As I wrote last week, I love me some Peggy Carter, and worried about how ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ would fare (mostly) without her. So I was pumped that Peggy not only appears from the past (interviewed in a video presentation in the Smithsonian exhibit on Captain America), but as an ailing nonagenarian Steve still calls “his best girl.”
And even better, the other women in the film are all some shade of awesome. I wanted more from all of them, but I’m greedy like that.
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
[This review contains spoilers]
As I wrote last week, I love me some Peggy Carter, and worried about how Captain America: The Winter Soldier would fare (mostly) without her. So I was pumped that Peggy not only appears from the past (interviewed in a video presentation in the Smithsonian exhibit on Captain America), but as an ailing nonagenarian Steve still calls “his best girl.”
And even better, the other women in the film are all some shade of awesome. I wanted more from all of them, but I’m greedy like that.
Emily VanCamp as Agent 13
The other Carter to make an appearance is Emily VanCamp’s Agent 13, who is originally introduced as “Kate,” Steve’s cute neighbor from across the hall, who is quickly revealed to be a S.H.I.E.L.D operative tasked to keep an eye on Steve. And let’s be real: all this character needs to do in this movie is exist, click off another “canonical comic character” box and give a bit more set-up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe should she become Cap’s love interest as she has been in the comics. As S.H.I.E.LD is revealed to be riddled with corruption and infiltrated by evil organization HYDRA, we assume Agent 13 is One of the Good Guys because she looks concerned when they cut to her in the control room scenes. She doesn’t get much dialogue, but she does punch a few bad guys at some point, I think. There’s so much punching in this movie I couldn’t keep track of all of it. (Note: this is not really a criticism.) Anyway, she’s Sharon Carter, who will theoretically be some relative of Peggy’s, and in the next sequel she and Cap will probably smooch. They’re is plenty of time to develop her character before Captain America 3 comes out in 2016.
Steve Rogers and Natasha in battle in their civvies
The woman with the most screen time in the film is Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. A lot of critics are saying this is her most substantial outing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (at least the ones not still hung up on her being mere eye candy), but The Avengers still made the best use of her character. While she may be on screen more in Winter Soldier, she’s not as crucial to the plot here, and not quite as lovable. I was a little put off by her fixation with Steve’s love life, finding it out of character and merely an instrument to highlight Steve’s loneliness. But that’s a minor quibble: Black Widow is still a total badass in this movie, and gets in some great snarky lines, and looks hot doing it.
But what really made Black Widow work in The Avengers was the glimpses of her vulnerability: her genuine fear of The Hulk, he anguish over Hawkeye, her guilt over her past. These made her badass moments so much more satisfying, in particular the turnaround in her interrogation of Loki when she gets him to say too much leaning in to these weaknesses. In the Winter Soldier, Black Widow’s vulnerability is demonstrated through physical injury, which is dramatic, sure, but superficial and less interesting.
And I know, I know, “strong but vulnerable” is the oldest cliché in the book when it comes to well-developed female characters. But that’s because “strong but vulnerable” is what makes characters, irrespective of gender, someone to root for and relate to. And sure, the vulnerable side of the equation for female characters appeals to some because it reinforces sexist ideas about women’s weaknesses. But for me, vulnerability is especially important when it comes to action heroines, to escape the trope of The Fighting Fucktoy (which is exactly what Black Widow was when she first appeared in Iron Man 2).
Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill
Speaking of absence of vulnerability: Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill returns, and remains on the precipice of awesome. I’m patiently waiting for her character to get fleshed out a bit in the MCU, because all we know about her now is that she’s extremely tough. While she’s not as sexualized as Natasha Romanoff has sometimes been, she still looks like Cobie Smulders, and I want her to be more than a Hot Chick With a Gun. She’s the person Nick Fury calls when he’s in trouble. I want to know why. (In the Black Widow movie the whole world desperately wants to see, she could be Natasha’s buddy cop. MAKE IT HAPPEN, MARVEL.)
All in all, Captain America: The Winter Soldier does all right by its women. I’m also going to award it feminism points for the thematic importance of male friendship, because dudes have emotions too! This comes primarily from the epic drama of Steve vs. The Winter Soldier, who is none other than his childhood best friend and fallen comrade Bucky Barnes, which brings about a tremendous amount of what I believe the internet refers to as “feels.” (Bucky is remarkably emotional for someone allegedly brainwashed. I reached the point where I had to stifle my laughter every time his face was in closeup because he’s soooooo tortured. Part of me thinks I laughed so I wouldn’t cry. The other part of me is still chuckling).
The Winter Soldier and his eye beams of inner turmoil
But there’s also Steve and his new BFF Sam Wilson (an unstoppably charming Anthony Mackie), who joins him in what’s pretty much a suicide mission as The Falcon because that’s what good bros do when their buddy is dismantling a corrupt government organization. Steve and Sam bonding over returning from combat and laughing at their own dumb inside jokes is the perfect counterbalance to the tooooooorturrrrred broken relationship between Bucky and Steve.
Best Friends Best Friends Baking a Cake!
Captain America: The Winter Soldier definitely gets my geeky stamp of approval (I can see this being in heavy rotation for me when it comes out on video), and it is nice that doesn’t have to be “in spite of” its treatment of women. If you are even a little bit of a comic book movie fan, you should see this one.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer who has dressed up as Captain America for Halloween.
Interestingly and unfortunately, most reviewers have been unable to see this. Her costume is tight, but then so is the captain’s and we are not treated to lingering shots of her butt and cleavage; in fact, most of the time we are looking at her face and not her body. Generally speaking the captain is at least if not more so objectified than she is and yet we do not seem to allow that to interfere with his essential humanity. This is often not the case when it comes to the perception of Johansen’s character. People can’t seem to see past the fact that she wears a cat suit even when she does so much more than look sexy. Like most action movies, this one doesn’t pass the Bechdel test but unlike most action movies it provides us with a female character who is actually a character in her own right.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier was everything I expected and a little more. Captain America has always been the strait-laced cousin to Iron Man and Thor. It doesn’t have the campy good humour that is so delightful about Thor or the kind of brash arrogance that typifies Iron Man. Captain America is generally the “nice guy” of the Marvel universe. Co-headlining is Scarlett Johansen reprising her role as Natasha Romanoff (alias Black Widow) for this movie. Her character was first introduced to us in the universe in Iron Man 2 where her portrayal was that of a sexed-up femme fatal. However over subsequent movies, particularly The Avengers, she has evolved into a pretty decent three dimensional character.
The movie opens with Cap, aka Steven Rogers (Chris Evans), and Black Widow having to go rescue some hostages from a covert S.H.I.E.L.D boat that had run afoul of pirates. I was quite excited at first because the pirates spoke French and presented as white to my eyes. “Omg the bad guys aren’t brown people,” I whispered excitedly to my partner. This notion was to be destroyed later when someone said something about “French pirates” to be told something along the lines of ‘They’re Algerian actually.” Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. They are mostly a macguffin anyway. The raid on the boat reveals the fundamental difference between Romanoff and the Cap. He always strives to do what is right while she does what she believes (or is told) is necessary. This is an on-going theme throughout the movie. What is necessary is sometimes not what can be considered morally right, but does that make it any less necessary?
From this point on, it is pretty much what you would expect from a superhero flick. Many fights and explosions held together by a storyline that taps into people’s fears about NSA surveillance and how topical the temptation to trade freedom for security is. There is some strong messaging about the value of personal liberties and the consequences that can occur when these are overstepped even on the basis of protecting us from what might be lurking out there in the depths.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier also introduces us to another lesser known hero from the Marvel universe, Falcon. Anthony Mackie does a great job and manages to be funny and endearing while also being totally badass. His introduction also provides a much needed perspective about the difficulties soldiers have on their return home, something most action movies don’t touch with a stick. This follows up neatly from Iron Man 3where Tony Stark was clearly seen to be suffering from mental health consequences from his time in The Avengers. I really appreciate how the Marvel universe movies manage to slip in every now and then that violence is not without consequences to the one who commits it. I really hope we get to see more of Falcon in subsequent Marvel universe movies. It is really great to have the introduction of a super-hero of colour to the film universe and he is a nice addition to the team of Romanoff and Rogers.
One of the interesting things I have found about the Marvel universe movies is how they play with the heterosexual female gaze. Who can forget the close-up of the Cap’s buttocks while he was working out his frustrations on a punching bag in The Avengers and Thor’s shirtless scenes in both Thor and Thor: The Dark World. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Captain’s body is very much on display. When he is not in uniform he wears an extremely tight white t-shirt that appears to be custom designed to show of each of his muscles. His uniform also appears to be built to highlight his physique.
On the other hand, the movie is blessedly free of a seduction by the Black Widow scene. Unlike in other Marvel movies that she has appeared in (primarily Iron Man 2), she does not need to use her feminine wiles to get her job done. Instead we are treated to a display of Natasha’s tech and problem solving skills. She also kicks ass, Her fighting style tends towards stealthy and efficient in contrast with the Cap’s flashy shield-throwing antics, but that is almost a side note to her intelligence in this movie..
Interestingly and unfortunately, most reviewers have been unable to see this. Her costume is tight, but then so is the captain’s and we are not treated to lingering shots of her butt and cleavage; in fact, most of the time we are looking at her face and not her body. Generally speaking the captain is at least if not more so objectified than she is and yet we do not seem to allow that to interfere with his essential humanity. This is often not the case when it comes to the perception of Johansen’s character. People can’t seem to see past the fact that she wears a cat suit even when she does so much more than look sexy. Like most action movies, this one doesn’t pass the Bechdel test but unlike most action movies it provides us with a female character who is actually a character in her own right. She doesn’t exist merely to reveal plot points about the captain and provide fodder for the heterosexual male gaze. Black Widow tends to gain unfavourable comparisons to Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster in the Thor movies because Jane is a scientist and doesn’t prance around in skin tight leather. However this is a failure to realise that Romanoff’s leather is a distraction from the quick mind, loyal friend and ruthless agent that she is. The movie does a great job with providing tantalising details about Natasha’s past, hopefully because they intend to make a stand alone Black Widow movie. I really hope that this is the case because Romanoff is an interesting character that deserves a thorough exploration in her own right.
