and the inmates – which leads Daya to explain, in a heavy-handed way, that he doesn’t need to bully anyone; the fact that he has a choice about what he does already gives him more power than any of the inmates have.

Soso, a college-aged inmate, initially refuses to shower for unspecified reasons, though it eventually becomes clear that she feels ashamed to be naked in front of everyone else. After the guards force her to do it anyway – in a scene that’s excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch – she starts a hunger strike as a way to reclaim some of her dignity by fighting back against the system. While she attracts some followers who aren’t very serious about prison reform, she also attracts a few people with legitimate grievances. We’re invited to laugh at the protest, but it’s a way for several characters, with different motivations, to try to gain respect.

The A-story, which is about the fight for control of the contraband line – between three opposing, racially segregated camps, represented by Vee, Red, and Gloria Mendoza – is really about individual women trying to hold onto positions that give them a positive sense of self. Controlling the kitchen gives Mendoza higher status in the prison, and it lets her give cushier jobs to the other Latina women; controlling the contraband line gives Red special status, and allows her to buy herself friends; controlling other people feeds Vee’s sociopathic drive to power.

There’s a moment, late in the season, where Vee jokes that it’s stupid to kill and die over who can sell mascara in prison – but that’s not what the fight is about. It’s about holding onto a sliver of self-respect in a place where you have to lie down on the ground when you hear an alarm; it’s about having something that’s yours in a place where you are a number, and issued the same clothes as everyone else.

It’s easy to understand how it would be detrimental to someone to be on a chain gang, to be assaulted, or tied up like an animal while she gives birth – but it’s also detrimental to be treated like you’re not a person, no matter how nice the cellblock is. What Orange is the New Black shows us effectively is women trying to hold onto personhood, even in difficult times.

The first season ended with Piper beating the shit out of Pennsatucky – a meth addict who’d harassed her all season, and pushed her so far that she snapped. The second season dives farther into that same well of darkness, striking an awkward (and sometimes confusing) balance between acknowledging Litchfield as kind of a candy-ass prison, and stirring things up by releasing a predator into the mix.

There are moments that are disappointing, there are moments that are cop-outs, there are moments that are sickeningly sweet, there are moments that don’t make sense, there are moments that seem kind of creepy and slightly misogynist (see: Caputo’s ill-gotten blowjob from Assistant Warden Fig) – but, one of the things that’s always been worthwhile about this show is that most of its characters – good, bad, dull, interesting, funny, sexy, cruel, cunning, average – are played by women, and that means that we get to see something we don’t normally get to see on TV. We get to see complex stories about human nature where “human” doesn’t default out to “male.” That’s the first thing everyone says when they write about Orange is the New Black – I know – but it’s worth saying again, because it’s such an unusual thing.

Season two, if anything, is stronger than season one, since it widens its focus, and gives more of its characters a chance in the spotlight. It’s also stronger because it’s gone beyond the story of season one (being in prison is hard, and it’s not like being out of prison at all), to explore something deeper. It’s pounding the same drum of “prisoners are people,” and, for those of us who already know that, that drum can get old, but this season at least drums with style.

Orange is the New Black is not on my list of “World’s Greatest Television Shows,” but Lorraine Toussaint may be on my list of “Greatest Performers in a Television Show,” and the series is doing something important by modelling how you can have a diverse cast of characters made up of women, and how you can tell stories about our universal humanity, when the humans in question are female.

So, if you didn’t binge watch it opening weekend, it’s worth a look, just to see something different. If you did binge watch it, you already know.

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

‘The 100’: Not as Bad as You Would Think

The acting is poor, the dialogue is terrible, and the production values are low, but the first season of ‘The 100’ has its moments, and most of them are pretty effing dark.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The acting is poor, the dialogue is terrible, and the production values are low, but the first season of The 100 has its moments, and most of them are pretty effing dark.

With the finale airing tonight, the CW is set to wrap up the first season of its post-apocalyptic YA series, The 100 . Based on a novel of the same name, the show takes place in the future, where humanity has been forced to live on space stations after destroying the Earth. Almost a century after the exodus, the crew of the last remaining station, The Ark, discovers that life support is failing and decides to send a team of one hundred twenty-something models teenage prisoners back to the planet, to determine whether it’s fit for colonization. Unfortunately, the prisoners immediately lose contact with the space station, leading each group to believe that it is alone, facing difficult choices about its survival.

The main character on the ground is Clarke, a political prisoner who’s basically the same serious, hyper-competent seventeen-year-old girl who stars in all post-apocalyptic YA fiction. Clarke knows a little bit about medicine, which makes her valuable to the group, but her main job is being right all the time and lecturing the others about why they are wrong. The group’s de-facto leader is an older boy named Bellamy, who snuck onto the transport ship because his sister was on board, and a lot of the tension early on comes from Clarke thinking the group should do one thing, and Bellamy thinking they should do something else.

The story on the space station is anchored by Clarke’s mother, Abby, who’s a doctor and sits on the governing council (mirroring Clarke almost exactly, but in a world of adults, rather than teenagers). Abby believes that Earth is habitable and keeps pushing for a wait-and-see approach, while other councillors want to start culling the population in order to extend life support. Her main adversary is the Vice Chancellor, Marcus, who argues (pretty persuasively) that, if Abby is wrong, then, the longer they wait, the more people will have to die.

