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Movie Review: Pirate Radio

*This guest post also appears at Shakesville.

I saw Pirate Radio last night, and had one of those experiences where you can only really enjoy yourself if you turn half your brain off and pretend you’re not getting the messages that are clearly being sent.
Early in Pirate Radio, just as I idly wondered where all of the women were, one of the characters refers to the only woman present with surprise. “I thought there were no women allowed on board…” And it is explained to him that an excuse is made for the cook, because she is a lesbian.
That is all the explanation deemed necessary for the total exclusion of women from the world of Pirate Radio, except as sex partners, mothers, food preparers, or avid audience-members. I have no trouble believing that the world of Pirate Radio in the sixties largely excluded women, but I didn’t expect to find a movie so gleeful about the wonderland of boy bonding and camaraderie that, the movie posits, is only possible in a world where women are only allowed on board every other Saturday in order to provide sex.
The movie veers into an early scene of near-rape played for laughs as well. One of the successful DJs, feeling sympathetic toward a younger man because of his virginity, tries to trick his date for the night into having sex with the other man while the lights are turned off. He hopes that she won’t notice the switch, in spite of a huge size differential between the two men. The scene is played entirely from their perspective, and while the younger man doesn’t get near enough to the woman to touch her, there is a “ho ho ho, so funny my sides might split” scene in which the lights unexpectedly go on, and she screams as she finds herself alone in a room with a naked stranger. I was left with a queasy feeling at the end of that scene, wondering if this was what the whole movie would be.

While the movie doesn’t play rape for laughs again, the only other two love interest characters who appear are betrayers and interlopers in boyland. One woman, while waiting for a man to find a condom, ends up sleeping with someone more famous because she finds him impressive. Another comes onboard to marry one DJ, without telling him that she’s only doing it in order to sleep with someone else on the ship. I can imagine the first case happening in real life: When women have sexual agency they will sometimes decide to sleep with someone other than the person they start out an evening with. I can’t imagine a context for the inexplicable cruelty of the second case though, and since she represents roughly one quarter of all women in this film, it is easy to assume that the film is endorsing the idea that all relationships with women are suspect, and only relationships between men are noble and pure.

More than anything, I wonder why the film felt it necessary to revel in the sexism of the world that it depicts. These men are not actually great rebels if they really expect women to be content providing sex and food. There may have been many great things about sixties Pirate Radio, but the exclusion of women was not one of those things, and the film would have been more effective if it had taken pains to include women rather than shrugging its shoulders early on and trying to opt out of the subject.
I had a discussion with my husband after the film, and pointed out that most women perceive themselves as the protagonists of their own lives, not as an avid audience for men as they play out their stories. My experience throughout my life when watching movies like this has been to desperately try to find a place for myself among the male characters. How can I be Phillip Seymour Hoffman? There is no space for women in this movie, so how do I rewrite the movie so I can fit myself in? I’ve been doing it for so long that it is almost natural to me, but I think it’s time that it stopped.

The sad thing about this film is that I could have really enjoyed it otherwise. As I was watching it I wondered why I was feeling so fatigued, and I realized it was because it was yet another time that I was expected to happily stand in the sidelines and watch boys have lots of fun. That’s such a bummer to me nowadays that I can’t even pretend to be enthused anymore.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for filmmakers to do a better job than this. One can acknowledge the sexism of an age while still admitting the personhood, value, and contributions of women. Beyond just their ability to cook up a tasty meal, I mean. My gleeful exclusion from this film turned what should have been a charming experience into another bitter pill. It’s not 1967 anymore. I’m ready to throw those pills away.

Eileen Hunter has an MA in English and is working on an MLIS. She lives in California with her cat, husband, and daughter.

Flick-Off: Taken

So I decided to watch one of those mind-numbingly mediocre action films, assuming I’d walk away from the experience merely mind-numbed and ready to move forward with more serious cinema. The exact opposite happened. Not only is Taken a terribly made film in terms of its pacing, plot points, character development, and dialogue, it’s one of the most offensive, misogynistic films I’ve seen in a long time.
imdb summary: Seventeen year-old Kim is the pride and joy of her father Bryan Mills. Bryan is a retired agent who left the Secret Service to be near Kim in California. Kim lives with her mother Lenore and her wealthy stepfather Stuart. Kim manages to convince her reluctant father to allow her to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Using this information an Albanese gang of human traffickers kidnaps the girls. Kim barely has time to call her father and give him information. Her father gets to speak briefly to one of the kidnappers and he promises to kill the kidnappers if they do not let his daughter go free. The kidnapper wishes him “good luck,” so Bryan Mills travels to Paris to search for his daughter and her friend.

First, the tortured relationship between Kim and her father exists solely to set up the mother as a careless, liberal, money-grubbing asshole. While he gets to be the oh-it’s-too-dangerous-for-my-17-year-old-daughter-to-go-to-Paris-alone “good parent,” the mother gets relegated to the role of oh-just-let-her-go-I-mean-what-could-possibly-go-wrong “bad parent.” Of course, shit goes terribly wrong, and the audience can’t help but be all, “that horrible mother should’ve known better!” Then, as is usually the case, Daddy gets to rush to the rescue while Mommy stays at home sobbing into the arms of her new, rich, conveniently helpless husband.

To make matters worse, the Albanese gang deals in sex trafficking, which is an actual, serious issue in the world, an issue that this film exploits to serve the ultimate, final plot point: Daddy gets to save Kim from the evil Albanese sex traffickers in the moments just before she loses her virginity and remains forever “impure.” The most offensive aspect of all this rests on the fact that Bryan’s (and the film’s) focus never veers from his daughter. So, while we see countless drugged-up young women tied to bed posts, waiting to be raped again, the film treats them and their situation as entirely insignificant; the focus always remains on Daddy’s ass-kicking, murdering attempts to save his daughter’s virginity.

