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Concerning the Confusingly Named ‘Love & Friendship’ (Jane Austen’s ‘Lady Susan’)

Whit Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. … Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations… a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer.

This guest post written by Laura Witz is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Witzster. It is cross-posted with permission.

Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship follows the narrative of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan rather neatly and although many reviews seem to be, often ignorantly, telling us that this is Austen with teeth or some such, what I don’t think they realize is that Austen already has teeth. The film is great, but it is great because it is so faithful to tone.

Austen probably wrote Lady Susan when she was about eighteen (although it wasn’t published until long after her death in 1871), already aware that her hyper intelligence may not stand her in good stead as a woman, but long before the much sadder points in her life, when she was also to fantasize about being able to intellectually and physically subject herself to the whim of the man intended to be her superior (Mansfield Park).

Where in Mansfield Park the Lady Susan character (Mary Crawford) is sidelined and punished, in Lady Susan, she is celebrated. I once read that Lady Susan is a fantasy of female power in a world where, legally speaking, women had none. This power is in the most part manifested in the original text by the fact that the story is told through letters, a medium really only upper class women engaged in, and since the women control the letter form, they do in fact control the boundaries of this reality. Whenever men get involved, their letters are short and stilted and ineffective. I would argue that, to a degree, this reality is also an idealized version of a very real subculture that did exist.

Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. The men in the film are useless and defunct, from the wonderfully silly Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) (my new crush), to the priggish and apparently clever Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and in particular to the “very handsome” Mr. Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin) who, although he appears in several scenes, has no lines, not one.

As in the original text, this is a battle between two women, Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) and her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell). Catherine has her mother (Jemma Redgrave) in her court and Lady Susan has her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny) in hers. Throughout the film, these two vie for power, over Catherine’s brother, Reginald, over Lady Susan’s daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), and arguably over a position as matriarch of the family.

The film is great and so are the actors. Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin made me cry with laughter. And the ending, in particular, is very interesting. The original text finishes with Austen getting slightly bored and making fun of her own narrative form. Stillman’s adaptation sticks very closely to the spirit of the text, ignoring the potentially problematic tone of the final passage, which is arguably written in the voice of Catherine Vernon anyway. And most importantly, this film has steered clear of any attempt to romanticize the story.

As most people who know me know, I have an ax to grind where it comes to Jane Austen and I’ve been grinding it for the better part of the last seven years. Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations made by people who in some cases don’t even seem to have read the source text (Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice), a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer. Now there’s nothing wrong with romance, I very much enjoy a good rom-com (and quite frequently a very crap one). But the fact is that this genre has been sidelined as one that is trivial and silly ever since Austen herself wrote and idle upper class young women got kicks from reading saucy French novels.

Of course if you actually look at Austen’s works, only Pride and Prejudice can reasonably be described as a romance and that romance is running alongside a lot of social commentary and out and out comedy. In particular, look at Sense and Sensibility, where Elinor marries Edward the bland (a far cry from Hugh Grant / Dan Stevens) and Marianne gets Brandon the old. As a rom-com alone, Sense and Sensibility fails since the major love affair of the text remains unfulfilled.

Dickens wrote romances into every book, but nobody refers to him as a romance writer. The name Allan Woodcourt – or I suppose Woodcourt – hasn’t been adopted as a catch-all for everything women desire and everything that is irritating about the romance genre (Bleak House, in case you’re wondering). Because Dickens doesn’t represent a threat because he is a man and therefore it’s okay for him to be a writer and we don’t need to undermine and diminish him.

So what if we make Austen adaptations that don’t conform to that stereotype? What if we write fan fiction that doesn’t include shit fantasies about pseudo-romances with a misunderstanding of Mr. Darcy? What if someone decides to adapt texts Austen wrote that do not conform to this? What kind of writer do we call her then? And that’s where Love & Friendship comes in. It might not seem groundbreaking that there is yet another period drama out there getting some attention and some critical acclaim, but trust me, this film is rocking my fucking world.

And Whit, if you’re reading this, I have an adaptation of the actual Love & Friendship that we can start work on any day. Although the title might be a problem.

Laura Witz is an editor and writer of plays and stories living and working in the UK. She has written plays that have performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Jane Austen Festival in Bath and her articles and stories have been published in a number of institutions and publications, a few of which can be found on her blog. Witz hopes to one day become an aerial clown. You can follow her on Twitter @Charlotte_Prod.

Eva Green vs. Frank Miller: A Feminist Revolt in a Man’s World

Even when Eva Green chooses to take part in obviously bad movies, she somehow manages to carry them to a higher level of quality all on her own. Such is the case with two of her films: ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ and ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.’ …Both of which starred Green in major femme fatale roles, and both of which feel, in part, like pro-feminist reactions to the original films they follow.

Guest post written by Josh J. Bell.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Eva Green is possibly my favorite dramatic performer on the planet. Her striking presence and physicality, that raspy, compelling voice, her often unhinged acting style; she has an amazing talent for raising the entertainment value of anything she’s involved in. Just watch Penny Dreadful, which featured a 10-minute long séance scene: 10 straight minutes of Green writhing around, babbling in weird voices, and somehow it never once becomes tedious. The woman is one of the major unappreciated MVPs of the film industry right now.

Even when Green chooses to take part in obviously bad movies, she somehow manages to carry them to a higher level of quality all on her own. Such is the case with two of her films I’d like to compare and discuss: 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

Sin City and 300 have strangely parallel trajectories as franchises. Both are based on graphic novels written by Frank Miller; both were released in the mid-2000s, and were highly accurate to the source material, recreating panels from the graphic novels down to the tiniest details. Both are post-modern takes on classic film genres no longer very popular at the both office: film noir and sword and sandal historical epics. Both were highly stylized with slow-motion violence and sex, distinctive color-palettes, and heavy use of CGI sets. And finally, both franchises released sequels in 2014, both of which starred Eva Green in major femme fatale roles, and both of which feel, in part, like pro-feminist reactions to the original films they follow. If that all is coincidence, it has to be one of the most stunning series of coincidences in Hollywood history.

Now, Frank Miller is many things but no one would ever describe him as a feminist. He is notorious for writing female characters who are highly sexualized, possess little to no story agency, and usually have some cruel and humiliating violence or death inflicted upon them. In short, he’s about as old school and outspoken a misogynist as you can be and still remain employable in the comics industry (which says more about the industry than it does him, but that’s another essay entirely).

The original Sin City and 300 films did little to remove or minimize Miller’s lack of respect for his female characters. Women such as Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) and Gail (Rosario Dawson) were allowed to be powerful only through their sexuality and violence; they remained passive supporters of their male counterparts’ storylines. The remaining female characters were used merely for window dressing and cannon fodder.

The sequels, flawed as they may be, diverge from their origin films. While Frank Miller has claimed to have a 300 prequel in the works for years, it, like many of his proposed projects over the last few decades, has yet to materialize. Unwilling to wait on the increasingly irrelevant writer, Warner Brothers pushed ahead, and the resulting film was instead written by the first film’s director, Zack Snyder, with Miller’s only contribution being whatever he actually finished of that prequel comic serving as inspiration.

Snyder’s history with writing female characters and feminist ideas into his screenplays is… inconsistent, to say the least. He strikes me as someone who has at least a passing interest and respect for feminism, but isn’t really particularly dedicated to it. When looking at 300: Rise of an Empire and Snyder’s even more controversial Sucker Punch, it’s hard to deny that he isn’t at least making an effort to write an empowering story for women. But most of his films (300, Watchmen, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) ignore the handful of women characters, often seeming annoyed by or even outright hostile to their presence.

Despite the fact that I have yet to fully forgive him for Batman v Superman, I generally try to cut Snyder some slack, because he a) is genuinely talented, and b) does usually seem to learn from his mistakes, however slowly. Case in point, 300: Rise of an Empire, which comes across as almost a response to or apology for the previous film. The film’s protagonist, the Athenian Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), takes a rather dim view of the brutality of the Spartans, as evidenced by a needlessly long scene of a group of Spartans brutally beating one guy during training. Perhaps this was Snyder’s way of addressing the accusations toward 300 that he was promoting fascism and eugenics, not to mention the first film’s racism and ableism. Also, Queen Gorgo is given far more screen time and more to do, including leading a Spartan army to battle, and none of which involves seducing her husband’s rivals for political favor. Now if only Snyder had thought to include a positive queer character as recompense for the blatant and historically inaccurate homophobia of the first film.

But as with seemingly every project she appears in, this is Eva Green’s stage, and the really interesting stuff begins and ends with her. Green plays Artemisia, very loosely based on a real historical figure of the same name. Despite being the villain, she is the true star of the film, and director Noam Murro knows it. The camera often lingers on Green during long pauses, allowing some truly stellar acting moments, even though whenever she’s absent, the film could care less about acting, preferring to keep a kinetic pace from one gratuitous image of violence and sexuality to the next.

Green is nothing short of transcendent in this role, one she’s honestly overqualified for, but Snyder doesn’t exactly leave her with nothing to work with either. Artemisia’s arc is fascinating to analyze and casts the entire film in a different light when viewed up close.

Artemisia is not only the chief villain, completely overshadowing Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), but she is retroactively cast as the true mastermind behind the events of the previous film as well. We are shown that in fact Artemisia is the true power behind the Persian throne, with Xerxes being little more than a puppet ruler she manipulated into invading Greece, even being responsible for his delusions of godhood. As much as I normally hate retcons (see Spectre for the worst example of the hackneyed “secret villain responsible for literally everything” trope), it’s noteworthy that Snyder not only gives Artemisia agency, but in fact makes her responsible for the inciting events of the entire franchise. Without Artemisia, there is no 300.

Artemisia’s backstory and motivation are even more interesting. As a child, she was captured by Greek soldiers who raped and murdered her family in front of her, and then kept her as a sex slave for years before discarding her half-dead in the streets. She is then found by a Persian ambassador (Peter Mensah), who took her in and trained her in combat and strategy. From there she rose through the ranks until she was the most trusted advisor to the Persian King Darius (Igal Naor), favored even above his son Xerxes, and leader of the entire Persian Navy.

