Considering more than one in five women are raped in their lifetime in the USA, I feel it is a hard-hitting reality and it is about time this film is made. I should also point out, that the script focuses on the recovery of a rape survivor and is much less of a tragic tale, than a realistic and a hopeful one.
Filmmaker, Jessica M. Thompson, at the premiere of her short film, Across the Pond, at Tropfest NY 2013
This is a guest post by Jessica M. Thompson.
When I started writing my latest feature film, The Light of The Moon, I had a few comments from friends lamenting that I was not writing a Romantic-Comedy. Now, I should point out, I have not written or directed many Rom-Coms in my life – I am definitely more driven by the genres of Drama, Thriller, and even Sci-Fi – so these friends were not making a statement about my previous Rom-Coms being an utter hit and that I should not digress from my proven track record. These friends were making assumptions about the types of films that women write and direct, and also suggesting that these are the types of films that resonate with female audiences. Because, you know, Rom-Coms are the only types of films that women want to see, right?
Carlo Velayo and Jessica M. Thompson from Stedfast Productions at Tropfest NY 2013
Now I am very picky about my friendships: I only mingle with highly intelligent, interesting, creative and progressive women and men of the world, so I was pretty shocked to hear some of them make such blatantly pigeonholed comments. I had the overwhelming sense that the overarching stereotypes that Hollywood projects on to female writers, directors, actors, characters, and audiences were even starting to encroach on the Brooklynites of New York.
Director Catherine Hardwicke on the set of Red Riding Hood, 2011. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
There has been a long pervading idea in Hollywood that it is only men, between the ages of 18-35, who go to the movies. This has been disproved time-and-time again, with one article in Variety pointing out that women made up 51 percentof all film audiences in 2011. Yet, only 30 percentof speaking roles in movies in 2014 were female characters (and this includes animated films that suggested we should just “let it go!”). And to make the situation direr, those speaking roles were largely supporting characters who were passive in nature and contributed very little to the overall plot within the film.
Director Catherine Hardwicke at the premiere of Red Riding Hood, 2011. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
Writer/director Catherine Hardwicke struggled to secure funding for her indie hit Thirteen in 2003. “Of course there are double standards. No one can say it’s a level playing field,” she said. Stories with strong female leads are often disregarded for funding by the largely male-dominated production and distribution companies of Hollywood. Although Thirteen went on to win the Sundance Award for Best Director, be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and earn over $4.5 million at the box office, Hardwicke still found it hard to get her future films, with ladies in the leading roles, off the ground.
Actor/writer/producer Brit Marling in I Origins, 2014. (Photo courtesy of IMDb)
Interesting to note, Hardwicke did go on to direct the first Twilight movie in 2008, which grossed over $392 million worldwide, only to have male directors take over her role for the last four films in the series. As Hardwicke points out: “Despite achievement at the highest levels, women still find themselves pounding on doors that are slow to open.”
Actor/writer/producer Brit Marling, in The East, 2013. (Photo courtesy of IMDBb)
The film I am making this year, The Light of The Moon, is about the first six weeks after a sexual assault and the impacts on the main character, Bonnie, and her relationships. When I have spoken to some savvy film festival audiences about the story, I’ve heard comments, like: “Wow, sounds like a real picker-upper” or “isn’t that a bit too depressing to watch?” Considering more than one in five women are raped in their lifetime in the USA, I feel it is a hard-hitting reality and it is about time this film is made. I should also point out, that the script focuses on the recovery of a rape survivor and is much less of a tragic tale, than a realistic and a hopeful one.
Jessica M. Thompson co-founded Stedfast Productions in 2010. This year, Stedfast will be making their first feature film, The Light of The Moon, which is now crowd funding through Seed&Spark.
But these comments did make me start to wonder if male directors, like Derek Cianfrance, encountered the same problems when pitching an utterly sad, romantic-tragedy, like Blue Valentine? Or if our darlings, Matt & Ben, got some slack for making a film about a genius who was violently abused as a child and now has emotional problems in Good Will Hunting? Or any of Lars Von Trier’s movies for that matter!
Do we have a problem with women who are not just passive side-characters? Do we have an issue with women making films where the female characters do not only act as sexy half-time entertainment or as the love interest of the male protagonist? Do we have a problem with seeing complex female characters, who make mistakes, who hurt, and change, and grow, and fight, and struggle to achieve what they want?
No. Actually, I don’t think we do. Because the movies that have been made in the past with dynamic female leads, like Thirteen, Boys Don’t Cry, Hunger Games, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill, Amélie, Juno, Erin Brokovich, (etc., etc.), have all proven otherwise. They have all performed ridiculously well, both in the critics’ circles and at the box office. But I do think, despite all of these success stories showing that film audiences want to see more interesting female characters on screen, it is the male-dominated Hollywood executives who still have a problem with funding movies about women and by women.
Fortunately, there is hope. As Brit Marling said at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: “I think it is something like less than 10 percent of directors and screenwriters are women? So, of course then, cinema and TV is usually from the male perspective…so I think the more women that go into writing and directing – I think that will be the beginning of the shift…women taking the reigns and saying: ‘I’m not finding the characters that I need, I’m just going to sit down and write them.’”
With females now making up the majority of the human population and theatregoers alike, surely, it is about time we give the masses what they want. It is about time that art reflects life in this matter. So ladies, pick up your pens and your cameras and keep on fighting the good fight!
Jessica M. Thompson is an Australian filmmaker who moved to Brooklyn, New York over four years ago and founded Stedfast Productions – a collective of visual storytellers. Jess has directed several short films, music video clips and commercials and recently edited Cheryl Furjanic’s award-winning documentary, Back on Board: Greg Louganis.
Jess looks forward to making her feature directorial debut with The Light of the Moon, which is currently crowd funding through Seed&Spark.
Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors.
Part ofVintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.
“No women directors have achieved the all-embracing, powerful status once held by Lois Weber” – film historian Anthony Slide
Lois Weber: social justice warrior
The career of Lois Weber demonstrates the importance of mentoring between women; entering Gaumont Company as an actress in 1904, Weber was encouraged by the original film director, Alice Guy, to explore directing, producing, and scriptwriting, while Weber mentored female directors at Universal like Cleo Madison and Dorothy Davenport Reid. Weber’s career also demonstrates the importance of precedent: elected to the Motion Picture Directors’ Association and the highest paid director in Hollywood, her success inspired Universal to promote female directors such as Ida May Park to replace her when Weber left to found Lois Weber Productions. Thanks to Alice Guy and Lois Weber, filmmaking was once almost unique in its gender equity, before a centralized studio system eliminated the female directors. The only survivor into Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dorothy Arzner, was great for transmasculine representation, but an indicator of how exclusively masculine-coded directing had become.
Three directors: Cecil B. DeMille, Lois Weber, and Jeanie MacPherson
For her first feature film, 1914’s The Merchant of Venice, Weber chose a Shakespearean classic whose brilliant female lawyer, Portia, resolves the plot’s dilemma. Her 1915 feature, Hypocrites, is a lush epic. Made the year before D. W. Griffith’sIntolerance, Hypocrites parallels the medieval past and the present in a moral allegory, anticipating Griffith’s most admired film. Weber’s Hypocrites criticizes mob mentality and organized religion, as a medieval monk creates an icon of truth as a naked woman and is murdered by a mob for lewdness. Using innovative traveling double exposures and intricate editing, Weber constructs her naked star as a disembodied phantasm, who confronts congregation members with their own urges for money, sex and power, bypassing slut-shaming to examine society’s fear of the naked woman in the abstract. Fact mirrored fiction, as audiences flocked to Hypocrites for its nudity, before Weber faced a backlash of hypocritical outrage. Weber’s film also features vast canvases and landscapes, using mountains with interesting silhouettes and the highly reflective surface of lakes to compensate for the low light-sensitivity of early cameras. Film critic Mike E. Grost points out that this pictorial quality is associated with the cinema of John Ford, who started his directing career working for Weber’s employer, Universal, in 1917, two years after Hypocrites. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJBJvEEPegI”]
Extract from Hypocrites, showcasing Weber’s pictorial allegory
In 1915, Hypocrites was banned by the Ohio censorship board, as was the racist The Birth of a Nation. The all-male Supreme Court’s judgement in Mutual vs. Ohio, that free speech protections should not apply to motion pictures, centers sexual “prurience” as their concern however, not hate speech. By 1915, female directors Alice Guy and Lois Weber had explored gender role reversal, gay affirmative narratives, social pressures fuelling prostitution, the evils of domestic abuse, and the hypocrisy of male censorship of the female form. The following year, Weber would condemn capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe, while the Supreme Court’s decision enabled widespread censorship of films by Weber and Margaret Sanger advocating birth control. By the time free speech protections were extended to film, with 1952’s Burstyn vs. Wilson decision, female directors had been eliminated from Hollywood’s studio system.
More than just social propaganda, Weber’s films were equally noted for her talent at drawing out effective performances, shown in this extract from 1921’s exploration of wage inequity and the credit crisis, The Blot. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1ttuOKdPC4″]
Margaret McWade‘s dignified humiliation in The Blot (extract)
Though most of Weber’s films are credited to the husband and wife team of Weber and Phillips Smalley, Weber was the sole author of their scenarios. She went on to write and direct five feature films after her divorce from Smalley, while he never directed again. Nevertheless, film historian Anthony Slide claims that her productivity declined post-divorce as she could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband. Her drop in productivity actually parallels most of her female peers, with outside investors playing an increasing role in 1920s Hollywood and preferring to back male productions. Despite setbacks, including the bankruptcy of Lois Weber Productions, Weber entered the sound era with lost film White Heat in 1934, depicting a plantation owner ruined after discarding his native lover and marrying a white society girl. This echoes Weber’s 1913 shortCivilized and Savage, in which a heroic native girl nurses a plantation owner and departs unthanked. Though Weber’s brownface performance in Civilized and Savage, and her use of “tragic mulatto” clichés for White Heat‘s martyred heroine, can be criticized, both films are theoretically anti-racist. Weber died of a ruptured gastric ulcer, aged 60, in 1939, dismissively eulogized as a “star-maker” rather than a distinctive artist with her own voice and politics.
Suspense – 1913
“The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it.” – Carol J. Clover
In Carol J. Clover’s influential studyMen, Women, And Chain Saws, she expresses surprise at finding feminist enjoyment in horror, where majority-male audiences are expected to identify with a female protagonist. But slashers were not the male creation she assumed them to be. Gothic horror was popularized by Ann Radcliffe, writing from the perspective of a vulnerable yet resilient heroine. Radcliffe’s Final Girl was raped by Matthew Lewis’ Monk, parodied by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and made lesboerotic by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, but her role as the conventional protagonist of horror was fixed, her impact discussed by Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia. Male artists obsessively sexualized the Final Girl, but didn’t create her.