After he finds her friend Amanda dead and tied to a bedpost, he moves on to the next young woman who might help him, a girl who happens to have his daughter’s jacket. He runs from room to room, finding women unconscious, enslaved, raped repeatedly, and he saves that particular girl, not because he’s appalled by what’s happened to her, but because she might lead him to his daughter. He nurses her back to health, and as soon as she can speak full sentences, he interrogates her about where she got the jacket. Basically, the film makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to comment on the atrocity of sex trafficking—it serves only as a plot device to help Bryan redeem his broken relationship with his virginal daughter.

I hated this film.

‘Obvious Child’: Short Film Review

Obvious Child made its way around the blogosphere last month, but I just watched it today. Here are some general thoughts.

Abortion is a legal medical procedure, and it’s presented as such in this film. That alone is a welcome change–as others have stated–from recent film and television. Obvious comparisons have been made to Knocked Up and Juno, as both completely failed in their representations of options for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy (the former refusing to even speak the word abortion, and the latter representing a dumpy and disturbing clinic).

The star of Obvious Child, Donna (played by Jenny Slate), is a freelancer who lives in hipster Brooklyn. Others have mentioned the “indie sensibility” of the film, and Donna is the kind of privileged hipster many of us love to hate–and she’s a little bit like Juno in this regard, with toned-down dialogue and ten years added. She has an immature sense of humor (her use of “fart-face” and “fucktard” come to mind), and she just wants to go out and have a good time after the ugly end of her two-year relationship with Joe.

But her maturity level is kind of the point. She is an obvious child. Not a woman who is ready to bring a child into the world. It’s okay that she’s childish, because she’s mature enough to recognize where she is in life, and what her priorities are. She might be a tad immature, but she’s smart and independent. What could have been a self-destructive one-night-stand was handled about as responsibly as possible, and when she learned of her pregnancy she didn’t break down. She handled it.

There are some weaknesses in the film. Donna’s phone conversation with her mother–which was the ethical high point of the film–fell flat. I like that little was made of the revelation–and comparison–of abortion pre- and post-Roe, but the acting left something to be desired. And, there is the whole privileged-white-hipster-with-easy-access-to-a-clinic issue. While the tone and tenor of the humor isn’t my favorite, I like the film and its smart, sweet nature.

Read what Jezebel, Reproductive Health Reality Check, Feministing, and Bitch have to say, and share your thoughts with us!

 

Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre on Vimeo.

The Codes of Gender: Documentary Preview


From the Media Education Foundation (MEF):

Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman’s groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized cultural performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman’s central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations. With its sustained focus on the fundamental importance of gender, power, and how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.

I haven’t yet watched The Codes of Gender, but I imagine it might provide some insight for our continued frustration with movie posters.

We previously highlighted Generation M, another documentary by the MEF, which focuses on the misogyny prevalent in contemporary culture.

As the MEF is a foundation focused on education, you can watch a low-resolution preview of any of their films online (for personal viewing only).

If you’ve seen The Codes of Gender, let us know what you think!

Whip It: Ripley’s Pick


*This guest post also appears at I Will Not Diet.

I finally saw Whip It this weekend, and I have to say that the movie did not disappoint. I had low expectations because some people we trust had told us they didn’t like the film. I always think it’s better to go into the theatre with low expectations than high ones anyway because it makes it easier to enjoy yourself if you’re not sitting there thinking something like, I thought this was going to be the greatest movie ever made, but this dialogue is awful!


Maybe the movie was a little bit silly and predictable (and possibly not an accurate depiction of roller derby life), but, like I said, since I had low expectations, I didn’t even notice.

Because to me it didn’t feel predictable as much as relatable, and it didn’t seem silly as much as youthful and fresh. And the story is stand-up-and-cheer inspiring: teenage Bliss (played with loads of empathy and huge Bambi eyes by Juno‘s Ellen Page) has no agency or direction in life (and nothing that really makes her happy) until she sees two roller derby teams in nearby Austin shove it out one fateful night. After trying out for one team, she develops into a derby prodigy named Babe Ruthless who has as much drive and discipline as an Olympic athlete. In this way, it’s a wonderful girl empowerment story that will join the ranks of films like Girlfight and Bend it Like Beckham before it.


But the reason I’m writing about the film is because I couldn’t help but notice that all of the actors looked so darned real, which I absolutely loved. They were all different shapes and sizes—Ellen Page’s Bliss was an adorable little french fry of a girl while her best friend Pash was a lovely roller coaster of valleys and curves. It was a much needed reprieve from the model thin blonde archetype we normally see on the big screen, especially in movies that are supposedly marketed towards women.

And the girls on the various roller derby teams were similarly diverse—sure, Drew Barrymore was in phenomenal shape, but some of the others—Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis included—looked their age and sported imperfect stomachs, thighs, and arms without an ounce of shame or self-consciousness. (It’s hard to be self-conscious, I suppose, when you’re skating around a roller rink wearing a short pleated skirt, a sleeveless, stomach-baring top, and fishnet stockings.)

But it wasn’t just their bodies that looked imperfect—it was also their hair (sometimes stringy or uninspired), their makeup (often greasy and overdone), and their skin (blemished on some occasions and wrinkled on others).

Of course, I credit the female director, Drew Barrymore, with keeping these women from looking artificial and plastic while still allowing them to look attractive and even hot. It makes perfect sense to me that it was Barrymore—an actress who’s gone through a variety of looks and dress sizes over the years—who felt comfortable letting these women look so true-to-life. In that way, the direction feels both emotionally and physically honest. And the movie is clearly better for it.