If you like superhero movies I think that this is one to watch. While the emphasis is definitely on the effects, it also manages to carry a fairly intelligent engaging storyline and entertain throughout.
Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Storyand tweet her @A_Gaayathri.
As it turns out, ‘Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1’ is delicately told with both humor and sentimentality. Granted, we are given a rapid sequence of tight close-ups on male genitalia which lasts several minutes, but Gainsbourg’s detached voiceover makes the whole thing feel comical. In fact, we view all the sex acts through Joe’s curious, discerning lens. We’re not just looking at the life of a sex addict, but instead at the intertextual experience of a specific woman who feels she is addicted to sex, but not love. Joe recalls significant moments in her life and analyzes them; in one instance, she wonders why her virginity was taken in a number of thrusts equal to numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.
In the two weeks before the theatrical release of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol 1, I watched every film von Trier has ever written and directed. This included the three hardcore pornographies produced by his company Zentropa. I will neither confirm nor deny whether the porn films are successful in their intent.
Some of von Trier’s films are moody and lyrical (Melancholia, Breaking the Waves), and others are gory and severe (Antichrist). Some are musicals (Dancer in the Dark) and others have a noir aesthetic (Europa trilogy). What binds von Trier’s work together is the sense that he’s just experimenting with different variables. Nymphomaniac’s protagonist Joe—played in the present by Charlotte Gainsbourg and in flashbacks by Stacy Martin—simply throws ideas about her sexual desire against a wall to see if anything sticks. She recounts the events of her life to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), an academic who finds her unconscious in the film’s opening sequence. The film doesn’t hammer home a central message on female sexuality or even nymphomania, but I’d wager that we’re better off without films making a monolithic message on female sexuality.
von Trier’s films tend to be more literary and nuanced than most critics will admit. Yes, a woman’s clitoris is sliced off in Antichrist, and yes, I shrieked watching it and had to pull my sweater over my head. But the film is a four-part funeral pyre for a dead child whose parents cannot cope with their guilt. There’s so much more at work in Antichrist than the infamous, bloody pair of garden shears (featured prominently on promotional posters). Selling films like Antichrist as torture porn is a disservice to the full text. It’s true that von Trier is obsessed with dark sex acts; in fact, his explicit images of intercourse in 1998’s The Idiots are cited as the genesis of non-simulated sexual films like Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999) and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003). However, the classification of these films as “porn” is questionable, especially since the actual pornography affiliated with von Trier’s company differs in tone from his other films. Sex doesn’t have thematic weight in films likePink Prison (1999), which German Cosmopolitan calls “the role model for the new porn-generation.” I’m not entirely sure what a porn-generation is, but I’m pretty sure I belong to it now that I’ve seen the Zentropa movies.
But what do we do with images of people entering each other on screen, as they do over and over in Nymphomaniac, if these scenes are not intended to arouse us? von Trier’s intent can feel murky in many of his projects (I still don’t know what Europa was about), but the objectives in Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 feel less complex.
I’d like to identify a gaping disconnect between the actuality of Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 and the way it was marketed. The film’s posters feature each of the film’s stars in mid-orgasm. One might assume looking at them that Nymphomaniac is just about a bunch of white people cumming all over the place. There’s even a poster of Christian Slater, who heartbreakingly plays Joe’s father in flashbacks. To my great relief, he doesn’t play a sexual role in Joe’s life, unless you subscribe to Freudian readings of desire (to which I say, “stop doing that”). Considering Uma Thurman’s role as an emotionally ravaged mother and wife, her poster image (shot from above) isn’t logical, or even helpful. In fact, most of the players in the film don’t engage in sex—their personal issues are too emotionally crippling. This discord in tone is the kind of information I would have appreciated before I walked into the theatre gripping my popcorn carton with anxiety. I assumed I was about to watch a grim, brightly-lit orgy featuring actors like Stellan Skarsgård, with unapologetic shots of penises abounding.
As it turns out, Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 is delicately told with both humor and sentimentality. Granted, we are given a rapid sequence of tight close-ups on male genitalia which lasts several minutes, but Gainsbourg’s detached voiceover makes the whole thing feel comical. In fact, we view all the sex acts through Joe’s curious, discerning lens. We’re not just looking at the life of a sex addict, but instead at the intertextual experience of a specific woman who feels she is addicted to sex, but not love. Joe recalls significant moments in her life and analyzes them; in one instance, she wonders why her virginity was taken in a number of thrusts equal to numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.
Notably, after Joe has considered the golden ratio as a metaphor for her sex life, she says simply, “it hurt like hell” to signify the end of her analysis on the matter. There is a quiet poetry in what von Trier does with seduction in Nymphomaniac. In one scene, we see Joe fellating a penis, preceded by a beautiful sequence in which Joe perceives men on a train as fish in a river. As each man looks up to regard Joe in her shiny red hotpants, his face is illuminated with overlaid footage of running water and long, rippling weeds.
Interestingly, Joe maintains agency in her sexual experiences almost 100 percent of the time. In one sequence, she has sex with three young men in split-screen and tells each of them that they’ve figured out how to give her an orgasm for the first time in her life. It’s clear that this is not true.
Though the New Yorker calls Nymphomaniac a “joyless sexual tantrum,” there are distinct glimmers of happiness littered through the film. As a child, Joe runs bathwater onto the floor, and she and her best friend B (played later by Sophie Kennedy Clark) pretend to be frogs, sliding back and forth on the wet tile, laughing. Joe closes her eyes intently, clearly enjoying the sensation of rubbing her body against the wet surface, and sunlight streams into the bathroom. There is playful, childlike joy here, and the scene is not filmed in a predatory manner. In fact, when the New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, “the average male art-house viewer emerges from the first part of Volume I filled with the pleasant idea that there are young women out there—young, pretty, sleek, and determined—who will suck him off in a random train compartment even though he’s forty,” he seems to discount the reaction of more than half the film’s audience. The problem is, the conclusions of art-house dudes aren’t relevant in Nymphomaniac. I’d point to the scene in which a young Jerôme takes Joe’s virginity upon her request, painfully and without concern for her pleasure. Before she hobbles outside, she makes a small adjustment on the motorbike Jerôme is attempting to fix, apparently solving his problem. Later, as adults, Joe and Jerôme argue about a parking space which only Joe is able to get into. Jerôme is visibly frustrated in both scenes, but Joe doesn’t seem to care.
The power in Nymphomaniac has nothing to do with any male character’s reaction to Joe; in fact, we never see any of her partners for more than a few moments on screen, discounting only Jerôme, the man she says she loved. von Trier instead fills the film with weighty female characters like B, Mrs. H, or the other young women in Joe’s sex-without-love cult, which calls itself the “little flock.” I felt genuine joy hearing the little flock’s chant: “mea vulva, mea maxima vulva.” Joe builds her personal, erotic mythology in disregard of any man’s opinion. When she is unable to discount the emotions of male characters in her life because of her connection with them, she reevaluates her ethical framework to fit them in. The film’s whispered refrain seems to haunt Joe: the secret ingredient to sex is love.
I’d argue that Nymphomaniac: Vol 1 is one of von Trier’s most sentimental projects, and I’d point critics to Joe’s meditation on love as an example. She remembers masturbating on a public bus, looking desperately for details on her fellow passengers to remind her of Jerôme. When Jerôme returns to the narrative, pulling Joe to him from above as he does in an earlier scene, Seligman interrupts the flashback and calls the whole situation unbelievable and ridiculous.
“Ask yourself how you’ll get more out of my story,” Joe says. Does Seligman have to believe every part of Joe’s narrative for it to have meaning? Probably not. Do we have to believe her or come to a conclusion about her character? I hope that this isn’t the case, as watching Joe categorize her lovers according to their roles in a polyphonic, sexual spree is enjoyable enough. The film’s interwoven themes of desire and guilt coalesce in its final image, as Rammstein’s “Führe Mich” thunders into the room, the shot cuts to black, and we’re left wondering if Joe’s sex life meant anything philosophical or ethical at all.
Watching Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 was, weirdly enough, a relief for me, after wading through von Trier’s other works, back to back. It’s certainly the least emotionally exhausting installment in what von Trier calls his “depression trilogy,” which includes Antichrist and Melancholia. Though von Trier’s focus on female characters began in his early work, his attention to detail makes Joe feel more fully realized than his other protagonists. Joe’s femininity is built around her curiosity, and von Trier seems to enjoy watching her experiment with others and fail to achieve emotional intimacy. Though Joe suffers the way von Trier’s other women suffer, she also causes suffering in others, which is a dynamic give-and-take not afforded to characters like Melancholia’s despondent Justine. Most refreshingly, there is more humor in Nymphomaniac than in von Trier’s other work, in its Wes Anderson-style titled chapter structure and the scenes shared by young Joe and Jerôme. in Nymphomaniac, sex remains fodder for von Trier’s dark commentary, but the question of love is a bright spot in his analysis. von Trier seems as transfixed by love as Joe is, and watching both storytellers parse out this confusion is actually fun.
Following my geek programming, I re-watched ‘The First Avenger’ in preparation for ‘The Winter Soldier.’ And I was reminded of the sad truth that the best parts of the first flick can’t carry on to this one, because they’re in the 1940s and now Steve Rogers is in the present.
