Films by Women – Page 24

The Stronger ‘Vessel’

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Dear Women on Waves,

I’m not married and am pregnant. I cannot have a baby.

I heard you can drink bleach, but I’m scared it will kill me.

My sister told me about your ship. Can you help me?

– Amina, Morocco

This plea opens Vessel, the documentary about the abortion-rights organization Women on Waves (and Women on Web), led by Dutch doctor Rebecca Gomperts. Women on Waves was launched in 1999, when Gomperts realized that if a Dutch ship sailed to international waters adjacent to countries with abortion restrictions, she could legally help women to have a safe abortion.

Directed by Diana Whitten, Vessel examines how, as Whitten says, “a woman had to leave one realm of sovereignty to reclaim her own.” Gomperts—who has been an artist, Greenpeace activist, doctor, and mother, all roles that inspire her work with Women on Waves—is dynamic on camera. The scenes of her deftly dealing with protesters and pundits show us the power and strength necessary to do the work that she’s doing—providing safe abortions and reproductive education to the women in places least likely to receive those services.

The original aim of Women on Waves was to sail their mobile clinic (contained in a shipping container) to countries where women most needed their services. They would get the women on board, sail 12 miles off-shore, and administer the medical abortion. Their maiden voyage was to Ireland, where they were met with harsh press, angry protesters, and legal setbacks.

When a journalist presses Gomperts and asks if she’s had an abortion, she shoots back:

“It’s a frequent medical procedure. Just because it’s women, because it’s invisible… no one fucking knows. Are you going to ask someone who works with Amnesty International if they’ve been tortured?”

One of the most powerful aspects of the documentary is the inclusion of the actual women’s words (and women in need call and email constantly). Gomperts is right: abortion is frequent and necessary. The fact that it is about women’s autonomy and choice makes it invisible, and in countries where abortion is restricted, this is incredibly dangerous. The words and voices of these women drive the documentary forward.

When they arrive in Poland, Women on Waves is contacted by a desperate young woman. She was raped, and is seven weeks pregnant. “Welcome Nazis,” male protesters scream at them as they dock their ship. This juxtaposition—the desperate woman, the vicious protestors—underscores the larger issues at play in activism surrounding abortion rights. It’s about male control.

The Portuguese government sends warships to stop their ship from sailing into international waters. The masculine image of a warship up against a small, feminine vessel built to liberate women, is dramatic. The ocean—so often symbolizing femininity—is full of possibility, and full of limitations. Through all of the gorgeous shots of the water, it’s hard to not think about Virginia Woolf or Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The femininity of the water is liberating and stifling, and Gomperts and her amazing crew feel that when faced with each new obstacle. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something,” she says.

“We decided if women couldn’t get to the ship, we could help the women get the pills,” Gomperts says, and she announces on air on a Portuguese talk show exactly how women can self-medicate with just Misoprostol to give themselves abortion. She quickly and aggressively gives the prescription as the host nods and the smug male pundit looks stunned.

Immediately afterward, she announces her pregnancy. “If it’s wanted, it’s delicious,” she says. She stresses that she wants to show that side—that you can be pregnant, a mother, and be supportive of abortion rights. This evolution of her ethos goes hand in hand with the evolution of her activism.

A volunteer says that they get more and more emails from women who want to get the pill. There’s a plea for help from a woman in the US military in Afghanistan. “Every story of the women who write is different,” the volunteer says. “It’s hard to generalize because abortions are so common.”

The power of the Internet gives the women a new wave to ride on. They field emails and calls, and created their sister organization, the website Women on Web. It may be illegal to give women the pills, but giving information on how and when to take the pills isn’t illegal. So education—via trainings and hotlines—became their new voyage.

The power of female solidarity in Vessel is overwhelming. These women seem tireless in their goals of empowering women all over the globe—from educational workshops in Tanzania to draping “Tu Decision” with their phone number on the La Virgin del Panecillo in Quito, Ecuador (my favorite scene).

p1010060.jpg(mediaclass-base-page-main.d2c518cc99acd7f6b176d3cced63a653791dedb3) — “Your Decision,” “Safe Abortion” at the feet of the Virgin at El Panecillo in Ecuador

In 2012, Women on Web responded to more than 100,000 emails from 135 countries requesting information about abortion with pills. They point out that in some countries, abortion may be legal, but not accessible to women. The United States of America is one of those countries.

We are often so focused on changing laws that we don’t realize the power in giving women the right tools and education to empower themselves “despite the laws.” Through their campaigns—across the sea and across the web—Women on Waves and Women on Web do it all, effecting change in legislation and in women’s personal lives.

The documentary is understated and beautiful, and we are left with a sense of hope. The images of women celebrating in spite of men screaming and yelling, and the images of a fearless older woman with bruises on her arms from fighting with police who ransacked their ship remind us what power we truly have.

While the virgin-in-chains turned abortion-activist was my favorite image in the film, the most emotional moment was during an email exchange with a woman from Nairobi. She kisses the pills when she gets them, and a raw, personal email exchange follows as she goes through the process. When it’s over, she requests the name of the volunteer who was emailing her. A Women on Web volunteer responds that they are a collective, working as a team, so she couldn’t give the specific name—a beautiful and poignant reminder of the power of both individual stories and collective support.

“Women will make it happen.”

* * *

Vessel, Diana Whitten’s first feature film, won the Audience Award in the Documentary Competition and the Special Jury Award for Political Courage at South by Southwest.

Vessel will be shown during DOC NYC on Saturday, Nov. 15.

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Why ‘The Babadook’ is the Feminist Horror Film of the Year

Firstly, ‘The Babadook’ complicates the depiction of women as primarily victims by presenting Amelia as a complex and multi-faceted figure. For one, she is a not a young big-breasted girl but a mother and fully grown woman. This is not necessarily groundbreaking in itself.

Written by Sarah Smyth.

“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…”

The poster for 'The Babadook' — The poster for *The Babadook*

So begins the bedtime story read by Amelia (Essie Davis) to her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman) in the hit Australian horror film, The Babadook. The story focuses on Amelia, a single mother whose husband died in a car crash on their way to the hospital to have Samuel, as she struggles in her role as a parent to her difficult, troubled, and increasingly erratic son. Samuel is afraid of monsters, believing them to be waiting to get him come nightfall. He frequently sleeps in bed with Amelia, and makes his own contraptions to protect both of them. His behaviour becomes so disruptive, however, that he is kicked out of school. One night, Amelia and Samuel read the story of the Babadook in a creepy pop-up book which Amelia has no recollection of owning. The Babadook, a sinister and scary ghoulish figure, will never leave after its presence becomes known. After they read the book, strange occurrences take place, and the rest of the film follows their terrifying encounters with the Babadook.

Amelia and Samuel read the creepy book about the Babadook together

The main strength of the film, in terms of both narrative and gender politics, is the role of Amelia. Before we even consider how women are represented on film, the fact that women are represented on film, particularly by taking on the central role, is an achievement. Not only did only 30 percent of the top-grossing films of 2013 have lead female characters, but a huge number of films still fail the Bechdel test. In terms of race, the picture gets even worse as 73 percent of female characters are white. However, simply making female-led films and passing the Bechdel test is not enough. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Distinction all pass the test, yet the film’s treatment of women on (and apparently off) screen is atrocious. After Megan Fox quit the franchise, apparently likening Michael Bay, the films’ director, to Hitler, Shia LaBeouf commented that Fox developed “this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael, who some people think is a very lascivious filmmaker, the way he films women.” The Transformers franchise makes apparent that, in order to get a more accurate look at the role women play and the impact women have in the film industry, we must look at how women are represented on screen as much as whether women are represented at all.

The 'Transformers' franchise demonstrates why the Bechdel test doesn't always cut it... — The *Transformers* franchise demonstrates why the Bechdel test doesn’t always cut it…

Horror films, in particular, demonstrate this case. Although women are often the lead character in this genre, the representation of women as a whole is often problematic at best. When filming The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock famously claimed he always follows the advice to “torture the women!” something which apparently happened as much off-screen as on-screen. As Sydney Prescott noted in the horror-parody franchise, Scream, horror films often depict “some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door.” Both Hitchcock and Sydney’s comments demonstrate women’s twofold role in the horror genre: victim and sexual object.

Firstly, The Babadook complicates the depiction of women as primarily victims by presenting Amelia as a complex and multi-faceted figure. For one, she is a not a young big-breasted girl but a mother and fully grown woman. This is not necessarily groundbreaking in itself. The Others, The Ring, and Dark Water all depict their central characters as mothers. However, none so brilliantly present their central character as complicated as Amelia in The Babadook. Amelia is not only a victim and a mother but a colleague, potential lover, sister, neighbor, and grieving widow. The strength of the narrative is the way in which the film meshes the difficulties of being a mother to a troubled child with the haunting of the Babadook, and the way in which this complex combination strains all Amelia’s relationships. It also causes her to lash out at her neighbor, miss days at work, refuse advances from potential partners, and fall out with her sister. But whether it’s the stress of being a mother or the terror of the Babadook remains ambiguous as the film presents her identity, relationships and experiences as layered and complicated.

Secondly, The Babadook consciously subverts the conventional depiction of female sexuality in horror films. Broadly speaking, female characters are either presented as “virgins” or “whores,” where they are punished “appropriately,” or female sexuality is presented as something excessive, disgusting and monstrous. In her authoritative and brilliantly titled book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Films, Carol Clover outlines the trope of the Final Girl in the slasher film. The Final Girl, she claims, is the films lead character, who, as both the victim but also the only survivor in the film, serves as both the site of the audience’s sadistic fantasies, and the anchor for the spectator’s identification. Primarily aimed at young heterosexual men, the Final Girl must be “masculine” enough so that this (assumed) spectator can identify with her; she is often androgynous or tomboyish in appearance and sometimes in name. More crucially, she must be sexualised but never sexual; she must provide the fleshy site for the heterosexual male’s voyeuristic fantasies but she must never have autonomy over her own body and sexuality. In fact, she is often virginal. If a woman does have sex in these films, she is branded a “whore” so quickly gets killed off. Examples of films which conform to these tropes include Halloween, Friday the 13^th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and, more recently, You’re Next. Post-modern pastiche horror films including Scream and The Cabin in the Woods also play on the trope. On the other hand, as Barbara Creed discusses in her book, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, female sexuality is also presented as grotesque and terrifying, reflecting, she claims, male anxieties over female sexuality. Examples include The Exorcist, The Brood, and Carrie.

Laurie in 'Halloween' is a typical example of the Final Girl trope — Laurie in *Halloween* is a typical example of the Final Girl trope

The Babadook subverts these conventions by presenting woman in possession of (healthy) sexual desire and needs. In one scene, Amelia watches a romantic film alone before going up to her bedroom and taking out her vibrator. Her night of pleasure is ruined, however, after Samuel interrupts her claiming he is terrified of his own room and so cannot sleep in it. Her disappointment is evident; motherhood, it seems, can be as much frustrating as it can be difficult. Crucially, however, the film not only radically foregrounds female sexuality and desire, something which horror films, as I demonstrate, conventionally dismiss. It also links the terror of the Babadook with Amelia’s frustrated lack rather than an excess of grotesque and monstrous sexuality. At moments, the Babadook manifests itself in the form of her late husband. When Amelia first sees him, she passionately hugs and kisses him, clearly missing the affection and sexual intimacy offered from a romantic partner. Only after the Babadook, disguised as her husband, asks for her to bring him the child does she realise that this is a trap. Her husband cannot and will not come back to fulfill the needs she so desperately craves. The Babadook, like the grief she feels for her husband, will continue to haunt Amelia forevermore, serving as a constant reminder of the loss of sexual desire and intimacy which the death of her husband so tragically caused. The terror of the Babadook, then, is as much about the loss of a treasured presence as well as the intrusion of an unwelcome presence.

The Babadook offers a hope for feminist horror fans who are tired of cliché-ridden depictions of two-dimensional, victimised, hyper-sexualised female characters. A film which not only passes the Bechdel test, but presents a complex, multi-layered, sexually autonomous central female protagonist, The Babadook offers hope that the horror genre will shift its depiction of lead female characters to create more compelling, engaging and accurate representations of women onscreen.

___________________________________

Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

The Curse of Beauty: The Meaning of ‘Penthouse North’

In her Central Park West apartment, Agneta Eckemyr lives in a wonderland of knick knacks, of lace and faded photos and rose appliqués. Her artfully shabby chic wrought iron bed, mammoth and cloud-like, is crowned with embroidered pillows; she lounges with one that says, “And they Lived Happily Ever After.” She picks up another, “The Queen Reigns Here” and sighs, it’s no longer true.
Once upon a time, she was beautiful. Impossibly so.

