The primary theme of ‘The Dark Crystal’ is that there should be no opposites, no dichotomies, no binaries. There cannot be balance when we separate out good and evil, ends and beginnings, cruelty and kindness, male and female. These things are truly one and exist together, inseparable.
I’m at it again, reviewing a piece of media from my childhood that powerfully affected me in the hopes of determining what kind of message it imparted to my younger self and how that message helped shape the woman I am today. This time around, it’s Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. (My blast-from-the-past reviews thus far include: Was Jem and the Holograms a Good Show for Little Girls, Splash: A Feminist Tail Tale?, She-Ra Kinda, Sorta Accidentally Feministy, and “No man may have me”: Red Sonja a Feminist Film in Disguise?) The Dark Crystal, like so many other 80s movies, appealed to me because it was dark, otherworldly, and told a story that was not only unique, but epic in scale. When I look back on The Dark Crystal, what strikes me most is the film’s complicated representation of gender. Most of the film’s characters are overwhelmingly androgynous.
The last Gelflings: Jen and Kira
The heroes of our tale are a pair of Gelflings, the last surviving members of a race the Skeksis genocided to avoid a prophecy foretelling their downfall. In appearance, Gelflings are decidedly androgynous: they are small and child-like with smooth, feminine features and long hair. Both are gentle and soft-spoken; Jen loves to play music on his pipe while Kira sings along. However, being female gives Kira the advantage of flight because female Gelflings have wings.
Kira surprises us by using her wings to rescue Jen
Kira can also speak to animals and plants. Though that is a learned trait from her Podling foster family, women being able to understand creatures of nature is a common trope to denote femininity.
Kira marshals a pair of Landstriders to help their quest
Though Kira is physically the least androgynous character in the film, she is brave and sure of herself when Jen is not. Though Jen is the one singled out for destiny and agency with his possession of the crystal shard, he doubts his mission and himself. Kira must spur him to adventure. She also uses her wits and talents to rescue herself when the Skeksis try to drain her essence. Not only that, but in the final scene when the Skeksis are closing in, she sacrifices herself, using her own body to show Jen the path when he is lost. Kira is simply a hero. Her feminine traits don’t make her weak, and her possession of typically coded masculine heroic traits does not make her masculine. At the end of the film when the Skeksis and Mystics are joined together again to form the UrSkeks, one of them says to Jen as he holds Kira’s lifeless form, “She is a part of you.” This is true, especially considering their earlier Dreamfasting scene in which the two touch and share memories. Though Jen is male and Kira is female, their genders do not make them binary. They are stronger together; together they form a single whole. (More on that theme later…)
Kira sacrifices everything to help Jen heal the Dark Crystal
The wise figure of Aughra is also androgynous. She is clearly female with a woman’s voice and large breasts with protruding nipples, but she has a beard and curling ram’s horns along with a removable eye. The companion novel to the film, The World of the Dark Crystal, apparently identifies Aughra as both male and female, the essence and personification of the planet Thra in which our story takes place.
Aughra. Don’t mess with her.
Aughra is powerful, ancient, and grotesque. She commands the plants of the earth and holds the crystal shard. She is an astronomer, scientist, and prophetess who can read the future in the stars. She regards the Great Conjunction as “the end of the world…or the beginning,” claiming it’s “all the same.” Like the Gelflings don’t distinguish between self and other when it comes to male and female of their race, Aughra sees ends in beginnings and beginnings in ends. Instead of focusing on how things are different, disparate, and separate, Aughra sees infinite connections, sameness, and harmony in unity.
Portrait of Augra
The entire journey of the film centers around reuniting a sundered shard to make the Dark Crystal whole again. This will reunite the sundered Mystics and Skeksis who were once single beings now separated, embodying binary, dichotomous traits with the Skeksis being evil, selfish, greedy, cruel, and violent while the Mystics are gentle, kind, peaceful, and generous. Interestingly enough, the Mystics and Skeksis are all male, and their combined form continues to be male, but their maleness is not wholly traditionally masculine in its representation.
The Mystics nurture Jen, teaching him the gentle magics of the earth
The Mystics embody more traditionally coded female characteristics: gentleness, nurturing, community building, a connection to the earth: teaching, music, and magic. They’re long-haired and peaceful…the hippies of their planet (one of them even wears a stylin’ do-rag over his hair).
Look at those lovely locks flowing in the wind. Think he conditions?
In many ways, the Skeksis are more overtly masculine in their desire to subjugate others, the grotesque way they eat, their trials by combat, and their quickness to anger and violence. On the other hand, the Skeksis are obsessed with fashion. Their clothing defines them, and the disrobing of our lead Skeksis, Chamberlain, is the height of dishonor and humiliation. They disrobe him before casting him out after he loses the trial-by-stone competition to be emperor.
The Skeksis are serious about their opulent robes.
Chamberlain himself is very androgynous with his high-pitched voice, slight build, and his preference for manipulation over force. The Skeksis are also obsessed with looking youthful. They drain the “essence” of Podlings, turning it into an elixir that they drink in order to temporarily rid themselves of wrinkles. This obsession is reminiscent of our own female-dominated beauty and fashion culture.
A disrobed Chamberlain trying to beguile the naïve Jen
The primary theme of The Dark Crystal is that there should be no opposites, no dichotomies, no binaries. There cannot be balance when we separate out good and evil, ends and beginnings, cruelty and kindness, male and female. These things are truly one and exist together, inseparable. The film’s representations of gender give preference to a more androgynous, non-binary mode of being, insisting that gender and human nature are too rich and complicated to be “this or that,” “one or the other,” “either or.” As a child, this de-coding of masculinity and femininity that allowed characters to be so much more than a simple gender formed a piece of the bedrock of my lifelong questioning of gender roles, gender hierarchy, and the entire binary system of gender. Thanks, Brian Froud and Jim Henson!
Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.
When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.
But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).
Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-fundedShe’s Beautiful When She’s Angrylooks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makerswhich aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.
We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.
Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.
Ellen Willis
The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).
While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.
Rita Mae Brown (right)
Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”
Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Here’s the thing–for all of its controversy (which isn’t hurting the show’s viewership, I’m sure), people are still connecting to this show and are connecting to the terrible, senseless, often difficult situations that they have to struggle through. ‘Game of Thrones’ offers us, and its characters, no clear way out of mess, no neatly tied up episode endings, hell, even the most devoted fans can only speculate on the series’ ending. This show hosts both the unknown future and the sadly familiar past of familial dysfunction and bad romantic choices.
The aftermath of the Purple Wedding and the start of all the controversy
The hot button topic the past two weeks has undeniably been the intense scenes of sexual violence in Game of Thrones. Out of this controversy came a few questions for me:
HBO is known for its gratuity, why are people suddenly so concerned now?
What is different about these scenes that’s making people uncomfortable? Or is just the larger viewership of Game of Thrones that brings a wider range of audiences, maybe some un-used to HBO’s in-your-face nudity and violence?
Are these scenes necessary? What role do they play in the lives of the characters and the plot?
Many were angry that Jamie’s role had been changed in his rape of Cersei since in the books it is consensual sex; in changing the scene, what were the producers trying to demonstrate with his character? Is it a reminder that despite his honorable changes, this is still the man who pushed a child out of a window? Or was it building a plot point that Jamie is a man consumed by Cersei, who now realizes that he must move on from the “love of a hateful woman”?
This past week, there was even more sexual violence at Crastor’s keep, when it is implied and shown that women are raped, and the possible raping of Meera. This entire scene doesn’t happen at all in the books, and I wondered about its plot and character purposes? Was it only there to show that Bran may now enter the minds of humans as he uses Hodor to save himself, Jojen and Meera?
And of course at the end, the killing of the rapists by the victim–always a problematic issue, but one that resurfaces frequently in discussions of sexual assault and trauma.
