Author: Robin Hitchcock

2013 Oscar Week: Searching for Sugar Man Makes Race Invisible

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Rodriguez, the central figure of documentary Searching for Sugar Man
Searching for Sugar Man, considered the front-runner for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards this weekend, shares the unlikely story of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure failed musician in the United States who became an icon on the other side of the planet in South Africa. Rodriguez is a figure of mystery to his fans, and urban legends bloom about his having committed suicide on stage. A group of fans seek out the truth in the 1990s, and find Rodriguez is alive, still living in poverty in Detroit, completely unaware that to a generation of South Africans, he’s a rock god. 
It’s a fascinating stranger-than-fiction story that is heartwarming and inspiring: perfect subject matter for a documentary. And Searching for Sugar Man is undeniably well-crafted, building suspense and mystery in the first half of the film on the hunt for Rodriguez, yielding to a very satisfying emotional catharsis in the second half of the film, where we meet Rodriguez and his daughters and see his triumphant arrival in the land that adores him. The stand-in music videos for Rodriguez’s songs that pepper the film are gorgeous to look at and the songs themselves are a revelation.  Searching for Sugar Man is an excellent film that has a huge problem: the invisibility of race. 
Searching for Sugar Man is about white South Africans. This is not in of itself a problem. White South Africans have stories that deserve to be told. [I am a white American living in South Africa and I think you should hear me out, for example.] But race is an intrinsic part of any South African story, especially any apartheid-era South African story. And Searching for Sugar Man is barely interested in race. It presents white South Africans as synonymous with South Africans, which is an exceptionally outrageous instance of white cultural hegemony given this country’s very recent history of extreme racial oppression. 
Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, one of the South African Rodriguez fans integral to solving the mystery of the musician’s fate, does qualify Rodriguez’s South African fans as the “white, liberal, middle-class,” but it’s a quick aside in one of many descriptions of Rodriguez’s South African ubiquity.  We see how the white conservatives in the apartheid government responded to Rodriguez (by censoring his records and banning airplay). But at no point in Searching for Sugar Man do we hear from a black or coloured South African on Rodriguez (with the very small exception of a news broadcaster in archival footage). I wanted to know if Rodriguez’s influence made it outside the white bubble in apartheid-era South Africa, but Searching for Sugar Man wasn’t interested in telling me. Documentaries should not leave glaring questions unanswered.
Another South African blogger had the same curiosity, and asked a  black friend    about his memories of Rodriguez:

He replied that he had known of the artist, but only because he used to work in broadcasting. This short and interesting answer was essentially all I asked for; a black South African commenting on the fact that Rodriguez was virtually unknown or seemed to not have played a vital role in the lives of black South Africans. Not to prove that Rodriguez did not matter, but to acknowledge that though Rodriguez fan base was mainly white, it does not mean that black South Africans have nothing to contribute with in this particular and fascinating aspect of South Africa during apartheid. A story about Rodriguez would be incomplete without the mentioning of apartheid, and a story that talks about apartheid without including a black South African experience feels incomplete to me. 

Searching for Sugar Man‘s treatment of apartheid is also limited to the white middle-class perspective. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics are said to have ignited political awakening in the white Afrikaner youth in South Africa. The white male Rodriguez fans elaborate: one saying Rodriguez’s song “The Establishment Blues” taught them the very concept of being “anti-establishment”, planting the idea that “it’s OK to protest against our society; to be angry against your society.” 
Segerman adds, “Because we lived in a society where every means was used to prevent apartheid from coming to and end, this album somehow had in it lyrics that almost set us free, as oppressed peoples. Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently.” 
South Africans protesting apartheid in the Soweto uprising of 1976.
While there is no doubt that the apartheid government was oppressive to all South Africans, I bristle at hearing a white man refer to himself and his Afrikaner friends as “oppressed peoples” in a film that doesn’t provide the context of how apartheid shaped the lives of people of color in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement we see in Searching for Sugar Man is one of privileged white youth rebelling against the censorship and control of their ultra-conservative government; when the fight against apartheid was a life-and-death struggle for basic human rights and freedom for millions of black and coloured South Africans. 
Searching for Sugar Man‘s narrow white perspective on apartheid-era South Africa is all the more troubling because Sixto Rodriguez is himself a person of color (Mexican and Native American) living in extreme poverty in Detroit. Clarence Avant, an African American record producer who worked with Rodriguez, is the first and only person in the documentary to suggest that Rodriguez’s race may have contributed to his commercial failure in the United States. Rodriguez does not appear to be concerned with material wealth, having given away most of the money he’s earned touring after his rediscovery in the late 1990s (Since the release of this documentary, Rodriguez has embarked on a world tour). But when one compares the urban blight Rodriguez sang about on his albums to the circumstances of many South Africans two decades after the end of apartheid, the omission of their story in this documentary is even more appalling. 
I’m delighted that Searching for Sugar Man has helped expose Rodriguez’s fine music to a wider audience (including myself); and as a resident of South Africa it is nice to see this country have a worldwide cultural moment. I just wish that the documentary that achieved all this was more fully and honestly representative of South Africa and its history.  

Fun with Stats: Winners of Oscars for Acting by Age

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Michael Caine, Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank, and Kevin Spacey at the Academy Awards in 2000
I’ve seen a lot of Oscar talk asserting that the acting categories for women skew younger than the acting categories for men, which certainly seems true (and would logically follow from the relative scarcity of good roles for older women in Hollywood). But you know me, I’m not satisfied until I’ve seen the cold hard stats.
So I ran the numbers. I only used the winners instead of the entire field of nominees this time around, mostly because calculating the ages various people were on various dates in history is a real chore and someone already did all that pesky arithmetic when it comes to the winners.  
Scatter plot of ages of Oscar winners in acting categories

I apologize for the hokey pink and blue color scheme, but it’s the easiest way to illustrate that the cluster of women winners in the acting categories falls a bit below that of the men.  This plot also makes it clear that there have been no major trends over the years; the winners aren’t generally getting any older or younger in any category. 

The average age of the Best Actress winners is 36.2 with a standard deviation of 11.67; and the average age of Best Actor winners is 43.9 with a standard deviation of 8.86. Best Supporting Actress’ ages average at 39.9 with a standard deviation of 13.86; Best Supporting Actors’ ages average at 49.6 with a standard deviation of 14.44.  Here’s how these distributions overlap:
Histogram depicting ages of winners in acting categories
In the supporting categories, we see a wider distribution of the ages of the winners, not only because children and the elderly are more often in supporting roles, but because child actors are often placed in the supporting category even when they play lead roles (e.g. Timothy Hutton, Tatum O’Neal, Patty Duke). [This year, of course, breaks from that pattern, with both the oldest-ever and youngest-ever nominees in the Best Actress category (Emmanuelle Riva, age 85, and Quevnzhané Wallis, age 9).]