And the best of the left-behind best is Peggy Carter, Hayley Atwell’s British intelligence agent working with the Scientific Strategic Reserve, a precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. As a British woman surrounded by American military men, Peggy obviously sticks out, but she’s so self-possessed, confident, and skilled that it doesn’t seem far-fetched for her to be in the inner-circle. It’s wonderful to see how the higher-ups, even cad Howard Stark (Tony’s dad) and crotchety Col. Phillips, accept her presence and authority implicitly. The enlisted men who give her guff are quickly put in their place by her tendency to shoot at things that annoy her, which somehow comes across as less reckless than it actually is, probably because she’s so generally competent.
[This review contains potential spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier]
Captain America: The Winter Soldier comes out tomorrow in the US*, with abundant preview showings tonight. I’ve been eagerly anticipating it, even though I remembered Captain America: The First Avenger as just “pretty good,” because I have been programmed by my geeky upbringing to eagerly anticipate all superhero movies.
Further following my geek programming, I re-watched The First Avenger in preparation for The Winter Soldier. And I was reminded of the sad truth that the best parts of the first flick can’t carry on to this one, because they’re in the 1940s and now Steve Rogers is in the present.**
Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter
And the best of the left-behind best is Peggy Carter, Hayley Atwell’s British intelligence agent working with the Scientific Strategic Reserve, a precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. As a British woman surrounded by American military men, Peggy obviously sticks out, but she’s so self-possessed, confident, and skilled that it doesn’t seem far-fetched for her to be in the inner circle. It’s wonderful to see how the higher-ups, even cad Howard Stark (Tony’s dad) and crotchety Col. Phillips, accept her presence and authority implicitly. The enlisted men who give her guff are quickly put in their place by her tendency to shoot at things that annoy her, which somehow comes across as less reckless than it actually is, probably because she’s so generally competent.
Peggy Carter shoots at a lot of things.
Peggy gets extra points for showing Steve respect and care before he gets all Hunkified, and then falling for his integrity and heart even with all those distracting muscles. The best thing about Captain America as a character is that his moral decency is as freakishly overdeveloped as his pecs, and that’s clearly what Peggy adores about him, which makes me adore her.
There is no amount of decency that will get you out of this situation
I’ll even give her a pass for getting mad at Cap for locking lips with Natalie Dormer, even though no one should be faulted for kissing Natalie Dormer. Peggy isn’t just jealous, she’s disappointed to see any shade on Cap’s aura of decency, which is much more understandable and forgivable. And of course, Captain was “innocent,” and she forgives him in time to tearfully talk him through his self-sacrifice at the end of the film.
And now Cap’s unfrozen seventy years later, and they’re a Peggy Carter-shaped hole in his story. Fortunately, Hayley Atwell is reportedly appearing in flashbacks in The Winter Soldier. She also starred in her own short film “Agent Carter” included in the Iron Man 3 blu-ray, and has a television series in development. I’m glad we can see more of this great character, but I’m guessing I’ll still miss her in Captain America’s present.
Poster for short film ‘Agent Carter’
It’s also nice that her independent appearances make Peggy Carter clearly more than a love interest. But I’m still interested to see if the Marvel Cinematic Universe lets Captain America have another love interest, and if she’ll be able to live up to Peggy. In the comics, Peggy’s relative Sharon Carter takes on that role, and Emily VanCamp is in the new film as Agent 13. Hopefully Winter Soldier will overcome Marvel’s occasional issues with the Smurfette principle and develop Sharon Carter successfully alongside Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. I will let you know how Captain America: The Winter Soldier fares with its female characters in my next piece for Bitch Flicks.
*this is one of the RARE movies that came out in South Africa (and the UK and many other countries) before being released here, but of course I’m visiting home at the time. Oh well, USA USA!
** I mean, comics and comic book movies FIND A WAY to revive and reintegrate characters from the past or beyond the veil. See the eponymous Winter Soldier.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer who is presently in America! USA USA!
I’m hopeful that ‘Divergent,’ as the first installment of the series, is setting Tris up to be a memorable heroine in her own right in the following films. I’m hoping that ‘Divergent’ is the story of the forging of our heroine, the exploration of her talents, abilities, and heart and that the second and third films will show her learning from her experiences, becoming a leader, and inspiring others.
“Divergent” Poster
Written by Amanda Rodriguez Mild Spoilers Trigger Warning: mention of sexualized violence
The much-anticipated film Divergent is based on the series of teen sci-fi novels by Veronica Roth dealing with a walled-off, post-apocalyptic Chicago wherein society has divided itself into factions in an effort to create order and peace. Our heroine Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley) finds out she is “Divergent,” a taboo non-conformist who doesn’t fit into any of the factions and is therefore threatening to the caste system.
The five factions of the Divergent universe
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the novel series yet.
As a sucker for female-driven sci-fi stories, I liked the premise, but Divergent stands on the shoulders of many young adult and teen movies that came before it. Divergent features training-based dream-like hallucinations like in Ender’s Game.
Tris frees herself with the realization, “This isn’t real.”
Tris must be brave and not flinch at the knives flying at her.
Divergent‘s Choosing Ceremony has young people choose which faction they’ll belong to for the rest of their lives (“faction before blood”). With factions like Abnegation, Erudite, and Dauntless, the Choosing Ceremony hugely resembles the Sorting Ceremony from the Harry Potter series, wherein wizarding youths are sorted into houses like Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw (representing bravery, hard work, and intelligence respectively).
The factions seated at the Choosing Ceremony
Divergent also spotlights the obligatory overwrought teen romance replete with multiple manly rescues of our heroine in a way that bears a strong resemblance to Twilight (though Tris admittedly has more fortitude and independence than her counterpart, Bella).
Obligatory sunset make-out session…with tattoos.
Divergents themselves are essentially misfits with special abilities that speak to the potential of human beings for evolution into a more advanced species like in the famed comic book turned cartoon series turned movie franchise X-Men.
Tris defies categorization, her test revealing her to be Divergent.
Lastly, I think we should expect the second film (Insurgent) to really play up the youth rebellion angle like in The Legend of Billie Jean.
Outlaw youths on the run, trying to be understood, striving to overthrow an unjust system.
So, yes, Divergent is derivative and predicable. Funny how a movie with an emphasis on the importance of being different…isn’t all that different itself. I was, however, still entertained, and I’m willing to wait and see if the second two films pave their own way, uniquely establishing themselves within the lexicon of the iconic pop culture fantasy/sci-fi teen series genre.
Divergent is basically an unnecessary prequel. I’m a fan of training sequences and didn’t tire of them despite the fact that Tris repeatedly gets her ass handed to her.
With a defense stance like that, no wonder she’s always getting gut punched.
However, almost an entire film dedicated to Tris’ martial training, her budding romance, and the requirements of survival within the faction of Dauntless are not strictly necessary for the big picture scope of the series. I suspect the real story starts in the next movie, Insurgent, with the caste system in upheaval and Tris coming into her own as a leader of dissidents.
I was disappointed at the under-utilization of Kate Winslet‘s extensive acting powers in her role as the Erudite leader and villainess Jeanine. I’m frankly so tired of the cold, fanatic female villain trope. Jodie Foster played a similarly uninspired role in the sci-fi film Elysium. At first, I hoped that Jeanine would only be Tris’ first foe, the patriarchy-complicit woman, and that Tris would advance beyond that to actually deconstructing the patriarchal system of oppression in the following films. A quick Wiki search disabused me of that notion.
Kate Winslet as Jeanine in Divergent
No, it looks like our lead villain throughout the series will be Jeanine, which makes me question the underlying thematics behind the class structure that the film and book series critique. Is it claiming that cold, intelligent women are the problem? Are they the purveyors of this dysfunctional culture? If so, for which real world social ill is the post-apocalyptic world of Divergent a stand-in? What problematic mechanism of power does this sci-fi series seek to illuminate? So far, all we’ve got is a generic argument that being different and thinking differently is a good thing. Not much subversiveness going on there.
Tris also gets rescued a lot, mostly by her love interest, Four, played by Theo James (James Franco called…he wants his face back). This made me roll my eyes a lot because I didn’t pay $10 to watch a young woman lead be so dependent on a dude for her survival. Not only that, but through a fear simulation, we learn that one of Tris’ greatest fears is that Four will try to rape her, and that theme isn’t delved into at all. However, I did admire the close, loving relationship Tris shares with her mother (Ashley Judd) and that her mom also rescues her in a surprising act that would make both factions Abnegation and Dauntless proud.
Tris’ mother, Natalie, brushes her hair on test day.
As with so many other aspects of the film, I’m letting our heroine’s constant need to be rescued slide because I’m hopeful that Divergent, as the first installment of the series, is setting Tris up to be a memorable heroine in her own right in the following films. I’m hoping that Divergent is the story of the forging of our heroine, the exploration of her talents, abilities, and heart and that the second and third films will show her learning from her experiences, becoming a leader, and inspiring others. At the end of Divergent, we saw a glimmer of her potential in her rallying of others, quick thinking in a crisis, her empathy, self-sacrifice, inventiveness, and the steel in her spine.
Tris is endlessly tenacious and makes up her own mind about things.
The bottom line is that, despite Divergent‘s glaring flaws, I am so inspired by this outpouring of stories written by and about women. The mathematical expression of the term divergent is, simply put, “having no finite limits.” Right now, Tris’ story is empowering young girls and women with her bravery, her vulnerability, and her centrality. We have so desperately needed greater representation for young women so that they can imagine themselves in the roles of heroines, leaders, and catalysts for change. It is an important step forward that these films are being made at all. It is a coup that they are so damned popular, proving that people, in fact, DO want to see stories about women and that those stories DO sell. Eat your heart out Hollywood.
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
Frequently repeated lines:
Keith Mars: Hey…who’s your daddy?