When we show graphic and violent images we hear the constant refrain “is it gratuitous”–in other words, what purpose is it serving? For me, the scene between Jamie and Cersei, while not true to the books, seemed true to Jamie and Cersei’s character and relationship so I felt that the scene served a purpose. However, in this last scene, I found it hard to justify the violence that was played out and the amount of violence that was implied on every level, especially since its only purpose was highlight Jon Snow as the grand and righteous (albeit pouty) hero who delivers the sweet young girl from a horrible fate and deals out retribution for his past crimes. Noticeably the last minute saving of Meera felt contrived.
Jojen and Meera prior to capture by heathens.
I understand the concerns about utilizing sexual assault as a shock factor exploitation mechanism to amp up the viewership on an already shocking show. And HBO isn’t a perfect network with perfect directors (and neither is George R.R. Martin’s source material a perfect work of fiction).
However, I do think it interesting that so many viewers, mainstream and those who already followed HBO and cable TV, have been drawn to the show in unheard of numbers. This show, with all of its darkness and disturbing scenes, has pulled in a staunch fan base from my 17-year-old brother, my conscientious feminist friends, and even my deeply conservative father—in what can only be a tribute to the themes and the masterful storytelling that Game of Thrones is portraying. As Maureen Ryan of The Huffington Post said in an interview, “Game of Thrones possesses ‘an incredible ability to make you care about people who really have done terrible things — repeatedly, it’s done that, and I think that’s its great strength.’
With such a large committed audience, obviously we’re connecting on a incredible level to this show. But why?
Anne Rice, beloved author of Interview With A Vampire and prominent voice in the arts community, actually spoke out about the recent controversy, saying Game of Thrones is a fantasy series, and can we not explore the dark and the light boldly in our fiction and fantasies? Isn’t art the very place for such exploration? And isn’t HBO known for its boldness in this regard? I remember deeply disturbing scenes in Carnivale, and in The Sopranos. I value the daring of HBO and the daring of Game of Thrones. This from an author who is by no means shy with her own portrayals of sexuality and even created a three-part BDSM erotic novel retelling the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty.
The disturbing scene of Jamie’s betrayal.
Here’s the thing–for all of its controversy (which isn’t hurting the show’s viewership, I’m sure), people are still connecting to this show and are connecting to the terrible, senseless, often difficult situations that they have to struggle through. Game of Thrones offers us, and its characters, no clear way out of mess, no neatly tied up episode endings, hell, even the most devoted fans can only speculate on the series’ ending. This show hosts both the unknown future and the sadly familiar past of familial dysfunction and bad romantic choices.
In the end, with or without controversy, compelling stories that are acknowledging sexual assault, that recognize the deep horror in violence, seem a necessary outlet for human fantasy—both dark and light.
As George R.R. Martin stated (in regard to the recent scenes): “To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest,” he continued, “and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves.”
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Rachel is a traveler and teacher who spent the last few years living in Asia. Now back in her native California, she focuses on writing about media, culture, and feminism. While a big fan of campy 80s movies and eccentric sci-fi, she’s become a cable acolyte, spending most of her time watching HBO, AMC, and Showtime. For good stories about lions and bungee jumping, as well as rants about sexism and slow drivers, follow her on Twitter at @RachelRedfern2
Yet although the show deals with a number of important social issues, and contains naturalistic elements, its subversive, socio-political power lies in its vivid, carnivalesque interpretation of prison life. It contains heart-breaking incidents but it also honors endurance and joyous resistance. Celebrating individuality, personal expression, and sensual pleasures, ‘Orange is the New Black’ ultimately humanizes women who have been dehumanized.
I went on one of those Netflix benders recently and consumed the entire first season of Orange is the New Black in a little less than 24 hours. A little late to the party, you might say, but my timing, I believe, is perfect. I do not have long to wait for my next binge. The show returns in June. For those who have yet to sign up, Orange is the New Black tells the unusual, colorful tale of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a young, affluent, college-educated white woman incarcerated in a women’s prison in upstate New York. Piper is serving time for smuggling drug money a decade previously. The pretty, bourgeois life she has mapped out for herself–a loving fiancé, Larry (Jason Biggs), and business plans with her best friend–has been put on hold as her connection to her ex-girlfriend, and drug cartel member, Alex (Laura Prepon), has come back to haunt her. In fact, her past is made flesh in her new residence: the beautiful, exotic Alex is also an inmate. The show is based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, yet although it addresses serious issues such as addiction and lack of prisoner training and education, the tone of the show is not, for the most part, dark. Created by Jenji Kohan, Orange is the New Black can safely be categorized as a comedy-drama. It is funny, subversive, and teaming with interesting and eccentric characters.
The show has been praised for its inclusiveness and diversity. Its large, predominantly female, multi-racial cast of characters and embrace of a multiplicity of femininities is impressive for an American television show. Piper, it is true, is the central character but Season One incorporate the stories of a number of her fellow inmates. There are interesting, well-drawn and outrageous characters of many backgrounds. All the women’s lives are interesting.
Pennsatucky
Orange is the New Black should also be celebrated for its vivid, humane appreciation of the female body in all its forms. The show features a life-affirming variety of female bodies: thin, voluptuous, boyish, corpulent, athletic, ailing, aging, pregnant, transgender, desiring, desirable, and celibate. The body is, in fact, one of the central themes of the show. This is not surprising. Prison depersonalizes and dehumanizes human bodies. The female inmates in the show are constantly watched, frequently searched and sometimes molested and exploited. As it is clear from the very first episode, looking after your basic physical needs is not easy in prison when the authorities do not supply basic items. The problem often demands creative solutions. Orange is the New Black depicts and celebrates acts of free expression by the incarcerated women that serve to challenge the constraints that the prison regime puts on their bodies. These include exercise, yoga, running and dance. Prison also, of course, seeks to silence the human voice, but speech and song provide self-affirmation for the inmates. Expressing sexual desire is also a manifestation of freedom and autonomy. It is, however, read as subversive by the authorities. When Piper dances suggestively with Alex at a party, she is thrown in isolation. The decision is made by prison supervisor Sam Healy (Michael J. Harney), who shows a half-paternal, half-sexual interest in Piper. He has a near-pathological obsession with lesbians and initially sees the privileged, engaged Piper as respectable. His punishment is both misogynistic and homophobic.
Coming together
Orange is the New Black’s appeal lies in watching the women express themselves freely. The show has a deeply human, celebratory appreciation of the women’s condition. The inmates fight darkness with laughter. In fact, the prison world of Orange is The New Black can be likened, strangely enough, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnival in its celebration of the anti-hierarchical spirit, socially subversive and sacrilegious acts, sensuality, eccentricity and unconventional connections. In his reading of the carnivalesque literary world of French Renaissance writer, Francois Rabelais, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin underlines that carnival “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.” Laughter is also celebrated as an anti-establishment weapon and Bakhtin explains that “festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power of the earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts.” He notes, however, that the laughter of the carnival is “universal” and “directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants.” The carnival, furthermore, supports “marketplace” anti-official, profane, parodic and abusive language. Orange is the New Black also mocks power and faith while celebrating joyous, subversive laughter and inventive, parodic speech. Both laughter and speech provide the female inmates with vital, democratic means of expression.
Orange is the New Black also valorizes sensual pleasure, particularly female sexual desire. Like other ground-breaking US TV shows of the last decade, it is merrily anti-puritan. It also has a rare, carnivalesque, in-your-face frankness. This is illustrated by repeated shots of vagina selfie shots of a female inmate who has been taking them in the women’s toilets while pretending to talk with the devil. Equally true to the ethos of the carnival, Orange is the New Black embraces the profane. Female inmates have sex with each other in the prison chapel.
