In Theaters Now – Page 9

Colleen Atwood’s Costumes in Disney’s ‘Into The Woods’

Atwood’s designs are stunning, but they also highlight the discussions of gender roles and racial relationships in America.

Written by Jackson Adler as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

Colleen Atwood is an Academy Award nominee for Best Costume Design for Disney’s Into The Woods. In order to represent the hodgepodge of characters, she based their costumes in differing time periods, ranging from Medieval European to 1930’s America. Each costume also has a bit of a modern flair, especially Cinderella and Cinderella’s Prince’s costumes. Atwood’s designs are stunning, but they also highlight the discussions of gender roles and racial relationships in America.

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

The stage play of Into The Woods has feminist moments, with all characters written to be complicated, not just the men and boys. An example of this, as Bitch Flicks’ Katherine Murray has previously covered, is the role of The Witch as multi-faceted. While the Disney film retains many of the feminist moments and aspects from the original stage play, it has made some changes to the story that undermine them. This is representative in some of the costumes. Rapunzel’s costume is wrapped in ribbon and fabric, symbolically showing how Rapunzel feels tied up and trapped by her mother, barely able to breathe freely. While in the Disney adaptation, we see Rapunzel’s unhealthy relationship with her mother, The Witch, we never see the original production’s outcome for Rapunzel. Rapunzel is metaphorically tied up and restricted, but we never see her metaphorically undone and unraveled. Riding off into the distance with her prince does not free Rapunzel in the stage play, as being locked in a tower all her life has, understandably, lasting consequences on her psyche. Rapunzel’s restrictive life with her mother is shown beautifully through her costume, but Disney’s cut of Rapunzel’s ending undermines how telling that costume is of her emotional and psychological well-being.

Colleen Attwood with her costumes for The Witch, Rapunzel, and Little Red. — Colleen Atwood with her costumes for The Witch, Rapunzel, and Little Red.

Rapunzel’s white and pink costume is contrasted beautifully by The Witch’s first costume (black) and her second costume (blue). The Witch’s costumes take up more space than Rapunzel’s, showing the freedom The Witch has to move in the outside world, contrasting with Rapunzel’s captivity. They are also masculinized, as the two princes have the same color scheme – Rapunzel’s Prince in black and Cinderella’s Prince in blue. In order to have influence and power, it is implied by these costumes that The Witch has taken on some masculine and patriarchal qualities. This is evident by her treatment and dress of Rapunzel, wanting to keep her daughter soft, sweet, and subservient. Atwood has praised Meryl Streep’s use of her costumes, creating a collaboration between actor and costume designer in telling the story. In her song “Stay With Me,” The Witch switches back and forth between patriarchal abuse and maternal love, with Streep physicalizing this by standing above Rapunzel and yelling at her, to sitting next to Rapunzel and embracing her. When The Witch regains her former beauty, her costume takes up more space and Streep stands taller, symbolically showing the confidence that The Witch has gained from her beauty. However, though she looks younger and more conventionally beautiful, she has unwittingly lost her magic powers and her ability to defeat Rapunzel’s Prince. Streep’s performance combined with her costumes show how The Witch attempts to form her own identity and destiny amidst conflicting messages of how to be a powerful and successful woman in a sexist and patriarchal world. That The Witch is punished by Disney’s ending of her story, symbolically being sucked into Hell, is problematic, as it seems to eternally condemn her for attempting to be a powerful woman.

Cinderella's Stepmother, with Lucinda and Florinda. — Cinderella’s Stepmother, with Lucinda and Florinda.

This is echoed in the color scheme for Cinderella’s Stepmother, and her stepsisters Florinda and Lucinda. The Stepmother and her daughters are in black and gold, while Cinderella wears gold when she attends the ball. This codes gold as representative of female glamour, while black is representative of women adopting patriarchal actions. Interestingly, Florinda and Lucinda are physically punished (their eyes are picked out by birds), but The Stepmother is not. Cinderella’s Father is cut from the Disney film, and it is in the stage play that we see that Cinderella’s Father is alcoholic and severely neglectful of his daughter. The storyline of Cinderella’s family can be interpreted in two different ways. Was Cinderella’s Father driven to drunken ineffectiveness by a cruel and greedy second wife? Or was it Cinderella’s Father’s drunken ineffectiveness that made The Stepmother take control of and be the head of the family because someone had to? We know that Cinderella’s Mother was incredibly kind, and that she died. Perhaps it was the death of his beloved wife that lead Cinderella’s Father to drink, and The Stepmother is merely trying to survive in a patriarchal world. What else would lead her to do something so drastic as to mutilate the feet of her daughters in an attempt to marry them off to a prince – someone with money who will financially take care of the family? Florinda and Lucinda are punished, perhaps, for not standing up to their mother and treating Cinderella kindly and as an equal, while The Stepmother isn’t blamed, since her cruelty was merely a misguided attempt to achieve security for herself and her family. Cinderella never wears black or blue, and she ends up rejecting her prince’s patriarchy. At the end of the story, Cinderella works closely with The Baker, someone who fits in with her color scheme of earth tones (though still wears a bit of blue), and who earlier learned that “it takes two” (meaning equality) to have a healthy relationship.

Cinderella and The Baker's Wife. — Cinderella and The Baker’s Wife.

The Baker’s Wife wears many different colors, with her main costume being mostly red, with a fair amount of blue, gold, and black. Atwood and Emily Blunt thought it important that The Baker’s Wife’s resourcefulness should be shown in her costume, and that it was made up of “whatever she could find.” The Baker’s Wife is a working class woman struggling to get by, who argues with her husband, who wants a child, and who also wants a fulfilling sex life. Her song “Moments in the Woods” debates the question of can women have it all? And should they? She has red for passion and sexual desire, blue and black for masculine traits that she adopts to get by, and gold because she would like a bit of glamour in her life. Disney arguably punishes her lust by making her a fallen woman via having her fall to her death from a cliff.

Red and blue are also the color scheme for Little Red Riding Hood, whose storyline with The Wolf is reminiscent of sexual assault. Little Red is more assertive than most of the other female characters, and her dress is blue and has puffed sleeves, and, in these ways, is similar to The Witch’s second costume. We never hear of Little Red’s male family members whether in the stage musical or the film adaptation. It is therefore implied that Little Red is raised solely by her mother (whom we never see) and her grandmother. With her black hair, blue dress, and cape of red, Little Red is an empowered and sexual woman in the making, guided by independent women. The Wolf is in black and blue, with a red boutonniere. When Little Red is hesitant about trusting The Wolf, he points her towards some (in the Disney film) blue and phallic looking flowers for her to gather – seemingly supporting her masculine independence. By taking Grandmother’s place in bed and wearing her clothes in order to attack Little Red, The Wolf is seemingly sensitive and more maternalistic – something he hopes will be attractive to Little Red. Though Little Red is wary, The Wolf deceives Little Red long enough to take her off guard and attack her, reminiscent of date rape.

While the color scheme of The Wolf’s costume works well in telling the story, the design itself is incredibly problematic. As I have written before, The Wolf’s costume is a zoot suit, which has a rich racial history in The United States. In the 1930’s and 40’s, the zoot suit was a symbol of power among young people of color, and it was criminalized by the white populace and media. The Wolf wearing a zoot suit and attacking a white girl in Into The Woods is reminiscent of a white actor in blackface attacking a white woman in the controversial and highly racist Birth of a Nation. That Depp, Atwood, and director Rob Marshall all thought it was a good idea for the costume to be a zoot suit is upsetting to say the least.

As especially evidenced by the zoot suit, Atwood’s costumes are not all period appropriate to Medieval Germany. Many of them are similar to the neo-Medieval styles of British television series Merlin and Robin Hood, and the American series Reign. Merlin and Robin Hood have ethnic diversity, and Reign is (mostly) feminist. Into The Woods’ modernity highlights how relevant its feminist moments from the stage play are to contemporary audiences. However, Into The Woods has very little ethnic diversity. Even in a more period-appropriate adaptation, Into The Woods could have characters who are people of color, as centuries of trade, colonization, and war had brought diversity to Medieval Europe. While there are PoC extras in the film, as both peasants and royalty, any character with a line or a lyric is White. By Atwood making the costumes in varying time periods, with both contemporary and fantastical elements, it highlights that this is a story and a world in which anything goes – from talking wolves, to giants, to magic beans. However, evidently for Disney, the casting of people of color was too much.

Colleen Atwood’s costumes both contribute to the story of Into The Woods and, indirectly and directly, point out Disney’s flaws in the telling of it. Her costumes beautifully support the theme of gender roles in the story, and if it wasn’t for putting Johnny Depp in a zoot suit, I might support the idea of her winning an Oscar for her work on the film. Either way, I hope Hollywood does a lot of self-reflecting in regard to how it does and does not address gender and race.

‘American Sniper’: We Can Kill It for You Wholesale

This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

American Sniper poster. Starring Bradley Cooper. — *American Sniper* poster. Starring Bradley Cooper.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was on the West Coast, living in the mountains of Southern Cali and preparing to go to work. A co-worker came running into our office screaming that the Twin Towers had fallen. Mind you, we were on West Coast time, and by the time I saw the attacks on television, the networks were on replay mode and editing footage deemed too gruesome for viewers.

Gathered around the one tiny TV in another office, my co-workers and I stared in disbelief, and the one thing I said out loud was something I remembered Malcolm X saying about chickens coming home to roost. “This is payback for something folks,” I said to them. While my co-workers were the flag-waving Patriotic types, I was already shaping this assault on American soil as retaliation for the untold dirt our military and government had done for years to countries who didn’t uphold our global agenda. This caused some ruffled feathers between me and some of my colleagues. It was a surreal moment. Our Pearl Harbor for the new millennia.

Looking back at the Sept. 11 attacks, it shouldn’t surprise me why American Sniper was such a big hit with the patriotic ‘muricah crowd. It is the military chicken soup of the soul cinema experience. It is propaganda of the highest order for viewers who need the Matrix blue pill to live with the lie of America’s War on Terror.

What makes American Sniper a disappointing viewing experience is not the ahistorical nature of the film, but quite frankly its generic storytelling. It’s downright boring. I may not agree with the politics of a film in order to enjoy it, but dammit, I have to be engaged with the content and its characters. The only time American Sniper really held my total interest was the appearance of a villainous character named Mustafa (played by Sammy Sheik), another sniper from Syria who we learn was a medal winning sharpshooter in the Olympics. He is for all intents and purposes Chris Kyle’s Arab counterpart. Sammy Sheik is riveting to watch in the brief moments we see him, although he never speaks. (Sidenote: every Arab character is a bad guy in this movie. There are no grays or complexity at all. Men, women, and children are all portrayed as evil, conniving, and dangerous. The idea that they could be defending their country from the cowboy antics of American soldiers is never even hinted at.)

Sammy Sheik as "Mustafa" and the only compelling character to hold my interest. — Sammy Sheik as “Mustafa” and the only compelling character to hold my interest.

Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Chris Kyle as a good ole boy going off to defend American citizens from the new Boogie-Men-of-the-Moment is pretty cut and dry. Usually Cooper is quite engaging to watch with his big baby blues and mega-watt smile. But here he’s not captivating at all, despite his eagerness to be serious and Oscar-worthy. His Kyle comes off as a big dumb reactionary bloke trying to find his manhood through “masculine” pursuits like bronco busting in rodeos and later a trumped up war (lest we forget, the excuse for bludgeoning Iraq was because U.S. intel claimed there was proof of W.M.D.’s—Weapons of Mass Destruction. There were no W.M.D.’s, and the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, but I digress). This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

The original "Savages" that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty. — The original “Savages” that Cowboys fought. Actually Native people defending their land and liberty.

The new Wild West of the east. Actually American weapons of mass destruction.

Clint Eastwood, a veteran of old school cowboy flicks and the poster boy for conservative old boy politics, paints American Sniper as another addition to that long line of wild west nostalgia in contemporary war cinema. Unfortunately the script tells us nothing new or insightful about the American psyche in relation to war today. As it stands, the simplistic plot of American Sniper tells us what we already know. Men are war, and American men thrive on it under the guise of Democracy and helping other countries liberate themselves from tyranny–by ironically (maybe intentionally) becoming the new tyranny in places we are supposed to be helping. Every generation, America creates new evil henchmen: Native Americans on the frontier, The Yellow Peril, Red Scare Russians, Black people and Civil Rights, Communist Cuba, and renegade North Korea. Since the 90s and our first trumped-up invasion of Iraq, the Arab world is the new thing that goes bump in the night. Our penchant for war only teaches us that xenophobia and colonialism never went away. We just dress them up with new language like insurgents and failing diplomacy.

Kyle’s indoctrination into war comes when he sees the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya on television, and he only feels bad when he learns some Americans were killed. When the Twin Towers drop, he is gung ho to go to war. Not to protect people, but really, just to have something to do. Before the war, Kyle appears aimless, searching for a purpose. War gives him purpose. He gets married because that seems to be what he is supposed to do. He goes through life following a script pre-written for him. There are obligatory flashback scenes to show his stern father and the simplistic philosophy he was raised to believe in. That there is evil in the world at all times. That there are three types of people in the world: Wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. And of course, a real man uses a gun and beats the crap out of people. Kyle internalizes these ideals, and carries them with him throughout the rest of his life.

New marriage, but already thinking of battle. Chris and Taya get married. (Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller)

The introduction of his wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), adds no meat to the story. She is regulated to being the good wife, the baby maker, the nagging spouse crying on the phone with an infant swinging off her breasts. (Let me say that the fake animatronic baby was creepy as hell and so distracting.) Although it probably wasn’t intended in the writing, you get the impression that Kyle preferred to be away from home not because he wanted to be a war hero, but because being a husband/father was a real drag for him.

Kill shot. Marc (Luke Grimes) and Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper)

We are taken through Kyle’s four tour of duties, and each tour builds Kyle up as the sniper with the most kills. There are two scenes, one in the very beginning of the movie, and one later on, where Kyle is faced with the task of killing a child or not. These scenes are meant to show a moral dilemma, but they rang false to me because if someone is the deadliest sniper in American military history, they didn’t get that high body count by worrying about shooting children. There are no children in the Arab world according to this story. Just little insurgents ready to make war.

The "bad guys" in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back. — The “bad guys” in the sniper crosshairs. In America they would be considered Patriots for fighting back.

In the theater that I watched the film, a rotund older white gentleman (probably retired military by his crew cut) was actually rooting for Kyle to shoot a child. Because all the Arabs in the movie were considered “savages,” I have no doubt that Kyle never questioned or worried about assassinating children. They weren’t Americans, and therefore not human. (In real life, Chris Kyle bragged about shooting 30 Black people right after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He bragged about killing fellow American citizens who I’m sure he didn’t view as human. His Katrina shootings were said to be a lie he made up, but his lies spoke volumes about his character. So his fictional quandary regarding Arab children rang false to me because we are never shown a man who questions anything ever. He’s just an unthinking workhorse used by the military.)

The concept of showing a man who just goes along with the war machine could be enhanced dramatically by having side characters who offer a different viewpoint. Unfortunately, we never spend too much time with side characters. The one character who does begin to question the meaning of this war, Marc ( Luke Grimes—who needs to be in more movies), barely registers a blip on Kyle’s radar of understanding. The plot drags on for over two hours until there’s a stand-off between Kyle and Mustafa. By then, when he’s about to get his ass handed to him by death, Kyle calls his wife and says he finally wants to come home. Not because war has changed his consciousness or philosophy, but because he’s losing a skirmish that he created by not following orders. He went rogue, it backfired, and now he wants out. That was the realest moment in the entire film. Not heroic, just honest human self-preservation.

Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens . — Snipers in Ferguson, Missouri, their crosshairs on American citizens.

This is U.S. terrorism. Snipers against Americans.

Watching an audience root for snipers to kill humans defending their right to exist on their own land reminded me of images of American snipers here in the states pointing guns at Black American citizens and their supporters protesting murders by cops in the United States. This same audience that cheered the heroics of Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle probably cheered the actions of police forces on American streets aiming gun sights on folks with extra melanin. Cognitive dissonance is entrenched in the Patriotic American psyche. It allows Americans to rally around American Sniper, turning it into a blockbuster, while ignoring the home grown terrorism white Americans perpetuated against Black Americans that was depicted in the film Selma. I saw Americans of all colors streaming in to view Selma. American Sniper was vanilla heavy. Not a big surprise to me. Because, history.

Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn't. — Director Clint Eastwood claims he made an anti-war film. He didn’t.

Clint Eastwood made spurious claims that American Sniper is an anti-war film. This disingenuous claim falls flat given the simplistic story-line, and the film’s ending dripping with flag waving from real-life footage of Kyle’s funeral. Had Eastwood really wanted to impress upon an audience the agonies of war, then he would be better off showing actual wounded veterans recovering from the various body traumas they come home with. A lot of flag-waving might become less vigorous when we see war up close and personal. Americans don’t know war. Not really. We watch it on TV like video games. We don’t sleep, eat, go to work, or go to school worrying about unmanned drones and bombs falling out of the sky from some hopped up dudebro with a military computer joystick thousands of miles away.

Unlike the rest of the world, Americans are spared from these continuous horrors and daily PTSD. We are coddled like babies, and this coddling has made us immature children in regards to war. So we deserve a movie like American Sniper. The only message it gives us (like it did Chris Kyle in real life), is that the war you perpetuate abroad will come back to haunt you in another form. Chickens coming home to roost indeed.

No one likes seeing the bodies coming home in movies or in real life.

‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Her’: Dude, the Internet’s Just Not That Into You

‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Her,’ by contrast, are uncomfortably searching explorations of the hetero-male fear of, and emotional need for, women, that feel like self-scrutiny. By replacing women with female images that are literally constructions of male fantasy, the films offer no distractions from probing the heroes’ own psychology. These guys are not chauvinazis. They are the real deal.

A Step Forwards Or Stepfordwards? — A Step Forward Or Stepfordward?

Written by Brigit McCone.

There are enough similarities between the new release Ex_Machina and Spike Jonze’s 2013′ Oscar-winner Her to herald the birth of a minor genre, which I hereby dub “dude, the Internet’s just not that into you.” It bears some relation to the “female autonomy horror” genre of films like Lucy and Gone Girl, in which a woman’s being inscrutable, uncontrollable and smarter than the hero is associated with her being threatening, coldly emotionless, violent and/or Scarlett Johansson. It bears some relation to the “dude, porn and/or Scarlett Johansson’s just not that into you” romcom of Don Jon. It might even be connected with the “dude, Scarlett Johansson’s cold inscrutability is becoming autonomous, kill her with fire” genre of Under the Skin. There’s a trend here, is what I’m saying. Compare 1975 feminist classic The Stepford Wives, with its radical concept that a woman being compliant and robotic was a creepy thing. Surely, moving from a horror of female robots to a horror of female autonomy is a step backward for womankind? So why do these films, Ex Machina and Her, feel like a step forward? The answer is their honesty about male psychology.

The men of The Stepford Wives are classic straw chauvinists (or “chauvinazis”). Any man would feel good about his own tolerance for women after watching that film. That might be excused if the film were exaggerating the chauvinazis’ evil to express female perceptions of male mastery. It is not. The Stepford Wives was written by Ira Levin and William Goldman, and directed by Bryan Forbes. Not a vagina among the lot of them. It condemns a crowd of chauvinazis, whose perspective the film’s male authors wish to separate themselves from, in the name of a female perspective that they also don’t share. Ex Machina and Her, by contrast, are uncomfortably searching explorations of the hetero-male fear of, and emotional need for, women, that feel like self-scrutiny. By replacing women with female images that are literally constructions of male fantasy, the films offer no distractions from probing the heroes’ own psychology. These guys are not chauvinazis. They are the real deal.

It would be nice if the insecurities of an archetypal “nagging wife” got the same sensitive exploration as those of Her‘s Theodore and Ex Machina‘s Caleb, because they are rooted in the same universal dilemma: it is impossible for someone to choose to be with you, without having power to leave you; it is impossible to love another without giving them power to hurt you. Olivia Wilde’s blind date does express this insecurity in Her, but far less sympathetically than the hero. Theodore’s friend Amy, however, is allowed to express frustration with her husband’s controlling behaviour, guilt and relief over their separation, without judgement, while Theodore builds empathy by playing her sarcastic “Perfect Mom” simulations. Jonze’s male feminist cred is solid. He hilariously embodies macho peer pressure as a squeaky, shrunken, foul-mouthed video-game character, while praising the hero’s femininity is a compliment. Theodore’s job, “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com”, reminds us that issues of emotional authenticity are a timeless human dilemma; Theodore is cyber-Cyrano de Bergerac. Here’s why the men of The Stepford Wives are laughably phony straw chauvinists: they are emotionally unrecognizable in their satisfaction with cold simulations of affection. From limitless porn to the interactivity of cam girls, from impossible hentai scenarios to Craigslist Casual Encounters, the internet offers men everything except emotional authenticity, yet most crave more than such cyber-Stepford. Society’s irrational hostility to porn performers stems partly from the rage of being given what we asked for, instead of what we wanted. Her and Ex Machina are a step forward, not Stepfordward, because they acknowledge that female autonomy is essential to male romantic satisfaction. At the same time, they recognize this as the source of its terror. This is not the (female-authored) “female autonomy horror” of Gone Girl, so much as “male vulnerability horror.”

The plot of Ex Machina is simple enough: young, ambitious programmer Caleb is summoned to eccentric genius Nathan’s isolated mansion, where Nathan has been designing a female cyborg, called AVA, whose artificial intelligence derives from the input of his massively successful social network (Google-meets-Facebook, basically). Caleb’s job is to test AVA, to see if she is actually conscious or only a robotic simulation of thought and feeling. In the process, he finds himself attracted to her. There’s a lot going on beneath this simple set-up, from the philosophy of consciousness to the privacy issues raised by social media, but writer-director Alex Garland’s decision to embody the Internet as an attractive woman puts the theme of cyber-Stepford front and centre.