In a melancholy moment, Agneta remembers her youth

In her Central Park West apartment, Agneta Eckemyr lives in a wonderland of knick knacks, of lace and faded photos and rose appliqués. Her artfully shabby chic wrought iron bed, mammoth and cloud-like, is crowned with embroidered pillows; she lounges with one that says, “And They Lived Happily Ever After.” She picks up another, “The Queen Reigns Here” and sighs, it’s no longer true.

Once upon a time, she was beautiful. Impossibly so.

Back in the 70s, Swedish born Agneta, subject of Johanna St Michaels’s documentary Penthouse North, which makes its New York premiere this month at DOC NYC, was a model turned actress turned would-be screenwriter and prodigiously skilled fashion designer and interior decorator. She lived in one of Manhattan’s best apartments, a steal thanks to rent control, and held glamourous parties with rock stars and the New York glitterati. She was a social magnet, charming and vibrant with a revolving door policy in her home and a sense of humour about herself. She designed clothes for people like Julia Roberts and Grace Jones, covered Playboy and Cosmopolitan, was considered for a Bond-girl role and was generally pleased with her place in the world. For most of her life she had succeeded at using her beauty as currency, even the ads for her clothes show her beautiful face.

The question Penthouse North ruminates on, but offers little in the way of answers for, is what Agneta can be without that beautiful face, that beautiful body that once were her everything. The documentary began as an attempt to explore the impacts of beauty on the aging process, but Agneta’s real life tragedies intervened and made the story much more substantial.

As the film begins, Agneta is in her 60s. She can’t pay her seamstress and her dresses aren’t selling. Her landlord threatens eviction after discovering she has been subletting to multiple roommates to pay the rent and if evicted, she matter-of-factly states, she plans to kill herself. She has no income and the homeless shelter and the food bank, worlds away from her penthouse, look like they will be part of her near future. Much worse is the fact that she has been forgetting things and repeating herself. In the film, she is told she has high blood pressure and advised not to eat sugar, though she ignores this. Text at its end informs us that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s since the film was shot.

As she faces a legal battle, a friend tells her: “You have to be real now, you can’t live in fantasy.” But Agneta continually refuses.

She will give up in a fight and leave the room before facing anything harsh. She will tell people she can’t deal with hardships right, that she’s not in the mood and break down in tears. She is sure someone or something will come along to save her. Even as she signs up for welfare, she is talking about the films she was in, her relationships with Ringo Starr and the like. In the words of someone’s over-anxious mother, she continues to make a spectacle of herself.

Agneta’s apartment is prime real estate and even at a reduced rate, she has a hard time affording it

Penthouse North becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch as she falls apart. Often it feels as if we are eavesdropping on the hardest points in Agneta’s life. The question of exploitation is raised when it becomes clear that Agneta is not in her right mind. I am left wondering if she could properly consent to having such personal aspects of her life filmed.

Just as the filmmakers were, we as viewers are lulled into a sense of security. From the film’s opening with all its lovingly framed shots of the Penthouse North apartment, a place that looks ripped from a magazine, we’re sure this will be only a light-hearted character piece. A study of a deluded woman living in luxury, that we don’t have to think much about, except every once in a while to “ooh” and “ahh” over her pretty things. But it’s impossible to pretend Agneta is not a real person; her story is stranger than fiction. As one of her friends, frustrated over the way she fascinates people, makes clear, people have a tendency to romanticize her life, to see her as a tragic figure. Instead, she’s a sick woman who needs help instead of enamored style bloggers.

Still, even in the aborted screenplay she wrote about her glamourous life back when she was living it, it’s clear that this life was far from stable. Agneta had always struggled to pay rent even at a fraction of its true worth. Back then, she was unable to sell the screenplay because all the directors and producers she encountered only wanted to have sex with her.

Agneta says she has felt exploited her whole life, that everyone has taken more from her than they provided. Men used her for sex, and did things like invite her to dinners where they masturbated under the table and it didn’t occur to her to say anything, to do anything but act the naïve, polite schoolgirl who thanks them for the invitation. After all this time she feels she wasted her energy in relationships making beautiful tableaus of the best food and flowers and giving great sex but always being left anyway. Even now, people are constantly taking advantage of her, like the squatter who refuses to leave and screams at her all day.

Like Madame Butterfly waiting for a man everyone knows plans never to return to her, Agneta refuses to believe that things will not just magically get better. She wishes she’d gone back to Sweden, that she’d accepted the proposals of rich gentlemen and left her apartment. In the end, she seems imprisoned in this home she is on the verge of losing, it is the only place where she can feel safe and in control. Yet, it is a curse that has kept her from living a real life among the mortals.

In her youth, Agneta felt constrained by “bubbly bimbo” roles

Agneta talks a lot about the character of “the bimbo,” who she has played for most of her life and all of her career. She says she learned being a bimbo was currency in America and does her impression of one, puffing out her chest and speaking in an exaggerated Swedish milkmaid accent. Here is the conflict in her life, she has become the bimbo to survive, dressed up in her clothes and seen her in the mirror and eventually believed that was all there was of worth to her. And it was fun, it was lucrative and exciting, but it stops working. You have to be young.

Because all she was given were “bubbly bimbo” parts in films, her decision to write a screenplay was an attempt to take control, to write parts for herself with a range of emotions and write her own stories, to no longer be a one-dimensional character in others’. In clips from her old films and magazine covers, she is mostly naked and supplicant, always smiling and asking for me.

But this was never enough. Agneta wanted to bare her soul as well as her body. In this era where women are criticized for looking ugly when they cry, her desire to be allowed to be sad, to contort her face in a way besides eager-to-please smiles, is very relatable.

Agneta shows of her fashion designs, she hopes they will save her from ruin — Agneta shows off her fashion designs; she hopes they will save her from ruin

At some points, you just want to shake her out of it, tell her she’s incredibly talented in other ways. That she could always be a decorator if all else fails. It’s tragic that Agneta can’t see this. Her beautiful apartment becomes her self, by making it beautiful and admired, she can be too. Even the beautiful clothes she creates, the kind of floaty white dresses a generation of girls in love with The Virgin Suicides would kill themselves for, are attempts to feel beautiful herself.

At one point, the filmmakers arrange for Agneta to encounter her young self by hiring young actresses to act out her script. It is surreal to see her dress the girls playing her and size them up. In one scene, she looks on, jealous of the girl playing her young self, who is being praised for her beautiful eyes. She is framed in the same shot as the girl, looking over her shoulder, like a specter, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

She conflates herself and the fictionalized version of herself from her script, saying “I” and then correcting herself. When talking about the script, she describes her character as strong, but emotionally fragile.

In one scene, her friend tells her she does not need to try to sexy anymore, to pout and show off her cleavage. She can go for dignified beauty instead. In his view, the aging woman trying to be young is a grotesque.

But this cuts her off from actualization, suggests she should stop trying to be attractive because she has gotten older. This view says, if you’re not attractive anymore no one wants to see you or your body. You dressing the way you want to now offends us. Beautiful women are allowed to age if they become classic, boast taunt leather skin and an air of health, and dress in heathered sweaters and tweed slacks, buoyed by accumulated wealth and patrician voices. Not if they continue to try to dress, to live, like they’re still the fairy princesses that they’ve always been.

Agneta applies make-up in an attempt to look young

It raises the question of whether there is an age appropriate way of dress and why. Are there clothes an older woman isn’t allowed to wear, or decor she’s not allowed to love? Why is it that our culture is so quick to look at a woman like Agneta as a pathetic, inhuman creature? But as for Agneta herself, its unclear, whether she dressing this way because she thinks looking sexy is the only way to be worthwhile or because its how she wants to dress, what she wants to show of her body?

Early on, Agneta gets a massage and her soft, older woman’s body is on display. The film is riveted by her flesh, the spots and wrinkles, the uncontrolled movements of her neck, and her uneven cleavage. There are frequent extreme close-ups of her body, her face, her breasts, so tightly framed that we can see the pores, the hair and lines, the permanent purse of her mouth that mark her as an aging woman.

Is this view of her exploitative? Are we meant to feel sorry for her just from the sight of her flabby skin? Agneta certainly feels this way, obsessed as she is with reclaiming her youth. While being filmed, she is constantly asking if this make-up or that hairstyle will make her look younger, asking to sit in more flattering light (shades of Blanche DuBois in that) and taking breaks to freshen up her lipstick.

It’s important to note that this film was made by a female director and as such, is directed from a female gaze. We are meant to identify with Agneta, to think “there but for the grace of God go I,” not to shudder in repulsion at the idea that we once found her attractive. Shots pan from Agneta’s breasts to her face, but spend a lot of time focused on her eyes and the pain clearly visible within them. The camera’s eye is kind. These scenes are shot from a directorial distance, as documentary evidence, capturing but never commenting.

It is so odd to see her in the real world, waiting for the subway, struggling alone with heavy bags of groceries and facing eviction and indignity, an ordinary person’s problems, the ones we are a culture tend to think beautiful people are exempted from.

Agneta is living every woman’s worst nightmare: old, poor, alone and unsure of her looks, even losing her mind. I think maybe her story tells us about the curse that beauty can be. We’re told that beautiful people don’t have to live in the real world, that if you were born lovely to look at you can live in fairyland. Except, the truth no speaks, is that when you return to earth as everyone eventually does, you will find that 40 years have passed in one day of fairyland’s and everyone who loved you or cared about you will be lost.

This idea makes me feel guilty. I am exactly the audience for film. I read books like this (most recently the delightful Wish Her Safe At Home), I watch movies like this. I am fascinated by characters like Blanche, like Miss Havisham and real fallen beauties like Little Edie and Dare Wright. I decided to watch this film in the first place because I was drawn to the idea of a beautiful tragedy. Even the constant fairy tale references I am tempted to make here, seem like I’m trying to make things more picturesque than they are, that I’m attracted to the wrong parts of the story.

I don’t think I am at all unusual in that.

Penthouse North is hard to watch but maybe it should be. It’s an important film that touches a nerve, forces us to think about our ideas of aging, of how we treat the elderly, of how we tell stories and force people’s lives into romantic frameworks, three-act fairy tale structures.

There’s no happy ending for Agneta. She loses her apartment and moves back to Sweden to live in a retirement home and lose herself to Alzheimer’s. It’s important to remember these are the facts.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Laggies’: Mentors, Tortoises, Dads, and Growing Up

A Peter Pan syndrome, or in Jungian terms, the “puer aeternus” complex (forever young), is active here for Megan’s character as she fears personal and professional commitment; the term is “puella aeterna” for women. The appeal of this complex is to stay “forever young,” a girl-woman without adult-level commitments. Her complex is strongly activated by her friend Allison’s (Ellie Kemper) bridal shower and large wedding.

This is a guest post by Laura Shamas.

Laggies, a new comedy written by Andrea Seigel and directed by Lynn Shelton, explores how indecision and passivity wreak havoc in the personal life of Megan (played by Keira Knightly), a Seattle woman in her late 20s. Various themes and motifs explored in the film include: the desire to be “adolescent forever” or the appeal of the “puella aeterna” complex; the meaning of animal spirit guides; and complications of father-daughter relationships in terms of female identity. In the growing body of work from talented filmmaker Shelton, this movie’s theme could be categorized under a general umbrella of healing troubled family ties, as seen in her previous films Touchy Feely (2013) and Your Sister’s Sister (2011).

Megan (hilariously portrayed by Keira Knightly) is still part of a circle of friends formed in high school. As 30-ish young adults, they are collectively moving on to marriage, parenthood, and ascending careers. Floundering Megan, who quit grad school therapist training, lives with her serious boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), and works for her accountant father (Jeff Garlin) by waving signs on the street to advertise his business. Her friends and her mother express impatience with Megan’s inability to “grow up” and commit to a solid direction in life, be it by marrying, getting career counseling, or finding a new interest of any kind.

A Peter Pan syndrome, or in Jungian terms, the “puer aeternus” complex (forever young), is active here for Megan’s character as she fears personal and professional commitment; the term is “puella aeterna” for women. The appeal of this complex is to stay “forever young,” a girl-woman without adult-level commitments. Her complex is strongly activated by her friend Allison’s (Ellie Kemper) bridal shower and large wedding. When boyfriend Anthony proposes to her at the wedding reception, Megan takes a moment to consider things and goes outside, where she catches her father passionately kissing another woman.