Rape as a backstory for violent, vengeful, strong, or ambitious female characters is one of the most overdone plots in modern fiction, let’s admit that right now. It is ridiculous how writers behave as though the only justification or motivation a woman can have for revenge is rape and sexual assault. So Snyder wins no points for dipping into this dry well and employing this trope. However, normally the rape-revenge heroine is a… well, heroine. Rape is a horrific crime; it’s difficult to watch on-screen and is often triggering to survivors, so filmmakers don’t tend to subject characters to that kind of traumatic ordeal on-screen if we’re not meant to empathize with them.

Eva Green’s performance combined with this backstory makes Artemisia by far the most three-dimensional character in either 300 or its sequel (although that’s not saying much). As a result, she’s far easier to identify with and root for than the bland and lifeless Themistokles, who is little more than a Leonidas clone, and Sullivan Stapleton as an actor is so massively out of his league next to Green that it’s laughable. The film’s divisive, aggressive sex scene between them is interesting and over the top all at once, and while the scene’s merits are debatable — whether it sexualizes a rape survivor, empowers her, or both — it’s hard to deny Green owns the whole scene, even if only by virtue of her being a far superior actor than Stapleton.

In the finale, Artemisia and Themistokles face off in an epic sword fight, during which Green delivers one of the all-time great insults (“You fight harder than you fuck!”), which finally culminates in her death at the point of Themistokles’s sword. Now this by itself might be a coincidence, swords are phallic instruments by default and not every movie featuring swordplay is trying to say anything symbolically about sex or gender dynamics. But when the sword goes right into Artemisia’s midsection and she forces it deeper into her, almost seeming to orgasm at the feeling of it, and then falls to the ground in a position mirroring that which her captors left her for dead as a child, while Themistokles (whose appearance looks similar to the hoplites who killed her family) stands over her, there’s no way to argue that this scene isn’t inviting direct comparison to Artemesia’s origin story.

There are two ways to interpret this. One is that 300: Rise of an Empire is a violently misogynist movie that vilifies a rape survivor and sees the symbolic rape of her demise as just punishment for her sin of being an ambitious woman. That’s an extreme view, but given our country just elected a racist misogynist who bragged about sexual assault over a potential first woman POTUS, it certainly is still possible for that level of hate to exist in our movies. However, I choose to believe that the film actually subtly condemns our supposed hero, encouraging you to root for the villain and reexamine the sexist roots of the macho power fantasy the first film provided. When the final shot of the film is Themistokles coming right at the camera like a horror movie monster, in fact just like the sea serpent that comes right at the camera during a random dream sequence that otherwise has no clear purpose, it’s not unreasonable to interpret this as a sign that maybe he isn’t really the good guy.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is far less complex and subtle than 300: Rise of an Empire, and as such, is a little harder to find meaning in. It also differs in that Frank Miller clearly had much more influence in the film adaptation. Not only does he once again have a co-directing credit, but he is the only credited writer this time around. However, like Snyder, I think that Miller’s attitude towards women, while clearly outdated and hateful, might be just a bit more complex than he usually lets on. Once again, parts of this film feel like they’re responding to backlash against the first film.

The most obvious example in the final chapter in the film’s anthology, “Nancy’s Last Dance,” in which Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), a passive Damsel in Distress in the last film, is transformed into an unstable, Travis Bickle-esque vigilante. She manages to finally kill off Roarke (Powers Boothe), the big bad of the franchise, which no one ever managed before. It’s not really a good story, Alba just isn’t a strong enough actress to believably pull it off and it renders Hartigan’s (Bruce Willis) sacrifice at the end of the last movie pointless. Killing off Roarke seems like it defeats the point of the Sin City series, where the bad guys always win and the best the good guys can do is ruffle their feathers a bit on the way to the grave. But still, it’s an unexpected place for Miller to take this story.

But once again, Eva Green steals the show; these films live and die on her shoulders. There isn’t really much to unpack with her character compared to 300: Rise of an Empire. Ava Lord (Eva Green) is a pretty standard femme fatale: duplicitous, amoral, using her sexuality to manipulate men into doing her bidding. She does mirror Artemisia a bit, in that both women are sick of living at the whim of men and acquire power through seduction. But Ava has no tragic backstory to motivate her, and in fact, all her claims about being abused are merely lies to garner sympathy (which is incredibly problematic). But I’m a firm believer that even monstrously evil female characters in fiction can be a positive thing if they provide a wider range of roles for actresses; and nobody does bad quite like Eva Green. She dominates this movie so much, it’s no wonder she’s the character the film’s title references. Ava Lord is almost like a slasher villain, in that she’s so much more interesting and fun to watch than her victims; you find yourself rooting for her despite the depths of her evil.

Neither of these films, 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, are particularly good, if I’m being honest. The plots are poorly structured, they both feel a little phoned in, the aesthetics have long lost their novelty since the originals came out, and Green is (in both cases) surrounded by castmates who either aren’t nearly on her level, or simply can’t be bothered to put in the same effort. Neither film is feminist, since — with the exception of the last ten minutes of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For — neither have any actual female protagonists, with the women (aside from Nancy) instead serving as adversaries or supporting players to the men. But it’s a testament to Eva Green’s abilities that she steals so many scenes that you forget the film isn’t actually about her.

I like to recognize effort where I see it, and despite all their failings, there is effort in these films. Snyder and Miller are far from my favorite writers, but there is the faintest scent of self-examination in these scripts that is encouraging. Maybe their treatment of female characters will improve further in time; maybe it won’t. In the meantime, we still have Eva Green. And there is never a bad time to celebrate Eva Green.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Eva Green’s Artemisia Disappoints in 300: Rise of an Empire

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For Review

Josh J. Bell is a freelance blogger and stage actor from Charleston, South Carolina. He has written for The Escapist and The Agony Booth. Follow him on Twitter @joshjbell.

‘The Girl on the Train’: Trauma, Fragmentation, and Female-Driven Resilience

The film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Written by Eva Phillips, this is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Indie Film Minute. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of alcoholism, infertility, abuse, and trauma.]

The Girl on the Train functions, in myriad unexpected ways, as a soliloquy. It is a soliloquy for ineffable, unattended loss; an ode, of sorts, for shattered, misplaced desires, for lives ended or redirected. Most compelling, and most devastatingly at times, the film — directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor — is an unflinching soliloquy for broken women. I have a fair amount of hesitation even considering employing the term “broken women,” let alone assessing a film or any text as a soliloquy for them. So much is insinuated on a personal, social, and even voyeuristic level when the phrase “broken women” is used, and often the overarching implication is women defined and stultified by brokenness, immured in an agony or vulnerability that leads to some fetishizing of these women. In The Girl on the Train, however, the brokenness is not all-encompassing, nor definitive. Aided by the melancholic, complex irreverence of Erin Cressida Wilson and her screenplay (she also wrote Secretary (2002) and 2010’s Chloe), the film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Based on Paula Hawkins’ outrageously popular 2015 novel, much of the film’s upholding of this complex, painful, but intensely refreshing and even invigorating portrayal of femininity lies in the fact that the film is centered around women acting upon, around, in conversation, and in unique matrix with one another. The film is not predicated upon interactions with or justifications from men — either within the film or in the larger, more metaphoric audience — nor does it seek a sympathizing or adjusted response from its audience. This is no more apparent than in a moment of excruciating discombobulation near the end of the film’s action.

The moment is brief but echoes seismically: the titular protagonist, Rachel (an astonishingly brutal Emily Blunt) approaches the wife of her ex-husband’s boss to apologize for a night of blackout-drunk rage, only to be told she did nothing other than slept the night away in a guest room. This revelation allows Rachel to sift through the fractured and blotted out memories of her months of alcoholism, clearheadedly recollecting the abusiveness of her former husband, the vile manipulations he would enact and deceptions he would weave, capitalizing on her depression and drinking to gaslight her into believing her behavior and her blackouts were the cause of their marital disintegration. Rachel is finally aware, critically coinciding with her troubled investigations into a murder that drives the mystery of the film, of the realities of the tempestuous relationship with her husband and the violence and fights he initiated and blamed on her. The film, which interestingly often flirts with the mediated ways in which women are forced to reconcile or contend with their grief and the limitations put on them — obsessive social media behavior and male-orchestrated therapy, as fascinating examples — provides women (most importantly Rachel) their own space to confront the anguishes and often male-driven suppression that stifles epiphanies with their own consciousness.

It is important that this moment of epiphany and awakening — which is not hyperbolically lofty, as Rachel quite literally is awakened to memories and moments that had been occluded throughout the film, either as a result of drinking or trauma — is shared between women and catalyzed by a woman. This is one of the myriad moments and facets of the film that transforms it into a cinematic experience of women viewing, interacting, and behaving in correlation to one another, when it could have very easily been limited and diminished by the unending problem of the omniscient patriarchal glare.

Frustratingly, whenever I would talk about the film or would attempt to look it up, I constantly found myself referring to it as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The two films, aside from sharing the potentially problematic reliance on the designation “girl” — the debates over and problems with “girl” as an identifier for adult women can ignite a discourse that would necessitate pages and pages of writing. For instance, while the “girl” identifier can carry positive resonances for women of color, highlighted by the “Black Girl Magic” phenomenon. “Girl” in the case of The Girl on the Train, works as a curious juxtaposition to the “girl” in the various adaptions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as both present films about feminine ferocity and intuitiveness in the wake of a crime. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functions as piece that emphasizes, both explicitly and implicitly, passivity and fetishizing the violence done to and by women, using “girl” as a nomenclatural tool of disempowering. In contrast, The Girl on the Train could easily be read as a remark on female fragility, female promiscuity, female unreliability, and a gamut of other tropes and disqualifications cast upon narratives involving women, addiction, and depression. Rather, the film transcends these tropes — primarily with the help of the astonishing, female-driven cast, who vivify Erin Cressida Wilson’s devastating and complex screenplay — and the film emerges as a testament to the agonies women endure (and often expected to be silent through) and the elocutions women engage in their handlings with each other, their reconciliation of selfhood, their desires, and so on.

