Off the Fury Road and Without a Map: Masculine Portrayal in the New ‘Mad Max’

Wrapped in a hypermasculine Trojan Horse of violence and war custom is a heady lesson about the dangers of ceding to those expectations, and about the road away from them and toward something like redemption. Here is a film where women are shown to be men’s combatative equals. Even more so, it is a film where the only way the men can escape their own oppression is to join up with, and occasionally defer to, these women.

This guest post by Zev Chevat appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.


In our generation, action dominates the box office with bombast, containing enough C4 to blow up a major city, and enough stuntpeople to populate it. While it’s high entertainment, it may seem like the last place to find social progress, let alone a challenge issued to its own core values. Yet this summer’s first great critical and commercial success has done the seemingly impossible, uniting powerful messages about gender and society with enough explosions to bring people into the megaplex seats.

While much hay has been made, and rightfully so, about the women in Mad Max: Fury Road, it was the men who began to catch my interest on a second viewing. Tough, monosyllabic, and utterly capable on the surface, the main men of Fury Road are also deeply flawed individuals who have been poisoned by the expectations placed on males in their (and, therefore, our) culture. Wrapped in a hypermasculine Trojan Horse of violence and war custom is a heady lesson about the dangers of ceding to those expectations, and about the road away from them and toward something like redemption. Here is a film where women are shown to be men’s combatative equals. Even more so, it is a film where the only way the men can escape their own oppression is to join up with, and occasionally defer to, these women.

By diverging male heroes from the narrow path that action movie precedent has carved for them, and eschewing the trappings of toxic masculinity for emotionally mature character growth, this film is striking out into new, more complex territory. Critics and audiences alike have responded with enthusiasm, crowning Fury Road an instant cult classic, and lauding the potent mixture of images and ideas that set it apart. For, although Fury Road’s most obvious addition to the conversation is its women, especially Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, the portrayal of its main men is just as radical, if more quietly so.

One of the biggest complaints from opponents of Fury Road is that Max (Tom Hardy), though ostensibly the title character, is not only upstaged; they say, he’s also barely a character at all. But, if he seems like non-existent person that’s because, for much of the film, the things that make Max himself, both material and mental, have been taken away or buried far underground. Max Rockatansky’s journey, it could be said, regards the mastery of himself, rather than the domination of others. Fury Road is about many things. Among them is Max’s arc, one in which a man in shellshock re-gains his humanity through cooperation, empathy, and compassion.

Max fights his way through the future.

First, the cooperative aspect, the lowest-hanging desert fruit on the thing-I mean tree. What gets Max that semblance of redemption he’s seeking is not simply overtaking the enemy with superior skill, though that plays a part. Nor is it taking up the mantle of despot at the film’s conclusion. Instead, the normally lone male warrior must team up with a group of women – some warriors, some escaped “Wives” – if he is to survive the coming onslaught.

Though initially combatants (their brawl upon meeting is one of the film’s most interesting set pieces), and highly suspicious of one another, Max and Furiosa quickly develop a strong respect, and trust. Recognizing Max’s reaction to her questions as evidence of trauma, Furiosa extends an olive branch of mutual trust when she tells him, “I need you here, you may have to drive the rig.” By saying, essentially, that she needs to trust him, so he better be trustworthy, Furiosa begins to help Max emerge from his shell. This is a reversal of the common trope of the in-control man who must bring a damaged woman into the fold. Here, it’s Max who has baggage, and who needs to meet Furiosa halfway. He does, and the two begin to work in deadly tandem almost immediately thereafter.

Through his interaction with the group of escaping women, not just their hard-bitten commander, Max becomes gradually more human. When it looks like Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), one of the Wives, has been bashed off the rig by a rocky outcrop, she reappears, smiling from behind the curve of the truck’s cab. Max gives her the thumbs up and, it appears, the first expression approaching a smile from him. He cares about what’s happened to this member of their group; he’s thinking about all of them, and no longer just himself. The extension of Max’s compassion culminates when Max speeds out into the salt flats after the group of Wives and Vulvalini, and convinces them to turn back instead of driving to what may well be their deaths.

All this puts Hardy’s Max in stark contrast to Mel Gibson’s taciturn cop, who swooped in to help a group of survivors in The Road Warrior. Gibson’s Max needed no one, and while he was not without heart, he was allowed to show little change. By the time he saunters off into the post-apocalyptic sunset, Hardy’s Max has not so much softened –there being no place for softness in Miller’s hyperviolent and hard world – but expanded, from bludgeoned bloodbag to being a man.

Crazed War Boy Nux rides into a "lovely" day.

This path, though evident in Max, is even more obvious when it comes to the character of the War Boy Nux, played with glee and a certain amount of sensitivity by Nicholas Hoult. Nux is a product of a tyrannically patriarchal society, who, through equal interactions with women, instead of domination of them, has a change of heart. His turn from emotionally barren war pup to white hat with a mind of his own is, even more so than Max’s, a tale of remarkable self-mastery. As some have perceptively pointed out, the men under Immorten Joe are treated like disposable commodities, determined to find glory at the end of their “half-life.” Their entire lives are built not around heroic deeds and deaths, but around the witnessing, the verification by other men, of those deeds. In an era without written history, the men need someone to see what they do, to affirm their reality. When Nux’s chain catches on the War Rig and he falls in front of Immorten Joe, his leader, the loss of face represents a greater failure, a systemic one. Adhering to the warmongering patriarchy has led to Nux’s decline and, in a sense, exile. Abandoned by the very things that propped him up, Nux devotes himself to the cause of the Wives after Capable (Riley Keough) shows him compassion. Nux is a man so bereft of affection and touch that, when Capable puts her finger to his lips, he keeps them absolutely still in mild terror. Here is Miller’s theme writ large: that patriarchy controls us all equally, and can prove venomous regardless of gender.

As the War Rig tears a furious path of destruction through the desert, it may seem as though such sentiments are secondary, if present at all. Yet Fury Road, and films like it, are pushing the envelope of social themes as much as you can in an action movie without dissolving the very genre in a vat of metatextual acid. Sci-fi blockbusters such as Pacific Rim (where masculine angst is overridden by a literal meeting of minds), and Edge of Tomorrow (where ego must be cast off in favor of cooperation), as well as the classic Terminator 2 (where survival depends on trusting and following a strong woman) are all successful examples that are threaded with many of the same concerns as Miller’s opus. But none present their thesis as clearly as Miller does his. Here is a brutal world that has entrapped and broken men as well as women, where the way to salvation is couched in qualities outside the typical action hero mold. The lone man blasting his way through the enemy will not lead to triumph. It is only together, with care in and joint effort with women, that a man may “come across some kind of redemption.”

“At least that way we'll be able to... together... come across some kind of redemption.”


Zev Chevat is a writer, artist, and animator who specializes in feminist discussions of film and media. In addition to Bitch Flicks, he has written extensively for TheMarySue, Bitch Media, and Animation World Network. Follow him on Twitter @zchevat, or on tumblr at justchevat.tumblr.com.


“24/7” Music: ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ and ‘Eden’

Anyone could make a pretty good video montage of Nina Simone in popular culture: first that iconic Chanel commercial featuring Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” then an early pre-Wallace-and-Gromit Aardman Studios short in which a sexy, clay-mation cat chanteuse sings the same song (in Simone’s voice), and finally Julie Delpy near the very end of ‘Before Sunset’ imitating Simone’s stage patter (white people, please, let’s not mimic Black people ever) for Ethan Hawke.

ninasimoneCover

Anyone could make a pretty good video montage of Nina Simone in popular culture: first that iconic Chanel commercial featuring Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” then an early pre-Wallace-and-Gromit Aardman Studios short in which a sexy, clay-mation cat chanteuse sings the same song (in Simone’s voice), and finally Julie Delpy near the very end of Before Sunset imitating Simone’s stage patter (white people, please, let’s not mimic Black people ever) for Ethan Hawke. But what these clips lack is Simone’s face, when her dark skin, wide nose, and full lips differentiated her from other Black women who were popular stars in the mid-twentieth century, like Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne, and even the Black women we see in movies and TV today. A recent bio-pic of Simone, which never had a real release in theaters, featured lighter-skinned star Zoe Saldana wearing dark makeup and a fake nose to play one of the first Black woman entertainers who performed with her hair natural and long earrings that brushed her shoulders in African-inspired dresses and head wraps.

Liz Garbus’s new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? (which opens in New York this week and will be streaming on Netflix starting this Friday, June 26) has glorious closeups of Simone’s face throughout. The film commences with a clip of a live performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival when, after a long glare at the audience, she says, “We’ll start from the beginning.”

