Author: Max Thornton

Goodbye Forever, ’30 Rock’

Written by Max Thornton.
 
If you care at all about popular culture and feminism, you may have noticed that last Thursday seven years of television history came to an end.
 
30 Rock had a complicated relationship with feminism. Linda Holmes of NPR’s Monkey See wrote an excellent article on the difference between what 30 Rock wasand what it did:
I have never considered Liz Lemon a feminist icon of any kind, nor have I ever considered 30 Rock especially strong when it comes to gender politics.
I don’t care for the obsessive joke-making about how Liz is ugly/mannish/old/awkward, and I haven’t always been comfortable with the way some of the “she’s baby-crazy!” or “she’s relationship-crazy!” comedy has played. …
And yet, I think it’s been one of the most important, helpful, meaningful, landscape-altering shows for women in the history of television.
No assessment of 30 Rock can escape the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to scrutinize every aspect of a female-led show to an unreasonable degree – most of all its creator. Exhibit A is, of course, poor Lena Dunham. The misogynists are looking for any excuse to hate a successful woman, while we feminists are dreaming of intersectional perfection that the mainstream media is never going to provide. As a result, conversations about 30 Rock are inseparable from conversations about Tina Fey. Which at least is an excuse to link to this.
Luckily, 30 Rock was (it feels so weird to be using the past tense) a show with a strong sense of the meta, and as such it pretty much demands contextualization.
A few years ago, Overthinking It pointed out that 30 Rock looked like a staunchly liberal show – “from far away, if you squint.” Once you start paying attention, though, neocon Jack Donaghy tends to be in the right, and the joke is almost always at the expense of Liz Lemon, the leftist comedy writer and (to at least some extent) Tina Fey self-insert characer.
There’s a kind of self-parody you do around friends which you might avoid more publicly, because you know your friends know you’re kidding. My friends and I tend to Godwineach other with wild abandon, because we spend so much time on the internet that we enjoy its utter absurdity. In a discussion with a stranger, though, I probably wouldn’t throw around the wanton Hitler analogies, since there’s a risk they wouldn’t get the joke.
One of the things that was simultaneously endearing and frustrating about30 Rock was its frequent usage of that friends-only self-parody material. When it worked, it made you feel like a good friend of the show and of Tina Fey, sharing in a self-critical but ultimately loving humor. When it didn’t work, it was awful. (Remember the season-five sleep-rape controversy?) A lot of the time, though, it was hard to tell which side of the line the show was on.

This A.V. Club review of a December 2012 episode asserts that “30 Rock is one of the few shows that can cleverly get way with joking about stereotypical female behaviors, such as everyone rushing to the bathroom at the same time or being unable to work the projector, without getting offensive.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. Andrew Ti of Yo, Is This Racist? illustrates the problem with the example he sometimes uses, of the season six episode that features Jon Hamm in blackface. In the context of the episode, the brief skit is parodying TV’s history of blackface. That might potentially be a reasonably clever joke, but, as Ti has pointed out on his site and in his podcast, we live in a media culture where things get taken out of context all the time and people have short attention spans, and what that means is that there’s just a gif floating around the internet of Jon Hamm in blackface. I’m inclined to think it’s just hopelessly irresponsible to make jokes like that when you know how widely your material is circulating.
Having said that, 30 Rock had a tough job to do: trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, while still maintaining its distinctive voice and viewpoint. And did it ever have a distinctive voice. If, before I saw the episode, I had come across the finale’s line “Hogcock. Which is a combination of hogwash and poppycock,” I couldn’t have mistaken it for a joke from any other show. It’s a style of humor and a general set-up that simply won’t appeal to everyone, and it never translated to particularly high ratings. To avoid alienating uncommitted viewers further, I think the show sometimes had to pull back from fully supporting specific ideals – I seem to recall a number of feminist blogs complaining that the end of the infamous Jezebel-parodying season five episode “TGS Hates Women” was a cop-out, forcing in some unlikely circumstances to avoid actually engaging with the issues it had raised.
Ultimately, I agree with Linda Holmes, that 30 Rock was willing to sacrifice pretty much anything for the sake of a joke. In the end, its effects on the TV landscape are more feminist than its content ever was; but it was a damn funny show, written by and starring a damn funny woman, and I miss it already.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

When Dumb Fun Turns Nasty: Sexual Violence in Stupid Movies

Written by Max Thornton.
[content note: explicit discussion of violence and rape]
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Violent media poisoning nation’s soul.”
Is it, though? To his credit, LaSalle recognizes that it’s pretty fatuous to blame movie violence for real-life violent crime, but that doesn’t stop him from calling for blanket R ratings for movies with “any violence at all.” I honestly don’t see how that will help. An R rating won’t stop anyone from seeing a film they’re determined to see (hi there, internet!), and it definitely won’t encourage critical thinking (the trouble is, you can’t legislate for that).
Also, you know, Adam Lanza – the motivation for LaSalle’s piece – was 20. He could have seen the most brutal NC-17 movie he wanted.
It’s an old complaint that MPAA ratings are seriously messed up, mired in disturbing double-standards around male and female sexuality, straight and queer sexuality, sex and violence. However, if you happen to believe that violent movies contribute to a “culture of violence,” age-based restrictions don’t accomplish a thing. Except perhaps to make under-seventeens desperate to see movies just because you say they can’t.
I really don’t think the problem with movie violence is that too many superhero flicks are rated PG-13. I don’t even think the problem is the existence of movie violence. I think the problem is the context and presentation of the violence. MPAA ratings, audiences, and filmmakers themselves overwhelmingly fail to distinguish between cartoonish violence and realistic violence, or between sex and sexual violence, and this is what I find truly alarming.
I have a shameful love of really stupid gory movies. I have a dumb but almost limitless enthusiasm for the subgenre lovingly dubbed “splatstick.” Evil Dead II. Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Appendages being severed in improbable ways, fountains of dyed corn syrup gushing forth, heads and eyeballs rolling all over the place… That stuff cracks me up, and has done ever since I was an eight-year-old at home with septicemia, watching videocassettes of Tom & Jerry and bringing my mother running with every yell of sympathy that quickly dissolved into peals of laughter.
And I respond just like Bart and Lisa Simpson.
 
Realistic movie violence disturbs me, of course, in films like City of God or Irreversible. These are movies intended to confront you with the utter awfulness of the events they depict, with no interest in minimizing or trivializing their horror. They’re hard to watch, and they should be.
Cartoon violence, on the other hand, is outlandish, clownishly over-the-top, and nothing like real life. A scene like the possessed hand scene in Evil Dead II or the zombie baby scene in Braindeadis funny in the way that a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel is funny. It’s an outlet for Schadenfreude in a really goofy setting.
It really, really bothers me when cartoon violence turns sexual.
When a tree rapes a woman in the original Evil Dead. When a tentacled zombie-slug-man rapes a woman in Slither. When a snowman serial killer rapes a woman with his carrot nose in Jack Frost(no, not that Jack Frost). Most recently, when zombie Nazis turn rapey in Nazis at the Center of the Earth.
Goddammit, it’s called Nazis at the Center of the Earth, not Rapists at the Center of the Earth.
 