In Lois Weber’s 1913 shortSuspense, the Final Girl crosses into cinema, now unsexily a wife and mother. Ideologically, Suspense is not radical: Weber’s middle-class heroine is a damsel-in-distress, shrieking and clutching her baby as she’s imperiled by the house-invading “Tramp,” waiting passively for her husband to rescue her. What Suspense brilliantly achieves is a cinematic language of the female gaze, inducing male viewers to identify with the heroine. From the mother spotting the Tramp from an upper window in dramatic close-up, to the Tramp’s slow ascent, viewed from the woman’s position at the top of the stairs, to Weber’s close-ups of the mother’s terrified reactions, Suspense demonstrates that identifying with the imperiled woman is essential to produce… suspense.
Weber’s split screens, and the dread she builds by allowing the Tramp to initially lurk in the background, were also innovative. From George Cukor’sGaslightto Hitchcock’s Rebecca to John Carpenter’s Halloween, directors would use Weber’s techniques of female gaze to induce the male empathy that they required for their suspense effects, creating the accidental feminism of horror that Clover celebrated. Though often remembered for her moralism, Weber mastered the craft of popular entertainment, scripting the original 1918 Tarzan of the Apes, and being drafted to recut the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera after initial versions tested poorly, successfully crafting it into an acknowledged classic. [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_wkw5Fr_I8″]
Where Are My Children? – 1916
“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.” – Margaret Sanger
“Must She Always Plead In Vain?” by legendary feminist cartoonist Lou Rogers, 1919
A Cinema History slams Weber’s influential 1916 film with the claim that “even more strongly than D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, this film defends the superiority of the white race… the film is in the first place defending eugenics.” It is true that Weber’s film invokes eugenics in her courtroom defense of birth control, but her case studies are of impoverished white families in circumstances unsuitable for children – abusive relationships, overcrowded homes and ailing mothers. Weber’s argument, “if the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out,” actually anticipates research by popular book Freakonomics. The irony of Where Are My Children? — that birth control and abortion are available to women who can afford children, but not to the poor — mirrors current realities in Ireland. Though the activism of Women on Web has reduced the number of Irish women driven overseas for terminations over the last decade from over 6,000 yearly to around 3,000, the law almost exclusively impacts institutionalized women, illegally trafficked women, asylum seekers, homeless women, hospitalized women and victims of reproductive coercion – that is, groups most at risk of sexual exploitation.
Like Weber’s choice of a white actor for the Tramp of Suspense, and her argument in Civilized and Savage that civilized values are independent of race, her choice of white families as negative case studies in Where Are My Children? dodges eugenics’ racial aspect. To understand why she is using eugenics, one must appreciate the philosophy’s widespread acceptance before its adoption by Nazism, shaping US debates on immigration and converting celebrities George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill in the UK. Weber covers her bases by invoking religion as well as pseudoscience, using Calvinist concepts of election as a metaphor for the “predestination” of planned parenthood, with cherubs representing pregnancies that were unfilmable at the time.
The prosecution of Margaret Sanger inspired the film’s Dr. Homer. A Cinema History questions Weber’s feminist cred by demanding, “Why did Lois Weber turn this positive female character into a man?” Why A Cinema History considers eugenicist Sanger “a positive female character” while criticizing Weber is a mystery, but here’s why Dr. Homer’s a man: the success of Where Are My Children? emboldened Weber to make The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, starring Weber herself as a woman on trial for advocating birth control. The film’s original title Is A Woman A Person? echoes Ireland’s #iamnotavessel. The Hand That Rocks The Cradle was censored across the Northeast and Midwest, and is now lost.
Alison Duer Miller, sarcastic suffragette bitch (in a good way)
The suppression of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle demonstrates the necessity of Weber’s patriarchal approach to Where Are My Children? (including remaining uncredited to obscure its female authorship), as classic deliberative rhetoric. Weber harnesses popular horror of abortion to present birth control as the only alternative to “stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of unwilling mothers.” The hero, Walton, fails to consult his wife on having children, driving her to secret abortions which render her unable to conceive, punishing him with permanent childlessness. In aDirty Dancingtwist (another female-authored blockbuster), the housekeeper’s daughter dies by tragically botched abortion, blamed on the wealthy “wolf” who seduced her without consequence.
Though A Cinema History claims the film shows “how moral values have shifted since the 1910s,” their interpretation of Weber’s frankly depicted unwilling mothers, as “refusing motherhood out of pure selfishness,” rather suggests little has changed. Where Are My Children? is not a free expression of Weber’s eugenic or anti-abortion views (whatever they were), it is calculated propaganda for an age when advocates of birth control were prosecuted by male juries, under obscenity laws created by legislatures for which women were not yet entitled to vote. Watching Where Are My Children?, you see our foremothers going to the mattresses for freedoms we (even me, thanks to Ireland’s Contraceptive Train) now take for granted. Despite its outdated imagery, or precisely because of how that imagery reflects Weber’s anticipated audience, Where Are My Children? is a milestone in the struggle for reproductive rights.
Lois Weber was only one of many actresses who took creative control over their films by moving into directing in the silent era. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge. Stay tuned!
Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female artists (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).
Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.
“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” –Malcolm X
Directed with great spirit and empathy by Barbara Kopple, the documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) is the story of an eventful strike in eastern Kentucky. The 13-month-long Brookside Strike (1973-4), as it was called, involved 180 miners from the Duke Power-owned Eastover Mining Company’s Brookside Mine in Harlan County. The film chronicles the miners’ fight to join the United Mine Workers of America, a move prohibited by the mining company when they refuse to sign the contract. Their hard struggle for representation, better wages and working conditions is lived and portrayed as a collective one. The men are joined on the picket lines by their wives who play a central role in the story. Their dramatic journey is understood and depicted as a deeply personal and political one.
In the first few minutes of Harlan County, U.S.A, the viewer is transported into the mines. We watch the men labor, and even have a bite to eat, in the grimy, confined spaces before emerging into the light once more. This is proper political film-making. Kopple takes us into the working men’s world. She sides with the miners and we are encouraged to do so too. She gives us a strong sense of how dangerous the job is. The men’s working conditions are appalling. The miners have had black lung for generations and suffer injuries for which they receive no compensation. The living conditions the workers endure are shameful too. Their houses don’t have indoor plumbing and running water. We see one miner’s wife wash her child in a tin bucket. Kopple’s documentation of these inexcusable living conditions may shock both American and non-American audiences watching today- as they, no doubt, must have done in 1976. U.S. popular culture- particularly Hollywood- does such a good job concealing American poverty that when audiences see it, it always comes as a jolt. This is, perhaps, even the case for people who have few illusions about the American Dream. There are, of course, reminders now and again. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, for example, revealed to the world disturbing truths about US economic inequality.
Lois Scott
Numbers cited in Harlan County, U.S.A. tell an outrageous tale: coal company profits in 1975 rose 170 percent while workers’ wages rose only 4 percent. As U.M.W. organizer Houston Elmore explains, the miners are victims of a “feudal system.” The story of Harlan County, U.S.A. is one of struggle and resistance to power. The strike rejuvenates and organizes them. It is gruelling, perilous fight too. When they are not being arrested and jailed, they are being intimidated, assaulted and shot at by mining company thugs. Kopple is always with them recording their struggle. At one frightening night-time picket, her camera is attacked. The workers begin to arm themselves too. Tragedy finally strikes when a young miner is murdered. The company soon concedes and the strike ends. While the story of the strike may be a stirring one, and the workers secure their right to unionize, there is neither a neat nor fairytale ending. Some workers are happy with their pay but others express disappointment about their contract. Union compromises like the no-strike clause indicate that the struggle for miners’ rights will continue.
Into the Mines
The women of the community play an essential, dynamic role during the strike. As with the men, the struggle strengthens and politicizes them. They join the picket lines too, and block the roads with their bodies to prevent the scabs from getting through to the mines. The women are fully aware of what they are up against. One addresses a judge at court: “You say the laws were made for us. The laws are not made for the working people in this country…The law was made for people like Carl Horn.” Carl Horn was the president of Duke Power at the time. Although the women are not entirely immune from letting personal crap get in the way, they are focused and determined. They are, in fact, incredibly strong. An older lady encourages them to not back down as backing down would mean a return to the dark, hungry days of the 30s. “If I get shot, they can’t shoot the union out of me,” she says. The women are also intimated, assaulted and shot at. The film rightly focuses on the collective but the community does have its characters. The most charismatic woman among them is perhaps organizer Lois Scott. Both an inspiration and a badass, Lois seems frightened of very little in life.
The Women of Harlan County
What Norman Yarborough, President of the Eastover Mining Company, says about the miners’ wives at a press conference is extremely revealing. When asked about their role, Yarborough smiles in a patronizing, good-old-boy fashion before conceding that they have played “a big role.” He goes on to say that their activities disturb him: “I would hate to think that my wife had played this kind of role….there’s been some conduct that I don’t think that our American women have to revert to.” Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.
The numerous songs featured in the documentary illustrate the central role music plays in their lives of the mining community. They chronicle the history of Harlan as they rouse and unify its people. The most memorable is “Which Side Are You On?.” Widely recognised as one of the great protest songs of the 20th century, this anthem to worker’s rights was penned by activist, folk song writer, and poet, Florence Reece. A daughter and wife of miners, Reese penned “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan strike of 1931. The great woman herself is featured in Harlan County, U.S.A. singing her iconic song at a strike rally.
A Company Thug
The documentary focuses on the 1973 strike in Bloody Harlan but it also manifests an understanding of labor history. The miners, like any other exploited group, remember what was done to them decades before. Kopple connects the past to the present through powerful interviews with older residents, film footage and stills. Remembering is essential work, especially in a country where the silencing of historic abuses has always been routine. As writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Harlan County, U.S.A. is an extremely detailed, multi-layered film. The documentation of other labor-related events and struggles deepen our understanding of the time. Kopple documents leadership challenges and reforms in the union in the early seventies, the extraordinary story of the Mafia-style hit of United Mine Workers President Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter by President W.A. Boyle in 1969, as well as the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia mine explosion, a tragedy which killed 78 men.
Harlan County U.S.A.