Simone grew up poor in the Jim Crow South, but because her mother was a preacher, played the piano from a young age. At a church concert a couple of white women recognized Simone’s talent and she began to train as a classical pianist with the town’s white instructor. Simone practiced seven or eight hours every day, so even as a child was isolated from her peers, both Black and white. Segregation kept her from fulfilling her early dream; although she was able to attend Julliard (thanks to fundraising efforts in her hometown) she failed her audition for The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She later learned she was turned down because she was Black (a side note: classical auditions are now conducted with the musician hidden from view, a change that has been key in helping modern orchestras get closer to gender parity).

Simone adopted the pseudonym we know her by (she was born Eunice Waymon­­) taking “Nina” from a boyfriend’s nickname for her and “Simone” from the French actress Simone Signoret to perform the “devil’s music” in bars to support herself and her family. She had never sung before but was told at her first job she had to. Incorporating virtuoso piano technique with the greatest jazz improvisers’ instincts (Simone says she would sometimes change key in the middle of a song–her longtime guitarist Al Schackman was one of the few musicians who could keep up with her) along with a beautiful, distinctive voice and a deep, emotional connection to whatever she sang, she soon became a star. She performed blues, pop, and jazz songs as well as show tunes, remaking each of them in her own style. As critic Stanley Crouch says during the film, no one would ever mistake her work for that of anyone else.

SimoneMakeup
Nina Simone prepares for a concert

 

She married a New York vice cop, Andrew Stroud, who became her manager (which rarely turns out well). He physically and sexually abused her and pushed her to perform and tour more, even as she, like a lot of musicians who while away much of their childhood practicing, began to question if she really wanted a music career.

The civil rights movement gave her renewed purpose: she cultivated friendships with other Black artists, like Langston Hughes (who co-wrote with her “Backlash Blues”) and Lorraine Hansberry (the godmother of Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, who is interviewed extensively in the film). Simone also performed for the marchers with Martin Luther King at Selma and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the killing of Medgar Edgers and the four little girls in Alabama. She was close to Malcolm X’s wife and children and lived a short distance from them in Mount Vernon, New York, where her daughter became an honorary member of their family.

Like many others from that era she became disillusioned in the wake of the assassinations of civil rights leaders, and when the revolution so many spoke of and believed in during the 1960s never came. Manifesting symptoms of the bipolar disorder doctors would eventually diagnose (her mental illness was probably exacerbated by the beatings) she abandoned her marriage–and, for a time, her daughter–and never lived in the United States again.

The film has many great performance clips of Simone (including a moment in Montreux where she goes from palpable anger to laughter as an audience member spontaneously shouts out to her). I wish the film included even more of Simone’s music. The interviews are all first-rate and thorough, even as the interviewees, like Stroud and Schackman, seem to have opposing viewpoints. Lisa Simone Kelly is remarkably even-tempered in her remembrances of her mother as a genius and a star, but also as the person who physically and emotionally abused her. She says, “People think that when she came out onstage she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7 and that’s where it became a problem.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moOQXZxriKY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

 

In theory I’m the ideal audience member to see Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film, a fictionalized bio of her brother Sven Hansen-Løve (he co-wrote the script) about his days as a well-known DJ in Paris. Although I’ve never been to Paris, I spent enough time in US clubs in the 1990s that when I recognized a familiar song quietly humming in the background of an early scene, I started swaying in my seat in anticipation of hearing the song at full volume and becoming enveloped in a mass of lights and dancing bodies. But those few faint notes were all the film included; the characters end up walking away from the music in that scene, a metaphor for the film itself.

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A frustrated couple in a frustrating film

 

We all want to do the best we can for our families (well, most of us do) but Hansen-Løve seems to have zero affinity for the music, fashion, atmosphere, and dancing of the club scene in the ’90s and 2000s. Her idea of a great club scene is one in which the main character says of Daft Punk, “They’re killing it,” instead of letting us see, hear, and come to that conclusion ourselves. She should have steered her brother to a different director.

Additionally, the women in the life of the main character, who never gives us any reason to care about him, Paul (Félix de Givry) are, with one exception, nothing more than the interchangeable ciphers we’ve seen in every movie about straight, white, male protagonists. Each woman is ready to drop everything, either to accompany Paul on his US tour or clean up after him when he vomits. Greta Gerwig, in an English-speaking role, is the only one allowed ambitions of her own and she is on screen far too briefly.

Somewhere in this film of club scenes that are often tedious and indistinguishable from each other (Eden is 131 minutes long, but you’ll swear it lasts the same couple of decades the film covers) is the bare bones of a decent story: what it’s like to outlive the fashionability of one’s talents and tastes. After a disastrous gig, a drunk and drugged-out Paul is carried home from the club by his friends and as they pass an older woman on the staircase she says something about, “The youth of today.”

He retorts, “I’m 34!” That’s a pretty good line, but it’s the only one in this morass of a film.

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

‘Welcome to Me’ and the Trouble with Mental Illness Comedies

‘Welcome to Me’ is pitched as “woman wins the lottery and uses it to finance her own daytime talk show.” I interpreted this as “Joan Calamezzo: The Movie” and immediately added it to my to-watch list. What that quick summary fails to mention is that Kristen Wiig’s character Alice Klieg has borderline personality disorder, and that her decision to produce her talk show coincides with her going off her meds.

Kristen Wiig in 'Welcome to Me'
Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me

At the end of her now-legendary Tonight Show interview as Daenerys Targaryen, it is revealed Kristen Wiig is there to promote Welcome to Me, pitched as “woman wins the lottery and uses it to finance her own daytime talk show.” I interpreted this as “Joan Calamezzo: The Movie” and immediately added it to my to-watch list. What that quick summary fails to mention is that Kristen Wiig’s character Alice Klieg has borderline personality disorder, and that her decision to produce her talk show coincides with her going off her meds. Yes, Welcome to Me is in the perilous genre of the mental illness comedy. Is it the Silver Linings Playbook for borderline personality disorder or another Blue Jasmine offering a vague Blanche DuBois-esque mélange of symptoms in lieu of actual characterization? Welcome to Me falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

A very special episode of 'Welcome to Me'
A very special episode of Welcome to Me

On her show, Alice describes her history of mental health diagnoses: manic depression, rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, and most recently, borderline personality disorder. As a mentally ill person myself, I nodded my head along to the ever-changing labels psych patients keep up with. But borderline personality disorder is outside my personal mental health history, and I know very little about it. I don’t even “know” anything about it from Hollywood; the only other borderline character I could think of was Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, and that film strongly challenges the appropriateness of that diagnosis. So I cannot tell you if Welcome to Me “gets borderline personality disorder right” (but here are some articles that address that question, each with different conclusions).

Alice delivering one of her 'prepared statements' on television
Alice delivering one of her “prepared statements” on television

Whether or not Alice is a fair representation of borderline personality diorder, she is a clearly realized character. Wiig plays her with a flat affect most of the time, somewhat interpersonally detached and awkward, and either unaware or uninterested in social decorum (her “prepared statement” after her lottery win begins, “I was a summer baby born in 1971 in Simi Valley, California, and I’ve been using masturbation as a sedative since 1991”). But Alice’s emotions are easily and erratically triggered in ways that leave deep wounds, evidenced by her talk show segments re-enacting small slights from her past, like a friend swiping some of her makeup. Alice’s personal take on her condition becomes clear when she reflects on “all the times in my life when I was supposed to feel something but I felt nothing, and all the other times in my life where I wasn’t supposed to feel anything but I felt too much and the people around me weren’t really ready for all of my feelings.”

Alice has an emotional breakdown on the set of her talk show.
Alice has an emotional breakdown on the set of her talk show.

 

While the writing and acting create a consistent vision of Alice, it is one wholly defined by her mental illness.  She’s not a person, she’s a DSM-V checklist. So it is impossible to relate to her character, even as a mentally ill person myself.

And it becomes very hard to watch Welcome to Me as a comedy because laughing at Alice feels cruel.  She is taken advantage of by the small-town tv station that airs her show, who keep telling her they need more money because she’ll robotically write them checks until she’s spent nearly all her fortune. Her therapist (Tim Robbins) is condescending and callous. And when people ARE kind to Alice (like her best friend Gina [Linda Cardellini] and her co-worker and occasional lover Gabe [Wes Bentley]), we see her hurt them terribly through her own self-involvement and volatility.  It is a very sad story. The absurdity of the talk show in the center stops being funny and becomes tragic. And not being able to laugh at Kristen Wiig riding a “swan boat” onto stage while she sings her own theme song is just a waste.

