On Television – Page 8

Rey Is Not the First Female Jedi Protagonist

You can thank me when you’ve finished watching ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ and ‘Star Wars Rebels.’ In my opinion, they’re everything ANY of the ‘Star Wars’ movies lacked in story writing, character development, and feminism. You’re welcome.

This guest post written by Estella Ramirez.

A few years ago, I wrote an article about Ahsoka Tano. I praised the animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, because of its variety of female characters and how it passes the Bechdel Test, with some story arcs featuring a trilogy of women in leading roles. These often included Ahsoka Tano as our Jedi hero and Asajj Ventress as our force-sensitive villain, so powerful, only Yoda could confront her without assistance. At the start of the show, Ahsoka has been assigned as Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan. She is not presented to us as exceptionally strong with the force, the way Luke, Anakin, and most recently, Rey, were presented. Unlike these three, Ahsoka underwent a lifetime of Jedi training. This immunizes her against that ill-intentioned label of “Mary Sue,” whereby one claims that a female character is inexplicably perfect, yet she displays exhilarating super-human abilities that are in keeping with the other Jedis. She is, however, exceptional in her drive to improve as a Jedi and, as she matures as a character, to improve as a leader. Ahsoka is as confident and independently minded as Anakin, yet humble enough to take direction at crucial moments, from him, from Clone Trooper captains, from Senator Amidala, and from her Jedi fellows and elders. One gets a sense of her weaknesses as well as her strengths.

Asajj Ventress is introduced to us as an imposing villain. As her character develops, we learn that she comes from a clan called the Night Sisters. She is exceptionally force sensitive, but she is neither Jedi nor Sith. She becomes more and more compelling as the show progresses. Let’s just say Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni knows how to pick his writing teams.

In that article, I looked forward to a new project by Filoni and team, called Star Wars Rebels. The time has come to praise this show, especially in light of the overwhelming success in theatres of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

It’s clear The Force Awakens captured our curiosity and our hearts. Many have pointed out what I do not need to say. Hooray for a blockbuster with a woman Jedi protagonist!!! I defend her unrealistic natural ability by pointing out that EVERY MALE HERO IN EVERY ACTION MOVIE possesses unrealistic ability and unrealistic luck. That’s the point: to see on-screen someone doing the things we could only do in our fantasies. We love our underdogs. For Star Wars in particular, it is important to note that being in tune with the force gives you the power to transcend your physical limitations. It’s what’s so endearing and inspiring about Yoda. No one questions Yoda’s power even though he is the size of a terrier and at least hundreds of years old. But Rey has no training! I feel the comment sections pulsating with the words. To that, I submit what Anakin Skywalker, barely out of toddlerhood, was able to do without Jedi training.

Star Wars tells us that to triumph you need to be strong of mind, focus, and little else. If your suspension of disbelief is only threatened when the character is a woman, then you need to reevaluate your life. I’ll add that both Rey and Finn had applicable training to explain their skills with the light saber. Rey survived as an orphan in Jakku fighting with a staff (and we don’t know all her life yet, so hold your judgment) and Finn had combat training as a Storm Trooper since childhood, so it can be presumed that his training could have been comprehensive, despite how necessary a plot point it is for Storm Troopers to be completely incompetent when faced by our heroes. Hey, it’s a movie. Finn, it’s important to note, represents an exceptional character as well. Of all the storm troopers, he has the independence of thought and strength of character to rebel against his training, on moral principle.

As lovely as it is to see the matter-of-factness with which The Force Awakens makes Rey a Jedi protagonist, and how audiences overwhelmingly embraced the movie, we have yet to reach feminist paradise. When it comes to the toys and game pieces (#WheresRey) some decision-makers decided that boys wouldn’t be interested in Rey figurines – no fair to blame the boys. They aren’t the problem; it’s our job to be the adults. Even if focus groups showed that boys preferred to play with figurines that they identified with, where were the adults to see the commercial potential of girls buying action figures because they finally could identify with them? I watched the movie…twice. And I cried quite a bit…twice. I thought about the little girls who would see the movie, for whom what’s possible drastically shifted forward, but just as importantly, the little boys, and children anywhere in the gender spectrum, who would see the possibilities for women and girls. I still remember being in second grade with my Barbies, and my classmate pulling down their tops and acting out how smitten he was. In my previous article, I wrote about how despite the show representing Ahsoka Tano as a fully realized character, fetishists managed to objectify her in their fan art. My hope is that today’s kids can see images and toys depicting women as heroes and protagonists instead, and they realize female characters are interesting for some of the same reasons male characters are – they take their imagination on a world of story and adventure.

Observing the other women in The Force Awakens, I’m looking forward to more of Lupita Nyong’o’s character Maz, because one does not hire an actress of her caliber and not bank on further developing her character in the sequels. I’d like to see more of Captain Phasma, who was severely undermined by how easily Finn and company captured her. I get that it was necessary to the plot, but is that all there is to her? Having one developed female character in Rey, and a few respectful nods to women of color in the background as military and pilots, shows a nice bit of progress, but it’s not enough.

At a talk in Georgetown University last year, Ruth Bader Ginsberg (aka Notorious RBG) said we’ll have enough female justices when all nine justices are women because when all nine have been men, no one questioned it. At the end of the movie, Rey reverently hands back Luke’s saber to him, and you know what? We’ll have enough female Jedi when one woman hands the saber to another woman, when Rey is more than just a female Luke Skywalker, when any child would love to play with a Rey figurine because, duh, she’s a hero.

To see how it’s really done, check out Rebels. Before Ezra shows up, half the Rebel team on the Ghost is comprised of women. Hera is the ship’s lead pilot and owner, and Sabine is the explosives expert, artist, and tagger.

They get shit done. In an interesting episode, Hera and Sabine bond over a difficult mission, incidentally because Ezra and Zeb failed to refuel the ship, as directed by Hera. Hera and Sabine encounter ravenous creatures, and must fight them off with limited resources and without a means of escape. Ezra and Zeb, like Finn does with Rey, rush over to save the “damsels” only to find the women found a solution themselves. They climb aboard while covering the remaining creatures with gunfire. Ezra attempts to save Sabine from one such creature, but finding him overcome, Sabine saves him. They may not be Jedis, and our protagonist Jedis are indeed men, but Hera and Sabine are equally compelling protagonists in the storytelling.

Filoni and his team have been writing feminist stories long before The Force Awakens. I don’t know if it’s deliberate on their part, or if the stories are what I call accidentally or “casually feminist,” meaning they organically pass the Bechdel Test by virtue of including more female lead characters. In any case, this is ideal as it proves that anyone can enjoy a feminist story. The shows are meant for kids, and adults love them, too, because they are good stories, made better by having more female characters. There’s less “Mary Sue” happening because no one female character has to represent the whole of her gender.

Lastly, without spoiling the identity, I’ll hint that a female Jedi appears at the end of the first season of Rebels (squee!), and another squee-worthy female character appearing in its current second season. You can thank me when you’ve finished watching Clone Wars and Rebels. In my opinion, they’re everything ANY of the Star Wars movies lacked in story writing, character development, and feminism. You’re welcome.

Estella Ramirez is a private tutor, writing coach, and singer in Los Angeles. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, and her poetry has been featured in several literary journals. You can read her other article on Ahsoka Tano at The Toast. Read more of her feminist-friendly fandom writing, plus other updates at her personal blog. You can also find her profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

‘Jessica Jones,’ The Kilgrave Mirror and the Distancing Effect of Negative Masculinity

The result is that while many viewers are no doubt cishet white men, few will truly identify with what Kilgrave illustrates not just about rapists and abusers, but about negative ideas about masculinity itself.

This is a guest post by Scott Remington.

When Netflix announced their new series Jessica Jones featured a villain who was not just evil, but an actual emotionally abusive manipulator, there was a rush on various social networks to remind fans that despite being a superhero show, his actions would not be unlike ones real people have experienced. In Jessica Jones, they seemed to suggest, we can see more than just a superhero trying to triumph over a villain, but reflections of real people’s struggle with the emotional wreckage of abuse and rape and the difficulty survivors face in having to move past it while the abusers remain at large. The show has been praised for its ability to illustrate what abusive techniques like gaslighting, victim-blaming, and emotional coercion can feel like, thanks to the way viewers identify with the title character and her struggle to overcome her PTSD. Yet Jessica Jones falters in one key area, and that is with viewer identification with the negative aspects of masculinity displayed by the abuser, Kilgrave.

Kilgrave’s ability is mind control, but within the context of the show it’s not just how he can make anyone do anything, it’s how getting anything he wants simply by asking for it has led to him growing up with an enormous sense of entitlement to the world and the people in it. Series creator and showrunner Melissa Rosenburg reflected on this in an article where she drew parallels from Kilgrave’s power to the privilege and entitlement white men have normalized for themselves through media and the principle of American bootstrap logic. When he’s denied what he believes is his (Jessica’s love), Kilgrave becomes fixated on changing her mind much the way men try to reason with women who reject their advances.

Throughout the series, Kilgrave obtains money, fancy dinner reservations, and yes, even people, with barely a thought to whether he should have them. His manipulation results in trauma and death for many of those around Jessica. While this makes him a powerful avatar of privilege and colonialism, it also has the consequence of making Kilgrave and all he represents into “the other.” As long as his actions so clearly violate laws of viewer’s morality, and are portrayed as such by the main character, it’s unlikely viewers will reflect on what they mean coming from a man motivated by ideas about masculinity and not just free will. The result is that while many viewers are no doubt cishet white men, few will truly identify with what Kilgrave illustrates not just about rapists and abusers, but about negative ideas about masculinity itself.