I ran an ANOVA (analysis of variance) test and Tukey’s multiple comparison post-test and found that nearly all the groups’ distributions vary to the point of statistical significance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no statistical significance between the distribution of ages in the lead and supporting acting categories for women (but the difference between ages of lead actors and supporting actors is significant). Interestingly, there’s also no statistical significance between Best Supporting Actress winners’ ages and Best Actor winner’s ages.

So I also lumped the best lead and best supporting categories together by sex and ran a t-test to get more a more simple answer. This test yielded a p<.0001, indicating extreme statistical significance. 
   
Now that we know this data is statistically significant, let’s try to visualize it more clearly:

First I broke the groups down demographically:

Age demographics of Oscar Winners in Acting Categories
As you can see here, more than half of Best Actress winners (62.35%) are age 35 or younger, whereas only 14.12% of Best Actor winners are that young. Male actors younger than 35 are also rarely awarded in the supporting category (14.48%), but women under 35 still make up nearly half the winners of Best Supporting Actress (47.37%).  

I also broke down the winners’ ages by decade:

Age by decade of Oscar winners in acting categories
This chart further illustrates what we already know: the supporting categories are open to a wider range of actors of either sex, but the female categories are dominated by younger performers, whereas the male categories skew older. Like with my analysis of Best Picture nominations versus lead acting nominations, I don’t think this is as much of a problem with the Academy as it is with Hollywood itself. If there were more strong roles for older women (and perhaps more strong roles for younger men?) the age distribution of Academy Award winners for acting would be more aligned between the sexes.

Perhaps the most striking figure I found is that there has been only one winner of Best Actor under the age of 30 (Adrien Brody, who won at age 29 for The Pianist in 2003) but twenty-nine Best Actress winners in their 20s. 
Adrien Brody, the only person to win Best Actor under the age of 30
As a final note, I’ve been asked, as an Oscar-obsessed feminist, if there is any reason why the acting categories should be split by sex. I’ve never had a good answer, mostly because it opens up a whole kettle of cats about the rejecting the gender binary and biological essentialism while celebrating gender differences that I generally don’t have the time or interest to drag into my awards talk. But reviewing all this data and seeing the reflection of various types of sex discrimination within it, I think the Academy isn’t ready for a gender-neutral “Best Performance” award. 

Fun with Stats: Best Actor/Actress Nominations vs. Best Picture Nominations

Written by Robin Hitchcock
Last year’s Best Actress and Best Actor Oscar winners, Meryl Streep and Jean Dujardin. The Iron Lady was not nominated for Best Picture. The Artist was nominated for and won Best Picture.
It’s February, which means it is the Dog Days of Oscar Season. So for this week’s post I’ve done what any obsessive fan would do: create a massive database to conduct some simplistic statistical analysis to which I will subsequently ascribe excessive importance and profundity!
Specifically, I decided to look at the Academy Awards’ 843 nominated performances for Best Actress and Best Actor over their 85-year history, and see how many of those were from films that also received a nomination for Best Picture. My hypothesis was that the movies that earn their leading ladies Best Actress nominations are less likely to be nominated for Best Picture than those films that garner Best Actor nods. I’ll speculate on some of the reasons why that might be in a bit, but first I will share the results I found:

Pie chart illustrating relationship between Best Actress nominations and Best Picture nominations
Out of the 423 performances that have been nominated for Best Actress, 153 were in films also nominated for Best Picture. This means that approximately 33.16% of Best Actress nominees were from Best Picture-nominated films.  In contrast, 229 of the 420, or 54.5% of the performances nominated for Best Actor were in Best Picture-nominated films.[1]
Pie Chart illustrating relationship between Best Actor nominations and Best Picture nominations
[1]Some minor notes on how I calculated these figures. These are incredibly minor quirks that only the hugest of geeks would care about, so push up your glasses. I counted all of the performances for which the nominees in the first year of the Academy Awards separately, even though winners Janet Gaynor and Emil Jennings were awarded for their cumulative work.  I did not include Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage in 1934, because she was not nominated even though she did come in third place through write-in votes. I separated films not nominated for Best Picture but nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the above pie charts but not in the calculation of data, because several foreign language films have received Best Picture nominations straight out (for example, this year’s Amour). You can check my work in my [Oscar Spreadsheet of DOOM, and you probably should, because my brain DID NOT want to accept the fact that The Reader was nominated for Best Picture, and that was only four years ago.
The disparity here is plainly evident but I did my statistical due diligence and ran a chi squared test, proving that the distribution of Best Picture nominations between the sub-groups of Best Actor and Best Actress deviates from what you would expect. The chi squared value here equals 28.634, with 3 degrees of freedom and a p<.0001. That's math talk for "something isn't right here." Basically, these figures offer proof of the statistical significance of Best Actor nominees more frequently appearing in Best Picture nominated films than nominees for Best Actress do.
Now let’s consider why this might be the case. Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress require more than a great performer: that performer needs a meaty role to play. What this data suggests is that the kind of movies that provide these great parts for actresses are less likely to be “Best Picture caliber” than the films that have Best Actor-worthy male roles. The films that yield Best Actress nominations are more often “small” (e.g. Frozen River, TransAmerica, You Can Count on Me) or “non serious” movies (e.g. Julie & Julia, Bridget Jones’s Diary) that aren’t as attractive to the Academy as Best Picture contenders.

2003 Best Actor  winner Sean Penn (for Best Picture-nominated Mystic River) with 2003 Best Actress winner Charlize Theron (for non-nominated Monster).

Notably, in the years where there were 5 or fewer nominees for Best Picture (1927/28–1930/31, 1944–2008), the disparity between Best Actors and Best Actresses appears even greater: 109 out of 348 (31.32%) Best Actress nominations were for Best Picture-nominated films; whereas 177 out of 347 (51.01%) Best Actor nominations were for films nominated for Best Picture. The chi squared for this data set is actually a smidge lower at 27.841, but that still indicates considerable statistical significance.
Conversely, isolating the years with an expanded list of Best Picture nominees (1931/32–1943, 2009–2012) finds no statistical significance in the disparity between Best Actor and Best Actress nods correlation with Best Picture nominees. Both Best Actor and Best Actress nominees see a significant bump in the chances of their film being nominated for Best Picture: up to 71.23% for men and to 58.6% for women. The chi squared is 2.565, df=3 and p=.4637, so these results aren’t statistically significant. Unfortunately, this data set is much smaller than the other ones I looked at, and makes the strange bedfellows of the last four years of Oscars and a set of nominees from 8 decades ago, so it may need to be viewed more skeptically.
To get a better idea of how these trends might have changed over time, I also split the data into two roughly equal blocks, everything before 1970, and everything after.  The good news is that the disparity had already started to narrow in the modern era even before the Best Picture nominations field expanded in recent years. When the data is split into these two groups, the earlier era gets a chi squared score of 20.037 (df=3, p<.0002), indicating extreme statistical significance; the newer data computes to a chi squared of 9.816 (df=3, p=.0202), which indicates statistical significance as well but less dramatically. 
But this does not mean there has been steady progress on this front over the years. These graphs show fluctuation over the years and decades for both genders of nominee, with men remaining slightly above women most years and more substantially above women in all decades: 