No one wants meatloaf cake
No one wants meatloaf cake

Welcome to Me offers the ingredients of a good drama about mental illness and a good comedy about a low-budget vanity talk show, but combined this comes out like the meatloaf “cake” with sweet potato “frosting” that Alice presents on her show.  It’s unpleasant and you wonder why anyone would make it in the first place.


Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh. If she had her own TV show, she would hire a professional to sing the theme song.

Alicia Vikander Stars As World War I Feminist and Pacifist in James Kent’s ‘Testament of Youth’

Director James Kent: “People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. “

James Kent
James Kent

 


This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.


Featuring an interview with director James Kent

Alicia Vikander, who recently embodied female robotic perfection in Ex Machina, stars in James Kent’s circa 1914 drama Testament of Youth. The movie is adapted from the World War I memoirs of British pacifist and feminist Vera Brittain, who spoke for her generation when she chronicled her wartime struggles and losses. Brittain, contrary to the wishes of her family and what was expected of women at that time, pursued an Oxford education instead of a husband. Instead she fell in love with her brother’s friend, Roland (Kit Harington from Game of Thrones), and deferred her education to serve as a nurse on the French War Front. Sweepingly romantic and seemingly old fashioned on the surface, the feistiness and determination of the heroine gives the story a modern kick.

Vikander is having a moment, and the director, making his feature film debut, lucked out in his timing. At a recent press event to promote the film, he told me that if he had cast Vikander now he wouldn’t be able to afford her. The Swedish actress first came on everyone’s radar as Denmark’s queen in A Royal Affair, while the sci-fi Ex Machina propelled her to the next level. She seems to be everywhere with at least five other films scheduled for release this year. She will soon appear with Eddie Redmayne in Tom Hooper’s highly anticipated film, The Danish Girl.

Vikander is dating Michael Fassbender, whom she met when they made The Light Between Oceans, also scheduled for release this year. The 26-year-old actress was staying at the same hotel where she and the director were promoting the film. Now with her sudden celebrity, paparazzi circled outside the Crosby Street Hotel for hours in hopes of getting shots of Vikander and Fassbender leaving together.


Following are highlights from my interview with director James Kent about his film, his inspirations and especially his star:

Talk about the movie’s pacing and how you told the story.

James Kent: It’s not rushed, so you enter the film and you have these moments where you think, I’ve got a moment to think about what I’ve just seen. Otherwise it’s like plot, plot, plot, and you can’t stay in her head. And there’s a slightly reflective quality to the film that allows, hopefully, certain elements of the audience who get it to feel that it speaks to them singularly. Otherwise it could be boring.

Also I had never made a feature film. I made documentaries and television dramas, so this was my first feature I was obviously anxious to prove that I would be able to shed the televisual side, which is different, although it’s more cinematic now than it’s ever been. There’s a sort of different type of vernacular for television than cinema, and I wanted to make a film that felt like cinema.


You didn’t get the memo that audiences don’t want to see female heroines in film?

I didn’t get that memo and you know what, I think cinema isn’t getting the memo either at the moment. There’s Far From the Madding Crowd. There’s going to be the Suffragette movie. There’s Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan and Mad Max: Fury Road starring Charlize Theron. I think, finally, they are waking up to the fact that most of the audience is actually women.


This is your first narrative film, but you’ve made television movies featuring women, including Maggie about Margaret Thatcher. Are you especially drawn to woman protagonists?

People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. What’s a better story than Joan of Arc? And I also happen to be a gay man and I think that gay men also are underdogs, so maybe there’s a connectivity I feel is there between myself and the women’s experience. I also think women are much more psychologically alert and emotionally alert.


World War I is not an especially known subject for Americans. Were you concerned it would find an audience here? 

It was a challenge, but what I’m hoping is that the power of Vera’s story and her pioneering spirit, which is largely in a love story but beyond that because Roland dies, it’s about a woman who powers herself and inspires herself to do what she always wanted to do, which is to become a writer. I think that’s a universal story. That’s not a World War I story.

Also the way I filmed it–because it’s filmed in a very subjective way–it’s very much her interior mind, and I think that modernizes that story. It’s not a 100-year period film. It’s a story about love and loss and rebuilding.  You could have done that in modern dress.

Alicia Vikander
Alicia Vikander

 

You have a wonderful supporting cast but your star, Alicia Vikander, is basically the whole film. Your timing couldn’t be better. You got her right after A Royal Affair and Anna Karenina and before Ex Machina. She has about five other films coming out this year.

What can I say? It’s her film. We were fated. God smiled on us. Alicia Vikander was free, available, affordable, willing. And it was my first film! What more could a first film director want? And then to have her and then to have Taron Egerton, who’s in Kingsman, also on the rise. And Kit Harington, who’s in Game of Thrones, phenomenally successful, but all fresh, all not seen in the cinema world by big English language audiences.

I think Alicia produces a very specific Vera. There’s a sort of gritty determination, powerhouse there. You know she was a ballerina with the Swedish Royal Ballet from the age of 9. Now think of Black Swan. There’s a particular kind of girl who has that fortitude to be a dancer. They’re ambitious. They’re also very determined. And they set themselves the highest standards. And that’s what Vera did, and I think Alicia immediately focuses us on those qualities. An actress, what they do is they allow the audience to immediately focus on a particular aspect of that person that the film’s about. Another actress will alter that. It doesn’t mean they won’t do a great role, but you’ll have a different impression of that person. Alicia brings out some of the core qualities of Vera really within the first few seconds of meeting her. You know. You sense because that’s what Alicia’s like.


The scenes where Vera and her brother and Roland and a friend are bathing in the pond are particularly effective because of what happens later to all of them. Were the water scenes as much fun to shoot as to watch?

There was no joking around. That water was 8 degrees. And we’re talking February in England. I mean that was a lot of production panic because of my desire to have them in the water. Luckily we shot that part late because we didn’t want to kill off our actress. But she has no body fat. I mean her body double for the close-ups, she could stay in there. But Alicia because she’s so slim, that water went straight to her bones and so she was in and out. She never complained. Incredible.


You came into the project rather late, in 2012 when there was already a script in place. Did you make major changes?

It shifted. My agent told me as a first time film director I would only have a certain element of power. If it goes well, the second film you’ll have a lot more power. And that’s how it works. You desperately want the film to happen. I’m also in love with the script and it so happened coincidentally a great friend of mine, Juliette Towhidi, had written the script, so I did love the script but there were things that I wanted changed. I wanted more internalizing on the script, more subjectivity from her viewpoint. I wanted the War to be clarified. I didn’t want to stint on the warfare and the suffering that the audience would have but I didn’t want it to be too much either.


The love scenes are so understated, which makes them even sexier. What inspires you?

I’m quite good at romance. Some of my television projects are about romance and I’m very good at asking actors to do follow my direction that less is more, but to do it with their eyes, and with their mouth, and with their hands. Like that scene in the café, where they touch fingers, that was straight out of David Lean’s Brief Encounter for me.

I was very inspired by that movie. That’s a movie with Celia Johnson and she has this sort of internal voice and it’s like a close up and it’s all about trains and separation. These are the things Testament has in it and I love the lavish amount of romanticism of Brief Encounter. It was radical for its time to do that, to have internal voices and the way it’s shot. It’s just so radical, and I found that inspiring.

What I do, I try desperately to look for film references because you’re trying to give your crew and actors something to watch and say, “Look, it’s got a semblance of this.” I find it really hard to find things that I love. I love movies but I find it really hard to find something specific for the one that I’m making, but that came closest. And also as you can tell, a bit of Gone With the Wind. Because I think there’s also something about Vera and Scarlett O’Hara, there’s something about her feistiness, she won’t be told what to do by men.

 


Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

 

 

Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’ Provides Long-Term Joy

As for ‘Inside Out,’ it gives us not one female protagonist, but three – Riley, Joy, and Sadness – and NONE of them are princesses! And, minor criticisms aside, the film is a true joy to watch – and, like deeply felt joy – it has its moments of hilarity, of reflection, of nostalgia, and, yes, of sadness too.

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This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Skirt Collective and is cross-posted with permission.


Inside Out is an excellent addition to the Pixar canon, one that, like the equally amazing Brave, has female characters front and center. A coming-of-age story about Riley, a young tween forced to leave her beloved Minnesota, the film departs from the typical stories about girlhood – stories that often focus, in soppy-romantic-teen-angsty fashion on L-O-V-E at the expense of character development and female friendship. Some of these films are good (yes, I admit to liking The Notebook), some are rather great (I sobbed my face off at The Fault in Our Stars), and some make me feel like spewing vomit Exorcist-style (Breaking Dawn). Inside Out is in a league of its own, however – hardly surprising given the unstoppable Amy Poehler is the lead voice.