Kilgrave does many things representing male fantasies, such as when he joins a high stakes game of poker and forces all the other men to let him win. He eggs them on with emasculating insults, (“Where are your balls?”) and boosts his ego even further by compelling the non-participating women in the room to echo his words at them. When threatened by a man for leaving without giving them a chance to win their money back, Kilgrave slips out by getting him to pound his head against a pole. It’s a twist on the “underdog outwits the bad guys” formula, the masculine idea of triumphing against the odds through brains, not brawn, but given a bad taste when we later learn Kilgrave will use the money to buy Jessica’s old house to enact a disturbing parody of a marriage and the American Dream.

No less disturbing, but far more culturally relevant is Kilgrave’s ability to blackmail Jessica into sending him photos of her under fear of reprisal against those she cares about. While male viewers no doubt see his actions to control her via the threat of violence as abusive, it’s unlikely many would associate his desire to have them with the way men casually request similar from women on dating sites as though it were a normal and not potentially dangerous request (see the celebrity photo hack). A phenomenon often observed in scenes where women fight sexism is how male viewers identify with the character “triumphing” yet don’t see how they have more in common with the male perpetrator than the character.

Jessica Jones features several examples where men’s seemingly innocuous entitlement to a woman’s body or her attention is shown as an annoyance, such as when a man harasses Patsy and Jessica in the bar with suggestive comments, to actively dangerous, such as Simpson’s insistence that he be allowed to make up for trying to kill Patsy while under Kilgrave’s control. Simpson’s struggle to overcome his mind control manifests in increasingly dangerous ways, yet overlooks the fact that as a white male in a position of authority his insistence on being “forgiven” by Trish is a function of privilege and abuse and not just personality. When the perspective shifts to actions, viewers are often given an excuse not to identify with the masculinity the character expresses, or else they excuse it by suggesting the characters’ actions are “not what I would do.”

This is nothing new however, as the cognitive flip that allows viewers to enjoy watching and rooting for male anti-heroes/villains while ignoring their own ties to the message is so common it’s basically accepted as part of the cishet white anti-hero character. The distance viewers establish from the characters is present in the so called “morally grey character,” a simultaneously cautionary tale/wish fulfillment vessel who follows a path of masculinity leading them to make terrible decisions most viewers innately reject. Often the characters justify this as being either about “surviving” or “protecting,” two feelings viewers identify with even when the result twists into something amoral.

For examples of the dark side of control and protection, look no further than the darkly comedic serial killer drama Dexter. The series urged viewers to root for and identify with a white male anti-hero who compartmentalized his life in order to exercise the ultimate form of control by killing those who the viewer saw as “monstrous” as their actions made them unforgivable. It’s notable that the titular character always painted his targets in black and white terms based on their actions, while he (and many viewers) dismissed his own horrendous behavior as not under his control, thus absolving him from similar judgment. A closer look often revealed Dexter’s “good” side to be both a shield, as well as genuinely relatable in how he struggled with being a father and husband while hiding his need for homicidal behavior.

Throughout the series, Dexter faced other murderous men who reflected parts of him — men equally control obsessed and claimed just as many lives — yet viewers were always allowed to identify with Dexter’s paternalism and vigilantism enough to brush off lies and deceptions. This distancing from his obsession with control remained so strong that it was only by the end of the series that people saw the true damage wreaked by his attempts to hide his secret from his loved ones. Dexter’s killer masculinity may have been an exaggeration, but his selfishness is all the more dangerous because of how easily men identify with lying for the “sake” of others’ safety.

The theme of “protecting” is central to the masculinity of the “good” anti-hero, even when that protection is not necessarily wanted. For a shining example, look no further than the forever-entitled patriarch Walter White (See what they did there?) in Breaking Bad. Viewers were quick to identify with Walter’s meek, emasculated everyman who nonetheless possessed an aptitude for the sciences that made him capable in entertaining yet deadly ways. Like Dexter, the fun was seeing how Walter could regain control when under pressure. However, where Dexter kept his life secret from his loyal wife Rita, Walter’s wife bore the brunt of Walter’s anger and dissatisfaction. Skyler White was accused of second guessing and belittling her husband on numerous occasions, even while she tried desperately to free her family from the dangerous life he made them a part of. Viewers identified with Walter’s amoral antics while despising Skyler for talking back or lashing out against her husband’s poisonous control “with such venom” that actress Anna Gunn wrote an entire essay on how easily the annoyance with Skyler conflated annoyance with her in real life and what this indicates about our perspectives on gender and misogyny.

When viewers analyzed Walter’s pathological refusal to take “charity” or his pride and belief he DESERVED to be more than a high school science teacher, they rarely scrutinized the connection to masculinity. When he manipulated his former student Jesse Pinkman under the guise of security and partnership, viewers excused it as necessary to keep him safe, and rarely saw it as the same kind of entitlement that Kilgrave practiced. When Walter himself admitted he’d done what he’d done not just for his family, but because he enjoyed the power and control he got, viewers saw him as a figure consumed ambition, not a man like themselves who had grown up believing they had a right to wealth and fame simply by growing up in the “land of opportunity.”

But the most unnerving example of these toxic avatars whose critique of masculinity goes unacknowledged is the one whose popularity is itself evidence of how far male viewers will identify yet differentiate themselves from negative masculinity. Tyler Durden of Chuck Palahniuk’s ode to lost manhood and twisted revolution, Fight Club, and portrayed by Brad Pitt in the much-lauded David Fincher film. Acting as both a charismatic cult leader to young men who feel emasculated and beaten down by corporate culture, and a dangerous realization of the Alpha Male archetype, the narrator, like the audience, is at first captivated by the controlled presence of Tyler.

In Tyler’s own words he is: “smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not,” a real life masculine fantasy being sold to the yearning men of the world, including the young cishet white viewers. Yet, the narrator’s relationship with Tyler is not portrayed as a healthy one, ranging from him excusing bruises on his face with explicit reference to domestic violence, to him tricking his boss to let him leave work by making himself look like a victim of him. As corporate skyscrapers fall, male viewers reject Tyler’s actions, but have they really understood how Tyler Durden’s masculinity exists all around us? In the white terrorism from the rage at not feeling recognized? Or in the men who see women as only virgins or whores?

Melissa Rosenberg referred to Kilgrave as “Jessica’s Chinatown,” alluding to the legendarily bleak film by the convicted sex offender Roman Polanski, whose most haunting scene is the failure of the male hero Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to save Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her sister/daughter from the clutches of her predatory father. What the film doesn’t dwell on is how Jake learns this information: a desperate interrogation wherein his masculine desire to “find the truth” motivates him to hit a woman and (unknowingly) an abuse survivor, while ignoring her tears and pleas.

Movies are mirrors, and just because we don’t like the reflection they display doesn’t mean viewers can shatter them and then claim it’s not accurate. Because movies aren’t mirrors individually: they represent diverse people’s experience of the world and the people in it. If we’re willing to accept Jessica Jones as the story about one woman’s struggle with a male abuser, why can’t we accept that, on some level, it’s just as much a story about women’s experience with harmful masculinity as it is about “monstrous” abusers?

Scott Remington is a TV aficionado and prospective writer, currently examining privilege and gender via social media. Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and multiple credits in religious studies, he analyzes movies at (https://myfearfulsymmetry.wordpress.com/) and provides support to others at @RemingtonWild on Twitter. He has no cats but would like to someday own several.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we have been reading this week — and let us know what you have been reading/writing in the comments!

A Year with Women: What I Learned Only Watching Films Directed by Women in 2015 by Marya E. Gates at Cinema Fanatic

Where Are All the Diverse Voices in Film Criticism? by Chaz Ebert at The Daily Beast

Why Are So Few Film Critics Female? by Katie Kilkenny at The Atlantic

The 10 Best Women-Directed Films of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

The Women of Star Wars Speak Out About Their New Empire by Meredith Woerner at The Los Angeles Times

Gina Rodriguez Writes “Love Letter” to Rita Moreno at Kennedy Center Honors by Celia Fernandez via Latina

Fuck You, Spike Lee: Chi-Raq Is an Insult to Do the Right Thing, to Black Women, and to Malcolm X by Ijeoma Oluo via The Stranger

Of Fear and Fake Diversity by Lexi Alexander

Going Home for the First Time: A Return to Cuba by Monica Castillo at RogerEbert.com

Carol Is the Lesbian-Centric Christmas Movie of My Dreams by Grace Manger via Bitch Media

The 11 Most Important Women of Color Moments of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

Mara Brock Akil Talks Doing the Work in Spite of Not Getting the Recognition She Deserves via For Harriet

Mustang Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven on Turkish film, L.A. riots and Escape From Alcatraz by Carolina A. Miranda via The Los Angeles Times

The Best and Worst LGBT TV Characters of 2015 via Autostraddle

Leia-Loving Feminists Have A New Hope for Female Roles in Star Wars by Sarah Seltzer at Flavorwire

Writer Phyllis Nagy Talks Adapting Carol by Nikki Baughan at Screen Daily

How Our February Cover Star Amandla Stenberg Learned to Love Her Blackness by Solange Knowles at Teen Vogue

Young Women Weigh in on the Hijabi Character on Quantico by Lakshmi Gandhi at NPR

Fandom vs. Canon: On Queer Representation in The Force Awakens by Maddy Myers at The Mary Sue

The Case for Female Filmmakers in 2015: Breaking Down the Stats by Carrie Rickey at Thompson on Hollywood

Laurie Anderson on Her New Film, Heart of a Dog by David Hershkovits at Paper Magazine

The Top 10 Film/TV Moments for Queer Women in 2015 by Dorothy Snarker at Women and Hollywood

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘Jessica Jones’: A Discomforting Yet Real Portrayal of Abuse

If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave. … He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger warning: discussion of intimate partner abuse] | Spoilers ahead.