Charts showing disparity between Best Actor/Actress and Best Picture nominations over years and decades
To sum up: Academy Awards nominees for Best Actor have been nominated for films also nominated for Best Picture to a much greater degree than the nominees for Best Actress. In years that have a wider field of Best Picture nominees, the disparity between actors and actresses narrows to the point it is not statistically significant. The disparity has also decreased in more modern years but remains statistically significant. 
I believe, optimistically, that this is more of a problem with Oscar’s past than it’s present and future. With more (but still not enough!) women filmmakers active, we’re going to see more and more women in central roles in the Big Important Pictures that tend to get nominated for Best Picture, as we have this year with Best Actress nominee Jessica Chastain at the center of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Furthermore, the expanded list of nominees for Best Picture makes room for different kinds of films, so smaller, women-centric gems like Amour, The Kids are All Right, and Winter’s Bone are included in the Best Picture nominee club. In the future, I hope the sex of a nominated performer won’t be predictive of the Best Picture nomination of his or her film. While this is certainly only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Academy’s limitations in recognizing diversity in their nominees, I’m still glad we’re seeing progress here. 

Beautiful Girls, Emotionally Stunted Boys

By Robin Hitchcock

The male cast of Beautiful Girls

It always raises a red flag for me when a film presents men one way and women another. My feminist knee starts to jerk—GENDER BINARY—BIOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM—DANGER WILHELMINA ROBINSON!

So 1996’s Beautiful Girls, an ensemble belated-coming-of-age story centered around New York City pianist Willie (Timothy Hutton) returning to his hometown for a high school reunion, starts out on notice because it centers on big ideas about The Way Men Are. And that’s before it goes down an even more troubling Lolita-esque road. And yet, it’s one of my favorite movies. I’m just not sure if I should qualify it as a guilty pleasure. 

The main thesis of Beautiful Girls is that men will never be satisfied with what they have because they can always imagine having something more. They’ll never be satisfied with the women the are with because there will always be other women they could be getting—prettier, younger, cooler, NEWER women. As the film’s voice-of-lunacy, Paul (Michael Rapaport) explains in the films title-bestowing monologue: 

A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man – promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay. 

But yearning for this promise leads these guys to neglect the women they can and do have relationships with. This is laid out without any subtlety in a quaint quasi-feminist rant oh-so-clearly written by a man in the 1990s but delivered with winning gusto by Rosie O’Donnell, who details the artifice of the women presented in a pornographic magazine and laments: “But you fucking mooks, if you think that if there’s a chance in hell that you’ll end up with one of these women, you don’t give us real women anything approaching a commitment.” The men don’t really consider that even if one of these perfect supermodels walked into their lives they might not be able to have her, which becomes abundantly clear later on.

Rosie O’Donnell as Gina in Beautiful Girls

So much of the conflict in Beautiful Girls reads as “Woe, the pain of basking in male privilege.” This can be very annoying. But the film clearly aims to critique this attitude and demonstrate that its men would be much happier if they would just settle down (emphasis on “settle”). So it’s possible that Beautiful Girls actually seeks to deconstruct gender stereotypes and attack the system which creates both the perils of the privileged and desperation of those who are not.

Timothy Hutton and Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls

But before I go any further with giving Beautiful Girls the benefit of the doubt, I should mention that the core plot thread is the main character Willie falling in love with the girl next door. The girl next door who is thirteen-years-old. RECORD SCRATCH! This thirteen-year-old neighbor, Marty (Natalie Portman), is so charming and vibrant and precocious (she explains that she has an “old soul”) that it is easy to sympathize with Willie’s creepy crush. And it helps that Willie, most of the time, knows that his feelings for Marty are skeevy and wrong. [When I first saw Beautiful Girls, I was fourteen, and had already had my share of crushes on age-inappropriate men, so I related to Marty’s impossible longing more than I worried about the inappropriateness of Willie’s. My husband watched this movie for the first time this week, at age 29 (the same age as the character Willie), and could not get past the ick factor of someone his age pining for a girl that young. So your mileage may vary regarding the possible automatic disqualification of Beautiful Girls.] 

Willie has a perfectly lovely and age-appropriate girlfriend back in the city, but he can’t commit because that means giving up future chances to fall in love again before he “settles in to the Big Fade.” Willie’s infatuation with Marty represents the ultimate fantasy in the worldview of Beautiful Girls‘ men—as a girl on the cusp of womanhood she’s the ultimate in “promise”, and because of the circumstance of her age she’s completely unattainable without the pesky pain of rejection.

Uma Thurman as Andera in Beautiful Girls

Although the men in Beautiful Girls seem to take rejection almost alarmingly in stride in a no-means-yes kind of way. Uma Thurman shows up at some point as The Perfect Woman, Andera (not a typo, just an obnoxious name). She’s gorgeous, confident, funny, and smart. She shoots whiskey and knows exactly how many days there are until Spring Training begins—so we know she’s not just cool for a chick. She’s also in a committed relationship with an unseen man back in Chicago. Despite being out of everyone in town’s league and being unavailable besides, all of the male characters (except her cousin) assume they will be able to have sex with her. When Paul asks her out (she’s not aware it is a date) and takes her to a bar where he knows his ex Jan (Martha Plimpton) will be, she reiterates that she’s unavailable and uninterested, but ultimately agrees to play along as though she’s on a date with him to help make Jan jealous. To that end, Andera takes Paul to the dance floor and puts on an hot-n-heavy show. Paul responds by kissing her. She angrily leaves. 
Then Andera runs into a drunk Willie, who asks her to sleep with him. She says no, and he asks again. She refuses again but does agree to go ice fishing with Willie, where she charitably tries to disabuse him of his manly notions that there will always be another better woman around the corner. He responds for propositioning her for sex yet again. For a movie that is struggling to excuse itself for presenting statutory rape as a possible happy ending, you’d think it would take it’s other representations of consent much more seriously.