Structurally, the film replicates the fragmented sense of self and the process of reassembling that each woman in The Girl on the Train undergoes or is involved in. The action of the film is conveyed in vignettes from the perspectives of three achingly intertwined women. Rachel, hiding that she lost her job over a year ago as a repercussion of her alcoholism, rides the same train into the city to drink and further descend into the misery of her infertility and disintegrated marriage. When riding the train, she excruciatingly obsesses over the neighborhood which use to be her own, fixating on the gorgeous, enigmatic, and seemingly blissful “new neighbor” Megan (Haley Bennett), and is haunted by the vision of her former home, inhabited by her ex-husband (a delightfully impeachable Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

As each woman’s vignette is further explored in brilliantly disjointed episodes and reveals, the possibility of rendering vile, redundant archetypes of each of these women — pathetic, obsessive alcoholic (Rachel); oversexed, cold twenty-something (Megan); narcissistic, type-A “new woman” (Anna) — is obliterated. Haley Bennett portrays Megan with such a compelling amount of brusque aloofness paired with subtle, unbearable pain, that she transforms the character into a tragic heroine, and her murder, that becomes Rachel’s multilayered fixation for most of the film, reads more than just a sacrifice of a woman. Most critically though, Rachel’s character, both through the script and Blunt’s astonishing performance, is presented with such delicate yet overwhelming agony that the woman immured in the savage cycle of alcoholism and relentless depression is not pitiful or an object of scornful gazing. Rather, Rachel is an embodiment of every woman who has been demolished — by those she loves; by the expectations and hopes she had for her own body that “failed”; by the unpredictability of her own psychology; etc. — and finds her form of coping and torment to be indiscernible. Her behavior and missteps are often bleak, but never objectified.

Yet, in her own unceremonious and dangerous way, Rachel perseveres and ultimately triumphs. Each of the three women of The Girl on the Train, by the film’s denouement, have prevailed or are vindicated in some form. What distinguishes the women, however, is they are not vindicated by some unseen but always felt Male Gaze censor: they are not vindicated by some impulse of proving a woman’s worth through her death or her sacrifice or how a man has changed his opinion of her. The men in the film are flailing, meretricious, violent, unreliable, and ultimately impotent. Rather, the female characters are women of incredible worth and mettle; they contend with incredible pain that women are expected to grin and bear. Moreover, the female body and the things done to it — specifically Rachel’s infertility and her consequent addiction — are not vilified or voyeuristically portrayed. Devastation and obsession, bodily and psychological manipulation, are all conveyed as natural, and not symptoms of deviant or fetishized femininity. The women then succeed and emerge validated through their own words, their own actions, and their interactions with and discoveries about one another.

The matrix of women and female dialogues in The Girl on the Train is an exquisite example of the crude diminishing that women experience under the trope-centered expectations of male (and popular) viewership, and the crucial need to allow women to speak, to act, to suffer, to exposit in their own language and their own space.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls

Eva Phillips is a relatively recent import to Pittsburgh, PA. She relocated from the crust of Virginia after receiving her BA in English at the University of Virginia to complete her Masters at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests include: representations of femininity and violence in film, refusing to quell her excitement over The Fast and the Furious franchise; having every cat; queer representations in horror and melodrama (both film and television); queer sexuality and religion; and finally getting to meet Sia and maybe wear her wig. In addition to Bitch Flicks, she writes for the good folks at Indie Film Minute, and has appeared in Another Gaze Journal. Her various disintegrations can be viewed at https://www.instagram.com/menzingers2/.

“What’s Next for Horror” Panel and More at C2E2

One message reinforced in panels throughout the day — including the “Gender Identity: Understanding Through Art” panel earlier that morning — was best articulated by filmmaker Kellee Terrell: the need for diversity in film. The revelation of ‘Get Out’ sparked a conversation on representation, universal experiences, and relating to what’s on-screen.

This guest post is written by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski.

Saturday, April 22nd at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) was the most crowded day yet. Crown Champions of Cosplay hopefuls showed up in their most creative and best, and those hoping to attend panels and shop the floor arrived early.

In recent years, both the “big two” comic book publishers (DC and Marvel) have removed all floor presence, meaning that while they host panels, they have no representation on the floors beyond third-party vendors — a noticeable shift from big market branding to more independent vendors.

There was little floor presence for film and television, besides celebrity autographing sessions and merchandise by third parties. Weta Workshop did host a booth and held a special effects demo on Sunday of the convention. The effects company is famous for a number of films, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Like any good vendor, they have merchandise for sale, including impressively rendered models of some of their most famous creations. Their presence at the convention is more than just filling floor space, however. Staff is available to chat about their creations, and even about special effect techniques in film. It’s an unexpected resource for filmmakers at a convention that is traditionally centered on comic books.

At the Crown Champions of Cosplay, cosplayers compete with each other for the crown. Judged by special effects professionals and cosplay celebrities, their entries were judged for craftsmanship and then their performance on-stage. While timing makes it impossible for some people to attend the competition, the celebration lasts all day with entrants and others joining in with their best costumes on the floor and in panels.

“Reinventing Horror: What’s Next for Horror in Comics & Film?” Panel

The “Reinventing Horror: What’s Next for Horror in Comics & Film?” panel, moderated by Ain’t It Cool News’ M.L. Miller provided the highlight of the day. Filmmaker Kellee Terrell, cover artist Jenny Frison, writer Brian Level, and director Dorian Weinzimmer shared their thoughts on recent horror, where they want to see the genre go next, and how to get there.

One message reinforced in panels throughout the day — including the “Gender Identity: Understanding Through Art” panel earlier that morning — was best articulated by Kellee Terrell: the need for diversity in film. The revelation of Get Out sparked a conversation on representation, universal experiences, and relating to what’s on-screen.

“When we talk about what’s universal, as a Black woman, Hollywood is not geared toward me,” Terrell explained. “Besides Get Out, I cannot name that many movies with people like me… I want to create movies that have people that look like me, but you can still relate to them.”

The panelists agreed that having films with diverse casting or character elements does not exclude audiences. In fact, Terrell expanded, “The more you see people that don’t look like you, it enhances who you are.” Frison shared her own experience with seeing herself in movies, explaining that she never had a problem seeing herself in action films. Or so she thought:

“I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw [Mad Max:] Fury Road… Now I can really be a badass.”

Level agreed that more diversity is needed in the industry, both indie and Hollywood, citing that some of his favorite films that have come out recently were written and directed by women. “And I want to see more of that,” he said to many head nods in the audience. Later he elaborated, “I get so excited to see things I have never seen before from viewpoints I cannot have.”

Weinzimmer also added that it’s important to get to a point in narrative filmmaking where we can have diverse characters that are not defined by the fact that they’re different from the status quo: “And have the focus not be on them, but on who they are as characters.” “I want us to be really careful when we talk about that,” Terrell cautioned. She reiterated that when depicting personal experience to draw on a universal one, we cannot erase what makes those experiences personal. Weinzimmer agreed.

The panelists also explored what drew them to the horror genre in the first place. Some cited their beginnings in horror to the video store. Some were attracted to the cover art, others to the thrill of picking out an R-rated movie as a minor. Like so many, their introduction to their current favorite genre seems to be tied to format. There is nothing like picking out a movie in a video store, an experience that is largely missing with the rise of Netflix.

While not discussed in depth at the panel, this was a fitting parallel to the generations of experiences attending C2E2. A convention mostly about comics, the attendees have vastly different experiences with comics themselves. While there are still plenty of independent shops on the floor, few are local. Mostly gone are the collectors selling off their dusty boxes of garage kept trades. The experience at conventions like these have changed significantly, even in just the last few years. The move to digital undoubtedly has something to do with it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a decrease in quality of content, but it is a shift, and the truth is that people getting into film and television now are building a very different nostalgic base for genre. That being said, some forms of media delivery are not dead.

While fans pressed actress Danielle Panabaker at a celebrity spotlight session for clues as to what might happen in the next five episodes of the CW’s The Flash, where she is poised to become the villain Killer Frost, she gave nothing away. It was clear that while audiences are now used to binge watching entire seasons of shows on online streaming services, they are also willing to wait for what comes next in something they truly enjoy.

The best moment of the con so far was incited when the “What’s Next for Horror” panel ran over time to answer one last fan question. While it had been a friendly experience up to that point with some honest discussion, this fan was ready to take on the big problems in film. It’s hard to remember his actual question, but his statements implied that diversity creates a lack of reality in film. Citing the recent Ghostbusters film as an example, he said that the female protagonists’ reactions to the ghosts in the films were inaccurate and displayed a “false level of badassery.”

The panelists disagreed, explaining that the film was about ectoplasm and absurd spirits with a heavy comedic element. They collectively pointed out that the same conversation would not be had if the rebooted Ghostbusters starred men, which Weinzimmer expanded on. “When they go into the library… I would have been running out of there!” he said of the realism of badass Ghostbusters.

As the Ghostbusters attempted to draw out the conversation, Terrell finally put an end to the discussion saying firmly, “No, I don’t agree with you.”

The panelists all lined up, there was applause, and now I have a phrase for a T-shirt for next year’s C2E2.

All C2E2 2017 photos taken by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski.

Links:

Kellee Terrell’s Vimeo

Revival comic book series (cover art done by Jenny Frison)

Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski is a museum educator by day (and often night), and a freelance writer every other time she manages to make a deadline. She can be found on Twitter @JMYaLes.

‘The Transfiguration’ Offers Insights into Vampirism and How Our Experiences Shape Us

The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I have a confession to make: I am so taken with the idea of being a literal vampire that it completely escaped my notice that Michael O’Shea’s film, The Transfiguration, may not be about literal vampires.