I’m watching a movie called Nazis at the Center of the Earth because I want to laugh at a lousy special effect of Zombie Josef Mengele ripping a guy’s skin off in one elegant motion. That’s funny to me, because no one in real life gets their skin ripped off by Zombie Josef Mengele, and if they did it wouldn’t look like that. The sudden inclusion of sexual violence is just grim.
We’re all feminists here, so I don’t need to repeat the stats, but here they are again: 1 in 6 women. 1 in 33 men.
Comical beheadings with fountains of unrealistic blood are funny to me in the way that Laurel & Hardy dropping the piano again is funny. Sexual assault IS NOT FUNNY. Jack Frost (again, the killer-snowman one, not the family film or the bizarre Russo-Finnish fairytale that was on MST3K) is rated R for “violence and gore, language and some brief sexuality.” For “brief sexuality.” CALL IT WHAT IT IS, MPAA.
I get that plenty of people don’t find splatstick funny. That makes sense and is valid, and I can respect that opinion. What doesn’t make sense, isn’t valid, and does not merit my respect is thinking that sexual violence belongs in splatstick humor. Contra George Carlin, Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd is not funny to me. Cartoon sexual violence isn’t funny in the way cartoon splatstick can be, because of the whole rape culture thing. The difference is crystallized in the fact that the MPAA doesn’t call a nose-breaking punch “brief face-touching,” but it does call carrot-rape “brief sexuality.”
In the end, what crosses the movie-violence line depends largely on your personal taste. A really cheesy special effect of a sharktopus eating a person makes me laugh; others won’t find that funny. But I don’t think sexual violence is a matter of personal taste. When I sign up for some cheesy splatstick movie fun, I want cheesy splatstick fun, and that does NOT include sexual assault of any kind. What’s so hard to understand about that?

 

If you’re more of a words person, this might help.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

 

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Ballet Shoes’

 Written by Max Thornton.
If people see a list of things I love – science fiction, fantasy, progressive rock, movies about zombies, witty and charming sitcoms that you will watch on NBC Thursday nights at 8/7c starting February 7 – they might be surprised to learn that I think ballet is awesome.
If people see a list of my favorite authors – a small selection: China Mieville, Ursula LeGuin, Alan Warner, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood – they might be even more surprised to learn that some of my most dearly beloved childhood books are about ballet.
This odd and rather niche enthusiasm neither stemmed from nor translated to any interest in performing myself. Slightness of build, grace, agility, physical stamina, a right and a left foot instead of two lefts: I have never in my life possessed any of the attributes necessary for success in the field of ballet dancing. My single semester of lessons was a comedy of ineptitude for my watching family, and a crushing humiliation for me.
Me.
All of which is to say, the depth of my love for Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 children’s classic Ballet Shoes might initially seem baffling. Until you read it, and learn how very very awesome it is. Alternatively, you could watch the 2007 BBC adaptation starring Emma Watson, which is very nearly as charming as the book.
 
Ballet Shoes is the story of three sisters, Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil. Adopted from assorted circumstances of orphanhood by the eccentric fossil-collector Great-Uncle Matthew, or “Gum,” they are brought up by his great-niece Sylvia and her beloved nurse Nana while Gum is off on a decade-long expedition around the world. When poverty compels Sylvia to take in boarders, the Fossils’ lives change dramatically: they are sent to a stage school to learn dancing and acting.
Much of the story’s genius lies in the characterization of the three sisters. Beautiful Pauline is a talented actress who feels the responsibility of being the eldest sibling; dreamy, waifish Posy thinks of nothing but dancing, to the point of complete otherworldliness; Petrova is the tomboy, the middle child, and the odd one out, who loathes being onstage and is happiest around engines. This set-up creates a lovely interplay of strong, distinct personalities who are united by the loyal bonds of sisterhood, which is really the heart of the story.
Petrova (Yasmin Paige), Posy (Lucy Boynton), Pauline (Emma Watson)
The adaptation is fairly faithful, notwithstanding the inevitable glossing over of details and eliding of the timeline. Two notable changes that, in my opinion, weaken the story are the character assassination of Winifred and Theo’s happy ending. Winifred is an enormously gifted actor and dancer, who is consistently overshadowed by the classically beautiful Pauline. In the book, she is also a genuinely sweet person and a stalwart friend to the Fossils; in the film, she’s rather bratty and unkind. Theo, one of Sylvia’s boarders, has no personal life to speak of in the book, but gets an unlikely reunion with a long-lost lover at the end of the film. I understand the motivation for these changes – they heighten the story’s fairy-tale feel: every character, good and bad, gets what she deserves – but they’re unfortunate from a feminist standpoint. Female friendship is undermined in order to perpetuate the tired trope of the jealous, spiteful girl; while the cleaning up of romantic loose ends reinforces the old chestnut that a single woman couldn’t possibly be happy.
Probably the biggest alteration made from the book to the film is the Sylvia and Mr. Simpson subplot. The book Simpsons are a happy couple, both boarders who act as friends and parental figures to the Fossils; movie-Simpson is a widower who lost his wife (and child, for added Tragic Backstory) to typhoid. Seeing that Mr. Simpson is the only male character of any presence in the story, he and Sylvia somewhat inevitably get a little romance.
This subplot has overtones of a lot of tedious cultural tropes, from the above-mentioned Unhappy Single Woman thing to the Wounded Man Who Can Only Be Healed By The Love Of A Good Woman, but on balance I think it’s a good thing. Sylvia gets very little characterization in the novel outside of her noble devotion to her girls; the love story is only one of several ways in which she is fleshed out for the film – she also gets an ongoing health problem and a rather charming unlikely friendship with Theo.
Theo (Lucy Cohu) and Sylvia (Emilia Fox)
What I really love about this story (apart from the “lady doctors,” who are certainly a couple) is that it’s ultimately a story about sisterhood and chosen family. Three orphans, a young woman, an older nurse, two retired professors, a dancing teacher, and a widower – none of them related by blood – come together, mostly by chance, and constitute a family. That’s pretty progressive for 1930s Britain. The three sisters love each other dearly, but they also have dreams and big ambitions. Their familial devotion and their wild ambitions are never presented as being in conflict; in fact, it’s those very ambitions that bind them together, as they vow on every Christmas and birthday: “We three Fossils vow to put our name in the history books, because it is uniquely ours, and ours alone, and nobody can say it’s because of our grandfathers.”
At the end of the story, Gum – the patriarchal male figure who has been totally useless and absent from the entire thing – returns after a decade abroad. He asks in surprise, “Who are all these women? … I brought entrancements! I brought babies!” To him, the girls were souvenirs, fossils, which he brought back as presents from his globe-trotting exploits. In his absence, they have grown into a close family of faithful sisters and strong, ambitious women, and it’s because of their guardian and their wealth of female role models, and certainly not because of their grandfathers. 