Although the women dedicate themselves to maintaining personal hygiene, looking after their hair, bodies, and general appearance, the show is not frightened of depictions and discussions of emissions from the body. There is a scatological interest in bodily functions in the show. In Season One, a male guard and female inmate pee intentionally in places other than the bathroom while a bloodied tampon is served up in a sandwich in the prison canteen. This focus on the lower regions of the body equally recalls Bakhtin’s concept of the “grotesque body.” In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explains, “In grotesque realism…the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people.” The “lower stratum” should not only be celebrated; it has anti-authoritarian significance too. Bakhtin notes that the function of the medieval clown is to remind the powerful of the “lower stratum.” In Orange is the New Black, emissions from the body also assume an anti-establishment, socio-political importance.
Sophia
It is, in fact, unsurprising that the upper-class heroine of the tale finds herself on the receiving end of bodily waste in this carnivalesque world. It is Piper who is served the used tampon. She insulted Red’s cooking, albeit unintentionally. Charismatic, red-haired “Red” (Kate Mulgrew) is the prison’s Russian chef and matriarch to many. She also punishes Piper by withholding food. The latter needs to pay for her upper-class conceit and adapt to their world. It is also Piper who is forced to watch an admirer, Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) pee on the floor, in front of her bed, in response to being slighted. More on the unconventional Suzanne later but Piper is, in a way, also being punished for her vanity in this outlandish, amusing incident. The representative of the upper class is, furthermore, being reminded of “the lower stratum.”
Piss and menstrual blood are, used, therefore, as socially subversive weapons in Orange is The New Black. This carnivalesque treatment of Piper is all the more potent, and amusing, in the light of her professed love of bath or shower time–associated with both cleanliness and sexual love–as well as her job making artisanal bath products. But they do not, actually, have cruel intent on a symbolic level. They are, instead, democratic: Piper must surrender her bourgeois ego, sterile, little world, and join the carnival. The parodic insults Piper endures are also, incidentally, amusing. As she herself memorably notes, “I have been teased, stalked, threatened and called Taylor Swift.”
Orange is the New Black also addresses age-old American racial divisions and tensions. We see inmates welcome “their own” and vote on racial lines in leadership contests. Yet although the women hang out in racially segregated groups, these lines are broken quite regularly. They are happily transgressed in the carnivalesque spaces the prisoners create for themselves. Movie night and leaving parties function as joyful, heterogeneous, egalitarian spaces where women of all races mix and subvert racial divisions.
Miss Claudette
Orange is the New Black, what’s more, celebrates unconventional, carnivalesque connections. A particularly interesting, and lovely, one is between Sophia (Laverne Cox) a young African-American trans-woman, in jail for credit card fraud, and Sister Ingalls (Beth Flower), a white, political activist nun in late middle age. The Sister exercises a pastoral role to some extent–and Sophia ultimately appreciates her warm, no-nonsense advice–but there is nothing patronizing or judgmental about her manner and intent. Both are intelligent, compassionate people and both laugh–wisely–at the madness of the world around them. They are, moreover, interesting, likeable people. Sophia is, in fact, arguably, the most attractive, well-rounded character in Orange is the New Black.
But the show has a great number of interesting female characters such as Miss Claudette Pelage (Michelle Hurst), Piper’s “roommate.” An older, Haitian woman, Miss Claudette is in jail for killing a man who was abusing one of the young maids who worked in her cleaning company, a service comprised of young, illegal immigrants. A certain mystique has built up around Miss Claudette. She keeps herself to herself and does not have visitors. Dedicated to order and neatness, she is sharp, unwelcoming woman but gradually warms to Piper. Her fate is a deeply sad one.
Suzanne (crazy eyes)
Orange is the New Black also incorporates another important carnivalesque trait, eccentricity. Which brings us back to Suzanne. Nicknamed “Crazy Eyes” by many of her fellow inmates, Suzanne is a little different. As evidenced by the peeing incident, she is also unpredictable. Her manic intensity is, however, coupled with an engaging openness and sincerity. The characterization of Suzanne should not be read as naturalistic. Her unbalanced state is not portrayed in a clinical fashion. She is a carnivalesque, excessive figure who transgresses norm and boundaries and we are encouraged to enjoy her “madness.” A young, gay Black woman, Suzanne, in her eccentricity, also arguably goes beyond race and sexuality. There is another outrageous, key character is the show: Tiffany or “Pennsatucky.” The makers’ portrayal of “Pennsatucky” could be seen as classist–she is a lank-haired, racially prejudiced, rabidly homophobic young white “Jesus Freak” with appalling teeth–but she is so completely over-the-top that she cannot be said to represent the average, working-class, white, born-again Christian. The show’s most unlikeable character is, also, in fact, quite complex and her back story is out of the ordinary. “Pennsatatucky,” furthermore, has an important political function in that she exposes literalist, narrow-minded interpretations of faith. Compare the young woman’s Christianity with that of Sister Ingalls.
Red
Orange is the New Black sends up the prejudiced, powerful, and comfortable. It takes deft, funny swipes at heterosexist, patriarchal attitudes as well as white privilege and complacency. Piper’s snooty, bird-like mother embodies the latter. When her daughter observes that she is not better than anyone of her inmates, she proclaims: “You’re nothing like any of these women. Any jury worth its salt would have seen that…” Parody is another carnivalesque weapon used in the show to puncture establishment pretensions. In one scene, friends “Taystee” (Danielle Brooks) and Poussey (Samira Wiley), whose love for each other has not quite been articulated, vividly parody the speech of a bourgeois, heterosexual white couple. Corrupt, sexist and homophobic prison guards and supervisors are also amusingly derided in the show. George Mendez (Pablo Schreiber) is one such example. “Pornstache,” as he also known, smuggles drugs into prison and sexually exploits the inmates. The show’s portrayal of “Pornstache” serves to drain him of power. Although a sleazy, dangerous character, he is meant to mocked rather than feared.
Orange is The New Black’s back stories depict the struggles of the underclass. Addiction, homelessness, neglect, and sexual exploitation are among the social issues addressed. The back-story of the young addict Trisha (Madeline Brewer), marked by abuse, addiction, and prostitution is not an uncommon one, while Taystee’s fate speaks volumes about the lack of support prisoners face when they are released. Yet although the show deals with a number of important social issues, and contains naturalistic elements, its subversive, socio-political power lies in its vivid, carnivalesque interpretation of prison life. It contains heart-breaking incidents but it also honors endurance and joyous resistance. Celebrating individuality, personal expression, and sensual pleasures, Orange is the New Black ultimately humanizes women who have been dehumanized.
I only recently discovered the ‘Despicable Me’ movies, and I’m overjoyed that I have an excuse to review the second one and to explicate its feminist elements, especially since so many women have primary roles in the ever-changing life of villain-turned-hero Gru (Steve Carell). In fact, I love these films so much, I enjoyed a Despicable-themed birthday cake earlier this week. It’s no mistake that the second movie concludes while Cinco de Mayo festivities ensue–my birthday!
I only recently discovered the Despicable Me movies, and I’m overjoyed that I have an excuse to review the second one and to explicate its feminist elements, especially since so many women have primary roles in the ever-changing life of villain-turned-hero Gru (Steve Carell). In fact, I love these films so much, I enjoyed a Despicable-themed birthday cake earlier this week. It’s no mistake that the second movie concludes while Cinco de Mayo festivities ensue–my birthday!
Gru returns to us in Despicable Me 2 (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaid, 2013) as a nurturing father to three wonderful little girls–Agnes, Edith, and Margo–and we find that he’s able to merge his fatherhood duties with his exciting lifestyle. In the first film, Gru’s main priority is to become the most evil villain in the world, and he competes with the nerdy yet skilled Vector (Jason Segel) for the title. While Gru’s evil deeds range from cutting in line for coffee to encouraging his ugly dog to poop on his neighbor’s flowers, he literally gives up the moon for his girls, which now includes his new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), sent from the Anti-Villain League to request his help in pursuing a new villain. Because Lucy completes the image the girls maintain of the exemplary family before they were adopted, and she finds a way into Gru’s heart as well, I would like to focus primarily on her in this post.