For when Babe Ruthless and her cohorts take to the rink, it’s incredibly easy for those of us sitting in the audience to cheer for them because they look a lot more like us than most of the women we see staring back at us from that giant movie screen—more authentic than artificial, more lifelike than fantasy, more likeable than distasteful.

So I applaud Barrymore and her talented crew of actresses for baring not only their wonderfully diverse bodies but also their middle-aged and appealingly flawed faces.

And I encourage all of you to support Barrymore—and all female directors by extension—by taking your daughters and nieces to see this film (either now while it’s still in the theatre or later on DVD). After all, if we don’t support women who give us what we want, we have only ourselves to blame.

Molly McCaffrey teaches English and creative writing at Western Kentucky University. Her blog, I Will Not Diet, chronicles her effort to lose weight without unhealthy dieting and encourages readers to reject the notion that curvy women are not attractive. She has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Vestal Review, Word Salad, Cairn, Gravity Hill, Antipodes, Quirk, XX Eccentric: Stories about the Eccentricities of Women, and Gilmore Girls and the Politics of Identity.

Ripley’s Pick: Season One of Pulling


Pulling is a British comedy series written by Sharon Horgan (who co-stars) and Dennis Kelly. It aired on BBC3 for two seasons (of six episodes), starting in 2006, and an hour-long farewell special aired this May.

After breaking off her engagement, Donna (Horgan) moves in with two of her best friends, Louise (Rebekah Staton) and Karen (Tanya Franks). What follows is a hilarious, raunchy, irreverent take on life as a thirty-something woman.

Things I Love About Pulling

  1. Women behave badly, too. While something like 99% of television and movies allow men to behave badly and enjoy themselves, when women behave similarly they’re slut-shamed and made to feel guilty for thinking about anyone but everyone else. A woman has a one-night stand in most movies, and she’s punished with a pregnancy (and, yes, in comedies pregnancy typically is a punishment, meant to teach a woman she needs to change her selfish, uppity ways and start living for someone else). See Knocked Up, Juno, and just about every other American comedy.

  2. Successful dark comedy. While American dark comedy typically consists of some pretty awful misogyny, or at least humor at the expense of others, Pulling manages to be funny and edgy without displaying hatred for any group of marginalized people. Even a tirade against a man who gave a less-than-stellar performance in the bedroom has a tone of lightness and regard for the man, who looks adorably helpless standing by the kitchen table as Karen goes off. The viewer isn’t supposed to hate that man; the viewer feels sympathy for him.

  3. No interest in babies, marriage, children, or shopping. Donna decides she doesn’t want to marry Karl, despite caring for–even loving–him. Although Karen is a teacher, the one moment when she gets all sappy about children–with their tiny fingernails–being the future is played for laughs. And the only moment in the first season that approaches interest in clothes involves Karen verbally assaulting her dry cleaner for not being able to deliver same-day repair service for a torn dress, despite the fact that she had a completely bullshit suck-up conversation with him.

  4. The show is smarter than its characters. So many so-called smart shows have characters who are successful professionals–doctors, lawyers, businesspeople–and who do sophisticated things. Not this one. These women go to the pub–a lot. They have working-class jobs (waitress, teacher, personal assistant). They don’t feel guilty about being working-class women. They work. Lousy jobs. They lose lousy jobs. They don’t enjoy gallery openings.

  5. Despite the drinking, sleeping around, and general screwing up, the show still has a moral center. When the characters do something reprehensible, they know it. When Louise’s mother comes to visit, it’s clear that her behavior (which I won’t give away here) crosses a line that her daughter’s (and the roommates) don’t cross.

From a subjective viewpoint, these three women are my age and their lives are disasters. Their lives are, in fact, closer to most people I know than anything else represented in film and television. If I’m to believe media, the things I really concern myself with are marrying, having babies, buying a house, driving a newer car than I do, using the best hair/skin/cellulite-diminishing products, and obsessing over my investments. If I’m to believe my regular life, no one knows what the fuck they’re doing.

Pulling is a show starring women, but it’s not all about female empowerment and becoming a better person and sisterhood and all that. I’m all for female empowerment, but sometimes I just want to laugh. Pulling delivers, and it’s a shame the show lasted only two seasons. Those two seasons are, however, available on Netflix. If you haven’t seen Pulling, I suggest you immediately add it to your queue.

Antichrist Roundup

Lars Von Trier’s new film Antichrist opens in select cities on October 23, and already the controversy surrounding the film’s potential misogyny has the web and blogosphere buzzing. Much of it has to do with the Cannes Film Festival giving the director an anti-award. In the article, “Antichrist gets an anti-award in Cannes,” Jay Stone writes:
The ecumenical jury—which gives prizes for movies that promote spiritual, humanist and universal values—announced a special anti-award to Antichrist.

“We cannot be silent after what that movie does,” said Radu Mihaileanu, a French filmmaker and head of an international jury that announced the awards Saturday.

In a statement, Mihaileanu said Antichrist is “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world,” a reference to a statement by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier at a post-screening news conference. The movie, Mihaileanu added, says that the world has to burn women in order to save humanity.

And, the New York Times article, “Away From It All, in Satan’s Church” by Dave Kehr summarizes the film as follows:

Antichrist is the story of a woman (Ms. Gainsbourg) who blames herself for the accidental death of her young son. With her husband (Willem Dafoe), a cognitive therapist, she retreats to a cabin in the woods with the hope of working through her debilitating grief. But rather than a source of calm and comfort, the forest manifests itself as an infernal maelstrom of grisly death and feverish reproduction. Seeing herself as another “bad mother,” Ms. Gainsbourg’s nameless character identifies with this nature, red in tooth and claw, and descends from depression to insanity. “Nature is Satan’s church,” she proclaims, before moving on to acts of worship that will have some viewers looking away from the screen (if not fleeing the theater).