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

 

2013 Pop-Culture Resolutions

Written by Max Thornton.
I have a confession to make:
Last year, I only went to the movies a dozen times, and only 7 of those were 2012 releases.
That is the least time I have spent at the movies in any year since I started going to the movies. There are a few reasons for this tragic failure of mine:
  • I’m a grad student, so I don’t have much free time.
  • I’m a grad student, so I don’t have much spare money.
  • After a blissful six-month stint working in a cinema in 2011 and taking full advantage of my comps, I am still a little resistant to the prospect of having to pay to go to the movies.
  • I no longer live in London, where there is a glorious wealth of theaters screening any and every movie you could want to see. All of four movie theaters exist within walking distance of me now, and most of them have a pretty unexciting selection of films most of the time.
The biggest reason, though, is my general sense of disillusionment with Hollywood as a whole. I’m not sure if this is because the past year or two offered genuinely fewer interesting movies than previous years, or because inevitably a sense of ennui sets in after a while. For example, I thought The Master was okay, but it didn’t blow me away like There Will Be Blood did in 2007. Is this because The Master is an inferior film, or because, with five more years of film-watching behind me, I am just bored to death of movies about white dudes talking about stuff?
To be honest, 2013 doesn’t look much better than 2012 when it comes to movies that grab my attention. A cursory glance over the list of forthcoming releases fills me with despondence. I want to see Zero Dark Thirty, but I’m disturbed by reports that it’s naked CIA propaganda. I’ll see the Evil Dead remake, though my expectations are lowered with every advance word that trickle out. There won’t be any escape from seeing Star Trek: Into Skegness (British joke!). Just about the only 2013 movie I have unmitigated, childlike excitement for is Pacific Rim. Giant robots, giant sea monsters, Guillermo del Toro, and Idris Elba are four of my favorite things, and I can only hope and pray that the combination will be as marvelous as I’m anticipating.
I can’t be the only one who would switch teams for this dude in a heartbeat, right?
 
The thing about being a grouchy griping curmudgeon, though, is that it gets old fast. I want to like things. I want to get excited about upcoming movies. Salivating over a giant-robots-versus-sea-beasties movie is way more fun than shitting all over the latest crop of derivative, kyriarchal tedium. I’m not going to quit fighting the good fight, but I am going to change my focus a little. Here are my pop-culture resolutions for 2013:
I will see more movies alone.
Last week, I went to the movies alone for the first time in eighteen months. It was FANTASTIC. I used to go to the cinema alone all the time, back when I was a fresher in university trying to escape roommate troubles, and I’d forgotten just how brilliant it is. Something about sitting in a darkened auditorium with a group of strangers, never speaking to each other but sharing the cognitive experience onscreen, is just delightful to me.

I’m certain I get this exact expression when I see a good movie alone.

 

I will seek out more foreign and independent films.
It was so easy when I lived in London. I had maybe half a dozen favorite cinemas, scattered all around central London; anything that got any kind of UK release was guaranteed to be screening somewhere nearby. In 2012, shamefully enough, I didn’t see a single foreign-language film. Not one. I haven’t even seen Les Misérables yet, and I’m pretty sure the title and character names are the only French things about that movie. I pledge to make more of an effort this year. Hollywood might be boring me silly, but there must be interesting things going on elsewhere in the world.
I will not be ungrateful about Community, no matter what happens.
When showrunner Dan Harmon was unceremoniously fired from his brainchild, it seemed like yet another death-knell in the long, slow, painful process of NBC’s gradual euthanizing of my favorite show. I had spent so much energy hoping for Community‘s unlikely season-four renewal that, when it actually happened, it seemed churlish to carp about Harmon’s absence. Some fans are predicting that season four can only be a vortex of suck without his guidance. For now I reserve judgment – though, after being so vocal about my hope for a fourth season, I won’t really feel I can legitimately complain even if I do wind up hating it.
This picture does a lot to assuage my fears.
 
Anyone else have any pop-culture resolutions? What are you planning to do or not do in 2013?
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

The Great ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Rewatch of 2012

Written by Max Thornton. There is a delightful Freaks and Geeks special in Vanity Fair this month, with set photos, a cast reunion, and an interview in which creator Paul Feig discusses what would have happened had the show not been canceled. I recommend savoring all of it, but be warned – you may find yourself compelled, as I was, to hasten to Netflix and marathon the whole series once more.

The Vanity Fair reunion.
Not that a Freaks and Geeks marathon takes very long. For the uninitiated, F&G is one of the great unjustly-canned, widely-mourned, single-season shows, right up there with Firefly in terms of squandered brilliance. Set in a Michigan high school in 1980, it focuses on sister and brother Lindsay and Sam Weir and their respective groups of friends, the freaks and the geeks.
To some extent, F&G feels like an improved version of My So-Called Life – not that My So-Called Life couldn’t be charming, or speak the truth of the adolescent condition, but it undeniably succumbed to schmaltz and caricature in a number of ways. Freaks and Geeks nails absolutely everything it tries.
I do wish there were more female characters. Of the eight core characters – five freaks, three geeks – only two are women. The more general lack of diversity, particularly in terms of the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of the characters, can be attributed to the fact that the show is based on Feig’s personal experience of an overwhelmingly straight, white Michigan suburb in the late seventies and early eighties. This, of course, feeds into a larger and still ongoing conversation about whose experiences get put on television; but, assuming we can accept the show’s premise and the whiteness and (ostensible) straightness inherent therein, I still think there could be more female characters.
Kim isn’t even in this picture, dammit.
The female characters that are included are fantastic. Lindsay Weir is one of my all-time favorite TV protagonists: blisteringly intelligent and world-weary, yet still a vulnerable and confused teenager searching for an identity and a place, Lindsay kicks off the series with a paradigm shift brought on by her grandmother’s death. Losing her religious faith and quitting the mathletes, Lindsay ditches long-time best friend and inveterate goody-two-shoes Millie in order to befriend the “freaks,” the “burnouts,” a laid-back group of stoners who cut class to hang out and passionately discuss their favorite bands (something that resonates with me personally: I may have attended high school 20-25 years later than these characters, but I was just as enthusiastic about the Who, Pink Floyd, and Rush!). Lindsay doesn’t truly fit in with the freaks, but the more her parents and her guidance counselor and Millie press her on this, the more determined she is to make a place for herself among them.
Lindsay’s place among the freaks becomes secure once she makes a true friend out of Kim, the only other girl among them. The episode in which their friendship solidifies, “Kim Kelly Is My Friend,” was supposed to be the fourth, but was shelved from airing because of its intense subject matter. Lindsay rolls her eyes at her parents’ narrow suburban existence and hopeless squareness, but witnessing Kim’s violent and abusive relationship with her mother causes her to reassess her own life. Most of the freaks have difficult home lives, and they expand Lindsay’s horizons even as she expands theirs. Kim – fierce-tempered and hotheaded, unashamedly sexual, a total spitfire – shows Lindsay that a person’s worth is not dependent on the school system’s assessment of them, but Kim also gains from Lindsay a sense of ambition and motivation.
“You’re like my only friend, Lindsay, and you’re a total loser!”
The relationship between Lindsay and Millie is one of the most beautifully observed and painful aspects of the show. Millie, who initially seems like a caricature of the strait-laced goody-two-shoes, proves to be an unfailingly loyal friend who loves Lindsay enough to let her go. In my favorite episode, number 13, “Chokin’ and Tokin’,” Lindsay smokes pot just before a babysitting job, and Millie steps up to care for both the child and an increasingly paranoid Lindsay. During the comedown, the following conversation ensues:
“I love you, Millie. Why aren’t we friends anymore?”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are. But just, you know, not really. But we’re still the same people we were when we were five. It’s just different now.”
“You’re different now.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But I’m not gonna be different anymore. I’m gonna be the same. And we’re gonna be best friends.”
“You know what, Lindsay? I feel sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow, when you’re not loaded anymore, you’re not going to believe in God, and you’re not going to want to be my friend anymore.”
It’s heartbreaking.
Awww, Millie.
I don’t think Freaks and Geeks has a hidden feminist agenda, but it has a core of real decency and generosity toward its characters. It tries to walk the line of portraying kids honestly, warts and all, without necessarily condoning their behavior. They’re high-school kids; they can be misogynistic, essentialist, bigoted, and the show portrays this honestly, sympathizing for them in their ignorance while gently revealing the flaws in their thinking.
 
