Bitch Flicks – Page 15 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Second Mom Syndrome: Sisterhood in ‘My Neighbor Totoro’

The film shows how Satsuki struggles with this dual role of acting as the most present parent while still being only a child herself. … While Satsuki fulfills the role of mom to Mei, it’s her status as sister and child that ends up saving the day. … ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ is one of Miyazaki’s best odes to sisterhood, portraying both the struggles but also the benefits of having a sibling at your side.

This guest post written by Clara Mae appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Anybody who has a sister knows that sisterhood is the source of both endless support and frustration, of happiness and anger and sorrow. Sisters often have a turbulent relationship with each other, and a sister’s opinion can lift us up or just as easily shatter us. When there’s a large age gap between the sisters, the relationship becomes even more complicated, as the older sister often takes on the role of third parent — or second, or even first — to the younger sibling, while still playing the role of confidant and best friend. Suffice to say, the bond of sisterhood is a complex one, and it’s one that’s thoroughly explored in Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film My Neighbor Totoro.

My Neighbor Totoro focuses on two sisters, ten-year-old Satsuki and four-year-old Mei Kusakabe, who befriend a giant furry forest spirit in 1950s Japan. The sisters and their father move to an old rundown house in the countryside to be closer to their mom, convalescing in a nearby hospital. (The novelization of Totoro confirms that the mom is suffering from tuberculosis.) The film opens with the girls sharing candies and playing as young siblings often do, with the younger sister clearly emulating the older one. They laugh and explore their new home together, with Mei repeatedly mimicking the body language of Satsuki and echoing her words: “Wow, it’s creepy.” “CREEPY!” “A camphor tree.” “CAMPHOR TREE!” “Hey dad, acorns are falling from the ceiling.” “FALLING FROM THE CEILING!”

While the two clearly make wonderful playmates — with Satsuki especially showing a tremendous degree of patience and love for her rambunctious sibling — the film also goes to great lengths to show how much slack Satsuki picks up because of her mother’s absence and her father’s inattentiveness (which is not malicious but rather stems from him working as a university professor). At ten years old, Satsuki wakes up early to make everyone breakfast and box lunches. Halfway through her preparation, her father wanders in, sleep-tousled, and admits he forgot about doing that. Satsuki puts Mei’s hair into her signature pigtails every day, and she rebukes Mei that she can never sit still. When Satsuki starts school, Mei runs off, falls down a hole, and meets Totoro for the first time. Her father never even notices she’s gone, and he only realizes something is amiss when Satsuki comes home and immediately asks for Mei. “You and I are a lot alike,” their mother says tellingly to Satsuki. One can only wonder the trouble that Mei would get into if Satsuki wasn’t there to be a stand-in guardian.

We also see the ways in which Mei accepts Satsuki as a surrogate parent, despite Satsuki being barely into her tweens. When Satsuki leaves Mei with their neighbor Granny in order to go to school, Mei throws a fit. But it’s Satsuki, not her father, that Mei drags Granny to: “She said she wouldn’t stop crying unless I brought her to you,” Granny tells Satsuki. Mei then runs to Satsuki and buries her face in her skirt. Satsuki ends up negotiating with the teacher to let Mei stay with her, a mimicry of what a young mom would likely have to do with a daughter. Later, when the two walk home together and Mei falls, Satsuki immediately picks her up and wipes her face. “I didn’t even cry. That’s good huh,” Mei asks her sister, again seeking approval as a child would with her parent. As for their real parents, it’s implied that they never learn about this episode.

The film shows how Satsuki struggles with this dual role of acting as the most present parent while still being only a child herself. On one hand, Satsuki is able to see spirits like Totoro and the soot sprites as well as Mei — something that Granny notes only children are able to do. On the other hand, everyone expects Satsuki to act more mature, which clearly starts to wear on her as the film goes on. When Mei throws a tantrum because their mom is too sick to come home for the weekend, Satsuki explodes at Mei, “You want her to die, is that it? You’re such a baby. Just grow up.” She then runs off, leaving Mei sobbing. It’s implied that Mei then runs away after seeing Satsuki breaking down to Granny; the illusion of Satsuki as her mother breaks, and she runs toward the comfort of her real mother.

In the end, Satsuki is still just Mei’s sibling. While Satsuki fulfills the role of mom to Mei, it’s her status as sister and child that ends up saving the day. When Mei runs away, all the adults in the village try in vain to find her. Despite her best efforts, Satsuki is unable to find her either. It isn’t until Satsuki calls on Totoro — the creature she wouldn’t even be able to see if not for her youth — that she’s finally able to find her. The film ends with the siblings reunited and laughing together in the catbus, their status as sisters, rather than mother and child, reaffirmed.

My Neighbor Totoro is one of Miyazaki’s best odes to sisterhood, portraying both the struggles but also the benefits of having a sibling at your side. Compare Satsuki to characters like Chihiro in Spirited Away or Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service — both an only child who spend their respective films struggling to just take care of themselves, and who are lost and miserable until they find sisterhood and support in older female characters like Lin, Ursula, and Osono. Chihiro especially is the same age as Satsuki, yet it’s difficult to imagine the sullen and moody Chihiro — at least at the beginning of her film — patiently taking care of a younger child like Mei. Similarly we can look at how Satsuki and Mei often function as a supportive unit in their film (with most of their scenes framed to include both siblings), versus in Howl’s Moving Castle, where Sophie’s sister is ultimately absent from the film and when Sophie needs help the most.