There’s TV that, when you watch, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and can be likened to a hug. For me, it’s Grey’s Anatomy. And then there’s TV that doesn’t necessarily fall within this category that I still love, such as Orange Is the New Black, with its focus on crime, drug addiction, broken families and poverty, and that upon marathoning makes you ache to get back to the trials and tribulations of Sophia, Taystee, Poussey, and Red.

Despite binging Jessica Jones over my Christmas and New Year’s break, I almost dreaded sitting down for a few hours every afternoon to check into Jessica’s world. I guess that’s what a series directed so heavily at abuse is wont to do.

https://twitter.com/mojorojo/status/670495742503489537
https://twitter.com/2k16sebastian/status/676787210411208704

In the six weeks or so since Jessica Jones was released in full on Netflix, the internet has been abuzz with its brilliance. Many feminists asserted that this is what it feels like to watch content created for women, by women, while others marveled (pun intended) at the show’s gritty portrayal of New York City and an actually villainous villain, a departure from some of Marvel’s other offerings.

Jessica Jones’ emphasis on abuse was also heavily discussed. Kia Groom at The Mary Sue wrote about her experience in a similarly abusive relationship as the one central to the TV series. Stassa Edwards at Jezebel wrote:

“If Jessica Jones is a feminist show, as many critics have said that it is, it’s not simply because it presents a complicated woman, but rather because it understands how strength and control play out in the lives of women.”

To return to OITNB, for example, the fellow Netflix offering isn’t necessarily littered with likable characters (*cough* Piper *cough*), but there are enough peripheral characters whose backstories come ‘round every now and then to tide you over while the story pivots back to Piper, Alex and the more boring inmates. Despite a couple of likable characters in Jessica Jones (I can only think of Malcolm and Trish), they weren’t enough to get me excited to come back to the rollercoaster of emotions. This is understandable: pretty much all of the characters are victims of some kind of abuse, whether it be villain Kilgrave’s mind control or otherwise, so if anyone has an excuse to be pissy, it’s them.

Edwards writes:

“…[Jessica Jones’] expression of anger — her inability to contain it — is what makes Jones deeply unlikable. But then, being unlikeable is part and parcel of being a woman on the edge. The emotional expression of anger has always been coded as an indelible marker of trauma and of difference.”

But what even are “likable” characters? Roxane Gay, a couple of years ago almost to the day, wrote about this phenomenon at Buzzfeed, touching on points from unlikable female characters being perceived to be suffering from mental illness, being inconveniences and coming across as having more humanity than likable ones. (Gay, as a survivor of sexual assault herself, has also written about the futility of trigger warnings, however this piece makes the case for them in Jessica Jones.) Jessica Jones works so well because most of its characters reek of humanity, however unflattering.

What’s more important than likable characters, though, are relatable ones and Jessica Jones has that in spades. We get impressions of this when Jessica tells Trish she can’t comfort her when she’s tased in an attempt to capture Kilgrave and when Jessica pushes those close to her away.

Perhaps the most human character, despite his villainy, is Kilgrave. We are first introduced to him through Jessica’s perspective as a cold and calculating abuser, which he is. But as the season progresses, we see glimpses of Kilgrave’s humanity and that he himself was embroiled in the cycle of abuse perpetrated by his parents who performed experiments on him as a child in an attempt to understand his mind control powers. While Jessica Jones seems to want us to believe that Kilgrave’s parents were trying to protect him and others from his “gift,” to me it was unclear as to who was abusing whom.

As I started to fathom Kilgrave’s past, I was reminded of an article written in 2014 for White Ribbon, an Australian campaign for the prevention of violence against women (which has its own problems), by Tom Meagher whose wife Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in Melbourne in 2012. He asserted that, despite the attack perpetrated against Jill by a known criminal, rapists, murderers and abusers of women aren’t “monsters” lurking in dark alleyways and behind bushes in the dead of night: they’re most often known to, trusted and/or loved by those they choose to abuse. Meagher wrote:

“By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding the more terrifying concept that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions…

“The only thing more disturbing than that paradigm is the fact that most rapists are normal guys, guys we might work beside or socialize with, our neighbors or even members of our family.”

Groom echoes this at The Mary Sue:

“Yes, Kilgrave is a rapist, but his sexual abuse is not of the kind we often see represented on television; he abuses in the context of relationships that seem, to the outside observer, consensual, and it is this — his psychological abuse of his victims, his absolute and total control and manipulation of them, his dominance over their agency and their free will — that make[s] him so utterly terrifying.”

Edwards further expands on this at Jezebel, asserting that Kilgrave is a different kind of villain — and a more terrifying one — from your typical Marvel fare in that:

“…The mundanity of control he exercises over Jones, over nearly every woman who crosses his path, is what makes him so evil, even more menacing than the typical villain. Kilgrave is every woman’s worst nightmare: he is a rapist, an unrepentant stalker, a man who, at any moment, can exercise his power and does.”

This “monster myth” and the cycle of abuse can also be seen in Officer Will Simpson, who begins a relationship with Trish after he tries to kill her whilst brainwashed by Kilgrave. Cate Young at Batty Mamzelle (cross-posted here at Bitch Flicks) explores this in depth. The fact that the actress who plays Trish Walker, Rachael Taylor, also survived abuse by her high profile ex-partner in 2010 adds yet another layer to the series.

As these examples attest, what Jessica Jones arguably has more of than relatable characters is relatable situations.

Not everyone can relate to being in an abusive relationship, and thank god. I haven’t personally been abused by a partner, but I grew up in a violent home as well as abuse being a big part of my life in recent years in reading about it, watching it take place on screen and in the news, and working towards changing attitudes about it through my writing and in everyday conversations (though I could be doing more; we all could). One of the more pervasive attitudes surrounding intimate partner violence is asking why the survivor “doesn’t just leave” without paying mind to the isolation from loved ones and external support systems by the abuser; the abuser’s reinforcement of worthlessness in the survivor; the depletion of their resources, such as money and their ability to make a living; and the threatening of children, pets and other loved ones. If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave.

Kilgrave preyed on a once vibrant and happy young Jessica Jones, glimpses of whom we see in a bar scene with Trish in episode five, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me,” trauma which caused her to suffer from paranoia and alcoholism. Even after she manages to escape him, her life in tatters and suffering from PTSD, Kilgrave infiltrates himself back into her life, turning even the most tenuously connected people to her into his pawns, such as Malcolm, her — again — once vibrant and now drug-addicted neighbor. In a metaphor for the disbelief domestic violence survivors often face, Kilgrave manipulates Jessica’s allies into helping him, as seen with Jeri Hogarth assisting him in his escape, partly of her own free will but also under his mind control. He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves. He tries to win back her affections by buying her childhood home and restoring it to its former glory, another allegory for entrapment and, frankly, is just plain creepy. He tells her he can’t live without her and how much better she makes him, exemplified in their short-lived foray into tandem superheroism in episode eight (“AKA WWJD?”) when they save a family from another, perhaps more archetypal domestic abuser. This is also a pitch perfect portrayal of the hope an intimate partner violence survivor might face in seeing the “good” side of their partner and is transferred onto the audience: maybe Kilgrave can be good, I wondered.

Hope is a guiding force in Jessica’s pursuit of Kilgrave, embodied by the character of the same name. Jessica resists the easy way out — killing Kilgrave — for much of the thirteen episode arc as she needs him alive as proof of Hope’s innocence in her parenticide charges, committed under Kilgrave’s control. Proof is also something intimate partner abuse survivors are perpetually demanded to demonstrate — by law enforcement, the criminal justice system, society, even friends and family — even when it’s on their bodies in the form of blood and bruises and, in Hope’s case, in her uterus. Also, as previously stated, not all abuse is physical and society should believe, rather than disregard or dismiss, intimate partner violence survivors.

Despite Kilgrave’s rape of both Jessica and Hope, and his intention to do the same to Trish (and who knows how many others), showrunner Melissa Rosenberg was very conscious of depicting rape and abuse differently from a lot of other media that uses it as a “titillating” plot device, telling The Los Angeles Times:

“With rape, I think we all know what that looks like. We’ve seen plenty of it on television and I didn’t have any need to see it, but I wanted to experience the damage that it does. I wanted the audience to really viscerally feel the scars that it leaves. It was not important to me, on any level, to actually see it. TV has plenty of that, way too often, used as titillation, which is horrifying.”

Despite the influx of shows dealing with abuse, such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Game of Thrones and mainstay Law & Order: SVU (which Emily Nussbaum and Lindy West discuss on The New Yorker Radio Hour), how often do we actually hear the confident pronouncement of the word “rape” that Jessica spits at Kilgrave in other media? Jessica Jones succeeds in depicting sexual abuse in a more harrowing and real way than shows that throw it around willy-nilly for shock value and not much else.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

The Women of ‘American Ninja Warrior’ Challenge Gender Stereotypes

‘American Ninja Warrior’ may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not.

This is a guest post written by Cameron Airen, who interviewed Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.

“What!? Shut the front door. She’s about to do the impossible for the second time,” shouted the hosts of American Ninja Warrior as millions of us watched 5’0”, 95lb Kacy Catanzaro become the first woman to hit a city finals course. This meant that she was the first woman to qualify for Mount Midoriyama, the finals in Las Vegas consisting of four stages. Catanzaro’s achievement was led by her being the first woman in the history of the show to beat the warped wall and finish a qualifying course. She made history that year on American Ninja Warrior, but she wasn’t the only one.

2014 of American Ninja Warrior was the year of many firsts for women. Michelle Warnky and Meagan Martin were the second and third women to make it up the warped wall and hit buzzers on their city’s qualifying course following Catanzaro. This was the first time this many women qualified for a city’s finals course in the same season.