Upset Megan, in true “puella” style, flees the wedding without explanation, and drives away alone. In front of a store, teenaged Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), asks Megan to buy alcohol for her lively group of high school friends. Megan agrees, saying it’s a “rite of passage” since someone once did it for her; Megan ends up spending the rest of the evening drinking with the teenagers outside, and even TPing a house. When she returns home, Megan finds that Anthony, her friends and parents were understandably alarmed by her abrupt disappearance from the wedding reception. However, Megan and Anthony seal their elopement plans and look forward to getting married in the next week or so in Las Vegas.

This first “regression” sequence for Megan, of hanging out with high school kids, leads to more, as Megan eventually fakes attending a business conference for a week, while in reality, hanging out with Annika’s crowd, staying at her house and getting to know Craig (Sam Rockwell), Annika’s charismatic father. Megan poses as Annika’s mom for a conference with a school counselor, trying on the role of “mother.” Megan’s ongoing vocational interest in “healing” is foreshadowed here as she inquires about the credentials needed to work as a school counselor.

The leitmotif of animal spirit guides is present in the film, used to metaphorically probe the undercurrents of character. Anthony learns, while attending a conference, that his animal guide is “Shark,” a motivating image for him in terms of personal/professional growth. But what is Megan’s spiritual animal avatar? During her weeklong “secret residency” at Annika’s house, Megan takes care of a pet tortoise left behind by Annika’s mother, who moved away. Although the pet has feeding issues, Megan gets on the ground with it in the back yard and cures its eating disorder – another sign of her continued interest in the act of healing. Megan declares to Craig that “Tortoise” is her animal spirit guide. At the teenager’s request, Annika and Megan visit estranged mom Bethany (Gretchen Mol), by tracking her down from a return address on checks sent to Craig. Inside Bethany’s apartment, there are tortoise images on the walls, heading downward towards the floor – a symbolic tie to the family Bethany left behind. Megan, in the encounter in Bethany’s apartment, tries to help both mother and daughter connect, a third instance in the film of Megan promoting a healing process.

In the end of the film, Megan falls in love with Craig while engaged to Anthony, without either of the men knowing about each other. She declares herself to be “a Snake,” but one in the act of transformation, shedding skin. Although some have interpreted the film’s ending to be in the “romantic comedy” vein, the animal imagery here signals that it’s more about Megan’s understanding of herself. More than a simple “happily ever after” ending, she comes to terms with who she really is. Her admission of her own “slow pace” (Tortoise) and duplicity in romance (Snake), along with an articulation of a desire to change (her connection to the “snake’s skin”) leads her to break free from the passivity of her “in-between” life and the stereotypical social pressures of her friends, to go for what she really wants. Siegel and Shelton remind us that our “animal” instincts connect to personal identity and self-acceptance.

Father-daughter relationships get a lot of screen time in Laggies. Two daughters, with loving dads, struggle with identity issues and passivity. Ed has always loved Megan unconditionally, cutting her slack when others judged her “laggie” ways harshly. He never “pushed” her towards easy answers as others in the film seem to do. But Megan cuts off all contact from her dad after seeing him kissing another woman. In the film’s third act, Megan admits that she is like her father with her own recent bout of cheating; she confronts Ed about his “cheating” incident, and also listens to his advice about the changing nature of relationships, and the ongoing need to work at maintaining them. She’s also happy that he told her mother the truth about what happened, and her parents are going to work through their relationship issues.

Craig and Annika also have a paired focus in the film. Craig’s initial alarm upon finding the adult Megan hanging out in his daughter’s bedroom highlights his role of “protector.” But Annika is protective of her father, too; she cuts off her friendship with wayward Megan upon learning that she’s engaged to another man while becoming involved with her dad. Annika misses her mother; Megan functions as a surrogate mother-mentor figure to her in a large portion of the film, but facilitates a reconciliation visit between Annika and Bethany.

Laggies investigates how a Peter Pan syndrome might lose its appeal, and what happens, at the quarter-life mark, when one outgrows a circle of former high school friends. The film begins with old footage of Megan and her friends jumping into a fenced off pool on their high school prom night. In Act Three, Megan ends up at Annika’s prom night, and mentors her by urging Annika to “take action” at the dance and disclose her romantic interest in high schooler Junior (Daniel Zovatto) to him. Megan realizes that she must take her own advice. The clear emphasis on the need for women to claim agency in the final moments of Laggies elevates its message beyond a “romantic” ending. Megan regrets her own passivity; she learns, by the end when she finally knocks on Craig’s door, that she’s the one who’s responsible for what happens in her life, and doing something about it.

Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays. Read more at her website: LauraShamas.com.

Shishihokodan: Ice Prince/Wolf Rivalry As Female Madonna/Whore

I would argue that genres dominated by female scopophilia and sexual tension, such as the YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy (SARCom) genre, challenge Mulvey’s paradigm and allow us better understanding of the role of desire in shaping visual media.

This is a guest post by Brigit McCone.

With so much feminist discussion of the Objectifying Male Gaze(TM) and its effects, we often fail to consider the hetero-female objectifying gaze, or scopophilia, in visual media. Indeed, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey effectively denied its existence in her influential 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which states that women “cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything more than sentimental regret” as female onscreen presence must monolithically serve as passive erotic fetish for the Male Gaze, unless scopophilic pleasure is disrupted by radical techniques. I would argue that genres dominated by female scopophilia and sexual tension, such as the YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy (SARCom) genre, challenge Mulvey’s paradigm and allow us better understanding of the role of desire in shaping visual media.

SARCom was created in 1987 by the manga artist Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2. Her mixture of kung-fu demon-of-the-week fights, romance and comedy, with a supernaturally strong heroine, dual shapeshifting supernaturally strong love interests and sarcastically quipping sidekicks, was then a completely unique story and rapidly became popular in the West and Japan. Takahashi’s creative control as visual and story artist (particularly after the success of the slapstick Urusei Yatsura) meant that the aesthetics of SARCom were shaped by the female gaze from the outset. Among its innovations, Ranma 1/2 introduces an Ice Prince/Wolf love rivalry between the hero Ranma and his rival Ryoga, a trope Takahashi would develop in her next SARCom Inuyasha. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer popularized the SARCom in mainstream Western culture, developing its own Ice Prince/Wolf rivalry with the characters Angel and Spike. The Ice Prince/Wolf dynamic now dominates teen girl cinema, after Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight made her the most commercially successful female director of all time.

Twilight‘s inversion of Mulvey’s gendered model of cinema, with Hardwicke’s camera continually privileging Kristen Stewart’s gaze as Bella Swan, and offering Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen as erotic spectacle, would be interesting to analyze. Twilight also almost fails a reverse-Bechdel through the intense Bellacentrism of all its characters. In this essay, however, I would like to focus on the Ice Prince/Wolf rivalry itself, as a generic trope of SARCom, and its illuminating parallels with the male Madonna/Whore complex.

Celebrating Celibacy: The “Ice Prince” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the “Ice Prince” is his combination of emotional fidelity and sexual unavailability, generally accompanied by emphasized superiority and by physical threat. Ranma, the hero of Ranma 1/2, not only rivals the heroine Akane in martial arts, but periodically transforms into a girl more sexually attractive than she is. This tantalizing superiority in femininity enhances the character’s sexual unavailability; the world of Ranma 1/2 plays with gender but is strictly heteronormative with biological sex. His loyalty and rescuing of Akane go alongside Ranma’s constant sexual frigidity. Ranma 1/2 occupies an intermediate position between the shounen (boys’ manga) harem plot of Takahashi’s previous Urusei Yatsura and the love rivalries of her later Inuyasha: as a shounen hero, Ranma is the center of a harem of sex-crazed women, but as a shoujo (girls’ manga) “ice prince” he must be sexually attracted to none of them.

Inuyasha tames its threateningly feral hero, while maintaining his sexual unavailability, by making him frustratingly in love with a previous incarnation of the heroine Kagome – thus, he loves Kagome as a reincarnation, but cannot consummate this love due to his fidelity to the original.

The most extreme “Ice Prince” archetype in Takahashi’s work is Sesshomaru, the haughty, aristocratic pureblood demon introduced as a villain, accompanied by a sycophantic toady, and attempting to cheat his socially inferior, half-brother Inuyasha out of his inheritance; that is, almost exactly the set-up of Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. The character is also redeemed by Austen’s strategy: meeting an open-hearted, mischievous and unintimidated girl whom he struggles to scorn as inferior; having his flaws contextualized by introducing his controlling, snobbish mother; finally, risking everything to rescue the redeemer-girl. Introducing a poison-clawed Demon Dog Darcy, with the power to raise the dead and blast his enemies to hell, unbalances Inuyasha: Sesshomaru’s well-written redemption arc commences just as Inuyasha’s own arc grinds to a halt, spending a hundred chapters randomly upgrading his sword while the fandom sways toward the narratively marginalized Sesshomaru. Demon Dog Darcy is then forced to hand his emotionally-earned powers over to Inuyasha in an exasperatingly contrived plot twist. But Sesshomaru’s very marginalization in Inuyasha‘s narrative, and total detachment from the main heroine, function to intensify fangirl emotional and sexual frustration: the ultimate aim of any Ice Prince. Although Demon Dog Darcy progressively thaws emotionally, the character’s sexual unavailability is emphasized by spiked armor encircling his chest and maintained by filling the “Elizabeth Bennet” role with a pre-pubescent girl (one fervently hopes).

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel loves and saves Buffy but is made sexually unavailable by a curse that he will lose his soul if he has sex with her. This loss of soul also allows the intensification of Angel’s physical threat and sadism, while permitting the ‘real’ Angel to remain a dutiful lover. Twilight likewise presents Edward Cullen as a deeply loving and loyal ‘Ice Prince’ who threatens Bella repeatedly by mentioning his urge to devour her and, of course, is sexually unavailable through his fear of ‘losing control’.

Demon-in-Distress: The “Wolf” Archetype

The defining characteristic of the ‘Wolf’ is his combination of desperate emotional and sexual availability with repeatedly emphasized vulnerability and animalism. The most exaggeratedly vulnerable is Ranma 1/2‘s Ryoga, a little boy lost in the literal sense that he farcically lacks any sense of direction. The fanged, impulsive Ryoga’s regular transformations into a small, cute piglet add to his vulnerability. His inability to tell the heroine Akane of his true nature and feelings, out of fear of losing his privileged access as her pet pig, forms a near-perfect satire of the “Friendzone” phenomenon.

Inuyasha‘s impulsive, hotheaded Koga, a Ryoga lookalike, is a wolf-demon. In contrast to the elusive, emotionally conflicted hero Inuyasha, Koga falls for the heroine Kagome almost immediately and pursues her consistently. The manga is notable for constantly placing Koga in helpless ‘demon-in-distress’ situations requiring rescue, and for counterbalancing Sesshomaru’s spiked, hug-repellent armor and Inuyasha’s loose robes with Koga’s skimpy armor and furred micro-miniskirt, concealing his crotch only by careful choice of viewing angle.

Although Buffy‘s Spike is a vampire, theoretically an “ice prince” archetype, the character bears a dog’s name and typical ‘wolf’ impulsiveness and romantic vulnerability. In his second season introduction, he is confined to a wheelchair and forced to watch his beloved Drusilla seduced by “Ice Prince” rival Angel. In the third season, he’s pathetically dumped and weeping. In the fourth, he’s neutered by a brain chip that zaps him for attacking, so ‘he doesn’t chase the other puppies anymore’. In the fifth, the trope of Spike’s nakedness is introduced as vulnerability; he bares his chest to Buffy’s stake and confesses his love. This sequence is revealed as Spike’s dream; he is stripped and Buffy is fully clothed even in his own sexual fantasies. Spike is also stripped and tortured for love of Buffy by the dominant, female deity Glory in this season. In the sixth, after their first sexual encounter, Buffy is again fully clothed, abusing Spike verbally while he sprawls naked and defenseless. She repeatedly violates his sexual boundaries from a position of dominance; his attempt to force himself on her is presented as a crime of pathetic desperation. Though “Ice Prince” Angel wishes to torment and kill Buffy when he is soulless, Spike’s soulless state is no obstacle to his love – the emotional dependence of the ‘wolf’ knows no bounds.

Twilight’s Jacob Black is another wolf defined by constant loyalty, before attempting to force himself onto Bella in an act portrayed as pathetic desperation. Where Edward’s brief moment of toplessness is a dramatic, suicidal act that will dazzle a watching crowd, Jacob’s toplessness and skimpy attire are chronic, underlining his availability.