Perhaps Miyazaki’s strongest message about the strength of sisterhood can be found in the fact that Satsuki and Mei were first conceived as a single character. Seen in original cover photos, My Neighbor Totoro was originally going to focus on just one six-year-old girl. Before production started, Miyazaki decided to split that one character into two, and thus we got one older and one younger sister. This duality carried over into their names: “Satsuki” is an old Japanese term for the month of May, and “Mei” is the way the Japanese would pronounce the English word May. And maybe that’s what sisterhood is: having both a sidekick and mirror of who you really are.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Magical Girlhoods in the Films of Studio Ghibli

Clara Mae is a twenty-something English major grad from UC Berkeley. Works somewhere in the San Francisco financial district. If not at work, is probably off eating ramen, petting dogs, or attempting yoga. Blogs too little at https://claramae.contently.com/ and tweets too much @ubeempress.

‘A League of their Own’: The Joy and Complexity of Sisterhood on a Baseball Field

The bond between the sisters is at the heart of the wartime baseball movie, directed by Penny Marshall… Their competitive nature is a motivation to be the best… It’s obvious that Dottie always seems to have one up on Kit, which sets up the relentless struggle of the spirited Kit who wants, finally, to be better than Dottie. … Kit and Dottie are the embodiment not just of sisterhood, but of the true nature of a teammate relationship.

This guest post written by Jessica Quiroli appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

It only takes a few minutes into A League of Their Own that we learn what drives the Keller sisters, Dottie and Kit, as individuals. Their competitive nature is a motivation to be the best, even in the smallest ways, like racing home to see who can run faster. It’s obvious that Dottie (Geena Davis) always seems to have one up on Kit (Lori Petty), which sets up the relentless struggle of the spirited Kit who wants, finally, to be better than Dottie. It’s immediately clear they genuinely love each other and are devoted to family, and Dottie (now Hinson) to her husband Bob. When a scout comes calling, it’s obvious that they’ve always played the game, and he considers Dottie the bigger talent. But Kit is the driven one, filled with an intense desire to play, and not just to compete, but to win.

The bond between the sisters is at the heart of the wartime baseball movie, directed by Penny Marshall, and it serves as the energetic force in many key scenes. There are many female-bonding movies, but this is a rare one that passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. There are few sports movies focused on women, and none like this. Add to that the driving theme of sisterhood, both forged and biological, and it makes for a complex and emotional ride.

There are a lot of themes at work here. World War II created a lack of spirit in the U.S., with many of the men who once played sports serving their country overseas. Based on the real All-American Girls Professional Ball-League, the film shows the unfolding drama of the Rockford Peaches: women learning to be professional ball players and prove that they’re perfectly capable of playing the game, mixed with the fear of losing their husbands, which throbs beneath the surface every moment.

When scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz at his acerbic best) finds them on the farm, there’s something striking about the parallels to other jobs in sports; slots are few, so women must battle harder, and, hopefully, uplift each other along the way. Dottie wants to help her sister succeed and does what she can to make sure she too has a slot. Kit’s opportunity is a hard-fought chance, something any woman in any area of sports can relate to. In 2012, A League of Their Own was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

The theme of overcoming barriers and refusing to settle is threaded throughout the stories of some of the single women, like Doris Murphy, portrayed so beautifully nuanced by Rosie O’Donnell in one of the most tender, throat-tightening moments (at least for me). She quietly tells her teammates on the team bus about her boyfriend who treats her poorly. She explains that she stays with him because, “They always made me feel I was wrong, you know? Like I was some sort of weird girl… I believed them too. Not anymore. There’s a lot of us. I think we’re all alright.” In a moment of inspired strength, surrounded by support, she tears up his photo and throws the pieces out the window.

Similarly, Megan Cavanagh, in one of the more memorable roles, has a heart-wrenching scene with her father, as he sends her off at the train station. Her character embodies the constant struggle women, particularly those in sports, endure as “tomboys” (let’s ban that word). As women we’re judged first by appearance, and judgments hold even after we’ve proven our ability. Marla plays through taunts from fans, and being openly mocked in a team introductory video. In these days of social media, women athletes are subject to that verbal abuse every day at an overwhelming level. Hooch, like any female athlete, just keeps on playing.

Everything always comes back to Dottie and Kit’s push-pull relationship. Dottie’s quiet leadership guides the team, while Kit’s frenetic nature pops in almost every moment she’s on-screen. On the field, their teammate relationship is tempered by that leadership. Dottie is asked to be honest about her sister’s limitations when Jimmy Dugan (the unbelievably perfect Tom Hanks) wants to lift Kit for another pitcher. Kit’s explosive anger is a snapshot of the experience of women in sports, today and throughout history. Women, especially in that era, were made to feel small, incapable of physically achieving what men could. In this story, however, Kit’s main adversary isn’t a man with an agenda, but a sister whom she regards as a more capable rival. Dottie’s loving and supportive (she’s the reason they’re on the team after all), but she takes the upper hand when necessary. That pivotal moment in the game embodies the rich, emotional bond of sisterhood.

There are no male heroes in the traditional sense. There’s an equal respect that grows between Dottie and Jimmy. She doesn’t stand down. He stands up. In the scene that is a turning point for Dugan, he and Dottie give competing signs to Hooch. It’s a classic moment, perfectly performed. And, more pointedly, a man and a woman, on equal ground, communicate (argue really) through the language of baseball.

Other characters emerge in their own way and aren’t lost by the central storyline. But how could Madonna ever just blend in? Not here. As Mae Mordabito, she’s the other half of the comedy duo with O’Donnell and, although opposites in a number of areas, their relationship shows what drives the soul of sisterhood. She’s flirtatious and free-spirited, while Doris struggles with self-confidence, but is also good for a scrappy on-field fight. Their loyalty and love for each other shines through, despite personality differences.