Great, another film about a woman falling victim to the Bad Mother complex while her husband desperately tries to save her from her inability to not get all irrational and insane and shit. But what I find so interesting about the controversy surrounding Von Trier’s latest probable woman- hatefest (see Dancer in the Dark and Dogville for similar themes) is that many people who’ve seen it argue that Antichrist actually takes religion to task, illustrating its harmful contribution to the continued second-class citizenship of women.

I haven’t even seen this yet (will I?) and I’m skeptical to say the least. A film that, according to Cannes judges, positions a woman as essentially evil, unapologetically physically abusive to her husband, and in the end, so self-loathing that she cuts off her own clitoris, well, yeah, I’ve got some skepticism about the whole “but he’s merely exploring misogyny!” theme. However, through my web and blogosphere research, I’ve found that many reviews and articles attempt to argue that exact point—Von Trier’s latest film has nothing to do with misogyny.

Take a look at some of the following excuses I mean apologies I mean theories about Antichrist and the description of how it actually (heh) portrays women (or how it doesn’t intend to say anything about women at all).

Landon Palmer at Film School Rejects writes:

Antichrist has received many an accusation of being misogynistic. There’s certainly an argument to be made there, and the film will no doubt become a central text in feminist film theory and criticism, coupled with von Trier’s history of treating his lead actresses in not the most respectful manner (many of which have consequently resulted in some of the best performances of their careers, including Gainsbourg’s). But to call Antichrist misogynistic is like saying American Beauty is a movie the champions pedophilia. Just because the idea is introduced and explored does not mean the standpoint of the film, the filmmaker, or how we perceive the film simply and directly runs in line with that. To make such an accusation is dismissive and simplistic, ignoring the many of ideas going on in a film whose central flaw lies in its very ambition. That the message of Antichrist is confused and muddled is a reaction to be expected, but the accusation of misogyny entails a frustrated preemptive refusal to explore the film any further. If Antichrist should be lauded for anything, it’s the many debates on sexism, the depiction of violence, the responsibility and influence of the filmmaker, and the important differences between meaning intended by the filmmaker and meaning interpreted by the audience. But the only way these debates can be constructive is if one genuinely attempts to view this film outside its now-notorious knee-jerk reactions at Cannes and take it at face value.

I agree—the debate is refreshing. We’re actually talking about misogyny. In film. But why the desperate attempts to defend Antichrist against accusations of misogyny? Have these defenders gone to the movies lately? You can’t even see a movie that doesn’t on some level reflect our cultural values and beliefs, and unfortunately, we live in a society that still strongly portrays women in film through embarrassingly and unapologetically sexist, misogynist stereotypes. And they especially run rampant in the supposed oh-so-inoffensive, “perfect date movie!”: the romantic comedy. (To be honest, I often wonder if these supposed film critics can even identify misogyny.)

But perhaps more important than the apologism of critics like Palmer: Von Trier actually hired a misogynist consultant who took part in an interview regarding her role in researching centuries worth of misogyny (so that he could include it in the film). In the interview, she says:

Antichrist shows completely new aspects of woman and adds a lot of nuance to von Trier’s earlier portraits of women, but you can’t really tell from his films what his own actual view on women is, just like you can’t conclude from Fight Club that Palahniuk wants to promote more violence in society. Art doesn’t work that way. The good question is why it is such a provocation for so many to be confronted with the image of woman as powerful, sexual and even brutal?

If that weren’t enough, she also wrote her own piece, arguing that:

The indictment against women I composed for Von Trier sums up the many misogynistic views all the way back to Aristotle, whose observations of nature led him to conclude that “the female is a mutilated male”. Should we avoid staring into that abyss or should we acknowledge this male anxiety, perhaps even note with satisfaction that women are mostly described as very powerful beings by these anxious men?

Many of the defenders of Von Trier’s portrayal of women argue that he really attempts to explore people’s relationship to nature, or problems with psychiatry and an over-medicated society, or depression, or how we’re all inherently evil, or that it’s just too brilliant a film to even warrant analysis—it just needs to be experienced. Even Roger Ebert says:

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw “Breaking the Waves” that von Trier’s sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world.

But others came away from the film with an entirely different interpretation of being “shaken.” One of the most thought-provoking pieces I came across was an article in The Guardian, which asked several women—activists, artists, journalists, professors, and actors—to respond to Antichrist. Surprisingly, I felt like most of them dodged the “Is it misogynistic?” question by either choosing not to go there at all or barely glossing over it. Julie Bindel, however, had this to say:

No doubt this monstrous creation will be inflicted on film studies students in years to come. Their tutors will ask them what it “means”, prompting some to look at signifiers and symbolism of female sexuality as punishment, and of the torture-porn genre as a site of male resistance to female emancipation.

It is as bad as (if not worse than) the old “video nasty” films of the 80s, such as I Spit On Your Grave or Dressed To Kill, against which I campaigned as a young feminist. I love gangster movies, serial killer novels and such like. But for me they have to contribute to our understanding of why such cruelty and brutality is inflicted by some people on others, rather than for the purposes of gruesome entertainment. If I am to watch a woman’s clitoris being hacked off, I want it to contribute to my understanding of female genital mutilation, not just allow me to see the inside of a woman’s vagina.