Veronica Mars: I hate it when you say that
If you’re anything like me, you’ve read countless tributes. 1000 words here, 500 there on the class wars , miscarriages of justice and police corruption on the show that got us talking, agonizing and gleefully applying story lines to our own political climate. Tumblr raves praising the series for taking its audience seriously: delivering compelling season-long mysteries as well as episodic ones, developing character far beyond labels of good and bad, rich and poor, and committing to a dark, noir tone not often seen on a teen drama. As explored elsewhere on Bitch Flicks, Veronica Mars was also unprecedented for putting a rape survivor at the centre of a high school-set series.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal things the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
No matter what, Keith will always support Veronica
Sadly neglected in the movie, where Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) stepped in periodically to guide Veronica (Kristen Bell) between set pieces, their relationship was notable for the great deal of understanding within it. Throughout the series, Keith was a great friend to trade sarcasm and snark with, a colleague to discuss investigations with, a partner to help make major life decisions, but never forgot his role as a parent. Even when it led to fights and weeks of radio-silence, Keith was capable of stepping out of his friend role to dish out groundings, forbid self-destructive and often criminal antics, and (attempt to) quash romantic and platonic relationships he believed capable of robbing his bright, shining daughter of her light. He always respected Veronica and her interests, independence and what’s more, genuinely liked and appreciated her as a person. Back in season one, the depth of Keith’s unconditional love was clear when we learned he had been unsure whether Veronica was biological daughter for quite some time though never let the uncertainty color his feelings for her.
It bears repeating that nuanced, complicated and respectful relationships between fathers and daughters are disturbingly rare on our screens these days. As most of us know from our everyday lives, there’s no shortage of great stories within the father-daughter (or father figure-daughter) dynamic.
Sure mother-daughter stories are important too and there are so many movies, so many TV shows that have given us mother-daughter relationships to cherish. And in every variation: jealously of the daughter’s youth coming from the mother, jealously of her mother’s independence from the daughter, disturbing romantic rivalry, close friendship that borders on symbiosis, a mother’s disappointment that her daughter is not a mini-version of herself and the mother who worried that her daughter will make the same mistakes she did (Lauren Graham seems to have made a cottage industry out of these roles in Gilmore Girls and Parenthood), and many more. You name a variation and someone’s made something about it.
All the talk about the Veronica Mars Movie got me thinking about the kind of story lines we generally see between fathers and daughters. The general population of TV dads are bumbling idiots, who don’t know their kid’s bedtimes or whether or not to give them sugary snacks. As a group, they lag behind TV mothers, who are most often called upon to play bad-cop against the over-grown man-children they married.
Fatherhood in movies brings to mind disapproving curmudgeons, gruff off-duty cops wielding a shot gun on their daughter’s dates or an absence commonly used as a ham-fisted explanation of why the female character likes older men or works as a stripper. In a growing sub-genre of action movies, it falls to a father to get revenge for his daughter’s rape or murder or try to save her (Taken, The Limey, Traffic ). 2010’s Winter’s Bone was notable for reversing this common narrative.
A young woman’s relationship with her father is rarely the focus of a narrative unless the mother is out of the picture. Usually she’s been killed off, sometimes she left the family or is somehow ill, often she chose to focus on work over family (a plot line used to make a negative point about women in the workforce).
It seems like his role is only allowed to be prominent in his daughter’s life if he is the sole parent, he can shape her only if there are no other options. Most often the single father as a character is used to explain why the female lead is a tomboy or to delve into his discomfort addressing the sex talk and menstruation. As a character, it’s unusual for the married father to do the heavy lifting or even do his share in an equal partnership. Sadly these story lines may mirror mainstream ideals of real life, where a man taking care of his children or showing an interest in his daughters is seen as effeminate or labelled as “Mr. Mom”.
Thinking about this, I made a list of notable and interesting father-daughter relationships, presented here in no particular order. Got any additions to the list? Let me know in the comments.
Atticus and Scout
Scout and Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) is really a prince among fathers. Determined to teach his children to be good citizens who believe in fair treatment for all and are willing to take a stand for it, Atticus provides a great example. As a father to Scout (Mary Badham), he respects her tomboy identity and tries hard to allow her to have a childhood fun of innocent games, in the midst of important lessons. But he knows the way to raise her right is not shield her from tragedy and allow her to be naive about the injustice in the world. Notably for the time period, he doesn’t hold Scout and his son Jem to separate standards or unduly protect Scout as a member of the ‘weaker sex’. He holds both his children to a high standard and expects them use what they have learned in the adult world.
Howard and Samantha Newly, Samantha Who: In a twist on a common rift between fathers and daughters, Howard (Kevin Dunn) explains to an adult amnesiac Samantha (Christina Applegate), that they stopped being close when she hit puberty and stopped being the bright eyed little girl who followed him around and wanted to inherit his chicken farm one day. Unfortunately for Howard, the changes in Samantha went further than a concern for boys and fashion and she became a truly vile person, attempting to humiliate her parents at every opportunity. Rebuilding her life and trying to becoming a better person, Samantha must make amends with her father and gradually teach him to trust her again.
Richard and Olive
Richard and Olive Hoover, Little Miss Sunshine: Though he’s striving to be a motivational speaker, Richard (Greg Kinnear)’s greatest challenge may be supporting his seven-year old daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), who wants nothing more than to be a beauty queen. Like every father, he wants to believe his daughter is the most beautiful little girl out there, but the very fact of a beauty pageant makes it clear to him that she can’t compete and he’s certain she will be humiliated. But Olive has a trick up her sleeve, a risqué dance performance and the uproar caused by it, leads Richard to abandon his worries and join her on stage, preventing official from stopping her. Richard truly becomes a supportive father, after, when instead of lecturing Olive, he tells her how proud her late grandfather would be of her.
Tony and Meadow
Tony and Meadow Soprano, The Sopranos: Tony (James Gandolfini)’s relationship with his daughter is complex: on one hand, she’s his smartest, most hard-working child, the one who reminds him of all the things he likes about himself, but on the other, she’s the girl. In the world of old-fashioned, frequently misogynistic values Tony inhabits, this means she’s always going to be second best and must be kept virginal. Like other fathers with Tony’s value system, protecting his daughter drives him to do despicable things, like threatening her half jewish, half black boyfriend. But the degree to which Tony values Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and sees her as his great hope for a legacy (he dreams of her becoming a pediatrician), is one of the areas where he chafes against his mob lifestyle throughout the course of the series.
Mel and Cher Horowitz, Clueless: As a modern day update of Jane Austen’s Emma, Beverly Hills schoolgirl Cher (Alicia Silverstone) plays nursemaid to her father (Dan Hedaya), reminding him of his high cholesterol, planning his wardrobe and his birthday parties. A successful litigator, he scares and intimidates nearly everyone he comes into contact with, except Cher, who has learned to use negotiation tactics against him and usually gets her way. As no mention is made of Cher’s college prospects or the value she personally sees in good marks, her efforts to raise her grades seem intended to make him proud of her, something she values above all else.
Matt with Alex and Scottie
Matt and Alex and Scottie King, The Descendants: It takes an accident that leaves Elizabeth, his wife, comatose to bring Matt (George Clooney) together with his daughters. Alex (Shailene Woodley), his elder daughter is a rebellious teenager that he was previously unable to understand, while Scottie (Amara Miller) behaves inappropriately with other children. The real story of the movie, is Matt’s connection to Alex which strengths through the tragedy as he comes to respect his daughter and she her as a person independent from him. In the search for Elizabeth’s lover, Alex reveals her ingenuity and her continuing loyalty to him even when their bond was troubled. Ultimately restructuring their family as a three-person unit, the King’s learn to rely on each other and find solace even in the hardest times.
Mac and Juno MacGuff, Juno: Mac (J.K. Simmons) supports Juno (Ellen Page) through two adult situations she is in no way prepared for: having a baby and falling in love. He’s always there for her and his wise, though ornery talks help her to work towards mature decisions and provide turning points for her character. He has a sense of humor about everything that’s happening, something he’s clearly passed down to his daughter and provides just the right balm to soothe, (though realistically not eliminate) her pain.
Homer and Lisa
Homer and Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons: Homer (Dan Castellaneta)’s struggles to connect with Lisa (Yeardley Smith), lead to some of the most heart-warming episodes of the series. Homer is cartoonishly dumb even for a cartoon and Lisa’s genius IQ and sophisticated interests make her completely alien to him. On several occasions he breaks his back to make her dreams come true, notably taking a demeaning second job to get her the pony of a little girl’s dream. When he becomes temporarily intelligent after removing a crayon from his brain, Homer is able to see what Lisa’s life is like and comes to respect her strength in a way that was impossible before. Likewise, in each Homer-Lisa episode, Lisa gains a new appreciation of the sacrifices Homer makes for her happiness. However, because of the show’s format, any progress Homer and Lisa make understanding each other, resets by the end of the episode.
Clancy and George Lass, Dead Like Me: It is only after her death that grim reaper George (Ellen Muth) comes to understand her father, a man she hasn’t given a lot of thought to since she was a child. Sitting in on the poetry class he teaches, she comes to understand him as a person and to identify with him. Clancy (Greg Kean) is never shown as a great dad, already introverted to a fault, his grief over George’s death leads him to shut everyone out and ultimately, he has an affair and leaves his wife and surviving daughter. But George’s glimpse of him as an imperfect person, who loved her very much but had no idea how to show it, mirrors the realizations many of us have about our parents at some point as we grow up.