Focusing mainly on the inner-workings of Riley’s brain, the film is a coming-to-emotional-maturity story featuring Riley’s main emotions –   Joy (Amy Poehler), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). These emotions run “Headquarters” – the part of Riley’s brain that creates the “core memories” making up her identity. The unflappable and infectious Joy believes herself to be Riley’s most important emotion, but when the usually happy Riley goes into a tailspin after the family’s move to San Francisco, havoc erupts at “Emotion Headquarters”causing Joy and Sadness to embark on a journey through Riley’s brain in hopes of salvaging her once happy, confident personality.

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The movie is brimming with clever nods to how we think about thinking (Riley’s brain includes a “Train of Thought”), pop-psychology (trouble-making memories and thoughts get taken to the prison-like subconscious), and imaginary friends (in the form of Bing-Bong). It is perhaps Pixar’s deepest film, a laugh- and tear-fueled lesson about the key role emotions and our thoughts about them play in our lives. Nope, this is not the id-filled fun of Toy Story, or the ego-pumping race of Cars, but a super-ego tinged exploration of how our emotions will control us if we don’t get control of them.

Most of the movie takes place within the landscape of Riley’s mind, allowing for witty forays into the dream production center (replete with its “reality distortion filter”), inventive exploration of abstract thought (characterized as a “danger zone”), and adroit usage of those commercial ear-worms that take-over one’s brain. The scenes set in real-world San Francisco are similarly delightful, mocking the ire Riley feels when broccoli pizza is the only choice on the menu, evoking the horrors of being the new kid at school, and capturing the frustrations of trying to fit one’s old life into a new house.

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The film’s use of emotion and memory is inventive and ingenious, ultimately offering a lesson about the importance of emotional diversity (hint: Joy, as it turns out, is not quite as important as she thinks). Adding to the poignancy of the emotional rollercoaster ride (my daughter named it “the saddest kids movie ever”), is the incredible cast of voice actors. Joy is reminiscent of Poehler’s ever-positive Parks and Rec character, while Phyllis Smith (from The Office) stands out ingeniously as Sadness, playing her blue-bodied character with the palpable dreary, depressive ennui that all of us (except Leslie Knope perhaps) experience at some point or another.

If I have a quibble with the film, it would be with its gendering of emotions. While it is hard to portray genderless characters to an audience still embroiled in the gender binary, some slight changes could have nudged the film towards a more gender-fluid narrative. Riley’s emotions are presented as a mixture of female (Joy, Sadness, Disgust) and male (Anger and Fear). This gendering of her emotions nods to the “unfixedness” of gender pre-puberty, especially as all the adults (most notably, her mom and dad) are presented as having emotions that match their sex/gender (and the dad’s are not only male, but think in sports terms!).

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The end of the film, which includes a look inside the brains of various characters, accords with this view – that once someone moves beyond puberty into the realm of adulthood, one’s emotions “match” the sex/gender of the person. While this is a minor criticism of an otherwise great film, it could have been easily remedied by not stereotypically displaying the inner minds of post-puberty characters. I get it, stereotypes are a quick and fast route to comedy, but they also lead us to dead-end either/or thinking. One other beef is that Riley’s mom (voiced by Diane Lane) doesn’t seem to have a job. No, not ALL women have to have jobs/careers, and NOOOOOOOOOOOOO I am not saying that being a mother is not a more-than-full-time, important job — what I am questioning is a world in which dads are still depicted  as the major breadwinners and also often get to be “good dads” to boot, while moms are more often “just moms.” Perhaps these gender-conforming aspects of the film can be partially put down to what one reviewer calls  “the Mouse’s boot” on Pixar’s neck – or, in other words, the fact that Disney now owns Pixar. Yet, while Pixar admittedly gave us a marvelous run of inventive movies that put the tried-and-true princess narratives to shame, they were not without their gender problems, with Brave standing out as the most feminist in its exploration of gender confines that bind.

As for Inside Out, it gives us not one female protagonist, but three – Riley, Joy, and Sadness – and NONE of them are princesses! And, minor criticisms aside, the film is a true joy to watch – and, like deeply felt joy – it has its moments of hilarity, of reflection, of nostalgia, and, yes, of sadness too. I agree with this review, that “One viewing is nowhere near enough to appreciate the extraordinary level of detail lavished on this world.

So see it and see it again, my many-emotioned friends, and take all your emotions with you, even the non-gender conforming ones!

 


Natalie Wilson teaches women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Seduced by Twilight and blogs for Ms., Girl with Pen and Bitch Flicks.

 

 

Sweet Nectar of the Matriarchy: Breastmilk in ‘Fury Road’

Furiosa, the “Wives,” the Vulvalini, and Max’s triumphant return to the Citadel finds the once chained-to-their-pumps milk mothers now opening the floodgates and pouring water down on the people below. It seems likely that our sheroes and the milk mothers will move forward on the “plentitude model” – bathing in an abundance of sweet, thick human milk, sharing water access, and growing green things from heirloom seeds – rather than continue in the scarcity model exemplified by Immortan Joe, with the milk mothers as capitalists profiting from their own production.

Immortan Joe sampling the goods with milk mothers and their machines in the background
Immortan Joe sampling the goods with milk mothers and their machines in the background

 


This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.


Liquids abound in the otherwise dry landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road: precious gasoline (or “guzzoline”), scarce water, spray-on chrome, blood transfusions, and stolen mother’s milk. A dystopia wrapped around a feminist utopia, Fury Road has been cheered by women’s rights supporters and action film lovers alike. The film’s nightmarish post-apocalyptic world is characterized by a patriarchal power that exploits women’s reproduction and consolidates resources, leaving many in abject poverty. Hard to imagine, I know. It’s no surprise then, that the film was boycotted by MRAs. While rape and forced procreation are the most obvious examples of women’s exploited reproductive labor, breastmilk recurs throughout Fury Road as a symbol of that oppression. We view women imprisoned in milk-pumping machines, much like harrowing images of factory dairy farms. And unlike sex and sexuality, which are left conspicuously out of the film’s uprising, redemption is symbolized through human milk: “Mother’s Milk” anoints Max’s (Tom Hardy) face after his first proactively selfless act in support of Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the “Five Wives,” for example.

We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with breastmilk: on the one hand, there’s an almost fanatical love of it as a healing substance, and on the other, fear and disgust so intense that mothers are routinely shamed for public breastfeeding (it’s supposedly “unsanitary”). Fury Road dramatically and imaginatively reproduces this stance toward breastmilk. The Citadel’s inhabitants worship Mother’s Milk–they chant these words, among others, before Furiosa’s supply run to Gas Town (the implication is that the city exports milk in exchange for gas and therefore it is central to their economy)–but we also see that the women providing milk are chained to breast pumps with their mouths covered, holding sad, filthy baby dolls in their arms meant to stimulate milk production. Women the producers are unsanitary and devalued; the milk they create is holy. Holy and commodified, of course: it’s meant to sustain the patriarch Immortan Joe, his sons, and anyone else he deems worthy, and to keep the hierarchical structure going through trade with neighboring patriarchal cities.

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Water flowing

 

Feminist breastfeeding scholars point out that we already live in a world in which breastmilk is a commodity. Linda C. Fentiman argues that human milk is “marketed both literally and figuratively, as a good for sale, a normative behavior, and a cure for a variety of contemporary social and medical problems.” Pediatricians promote breast is best, nonprofit milk banks and milk sharing organizations are popping up everywhere, and even for-profit formula companies use breastmilk in their scientific studies. All of these benefit people; rarely do they financially benefit those providing their milk. In response, Fentiman proposes we make more explicit the market value of breastmilk, because this would recognize women’s labor in milk production. Why not let mothers quantify and sell their milk? Why not give nursing mothers more economic power within the system as it is?

But others, like Fiona Giles, encourage us as a culture to “waste breastmilk.” Our intense fear of “the leaky body,” she says in Breastmilk: The Movie, means that we often treat women’s bodies as “monstrous.” Shaming nursing mothers is one example of how society strives to keep women’s bodies controlled and neat and orderly. Breastmilk (and pregnancy and menstruation, for that matter) threatens to make the leaky body public. Yet at the same time, we have public health campaigns praising human milk as “liquid gold” and dictating diet, sleep, behavior, and more to protect and champion this substance. The conflicted message here, which Fury Road so vividly amplifies, is disgust of the body itself while praising what the body produces. And so why don’t we push back by pouring it everywhere? “Let’s throw it around,” Giles says. “Let’s do what we feel like in it. Have baths. Who cares?” This has a double effect: refusing bodily shame and rejecting the idea of milk as something precious and rare. Or to use Giles’s terms, wasting human breastmilk moves us from a “scarcity model” to a “plentitude model.” In the scarcity model, we see fear of insufficient production, rhetoric that links “good” behavior with breastfeeding, individual responsibility for failure or success in infant nourishment, and anxious hording of backup milk. But why not operate from a place of abundance instead? Resist the system as it is and disrupt “orderly” (read: controlled) public spaces with leaking breasts, unpredictable bodies, and shared milk?