Kopple gives an in-depth portrait of the men and women of the mining community of Harlan County as well as a gripping account of the strike that transforms them. She never patronizes the people of Harlan and she can never be accused of exploitative class voyeurism. From the very start, she plunges the viewer into the life of the community, and we are with them every step of the way.
Florence Reece
Harlan County, U.S.A. is a stirring tribute to working-class kinship and activism. Although it is a story specifically rooted in the history of Harlan, as well as a very American story, the struggle for economic justice it documents is one that transcends regional and national borders. Koppel’s gutsy film-making was rewarded. Harlan County, U.S.A. won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards that year. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and it should be shown in every school in the United States.
This moment, of course, is true beauty. They are vulnerable with one another, and that erases the walls that we constantly build up between generations, religions, and genders.
“What is beauty?”
“I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question.”
Assal Ghawami’s short film, A Day in Eden, quietly reflects upon the question of beauty. The first images we see in the film are in a nursing home–an elderly man in a wheelchair, a nurse roughly scrubbing a resident. The workers seem harsh, and the residents seem disconnected. All this unfolds as the narrator asks, “What is beauty?”
A volunteer cellist, Fereshde (Briana Marin), who is unmistakably conventionally beautiful, is led into the room of Mr. Hammacher (Stewart Steinberg). The nurse tells Fereshde that he has no friends or family. Fereshde, in her headscarf, sits and takes out her cello to play for him. There is a crucifix hanging above his bed. The contrast of youth and beauty and age and decay is clear in every shot. But the concept of “beauty” is much deeper than the skin.
A Day in Eden: the contrast of the headscarf and crucifix
Mr. Hammacher is angry and combative, but finds himself in an incredibly vulnerable position (even more so than before) when he soils himself. “Please don’t tell,” he says to Fereshde. “I just want to go home.” They embrace, and she gently, with great care and compassion, changes his pants. “It’s OK,” she says.
This moment, of course, is true beauty. They are vulnerable with one another, and that erases the walls that we constantly build up between generations, religions, and genders.
While she was making the film, Ghawami wrote about her work advocating for the Elder Justice Act (which became law in 2010). She said,
“To help pass this piece of legislation I produced and edited more than 50 interviews with victims of elderly abuse that were presented to Congress in 2010. I hope that A Day in Eden will continue to shed light on the issue of elder abuse and inspire more people to fight for the rights of our elders.”
On its surface, A Day in Eden is not overtly an activist film. The residents seem neglected and the workers seem cold, and we need to question how normal that seems. The deep humanity with which Fereshde treats Mr. Hammacher transforms him. Ghawami’s message is clear, then: only through compassionate humanity can we heal and be healed.
A Day in Eden is beautiful not only in its message, but also in its cinematography, editing, soundtrack, and acting. Beauty can be defined in a thousand different subjective ways. But A Day in Eden’s beauty lies in its truth.
In honor of Henry’s wives and the #filmherstory campaign, here are six Royal women overdue the Hollywood treatment. To help with your visualizing, I’ll even toss in a pitch, director, and star.
Oh, not ANOTHER one
Damian Lewis smirks at me from a magazine rack under the caption “Damian Lewis Makes Henry VIII Sexy!” Déjà vu. Clearly, I’m missing the exciting difference between Wolf Hall‘s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII and Eric Bana’s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII inThe Other Boleyn Girl, which rewrote Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII in Fifty Shades of Tudors (OK, OK, Natalie Dormer did rock), which updated Richard Burton’s sinister-but-sexy Henry VIII inAnne of the Thousand Days, which critics agree was sexier than Charles Laughton’s Oscar-winning sinister-but-lovable Henry VIII inThe Private Life of Henry VIII. It would be easy to make this a feminist issue, considering that chronic womanizer Henry VIII executed two wives for infidelity, despite having won the right to divorce them. However, 18 actresses have immortalized Queen Elizabeth I on screen, earning Oscar nominations for portraying the woman who presided over campaigns of religious persecution and expansive colonization as heroic, or sinister-but-lovable at worst.
Nowadays, we theoretically agree that colonialism was a bad idea. Our conquering heroes have become conquering antiheroes. Yet antiheroes actually command empathy as effectively as heroes. A study by Chippewa researcher JoEllen Shively found that 60 percent of her Sioux focus group, viewing WesternThe Searchers, identified with John Wayne’s viciously racist (and misogynist) Ethan Edwards. While conflicted, “half breed” sidekick Martin Pawley is cited as evidence that the film is “morally complex,” according to Shively, “the Indians, like the Anglos, identified with the characters that the narrative structure tells them to identify with.” Tokens represent no-one, only their author’s urge to appear liberal, while vicariously identifying with conquerors. Meanwhile, today’s White Saviors admirably rescue natives from evil colonizers, thereby ironically reinforcing the colonialist assumption that white heroes should control the destinies of the colonized.
Women of the Third and Fourth World are doubly marginalized; they are the damsels-in-distress for the natives-in-distress for the White Savior: #filmheranticolonialstory. Here in Ireland, our anticolonial icons remain unfilmed, apart from Irish director Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, but entry to the EU Colonizer’s Club has entitled our Mr. Rhys Meyers to play colonial icon Henry VIII (progress!). So, while I would love to see Fiona Shaw as Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley, storming fortresses and sailing to London to confront Elizabeth I (thereby nailing the elusive Royal Bechdel), it matters more to invite audiences to identify with female leaders of the Third and Fourth Worlds. In honor of Henry’s wives and the #filmherstory campaign, here are six Royal women overdue the Hollywood treatment. To help with your visualizing, I’ll even toss in a pitch, director, and star.
Ava DuVernay’s Nzinga
The plot: Queen Nzinga Mbande fought and maneuvered in 17th century Angola. Serving as diplomatic envoy for her brother, Ndongo’s King, Nzinga personally negotiated a peace treaty with Portugal, sitting on a willing follower when denied an equal seat by their governor. Taking the throne in 1626, Nzinga forged alliances with African neighbors and Portugal’s Dutch rivals, scoring a victory against the Portuguese at the 1647 Battle of Kombi, and personally leading troops in battle until the age of 60. Building her base, Matamba, as a strategic trading port, the abolitionist Queen resisted the Atlantic slave trade and foreign rule throughout her lifetime, dying peacefully in 1663.
The star: Lupita Nyong’o is an internationally celebrated African star, noted for her regal style on the red carpet as well as her Oscar-winning acting. Playing an actual queen is the logical next step.
The director: Ava DuVernay’sSelma shows she can find interesting humanity in inspirational icons. In her hands, Nzinga could be a pragmatic political player, juggling conflicting alliances, more than a romantic ideal, and shed light on African colonial history from a fresh angle.
Ang Lee’s Cixi
The plot: Chinese historian Jung Chang‘s biography of Empress Dowager Cixi highlights her role in industrializing the country, opposing foreign rule, banning torture and foot-binding, educating women, establishing a free press and initiating China’s transition to parliamentary democracy. This semi-literate concubine forged a stable alliance with the Emperor’s wife (another Royal Bechdel), loved and lost a palace eunuch, whose execution was ordered by her own brother-in-law, faced down continual threats to her power and was driven by European encroachments to back the devastating Boxer rebellion. Not forgetting a Japanese invasion, a rebellious Emperor’s gay love affairs and Cixi’s final decision to prevent her reactionary adopted son from undoing her reforms by poisoning him. Drama!
The star: Michelle Yeoh should be in everything. From her delicate portrait of repressed longing in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to her commanding turn inThe Lady, Yeoh is the natural choice.
The director: With a heroine forced by convention to rule from behind a silk screen, this demands a director like Taiwan’s Ang Lee, who can make gripping drama out of restraint.
Deepa Mehta’s Lakshmibai
The plot: Though Rani (Queen) Lakshmibai was the heroine of India’s first technicolor epic, 1956’s Jhansi Ki Rani, she deserves Hollywood stardom and a grittier reboot. After her Maharajah husband died, Lakshmibai’s claim to rule, as regent for her adopted son, was denied by the British East India Company to justify their annexation of her state, Jhansi. Learning martial arts in childhood, Lakshmibai became a major leader of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, training women to fight in her ranks. Her role in a mutiny that massacred British forces at Jhansi’s fort remains unclear. Fighting off invasions by two neighboring rajas, her city finally fell to British heavy artillery. Lakshmibai fled in male disguise with her infant son, joined the rebel army of Tatya Tope and died fighting in the battle of Gwalior.
The star: Shriya Saran, who played Parvati in Mehta’sMidnight Children, showed the determination to prepare for her role by working for two months in Mumbai’s slums, and has an athletic body trained in Kathak and Rajasthani dance, with the striking beauty that even her British enemies admired in Lakshmibai.
The director:Deepa Mehta has tackled epic narratives of India’s Partition inEarth, taboo sexuality inFire, the cruel treatment of widows in Water, and the diaspora experience in Heaven on Earth, but never explored British colonial rule. Like Sam Mendes directing Skyfall, putting Mehta in charge of an action epic could bring psychological depth to its high-octane clashes. Lakshmibai is so iconic in India that she is almost saintly, but Mehta has the guts to give her human flaws and delve into the brutal dilemmas of warfare.
Shonda Rhimes’ Ranavalona
The plot: “I will rule here, to the good fortune of my people and the glory of my name!” Ranavalona I has been labelled the “Mad Queen of Madagascar” for overseeing religious persecutions, inquisitions under torture and sweeping purges of political enemies, just like sinister-but-supposedly-sexily-sane Henry VIII. Rising from a commoner’s background, marrying the king and seizing absolute power on his death in a masterful coup, Ranavalona murdered the father of her child for his infidelity (*cough* Henry VIII), and harnessed French lover Jean Laborde to oversee Madagascar’s industrial revolution. Her later years were marked by excess, with numerous Malagasy dying to construct a road for her buffalo hunt, but Ranavalona foiled all plots to overthrow her (including ex-lover Laborde’s) and kept Madagascar free from colonial rule. There was method in her madness.
The star: Angela Bassett’s Emmy-nominated voodoo queen, Marie Laveau inAmerican Horror Story: Coven, shows she can be commanding, scary and sympathetic in turn. Ranavalona is the role she was born for.
The showrunner: Ranavalona’s journey to the dark side deserves a Tudors-style series to fully develop. InScandal and How To Get Away With Murder, Shonda Rhimes has proved that she relishes antiheroines and moral ambiguity. Ranavalona would take Rhimes into the lush historical epic, too long monopolized by white royalty.