Jack and Andie
Jack and Andie Walsh, Pretty in Pink: To a teenager’s mind, anything wrong in her life her parents’ fault. As the chief conflict in Pretty In Pink is Andie (Molly Ringwald)’s status as a girl from “the wrong side of the tracks”, it’d be easy for her to see her underemployed father as a one-dimensional villain, keeping her from a better life. But through a painful confrontation scene, it becomes clear that Jack (Harry Dean Stanton) is still depressed about Andie’s mother leaving them and is so broken he is unable to move on and give his daughter what she needs. So far in her life, Andie has been the more mature of the pair, the one who’s forced to take care of him. It’s a difficult situation, but it’s an honest one and Jack and Andie’s conversation gives hope that things might get a least a bit better in the end. As Andie prepares her new look for prom, attempting to change her life, it’s clear Jack has also changed, symbolically moving on from his wife by putting her picture in a drawer.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
Some of these scenes we watch like they are part of a horror movie, wanting to say to Lila, “What are you thinking?” Lila, with all her lies (to her father, to Chiara, to her neighbor and to Sammy) never takes the audience (or anyone else) completely into her confidence, so we don’t know what she might do next–and dread seeing her do it. Besides Chiara (who does offer some limited advice and support) Lila has no female figure in her life who can help her navigate the complicated sexual landscape in which boys treat her as if she’s not there. While she listens and watches they talk shit about other girls (and even about her), look at porn and listen to hip-hop in which a man brags that “she fuck me…until she bleed cum.” Lila’s mother is dead and her father hardly seems like someone she can talk to. We can see she wants someone to care about her comings and goings as much as she wants sex: when she texts Sammy or calls him and gets his voice mail the family dog is often her only company.
Films that focus on a 14- or 15-year-old seeking out sexual experience are not unusual, but ones that do so from a female perspective are. The Norwegian movie Turn Me On, Dammit!, written and directed by a woman, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, featured a teenage protagonist who wanted sex, but the actress who played her was a young adult, not a kid, so laughing at her scenes of lust gone awry was easy. For a film as powerful and unsettling as writer-director Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, which will soon have a theatrical run after playing at the Sundance NEXT section in 2013, we have to go back more than 25 years to David Leland’s Wish You Were Herewith the magnificent Emily Lloyd in the lead as a girl who both longs for and is eventually undone by sex.
Hittman’s film focuses on one girl growing up in an unhip section of Brooklyn (though as in Girls, it’s the alternative universe version of Brooklyn where hardly any people of color reside). Lila (hauntingly embodied by Gina Piersanti, just 14 at the time the film was shot) spends the summer hanging out with her friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni) and the latest in Chiara’s succession of boyfriends, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco). Lila’s pale, open face, often shot in close-up, with her bud-like mouth and dark eyes, thickly lined in black is reminiscent of the 60s supermodel Penelope Tree with dense bangs that cover her forehead along with long, luxuriant hair that brings to mind the other “dolly bird” actresses and models of that era. But for the same random reasons (which never last beyond graduation) many of us remember from our own high school years, well-tanned Chiara with her bikini and short shorts and skirts is the one who receives all the attention from boys, while Lila sits on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit that’s a little too big for her, her face covered in zinc oxide.
Lila at the beach
In one early scene Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick breaks into an empty house that he invites the girls into and pilfers a cheap-looking “promise” ring from a music box as Lila watches. He puts his finger to his lips, the same gesture he makes when Chiara shows the ring Patrick “got” for her to Lila. And as close as Lila is to Chiara (she dyes her hair an identical color to her friend’s and in one scene Chiara asks Lila to look under her skirt to check and see if “there’s anything there” on her itchy vulva) Lila never tells Chiara Patrick’s secret.
Patrick’s presumptuousness–and Lila’s response to it–is a precursor for the relationships (if one can call them that) which Lila develops with the boys she meets at the beach and parties, who all resemble Patrick, with their slim, hairless but muscular bare torsos (often the subject of close-ups, in Sean Porter’s striking and expert cinematography) they are all about the same height and have similar, unflattering, short haircuts. They reminded me of the one boy the girls who appointed themselves the leaders in such matters determined was the “cute guy” in my seventh-grade gym class. He was inarticulate, not smart and not even good-looking by most measures, but seemed the kind of boy girls were supposed to like, as opposed to the scrawnier (or tubbier), soft-faced ones we girls could actually talk to. Lila readily buys into the peer-determined standard of attractiveness: the middle-school neighbor boy she hangs out with and “confides” mostly lies to is just a friend. The barely verbal, college boy with the tattoo winding around his shoulder whom she sees at the beach (and of whom Chiara says, “He’d fuck anything”) Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) is the boy she pursues.
Chiara, Patrick and Lila
The problem is: she hasn’t even been introduced to or talked to him. And because Lila is at the very beginning of forming her own identity, and Sammy barely acknowledges her–as either a pretty girl or just a person–neither of them have anything to say to one another. Even when she visits his workplace he continues to merely tolerate her company as her machinations to spend time with him (and to try to make him want to spend time with her) become progressively more desperate.
Some of these scenes we watch like they are part of a horror movie, wanting to say to Lila, “What are you thinking?” Lila, with all her lies (to her father, to Chiara, to her neighbor and to Sammy) never takes the audience (or anyone else) completely into her confidence, so we don’t know what she might do next–and dread seeing her do it. Besides Chiara (who does offer some limited advice and support) Lila has no female figure in her life who can help her navigate the complicated sexual landscape in which boys treat her as if she’s not there. While she listens and watches they talk shit about other girls (and even about her), look at porn and listen to hip-hop in which a man brags that “she fuck me…until she bleed cum.” Lila’s mother is dead and her father hardly seems like someone she can talk to. We can see she wants someone to care about her comings and goings as much as she wants sex: when she texts Sammy or calls him and gets his voice mail the family dog is often her only company.
Sammy and Lila
Although another world of cultural and social opportunities would be just a subway ride away for Lila, she, for the moment, is stuck in a very limited high school social sphere those of us who grew up in the suburbs will recognize. Because Lila is so young she doesn’t realize she can escape and doesn’t find out, until too late, what the audience knows from the start, that no matter what she does to or for Sammy (or pretends to), he still won’t give a shit about her. In the same way she doesn’t know (but her father does) that Chiara’s romance with Patrick won’t last, no matter how “in love” they say they are. In the end Lila is too young to know that Sammy, if he did reciprocate her interest would have to be something of a loser himself, because she’s just a kid, yet to be formed.
THE WRITER-DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE FILM
I was able to speak by phone to Eliza Hittman (whose remarks here are edited for clarity and concision). Hittman says this film was influenced by French writer-director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl): “There’s so much that’s provocative in her work. It explores power dynamics between women and also these views of romantic love and different types of sexual experiences that you don’t necessarily encounter in a film about young women growing up.
“Catherine Breillat is part of a movement that explores sex as hard. I think a lot of times you watch films about girls who are pursuing men and the main character is super-sexualized. What’s different about this film is, the intention of the character is the same, but in this film you don’t want to see her have the experience. She’s not ready and it’s not reciprocated. That’s uncomfortable to watch but I feel like it’s true, at least of my experience growing up.
“(Lila’s age) is when all of the pressure starts. (You are) looking for models, so you build your identity. That’s why the character dyes her hair like her friend.”
Writer-director Eliza Hittman
Hittman says, “The title (of the film) for me is about wanting to have a certain type of intimacy without quite knowing what it is. When you’re that age you’re always (wondering) what love is. I was listening to that song, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” from the 60s. This character is pursuing something and not really knowing the difference between positive and negative experience.”
Although the film will have theatrical releases in New York (this Friday, March 21) and Los Angeles (on March 28) and has received good reviews, like Concussion, another well-reviewed film about a woman from a woman writer-director that was part of Sundance in 2013, it won’t play theaters in my very art-house-friendly city, but will be available on VOD. I can’t shake the feeling if the film were directed by a man, and told from the viewpoint of Sammy, it would be in more theaters. I asked Hittman to comment on distribution of women-directed, women-centered films, “I will say that it does feel like there are limited options for women telling stories about women.You get to Sundance and you have, or I had, this realization that everybody buying and selling movies is male. I think that affects the market in some way.”
You can help change this status quo by making plans to see Hittman’s disturbing, distinctive film however you can. More info, including on future screenings of the film, can be found at http://itfeltlikelove.com
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast,xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult’, it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary ‘Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me’ (directed by Chiemi Karasawa who first met Stritch in a hair salon) I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do).
I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult,’ it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (directed by Chiemi Karasawa, who first met Stritch in a hair salon), I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do). Certainly the men Stritch has worked with in her long career don’t seem easygoing. In one scene Stritch reads aloud a letter Woody Allen wrote her in the ’80s listing point by point the circumstances under which he’ll work with her. One of his many conditions is that she can’t second-guess his wardrobe choices. Earlier we see Alec Baldwin have a hissy fit on camera because he thinks Stritch is stepping on his laugh line (Stritch is playing his character’s mother on 30 Rock). When he stalks out she laughs at him–as does the crew.
This partially Indiegogo-funded film has some superficial resemblance to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, another documentary that followed a famous older, “difficult” woman as she prepared for and performed in shows, but Stritch doesn’t seem interested in using the film as a tool to bolster her image, the way Rivers did. Shoot Me has no scenes as cringe-worthy as the one in which Rivers takes her grandson to deliver meals to people with AIDS (as if Rivers headlining a fundraiser wouldn’t be a better use of resources) or the one in which Rivers mentions that she pays for the private school tuition of her employees’ children.
Stritch makes her home in a hotel, never had children, and her husband died 30 years ago, so she is free to focus on her own health, career and legacy–and doesn’t feel the need to launch a revisionist propaganda campaign. Stritch isn’t afraid to mumble wry asides when fans in the street approach, and she raises her fists in victory when she learns that she will still be paid for a gig canceled in the wake of a hurricane.
Stritch’s legendary directness and humor are aimed right at the filmmakers and audience, when, in the middle of talking about something else, she looks up to say, “Don’t you think that camera is awfully close?” When the camera pulls back she continues, “We’re not making a skin commercial here.”