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Furiosa, the “Wives,” the Vulvalini, and Max’s triumphant return to the Citadel finds the once chained-to-their-pumps milk mothers now opening the floodgates and pouring water down on the people below. It seems likely that our sheroes and the milk mothers will move forward on the “plentitude model” – bathing in an abundance of sweet, thick human milk, sharing water access, and growing green things from heirloom seeds – rather than continue in the scarcity model exemplified by Immortan Joe, with the milk mothers as capitalists profiting from their own production. In other words, the film suggests these women will build a new economy altogether; I hear echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) and philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes a wildly fascinating theory about the feminist power of liquids in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). For me the promise of this new economy is the film’s most cathartic gesture.

Cathartic, but not perfect. It isn’t human milk that flows at the triumphant end, but water drilled from deep in the earth. Does the milk mothers’ liberation come at the cost of the earth’s resources, I wonder? Or are we meant to conflate maternal women with the earth? Both troublesome suggestions. And of course as controversial as mothering is in our culture, a maternally centered revolution remains less threatening than would, say, any gesture toward sexual pleasure at the heart of the uprising. If we are disgusted by maternal bodies, we are downright terrified by sexually empowered women’s bodies.

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Yet, regardless of what happens next in the Citadel, Fury Road’s use of breastmilk both in its oppressive and resistant visions demonstrates that when we talk about human breastmilk we aren’t just talking about feeding human infants, personal choice, or love and bonding. We’re also talking about economics and labor, and our societal fear of unpredictable, leaky female bodies even while society commodifies what those bodies produce. Fury Road concretely and imaginatively re-connects bodies with human milk, making milk-producing breasts very much public. Although the film’s ending is more symbolic than prescriptive, the final scene suggests that prosthetic-free Furiosa, the seed-wielding Wives, and the water-pouring milk mothers are no longer outliers in an otherwise orderly society, but are now the source and foundation of society’s structure. This enables us to imagine a world in which the leaky body is not an object of shame or fear, but instead a source of power and creation.

 


Colleen Martell is a writer, literary agent, and lecturer of public health and women’s studies based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There’s a place for both breastfed and formula fed babies in her feminist utopia. She tweets about bodies at @elsiematz.

 

 

Lies The Government–and Movies–Tell Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ and ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

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In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Just last week, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi who makes inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

Meanwhile, the jihadi, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

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The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.

Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.

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This film could use a lot more “girl” (Olivia Cooke)

 

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.

Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.

As I sat through Me and Earl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfmAllbYC8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Spy’: Truly Funny and Truly Feminist

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by or starring women once and for all, by force- feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place.

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An advantage of getting older is being able to predict what types of maintream entertainment I won’t enjoy and then being able to cheerfully avoid them. I have never even seen a clip from Breaking Bad: the fulsome interviews with the (male) cast and creator on NPR were all I needed to hear. In the many years people have been posting “hilarious” Saturday Night Live clips I’ve found only “Brownie Husband” and Tiny Fey as Sarah Palin funny, so now I just skip them. With movies I am a lot more susceptible to hype, especially if the film is about a woman or women. I’ve been let down enough times that, for about the past decade, I’ve seen hardly seen anything at the multiplex, especially “comedies” which rarely make me laugh out loud or even smile. After sitting through The Devil Wears Prada, I decided I would no longer believe anyone who said, “You’ll like this one.”

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by, or starring women once and for all, by force-feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place. What I find especially galling is when a film that is supposed to “empower” women ends up making one the butt of the joke, but instead of being a joke just because she’s a woman (as she would be in the usual bro-comedy) she’s a joke because she’s fat, or not white or because her appearance doesn’t conform to the ultra-femme standard of most women characters in movies. I feared that Spy, which opens this Friday, June 5, and stars Melissa McCarthy (who has been in more than one of the type of films I’ve described) might be another disappointment, but was pleasantly surprised.

The film starts out strong with a pre-credit sequence in which McCarthy’s character, Susan Cooper, from an office in Washington DC, guides spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) through various ambushes and traps in an Eastern European mansion/castle using an earpiece, a contact lens camera and surveillance technology–plus her own expertise. She’s the super-competent office assistant that most powerful men have back at the office. She never falters and he, in the mold of James Bond and Jason Bourne never does either until the end when he confronts a villain and makes a huge error (which, in context, made me laugh out loud). At first Susan says, “Oh my God, why, why did you do that?” But then, like all great office assistants she immediately takes the blame, saying she should have taken additional measures to prevent the incident, even though we see she has already taken more than enough.

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Agents Cooper and Fine

 

Susan has a crush on Fine (who wouldn’t? Law here is at his most charming and, unlike in some other recent roles, has hair) which keeps her in his thrall. She confesses her desire to be a real spy only to her office mate, Nancy (a wonderful Miranda Hart, whom some might recognize from Call The Midwife), who tells her, “You play it too safe.”

Also on hand is Allison Janney (in one of the brusque, take-charge roles she does so well) as the agency boss who has no patience with Susan until she realizes “We need someone invisible,” in the field. Janney’s character also counsels Susan, saying that Fine, by telling her she was best at her job as his helper was actually holding her back. Susan is eager to take on the sophisticated false identity that she’s seen Fine and the other agents given but always ends up as a variation of a frumpy, Midwestern cat-lady, a sly dig at the type of roles actresses who aren’t slender, like McCarthy, are typically asked to play.

When Nancy and Susan visit the gadget sector of the agency, instead of the cross between a hovercraft and a Segway we see a good-looking man in a suit and tie thoroughly enjoying himself on, Susan receives a bottle of “stool softeners” that are actually  poison antidotes along with equally unglamorous accessories. Once in Europe she runs into another agent (who is supposed to be lying low) Rick (Jason Statham making fun of his usual “tough guy” roles) a bungling braggart who takes every opportunity to disparage Susan’s skills as a spy, even as we see that she brings the same efficiency to her work in the field as she did back in the office.

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Susan and Nancy

 

In a world where “satire” is used as a descriptor for works like Entourage, the word might not have much meaning, but Spy, in the tradition of the best satire, makes fun of conventions we might not have realized we were sick of–like the cat-lady typecasting. Also, while male action heroes like 007 and Jason Bourne never make a wrong move, no matter how extreme the situations they find themselves in and shoot and kill others with all the sensitivity of a giant swatting at flies, two of the women in Spy who kill react more like the rest of us might: neither plays it cool.

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Rose Byrne as Rayna and Melissa McCarthy as Cooper (front)

 

I kept on waiting for the film to go wrong, for someone to humiliate Susan for her size, which miraculously never happens. Others doubt her skill and the villainess Rayna (Rose Byrne, having a ball as a spoiled, rich Daddy’s girl with a British accent) rips apart her fashion sense, even after Susan changes into flattering, chic evening wear, but no one ever comes close to making a fat “joke” or comment, which has to be some kind of milestone: imagine if Will Smith or Denzel Washington had spent a good part of their careers being the butt of racist jokes–and how different their careers would then be today.

I haven’t before seen McCarthy in a role I’ve liked, so was gratified to see how good she was in this one, which calls on her to take on multiple identities, sometimes switching personas in the middle of a scene. Writer-director Paul Feig (the director of Bridesmaids who is also one of the only male directors to publicly support the ACLU action on behalf of women directors in the industry) gives us the same settings as the real Bourne and Bond films use: European casinos, lakefront estates and helicopters, but isn’t so dazzled by them that he forgets to include jokes, good ones. For once no one is making fun of the office ladies (Hart’s Nancy also gets her turn in the field) but of those who make fun of the office ladies, like Rick, who by the end grudgingly admits that Susan has done a good job though we see he’s still not the smartest guy. I even liked the celebrity-as-himself cameo (Fifty Cent, who gets a great last line) and some of the physical comedy, which is a first for me.