Steve McQueen’s Nanye-hi
The plot: After snatching the rifle of her dead husband and rallying Cherokee warriors against their Creek rivals to win the 1755 Battle of Taliwa, Nanye-hi was elected Ghighau (Beloved Woman), heading the Women’s Council and sitting on the Council of Chiefs (OK, the Cherokee were too advanced to technically have royalty, cut me a break). Nanye-hi, also called “Nancy Ward” after marrying settler Bryant Ward, was a political moderate juggling extreme pressures, alerting settlers to Cherokee plans for a massacre, saving a white woman from burning at the stake and personally negotiating the peace treaty of 1781, but strongly opposing the sale of Cherokee lands and petitioning against plans for removal, which would culminate in the Trail of Tears after her death. Nanye-hi would showcase Indigenous traditions of “petticoat government” that inspired the first suffragettes, within a tense drama of compromise and resistance.
The star: If you’ve seen her powerful performance in Blackstone (lucky American readers can catch up on hulu), you know Michelle Thrush should be in everything that does not already star Michelle Yeoh (actually, I just had a great idea for a buddy cop movie). She’s a natural choice to capture the strain of Nanye-hi’s political conflicts.
The director: I haven’t yet seen Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, so I can’t suggest any Native American women to direct. However, Steve McQueen’s treatment of the Irish Troubles in Hunger, and American slavery in12 Years A Slave, prove the British director is unafraid to tackle controversial history with an outsider’s fresh eye. Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar, for her first major film role, also shows his talent at coaxing raw performances from his actresses. Disney’s Pocahontas this would not be.
Timur Bekmambetov’s Khutulun
The plot: Mongols were pretty imperial, what with the largest land empire in history. But Central Asia’s absorption into the Russian/Soviet sphere has made it invisible, with Sacha Baron Cohen selecting Kazakhstan for Borat because “it was a country that no one had heard anything about” despite being the ninth largest in the world and launching the first man into space. Played by the physically slight Korean actress Claudia Kim, as a supporting character in Netflix’sMarco Polo, champion wrestler Khutulun deserves solo stardom. Excelling in battles against the armies of her cousin Kublai Khan, this Mongolian princess demanded that suitors beat her in wrestling, or forfeit 100 horses. She acquired 10,000 horses before making a politically strategic match of her own choosing. Nominated for khanship after her father’s death, Khutulun reportedly backed her brother Orus’ bid in exchange for being appointed Commander-in-Chief of his army.
The star:Mongol actress Khulan Chuluun was mostly stuck in the love interest role, but showed flashes of stubborn spirit. With a director like Bekmambetov, known for making action heroes of character actors like James McAvoy, could she train up and become an icon?
The director: Kazak director Bekmambetov’s talent for tongue-in-cheek, inventive action would be perfect for the unbelievable legends that have grown up around Khutulun. Witness his wild portrait of his namesake, Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane (Timur) in the opening ofDay Watch. He’s also a great director of women, from Galina Tyunina’s scene-stealing Olga to Angelina Jolie’s tough-but-fair Fox in Wanted. Movie, please.
So, who would be your historical (anti)heroines? For the Soska Sisters to realize their dream to film Bathory? Michelle Rodriguez in Robert Rodriguez’sMalinche, as a punk survivor of sex trafficking who wants to watch the world burn? Gong Li as Zhang Yimou’s Wu Zetian? Kerry Washington in Fanta Régina Nacro’s Mama Yaa Asentewaa? Saoirse Ronan as a young Countess Markievicz for Juanita Wilson? Iman as Hatshepsut? Join the conversation – #filmherstory.
Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and memorizing lists of forgotten female leaders (Brigit McCone is an extremely dull conversationalist).
While Rory struggled with the myriad of concerns afforded to a main character: her love life, her future, her friendships and family, Lane’s biggest conflict was always her overbearing, uber-religious mother and to a lesser degree, her own Korean heritage. Being Korean is never posed as a positive thing for Lane, it is only a marker of difference.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.
When Gilmore Girls was on it never occurred to me how strange it was that doe-eyed, bookworm Rory was on odd choice for a main character. Rory always carried a book around in her purse and considered an ideal evening to be watching a movie with her mother and eating her weight in junk food; on any other show she’d be a nerd, but her best friend, Lane Kim was undeniably cool. Lane was in a rock band, Lane was a cheerleader, she had an encyclopedia knowledge of music and later, she lived in a virtual frat-house with her bandmates. But she wasn’t Rory, the town’s baby, the golden girl, Snow White. Lane appeared to be just as smart and well-read as Rory, but no one ever suggested Chilton or Yale could be options for her. Rory and her big blue eyes went off to conquer the world and Lane stayed back in Stars Hollow, a few blocks from where she’d grown up, still in her mother’s sphere of influence.
For most of the show’s run, Rory or her mother Lorelai, would have their A-plot adventures, navigating the strange world of wealth and classism their old money background and Rory’s acceptance to Chilton usher them into, while plots for supporting characters like Lane, Rory’s closest friend (besides her mother) since the first day of preschool, popped up occasionally. While Rory struggled with the myriad of concerns afforded to a main character, her love life, her future, her friendships and family, Lane’s biggest conflict was always her overbearing, uber-religious mother and to a lesser degree, her own Korean heritage.
Being Korean is never posed as a positive thing for Lane (played by Japanese American actress Keiko Agena), it is only a marker of difference. Besides Michel, the flamboyant Celine Dion-loving inn concierge, who is Black, there are no other memorable minority characters in the series besides Lane and her mother. Though she is given her share of witty lines and pop culture references, Lane is the token minority best friend who has quirky hobbies, such as obsessively collecting CDs and hiding music and books her mother wouldn’t approve of under her floorboards. Once, when she believes she is being shipped off to Korea with a giant suitcase and a one-way ticket, the unseen idea of Korea, a far away land full of unknown relatives and unfamiliar culture so different from her American identity, is posed as a punishment and a threat.
In the first few seasons, her major hurdle is her mother’s insistence that she only date nice Korean boys, preferably future doctors. In one episode, she finds herself interested in a Korean boy who attends Chilton with Rory and her attraction to him becomes a minor identity crisis, that she handled by sneaking around and acting as if he was a boy her mother would not approve of. The relationship quickly ended before it had really begun because of Lane’s fixation on her mother’s approval, and her often pointless rebellion against her. In a later plot line, Lane discovered another young Korean boy, who she described to Rory as “the male me”, as he was forced to keep his relationship with a white girl secret from his mother. At the time, Lane was dating a white boy ( Adam Brody , who left Gilmore Girls to make his name in The OC), they made a deal to pretend they were dating each other.
If Lane is used as a foil to Rory, Lane’s mother, who is only ever referred to as Mrs. Kim (Emily Kuroda), is contrasted with Lorelai. Lorelai is young and fun, while Mrs. Kim is austere and unyielding; if the show’s thesis is that Lorelai’s parenting style, acting as best friends instead of mother and daughter, is successful and enviable, we can only infer we are meant to see Mrs. Kim’s authoritarian parenting as failing her child. Though her character is given several humanizing moments throughout the series’s run, she retains cartoonish characteristics (notably in seven seasons, she is never given a first name), though this is common among the denizens of Stars Hollow. She talks fast and brusque, “barking” out orders in her heavy accent, scaring and dominating other adults, and single handedly controls Lane’s life, like a less ambitious “Tiger Mom.” Her idea of the life Lane can have is small: attend a religious college, marry a Korean doctor and have children. It’s a life not unlike her own.
Though early seasons hint that there is a Mr. Kim living with Lane and her mother, just offscreen, gradually these hints peter out and Mrs. Kim is left in a strange netherland: She mistrusts unmarried women and considers herself to be married, yet she doesn’t seem to be divorced or widowed. Like Lorelai, she is, or at least acts as, a single mother and along with her dominance, this masculinizes her.
Meanwhile Lane is closer to the stereotype of Asian women as submissive. Though she attempts to be rebellious and independent, Lane’s worldview has been shaped by the mother whose shadow she lives in. As Gilmore Girls began with the tension of whether or not Rory would repeat her mother’s mistakes, sex was always loaded territory in the show. Though Rory is able to grow into an outgoing, sex positive woman, thanks to Lorelai’s example, Lane is never able to enjoy sex. She believes her mother has somehow gotten into her head, convincing her subconscious that she had to wait until marriage to have sex, even though her conscious mind has not made this choice. On her wedding day, she learns that Mrs. Kim believes she is lucky because she only “had” to have sex once in her life, which produced Lane. Likewise, Lane becomes pregnant from her first, grossly unsatisfying sexual encounter.
As a friend, Lane is also subservient to Rory, though part of this is the nature of her role as a supporting character. Rarely does she get mad at Rory for going off to a fancy new school, leaving her at Stars Hollow High, frequently referred to as a nowhere school which prepares students only for trades and sales. Lane is forced to live the life Rory would have lived if not for her rich grandparents’ patronage.
Part of Rory’s new life are her countless new friends, classmates roommates and colleagues (mostly notably frenemy cum BFF Paris Geller), who often seem closer to her than Lane. Even if Lane is Rory’s closest friend, Lorelai is always her best friend, the person she cares about and understands better than anyone else. In contrast, Lane only has her music and she accepts this.
Besides being the only non-white character whose background we are given in detail, Mrs. Kim is also the only religious character, thus her Asian-ness is inexplicably tied to her religiousness, as a Seventh Day Adventist. Her church appears to be mainly Korean and Korean food and instruments are major parts of their gatherings. Though religion is a major source of conflict between Lane and Mrs. Kim, it also facilitates an understanding when Mrs. Kim’s mother comes to attend Lane’s wedding. The grandmother is a strict Buddhist who is unaware that her daughter is a Christian, forcing her to hide her bibles and crosses under the same floorboards where Lane hid her music. Lane is finally able to understand her mother though this rebellion, her Christianity becomes as subversive as Lane’s rock and roll.
Though Lane’s Korean identity only ever appears to be a source of discomfort, by the series’ end she seems to have made an offscreen peace with her heritage, as she names one of her twins Kwan.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
Moving away from the Bollywood style masala and dancing-around-the-trees numbers, this film focuses on the real-life issue of the position of women in the domestic and social spheres in India.
This guest post by Asma Sayed previously appeared at AwaaZ Magazine and appears here as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture. Cross-posted with permission.