Lauren Holly as Darian and Matt Dillon as Tommy in Beautiful Girls

Tellingly, consent is also a fuzzy concept for the female character Darian (Lauren Holly), former high school Mean Girl, current philandering wife, who of the women in Beautiful Girls is most in line with the male characters. Darian regularly cheats on her husband with high school flame Tommy (Matt Dillon), who is also straying from his girlfriend Sharon (Mira Sorvino). Darian crashes a surprise birthday party Sharon throws for Tommy and drunkenly throws herself at him. Tommy’s repeatedly refuses her advances which just leads Darian to up her seduction game, because she treats Tommy’s consent as foregone conclusion. As high school Queen Bee, Darian had status and privilege. So she falls into the same traps of male privilege that plague the men of Beautiful Girls. It’s one of the saving graces that keeps the film from being completely mired in Men Are From Jerkass Mars/Women Are From Long-Suffering Venus territory.  
Unfortunately, only Darian gets an unequivocal smack-down when she’s soundly rejected by Tommy and told off at her high school reunion by someone she bullied. The other disillusioned-by-privilege (male) characters in Beautiful Girls either find the peace of mind to settle with the women they have, or in the case of Paul, give up the chase for the woman he lost. That this happy ending seems kind of sad belies how difficult it is to disengage from the allure of beautiful girls. The italicized and capitalized Beautiful Girls is just as frustrating and compelling as its lowercase namesake.

2013 Golden Globes Week: 2013 Cecil B. DeMille Award Recipient Jodie Foster: Credibility over Celebrity

Jodie Foster at last year’s Golden Globes

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

This weekend at the Golden Globes, Jodie Foster will be honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award to honor her lifetime achievement in cinema. At age 50, Jodie Foster is the fourth-youngest recipient of the award, but having started acting at only three years old, her career spans as long as many more senior actors, directors, and producers. 

For many, Jodie Foster represents the ideal model for transitioning from child acting to an adult career. She’s also known for being one of the most private people in Hollywood, despite her nearly lifelong stardom and such high profile incidents as her stalker John Hinckley shooting President Reagan in 1981. Jodie Foster is the first “openly gay” woman to receive of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, but she has almost never publicly commented on her sexuality. She “came out” in a 2007 when she thanked then-partner Cydney Bernard while accepting an award. Foster still generally refuses to answer questions about her relationships and other aspects of her personal life, and in so doing has, against the odds, cultivated genuine movie stardom without the trappings of celebrity. This is a rare feat for anyone in Hollywood and even more unusual for a woman. 

Foster’s priceless response to Ricky Gervais’ jokes about her sexuality at last year’s Globes 

And there can be no doubt this has made a direct contribution to Foster’s ability to practice her craft; the piece she authored for The Daily Beast responding to the tabloid spectacle surrounding (her Panic Room co-star) Kristen Stewart’s affair with director Rupert Sanders asserts, “if I were a young actor today I would quit before I started. If I had to grow up in this media culture, I don’t think I could survive it emotionally.” Foster elaborates:

Acting is all about communicating vulnerability, allowing the truth inside yourself to shine through regardless of whether it looks foolish or shameful. To open and give yourself completely. It is an act of freedom, love, connection. Actors long to be known in the deepest way for their subtleties of character, for their imperfections, their complexities, their instincts, their willingness to fall. The more fearless you are, the more truthful the performance. How can you do that if you know you will be personally judged, skewered, betrayed?

Jodie Foster has built her career on her ability to communicate vulnerability without diminishing her dignity, a compelling balance she is able to bring to her characters partially because her talent is not eclipsed by her celebrity.

Jodie Foster in The Accused

A recurring thread in Foster’s films is the issue of credibility: her characters often have to fight to have their voices heard and stories believed, and/or to be afforded the authority and status that they rightfully deserve. In The Accused, the first film for which Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Actress, Foster plays Sarah Tobias, a victim of a brutal gang rape. The prosecuting attorney Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) makes a plea bargain deal with the perpetrators in part because she thinks Sarah makes a poor witness for a trial because she has a reputation for promiscuity and uses drugs and alcohol. Sarah has to continually reassert that she is worthy of justice and deserving of being heard, even to her ally Murphy. Ultimately, Sarah is given the platform to tell her story in the court and help secure some measure of justice toward those who assaulted her.

Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs

Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, perhaps Foster’s most celebrated role, is largely defined by her ability to command respect from a world that seems hell-bent on denying her equal status (as is astutely analyzed in this post by Jeff Vordham that previously appeared on Bitch Flicks.) Hannibal Lecter at first dismisses Clarice as a “rube,” but she wins his respect by forthrightly communicating with him through his constant attempts to play status games with her.

Like Clarice Starling, Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in Contact, is not taken as seriously by her peers and colleagues despite her merit. Arroway has to passionately fight to keep funding for her search for extraterrestrial communications.  Even after the value of her research is proven by her discovery of a message from outer space, she is kept on the periphery of the (largely white and male) “in-crowd” that responds to this development. In the film’s final act, Arroway’s experience travelling through a wormhole and speaking with a representative of the alien species who sent the message is officially disavowed due to lack of evidence, although it is clear most of the characters trust the veracity of her account. Again, Jodie Foster’s gift for credibility connects the audience to her character’s struggle to be accepted and believed.

Jodie Foster fights to be believed in Flightplan

This recurring theme of asserting one’s credibility and value in the face of denial and dismissal is a fundamentally feminist motif. When she appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, Jodie Foster discussed her role in Flightplan, which also hinges on her character’s questioned credibility. The character was originally written for a man to play, and when Foster lobbied for the role she specifically noted that this conflict is inherently female: “‘There’s a point in the film where she is so bereft that she has to consider that she’s lost her mind… Well that’s a scene a man could never play. A man in a crisis like this wouldn’t question his sanity, he’d question someone else’s.”

Jodie Foster understands that as women, each of her character’s credibility is considered inherently questionable by a sexist society. In film after film, Foster infuses her characters with an authority that silences those doubts. And as such, watching Jodie Foster’s characters is often immensely satisfying to the feminist viewer. It’s fantastic to see the Hollywood Foreign Press honor her remarkable career with the Cecil B. DeMille award. Congratulations, Jodie.