Gru is slow to recognize that Lucy’s antics complement his nicely.
The various roles Lucy plays in this movie are pivotal to the plot and character development we see throughout as we come to understand her as a professional, a cunning and intelligent woman, and an undeniably feminist hero. That isn’t to say that Gru is not a feminist character as well–indeed, he is very much so. Lucy becomes Gru’s work partner as the two get themselves into trouble, only to come to each other’s rescue. She then becomes the temporarily unattainable love interest, then the damsel in distress, and finally Gru’s bride and a mother to the precocious girls, who find their new mom pretty amazing. As Gru is busy uncovering clues for the Anti-Villain League and combating Margo’s (Miranda Cosgrove) newfound interest in boys, he can’t help but fall for the poise and quirky charm that Lucy emanates.
At Agnes’s birthday party, an unnamed woman is persistent in setting Gru up on a blind date. Why the push to find someone to love and marry? This buzzing in Gru’s ear is symptomatic of the heteronormative agenda Gru is struggling to resist. Gru rejects the woman’s invitations both intellectually and socially by not-so-politely declining, and bodily by spraying her with a garden hose. His comical proclamation “I did not see you there…or there,” as he knocks her off her feet, signifies the ex-villain’s outright refusal to acknowledge his own “aloneness” (not to be confused with “loneliness”) that others may see when they look at a single (and new) father. Quite simply, Gru feels perfectly fulfilled by his daughters and his rather eccentric life fighting villains and manufacturing delicious jams and jellies.
However, I think it’s important for us to notice this dynamic as a downtrodden Gru admits to “liking” Lucy to his youngest daughter Agnes (Elsie Fisher), trusting her with this intimate and sensitive knowledge. Although Gru inevitably gives in to the social contract that we should all marry, especially when we have children, he does so on his own terms and in the name of true love.
Dressed as a fairy princess for the birthday party, Gru is excitedly told, “I know someone whose husband just died!”
Lucy arrives quite unannounced and throws Gru in the trunk of her car after assaulting him with her “lipstick taser,” a handy tool that helps her to take advantage of her femininity while fighting crime. After Gru proves his strength and cunning in the first movie, it’s a bit of a surprise to watch an unknown character take him down so quickly. However, it’s only fitting that the pair then fall in love and marry; Gru has met his match in more ways than one. Lucy is kind yet assertive, and possibly most important, she knows how to balance these qualities to embody the type of woman that Gru’s daughters can hope to become someday. We love her even as Gru’s minions are chasing her car to save their boss, and we continue to adore her even as she embarks on her journey to Australia to take a new job far away from Gru and the girls, only to jump out of the plane and claim Gru as hers.
As we’ll see, the violence in the film is naturalized as a source of comedy.
When Gru is forced to go on a date with the insufferable caricature Shannon (Kristen Schaal), Lucy takes the initiative to end the date prematurely because she sees that Gru is being demeaned by the shallow woman, specifically for wearing a hair piece in order to hide the fact that he’s bald. In perhaps one of the darker scenes in the film (along with Gru indirectly threatening to kill his neighbor’s dog in the first movie), Lucy shoots Shannon with a tranquilizer dart, and the two load Shannon’s inanimate body on the roof of Lucy’s car, reasoning to bystanders that she has drunk a bit too much wine with her meal, and they proceed to dump her body at her doorstep as if she’s dead. If we look carefully later on, we see that Shannon is actually a guest at the couple’s wedding.
Gru is thankful to Lucy for rescuing him.
In the final action scene, I think it’s important to refrain from classifying Lucy as purely a “damsel in distress,” although this is how I reference her above–because this is, after all, what she is when she’s strapped to a rocket–along with a comically large shark–that’s set to launch into a volcano. However, from the moment we meet Lucy, we know she’s self-sufficient and more than anything, smart; after all, her decision to love Gru is smart as he’s likely the only person capable of defeating El Macho. In fact, every decision Lucy makes throughout Despicable Me 2 is for the betterment of Gru and his growing family. He doesn’t rescue Lucy–just as he rescued Edith, Agnes, and Margo in the first movie–because these characters are helpless females; rather, this conclusion confirms his placement as a hero rather than a villain. On the contrary, the women found in the Despicable movies are quite capable of protecting themselves and those they care about.
As Gru attempts to deactivate the rocket, Lucy offers her expertise: “Is there a red one? It’s usually the red one.”
In the wedding scene, which of course involves some skillful dancing, Agnes recites a monologue that she struggles with earlier in the film: an homage to her mother. The meaning of this recitation has now shifted since she’s gained a mother. Earlier, we also enjoy a private moment when Agnes first meets Lucy at the mall and she’s simply dazzled by her presence, a nice precursor to the girls coming to know her as their own mother and celebrating their status as a complete and unique family.
Agnes recites, “She kisses my boo-boos, she braids my hair, we love you mothers, everywhere, and my new mom Lucy, is beyond compare.”
Because of Lucy and the girls, Gru comes to understand that he’s not merely a villain in a perpetually bad mood; he’s a caring father, a loving husband, and a boss who’s willing to give goodnight kisses to each and every one of his funny, yellow workers, who are, after all, part of his family as well. Both Despicable films can be read as feminist pieces as Gru is transformed by the feminine energy he finds pervading his life, influencing his decisions, and causing him to reevaluate his ideals as a villain and a single man. A concurrently responsible yet offbeat character, Gru represents the new family man in this second film. With the introduction of the delightful Lucy, Gru finds yet another reason to strive to be his best possible self by taking on the role of husband and learning that if he overcomes his fear of the unknown (and women!), he can attain true happiness.
A lovely wedding photo, complete with Gru’s cranky mother and adorable minions.
With the upcoming release of Despicable Me 3 (2017), we can expect more zaniness from the extraordinary family!
Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.
It’s been more than 12 years since ‘Daria’ ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up lists of best TV shows, cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia. Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years, ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancelation no longer means the end of a series, Daria is often one internet commentators beg for more of. And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.
A memorable shot of an uncaring Daria from the show’s theme song
It’s been more than 12 years since Daria ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up on lists of best TV shows , cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia. Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancellation no longer means the end of a series (as seen in recent resurrections like Arrested Development, 24 and Veronica Mars), internet commentators often beg for more Daria. In the comments section for College Humor’s video, many implored the website to find a way to make the movie for real.
And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.
On the internet, as in real life, the Daria Morgendorffer people remember is a misanthrope with a monotone voice. An uncaring, almost comatose girl, wandering through the world and hating it indiscriminately.
Aubrey Plaza plays Daria in College Humor’s fake trailer
Plaza plays her this way, never excited, never caring, never attached to anyone or insecure. Several articles about the College Humor video even praised her performance as a perfect Daria impression. But Daria, though often monotone, was much more than that. While she did wander around uncaring through the theme song, in the series proper, she was always running into walls- the people and institutions around her, her world’s expectation of what she should be, and most crucially, her view of herself.
More than anything, Daria wanted to be the girl we remember as unfazed by anything, but instead, kept disappointing herself with her insecurities and the inadvertent connections to people she formed. She was like so many of us as teenagers, deciding what kind of person we were supposed to be while killing ourselves to fit the mold.
But did she cared. Perhaps she cared about things more than anyone else around her. Through five seasons, she fought against fake sincerity, commercialization, and the power and respect given to those with status, money and good looks. She refused to lie about herself for a college scholarship, fake enthusiasm for a part-time job and challenged authorities who threatened the quality of her education, her integrity and her artistic expression. While she scoffed at false values like school spirit, popularity and edginess (a word adults use to sell things to teenagers), she hated them for robbing her generation of meaning and for talking down to youth.