Watching A League of Their Own is a meditation of sorts for me as a baseball writer and fan. My heart swells, and my eyes fill, and I feel tremendous pride. I’m moved by the loss, the confusion, and the struggle the women face to keep going and to, eventually, let go. Kit and Dottie are the embodiment not just of sisterhood, but of the true nature of a teammate relationship.

We need these images of women physically competing, motivated by a love of a sport, winning, and the unique bonds of teammates and sisters.

Jessica Quiroli is a minor league baseball writer for Baseball Prospectus and the creator of Heels on the Field: A MiLB Blog. She’s also written extensively about domestic violence in baseball. She’s a DV survivor. You can follow her on Twitter @heelsonthefield.

‘Our Little Sister’: Making Enough Room for the Half-Sister

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ‘Our Little Sister’ is a mature and subtle exploration of the place of the half-sister within family life; how she fits in and how she transforms what we think the family means. … The camera lingers on Suzu’s face in a moment of indecision: will she go on as before, having no feelings for what are essentially strangers anyway, or will she take a leap of faith that will mean her identity will be forever tangled with theirs?

This guest post written by Katherine Parker-Hay appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Ideas of the family seem to come interwoven with requirements of unconditional love. Whether we really like our siblings, whether we would have picked them out of a crowd, is beyond the point. The task is to love them as unthinkingly and uncritically as we can manage. But, with such black and white ideologies attached to what family means, the half-sister is surely always on precarious ground; her role seems like an oxymoron by nature. After all, when we think of sisters we tend to think less in halves and more in terms of too much: too much frustration, too much jealousy, too much love. From my experience at least, sisterhood is not something we do in half-measures. So when the half-sister encroaches on the space of the traditional family unit, what do we do with her? How do we make room for her? How does she transform us, if we let her?

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister is a mature and subtle exploration of the place of the half-sister within family life; how she fits in and how she transforms what we think the family means. The story follows three adult sisters: Sachi (Haruka Ayase), who works in a hospital and is struggling because of an affair with a married man; light-hearted Chika (Kaho), who works in a sports shop; and Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), who works in a bank and has an insatiable appetite for beer and dating. The three live comfortably together in a house left to them by their grandmother. Though not openly discussed, it is apparent that their parents had a difficult breakup, with their father having an affair and their mother disappearing. The siblings now live harmoniously together; however, this balance is disrupted when they are called to their father’s funeral, where they meet their long-estranged half-sister.

On meeting agnate-sibling Suzu (Suzu Hirose), the close-knit trio are forced to question whether a stranger could ever approximate the bond formed through having grown up together. Could this officious girl of a different generation meaningfully be a sister to them? With her nearing proximity, the girls are forced to consider the nature of relationships that seemed entirely natural and obvious. With so few shared points of reference, it would be easy for the sisters to turn away. However, something stops them. Saying a stilted goodbye at the station, the sisters on one side of the glass and the half-sister on the other, Sachi blurts out, “Come and live with us.” The camera lingers on Suzu’s face in a moment of indecision: will she go on as before, having no feelings for what are essentially strangers anyway, or will she take a leap of faith that will mean her identity will be forever tangled with theirs? As the doors close, she calls out, “I will.” Watching this as a child of a broken home left me near to tears. Suzu’s situation, as she considers whether to take the chance, seemed to encapsulate to me the position that a breakup can so often leave a child in: suddenly having to choose over what their family will look like and where its emotional and psychic boundaries will fall. Vulnerable and confused, we witness Suzu in the moment where she has to decide on what she can find enough room for within herself.

The film ambles subtly, Suzu having thrown in her lot with Sachi, Chika, and Yoshi, as it documents the small acts of the sisters making one another feel at home. This is not a simple task when all share such uneasy structural relationships with one another. Suzu starts off feeling awkward, inauthentic – a guest at the house belonging to the “real sisters.” To a friend, she confesses the precarious place that her family history has left her in: her “existence is the reason for other people’s pain.” However, as we watch the three girls in everyday activities like cooking, bathing, and lounging on the floor, we come to see that so much of what matters about being a sister is not the structural relation, the label imposed on the relationship from the outside, but the daily routines. It is the running to the bus together, the annual traditions like making plum wine.

As Suzu gradually becomes more comfortable, they even come to realize that there might be something very special about bringing a half-sister fully into their lives. They have chosen the relationship, chosen each other in the way that one might choose a partner or a best friend. Though not quite that. It is a choice far more willful, because they choose her against the weight of family history and against all the reasons that could have made it so easy to turn away.

Of course, the adult sisters find themselves in a situation that few children of divorced parents could dream of: on fleeing, the mother leaves the family home solely in their hands, to do as they wish. This situation could not be more different than when parents, siblings, half-siblings, and step-siblings, wounds still raw, are all brought together to cohabit under one roof. In such volatile living situations, the bloodlines seem almost fluorescent and, with just the slightest friction, can so quickly demarcate who belongs to whom. In contrast, Our Little Sister hands the protagonists a blank slate in the form of this expansive house that is all their own. They have the chance to establish relationships at a remove from the identity of their mothers and fathers. The empty house, with its excess of uninhabited rooms, becomes symbolic of a new kinship model. It is an elastic space, where they can encounter each other beyond the psychic confines of the Oedipal.