There are five women veterans on American Ninja Warrior that particularly stand out. Catanzaro, Warnky, and Martin are three of them. Jessie Graff was the first woman to complete five obstacles and the second woman, besides Catanzaro, to qualify for the Vegas finals. Joyce Shahboz was one of the first women to compete on the American Ninja Warrior course and has been participating since season four. At 44 years old, she is also the oldest woman “to make it to Vegas and to the 5th obstacle.” One of the reasons to love American Ninja Warrior is because it represents athletes of all ages. Shahboz told me, “There are things I can do now that I couldn’t do 3-4 years ago and I’m 44 as of today!”

One of the most captivating aspects of American Ninja Warrior is that the women compete on the same platform as the men, making gender irrelevant. This appeals to Warnky, who said,

“I know many people have made comments to me about having a separate Ninja Warrior for ladies. But for myself and at least several other ladies I’ve talked to, we like that extra challenge, we like the strength that is required, and we enjoy competing with the guys.”

The hosts of American Ninja Warrior, Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila, generally do a good job of not making a big deal of gender in relation to one’s performance on the course. During Martin’s run at the 2014 Denver finals, Gbajabiamila exclaimed, “She’s got the athleticism; she’s got the upper body strength; she’s built for American Ninja Warrior — that’s for sure!” This is a testament of how the course, with different obstacles that benefit different athletic strengths, is made for people of all genders.

By participating on American Ninja Warrior, women get to demonstrate their strength and other abilities, challenging the gender stereotypes placed upon them. There’s no doubt that the women have the strength, including upper body strength, in order to finish all of the obstacles. In fact, the upper body exercises are the women ninjas’ favorites to perform. Shahboz pointed out,

“The upper body challenges are appealing to us. In Japan, the Women of Ninja Warrior course isn’t as upper body intensive, and we all felt that was our forte and wanted more of the physical strength challenge instead of the balance challenges.”

On a tougher course with new obstacles, Jessie Graff was the first athlete to get the farthest on the 2015 Venice finals course. Even though she didn’t complete the course, she came close, making it to the second to last obstacle, giving it her best fight. Only the top 15 qualify for Vegas and she finished in sixth. Graff ended up being the woman who made it the farthest in a city finals course across the nation.

There is a huge gender disparity on American Ninja Warrior and that needs to change if we want to see women succeed more than they already do on the show. If there were as many women on the show as there are men, then there would be a greater chance of women making if farther. No woman has made it up the warped wall and hit the buzzer on stage one in Vegas yet in the history of the show. Shahboz believes it’s because of numbers: “We just haven’t had enough of us trying it out or training at the necessary level until now.” In season four, there were four women, Shahboz included, and 96 men competing in stage one in the Vegas finals. Warnky believes that the biggest challenge women face on stage one in Vegas is speed:

“I know Jessie Graff and I had many conversations and really wanted to beat it and knew we both had the ability to. Time plays a big factor in Vegas. In the regional rounds, most of us women play it pretty safe with time and don’t rush ourselves, whereas in Vegas, women are not able to stall much at all and need to go quickly through the obstacles and in-between the obstacles. Also, any time a girl does pretty well, history can be made, so I think we tend to focus on the safer and surer ways to do things, which isn’t really possible in stage 1. But I do think I have the ability to complete it, as do several other girls, we just didn’t make it happen the day it counted. Hopefully we’ll make that change soon!”

Even though the numbers are still low, more women competed in 2015 than any other year. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer of American Ninja Warrior, Kent Weed, said that the producers want more women competing and doing well, and that we will see more women compete as the show progresses. He doesn’t believe that succeeding at the obstacles has to do with gender and is confident that we will see our first woman to complete stage one in Vegas next year in 2016. Warnky expressed, “Hopefully, the show has encouraged other women to push their limits.” The more women see other women competing on the show, the more they will be inspired to train for it and get accepted.

“Could a woman ever win American Ninja Warrior?” an E! Online interviewer asked Isaac Caldiero after he became the first ever winner of American Ninja Warrior. Without hesitation, Caldiero responded, “Definitely. My girlfriend, Laura, could win it!” Even asking the question shows how far we have come in changing sexist beliefs and attitudes about women’s abilities. When Shahboz competed in season four, she was known for going farther than her husband. She said,

“People who didn’t know me or him would occasionally comment to him about getting beat by his wife. People would ask me, ‘How’d your husband take it?’ It’s still amazing to me that people still have the notion that ‘getting beat by a girl’ is an issue.”

Unfortunately, it is still an issue, otherwise the question of whether a woman could win wouldn’t even have been asked. But, American Ninja Warrior plays a pivotal role in changing all of that.

One way that the show doesn’t reinforce gender distinctions, aside from having women compete on the same platform as the men, is by not referencing gender when discussing an athlete’s abilities. During Martin’s performance at the Vegas 2014 finals, Gbajabiamila said,

“I’ve had a lot of sport heroes in my life: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson…Oh, add Meagan Martin to the list, what she did was phenomenal.”

Another way American Ninja Warrior doesn’t emphasis gender is that the athletes are all in support and cheer of each other. Shahboz pointed out that her male ninja competitors “have always been encouraging and supportive, it’s never been a guy vs. gal thing.” It’s refreshing to see a friendly community be positive and supportive of one another despite gender and background. This is definitely a rarity for competition shows on TV.

A sense of unity exists among the women of American Ninja Warrior. Even though it is a reality TV show, we don’t see unnecessary drama. It’s a show with friendly competition where the athletes support each other. This is a rarity on TV in general, especially in reality TV where women are often depicted as wanting to tear each other to shreds. It’s quite the opposite on American Ninja Warrior, making it one of those rare athletic competitions where you want everyone to do well. When one ninja falls, the other is sad that her fellow competitor did not make it. The women even travel to other cities to cheer each other on.

This solidarity is powerful and creates a positive influence for women and feminism. We need to see more of it onscreen. American Ninja Warrior may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not. Athletics is often viewed as a metaphor for the rest of our lives. What one learns in being able to conquer a physical obstacle can translate to facing obstacles in other aspects of life. The women on American Ninja Warrior are powerful examples of women coming into and owning their own power, whatever that may look like.

Check out a more in depth interview I did with Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.

Cameron Airen is a queer feminist with a M.A. in Anthropology and Social Change. She loves to dissect and write about women and gender in film/TV. Cameron is also passionate about vegan cooking and resides in Berkeley, Calif.

Rape, Consent and Race in Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’

Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’ is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism.

This guest post is written by Cate Young and originally appeared at her site BattyMamzelle. It is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape culture.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism. There are a lot of great things about this series that speak directly to the ills that women face on a daily basis. Kilgrave, the central villain, is chillingly terrifying, specifically because the only difference between him and your garden variety abuser is his total power to enact his will. The examination of male entitlement in ways both large and small (by contrasting Kilgrave and Simpson for example) are excellent and poignant. But as I watched the 13 episode first season, I was struck by how callously black people’s lives were treated on the show, rendered into convenient plot devices in service of the white female protagonist’s character development. As a black woman viewing the show, it was easy to see that the active pursuit of liberation from abuse was not a struggle that this show believes includes me (an ongoing struggle for Marvel). Ironically, the best parts of the show are its treatment with its villain, while the worst are its treatments with its female anti-heroine.

While I do have several critiques of the show, there were a number of things that I thought were handled exceptionally well. Firstly, this is a show driven by women about the fears and terrors that women must navigate in the world shrunk down to a micro-level, enabling us an intimate look at the various levels of abuse women routinely endure. The contrast between Kilgrave and Simpson is genius, as it helps demonstrate the full scale of abuse that men knowingly and unknowingly enact on the women around them. The two men are flip-sides of the same coin. While Kilgrave simply takes what he feels he is entitled to by means of his powers of enhanced persuasion, Simpson initially takes a less forceful but no less sinister approach, exemplified in his treatment of Trish after he realizes that Kilgrave has compelled him to murder her. As Stephanie Yang writes in a Bitch Magazine review:

The warning signs are there early on. Under Kilgrave’s control, Simpson assaults Trish inside her own apartment. Once Kilgrave’s control wears off, he’s wracked with guilt and comes back to apologize. The problem is that Trish doesn’t want Simpson’s apology; she wants him to just leave. Trish doesn’t want to be reminded that she was attacked in her own home, or feel trapped by her own high-end security system while her attacker lingers outside. But Simpson is insistent, sitting in her hallway and talking to her through the intercom. Simpson makes his apology about his needs and his absolution, not about Trish’s needs, safety or mental health. It’s entirely understandable, but it’s still wrong.

Simpson and Kilgrave certainly have different motivation for their destructive actions. But as Jessica points out, intent doesn’t matter. Their actions and consequences are what matter. That’s an important distinction that needs to be made at a time when courts and media alike dismiss many real-life cases of abuse because the abuser “couldn’t know” what they were doing was wrong. Violence is a symptom of a culture that indulges bad behavior as being inherently and unavoidably part of masculinity, or even a romantic expression of desire and protectiveness.

I would go a step further and name Simpson’s insistent apologies to Trish as outright abusive on their face, specifically because they prioritize his need for absolution over her need to heal. Trish is the victim in the situation, and yet Simpson manages to find a way to center himself in the story of this trauma. As with Kilgrave and Jessica, Simpson’s abuse is rooted not in a cartoonish hatred of women as we are often led to believe, but rather in prioritizing his own will and desires over Trish’s.