Nowhere is this clearer than in two storylines that dovetail neatly in the penultimate episode, “The Little Things”: geeky Sam’s courtship of his dream girl Cindy, and sarcastic freak Ken’s relationship with Amy. Sam has long been the Nice Guy™, worshiping all-American cheerleader Cindy from afar and slowly becoming the friend she can talk to “like a sister.” When Cindy tires of her jock boyfriend and decides to give Sam a shot, it seems like every little geek’s (and every Nice Guy™’s) dream come true – except that they turn out to have nothing in common, to bore each other, and to have no fun at all. It’s a nifty subversion of what initially seems to be a straightforward idealized Nice Guy™ trajectory from friendship to dating: without any kind of heavy-handed moralizing, the show suggests that the Nice Guy™ routine is not the way to a happy relationship.
It could never have lasted. Look at the terror on his face.
Ken, on the other hand, doesn’t spend too much time mooning after Amy before asking her out. They click immediately, and seem very happy together. In pursuit of full disclosure, Amy tells Ken that, although assigned female and comfortable in her gender identity, she was born intersex. Ken reacts the way you might expect a teenage boy ignorant of all things intersex to react: by freaking the fuck out. He worries that this makes him gay (and experiments, hilariously, with disco and a dirty mag) and figures he will have to break up with Amy. It’s only on hearing Sam list the reasons he has to break up with Cindy (“we don’t have anything in common… she thought The Jerk was stupid… we don’t have anything to talk about… she doesn’t like anything that I like… we never have any fun together”) that Ken realizes that he’s being ridiculous.
 
The handling of the whole intersex storyline is wonderfully sensitive (this episode actually got nominated for a GLAAD award). Ken’s initial insistence that “It’s over, move on” is not how Amy views her intersex status. He has to go through the stages of denying it completely and then letting it take over completely before he can come to acceptance: “I’m sorry, and I don’t care, and I’m sorry.” Had the show lasted, I don’t doubt that there would have been other queer or queer-adjacent storylines, and that they would have been handled with a similar tact and delicacy.
 
Freaks and Geeks is long dead, but with each rewatch I find new things to appreciate about one of the best television shows ever aired. Long live Freaks and Geeks.
 
 
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Six Essential Christmas Specials

This Christmas will be my second in a row spent 5000 miles away from my family and the happy, traditional celebrations that characterized the first 21 Christmases of my life. I am feeling pretty okay about this, though, because I’ve discovered the essential ingredients for Christmas to be Christmas. They’re not family or presents or a big meal or the baby Jesus. As it turns out, all I really need to get into the holiday mood is my little list of essential Christmas viewing.
This is an exact depiction of the Lukan birth narrative, right? Look, I’m a theologian, not a biblical scholar.
For your viewing pleasure – particularly if you are far distant from family traditions – I share with you my Six Things To Watch Otherwise It’s Not Christmas.
(Sorry, Die Hard not included.)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 5 episode 21: “Santa Claus”
This is a deeply, profoundly, horrendously painful movie to watch. If you ever wanted to watch Saint Nick best Old Nick, where Saint Nick is the creepiest non-serial-killer Santa in cinematic history while the devil is just flat-out incompetent, then there’s something very very wrong with you, but there’s also a movie that caters directly to your reprehensible tastes. For everyone else, enjoy that endless beginning sequence of Santa’s sweatshop flagrantly flouting child labor laws – a timely reminder that the gifts you give and receive this holiday season were probably made by actual child laborers in actual sweatshops. Merry Christmas!
 Also, the best holiday song ever.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 3 episode 21: “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”
This one, on the other hand? Is just so stupid, I can’t even. Yes, it is literally a movie about Martians kidnapping Santa Claus. Yes, it’s terrible on every conceivable level. And yet, to my shame, I find it immensely watchable. Honestly, if this movie had never appeared on MST3K, I would probably watch it every year anyway. Luckily, it was not only featured on MST3K, it was re-riffed by the same team with all-new jokes a couple years ago, which means I get to watch it twice without looking like a person who enjoys watching this movie.
 Also, the second-best holiday song ever.
The Muppet Christmas Carol
I don’t need to say anything about this. It’s The Muppet Christmas Carol. Who ever heard of a Christmas without The Muppet Christmas Carol?
Pictured: Christmas.
A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!
I’ll be honest, the rewatch value on Stephen Colbert’s 2008 Christmas special is not that high, and your patience for the songs is likely to vary wildly depending on your ability to stomach the assorted musical guests. (Goddamn, the Toby Keith bit is painful.) But the opening number is pretty great, and I sometimes have these cynical moments when “There Are Much Worse Things To Believe In” is my favorite Christmas song ever.
Community season 2 episode 11: “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”
So what if it’s only two years old? It’s super amazing forever! Songs! Feelings! Stop-motion, of which it is legally mandated that every list of favorite Christmas specials must include at least one! The Christmas pterodactyl! Also, it’s freaking Community!!
Did you know it’s coming back on February 7???

 

The Snowman
A very British entry to round out the list. If you’re unfamiliar with The Snowman, it’s a short, wordless, entirely lovely animated film about a boy whose snowman comes to life. You should watch it this Christmas and have a good cry.
Happy hols, everyone!
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Why I Love ‘Wonderfalls’

If you want to be taken seriously as a television fan (and who doesn’t hold that as their highest life goal?), you have to know how to talk the talk. You have to have an opinion on when exactly The Office jumped the shark.You have to be able to namedrop characters from The Wire, even if you’ve never seen it (cough). You have to loudly lament, at the slightest provocation, the untimely cancellation of some of your most beloved shows: Firefly, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks.
And, if you really want to prove your credentials, you should have a little list of rather less well-known shows whose early demise you can bewail with even greater fervor. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Terriers. Wonderfalls.
I have lots of squishy feelings about Wonderfalls. Hailing from the mind of Bryan Fuller, which also graced us with the late, longed-for Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls aired all of four episodes prior to its ignominious termination. (It can’t have helped that one of its executive producers was Tim “Touch of Death” Minear.) The remaining nine episodes saw the light of day in a nifty little DVD set which you should own.
In this gif, the part of Wonderfalls is played by Daria. Wait, that’s kind of confusing.
With every passing show of his that is born into this world, shimmers momently like a beautiful dragonfly, and is mercilessly slaughtered by evil network execs, I become more convinced that Bryan Fuller is a cruelly underrated genius whose mind is a gorgeous happyland full of puppies and rainbows and sparkly cupcakes of loveliness. If I can whip the nerds up into a Whedonesque frenzy over the name of Bryan Fuller, then maybe we can keep his next project on the air longer than five minutes. To that end, I offer five reasons why Wonderfalls is supergreat and awesome and should be watched and loved by all television-minded lifeforms.
Inside Bryan Fuller’s brain. Artist‘s rendition.
1. Jaye Tyler
Jaye is one of the best female characters I’ve ever seen on a TV show, and one of my favorite TV characters full stop. She’s a disaffected twenty-something philosophy grad living in a trailer park and working in a Niagara Falls gift shop, where the souvenirs start talking to her and guiding her to help others – which, as a curmudgeonly cynic to the bone, is the last thing Jaye wants.
Not that Jaye knows what she wants: “There is no ‘like me.’ I’m not ‘like’ anything, and if I were it certainly wouldn’t be me.” In the episode “Karma Chameleon,” Jaye is taken as an exemplar of Gen Y: directionless, shrouded in a facade of ennui and many protective layers of irony, feeling suffocated by the weight of her successful family’s expectations.Considering in how many fields of life women are still considered a special interest group who can be represented by men but can’t represent them, I find it very awesome that this show’s schlubby everyperson character, who undergoes a slow but sure transformation from acerbic jerk to somewhat caring human being, is a young woman.
2. Female Friendship
Jaye and Mahandra