For the sisters, the house becomes a means of shutting out the wider world that would delegitimize their budding yet fragile relationship. The value of the neutral, insulating space of the house is made clear with a surprise visit from the three girl’s mother. During the visit, she casually relates that she is selling the house. She had been unhappy there and does not stop to imagine that her girls could relate any differently to the space. This is a failure of imagination – a failure to allow the children of divorce to move beyond the pain that their parent’s have left them as an inheritance. Similarly, their aunt warns the girls that they should be on their guard against the half-sister, after all, she reminds them, Suzu is “the reason for the breakdown of the parents.” For the aunt, the emphasis falls almost entirely on the half in half-sister, where it is synonymous with tainted and impure. Sachi has to remind her aunt that the affair had been well underway before Suzu was even born. Sachi refuses to reject her half-sister based on a sense of loyalty to her parent’s past, and so refuses the idea that she and her sisters must spend their lives forever reproducing the narrative of their parents’ pain.

Our Little Sister is a gentle probing of how much psychic room we have to create kinships that are more flexible and generous. This is a question often forced upon children of divorced families but, tragically, tends to come at a time when they are too young and too vulnerable for generosity. On the other hand, as adults these sisters have the distance and emotional availability to make space for their half-sister. The idea of this, making enough room for the half-sister, is beautifully illustrated in one of the film’s final scenes. The girls look at their heights at different ages, penciled onto a door frame. This remains an iconic image of family, where each penciled mark seems to boast so much: “my identity is here,” “I belong here, in the family home,” “I was here all along.” How can the half-sister find a place for herself when face-to-face with this? Here is an archive of proof that she came too late and has missed out on too much. Suzu gazes at this height-chart with deference, a late observer of the years already past. But then her sister nudges her and, in a moment that seems to willfully bend time, places a pencil line that definitely marks Suzu’s presence on the frame, in tandem with the others.

Katherine Parker-Hay has a BA in English from Goldsmiths University of London and an MA in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford. She writes on queer theory, women’s cultural output, temporality, and comic serials.

The Scary Truth About Sisters in Horror Films

So what makes sisters such fascinating subject matter for horror films? What makes them both scary and powerful, yet the most vulnerable, both to outside forces as well as to each other when they are threatened? … Sisters can behave as a single entity and fight for the same things, but there are two bodies — two physical forces — to reckon with.

This guest post written by Laura Power appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Female siblings have been a go-to in horror films since horror films themselves. Sisters have been used as minor characters to fill in a cast: Daisy and Violet, the conjoined twins, and Elvira and Jenny Lee, the “Pinhead” twins, in 1932’s Freaks; the Soska sisters playing twin body-modification gurus in their own film American Mary; as specters that haunt a protagonist (the murdered twins in The Shining); as a smaller pair within a larger community of women (Danielle and Laurie in Trick ‘r Treat); and as protagonists (the Crane sisters in Psycho, Su-mi and Su-yeon in A Tale of Two Sisters, Jay and Kelly Height in It Follows).

Sisters are bound by unconditional forces: love, blood, family. Yet unlike the mother-child story in horror movies (Carrie, The Exorcist, The Babadook), the story of sisters in horror has the potential to be more forceful, more frightening. Sisters can behave as a single entity and fight for the same things, but there are two bodies — two physical forces — to reckon with. Sisters share secrets that no one else is privy to, and those secrets bind them together and make them mysterious and sometimes deadly. And turning on your sister is the ultimate betrayal, scarier and more unexpected than an attack from an outsider, which is why it makes for such effective conflict in film, especially in horror.

Sisters represent a single strong force that is duplicated in another person. Sisters work together, act together, and yet even when forces are driving them apart, they are powerful. In fact, sisters frequently become even more powerful when they are reacting to those forces that are driving them apart: they become more cunning, braver, smarter, stronger, and usually more violent and dangerous. They become even more of the “other” than they are already, and this force can be either terrifying or heroic — and sometimes both.

This power dynamic is exhibited beautifully and thoroughly in the Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps, written by Karen Walton and directed by John Fawcett. The film’s sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) begin the story as a powerful duo. As children, they made a blood oath because just being sisters wasn’t enough. In school as teenagers, they stick together, even as outcasts, collaborating on a morbid “Life in Bailey Downs” photo project, standing together as though they are a single brooding unit, protecting each other on the field hockey pitch, and wearing a similar uniform of thick, dark, oversized clothing. But when the girls are driven apart — by their biological differences, both natural (Ginger starts menstruating) and unnatural (Ginger becomes a werewolf) — the changes between them that follow only seem to increase each girl’s power.

While Ginger becomes increasingly powerful physically and sexually, taking on the role of male aggressor with Jason, and tackling and beating Trina when she attacks Brigitte in a game of field hockey, Brigitte becomes increasingly powerful physically and emotionally. She is required to problem solve time and time again, and the stakes get higher and higher. Brigitte pierces her sister’s belly button with a silver ring hoping it will curb Ginger’s werewolf traits; Brigitte reacts quickly to Trina’s accidental death in their household kitchen to make sure their parents don’t suspect what has happened (and then she chips away at Trina with a screwdriver, dislodging the girl’s stiff, dead fingers from her hand). And Brigitte problem solves, delegates, and acts with maturity to the ever-increasing drama and violence around her. When the sisters have to dig a grave to bury Trina, Brigitte makes Ginger do the physical labor while she watches. She takes charge to figure out a way to help Ginger by hiding it from their parents, locking her sister in the basement bathroom, and enlisting drug-dealer Sam’s help to cook up a cure. But Brigitte must also decide if trying the cure on Ginger is worth the possibility of killing her, of losing her sister for good. And then, ultimately, Brigitte must make the decision to live and to fight — to the death — the werewolf her sister has become.