English-Vinglish is a new addition to the increasing number of Indian crossover films—socially progressive films that can still be commercially successful on a global scale. Moving away from the Bollywood style masala and dancing-around-the-trees numbers, this film focuses on the real-life issue of the position of women in the domestic and social spheres in India. Traditionally, many Indian feminist filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Meera Nair, Gurinder Chadha and Aparna Sen have made films about subject matter generally not discussed in the mainstream cinema: domestic violence, prostitution and trafficking, sexuality, and women’s rights in general. While these filmmakers continue to direct films with new and varied focuses, it is also exciting to witness the new generation of female directors in India that includes Anusha Rizvi (Peepli Live), Kiran Rao (Dhobi Ghat) and now, Gauri Shinde (English-Vinglish), who are doing excellent work and bringing unconventional cinema and subject matter to audiences. In a country where women’s role in society is very complex—on one hand, there have been female presidents and prime ministers, and on the other, the society remains highly patriarchal and there are the growing concernsrelated to the imbalance in birth sex ratiosresulting from female foeticide—presenting women’s life experiences can be a daunting task.
In her debut film English-Vinglish, Gauri Shinde, the writer and director, takes charge of the issue of women’s role in a society still suffering from the colonial mindset where people’s worth is judged on the base of their proficiency in English. Shashi (Sridevi), the protagonist of the film, is a wife and a mother, and also a good cook. She puts her culinary skills to work by starting a small home-based business selling “laddoos,” an Indian sweet. But Shashi’s knowledge of English is limited, and her tween daughter, the older of the two children in the family, and her husband Satish (Adil Hussain) continuously make fun of her linguistic incompetency. The daughter is embarrassed about her mother’s minimal knowledge of English and does not want Shashi to go to school with her as Shashi will not able to converse in English with other mothers or with the principal of the convent school. Satish is complicit in deriding Shashi’s weaknesses. Shashi feels justifiably belittled and insecure. Nonetheless, despite the lack of appreciation that her family shows toward her, Shashi never sways in performing her motherly and wifely duties. As part of a patriarchal system that she doesn’t explicitly question, she accepts that Satish expects her to have his breakfast ready in the morning, and that shebe ready to warm his bed by night. As such, Shashi spends her time doing all the household chores and running her small business, and never finds a moment for herself.
Incidentally, performing another of her traditional roles, Shashi has to travel to America alone to help her sister plan her daughter’s wedding. Once in America, she reads a billboard advertising English classes that promise fluency in four weeks. Shashi starts attending classes. What follows is reminiscent of the 1970s BBC sitcom Mind Your Language and the follow-up Indian Hindi sitcom titled Zabaan Sambhalke. Shashi’s classmates are from various ethnicities and nationalities; all of them are struggling with their language skills and ultimately become good friends as they learn English. One of her classmates, a Frenchman, Laurent (Mehdi Nebbou), falls in love with Shashi. As the film progresses, Shashi’s husband and children come to Manhattan to attend the wedding. Shashi, who has been making all the arrangements for the wedding, makes laddoos for the party. When Satish makes the statement that —“My wife was born to make laddoos”—Shashi is supported by her niece who reminds Shashi that she is capable of much more than laddoo-making and is far more competent than her husband perceives her to be. At the wedding party, Shashi gives a speech—yes, in English. She reminds the couple getting married, as well as her husband and daughter, of the value of family and the need to support one another without being “judgmental” – a word Shashi has picked up from one of the many English films she has watched to learn the language. After her speech, both Satish and their daughter apologize to Shashi for their ill-manners. However, this repentanceemanates only after Shashi has learned English and in so doing learned her own self-worth. Shashi comes to appreciate herself, her work and her identity, and becomes a more confident woman.
The film is certainly entertaining and well-made. The plot is tight-knit and gripping. The film attempts to showcase the everyday reality of women’s position in male-controlled Indian society. But, ultimately, the message that Shashi imparts in her speech is very conventional.When I watched the movie the first time, I was reminded of an advertisement that I saw in Gujarati newspapers when I was growing up in India. The bold writing at the top of the advert read “modern but good mother.” The advert insisted that a mother who is modern enough to know the world around her would ensure that she used the product it advertised. I never got over the conjunction “but” in that caption. The word posed modernity and motherhood as antithetical – any modern woman had to make a special attempt to simultaneously be a “good” mother. The institution of motherhood is much glamorized in contemporary societies in that a woman is deemed incomplete if she is unwilling or unable to conceive. Motherhood is still considered a central tenet of female identity. And yet, in a changing neoliberal and patriarchal society people fail to see the value of women’s domestic chores including those related to motherhood, and as such mother-work is neither socially respected nor valued economically. This reality is reinforced at the end of the film for Shashi’s role does not change – she is still the same housewife and a doting mother – although one who can now speak English. Shashi’s speech about family values brings her right back to square one; thus, Shashi’s role is static. Therefore, the film does not suggest any radical transformation of women’s social roles. It merely demands from them a higher level of education that, while potentially personally fulfilling, is not intended to challenge their traditional roles and could be argued to be simply placing more pressure on women. Moreover, the audience does not get a glimpse into Shashi’s feelings for Laurent; when her niece questions her about Laurent, all that Shashi says is that she does not need love, but respect. Shashi thanks Laurent for making her feel special, but as a dedicated Indian wife, she is not allowed to have any feelings of her own, and she goes right back to the husband who didn’t appreciate her much – one is to be hopeful that he will be a changed person when they land in India off the airplane from America, but then, can the patriarchal ideologies that have been internalized over the years be forgotten that quickly? After all, following more than six decades of decolonization, India has not unlearned the hegemony of English.
The role of language has been debated continuously in the post-colonial world. While English came to countries such as India and Africa as a result of colonization, it has endured and, in India, now has a much stronger hold than during the colonial period. English has become a tool of what R. Radhakrishnan has called “cultural modernization.” However, English has been a contested language in post-colonial world at large. For instance, while Ngugi Wa Thing’o wrote that “language is a collective memory bank of people’s experience in history” and refused to write in English, Chinua Achebe declared that the language that the colonizers left behind belonged to him. While he decided to use it, he saw it as remade via appropriation: for the English he used had “to be new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Whether it is Standard English, or appropriated, favoring the language at the cost of indigenous languages is a political move and a culture-altering exercise.
One cannot deny that English has become a lingua franca in India, and that sadly, there is linguistic hierarchy in the nation with English as the ticket to upward mobility. Thus, the fact that in the film, Shashi proves her worth by learning English showcases India’s highly colonialist linguistic history. However, India’s women’s liberation movement can certainly do without adhering to such hegemonic ideologies. At one point in the film Shashi is ecstatic when she learns the word “entrepreneur” – she is told that she was an entrepreneur as she sold sweets. Suddenly, this English word gives new elevated meaning and value to her work, making her feel important and confident. She walks the streets of New York saying the word repeatedly. In showing Shashi’s success through her acquisition of English, Shinde fails to address other issues of a post-colonial nation. Many advertisements and mainstream films in India play on the insecurities of women; for instance, the fairness creams are a huge market in this country where women are always reminded by society and through these ads that dark-skinned women are somehow inferior. Similarly, in this case, those who lack the knowledge of English have to prove their worth by learning the language of the colonizers. In not moving away from a colonialist mind frame, Indians are fulfilling Lord Macaulay’s desire, expressed in his 1835 “Minute on Education,” “to form a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions . . . .” It is an irony that in a country which has its own richness of multiple languages, the hegemony of English has outlasted British colonial times.
Ultimately the film is about an Indian woman’s moral and family values – Shashi shows no interest in Laurent, the Frenchman who loves her, nor does she even once abandon her saree and mangal sutra –signifiers of a married Hindu woman – when in America. At the end, Shashi is just an English-speaking, sacrificial Indian woman – not a woman who has awakened to her rights or to her own needs. Shashi’s confidence returns after she found acceptance by a Frenchman, and after her husband and daughter have found her worth enhanced due to her English speaking skills. This is a classic example of patriarchal and linguistic supremacy. Shashi depends on the approval of men to feel good about herself. She also proves her worth by learning English. One does wonder if a single woman speaking Marathi or Gujarati or Tamil or Telugu has anything to feel good about.
An entertaining crossover film, English-Vinglish fails to deliver the feminist message that it may have intended to bring forth. While in various interviews the director has demonstrated her awareness of British colonization and Indian people’s misplaced awe of white people, it is a shame that rather than showcasing the ridiculousness of racialized and colonial insecurities, the film ultimately fails to transmit a message of awareness. Instead this work falls prey to the same stereotypes the director appears to critique.
Dr. Asma Sayed teaches English, Communication Studies, and Women’s Studies in Canadian universities. She has published three books as well as several refereed articles and book chapters, on such topics as diaspora literature, Canadian comparative literature, Indian cinema, and women’s representation in cinema. She writes a film column for AwaaZ: Voices, a periodical in Kenya.
Pahuja sees the film as going beyond the issues of women’s rights; according to her, the film is about India, and what’s happening there, and the fear about the future as the culture of the country goes through extreme changes. She adds that, through the film, she would like to showcase the kind of “hatred being taught in the camps in the guise of patriotism.”
This guest post by Asma Sayed previously appeared at AwaaZ Magazine and appears here as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture. Cross-posted with permission.
“I hate [Mahatma] Gandhi; frankly speaking, I hate Gandhi,” declares Prachi, a 24-year-old young woman. “I am here to win [the Miss India title], and that’s my only goal,” says Ruhi, a 19-year-old. Indo- Canadian director Nisha Pahuja’s documentary film The World Before Her captures the worlds of these two young women representing many other women in contemporary India. The World Before Her is a thought-provoking, disturbing, and yet, compelling documentary that brings together the seemingly opposite worlds of Hindu nationalist ideologies and beauty pageants. Prachi and Ruhi denote dualistic faces of a country undergoing swift change. The documentary juxtaposes two female-dominated Indian communities: one is centered around the biannual camps organized by Durga Vahini, women’s wing of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu nationalist organization, and the other is the month-long preparatory training event leading up to the live broadcast of the Miss India beauty pageant.
The film was completed in 2012 and has been on the international film festival circuit in the interim, and won many awards, but its theatrical release in India in June 2014 coincides in ironic ways with the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2014. Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is known to be closely affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist group that operates on the principles of Hindutva. VHP, founded in 1964, is closely aligned with the RSS and functions under the umbrella of Sangh Parivar, a group of organizations dedicated to Hindu nationalist movement. In short, these are different groups that share similar ideologies and have strong ties to the current ruling party in India. Prime Minister Modi is famously known to have been an active member of the RSS since the age of 8.