There are thirteen episodes in the season, including tonight’s finale, and the premiere episode is rough. Rough, like it’s kind of painful to watch, and you think, “This is the worst show that I’ve ever seen.” The tone is all over the place, the actors look and sound like they feel really awkward, everything looks cheap, and the story is silly. The second episode, in all honesty, isn’t much better.

But, then the third episode happens and, it’s not that the show becomes good, but it becomes about a million percent better than it was, and it keeps it keeps improving from there.

The third episode of The 100, “Earth Kills,” does two important things. The first is that it displays honest emotion. Clarke’s backstory is that her father was the engineer who discovered the life support system was failing, and he was executed for trying to warn the population (Clarke was in solitary because she knew the secret). Her best friend, and the Chancellor’s son, Wells, is also on Earth with her, but they’re not really friends anymore because he’s the one who ratted her father out after she told him the plan. We know this already, but most of “Earth Kills” is taken up with flashbacks that dramatize these events in a much more visceral way. We see Clarke watching as her father gets sucked into space (the preferred method of execution on The Ark), and it’s horrible. It completely explains why she’s so mad at Wells and why everyone else who’s had a loved-one sucked out the airlock hates Wells’ father for pushing the button.

The second important thing “Earth Kills” does is end with a shocking, gruesome, grimdark twist that makes sense, given the emotional journey we’ve been on, but also establishes the tone of the show much more clearly. Because, despite the wacky hijinks in the first couple of episodes, The 100, once it gets going, is surprisingly dark for a network TV show.

I mean, William Golding understood in 1954 that, if a bunch of kids built a society, it wouldn’t be all bonfires and sparkly butterflies — I have no grounds to be surprised. Still, after the ridiculousness that was a Jaws-attack by a giant, invisible water snake in episode one (a scene that ends with everyone having a chuckle about it), I was not prepared for episode three, or episode five, or any episode where the series actually followed through on a threat and had something terrible happen.

It’s not that I think being shocking, and making your show a big downer automatically means that it’s good – in fact, I would still hesitate to say that The 100 ever actually gets good – but, The Hunger Games, and second-wave sci-fi, and the generally dark as hell turn that TV has taken in the last few years, have taught us that moral complexity requires a certain engagement with unpleasant content. I think we also may have reached the tipping point where it’s now a “safe” decision to include that in your show – where even a drama for the CW, staring insanely good-looking people who want to hook up, needs some violence, death, and torture, just to stay relevant.

I’m not being judgemental – I enjoyed this show a lot more, once it turned serious and dark. I’m just saying, I notice that a lot of pop culture is tilting that way, and I wonder what it means.

Setting aside the tone for a second, some other good things happen once the series gets going. To start with, the actors relax more into their roles. They forget to be embarrassed and, as they take themselves more seriously as penal colonists on a strange planet, it’s easier to suspend your disbelief. It’s also easier because the costuming and makeup departments are so good at making everyone look dirty.

You can tell that the series is based on a book, because there seems to be a plan as the action moves forward. The 100 throws a lot of twists and cliff-hangers our way – just as one problem is solved, it turns out there’s another – but, unlike other shows, where it feels like the writers are just trying things out, the plot in The 100 progresses more organically. One thing leads to another, and the stakes raise each time, building to the climax.

The characters are also allowed to disagree and still be likable. At the outset, it looks like Marcus is evil, but, once we get to know him, we see that, like everyone else, he’s trying to make good decisions in a bad situation. Similarly, we’re invited to like both Bellamy and Clarke, even though they often disagree with each other, and sometimes make the wrong move.

And, while this isn’t the first show I would point to for awesome portrayals of women, it does better than you’d expect.

Even though Clarke is ripped straight from the pages of every YA novel ever, she’s a pretty decent heroine, and it’s nice that she and Abby serve as our entry points into this world. Whether or not we identify with Clarke, most of the major events on the ground are filtered through her point of view – she’s involved in all the major missions, she has a really loud opinion about everything, and we learn about this world and its characters at roughly the same pace she does. While she’s initially presented to us as an idealist (and a kind of a self-righteous one, at that), it’s interesting to see how she reacts as she’s forced to solve problems with no good solution.

There’s also a secondary character named Raven who’s introduced to us first as a mechanic, and only secondly as somebody’s girlfriend. Even though there’s some triangle drama happening with the character, the most important thing about Raven is that she’s smart and she knows how to build stuff. There’s even a nice scene where one of the boys tells her that they need her around for that reason. One of the most interesting relationships on the show is also between Raven and Abby, as they scheme together aboard The Ark.

On the flipside, there’s another character who’s more problematic.

Bellamy’s sister, Octavia, is initially presented as The Sexy One – an angry, outspoken, promiscuous girl who’s competing with Clarke for the affections of a boring boy named Finn. The first episode has this eye-rollingly bad scene where she gets undressed in front of everyone while they stare at her; in the second episode, she’s macking on three different dudes, partly just to rebel against Bellamy.

After the first couple of episodes, though, her personality does a 180, and she becomes Saint Octavia, a gentle and innocent soul, who’s annoying in a wholly different way. Saint Octavia literally trips over her own feet, at one point, and knocks herself out, necessitating a daring rescue. She also falls in love with a man who kidnaps her and chains her up in a cave. (Then she apologizes to him for freaking out when he chained her up in a cave – I’m not making this up).

Whereas the other characters are more active, the main point of Octavia is how other people feel about her – whether or not they’re attracted to her, how Bellamy structures his life to protect her, etc. In fact, the whole reason she’s named Octavia in the first place is because of how Bellamy relates to her – when she was born, he named her Octavia because Octavia was the Emperor’s sister, just as she is his.