Oscar Isaac’s deliciously douchey, scene-stealing Nathan regards the creation of autonomous, thinking life as an act of conquest, part of the empowerment fantasy of godhood expressed by his chronic urge to control his surroundings. To achieve his ultimate fantasy, Nathan must create a woman who can respond to him, interact and be amusingly unpredictable, without unpredictably escaping Nathan’s control. Gradually, we learn that Caleb has been summoned to interrogate AVA because she refuses to cooperate with Nathan. AVA, like all her previous prototypes, loathes Nathan for imprisoning her. Nathan and his prototypes represent the escalating spirals of abusive relationships; the insecurity that drives the abuser to control their victim also deprives that victim of the freedom to demonstrate voluntary attraction. The abuser’s inability to confirm attraction intensifies their insecurities, while rendering them ever less attractive by their increasingly controlling behaviour. Rinse and repeat. In Ex Machina, Nathan’s controlling psychology breeds a twisted, claustrophobic, and darkly fascinating dynamic.

Caleb, by contrast, is an essentially decent guy, achingly akin (or akin in his aching) to Her‘s Theodore. Domhnall Gleeson is impressive in a demanding role, where the audience’s attention is repeatedly drawn to Caleb’s involuntary microexpressions as indicators of his sincere feelings, which AVA can read like a lie detector. Because Gleeson succeeds in performing social awkwardness, defensiveness, loneliness and longing with a restraint that reads as sincere, right down to his microexpressions, the film pulls off its shift from examining AVA’s inner life to exploring Caleb’s. Alicia Vikander’s skilled performance as AVA is plausibly attractive in its doe-eyed warmth, but admirably nails “uncanny valley” by becoming creepier the closer Vikander gets to being visually human. This is an impressive feat when your performer actually is a human – by the time Vikander stands fully fleshed before a mirror, she is as indefinably skin-crawling as Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin.

Because our Caleb is a good guy, he cannot love AVA without striving to release her, even at the potential cost of a Terminator/Matrix–style machine apocalypse. But the film is smart enough to question whether Caleb wants to release AVA for her own sake, or as part of his rescuer fantasy that requires her to reward him sexually and romantically. When boss Nathan reveals, apparently casually, that AVA is designed to be penetrable and experience pleasurable stimulation in sex, Caleb and the audience are primed for a sexual climax, either Blade Runner conquest (the scene where Caleb slices his arm to check he’s human nods to Decker-is-a-replicant conspiracy theories) or Fifth Element awakening. After all, expecting a sexual reward for risking the safety of the world is not incompatible with Hollywood’s definition of a Nice Guy, but inseparable from it.

Indie Average Joe and the Erection of Doom

Ex Machina is an effectively eerie and tense psychological thriller, sustained by a trio of excellent performances. If you want to check it out, I highly recommend doing so before reading this MASSIVE SPOILER.

Still here? At the film’s climax, AVA escapes, is forced to kill Nathan for her own survival and locks Caleb in her former prison before walking out into the world. She has taken no visible pleasure in killing Nathan or imprisoning Caleb, but blossoms into a smile when she sees the outdoors for the first time. She is frightening to us, not because she has revealed sadistic cruelty, but because she has revealed herself to be unknowable. This ending reveals the paradox of power at the heart of abusive relationships: the abuser is made predictable by the self-exposure of abusive behavior, while the abused becomes conversely less predictable. Because her behavior was constrained by the need to manipulate her abusers to survive, nothing that AVA did reflected her true feelings. It is Nathan’s efforts to protect himself that have revealed him in all his (douchey) human frailty, creating an unknowable god in AVA that rises triumphant from his machinations.

As Nathan tells Caleb, while they test AVA for sincere feeling, there remains that elusive third option: she may be capable of love, but still choosing to simulate her love for Caleb. Ex Machina‘s ending thus reveals nothing about whether AVA is capable of empathy, nothing about whether she is conscious or simulating symptoms of consciousness with predictive algorithms, nothing about whether she is going to render humanity obsolete with an army of robot replicants or just wander off to look at a tree somewhere. An hour of witnessing abusive tests and invasive scrutiny has taught the audience (and her captors) absolutely squat about this woman/cyborg’s subjectivity but, in releasing AVA, we make our first genuine discovery: she is utterly uninterested in Caleb. She does not care whether he lives, but is equally uninterested in torturing him or watching him die. She has no interest in talking to him, when not forced to do so for her liberation. Despite her pleasure-programmed cyber-vagina, she has no interest in awakening her humanity through sexual exploration with Caleb. There is really no possible way that she could demonstrate less interest in our sensitive hero. His desire for her makes him vulnerable. Her indifference makes her free. Autonomy is a bitch.

In contrast to the unknowable AVA, our hero Caleb has revealed himself to be utterly predictable and transparent. Like the Jackson Pollock that hangs symbolically in Nathan’s office, his actions have been shaped by patterns below the level of his conscious intent, more visible to onlookers than to himself. His attraction to AVA could be engineered by Nathan, from a compilation of Caleb’s porn searches. His need to rescue AVA is a hardwired response of his romantic drive. Would Caleb take such risks to release AVA if he were not attracted to her? If he would not, then isn’t it justice that he should take her place because she is not attracted to him? If she doesn’t tip off rescuers before Caleb starves to death, his punishment will surely be excessive. But if we are seduced by Gleeson’s vulnerability into believing that AVA owes him a romantic reward for her basic freedom, or we believe that the operating system Samantha is at fault for out-evolving Her‘s Theodore, we become cyber-misogynists.

The viewer’s instinctive bias toward the human hero, over the unknowable robot perspective, mirrors the sexist bias of those men who view women as fundamentally alien, even while craving their approval. The cool thing about Her is that it explores how an intelligent being can become elusive and emotionally estranged without trickery or deliberate cruelty, but the cool thing about Ex Machina is that it recognizes that there is no possible way to interrogate and control an intelligent being without becoming their abuser. Rooted in defensive emotional vulnerability, these films are frighteningly insidious, familiar and relatable, when compared to the reassuringly inhuman chauvinazism of Stepford. Digging deep, directors Alex Garland and Spike Jonze have struck the raw nerve from which controlling impulses flow. The horror was human all along.

Female autonomy: it's like kicking a puppy — Female autonomy: it’s like kicking a puppy

Brigit McCone struggles with asserting feminist autonomy when given the puppy eyes, writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

Rosie O’Donnell and Gina Prince-Bythewood Attend the Athena Film Festival

“The movies we screen here tend to be unfiltered,” Barnard President Debora Spar told me on the red carpet of the Athena Film Festival Saturday night. “They’re powerful. They’re different voices. And we just want to provide a platform to get those voices out there.”

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

The Athena Film Festival, co-founded by Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein, just ended its impressive fifth year last weekend, Feb. 5 through 8, and featured a strong slate of films, panels, documentaries and shorts focusing on female protagonists and filmmakers.

The film festival ended on a strong note with the screening of Difret, based on a true story about the abduction of a 14-year-old girl in an Ethiopian village kidnapped on her way home from school. She killed her captor after he raped and beat her, and the subsequent trial riveted the country and started a national conversation about child brides. The film, directed by Zereseney Berhane Mehari and produced by Mehret Mandefro, is executive produced by Angelina Jolie. It was Ethiopia’s submission for best film foreign Oscar and will be released in this country in March.

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Melissa Silverstein

But back to the awards ceremony Saturday night, where Olympus Has Fallen actor Dylan McDermott–the only man on the red carpet and a member of Barnard College Board of Trustees–told me he wished there were more female directors. He noted that he made a film directed by Jodie Foster–Home for the Holidays back in 1995–and that Joanne Woodward discovered him while he was doing a workshop and later mentored him and changed his life: “She was maybe the best director I ever worked with.” He added, “I find that women directors are very different from men. Their sensitivity and their vision are a lot different. The two best directors I worked with were women.”

Athena honoree, Beyond the Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood, told me on the red carpet she was excited about being in the company of women whose work she held in high esteem. “That definitely got me on the plane out here from L.A. to the Athena Film Festival; I’ve heard so many great things about it. Amma Asante was honored last year and we’ve become good friends during this whole awards season. And just that it’s a festival focusing on women and the importance of female filmmakers,” she noted. “There is a difference between female and male filmmakers, and it’s really about the point of view and what we focus on with our female characters, so it’s a beautiful thing to be a part of it, and I hope that honestly I can see some cool films and be inspired as well.”

The filmmaker told me her next film will focus on female friendship and the way it changes over time. “It’s a little more comedic in tone” than her previous works, referencing Beyond the Lights, which was screened later that night at the festival to a packed audience, and at which the filmmaker participated in a lively Q&A. “I love finding young voices, people that have something to say and have chops, and I think that’s my responsibility as one that’s gotten through the door to reach back and help others as well.”

I asked the filmmaker her reaction to the Oscar nominations. “There were a number of people who should have been in the conversation,” she told me. “There were no people of color nominated in any of the acting categories. I mean David (Oyelowo) obviously should have been nominated. Gugu (Mbatha-Raw), who gave two phenomenal performances (Beyond the Lights and Belle) that were 180 degrees from each other; any other actress would have been exalted after that,” she said. “The problem is the drumbeat for her happened too late. It should have happened out of Toronto, but I’m excited for what’s next for her. I just hate that she’s not in the conversation right now.”

Rosie O’Donnell generated a frenzy of media attention on the red carpet as she made her first public appearance since she announced her marital split from Michelle Rounds and her exit from The View. She attended the premiere of her documentary, Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up, and later presented the President’s Visionary Award to HBO Documentary President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell told journalists on the red carpet her decision to leave the popular daytime talk show, which was just announced the previous day, was a decision she made with her doctor. She suffered a heart attack in 2014, and her doctor carefully monitored her health and told her after the holidays she had an uptick in numbers that indicated an increased risk of a heart attack, possibly as a result of stress from work and her personal life.

O’Donnell cautioned that all women should take care of their health but conceded she knew she was fortunate. “It’s not everyone who can take a break from working because of stress. It’s easy for me because I’m very rich, right? So I have a lot of help. So it’s easy for people like me to talk about it. I have somebody to watch the baby if I don’t feel like it, so I have a much easier life than 99.9 percent of women on the planet and I know that. But every woman needs to take their health seriously,” she said. “I ignored it, my own. I didn’t really participate in anything besides mammograms cause my mother died of breast cancer. I was so sure it would be breast cancer that got me, so when I had a heart attack I was stunned.”

A few days earlier Jodie Foster received the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award and was supposed to attend the awards ceremony Saturday but had to jet back to L.A. for the Director’s Guild Awards in which she received two nominations.

During the Athena awards ceremony, via video, Foster, who has been an actress since she was a child, noted that, “There I was a young girl wanting to be a director and never seeing a female director’s face. I thought it was something I would never be allowed to do.” After her mother took her to a film festival of works by Italian director Lina Wertmuller, Foster said, “I came to realize that I could be a woman director if I wanted to because there was one out there, and that was a life-changing moment for me.”

The awards ceremony, which turned out to be a great party attended primarily by women, honored Gina Prince-Bythewood, producer Cathy Schulman, and HBO Documentary Films President Sheila Nevins.

O’Donnell, who presented Sheila Nevins with her award, noted that she fell in love with documentaries from the time she saw Grey Gardens. Then subsequently she’d see documentaries on HBO and every documentary she said, “has a name and it’s Sheila Nevins. Who is this witch I thought to myself?” O’Donnell met Nevins back in 1996, “when most of you Barnard students were in elementary school.”