Shishihokodan! Or, Why Team Jacob Loses

Comparing the fandom of all four series reveals an interesting trend: fangirls are roughly equally divided between Team Jacob and Team Edward, Team Spike and Team Angel, Team Ryoga and Team Ranma, Team Koga and Team Inuyasha; nonetheless, the “Ice Prince” always gets the girl. It would be easy to blame the creators. Yet, Stephenie Meyer claims to be “Team Jacob.” Both Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson Buffy‘s main female writer/directors have made statements in support of the BuffyXSpike romance. Rumiko Takahashi’s writings in the romcom genre, Maison Ikkoku and One Pound Gospel, also reward and root for heroes in the vulnerable ‘wolf’ mode, and it is Takahashi who provides a structural explanation for ‘ice prince’ triumph with Ranma 1/2‘s Shishihokodan arc.

The “Shishihokodan” is a blast of energy which enables perpetual loser Ryoga to defeat the hero Ranma by harnessing his heartbreak. Ranma attempts to defeat the all-powerful Shishihokodan with a confidence-blast, but can only triumph by giving Ryoga momentary hope of sexual opportunity. In other words, Ryoga loses not because he is inferior, but because losing is the paradoxical source of his power. Any woman attracted to the “wolf” archetype is inherently drawn to vulnerability; her attraction is intensified by the wolf’s heartbroken rejection. Any woman attracted to the ‘ice prince’ is inherently drawn to dominance; her attraction is conversely reduced by his loss of mastery. As such, pursuing the resistant hero and resisting the pursuing hero create positively and negatively charged polarities to an explosive battery of sexual tension, a narrative trap which dooms the “wolf,” as Takahashi showed herself sympathetically aware with the Shishihokodan arc.

The wolf is difficult to dispose of: any alternative love interest would undermine his painful availability, thus one must be introduced with unsatisfactory suddenness at the last minute. The sudden arrival of a pig-fetishist marks Ryoga’s sidelining in Ranma 1/2; a wolf-girl for Koga is a last-minute addition to the Inuyasha anime, while Koga simply loses his previously foolhardy fighting spirit, forgets his long-established vengeance vendetta and slinks out of the original manga after admitting that Kagome should be with Inuyasha. Most disturbingly, the newly-arrived love interest for Jacob Black is literally newly-arrived as a newborn; his obsessive need to psychologically groom an infant into a future bride doesn’t bother the infant’s parents, presumably merely relieved that the wolf has been disposed of. More satisfyingly, rather than slinking away Koga-style, Spike’s acceptance that Buffy can’t love him “but thanks for saying” allows him to destroy the Hellmouth and be redeemed, incinerating himself in a spectacular blast of purest Shishihokodan.

What does this mean for our reading of film representations of male Madonna/Whore complex? It implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. So, is womankind’s reading of a value judgement in the Madonna’s triumph flawed, like the hetero-male audience’s resentment of SARCom as poisonously emasculating? In fact, mankind’s Whore is generally portrayed as more empowered than womankind’s Wolf, probably because our culture sees male sexuality as common weakness but female sexuality as social rebellion. It is the female audience’s model of dominant-resistor/submissive-pursuer that aligns the rivalry dynamic of triumphant dominant with the love dynamic of triumphant resistor in a perfect feedback loop that structurally maximizes sexual tension (hence the squealing). But if male readers fail to appreciate Ice Prince/Wolf, are we likewise misreading Madonna/Whore? When Marlene Dietrich’s Frenchy hurls herself in front of a bullet and dies in James Stewart’s arms, is this the patriarchal punishment of a promiscuous woman or is it merely a blast of purest Shishihokodan?

Brigit McCone is unapologetically Team Wolf, writes and directs short films, radio dramas and The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and making weird Pride and Prejudice analogies.

‘War Zone’ Shows How Little Street Harassment Has Changed

In the late 1990s, a white woman director, Maggie Hadleigh-West, spent five weeks walking along the streets of New York–but she also filmed other women (and at least one girl) on the streets–together they were a small but diverse group: some in New York, one in San Francisco, two in New Orleans and one in Chicago. Hadleigh-West wore a tight but fairly modest, sleeveless summer outfit (always the same one, as if she were in a science experiment) and 1,050 men harassed her. Her excellent feature-length documentary ‘War Zone’ (which streams for free on Snag Films) expertly edits together 53 of these men on camera –and doesn’t just show the harassment but also shows the interviews Hadleigh-West conducts with these men right after they catcall her.

“I don’t have to watch a video to know women are harassed on the street” was my official reason for never looking at the “viral” Hollaback clip of a white model filmed by a hidden camera (she knew about the camera; passers-by did not) as she walked in New York City, getting catcalled everywhere. Although the film had the “Hollaback” name on it, a man directed it (he runs an ad agency) and “for whatever reason” edited out all the white men who harassed the model. The director, of course, is a white guy himself.

In the late 1990s, a white woman director, Maggie Hadleigh-West, spent five weeks walking along the streets of New York–but she also filmed other women (and at least one girl) on the streets. Together they were a small but diverse group: some in New York , one in San Francisco, two in New Orleans, and one in Chicago. Hadleigh-West wore a tight but fairly modest, sleeveless summer outfit (always the same one, as if she were in a science experiment) and 1,050 men harassed her. Her excellent, feature-length documentary War Zone (which streams for free on Snag Films) expertly edits together 53 of these men on camera–and doesn’t just show the harassment but also shows the interviews Hadleigh-West conducts with these men right after they catcall her. Sometimes they don’t need to make a sound. She’ll just turn around and focus her camera on a man as she says, “I just noticed when I was walking by, that you looked at my breasts.”

Hadleigh-West explains in a voice-over at the beginning how she came to make the film: “I bought this Super 8 camera at a yard sale with no idea what I was going to do with it…I realized I actually had a weapon, a weapon to take back the power that was being taken from me every time I stepped out of my house, a weapon I could turn on men the same way they turn their aggression on me.”

As a saxophone plays on the soundtrack, Maggie walks and we hear comments at the same time she does, at which point she turns around and gets a closeup of the man as she questions him. Her approach is friendly and polite, but we see the surprise and uneasiness on the men’s faces as she confronts them. She asks one Black man who is surrounded by male friends, “”You didn’t say, ‘Hey beautiful’?”

He’s not a very young man but he seems almost like a kid when he says, “No!”

She smiles to say, “Now why would you lie about something like that?”

warzone2guys — Maggie interviews two men who catcalled her

Her interactions with men of color–less than 50 years after Emmett Till was lynched for flirting with a white woman–have a lot in them to parse. We also see a class element as many of the men in the film are blue-collar workers, like a group of movers inside a truck. She asks one (who is also Black), “So why were you whistling at me?”

He answers, “Excuse me, I’m working, please.”

She counters, “Excuse me, I was walking, please.”

Some of the more sexually aggressive men also seem to have mental illness or substance abuse issues. Some might be homeless. All the men feel aggrieved; why can’t they say what they want to a woman walking down the street? This film was made years before Hollaback or any sort of organized anti-street-harassment organizations–or public service announcements–existed. Like the men commenting on the viral street harassment video, the men on the street claim they don’t know that they’re doing wrong.

When Hadleigh-West talks to a young white man on a park bench and tells him she’s making a film about sexual harassment he says, “Well, I’ll be the star…I don’t say nothing. I just look at them. I’m not bothering them… I can look at anything…freedom of sight!”

WarZoneMaggieBackMen — Maggie looks back at the men who look at her

When she asks follow-up questions, many of the men dislike having to explain themselves. They don’t want to be imposed upon, the way they impose themselves on the women who pass them. In some ways Hadleigh-West seems to call their bluff as the men claim they just want to “say hello” or that they’ve actually hooked up with women after harassing them on the street. But when this woman tries to talk to them, they get angry at her. Many of the white men in the film (often in ties and button-down shirts) start verbally abusing Hadleigh-West, saying, “Fuck you,” telling her she’s ugly (a familiar tactic to any woman who talks back to street harassment), commanding her to put her camera down, sometimes forcibly trying to strike it down themselves, walking away, turning around and then mooning the camera or trying to run away from the lens on subway escalators and stairways. I don’t think the white men being (as a group) the least willing to engage Hadleigh-West is a coincidence. These men are the ones who have historically owned the streets–and want to exercise power over any woman who walks by.

Even the few white guys who do talk to her– without telling her to fuck off–reveal this mindset. Hadleigh-West asks one, “What’s the message you’re trying to give to women when you check them out?”

He makes a face and asks “The message?”

She presses him, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how am I doing?”

After hemming and hawing he says, “You look…nice. You’re a 5.” He is hardly a paragon of attractiveness himself.

The film’s interviews with women and girls of color are even more incisive. One Asian American woman breaks down the different types of catcalls she receives from men by race. She admits to Hadleigh-West that while she pretends the harassment doesn’t bother her, it does.

We meet one pair, the mother an immigrant from the West Indies, the daughter raised in the US, who talk about their different reactions to street harassment. The daughter, who is a queer woman (she looks to be about college age, though she could be younger), hates it, but the mother says she met her long-term boyfriend after he catcalled her on the street. The women look directly into the camera together, a Diane Arbus photo come to life (the stills from this film would have made a great coffee table book) during a long silence, the mother starting to look alarmed, the daughter visibly bristling. The daughter finally says she’d rather not talk about her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend. Although fear of rape is a reason Hadleigh-West gives for her own loathing of street harassment, this part of the film, along with the scene in which a mixed race woman from New Orleans says she fears some of the men in her own family, seems to touch on how sexual assault and abuse can come from inside the home as well (the logical extension of the ideology behind catcalling). Hadleigh-West also seems to refute the idea that efforts from the police will solve this problem when she confronts a man in a sheriff’s office uniform. She asks, “Aren’t you supposed to be protecting women on the streets, not making them feel threatened?”

One of the most compelling parts of the film are the scenes with a 14-year-old Black girl from New Orleans. At first, when she is in closeup we don’t know how young she is, as she details the kind of harassment she’s received on the streets, but then we see her walking by storefronts, her school uniform skirt exposing her thin legs in ankle socks. She is at least a full head shorter than anyone who passes her and looks even younger than 14. But grizzled old men still leer at her. That “girl” would be about 30 now. I can’t help feeling sad at how little seems to have changed.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIW9iRMSqY”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Talking with Horror’s Twisted Twins: An Interview with the Soska Sisters

To get an idea of the Soska sisters, picture ‘The Shining’s Grady twins, only all grown up and in control of their destinies. Just in time for Halloween, Jen and Sylvia Soska spoke with us about their favorite horror movies, the hardships of working as female directors in masculine genre, their work on ‘See No Evil 2’ and what’s next for their careers.

To get an idea of the Soska sisters, picture The Shining’s Grady twins, only all grown up and in control of their destinies.

As kids, Jen and Sylvia Soska were drawn to horror movies, fascinated by the spectacle of the genre and the mystique of the Final Girl. When they grew up, they tried acting, only to find the roles they were offered as a set identical twin actresses, were either infantilizing or fetishistic.

Fed up, they wrote, directed and starred in Dead Hooker in a Trunk , a low-budget strike-out at the constraints they faced in film school. Next came cult favorite, American Mary, a dark journey through the world of body modification and the controversial rape-revenge genre. One of my personal favourite horror movies, American Mary features a fascinating central character in Mary Mason (Katherine Isabelle), who morphs from anxious med-student to a cold as ice antihero we can’t help but root for, even as she becomes a monster.

Their new film See No Evil 2, a sequel to the 2006 WWE Studios production, See No Evil, is an entertaining and well-thought out slasher flick that knows the genre conventions well enough to simultaneously play around with them and celebrate their fun. All the familiar elements from the sisters’ previous films are there: three dimensional female characters, gore and gleeful violence, splashes of humour, and a Hitchcock-style cameo, now paired with the terrifying figure of wrestler Glenn “Kane” Jacobs, a longtime favorite of the sisters, as the hulking serial killer, Jacob Goodnight.

Just in time for Halloween, the Soska sisters spoke with us about their favorite horror movies, the hardships of working as female directors in masculine genre, their work on See No Evil 2 and what’s next for their careers.

Bitch Flicks: What horror films do you remember scaring or affecting you as children?

Sylvia: Poltergeist– it was our first horror film that was the catalyst to our mum explaining how filmmaking really works and us falling deeply in love with the genre. I remember The Stand was the next thing to really scare the shit out of me. I saw Hellraiser at a very young age, but I was so into prosthetics that it was just beautiful to me.

Jen: Alien, too. I remember being so scared at the end and my mum telling me not to worry because Ripley always wins. I was witnessing the evolution of the final girl without even knowing it.