Either version of Octavia is hard to take, but she’s an anomaly on a show that’s otherwise pretty balanced when it comes to gender. The characters who drive the action are just as likely to be male or female, and the show passes the Bechdel test pretty often, considering that it’s pre-occupied with heterosexual dating relationships.

If I had an award for “most improved show,” I think The 100 would win it. Most sci-fi series take a while to figure out what they’re trying to be, but the contrast between the first two episodes of The 100 and the rest of the season is pretty extreme. I’m actually excited to see the finale, and, since it’s already been picked up for a second season, I’m planning to tune in again.

Programming note to my fellow Canadians: Netflix Canada streams The 100 the day after it airs in the States.

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

Of Phallic Keys and Ugly Masturbation: Let’s Talk About ‘Mulholland Drive’

That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze ‘Mulholland Drive’ for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.

Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze Mulholland Drive for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.

Mulholland Drive (2001), more colloquially known as “Mulholland WTF Did I Just Watch?” is a story told in two parts, both of which were written and directed by David Lynch.

In the first part, Laura Harring plays Rita, a woman who escapes attempted murder but ends up with amnesia and doesn’t remember who she is or what’s going on. She stumbles across Betty (Naomi Watts), a plucky go-getter and brilliant actress who’s come to LA to launch her career, and Betty decides to Nancy Drew this thing by helping Rita piece together her identity. Along the way, they discover the body of a woman named Diane, who killed herself, and briefly run across an actress named Camilla who’s cast in a leading role as result of mob-related conspiracies.

Betty and Rita start a sexual relationship and go to a creepy post-modern theatre where everything is a facade. Then, Rita finds a magic blue box, and stuffs a key inside, at which point all of the characters and plot points go through a blender and the story starts again.

This time Naomi Watts is playing Diane, a failed actress who’s in love with her much more successful best friend, Camilla (Laura Harring). Camilla’s dating a man, which makes Diane insanely jealous, and, when she finally can’t take it anymore, she hires a hitman to murder Camilla and then feels guilty and shoots herself.

The most straightforward interpretation of the movie – and therefore, the one I will steadfastly cling to – is that the second story, about Diane and Camilla, is “true,” whereas the first story is a fantasy created by crazy Diane as a way to escape from her pain.

The first story shows Diane’s alter-ego, Betty, as being capable, likable, talented, and charming. She totally kills her first audition (even after being placed in an awkward position by her co-star), she lives in a beautiful apartment (owned by her aunt, who isn’t present), and she has a timeless, youthful appearance that invokes the sense of an earlier era.

Diane’s idealized version of Camilla is Rita, who takes her name from Rita Hayworth, also invoking the sense of an era gone by. In contrast to Betty, Rita is vacant and dependent, constantly deferring to Betty’s judgement and praising Betty’s abilities without offering any ideas of her own. She’s also the one who initiates their sexual relationship, which frees Betty/Diane from having to feel responsible for it.

The first two thirds of the movie, then, is a story about the way things should have been, from Diane’s perspective – the way, perhaps, that she imagined they would be, before her youthful optimism was crushed by the film industry. So, what do we make of the fact that Diane’s such a creepball?

Because, make no mistake, now – Diane is a creepball. She behaves in a way that makes Camilla uncomfortable; she pretends to be Camilla’s friend while simmering with hatred, envy, and jealousy from the sidelines; she has Camilla killed (which is creepball enough); and her ultimate fantasy is one in which Camilla’s not even a person, but rather a prop in a story about how great Diane is. To drive it all home, the second story treats us to a long, ugly scene where Diane angrily cries while she masturbates, because that’s what her life has become. She is president of the Friend Zone, but the lesbian aspect adds an extra layer of discomfort.

The first part of the film, with Betty and Rita, feels uncanny and bizarre, like you’d expect from a David Lynch movie. You’re not going to sit there and think, “My, what a beautiful love story that isn’t unnerving at all,” but there’s a sense in which the lesbian romance is not a big deal. You’re just watching two attractive, basically likable people, with no secret, evil agendas, who decide to get it on. It’s a nice change from the way lesbianism was portrayed as sinister and corrupting in Ye Olde Hollywood – and that change lasts exactly as long as it takes for Rita to stick a key in a box and uncover the truth.

I haven’t checked to see, but I bet there’s a paper out there about what it means that one of the lesbian characters discovers her true identity as a straight woman after sticking that key in the box. I’m just saying. I won’t subject you to that kind of symbol analysis, but I do think it’s significant that, after we’re shown such a nice, cuddly picture of lesbian intimacy – like, almost right after – it turns out that Diane is a creeper who’s destined to wind up alone.

The trope of the lesbian friend who weasels her way into your life while secretly creeping on you is something that’s on the way out, but it still exists. You can see it, for example, in Notes on a Scandal, where Judi Dench pretends to be friends with Cate Blanchett while secretly stealing her hair. Somehow, she ends up looking like more of a creep than the woman who’s having sex with a 15-year-old boy.

The question for Mulholland Drive – and I confess that I don’t know the answer – is whether we’re supposed to see Diane’s situation as being universal to the human condition, or as being specifically wrought by her sexual preference. In other words, is this a story about envy and disappointment – the illusions we hold about ourselves, our regret when we don’t live up to our own expectations, our sense of being duped by the images we grew up watching on TV – or is it a story about how lesbians creep on their straight friends? Is Diane’s desire supposed to be creepy because she objectifies Camilla and wants to strip her of agency – because she feels entitled to have Camilla belong to her in a way that is creepy, regardless of gender – or is her desire creepy because she’s a girl?