Male training camps, called shakhas, organized by the youth wing of VHP/RSS, called Bajrang Dal, have existed for decades and have branches in India and abroad, and their activities have been largely known. By contrast, very little information has circulated about the female wing—Durga Vahini (Carrier of Durga)—which is a comparatively newer innovation with roots going back to 1991. Pahuja’s direction exposes this largely unknown female world that prepares women for traditional Hindu social roles as wives and mothers, but also for militia-style combat in defense of the Hindu nation, if necessary. Pahuja is the first filmmaker to have gained access to these exclusive camps organized by the Durga Vahini group. Her film is a courageous attempt to present the realities of extremist ideologies taught in the camps, and of linking them to the various events that have troubled India in the last decade and a half: the film shows footage of the Malegaon bombings, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, and VHP/RSS members consistently acting as morality police by violently ransacking bars to ensure girls and women do not drink, dance, and mingle with the opposite sex.
Girls attending the Durga Vahini camps are between the ages of 12 and 25. They follow a regimented training schedule that includes martial arts, physical fitness training, and lectures that remind them of their Hindu identity. They are instructed about the virtue of fighting against Muslims, Christians, and Westernization, all presented as the antithesis of Hindu nationalist ideals. The film captures a lecture where girls and young women are being taught that “Muslims and Christians are attacking our [Hindu] culture,” and that the people in caps and beards look like demons similar to those described in the ancient Hindu scriptures. They are told that it is not Gandhi’s non-violence that brought independence to India, but the sacrifice of thousands of Hindu martyrs.
Prachi, one of the strongest Durga Vahini female members, who with several years of experience in the camp, also acts as a leader to the next generation of campers, speaks out against beauty pageants, the second subject of the film, which, to her, represent Western decadence. Having herself attended more than 40 camps, Prachi has been inculcated into accepting the values that the camp organizers promote. Girls in the camp chant simultaneously “dudh mango kheer denge; Kashmir mango chir denge” – “if you ask for milk, we will give you rice pudding; if you ask for Kashmir, we will slit your throat,” referring to India’s long conflict with Pakistan over the Kashmir valley region. When a camper is asked if she has any Muslim friends, she replies, “I am very proud to say that I have no Muslim friends.” Prachi too declares that she is willing to build a bomb and blast it “if conditions call for it.”
On the other hand, Prachi’s father is eager to marry her off against her wish. He has no qualms admitting that he hits her, if necessary, to ensure that she obeys. He proudly mentions that when Prachi was a child he burned her leg with a hot iron rod. Prachi does not object; she believes it is his right as a parent. In a country where 750,000 girl fetuses are aborted every year and the statistics for female infanticide remain undocumented, Prachi is happy that her father let her live. She points out that “many traditional families kill a girl child. He let me live; that’s the best part,” she says.
Then again, in Mumbai, Pahuja cinematographically captures the daily activities of 20 young Miss India hopefuls. Their focus is dramatically different: filled with regimen–Botox injections, skin whitening treatments, catwalks, and diction training. This female world is one focused on glamour, on pleasing the male-dominated jury, and on preparing for the big break that will come with the title of Miss India. Many of the pageant’s participants aim for Bollywood screen-careers. In fact, many former winners have gone on to become famous Bollywood stars: Aishwarya Rai, Shusmita Sen, Priyanka Chopra and Lara Dutta, among others. However, the young women who perceive the Miss India pageant as a path to freedom, fame and equality, largely fail to note the irony of the situation as they are made to walk in front of juries in bikinis, or with their upper bodies covered under white sacks so that the jury members may assess the “beauty” of their legs: sexual objectification and conformity to traditional beauty paradigms is not the equivalent of personal freedom. The few who are aware, at all, of the problematic of their current situation, brush it off, considering it a small price to pay to achieve the stardom that awaits them. And, of course, that stardom will come at a cost, as well.
Pahuja’s camera follows Ruhi, one of the contestants from a lower-middle class family in a small town. Ruhi’s parents support her dream, and are keen to see her win the title. In many ways, Ruhi represents the dreams of a young generation of women in India. Pahuja also interviews Pooja Chopra, a former Miss India. Raised by a single mother, Chopra participated in the pageant in an attempt to prove herself to her father, who had wanted her mother to either kill her (after she was born) or give her up for adoption, as he did not want a girl child. Thus, the documentary beautifully mirrors the lives of different women in many ways, all of whom in one way or another, are attempting to prove their worth and their right to live, whether it is in taking up arms in defense of Hindu nationalism or succumbing to traditional ideals of worth equated with female beauty.
While these young girls and women are all attempting to empower themselves, their attempts are reflective of the inherently flawed options available to them. There is an innate sadness in these women’s attempts at either becoming part of a right wing fundamentalist group or using their bodies to showcase their worth. Neither of these efforts contribute to improving women’s condition and advancing women’s rights in patriarchal India, now troubled by a variety of issues including increasing gender tensions in a global world where women are, to greater and lesser degrees, aware that change is possible, if not quite within reach. However, the recent rise in gang rapes is a testament to the fact that India has a very long way to go before majority of women in India will be anywhere closer to gaining equal rights.
With Modi coming to power, it becomes increasingly important to be aware of the influence of groups such as VHP and RSS, and how they will sway the political rhetoric as well as women’s rights in India. In a recent interview with filmmaker Shazia Javed, Pahuja, speaking of the content of her film, said that “with the new government, people really need to know that these things exist . . . Now that the BJP and Modi are in power, we have no idea what is going to happen. But to me, it feels that these groups feel a certain kind of validation. They feel emboldened; there is a confidence now. So I think that the film reminds us that we can’t close our eyes. It reminds us that there is a potential for these movements to grow and that is a threat.” Pahuja sees the film as going beyond the issues of women’s rights; according to her, the film is about India, and what’s happening there, and the fear about the future as the culture of the country goes through extreme changes. She adds that, through the film, she would like to showcase the kind of “hatred being taught in the camps in the guise of patriotism.” Starting in October 2014, Pahuja has done grassroots screening of the film with women’s rights and human rights activists, and those who work in the area of communal harmony. The World Before Her, well researched and edited, is a welcome addition to social issue films.
Dr. Asma Sayed teaches English, Communication Studies, and Women’s Studies in Canadian universities. She has published three books as well as several refereed articles and book chapters, on such topics as diaspora literature, Canadian comparative literature, Indian cinema, and women’s representation in cinema. She writes a film column for AwaaZ: Voices, a periodical in Kenya.
Like ‘Chutney Popcorn,’ ‘Saving Face’ is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but ‘Pariah’ is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.
Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.
During writer-director Alice Wu’s 2004 romantic comedy Saving Faceone of the main women characters goes into a video store and looks at the “Chinese” shelf of DVDs: it’s The Joy Luck Club plus a whole lot of porn. In spite of East Asians making up an increasing part of the international film market (and American films increasing reliance on the rest of the world to make money at the box office), we still have hardly any mainstream films starring actresses of East Asian ancestry (or of any other Asian ancestry). Rinko Kinkuchi is a Japanese actress who has had success in Babel, Pacific Rim and most recently Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter and Lucy Liu has an established career, but we see relatively few Asian women stars in American films–and never more than one at a time.
Saving Face, which focuses on three Chinese American women (all of whom are also played by Chinese American actresses), came during what was, especially compared to more recent releases, a wave of films centered on people of color and their immigrant families (Bend It Like Beckham,The Namesake) along with some rom-com fluff which featured queer protagonists (Imagine Me and Youand a litany of forgettable movies on the LGBT film festival circuit). Like Chutney Popcorn, Saving Face is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but Pariah is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.
Michelle Krusiec as Wil
The characters of Saving Face don’t so much subvert stereotypes as present another side to them. Wil (short for Wilhelmina, played by Michelle Krusiec) is a high-achieving second-generation New York City surgical resident–who is also queer. Wil’s mother, Hwei-Lan Gao–mostly referred to as “Ma” (played by Joan Chen)–is the scolding, guilt-inducing first-generation immigrant, but also stunningly beautiful, and, at 48, pregnant and single. Wil’s girlfriend Vivian (Lynn Chen) has a career as a ballerina which, because it’s part of the classical arts, her doctor father approves of–but what she really loves is modern dance.
Even though Wil is the main character, she’s the least interesting of the three, though, refreshingly, she is one of the few women protagonists in film who wears pants and men’s cut shirts and jerseys throughout, with no “makeover” scene. We all know women, of every sexual orientation, who wear those clothes every day, but actresses in movies and TV seem to sport skirts and cleavage for every occasion. Wil also wears her long hair in a ponytail, not an unusual look for a busy medical resident, but one not usually seen on women main characters in movies even those doing jobs or activities (like fighting bad guys) that make loose, long hair impractical.
When Wil’s grandparents find out her long-widowed mother is pregnant they throw her out of their house in Flushing, Queens. The Chinese American community there also ostracize her, so, in a sitcom-like scenario she comes to live with Wil. As in most American films (Obvious Child is one of the few exceptions), even though the pregnancy is unplanned and disrupts her living situation and social standing, no one ever offers abortion as a solution, though it’s a procedure one out of three American women will have during her reproductive lifetime.
“Ma” is sad and shaken, but not enough to keep her from redecorating the apartment with a lot of red as well as blaring Chinese devotional music while she meditates. Women characters who are almost 50 hardly ever get this much complexity and screen time but giving it to a working-class (her job is at a hair salon), first-generation immigrant who is also sexy and vulnerable is unheard of. Joan Chen is so good in the role, even the queer supremacist in me wishes the film were more about her than her comparatively dull daughter.
Lynn Chen as Vivian
Gorgeous, flirty Vivian is an Asian American woman we don’t often see in films, a queer, confident femme. She tells Wil she’d like to meet her mother, something that Wil at first says, will never happen. But Vivian convinces her, “Just tell her I’m a friend. A nice Chinese girl….I’ll fake it.”
We see Wu teasing Chinese American stereotypes throughout the film. When her mother is about to go an a date, trying to find a husband before the baby is born, Wil tells her to change out of the matronly black dress she’s wearing. Wil holds up another of her mother’s dresses, but her mother dismisses it, saying “Chinese people cannot wear yellow.” When Wil gives her mother a questioning look she says (in English), “On sale.” We also see anti-Black sentiment isn’t confined to white people with some of the remarks Wil’s mother makes about Wil’s Black neighbor Jay (Ato Essandoh)–and with this character we also see that an Asian-American screenwriter can use Black characters as tokens the same way white screenwriters do.