There was a sour taste in her mouth when consuming media directed at youth but written by adults attempting to remain cool. She rejected media directed at teen girls in favor of Conrad, Camus and many political, philosophical and feminist texts, giving 90s teens perhaps their first exposure to classic writers and important ideas. That Daria read these kind of things on her own without a teacher assigning them shows how much she valued learning and encouraged many viewers, myself included, to revisit things we’d been assigned in school and written off as boring.
In her spare time, Daria wrote short stories, acted out No Exit with dolls, made anatomical models, learned about art history from her artist best friend, Jane, and music history from her crush, Trent, and enjoyed watching trash TV–all ways of developing an intelligent mind and broadening her conception of the world outside Lawndale High: her personal idea of hell.
Daria feels contempt for her peers, dismissing them as idiots
I think you can best understand Daria as a character by seeing her as the type of girl who suffers through high school, assuring herself that in college everyone will magically understand her and speak to her on her level. Sadly, when she visits a local college, she realizes that the people there are the same ones she knew in high school; they’re just older.
Like many of us, Daria looks down on her peers, believing she is more intelligent, sophisticated and mature than them. Though in many cases she’s right, as her classmates, particularly the jocks and cheerleaders are often cartoonishly stupid (even for a cartoon). The popular crowd can’t even spell their own names, and they view being a “brain” like Daria as a fate worse than death. She’s different from her peers, and that difference stands out, as in one episode, she and Jane are the target of a witch hunt.
But Daria is often shown that her assumptions of people’s character and her contempt for them are unwarranted. Her vain sister Quinn is capable of writing a vaguely intelligent poem, ditzy cheerleader Britney has moments of insight and a brilliant tactical mind, and infrequently Daria meets intelligent boys who understand her and her weird sarcastic humor. It’s even painted as a character flaw that Daria clings to first impressions and judges everyone around her. She’s never surprised when someone disappoints her, displaying their true self as self-centered, calculating or dense; she’s only surprised when they go along with her joke or give her an intelligent argument. For example, when she finds out Andrea, a would-be friend from summer camp, idolized her, she can only respect Andrea when she stands up to her.
Daria has a crush on Trent, her best friend’s older brother
Even Daria herself doesn’t always measure up to her ideals. Though she is a a teenage girl, Daria wants to be so much more than that. Along with her dismissal of her peers and of the media they enjoy, she views being a teenage girl as a weakness and refuses to allow herself to be human. She has a hopeless crush on an older “bad boy” who rarely notices her, even though she’s smart enough to know he’s irresponsible and totally wrong for her. If she’s being logical, she knows he’s not an option for her and the type of life she wants to live, but still she finds him irresistible and even gets a navel piercing to please him; something she would never do otherwise.
She feels ashamed when she realizes she really wants a romantic celebration for her anniversary (like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and her wedding), as she views sentimentality as pathetic. In several episodes, she struggles with her own sense of vanity, attempting to hide a rash across her face and attempting to wear contacts even though they hurt her eyes because she likes how she looks with them. She disappoints herself with her desire for contacts as she feels there is no reason to want them besides vanity.
Within her school, Daria is known as “the brain” and “the misery chick,” identities she never chose for herself, doesn’t completely like but feels entirely lost without. Within her family she’s the smart one, and Quinn is the pretty one. When that balance is disturbed and Quinn is praised for her intelligence, Daria feels threatened. If she isn’t a brain and smarter than everyone else, she doesn’t know who she is. In another episode, she struggles with her peers’ view of her as someone who is always miserable and thinking about death.
Daria briefly gives herself a makeover to look like her sister, Quinn
Though when people meet Daria, they frequently gasp (to an exaggerated degree) in disgust at her appearance, it is frequently suggested that she could easily fit in and be popular if she wanted to. Modeling scouts at the school first zero in on Daria over supposedly more attractive classmates, and in one episode, she dresses like Quinn and her appearance threatens her sister. Through she sees herself as far above her peers, she clearly understands them and knows how to appeal to them, once inciting a riot by manipulating them with a short story.
Daria’s friendship with Jane Lane is one of the greatest things about the show as it portrays them as two people with similar interests and a shared sense of humor, while managing to make them distinctive people with different reactions to the same events. Their relationship also humanizes Daria, as Jane challenges her and forces her to confront her flaws and figure out why she feels certain ways. Without Jane, Daria could easily be that silent girl, observing and judging a world she is unattached to, but Jane gives her reasons to care. Jane also worries less about fitting into a certain image; instead she wants to experience every opportunity she can, believing it will make her a better artist and drags Daria along to house parties, school dances and other parts of teen life she would otherwise ignore. Moreover, Jane doesn’t see being intelligent and sarcastic and joining the track team, getting a boyfriend or auditioning for the cheerleading squad as mutually exclusive. Her attempts to get involved force Daria to attempt to reconcile her contempt for their peers as a group with the existence of Jane, one of her peers who she really likes and respects. It is perhaps Jane’s humanizing influence that make Daria feel guilty about making a video that paints Quinn in the worst possible light and so edits it to be more flattering.
Daria’s best friend Jane is a humanizing influence
Certainly Daria is someone that needs humanizing. In one episode, she confesses to Jane that she often feels superior to other people, sometimes thinking to herself, “You can see things that other people can’t. You can see better than other people.” This reminded me of the first episode of Girls, where Hannah Horvath memorably told her parents she thinks of herself as the voice of her generation. It was an audacious statement, that led many to hate the character, but it was also really unique for a young woman to express grandiose thoughts, to think of herself as great and significant, rather than suppress herself with (often false) modesty as many of us have been taught to. Jane is a great friend for Daria because she takes her confession seriously, values Daria’s opinions, and disarms her, joking (though with a kernel of truth). That this is why she’s proud to be Daria’s friend. It’s great to see characters who are allowed to be audacious.
As she grows up, Daria is able to recognize how difficult she was as a child and how much her parents struggled to raise her. She learns that when she was in elementary school her parents’ marriage was strained as they were frequently called in by the principal to talk about her lack of friends, her refusal to participate and her depressive nature. Toward the end of the series, when she volunteers at a summer camp, she meets a young boy who reminds her of her younger self and is able to see some of her character flaws for herself. She quickly becomes invested in his growth, realizing that she really cares whether she gets through to him. She helps him avoid some of her mistakes, particularly missing out on life by pretending to be uninterested. It’s plain that Daria as she was when the show began would never have been able to see herself so clearly and to connect on this level.
Using a short story Daria imagines the future for her family
We see a glimpse of the future Daria expects (and most will most likely get) when she writes a short story imagining herself and Quinn as adults visiting their parents. Both are happy and have learned to get along and step out of their comfort zones. The story makes Daria’s mother cry and reveals she is more sentimental than even she realizes.
If you’ve never seen Daria, or you haven’t seen it in years, it’s worth a watch to see one of the most memorable and realistic teenage girls I’ve ever seen on TV.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Misan Sagay, the brilliant and passionate screenwriter of Belle, was in Manhattan recently to promote the film. Director Amma Asante and actors Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle), Miranda Richardson and Sam Reid also fielded questions from the press in separate rooms.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Here are highlights of the interview with the screenwriter, who is also a medical doctor. Sagay speaks with a precise and clipped English accent, but she exudes warmth and passion, especially when she talks about the genesis and the message of Belle.
What was it like to see it fully realized from your script? Was it everything you envisioned?
I think it surpasses what I think that everything at every level more and more was brought to the thing and I think it’s a marvelous movie, so I’m very proud of it.
How did you first discover the story?