The show’s exploration of rape and consent is also spot-on. Through interaction with Kilgrave’s superhuman abilities, Jessica Jones is able to make plain text of the subtext of rape culture. In one episode, Jessica makes plain that what Kilgrave did to her was rape. She says the word and invokes it over and over, explaining to him that by revoking her ability to consent, he violated her in a profound way that he can never make up for, nullifying any “kind treatment” during that time. For Jessica (and many other victims of sexual abuse) she was raped not only when Kilgrave forced sexual consent by rendering her suggestible, but also by forcing her to display trust and affection for him against her will. We see this idea replicated when Hope demands that she be allowed to abort Kilgrave’s fetus, because “every moment it’s in me is like he’s raping me all over again.”

The other great thing about Jessica Jones is that it is a show ostensibly about rape, that never depicts a rape. It can be argued that the entire engine of the show is powered by the actions of a serial rapist with many, many victims in his wake, and yet the show never feels the need to indulge in crude depictions of trauma to demonstrate how horrifying rape is. Instead, we spend extensive time examining the fallout; following Jessica and Hope as they try to cope with being violated on such a profound level, grapple with their own feelings of guilt and culpability and make it to the other side with their faculties intact. One of the things that made Kilgrave so scary in the initial episodes was the way the memory of him haunted Jessica, always lingering at the edge of her thoughts, out of sight, but never out of mind. It masterfully depicted the way that rape trauma is a burden that doesn’t go away once the act itself is over. In a year that’s been replete with depictions of rape in television, it was refreshing to see a show tackle the true emotional weight of sexual assault without using the violation itself to titillate.

On the other hand, the treatment of people of colour in Jessica Jones is often anti-intersectional and openly anti-black. Vulture‘s year end “Best of Television” list cites the show as demonstrating “a racially diverse cast, heavy on women,” a construction that belies that for many people, diversity means “add black men and stir.” To me, it is borderline disrespectful to call the show racially diverse when the only significant, named woman of colour character is dead before the narrative begins and never speaks a word, while the black male characters are all subjected to incredible violence in service of the white female protagonist. This force frames feminist representation as the representation of white women and yet again, erases women of colour from our popular narratives.

With Reva’s character, this is especially glaring. Her death at Jessica’s hands is essentially the inciting incident of the story; the act that allows Jessica to free herself from Kilgrave’s control. Reva is fridged to motivate Jessica’s escape and eventual confrontation with Kilgrave. As Shaadi Devereaux writes in Model View Culture:

[…] One has to wonder what metaphor is offered, that she has to kill a Black woman in order to finally obtain that freedom. She must literally stop Reva Connors’ heart with a single blow in order to experience her moment of awakening, enabling her to walk away from a cis-heterosexual white male abuser. It brings to mind how white women liberate themselves from unpaid domestic labor by exploiting Black/Latina/Indigenous women, often heal their own sexual trauma by performing activism that harms WoC, and how the white women’s dollar still compares to that of WoC. Like Jessica’s liberation is only possible through the violence against Reva, we see sharp parallels with how liberatory white womanhood often interplays with the lives of WoC. Were the writers consciously aware of these parallels, or was it just the same script playing out in their heads?

It’s disappointing that the show, knowingly or not, replicates the same cycles of abuse that routinely play out within the feminist movement, by positioning violence against black women as the justified cost of white women’s liberation. Jessica eventually enacts the same cycle of abuse against Luke Cage, her main love interest. Shaadi notes:

After killing Reva, Jessica goes on to stalk Reva’s husband, Luke Cage, in a compulsive and boundary-violating cycle of guilt. She finally sleeps with him…without disclosing how she was implicated in Reva’s death. She both withholds and actively obstructs him from finding out information about his own life, so that she can continue to get what she needs intimately from him. In dealing with her own demons, Jessica violates an invulnerable Black man and lays him a blow that no other character in their universe has the power to. Was this another nod to a complex understanding of gender, race and power, or another trope surfacing in insidious ways?

The issue here is that the show does not give any indication as to whether this is commentary or trope, so we are forced to assume the latter, interpreting the text as presented to us. Jessica makes a habit of using the black men around her, in service to her own ends treating them as interchangeable and disposable, a glaring and problematic oversight given the current political climate, and the historical context of black men being subjected to undue violence for the protection of white women. Jessica’s pursuit of Luke despite her knowledge of her involvement in what we are led to believe in the most painful event of his life replicates the same disregard for his feelings that we saw Simpson demonstrate with Trish. To Jessica, her own need to be in Luke’s orbit because of her overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, supersede his right to be fully informed about the circumstances of his wife’s death, and as Tom and Lorenzo astutely write in their review:

[…] Like it or not, she has the capacity to be a bit hypocritical about Kilgrave’s abilities choosing to think that there’s actually a right way to take people’s control away from them.

And Jessica very literally takes Luke’s control away by not disclosing her involvement in Reva’s death. She takes away his ability to choose not to be with the person who murdered his wife. Later, his choice to forgive is later revoked by Kilgrave, as he is forced to reconcile with her under Kilgrave’s control. Again, the invulnerable black man’s pain is not respected, but rather toyed with and manipulated by the narrative to serve the needs of white characters. As Shaadi again points out, the pattern becomes more uncomfortable and glaring as the series continues:

When her neighbor shares how Black people are more vulnerable to others’ perceptions, it invokes not sympathy but an idea of how she can use it for her own ends. The result is several scenes where she pushes Black men into people to create a scene of chaos, using the opportunity to go unseen as she breaks the law. Instead of challenging oppressive systems directly, she uses them to get what she wants and to center her own survival. We see that she has some guilt about it, but sis willing to do it for her survival and the survival of other white characters.

These scenes demonstrate that as people marginalized along a spectrum, we often leverage violence against others for our own survival, sometimes with full awareness. But is awareness enough? Or as long as power remains unchallenged, will we always be lured by self-priority, the hierarchy of own safety and access? Our hero is willing to take on the mindcontrol of Kilgrave, but not those dangers most affecting the two most important men in her life – both Black. She intimately understands that no one will believe her, but capitalizes on the hierarchy of who has enough humanity to be believed – against other marginalized identities. She can finally walk away from the mind of her abuser, but the gravitational pull of racism is still too much.

As a black woman, I’m left to wonder, is Jessica worse than your garden variety racist for acknowledging systems of oppression only to exploit them? And on a real world level, why is this behaviour heralded by viewers as feminist when it actively takes advantage of people that the feminist movement is meant to protect?

My last issue is less a problem with this show specifically and more a general trope in fiction. I expect that very little can be done about this considering the source material, but truly abhor narratives in which a black person’s “power” is that they cannot feel pain or be hurt. It is a direct callback to very pervasive superhumanization bias and stereotypes that still exist and are perpetuated today. As I have written before about this characterization, it feeds into the idea that violence against black people is not traumatic or dangerous as they can withstand the pain, and that this ability positions them as protectors of white characters who often also do them harm. It explains why young black boys are coded by white people as much older than they are, or why they think black people feel less pain. With Luke, we see this reflected in Luke’s fight scenes as person after person escalates the violence against him to no effect. He is easily able to trounce several men at once. Earlier, we also see him take a circle saw to his abdomen in order to demonstrate his power to Jessica. Later still, we see doctors poke and prod him with needles and other penetrating devices ostensibly to save him, but the scenes only reinforce what we have already been told; nothing can hurt him, and so violence against him is justified.

In the end, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the show. The way Jessica Jones deals with consent resonated with me on a deep level, but it also made me question why the show didn’t identify with me as a black woman, when I so easily identified with it. Hopefully in the next season we will see a more intersectional approach to the struggles that women face that treats its black characters with the same care that it affords the white women in the cast.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Forced Heteronormativity

Irene Adler never needed Sherlock Holmes or any man (including the Czech King who hired Sherlock to face her in the first place), and when she finds love (with a man who is neither the king nor Holmes), it’s on her terms. Irene Adler only appears in one of Conan Doyle’s stories because she has her own life, and it does not rotate around nor even involve Sherlock Holmes. She is a clever, intelligent, resourceful, sex-positive woman in control of her own life, her own body, and her own destiny, and deserves not only a writer to do her justice, but a series to completely center her and all her fantastic escapades.

Trigger Warning for the sexual assault, physical abuse, and murder of female characters.

The BBC will soon be releasing its Sherlock Christmas special called Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, and I know I’m not the only person tired of women in Sherlock being portrayed as “abominable,” less-than Sherlock and the other male characters in the show, and forcibly subjugated – often reduced to tears. Sure, the male characters on the show are often shown as far from Sherlock’s intellectual equal, but the female characters are treated far worse story-wise than the men are. However, the BBC’s Sherlock is far from the only Sherlock Holmes adaptation to treat its female characters badly, often far worse than the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Not only are women subjugated to make the men look better, women are used as props to heteronormatize Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. But women are human beings, just like men, not objects. And Sherlock Holmes has been adapted so many times, while I’m still waiting for a series on the fabulously infamous Irene Adler, one of the only people to ever “outwit” him.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most frequently portrayed fictional characters of all time, though most often played by heterosexual White British cismen and anthropomorphic animals, with Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking and the upcoming sHerlock being rare exceptions. Conan Doyle’s famous detective can easily be read as any sexuality, mostly because he prioritizes work over everything else, and therefore has practically no love life whatsoever. Story-wise (ignoring Conan Doyle’s excuses for Sherlock’s singlehood), he could very well be asexual, and indeed he is a hero for the asexual community. He could also be bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, or any other sexuality, and could be any combination of those with any romantic orientation – aromantic, biromantic, homoromantic, heteroromantic, etc. Collectively, most of the adaptations of Sherlock Holmes result in erasure of sexual and romantic orientations that are not heteronormative. This is particularly damaging to the asexual community, due to their strong identification with Sherlock Holmes and what they see as his queerplatonic relationship with Dr. John Watson.