Joan Chen as “Ma”
In a lot of ways the film feels like it takes place earlier than just a little over a decade ago and not just because of its landline telephones. Eleven years of queer rights legislation and legal marriage in parts of the US (now a reality in a majority of states) make queer people a lot less likely to be closeted to their own immediate families (even conservative, immigrant ones), so Wil’s behavior around her mother seems as alien to us as the time before (most) everyone had a smartphone. Later we find out that Wil isn’t closeted, that her mother knows, but is in denial. In contrast, Vivian’s mother, from the same first-generation immigrant community (but also somewhat ostracized because she’s divorced) knows that her daughter is dating Wil and doesn’t have a problem with it. She casually leaves a message on the answering machine–which the couple hear while they have sex, “Did Wil show up? Thought you may wanna talk after she leaves. Oh, maybe she’s still there? OK. Bye.”
Of course in the template for this kind of film even the most entrenched homophobia never lasts long. Nothing serious ever does: when a minor character dies, the mourning is so short-lived I expected someone to tell us the death had been a misunderstanding. The ending of Saving Face reminded me of Big Edenfrom 2000 where the denizens of a small town in the Montana all gather around an interracial male couple slow-dancing at the end and no one looks at them with anything less than benevolence–when at least some of these folks would probably be Ted Cruz supporters. But instant queer acceptance in small, sheltered communities might not be any more unlikely than a world where American movie executives continue to ignore the people who make up more and more of their audience.
As I write this, I’m approaching the mid-point of a crowdfunding campaign for my second film. It’s going slower than the first, and I’ve got the stomach pain and canker sores to prove it (thanks for talking about yours, Tina Fey. It makes me feel slightly less gross about mine). And I’m fearful. I have also had, at one time or another, the following thoughts on the making of this film:
You’re being selfish. Self indulgent. No one will like it. There’s a REASON you’re still scratching to get by. You’re just not good enough. Or pretty enough. Or talented enough. Did we mention that thing about your thighs being too fat? No one will back this project. And you’ll look like an idiot. With fat thighs. And you’ll never work again.
This is a guest post by Kimberly Dilts.
As I write this, I’m approaching the mid-point of a crowdfunding campaign for my second film. It’s going slower than the first, and I’ve got the stomach pain and canker sores to prove it (thanks for talking about yours, Tina Fey. It makes me feel slightly less gross about mine). And I’m fearful. I have also had, at one time or another, the following thoughts on the making of this film:
You’re being selfish. Self indulgent. No one will like it. There’s a REASON you’re still scratching to get by. You’re just not good enough. Or pretty enough. Or talented enough. Did we mention that thing about your thighs being too fat? No one will back this project. And you’ll look like an idiot. With fat thighs. And you’ll never work again.
Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t give a fuck about your fear.
Ok, enough, you get the idea. It sucks. Our fear fucking SUCKS. It masks itself as something helpful—something that will keep us safe and warm and wound-free. It wants us to not rock the boat. To be comfortable. To stay where we are. But not for a SECOND are we actually safe, comfortable or wound-free when we listen to our fear. And you know what? As Elizabeth Gilbert said in her extraordinary essay, our fear is boring.
So you know what? I don’t give a FUCK. I’m running toward my fear.
What brought me to this radical place?
You know who else doesn’t give a fuck about your fear? Tina Fey, Jill Soloway, and Ava DuVernay.
2) Understanding that I’m not alone. There are women in every corner of this industry running toward their fear every day, and I found some of them. And like the badass tribe that they are, they showed me my own ferocity.
3) Knowing in my bones that I want to be part of the changing of the guard in Hollywood. Straight white men have written and directed many—most—of my favorite films. That’s the history of who has gotten to speak, and I’d like to be part of the writing of the future where we ALL get to.
4) Understanding that I DESERVE a place at the table, but that I have to fight for it. No one is going to hand it to me, as much as this straight-A student wants that validation so very badly.
And most importantly,
5) The concept of “Why not?” as my husband said, when I asked him for the hundredth time if he really really thought we should dive in to making another film. I came to realize that fear was quite literally the ONLY thing holding me back. And I am not a chickenshit. I am happy to be looked upon as crazy, foolish, and ridiculous, but not as fertilizer.
F these guys.
For better or worse, I’ve done most of my learning as a human being in uncomfortable circumstances—and I’d venture a guess that you have too. So, if we want change, both within ourselves and within our industry, we have to be willing to get uncomfortable—to expand so much that the fear can just float right through us, like those blonde dreadlocked twins in the second Matrix movie (sorry, that’s the image that came to mind–feel free to substitute… Judi Dench in the Pitch Black sequel? The ghost train through Winston in GB2? Beans through your intestinal tract? …I may not be helping).
The film that I’m funding is about artists, and I’m finding that it is NOT going to be for everyone. It pushes some buttons, both for artists themselves and, I suspect, for the cultural critics who look at young artists with both the disdain and envy (judgment?) of age. It’s a comedy, which is certainly a matter of taste, and it touches on, among other things, women who choose to remain childless, global warming, eating disorders, and the collapse of the creative class. My husband had someone tell him to his face that he won’t see it because he’s “living it, why would I want to see it?” Didn’t matter when he explained it was a comedy. Dude wasn’t into it.
This border collie will eat your fear for BREAKFAST.
But you know what? Fuck it. Uncomfortable circumstances: I’m running at you, too.
Last week, the Executive Producer of one of our projects had me and my husband over for lunch. A recent cancer survivor, this woman had just left behind an impressive career as a fashion executive to pursue a passion project (a film we’re working on together), and to take on an entirely new career. She told us she’d never really thought about her retirement portfolio because it was scary—money brought up fear for her. And when cancer and a stroke temporarily slowed her down, she took stock of her situation and realized she was no longer passionate about her work, and that her retirement fund could have done so much better if she had just learned a little bit about how it all works when she was younger… So now she’s training, in her 60s, for a new career advising young women on how to invest wisely. She’s not running toward what she fears, she is sprinting at it, grinning like a puppy, ready to pounce on it and chew-love it to PIECES. It’s an incredible sight to behold.
*this box is empty.
So right now, when I’m scared, I think of her. I think of my mother who raised three children while working two jobs. I think of all the other women fighting the good fight in this industry—and of the women around the world living in desperate situations, denied the most basic of human rights. I think of my marvelously supportive husband, and of the million good things that are easy and good and delicious in this life, and I just have no more room for–not a single f#ck to give about–my fear.
Kimberly Dilts is a Los Angeles-based writer/producer/performer currently crowdfunding her second feature film, Auld Lang Syne, on Seed&Spark. The film is being written, directed, shot, and produced by women. She has worked off-broadway, at a hedge fund, in Haiti, and in TV and film, sometimes at the same time. Special skills include dreaming, playing the fool, and passing the Bechdel Test.
Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.
Over 20 years ago I was doing similar work to Myers-Powell’s, distributing condoms and talking with sex workers who worked the streets in my city. The emphasis at that job was safer sex education and HIV testing, but sometimes our clients needed more. One woman asked for and received a ride to detox (though we found out she left the next morning) and after we handed a scared-looking, visibly pregnant woman our condoms and information the driver did a U-turn and put a card for a treatment center (where our outreach van had its office) into her hand. Months afterward we saw that she had become one of the clients there.
When I hear debates about sex work and human trafficking these days I think of that woman and realize neither side would have done her much good. Some “empowered” sex workers would have thought her exploitation and drug addiction–along with the homelessness and violence she might have faced after leaving sex work, weren’t any of their concern. And worldwide efforts to stop “human trafficking” often assume no woman would willingly choose to do sex work; though people have no trouble understanding the difference in other kinds of human trafficking–a woman who works for wages as a maid and is free to quit is different from a maid who never receives her pay and is beaten if she tries to leave. They also ignore the danger law enforcement poses to sex workers themselves. Raids and arrests are, unsurprisingly, not very effective forms of outreach.
Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.
“That’s why I hardly ever come out here,” says the young woman, not entirely convincingly.
Myers-Powell asks her to have coffee, and we see the two, throughout the film, develop a relationship. When I saw Dreamcatcher at the opening night of the recent Athena Film Festival, Myers-Powell told the audience after the screening, “The first time I ask them: what do they want? And probably nobody has ever asked them that before.”
We see the cycle of sexual exploitation of some of these women starts in childhood. In a school-based “at-risk” group of girls that Myers-Powell facilitates, every girl in the room includes rape at an early age, often by someone in her own household, as part of her history, just as Myers-Powell does. When we see her speaking to another group she says, “I’m here to tell each and every one of you today,” and here her face softens, “it is not your fault.”
Myers-Powell has also worked to clear her own criminal record, as well as that of other women, successfully arguing that trafficking shouldn’t result in its survivors being charged with breaking the law. When she announces to the group that she no longer has a record she does a little dance in celebration.
Dreamcatcher is the foundation Myers-Powell’s co-founded; she told the audience at Athena that she started it in 2000, with no money, doing the outreach with her friend in a Ford Focus. Myers-Powell is glamorous (at one point she shows off her impressive wig collection), perceptive, and witty (at Athena she mentioned being directed to “‘social services,’ who are never very social”), but most striking is her unfailing kindness to the women and girls she encounters in the film, including parents we in the audience might judge more harshly. Even when she finds out one girl is making the mistake she herself has made, becoming pregnant at a very young age, Myers-Powell, without a wig or makeup, talking on the phone from her bedroom, is more resigned and sad than angry, but still not defeated.
Brenda and the biological mother of her young son
When I worked in human services, many of the people who worked alongside me were, after their own troubled histories, trying to “give back,” but most of them couldn’t hide their frustration and disappointment with clients, like a mother who is hardest on the child who reminds her of herself at that age. Myers-Powell seems to bring none of this baggage to her work . When she speaks to an obviously impaired in-law (whose young son she is raising) and tells her how much she enjoys talking together when the woman is not high, she doesn’t have any edge in her voice. She means it.
In her remarks after the film, Myers-Powell said that she uses her experience to help others by asking herself, “What would’ve saved me?” She credited the people who had been kind to her when she was hospitalized (after a john beat her up and dragged her body from a car, scraping the skin off her face): “A lady doctor…would kick it with me every day. She said, ‘You’re funny. You’re smart. You’re beautiful,’ And I knew I wasn’t beautiful.”
When she got out of the hospital she went to Genesis House, of which she said, “It was a home…And I hadn’t had a home in years…I spent two years there and when I left I was a diva. I was ready for the world.” Now she’s trying to give others the same chance.
In a lot of ways the women and girls Myers-Powell does outreach to are the ones we, as a culture, pay the least attention to: they’re poor, often victims of abuse and usually Black or Latina. I couldn’t help noticing at the fancy, opening-night screening how many people around me, mostly men, tried to distract themselves from the women and girls in the film, either by talking loudly or, in one extreme case, showing a video on his phone to his seatmates, even after I told him more than once, through gritted teeth, to stop doing so. Let’s hope this film encourages others to not just look the other way.