And perhaps another relative would have taken this same trajectory to help a family member or loved one. But would they have gone far enough? We see that the girls’ mother, Pamela Fitzgerald (Mimi Rogers), is willing to make major sacrifices to protect her daughters: when she finds out the girls are responsible for Trina’s death, she plans to burn the house down and take them away to “start fresh.” She is protective and proactive rather than scared or angry; but is this mother-daughter relationship stronger than the sisters’ bond? No. It is Brigitte who soothes her mother and then gives her instructions (which Pamela doesn’t follow). It is Brigitte who reenacts the sisters’ blood oath by slicing her palm and pressing it against Ginger’s, knowing that this action likely infects her with the same virus her sister suffers from. It is Brigitte who is willing to try to become a part of Ginger’s “pack” and drinks Sam’s blood. Even though Brigitte ultimately can’t follow that through, she is willing to try, and this bond — this willingness to stand together — is what makes these sisters such a powerful force.

But what happens when one sister is not willing to sacrifice for another? As Brian De Palma shows us with his 1973 film Sisters, the results can be just as powerful and just as deadly.

In Sisters, Margot Kidder plays Danielle, a French-Canadian actress and model living on Staten Island. But Danielle has a sister — a twin sister, Dominique — who we believe is disturbed and violent, and responsible for the death of Danielle’s love interest, Phillip, at the start of the film. But as the story develops we learn that Dominique, who was not just Danielle’s twin sister, but her conjoined twin sister, died a year earlier during an operation to separate them. It is, in fact, Danielle who is the murderer; it is she who has been having violent episodes and “becoming” her dead sister to assuage the guilt at having been indirectly responsible for Dominique’s death. Danielle wasn’t willing to sacrifice her romantic relationship for her conjoined twin, and she asked Emile (her doctor and lover) to “make [Dominique] go away” so that she and Emile could make love. This desire started a deadly chain-reaction, resulting in Danielle getting pregnant, Dominique reacting violently, and stabbing her sister in the stomach to end the pregnancy, and the doctors needing to separate the twins in order to save Danielle’s life, knowing that the surgery would kill Dominique.

The removal of Dominique from Danielle — removing her from Danielle’s physical body, and removing her from Danielle’s life — had such a powerful impact on Danielle that it split her mind in two. The Dominique side of her lashes out at anyone trying to love Danielle; the Danielle side regrets what she has done and calls out for her sister to “come back,” yet cannot admit that she has hurt anyone (as she stands calmly over the body of the man she has just murdered). Danielle is the villain, the monster of the film, but she has become so because her sister was taken from her.

The sacrifice of a sister is approached differently in the 2013 Andrés Muschietti film Mama. Here the sisters are Victoria and Lilly Desange, who are orphaned as very small children after their father murders their mother and then is killed himself by a mysterious creature that the girls come to call “Mama.”

The creature Mama has been living with the sisters — raising them in a way that ensures their survival but turns them near-feral — in a cabin in the woods until they are found and sent to stay with their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Mama follows the girls and continues to play with them and protect them while getting more and more jealous of their uncle’s girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). The older sister, Victoria (Megan Charpentier), recognizes Mama’s jealousy and knows just how volatile she is; so she tries to protect Annabel whenever she can, warning her to stay away from the places Mama is likely to be.

As Victoria and Annabel’s relationship strengthens, Victoria and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) drift apart. Victoria’s brow is constantly furrowed when she sees her sister acting contrary to their surroundings or continuing to cling to Mama. And Victoria literally turns her back on her sister when Lilly tries to get Victoria to leave their bedroom in the middle of the night to play with Mama: Lilly shakes her head in a warning when Victoria will not go, but Victoria, after telling her sister that she loves her, is steadfast in her refusal, and Lilly goes alone.

Ultimately, Mama steals the girls away to the cliff where she died decades before, and Annabel and Lucas must try to save them. Mama tries to take both sisters off the cliff with her, and Lilly goes willingly, feeling that her place is with Mama, the mother and playmate she has known all her life, rather than with the new guardians Annabel and Lucas. At first Victoria is willing to go, to sacrifice what she can see as a happy family life with Annabel and Lucas for her only sister. Victoria is older and wants to protect Lilly, and she feels that this is how she must do that.

But when Annabel grabs onto Victoria’s robe and doesn’t let go, Victoria reconsiders and decides to let Mama and Lilly go without her: “Goodbye, Mama,” she says. “I love you.” Lilly and Victoria, separated by air as Mama and Lilly hover over the cliff, make a mirror-image as they stretch their hands out towards each other. But Lilly accepts that Victoria is staying, clasps her hands over Mama’s, and the two go over the cliff.

Victoria’s action may seen antithetical to the sister relationship, but it is not. Victoria has seen how Lilly has acted with Annabel — closed off, angry, and unhappy — and this is the opposite of how Lilly behaves with Mama. Victoria can see the unhappiness in her sister’s future if she stays, while she knows that Lilly will be happy if she goes with Mama. Victoria’s sacrifice sits in the fact that she is willing to lose her sister and live without her, so that they may both be happy.

It is in these sacrifices where we can find the true power of sisters in horror films. These sacrifices may drive the sisters apart or pull them together; but whichever way sisters in horror are drawn, the fallout is so intense and potentially destructive that it is a natural pairing with the genre — a pairing that will hopefully continue on both sides of the camera.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: ‘Ginger Snaps’

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter @chicagocommuter.