Whether Holmes’ relationship with Watson is queerplatonic, romantic and/or sexual, or more traditionally platonic is up to speculation or interpretation. However, nearly every adaptation forces heteronormativity onto the character one way or another, usually with female characters, and even while sometimes simultaneously queerbaiting the audience, seemingly for both humor and fanservice. This is particularly evident in BBC’s Sherlock (see Erin Tatum’s amazing Bitch Flicks post), Sherlock Holmes (2009), and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (so much queerbaiting, including a lovely choreographed waltz). Meanwhile, in numerous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes canon, including those directly listed above, female characters mainly or only exist to heteronormatize Sherlock Holmes and his friend (or possible “friend”) Dr. John Watson. Occasionally, and more in the past than in the present, Watson’s importance to the narrative is even minimized to make room for Sherlock to have a romance, such as in Sherlock Holmes (1922) starring John Barrymore as the title role, though also in House M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie), to an extent.

In They Might Be Giants (George C. Scott as Holmes/Justin and Joanne Woodward as Watson) and Elementary (Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson), the roles of Watson and the heteronormatizing woman are combined, as a female Watson to a male Holmes ensures that any close feelings between Holmes and Watson can be read as heteronormatively romantic. This is albeit, thanks to good writing and acting, done in a way in which Watson does have some agency, especially in Elementary, as written about in Robin Hitchcock’s post for Bitch Flicks.

Despite female adaptations of Watson becoming more popular, Irene Adler, though having only ever appeared in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and briefly mentioned in a few more of them, is most often used when Hollywood or the BBC desires to heterosexualize the detective. Indeed, Irene Adler is often portrayed as the Catwoman to Sherlock Holmes’ Batman, particularly in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), played by Rachel McAdams to Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes. However, women are often objectified in Sherlock Holmes adaptations to the point that they are often damsels in distress (such what Irene Adler was reduced to in the BBC’s Sherlock, played by Lara Pulver to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes) or women in refrigerators, to which Irene is also not immune. In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Irene Adler is (infuriatingly!) fridged in order to make Holmes sad and revengeful and oh so heterosexual amidst all the homoeroticism he has with Jude Law’s “Hotson” (as if the detective couldn’t possibly be bisexual…). She is then soon replaced in his (somewhat) heteronormatized heart by a racist depiction of a Roma woman, played by Noomi Rapace.

However, Irene Adler is not the only choice for fridging. For example, in Chris Columbus’ Young Sherlock Holmes, Holmes’ love interest Elizabeth (played by Sophie Ward to Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes) survives until the very end of the film, thereby fridging her for motivational and heteronormative purposes less within the prequel film itself and moreover in the larger Sherlock Holmes storyline. By killing off Elizabeth, this adaptation also seeks to justify Holmes’ singlehood throughout the rest of his life (as Elizabeth was shown to be his one-true-love), as well as to heighten his nemesistic relationship with Moriarty (as he was responsible for Elizabeth’s death).

While usually the focus of heteronormatizing in these adaptations is Holmes, Watson can alternatively be the focus, usually by Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan, such as in the BBC’s Sherlock (played by Amanda Abbington) and in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (played by Kelly Reilly). This often serves the dual purpose of heteronormatizing the Holmes/Watson relationship and showing Holmes as lonely and more sympathetic. This is particularly emphasized in the 2002 TV film Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (starring Rupert Everett), though in this case Watson (Ian Hart) marries a sex-positive feminist American psychoanalyst named Mrs. Jenny Vandeluer (Helen McCrory).

As producer Elinor Day pointed out in the DVD commentary, a sequel in which the three of them were a team – Sherlock, Jenny, and John – would be amazing (though it sadly seems unlikely to happen now). Though the BBC’s Sherlock gets a similar trio-dynamic with the introduction of Mary, Mary is subjugated and ashamed, while Jenny openly defies Sherlock’s misogyny and heartlessness, and he would not have been able to solve his case at all without her. Sadly, though Jenny is an amazing character, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking falls short of being a feminist film. Under the guise of critiquing rape culture, the film in many ways fetishizes the physical and sexual abuse of young women and girls, emphasized by the camera movements and the focus on the helpless sounds the girls make while they are being gagged and suffocated.

Though the upcoming sHERlock, starring Helen Davies in the title role, is certainly exciting, I personally think that instead of the message being “women can fill Sherlock’s shoes” (which they most certainly can), the message could be “women don’t need Sherlock, and are awesome on their own,” especially when it comes to Irene Adler. Irene Adler’s character has been tweaked and even completely reimagined numerous times to fit male-contrived adaptations of the (admittedly male-contrived) Sherlock Holmes canon, sadly often coming short of her original depiction – though also not free from its problems. Irene Adler deserves her own series, whatever the story may be, and whatever part of her life is the focus.

What Happened to ‘Doctor Who’s Clara

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from ‘Doctor Who,’ and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from Doctor Who, and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

To recap: there’s an overall pattern on New Who where women who travel with the Doctor end up being destroyed in some way, and Clara Oswald, the Doctor’s companion from mid-season seven to the end of season nine, is no exception. Clara was first introduced as The Impossible Girl, a woman who kept showing up in the Doctor’s timeline and dying while she tried to save him. The reason for this was revealed in “The Name of the Doctor,” where we learned that Clara’s special destiny was/is/will be to throw herself into the Doctor’s time stream so that she can be torn apart and reappear as various women whose only purpose in life is to help him.

After witnessing this heroic sacrifice, the Doctor rescues Clara from the time stream so that she can stop dying forever and be his real companion. Thus begins a long story-arc in Doctor Who that’s unofficially titled, “We don’t know what to do with Clara anymore.”

In season eight, there’s a new Doctor in town and Clara’s story line is that – unlike Amy, who gradually drifted away to lead a normal life (up until she was past-zapped by aliens, because no one can ever be happy) – Clara gradually spends more and more time in the TARDIS, leaving her normal life behind. Her boyfriend, Danny Pink, is worried about the influence the Doctor is having on her, but then he dies, and Clara’s got nothing to keep her tied to her life on Earth.

By season nine, Clara’s fast-talking the aliens and coming up with clever, reckless plans as if she is the Doctor. The bells of foreshadowing start to toll as the Doctor talks about how he wouldn’t know what to do if he lost her, but, no matter how often he says they should be more careful, he can’t resist her when she wants to go on an adventure. At this point, it starts to become clear that, despite the murky character development in season eight, the new point of Clara is that she and the Doctor are a Bad Influence on each other, and that this is probably why the Doctor’s arch frenemy, the Master, played match-maker by introducing them.

Things finally come to a head in “Face the Raven,” when Clara tries to cheat her way out of an alien contract she doesn’t understand and ends up marked for death. The Doctor can’t do anything to save her, and, after a protracted goodbye speech, he’s left to watch as Clara gets killed by a magic tattoo bird of some kind.

Clara’s death got a mixed reaction from fans, with some thinking this was a stupid way for the character to go out, and some just glad to see her gone after she’d overstayed her welcome. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other about Clara (besides finding her a little bland in season eight), but I was willing to accept “Face the Raven” as the end of her story. Even if she had to die again, and even if her time with the Doctor had to destroy her, just like it destroyed all of his other companions, at least this ending offered us something different than we’d seen before, as well as a new perspective on the Doctor/companion dynamic.

When you watch a TV show like this, it’s normal to imagine yourself in the same situation as the characters and wonder what you would do. Clara’s character arc, such as it was, was a nice way of addressing the daydreams we have of being Really Good at Time Travel and underscoring the difference between the Doctor – who’s basically a god, in this story – and the mortals he travels with. Clara was, for a while, Really Good at Time Travel, and as close to being a Time Lord as anyone can be – but she was still human in the end – still mortal and fallible; still part of a story that can’t last for billions of years. It was annoying that she had to be destroyed like all the others, but it was a thoughtful, interesting destruction all the same.

Except, then she came back from the dead.

The penultimate episode of the season, “Heaven Sent,” delivers one of the best Hell Yeah moments we’ve had in long, long time, when the Doctor spends four billion years punching his way through a wall to escape a Time Lord holding cell and return to his home world, Gallifrey. The season finale, which aired this past weekend, reveals that he did this, in part, so that he could use their technology to violate the laws of space and time and undo Clara’s death.

His plan doesn’t work as well as he’d hoped, though. He’s able to snatch Clara out of time at the moment she before she dies, but she isn’t really alive. She’s walking and talking, but her heart is stopped, and she will ultimately have to return to the day she faced the raven, so that she can die for real. In other words, she’s kind of a time zombie four billion years in the future. Realizing that the Doctor plans to wipe her memory and leaver somewhere safe, Clara out-Doctors him and reverses his mind-wiping device so that it wipes his mind instead. He forgets everything about her, except that she existed, and she visits him one last time, disguised as a diner waitress, to confirm that he has no memory of who she is. And then zombie diner waitress Clara flies away in her own stolen TARDIS with Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, and goes to have adventures before she has to die.

I’m not gonna lie – that’s pretty amazing.

As a TV viewer, there’s part of me that instinctively feels ripped off that Clara didn’t really die in “Face the Raven,” especially after all the hullaballoo that was made about it in the episode, and the long, protracted goodbye speech she got to give. But, as someone who’s on record as being bummed out that all the women on this show meet such horrible ends, I’m really happy at this surprisingly positive turn of events. In a way, it’s even more satisfying that’s it’s Clara, the girl who died again, and again, and again, and again during her time with the Doctor, who gets to live forever, through this weird, cosmic loophole, with everything she ever wanted. This wasn’t a story about how trying to be like the gods destroyed a mortal after all – it was a story about how, after she suffered so much for so long, Clara got to be amazing.