I think it’s possible that the answer to all of those questions is, “Yes.” Mulholland Drive is a movie that, in many ways, could be about anyone but that, in being about a lesbian, connotes something different than if Diane were, instead, a straight man (or a woman in love with a man – or any other combination there might be). Notwithstanding recent events, as a culture, we’re much more relaxed about men who want to possess women than we are about women who want to possess. The experience of wanting something that doesn’t want you back is filtered very differently, depending on how much privilege we have, and Diane is rejected in a specifically woebegone, Hollywood lesbian way – a way that is, sadly, in keeping with the golden age of cinema she thinks she wants to resurrect.

That said, Mulholland Drive doesn’t feel like its trying to say something really self-reflexive and insightful about the way lesbians have historically been portrayed in film – it feels more like Diane is just creepy. But her creepiness is only one layer in a multi-faceted approach to character that touches on Big Themes of longing, regret, and self-hatred – so, it’s both. It is both a story about our universal humanity, and how lesbian friends are the worst. Complete with phallic keys and ugly masturbation.

Recommended Reading: After Ellen’s review of Notes on a Scandal, AMC’s blog post: Movie History – Why Are There So Few Lesbian Romance Films With Positive Endings?

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

‘Super Fun Night’ Postmortem

ABC announced late last week that ‘Super Fun Night,’ Rebel Wilson’s half-hour comedy about being supremely uncool, was getting the axe. After 17 very strange episodes, it’s time to look back and figure out what went wrong (and right) with this offbeat series.

Written by Katherine Murray.

ABC announced late last week that Super Fun Night, Rebel Wilson’s half-hour comedy about being supremely uncool, was getting the axe. After 17 very strange episodes, it’s time to look back and figure out what went wrong (and right) with this offbeat series.

Super Fun Night is/was a sitcom produced by Conan O’Brien, starring the hilarious Rebel Wilson as Kimmie, an awkward, uncool lawyer who lives with her awkward, uncool friends, while pining after her handsome, unattainable co-worker, Richard. It’s significant that Kimmie lives with her high school friends, since the defining question of the series is whether or not being cool is the prerequisite to having a satisfying life.

Kimmie, who would like to think of herself as being a little bit cool, drags her friends into misadventure by taking them out of the apartment and into the city on various outings they call “super fun night.” Also, she works in an office and stuff.

The show includes a strange mishmash of singing, and jokes, and serious after-school-special moments about accepting yourself. At times, it tantalizes you with the idea that it might actually be good, only to let you down in the following episode. There were lots of things to like and dislike about it, but I enjoy finding fault with other people’s work, so let’s start with the stuff that went wrong.

The Stuff that was Wrong

● The American Accent
Rebel Wilson is Australian; her character is not. That is a mistake of huge proportions, mainly for the reason that a lot of Wilson’s comedy comes less from what she’s saying, and more from the specific way she says it. For some unknown reason, Kimmie is American, and you can hear Wilson struggling with the accent during the first few episodes. It flattens her delivery and makes it hard for her to use the right inflection to carry off a joke.

Wilson has explained that the decision sprang partly from the fact that Kimmie is supposed to have gone to school in America, but, if the character had moved from Australia as a teen, I doubt anyone would have cried foul.

● The Law Firm
Kimmie is a lawyer in the way that children imagine people are lawyers – she’s vaguely in an office setting, wearing a suit, doing legal-sounding things. Her job bears absolutely no importance to the story, and yet the show insists on following her to work, where her career and her coworkers are drawn in very broad strokes, and not nearly as entertaining as the rest of the show.

It seems from the title, and the pilot (which aired as the eighth episode), that the real meat of the story is Kimmie’s interaction with her friends, Helen-Alice and Marika, who are also the funniest and most specific characters. It would have been easy to structure the show so that each episode was focussed on whatever Kimmie and her friends achieved on “super fun night,” and it’s surprising that so much screen time is instead given to Kimmie moving papers around at an imaginary job.

The only interesting fact about the law firm is that, between two Australian actors and one Englishman, nobody who works there is American. I’m pretty sure Matt Lucas even showed up in the elevator. As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I’m pleased that our invasion is proceeding according to plan.

● The Woman With No Personality
It’s clear that the series did not know what to do with Kimmie’s arch nemesis, Kendall. She’s the shallowest character, and the role was changed and re-cast after the pilot (some of the official websites still show a photo of the original actress, because that’s the level of support this show got on the ground).

The problem with Kendall is that she isn’t a person. She’s the most archetypical character on the show – a projection of what we imagine pretty, successful career women must be like (confident, lovelorn, a little bit mean), lacking in the little quirks and details that make the other characters seem human. Even after the writers flip the script and try to make Kendall into Kimmie’s friend, we never get a sense of who she is, beyond how she makes Kimmie feel awkward and slovenly by comparison. It drags down the law firm scenes even more.

● The Tinkley Piano Music
This is not actually a complaint about the music (though the music numbers were weird). It’s a complaint about the Very Special Moments the series had where the characters Learned A Lesson or otherwise expressed their innermost emotions in an entirely serious way. Kimmie is a virgin! Marika is a lesbian! Both of them were really unpopular in school!

Super Fun Night tries really hard to be sensitive to all of these things (and more – so many more) by not laughing at the characters, or shaming them for their experiences. That’s awesome, but, given that this is a comedy, it would also have been nice if the writers had found a way of laughing with the characters instead, so that at least there could be laughter.