The film isn’t perfect. I could have done without Peter Serafinowicz’s terrible Italian accent as a lecherous fellow agent and would remind everyone involved that Europe (not to mention Washington DC) has plenty of people of color and encourage them to cast some in speaking roles (the villains here are Eastern European, so we don’t even get Arab actors, though Bobby Cannavale, who is half Cuban, plays one hard-to-kill baddie). The film also includes a scene where Cooper and Nancy tear down a friendly, thin, well-dressed woman agent behind her back and an instance where a newly glammed-up Cooper delights in being the target of street harassment, false tropes that a woman writer-director probably wouldn’t have perpetuated. But Spy is so much better than any other film in its genre (and unceasing in its feminism: the solidarity between the women characters continues right through the end) that even those who put together the trailer must not have been able to believe it, since they strung together–badly–moments that make the movie look like the usual summer mediocrity. It’s not! Instead we finally have an action-adventure comedy that is truly funny and truly feminist–and almost makes me look forward to my next trip to the multiplex.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAqxH0IAPQI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Sex, Drugs, and Developing Breasts: ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ an Unforgettable Debut

The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, allowing us a panoramic view of Minnie’s inner life through animated versions of her intense and thoughtful comic illustrations, drawn frame by frame. Still, ‘Diary’s best feature is its script. While the lessons Minnie learns are expected ones, they are important and the audience will be deeply pleased to see her arrive there. As Minnie reflects on her changing body, interests, and desires, it becomes easy to empathize with a character so familiar and yet so individual.


This is a guest post by Ariana DiValentino.


When it comes to budding sexuality, movies have frequently told us stories of the trials and experimentations (sometimes with baked goods) of high school boys who can’t hardly wait. Teen girl sexuality, however, gets far less screen time and even less nuance. This is why The Diary of a Teenage Girl, directed by first-timer Marielle Heller, stands out as an exciting rare gem.

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Bel Powley stars as the 15-year-old Minnie living in San Francisco in the 1970s, who is simultaneously naïve and precocious—both in her artistic and sexual endeavors. Minnie initiates an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe, played by Alexander Skarsgård, when, after he discloses an untimely physical reaction to some horseplay, she realizes for the first time that a man views her as a sexual being. Though Monroe is two decades her senior, the film manages to turn the Lolita trope on its head by avoiding illustrating Minnie as a deviant teen seductress or vilifying Monroe as a predatory monster. We are along for the ride, alternatingly understanding Minnie’s crush and desire for affection, and cringing at the blatant manipulation she is unknowingly subjected to.

Powley plays a hilariously and touchingly feisty, creative, and confused Minnie, whose bad behaviors are little mystery given the juvenile, wild-partying adults she is surrounded by. Alexander Skarsgård, while initially charming in Minnie’s eyes, portrays an excellent man-child who cannot grasp the impact of his actions on others. Kristen Wiig removes all doubt about her ability to play dramatic roles as Minnie’s loving but deeply flawed mother, Charlotte. Christopher Meloni makes a pleasant appearance as Charlotte’s ex-husband, and the closest thing Minnie has to a protective parental figure.

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The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, allowing us a panoramic view of Minnie’s inner life through animated versions of her intense and thoughtful comic illustrations, drawn frame by frame. Still, Diary’s best feature is its script. While the lessons Minnie learns are expected ones, they are important and the audience will be deeply pleased to see her arrive there. As Minnie reflects on her changing body, interests, and desires, it becomes easy to empathize with a character so familiar and yet so individual. The film finds its humour in its truth, deriving laughs from lines like the dead-serious “I’ve had breasts for three full years now” and genuine, sometimes embarrassing scenes of intimacy.

Not easily categorized, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a deeply dramatic coming-of-age story with moments of sharp, undeniable wit. Minnie navigates the San Francisco of 1976, sharing thoughts and making mistakes that even more recent survivors of adolescence will gleefully identify with. Marielle Heller has proven herself to be a writer-director to watch, utilizing specificity and a deep understanding of people across generations to create a beautiful and deeply human portrait of growing pains.

 


Ariana DiValentino is a lover and budding creator of all things film and feminism, based in New York. Catch her in action on Twitter @ArianaLee721.

‘Mad Max’: Fury Road Is a Fun Movie. It’s a Solid Action Flick. But Is It Feminist™?

However, I’d argue that ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

 

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in 'Mad Max: Fury Road'
Mad Max: Fury Road

This guess post by Rebecca Cohen previously appeared at Rebecca’s Random Crap and is cross-posted with permission.


Many who devote ourselves to the struggle for gender equality want to claim this movie as our own. Others have said feminists need to demand more from our entertainment than Mad Max: Fury Road actually delivers.

To wit:

They’re right. Our culture glorifies violence, equates strength and power with violence, and attributes that strength and power to men. While violence may sometimes be necessary in self-defense or in rebellion against oppression, the glorification of violence is distinctly patriarchal. We can’t fight patriarchy’s values by adopting them. We can’t simply substitute a woman in the place of a man, giving her strength and power according to patriarchy’s narrow definition, and call it feminist. There’s nothing revolutionary about masculine power fantasies, even with a woman at the center of them.

But. They’re also wrong. They’re wrong about Fury Road and exactly what’s going on in that movie.

I want to say, as a side note, that there’s nothing wrong with fantasies of violent rebellion against violent oppression. When you experience the frustration of being dehumanized and marginalized and discriminated against, you need catharsis. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. It’s necessary. But, OK – maybe if we want to narrowly define what makes a “feminist film,” we can say it’s not, strictly speaking, feminist.

However, I’d argue that Mad Max: Fury Road contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

Yes, the villains are caricatures, or at least, they’re cartoonishly exaggerated – as everything in the movie is. The whole thing is basically a cartoon. But we don’t have to read the movie so literally. To say that a narrative must literally portray the dismantling of realistic social and economic systems is setting the bar too high. A message about social justice, like any message, can be conveyed symbolically or subtextually. Science fiction has always done that. Sometimes a flame-throwing guitar is NOT just a flame-throwing guitar. Well, OK. It’s just a flame-throwing guitar. But some of the other stuff has meaning.

Fury Road depicts a patriarchal society controlled by a small and very powerful elite. It’s not accidental that all the warlords in the movie are older white men. They even have ailments that make them each of them physically deformed and weak – Immortan Joe has visible abscesses all over his back and requires an apparatus to breathe – highlighting that their power doesn’t rely on their own physical strength. Their power is systemic. They control others through religion/ideology (promising the War Boys honor and entry to Valhalla) and hoarding of resources (most obviously water). The 1 percent, if you will, keep the rest of the population in line by forcing them to rely on whatever meager allowance of resources the warlords dole out. Men and boys are exploited for labor and as foot soldiers. Women are exploited for their sexual and reproductive capacities. No, it’s not subtle, but it’s not empty action movie nonsense either.

The narrative is driven (heh) by women exercising their agency. It’s easy to see the central plot as an old, sexist trope: rival characters battling over possession of damsels in distress. But Fury Road turns the trope on its head; it’s the damsels who engineer their own escape. “We are not things” is the memorable line, but their scrawled message, “Our babies will not grow up to be warlords,” is the key to understanding Fury Road’s critique of patriarchal systems. The “wives” want more than just escape from sexual slavery; they want to stop contributing to the oppressive systems around them. The repeated question, “Who killed the world?” implies a larger critique as well – it was a male-dominated society which created this apocalypse and men who are responsible for current conditions.

Another trope that gets turned on its head is the contrast between society and wilderness. Traditionally wilderness is understood as a dangerous place for women, who are too weak and vulnerable to withstand its dangers. They need the protection of society. But in Fury Road, society, i.e. The Citadel, is the dangerous place. The women experience relative safety only when they reach the wilderness. The Vuvalini, Furiosa’s matriarchal tribe, may struggle to survive in a barren wasteland, but they’re still better off than women living under the protection of a warlord, who protects them only from other men. Away from male-dominated society, they’re safe.

The most feminist yet least talked about aspect of the film might be Nux’s story. He starts out happily ready to die in glory on behalf of Immortan Joe, but he learns that there’s another way. When Capable discovers him hiding in the War Rig, she treats him with tenderness instead of vengefulness. Nux discovers something to live for, rather than something to die for. He finds a bit of the redemption Max and Furiosa are also seeking.

Ultimately, Furiosa’s rebellion isn’t just an escape or revenge fantasy; instead we see an exploited people liberated. So the film asserts the need to overturn oppressive systems, and depicts a whole society benefiting from feminism – men and women alike.

Of course, there are problems. Nux’s rejection of warrior ideology might be more powerful if he had been allowed to live. Instead, he simply dies for a better cause, and the movie misses the chance to affirm that death isn’t really glorious. Also the “wives” aren’t the developed characters they could and should be. The narrative revolves around them, yet they barely assert individual identities. It’s hard to accept the claim that they’re “not things,” when they’re beautiful but rather anonymous for most of the movie. The role of the Vuvalini is also a bit disappointing; they appear in the narrative, strong and capable, possessing nearly forgotten knowledge and values… only to die one by one. They might as well have been wearing red Star Trek shirts.