The turnaround where Clara escaped the memory wipe is also a really interesting call-back to one of the most brutal companion disposals thus far, in which the Doctor’s companion, Donna, saved the world by downloading his knowledge into her brain, only to discover that that meant he had to erase all her memories of him to stop her mind from imploding. While the general level of pessimism and tragedy in that ending may ring more true to life than the ending we get in “Hell Bent,” this reversal also drives home the point that Clara escaped the fate of all the companions before her – that she escaped even the story’s expectation that attempts to be more than she was would end in tragedy.

Speaking in general terms, season nine wasn’t always strong on story, but its presentation of women was unusually rad. Aside from Clara and Maisie Williams’ character (an immortal who appears in four episodes and is frequently both sympathetic and up to no good), this season also featured really outstanding work from Michelle Gomez as a female regeneration of the Master, Doctor Who’s first deaf character, played by Sophie Stone, and the return of a fan-favourite named Osgood whom I’m not all that into, but everyone else seems to like. What all these characters have in common is that they were cool and interesting and well-acted but didn’t, like, ruin their lives and kill themselves to save the Doctor from his sad existence. In many cases, they were, instead, the characters who made the story happen through their choices, and that was refreshing to see.

This season and last have also taught us that it’s normal for Time Lords to change gender when they regenerate, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor one day. It’s an important step for the franchise to take, not because there’s anything wrong with the Doctors we’ve seen, or because casting a woman will automatically make the show better, but because it’s one really good way to undo the uncomfortable undercurrents in the series so far, where the power dynamic always shakes out to Omnipotent Man – Vulnerable Woman.

Until that day comes, though, I’m very pleased that Clara is an honorary Time Lord. Even if she is a zombie waiting to get killed by magic birds.

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

Meredith Grey’s Woman Problem

Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.

Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed Grey’s Anatomy, we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

Of course Dr. Cristina Yang was Meredith’s one true love, not McDreamy. Cristina was there for her when she broke down over the execution of a death-row patient even though they were fighting about the intern self-suturing debacle of season five. Cristina helped Meredith with newly-adopted Zola when Derek left her for tampering with the Alzheimer’s trial even though Cristina was having her own relationship and motherhood issues. She was there for her again in season 10, despite Cristina’s resentment toward Meredith for leaning out of work to focus on family. Cristina supports Meredith through her tumultuous life which includes multiple near-death experiences, the death of her husband and mother and sister. (Seriously, how many tragedies can one person handle?!) Despite the actress who plays Cristina, Sandra Oh, departing the series in season 10, she left an indelible mark on Grey’s Anatomy and its title character.

In addition to Cristina’s impact, you’ll notice a recurring thread throughout Meredith’s most trying times: women were involved.

Meredith’s very existence is in the shadows of her famous and brilliant mother, Ellis Grey, to whom she was never good enough. Her dementia colors the first season of the show and how we come to know Meredith. Ellis’ death in season three also throws Meredith for a loop and reverberates throughout the following seasons, culminating in the arrival of Meredith’s previously unknown half-sister, Maggie Pierce, in season 11, bringing with it a whole host of sister issues Meredith has to work through.

Which brings us to Lexie Grey, yet another half-sister, this time on Meredith’s father’s side. Introduced at the end of season three as an intern at Seattle Grace (now Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital) before her aforementioned death (and one of the reasons for renaming the hospital) in season eight, Lexie had her fair share of tragedies that in turn affected Meredith.

While Meredith was working as her doctor, Lexie’s mother died which put further strain on her difficult relationship with her estranged father. Lexie also struggled with the Seattle Grace Mercy West (yes, yet another formation the Grey’s hospital took!) massacre that claimed the lives of several fellow surgeons and threatened Derek and Alex’s, Lexie’s partner at the time.

The repercussions from Lexie’s death in a plane crash made the following season one of the most emotionally interesting. Meredith became known as Medusa for her ruthless treatment of her interns while Cristina took off to Minnesota to work at the Mayo Clinic. Meredith also discovers she’s pregnant, without her sister and best friend there to support her through what’s supposed to be one of the happiest times in her life.

And let’s not forget the most recent woman to shake up Meredith’s world: Callie’s girlfriend, who also happens to be the doctor who treated Derek prior to his death and is a new resident at Grey Sloan to boot! In one of the best episodes of the show’s 12-season run, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Meredith attempts to swallow her grief over her surprise dinner guest and not tell Amelia, Derek’s sister, or Callie that the new woman in the fold is actually one of the last people to see Derek alive.

If these examples aren’t enough to convince you that women influence Meredith and the trajectory of Grey’s Anatomy as a whole, remember the season one cliffhanger that succeeded in throwing Meredith’s life even more off course than her mother’s illness had?

Addison Shepherd’s—that’s right, Derek Shepherd’s wife!—arrival set the tone for many of the aforementioned women’s introductions into Meredith’s life. They sneak up on her unawares, throw her already messy life into total disarray, but are then accepted into the fold. In a community as close knit as the doctors at Grey Sloan it’s not really surprising that enemies soon become friends.

What is surprising is how close women like Lexie and Maggie have become to Meredith despite the fact that she kind of treats people like shit. Yeah, we know she’s “dark and twisty” to say the least but, apart from Cristina and sometimes Callie, the interactions she has with these women are usually tense, when she’s speaking to them at all.

But can you really blame her? Everyone she’s ever gotten close to, with the exception of Alex and Dr. Weber, has left her. Meredith doesn’t easily open up to people, but there is some disconnect between how she’s portrayed and the characters she’s supposedly written to be close to. She’s the quintessential unlikable female character.

Grey’s Anatomy, like all of Shonda Rhimes’ creations, is a lesson in depicting people from all walks of life, warts and all. Meredith and her relationships to the women in her life can be tense at times, but Grey’s succeeds in portraying them as the result of many strong personalities and highly skilled surgeons attempting to coexist in a high pressure environment, not because women can’t be friends. The women Meredith does get along with passionately she makes “her person” and will go to bat for them under any circumstances, as we saw in recent episodes when she supports Cristina’s ex Owen in his vendetta against new doctor Nathan Riggs because she told Cristina she would.

Many new small screen offerings, such as Orange is the New Black, Broad City and Playing House, take a page out of Grey’s Anatomy’s book and center on the close and complex relationships between women. Sure, Grey’s may have started out as a romance gone awry but, as in real life, relationships evolve and sometimes the most intense and long-lasting ones can be between female friends.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

‘3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets’ and the Aftermath in ‘The Armor of Light’

Marc Silver’s documentary ‘3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets’ which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death.

The following is partly a modified repost.

Enough unarmed Black people have been shot by white people (including cops) in the past few years that, except for the most famous cases, the circumstances of each shooting has begun to blur into the others. We hear a victim’s name that sounds faintly familiar and we have to ask ourselves, “Wait, what happened to him (or her) again?” We know the victim ended up dead but we forget what took place before–and in the few cases in which the killer is put on trial, what took place afterward.

Marc Silver’s documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death. The three and a half minutes of the title refers to the total amount of time Davis and his friends were in a car at the combination gas station and convenience store when he was shot and killed by a white man, Michael Dunn, who had parked next to their vehicle. As is mentioned in the film, the media glommed onto the dispute between the two being about “loud music” when the shooting was, at its core, about white fear of Black people.

The film focuses on Dunn’s trial (the verdict of which I had forgotten) in which he famously claimed that Davis had a gun (which no witness saw and we see police tell Dunn in their own video “There were no weapons in the car,”) and so used the same “stand your ground” defense (in which one doesn’t have to be threatened to shoot and kill but just to “feel” threatened) under the Florida law which was the basis for George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Dunn had, according to his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, downed many rum and cokes before the incident (they had just come from his son’s wedding reception) so was probably driving drunk–and could have been pulled over for doing so. But of course no additional consequences exist for grabbing and shooting a gun while under the influence.

Dunn, with his dead eyes, a mouth that always seems on the verge of a smirk and a voice that sounds like that of a mild-mannered cartoon character is not a bright man, as his jailhouse letters and phone calls (excerpts of which we hear over stunning footage of Jacksonville: the cinematography is also by Silver) attest. We hear Rouer at one point tell him firmly that they should discuss the legacy of his actions (he postures himself as some kind of cultural hero) “at another time.” She was probably cognizant that whatever he said to her could be used against him. He readily admits to being a killer but repeatedly denies he’s a racist, though his remarks about other prisoners and the teens, including Davis, in the car he shot at say otherwise.

In spite of his claims, and his high-priced attorney trying to sew doubt in the jurors’ minds (and media coverage of the trial giving equal time to the defense’s arguments, no matter how specious) we come to understand Dunn shot and killed Davis because the teen annoyed him. Throughout the trial and outside the courtroom, Dunn expresses as much remorse for this killing as another person would for swatting a mosquito or a gnat. He’s an extreme example of a mindset that many white people in the US have, including those in Jacksonville, and we hear (briefly) from another local racist (who also probably doesn’t consider himself a racist) outside the courthouse and see, in beach footage, one woman’s swimsuit bottom is decorated with a large Confederate flag.

The courtroom drama of 3 1/2 Minutes is as compelling as that of any narrative film. Outside the court, the film features Davis’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, talking about their son and even includes home movies of when he was a baby, so I didn’t expect the moment I started to cry would be during Rouer’s testimony. She was, after all, the person who partied with Dunn in their hotel room after she knew that he had shot Davis (the film never reminds us that the two drank more and ordered pizza after the killing) and apparently she never told Dunn to turn himself in (Dunn was arrested when they returned home, but only because a witness noted his license plate). In the jailhouse calls with Dunn she’s supportive and talks about how much she loves and misses him, as Dunn, convinced he’ll be acquitted says the first thing he’ll do when he’s out is “make love” to her. When she’s first sworn in, the camera focuses on her shaking hand (she even raises the wrong hand) as she takes the oath. With her final testimony we find out why she’s so distraught. In her earlier testimony she had told the jury about the conversation she and Dunn had before she had left the car to go into the store (a little before he shot Davis) “He said, ‘I hate that thug music,’ and I said, ‘I know,”’ and the resignation and hopelessness in her voice at that earlier moment takes on a deeper meaning.