The film, which premiered at Cannes last year and opens in limited release this month, follows Milo (Eric Ruffin), a teenager who’s even more obsessed with vampires than I am. Milo, who we learn early on has been seeing a counselor about his violent impulses, gets beat up by local gang members during the day and stalks the streets at night, cutting his victims with a knife and drinking their blood. He keeps detailed journals explaining the “rules” of vampirism as he’s learned to understand them and he never socializes with anyone except his older brother and, as the film progresses, a neighbor girl named Sophie (Chloe Levine). Sophie has a much more casual, romantic interest in vampires, preferring popular works like Twilight and True Blood over Milo’s darker, more refined tastes – Let the Right One In, a Swedish film that shares more than a couple of plot points with The Transfiguration, is his favorite.

As Milo starts to care for Sophie, he also starts to see himself through her eyes and to question some of the choices he’s made, as well as some of the rules he’s learned about vampires. He also starts to reflect on how he became a vampire in the first place, an origin story that has less to do with being bitten by a stranger and more to do with witnessing his mother’s suicide. Eventually, like the sun setting over the course of a month, a heavy existential question settles over the film: if this is what Milo’s experiences have already made him, what comes next?

The Transfiguration is a slow-moving but confident film that uses the idea of vampires in a way I haven’t seen before – which is saying something, considering how omnipresent vampires were just a few years ago. As many other critics have pointed out (to me), it’s never entirely clear whether Milo has literally become a vampire, or if he’s just a messed-up kid who kills people and drinks their blood – and it doesn’t need to be clear. The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Shot “guerrilla-style” by a first-time filmmaker, it’s impressive that The Transfiguration even exists, and that O’Shea and his director of photography, Sung Rae Cho, were able to create an unconventional horror film that can stand side by side with indie and art house offerings at festivals around the world. The understated performance from the two young leads, Eric Ruffin and Chloe Levine, also helps to maintain the difficult balancing act between the real and the supernatural. That said, The Transfiguration is better at asking existential questions than it is at answering them and the film’s final act is a bit of a downer.

In that respect, it reminds me of another weird movie with a problematic ending: Sony’s 2012 sci-fi film, Looper. Although I liked Looper a lot, the movie’s resolution, and its message [spoiler] that its main character should kill himself so that he doesn’t ruin someone else’s life, rubbed me the wrong way. Like The Transfiguration, Looper is a complicated story about destiny, the role of formative experiences, and the question of whether someone who has internalized a very deep trauma and lashes out in violent ways has any possible path toward redemption. That question is not academic to some people; it’s something they struggle with in real life, and I hope they will not conclude that the answer is “Once a monster, always a monster.”

The Transfiguration is less glib about this question than Looper is, but it definitely seems to take the position that, after life has placed you on a particular path, you walk it until you die.

For me, the most interesting character in The Transfiguration is actually Milo’s taciturn brother, Lewis (Aaron Moten). What we know of him, we only know from a single scene late in the film, but he was, apparently, a part of the neighborhood gang before withdrawing for unspecified reasons. He served in the military for some period of time and saw people get blown to pieces overseas. And, in the single scene where he talks for more than five seconds, he soberly and surely tells Milo that, no matter how bad he feels for whatever he’s been doing, there are people all over the world doing something a million times worse. This is a moral philosophy that’s both true and incomplete, but it’s fascinating because it’s about how you go on living – and that’s something we only do when we haven’t given up on ourselves as being a lost cause.

By contrast, the least interesting characters are the undifferentiated clump of gang members who apparently have nothing better to do than to terrorize middle school kids. Nothing about them feels particularly real to me, and it seems like they exist only to fulfill a plot purpose and to serve as a vague reminder that young men with histories like Milo’s can grow up to be killers even without getting weird and vampiric about it.

The Transfiguration is an uneven film with an uncomfortably pessimistic ending, but it’s rescued by its insight into Vampire as monster and the way it leverages that insight to examine the human condition.

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

Alienated Women: The Terror in Mica Levi’s Scores for ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Jackie’

Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Mica Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

This guest post written by Zoë Goodall originally appeared at Cause a Cine. It is cross-posted with permission.

When I saw the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), my first thought was, “Why do I feel so afraid?” I was unsurprised then, to discover that the woman behind the music was Mica Levi, who composed the score to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). After seeing Jackie, it occurred to me the two films that Levi has composed music for have more in common than it initially appears. Under the Skin is a sci-fi angle on the femme fatale, where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who seduces and kills men in Scotland. Jackie is the Oscar-ready biopic of Jackie Kennedy, centered on a masterfully emotive performance by Natalie Portman. Yet both films feature women who are lost, distanced from others and profoundly alone. Those around them cannot understand them, and so they are alienated. It is the haunted feeling of such alienation that Levi’s scores illuminate.

Johansson’s alien in Under the Skin is of course the more literal embodiment of alienation. She blankly visits human settings such as shopping centers and nightclubs, never sure of how to arrange her face to fit in with those around her. She lacks human empathy, illustrated starkly in a scene where she leaves a baby on a beach with a tide coming in. When she experiences sex with a human man, she is so overwhelmed that she flees. Levi’s score is fittingly otherworldly, pulsing with unidentifiable noises, the viola screeching like a wounded animal. It’s utterly unlike other film scores, giving the audience no easy emotional cues. The nails-on-chalkboard discomfort it conjures makes audible the colossal distance between the alien and humanity. One cannot relax when listening to the score, instead feeling a constant sense of dread at what this unknowable creature might do next.

This constant dread, this grim unease, are present also in Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Jackie. Jackie, in contrast to the alien, is utterly, familiarly human. Her grief and trauma over her husband’s death is the bedrock of the narrative. The audience knows how she feels, due to Portman’s highly expressive face. Jackie is also privileged, famous, and powerful. But as the narrative demonstrates how quickly Jackie loses her power, Levi’s score highlights the instability of Jackie’s world in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The score is more lush and regal than the score for Under the Skin, in part because there’s an orchestra and in part to reflect the high-class American world that Jackie inhabits. But the discomfort that Levi brought to Under the Skin is present in Jackie, too. Many times when the score begins, it sounds light, almost cheerful, before being undercut by low, ominous strings that lurk obtrusively in the background. The result is a feeling of disturbance, that something familiar and romantic has been polluted by a grim terror.

Just as Under the Skin showed how Scotland was a completely foreign world to the alien, Jackie displays how the First Lady losing her title and home throws her into a world that’s entirely unfamiliar. Visually, this is represented through particular, subtle moments: the look of shock on Jackie’s face when Lyndon B. Johnson is greeted as “Mr President” hours after JFK’s death; the camera lingering on Lady Bird Johnson picking out new White House curtains while Jackie watches, unseen. Jackie is constantly filmed on her own, without even the presence of bodyguards or servants to lessen the impression of her alienation. Her friendship with her assistant, Nancy, is shown to be of great value to her, but the film’s repeated shots of a solitary Jackie make clear that she feels cut off from everyone around her. In the film’s final minutes, a happy sequence of her playing on the beach with her children is concluded with a close-up of her grief-stricken face, and her children out of the frame. Then, she sits alone on the couch while the Life interviewer talks on the phone. Then, at the burial of JFK, she stands starkly apart from everyone else. The final shot is of her dancing at a party in JFK’s arms, placing her feelings of joy and belonging firmly in the past.

Angelica Jade Bastién writes that Jackie uses horror movie techniques to illustrate Jackie’s grief. Levi’s score is an integral part of this, the relentless, ominous strings suggesting that life has changed for Jackie in a most terrifying way. When she finally returns to the White House from Dallas, the score is fundamentally eerie, sadness undercut with grim foreboding. It’s a score suited to a dangerous expedition into unknown territory, rather than a return home. Levi’s score communicates what doesn’t need to be said through dialogue; the White House isn’t home anymore, and Jackie’s power has disappeared with her First Lady title. The terror of being cut off from a familiar world, and the subsequent alienation, are made salient in Levi’s grim, uncomfortable music.

The alien in Under the Skin has no possessions apart from her classic predator’s white van, and the outfit she chooses to resemble the common woman. Although dressed in the finest of outfits, Jackie finds herself similarly dispossessed, telling the Life reporter that the White House and her current house never belonged to her. “Nothing’s mine, not for keeps anyway,” she tells him. Separated from the home planet or the White House, both women are anchorless, adrift. Even when surrounded by revellers in metropolitan Glasgow, or watched by thousands at her husband’s funeral, the alien and Jackie remain fundamentally alone. Haunted by their inability to connect with others, to slot in to this world, they stand lost and detached. Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

Zoë Goodall is currently an Honours student and Media Coordinator for an Australian not-for-profit organization. She likes feminist film analysis, dogs, and reading Batwoman comics. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Unpopular Opinions Week: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Unpopular Opinions theme week here.

My intent is not to claim that ‘Twilight’ is a perfect movie, but rather, I want to argue that it has more virtues than it is given credit for, and to point out that its dismissal is frequently based on pervasive sexist attitudes. I am not speaking for the other films in the series — all directed by men — but rather, the first film, which was written and directed by women (Melissa Rosenberg and Catherine Hardwicke, respectively), based on a novel written by a woman. There are many valid reasons why one may not enjoy ‘Twilight,’ but it is important to recognize that it is unfair and sexist to dismiss the film and its fans based on the fact that it is a romance told from a female perspective.

The Villainization of Claire Underwood on House of Cards by Abby Norman

Much of what makes besmirching Claire Underwood villainous is also what I can’t help but find admirable about her — and at first, this made me question myself. Do I have sociopathic tendencies? Am I, at my core, a heartless, ruthless shrew? But then I thought, perhaps, it could be possible that we’ve vilified every aspect of Claire Underwood because our culture is inherently threatened by her. She’s the personification of what a patriarchal society is most fearful of, so, in characterizing her firstly as this strong, successful, indurated woman she must also, therefore, be a remorseless murderer too. Because God forbid she’s a career-climbing, child-free, influential, and tenacious woman without also being an unambiguously horrible person…

Claire Underwood has to be a villain because we aren’t ready for a world where she’s a heroine.