‘Bachelorette’ Proves Bad People Can Make Great Characters

Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan in Bachelorette
Written by Robin Hitchcock.
[Warning: spoilers ahead!]
When I saw The Hangover, around the time its sequel came out, I was disappointed they didn’t make the sequel the story of “meanwhile, the bride and her girlfriends had an even MORE wild adventure.” Some of us hoped we’d get something along those lines with Bridesmaids, which certainly was an enjoyable movie and huge step forward for female-focused comedies in mainstream Hollywood, but sometimes felt forced when it veered into the “shocking” territory of ladies pooping.
So three cheers for Bachelorette, which certainly stands on the shoulders of Bridesmaids, but makes it look tame in comparison. Bachelorette doesn’t just have its female characters do shocking things, it has the shocking characterizations. For once, we have a movie full of female characters allowed to be the horrifically selfish jerks that routinely populate dude comedies like The Hangover. It’s delightfully bracing.
For some, the ladies of Bachelorette will be too bitchy, or too similar to sexist stereotypes, to bear. Maid of Honor Regan (Kirsten Dunst) is a Type-A ice queen, joined by bridesmaids Gena (Lizzy Caplan), a self-centered fuck-up, and airhead Katie (Isla Fisher). All three enjoy drugs and casual sex, and all three can be jaw-droppingly mean. All are horrified that the bride Becky (Rebel Wilson) is getting married first among them, because, well, she’s fatter than they are. They still use the cruel nickname (“Pig Face”) they gave her in high school, and spend the first act showing shocking disregard for the her well-being and the success of her wedding. [Fortunately for the bride, there are other women in her bridal party lurking on the sidelines of the story, theoretically taking care of most of the wedding business while these three cause trouble].
Rebel Wilson is unfortunately not given much to do as Becky, but I really enjoyed how the movie didn’t just victimize her as the “fat friend”, subverting that dynamic by making it clear that Becky’s size is much more of an issue for her skinnier friends than it is for Becky herself.  Although Gena awkwardly jokes in her rehearsal dinner speech about meeting Becky when she was making herself vomit in the high school bathroom, it’s later revealed that Regan is actually the one with a history of bulimia. It’s made clear that Becky doesn’t tolerate strangers being cruel to her: she puts a stop to her bachelorette festivities the moment the male stripper Katie brought in calls her “Pig Face.” Becky retains her dignity, while Gena, Katie, and Regan pathetically retreat to have their own private coke-fueled hotel room bender without the bride or the other members of the bridal party.
Rebel Wilson as the bride, a well-adjusted foil for the main characters
During this party, the girls cruelly mock the size of Becky’s wedding gown, and Regan and Katie both try to climb into it. But Becky is only twice their size in their demented imaginations, so the gown rips.  The rest of the plot follows their misadventures as they attempt to fix the gown before the next morning.
Gena, Katie, and Regan never stop being selfish bitches in their quest to undo this huge wrong. A potential solution is reached when they are able to get into a bridal shop after hours and there’s another dress available in nearly Becky’s size, but it’s rejected because that dress is Regan’s favorite, and she can’t let her friend wear it instead of her. They’re also all distracted by their own romantic subplots, particularly Gena (who is paired against her former Party Down co-star Adam Scott, to the same irresistibly watchable effect).
But through all of this shocking meanness, there’s a true-to-life thread of the genuine friendship between these women. It may be hard to imagine how these characters became friends in the first place, but who didn’t build some unlikely friendships through the happenstance of high school classroom seating charts and locker assignments? And despite all their nasty behavior, it’s not hard to understand why they are still friends after all these years: Bachelorette masterfully illustrates the bond we feel with the people we’ve known the longest, even if they aren’t the closest people in our present lives. Becky and Regan will always have a bond because Becky covered up for her high school bulimia; Regan and Gena will always have a bond because Regan took Gena to get an abortion when her high school boyfriend (Scott) chickened out. In the final scenes, Regan bounces between finally putting her bitchiness to good use by chewing out Becky’s floundering florist, and saving Katie’s life after she overdoses on Xanax. Gena assures Katie’s bewildered suitor that even though he’s right that Regan is a “head case” it’s also true that “she’s a good friend.” It rings true. Regan is the kind of friend you’d never want, but you would nevertheless be grateful for if you did have her in your life.
Bachelorette has a happy ending without absolving the characters
Still, Regan, Gena, and Katie sit out Becky’s wedding ceremony, beat-down and vomit-covered on a bench, unneeded by Becky the beaming Bride. The film ends with a wedding reception coda that’s appropriately joyful, but there’s no clear-cut redemption for our troubled trio. Bachelorette strikes a delicate balance, getting us to like and root for these flawed characters without denying their shortcomings (as The Hangover and its ilk are wont to do).  It’s a rare feat for any film, and almost unheard of with a female-centric comedy.

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’: I didn’t get it.

Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild
Just in case the world does end today, I need to get something off my chest, so I can go to my apocalyptic grave with an unburdened movie-loving conscience: I didn’t get Beasts of the Southern Wild.
When it started picking up mad buzz and heaps of festival awards earlier this year, Beasts of the Southern Wild shot up to the top of my to-see list. A visually-stunning, lyrical American fable centered on the breakout performance of a five-year-old powerhouse of a little girl? Sign me up!
I finally got the chance to see Beasts of the Southern Wild on an overnight transatlantic flight last fall, admittedly imperfect screening conditions. I fell asleep during my first attempt to watch it, lulled by its dreamlike qualities (on top of travel fatigue and a couple 187ml bottles of red wine). So I tried watching it again later in the flight, after the sun had come up. I managed to stay awake this time, but not awake enough to understand WHAT ON EARTH WAS GOING ON.
This is the part of the review where I should offer a brief synopsis of the film, but I didn’t understand what was happening enough to be able to adequately do so.  In my memory it goes something like this: Hushpuppy lives in The Bathtub, a simple swampy community isolated from the rest of society. Hushpuppy explains her worldview in poetic narration while Events Occur.
Here’s a few more half-remembered details, bolstered by some research into other reviews: Hushpuppy’s dad is also around, bouncing intermittently between neglect of and tough love survival training for Hushpuppy. And then there is a storm and a forced-evacuation from the suddenly-present government? And Hushpuppy and some other little girls go look for Hushpuppy’s mom, and may or may not find her? And then Hushpuppy wins a staring contest with a herd of gigantic prehistoric animals who floated over from the melting ice caps?
Hushpuppy vs. Auroch
Whaaaat? This all makes The Tree of Life seem like a straightforward piece of traditional storytelling.
What makes Beasts of the Southern Wild so elusive is that it is told from the perspective of its young protagonist, Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhané Wallis, only five years old at the time of filming). Wallis really is a magnetic screen presence, and I wanted to love this movie on the basis of her captivating performance alone. But I also wanted to know what was happening. The sci-fi fan in me was too distracted by the unanswered questions (among them: what year is it?) resulting from the sidelined world-building of The Bathtub to fully invest in the character-driven, loosely-structured story in Beasts, no matter how engaging I found Wallis’s tiny tour de force.
“Even as you watch the film, you might not understand or fully comprehend the meaning of the unusual plot. But let its poetic beauty, emotions and raw honesty wash over you. Let it sink in.” 
I tried. I want to support experimental narratives. I want to support films that showcase marginalized groups like children, women, and people of color (Hushpuppy is a triple threat!). I want to be intellectual enough, patient enough, film-lover enough and feminist enough to enjoy Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I was not.
So if this is the end of days, at least I will go out honestly. Do you have any cinematic confessions to share with the class while you still have the chance?