I love Mahandra. I love her so, so much. (I love everything about this show to a superlative degree; it’s possible you’ve noticed.) Mahandra is Jaye’s best friend, her witty, sometimes scathing voice of reason, and the lone character of color in the main cast. Although much of the series’ overarching plot concerns the budding relationship between Jaye and heartbroken hottie bartender Eric, it’s the friendship between Jaye and Mahandra that I find most memorable and delightful.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Jaye’s relationship with big sister Sharon, which is very strained at the beginning of the series but develops into an appropriately sisterly bond of mutual irritation but rock-solid support – largely thanks to Jaye’s inadvertently facilitating the meet-cute between Sharon and her girlfriend.
3. Feminist Sensibilities
Watching disturbing rom-com cliches get subverted is something I very much enjoy, and Wonderfalls has a great example in the episode “Pink Flamingos,” where Jay and Mahandra attend their high-school reunion and encounter mean girl Gretchen. Of course, Gretchen turns out to be a sad sack trapped in a loveless marriage; of course, she winds up in the bathroom trying to scrub a drink stain out of her dress; of course, the boy who had always admired her from afar takes this chance to tell her about the feelings he still has for her, which massages her ego – and then she tells him he’s creepy and threatens him with mace. It’s brilliant.
(The evil-cheating-manipulative-wife trope employed elsewhere in the show leaves a little something to be desired, but I’m trying to accentuate the positive here.)
And I’m supposed to believe Jewel Staite is evil and manipulative??
4. Metaphysics and Philosophy
It’s a show about a woman who follows the cryptic directives of talking figurines, to the betterment of her life and those of the people around her. That premise was always going to raise interesting philosophical and theological questions, and it’s enriched by Jaye’s philosophy degree and her older brother’s studies in comparative religion. I mourn the fact that Wonderfallsnever got a chance to explore all the fascinating possibilities raised here. It’s a cruel world.
5. That Awesome Theme Song
Okay, this one is nothing more than a personal bias. XTC is one of my all-time favorite bands, and the last place I expect to hear a song from their main man Andy Partridge is on an American TV show in 2004. I love this theme song A LOT. It’s catchy, quirky, and – to me at least – irresistibly loveable. Like XTC, and like Wonderfalls itself.
 
  
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of ‘Skyfall’

Growing up, my little brother was an enormous James Bond fan. He rewatched the films repeatedly on video; he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of all the villains, plots, and gadgets from reading his glossy making-of books; and, in an anecdote our mother never tires of retelling, he wanted to be Bond “without the kissing.”

Thanks to his enthusiasm, and everyone else’s moderate enjoyment, each new Brosnan Bond film was cause for a Family Outing to the cinema (and we have never been big on Family Cinema Outings; our taste in films is too disparate). For me, this meant a couple hours’ quality nap time. I snoozed happily through Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.
Me, watching a James Bond movie, 1997-2002.
Casino Royale, of course, famously upset some Bond fans who felt it was too serious, too Bourne-y, and unfaithful to the sense of fun that had always previously characterized the series. And maybe it is indeed a complete break with the rest of the franchise, because it’s the first Bond film that kept me awake for its entire (bladder-busting, 145-minute) runtime.
Bond is a British institution, and every new film is quite the cultural event back in Blighty. It’s a slightly different perspective from this side of the Atlantic, but in some ways the US is an appropriate place to be for the release of Skyfall: director Sam Mendes is a Brit, but he’s most famous for a film with “American” in the title. This latest offering turns out to be not only self-reflexive on the half-century-old Bond film franchise itself, but also a somewhat disturbing meditation on Britain’s role in the modern world.
Before I get into a geopolitical reading of the film, let’s talk feminism: this is NOT a good film for its women characters. The Craig Bond films have been weird about women in general. They don’t seem to be quite sure whether or not they want to get away from the traditional Bond treatment of women as interchangeable totty for 007’s shagging pleasure. On the one hand, Casino Royale won feminist plaudits for recapitulating Dr No‘s famous Ursula-Andress-rising-from-the-sea moment with a ripped Daniel Craig in the role of Anadyomeneeye-candy. On the other hand, Skyfall features Bond walking in on a former child sex slave in her shower, and that is objectively more squicktastic than most Bond seductions.
Even the one where he shags Honor Blackman straight.
Plus, without getting too far into spoiler territory, by the end of the film the role of women in the MI6 workplace is not exactly inspiring for one’s feminist sensibilities.
SPOILER: this is the final shot of MI6 at the end of Skyfall.
Having said all of which, the film does focus significantly on one female character. Dame Judi is of course a British icon, and – particularly in the wake of the Olympics opening ceremony stunt – it’s not a huge leap to see her M as representative of the queen (and, by extension, the UK as a whole): she’s talked about obsessively as a “little old woman” who holds people inexplicably in her thrall and power, and unfailing loyalty to her is presented as an irrational but ultimately very British characteristic.
I should make it clear that I am not a fan of monarchies, empires, or jingoism, and that my own British nationality is so compromised by my third-culture childhood that it doesn’t really have abstract, personal, emotional, or ontological relevance for me. As such, I don’t care much for the endless, usually racist and Islamophobic debates over what British identity IS or whether the Royal Family is relevant(IMO: this, and no).
However, I do think that there is a very good reason for the continuance of these discussions, and it is this: Britain has never really bothered to process the loss of its empire.
By this I mean both that Britain has failed to properly grapple with or repent for its imperial sins, and that it has not yet seriously reconsidered its place in the current global milieu. The former is the more difficult task, and I still don’t see anyone trying to do anything about it; on the contrary, imperialism, via western neoliberalism, looks to be reinscribed through the very public conversation on modern Britain’s role that has arisen in the past few years. Between the Royal wedding, the Jubilee, and the London Olympics, Britain has begun to gain something of a sense of itself in the 21stcentury, and I don’t know if that’s entirely a good thing.
The British brain. See, it does too exist.
21st-century Britishness is precarious and conflicted, but still deeply troublesome (and still, I think, built on a feeling of entitlement to control others). Skyfall beats you over the head with its theme of whether the Good Old Ways are useful in the modern world, but that’s because this is a question that has plagued Britain since at least WWII. Bond first meets young tech-savvy Q in front of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, and the obsessive harping on the motif of Old vs. New doesn’t get any subtler, between the callbacks to Bond movies past and the, well, explicit conversations about whether the old ways are useful in the modern world.
And yet the film has a striking caginess about the real world. The London Underground hijinks almost entirely avoid evoking 7/7. The villain of the piece is a former British intelligence agent with a grievance about his mistreatment at British hands, but he’s played by Javier Bardem; and, while many of the world’s countries have legitimate grievances about their mistreatment at British hands, Spain is waaaaay down the list. Giving the villain a purely personal grievance against M allows for a paralleled symbolism: as M represents imperial Britain, so Bardem’s character represents any or all of the formerly colonized territories of the world.
The film chooses not to engage with the perspective of the colonized. Bardem’s desire for revenge on M is a Very Bad Thing, and Bond takes M “back in time” to defend her. Bear in mind that I’ve been reading M as a symbol of the British Empire, and you’ll realize that I do not love where this is going.
***Spoiler ho***
Bond loses M, but another M arises to take her place. The Union Jack still flies over London. MI6 still operates. The new M still has missions for Bond, offered in front of another painting, this time of an intact fleet of ships. The Good Old Way of territorial imperialism may be gone, but the same colonizing work can still be done – in newer, slicker, more insidious ways.
 