Alas, I haven’t seen the film. And because of that, I don’t have much commentary to offer, other than the opinions of the critics who have seen it, and to say that getting people talking about misogyny in film certainly pleases me. However, the over-intellectualization of films like Von Trier’s (and Tarantino’s and other misogynist directors) irritates me not only because it tends to dismiss accusations of misogyny with “but you just don’t get it!” language, but critics who use that language also fail to convey what, for them, would actually qualify as misogyny.

I personally can’t name the last film I watched where I couldn’t identify at least some form of misogyny, the most “harmless” of which (romantic comedies, bromances, Apatow) get rave reviews from critics with rarely a mention of the extremely detrimental portrayals of women as one-dimensional sidekicks, either virgins or whores, love interests, nagging wives, irrational/insane and conniving, etc. So, maybe another question to ask is, why should I trust them in this debate at all?

Regardless, check out the links below for more commentary on the film.

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Antichrist shows that men have objectified women as being closer to nature because of their roles as mothers and their natural cycles; and while that can sometimes be seen as a positive stereotype Antichrist makes the case that this particular objectification also renders women terrifyingly alien to men by linking them to the darker aspects of nature that men universally fear.

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The notion of the ‘punishment of women’ in his work is not only the outworking of themes dealing with patriarchal oppression, but it juxtaposes the brutality of the world (power, money, hatred, etc) with the spiritual (forgiveness, love, transcendence, etc). While there’s nothing original about this, it seems (judging by reviews) that many people simply don’t get it.

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Some critics say that the film is misogynist because the mother takes on to herself all the guilt and blame for the loss of her child, while the father seems almost completely untouched by it. I’d say that sounds rather more like misandry, but what do I know?

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Like a number of Von Trier’s films, Antichrist too can and has come under the scanner for its alleged misogyny. While the aggressor in this film, be it in terms of sex or violence, is the woman, seeing her as the Antichrist would do the film a great deal of injustice. Von Trier has certainly moved on from the helpless Golden Heart(ed) girl as a protagonist, and this time around, he doesn’t have an agenda.

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Just as much as Antichrist is sure to provoke debate, it is likely to provoke disdain. Despite providing a historical context (both in the film and in his own body of work) to explain his misogynistic premise, von Trier has already been attacked as a misogynist. Such a reading of Antichrist is oversimplified. This is a movie that dares audiences to declare either one of its characters an aggressor, especially since it situates each of them in a realm that shows nature to be just as aggressive itself.

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If Antichrist escapes being labelled a misogynist film, Gainsbourg’s fiercely committed screen presence will be the main reason—you sense she’s in control of this character in a way Von Trier isn’t. Indeed, that’s the other reason it’s hard to call Antichrist misogynist: Von Trier made it on such an instinctive level, apparently even incorporating images from the previous night’s dreams into that day’s shooting, that I’m not sure he consciously intended it to be either misogynistic or feminist.

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Dafoe elaborated: “It’s not saying anything about women. It doesn’t speak. It’s telling you a story that evokes many things. It’s telling you things about the relationship between men and women. I think Lars has a very romantic idea about women, and in this configuration the man is the rational guy, the fool who thinks he can save himself, and the woman is susceptible to things magical and poetic. And she also suffers from an illness. He’s identifying with women.”

He added that just because misogynistic things might happen in the movie, it doesn’t condone or encourage that attitude. “A woman being self-hating can happen, without saying that’s the nature of women.”

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Here is a film that explicitly confronts the director’s intertwined fears of primal nature and female sexuality. But does a fear of femaleness automatically equate to hatred? I’m not convinced that it does. Yes, the “She” character is anguished and irrational; a danger to herself and those around her. And yet for all that, she proves more vital, more powerful, and oddly more charismatic than “He”, the arrogant, doomed advocate of order and reason.

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The actresses who have worked alongside Von Trier often attest to his bizarre relationship with women. Kidman famously asked the director why he hates women, while Bjork was so disturbed on set that she began to consume her own sweater. All that highly negative press is probably what led to Von Trier hiring a misogyny specialist for his latest film, ‘Antichrist.’ But he needn’t have bothered. Anyone in their right mind (i.e. none of the characters in the film) would realize this movie is not about men or women, at all, but about the repercussions of depression. Misogyny requires a certain commitment to hating women while anyone who knows anything about depression is aware that those afflicted with it have no attachment to anything at all.

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BlogLinks: Agree or Disagree?

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Ripley’s Rebuke: Phoebe in Wonderland

Phoebe in Wonderland. Starring Felicity Huffman, Elle Fanning, Patricia Clarkson, and Bill Pullman. Written and Directed by Daniel Barnz.


For a film that wants to explore the difficulties of marriage and motherhood and, essentially, what it means to exist as a woman in a society that places so many demands on wives and mothers, I found it disconcerting to say the least that this film only barely passes the Bechdel Test. If it weren’t for one scene, where Felicity Huffman’s character, Hillary Lichten, engages in a brief conversation about her daughter, Phoebe, (played by Elle Fanning) with her daughter’s drama teacher, Miss Dodger, (played by Patricia Clarkson), then this entire movie, a movie about women, would plod along without one woman ever speaking to another woman.

imdb plot summary: The movie focuses on an exceptional young girl whose troubling retreat into fantasy draws the concern of both her dejected mother and her unusually perceptive drama teacher. Phoebe is a talented young student who longs to take part in the school production of Alice in Wonderland, but whose bizarre behavior sets her well apart from her carefree classmates.

Well, on the surface, the movie is about Phoebe and her struggle to fit in with her peers. But it quickly turns into an examination of motherhood and parenting in general, when Phoebe’s odd behavior gradually worsens: she spits at classmates, she obsessively repeats words and curses involuntarily, she washes her hands to the point that they bleed—and she explains to her parents over and over again that she can’t help it. However, her mother (and father), being academic writer-types (Hillary is actually attempting to finish her dissertation on Alice in Wonderland), merely choose to see their daughter as nothing more than eccentric and imaginative.