Like many other artists, Stritch is working decades beyond the age most people retire. But the activities many senior citizens take up after they stop working–travel, singing, dancing, and acting–have been the staples of Stritch’s career since just before the end of World War II. When she was based in London (a fact that doesn’t make its way into the film though she even starred in a successful TV series there), she worked with the great English actor Sir John Gielgud (in the 1977 film Providence), who made his last film appearance in 1998 when he was 94. Gielgud was able to temper the exertion of his later work by taking smaller roles in films and also acting in radio dramas. For Stritch, her continued career is much more demanding: song and (in a limited way) dance in live appearances where she is the show.
Elaine Stritch, triumphant during her live show
Stritch has diabetes and some memory loss (her recall of long-ago events like her improbable–but photo-verified–two dates with a very young John F. Kennedy is razor-sharp) as well as an unsteady gait (she sometimes uses a cane and although she is unassisted while onstage, she needs assistance to make it there) and her voice shows the effects of age, but she’s still an effective performer. Before I saw the film I thought that audiences must go to her shows for nostalgia or for the same reason people in the mid-1990s went to see Courtney Love live, to see if she made it all the way through her act without collapsing or having a breakdown onstage.
Some of the film’s reviews seem to want to reframe the film as a pathetic spectacle with Stritch as an object of pity. They call Shoot Me “grim,” “painful,” and “about aging and its myriad horrors.” These reviewers seem determined to review their own fears of aging (or what they imagine the life of an older woman is like) instead of what is actually onscreen. In the same way that disabled and older people shouldn’t be called “inspiring” just for living their lives in ways many of us who aren’t disabled or very old do, the film shows us that the effects of aging for Stritch aren’t tragic–any more than they are advantageous–but just inconveniences and obstacles for her to work around. Stritch herself says of her worry about forgetting song lyrics, “The fear is part of the excitement.”
Excerpts of the show in the film, as well as vintage clips of her recording her signature “Ladies Who Lunch” for a cast album, and even a clip of her acceptance speech for winning an Emmy show that she lets the audience (or in the cast recording, her songwriters) not just see her vulnerabilities, but share them and empathize with them. We see her in rehearsal for the show forgetting the lyrics to “I Feel Pretty” repeatedly and then, during the show, she forgets again, but makes the moment a comic one, getting the audience to root for her as she (eventually) comes up with the next line.
Stritch and her musical director, Rob Bowman
Stritch has a lot of friends, many of whom are much younger than she is: every time we see a shot of her bed at the hotel where she lives we also see a wall covered in post-it notes of names (some of them well-known to us through movies and television) with the phone numbers digitally blurred. Though Stritch has no children we see unrelated, younger people pitch in to help her: during the show and rehearsal, musical director, Rob Bowman, for an upcoming dedication, an assistant who sorts through old photos and other memorabilia and for miscellaneous errands a woman who sat next to her at an AA meeting long ago and in spite of Stritch’s demands (Elaine not only wanted a ride home from the woman; she told her she needed to clean up her car before picking her up again), credits Stritch with helping her maintain sobriety.
Stritch, after many years of recovery, informs us that she allows herself one drink a day, then after a hospitalization (for diabetes) stops drinking again, then during a birthday party at the end is back to “one drink a day.” But the definition of alcoholism is the inability to have just one drink. The revelation that since her retirement (always just around the corner in the film, which was shot two years ago, but as of last year, when she did one last show and moved out of New York seems permanent now), she has upped her limit to two drinks is worrying. In the film she argues that at 87 a limited amount of drinking won’t harm her and is something she feels like she deserves. She says, “It’s wonderful being almost 87. You can get away with just about anything.” Now that she’s 89, she might be right.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast,xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes.
I’ve been a fan of the Veronica Mars TV show for the last 10 years, so it’s only fitting that I was inordinately excited about the Veronica Mars movie, where Veronica comes back to her hometown of Neptune for her 10 year high school reunion to clear her ex-boyfriend, Logan Echolls, of murder charges. The film aired in select theaters on March 14 (and is now available for digital download on Amazon and iTunes). In anticipation of the film release, I wrote a review last November called “Why Veronica Mars is Still Awesome.” Face it: I’m a marshmallow.
In reference to the pilot episode, Veronica Mars fans are lovingly called “marshmallows”
So, how does one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever fare when it’s all said and done? I’m gonna go with: meh. Though the premise itself wasn’t bad and I loved being back in that world, the creator and director, Rob Thomas, just tried to cram too damn much into 107 minutes. For the show, Thomas had three years and three seasons, comprising 64 episodes at roughly 43 minutes a pop to build the story, the mystery, the relationships, the characters, the drama, and the amazing humor. 107 minutes isn’t nearly enough time to catch us up after 10 years away, to solve a crime, to build that rapport between beloved characters, and to give all the fans everything they wanted. It’s just too tall of an order.
The VMars team is back with Wallace and Mac
Because they were trying to do too much, the character interactions ended up falling flat. Who have these people become, and why have they changed? Where is the biting sarcasm of Logan Echolls? He joined the military, which seems symbolic of a huge personality shift, or is it just an excuse to show him in a military uniform (whites no less)? Where’s the kinship between Veronica and Wallace or the abiding love between Keith and Veronica?
Not enough smart, sassy ladies killing it
Perhaps in part because of the lackluster character interactions, the plotlines are also lacking in luster. The mystery is half-baked, and even the obligatory Veronica Mars love triangle is a weak dud of a plot point with passion being largely absent from the players (Veronica, Piz, and Logan).
Logan takes Veronica “the long way home” per her request
The Veronica Mars movie is even a bit too gimmicky. Logan in military whites, the endless stream of celebrity cameos, and the massive wet t-shirt boy fight are all a bit over the top. Now, I like celebrity cameos, and I did laugh at the outlandishness of the lengths the movie went just to give us a glimpse of Logan in a drenched v-neck, but, dammit, VMars has come dangerously close to jumping the shark.
Gender role reversal with boys in a wet t-shirt fight? Check.
Dare I confess it? I also missed the clothes. Long have I loved Veronica Mars’ fashion sense, and long have I worked to emulate her sassy ensembles.
At least the purse made an appearance…
Because of a certain baby bump actress Kristen Bell was sporting, the costumers had to get creative with her wardrobe, which left us with a lot of blazers and muted colors. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that Kristen Bell decided the project was important enough to film during her pregnancy. However, both Veronica and I have aged 10 years, and I was hoping to get some tips from the master on how to stay sassy into my 30s.
Blazers everywhere all the time.
On the up side, the Veronica Mars movie did its damnedest to include all the important faces from the past like Dick Casablancas, Keith Mars, Madison Sinclair, Mac, Wallace, Weevil, Leo D’Amato, Deputy Sacks, Celeste Kane, Corny, and on and on. The film also saw fit to include some not-so-important faces like steroid trafficking baseball player, Luke Haldeman, and son-of-butler poker cash stealing Sean Friedrich, but it’s comforting to know that literally everyone wanted to come back to reprise their Veronica Mars roles. Not only that, but the movie is lovingly packed with a barrage of in-jokes for the long-time fans who’ll catch on to every wink, nudge, and nod.
Madison Sinclair finally gets her comeuppance
From a feminist standpoint, it’s about damn time Veronica finally saved herself all by herself from the scary, sticky situation she gets herself into hunting a murderer in Neptune. The film also leaves some mysteries open and sets up a new Veronica Mars future with the possibility of a new Veronica Mars spin-off (please don’t let it be a bumbling Dick Casablancas detective agency show). Since I’m a marshmallow, I’ll cherish this last hurrah in the world of Veronica Mars and keep my fingers crossed for a spin-off, but from the objective viewpoint of a film/TV critic, the Veronica Mars movie just isn’t up to snuff. There was simply too much ground to cover, too many gags, and not enough character development to let the movie live up to its legacy as the best kind of storytelling, characterization, humor, and wit television had to offer.
The super fun drinking game that I came up with for the show still works pretty well for the movie: Vodka Tonic with a Lime Twist & Veronica Mars. I hope you’ll play! [End shameless plug.]
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
‘Four Sheets to the Wind’ is an example of Indigenous survivance in this land as the characters interact with each other in the rural Seminole/Creek community in Oklahoma and with the faster-paced city of Tulsa. Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor wrote in ‘Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence’ (1998), “Survivance. . . is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence. . . The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates, survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.”
Winner of Best Actor (Cody Lightning, Plains Cree) and Best Director (Sterlin Harjo, Seminole/Creek) from the American Indian Film Festival, Four Sheets to the Wind (2007) tells a no-holds-barred realistic tale of survivance, loss, family, communication, and discovery in the best spirit of great independent films. As the Muscogee-language narrator tells the story of Rabbit and Bear at the opening of the film, the camera shows a man dragging another man’s body across the screen and down a dirt road, past a No Trespassing sign, and into a pond. Seminole/Creek Cufe Smallhill (Cody Lightning) discovers his father’s body early in the morning and follows his father’s wishes to rest in the pond. When he returns home to share his father’s suicide note with his mother, Cufe says, “He told me the other day that he never wanted to be buried. Said funerals ain’t nothin’ but a big circus.”
In the midst of this sad moment, the story takes a darkly humorous turn as Cufe, his mother Cora Smallhill (Jeri Arredondo), and cousin Jim (Jon Proudstar) come up with a plan for the expected funeral. As preparations continue, Cufe asks Jim, “You ever feel like just gettin’ the fuck outta here?” Jim responds, “Yeah. But where would I go? I mean, this is home.”