The Repercussions of Repressing Teenage Girls in ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and ‘Mustang’

Both are critically acclaimed dramas directed by women documenting the coming-of-age of five teenage sisters under close scrutiny for their behavior — especially when it comes to their sexuality. And in both films, the girls’ response to this repression is to resort to desperate measures to regain control, resulting in tragedy that could have been averted if they were given the freedom for which they hungered.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of suicide]

Anyone who has ever been a teenage girl knows that the bridge between girlhood and womanhood is a rough passage, rife with drama. Two films that examine this deeply personal struggle are The Virgin Suicides, released in 1999, and Mustang, released in 2015. Both are critically acclaimed dramas directed by women documenting the coming-of-age of five teenage sisters under close scrutiny for their behavior — especially when it comes to their sexuality. And in both films, the girls’ response to this repression is to resort to desperate measures to regain control, resulting in tragedy that could have been averted if they were given the freedom for which they hungered. Yet while the basic elements may sound the same, The Virgin Suicides and Mustang stand apart thanks to the different styles of the women directors who made them.

Adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides marked the feature directorial debut of Sofia Coppola, whose elegant, elegiac style immediately marked her as a talented filmmaker who didn’t need to hide in her famous father’s shadow. The film chronicles how the brief lives and tragic deaths of the five Lisbon sisters rocked the residents of a 1970s Michigan suburb. All long blonde hair and sun-kissed limbs, these beautiful girls are kept under lock and key by their infamously strict parents, making them even more desirable to the neighborhood boys.

The story is narrated by one of the boys, now grown, as he reflects on the brief time they spent in the Lisbons’ orbit. “Cecilia was the first to go,” he tells us, and indeed, it is the youngest sister’s suicide that sets the story on its path. After sad, sensitive Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall) throws herself out of her bedroom window and onto a spiked fence, a neighbor scoffs, “That girl didn’t want to die. She just wanted out of that house.”

The Lisbons were always a mystery thanks to the tight reins their parents kept them on, but after Cecilia’s death, the four surviving sisters are elevated to mythical status. When Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) is the only girl in school who doesn’t collapse at the feet of heartthrob Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), he makes it his goal to win her heart. He’s able to convince Mr. Lisbon (James Woods) to let him take Lux to homecoming, with one caveat: he’ll have to enlist boys to take her sisters, too. Like awestruck Cinderellas finally wiping the soot from their eyes, the girls — all clad in angelic, virginal white dresses — spend the night dancing, experimenting with alcohol, and canoodling under the bleachers. Lux and Trip celebrate being crowned homecoming king and queen by sneaking out onto the football field to have sex while the others go home without them. Yet the fiery adolescent hunger Trip had for Lux fades away upon consummation. Once he’s managed to win her over, she is no longer the object of his hazy, golden fantasies; when the mystery fades away, she’s just like every other girl. The spell broken, Trip abandons Lux on the football field to sleep through the night — and her curfew.

This is the moment when life as the Lisbon girls previously knew it ends. The sliver of freedom they were so briefly allowed is wrenched from their grasps as they’re taken out of school and kept cloistered within the house. Lux seizes freedom the only way that is within her power — with her body. She repeatedly sneaks onto the roof of the house to have sex with a variety of men; it seems to be the one thing she can do to feel alive. Eventually, the boys show up in a car to rescue the girls, but the scene they encounter in the Lisbon house is more horror show than heroic tableau. Like Cecilia before them, the remaining Lisbons have taken their own lives. The boys flee, left to spend the rest of their lives wondering what could have been if the sisters had found a different means of escape than the most permanent one of all.

Telling such a female-centric film from the point of view of a group of young men is an odd choice — especially for a woman director. One would expect The Virgin Suicides to explore the inner lives of the Lisbons, but instead, the audience — like the boys — is held at arm’s length. Coppola sticks to the format of the novel and filters the Lisbons’ story through the male gaze; we only see them the way the boys see them, both in reality and in their dreams. Lux is frequently seen in hazy glimpses that wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a paperback edition of Lolita — a flash of flaxen hair covering a twinkling blue eye, red lips curling into a mischievous a smile, long limbs leaping into the air with carefree abandon while a unicorn frolics nearby. Such an object of pure fantasy is Lux that her image is synonymous with that of a creature that only exists in fairy tales. Notebook doodles of hearts and names in cartoonish bubble letters illustrate the film, adding to the illusion that this is all a teenage dream.

Sixteen years after The Virgin Suicides, Deniz Gamze Ergüven made a big splash with Mustang, the emotional turmoil of the teenage years once again providing the inspiration for a talented woman director’s debut feature. Rather than tell their story from the point of view of an outsider, Mustang is narrated by the youngest sister, Lale (Güneş Şensoy), as she helplessly watches her older sisters fall victim one by one to what adults — particularly men — think a young woman should be. Because of this, Mustang feels more intimate, more immediate, and much more heartbreaking than Coppola’s film.

Mustang begins with the life-changing fallout from a seemingly harmless event: five orphaned sisters having chicken fights with the local boys on the beach. The image of these girls riding on the boys’ shoulders — rubbing their private parts on their necks, as their grandmother puts it — is a source of shame in the tiny, conservative village where they live. The elder girls are even subject to a virginity exam in the aftermath, with the ominous warning, “If there was the slightest doubt, you’d never be able to get married.”

The punishment for “teasing the boys” only escalates as the girls’ aggressively old-fashioned Uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) takes control over their lives; meanwhile, the boys involved are able to move on. The infuriating double standard that girls and boys are often held to is on display time and time again throughout Mustang — after all, none of the male characters are ever subject to the humiliation of a virginity test. The girls’ developing bodies are viewed as dangerous objects of temptation that must be subject to control, but one never suggests that the boys should be able to control themselves.

Like Lux sobbing as she is forced to burn her Kiss records in The Virgin Suicides, the girls of Mustang are forced to give up their computers, phones, and anything else that is deemed a perverting influence. The sisters are forbidden from returning to school; instead, they spend their days learning how to cook and clean while wearing “shapeless, shit-colored dresses” that Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) would have admired. It is only a matter of time until families come calling to ask for the sisters’ hands in marriage on behalf of their sons. As Lale notes, “The house became a wife factory that we never came out of.”