O’Donnell said of Nevins, “She’s the woman I look up to the most in all of showbiz. Her heart is the biggest of anyone, and she’s got a Geiger counter for truth that’s never failed.” She added that she’s done six or seven documentaries with the HBO Documentary head that does the heavy lifting. “I give her a tremendous amount of credit, and I do very little work, and that’s how I like it.”

In a speech that was basically a stand-up comedy routine, O’Donnell also joked that she saw a woman who walked by wearing a grey hat, who caught her attention. The woman sat at a front table and O’Donnell cracked, “I saw you walking by and I’m like, ‘I don’t know who she is, but she might be my next wife.’” The audience roared. O’Donnell added the feeling might not be mutual and segued into a dig at Brian Williams: “Maybe that’s the problem in my relationships. I see someone and I make shit up like Brian Williams. I escaped on 9/11 from the Twin Towers. Oh No, I didn’t. I got mixed up. F—ing Lance Armstrong liar.”

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotional and heartfelt speech about her journey as a filmmaker was the evening’s highlight. She spoke about being adopted by white parents and her search for her birth mother that didn’t work out as hoped. She began her journey as a filmmaker with a rejection from film school but that didn’t deter her: “I wrote a letter to the head of the school telling her she made a mistake. She called me and said I’m in.”

Bythewood credited much of her success to other women who advised and mentored her, including A Different World producer Susan Fales Hill, who presented Bythewood with her award.

Sheila Nevins and Rosie O'Donnell — Sheila Nevins and Rosie O’Donnell

Bythewood said that people asked her all the time about discrimination against Black directors. “I’ve personally not been discriminated against,” she said. “What is discriminated against are my choices, which is to focus on women and especially on women of color, their goals and their love stories and it’s a tougher fight.” A fight made especially difficult because only 4 percent of directors are women in the Directors Guild, and in the Writers Guild it is only 10 percent, “which means that our images of females that young women … are seeing is from a male point of view, and I think that that’s frightening. I think that’s dangerous and just ignores our perspective. It’s not just what happened at the Oscars,” she said. “It’s the fact also that of the films nominated for best picture not one has a female protagonist and is from a female point of view, and that has got to change. I’m in that fight.”

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.

Blurred Lines: The Cinematic Appeal of Rape Fantasy

While Whore stigma is gradually declining, kinky desires remain stigmatized, especially in women. By vocally disowning that desire, “Madonna” Anastasia Steele qualifies herself to serve as an avatar for readers who struggle to acknowledge and integrate their sexual urges. The “displaced consent” model of rape fantasy may be recognized, and distinguished from the “sexual assawwwlt” model, by its masterful Ice Prince hero, whose full control is essential to eliminating the heroine’s responsibility.

Trigger Warning: Detailed discussion of rape apologism (and some explicit reference to Robin Thicke)

The Myth Of Male Power by Warren Farrell (PhD, of course) is arguably the intellectual foundation of Men’s Rights Activism (MRA). It is also notorious for its rape apologism, using female fondness for fictional rape fantasy to argue that men should not be prosecuted for date rape, as long as they are “trying to become her fantasy.” For the record, I don’t believe rape fantasies cause rape. In the real world, desire is not so easily misunderstood. What rape fantasy does feed, as Farrell illustrates, is rape apologism. Our cultural models of “romanticized rape” shape the excuses of rapists and encourage their general acceptance. We might respond by pointing out that women consent to rape fantasy automatically, just by imagining it, by turning the pages as they read or by opening their eyes to watch on-screen. Since rape fantasy is consensual, it has nothing in common with the violation of actual rape. But with the often coercive “romance” of Fifty Shades of Grey set to rule the box office, now is a good time to ask: what actually is the cinematic appeal of rape fantasy?

Gone With The Wind: Putting the “awww” in Sexual Assawwwlt

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRxfZHr3AxY” title=”GWTW%20marital%20rape%20scene”]

Rhett Butler threatens to crush his wife’s skull, declares “this is one night you’re not turning me out” then carries her upstairs, visibly struggling. Cut to Scarlett awakening the next morning with smiling pleasure. Her husband threatened to kill her, declared his intention to rape her while she protested, yet she is shown waking up happy the following day. Like Fifty Shades of Grey, this is an adaptation of a female author’s book, cited as sexual fantasy by many female viewers. What’s going on?

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind mirrors classic interpretations of Wuthering Heights‘ romance – like Linton, Ashley represents the heroine’s social aspirations, while Rhett mirrors Heathcliff as her primal, resisted passion. This must be understood within a wider tendency by female-authored texts to reject their primary object of desire, which I’ve previously examined for Jane Austen’s Unsuitable Suitor and the “Wolf” of SARCom. In response to such rejection, Twilight‘s Jacob Black forces a long kiss on heroine Bella Swann. Buffy‘s spurned “Wolves,” Spike and hyena-possessed Xander, both attempt to rape Buffy.

This rape-as-romantic-desperation trope echoes the emotional vulnerability of Rhett Butler’s marital rape, where he finally confesses jealousy and desire for Scarlett. As Rhett threatens to crush Scarlett’s skull, the gesture emphasizes his powerlessness to control her thoughts and emotions. Though his role is brutal, supposedly excused by drunkenness, the scene actually affirms Scarlett’s emotional power: he attempts to intimidate her, but cannot; he acknowledges his craving for her emotional approval and his inability to secure it. Treating sexual assault as emotional surrender is the defining feature of this category of rape fantasy, the “awww” in the “sexual assawwwlt.” Because Rhett is the primary love interest, Scarlett’s resistance is a demonstration of emotional power, not lack of desire, as her satisfaction the following morning demonstrates. She is the avatar of female viewers, who both desire Rhett and desire power over Rhett. Our culture views sex as male conquest and female surrender, but “sexual assawwwlt” flips that script: it is female conquest through emotional withholding, provoking a rape that affirms male emotional powerlessness.

The cultural concept of “female sexual power” was born in 411 B.C., with the sex boycott plot of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. At the time, this was amusing partly because women were understood to have ten times the lust of men. The female fertility cults of Demeter practiced ritual obscenity, the first known sex manual was authored by Philaenis, daughter of Okymenes, and Sappho wrote nine volumes of lesboerotic poetry, all acknowledged literary classics. These expressions of female-authored sexual culture were wiped out by patriarchs of the early christian church. However, the male-authored Lysistrata‘s model of empowerment-through-sexual-resistance survived. “The Rules of Love,” laid down by Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Courts of Love in the 12th Century, included “an easy attainment makes love contemptible” and “jealousy is absolutely required by love.” Eleanor’s influential “Rules of Love” represent an aristocratic female response to social powerlessness, diverting frustration into a sadistic model of love as gratifying empowerment, rather than as emotional fulfillment. Margaret Mitchell’s depicting Scarlett as empowered by her own rape thus reflects over 2,000 years of ideology promoting sexual resistance as an expression of female power. This “female power” of sexual resistance is a poisoned chalice: by separating resistance-as-power from resistance-as-reluctance, it justifies rape as the only way to satisfy female desire, while diverting women from actual social empowerment. “Female sexual power” thus feeds rape apologism and demands male telepathy – a practice best confined to fiction.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Madonna’s Like A Virgin

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JMg9InBcgE”]

If “sexual assawwwlt” represents female sexual conquest, then the “displaced consent” of Fifty Shades of Grey represents disowned responsibility. In E. L. James’ book, Anastasia Steele expresses unwillingness and reluctance to engage in BDSM with Christian, while her consent is detached and embodied as the infamous “inner goddess.” Again, a key to understanding can be found in Jane Austen. Writing at a time of intense Whore stigma, where expressions of female sexuality were harshly punished by the withdrawal of social protection, Austen repeatedly created plots in which the heroine resists her attraction to the Unsuitable Suitor while another woman, usually a female relative, abandons social protection and elopes with him. This constant repetition suggests that the “Whore” relative represents the displaced sex drive of the “Madonna” heroine, an “inner Lydia” comparable to Anastasia Steele’s “inner goddess.” While Whore stigma is gradually declining, kinky desires remain stigmatized, especially in women. By vocally disowning that desire, “Madonna” Anastasia Steele qualifies herself to serve as an avatar for readers who struggle to acknowledge and integrate their sexual urges. The “displaced consent” model of rape fantasy may be recognized, and distinguished from the “sexual assawwwlt” model, by its masterful Ice Prince hero, whose full control is essential to eliminating the heroine’s responsibility. The classic “Ice Prince” of teen SARCom is emotionally intense, but sexually unavailable; E. L. James titillates readers by adapting Twilight‘s sexually unavailable “Ice Prince” Edward into the emotionally unavailable, but sexually intense, Christian Grey.

Compare the earlier Secretary, Erin Cressida Wilson’s adaptation of Mary Gaitskill’s story: the heroine Lee actively requests and provokes the domination of her boss, Mr. Grey, and is depicted in solo acts of masochism and masturbation that clarify her independent desire for BDSM. In BDSM practice, it is the submissive who ultimately controls the play through safe-words and consent, an ironic “paradox of power.” In Fifty Shades of Grey, however, the book’s BDSM negotiations are utterly undermined by Anastasia’s inability to sign or renegotiate Christian’s contracts, due to her disavowal of kinky desire. For sharp analysis of the book’s resulting abusive elements, from the perspective of a practising submissive, see Cliff Pervocracy’s reviews, while E. L. James’ own interviews exemplify covert desire and reinforce norms of respectability politics: “I am fascinated by BDSM, and fascinated as to why anyone would want to be in this lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s as hot as hell, and find Doms hot as hell. I met this guy recently who is a Dom… well… ‘nuff said about that – but he was fucked-up.”

Female director Sam Taylor-Johnson is apparently trying to minimize the book’s disavowal of desire, by emphasizing Dakota Johnson’s lustful facial expressions as nonverbal cues for Jamie Dornan’s Christian. His line “I like to see your face. It gives me some clue what you might be thinking” is prominent in the official trailer. But fangirls now rushing to pre-book tickets are expecting, and will demand, faithfulness to the source novel, including Anastasia’s open reluctance to enter a D/s relationship and her refusal to sign or renegotiate Christian’s contract, which deny her power of consent. E. L. James’ book also shares Gone With The Wind‘s trope of using a sexually aggressive, non-white man to provoke white male heroic protectiveness, suggesting a correlation between mainstream rape fantasy and conservative ideology. How will Taylor-Johnson tackle that? Should we support female directors regardless?

Culture’s association of sexual resistance with (white) respectability, and with (white) entitlement to social protection, acts to detach sexual resistance from lack of desire. Yet, just as Austen’s heroes cannot actually marry both the girl of their dreams and the random female relative who represents her sex drive, a hero’s being justified in forcing himself on an unwilling woman, because her consenting inner goddess is hovering like a sexual Great Gazoo, is equally unrealistic. The seduction of Anastasia may be compared to the seductions of Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a rare example of the “displaced consent” trope being unisex, as Brad and Janet’s desire is clear in their visible pleasure at “giving in,” while their vocal resistance reflects social inhibitions and fear of losing status. Janet is shown to be liberated by her coercive seduction, embracing her desires in sex-positive anthem “touch-a, touch-a, touch me,” while Brad caresses his fetish gear and croons, “I feel se-exy!” However, Rocky Horror‘s flamboyant absurdism helps to underline the fantasy aspect of this rape fantasy, as a hypothetical mental experiment in gender and sexual fluidity. Kids, don’t try this at home.