The top-hatted octopus-man is James Bond. Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor.


Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Trans* People On TV

I spent my weekend at a conference for transgender people, and it was a little frustrating. If there’s one place in the world you might hope to escape clueless questions, utter ignorance, and the necessity of patiently holding people’s hands through Trans* 101, it’s at a conference by, for, and largely attended by trans* people.
Alas, no such luck.
It’s well past time popular culture assumed the burden of basic education. Pop-culture overthinkers like myself enjoy citing articles that indicate the profound influence of the mass media on public attitudes. The Cosby Show changed the televisual landscape for African-American-centered shows. Will & Grace taught America about The Gays (FACT; Joe Biden says so). Isn’t it time Middle America learned, from its favorite babysitter / best friend / water-cooler-conversation facilitator, that transgender people are human too?
Stupid TV! Be more trans-friendly!
Certainly it’s much, much more likely for pop culture to get it wrong than right. I’ve read queer theory textbooks assigned for class that left much to be desired on the trans* front, and I hardly expect better from the mass media.
Of course, there are some lovely, sensitive, non-rage-inducing portrayals of trans* people to be found in books, film, and TV, but these tend to be fairly obscure. In the mainstream, things are still pretty terrible.
For example.
Apparently there are no actual trans* actors in Hollywood. Apparently a trans woman needs to be portrayed by a cis woman, and a trans man needs to be portrayed by a cis woman, and the films need to focus obsessively on these characters as explicitly trans bodies. We have to see all of the little things a trans person does in order to pass. We have to see crotch shots and/or invest all meaning in bottom surgery. We have to cast an ugly, voyeuristic eye over these bodies – bodies which, lest we forget, in real life belong to cis women: there’s a weird doubling of voyeuristic focus here, on the characters as trans and on the actresses as women, and while on one level we are being invited to leer over these bodies as trans bodies, we are certainly also being invited to leer over these bodies as women’s bodies.
For example.
I rage-quit Glee long before the introduction of its trans* character, and so did fully half the Americans who used to tune in on a weekly basis when the show was in what I (for want of a better term) will call its prime. People just aren’t talking about this show the way they used to. From what I can make out, the portrayal of the trans* character has been reasonably well-received; but, as always with Glee, things could spiral horrendously out of control at any moment. An unholy chimera of offensively over-the-top jokes and earnest After School Specials, and never remotely consistent with its tone or characterization, Glee would not have been the ideal venue for a realistic depiction of a trans* person even at the zenith of its cultural impact.
(And now I have wasted an hour of my life reading up on recent developments in this stupid show, and I have the TV equivalent of a caffeine headache.)
Help me. Friends don’t let friends relapse.
 For example.
A friend recommended the show Hit & Miss, starring Chloe Sevigny as a trans woman who is an assassin. But I’d already seen this interview, and I knew there was no way I could watch this show without spontaneously combusting from rage. I mean, really:
Whenever Mia is shown changing or in the shower, there are quick glimpses to remind viewers that a crucial part of her is still male. Hence the prosthetic, which took two hours to attach. 
 “It was horrifying,” says Sevigny. “I cried every time they put it on me. I’ve always been very comfortable being a girl, so it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that someone could feel so uncomfortable in their own skin.”

Everything about that just makes me so incredibly furious. The fact that the show’s producers thought it was necessary to include those “quick glimpses.” The journalist’s phallocentrism and essentialism. Just the whole fact that Chloe Sevigny is appropriating and trivializing the experience of gender dysphoria for the sake of some TV show. I’m so happy that all those times I sobbed in the shower because I hate my body, all those hours spent wishing myself away into some non-physical realm, the absolutely inescapable feeling of discomfort and discontent in my own skin – I’m so happy that all of that was able to be comprehended by comfortably cisgender Chloe Sevigny when she donned her prosthetic penis to play a transsexual assassin in a TV show.
Things that are retroactively ruined because I can’t see Chloe Sevigny without ragesploding: American Psycho, Boys Don’t Cry, that one episode of Louie
Some things are getting better. Lana Wachowski is pretty high-profile at the moment; I could personally take or leave her films, but as a human being she is perfection, and Hollywood’s first mainstream trans director is a BFD. And maybe Glee is going to do a really excellent job with its trans* character, and the six million suckers who still watch it will be vindicated.
But I don’t think I’m going to run out of things to be angry about any time soon.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