Dreamcatcher will be on Showtime next Friday, March 27, 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be On Demand March 28 – May 22
I don’t necessarily recommend Mae West’s narcissistic seductress as a role model for all women, but I strongly recommend her as Laverne Cox’s definition of a “possibility model”; Mae is a reminder that we define our own roles and culture is created partly by our consent.
PUA (pick-up artistry) is a strange beast. Its core technique relies on teaching men to dehumanize women as “targets” in order to numb themselves to rejection, making it psychologically easier to approach larger numbers of women and therefore, statistically, to enjoy greater sexual success, though at the cost of emotional connection. PUA thus represents the art of maximizing sexual success by minimizing sexual satisfaction. Mae West’s 1978 film Sextette is also a strange beast, and a fascinating film. When I say that it’s fascinating, I don’t mean to suggest that it’s good. Sextette is a car crash of a film, a head-on collision between a lavish MGM musical and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It is a perfect candidate for interactive midnight screenings and ironic appreciation, which should be mandatory at every festival of women’s film.
The usual responses of male reviewers label Mae West as “delusional” and “grotesque” for her iron conviction in her own seductive power at the age of 84 (minimum). West was Billy Wilder’s original inspiration for the aging, predatory narcissist Norma Desmond inSunset Blvd., while reviewer Nathan Rabin says of Sextette, “stick in a coda revealing that the whole thing was a ridiculous fantasy by an impoverished washerwoman nearing death, and the whole film would take on an unmistakably bittersweet, melancholy dimension.” Yes, the guy who invented the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” label, to criticize self-centered male sexism, suggests that female fantasies of lifelong desirability are only valid if they are affirmed to be impossible in real life. The irony. It burns.
Real life, however, differs from such critics’ expectations of “realism.” Far from ending her life as a sex-starved, “impoverished washerwoman,” Mae West actually had a flourishing relationship with the ruggedly handsome wrestler Paul Novak, almost 30 years her junior, who remained devoted to her for 26 years in one of show business’ greatest romances, nursing her at her death but discouraging her from including him in her will.
The actual Paul Novak
We may squirm at Sextette, to see an 84-year-old lady claim irresistible attractiveness without the apologetic, self-deprecating irony that we demand of older women’s sexuality, but Mae’s claims are securely grounded in her proven track record of seduction. If you will it, Dude, it is no dream. If Mae had listened to dominant culture’s messages about the female sell-by date, she would never have dared to play a sex-bomb in her late 30s, her age in her Hollywood debut, or selected a much-younger and undiscovered Cary Grant for her co-star. We owe Cary Grant’s career to Mae’s “denial,” while her selection of a young Timothy Dalton for the leading man of Sextette shows a similar eye for star potential, the film prophetically comparing him to 007.
I don’t necessarily recommend Mae West’s narcissistic seductress as a role model for all women, but I strongly recommend her as Laverne Cox’s definition of a “possibility model”; Mae is a reminder that we define our own roles and culture is created partly by our consent. Mae West’s Sextette is the most perfect illustration that the values of dominant culture depend on its male authorship, while female authorship (Mae insisted on writing or co-writing all her films, dictating to directors on set) can just as easily create images of octogenarian vixens commanding the lustful worship of entire “United States athletic teams” of half-naked musclemen, and brokering world peace through their irresistible sexual power (why haven’t you seen this film yet?). Sextette uncomfortably tears down the curtain and reveals the balding wizard behind the Great and Powerful Oz of cinema’s “realism,” just asSinging In The Rainexposed the artificiality of Lina Lamont’s glamour by swapping the sex of the voice behind the curtain. Here lies Sextette‘s true countercultural anarchy, and the reason it deserves midnight screening immortality. But the film also represents, as we shall show with our trusty pualingo.com, a classic PUA manual.
Abundance mentality is defined by PUA lingo as “the belief and life perspective that there is no shortage of hot girls to meet in any man’s lifetime.” This principle is continually reinforced within male-authored culture, from the female disposability fantasy of James Bond to the geriatric desirability dreams of Woody Allen, which influential New York Times critic Vincent Canby might have considered “a poetic, terrifying reminder of how a virtually disembodied ego can survive total physical decay and loss of common sense” if he hadn’t already said that about Sextette. Conversely, our culture constantly depicts narratives of female anxiety over their “biological clocks” and their “last chance for love,” reinforcing a scarcity mentality whose psychological impact is dramatized with wincing accuracy by the desperation romcom of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Mae West, however, modeled an abundance mentality throughout her life, in defiant immunity to cultural pressures. Though acknowledging her life partner, ruggedly handsome Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, was a “good guy,” she quipped in her mid-80s “course there’s 40 guys dyin’ for his job!”
The filmmakers originally intended West’s character, Marlo, to weep over Timothy Dalton’s abandonment, while goth-rock legend Alice Cooper (with tangerine tan and poodle perm, naturally. Why haven’t you seen this film?) serenaded her with piano ballad “No Time For Tears,” but Mae insisted that her character would not cry and forced Cooper to perform the jazzy, uptempo “Next, Next” (“he blew his chance with you! Next, next! Lost you to someone new!”), maintaining her character’s positive vibing so that the film’s advocacy of abundance mentality would not be compromised. West and Dalton’s final reconciliation suggests that this was only a soft next on Marlo’s part, however. Male critics interpret such abundance mentality as delusion, in a woman who resembles a macabre apparition and the monster from beyond time, but West’s track record of sexual success suggests that such protests be understood as token resistance.
Midnight screening suggestion: bring a loud buzzer to hit before yelling “next!”
While male sexual value peaks between the ages of 21 and 30 (as clarified by Sextette‘s “happy birthday, 21!” anthem and Mae’s criticism of Tony Curtis as an unsuitably elderly screen lover, only 30 years her junior) and is largely dependent on the man’s rugged looks and muscle-tone, a woman may increase her sexual market value (SMV) at any age by a canned routine of humorous quips, positive vibing, displays of wealth and willingness to walk away or “soft next,” as Mae demonstrates throughout the film. The best technique for a DHV is to avoid direct bragging (which can actually read as desperation, and thus a demonstration of lower value, or DLV), through the use of wings to praise you on your behalf. In Sextette, the role of “Marlo’s wing” is played by Everyone Who Is Not Marlo. Before the central couple arrive, Regis Philbin brands Marlo “the greatest sex symbol the screen has ever known,” while an obliging crowd sings her DHV anthem “Marlo! The female answer to Apollo! As lovely as Venus De Milo! A living dream!” the press corps laugh at her every word and even ex-husband Ringo Starr shows willingness to wing for her: “You know when your wife was my wife? Your wife was some wife!” Such consistent DHV naturally provokes Timothy Dalton’s target into the production of expensive diamonds as well as verbal IOIs, in this clearly approval-seeking ballad (click. I dare you). Claims by male reviewers that this moment is like “gazing upon one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, something so momentously and unimaginably monstrous that even perceiving the edges of it threatens one with madness” are best interpreted as manifestations of their bitch shields (BS).
Midnight screening suggestion: wing for Marlo by wolf-whistling and dangle bracelets of sparklers whenever she mentions being turned on.
Neuro-linguistic programming is the art of conditioning the target‘s responses through ambiguity and anchoring. In an NLP context, ambiguity is the use of normal, innocuous words that sound like sexual terms, to unconsciously stimulate a man’s sexual senses. Mae West reveals herself a grandmistress of this art, with statements such as “I’m the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night,” referencing her busy schedule as an actress, but subconsciously suggesting sexual stamina to the receptive male mind. “Everything goes up for Marlo!” literally refers to a pink cassette trampolined into a statue’s mouth (don’t ask) but on a deeply subtle and subconscious level could be regarded as sexually suggestive, while “when I’m good, I’m good, but when I’m bad, I’m better” might conceivably be associated with a sexual “bad girl” rather than with theft or arson. After this ingenious technique has made all men uncontrollably aroused by the octogenarian West, she is free to select her targets at will from their superabundance. Next!
Anchoring, meanwhile, is the art of associating gestures with emotional states through their repetition. In Sextette, Mae uses her anchors, such as trademark hair-patting, to elicit Pavlovian arousal by evoking her earlier performances, while groping her own breasts is a classic point to self (PTS) to anchor her feeling of success. A related art is kino, the regular touching and stroking of the target that prevents octogenarian actresses from ending up in his friend zone, which Marlo can be observed demonstrating on Ricky, the 21-year-old team mascot, throughout Sextette‘s gym scene. When male commentators describe the film as “like watching your grandmother at a gangbang,” the key is to reframe that observation, for example by cocking an eyebrow and purring “does that excite you?”
Midnight screening suggestion: Recognize NLP Ambiguity by clicking fingers and barking “you’re under!” in the style of Little Britain’s Kenny Craig, while all PTS maneuvers should be mimicked.
By wearing something showy, like a huge feather headdress or semi-transparent gown, a PUA is able to differentiate herself from her competition. Peacocking is a term derived from the biological behavior of peacocks and from Darwinism, not from the ginormous plumes crowning Mae West like a kooky cockatoo. Peacocking lures the PUA’s targets into starting conversations with her, offering her openings such as “what is that thing on your head? You look like a kooky cockatoo!” By wearing something completely ridiculous, the PUA also opens herself up to shit tests from men, such as New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s claim that Mae resembles “a plump sheep that’s been stood on its hind legs, dressed in a drag-queen’s idea of chic, bewigged and then smeared with pink plaster.” By demonstrating that she can deal with this social pressure, Mae shows her irresistibly alpha characteristics. It must be admitted that, in the striking costumes of legendary, eight-time Oscar-winner Edith Head, Mae looks like a damn chic sheep dressed as sexy lamb.
Midnight screening suggestion: the most ridiculous feather boas and fascinators you can get your hands on, for regular stroking throughout the screening.
So what’s the moral of this study? Should we be inspired by Mae’s conquests of the screen and of ruggedly handsome wrestler, crowned Mr. Baltimore, Paul Novak, to endorse the indomitable positivity of PUA philosophy (go West, young woman)? Or point to the reactions of squirming male viewers to finally prove that PUA is creepy, once and for all? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between, in cultivating a confident independence and immunity to cultural pressure, while still respecting the consent of others? Who knows? Only one moral is certain: never, ever play a drinking game in which you do a shot for every sex pun in this movie. Seriously. You could die. [youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH_j-DNJwZA”]
The trailer alone would get you bombed
Brigit McCone over-identifies with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and making bad puns out of the corner of her mouth.