In spite of these issues, though, I confess that part of me was pulling for this series to succeed. And that’s because of the stuff that went right.

The Stuff that was Right

● Kimmie’s Relationship with James
After Kendall and Richard start dating, they set Kimmie up with one of Richard’s friends. Kimmie spends the week fantasizing about what kind of suave, handsome, Richard-like man they’ve selected, only to find out it’s James, a goofy fat guy, who seems kind of loud.

Kimmie’s first reaction is to feel insulted that this is who Richard and Kendall imagine her with, but, once she gets to know James, it turns out she likes him a lot. She realizes, in a fairly understated way, that even though she’s used to being dismissed because of the way she looks and the awkward first impression she makes, she made the same mistake with James. It’s a nice, self-aware moment in which the audience takes the same journey as Kimmie – James is presented in such a way that we’re encouraged to find him disappointing (and to think that the joke is going to be “look what an awful blind date this is”) before the situation reverses, and we realize that he’s really an OK guy.

The series also ends on a really strong note, in terms of the Richard-Kimmie-James love triangle. Richard and Kimmie have always been friends – they share some of the same interests, and dork-out to the same kinds of things – but, once Kimmie starts dating James, Richard suddenly decides that he’s in love with her. He makes his feelings known during the final episodes of the series, right before he gets on a plane to leave the country and start a new job. Now that Kimmie finally has the chance to be with the man she’s been dreaming about, she frantically runs to the airport to tell him… that she thinks he’ll do really well at his new job and she wishes him the best.

Kimmie makes the mature choice of staying with James, the guy she’s actually built a relationship with, rather than chasing after Richard and the idealized romance she had with him in her mind. In real life, this may be what most sensible people would do, but, in TV land, this is the sitcom equivalent of “Ned Stark dies.” It completely reverses our expectations about how the story is going to play out, and shows that the writers are doing something insightful and intelligent with the genre. If I was going to identify a single reason why Super Fun Night deserved to exist, it would be that scene at the airport.

● Actual Lesbians (Not Just Lesbian Jokes)
One of the running jokes in the series is that everyone except Marika thinks that Marika is gay. The reasons for this mostly rely on stereotypes like the way she dresses, her love of sports, and the coffee table she built out of salvaged railway ties, but Marika also shows an obvious interest in other women, and an obviously fake-sounding interest in dudes, making her denial seem absurd.

Even if it’s a little heavy-handed (or a lot heavy-handed) it’s nice that Marika’s story line actually finishes out with her finding an awesome new girlfriend and accepting herself as she is (which means that the “LOL @ your lesbian coffee table” jokes also end). If you’re going to joke about your characters being gay, you earn it a little bit more if you’re willing to follow through by actually making your characters gay.

● It’s Totally Fine to Act Like a Dork
The thing that really set the series apart and made it seem special was this: the main characters, who are supposed to be kind of uncool, are actually kind of uncool. This isn’t a thing where they’re just wearing glasses (though one of them is wearing glasses). It’s a thing where their ideal Friday night involves cookies and DVD sets, and they keep fantasy figurines on their desks, and they have anxiety attacks about riding the subway, and they congratulate themselves for daringly eating papaya.

Most of the funniest jokes on the show are about this – which is why most of the funniest parts of the show involve Kimmie’s friends rather than her coworkers – but there’s no suggestion that the characters need to fundamentally change who they are in order to be cooler people. At the end of the pilot episode, they manage to agree that they will “sometimes” leave the apartment to venture outside, and that’s about as far as the concessions go.

It isn’t a novel idea that being a geek, nerd, or dork can be fine, but most of the celebrated characters within that niche are men. Comparatively, it’s much more rare to see a story about female geeks, nerds, and dorks, where they aren’t asked to change in some way, or to start dressing better, in order to prove they have worth. It’s rare to see a geek girl who isn’t also (secretly) a hot girl, and, as annoying as the Tinkley Piano Music moments are, it’s nice to see the characters confess insecurities that many women have without being punished for it.

There were a lot of problems with Super Fun Night – including the fact that it wasn’t consistently funny – but the core idea behind it was something important. It introduced geeky, nerdy, dorky female characters that women could relate to, and it inverted the legacy of 80s and 90s movies (which taught us that only cool people can date and have fun, therefore we should learn to be cool), by telling us that uncool people can still lead full lives and have self-esteem.

I’m not surprised that the series was cancelled, but I think it brought something of value, and, even after all the singing and the touching introspection at the law firm, I’m not really sorry I watched it. I would like a magic do-over where someone strengthened the content a little bit more before this went to air, but the feeling behind it was noble.

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

When It Seems Like the Movie You’re Watching Might Hate You

Quick – you’re all settled down in front of the TV with Cheetos and soda when you start to have an uncomfortable feeling. The characters are being really hateful, and you can’t quite tell if the writer supports them. Do you: a) keep watching the movie to see how this ends; b) stop watching the movie and do something else; or c) read spoilers for the ending, to find out if you’re wasting your time? If you answered a, b, or c to that question, congratulations! You win. There’s no single Right Way to respond when it seems like a movie might hate you.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I watched Chasing Amy for the first time last weekend, and it was a pretty intense experience. I can totally see why this film was such a boost to Kevin Smith’s career – it’s a great movie with a strong voice and an unusually forthright message about how women are actually people. What’s weird is that watching it still felt like walking through a minefield, and not in an exciting way. In a way where I was kind of scared and uncomfortable, thinking I might get blown up.