So maybe this isn’t a feminist movie? Fantasy violence probably doesn’t help dismantle patriarchy. It really doesn’t. But then again there is more to Fury Road than that. It offers more than a tough woman killing cartoon misogynist bad guys. There is a narrative about social structures and the nature of power.

OK. In the end, we’re not going to liberate anyone from oppression by driving fast and skeet shooting motorcycles. Action movies are not ever going to be a serious and meaningful way to talk about feminism, in the strictest sense. But perhaps we should differentiate between a feminist movie, and a movie feminists can really enjoy. Fury Road is definitely at least one of those two things.

 


Rebecca Cohen is the creator of the webcomic The Adventures of Gyno-Star, the world’s first (and possibly only) explicitly feminist superhero comic.

Gambling for Love and Power

These two characters’ inability to see each other as anything other than personal property emerges as the compelling dramatic engine of unfolding events involving far more sinister agents, who eventually exploit the fissure in the mother-daughter bond.

The poster illustrates the triangle Renée, Maurice, Agnès.
The poster illustrates the triangle Renée, Maurice, Agnès.

 


This guest post by Erin Blackwell appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


L’affaire Le Roux, or more vulgarly, the Leroux Affair, is a real court case involving a young heiress on the French Riviera, whose body never turned up, whose inheritance was absorbed by her lawyer-lover who didn’t love her, whose mother ran a sumptuous casino the Mafia plucked from her grasp with the aid of said lawyer-lover, a case that is still working its way through the courts today, 38 years after the young heiress vanished. Whatever else this affair might signify, say, to legal minds and the involved parties, it has served to inspire a movie that is very fabulous for the first 90 minutes of its 116 total run time.

In the Name of My Daughter premiered at Cannes 2014 out of competition, one month after Maurice Angelet was convicted for the second time to 20 years in prison. That same day, he launched another appeal. Frankly, I can’t keep up with this case, which keeps insinuating itself into my thoughts about the film, which is now in certain U.S. cities still able to sustain an art house. In the Name of My Daughter, directed by André Techiné, is an intimate melodrama wrought from sensational facts, starring Catherine Deneuve as a platinum blonde grande dame and Adèle Haenel as her wide-eyed and wild-hearted daughter. These two characters’ inability to see each other as anything other than personal property emerges as the compelling dramatic engine of unfolding events involving far more sinister agents, who eventually exploit the fissure in the mother-daughter bond.

Agnelet (Guillaume Canet) pushes his luck with Renée (Catherine Deneuve).
Agnelet (Guillaume Canet) pushes his luck with Renée (Catherine Deneuve).

 

Money changes everything? Money ruins everything. Especially in families. Especially when one generation does all the work and the next does all the spending. It is, of course, in the nature of a child to receive love, shelter, warmth, food, care, education, advice, protection, but in the presence of wealth, children sometimes prefer to take the money and elude the smothering, or the well-upholstered neglect or abuse. This syndrome is the crux of In the Name, when the daughter demands her small fortune in shares left by her dead dad, the immediate sale of which would compromise her mother’s ability to stay in business.

The father’s name is never spoken, nor his memory invoked. No incidental photos on a gilt rococo side table in the centuries-old Le Roux villa on the hill overlooking the drop-dead view of the Bay of Angels. And yet he reaches beyond the grave to separate the mother from the daughter by establishing the latter’s legal right to her fair share in the family business. This is the stuff of melodrama, and the French invented that genre after the Revolution to cover the sordid money-based family squabbles of the bourgeoisie. There’s no melodrama without a money angle, ever a reliable motive for murder.

The real Maurice Angelet.
The real Maurice Angelet.

 

Deneuve isn’t just Mom, or Maman, she’s the chic proprietress of one of the classiest casinos in Nice, le Palais de la Méditerrannée. All tarted up with heavy eyeliner and lipstick, platinum hair in a French twist, wearing clothes Imelda Marcos would fancy that look like shot-silk Chanel suits on acid, Deneuve is a vision of old, stolid, corrupt, bourgeois, money-grubbing glamour as it can only exist on the Côte d’Azur (Azure Coast), where the sun smiles on the blue Mediterranean, palm trees dance in the breeze, and the Mafia and other lesser-known brands of evil are eager to get in on the game. Not unlike Southern California, birthplace of Noir.

When we look at Deneuve’s face, we’re still looking for the young or younger face. That’s how it is with people we’ve “known” for years, and loved. The mother still sees the child, even as she must deal with the young woman. The daughter still yearns for the mother’s affection and attention, which she used to wallow in, or fail miserably to attract. The mother would like to move past dutiful child-rearing to a relationship in which she, too, is a person to be cherished and supported. So, fighting for the life of her casino and its 350 loyal employees, against an interloping crime syndicate, she asks her daughter to be patient.

Haenel as Agnès gives a performance impossible to imagine in a Hollywood film. She goes for broke. She tests the limits of her own vulnerability and our ability to watch her spiral out-of-control like a weepy drunk at a party. She bares all, as the tabloids like to say, which is why we love tabloids. Being French, what she bares is the soul of a Romantic, an open heart, a trusting nature, and a bottomless pit of emotional chaos. Her mother doesn’t mind her being a bit of a mess, and that’s a catastrophe for the child, should she ever fall prey to a cynic, a non-believer in romance, a soulless opportunist, someone in it for the money. Oops. I gave away the plot.

Haenel dances an African solo sans bra, swims, smokes, and stares with an abandon utterly opposite to the mother’s rigorous, staid, encrusted rituals. And yet, Deneuve’s eyes reveal the sophisticated depth of emotion those in the know count on the French for. Beneath their façades, their aspirations aren’t dissimilar, but Mom, like Mildred Pierce, does have a business to run, and Agnès, like Vita, doesn’t give a shit.

Agnès (Adèle Haenel) trusts Marcel (Guillaume Canet) all the way to the Swiss bank account.
Agnès (Adèle Haenel) trusts Marcel (Guillaume Canet) all the way to the Swiss bank account.

 

The original French title, L’homme qu’on aimait trop, or The Man We Loved Too Much, is a saucy wink towards real-life sleazy lawyer Maurice Agnelet, the third angle in the triangle. Agnelet is played by Guillaume Canet as your typical sociopathic control freak, who sucks up to Madame Le Roux because she is his only paying client, she pays well, and he figures he can parlay the widow’s quasi-maternal fondness for him into the professional jackpot of his dreams: a real job paying a real salary, affording him real power over his life and allowing him unlimited motorcycles, women, and prestige among those very fussy, old-money types who haunt the casino.

The American title, In the Name of My Daughter, refers to the fact that real-life Renée Le Roux dedicated her later years to proving Angelet guilty of her daughter’s murder. Without a body, that’s tricky. And one of his girlfriends gave him an alibi, so he served a year in prison and was released. Years later, that girlfriend changed her mind, said she’d lied, he wasn’t with her in Geneva when Agnès, after a well-documented suicide attempt, disappeared. Agnelet was tried again in 2006 and acquitted. In 2007, he was condemned to 20 years. In 2013, the European Court intervened to overturn the verdict and set him free. Last year, his own son testified against him, he was again given 20 years, a verdict he immediately appealed, a month before the film premiered at Cannes. You can see why Techiné had trouble closing his narrative. Too bad I wasn’t there to persuade him his rendering of the triangle is more compelling as a psychological mystery than any mere legal wrangling.

The American title, In the Name of my Daughter, suggests U.S. distributors hope to sell this mother-daughter-lawyer triangle as “a woman’s picture,” even though that’s a hard sell in this hard country. Variety‘s manly reviewer complained the audience is denied the spectacle of grande dame Renée Le Roux being whacked on the head by a thug, having to settle instead for Deneuve’s restrained account at a swanky press conference in her casino. Why go to the movies, thinks the red-blooded American male, if I can’t see a woman being attacked? All I can say is, thank God for the French.

The first 90 minutes make a splendid neo-noir built on a classic triangle, like something out of Liaisons Dangereuses. The mother and the lawyer both have hard heads, the daughter is the weak link. When the lawyer tries to push Maman around, she shoves him back in his place. Suddenly the daughter’s unresolved Electra complex, her past-due-date adolescent rebellion, makes her vulnerable to the lawyer’s machinations. The intrigue is spellbinding. Then Agnès disappears. No more triangle. Instead of ending the film here, director André Téchiné wanders into the vagaries of a complex legal battle and the camp value of facial prosthetics and wigs. Bad idea.

The real Agnes Le Roux.
The real Agnes Le Roux.