The Ironically Iconic Wonder Woman by Brigit McCone

With D.C. superheroine Wonder Woman recently named UN honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls and her forthcoming feature film building hype, her profile could hardly be higher as a feminist symbol. Yet Wonder Woman, who the U.N. hopes will focus attention on women’s “participation and leadership,” is an image entirely created by men. She represents, ironically enough, male domination of the struggle against male domination.

… Far from a step forward, Wonder Woman is worse than more simply offensive chauvinism, because it insidiously exploits the female audience’s desire to identify with Wonder Woman’s empowerment. … [The TV series pushes] female viewers into aspiring to a failed model of womanhood, one characterized by its hostility to other women, its punishing perfectionism, its sexual passivity and its self-sacrificing submission.

Does Pitch Perfect’s Fat Amy Deserve to Be a Fat Positivity Mascot? by Tessa Racked

It’s great to see a character whose fatness is a part of her identity without being a point of dehumanization, but the films try to make Fat Amy likable at the expense of other characters, positioning her as acceptably quirky, in contrast to the women of color, who are portrayed in a more two-dimensional manner, or Stacie, who is unacceptable due to her promiscuity. Ultimately, the underlying current of stereotype-based humor puts the film’s fat positivity in a dubious light, compounded by the erosion of Fat Amy’s status as kickass fat girl, as well as any thematic content about female friendship.

Parks and Recreation: Leslie Knope’s Problem with Women by Siobhan Denton

Leslie Knope, the much loved and indulged protagonist of Parks and Recreation, is by her own account, a feminist. For Leslie (Amy Poehler), feminism means, rather simplistically, that she admires women who are in power, believing that gender should be no barrier for achievement. Unfortunately, despite Leslie’s determination to highlight her dedication to furthering the feminist cause, her understanding is not only crude and rather rudimentary, but can, frequently, be damaging. Her identification as a feminist is, much like Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, hugely lacking in intersectionality. This is even more frustrating considering that three of the four female cast members are women of color.

Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct Is a Subversive Anti-Hero by Alexandra West

The notion of Catherine (Sharon Stone) as a subversive anti-hero develops when you view the film not as a story about the supposed protagonist Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) but as Catherine’s journey from mind games to almost domestic bliss but always returning to her basic instincts which threatens the Hollywood happy ending of established heteronormativity.

… Throughout the film, Catherine’s bisexuality is at the forefront of her character which marks her as transgressive to the hetro-male oriented police force while the other female characters in the film are also implied or explicitly coded as bisexual or lesbian. Any subtly or nuance in regards to the queer experience in a mainstream blockbuster is wiped away in favor of brash eroticism and the ultimate objectives of Nick who imposes his heteronormativity on his relationships, particularly with Catherine.

Privilege Undermines Disney’s Gargoyles Attempts to Explore Oppression by Ian Pérez

Yet Gargoyles is also a fantastic showcase of what can happen when creators possessing privilege write stories about the oppressed without their input. … Gargoyles, with its “protecting a world that hates and fears them and has been fairly successful in enacting their global genocide” premise, seeks to be about marginalized peoples. At the same time, it consistently centers and prioritizes the lives of the privileged over those of the oppressed, and places the burden of obtaining justice on the latter.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls Aren’t Problematic for the Reasons You Think by Ellie Carpenter

If Claire (Elizabethtown), Sam (Garden State), or Ramona (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) were paired with a male lead who saw them as full people rather than objects to derive inspiration from (and fuck), perhaps the MPDG label never would’ve happened. It is typical, though, that the women in these films be blamed for the projections and fetishization they are subject to from their male counterparts.

… Manic Pixie Dream Girls aren’t problematic because they’re quirky and girly; that audiences only see them as such is often indicative of shitty male leads who are intent on making women fit into their fantasies. Perhaps we adopt these tendencies while watching films too, and maybe it is better male characters we should be lobbying for: ones who see women as autonomous beings and treat them as such.

Obsessed with Boyhood: The Latent Misogyny Running Rampant in Richard Linklater’s Films by Maya Bastian

On the surface, a lot of his female characters reflect strong ideals. Sooze (Amie Carey) in Suburbia is a hardcore third-waver and lashes out “angrily” about smashing the patriarchy. The lead female character Amy (Uma Thurman) in Tape presents as a strong woman and an accomplished lawyer. Celine (Julie Delpy) in Before Sunrise and the rest of the Before Trilogy, is intellectual, graceful, and human. Sure, they all seem like feminist role models. But take a deeper look and Linklater’s female characters tell another story: one of a creator deeply obsessed with ignorant male stereotypes and the women that encourage them.

After viewing Everybody Wants Some!!, I had to reassess my devotion to Linklater. It led me to review his earlier titles, only to realize that he is suffering from the classic virgin/whore rhetoric. Every one of his narratives are about male characters running rampant over women’s rights. … Looking back through his films, they all contain this running theme of underdeveloped man-children who are routinely validated in their anti-woman approach.

Grey’s Antomy: Dr. Arizona Robbins, PTSD, and the Exploitation of Trauma for Shock Value by Madison Zehmer

Dr. Arizona Robbins’ (Jessica Capshaw) leg injury, amputation, and subsequent PTSD in seasons 9 and 10 of Grey’s Anatomy was depicted for shock value and entertainment. As a result, the narrative surrounding Arizona’s recovery is insufficient and flawed, ignoring the extent of the real mental health challenges she faces, ultimately blaming Arizona for her inability to completely recover mentally and emotionally from the trauma she experiences. …Arizona’s amputation seems to serve as a plot device to create shock and tension in Callie’s and Arizona’s relationship.

How Captain America: Civil War Crystallizes the Problems with Marvel Movies by Deborah Krieger

Continuing this line of thought, I realized that while I had ultimately enjoyed Captain America: Civil War, it exemplified the worst tendency of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — namely, the avoidance of dramatic risk and legitimate emotional stakes in order to create and maintain a sense of delight and entertaining status quo.

Why, as an Intersectional Feminist, I Can’t Get Behind the TV Land Heathers Reboot by Emily Scott

In the world that the TV series is creating, the diverse members of the Heathers will seek to torment and tear down these vulnerable, pretty white kids, leading them to stage their murders. While this premise was likely chosen because it seemed edgy, this restructuring of the power dynamic between marginalized people and privileged people is ill-advised and, frankly, irresponsible. The writers and producers (who, notably, all appear to be white men) have used this concept to give marginalized people power that they don’t have in real life. As a result, they cast cis straight white people as the oppressed underclass. This misrepresentation of the real world will ultimately work to reinforce the fallacious idea that marginalized groups are “taking over” and gaining power over white, cis, straight, or otherwise privileged people.

… I am not at all against a Heathers reboot, but I want one that is progressive and intersectional, one that expands on the feminism of the original rather than scaling it back.

Why Lorelai Gilmore from Gilmore Girls Is a “Cool Girl” by Scarlett Harris

We all know the famous “Cool Girl” screed from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel, Gone Girl. … Watching Gilmore Girls for the first time in the lead up to the revival because, even though I was in its target demographic, somehow I missed it the first time around, it hit me that Lorelai Gilmore was a Cool Girl long before Flynn, and Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen, popularized the term…

The Cool Girl is positioned as being so because she’s not like other women. You’ll notice that apart from Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy), Rory (Alexis Bledel), and the select few townswomen that put the Gilmore Girls on a pedestal, Lorelai (Lauren Graham) doesn’t play nice with other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say she disdains them.

Elektra Natchios (Daredevil) Is the Most Underrated Character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Sophie Hall

In a world where female characters in television are hated for minor flaws (compared to that of their spouses, anyways), I think it’s fantastic that Daredevil asks us to root for this woman whose flaws are on par with many other male anti-heroes.

Furthermore, Elektra’s anti-heroine status adds more diversity to the female characters of Marvel. You wouldn’t place her in the same ranks as ‘Black’ Mariah Dillard and Whitney Frost, but she’s not up to the heroics of Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Misty Knight, or Agent Carter either. … This is yet another example why women and people of color need to tell their own stories. If Elodie Yung hadn’t fought for and included more layers to Elektra, she could very well have been a one-dimensional villain, a negative to female characters of color rather than a positive.

Gilmore Girls: Rory Gilmore Is an Entitled Millennial by Scarlett Harris

There’s a difference between savoring a milestone and resting on your laurels, but it doesn’t appear that Rory (Alexis Bledel) knows that. That’s because she’s never had to hustle; everything has been handed to her. She only watched her mother struggle to raise her on her own, and even then it’s established that Lorelai (Lauren Graham) went to great pains not to expose Rory to her struggles. … Despite her flaws, I relate to Rory because she displays all my — and my generation’s — worst characteristics.

The Revenant Should Be Left in the River to Drown by Celey Schumer

… The second galling part of the film is its abhorrent treatment of Native peoples. It is at best mediocre, at worst condescending, and at all times unremarkable lazy recycled fodder. Almost every time Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) has an interaction with a Native American person, they meet with disaster.

… Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o) is probably the most significant female character, as Hugh rescues her after being raped by French trappers. Unfortunately, this is historically accurate as many Native women were raped by white men, yet the film still perpetuates the same old white savior shit. Powaqa does get to exact her own revenge, and then we see her later reunited with her people. Can we see this whole movie from the Arikara tribe’s perspective? From Powaqa’s perspective? That would be an actual game changer.

‘Pencils Down!’ Chronicles the 2007 WGA Strike and Raises Questions about Corporations in America

‘Pencils Down!’ chronicles the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike that largely brought television production to a standstill, through a combination of footage shot at the time, and reflective interviews shot in 2014-15. … In exploring the WGA strike, and the economics of how TV writers are compensated for their work, ‘Pencils Down!’ circles back to the same core issues of fairness and greed.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Sometimes, I get fooled into believing that film sets are happy, magical places where artists immerse themselves in the joys of their craft and feel nothing but a deep sense of satisfaction at doing the work they love. Then, I watch a documentary like Pencils Down! The 100 Days of the Writers Guild Strike and remember that, for most people, this is a workplace like any other.