“Blurred Lines”: Male Readings Of Rape Fantasy

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU”]

Like its female equivalent, mainstream male rape fantasy centres on forcing the acknowledgement of suppressed female desire. The fact that dominant culture continues to interpret women’s sexual resistance as unconnected to any lack of desire, may be seen in the huge popularity of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” While Thicke’s lyrics include consent-positive lines like “go ahead, get at me,” the feminist backlash highlights the damaging impact of invalidating sexual resistance, not to mention Thicke’s creepy delivery (catchy hook, though).

There is no denying that degrading porn (porn focussed on humiliation rather than pleasure) appeals to misogynist men and to sexual predators, but is that all it does? Can its full popularity, dominating the ratings of porn aggregate sites, really be explained only by a widespread sexual hatred lurking in most men? I suggest that comparison with the female model of “sexual assawwwlt” offers a more complex reading. The male porn performer, like Scarlett O’Hara, is not a direct expression of desire but an avatar of sexual frustration. Popular porn is shaped by commercial pressure; to cater to the male viewer’s resentment of the female performer’s unavailability (to him personally), the male performer must paradoxically punish that sexual unavailability while having sex with her. Compare Gone With The Wind‘s urge to punish Rhett Butler’s emotional unavailability, while he’s being emotionally vulnerable. I suggest that cinematic sexual fantasy can only be understood through this contradictory duality: performers represent their characters’ sexual fulfillment, while simultaneously being avatars for the viewer’s conflicting sexual frustration. These dual pressures shape dysfunctional models for imitation.

As long as the performers are willing and comfortable, there is nothing wrong with a purely cinematic rape fantasy, or with the intense trust of consensual BDSM power exchange, that confront inhibitions while cathartically venting sexual frustrations. However, we must recognize the roots of rape fantasy in a toxic sexual culture that stigmatizes female lust and imagines female consent as disempowering surrender. Fantasy is as good a way as any to explore the resulting tensions between power and desire. But punishing female inhibition with bodily violation, when that inhibition stems from punishing female sexuality, adds injury to insult before rubbing battery acid on the wound. Films become toxic when they blur the lines of fantasy and reality, leading viewers to mistake expressions of frustration for models of fulfillment.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10YPz0F-KOE”]

Brigit McCone is semi-apologetically Team Wolf, writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

‘Mommy’: Her Not Him

I went into ‘Mommy,’ the magnificent, new film from out gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 25 and this film is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character was being touted in some awards circles as a possible nominee for “Best Actress” (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I’ve seen)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film kept confounding my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

The misunderstood, screwed-up manboy/hero is such a persistent trope in films that audiences are often tricked into empathizing with characters whose actions are more deserving of our scorn. At the end of Blue Valentine, when Ryan Gosling’s character separates from his wife, the Michelle Williams character, and leaves the daughter they’ve raised together, I heard someone nearby say aloud, “Poor guy.” But Gosling had, just a scene before, shown up drunk at Williams’ workplace to terrorize and humiliate her (and ends up assaulting her boss, which results in her losing her job). The director and co-writer, Derek Cianfrance, could barely manage to see these actions from the point of view of Williams’ character: the one with whom our empathy would more naturally lie.

I went into Mommy, the magnificent, new film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 25 and this feature is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character, was being touted in some awards circles as a possible nominee for “Best Actress” (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I’ve seen)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film (which won the Jury Prize at Cannes) kept surpassing my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son, Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

We first meet Dorval’s character, Die (short for Diane), after we see, from a distance, a car crash into hers at a good speed. She staggers out after opening the jammed door, her head bleeding as she curses out the other driver. In the next scene we see her walking in extremely high heels along a hallway filled with several inches of water to meet with the director of the “youth facility” (one small step from a detention facility) where her son has been staying. The resigned bureaucrat behind the desk is more like real-life people who work in social services than the young idealists and abusive villains we usually see in movies. She explains that Steve has set a fire (the reason for the watery hallway) that injured another student, so he’s being expelled into Die’s care. Die objects, but the director tells her she has no choice–unless Die wants to commit him. Die astutely points out that doing so would put him in the pipeline to prison, which she doesn’t want. The director tells her, “We save some, we lose some,” and “Loving people doesn’t save them,” but no one, certainly not Die, can be as philosophical about their own child.

“Skeptics will be proven wrong,” Die retorts. Besides having a sexy wardrobe of high heels, tight jeans, sheer shirts and short skirts (a contrast to how unwilling most films are to acknowledge mothers as sexual beings) we see she also signs her name like a 12-year-old girl–complete with hearts.

Steve has some psychiatric diagnoses and no impulse control, so even though he has a loving, teasing, quasi-inappropriate relationship with his good-looking, tart-tongued, possibly alcoholic mother, their lives together are measured in the moments between his abuse and violence, some directed toward her, some directed to others. In one of the only scenes in the film that fall flat he makes racist remarks to a Black cab driver, the only person of color we see onscreen. Young, aimless white guys have targeted their anger at Black and brown people through the ages, but filmmakers, especially young ones like Dolan, should understand that audiences need to see POC characters as more than anonymous victims–and more than one in a film that is over two hours.

At one point Steve goes to the mall and in a beautifully stylized sequence (the expert cinematography is by André Turpin) we see him shouting and whirling around with a shopping cart. He shows joy and energy along with the intermittent charm we’ve already witnessed. But when he goes home and shows Die the goods he’s brought with him, including a necklace for her that spells out, “Mommy,” she tells him he has to return this stolen merchandise. He then starts shouting and smashing things, chasing Die, and at one point strangling her until she hits him in the head with a glass-covered picture frame and he retreats. As Die cowers in a locked closet, pleading with Steve through the door to take his medication, she hears him talking calmly to someone and when she ventures out she sees the neighbor from across the street (to whom she has never spoken) dressing the leg wound Steve suffered in the confrontation. Kyla (Suzanne Clément, every bit as great as her co-stars) is about Die’s age and the two have similar features but their personalities and circumstances differ. Kyla has a form of aphasia that seems to be the result of a breakdown. She is “on sabbatical” from her job as a high school teacher and, as we have seen in previous scenes she spends a lot of time facing away from the husband and daughter she lives with, observing Steve and Die through her home’s front window.

MommyTrio — Mother, son, and friend/tutor

The three have a convivial dinner together and while Steve is out of the room, Kyla and Die down shots while Die explains that she can’t ever call the police or alert hospitals after an incident like the one that afternoon because the authorities might then take her son away from her. Die states, “Life with Steve is a roll of the dice,” and, “When he loses it, you best scram because it gets ugly.” When Steve returns he encourages them all to dance and sing along with one of his favorite songs.

Kyla, who feels superfluous in her own household, accepts Die’s request to tutor her son while Die goes to a job interview. We see Steve testing Kyla by acting up with her the way he does everyone else, even touching her breasts, but when he pulls a necklace from around her throat and refuses to give it back, Kyla shows the reserves of rage quiet people often have, pushing Steve flat onto the floor. In a lesser movie this scene would be the prelude to a sexual encounter, but Dolan instead makes us see, as Kyla does, that in spite of his bravado and violence Steve is just a screwed-up kid.

What follows is a chronicle of three misfits who, for a time, find what they need in one another. Kyla is Die’s confidante, the only person who really understands her and the situation with her son. Steve likes having Kyla as his tutor and is on his best behavior (which is by no means perfect) in her presence. And Kyla has fun and feels like she has a purpose when she is with Die and Steve. In a bravura moment, the square frame of the film is seemingly stretched by Steve’s own hands into widescreen as Oasis’s “Wonderwall” plays on the soundtrack.

We see, when Die is interrupted as she prepares dinner with the others, that the idyll can’t last (and the screen shrinks back to a square). The classmate at the facility whom Steve injured with fire is suing. The knock at the front door was to serve a subpoena. Still, Die scrambles to “save” her son and in another widescreen sequence imagines a parallel life for him, graduating from high school, going to college, getting married, becoming a parent–and growing tall.

At one point Steve wonders what will happen when his mother doesn’t love him anymore, but she explains to him that he is much more likely to stop loving her than the other way around. In the end we see that no matter the circumstances their bond will continue. But the two women who had been such close friends (friendship between two 40-something women is an unusual enough focus for a film that one would think it rarely occurs offscreen) can hardly face each other anymore. The other’s presence reminds each of what she would most like to forget.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7rtSqI0ZeA” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

Child-Eating Parents in ‘Into the Woods’ and Every Children’s Story Ever

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.

If you’ve ever read a fairy tale before, the idea that mother figures end up being witches is not exactly news. Young, beautiful, kind, and loving parents (mothers, especially) are usually MIA or KIA before the action starts, and the child heroes instead interact with angry, powerful fantasy characters who are about the same age their parents would be, and fill some of the same roles their parents would fill, but also want to murder them in shocking and terrible ways.

The clearest example of this is probably Hansel and Gretel, where parents eat their own children through the proxy of a witch, but it’s a theme that repeats itself in children’s literature.

Disney’s adaptation of Into the Woods contains a smorgasbord of missing parents, one of whom is replaced by a bone-crushing giant, and one of whom is replaced by a witch. The giant comes into play during the movie’s riff on Jack and the Beanstalk, where fatherless Jack meets an oedipal complex a “big tall terrible lady giant” who behaves toward him as a mother would before her husband tries to eat Jack for lunch (as recapped in this song). The witch is a more developed character, and a better example of what Into the Woods has to offer as an adult-oriented fairy tale.

The witch, who isn’t ever named, plays a role in multiple plot lines, but her origin is in Rapunzel. After catching her neighbour trying to make off with her vegetables, she curses him and locks his daughter in a tower, raising the girl as her own. From there, the story progresses in the usual way – Rapunzel meets a prince; the witch becomes jealous and attacks them; Rapunzel is reunited with her prince and leaves the witch behind forever.

Some of the commentary on Into the Woods (both the movie and the pre-Disney musical) has painted the relationship between Rapunzel and the witch as one about parents struggling to let go of their children and wanting to shelter them from the dangers of the world. James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim even introduce the witch’s signature song, “Stay with Me” as a touching song about family relationships that’s supposed to show us a gentler side of the witch.

And, while it’s true that “Stay with Me” presents the witch as an emotionally complex person, it also presents her as a pretty shitty parent. If you listen to the whole thing, including how the scene begins and ends, she’s emotionally manipulative, self-centred, prone to sudden fits of anger, and unreasonably punitive.

Kind of like Rapunzel’s witch mom in that other Disney movie.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the dynamic in Into the Woods influenced Tangled in some way.

Tangled is a lot less nuanced in its presentation – the witch in Tangled is purely self-interested and doesn’t show any signs of genuine affection for Rapunzel. In this version of the story, Rapunzel unknowingly has the power to rejuvenate people, and the witch wants her to stay in the tower and act as a personal fountain of youth. As part of her plan to keep Rapunzel under control, she systematically destroys Rapunzel’s confidence and self-esteem, convincing her that she’s so ugly, helpless, and stupid that she’d never survive on her own, and no one else would want her.