BF: How did you realize you could create your own films?

S: By being pushed to the point where we made a punk rock FU in the form of a short film faux trailer called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. We are life long failed actresses that wanted to use our martial arts experience to get into stunt work that ended up in a crappy film school which was for us the last straw. They took away our budget for our final project, so we decided to write, direct, produce, star in, and do the stunt work for our own project. We were annoyed so we made sure to make it as batshit insane and offensive as possible. And come graduation night, it played to half the audience walking out and the other half cheering so loud you could barely hear the crass dialogue. That was what started it.

J: Robert Rodriguez and his book Rebel Without a Crew was a huge influence, too. Rodriguez has his epic Ten Minute Film School segments where he shows filmmakers how to do what he does in his films. I used to think I wanted to be an actor before I realized how much more fulfilling directing and writing is. You get to create this whole world, and stories, and characters. As an actor you’re usually chasing work you don’t even want just to be working.

BF: Can you tell me about the change from being actresses to filmmakers in charge of your own productions? Was the change empowering?

S: It was so empowering. Neither of us are fans of labeling, but being twins – people just put you in this box. As kids, it was cutesy, talk at the same time stuff, as we grew older it became overtly sexual, talk at the same time stuff. As we got into our twenties, we knew we wanted to do something different. I love watching films and always fantasized about what I would do if I could make films, I never thought it could be a reality. To have the job of creating the characters that we do and making the films that we do is an amazing opportunity.

J: It felt like coming home. In a weird way all the skills we had that we didn’t think had anything to do with one another just came together. I love filmmaking. We’re natural story tellers so being able to turn our ideas, concepts, and characters to the big screen is the most unbelievable feeling.

BF: Why are you drawn to horror? What came first, an interest in filmmaking or in horror? Did you seek out horror or fall into the genre due to its accessibility to low budget production?

S:I never even realized the effect horror films had on me until I went into filmmaking. I see all of my interests like horror films, comic books, video games, and wrestling reflected in what I do now because I grew up on that stuff and it moulded me into the strange individual I am today. The reason why DHIAT was low budget was because we didn’t know how hard or expensive making a movie would be. We read Rebel Without a Crew, we saw Grindhouse in the theaters a million times and thought, yup, we gotta make a feature film called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. We have to do that.

J: I’ve loved horror movies as far back as I can remember. It’s definitely not because it can be done inexpensively at even a low level. Surely documentaries and dramas are even easier to do on a small budget. Horror is just so much fun. You go to horror film festivals or conventions and you find the happiest, most out going people in the world. People who are into horror just seem to be happier, nicer people. Maybe it’s because we get out all our aggression on the screen, ha ha

BF: Have you ever wanted to experiment with a different genre?

S: Absolutely. It started with us wanting to tackle every sub genre within horror – so far we have body horror and slasher, maybe grindhouse if you really want to stretch the genre, and I don’t know what our ABCs of Death 2 segment, T is for Torture Porn, would be categorized as. We are just in post production on our first action film, part of the WWE Studios and Lionsgate Film Action Six Pack Series, called Vendetta, starring Dean Cain, Paul “Big Show” Wight, and Michael Eklund. It’s the macho-est thing we have ever done – it’s very gritty and super violent.

J: We definitely want to tackle each and every sub genre in horror. I wouldn’t say there’s really any genre we wouldn’t want to take on. It all depends on the project. We’d even make a kids movie if they’d ever let us, ha ha. I’d really love to make a Western. We’ll be doing our first comic book adaptation when we bring Jimmy Palmiotti’s Painkiller Jane to the big screen.

BF: Can you tell me a bit about some of your influences?

S: I adore Lars Von Trier’s work, it’s so unforgivingly bleak yet beautiful what he does. Takeshi Miike is just a master of tone and gore. Mary Harron is my hero, seeing her speak was the reason why I wanted to be a director – she’s so eloquent and her films deliver such a punch. We learned how films got made from Robert Rodriguez – we adore his work!

J: I love Joss Whedon. His writing, humor, characters, and story arcs are just incredible. I’ve loved him since he worked on Roseanne, but it was Buffy that really made me fall for him and his stereotype breaking, unconventional characters. And his out of nowhere, heart breaking favorite character deaths.

BF: Do you ever experience any prejudice or roadblocks as women in horror? Has that effected your sensibility? Difficulty getting funding?

S: Always and I think it might be forever. No matter how many cool people are out there, there will be hateful people that are bigoted, cruel, and disrespectful. We paid for our first film, my parents – who are the most wonderful and supportive people on the planet – re-mortgaged their home to invest in American Mary so it could happen, and then there came Lionsgate and WWE Studios who loved our stuff and wanted to team up to make some cool films. Getting funding is difficult, there are some misogynistic pricks out there but there are also a lot of cool people who don’t suck at life; with our time working with these studios – we got cool people who were funding the projects.

J: Oh, sure. But sexism is an issue much bigger than the film industry. I’ve encountered it everywhere I’ve worked and usually paired with ageism. We’ve never encountered it from someone who is actually successful and happy with their lives. It’s more often miserable people, often ones who somehow failed forward and are wanna be filmmakers themselves who end up just resenting us.

BF: Do you feel your films have a female sensibility? What other horror films do you feel might have a female sensibility? What would your dream film be?

S: Definitely, but it’s because Jen and I don’t believe in disposable characters. Everyone who exists in one of our films is important and unique. I think it comes from our acting days when we’d find ourselves going for roles that were lame just because we wanted to be working. Some awesome horror films with female sensibility would be Stoker, Excision , Spring , Martyrs, Inside, and Audition. You really get to see real, flawed female characters taking centre stage in these very amazing films. Being Hungarian, the dream project that we really want is Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess.

J: You can kill a hundred people in a film and have it not connect at all with the audience or you can kill a single person in a very real and emotional way. I think women have more of an eye for suffering. I totally agree with Sylv. It would be such a thrill to bring the Hungarian Murderess, Elizabeth Bathory.

BF: Do you feel you have a certain responsibility as female directors working in horror? Why is it important to have a female voice in horror?

S: Yes, because there are so few of us working. Not because there is a lack of female directors, but a serious lack of female directors being hired. Thank God you have directors like Jovanka Vuckovic making Clive Barker’s Jacqueline Ess and Kathryn Bigelow kicking ass all kinds of ass, and this is the same filmmaker that made the amazingly bro-tastic Point Break. That said, I want to see more. When you don’t have the perspective of half your population weighing in artistically there is a problem. There are too many stories not being told.

J: I wish I had more female role models growing up. The directors I loved that had the biggest influence on me were all male directors. John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch… It’s really important for us to do well so that other little girls can be inspired to be filmmakers, too. We need to hear more female voices.

BF: You’ve set out to cast women in lead roles in your films. Dead Hooker in the Truck was originally intended for an all women cast. There are several prominent female characters in See No Evil 2. Why is this important to you? Why do you cast yourselves in your films?

S: I have watched too many two-dimensional throwaway female characters. I have read for too many of them. I think it’s time to see the modern woman reflected properly in our entertainment. I want to see as versatile and complicated characters as are traditionally given to leading men. We play a lot with gender stereotypes in our films. I think gender is a big issue right now, things are slowly starting to change, and I want to be a part of that. As for our own cameos in our films, it’s something we loved that Hitchcock used to do. That and kill blondes.

J: I spent too much of my acting days chasing after roles I didn’t really even want. The options out there for women, let alone identical twins, was incredibly limiting. I like to write the kind of roles I would have killed to play or even audition for. We don’t believe in throwaway characters. Everyone that’s there needs a purpose and to look hot isn’t enough of one. I love Joss Whedon’s answer to “why do you write strong women?” “Because you’re still asking me that.” Women are every bit as strong and complex and interesting as men, but that’s just not often reflected enough in the films we see coming out. Women have such a capacity for evil. Just check out David Fincher’s Gone Girl. It’s such a beautifully executed film.

BF: What is your process working together? Do you each tackle different things? How has working with a partner changed your approach or refined it?

S: Jen and I are born collaborators. We went to school together, we’ve always been roommates, we’ve shared the same jobs, we have collaboration down to a fine art in a creepy The Shining hive mind kind of way. We have similar interests, but we are very different people. We take different paths to get to the same place. It is definitely more refined now, we just know what needs to be done and just divide and conquer. Jen’s awesome to work with on set, I’m really lucky.

J: I’ve never not had a partner. I’m a twin. I’m very lucky to have been born with such a talented artist, best friend, and strong business partner. Sylv is awesome. She’s so darkly creative. We have the same sensibilities and humor, but we’re very different. We always arrive at the same goal, but the ways we get there are very different. We really do compliment each other.

BF: How has being twins shaped your careers? Twins are quite a horror trope in itself, has that influenced you in your lives and attraction to horror?

S: My whole life I’ve walked into rooms and hear people talk about us being twins. It’s cool, but I wanted to be something more than that and it’s proven to be a difficult task. We felt confidant that being filmmakers could be recognizable than being twins. I remember the first time I heard someone call us the Twisted Twins and I fucking loved it. We are definitely seen as a sideshow oddity, which doesn’t bother me. I’m a freak, I like freaks. I love being a twin. It seems sad to me to not have a twin.

J: I’ve gratefully never had to know what it’s like to not have a twin. It’s really the greatest thing ever. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t have a twin. Because we’re twins we have always stood out in a crowd and grew up with people staring at us. Being an identical twin is also like having a backstage pass to the greatest shit. You will definitely see duality in our films. We love symmetry, you can see it in our cinematography. We like to show two sides to each of our characters. We’ll repeat little things, lines, or actions. Often in foreshadowing.

BF: How do you feel about your reputation as cult favorites?

S: I feel like we showed up under-dressed and over-loud with these crazy films and some people totally got it and decided to support us; and other people just loathe our existence. I like that the people that do like our films really fucking like them, that’s more than you could ever ask for!

J: It’s an insane honor! I can’t believe it, it’s just so surreal. I’m so grateful. It’s so weird to me that all the stuff we were made fun of for liking and being into growing up are the things people really seem to like about us now. I think all us nerds just grew up and took over, ha ha.

BF: As horror films, your films feature a lot of violence against women, how do you feel about this? Is it empowering to shape these narratives yourselves with a female voice? For example, American Mary works as a rape revenge story and Dead Hooker in The Trunk features a prolonged flashback to the beating of a prostitute.

S: The prolonged death of the Hooker in DHIAT was made with the intention of being very difficult to watch. We didn’t create the term ‘Dead Hooker in a Trunk’, there is a society wide stigma on these women that devalue them as worthless human beings. When working girls go missing, people don’t really care. We wanted people to care about the Hooker, we wanted to show that yeah, there’s a lot of silly stuff in the film to laugh at, but when it comes to the physical destruction of this woman, it’s not a joke. We are at a point in time where we need to get a zero tolerance for horrendously vile acts against women. We put these moments in these films because we want to open up a dialogue about it and it’s a lot easier to do with a genre film than other platforms.

J: Mary had her morals compromised and her ideals of being one of the guys, one of the surgeons she so admired, destroyed steadily before the rape. That was just the last thing she believed in taken away from her. Her idol fallen in a big way. The reason we put violence against women in our films is because it is so common in real life. It’s so common that people just turn a blind eye to it. The amount of letters and emails we’ve received from women who’d been sexually assaulted and had their attacker go unpunished was disgusting. They were so happy to see Mary get her revenge because there is so little justice in the world.

BF: Can you tell me a bit about See No Evil 2 and how you got involved in it and working with WWE?

S: After American Mary, we took meeting after meeting to get to work on our next film, an original monster movie called BOB, but all they wanted to see was a watered down version of American Mary. It was getting depressing. People think after you have a critically acclaimed film everything just falls into place, it doesn’t. When we got the offer for See No Evil 2, we were super excited. We are huge WWE fangirls, we started watching when the Kane character was introduced, and it was a cool slasher – it was a dream project. Lionsgate and WWE have been incredibly supportive collaborative partners.

J: We really love horror and want to take on every sub genre in horror. Not too many directors get the opportunity to.

BF: What was it like approaching a story for a sequel rather than an original story and working with someone else’s script? How did you put your personal spin on the project?

S: It was really fun, but that’s in large part because of the writers, Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, because they have very similar sensibilities to us. They are very rad Brits and that like to horribly murder people in their scripts. As soon as we got involved, we all got into the story, what we had, what we could do to push it more, it was a very collaborative process. Then you get Danielle Harris and Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs involved and the script evolves moreso. We got to put a lot of ourselves into the film – Tamara [Katherine Isabelle’s character] is Jen on a date.