Pencils Down! chronicles the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike that largely brought television production to a standstill, through a combination of footage shot at the time, and reflective interviews shot in 2014-15. In his director’s note, Brian S. Kalata – a member of the WGA – explains that he originally envisioned this content as part of a larger project about labor unions in the U.S., and it’s clear that the seeds of that idea are still here. Pencils Down! is most invested in explaining why Americans need unions to protect their interests at the bargaining table (which they do), and somewhat less invested in what the WGA strike, specifically, accomplished (which is, arguably, not much).

The early parts of the documentary explain what the WGA strike was about – officially, residuals for work distributed over the internet; unofficially, residuals for work distributed on home video and DVD. Like every strike, though, the motivating factor is a sense of unfairness – of being exploited, cheated, and taken advantage of. It’s weird to see middle-class writers on strike, but whether you’re in a blue or white collar job doesn’t matter – even monkeys stop working if they find out they’re making less than everyone else. There’s something about being cheated that insults our basic sense of dignity.

When the Sony hack in 2014 last year revealed the gender wage discrepancies between the actors on American Hustle, Bradley Cooper went on record as saying that what Amy Adams was paid for her work was “almost embarrassing” and that he hoped she would speak up. It’s that sense of embarrassment that underlies many disputes over pay. What happened to Amy Adams (and to many other actresses, particularly women of color) is familiar to women in many workplaces – the sickening moment you realize that, the entire time you thought you were doing just fine, you were really sitting at the bottom of the pay bracket while all your male coworkers got more. Right now, it’s fashionable to blame women for that – negotiate more, try harder, do a power pose in front of the mirror, be more like a dude – but the problem isn’t people who are too humble. The problem between studios and screenwriters is people who are too greedy and snatch up all the profit they can, as if they had earned it alone.

In exploring the WGA strike, and the economics of how TV writers are compensated for their work, Pencils Down! circles back to the same core issues of fairness and greed. In a nutshell, many people felt that the writers union had been tricked into accepting a bad deal on home video residuals and, even though that wasn’t on the table during the 2007 strike, their sense of justice wouldn’t allow them to be forced into accepting a similar deal on online distribution. It’s not a question of whether they’re being paid middle-class wages – it’s a question of whether the studio’s offer was insulting within the larger context of the industry. Not working in that industry, I don’t have an opinion about whether or not that was the case. But Pencils Down! is a reminder that, for people who do work in the entertainment industry, it’s a business like any other business and a workplace like any other workplace – the struggles that play out in office buildings and factories also play out in production studios, and the fundamental tensions between employers and employees are the same.

One interesting facet of the writer’s strike explored in the documentary is that the WGA was striking against corporations that owned the mainstream media outlets. Several people argue that that skewed coverage of the strike made it more difficult for the union to explain what was happening to outsiders. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but it does seem like a conflict of interest.

Another interesting aspect of the strike is that, as the documentary draws to a close, the success of the strike seems unclear. No one is emphatically sure that the stress and lost wages were worth it, and no one is overjoyed with the contract the union eventually signed. In some ways, the most important questions raised by Pencils Down! are whether it’s worth it to strike if you ultimately lose the negotiation – or whether American workers can strike in an effective way anymore, when the toll on them is so much higher than the toll on corporations. Those aren’t questions Pencils Down! ultimately engages with – instead, the triumphant mood of the film’s first three quarters is followed by an uncertain finale as Kalata’s interviewees take an “it could be worse” perspective.

In his director’s note, Kalata also explains that, while he began with a list of over 100 potential interview subjects, almost no one was willing to talk to him on record. Of those who do appear in the film, actor Alan Rosenberg explains that, while he was very outspoken in support of the strike, it may have hurt his career, and he now regrets some of his words.

Workers’ rights, including the right to receive a fair share of the profits from one’s work, are an issue that’s, paradoxically, both public and private. Many people would rather not know if they’re being paid less than their coworkers or less than they’re worth, because they’d either have to live with a feeling of shame or risk the long term discomfort and possible job loss that follows from confrontation. In some ways, the most important part of Pencils Down! is Kalata’s unseen list of hundreds of interview subjects who declined to appear – the story of why it’s so gauche to talk about payment and how many people fear reprisal for speaking out.

Pencils Down! The 100 Days of the Writers Guild Strike is currently available on iTunes and other streaming services.

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

‘The Revenant’ Should Be Left in the River to Drown

Don’t believe the hype. You have been conned. ‘The Revenant’ is a terrible film. … The second galling part of the film is its abhorrent treatment of Native peoples. It is at best mediocre, at worst condescending, and at all times unremarkable lazy recycled fodder. Almost every time Hugh has an interaction with a Native American person, they meet with disaster. … Can we see this whole movie from the Arikara tribe’s perspective? From Powaqa’s perspective? That would be an actual game changer.

This guest post written by Celey Schumer appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Don’t believe the hype. You have been conned. The Revenant is a terrible film. And what’s more insulting is that it’s not even a new version of terrible; it’s been-there-done-that tale-as-old-as-time terrible. It’s Dances with Wolves meets Kill Bill in the White Walker woods without the badass female protagonist. You know why EVERYONE who worked on The Revenant (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu) kept saying how HARD it was to make? How the harsh conditions were frigid, demanding, and grueling? This was to distract you from the fact that there was nothing else to talk about.

This white-man-against-all-odds tale of revenge has been told so many times, even Michael Bay is probably like, “Eh, can’t we find something more original?” The whole team wanted you to think the film was groundbreaking. They wanted you entering the theatre knowing all of these outlandish background stories of wading in freezing rivers and Leonardo DiCaprio the vegetarian eating a real bison liver because those stories swirling in your mind would prevent you from thinking, “Wait, why the fuck do I even care about this guy?” And on an elitist actor note, putting yourself in danger, and disgusting your body to the brink of repulsion is not, exactly, acting. Yes, bending your circumstances and “real world” experiences and research are essential to the craft. But the craft is, at its core, living truthfully under imagined circumstances. You don’t really have sex and you don’t really murder people, but actors pretend those characters and situations all the time. I’m not sitting here and awarding you gold stars for eating real liver and then jaw-clench screaming for 2 hours.

You know why people like The Revenant? Because the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is gorgeous. Really. When the film focuses on the glorious and unforgiving landscape, it is a beautiful sight. Its highest calling is probably being a screensaver for a graphic designer named Theil in Portland. And I know, claiming the critic darling that finally won Leo his Oscar is terrible (who robbed an un-nominated Idris Elba, but I digress) and is certainly a thrown gauntlet. But I stand behind that gauntlet, and this is the most boring zombie movie of all time.

Why is it a zombie movie? Because Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka the Land Lover, SHOULD BE DEAD. Yes, I know it’s based on real events, and to that I say, PSHAW. “Based on real events” covers a thousand half-truths. For a movie ostensibly obsessed with authenticity, the simple fact that Hugh Glass survives past minute 28 is utterly ridiculous. Here is a (not exhaustive) list of things Glass’ character has absolutely no business surviving: a full on bear attack; woodland “surgery”; being buried alive (Really? No dirt infection?); swimming in a BEAR SKIN (that MUST weigh upwards of 50lbs when wet) in a FREEZING turbulent river with a gaping neck wound; cauterizing said neck wound with gunpowder; swimming in the freezing river again (Really? No hypothermia? A tiny 3-log fire warms him and dries his bearskin? His body fights off all the infections? No blood poisoning? No missing toes?); falling with a horse into a pine-tree and then to the bottom of the pine-tree ravine; spending a sub-zero night inside the horse Tauntaun style… I could go on.

“But it’s a MOVIE!” you cry. “It’s supposed to be sensational.” Shove it. Fast and the Furious is supposed to be sensational. This sold me a bill of goods claiming realism and grit and the power of nature and honesty, and gave me instead a revenge-driven snow-zombie.

The second galling part of the film is its abhorrent treatment of Native peoples. It is at best mediocre, at worst condescending, and at all times unremarkable lazy recycled fodder. Almost every time Hugh has an interaction with a Native American person, they meet with disaster. Honestly, Chief Elk Dog (Duane Howard) and his men are the only ones operating with their own agency and justice in their quest to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). But we hardly see them and are left to infer all of this information, until of course Hugh the White Man comes to Powaqa’s rescue. The only two even partially developed Native characters are Hugh’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), and the wandering gent Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud) — whose name you never learn, I had to IMDb it — with whom Hugh shares the bloody snack carcass and a rollicking night of tongue-snowflake catching.

Hawk is killed early in the film (after Hugh is not killed by the bear) because he sees the half-scalped John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) trying to smother his father. Glass sees Fitzgerald murder his son but he’s so injured that he can’t do anything (maybe he’s tied to the stretcher, hard to tell) even though he has the strength to literally drag himself from a grave a few hours later. So, revenge for his son’s death inspires Hugh’s entire life from that point forward; it’s problematic to see Native characters fridged to propel the narrative of a white man. Hikuc offers Hugh shelter, food, and a dollop of friendship before he is later found hanging from a tree. Really? The film had to kill Hikuc? Why? To prove this land is brutal? Hugh was buried alive, his son was killed by a man who escaped his own scalping, and he’s performing self-surgery with gunpowder. We get that it’s brutal.

Even lazier than the film’s treatment of Native peoples — and even less surprising, as this is supposedly a “guy’s movie” made by guys being cool guys — is its treatment of women. There are 3 women on-screen in the entire 156-minute film. Not 3 female characters. 3 women. Ever. I scanned the entire IMDb page and included the extras. Powaqa is probably the most significant female character, as Hugh rescues her after being raped by French trappers. Unfortunately, this is historically accurate as many Native women were raped by white men, yet the film still perpetuates the same old white savior shit. Powaqa does get to exact her own revenge, and then we see her later reunited with her people. Can we see this whole movie from the Arikara tribe’s perspective? From Powaqa’s perspective? That would be an actual game changer.

The second woman on-screen is Hugh’s wife (Grace Dove), credited only as “Wife of Hugh Glass” who is brutally murdered along with most of the rest of her village and people (minus Leo and Hawk), and is seen only in dream flashbacks. He never speaks of her, neither does her son, and her entire narrative purpose is pretty much to make you think Hugh is a good guy and also, in case you weren’t sure yet, the West was really fucking brutal. The last woman is simply “Crying Arikara Woman.” I’ve seen the film twice and don’t even remember her.