 

In the Name of My Daughter, a terrible title, is based on Renée Le Roux’s memoir, A Woman Against the Mafia, about how her fight to stay in business resulted in the death of her daughter. Techiné, who co-wrote the script, makes not the Mafia, but the daughter’s tragic flaw the heart of the movie. Adèle Haenel plays Agnès as a slapdash, brooding, needy, watery-green-eyed tomboy-siren whose bourgeois bubble has ill-equipped her to deal with an arriviste rat like Agnelet. We watch her swim, like Alice swims in her own tears, while Maurice bides his time on the sand, and never was there a more astute rendering of the battle of the genders, or the Romantic vs. the Mercenary, or the spoiled hippie child vs. the sociopath.

Adèle Haenel’s Agnès reminded me of François Truffaut’s Adèle H., incarnated by Isabel Adjani as a woman shamelessly in love, who similarly loses first her self-respect and then her reason. That 1975 film, also based on real life, came two years before Agnès vanished in 1977. It’s entirely possible the real Agnès Le Roux watched Adèle H. and recognized that doomed Romantic story as her own. Bizarre, bizarre, that an actress named Adèle H. should incarnate Agnès Le Roux.

The fabled Côte d’Azur is a different country from the rest of France, a stone’s throw from Monaco, where the high-rollers have their empty apartments, and a short hop by motorbike to a Swiss bank, as the film splendidly demonstrates. It’s a real place and this was a real news story before it became a film. Apart from suffering narrative decline at minute 91, Techiné’s film is a riveting portrait of an homme fatal, a creature we don’t see enough of onscreen. Deneuve’s beauty isn’t right for the character, and it’s a distraction, but a fascinating one so who cares, and it does work to establish the daughter’s hatred of the mother, who is visibly everything she is not. I was regretting the fillers in her cheeks and rooting for her muscles’ ability to still deliver recognizable human expressions. The muscles do pretty well. The eyes are where it’s happening, however. Lively and liquid, Deneuve’s orbs register the pains of a heart that has gambled on a daughter and lost.

 


Erin Blackwell is a consulting astrologer who was raised to regard movies as a form of worship. She blogs at venus11house.

 

The ‘Poltergeist’ Remake Delivers Scares but Buries the Politics of the Original

Though the remake provides plenty of scare factor and makes excellent use of new technology (both at the level of cinematography and within the narrative itself with various nods to iPads, iPhones, drones, etc), it lacks the critical edge of the original.

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This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Skirt Collective and is cross-posted with permission.


The Poltergeist remake functions as an old-fashioned haunted house movie gussied up with new special effects, new technology, and a fair dose of contemporary references. For horror buffs, it’s a worthy scare-fest, but if you like political bite in your horror, give it a miss. At a slight 93 minutes, a lengthier run time would have allowed a heightened focus on the critical undercurrents which only serve as VERY subtle background in director Gil Kenan’s version.

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The original 1982 film, co-produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg, was more directly political in its depiction of an “all American family,” the stultifying effects of suburbia, and the dangers of “burying” ugly historical realities. As this review notes, the original provided “a sly commentary on the tribulations of suburban life, colonialism, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the break-down of the nuclear family unit, and the damaging excesses of capitalism and consumerism.”

Though the remake provides plenty of scare factor and makes excellent use of new technology (both at the level of cinematography and within the narrative itself with various nods to iPads, iPhones, drones, etc), it lacks the critical edge of the original.

In the remake, economics are the driving factor forcing the Bowen’s move to a new house. While this review argues the film “works well as a study of a squeezed middle-class American family struggling to survive in a punishing economic climate,” I didn’t find the film studied this climate so much as dropped references to foreclosures and the current economic downturn, all while having the Bowen family live in a house that exudes middle-class comfort, technological upgrades, and plentiful yard-space.

If this is “the least sucky house” the family can afford, they hardly hold up as economically deprived. In one scene, Eric, the father (played by Sam Rockwell) is depicted as painfully embarrassed that two of his credit cards are declined at the filmic equivalent of Home Depot. To assert his ability to purchase (a key part of new American manhood), he then goes on a shopping spree at the mall, bringing home an iPhone for his teen daughter, jewelry for his wife, and a drone “toy” for his son. The Bowens are thus far from economically oppressed – rather, their white middle-class lifestyle is not as easy as it once was. In fact, the street name of their new digs, “Paradise,” ironically points to the fact their economic hardship is pretty slight compared to many.

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The original film, in contrast, focused not on economic hardship but on the stultifying effects of suburban life with a trailer that ominously intoned their new house “looks just like the one next to it, and the one next to that, and the one next to that.” Like other Spielberg films, ET, and, more recently, Super 8, Poltergeist revealed suburbia is not all it’s cracked up to be and that perhaps we would be better giving up the notion of the “all American family.” In one telling scene between the parents, the dad is holding the book Reagan: The Man, The President while the mom smokes pot and reminisces – a scene that Eye for Film argues represents “succumbing to middle-class conservatism.” While the original bucked such conservatism, the remake instead pines for its loss.

Admittedly, the remake depicts domesticity as similarly stultifying – especially via mom Amy, played by Rosemarie DeWitt , who is in a writing rut and berates herself for being a bad mother. Though DeWitt is compelling, her role does not live up to JoBeth Williams’ portrayal due to the film’s troubling return to “traditional family values.” While the original included reversals of gender norms, with the mom depicted as far more proactive and powerful than the father, and even had the mother venturing to the “Other Side” to save her daughter Carol Anne, the remake returns the power to the father and has the son, Griffin, be the “superboy” that ventures to the “Other Side” to save his sister. Sadly, the iconic swimming pool scene with the mother fending off an array of skeletons is absent – so too is the powerful and enigmatic medium Tangina Barrons (played by Zelda Rubinstein).

In her place we have Carrigan Burke (played by Jared Harris) — meaning the film takes the largely female-driven paranormal team from the original movie and centers it on a white male reality TV ghost-busting star who insists, macho-style, “I am the only one who can lead those souls into the light” (why didn’t the filmmakers take a page from the forthcoming female remake of Ghostbusters??). To add insult to feminist injury, Dr. Powell (played by Jane Adams) is Carrigan’s ex-wife who clearly longs to rekindle their romance and her job in academia is presented as a sadly lackluster in comparisons to Carrigan’s reality TV fame. Ugh.

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Given the remake emphasizes closets as particularly dangerous, another lost opportunity is the chance to play up “being closeted” – why not, for example, have some character, any character, be “out,” and use this as a vehicle to extend the stultifying family norms the remake fails to fully explore? There is a great electric drill scene in the closet in the remake, but it would have been all the better if instead of typical hetero-dude Boyd, they coded the character Boyd as a gay “Boi” – just think of the closet jokes and shenanigans that could have ensued!

Further, given we have a new ending (I will avoid overt spoilers), why not emphasize cars and our reliance on oil as death trap? Why not play up our seeming cultural inability to escape the horror of suburbia and the lure of the shopping mall? Why jettison the original cemetery back-story instead of putting it to more political use? Indeed, it would have been more powerful to address the politics of race head on this time around – something the original (and its sequels) failed to do. Instead, Indigenous Peoples are put under erasure – yet again – with only a trite joke during a dinner party scene about “sacred burial grounds.”

The remake also jettisons any commentary on sexism. Whereas the original had the teen daughter rebuke street harassers, a rebellion that is tied to her mother’s similar subversive streak, the remake makes no reference to gendered harassment (except if you count the somewhat awkward exchange the dad has with the female employee of the quasi-Home Depot as his credit cards are turned down). Here, the film could have taken guidance from the recent It Follows, a film which similarly harks back to old-school horror while offering a condemnation of rape culture. To its credit, the film’s shift towards young Griffin as the savior is well-done, especially via its emphasis that it is normal for boys as well as girls to be nervous, scared, emotional, and in need of reassurance. Notably the dad emphasizes the normality of this, admitting he too is scared, and, in so doing, denies the gendering of fear/emotion. Indeed, Sam Rockwell is great in the role – wish that he could have been paired with a mom more akin to the feisty one from the original!

Poltergeist-reboot

While the original holds its own as a classic fright-fest, even being deemed “one of the scariest horror movies ever made,” the remake has plenty of good scares but lacks political punch (as do MOST horror films, admittedly). While the remake offers a more immersive view of the “Other Side,” making very good use of 3D to evoke threatening fleshy corpses as far as the eye can see, it fails to unearth what lies beneath our “sucky houses” in suburban “paradise.”

A trailer for the original film intoned “Poltergeist. It knows what scares you” – sadly, the remakes knows this too, but only on a visual level – the deeply buried socio-political realities that provide potency to horror are as absent as that infamous corpse-filled swimming pool…

 


Natalie Wilson teaches women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Seduced by Twilight and blogs for Ms., Girl with Pen and Bitch Flicks.