J: Ha ha, only a good one. I’ve been known to take dates on Buffy~esque walks in the graveyard. I would be the first one to suggest going down to the morgue, especially to take a peek at Jacob Goodnight. It was important for all the characters to matter and be strong, but especially the girls. I like that we were able to continue on our signature of keeping our audiences guessing. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t go into much more detail. You can definitely feel our humor and sensibilities in this one.

BF: What was it like working with Kane?

S: An amazing experience. As a fan, I had inhumanly high expectations on this hero I grew up watching. Somehow, he managed to be even better than that. Glenn is so professional, so hard working, and just a genuinely wonderful human being. He’s so smart, he brought so much to making this the next evolution of Jacob Goodnight, and he is so psychically capable that we could really show off his Hulk-strength in the film. I loved working with him. I actually cannot wait to work with him again, there’s a lot of roles someone like him can play.

J: Really a dream come true. A big part of why we were so excited to come onto the film was the opportunity to meet and work with Glenn. We started watching as he was introduced as Kane on WWE. To have our lives come so full circle is incredible. And so surreal. Glenn is an amazing performer as well as an athlete. He’s just fantastic to work with. I love him.

BF: How does See No Evil 2 fit in with your previous films?

S: I think the characters in See No Evil 2 could easily exist in a world where Badass and Mary Mason also live – there are from that same universe in our heads. It’s an art house slasher homage that is also very self aware – not many studios would let you do something like that with such a profitable franchise.

J: There’s a running theme in our films where seemingly everyday characters, people who could be you, me, our friends, get thrown into something life changing and end up getting tough and evolving. It’s very much the same in See No Evil 2. If you pay attention, you can also see the big beats for each character that also results in their outfits transforming more and more final girl as they go. We like to put a lot of heart in our films and you will care for these people that you see brutally murdered.

BF: You worked with Katharine Isabelle for a second time in See No Evil 2. Is it important to you to create a stable of actors and reliable people to work with again and again? She’s getting to a bit of a horror icon herself, as is Danielle Harris. Chelan Simmons has also been in her share of slashers. Can you tell me a bit about how you work with actors and what qualities make an actor fun to work with? Were these people you sought out to work with? Did you look to people with a reputation as horror icons?

S: We build a bit of a film family on these things, we have such an amazing crew in Vancouver – they are so good at what they do and they’ve been with us through so much, you will definitely see lots of names repeating in our various films. The same goes for the cast – you keep collaborating because there’s this magic that can happen as you keep getting more comfortable about each other. I love actors and the more I get to know them as people, the more I’m like, oh, they would be perfect doing this. Working with Katie on Mary, I got to know how ridiculously funny she is. You never see the hot girl also being the funniest one. Tamara came from us wanting to see that.

I know a lot of the actresses in SNE2 have done a ton of horror movies, that was intentional in the casting. We wanted a pedigree to the whole thing. It was so cool to work with Danielle and Chelan – they are just so good at what they do. I can’t wait to be able to work on the next thing with them. I know Danielle is about to direct her second feature and I cannot wait to see that. Can you imagine the kinds of films a woman like that will create? Badass.

J: We try to hunt down the very best people. People who love film and love what we’re doing. Life’s too short to work with dicks and it’s crazy to think people who work in film aren’t always super grateful to be where they are. We become very close with our cast and crew. They’re the people we call friends, some even family, like Katie. We love working with our friends. And actors are so capable. Just look at Michael Eklund. I could work with him on every film I do for the rest of my life and I know he’ll just keep surprising me and blowing us away with his performances.

S: We strive to build up that core. You see a lot of directors team up with the same talent because you become friends and want to do more and more with them and give them chances to play a range of different characters. I’m really so blessed to have been able to work with so many amazing people.

BF: A spoiler question…

You played with the concept of the Final Girl with the ending of See No Evil 2. How do you feel about the idea of the Final Girl?

S: I love the final girl so much. I have cheered many a Final Girl on in my living room, but I always see the Final Girl. We like playing with gender stereotypes, so Seth is the final boy. If you rewatch the film, he does all the final girl moments – love interest willing to die for to save, has an encounter with Jacob but survives, throughout loses more clothing for sexed up/battle damaged look (this was an intentional transition look for all of the cast), gives ‘everything is going to be ok’ speech, everyone else is dead, and the final impossible showdown. I hope we get to make three — Seth has more to do and Jacob’s still not dead.

J: I loved killing the Final Girl. And we killed one of horror’s true icons, Danielle Harris. She is the perfect final girl. We wanted to set up both Danielle and Katie as being potential final girls all the while building up our final boy, Seth, played by the wonderful Kaj-Erik Eriksen. Seth is a mix between Ash (Evil Dead) and Seymour (Little Shop of Horrors). He’s the hot, really sweet, nerd who turns out to be as tough as nails. I loved having him go head to head with Jacob Goodnight and just take all that damage.

BF: What projects do you have in the works at the moments?

S: There are a few things in development that we’re really excited about. A huge one is Painkiller Jane, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Craig Weeden, which is a big screen adaptation of the badass graphic novel heroine. It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read – which makes sense because Jimmy co-created the character. It’s an honest to goodness, straight from the comic, foul languaged, super sexy, hardcore violent, kickass chick cop buddy movie with a superhuman flair. It’s like The Heat on crack.

J: We just finished up Vendetta, our first action movie starring Dean Cain, Paul “The Big Show” White, and Michael Eklund. I’m so happy with it. It’s like a Punisher movie taking place in a men’s prison. And you’ve never seen Dean Cain be this much of a badass. It’ll be out sometime in 2015. We’ve got quite a few things in development, including our high concept, original monster movie called, BOB. Nothing would make me happier than to be doing BOB next. It’s so weird and heart felt and honest and brutal and hilarious. I cannot wait to be making it.

Sylvia and Jen’s new film See No Evil 2 is currently available DVD and Blu-Ray as well as On Demand and Digital HD.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Jennifer’s Body’: The Sexuality of Female Possession and How the Devil Didn’t Need to Make Her Do It

And now Anita is “needy” no more because she has tasted the power, lived to tell the tale and will use her new demon passenger to right the wrongs that she sees fit. Even though she’s possessed, you can sense that she will guide herself and the demon within and take control of it. Freedom is a beautiful thing, even if you have to be possessed to make it happen.

Needy, being a good friend to a bad girl.

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Female possession has been used as a plot device to show what could happen to a woman who strayed from the norm. It was engrained into our subconscious that if you weren’t a good little girl and didn’t toe the line you could, and probably would, be possessed. It would be horrible, you will become deformed, unattractive and suffer like never before. Whether you were a believer or not, you knew that being possessed was never a good thing.

You also learned very early on that if a girl was possessed and acted badly, it really wasn’t her fault and all the boys would run to save her because it was a horrible fate and all the bad things she did while possessed weren’t really her fault because, the devil or (insert demon here) made her do it. The messages in these films, that I both loved and loathed, were clear: if you had a vagina you weren’t to blame for your bad behavior and the devil is gonna get you if you don’t act like the perfect little girl that fits nicely into the mold that our society has set forth.

The devil didn't make me do it — The devil didn’t make me do it

This myth and the tropes within were the status quo for many, many years until Jennifer’s Body came along in 2009 and did something that even I didn’t see coming. It showed a different side of female possession. Sure, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) gets possessed, and true, she does some horrible things while under the influence of her demon and, yeah, she only got possessed because she did something that good little girls and nice young ladies don’t do, but what’s great about the whole situation is that in the midst of all of the horrible that follows the possession you don’t feel sorry for her. At least, not in the traditional way; you’re actually amused at all the carnage that follows because she looks like she’s having fun and she turns the tables on every horror movie trope you knew you hated or thought was laced with misogyny and seasoned with a heaping spoonful of the requisite female apologetics. Jennifer is bad, but she wasn’t made that way by the possession; had this been a regular old teen movie she would have played the anti-hero that you loved to hate and once possession takes hold she’s like Regina George in demonoid form.

One of the best things about Jennifer’s Body is how inappropriate it is and unapologetic it is for its inappropriateness. Jennifer’s Body is filled with pure naughty, campy fun. But it’s also filled with something even more interesting. It holds a mirror up to society and the dynamics of not only female friendships but also female sexuality. Not only is it the story of a girl “gone wild” in different kind of way, we get treated to two female possessions that have two totally different results. The first one is the possession of the film’s namesake, the flirtatious, wild child Jennifer Check and the second is that of her friend the quiet, good girl next door, Anita “Needy” Lesnicki. Jennifer pushes through and has fun with it and Anita tends to be fearful of the change and eventually comes to grips with her new interior angel and begins to embrace it and relish in her newfound freedom, even if that freedom starts off with her behind bars at a mental hospital.

The film gives us two different views of the same story. When it comes to Jennifer, on one hand she does seem to get “punished” in what feels like the generic, horror film, female possession fashion for ditching her friend and going alone into a van with a group of boys (GASP), but unlike every other female possession film this demon makes her not only stronger but more fearless and she knows how to use her powers. She turns the tables on every guy who crosses her path and takes to her new self like a champ. She doesn’t cry out for help or to be saved, she plays along and enjoys the freedom that the possession gives her and actual enjoys herself a bit. The demon doesn’t take control of Jennifer’s body, or force her to do something that you can sense she really doesn’t want to do. It engages the parts of her that were already there. No one flinches at Jennifer’s post-possession overt sexuality because that was a quality that she possessed before. In fact, her previous overt sexuality is what the demon uses to seduce her prey and from the first ingestion of the school’s football captain to the last man the demon leaves standing she wields her sexuality like an artist. She didn’t get taken over and changed into something opposite of what she was before, i.e. the usual nice girl who should be saved because she was so sweet before; instead it just turns her up to 11.

The other possession in Jennifer’s Body happens to the title character’s best friend, Anita , who gets possessed as an accidental side effect of trying to save Jennifer. Anita knows who her friend is and finds herself attached to her, hence the nickname “Needy,” in a super codependent way. After all of the killings that the possessed Jennifer commits, she shows up at Anita’s house, drenched in blood after her last male kill and tries to seduce Anita as a preamble to the demon, or is it Jennifer 2.0, telling the tale of how she came to be possessed. This confession leaves Anita a little more than freaked and she sets out to help her friend. She does everything that the good girl is supposed to do, including going to the library and researching what has become of her friend Jennifer. The film ends with Anita being forced to stab her best friend in the heart to kill her because she is a succubus and she killed her boyfriend along with a slew of other horny teenage boys. Of course, the good girl, Anita, who has actually saved the day, gets caught by her bestie’s mother wielding the knife over her now dead, or re-dead, daughter, and she’s shipped off to an asylum. It is from that asylum that Anita retells the story and it is also where she will escape from and set out to find the band that turned her friend into a murderous succubus and she kills them all.

Anita’s possession comes from a place of the girl who did everything good and right. She was a good friend, loyal girlfriend, smart, nice, modest. Pretty much everything that girls are supposed to be in these movies. When she gets possessed and retains Jennifer’s powers via a non-fatal bite during the catfight, literally, from hell she goes on to seem happy about it. She’s finally free. She is no longer “needy” or insecure. She finds strength in the knowledge that she can do anything. But, the question lingers does Jennifer want to be saved? Does Anita? Killing and cannibalism aside, what’s so wrong with a girl enjoying herself? Why does it need to be punished?

In movies where female possession is used as the main form of horror, it has always been hard for me to decipher if the reason that so many people attempt to save the “damsel in distress” is because she’s so altered that she needs it, or if it’s because she has become powerful, unstoppable, cognizant, aware, and free. Is it so much better to put the genie of strength back in the box? Is it so necessary for women to conform to society’s norms and expectations that any deviation from these norms causes society to feel fear? Is the dread coming from the empathy we have for the poor girl being possessed, from the feeling that it could happen to us, or from the knowledge that being powerless is a feeling that most women have? It’s should scare us that in movies like this we are only allowed power through artificial, usually male allowed or induced means, and when we become too powerful, the power gets taken away because we can’t handle it or shouldn’t have it. There is often an undertone in these films that the real problem isn’t the demon, it’s the vessel.