Check it out.

Chasing Amy is about a real-life experience Kevin Smith had, where he judged his girlfriend for her sexual history and then realized that he was acting like a jerk. The movie takes the situation further and fictionalizes it, giving us a story about a comic book writer named Holden who falls in love with a lesbian, Alyssa, convinces her to start dating him anyway, flips out when he hears that she’s had sex with other dudes in the past, and then alienates her completely and ends up alone. His best friend, Banky, stands on the sidelines making misogynist, homophobic jokes, before it’s revealed that the real root of his anger is his unacknowledged homosexual attraction to Holden.

The movie essentially pulls a bait and switch. The first half of the story looks like it’s going to be about a straight guy who only hangs out with a lesbian because he wants to sleep with her, and then turns her straight with his dick, but then the second half of the story is about that guy learning that he’s acting like an asshole. That, instead of treating Alyssa like a person with the right to her own sexual history and choices, he’s labouring under the belief that she’s obliged to be the Perfect Woman as created by his imagination. She calls him out on it in a pretty straightforward way – first when he assumes that his being attracted to her should mean that she’s attracted to him, and later when he tries to shame her for a three-way she had back in high school – and I can’t quite express how relieved I was when that happened.

It’s a sad commentary on the culture we live in that, as much as I like and respect Kevin Smith as a writer, I honestly wasn’t sure at first if I was supposed to think Holden was cool. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to think that what he was doing was OK, or that Banky was funny when he told jokes about man-hating dykes – I wasn’t sure if this was going to end with Holden and Alyssa getting married and living happily ever after. And I actually stopped the movie halfway through and looked on Wikipedia to see how it ended, because I didn’t think I could stand to watch it if it was really about Holden and the Bankster being awesome bros together.

It surprised me to have such a strong reaction – I mean, I will seriously sit through almost anything, no matter how annoying it is; I love sitting that much – but it also put me in mind of something Kendra James said about watching Django Unchained – “I advise seeing it in the company of people you trust.”

What makes Chasing Amy an important movie is that it taps into something that’s real in our culture – it puts its metaphorical finger right on a raw, exposed nerve. The things that these guys are saying, the things that they’re doing – these are things that some guys really do and say, without recognizing that there’s anything all that wrong with it. In fact, some guys have found it appropriate to say these things to me, for real, in my life. The fear that the movie might not have my back on that was not an abstract, intellectual concern. It was a visceral reaction. I didn’t want to let my guard down just to feel betrayed.

It isn’t just me, either.

Back when Dollhouse premiered in 2009, a lot of women I knew (and knew of, through the internet) swore off watching it. If you don’t remember the show, that’s OK – I’m pretty sure only five people actually saw it. It was made by Joss Whedon and the story was about a bunch of people (mostly women) who sell their bodies to a futuristic whorehouse where scientists have the technology to wipe someone’s mind and download a new personality into her brain. Clients could request exactly what they wanted, and the Dollhouse would give it to them by programming a human being to act like a fantasy.

Because it was an action-adventure show (sort of), the client of the week usually wanted something beyond whoring – they might need a spy, or a thief, or an expert psychologist or something to go on a mission – but it was clear that sex work was the company’s bread and butter.

As the story ultimately unfolds, it becomes clear that the Dollhouse is fundamentally evil – the first step toward the total collapse of civilization, heralded by the disregard for human life that displays itself in treating people as disposable, programmable shells. The inhabitants of the Dollhouse fight to escape and regain their identities, and find themselves at ground zero of a massive civil war. The dark desire to make women into whatever one wants or needs them to be – here expressed a little more literally than in Chasing Amy – is presented as a form of misguided entitlement, feeding into other situations where the powerful take what they want at somebody else’s expense.

Unfortunately, during the first few episodes of the series, it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to be bothered by what’s going on in the Dollhouse, or to casually accept it as a sexy, cool recipe for adventure. Just like with Chasing Amy, the attitudes expressed in the first half are attitudes expressed in real life, usually by people who don’t see any problem with what they believe – and watching the characters accept these ideas as normal raised the possibility that maybe the writers were just blind to it. 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. It’s hard to know, at first, whose side the story is on.

It doesn’t help that both of these stories also seem to be aimed at dudes. They’re both structured in such a way that the skeeviness of these attitudes toward women is something that’s “revealed” rather than taken as given. I have a hard time imagining a female audience that would begin from the position that all of this stuff is okay and need to hear an explanation of why it’s not. It’s a lot of dudes telling other dudes that women are people, and that’s encouraging, but it also reminds you that you’re not considered a person right from the start.

So, what do you do when you feel uneasy, and fear that the movie might hate you?

I think it just depends on how much you trust the people telling the story, and how much you’re willing to risk. I don’t think anyone is obligated to sit still and be insulted for two hours, so, if you feel like that’s what might be happening, you’re well within your rights to bail. I also don’t think you’re obligated to avoid watching something just because it’s problematic, so, if you want to stick it out and see the whole thing, that’s a totally awesome choice, too.

Either way, I think Kendra James has it right; when the topic is your relative equality, you need the company of people you trust–in the audience, behind the camera, on a Facebook chat after the show. People who think you’re a person right from frame one.

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

Doctor Who and the Women

Remember that uncomfortable moment when ‘Doctor Who’ became a story about how women destroy themselves to rescue an emotionally volatile man from his loneliness? It’s OK if you don’t; I’m going to remind you of it now.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Remember that uncomfortable moment when Doctor Who became a story about how women destroy themselves to rescue an emotionally volatile man from his loneliness? It’s OK if you don’t; I’m going to remind you of it now.