While it was the actions of the youngest sister that set the story of The Virgin Suicides in motion, in Mustang, the youngest girl starts the story on the sidelines. Lale is too young to be immediately threatened by the prospect of becoming someone’s wife. Her older sisters’ growing sexuality is still a mystery to her, one that she tries to solve by stealing eldest sister Sonay’s (İlayda Akdoğan) bras and kissing pictures of men in magazines. Meanwhile, Sonay is shimmying down the drainpipe every night to meet with her lover, using her body as a means of rebellion in the same way Lux did.

Sonay refuses to marry unless it is to this man of her choice, and shockingly, she gets her way — better she be married off, after all, then not married at all. So, the man meant for Sonay gets passed down to the second sister, Selma (Tuğba Sunguroğlu), with no regard to how she may feel about him. On her wedding night, Selma is rushed to the hospital for yet another invasive examination after she fails to bleed upon having sex for the first time; she’s treated like a defective appliance being returned to the store by a frustrated customer. Her husband has no concern for her emotional well-being, only that of her hymen. Selma’s life as something that belongs to her alone is effectively over.

The middle sister, Ece (Elit İşcan), is next, and her story is the saddest of all the girls in Mustang. Abused by Uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) and repeatedly denied the right to make her own choices, the only way Ece can prove to herself and others that she is still her own person is to choose to die. Her suicide is horrifying, a tragic act, particularly because it is also a form of liberation — the only one she had at her disposal. Ece rejects a life in a house that has become a prison, where nothing — not even her own body — is her own to do with as she pleases. As in The Virgin Suicides, taking one’s life is a desperate form of defiance, the only way to take control of oneself and one’s personhood. It should never, ever be that way, and yet the most painful thing about Ece’s death is knowing that there are other girls like her, and her sisters, in similar situations around the world.

After Ece’s suicide, second-youngest sister Nur (Doğa Zeynep Doğuşlu) is next in line for both marriage and Uncle Erol’s abuse; she’s also the only one left standing between Lale and this terrible fate. A passive observer of the events unfolding around her for much of the film, Lale grows increasingly active as she edges closer to the end of the wife assembly line. She convinces a friendly trucker to teach her to drive. On the night of Nur’s wedding, the two girls lock everyone out of the house so that they can prepare their escape. That’s right — the house that was for so long a prison is for a very brief moment a refuge, with Uncle Erol attempting to break down the door like a rabid animal. In the end, Nur and Lale make it to Istanbul, the bustling metropolis portrayed a symbol of freedom and modernity.

While The Virgin Suicides often has the aura of a dream thanks to its ethereal cinematography, swoon-worthy score by Air, and fantasy sequences, Mustang feels utterly grounded in the blood, sweat, and tears of reality — and because of that, it’s all the more painful and poignant to watch. A scene in which the sisters sneak out of the house to attend a soccer match was one of the most exhilarating moments I have ever seen on-screen, while Ece’s hauntingly calm exit from the kitchen table to take a gun and end her life nearly wrenched my heart in two. What is most heartbreaking about Mustang is the knowledge that communities like this exist throughout our world today (not to mention the sexism girls face in countries with supposed equality), continually repressing girls and telling that they are worth no more than their wombs. Their world is harsh and cruel, with flashes of beauty — the sparkling fireworks at the soccer match, the bright white sand of the beach shimmering beneath the clear blue sky — that are all too fleeting in the darkness.

Meanwhile, The Virgin Suicides seems to project glamour onto the lives and deaths of the Lisbons — likely because we are seeing them through the eyes of the boys, who always saw them as glamorous engimas. Unlike the sisters of Mustang, the Lisbon sisters don’t seem entirely real; there is an element of distance that prevents us from getting close enough to peer inside their heads and hearts. We don’t see them the way they seem themselves; we see them the way the boys do, which is less as fully-fledged human beings than as unattainable objects to lust after, like sparkling jewels kept locked away in a rusty casket that was then lost forever at sea. Because of this, one doesn’t feel the sucker punch of their deaths in the same way that one does Ece’s in Mustang. It doesn’t help that from the opening lines of The Virgin Suicides, we know that the story will end with all of the Lisbon sisters dead. This knowledge keeps us from being fully invested in their struggle for life, because we already know they won’t succeed. A story of the past recounted from the present with a languid tone of nostalgia and regret, The Virgin Suicides lacks the urgency of Mustang, which feels entirely of the here and now. Yet while these films might not emotionally connect with the audience in the same way, both still succeed in showing us the tragic consequences of confining teenage girls at a time in their lives when they most need to spread their wings.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Sofia Coppola and the Silent Woman; Director Spotlight: Sofia Coppola

Recommended Reading: An Interview with Deniz Gamze Ergüven on Her Feminist Fairytale ‘Mustang’ by Ren Jender via The Toast

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play and currently reviews television shows as a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

“A Truth Universally Acknowledged”: The Importance of the Bennet Sisters Now

But more and more it seems you can judge the quality of modern adaptations on how the filmmakers view Lizzie in relation to her sisters. Even though the representation of women has greatly expanded since Austen’s time, a story that revolves mostly around sisterly relationships remains rare, which makes it even more vital. And while it is true that Austen’s romance has a timeless quality that makes it popular, the narrative of sisterly love remains transcendent.

This guest post written by Maddie Webb appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

The Bennet sisters are some of the most enduring characters in fiction and Pride and Prejudice remains a beloved story. Can the modern incarnations of Lizzie, Jane, Lydia, Kitty, and Mary explain why people keep falling in love with their story?