The thing that makes Jennifer’s Body so great is that even though Jennifer dies, Anita, the girl who probably needs the strength that possession carries, gets to live and keep her power. There is something empowering about watching her joyfully skip away from the asylum and hunt down the band responsible for her current condition and Jennifer’s possession. She knows that she has the strength that she needs to survive and carry on but also that she’s no longer afraid. The fear of speaking her mind or exploring and existing outside the lines is gone. The possession allows her to speak and live freely, to live outside the lines and define her own goals, needs, and desire. The empowerment comes not from watching her go medieval on the men behind the curtain, but from the innocence on her face as she confronts them. There is something beautiful about taking a genre that has long punished women and turning it on its head. There was no man to save Jennifer here, only another woman, a friend, and she stands tall in victory when the dust settles. And now Anita is “needy” no more because she has tasted the power, lived to tell the tale and will use her new demon passenger to right the wrongs that she sees fit. Even though she’s possessed, you can sense that she will guide herself and the demon within and take control of it. Freedom is a beautiful thing, even if you have to be possessed to make it happen.

Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator, and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.

Does ‘Jennifer’s Body’ Turn The Possession Genre On Its Head?

‘Jennifer’s Body’ is not a traditional female possession film. The genre is generally typified by mild mannered asexual women who begin to act in overt and sometimes pathologized sexual ways once they become possessed. Jennifer’s sexuality, on the other hand is firmly established at the beginning of the film, from her clothing, the way she interacts with both her best friend Needy and the males in her school, to where she casually mentions that she is “not even a back door virgin anymore.”

This post by staff writer Gaayathri Nair appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

When Jennifer’s Body first came out in 2009, both writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kausama attempted to frame the movie as a feminist subversion of the horror genre. In interviews they both talked about horror being a genre that actually has a lot to offer women in terms of empowerment, in particular referring to the “final girl trope.” Despite their intentions, I’m not sure if Jennifer’s Body can be read as a movie that defies the sexist tropes of both the teen and horror genres. As a possession movie, it is certainly a departure from many of the tropes of the genre and I think the movie does have moments of brilliance. However it falls down for me because it relies on teen and horror movie staples of competitive female friendship, a young women that is constantly objectified on screen and then finally punished for her sexuality.

In Jennifer’s Body, Jennifer, played by Megan Fox is offered as a virgin sacrifice by a less than mediocre indie band to the devil in order to launch themselves into the big time. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, Jennifer is not actually a virgin and so a “demonic transference” occurs where she comes to life but happens to be possessed by a succubus.

Jennifer’s Body is not a traditional female possession film. The genre is generally typified by mild mannered asexual women who begin to act in overt and sometimes pathologized sexual ways once they become possessed. Jennifer’s sexuality, on the other hand, is firmly established at the beginning of the film, from her clothing, the way she interacts with both her best friend Needy and the males in her school, to where she casually mentions that she is “not even a back door virgin anymore.” Jennifer’s position as a person who is sexual and enjoys sex is very clear. It is also clear early on that she knows the effect her looks have on the people around her. She knows that her best friend is captivated by her and uses that to her advantage to keep her in line. She loves the small measure of power her sexuality gives her over the boys she knows desperately want to screw her but can’t. Jennifer chooses exactly who she wants to have sex with; she favors more mature guys who are out of high school.

Unfortunately, it is this preference for more worldly guys that gets her into trouble. Her interest in the lead singer of the band that has come to play at the bar of her small town literally gets Jennifer killed. This is par for the course in horror movies; women who actively engage in expressing their own sexuality are normally punished and often lethally. However in this case, Jennifer’s lack of purity saves her. The fact that she is not actually a virgin means that she gets a second shot at life.

In more traditional possession films, the female victim is fearful of her possession. She generally tries to fight against it and is often pathologized as mentally ill, for example in The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Ros e, Jennifer revels in her new found possession. She loves the power and strength it gives her. She compares it to feeling like a goddess and that feeling is worth the lives of a few paltry high school boys in order to sustain it. She feels no guilt or conflict about her appetites at all.

Unfortunately for Jennifer, her best friend Needy discovers how she is sustaining herself and is unimpressed, especially since Jennifer targeted a particular boy who she was friends with and then also tries to eat her boyfriend. So here, just when it all starts to get interesting we fall into the regular yawn-fest that is a female friendship that is not really a friendship at all and is instead characterized by petty fights over boys and jealousy. Sure this is on an extreme level, but that is what it really boils down to.

To me the movie would have been so much better if it hadn’t come down to Jennifer’s jealousy of Needy spending time with her boyfriend. It would have been so much more satisfying if the final showdown was not between Jennifer and Needy, but between the two of them and the members of Low Shoulder who sacrificed Jennifer for their own ends in the first place. Needy leaves the end of the movie with some of Jennifer’s powers minus the need to consume human flesh and takes her revenge on the people that hurt her friend. She deals with Low Shoulder eventually, but their demise feels like a sad afterthought when it is they who are in fact the arch villains, not Jennifer. For me, while Jennifer’s Body was interesting in the way it dealt with the tropes of the possession movie genre, it wasn’t revolutionary enough. It had so much potential and could have gone so much further; instead, it feels like a cop-out.

Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri

Choice Within Fashion and Fundamentalism: ‘The World Before Her’

In making ‘The World Before Her,’ Pahuja chooses to walk the neutral line by avoiding a personal stand and trying to hold up a mirror instead. In an interview with ‘First Post,’ she says that she made this documentary in an attempt to create a dialogue. Her humanizing, vérité cinema approach works to that effect.

This is a guest post by Nandini Rathi.

Chinmayee, a young girl at the Durga Vahini camp in Aurangabad, takes pride in the fact that unlike before, she has no Muslim friends anymore since her thoughts have matured in Hindutva at Durga Vahini. She takes exclusive pride in Hindu culture and looks forward to strengthen her thoughts about it in the future camps.

In another part of the country, Ruhi Singh, a 19-year-old Femina Miss India 2011 aspirant laments that her hometown, Jaipur, is not supportive of her ambitions as many people fear that allowing girls to get educated and choose their own careers will be tantamount to a loss of culture. “As much as I love my country and my culture,” she says, “I consider myself to be a very modern, young girl. And I want my freedom.”

This freedom, which is echoed by other characters in the The World Before Her (Pahuja, 2012), is of being who they want to be and living as they choose to live, without constantly having to worry about safety. Even though many institutions nurture the dream and promise to fulfill it, they come with strings attached. Indo-Canadian director Nisha Pahuja works hard in this phenomenal documentary to reveal some tensions within a rapidly modernizing India, through the microcosm of the Miss India beauty pageant and the Hindu nationalism of Durga Vahini. Apart from raising questions about objectification of women in the glamour industry, the movie also touches upon the state of communalism and religio-nationalism in India.

After stumbling upon its fascinating Kickstarter pitch video almost two years ago, I finally watched The World Before Her on Netflix. It was thoroughly engaging and every bit worth the time as Pahuja juxtaposes two diametrically opposite, extreme worlds of modern Indian women — behind the walls of the Miss India pageant boot camp in Mumbai and the Durga Vahini physical training camp in Aurangabad. Durga Vahini is the women’s wing of Bajrang Dal, a subsidiary of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu right-wing organization in India.

Beauty pageants deem all their critics to be a singular species from the “Old World.” Right-wing Hindu organizations see beauty pageants as a sign of Western attack on their frozen-in-time, monolithic conception of “Indian culture.” Archival footage informs the audience of the Hindu right wing’s various physical attacks on girls in pubs, in the name of desecration of this “Indian/Hindu culture.” In making The World Before Her, Pahuja chooses to walk the neutral line by avoiding a personal stand and trying to hold up a mirror instead. In an interview with First Post, she says that she made this documentary in an attempt to create a dialogue. Her humanizing, vérité cinema approach works to that effect.

The narrative of The World Before Her cuts back and forth between a Miss India crown aspirant, the sweet 19-year-old Ruhi Singh and a Durga Vahini camp youth leader and staunch VHP supporter, the 24-year-old Prachi Trivedi. It is full of ironies along the way, as the two radically opposite worlds come out to be more similar than what we initially imagined.

The doors of opportunity and exposure open far and wide for the Miss India crown-bearers. Pahuja claims early on that the beauty and glamour industry is one of the few avenues in India where women stand at par with men. Ruhi has the drive to win and the full moral support of her family. However, for many girls, to make it as far as the Miss India pageant is a difficult task of overcoming family reluctance as well as personal resistances. These girls understand that culture is, and was, never a fixed entity — but one that constantly evolves with time and contact with other cultures. Contestant Shweta says that that they are often accused of becoming “American,” to which she smartly argues that she isn’t becoming American for wearing jeans or eating a burger, anymore than Americans are becoming Indians for taking up Yoga.

42 Durga Vahini camps veteran and leader Prachi Trivedi is easily the most fascinating character, who likes to command others and talks to Pahuja with breathtaking candor. Prachi strongly believes in her Hindu nationalism which is based on the idea that the golden age of Hindu India was marred by outsiders who are still the enemy within. She has no qualms about killing any moment for her religion. Her father is cheerfully antagonistic to what she wants to do with her life. He fulfills his duty towards Hindutva by teaching the young girls in the camp — who the “bad guys” are, aka Muslims and Christians. Unlike Ruhi’s parents, Prachi’s father believes that she doesn’t have any rights besides what he gives her. One gets goosebumps when Prachi says that she forgives him for all the bullying, because it’s enough for her that he let her live — and didn’t kill her at birth for being a girl child, like many others do.

Prachi does not think her life is intended for marriage and family. She wants to dedicate her whole life to the Parishad (Vishva Hindu Parishad). But she is not sure if, being a girl, she has the freedom to make such a choice. The choice of a woman to stay single and not produce children is completely outrageous to the Parishad as well as her father. Her candid self-awareness reveals her vulnerable side in that poignant moment; it is so easy to forget then, that her ambition is to become the next Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur of the Malegaon bomb blast notoriety.

There is a palpable tension in the values inculcated at the Durga Vahini camp. “Sher banne ki prakriya yahan se shuru hoti hai (the process of becoming a lion begins here)”, says one of the camp instructors to the girls. On one hand, they want to increase young women’s confidence so they can be independent enough to rise to the call of action for the religio-nation. On the other hand, they are taught the dharma (duties) of a Hindu woman — in which chasing careers is a futile, corrupting, Western pursuit and only a “high moral character” matters, especially in the role of a wife and mother. Women’s action and power matters and is extremely important, but only while it actively and appropriately services the religious nationalism. They are nowhere expected to take liberties or choose their own paths. A conflict from this is likely underway in the future, as it is for Prachi.

On the occasion of Nina Davuluri’s crowing as Miss America, Rediff columnist, Amberish K. Diwanji noted that India’s beauty pageants do not reflect its diversity. Although the issue of inclusion of an Indian dalit or tribal woman in a beauty pageant is much more complicated (keeping in mind, the economic disparities, rural/urban divides and cultural clashes), simply speaking, the definition of beauty in pageants (and the glamour industry) is disturbingly narrow. I was shocked by Cosmetic Physician Dr. Jamuna Pai’s ease in administering Botox injections to achieve some ‘golden rule’ in the facial proportions of the contestants. Add to it, the application of face-whitening chemicals to burn through their tans. Miss India trainer, Sabira Merchant, describes the Miss India pageant boot camp as a factory, a manufacturing unit where beauty is controlled and prepared to meet the demands of the national and international fashion industry. The rough edges have to be straightened out and polished. The routine of the camp makes sure that any personal inhibitions on the woman’s part have been overridden. “The modern Indian woman” is produced for the world to look at.

“… I always had this vision of putting cloaks on women so we can’t see their faces, only their legs — and then decide who has THE best pair of legs. Sometimes you may get thrown — beautiful girl, lovely hair, she walks so good, she has a great body — we don’t want to see all that! I just want to see beautiful, hot legs!” –Marc Robinson, former model and Pageant director

Out of context, this would read as a perverted person’s fetish fantasy. I am trying to remind myself that Robinson speaks for the beauty industry– and so I shouldn’t think of only him as a creep. The parading Ku Klux Klan-esque figures are the contestant ladies, who ought to feel hot when they catwalk up to him like that.

What about self-respect and dignity, one is forced to wonder. Contestant Ankita Shorey, who felt claustrophobic during the cloak session, reflects on her feelings about bending over backwards for the sake of success.

“Aurat ko maas ke tukde ki tarah plate par rakhkar serve kiya jaaye, aur taango, breast aur hips ke aadhaar par taya kiya jaaye – ye toh poori duniya ki aurat zaat ke liye be-izatti ki baat hai, khaali Hindustaan ke liye nahin.” — an Activist in the 1996 archival footage of demonstrations against hosting Miss World in India

(To serve a woman like a piece of flesh on the plate, and to judge her on the basis of the size of her legs, hips and breasts – it is disrespectful to the womankind all over the world – not just to women of India)

My roommate’s and my reaction was — that’s true, she’s right. She expressed a genuine concern that would resonate with anyone who is even mildly concerned about the male gaze and the objectification of women’s bodies in media/glamour/film industry. Her saffron clothes suggest that she could be from a Hindutva-espousing party that sees pageants as a plain attack on “Indian culture”. It’s that awkward moment when feminists and right wingers find themselves to be bed fellows on this cause.