The caretaker role falls exclusively to Hillary. She’s a stay-at-home mom trying to write a book while also attempting to care for two young daughters. While her struggle to play The Good Mom definitely lends sympathy to her character—I mean, honestly, what the hell is a good mom?—I couldn’t help but despise her selfishness and blatant disregard for Phoebe’s needs. Even though both parents decide to (finally) get Phoebe into therapy, it’s Hillary who refuses to accept the doctor’s diagnosis, even going so far as to remove Phoebe from therapy, deliberately hiding the diagnosis from her husband.

The problem here, and where the movie most succeeds, is that Hillary feels alone as a parent. She believes that her children’s struggles will ultimately reflect poorly on her as The Good Mom, and she even says at one point that she doesn’t want her daughter to be “less than.” Obviously, we live in a society that mandates the over-the-top importance of living up to an unattainable standard of proper mothering (see: any celebrity mother and the scrutiny she faces, with barely a mention of celebrity fathers), and Hillary definitely effectively represents that unattainable standard.

The movie also successfully portrays the societal trend of the working father: he pokes his head in when necessary, checking in on his daughters, and demonstrating just the right balance between quirky annoyance at their neediness and curiosity about their daily lives—he shows up to parent/teacher conferences, he consoles Phoebe when she gets in trouble at school, and he genuinely wants to participate; he’s just not required to maintain the role of The Good Dad—it doesn’t exist.

In many ways, Miss Dodger, the drama teacher, saves Phoebe from herself, at least for a while. Clarkson’s character complicates the film further by positioning Miss Dodger as somewhat of an Other Mother—they’re kindred spirits, and Miss Dodger attempts to create a safe space for Phoebe in the theater, realizing that she doesn’t feel safe anywhere else. But in the one main interaction between Hillary and Miss Dodger, Hillary confronts Miss Dodger about Phoebe’s penchant for self-injury, even blaming her for not paying close enough attention (which is nothing more than a projection of Hillary’s own feelings about failing at the role of The Good Mom).

At first, the film explores Hillary’s inability to separate the weaknesses she perceives in her children from her (real or imagined) personal failings as a mother. And that theme deserves recognition. Hillary is a complicated character, after all, and how often do we get to watch complicated women struggle with real issues on-screen? The issue I struggle with, though, warrants discussion as well: how long does Phoebe have to repeatedly self-harm before her mother acknowledges the doctor’s diagnosis?

What could’ve been (and actually was, at first) a feminist investigation of the plight of motherhood and marriage in a society that still treats women as second-class citizens (even if it pretends not to view them as such), somehow turned into an indictment of The Selfish Mother. Just because Hillary says out loud (something along the lines of): “I don’t want to look at my life when I’m 70 and realize I did nothing important. But at the same time, I wouldn’t mind. My daughters make me live,” well, that doesn’t negate the fact that she waited until her daughter jumped off a fucking theater scaffold before she decided that, okay, something might be wrong with her.

The film makes it almost impossible not to hate that mother: in one scene, she comforts Phoebe after a nightmare, realizes Phoebe has horrible bruises all over her legs, and listens (once again) to Phoebe cry about how she can’t help hurting herself. While Phoebe continues her obsessive compulsions, which result in removal from the play at one point, her mother continues to ignore the doctor’s diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome.

My point is, what the fuck? Am I supposed to believe that part of the feminist complications of motherhood include the struggle to not seriously neglect (and consequently, abuse) your child? Perhaps in some warped way, the film wants to illustrate how motherhood in our society really is a double-edged sword: she can choose to help her daughter, and risk feeling like a failure as a mother (because she would have to acknowledge her daughter is “less than”), or she can hope that her child really is an imaginative eccentric who shouldn’t be medicated and drained of her creativity.

While Hillary clearly buys in to both the cult of motherhood and the demonization of disability, the filmmakers really only succeed in showcasing the latter, resulting in a somewhat interesting examination of how we, as a society, often react to what we perceive as different or Other. But because the film also attempts to examine motherhood simultaneously, I found it virtually impossible not to read it as anything more than a deliberate, over-the-top, worst case scenario metaphor for the consequences of Bad Mothering.

Ripley’s Pick: Season One of ‘True Blood’*

*That’s right, I said Season One. I haven’t seen a minute of Season Two, and won’t until it comes out on DVD. If Season Two contradicts everything I’ve said here, please bite your tongue–or leave your links in the comments section!

Here’s a secret: I love TV. Even more than I love movies. A television series can develop characters and story lines that are impossibly complex for a two-hour movie, and can really dig into themes and issues in ways movies can only touch upon. The high-quality television series is our generation’s answer to the 19th century serial novel–an excellent vehicle for cultural analysis and a popular genre (although most quality television is currently the domain of premium cable, which is, I admit, a problem).

A rare thing happened at work a few weeks ago: three of us (it’s a small business, and none of us has cable) started watching True Blood on DVD at the same time, allowing us to discuss a cultural object a little bit more complicated–and rewarding–than standard reality show fare.

To begin, in the words of my employer, since the show is on HBO, it’s already light years beyond anything else on TV–so even if it’s flawed, it’s hard to argue against watching (and enjoying) it.

True Blood, for the final few people unaware of the current vampire craze in the U.S., is set in small-town Louisiana a couple of years after vampires officially “came out of the coffin.” Supernatural figures and those with more mundane talents–like mind-reading and curing alcoholism & anxiety with fake exorcisms–populate Bon Temps. While the latter refers to the voodoo line True Blood refuses to cross, the former is the powerful ability of the main character, Sookie Stackhouse. (The show is based on Charlaine Harris’ series of novels about the heroine, which I haven’t read. But might.)