Doctor Who runs on a pretty simple dynamic. There’s a wizard god alien called the Doctor who travels through time and space in a magic futuristic magic police box and defends humanity from other aliens while encouraging people to be better humans themselves. He is joined on his travels by a human companion who, at least in the new series, is always female (although secondary male companions sometimes tag along).

The human companion’s job is to: 1) stand in for the audience by expressing surprise / bewilderment / excitement / low-simmering sexual desire for the Doctor / etc; 2) represent that which is Good and Noble about humanity through displaying traits like bravery and compassion; and 3) throw herself on metaphorical grenades to save the world.

Part of the strength of the show, in its rebooted form, is that, while we enjoy watching the Doctor run around being clever and wacky, the real emotional heft comes from watching ordinary people perform small acts of heroism. The Doctor doesn’t save humanity just by outsmarting the aliens; he does it by inspiring human beings to become their better selves.

Because the Doctor’s companions are our primary touchstone with humanity, it isn’t entirely surprising, then, that they make a lot of sacrifices and endure a lot of suffering along the way. The Doctor’s companions die, or their brains are erased, or they get stuck in some pocket of time where he can’t reach them, or they’re visited by a thousand other miseries they have to endure in order to travel through time. One of the eleventh Doctor’s companions, Clara “I was born to save the Doctor” Oswald, is actually distinguished by dying multiple times – this is why the Doctor takes an interest in her in the first place; because she keeps getting killed as an indirect result of helping him, only to come back again.

On the one hand, it seems like this is the price of heroism – that the tally of things these women have sacrificed is the measure of what they’ve accomplished. If the price were too low, the achievement wouldn’t be as great (and, certainly, the show often reminds us of all the things the Doctor has lost as a measure of his greatness).

On the other hand, though, there’s also a sense that we’re watching mortals destroy themselves to feel close to God, or women destroy themselves to feel close to a man. We’re invited to pity the Doctor for being alone – for literally standing in the rain and feeling sad while his companions walk away from him. There’s a sense of tragedy around the fact that these women couldn’t hang – that, no matter how much they wanted to be The One who could save him, human frailty prevented them from rising to the challenge.

And you might say, “No, that’s not what the story’s about, Katherine. He’s alienated, for sure, but nobody’s proposing that these women should just follow him around and sacrifice their own interests in an ugly, codependent way so he can have a friend.” You might say that, if it weren’t for this one really horrible moment in “The Angels Take Manhattan.”

That One Really Horrible Moment in “The Angels Take Manhattan”
The one really horrible moment happens like this: the Doctor and his companions and an honorary alien called River Song (who is more or less the Doctor’s girlfriend) are doing important time travel stuff in Manhattan when River gets her hand caught in a trap. The only way to get it out is to break her wrist, and the Doctor doesn’t want to do that, for important time travel reasons that would take too long to explain out of context. The point is that, instead of helping her, he leaves her there and tells her to find a way out of the trap without breaking her wrist.

In Doctor Who terms, it’s actually totally fine that he leaves River to find her own way out of the trap – she’s one of the most capable characters, and he’s respecting her as an equal by trusting that she can handle this herself. I have no problem with that.

It’s what happens after that that’s terrible.

River shows up again a few minutes later, free from the trap, and happily reports to the Doctor that she was able to escape just like he asked her to. He’s very pleased – and also, apparently, blind, because she’s holding her arm very stiffly through this – and he grabs her hand in joy only to have her scream like he’s pulling on her broken wrist, because – surprise – that’s exactly what he’s doing.

In the moments that follow, both the Doctor and his companion ask River why she didn’t just say her wrist was broken, and she explains – in this horrible, horrible moment – that the Doctor must be protected from knowing how much it hurts people to be around him; that humans must hide their weakness from him so that he will not feel upset.

In other words, a relationship is an endurance test where one person (here, a female person) has to pretend that everything’s OK when it’s not so that the other person (here, a male person) will be spared from either the inconvenience of having to deal with it, or the pain of feeling responsible, or the unwelcome reminder that the first person is not everything he hoped she would be. And, it’s his girlfriend who believes this. His girlfriend. Technically, she might even his wife. Oh, man.

The tenth Doctor’s girlfriend, Rose, never articulated the same idea, but their relationship was framed pretty clearly as one in which his magnificence rescued her from the boredom of leading a meaningless life and she, in turn, wanted to rescue him from the horror of being alone. The tragedy of their relationship, as it’s presented to us, is that, just as he allows himself to love her, and to carve out a place in his future for her to inhabit, she gets taken away. No matter how badly she wants to be the one to give him what he needs, she can’t live up to the challenge – she’s not alien enough to survive an attack from his enemies, and she’s trapped forever in a timeline he can’t enter. The icing on this tear-soaked cake is that he was never able to make himself say the words “I love you.”

So, now we have two women in romantic relationships with the same emotionally distant, volatile man, and one has to take it on faith that she’s loved, and one has to hide all her pain in order to save the relationship. Both of them are desperate that he shouldn’t feel alone.

If this sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is a pretty well-worn and disturbing trend in romance stories – the trend where women martyr themselves to win the hearts of isolated men. It isn’t a healthy dynamic in either direction, but it’s one that’s often repeated, and it’s a little bit uncomfortable to see it play out over and over again on what is otherwise a very fun, exciting, well-written show.