The formidable Ms. Merchant says in the second half: “There is a dichotomy and the girls seem like very with it, but they have traditional values. Should we go with the Old World or should we go with the New World? When they ask me that question, I always tell them to go with the New World, because the only thing constant in life is what? Change.” Just as Hindutva-espousing groups like VHP have no reason to not promote a blind hatred of Muslims and Christians, the beauty industry has no need or desire to parse out what the “New World” values really are.

P.S. While there is definitely a dichotomy between the old ideas and the new ones, Pahuja has chosen extreme, contrasting examples for the most narrative oomph. It creates a better story, which I am all for. The documentary is also timely as it is being viewed at a time when the Hindu right in India is gaining power and popularity (since Narendra Modi’s victory at the center). That said, it is crucial to remember that girls who participate in beauty pageants and those who participate in the likes of Durga Vahini camps are extreme minorities. They do not represent the majority.

Nandini Rathi is a recent graduate from Whitman College in Film & Media Studies and Politics. She loves traveling, pop culture, editing, documentaries, and adventures. Now living in New York city, she wants to be immersed in filmmaking, journalism, writing and nonprofit work to ultimately be able to contribute her bit toward making the world a better place. She blogs at brightchicdreams.wordpress.com.

‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Years ago, when Ingrid Bergman first went to work in Hollywood (after a successful career in Sweden), she was wary of how American movie studios had changed the appearance of other European actresses once they were under contract. The Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who appeared in films stateside looked very different from the actresses of the same name who were in European films a few years before. Bergman opted to keep her own eyebrows and resisted pressure to lose weight. She also wore more natural makeup than was the rule for other actresses working in Hollywood at the time. Her toned-down but still radiant look, along with her talent, may be why Bergman’s presence in films connected with audiences: she stood out among the crowd of Max-Factored, Hollywood actresses with deep hollows under sharp cheekbones.

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great Humpday and the equally delightful Your Sister’s Sister stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘“‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occurred to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, Laggies, I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and letting Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Laggies has a traditional script (in every respect) by Andrea Seigel and names familiar from the multiplex in the lead roles: Keira Knightley as Megan, an underachieving 20-something, Chloë Grace Moretz as Annika, the high school student she befriends and Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single Dad, Craig, who works as a divorce lawyer.

At the very beginning of the film we see Megan after her own prom hanging out with her best high school girlfriends in terribly framed and shot “home video.” We can barely see their faces: a clever and effective solution to the movie quandary of showing characters over a decade younger than they appear in the rest of the film. Unlike most people, who move on from their high school friends during college or in other parts of young adulthood, Megan is still hanging out with the same clique and we see from the beginning that they have grown apart. During the small, private, bachelorette party for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper, playing a snide variation of the same character she played in Bridesmaids) we see her friends snip at her for everything from her working for her father, holding a sign pointing to his business, to touching the chest of a huge, tacky, gold-painted statue at the Chinese restaurant where the party takes place. Perpetually irritated Allison asks, “Why would you tweak the nipples? That’s Buddha.” (actually it’s Budai the so-called “laughing Buddha,” but I don’t expect the characters to know the difference).

Megan has a nice-guy, live-in boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), also a relic from high school, who proposes to her at Allison’s wedding reception. Megan’s reaction when she sees him start to get down on one knee is to gasp and say, “No, no, whoa! Get up!”

Megan first meets Annika outside a liquor store when the teen approaches her with a flimsy story about her and her obviously underage friends that culminates in the question: could Megan buy liquor for them? Megan says, “Someone did this for me when I was your age. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Annika says, “I had a good feeling about you.”

Megan cracks, “That makes one of us.”

That night, Megan hangs out with and gets very drunk with the teens and through a series of contrivances ends up staying at Annika’s home for a week–accompanying her to teen parties, the mall and taking part in a sleepover with Annika’s best friend Misty (Caitlyn Dever from last year’s Short Term 12). Shelton still has a great touch with actors and Knightley here reminds us that the movie in which she first received acclaim, Bend It Like Beckham, was a comedy. In Laggies, she’s at her best the times she gets to use her long skinny body for comic effect, as when she dons headphones to undulate along a busy road while she holds the sign pointing to her father’s business or folds herself against the ground into a turtle-like posture to feed Annika’s pet tortoise.

The film also has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the activities of contemporary, suburban teens. Moretz’s character is a teenager who seems more like the peers I had in high school than the stereotypes that populate most movies. Husky-voiced Annika is an unapologetic “partier” who regularly lies to her father about where she’s going and what she’s doing–and unlike similar girl characters in mainstream films we’re not cued to see her as a sociopath or an alcoholic.

The film also shows empathy for Sam Rockwell’s put-upon Dad. Rockwell has good chemistry with Knightley and a great touch with lines like the one he gets when he first sees Megan in Annika’s room, “Wow, high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.” His Craig is a mixture of equal parts of love and exasperation he feels toward his daughter with some “embarrassing” Dad behavior thrown in. The film also refrains from completely vilifying Annika’s absentee mother, played briefly and poignantly by Gretchen Mol.

But the film’s central premise of Megan regressing to her high school days falls flat. Knightley’s Megan seems too sensible and grounded to be the kind of screwed-up (but sometimes fun) adult who hangs out with teenagers. And although Rockwell’s character briefly questions Megan’s intentions, no one else does, or comes to the conclusion that many of us would if we saw an adult spending lots of time with a high school student (including sleeping over): that the two are having sex or headed in that direction.

In this film queer people seem not to exist, a disappointment because Shelton is an out bisexual woman who created a complex and memorable title queer woman character (beautifully played by Rosemarie DeWitt) in Your Sister’s Sister and played a small, but memorable role as a queer woman herself in Humpday. Laggies, like the other mainstream American movies that assume everyone is heterosexual, is in danger of seeming outdated, especially compared to recent television shows like Please Like Me and How To Get Away With Murder, which nonchalantly depict every aspect of their queer characters’ lives–and feature them as leads.

The movie intermittently focuses on Megan’s lack of direction (she has dropped out of graduate school, where she was studying to be a therapist), but the ending, like that of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, seems to suggest her whole life is resolved by choosing the right man. This mainstream rom-com directed by Lynn Shelton is better and more nuanced than any other choice at the multiplex, but I still miss the wilder, funnier, earlier Shelton films shown at art houses–and the more complicated lives of the women–and men–at their centers.

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The Trauma of ‘Private Violence’

It is absolutely clear that throughout ‘Private Violence,’ Hill allowed Gruelle to take her into a world that she felt compelled to share with the public. That trust, that “wide-eyed curiosity” (as Gruelle said of Hill’s directing technique), created a documentary that not only pays homage to the strength and tragedy of women whose lives are torn apart by male partner violence, but also serves as a wake-up call that the system–law enforcement, news media, medical professionals, local and federal court systems–are not serving victims the way they should. ‘Private Violence’ is a public testament to the horror of domestic assault.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Gloria Steinem said,

“The most dangerous place for a woman statistically speaking is not in the street. It’s in her own home. She’s most likely to be attacked by a man with whom she lives. It’s the trauma of it we’re just beginning to realize.”

This “private,” not public, violence, is the subject of the documentary Private Violence, which premiers Oct. 21 on HBO. (Steinem is an executive producer of the film.) Cynthia Hill directs the documentary, which focuses in on Kit Gruelle, an advocate and survivor, and Deanna Walters, a survivor who is navigating the court system. Other women’s stories are woven throughout, but the individual stories of these women offer a stunning, jarring inside look on what goes on behind closed doors and how “Why didn’t she just leave?” is not a question we should ever ask.

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“It’s not your job to fix broken men.”

Statistics surrounding domestic violence in the US are stunning, even to those who are immersed in following women’s issues in the news–perhaps because the news media too often keeps these stories of assault, stalking, and murder in the private sphere. During the University of Missouri – Columbia’s Journalism School and True/False Film Festival collaboration, Based on a True Story: The Intersection of Documentary Film and Journalism last February, Hill and Gruelle participated in a panel discussion entitled “Telling Stories About Trauma.” Gruelle pointed out that in one of the cases she was advocating for, the local news refused to air graphic photos of a victim, but later that night, “the channel ran TV dramas about violence against women for profit–we can deal with the fantasy.”

The reality is this:

• One in four women (22.3 percent) has been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner

• One in six women (15.2 percent) has been stalked during her lifetime

• Thirty percent of female homicide victims are murdered by their intimate partners

Private Violence does not, as some social-issue documentaries do, continuously slam us in the face with these statistics. Instead, the film takes us inside, takes us behind closed doors, to come face-to-face with victims, families, and advocates. The news media may not show us photos of brutalized women, but Private Violence does. We hear–and see–Walters, as she tries to escape and get some kind of justice (and how difficult it is). In an incredible opening, Candy tries to escape from William (who didn’t even care if they used the scene). The intimate, heartbreaking look into these women’s lives turns a mirror onto a society that has historically been far too complacent about violence against women.

During the aforementioned panel discussion, Hill said that she was approached by Gruelle, who wanted to work on a project about the history of domestic violence advocacy work. “Her intention wasn’t to be the subject of the film,” Hill said. “I wanted to turn my camera in her direction… she already had access and intimacy. A historical film became a cinema verité film.” Hill’s decision to turn the camera on Gruelle was brilliant. Gruelle is a passionate advocate who works hard and speaks loudly about domestic violence in our culture. Hill invited her to speak up during the panel discussion, and Gruelle pointed out that “It’s never just about the abusers. It’s about patriarchal systems that are quick to blame her.”

The crux of Gruelle’s message to audiences, to not ask “Why doesn’t she just leave?” is amplified by focusing on these individuals’ stories. It was difficult to hear that when the film was shown at the True/False Film Festival, Candy had gone back to William. Seeing faces somehow makes that knee-jerk reaction of “Just leave!” creep up, even if we know better. “Leaving an abuser isn’t an event,” Gruelle said. “It’s a process.” The process isn’t incredibly fulfilling to watch in Private Violence, nor should it be. The system fails women far too often, and Private Violence shows that in painful detail.

Before the film screened at True/False (to an overflowing, sold-out crowd), Hill told the audience that the ultimate goal is “to make women and children safe in their own homes.” Because we know that as it stands, they are not.

It is absolutely clear that throughout Private Violence, Hill allowed Gruelle to take her into a world that she felt compelled to share with the public. That trust, that “wide-eyed curiosity” (as Gruelle said of Hill’s directing technique), created a documentary that not only pays homage to the strength and tragedy of women whose lives are torn apart by male partner violence, but also serves as a wake-up call that the system–law enforcement, news media, medical professionals, local and federal court systems–are not serving victims the way they should. Private Violence is a public testament to the horror of domestic assault.

During the Q&A after the screening, Walters appeared on stage with Hill and Gruelle. She said that her participation in the film–and how she laid herself bare–is “my way of helping people.” Gruelle pleaded with the crowd to “go back to your communities and pop the hood,” ensuring that victims got the justice they deserved (but first we must keep their stories out of the shadows).

Gruelle, left, and Watson. — Kit Gruelle, left, and Deanna Walters.

Hill’s direction is remarkable in its effortlessness; she knows to follow, to absorb, to tell the story. When she was asked during the panel discussion about her decision to include upsetting audio in the film, she said, “Well, this is what happens. People need to know what happens.”

Private Violence shows what does–and doesn’t–happen behind closed doors and within a system we’re taught to trust. May audiences be moved to lift the veil in their own communities, to listen to women’s stories, and to effect change in a patriarchal system that is far too brutal to its female citizens.

Private Violence airs on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 20. In 2015, Private Violence will be available for educational distribution through Women Make Movies.

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Recommended reading: Interview with Private Violence Director Cynthia Hill, by Danielle Lurie at Filmmaker Magazine; A Brief History of Sexual Violence Activism in the U.S., by Caroline Heldman and Baillee Brown at Ms. blog; Till Death Do Us Part, by Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes, and Natalie Caula Hauff at The Post and Courier; Prosecutors Claim South Carolina’s Stand Your Ground Law Doesn’t Apply to Domestic Violence Survivors at Ms. blog; Why You Need to Watch this HBO Film on Domestic Abuse, by Hilary White at Pop Sugar; Sundance Film Review: Private Violence, by Dennis Harvey at Variety

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.