In the smallest of silver linings, at least the actors playing Hawk, Hikuc, Powaqa, Chief Elk Dog, Hugh’s wife, and the rest of the Arikara are actual Indigenous actors and not whitewashed roles. Really though, the only true achievement of The Revenant (besides its gorgeous cinematography) has been the awareness and activism it helped bolster. DiCaprio’s Oscar acceptance speech, and subsequent environmental activism (which he has advocated for years now but has gained more pop-culture traction because of the buzz surrounding the film) have been hugely beneficial for many causes important to Native peoples as well as our teetering climate. Stars like DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Shailene Woodley have protested alongside Native people and raised awareness for the Standing Rock water crisis. For my money, you can have an Oscar for that. It’s a far greater accomplishment than most things we put on-screen.

Yet, wonderful as this activism may be, it does not make a good film. Nor does it justify the problematic depiction of Native peoples on-screen. In fact, the noble aspirations of the filmmakers — which they screamed about constantly, every chance they got — make the lazy and decidedly NOT groundbreaking treatment of Native peoples even more disappointing. Why NOT develop those characters? Why not allow them their own independent storylines? Hell, why not make a movie honestly and genuinely from a Native person’s perspective? “Because this was Leo’s passion project, a vehicle to finally win his Oscar,” you’ll say. And I will respond, “Of course it was. It also sucked.”

Celey Schumer is an actress, comedian, and writer. She is embarrassingly good at Harry Potter and Friends trivia. Her degrees in physics (Middlebury College) and structural engineering (University of Washington) look very impressive while they collect dust. She was definitely not eating chocolate as she wrote this. You can follow her on Twitter @CeleySchumer.

‘Moonlight’ and the Radical Depiction of Love

It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing. ‘Moonlight’ deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Moonlight is a serious, introspective, understated film from director Barry Jenkins that’s been an overwhelming hit with critics, winning numerous awards for acting, directing, writing, and Best Picture, including at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. It’s about a gay, Black drug dealer who lives in Miami — and it doesn’t think that any of those things are either funny or shameful.

The main selling point for Moonlight is that it’s different from other movies. Unfortunately, that also makes it hard to explain – the difference of Moonlight is something you feel while you’re watching it. It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing.

Moonlight deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love. The film checks in with its protagonist, Chiron (played by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), at three different points in his life – as a child, growing up in a rough neighborhood; as a teen, struggling with his sexuality; and as an adult, seeking a sense of authenticity. Each chapter ends at a startling point and begins by defying any stereotypes we’ve come to expect.

Hilton Als’ gorgeous essay in The New Yorker unpacks the story in more detail, and offers more insight into what it means to see Black gay men depicted this way on film, but, like Als, I was struck by my own reaction to the film’s first chapter. In that story, the young Chiron makes friends with a neighborhood drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) who becomes a surrogate father to him. I spent the first two thirds of that chapter with my shoulders and stomach clenched, waiting for something awful to happen. I was waiting for the drug dealer to be a bad person. I was waiting for Chiron to be disappointed, or rejected, or hurt somehow by this relationship. I was surprised and moved when I realized I was actually seeing kindness. I was seeing a picture of men with do-rags and pistols who love.

A lot of stories about poor Black communities are stories about either pity or invulnerable hyper-masculinity. Love is a lot more humanizing than pity and a lot more vulnerable than a rap video. Love makes us real to each other – it lets us see each other as kin. There is a shocking tenderness to Moonlight that cuts across boundaries – there is a confident assertion that these are people whose stories matter; that their experiences are worth sharing; that we will feel connected to them and sit with them in their pain, and triumph, and struggle, and caring. It’s an assertion that Black lives are human lives, as rich, complex, meaningful, and worthy as any other lives we see on film. The characters aren’t offered to us as archetypes or clowns – they’re offered to us as our own.

Moonlight isn’t the first film to act like Black people are human, or like poor people are human, or like gay people are human – but it is a beautifully-made movie, with a rich emotional palette and an introspective style. One of its strengths is that, for a movie about love – that is, in many ways, essentially a romance, at its core – it doesn’t fall into the trap of being sentimental. While racism, homophobia, and poverty aren’t the topic of the film, they inform the setting and the characters’ worldview. There’s a powerful scene where Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris), addicted to crack cocaine, screams at him, yelling words we can’t hear – words he later dreams or remembers as “Don’t look at me.” That sense of shame and self-hatred, manifested in the psychological violence she does to herself and her son, haunts every chapter of this story, but it’s allowed to exist alongside caring and hope, without either cancelling the other out.

The final two chapters of the film, in one way or another, concern Chiron’s relationship with his bisexual friend and primary love interest, Kevin (played by Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland), and the way that various pressures in his life converge to mold the way he presents himself to others. In some ways, Chiron comes full circle by growing up to be like the drug dealer who raised him – outwardly tough, physically strong, and kind.

Moonlight is about Black masculinity, and does an exquisite job of dramatizing gender performance, but it’s reductive to say it’s only about gender, sexuality, or identity. Moonlight is a movie that captures the zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century – of a generation that grew up in the 1980s and 90s; of a culture with a lot of bullshit things in it, that still has the courage to risk a vulnerability like love. It’s the kind of film that you want future generations to see, so they can understand what the world was like in the past – the kind of film you want future generations to be confused by, because so much has changed, and the kind of film you want them to connect to, because our humanity cuts across time.

Like many other festival films, Moonlight is a slow burn that requires some patience to watch. I promise you, though, that your patience will be rewarded. This movie stayed with me for weeks after I saw it, persistently tugging at my attention, making me want to watch it again. It’s different in a way you truly have to see to understand.

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

Top 10 ‘Bitch Flicks’ Articles Written in 2016

Here are our top 10 most popular articles written in 2016.

10. Lilo & Stitch, Moana, and Disney’s Representation of Indigenous Peoples by Emma Casley

…The 2002 film Lilo & Stitch features sisters Lilo and Nani, who are of Indigenous Hawaiian descent as two of the central characters. Looking at Lilo & Stitch can provide a valuable lens in which to analyze the upcoming Moana, as well as other mainstream films attempting to represent Indigenous cultures.

Lilo & Stitch has been heralded as a film that avoids many of the harmful stereotypes of Polynesian culture that so many other white-produced works perpetuate. However, it is also worth considering how Lilo & Stitch as a film exists in the world, beyond the content of its storyline. Regardless of its individual merits, Lilo & Stitch is a money-making endeavor to benefit the Disney Company, which has not always had the best relationship (to say the least) with representing Indigenous cultures or respecting Indigenous peoples.

9. How Anime Produced Two of the Best Interracial Love Stories of All Time by Robert V. Aldrich

Two of the greatest love stories in anime are interracial relationships. … While the industry as a whole generally eschews characters of color, that hasn’t stopped some series from featuring prominent people of color characters in narratively significant stories. This has led to interracial couples being featured in two of the greatest anime series of all time: The Super Dimension Force Macross and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

8. A Love Letter to Dr. Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman

GLAAD reported LGBT representation on scripted broadcast television that year at a measly 1.1%. Against a backdrop of a television landscape lacking in queer representation (especially queer women of color) emerged Callie Torres’ anxious and exciting adventure of self-discovery. … Callie Torres is a fully fleshed out resilient, sensitive, complex, and unapologetic bisexual Latina woman. … Callie’s journey was an iconic one that helped to not only change television, but to cement the oft forgotten notion that bisexuality is very real.

7. Interracial Relationships in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Importance of Finn and Rey by Sophie Hall

To have a Black character like this to not only be the co-lead in an iconic franchise but to also include him in a healthy, positively portrayed relationship with a white woman is a brilliant statement. Finn and Rey can be just as adventurous as William Turner and Elizabeth Swan, bicker as much as Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, wax as poetic as Aragorn and Arwen and take as many names as Rick O’Connell and Evy Carnahan. Finn and Rey’s difference in race doesn’t put any limitations on what this couple can and do achieve.

6. Beware the Sexist Celluloid Quilt that Is Nocturnal Animals by Katherine Murray

The most generous interpretation of Nocturnal Animals is that it mimics the conventions of sexist storytelling in order to criticize them. If that’s the case, the criticism is buried too deep for me to see it and I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead. … Like a lot of sexist stories, Nocturnal Animals is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men.

5. The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls by Sarah Smyth

Perhaps the depiction of “the girl” in The Girl in the Train will reassure my fears by allowing the woman to literally “grow up” on-screen. Yet, the title makes me very pessimistic. Presenting women as “girls” continues to fetishize women’s powerlessness in cinema. By situating this girlhood in a similar way to the male fantasy construction of the Final Girl, and by enforcing an infantilizing return to post-feminism’s “girliness,” these films offer ultimately disempowering images of female subjectivity.

4. Supernatural‘s Scariest Monster: Bisexual Erasure by Hannah Johnson

I won’t spend too much time trying to convince you that one of the main characters, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), is bisexual — or would be, if the writers and producers would allow him to be — and that the show is queerbaiting. I’m not arguing that Dean Winchester counts as representation at this point. Queerbaiting absolutely does not count as representation for marginalized sexual orientations. What I am arguing is that queer people do not need a character’s sexuality to be canonized in order to identify with that character and recognize literary tropes that are generally used to align characters with queerness.

3. Let’s All Calm Down for a Minute About The Hateful Eight: Analyzing the Leading Lady of a Modern Western by Sophie Besl

In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist? … It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Daisy Domergue.

2. Who Controls the ARQ in the Time Travel Sci-Fi Thriller? by Katherine Murray

The characters are thrown into an adrenaline-fueled, confusing, science-fiction quest from scene one. They don’t have time to make anything more than impulsive decisions, there’s a plot twist every time they think they know what’s going on, and every double-cross turns out to be a double-double-double cross instead. The story doesn’t always make sense, but it’s a wild ride that holds your interest from beginning to end.