I don’t know what the solution is, exactly, because the premise of the series almost demands an asymmetrical relationship between the Doctor and his companions, and the attempt to balance gender by having a male and female lead means that that relationship will almost inevitably Say Something (awkward) about the dynamics between men and women.

That said, season four gave us a precedent for a female companion who at least didn’t want to sleep with the Doctor and told him when he was annoying (I miss you, Donna). It might be a nice change if more of the Doctor’s companions had a reason for travelling with him that wasn’t either total obsession with him or the belief they were born, in one way or another, to save him. I’d like to see more of that kind of thing and less of the thing where people hide their broken bones to be polite.

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

‘Shameless’: The Most Dramatic Comedy This Season

‘Shameless,’ Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Shameless, Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.

Shameless, a remake of the UK series of the same name, has never been the kind of show that could go toe to toe with the Breaking Bads of the world. It has an uneven tone that often seems to make light of the class-based difficulties its characters face, and a sense of humour that slips over the line from “borderline offensive” to “actually, for real, offensive” at times. It’s never been entirely clear whether the series is supposed to be grounded in the real world, or take place in a hyper-reality where actions have no consequences and the characters are supposed to be satirical. The show’s dramatic plot lines lean toward the former and its comedic plot lines lean toward the latter (maybe because there’s nothing particularly funny about being poor in the real world).

The series follows the adventures of the Gallagher family–six children, and their drunken, absentee father, Frank. The eldest Gallagher child (and the only one over the age of majority at the series’ inception) is Emmy Rossum’s character, Fiona, who more or less serves as the moral center of the show.

Over the first three seasons, we watch Fiona struggle to care for her siblings while working odd jobs and dating men who turn out to be bad for her. Every time Fiona tries to better her life, the family drags her back down either through sabotage or (more usually) through requiring things from her that aren’t compatible with what she wants. Through all of these setbacks–and despite the occasional outburst–Fiona, like all of the Gallagher children, displays an almost super-human resilience. Despite being abandoned by her parents and dropping out of high school to raise five children on her own, despite shuffling from low-wage job to low-wage job and scrounging for money for food, despite being repeatedly cheated out of even the smallest opportunities for happiness, Fiona stays positive, optimistic, determined, and focused on doing for everyone else, when no one is doing for her.

It’s the kind of chipper, poor-but-happy attitude the show sometimes displays, which undercuts the seriousness of the situation the characters find themselves in. Events that would scar you for life, in the real world, become funny anecdotes and colourful stories about triumphing over adversity. You might get the impression, watching this show, that being poor is a great adventure that doesn’t hurt anyone’s chances to lead a fulfilling life.

And then season four happens. Wonderful, dramatic, thoughtful season four, which we are now calling a “comedy.”

In this “comedy,” Fiona finally has a stable middle-class office job. She’s a rising star in the sales department, and she has a comprehensive benefits plan that covers all of her dependents. She’s dating her boss, which isn’t great, but he’s a stable, emotionally healthy man who treats her with respect and encourages her instead of dragging her down. With no one trying to sabotage her, Fiona decides to sabotage herself.

Over the course of this season (the last episode airs this week), Fiona torches her relationship, torches her career, and–because that’s not enough–ends up with a felony drug conviction that sends her to prison, passing all of her responsibility onto her next oldest sibling, Lip.

What makes this different from previous seasons is that the story line is played completely straight. Although there’s an element of humour in the earlier episodes, Fiona’s arrest turns this into a Big Deal, and the scenes of her arrest, trial, parole, and incarceration are treated very seriously. They’re much darker than similar scenes on, for example, Orange is the New Black (which is more legitimately classified as a comedy due to its tone), and the show engages in a fairly downbeat explanation of how things ended up this way.

Fiona is a product of the environment she grew up in, and her attempts at mobility are almost pre-destined to fail. At one point, she explains that she never felt like she deserved to have a good job or a stable relationship, and she wanted to prove she was right by destroying it. The values she holds as a working class woman also play a role–she might have been able to get a better deal with the prosecutor if she had sold out the middle-class man who gave her the drugs; she didn’t, because it was unthinkable to her to be a rat.

The penultimate episode invites us, as well, to see the connection between Frank’s poor parenting and the fate of his eldest child, essentially forced into the role of parent during her own childhood. She’s self-destructing the same way her parents did and, in a world of such limited options, when so much pressure has been applied to her, it’s hard to imagine that this wouldn’t have happened someday.

The show also takes a very serious attitude to the way these events affect Lip. The first in his family to go to college, he–like Fiona–struggles with fitting into middle-class culture, and initially tries to sabotage himself by withdrawing. Just as he seems like he’s making progress, he’s forced into Fiona’s role as head (and moral center) of the family, and he looks at her with the same hatred and sense of betrayal that they’ve both directed at Frank.

This is just one of several serious, dramatic story lines this season, but it lends the show a sense of gravity and relevance that it hasn’t always had. It’s also given Emmy Rossum a chance to demonstrate what an outstanding performer she actually is–she’s come a long way from staring into the middle distance while a guy in a mask swarms around her. In fact, I might have liked to see her compete as an actress in a drama series during awards season–I think she might have wormed her way into a nomination, this time.

Alas, this is not the world we live in. In probably the least funny season of Shameless ever, and the season that treated the characters’ situation with the greatest respect, and the season that finally gave the leading actress a meaty, dramatic role to sink her teeth into–one in which, dare I say it, she takes off her clothes to a little more purpose–it’s a comedy. OK, then.

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