Rather than write a complete review of the entire first season (twelve 50-minute episodes), which I’m not sure how to do in the first place, I’ll highlight a few of the female characters and why I choose this series–despite its flaws–as a Ripley’s Pick.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin)
Sookie, the star of the show, is a waitress who can read minds–unless she concentrates on not listening. What draws her most to Vampire Bill is that she can’t hear his thoughts, even if she tries. Now, Sookie conforms to a lot of vampire story tropes: she is chaste (at first), in a kind of distress that warrants supernatural intervention (mostly), very pretty, and scantily clad. She is all of these things, yet she subverts so many expectations that I think the show plays with these tropes more than conforms to them. Sookie is a virgin when the show begins, but it doesn’t take long for her to run for Bill (literally) after–in a Like Water for Chocolate moment–eating a pie her grandmother made (with love). She enjoys sex, and isn’t shamed by the ‘fangbanger’ accusations hurled at her. She’s strong, independent, smart, and ultimately powerful; and even if she does wear tiny, tiny dresses, she still beheads a serial killer with a shovel.

Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley)
Sookie’s best friend, and my favorite character. Unlike most female characters on TV, Tara is a real woman with real problems. Aside from her shape-shifter boss/love interest, Sam, and her origins-yet-defined adolescent crush, Jason, Tara deals with isolation, loneliness, and an alcoholic Jesus-freak mother. She is independent and abrasive, and despite her best efforts, falls to the defense mechanisms of her mother (her go-to accusations of racism and sexism, drinking, demon exorcism for melancholy). She’s also wicked smart–the show opens with her reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, and reminds us again and again that she reads for knowledge. She doesn’t always know what to do with her knowledge, however, as evidenced in her lashing out at the customer who interrupts her reading of Klein. Tara is legitimately angry, but hasn’t figured out how to direct her anger at anything but herself.

Amy Burley (Lizzy Caplan)
Amy Burley is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On the surface she’s a beautiful, free-spirited wanderer who opens Jason’s eyes up to the wonders of the natural world–and vampire blood, an illegal substance with LSD qualities. While we’re charmed by her indie good looks and hippie-stuck-in-a-perpetual-summer-of-love ways, there’s something dark and evil underneath. She’s selfish and nasty, and will stop at nothing–including manipulating born-follower Jason, kidnapping, and murdering–to indulge her desire to escape into a drug-induced euphoria. Though her storyline isn’t a major one, it offers some straightforward cultural critique. Like some actual hippies in the ’60s, interested only in indulging selfish desires while Vietnam raged and the Civil Rights casualties mounted, Amy ignores reality in service of continuing her fantasy. (Those who critique the show as ultimately regressive might use her character as an example; selfish hippies are a conservative bugaboo. Or, she might just be an example of the destructive nature of human desire.)

This barely scratches the surface of True Blood, and I do think there are some legitimate critiques of the show–despite couching many of its themes in camp. My least favorite moments in the show involve its romantic plots, which are, frankly, boring and soap opera-esque, and pale in comparison to the show’s other interests.

True Blood–like creator Alan Ball’s previous series, Six Feet Under–definitely feels like a guilty pleasure, but both shows exhibit intelligence along with entertainment. I hope Season Two, which wraps this coming Sunday night, delves further into Southern identity, sexuality, and desire–rather than losing its smarts in a storm of supernatural battles.

The Ugly Truth Roundup


Despite a “rotten” rating of 16%, The Ugly Truth raked in another $7 million at the box office this past weekend (to compare, the by-all-accounts stellar Julie & Julia brought in just over $20 million), remaining in the top 10 two weeks after its release. The real ugly truth is that this kind of tripe continues to sell.

In our last Roundup, we collected discussions of a film that was controversial due, in part, to its played-for-laughs date rape. In this one, we have a romantic comedy, sold to women and packaged as a date movie/chick-flick, that rests on the age-old premise that women love with their minds, and men love with their dicks. Oh, and that successful career women need to be taken down a notch or two–preferably by a lowest-common-denominator-type buffoon–in order to be happy.

Is this just another crappy Rom-Com? Or is it something more? What about the fact that it was written and produced by women?

Here are some things other people are saying:

  • Women’s Glib might give Katherine Heigl a little too much credit, calling her a “part-time feminist,” but they do remind us that this kind of movie ought to be seen as just as offensive to men as it is to women.

And, in the What Were They Thinking? department:

In a shockingly unaware moment, Ruth McCann exemplifies what’s wrong with post-feminism: “But when Mike advises Abby to be ‘the saint and the sinner, the librarian and the stripper,’ how can the hardened, rom-com-hating Thinking Woman not bark a gruff and hearty ‘Ha!’?”

Um, really?

Leave your links & thoughts in the comments section.

Movie Review: 500 Days of Summer, Take 1

500 Days of Summer. Starring Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Geoffrey Arend, Chloe Moretz, Matthew Gray Gubler, and Clark Gregg. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. Directed by Marc Webb.Within the past few years especially, independent films have developed a certain easily identifiable “indie charm,” and 500 Days of Summer most definitely fulfills the criteria. These films used to be termed “independent” due to budget constraints, but just like the big studio films, indie movies have essentially become marketable, targeting a very specific audience to the point that indie elements have basically become indie clichés:

—amazing alterna-soundtrack? check.
(see also: Juno, Garden State, Away We Go)

—strangely cartoonish, bubbly-lettered and/or pencil-sketched movie poster? check.
(see also: Juno, Away We Go, Wes Anderson movies, Napoleon Dynamite)

—quirky female lead? check.
(see also: Juno, Garden State, The Royal Tenenbaums, Reality Bites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

—at least one scene that occurs in a ridiculous location? check.
(see also: Juno [furniture on the lawn scenes], Away We Go [department store bathtub scene, trampoline scene, stripper pole scene], Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [most of the scenes])

—tortured love, tortured souls, tortured existences? check.
(see also: every indie film ever made)


For interesting reading about independent film clichés, coupled with a good review of Away We Go, read this.