Where ‘Ruby Sparks’ Goes Wrong

Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks
Written by Robin Hitchcock.
I expected to either love or hate Ruby Sparks depending on where it took its premise. This premise being: sad sack writer creates a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Character named Ruby Sparks, she manifests into his real life, still influenced by what he writes about her, consequences ensue. I suspected I’d hate the movie if the creation of the woman Ruby Sparks was a happy miracle, and love it if it turned out to be a disaster, depicting the limitations of the fantasy applied to real life. 
But my feelings were more complicated than I expected. I found Ruby Sparks to be an engrossing film that was very uncomfortable to watch, like a good horror movie. But I was also left unsatisfied and disappointed by the film, wanting both a better take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and a better all-around movie watching experience. 
The first problem with Ruby Sparks is that it takes entirely too long to establish its premise. It’s actually a pretty simple idea for anyone hip to storytelling tropes (even if you don’t know the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” you probably recognize one when you see one, and writers with God-like authorial power is nothing new either). While it is realistic that it would take our characters a while to accept this premise was actually happening, it’s frustrating for the audience. We’ve already accepted it before we started to watch the movie, which makes the first forty minute or so of “Yes, REALLY” rather tedious. 
I believe this first problem is a symptom of the second and most serious problem with Ruby Sparks: that the writer who creates her, Calvin, is the protagonist. Given the that film was written by a woman (Zoe Kazan, who also plays the eponymous character), co-directed by a woman (Valerie Feris, alongside Jonathan Dayton, the directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine), and centered on deconstructing an antifeminist trope, I was surprised how much sympathy I was expected to have for the man luxuriating in a hyper-real version of it. 
The Sad Sack in Need of the Love of Good Woman, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s counterpoint, is a sexist trope in and of itself. It’s rooted in the idea that only men are burdened by the pathos of true adulthood/personhood, that the expectation to be a Great Man is a constant yoke that women will never understand. In the case of Ruby Sparks‘s Calvin (Paul Dano), he’s suffering the terrible burden of being a literary wunderkind who hasn’t been able to follow up the Great American Novel he wrote in his early twenties.
Zoe Kazan as Ruby Sparks
Calvin’s therapist gives him a writing assignment to help with his writer’s block: write about a person who could love Calvin’s shaggy dog, Scotty, despite his flaws (guess what guys: THE DOG IS A METAPHOR FOR CALVIN! Whoaaaa!). Calvin then dreams (literally) and encounter with Ruby Sparks, a pretty, friendly, charming girl who likes Scotty even though she’s unfamiliar with the works of his namesake, F. Scott Fitzgerald. After this dream, Calvin can’t stop writing about Ruby (on a typewriter! In 2012. Ugh, he’s the worst.)
Calvin at his magical typewriter.
Cultural ignorance is only one of the many infantalizing qualities given to Ruby by Calvin: she can’t drive, she doesn’t own a computer, she “isn’t very good at life sometimes” because she forgets to pay bills and the like. Then there are the deficits in Ruby’s true personhood that aren’t by design, but by omission: Calvin writes that she is a painter, but we never see her paint, and neglects to give her a regular job, or any friends or family. The only outside relationships he gives her are memories of inadequate exes: a high school teacher she had an affair with (thus failing to get her diploma), an alcoholic, another age-inappropriate partner. All to make Calvin the more comparatively worthy. 
While this is all cutting writing on Kazan’s part, doing its work to highlight what makes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl a problematic trope, within the story of the film it comes out of Calvin, which makes him extremely unsympathetic to the audience. But it is clear we’re supposed to be rooting for him: as he swears off writing about Ruby and she becomes more and more human (and less and less interested in Calvin), we’re meant to worry for him. When he succumbs to the pressure to write her back into being the perfect girlfriend and it backfires, we aren’t supposed to fret for Ruby as she suffers extreme mood swings, but rather for their effect on Calvin. We don’t see how “Real Ruby”‘s friends react to these changes, only Calvin. We see how Calvin’s family responds to Ruby, but Ruby doesn’t have a family, because Calvin didn’t bother to write her one. 
I kept wondering if I was reading the film wrong, until the denouement  which confirmed that Calvin is meant to be the main sympathetic character. Having “released” Ruby from his magical creativity, Calvin writes a novel recounting this experience called The Girlfriend. It is met with wide acclaim, duhdoy. Then Calvin, walking Scotty, happens upon a woman in the park. A woman who looks just like Ruby. She acts a little bit more like a real person than the Ruby from Calvin’s original dream, but it’s clear Calvin still has the upper hand: she asks if they’ve met before, because he looks familiar to her, and he points her to his photo in her book jacket, as she’s reading The Girlfriend. The scene is extremely reminiscent of the end of (500) Days of Summer, where despite all the self-entitled jerkwad behavior we’ve seen the main male character go through over the course of the movie, we know he’s the one we’re supposed to be rooting for because he meets another (sorta, in this case) girl. 
This meeting should have read more like the villain in a slasher flick popping out of his grave to kill again, but it really seemed intended to be a heartwarming second chance for a lovable loser. And trying to make Calvin a sympathetic character when he’s acting more like a monster for most of the film makes Ruby Sparks fall apart. It’s not like we couldn’t have had Ruby as our primary protagonist because she’s “not real”, see Pinocchio. It’s a shame that Ruby Sparks asks us to sympathize more with Calvin than the title character, it weakens the film’s mission and makes it much less enjoyable to watch.

In Praise of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln

When Mary Todd Lincoln, played by Sally Field, first appears in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I got nervous. With a weary voice and a far-off manner, she analyzes one of Mr. Lincoln’s dreams as a portent of doom. Looks like we’re getting the “batshit crazy” take on Mary Lincoln, I thought.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I was particularly upset by this because the characterization of Mary is especially crucial to the success of the film from a feminist perspective, because it is otherwise almost entirely focused on men (although Gloria Reuben is great in her small role and S. Epatha Merkerson brings as much as she can to her even smaller one). 

But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that just as it does with her husband Abraham, Lincoln is merely incorporating the legend of Mary Todd—stated eloquently by the character herself as “all anyone will remember of me is that I was crazy and that I ruined your happiness”—into a much more nuanced depiction of a complex character.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I have to admit, my initial reaction to the Mary in Lincoln was not helped by my preconceived opinion on the casting of Sally Field. My issue was not the age difference (Field is 10 years Day-Lewis’ senior, the reverse of the real-life age difference between the Lincolns) that required Ms. Field to fight to keep her role. I was rather concerned with the contrast in acting style between Field and Day-Lewis. I recalled the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, where Marlon Brando’s then-revolutionary method realism left Vivian Leigh’s remarkable (and Oscar-winning) yet much more theatrical performance as Blanche DuBois in Stanley’s dust. 