I was at university in Scotland. I was a medical student… It’s where William and Kate met. It’s a very traditional university, so quite often I would be the only black person around and so I went to visit Scone Palace and I was walking through and I came to a room and bang, there was a black woman in a painting, and I was stunned and intrigued and thrilled. She didn’t look like a servant or a slave. And I though, ‘Wow!’ and I looked at the caption and it just says, ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray,’ so Dido is not known. The black woman is unknown. She’s completely silent and I remember carrying this image with me for years and when I went back to Scotland years later and I saw it again, the caption had been changed to ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido, the Housekeeper’s Daughter.” I looked at that and I thought, ‘The Housekeeper’s daughter”? She doesn’t look like that, it doesn’t look right, and that was what was the jumping off point for me for the script. Who was she? Who was this woman who was gazing out of this portrait, not just with directness but with a mischief in her face, and who was pointing to her cheek as though, you know, “I’m what I am,” and I really wanted to tell her story.
Did you ever find out why they updated the portrait?
I think it’s almost a Teutonic shift that the older Mansfields were probably less accommodating to the view that this was blood and this was a relative and that the younger generation then are receptive to it. It may be it was updated because people began to ask, up until then no one had asked, and then people had begun to ask. Yes, I think it’s odd that was the story that was put there but that’s what they felt comfortable with I suppose.
It seems like that same story could happen today couldn’t it?
Absolutely. I lot of the research that I did was actually going to speak to people who had been adopted into very, very white environments and yes that story can play out today.
Dido was educated. She could write. There was no reason she hasn’t left a journal. She’s not left a word. This is a girl who lived very carefully about what she said and did. She may have been a Mansfield but she certainly wasn’t free. It was the same feeling I got when I spoke to people who lived in those environments, beloved and taken care of, but always slightly on eggshells.
What did you find out about her father?
That he was an Admiral… But what I found out, the two things that are really interesting, he must in some way he must have lived with Dido’s mother in the West Indies beforehand. And also when he came back to England that his relationship with Dido’s mother fell apart and he then married appropriately but appears never to have lived with that new woman. Whenever you’re doing research you always end up reading stories in the gaps between the stories and my romantic story is that they broke up that relationship and he never loved again. But he certainly never lived properly with his new proper wife, never had children with this new woman.
So you have archival material that no one else saw?
I don’t know that other people didn’t see it. I know that other people, who had seen it, did not – you look at the papers that were out that time – lots of them sort of fudged the issue of who she was. I think it was an issue who she was. I don’t want to say I was the only person, but I was prepared to name – and I wanted to name – what was there. I thought it was a lovely story.
How long did it take for you to develop this story?
I wrote the pitch in 2004 and I began to write the story then, and then the screenplay developed over (time). By 2010 it was over, so it was a long process. It’s a difficult script, many, many difficult decisions had to be taken in order to stay true to this central thing that it would be Belle’s story, so how do we do that? And also what is our aim? Belle herself did not marry until she was 32. It would be perfectly possible to write a long story of her as a life frustrated and a life from which she did not really fulfill herself until after everyone had died. I just didn’t want that for her! I wanted her loved! I wanted her to be beautiful! I wanted somebody to rip off her bodice and want to do so.
I wanted her to be beautiful and so that was why I took that decision that what might be the obvious story was not the way we would go; I would go with a love story.
I also wanted to make sure we looked at this cusp when she would really be discovering, really what being black meant. In the Arcadia of Kenwood and cocooned by childhood and wealth she would not have encountered that until she could encounter the point where she wanted to get married and that there is no place for her… The moment when you understand what your race actually means I think is a big one and I wanted that for her.
What other research did you do to make it factually true to the cultures and to the period?
This kind of thing needs massive research, especially when you’re writing about women. For example, the decision to put women and to have their relationships, which I’m always interested in, to write this sort of Jane Austen romance, made this research absolutely key, that finding the voices of women like this at this time. I was amazingly lucky to stumble on the diary, on the actually diary written by the Countess of Hardwick… much of what was the day to day life we see arise from looking at those women.
I was always looking for emotional truth. There weren’t video camera. We don’t know what actually went on. But it is true in that the Zong case happened. She was in his house. He had to deal with it, so there was a huge amount of that sort of research. (Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, handed down a decision in this case, which involved the massacre of slaves, and which became instrumental in the abolition of slavery. He also raised Dido as though she were his daughter.)
There are so many parallels with Belle’s story and even with stories of women of color today. What is the message you would like to get out?
It’s terribly important that this is a voice of black women, that’s what this film is. The main thing for me is this issue about your worth.
There are so many messages, and a lot of it is subliminal but from a very young age what are you worth, compared to other people? And I think it was something Belle had to encounter. What was she worth? She was worth loving but she wasn’t worth eating with.
At the moment where Belle herself had to say, you know what? I’m worth me. I’m worth loving and I can have it. And I can be myself and I think that is the message and I think at the end of the day when every screening I’ve attended the women will stand up and clap because the moment when she says that is a great moment for all of us. I think that it’s a terribly empowering moment and I think that that was the aim.
This movie is so unique, just by the mere fact that both the writer and director are black and female. What type of relationship do you guys have?
I was unwell and I left the project. In 2010 Amma came on as director and she – I believe and feel that at the moment where I maybe had flagged, because it had been seven years, but the script was there, the subject was there, everything was there, that Amma was able to take the baton and run with it, and run for her life with it and she has done an extraordinary, extraordinary job. She’s been true to absolutely everything that was the aim from the beginning.
I assume you’re talking a bit about the controversy. [There was a Writers Guild of America decision that credited Misan Sagay as the Belle screenwriter.] Whenever you see tough opinionated women, you will see tough opinions. And I think that’s what we have here, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for what she’s done as a director, and I think it’s a marvelous movie, marvelous.
What’s next for you?
I’m doing a historical story set in Burma during the Second World War. We always think that it’s white people who have fought that battle, which is called the Forgotten War, but in fact it was won by 300,000 black Africans that were taken over there as part of the British Empire and it was a war that Britain was losing and they brought the Africans and they fought their way through the jungle and helped. Without them the War in the East would not have been won but no one’s told their story.
You’re also a medical doctor. How does that inform your writing?
I think it informs my writing because one of the things you that you look for – maybe you all know this without being a doctor – you’re looking for truth. You look at what’s in front of you and you say what is the emotional truth here?
It’s not that different a process for me. I love doing both things. There’s an immediacy to medicine which there isn’t in this. It can take years looking for a story but to me they’re not that different.
Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.
Instead what we have is a movie that presents us with a tired pseudo “Girl Power!” line and expects us to swallow it hook line and sinker. Many times the movie presents us with tropes about female friendship and then pretends like it is subverting them in a clever way. But it doesn’t. Instead we have a movie about female friendship that is all about talking about a man (again) and involves shaming him by trying bring question to his masculinity (again), while simultaneously throwing women of colour under the bus (again).
I have a lot of complex feels about The Other Woman (firstly should it not be Women not Woman?!). I am really glad that a comedy starring two women and featuring a third has been so successful – it is currently sitting in the No. 2 spot for box office takings under The Amazing Spiderman. I think it just goes to show how thirsty people are for movies with more than one woman in them. Despite its box office takings, The Other Woman has a score of 24 percent on the critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; this is extremely low. This movie is not amazing but it is not the D-grade movie that this rating makes it out to be. In comparison the Seth Rogen and friends comedy vehicle This is The End rated a healthy 83 percent despite in my opinion being decidedly average and verging on terrible for its heavy reliance on rape jokes.
The plot centres on three women: Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Kate Upton who play Carly – high powered lawyer and accidental other woman, Kate – quirky wife who talks a lot and has forgotten the grooming required by all women necessary to maintain a man, and Amber – the boobs (they actually refer to her as this in the movie). I’m not sure if you can actually say that Kate Upton actually stars in this movie as she has barely any dialogue.