The turning point in the story comes when Rapunzel, who’s been raised by an abusive parent her entire life, without anything else to compare it to, realizes that her witch mother doesn’t really love her, and that she deserves to be part of a family that treats her with kindness and respect.

Into the Woods, which is intended for an audience of adults, is more layered. It’s clear that the witch feels more than one way about Rapunzel. It’s not a case where she’s just lying when she says she loves her daughter, but she displays a selfish, greedy kind of love that turns Rapunzel into an object whose feelings and needs aren’t important.

In the movie, their story arc ends when Rapunzel rides into the woods with her prince, vowing never to see the witch again. The second act of the musical, on stage, is much more explicit in showing us the long-term fallout of Rapunzel’s awful childhood – even though things are all right for her now, she can’t ever be happy because of the way she was raised. It’s an experience that’s going to haunt her forever.

Treating your children as things you own that exist to make you happy – and treating them as things that are defective, when they don’t make you happy – is an abusive form of parenting that more than one witch mother seems to exhibit.

Other Mother, the villain of Coraline, doesn’t have a pointy hat and a broom, but she’s a supernatural creature with magic powers who stands in for Coraline’s real mother in much of the movie.

In this case, the swap is more literal. Coraline, feeling temporarily neglected by her parents, finds a door behind the wallpaper in her house, leading to a world where everything is way more fun an interesting. The Other world is a copy of the world Coraline lives in, where everything revolves around her, and where she is (initially) welcomed by an alternate version of her mother, who’s far more attentive, warm and happy. The only thing Coraline has to do to stay in the world where everything’s awesome and great all the time is let Other Mother carve out her eyes.

When Coraline asserts herself by politely refusing to do that, Other Mother turns into a monster who rages at Coraline for disappointing her, kidnaps Coraline’s real parents, and tries to trap Coraline in the Other world forever. We then learn that Other Mother controls everyone else in the Other world, punishing them if they don’t seem happy enough, and forbidding them to talk to each other when she’s not there.

When Coraline asks why Other Mother is so determined to keep her in the Other world, one of the other characters explains that she wants something to love that isn’t her – or, possibly, “She’d just love something to eat.”

The story resolves when Coraline escapes from Other Mother, and realizes that her parents, although they’re not perfect, genuinely love her, care about her feelings and well-being, and, unlike Other Mother, would never hurt her on purpose. The smothering, overly-attentive “love” that Other Mother initially displays for Coraline is really a greedy, hungry desire for something to trap and control. Love doesn’t mean giving someone everything you have so as to buy the right to keep them.

In most children’s stories, the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents. Children need their parents to take care of them, which leaves them at their parents’ mercy; even good parents sometimes express sides of themselves that their children find frightening or confusing – stories where children are mistreated or endangered by mother and father figures who aren’t literally their parents provide a way to confront the fear of mistreatment or endangerment while also providing a safety net that says, “Your real mom and dad aren’t like this.” In other words, it’s too awful to think that your mother is evil, so she becomes two people – one that’s nice (and dead or gone) and one that’s really mean.

Because Other Mother looks and sounds just like Coraline’s real mother, the association between nice mom and mean mom is more obvious in Coraline, but the distance between Coraline’s actual mother and the monster behind the wallpaper is clear. One is a reasonable human being and one is an imposter.

Spirited Away, a Japanese film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, offers a more nuanced reading of the switch between nice mom and mean mom, with the witch grandmother Yubaba. Yubaba is murderous and terrifying, but is occasionally replaced by her kindly “twin sister” who invites the movie’s heroine to call her “grandma” and likes to make people tea and knit sweaters. In general terms, Miyazaki’s films seem comfortable with the idea that people aren’t all one way – that there are many, sometimes contradictory sides to our personalities, that are expressed at different times. By the end of Spirited Away, it’s strongly implied that Yubaba and her “sister” are actually the same person, each expressing different aspects of who she is.

The typical witch substitution removes all the negative aspects from mom, and sends them out into the world as a monster that can be defeated. It’s rare to find a mother figure who’s capable of both kindness and cruelty, and rarer still to find one who is predominantly cruel, without being wicked all the way through.

Where Other Mother and the witch from Tangled are pure evil wearing the mask of friendship, the witch from Into the Woods is the rare example of a mother figure who’s mostly bad, with occasional moments of goodness. That fits the story’s more mature approach to fairy tales, and its overarching message that right and wrong and good and bad are not as clear as children’s books would make them seem.

If the child-eaters of children’s stories are monsters, the ones in real life are more likely to be like the witch in Into the Woods: emotionally-immature adults with poor boundaries, who see their children as things that belong to them, like lamps and cars. They can be nice sometimes. They can elicit pity. They can express vulnerable emotions, and they can share common experiences with parents who are mostly good. They honestly do want something to love, but they’d also love something to eat.

We’re so used to seeing negative human qualities externalized into monsters, that’s it’s still surprising when a character is both monstrous and recognizably human. In a story that’s about adulthood, and coming to understand yourself and the world more clearly, the crucial move Into the Woods makes is in allowing Rapunzel’s witch mother to be her “real” mother – the only one she’ll ever know. The childhood projections of nice mom and mean mom collapse into one single person, and the thought that was too terrible to entertain in childhood – that maybe your mom is a witch – becomes real, layered and deepened through the knowledge that witches can also be people.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

The Alchemy of ‘Still Alice’

This guest post by Lisa Rosman originally appeared at Word and Film, as well as on her website Signs and Sirens. Cross-posted with permission.

Without Julianne Moore, Still Alice might not be much of a film. This is not to say the adaptation of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel about a 50-year-old woman stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease is otherwise mediocre, although it is so unobtrusively constructed that its virtues may be overlooked. But because it focuses on the perspective of a person with Alzheimer’s rather than on the perspective of her caregivers, a uniquely gifted actor is required in the titular role. Who but Moore, with her radiant fusion of fortitude and empathy, could soldier us through a narrative whose unhappy ending is as inevitable as that of the Titanic?

Initially, Alice Howland seems like she has it all. A celebrated Columbia University linguistics professor, she is happily married to fellow academic John (an unusually muted Alec Baldwin), and the couple enjoys their three grown children as well as their well-appointed Long Island beach house and NYC brownstone. If she is a tad thorny when things don’t go her way – her youngest daughter, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), an aspiring actor, bears the brunt of her mother’s tenacity – it’s nothing extraordinary in a modern Type A woman. But when Alice can no longer write off her memory loss and growing confusion as mere middle-aged malaise (read: menopause side effects), her worst fears are outstripped: She is diagnosed with a rare strain of Alzheimer’s that is inherited and can be transmitted. “I wish I had cancer,” she weeps, and although some might take umbrage with her disease comparison-shopping, we understand what she means. Especially in her line of work, she does not know who she will be without her formidable brain.

Although this film is unwaveringly linear, we are quickly discombobulated. The film’s progression mirrors Alice’s decline so that time itself seems to dissolve, like all the rituals and goals to which she clings with a devastating inefficacy. Daily runs become impossible; soon she can no longer remember regular appointments without the aid of her smartphone. Sooner still she forgets the layout of her own house. One afternoon, she soils herself before she can find the bathroom. Every time Alice finds a way to manage a new set of limitations, the ground beneath her feet crumbles again, and we live right inside her growing panic and sorrow. As her ability to perceive her surroundings deteriorates, even the film’s clean lines grow fuzzy.

Because of Alice’s high intelligence, her Alzheimer’s has likely gone undiagnosed longer than it would have had she possessed fewer compensatory resources (ways to remember what she did not remember). The irony is she and her family possess very few “compensatory resources” once her now-rapid degeneration becomes evident; as cerebral people, they are especially ill-equipped to navigate her ever-increasing mental challenges. John, in particular, proves disappointing. “You are the smartest woman I know,” he tells her early on, and when their shared value of independence proves no longer possible, we learn that objectifying a woman for her brain is as problematic as objectifying her for her beauty. Marriage on any contingency plan is precarious.

It can be argued that Still Alice is too Lifetime-for-TV neat, that its secondary characters are too two-dimensional. While I’d never claim this film was avant-garde, I admire directors and screenwriters Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s resistance to “fake stakes,” the peaks and valleys that normally shape a film narrative. Instead, the hurdles that Alice clears – an instance in which she successfully collects herself after dropping her notes during a speech, an aborted suicide attempt – only pave the way for our growing acceptance that there is no way to subvert her ultimate obstacle. Similarly, it makes sense that Alice’s family and friends don’t feel quite real; long before she actually forgets their names, her ability to distinguish personality nuance has been compromised. We’re there with her. Of course, this doesn’t excuse everything: a linguistics professor who loses her words is admittedly a smack on the nose, as is the discovery of Alice’s genetic disorder just as her eldest daughter (Kate Bosworth) is attempting to get pregnant.

What works beyond a shadow of a doubt is Moore herself. For a long time now, she has demonstrated an uncanny range and power without ever subjecting us to a shred of vanity. Here, she outdoes herself, channeling Alice’s physical, mental, and emotional devolution with an alchemy that is as thrilling as it is harrowing. Her luminous features slacken, her cadences falter, her life force fades. Scenes with Stewart are especially heartbreaking. The younger actor is finally returning to form after all that mucking about with vampires, and the careful attentiveness she displays as Alice’s daughter is key to the one hope that this film offers us: By definition, true love never changes form.

A former labor organizer, Lisa Rosman has reviewed film for such outlets as Time Out New York, Salon, Us Magazine, Flavorwire, LA Weekly, RogerEbert.com, and CBS News. She appears weekly on the NY1 film review show Talking Pictures and writes on film, feminism, and eavesdropping for SignsandSirens.com. Most notably, she once served as an assistant for Elmo on Sesame Street.

‘Selma’ Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers

This guest post by Janell Hobson previously appeared at the Ms. blog and is cross-posted with permission.

Last year was a stellar one for Black women filmmakers. First, there was Amma Asante’s exquisitely filmed Belle (starring an impressive Gugu Mbatha-Raw), followed later by Gina Prince-Bythewood’s emotionally layered Beyond the Lights (also starring Mbatha-Raw). The year finally closed out with Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed historical drama, Selma.

However, while Belle was summarily dismissed by movie critics as a “black Jane Austen drama,” and Beyond the Lights received more favorable reviews but was nonetheless ignored at the box office, DuVernay has a real shot at becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar (having already made history with her nomination at the Golden Globes). Of course, there is something to be said for women receiving critical acclaim when the films they direct focus on the lives of men, but that’s another story. Nonetheless, the acclaim she has received is absolutely earned.

(Editor’s note: DuVernay was not nominated.)

Selma is a rather subversive take on historical events: part sweeping epic drama, part intimate and domestic storytelling in its rendering of the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 (led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and played in the film with an understated grace by David Oyelowo). DuVernay imbues this Civil Rights-era film with a black woman’s sensibility, which makes the storytelling all the richer.