A Walkthrough of the New ‘Evil Dead’ Trailer

The Evil Dead movies are some of my all-time favorites. I love them the way you can only really love something you first saw in your teens: with nostalgia, delight, and fierce ardor.
Just looking at this makes me incoherent with happiness. ;aksdjf.
So I have a lot of complicated feelings about the forthcoming remake. On the one hand, precedent suggests that any remake of a classic horror film has a high likelihood of being terrible (see: Psycho, The Wicker Man, The Omen, etc.), and what’s an Evil Dead movie without Bruce Campbell anyway? On the other hand, The Bruce is onboard as a producer, as is original director Sam Raimi; and, now that the new red band trailer is out, I am starting to get excited.
00:09 –Look at the cabin! It’s so perfectly Evil Dead, just looking at it makes me happy.
00:18 –Aah! Creepy basement of taxidermy.
00:24 –DON’T SAY IT DON’T WRITE IT DON’T HEAR IT! Oh you dumb kids. You never do what you’re told.
(Actually I’m pretty interested to see how the movie will deal with the problem of self-awareness. Will they just be dumb horror-movie kids who ignore all warnings, or will there be some nice meta Cabin in the Woods-style explanations for their behavior? Is it going to pretend the last 30 years of film never happened, or is it going to acknowledge them?)
00:27– Shakycam through the woods. Nostalgia is threatening to overwhelm me. Maybe I should just go marathon the originals.
00:31– Well that’s new! A creepy girl rising from a lake. I can get behind that.
00:39– “We’re all going to die tonight.”
00:41 –FROM THE CREATORS OF THE HORROR CLASSIC. Comforting words.
00:50– I’m not quite sure what’s happening here. A red-clad figure appears to be catching a red ball. Somehow this is the creepiest image in the trailer to me.
00:51– Although the long-haired girl crawling along the ground, The Ring-style, comes close.
00:54– Lightbulb! Nostalgia again. The bloody lightbulb is one of my favorite little moments from the first Evil Dead.
Somehow simultaneously silly and creepy, which is the Evil Dead franchise in a nutshell.
00:57– Another creepy girl standing there. There are an awful lot of creepy girls in this trailer, which seems to be the biggest influence of the past few years of horror. Someone really needs to write a Men, Women, and Chain Saws-type analysis of all these J-horror silent creepy girls in contemporary horror.
1:05 –Chainsaw! This can only end well.
1:06– Possessed arm! This is definitely going to end well.
1:07– Chainsaw, meet possessed arm.
1:08– A girl in KISS makeup appears to be getting stabby on another girl.
1:10– Lamp getting spattered with blood. An even better lightbulb moment.
1:12– Explosion!
1:14– Oh no. The tree-rape. Um. Of all the scenes in the original, is that one we really need to see again?
This sad puppy has just seen moment 1:14 in the new Evil Dead trailer, and now is very very sad.
1:20 –She just sliced her own tongue in two with a box cutter! Okay, the gorehound in me must admit that’s kind of awesome.
Honestly, overall I have mixed feelings about this trailer. It looks like a mash-up of some great horror tropes of the past few years all in a classic Evil Dead setting, and there look to be at least a couple quite inventive horror set-pieces. As a straight horror film, there’s plenty to like here.
However, I’m both intrigued and concerned as to the new film’s approach to gender. One of the most striking points about the remake is the fact that the Bruce Campbell character has been gender-flipped. Of course, as Bruce himself observes in this video, it was already a gender-flip in the original. Ash was the Final Girl, and I’m awfully worried that, in making the Ash character female this time, the film-makers are going to wind up watering down everything that made Ash a memorable character and falling back on traditional Final Girl tropes.
The trailer does little to allay my fears on this front. The female protagonist gets to do a lot of standard Final Girl screaming and hiding, and most of the talking and action is done by the nerdy guy in flannel. (When my brother watched the trailer, not knowing in advance about the gender-flipped Ash, he assumed this guy was the new Ash.)
I want to see a female Ash. I want to see a woman in a movie who is as goofy and prone to slapstick as Bruce Campbell in the original Evil Dead films. I want to see a woman in a movie who follows Ash’s character arc, from cowardly dweeb to loudmouthed braggart with a chainsaw for an arm.
I want to see this, and I am not sure that the Evil Dead remake will give it to me. But I’ll certainly be there in 2013 to find out.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Horror Week 2012: A Brief Feministory of Zombie Cinema

I spent my teen years hopelessly addicted to zombie movies. No matter how poorly made, no matter how artistically worthless, no matter how nasty and exploitative, if the movie had zombies in it, I would watch. The first thing I bought with the first paycheck from my first job at seventeen was Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema.
In 2006, it was indeed more or less complete, but a LOT of zombie movies have been made since then.

I should state upfront that I hold no truck with narrow, exclusionary definitions of “zombie.” To me, the zombie is a very broad church: if somebody has ever called it a zombie, it’s a zombie. The Deadites of Evil Dead? Zombies. The Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari? A zombie. The Dead Men of Dunharrow? Zombies. (Don’t even try that 28 Days Later “infected” crap with me. Those are most definitely zombies, and you should trust me on this because I probably know more about zombie cinema than you.) (Unless you’re Jamie Russell, in which case thank you for stopping by, sir, and I love your book, and I wrote a paper about Zombie Jesus if you’d like to read it?)
As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism.
Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.
Stage One: The Pre-Romero Era
The early stage of zombie cinema is the least popular (and it is also my strongest ammunition in the fight against the purists who insist that only the Romero flavor of zombie – the dead, resurrected, flesh-eating variety – counts as a true zombie). For the first 35 years of its onscreen existence, the zombie didn’t eat anybody’s flesh. Instead, a zombie – first seen in 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie – was a mindless slave resuscitated by voodoo.
The words “voodoo,” “1932,” and “slave” all in the same sentence like that has probably alerted you to the most striking fact about these early zombie films, which is that they are hella racist. In White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo master who conspires with a plantation owner to zombify a white woman. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) also draw on Haitian voodoo and slave plantations. Per Russell’s thoughtful postcolonial reading of these films, they play on colonial fears of white enslavement and Afro-Caribbean magical powers. In all three movies, the great threat posed by the zombies and their voodoo master is the enslavement of a young white woman.
I Walked With A Zombie: SO MUCH horrendous racial and sexual imagery in one little screencap.

In these early films, white women exist primarily to be threatened by a monster with a subtext of sexual violence, suggesting the racist narrative of predatory, animalistic black men preying on lily-white women. It’s pretty stomach-churning to watch, even if it’s fascinating fodder for students of gender, race, colonialism, and the cinema. Luckily, in 1968 zombies were revitalized, and their race and gender aspects completely transformed, by one remarkable movie.
Stage Two: The Golden Age
In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s most obvious innovation was actually cribbed from the Richard Matheson novella I Am Legend (in which the undead bloodsuckers are actually identified as vampires, though often read as zombies). Like their literary predecessors, Romero’s shuffling reanimated corpses fed on the living. The association of zombies with Haitian voodoo, slavery, and colonialism was jettisoned, and pop culture hasn’t looked back.
Calling this period the golden age is almost entirely a matter of personal preference, but good lord are there some terrific zombie films from the 1970s. Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead is the undisputed masterpiece of the era, but there are some wonderful movies from all across Europe: the Spanish Blind Dead series, Lucio Fulci‘s giallo gorefests in Italy (especially the splendid The Beyond), French film The Grapes of Death, the underrated and transnational The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue…
But it was Night of the Living Dead that set the tone for these movies, both in terms of the unremitting bleakness and in the heightened consciousness of social issues. Romero has always claimed that his choice of African-American actor Duane Jones for protagonist Ben was color-blind casting, but his own subsequent filmography displays a clear concern for class and race issues. The role of gender in golden-age zombie films is subtler, but no less present. One of the more shocking moments in NotLD is the reveal of the little zombie girl chomping on her dead father and murdering her own mother. The message is clear: the zombie apocalypse breaks down all social categories. The mother-child bond, so often inviolable in Hollywood, is broken in the most violent way imaginable. A little girl, the archetype of innocence, enacts the violence. Social roles cannot possibly hold in the face of the undead threat; in the end, the zombie makes equals of us all.
No wonder I am terrified of preteens.
Stage Three: The Great Comeback
The eighties and nineties saw a proliferation of slasher flicks, while the zombie fell out of favor. Russell ascribes the zombie resurgence of the past decade to the 2002 double-whammy of 28 Days Later and the video game Resident Evil. Before long, Dawn of the Dead was remade, while Shaun of the Dead gave the genre a simultaneous shot in the arm as the first self-styled “RomZomCom.” By the middle of the decade, zombies were well and truly mainstream.
It’s a curious fact, explored by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, that lowbrow genre fare can sometimes push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable by mainstream Hollywood standards. Arguably, the mainstreaming of zombies has actually defanged some of their ability to make interesting commentary on gender.
For example, the largely entertaining and in some ways surprisingly innovative 2009 zom-com Zombielandends with its previously strong, capable female characters screaming on an amusement park ride, needing to be rescued by the male protagonist. While 1970s zombie films didn’t exactly lack delicate fainting ladies, there was an overall thematic sense that the rising of the dead renders categories such as gender roles ontologically insignificant. A film like Zombieland manages to use the zombie apocalypse to actually enforce gender stereotypes. Similarly, I rage-quit AMC’s The Walking Dead after one season, in part based on a scene where the female characters had a discussion along the lines of, “Well, the apocalypse has hit; better revert to traditional gender roles, ’cause cavemen!!”
I still love zombies deeply. I love the wish-fulfillment aspect of imagining yourself as the last brave outpost of survival against the onslaught, creating your own beleaguered little society when this one collapses. I love the multiplicity of symbolic potential in the zombie, the seemingly endless variety of fears for which it can stand: the inevitability of death; infiltration of human-seeming replicants or pod people; fear of brainwashing or enslavement; loss of all particularity or individuality; uprising of the faceless proletariat; the revenge of Gaia; communism; enforced conformity; being overwhelmed by whatever force it is that you fear most (feminism or kyriarchy or theocracy or secularism or or or…). 
 