The premise is that Carly is dating a guy and finds out by chance that he is actually married to Kate. The two of them then go on to plot their revenge against him and discover that he is cheating on them with a third woman, Amber, who is devastated to discover his lies and teams up with them to make him suffer. One of the nice parts of the movie is it’s overarching premise is that even though these three women discover that they have been sleeping with the same man they band together and become friends rather than falling into that old trop of competitive womanhood and trying to “steal” him from each other. However this is not terribly original as this also neatly sums up the plot of John Tucker Must Die, a teenage movie where they do a lot of the same things as this one.
Linda Holmes at NPR calls The Other Woman “a terrible movie that has happened to funny actresses” and it is hard not agree. I think what annoys me most about The Other Woman is what it could have been. I was hoping that this was going to be a funny female-driven comedy that is fundamentally about friendship, something akin to Bridesmaids or The Heat, or maybe even Mean Girls. Sadly that was not to be the case. Instead what we have is a movie that presents us with a tired pseudo “Girl Power!” line and expects us to swallow it hook line and sinker. Many times the movie presents us with tropes about female friendship and then pretends like it is subverting them in a clever way. But it doesn’t. Instead we have a movie about female friendship that is all about talking about a man (again) and involves shaming him by trying bring question to his masculinity (again), while simultaneously throwing women of colour under the bus (again).
How does the film throw women of colour under the bus you ask? Well firstly, we are, as so often happens in film and television, treated to a hilariously white-washed version of New York City. I’m pretty sure even all the extras are white. The only person of colour who speaks is Nicki Minaj, who plays assistant to Cameron Diaz’s high powered lawyer character Carly. Fortunately unlike Jennifer Hudson’s character in the first Sex and the City movie, her role isn’t to teach Carly about love and show her the error of her ways with her earthy Blackness and down home wisdom. She mostly wears killer outfits and provides sardonic commentary in a New York accent.
Secondly, there is a pivotal-to-the-plot scene where Carly has lunch with her father to ask him what he would do if he wanted to hide money. This makes no sense as Carly is a lawyer for a large New York City firm so it seems likely she would know what people do with their money if they are trying to hide it. Even worse, however, is that this scene takes place in a bar/restaurant called No Hands ,where Asian women massage them and hand feed them. The message is pretty clear: empowerment, even such pale empowerment as this is only for white women.
Overall, the movie toes the line of Sex and the City faux empowerment where everything in a woman’s world centers around a man. Its “LADEEZ ON TOP” message comes heavily watered down by the fact that the movie barely passes the Bechdel test and the conversations not relating to Mark (the cheating husband) are about such thrilling topics as how hot Amber is.
I think part of the problem is that the movie relies heavily on physical comedy rather than clever writing and this is often hit or miss. Some parts are genuinely hilarious but many others fall quite flat. I’m not sure why, because Diaz in particular has certainly proven herself to be a gifted at physical comedy, but many of the gags tend toward feeling too forced and unnatural. This is especially true of Leslie Mann’s batty housewife act.
Despite all of this there is a lot of lovely imagery of women enjoying each other’s company, something that is STILL woefully lacking in the movie world where most big budget movies only have one named woman in them. Some of the best scenes are the ones where you don’t really get to hear any dialogue but just view the women hanging out. The fact that these scenes have no dialogue that we can hear sends the message that the only types of conversations that are worth hearing from women.
I don’t regret going to see The Other Woman because I think it was passably funny and it was really nice to have a movie where women are the stars of the show for a change; but it could have been so much better. The starring women were certainly not used to their full potential and the movie was definitely not as subversive as it pretended to be.
What’s shaping up to be the forefront theme in ‘Orphan Black’ season two is reproductive rights. Of all the clones, Sarah is an anomaly because she was able to give birth to Kira when all her clone counterparts are infertile. The seemingly impossible birth of Kira has the forces of science and religion both vying for access and control over clone bodies.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I continue to be a fan of Orphan Black into its second season. My review of season one—Orphan Black: It’s All About the Ladies–focuses on the strength and wide range of female characters that the show revolves around (not to mention Tatiana Maslany‘s formidable acting talents as she portrays all of the clones). In season two, the compelling female relationships continue to be integral to the heart of Orphan Black‘s plotlines. In particular, we see a deepening of Cosima’s connection to and lingering distrust of her monitor, Delphine.
Can Cosima trust her lover and monitor Delphine?
We also delve into the dark past of Sarah’s foster mother Mrs. S, full of secrets, violence, and questionable intentions.
Is Mrs. S helping or hurting Sarah and Kira?
We also meet a new and powerful clone, Rachel, who works for the dubious cloning research corporation, Dyad, and who doesn’t seem to feel a kinship with her fellow clones.
Clone-Off: Sarah and Rachel
We also see more of Sarah coming into her own as a responsible, present parent for her medical miracle daughter, Kira. Though Felix is not a woman, his close relationship with foster sister Sarah and his queerness seem to get him into the inner circle of Clone Club, and it’s always a pleasure to watch scenes where he calls Sarah on her shit, is nurturing to Kira, is hilarious, and remains fabulous the whole time.
Felix: King of the Smart Asses
What’s shaping up to be the forefront theme in Orphan Black season two is reproductive rights. Of all the clones, Sarah is an anomaly because she was able to give birth to Kira when all her clone counterparts are infertile. The seemingly impossible birth of Kira has the forces of science and religion both vying for access and control over clone bodies. Yes, a pitched battle between science and religion is mounting over the reproductivity of female bodies. Sound familiar? Art imitating life perhaps…
The Prometheans, a religious cult, attempt to bind Helena to their cause
Both the Prometheans (religious nutjobs) and the Dyads (cold, calculating scientists) are deceptive, selfish, and don’t see the clones as autonomous human beings. Our heroines must navigate these treacherous forces that seek to exploit them. Even more remarkable is the way in which the clones fight back by using these forces for their own gains by gathering, stealing, and manipulating resources and information in order to better understand themselves: their origin, DNA, and purpose. From within a system that attempts to abuse and dehumanize them, these woman are making their own way, living by their own rules, and relying on their collective strength to survive. Now that, my friends, is a feminism.
Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
If you hear that people hate this movie, this re-inscription of feminine expendability and excoriation is probably, I’m guessing, why. Or there’s not enough explicitly in the surface of the movie: everything’s implied, ergo too many loose ends. They probably hate what happens to the baby: I think that’s when women walk out of the movie. The fact that men regularly walk out of screenings (because of the erect penises on the victimized men–that is a whole other essay for a whole different internet venue and I want to read that essay a.s.a.p.)
Scarlett Johansson herself says the movie Under the Skinis about an “it” becoming a “her”. Not a she: subjective, but a her: objective. This is the key dynamic character shift in the film, so that you’d think this film would embody a cultural critique of how women are treated, or at least, the idea of human predation. Because the “it” is a predatory drone and becomes a “her”, it first discovers slowly and sadly the immense vulnerability and mundanity of being a human person and then of being a human woman. The attractiveness of the Johansson human body (the thing for which she was singled out) ends up completely working against the alien. Its alien culture didn’t fully understand the position it was putting “it” in by putting “it” in a female body, and the amount of thinking we can see on the alien’s face as it is preying on people amounts to what we get from watching a spider on a web. Sometimes it’s the glass of water that does in an alien (Signs); sometimes it’s Johansson’s face and body.
In the first minutes, I didn’t think of a femme fatale; I thought Johansson was acting out some revenge fantasy–the abducted woman with the very deadpan comic twist: men don’t have to be abducted by force or tripped up by a woman’s doubt of her own instinct for being in danger; you can just promise them a one-night-stand with a lost English woman who looks like Johansson, and they’ll conveniently take their clothes off. That seems like the wink from the director, past the affectless alien, to us. Except the movie has a hard time offering up meaning from the gross amount of predation foisted on men—though it sure keeps showing their demises to us, over and over again.