In an interview with Sharon Knolle, Sally Field insists:

“Listen: People don’t know what method is. I am method! I studied at the Actors’ Studio. I studied with Lee Strasberg. That’s where the term “method” came from. Daniel and I work exactly the same way. I always stay in character. Any good actor does that.” 

Ms. Field obviously knows her own technique better than I do, but I doubt I am alone as a moviegoer in thinking of her as an actress whose screen presence is largely defined by her personal charm and her ability to turn the melodrama up to eleven rather than an ability to disappear into a character.

But Field’s performance style actually fits in well among a universally strong but stylistically-varied ensemble. While Tommy Lee Jones is uncharacteristically reserved even playing the bombastic abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and the inimitably restrained David Strathairn does fantastic work as Secretary of State William Seward [Tangent: my greatest beef with this film is that Seward is largely absent from the third act—just when his story gets really good!—because it diminishes Strathairn’s awards chances, and I think he’s still owed statues from Good Night and Good Luck]; there’s also plenty of delightful scenery chewing among the supporting cast, from Lee Pace as pro-slavery Democrat Fernando Wood, who ought to have a mustache just for twirling at the appropriate beats in his racist speeches on the Congressional floor, to James Spader’s cartoonishly uncouth political trickster.

Although Field plays most of her scenes against Day-Lewis, they play off each other surprisingly well. Lincoln as a whole walks a fine line between humanizing and further mythologizing one of the greatest figures in American history. Despite Day-Lewis’s historically-accurate adoption of a slouched posture and gentle high-pitched speaking voice, the film unquestionably presents Lincoln as the Great Man of the Lincoln Legend. But these indulgences are brilliantly counterbalanced by having the character aware of his place in history and the inevitable myth-making about him. 
Fittingly, this vulnerability is no more apparent than when he is with his wife. Playing off Field, Day-Lewis is perhaps at his most actorly, but the effect is subtly demonstrating to the audience that Abraham is the one acting as the character of President Lincoln when he is politicking and speechmaking. Field’s work in Lincoln makes the central performance and consequently the film itself better, which is exactly what a supporting actor should do. My misgivings about her casting could not have been more wrong.

And thankfully, neither could my first impression of the film’s overall take on the character. While Lincoln‘s Mary is indeed emotionally erratic, occasionally difficult, and haunted by grief, the film doesn’t damn her the way some historical accounts have by making these her only characteristics. She’s treated as an intellectual equal by her husband, we see her watch the congressional debates on the 13th Amendment from the balcony with keen interest, and in Field’s best scene, she epically takes down Thaddeus Stevens with a smile while playing the role of First-Lady-as-Gracious-Hostess.

Field’s best scene in Lincoln

Tony Kushner’s script and Sally Field’s game performance evade the two traps of fictional portrayals of Mary Lincoln: she’s neither the crazy shrew undermining her great husband nor the equally sexist and hoary cliche of the Great Woman Behind a Great Man. Instead, Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln is one of the many compelling elements that make up Spielberg’s excellent Lincoln.

Damning ‘Ted’ with Faint Praise

Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis in Ted.
As I’ve written on Bitch Flicks before, I’m not a fan of Seth MacFarlane’s work. I must admit, when I selected his feature-film debut Ted for my in-flight entertainment during my long trip back to the States for Thanksgiving, I was expecting it to be a diverting “hate watch” that would give me fodder for an easy-to-write negative post for this site, something I could quickly crunch out in between turkey and pie without missing too much family time.
But, alas, I sort of enjoyed Ted. It made me laugh out loud over a dozen times, even though I was watching it through headphones surrounded by hundreds of strangers probably watching The Amazing Spider-Man, and even though every time I laugh at something Seth MacFarlane is responsible for I feel like a hypocrite at best, if not a morally reprehensible enemy of human decency and storytelling itself.
Then again, Ted proves that Seth MacFarlane is capable of presenting jokes within the confines of a meaningful narrative, and of deriving comedy from plot and character interaction instead of meaningless cutaways to pop cultural name-checks. This is a huge step forward for MacFarlane, finally putting him on par with, well, pretty much everyone who has ever told a story or a joke to any level of success, including your Uncle Morris at last night’s dinner when he regaled the family with the tale of how he almost got arrested during last year’s Black Friday.
Unfortunately, the story that Ted tells is an uninspired and sexist Apotovian tale of man-child John (Mark Wahlberg), whose failure to launch into adulthood threatens his relationship with a Good Woman (Mila Kunis). The “twist” is that John’s connections to his immature life of hedonism are represented by his relationship with his lifelong best friend and roommate, Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), a plush teddy bear come to life from a childhood wish. [DO YOU GET IT? John can’t be an adult because of his relationship with a CHILDHOOD TOY.]
Perhaps I’m so enchanted by MacFarlane’s ability to stick to a narrative to begin with because I’m so tremendously BORED with the pedestrian sexism of his chosen narrative. The Man-Child’s struggle to adapt to the demands of his Mature and Responsible Woman who Improbably Tolerates Him is soooooo 2007. There is nothing more to say about the sexism of this trope. I’m falling asleep thinking about it.
Which leaves only semi-positive notes like, hey, that Mark Wahlberg sure is charming, and Mila Kunis really is doing all she can to redeem this crap role; and wow, this CGI is pretty great, at least on a 3-inch screen on an airplane seat back. It’s so astonishing to me that Ted is a competent film it becomes all too easy to dismiss its entirely expected and uninteresting sexism. So I won’t do that. Ted is sexist. But I’m still impressed and surprised that it isn’t entirely terrible.

Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is not "Required" and not Praiseworthy

Cross-posted at Women and Hollywood.

Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables
If you recognize any of these phrases, then you’ve probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway starvation-diet-for-her-craft marketing blitz.
In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard about this already, I’ll catch you up: Anne Hathaway, slim to begin with and already leaned down to catsuit size for The Dark Knight Rises, lost 25 pounds to more realistically inhabit the role of starving-and-dying-of-tuberculosis Fantine in the upcoming movie musical Les Misérables. Actors forcing dramatic body weight changes for roles is nothing new and nothing unique (see the similar-yet-tellingly-different coverage of Matthew McConaughey’s weight loss to play an AIDS sufferer in The Dallas Buyers Club), but Hathaway’s weight loss has become The Story of the production of Les Mis: a subject of endless discussion on celebrity gossip sites, the talk show circuit, and the cover story in the December issue of Vogue magazine.
Why is a skinny person getting skinnier garnering so much media fascination? Are hummus and radishes so much more fascinating than Les Mis director Tom Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live for the cameras? And even if we insist on reducing an actress to her physical appearance, couldn’t we just talk some more about Anne Hathaway chopping off all her hair? 
When discussing her weight loss with Entertainment Tonight’s Mark Steins, Hathaway says, “It’s what is required. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.”
“Required”? Really?
This makes two gigantic assumptions: 1) That physical frailty is necessary to properly play the character Fantine.
Patti LuPone as Fantine, 1985 London production
Randy Graff as Fantine, 1987 Broadway production
Sierra Boggess as Fantine, current West End production
An assumption I think it is fair to reject: these women are slender, but not emaciated, and they are able to play the character convincingly.
But let’s give Hathaway the benefit of the doubt and say the intimacy of a filmed adaptation requires more stringent realism when it comes to Fantine’s body size. This still assumes that the actor actually losing weight is the only way to portray her extreme physical condition.
Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger
Yeah, nope.
So let’s be clear: Anne Hathaway’s extreme weight loss for Les Mis was in no way required.  But while it is artistically a wash; as a career choice, it was clearly a good move.  The film benefits from all this attention, and Hathaway enjoys the “she so devoted to her craft” kudos that often translate into statuettes.
But it is bad for women, and bad for our culture. More diet talk, more body talk, perpetuation of the myth that weight loss is a noble pursuit and merely a matter of dedication.  Voluntary adoption of disordered eating is not praiseworthy. These types of body transformations are not artistically necessary, and certainly not “required.” So let’s hope actors stop endangering their health for roles. We can suspend our disbelief over a few dozen pounds.

Disney Buys Star Wars: A New Hope for Women and Girls

Disney logo with Death Star
Last week, one of the only news items to penetrate the horrifying coverage of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation and the nerve-wracking anticipation for the US Elections was the surprising, perplexing, but exciting news that Disney was buying Lucasfilm and planning to release Star Wars Episode VII in 2015. It was like a shot of adrenaline to this weary geek’s heart.
The Five Stages of Disney’s Buyout of Lucasfilm: 1) Denial. 2) Angst. 3) Cautious optimism. 4) Futility. 5) Resignation.
— Eric S. Donaldson (@EricJokes) October 31, 2012

Like every geek, I’m riding the wave of emotions that comes with this news, with renewed “no, there is another” hope for new GOOD Star Wars movies, and anxiety that those hopes will be dashed yet again (I mean, think about what the word “Disneyfication” means.) As a feminist geek, there’s a whole additional layer to conflicted feelings about Disney buying Star Wars: what does this mean for women?

The Opportunity for Women to Take Creative Control of Star Wars

Enormously successful female film producer Kathleen Kennedy is now president of Lucasfilm and “brand manager” of Star Wars after the sale to Disney.  A woman is now in charge of Star Wars.  I don’t know about you, but I’m hearing a chorus of angels sing.
And then an abrupt record scratch, because it’s a naïve fantasy to suppose that having a woman executive produce the new Star Wars films will meaningfully shift the gender balance of the larger creative team.  A quick overview of Kennedy’s credits on IMDb confirm that she’s mostly helped bring male voices to the screen, and a very discouraging (although unsourced and hopefully entirely dubious!) quotation in her personal trivia section has a very “binders full of women” tone:
But what I always find interesting is when you take the areas of writing, producing and directing. I don’t think there’s a great deal of discrimination — although I’m completely perplexed and confused as to why there aren’t more women. For instance, if we’re looking for new, young directors, which is something we do all the time, we certainly never go look at films because they’re directed by a man or a woman. We look at films because they are winning awards, they’re good, and it has nothing to do with gender. And women certainly have equal opportunity to get into a university like UCLA or USC, to get into the film department, to take the same courses to allow them to make films, to deal with a whole gamut of subject matter, and yet I don’t know what happens. There’s something that happens in the process of getting there that seems to turn many women away. – Kathleen Kennedy [Oh, bugger, here’s the source.]

But the fact remains that a woman now controls Star Wars, and moreover the door is now open for new writers, directors, and other producers to step into the Star Wars franchise, and a lot more diversity in the creative team continuing the franchise is now a possibility.
Gender Neutral Kids Entertainment or the Entrenchment of the Girl’s Ghetto?
Disney Princess Leia
My childhood pretty much exactly coincided with the Disney Renaissance, so even though the Disney Princess marketing machine hadn’t fully sprung to terrifying life, I was pretty obsessed with Disney’s lineup of plucky heroines.  I foolishly assumed they were a cultural touchstone for everyone in my generation, until I was in college and went on a date with a guy who had only brothers, who said he’d never seen an animated Disney movie. “I always thought that was just girl stuff,” he said.
While the Disney Princesses (and the Disney Fairies) get a lot of direct-to-video content and toys, the feature films branch of Disney seems desperate to get that somehow-more-valuable BOY MONEY.  First they bought Pixar, which made animated kids movies untainted by the “girl stuff” smear (this year’s Brave was the first Pixar film with a female protagonist).  Then Disney acquired Marvel’s film division, and went about developing films for even pretty obscure male Marvel superheroes while leaving the women to Smufette-y supporting roles (Though I’m still holding out hope for a She-Hulk adaptation, which could be the brilliantly postmodern Gremlins 2: The New Batch-style answer to the Avengers mega-franchise.)  And while Disney Animation Studios still creates princess-centered features like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, they alternate these pictures with more boy-appealing fare like Wreck-It Ralph.  It’s easy to worry that Disney has cut its losses with girls, figuring they are only valuable viewers once they’re old enough to obsess over sci-fi/fantasy young adult novels with love triangles.
But while Disney Princess Leia was just an amusing meme for most of us, for me, it was a signal of hope that Disney buying Star Wars could help blur the distinction between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” when it comes to children’s entertainment.  Bitch Flicks’ Megan Kearns’s excellent feminist character analysis of Princess Leia demonstrates that while the original Star Wars trilogy was extremely limited in its portrayal of women and fell into some harmful tropes with its central female character, what it got right about Leia, it got VERY right.
I firmly believe Star Wars is the cultural juggernaut that it is because it captures young girls’ imaginations as well as young boys’, largely in part because of the dynamic character of Princess Leia.  And given their history of creating female-centric (albeit sometimes problematic) entertainment, and despite recent moves away from that niche, Disney may be the best production company to capitalize on that aspect of Star Wars‘ appeal when making the next trilogy.
The next Star Wars films could bring us more than one—seriously, I swear it is possible—dynamic female character.  We might even see a woman as the central figure in the next trilogy.  Those oh-so-valuable boys will still be bought and payed for by the Star Wars name and universe.  In this brave new world where a “Disney Princess” is a diplomat who carries a blaster, the new Star Wars films might finally break us of gender-segregating our children’s entertainment.