But I’m experiencing burnout. I don’t enjoy seeing such a rich, challenging, bleak, existential symbol stripped of all its nuance to cater to the same old reductive Hollywood tropes and narratives. I’m sick of the mainstream cultural attitude toward gender and social roles, and I am very sick of seeing things I love harnessed to serve this attitude.
It makes me want to eat somebody’s brains! Which is a thing invented in Return of the Living Dead in 1985.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Counterreading ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’

Reality television has never held much appeal for me. I get plenty of reality in reality, thanks – I like my TV fictional. Besides, hasn’t the last decade or more of respectable journalism assured me, in the shrillest possible tones, that reality TV is the very lowest form of entertainment, positively reveling in the filth of humanity’s worst, most voyeuristic excesses: a Coliseum for the digital age?
SATIRE!!!1111!1
Even without watching it myself, I’ve become less and less comfortable with the traditional critiques of reality TV as I’ve sharpened my critical apparatus. For a start, it seems predicated on the notion of a hierarchy of art, the assumption that some forms of entertainment are somehow innately higher or better than others. It’s a terribly condescending form of knee-jerk moralizing.And if you don’t ever watch it, it’s a bit presumptuous to be judgmental about the whole genre.
I’ve tried to stay in the moral middle ground, having no real opinion on reality TV other than that it’s not for me. I’d likely have continued my reality-TV-free existence, had it not been for this excellent piece at the incomparable Womanist Musings.
Renee and Sparky watched TLC’s infamous Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the reality show about six-year-old beauty pageant contestant Alana and her working-class Georgia family, and their reaction was not necessarily what you’d expect. They make many terrific points about how repugnant the show is as a piece of television, how it “other[s the family] at every turn,” but they also offer an invaluable counterreading. They like this family – the four daughters aged between six and seventeen, the quiet father figure, and heroic matriarch June – and they’ll continue to like them, no matter what the show’s structure seems to want us to think.
I love them all, but “Pumpkin” is my favorite.
If you consume entertainment and have any conscience at all, you are a practiced counterreader. You have to be, if you’re going to stand up to the hateful kyriarchal bullshit with which 21st-century westerners are bombarded every minute of the day. All responsible entertainment consumption requires a risk assessment, weighing the potential value to be gained against the potential harm to be done, and everybody’s evaluation is slightly different. For one person, well-rounded white female characters but no characters of color is worth the trade-off; for another, it simply isn’t. And sometimes performing an adequate counterreading requires you to marshal all your critical resources.
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is not a text that welcomes counterreadings with open arms. Operating well within the established format of reality television, it utilizes an arsenal of techniques – both subtle and not so much – to impel voyeurism. TLC makes it very, very easy to sneer at and judge Honey Boo Boo and her family. You have to work quite hard to counteract this compulsion. You really have to be on the critical ball the whole time. And is that okay?
All summer the debate has raged as to whether, or to what extent, the show is exploitative. Having watched all of it inside of a week, I’m still undecided. There are moments when June and the girls express a self-awareness and a confidence that has me cheering them to the skies, sure that their assertions of not caring what people think of them are sincere. At times, though – especially when outsiders arebrought in to interact with the family, an etiquette teacher or a pedicurist, and get all flustered and shocked by them – the whole thing seems enormously exploitative and gross.
It’s this indeterminacy, this openness to a multiplicity of different interpretations, that has the national conversation about Honey Boo Boo going so fiercely. As Time’s James Poniewozik observes:
…overall, she has a kind of sassy sweetness to her. In the second episode, she gets a pet teacup pig as consolation for losing a pageant and decides to dress him as a girl, which she says will make him gay. The ensuing argument with her older sister is both ridiculous and oddly wise in a 6-year-old way: “It’s not gonna be gay.” “Yes it is, because we’re making it a girl pig! And it’s actually a boy pig!” “O.K., but it’s not gonna be gay.” “It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do.”
You can’t tell that pig what to do. See, you can look at that scene, like you can most of Honey Boo Boo, several ways. You can laugh at the intensity of Alana’s conviction that she’s right. You can tut-tut at the gender-role signals this pageant girl must be getting to conclude that you can “make” someone or something gay by dressing it in girl clothes. But you can also see something kind of remarkable in it: a little country girl, whatever confusion and misinformation she has in her mind, fervently arguing a teacup pig’s right to determine its own sexual identity.
AWWW
There are plenty of other interesting aspects of this show (Salon considers the race angle; Slate tackles the class issue), but the two that can’t be ignored are the gender dynamic and the class factor. The gender dynamic is pretty glorious: five strong, opinionated women who love each other deeply and don’t take anyone’s shit. They do what they want to do, they look how they want to look, and they are happy. Dare I suggest that one of the reasons the country’s spent its summer in thrall to these people is that we just don’t see women like this in our scripted entertainment?
Of course, it’s rare to see poor white people portrayed sympathetically on US TV at all. My understanding of class in the US is much less nuanced than my understanding of the British class system, but I’m aware of this country’s distaste for its own working poor. “Rednecks” appear in the media as rapists, as racists, as the butt of jokes and the object of revulsion. Voyeurism and disgust motivate hate-watching in our culture to an obscene degree, and that is why I think it’s important to perform a counterreading, to celebrate this family and refuse to let your responses be dictated by classism and hatred. If you want to be truly horrified by your fellow humans, check outthe comments on this Gawker article (I hope you have a strong stomach). To me, this is the aspect of Honey Boo Boo that’s truly awful – not a happy family letting a camera crew into their lives in exchange for some money they surely need, but the legions of haters who judge Honey Boo Boo and her family to be less human, less worthy of dignity and respect for their life choices, than themselves.
The family certainly does not reciprocate that sentiment. Even in the throes of labor agony, when asked, “Do you recommend to anybody else to get pregnant at 17?”, oldest daughter Anna replies, “Do whatever you want to do.” She just refuses to tell anyone else what to do with their body or their life. The rest of America – from legislators to judgmental internet commenters – could learn something from her.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.