These words hang in the air with a practical sense of finality. The transition shots between scenes showcase the rural Oklahoma landscape, focusing the viewer’s attention on an almost idyllic world of rolling hills, open water, and sunsets. Director Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Creek) spoke with Christian Neidan for Camera in the Sun about the importance of the Oklahoma landscape to Four Sheets to the Wind: “For me, my films and stories — they are the place that they’re set in,” Harjo said. “I grew up in the country, like a normal kid, but also we had superstitions and stuff that were sort of ingrained in us, and it was just a cool magical way to grow up. So, for me it’s really important to shoot here, and I was telling somebody the other day I don’t know what I’d do if I had to shoot a film outside of the state” (camerainthesun.com).
Four Sheets to the Wind director, Sterlin Harjo
Within the film, after a funeral featuring a closed casket filled with weights and watermelons, Cufe decides to leave his rural home environment to visit his sister, Miri (Tamara Podemski, Anishinaabe/Israeli), and it is in Tulsa where Cufe begins to discover his own strength. When Francie invites Cufe to travel with her, he tells Cora and she wants to know, “What’s with this girl? Do you talk?” Cufe says they do talk and she warns him not to “make it a sex thing, ‘cause it’ll never work.”
Actor Jeri Arredondo plays Cora Smallhill in Four Sheets to the Wind
Cufe’s relationship with his sister, his somewhat shy interactions with her neighbor, Francie (Laura Bailey), and his conversations with his mother show that he isn’t as uncommunicative as his father. One evening, Cora returns from dinner with a friend and Cufe blames her for not being “helpful to dad,” but Cora responds gently, “It was his choice, we didn’t make it for him. And it’s not my fault that your daddy and I didn’t get along. He was a hard man to get along with. Right there near the end, there was weeks and I’d realize he hadn’t said a word. Weeks. Is life much different now that he’s gone? I miss him, too, but I don’t know.” Cufe doesn’t answer.
Actor Cody Lightning plays protagonist, Cufe Smallhill, in Four Sheets to the Wind
At breakfast one morning after Cufe arrives in Tulsa, Miri asks, “So you had, like, a whole conversation with Francie?” Cufe says with a smile, “Yeah.” Miri smiles back and says, “Well, I guess you’re not gonna turn out like dad after all.”
Tamara Podemski as Miri Smallhill in a scene from Four Sheets to the Wind
From Cufe’s visual reaction, it is clear that he is conflicted about this – whether he wants to be like his dad or not. When Francie asks Cufe to tell her about his dad, he responds, “He wouldn’t tell you what he felt about you, but when he didn’t think anyone was looking, he’d give you this approving glance, a smile, an approving look, you know. His silence felt like comfort. . .we’d go fishing and we’d be on the pond all day, barely even say anything, share maybe four words with each other, but it felt like we’d been talking all day.” Through this softly delivered monologue, it is clear that Cufe misses his dad and that things really are different now that he’s gone. Francie’s response is to kiss Cufe, but this doesn’t feel forced or cliched: it feels natural and real, which is a testament to the solid acting, music background, and camera work.
Another player in this film is alcohol. The title is a play on the inebriation phrase “three sheets to the wind” and alcohol certainly plays a part in this story. Jim tells Cufe the story of the time Cufe’s dad had been drinking all afternoon, but was able to alleviate Jim’s fear of a tornado by doing a dance in the front yard. Miri parties a lot in Tulsa and seems to make questionable dating choices, getting drunk and having sex with men because they “pick up the tab.” Soon after his arrival, Cufe attends a party with Francie where red Solo cups and kegs are prevalent. At this party, an inebriated white man sitting on a sofa near Cufe asks him, “Where have all the Indian gone,” and Cufe’s response reflects the ridiculousness of the question.
Cufe and Cora bring Miri home after an incident in Tulsa
Four Sheets to the Wind is an example of Indigenous survivance in this land as the characters interact with each other in the rural Seminole/Creek community in Oklahoma and with the faster-paced city of Tulsa. Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor wrote in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998), “Survivance. . . is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence. . . The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates, survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” The characters of this Sterlin Harjo film certainly endure, but they also repudiate tragedy and victimry as they use humor and the lessons of the past to move forward into the future together.
At the end of the film, the narrator speaks the following words in the Muscogee language as viewers see where the characters are now: “People come around in circles. Never ending circles, but you’re never that far away from home.” The tagline for this film is “See life for what it gives you.” Cufe, Cora, Miri, and Francie not only learn to see life for what it gives them, but they learn from those moments and do not fall victim to despair.
Four Sheets to the Wind is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, or on Netflix DVD.
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Dr. Amanda Morris is an Assistant Professor of Multiethnic Rhetorics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a specialty in Indigenous Rhetorics.
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most renowned animators alive. He brought us visually arresting, pro-woman, environmentalist tales like ‘Princess Mononoke’ and ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.’ He brought us lush tales of magic and mythology, like ‘Spirited Away’ and ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ with young women as protagonists and other women as focal, powerful characters throughout. Miyazaki now insists that his latest animated film, ‘The Wind Rises’ (‘Kaze Tachinu’), will be his last.
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most renowned animators alive. He brought us visually arresting, pro-woman, environmentalist tales like Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. He brought us lush tales of magic and mythology, like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, with young women as protagonists and other women as focal, powerful characters throughout. Miyazaki now insists that his latest animated film, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu), will be his last.
The film felt like a goodbye with its insistence that artists can only be creative and productive for 10 years, its somber outlook, and the way in which it concluded at the end of a major era in Japanese history (Japan’s defeat in World War II). The Wind Rises also features one of Miyazaki’s rare male protagonists, Jirô Horikoshi (a fictionalized version of the eponymous historical aeronautical engineer who designed Japan’s model “Zero” fighter plane); I suspect this is because Miyazaki identifies with Jirô and his dreams that are too big and too pure for this world.
“Airplanes are beautiful, cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.”
Considering Miyazaki’s focus on the centrality of female characters throughout his career, The Wind Rises is disappointing in its lack of developed female characters. There’s really only Jirô’s loud and pushy but soft-hearted little sister, Kayo, who grows up to be a doctor. Jirô’s encouragement of her medical school dreams and the achievement of a peripheral female character’s big dreams in the 1940’s are a bit too subtle to consider feminist, but it’s a welcome nod nonetheless. Nahoko is Jirô’s tragic love interest who has loved him completely and selflessly since he rescued her as a girl from the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Though we know Nahoko loves painting, French poetry, and Jirô, there is little else that we know about her beyond that. She exists solely to love and support Jirô and to humanize him in a way that none of his other relationships do.
Nahoko and Jirô meet by a picturesque spring
Though The Wind Rises is (as to be expected) beautiful, it is overly sentimental. Jirô’s reunion with a woman who he helped many years ago only to fall in love with her only to have her be tragically ill was a bit too neat of an unrealistic package designed to give magic and wonder to the external life of a young man who mainly lived within his own head. Not only that, but the ethereal quality of dreams is the heart of the film, insisting that we must make our beautiful dreams a reality no matter what the consequences, no matter how the world may pervert those dreams. This is particularly true of Jirô’s innocent desire to design planes that is warped and manipulated to serve his country’s wartime needs. As a member of the country who heinously dropped two atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, I find this particular theme questionable. Though I valued a glimpse of history from Japan’s perspective, which the US rarely sees, I would have been extremely uncomfortable had I been watching a tale about the creation of the atom bomb and how it was a beautiful dream that life distorted, a dream with deadly real life applications for which the dreamer takes little responsibility. We only know that Jiro and his dreamland mentor, the Italian Caproni, would prefer to design planes that weren’t used for war, but they do so anyway and without question.
Building a war plane
This leads me to my final critique of the film. The war and the purpose of the planes that Jirô builds are, strangely, non-issues. The Wind Rises is an oddly apolitical nationalistic film that laments Japan’s poverty, inability to innovate due to economic challenges, and the pain of pride for being a country technologically left behind. The motivations for the war are never discussed. No one is pro-war or anti-war. The film seems to be asserting that Japan’s involvement in World War II was due to a sense of honor rather than conviction or even political profit. Japan, like Jirô, is, instead a little country with a big dream. Miyazaki’s blasé approach to the war does not measure up to the clear-cut environmentalist stance he takes in many of his other films.
Jirô stands before his failed plane prototype
While Miyazaki continues to deliver breathtaking animated scenes and a sense of wonder and magic, The Wind Rises disappoints on a thematic level with its lack of engagement or curiosity about Japan’s involvement in World War II or an artist’s responsibility for their creations. The borderline cloying saccharine sentimentality along with the lack of strong female characters we’ve come to expect from Miyazaki leave me hoping The Wind Rises is not his swan song, that he will make just one more film that rivals, if not surpasses, the masterpieces he has already given us.
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
Most disturbing is the message the film conveys (or fails to convey) about rape and war. Artemisia herself presides over the sacking of Athens, during which we see several Athenian women stripped, raped, and hacked to death with short blades. Does Artemisia see this as suitable retribution? Does the memory of her mother’s suffering cause her to feel any empathy for these women? We do not know, because she makes no comment. This was a huge missed opportunity.
300: Rise of an Empire isn’t a movie about conflict – it is conflict.
300: Rise of an Empire (300: ROAE) was released Friday, about seven years after the original film…and that’s going to be it for historical accuracy, because there is precious little in the movie.
The film was directed by Noam Murro, and the screenplay was written by Zack Snyder. Snyder also wrote and directed the original film, 300 (2006), and is the writer/director responsible for Sucker Punch (2011) and Man of Steel (2013). The events in 300: ROAE take place before, during, and after the Battle of Thermopylae depicted in the first film, and again represent creative interpretations of key battles of the Greco-Persian wars, namely, the naval battles of Salamis and Artemisium.
Sullivan Stapleton is Themistokles, an Athenian politician-soldier who ascends to power after killing Persian Emperor Darius I at the Battle of Marathon. Rodrigo Santoro and Lena Headey reprise their respective roles as Xerxes, the so-called god-king of Persia, and Gorgo, Queen of Sparta. Eva Green plays Artemisia, commander of Persia’s naval forces and advisor to Xerxes.