1. The Women of Deadpool by Amanda Rodriguez

The newly released Marvel “superhero” movie Deadpool is more of a self-aware, raunchy antihero flick that solidly earns its R rating with graphic violence, lots of dick jokes, and a sex scene montage. It mocks the conventions of the genre while still giving us its warped version of a superhero origin story, a tragic love story, and a revenge story. Basically, it’s a good time. While Deadpool is entertaining, self-referential, self-effacing, and full of pop culture references, how does it measure up with its depiction of its female characters? The movie sadly does not pass the Bechdel Test. However, there are four prominent female characters worth further investigation.

Why, as an Intersectional Feminist, I Can’t Get Behind the TV Land ‘Heathers’ Reboot

The television reboot will give marginalized people power that they don’t have in real life. As a result, they cast cis straight white people as the oppressed underclass. This misrepresentation of the real world will ultimately work to reinforce the fallacious idea that marginalized groups are “taking over” and gaining power over white, cis, straight, or otherwise privileged people. … I am not at all against a ‘Heathers’ reboot, but I want one that is progressive and intersectional, one that expands on the feminism of the original rather than scaling it back.

This guest post written by Emily Scott appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions. | Spoilers ahead.

The cult classic status of the 1988 black comedy movie Heathers is firmly cemented in modern culture. The particular combination of high school hierarchy and gallows humor has struck a chord with millions of teenagers throughout the decades. The advent of Netflix has exposed the film to a whole new audience, and its campiness lent itself well to a highly popular Off-Broadway musical adaptation. Maybe most importantly, its portrayal of the power of young women has made it a favorite of many smart and self-aware girls, from its creation to today.

As with most cult classics, Heathers is ripe for a television reboot, and TV Land jumped at the opportunity. The network ordered a pilot for an anthology series based on a script by Jason Micallef and executive produced by Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi of Lakeshore Entertainment. But those who were hoping for a modern update to a dark, goofy, yet empowering story remain disappointed. The announced concept of the TV series adaptation makes extreme changes to the premise of Heathers, and not in a good way.

The original Heathers follows the top tier of the high school hierarchy, a group of three wealthy girls all named Heather and one girl named Veronica. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is somewhat of an outsider; she likes the benefits and privileges of being popular, but she has conflicted feelings about their treatment of those they consider beneath them. She starts to divulge her disillusionment to J.D. (Christian Slater), a mysterious, trench coat-clad new kid. After a fight with Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Veronica decides to play a prank on her by serving her a mug of milk and orange juice. But when J.D. pours a mug of liquid drain cleaner, ostensibly as a joke, Veronica accidentally takes it to her instead, inadvertently killing Heather. Panicked, J.D. convinces Veronica to help him stage her suicide by forging a note. Throughout the rest of the film, it begins to become clear to Veronica that J.D. is orchestrating these killings because he feels disenfranchised by the system of power; he is trying to shake up the social hierarchy by destroying everyone in it.

Heathers represents a certain set of feminist ideals that makes it an empowering experience for young women. While the film engages heavily in the “mean girls” trope, the inclusion of the protagonist (Veronica) in the antagonistic group (the Heathers) subverts the standard popular vs. unpopular dichotomy. But even though Veronica originally believes the Heathers to be evil and worthy of punishment, she comes to realize that there is a bigger threat – J.D. The Heathers are mean girls, but they are just that. They don’t deserve to die. In this way, the movie allows Veronica to condemn the practices of the Heathers while still acknowledging their humanity.

Ultimately, the feminism of the film is centered on Veronica’s journey to finding and reclaiming her own power. As Alize Emme discusses in her Bitch Flicks article, Veronica is initially unable to stand up for anyone, even herself, against the Heathers. But at the end of the movie, she literally saves their lives. By the time she finishes with J.D. — the greater evil — Veronica has the strength to denounce the conniving, judgmental ways of the Heathers. She goes on to engage in friendships with Martha Dunnstock (Carrie Lynn) and Betty Finn (Renée Estevez), girls who were considered beneath the Heathers. By saving the Heathers, but rejecting their hierarchy and condescension towards other women, Veronica proves to have grown as both a person and a feminist.

The television adaptation of Heathers, however, presents a set of competing, feminist ideals that, if the show progresses in the way the film does, will send a message of exclusivity and non-intersectionality in feminism. In this new version of Heathers, the TV series will portray a world that does not exist in reality. In the updated Westerburg High School, the popular crowd, including the Heathers, will be made up of marginalized people. The new Heather Chandler (Melanie Field), the queen bee, will be a plus-size woman. The new Heather Duke (Brendan Scannell), the bookish turned diabolical one, will be “Heath,” who identifies as genderqueer. The new Heather McNamara (Jasmine Mathews), the cheerleader, will be a Black lesbian. And if they are the oppressors in this new world, then who will be the oppressed? White, thin, cis, straight people.

In fact, the new Veronica is Grace Victoria Cox, a talented young actress who fits very much within the white, thin, stereotypically feminine beauty ideal of Hollywood. James Scully, the new J.D., looks more like Kurt and Ram, the football players from the original movie, than the murderous high school outcast that Christian Slater once embodied. In the world that the TV series is creating, the diverse members of the Heathers will seek to torment and tear down these vulnerable, pretty white kids, leading them to stage their murders.

While this premise was likely chosen because it seemed edgy, this restructuring of the power dynamic between marginalized people and privileged people is ill-advised and, frankly, irresponsible. The writers and producers (who, notably, all appear to be white men) have used this concept to give marginalized people power that they don’t have in real life. As a result, they cast cis straight white people as the oppressed underclass. This misrepresentation of the real world will ultimately work to reinforce the fallacious idea that marginalized groups are “taking over” and gaining power over white, cis, straight, or otherwise privileged people.

If the television adaptation follows the plot of the original movie, then Veronica and J.D. will be killing and staging the suicide of at least one of the Heathers, as well as other members of the popular crowd. J.D. enacts this plot because he feels oppressed by the high school hierarchy, and he seeks to destroy all those who have power within that system in order to gain power himself. In the original film, which is virtually devoid of identity politics, this notion is extremely troubling, but realistic, as proven by real-life cases of high school shootings. In the world of the TV Land Heathers, this plot makes J.D. into, at best, an internet troll, and at worst, a violent alt-right vigilante. J.D. perceives the Black, queer, non-thin Heathers as having too much power, more than they deserve. His plot to kill them reads as an effort to take them down a notch, to put them in their place as marginalized people, so that he, a privileged white boy, can rise to his rightful place at the top. In the television adaptation of Heathers, J.D. is not just a messed-up kid. He’s a misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist. In a world where such rhetoric is becoming increasingly common, the idea that a purportedly comedic television show would represent such a character is disturbing and endlessly problematic.

Additionally, this restructure of the hierarchy causes Veronica’s journey to become problematic as well. One could argue that J.D.’s implicit racism, sexism, and homophobia will not be an issue, as he is clearly set as the antagonist, and because the protagonist (Veronica) ultimately rejects his ideas and plans. But again, if the plot of the TV adaptation is parallel to the film, Veronica’s rejection of J.D.’s extremism will only result in a more insidious form of white supremacy. As mentioned previously, Veronica ultimately saves the Heathers but rejects their cruelty, choosing instead to befriend the kind but unpopular Martha. In the series adaptation, Veronica’s decision will act as an affirmation of White Feminism. Even as Veronica rejects J.D.’s racism, sexism, and homophobia, her ultimate choice will be to ditch her marginalized friends for the other privileged white kids of the adaptation’s false underclass. Veronica can claim a lack of prejudice because she didn’t want them to die, but she doesn’t want to include them in her personal life. She, like many white feminists, doesn’t seek to understand what they may be going through or how their experiences may have differed from her own. Instead, she decides that she would just rather hang out with people like her — cis, straight, white, and thin. In the original film, her decision to befriend Martha, who’s plus size, was a way of confirming the value of every person, regardless of their outward appearance or social standing. In the adaptation, it will act as an exclusion of marginalized people from Veronica’s conception of worthiness.

When a movie becomes as iconic as Heathers, remakes and revivals are inevitable. Any production company that takes on such a project has a responsibility to take the current sociopolitical climate into account. It appears that TV Land and Lakeshore Entertainment have attempted to do so with the inclusion of people of color, LGBTQ, and plus size characters. But the concept of the Heathers television adaptation uses these characters to give legitimacy to false ideas about the power of minorities and marginalized groups, as well as giving credence to the idea of White Feminism. Though the original Heathers features all white characters and largely avoids commenting on race or sexual orientation (although it does feature the deaths of two homophobic jocks, staged as the suicides of gay lovers), it culminated in a feminist, inclusive shake-up of the social order. But the ill-conceived premise of the TV Land reboot will only serve to reinforce power structures and harmful gender and racial dynamics that already exist everywhere. By restructuring Westerburg High School’s social order, the Heathers series will only solidify the inequality of our social order. The one that sets minorities and marginalized folks beneath cis, straight, white people; the one that perpetuates hate and intolerance; the one we all live with everyday.

While a pilot is currently being filmed, the television adaptation of Heathers has not yet been ordered to series. Hopefully, the studio will take the sociopolitical context into account when choosing whether to continue with the adaptation. I am not at all against a Heathers reboot, but I want one that is progressive and intersectional, one that expands on the feminism of the original rather than scaling it back. Ideally, the ill-advised concept behind the TV Land adaptation will be abandoned, and then the world can have the new, forward-thinking, inclusive Heathers that it deserves. This time, let’s make Veronica a Black lesbian.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

“I’m a Veronica”: Power and Transformation Through Female Friendships in Heathers

Veronica Decides Not to Die — Heathers: The Proto-Mean Girls

Cult Films that Changed Cinematic History

Teenage Girl Gang Movies Through the Years

Emily Scott is an actress, writer, and filmmaker currently living in the Bay Area. In addition to freelance work, she writes regularly for Culturess. You can find her on Twitter @Emascott92 or at http://emily–scott.weebly.com.