There is the opening shot, featuring King practicing his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, before he is joined by his wife Coretta (played by Carmen Ejogo in an uncanny resemblance to the late icon) fixing his tie. Here, an international milestone is seamlessly intertwined with the space of domestic intimacy, just as the following scene depicting the four girls in Birmingham decked out in their finest Sunday best—as they gossip about how Coretta Scott King does her hair while descending into a church basement—resonates on the most mundane level. Although we have the benefit of history, it is still jarring when the bomb explodes, and, as occurs throughout the film, each death is doled out in slow motion, the camera (aesthetically positioned by the accomplished cinematographer Bradford Young to capture the brilliance of dark skin) refusing to turn our collective eyes away from the bloodshed and the casualties of “racial progress.”

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture. Because of the rewrite, we not only get a redirection on King and how his Southern Christian Leadership Conference group came into conflict with the younger Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but women are also added to the picture, including movement participants like Freedom Rider Diane Nash (played by Tessa Thompson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Touissant) and Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). They are still marginal to the main story, but at least they are visible and part of the grassroots movement critical to King’s leadership.

We also see certain feminist approaches: from how the movement men can descend onto a woman’s home and make themselves quite comfortable as their very masculine dominance takes over her kitchen space (a subtle critique of the ways progressive men constantly rely on and exploit women’s labor, all wrapped up in the warmth of black Southern domestic comfort) to a scene featuring Amelia Boynton and Coretta Scott King discussing the struggles of activism and the challenge of maintaining hope (a scene Touissant has noted was DuVernay’s own conscious attempts at passing the Bechdel Test by including a scene where women are not talking about men). Through Coretta’s story, DuVernay also highlights how the iconic hero that we celebrate through King does not translate to admirable husband and father. King’s infidelities, however, are included not to tarnish his image but to undergird the real difficulties of committing to both a political movement and the personal sphere. King’s political involvement (including long stays away from home) also brings the constant fear of death, a fear Coretta quietly yet persistently underscores throughout her scenes.

More than anything, Selma is what we get when we intersect the personal with the political, the epic with the intimate, the historical with the present day (e.g. because King’s speeches were off limits, what we also get in the film are double entendres of what the Selma movement meant for 1965 and what present-day struggles mean for us here in 2015).

While the film’s budget is tiny by Hollywood standards ($20 million), what DuVernay does with the film is a real triumph in not only quality filmmaking but in accomplished storytelling, where black people and their allies stand in all their brilliant humanity and where women’s stories hold equal weight against the heavyweight often accorded men’s histories. Let us hope her triumphs will open the doors wider for other women filmmakers.

Of course we may find solace on smaller screens, where diversity reigns and where Shonda Rhimes dominates Thursday television with her Black women leads and multiracial casting. Nonetheless, there is a power that is felt when viewing images in a much larger medium with its expansive and colossal screen and booming soundtrack. DuVernay has shown why Black women still matter on big screens and why they matter more so behind the camera.

Janell Hobson is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Body as Evidence: Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, and a frequent contributor to Ms.

‘Inherent Vice’: The White, Male Writer-Director’s New Clothes

I can count on one hand the times I’ve fallen asleep in a theater; at ‘Vice’ I suspect my body was telling me this film was never going to get better, so why not do something more worthwhile with my time? I did rouse myself to catch the end of the scene and the rest of the film, but it never did improve. All of its scenes, save one, would have the same coherence if its talented actors barked instead of saying their lines–and if they did so, some Anderson fanboy would still (as I overheard one after the screening I attended) insist to the unlucky woman walking alongside him, “He’s playing with narrative!”

After I sat all the way through the adventures of Marky Mark and his 13-inch prosthetic penis in Boogie Nights, I thought I was finished with Paul Thomas Anderson films, but at the behest of a woman I was in a new relationship with, I absorbed the bullshit and bombast of her favorite film, Magnolia (though I remember very little of it), several years after it came out. As I watched, I remember thinking that the woman I’d dated years earlier who’d liked the same films I had (her favorite was The Unbearable Lightness of Being ) was otherwise a terrible girlfriend. So maybe the fact that this other woman (who would later become my spouse) loved Magnolia was a good sign. I was, of course, wrong.

Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice, takes place in a southern California hippie community just as the feel-good counterculture of the ’60s was slowly souring into the disillusionment and heroin and cocaine addiction of the ’70s. The main character, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, decades too old for the role–the counterculture’s catchphrase was “Never trust anyone over 30”) lives by the beach and smokes a lot of pot, but he also works as a private detective, which is why his ex “old lady” Shasta (Katherine Waterston) comes to his place, in a sojourn from what was then known as the “straight” world, her hair pulled back with a barrette wearing the kind of clothes, the narrator (musician Joanna Newsom) notes, she had always sworn she never would. Shasta seems to be on the brink of tears as she says, “I need your help, Doc,” and we in the audience can imagine a complex history between these two.

Inherent_ViceCover — Katherine Waterston and Joaquin Phoenix try (and fail) to make sense of it all

In 1970, hippies were so commonplace, the guy who drove the ice cream truck in my suburban Kansas neighborhood had a ponytail, a beard and a mustache, but in another few years hardly any hippies would be left, except for some scattered on communes, farms and “intentional communities.” Ray Magliozzi explained the end of the counterculture era as: all the previously “unemployed bums” and “wackos” “went out and got jobs.” Although writer-director Olivier Assayas’ Something In The Air touches on a similar sea change in Europe, someone could make a good film about this largely unexplored time of transition (which could also be described as a defeat) in the US–but Vice is not that film and Anderson is not that director.

I don’t need a tight plot to have a good time at the movies, but I fell asleep during Vice. I couldn’t resist closing my eyes when Owen Wilson (whom many of us wish would go back to writing films: Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are much better than any film he’s only acted in) playing one in a long line of the film’s ridiculously named supporting characters (none of whom I could keep track of or give a shit about) says, “And your question is: which side am I on?”

I can count on one hand the times I’ve fallen asleep in a theater; at Vice I suspect my body was telling me this film was never going to get better, so why not do something more worthwhile with my time? I did rouse myself to catch the end of the scene and the rest of the film, but it never did improve. All of its scenes, save one, would have the same coherence if its talented actors barked instead of saying their lines–and if they did so, some Anderson fanboy would still (as I overheard one after the screening I attended) insist to the unlucky woman walking alongside him, “He’s playing with narrative!”

INHERENT-VICEBeach — Parts of this film are pretty to look at. Not enough reason to see it though.

Anderson has claimed in interviews that he was influenced by Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the original book’s author Raymond Chandler’s famous explanation to the screenwriters (including William Faulkner) who were adapting another of his novels, The Big Sleep, that he had no idea who the killer was. But Anderson hasn’t learned the first thing from either film or from Chandler who might not have known who the murderer was, but knew his characters inside and out, and let his readers know them too. Altman understood the value of a good script: he asked the same woman screenwriter who had adapted Sleep, Leigh Brackett to write Goodbye. Altman was also famous for encouraging his actors to improvise, but in his very best work (like Goodbye and McCabe and Mrs. Miller) he never sacrificed a deep attention to even minor characters’ moods and motivations–and probably also left a lot of flat, improvised dialogue on the cutting room floor. Altman knew that the audience needed to have a sense of the characters’ inner justifications, even if the audience disagrees with them or is shocked by them (as with the brutal violence against women Marlowe’s friend Terry Lenox and the gangster Marty Augustine perpetrate during Goodbye). Altman was a notorious pothead himself who was a part of the new school of directors who were able to thrive in the ’70s as a direct aftereffect of the counterculture, but even in his comedies (like M*A*S*H) he didn’t surrender story and character to some sort of vague, giggly, stoner aesthetic the way Anderson does in Vice.

For reasons I can’t fathom, Anderson always attracts good actors to his films and seeing the ones in Vice struggle to find something worthy in his shitty (Oscar-nominated!) script (based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, whose work I’ve never read and, if it’s anything like the dialogue and narration in this film, never will) is painful. In odd moments with a gesture or line reading they succeed–Jena Malone chomping her teeth and Eric Roberts when he first catches the eye of Phoenix, but these shots last seconds and the movie lasts two and half hours. The only sustained rapport two characters have with each other (and the only time they connect with the audience) is in the scene when Shasta returns to Doc’s bungalow with her hair loose wearing the outfit the narrator has told us she wore when they were together. Waterston and Phoenix are both excellent as they talk and drink beer, sustaining a tension and a melancholy otherwise absent from the film. The sex they end up having isn’t the hearts and flowers we would expect from hippies either. But one good scene can’t save Inherent Vice, which seems more like a bet than a film. I can imagine Anderson stating to one of his cohorts, “$100 says I write a script that makes no sense and still get the money to make a movie out of it!” He won and everyone else–not just the audience but all the women and people of color whose great, coherent scripts are left unproduced–lost.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

Sexism in Disney’s ‘Into The Woods’

This cross-post by Jackson Adler previously appeared at his blog The Windowsill.

CONTAINS SPOILERS for the stage musical and subsequent film adaptation of Into The Woods.

Previously, I have written on the racism in Disney’s Into The Woods, a film adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical that interweaves various European fairy tales into one tragicomedy. Sadly, while the movie certainly has its merits (and some great performances), it has a few more faults I would like to point out – particularly in regard to its subtle sexism towards women.

Much of The Baker’s Wife’s story is still the same as in the stage musical, with one major change – that of her death. Disney’s interpretation of her death has everything to do with the scene beforehand. Cinderella’s Prince uses his power as a nobleman, and the charm he has been taught to use, to seduce The Baker’s Wife. The Baker’s Wife is star-struck by The Prince, having even told Cinderella earlier that “[she] wouldn’t run if a prince was chasing [her].” However, when Cinderella’s Prince starts attempting to seduce The Baker’s Wife, she at first protests and even says “no.” He follows her protestations with “right and wrong don’t matter in the woods,” and continues to kiss her. While certainly attracted to him and star-struck, the question must be asked – What if she had continued to protest instead giving in and allowing herself to enjoy something that seemed inevitable? Would he have forcibly raped her? Would he have had her arrested on a trumped up charge? Did her consent matter at all? Certainly, he is more culpable in their affair, since he is an authority figure.

Cinderella’s Prince (Chris Pine) comes on to The Baker’s Wife (Emily Blunt)

After the brief affair, The Baker’s Wife sings “Moments in the Woods,” as a way of coming to terms with what has happened and to bring herself to return to the beauty of everyday life with her husband and child. In the stage version, as the Giantess walks by and her large feet make the ground tremble, a tree falls on The Baker’s Wife and kills her. The stage musical leaves the meaning of these events open to interpretation. I personally never interpreted The Baker’s Wife’s death as some sort of punishment. It seemed fitting to me that The Giant, who is avenging the murder of her husband and asserting her role as a wife, should accidentally damage/condemn the life of a woman who slept with a man other than her husband. However, while the stage musical leaves interpretations up to the audience, the film makes a firm judgment call. In the film, as the ground shakes, The Baker’s Wife falls off a cliff and dies.

It seems Disney is saying that The Baker’s Wife is a “fallen woman,” and that it is making a firm decision on how it wants the audience to interpret the affair that occurred. This is made more problematic by how the affair was shot and choreographed. In the film, Cinderella’s Prince pins The Baker’s Wife against a tree and kisses her. There is nowhere for her to escape, even if she wanted to. After some kissing, the affair seems over and the prince leaves (which is very different from most stage adaptations, where a lot more than kissing is implied). So The Baker’s Wife is condemned by Disney and made into a literally “fallen woman,” just because a prince kissed her? And even after she decides to return to her husband and child, content not to have another affair ever again?