Eva Green as Artemisia.
300 was groundbreaking. Memorable elements, like the highly stylized costumes and CGI sets, the gratuitous slow motion violence, or Gerard Butler’s beard, have been adapted or satirized in many subsequent works. Unlike the imitators, however, 300: ROAE can lay direct claim to the production design of the first film. So, how has the 300 look fared after eight years?
Well, it turns out that the sequel is not as original as the original.
Everything about 300: ROAE seems bloated. The plot is more complex, which is fine, but the pacing is a tad slow; even the action sequences drag on. The characters have more dialogue, but not much more depth. Themistokles is slightly more well rounded than Gerard Butler’s Leonidas, and Xerxes gets a backstory (daddy issues and something about an evil hermit spa).
The battle setpieces are expanded. We get wider views of Sparta and Athens, and the backgrounds hold more detail. Unfortunately, this realism runs counter to what made 300 so awesome; it was the lack of detail and the claustrophobic camera work that made 300 seem more like a dream or a hallucination than a typical swords-and-sandals blockbuster.
And the blood…oh, the blood.
The original film could be accurately described as bloody, but the sequel is blood-drenched. Ridiculously so. The slow motion decapitations and hydraulic blood-sprays in 300 were a perfect fit for the stylized violence-as-art motif of the first film, but the violence in 300: ROAE is just hokey. Think Mighty Morphin Power Rangers instead of high art.
OK, I will, just put down the sword!
The historic Artemisia is a fascinating figure. Artemisia I of Caria, (aka Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus) was a Greek and the daughter of a Persian magistrate. Her husband was also a ruler; when he died, Artemisia took his throne. During the Greco-Persian war, she contributed several ships to Xerxes’ already massive navy. After distinguishing herself in combat during the battle of Artemisium, an impressed Xerxes praised her skills as a tactician and asked for her advice. The Athenians were quite upset about being beaten by a woman and offered a reward to the man who could capture her alive (so that she could be “shown her place,” I speculate).
By comparison, Snyder’s Artemisia seems to lack the inherent strength of the historical Artemisia. Instead, she exists as a damaged mechanism of vengeance. In 300: ROAE, Artemisia’s family is killed (her mother raped first) in front of her eyes by a group of Greek soldiers. Afterwards, the soldiers rape Artemisia and keep her captive as a sexual appliance in a ship’s hold. These scenes are disturbing, as they should be. Particularly so is the scene where we see the eight-year-old Artemisia (played by 10-year-old Caitlin Carmichael) battered, in chains, and surrounded by a gang of leering men.
Young Artemisia looks on while her family is slaughtered.
Several years later, a catatonic Artemisia is thrown out, like refuse, onto the docks. She’s found by one of King Darius’ kindly warlords,* who takes her in and teaches her the art of war. Eventually, her immense skill as a warrior gains her Darius’ favor. After the king dies from the injury given by the hand of Themistokles during the Battle of Marathon, Artemisia manipulates the grief-ridden Xerxes (who is not at all giant or golden at this point) into disregarding his father’s dying advice by renewing the war with the Greeks. She’s also responsible for planting the “god-king” delusion in Xerxes mind. The resulting dynamic is that Xerxes recognizes his need for Artemisia’s skill, but resents her for it, and for being Darius’ favorite.
Snyder gives us a break from the bloodshed and atrocity by inserting a sex scene between the two main battles. Upset by the failures of her sub-commanders, Artemisia summons Themistokles to her chambers under the pretense of negotiation. Her true intent is to persuade him to defect. She sees his skill as almost equal to her own – between the two of them, Persia would be unstoppable. Themistokles is not having it, however, so Artemisia resorts to seduction.
Wikipedia doesn’t have anything on a Themistocles-Artemisia rendezvous.
The rough sex scene that follows is kind of rapey, and given Artemisia’s background, I found it uncomfortable to watch (it didn’t help that Stapleton and Green lacked chemistry and seemed a bit embarrassed to be in scene themselves). Other commentators have pointed to the fact that Artemisia both initiates and ends the act as evidence of her power, and note that it’s often unclear during the scene who is coercing who. While Artemisia has more depth than the typical fighting fuck toy (FFT), towards the end of the scene the male gaze of the camera puts Green’s breasts front and center and lingers there longer than would be necessary to establish her fearlessness. Artemisia’s costumes are also somewhat impractical and sexualized, but, to be fair, there were one or two men in the film who seemed under-dressed for the weather.
The merits of the sex scene are debatable, but I argue that sexual assault does, unfortunately, define Artemisia. As Kate Conway noted in this 2012 piece for xoJane, rape as backstory is a common trope (e.g., Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I Spit on Your Grave) and it is often utilized by lazy writers attempting to quickly add some depth and motivation to a female character. Often, this woman is a vengeful, violent, female action character (VFAC), i.e., a “badass.” Artemisia is certainly vengeful and violent; in the film, she orders executions and suicide bombings and does quite a bit of skull-cleaving.
A predilection towards violence usually causes critics to reflexively deem a VFAC a “feminist” character. While seemingly directly opposed to the women in refrigerators trope, VFACs often end up as sidekicks or props for the main male character to use to further his own glory. In this way, VFACs usually have the equivalent effect of enforcing, rather than transcending, traditional gender roles. Additionally, VFACs are often killed off as subtle or overt punishment for their perceived masculinity (e.g., the Olga Kurkulina’s Mother Russia in Kick-Ass 2).
Surprisingly, none of the characters in the film comment on the discrepancy between Artemisia’s gender and skills as did the historical Xerxes. After the actual Battle of Salamis, according to Polyaenus, Xerxes said of Artemisia, “O Zeus, surely you have formed women out of man’s materials, and men out of woman’s.” Even Green herself seems to have internalized traditional gender stereotypes. At the red carpet premier last week, Variety quotes Green saying about Artemisia, “She’s so extreme, she doesn’t tolerate people who doesn’t [sic] follow her orders, she has no patience—completely irreverent. She’s a man.”
Unfortunately, during that interview Green also perpetuated the crazy woman stereotype, saying, “I wish I could fight like her or have the courage that she has, but she’s on the edge. She’s crazy.” A similar quote from Green in a USA Today piece reads, “She is a psychopath. I am so far from this in real life.” That article also exemplified the frustrating focus that many reviews have placed on Green’s physical appearance and clothing in the film, rather than on the development or historical context of the character.
Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo
Queen Gorgo gets more screen time and much more dialogue in 300: ROAE than in the original. However, much of this dialogue is straightforward exposition. The first fifteen minutes of the film are essentially a voice over – Gorgo giving us the film’s elevator speech. While on screen, Gorgo’s dialogue revolves around either worrying about her husband or mourning her husband. Her presence as a combatant as the Spartan cavalry rides in at the end of the film is welcome. Although – as with Artemisia – her motivation is vengeance rather than ideology or pure lust for conquest. While Gorgo is certainly a strong character, her impact on the narrative is minor.
Most disturbing is the mixed message the film conveys about rape and war. We’re shown several graphic scenes depicting the rape and murder of women as natural consequences of war in the ancient world, but Snyder must have been aware that they are just as common today. While narrating Artemisia’s backstory, Themistokles blandly states that it was his fellow Greeks who raped and murdered her mother, but he has no aversion to admitting this. Even more disconcerting, Artemisia herself presides over the sacking of Athens, during which we see several Athenian women stripped, raped, and hacked to death with short blades. Does Artemisia see this as suitable retribution? Does the memory of her mother’s suffering cause her to feel any empathy for these women? We do not know, because she makes no comment. This was a huge missed opportunity.
Similarly, just as Carmichael’s portrayal enables us to feel something of the pain experienced by the young Artemisia as she watched atrocity befall her family, we can also feel the pain experienced by Calisto (Jack O’Connell) as he witnessed Artemisia’s arrow pierce his father, Scyllius’ (Callan Mulvey) heart. Yet, despite what we see, underneath the talk of glory and freedom there is no coherent discussion of the futility of war and no allusion to the mental and physical scars left on the combatants.
Artemisia’s death scene articulates the film’s conflicted non-commentary on rape and war. Bloody, beaten, and anticipating the imminent arrival of the Spartan ships, we see Artemisia on her knees in front Themistokles, the point of his sword at her throat. Rather than accept Themistocles offer of escape, Artemisia chooses death. She feigns attack, and Themistokles stabs her through her lower abdomen. In excruciating detail, we see the sword sawing back and forth through her body. As she pulls Themistokles close, we see an almost orgasmic look cross her face.
While some have interpreted this scene as positive, her refusal to flee or to submit to capture a final example of her autonomy and self-determination, I argue that it instead serves as a capstone, an indirect culmination of the sexual assaults of her childhood, and a direct, forced (by Themistokles) culmination of the sex act that she had earlier delayed in her chambers.
300: ROAE is not a feminist movie, and that is not surprising given the film’s genre. The film fails the Bechdel Test; Gorgo and Artemisia never share a scene nor speak to other women. Snyder’s Artemisia is ultimately a construct of typical VFAC tropes and, despite a skilled and enthusiastic portrayal by Green, doesn’t do the historical Artemisia justice. Moreover, it’s disappointing that Snyder, having chosen rape as a shortcut to an interesting character, didn’t take the opportunity to also provide relevant commentary on the contemporary use of rape as a tool of war.
If you’re looking for buckets of blood, CGI naval battles, and fancy costumes, check it out. If you were hoping for an authentic adaption of the story of one of the ancient world’s most interesting women, you’ll be better off to stay home and curl up with a copy of The Histories instead.
*Coincidentally, the same warlord that Leonidas introduced to the bottom of a pit in the original film while saying the now infamous line, “Watch your step!”
Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.