I’m not sure why I cried during her testimony. Perhaps because if more white people told the truth (the bar is so low) either about their actions or about those of their fellow white people, more of the victims’ families might see some justice.

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

We don’t see much of the anti-gun advocacy, Davis’s mother, McBath, took up after Davis’s death, except a brief look at her testimony before Congress, in which the oily piece of slime known as “Ted Cruz” counters her. We never hear much of what she’s thinking during the trial: the in-depth interviews are with Davis’s father. In 3 1/2 Minutes we mainly see McBath cry and sometimes pray, which I’m sure she’s done plenty of, but is not all that she’s done.

To see the aftermath of the trial, watch the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light, the first film directed by Abigail Disney who has had a prolific career as the producer of films including She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Pray The Devil Back to Hell, and Vessel. Much of the film’s promotional materials emphasize the trajectory of Rob Schenck, a white Evangelical minister and fixture of the far right, who comes to see his “pro-life” views must include a stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the more interesting person in the film (who gets about equal screen time) is McBath. Her dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, so McBath immediately understands the racial aspect of her son’s killing and others like it, but Schenck doesn’t bring up race until the film is more than half over. We in the audience see a marked difference in how a white congregation and a Black congregation react to his new rhetoric against guns and the NRA.

What goes unsaid in the conversations of right-wing, white men and the repeated montage of white guys at gun shows is the connection between gun violence and masculinity: the popular fantasy articulated by many of the men to be “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun” by shooting him, something which even many police officers rarely, if ever, do. While the men talk about “protecting their families” I thought about all the women who are threatened or killed by guns their own husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances point at them, a concern to which these men seem purposefully oblivious. Instead, they talk about the government taking away their guns with the same vehemence they would about government taking away their balls.

Also fascinating is McBath’s meeting with Schenck in which both cite Bible passages to make their points, but which concludes with McBath in tears telling him, “It’s vitally important that you help. They will listen to you.” McBath states later, when she is alone on camera that although she doesn’t “condone” abortion, she would never interfere with another woman’s reproductive choice, but feels like she and Schenck have some common goals around guns, saying, “This is what this is all about: fighting for life.” We see her (again) testifying in front of Congress, and she eventually quits her job to devote her time to being the spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

I couldn’t help being a little cynical about Schenck’s intentions. He keeps citing the Bible and Jesus for his newfound, anti-gun mindset but with his long support of right-wing politicians (including members of the Tea Party) I wondered if he had read any of the many Bible passages in which Jesus ministers to the poor, the people those same politicians build their careers disparaging while defunding public programs meant to benefit them.

We see the slow, frustrating course McBath and Schenck have ahead when Schenck meets with three other anti-choice stalwarts (all white men, of course) across a table and tries to persuade them the NRA is antithetical to Christian values, asking, “Is that a pro-life ethic?” Two of the men yell at him in response, but he seems to sway the third, a triumph we can’t help hoping will repeat itself at other tables across the country.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSP0Soy8ACk” 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

The Illusion of Beauty in ‘Flesh and Bone’

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, the experimental modern ballet in your local theater–audiences are enthralled with elegant women who can dance on two toes. The entertainment industry repeatedly tried to accurately capture the dance world with various results. From Showgirls (1995) to Center Stage (2000), to Black Swan (2010), most of the time it’s a shallow portrayal of the drama in the dance world. In the TV landscape there are the documentaries: Misty Copeland’s A Ballerina’s Tale and Sarah Jessica Parker narrated City.Ballet. Yet the scripted TV shows didn’t fare well. CW had a modest hit with the “reality show” Breaking Pointe, ABC Family tried it with Bunheads, and in the Netflix catalog there’s the Australian show Dance Academy. It’s hard to engage an audience outside the theater. However, the pay cable network Starz likes a challenge and created their ambitious project Flesh and Bone.

The executive-producer, former dancer and brains behind the show is Moira Walley-Beckett who previously wrote for AMC’s Breaking Bad. She recounted to USA Today that for the leading role she was determined to find a dancer who could act, instead of an actress who has to endure rigorous training to execute the complicated ballet routines. It seems like a callback to the dance classic The Red Shoes (1948), which starred the renowned ballerina Moira Shearer. Yet after auditioning over a hundred girls Walley-Beckett became disillusioned. The network and Walley-Beckett decided to cast a wider net, searched abroad and that’s when they found the fabulous Sarah Hay. According to an interview with WWD, Hay was raised in New Jersey by artist parents, and she commuted every day of the week to train – first with the New York City Ballet, and then with ABT itself. After graduating she struggled to fit in because of her “curvy” physique and decided to try her luck abroad and became a soloist at the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany.

Flesh and Bone was created with a multiple season arc in mind and there’s certainly a lot of material to explore. From competitive jealousy to body image issues and pushing your personal limits to get to the top to the realization that your dream is not what you’ve envisioned over all those years. It turned out that the show was quite a gamble for the network and incredibly expensive; think rehearsal time, space, choreographers and physical therapy for the dancers. It seems that other shows in the Starz line up, such as Ash v. Evil Dead, got the preferential treatment. It was only a couple of weeks before the show premiered that Starz announced that Flesh and Bone would be an eight-episode mini-series.

Flesh and Bone centers around the young and talented ballerina Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay) who escapes her tormented family life in Pittsburgh, when she hears the news that her soldier brother Bryan (Josh Helman) returns from Afghanistan, to try out for the fictional New York’s American Ballet Company, which she makes on her first attempt. Once she’s accepted in the corps of the Ballet Company, she struggles with Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), a principal dancer who is almost at the end of her prime, her roommate Mia (Emily Tyra) who isn’t quite as talented as Claire and the larger-than-life artistic director Paul (Ben Daniels) who’s is still dealing with the loss of his own talent and sees in Clair his golden goose to a revitalized career.

Many have described the show as a “dark and gritty” ballet series. Of course there are the obligatory shots of the ruined feet and bloody toenails and the tedious exercises at the barre, but the framework is focused on personal drama. Comparisons are easily made with the aforementioned Center Stage and Black Swan. What they have common is that they’re focused on the art form ballet as the essence of drama. In all three stories, the audience sees the conflict, stress, and the cutthroat competition within a ballet school or company. Yet, compared to the other stories it almost seems that there’s no silver lining in Flesh and Bone.

Flesh and Bone doesn’t avoid the major clichés. Claire is the naïve girl who follows her dream and loses her innocence in the big city. There’s the tough, rich girl Daphne (Raychel Diane Weiner) who also dances as an exotic dancer and who has a questionable friendship with a Russian mobster (Raychel’s tattoo of “Take No Prisoners” inspired the art department). Paul has a Latino rent boy who gives him affection and keeps calling him “Papi.” Claire’s predatory brother has big bad wolf engraved on his forehead. There’s an arc with the overly polite homeless man Romeo (Damon Herriman) (he walked straight out of The Fisher King) who lives outside Claire’s building and develops a small obsession with her; there’s Charlie from Center Stage (Sascha Radetsky) as Ross, who plays a straight bad boy who wants to get in everyone’s tights. And so on.

Since the show is aired on a pay cable network, sex and nudity make an appearance. For some the nudity could be gratuitous in order to give the show a more edgy character. At first glance, it seems that Claire is exploring her sexuality in unconventional ways. In the pilot, the audience is introduced to Claire’s new roommate, Mia, as she rides a nameless guy on the couch, which she later instructs Claire to sleep on. Paul sees no problem in using his dancers as escorts to get what he wants (all for the sake of the company of course), and there’s the exotic dancer subplot. Dancers are relatively comfortable in their bodies so being nude isn’t a far stretch.

The sex isn’t just sex; it’s often revolved around power plays and personal liberation. It’s interesting to see Claire navigate sexuality, because she seems terrified of the men she encounters and looks envious at other women who unapologetically use their sexuality. The crux of the story is Claire’s damaged psyche and how she’s able to free herself from the horrible abuse she endured. It must be said that Hay is an intriguing actress yet sometimes Claire’s passivity throughout the series becomes rather frustrating to watch – especially in the incestuous scenes between Claire and Bryan. The writers tried to incorporate the atrocities of under aged Russian sex slaves into the mix but they didn’t flesh out the characters. So once again a minor storyline fell flat.

So why watch Flesh and Bone? The astute attention to detail in the ballet scenes, the charismatic and talented dancers, the customs, heck even the opening credits are amazing. Hay has a fantastic screen presence and gives it her all with what she has been given. Daniels certainly enjoys his role as Paul and was marvelous in the moments where he was able to show what the stress of such an high-profile job does to a person when the mask is off. Dvorovenko nailed her part as the coke-addicted prima ballerina and Tyra milked her screen time for all its worth as Claire’s bitchy roommate. Despite the cliché role, Herriman is really compelling as Romeo. It’s unfortunate that Starz decided to create a limited series, therefore the (melo)drama was weighed down with loads of clichés and many supporting characters fell flat.

Will Flesh and Bone dance itself en pointe into our cultural lexicon? That remains to be seen. However, a niche audience will always be enthralled with the illusion of beauty in ballet.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8wKm3grIxc”]

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law), and American pop culture. See her blog here.

Category: On Television