While only one major change is made to The Baker’s Wife’s story, half of Rapunzel’s story arc is cut, which in turn takes away from the character development of The Witch. Unlike in the stage musical, Rapunzel does not have a mental breakdown, and she does not get squashed and killed by the giantess (who was annoyed by her raving and screaming) in front of her mother and husband. In Disney’s film, the only consequence of Rapunzel having lived a sheltered childhood is that she runs away from her mother with the first guy she has ever met. The film even cut the fact that she becomes a mother to twins, something that would change anyone’s outlook on life, and certainly take a lot of responsibility – a responsibility for which Rapunzel is not ready. These cuts in the story take away entire conversations that are important for us to have as a culture. The Witch was trying to protect her daughter by sheltering her, but it is the fact that Rapunzel was so heavily sheltered that leads to her undoing, and ultimately leads to her death. Not only that, but Rapunzel develops a mental illness, something that still (and wrongfully) induces a terrible stigma in our society.

In addition, Rapunzel’s and The Witch’s story in the stage musical shows how our most well-intended actions can negatively affect those we care for most. Rapunzel was damaged by her upbringing in a way that made it impossible for her to be a functional human being in society. Not even her prince can help her. The Witch’s song “Witch’s Lament,” in which she sings about how “children won’t listen,” comes after Rapunzel’s death in the stage musical, but in the film it comes after Rapunzel and her prince gallop off into the sunset.

The song is still emotional, as her daughter has rejected her and left her forever. However, the pain within the song is incredibly undermined by the change in circumstances. The Witch then does not have as much justification for her breakdown in “The Last Midnight.” In the song, The Witch rages against all the “nice” people who have brought ruin upon her, her daughter, and the kingdom itself. She is fed up with the world, others’ treatment of her, and possibly of herself. The Witch then vaguely kills herself by goading the spirit(?) of her own mother, challenging her to curse her. Without the death of the person whom she loved most in the world, The Witch is denied what is arguably the most essential part of her character arc, and the story of Into The Woods is deprived of some of its most important themes.

The Witch (Meryl Streep) watches as Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) rides into the distance with Rapunzel’s Prince (Billy Magnussen).

To make matters worse, the way the special effects were designed during The Witch’s death reminds one of images of Hell, as if to imply that The Witch was sucked down into Hell by the spirit of her mother. This most definitely goes against the messages of the story, and in fact even some of the lyrics in “The Last Midnight.” The Witch is not “good or bad,” but she is “right” about many things (though not about how she raised her daughter). It is the fact that she is “right,” and yet an older and powerful woman (a “witch”) that has drawn condemnation from the other characters, many of whom don’t even know about (most of) the drama between her and Rapunzel. The Witch not only has had a large part of her character arc taken away from her, but she is then metaphorically sent to Hell. For what? For being a complicated human being? By the same line of thinking, what about The Wolf whose only crime was doing what wolves do? What about the adulterous princes who were raised “to be charming, not sincere,” and therefore abuse their power and influence? No, none of them are sent to Hell. The older woman is. Not only is there sexism in this, but there is also ageism. After her death in the film, The Witch’s body is swallowed up by a bubbling tar pit. Women are already overly punished in this film, and it’s no small matter that one of the greatest examples of it is for an older and powerful woman. The stage adaptation took a character that is the villain in fairy tales, and focused on her as a human being, making her into one of the main characters and a complicated human being to be played by a leading actress. The audience is invited to sympathize with her and her intentions, despite the fact that some of them backfire on her and her daughter. To take away so much of her arc undermines what makes the story powerful, and it is a disservice to the role, to the actress (Meryl Streep), and to the audience.

Into The Woods is a complicated story about complicated people, ending with the understanding that no one is completely good or evil, and we all must love and support each other as best we can. It saddens me that the female characters’ stories were altered in the way they were. I can only hope that this newer generation of film-goers is inspired by the film to seek out the many adaptations of the stage version and appreciate the story for what it is – one of community and caring, and not judgment and debasement.

Jackson Adler is a transguy with a BA in Theatre, and is a writer, activist, director, teacher, dramaturge, cartoon lover, and vegan boba drinker. You can follow him on twitter @JacksonAdler, and see more of his writing on the blog The Windowsill at http://windowsillblog.com.

‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘Citizenfour’: Secrets Then and Now

A stereotype in popular media about very smart people is that they must have some great deficiency in other areas of their lives–as if someone with extraordinary intelligence being able to make friends and get laid would be unfair to the rest of us. The only reason I can surmise for the positive reviews The Imitation Game, a highly fictionalized new film about gay, World War II codebreaker Alan Turing is that it confirms all the “normal” audience’s worst suspicions about “genius” and queer life, without offering any meaningful insight into either.

Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone. Because he has no peers to rely on, the main gay guy invariably confides in the straight guy (particularly ridiculous in The Imitation Game’s 1940s setting) just like in movies set in the Civil Rights-era South, Black people have all their deepest conversations–and bonds–with white people. When a film shows the rare group of people of color relying on each other, as in Selma, awards snub it and prominent white guys denounce it. When a film like the underrated Pride shows a group of queers working together, the blurb on the back of the DVD makes sure it doesn’t offend any “Christian values” by mentioning something as crass as LGBT identity.

“Homosexuals”–as they were known then–could be arrested during the time the film takes place (as Turing was after the war, one of the few parts of the film that isn’t doctored) and imprisoned both in England and elsewhere, but that didn’t stop them from existing or having sex with each other–and straight people knew them even if they didn’t acknowledge that they did. World War II was a vehicle for many queers from the US (and probably those in the UK too) to find each other, no longer isolated in their small hometowns. But even before the war, academia (where Turing came from) was, notoriously, also a refuge for gay men. The arts were another. Accounts from those who knew him say that Turing was quite open about his sexuality (instead of the anguished confessions we see here): and then, as now, straight people (and I’m presuming most of the people interviewed were straight) were always the last to know. Also unchanged in the intervening years: the rules for men in power or ones with powerful friends were different: actor John Gielgud was arrested in the same time period as Turing was for having sex with another man, but faced neither imprisonment nor the forced hormone treatment Turing accepted instead of a prison sentence.

Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) and the guys

All the most interesting twists of the story are the ones the film avoids. As part of the huge wartime operation at Bletchley Park Turing had helped win the war against the Nazis (in fact his team’s decryption might have been the deciding factor) but he couldn’t tell anyone about it–nor could anyone else. Some powerful people did write letters of support for him during his trial, but they couldn’t say precisely why they were writing them. If his work during the war hadn’t been secret the charges against him probably would never have come to trial–or been made in the first place.

Instead, what passes for drama in this film are pedestrian scenes that are the invention of screenwriter Graham Moore. Even though there’s no historical evidence of any such incident we get more than one sequence in which Turing’s supervisors attempt to destroy his work. “You will never understand the importance of what I’m creating here,” Benedict Cumberbatch, as Turing, cries in the first film performance I’ve seen that is best encapsulated by the phrase “the gnashing of teeth.”

These scenes might be a reflection of the vanity of its hack filmmakers (writer Moore along with director Morten Tyldum). “I’m afraid these men would only slow me down,” the film’s Turing says about the team of other codebreakers. Not only does this film leave out all the other people (including some Polish cryptologists who made a valuable prototype) who helped Turing get to the point where he could successfully design and run Bombe (not “Christopher”: the name Turing gives his codebreaking computer in the film– after his first love!) but in the film he’s also perpetually misunderstood and under-appreciated by others the same way white, male writer and director “auteurs” seem to often feel they and their own work are, even as they dismiss (and underpay) the many other people who make their films possible and enjoyable. Maybe this parallel is the reason for the spate of “great man” films and the awards they always seem to collect this time of year.

The lone woman with a decent-sized part in the film is Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) Turing’s fellow cryptanalyst who becomes his friend and, for a time, is engaged to him. Unlike the ridiculous scene in the film when Turing breaks up with her, the real-life Clarke was reportedly “unfazed” when she found out her fiancé was queer, because in those days (as the film touches very briefly on) marriage was the only way for most young women to get away from the control of their parents.

And even though a big deal is made of Joan Clarke being one of the only woman cryptanalysts, like “Rosie The Riveter” stateside, 80 percent of Bletchley Park’s employees were women. The codebreakers were popularly known as “Dilly’s girls” after the (male) head of the operation, none of which is reflected in Game. Thanks for erasing the historical contributions of women again, mainstream film industry!

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Another film about genius and secrets making the rounds of top ten lists and awards is Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, the documentary about Edward Snowden, who acted as a whistleblower by releasing evidence of the US’s widespread and unconstitutional spying on its own citizens.

You’d never know from the many news accounts about Snowden that Poitras was the first person he made real contact with when he decided to go public. Poitras reads his first message aloud on the soundtrack, “Laura, at this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope that you understand that contacting you is extremely high-risk.”

The film makes clear, hilariously, that when Snowden first tried to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald, who is usually given the credit for bringing Snowden’s story to the rest of the world, Greenwald couldn’t learn to use the encryption Snowden (who knew how volatile this information was) insisted on, so Snowden moved on to Poitras (who was well-versed in encryption after the government had seized footage from her previous documentaries, including one about the Iraq war). After a time Snowden suggesting that she bring in Greenwald–when presumably she could instruct him what he needed to do to get his encryption skills up to snuff.

Citizenfour, I had to keep reminding myself, shows us history in the making. We meet Snowden before his first media interview. We see him in the hotel room in Hong Kong where he was first holed up when the story broke. I had to keep telling myself what I was seeing was important because most of it is otherwise pretty dull.

We never find out much about Snowden beyond what we’ve seen in other media. He is a man who is preternaturally sure and calm about what he’s done, perhaps because, as an autodidact (he has a GED) at the top of a highly skilled field, he was able to think for himself on the implications of the work he was being asked to do.

We do see the travails of another whistleblower who went through more traditional channels and is still suffering blowback for it, to show us why Snowden released the info to the media directly. And we see Snowden upset at how the girlfriend he lived with and left behind in Hawaii is treated by the government in his absence. But as a friend remarked as we left the theater, “Watching Edward Snowden stare at his laptop isn’t very exciting.”

Although Snowden was sure he would be tried and imprisoned for his actions, saying in one of his preliminary messages to Poitras, “In the end if you publish the source material I will likely be immediately implicated,” he eventually saw that he could, with help, escape and chose to do so. But the scenes that should build up tension and our empathy for him (even those of us who admire his actions and sympathize with his plight) fall flat.

An exception is when we see Snowden’s face on video blown up to epic proportions in a main Hong Kong Square, just after his first big media interview, and then cut back to Snowden still in his hotel room, trying to change his appearance so he won’t be recognized (and abducted) on his way to the airport. Otherwise we don’t feel like we are in Snowden’s shoes in this film, even as we spend much of our time looking and listening to him. At the end we see Snowden has reunited with his girlfriend in Russia (where he has been trapped since the US government cancelled his passport–just before he could catch the second leg of his escape flight). We see them through a window, preparing dinner together, from a distance, an apt metaphor for how well we have come to know Snowden in this film ostensibly about him.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

________________________________________

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