What do you do with the insinuation that feminine wiles are basically manipulation? Or that men are so overwhelmed they can’t pick up on the fact that her questions are faintly pushy and one-track? Honestly, if I saw a gorgeous man on a beach, and he kept asking, “What are you doing here/are you alone/what country are you from?” I’d be taking ten steps back, turning, and walking away quickly. Which to his credit, is kind of what the surfer on the beach does when Johansson’s alien accosts him. The camera hangs on his face, taking in and registering the alien’s intrusiveness: she/it asks point blank what country he’s from. Viewers may worry, thinking: Are you gonna buy this, man? Are you really not noticing this is weird? He seems to feel baited, and the whole exchange is pushed aside for his altruism in wanting to help the drowning woman and dog. This is clearly a movie by a man: because if it were a movie by a woman. But we’re seeing a vulnerability in men we don’t often see on film. Considering the way the social criticism stays on a silent, not-very-deep level in this movie, backed up mostly by silence and blackness to fill in the gaps not covered in the story-writing meetings, I’ll take this one chance to see the tables get turned and go horribly wrong.
It’s hard to say what exactly is the trigger for the alien that makes her understand humans as something other than a meat parade. Is it mundane night life, malls, and people walking on the street? The alien’s modus operandi is a blend of “hunter” as well as tedious, dutiful, and atonal. I did not think she developed feelings or pity for humans. Her project is tedious to her. Is she really having a revelation about people? Or is this actually about sentience? Is she discovering the little bugs (humans) she’s picking off are values-driven?
Under the Skin seems more focused on the dreadfulness of being in another body, constantly amongst people who will want to kill her if they discover what she is. This isn’t, however, to say the movie is about Otherness in the way speculative fiction critiques and instructs on Otherness. It’s more about the weariness of being. Of being any being. Her work is so repetitive that I almost got enraged that it was still happening narratively, much less to these poor dudes. There’s no clue of how or when it could end. This can be read as rigor of repetition or, perhaps, as art for art’s sake.
Then comes the turning point, but it’s so crazily silent that it takes the length of this very long shot to understand what’s happened. The overpowering substance of the shot is that she looks out a window or into a glass tank and we see her face move from darkness into half-light. The beauty of this is its eyes go from an examination of the human as Other to self-regard pretty seamlessly. When the eyes dip into the light, the shot really communicates reticence and an inability to accept this gaze, this human face, these eyes. Does it look gruesome to itself? Maybe it loves this face? Is it creeped out? We don’t know whether or not sympathy is in the emotional currency on the alien’s planet, but we see something blows the alien’s mind. As a result, she releases the guy with neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson) that we rolled our eyes to see going into her trap.
Why compassion for him and not the baby? She has remorse. Because she relates to alienation? Because of job burnout?
It’s worth saying a few words here about the cinematography and the setting of Scotland. In an overwhelming number of shots, the lighting is so dim you almost don’t know what you’re looking at, and there’s neon and noise and gold and graphics. This is a nod toward Jordan Chenoweth (cinematographer for Blade Runner) from DP Daniel Landin. The alien repeatedly echoes Rachel from Blade Runner in the use of eyelights—an almost totally dark face except for eyelights and the lighting of the lower third of her face. Why are we echoing Rachel here? Because Rachel’s humanity was tested through her eyes. She’d thought she was human but actually wasn’t. Here, Johansson’s alien ascertains something through an examination of her own eyes, thinks she’s not human, but, as the symmetry of this subtext goes, is about to find out she feels just like one.
Once out of the comfortable workplace of her van, Johansson’s alien is trying to stop with the predation. Except her kind didn’t study women enough to understand that just by walking alone on a road, she’s vulnerable. Here comes symbolic and literal fog on the road. She cannot see where she’s going now that she’s acquiring a conscience. She walks through the fog until she’s just passed it. This whiteness counters the blackness attached to everything the aliens do as day-to-day business. She rides a bus, now alone, and looks utterly freaked out like a woman who is trying to get out of a traumatic domestic situation. Except, it’s the situation she was sent here to embody that she’s trying to leave. She would prefer something more domestic, it seems, as she keeps going into houses—first a man’s and then a shelter in some woods.
There’s so much to say about the most retold, re-cast tale about predation in Western culture (Little Red Riding Hood) regrouping itself into some horrifyingly corrupted archetypes here in the last fourth of the movie. The book on which this horror movie is based is a piece of Michel Faber’s Dutch/Scottish horror. Little Red Riding Hood originated from a group of sexual assault warnings that filtered through the French countryside in the 17th century. Don’t let yourself be tracked. Don’t accept people on appearances (shey could be a wolf with your grandmother in its stomach). A wolf in grandmother’s clothes. And here after an interlude of almost-happiness in which Johansson’s alien-woman checks out her body in a mirror and ventures to have consensual sex, realizes what’s between her legs, she runs out into a forest where she shouldn’t be, where she has little idea how dangerous it is, and she’s warned to follow a trail by a woodsman, who ends up being the wolf.
The woodsman hits on her just the way she hit on men for the first half of the movie. What happens next is even harder to process, because in the end, isn’t she the wolf trapped in a woman’s body?
She pays for the underestimation, but the woodsman also pays for his underestimation with a terrible surprise for his rape-impulse. But wait a minute. After all the totally lamb-like men she’s picked up and stowed in her death lake, she’s out in a forest and the ONE MAN in the WHOLE FOREST that she runs into not only hits on her while trying to give her directions, but goes to find her so he can molest her, which then turns into him chasing her in the woods to straight up rape her.
Why is this piece of crap woodsman the last human she encounters on earth? Oh that’s right, we’re re-inscribing the message we apparently don’t get enough of: lone women who aren’t protected will be raped and killed. If you’re a wolf in woman’s clothing, good luck preserving your wily alien-wolf self because this near criminally insane woodsman will immolate you for being the uncanny. What did she do to become a predator magnet instead of the predator? She started feeling stuff. She gave up her predatory sex-kitten game. She tried to back up and see how she could possibly fit in and try to consider the essence of what she was doing. And so she ends up in a fate reserved for the more spectacular pieces of murdered women porn regularly paraded between 8-11 pm every night of the year on network television in both magazine and crime shows. Back to an object save the second moment of self-regard she has when she looks on her own Johansson face as a mask in her lap. It’s the one moment that makes this ending uncanny, and I would say, ultimately about being a human.
If you hear that people hate this movie, this re-inscription of feminine expendability and excoriation is probably why. There are too many too many loose ends and surface-like implications. People probably hate what happens to the baby: I think that’s when women walked out of the movie. The fact that men regularly walked out of screenings (because of the erect penises on the victimized men) is a whole other essay for a whole different internet venue and I want to read that essay a.s.a.p.
When Johansson’s corpse is burning up into the sky, the black smoke mingles with snow that flakes down to obliterate the literal camera lens. The fog comes back. And that male body-snatching alien looks off a cliff with his back to us, seeing or not seeing this black smoke, trying to find a sign in the confounding mist. He is not unlike a Romantic hero mystified who constantly feels alienated from Nature–a more tableaux version of what Johansson’s alien, in her last look upon her human face, must have felt.
Cynthia Arrieu-King teaches literature and creative writing at Stockton College in New Jersey and has two published volumes of poetry. She has taught about 17 sections of freshman composition in which plagiarism was covered thoroughly, so beware internet magazines with sticky fingers. cynthiaarrieuking.blogspot.com.
Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.
Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.
April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.
Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.
Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.
Mr. B. and April
The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).
Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.
Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”
Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.
Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).
Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.
Sterling and Davina
We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.
In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