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Despite the fact that 500 Days of Summer is pretty much guilty of perpetuating all of the above indie clichés, I really liked it. Despite the completely conservative ending, I really liked it. Despite my two-week long depressive episode following my viewing of this film, alone, in a theater in Times Square, in the middle of the day, alone, I really liked it. And, for whatever reason, despite my initial ambivalence after leaving the theater, this movie managed to linger with me. Why?

Well, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, for starters. The distilled plot: he falls in love with a woman who doesn’t believe in love, which leads to his inevitable heartbreak. I hated watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt get his heart stomped on by [insert quirky hipster female love interest] Zooey Deschanel! Joseph Gordon-Levitt starred in Mysterious Skin! And Brick! And Third Rock from the Sun!

We love him!

The truth is, though, while I enjoyed watching a romantic comedy that changed-up the genre by turning the leading man into a mushy, self-loathing disaster who attempts to accept the reality of unrequited love, I hated how much the film still turned the female lead into a sidekick. In traditional romantic comedies, problematic as they are, the films at the very least focus on the couple, and you get to know the characters individually (The Break-Up, Eternal Sunshine, etc) by watching their interactions and conflicts as a couple.

But in 500 Days of Summer, the plot unfolds exclusively through the perspective of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Tom. Zooey Deschanel’s character, Summer, (haha, get it?) exists merely as a vehicle to further the audience’s identification with Tom. We never learn much about her. She likes Ringo Starr. She likes The Smiths. She likes karaoke. She doesn’t believe in true love.

Thankfully, we also know that she identifies as an independent woman who refuses to be tied down. She might even identify as a feminist, though she never explicitly states that.

I loved one scene in particular where she gets angry with Tom because of some performative alpha-male attempt to “defend her honor” in a bar fight. He might be defending himself a little too; after all, the initial punch happens after the other man says to Summer, “I can’t believe this guy is your boyfriend.” Harsh. But I would’ve loved the scene even more if it hadn’t been undercut by Summer showing up at Tom’s apartment later, soaking wet from the rain, to apologize for getting angry with him.

In fact, the biggest issue I take with this film is how often it undercuts Summer’s independence. The conclusion, which I won’t give away here, completely disappoints in that regard. Not only is it an easy, throwaway ending, but it doesn’t do justice to Summer’s independent-woman persona, and instead (and again), exists only as a plot point that encourages the audience to sympathize with Tom.

We barely know Summer, but why does the little bit we do know about her have to get unnecessarily lost in the end?

There are also no other important women characters. Tom occasionally solicits advice from his younger sister, who’s like, twelve, and I found it appropriately cute and indie-funny. And he goes on a blind date once, where he spends the entire time complaining to his date about Summer. (To the film’s credit, the woman he’s on the date with defends the shit out of Summer, rather than veering off into traditional rom-com female competitive-jealous territory.) Other than those few women though, it’s all about Tom.

However, if this movie can claim anything, it can claim inclusion of some seriously awesome meta shit. Movies within movies within movies, oh my! We get clips and parodies of The Graduate, Persona, and some other French films I didn’t recognize. And one can’t ignore the hilarious bursting-into-song scene, complete with full group-dance sequence and cartoon birds. The film also uses a style of storytelling that moves back-and-forth within time, and that works too, keeping the viewer slightly off-kilter and in the same headspace as its hero.

With all this film fun, you ask, then what’s my problem?

I think it has much to do with what I wanted for Summer. For her to go on being her quirky, independent-hipster self, unabashed and unapologetic. For her to never come across as potentially manipulative or dishonest, because she isn’t either of those things. And for the writers and/or director to have taken as much care in creating a 3-dimensional female lead as they did in creating a fully fleshed-out male lead who picks himself up, dusts himself off, and goes out and accomplishes shit.

They’re calling it a romantic comedy, after all. Even in the traditional “girl meets boy” then “boy breaks girl’s heart” then “boy realizes he really loves girl” then “boy and girl live happily ever after” bullshit, and its pointless variations, the male and female characters get mostly equal screen time. In cases where that might not happen, the audience at least comes to understand each of the characters’ motivations at some point.

(I’m by no means defending the rom-com, but at least in most female-driven rom-coms, like Pretty Woman and He’s Just Not That Into You, I know that I’ll have the pleasure of watching both of the characters one-dimensionally participate in a recreation of 1950s gender roles, ha.)

But in 500 Days of Summer—the female love interest exists, but she exists in the background as a supporting character, her main purpose being to help flesh out the hero. In turn, she becomes nothing more than an extension of him, just a quirky after-thought, another one of his personality traits.

500 Days of Summer could’ve (and should’ve) found a way to avoid that.

Yet at the end of the day, despite its shortcomings, I couldn’t help but really like this “story about love.” It felt authentic, at least in its illustration of relationship conflicts, from the initial courtship phase to the inevitable dissolution. Deschanel maintains her complete adorability and Gordon-Levitt, well, we love him! Their on-screen chemistry, intermingled with all kinds of mopiness and feel-goodness and splashes of The Smiths and Regina Spektor … look, who cares about my criticisms? You should probably just go see this.

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Check out some insightful reviews here, here, here, and here.