Pride and Prejudice, for most people in popular culture, is seen as an early example of the “rom-com” genre. Boy meets girl, boy and girl hate each other, but despite their clashing personalities, they grow, develop and eventually, inevitably, fall in love. But Pride and Prejudice is more than just a first in its genre; it’s also one of the most adapted, readapted, spun off, and reworked pieces of fiction. I think the reason for that isn’t about how hunky Darcy and Wickham are or even the comic stylings of Mrs Bennet; I think it’s because of the Bennet sisters.

Like most of Jane Austen’s work, there is so much more going on under the surface and it’s easy to miss how her plots or characters often subvert societal norms, which is part of the reason her stories endure. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, this subversion comes in the form of the Bennet sisters, who are at once relatable and thoroughly atypical female characters in Regency fiction. Even within the confines of the 19th century, the Bennet sisters, for better and worse, have agency and personality coming out their ears. Though I didn’t watch every single adaptation of Austen’s classic (you’ll have to forgive me but my spare time is not that abundant), the most successful ones choose to make Lizzie’s happiness as dependent on her relationship with her sisters as her relationship with Darcy.

Three modern versions of Pride and Prejudice I did watch recently are Bride and Prejudice, the web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — all of which I can recommend for different reasons, but all ground the heart of the narrative in the Bennet sisters’ bond. My personal favorite retelling of the Elizabeth Bennet story is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an Emmy-winning web series that reimagines Lizzie as a grad student who starts a video series while studying mass communication. Although only two of the sisters, Jane and Lydia, make the cut for this adaptation (there is a cousin Mary and a cat replaces Kitty), they are unquestionably more important to Lizzie than her love life, a good thing considering Darcy doesn’t even appear in person until episode 50. The vlogging format of the show gives the story enough room to fully flesh out both Jane and Lydia and shifts large amounts of Lizzie’s character development onto her relationships with her sisters. Lydia even gets her own spin-off series, which in her own words is “totes adorbs.”

I also enjoy Bride and Prejudice, the 2004 Bollywood film, mostly because of some killer musical numbers, but also because of the Bakshi sisters’ camaraderie. Our Elizabeth character, here called Lalita Bakshi, has three sisters, only losing Kitty in the translation (poor Kitty). Having the concept of arranged marriages still in place within the culture makes it a modernization that maintains more of the plot than The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. But again the alterations made to the story are largely to do with the sisters. The frame of the plot is largely the same, but the chemistry, affection, and bickering between the women feels honest and refreshing; it’s given more screen-time than the period adaptations. Bollywood and Regency fiction may not seem like a natural pairing, but keeping the family dynamic central is key to why this version is so charming.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies may be ridiculous but it’s both a period film and an action movie, making it my kind of ridiculous. Even though this is still technically a period piece it has much in common with the other modern spins on the story. The action in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is focused on the power of the sisters as a team and helps develop their characters. The opening fight scene — when the girls slaughter the zombie hoards — is a moment where an otherwise muddled film comes alive, while the training scenes are used to smuggle in some sister bonding time, over their love lives. Considering how easily this could have ended up as the period version of Sucker Punch, the Bennet sisters ensure that the film, while occasionally brainless, is never heartless.

Another key point of change in these versions is how the Wickham/Lydia plot is handled. I can only speak for myself, but in the book, Lydia’s behavior for me is just another annoying inconvenience in the path of Lizzie and Darcy’s happiness. In the original, the issue of Lydia running off isn’t about what will happen when Wickham abandons her, but more that it’ll ruin the family’s standing in society (read: Lizzie and Jane, the characters we actually care about). However, placed in a modern context, the Wickham/Lydia plot reads more like an abuse story. She is still young, naïve, and silly but crucially, not vilified because of it. As a result of this subtle but important distinction, Wickham is elevated from cad to full on monster. Hell, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, he literally locks Lydia up and is unmasked as the cause of the zombie apocalypse. It’s another element of this version that is a bit ridiculous, but again, no one can accuse Pride and Prejudice and Zombies of being subtle.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries variation on Wickham, while more restrained, is equally as menacing and monstrous. Over the course of the series, a subplot of party girl Lydia becoming isolated from her family slowly unravels. Now career women, Jane and Lizzie are too busy for their little sister, with the latter dismissing her as a “stupid whorey slut” in the second episode. This leads her to be emotionally manipulated by Wickham, which we get to see painfully play out in her own spin-off series. The episode in which Lizzie confronts her and Lydia realizes Wickham’s true nature, is devastating. Not because it messes with Lizzie’s happiness, but because we truly care about Lydia. Creators Hank Green and Bernie Su have spoken at length about the importance of their alterations to Lydia’s story, resulting in a heartbreaking and insightful portrayal of abuse, within a light comedy series.

A similar situation unfolds in Bride and Prejudice, perhaps to a more satisfying conclusion since we get to see both Bakshi girls slap Wickham before walking out hand in hand. It’s only fitting that, in each of these adaptations Lydia is (sometimes literally) saved from Wickham and her crime of being an impressionable and impulsive teenage girl is no longer worth a life sentence. This area of the story has always left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the otherwise completely serviceable 2005 Joe Wright film adaptation. Despite bringing a modern filmmaking sensibility to the rest of the narrative, Lydia is still just another silly, inconvenient hurdle on Lizzie’s path to happiness, a real wasted opportunity to show how crap it was being a woman in Regency England.

People love Pride and Prejudice for all sorts of reasons: for example, my mother is rather attached to Colin Firth’s Darcy. But more and more it seems you can judge the quality of modern adaptations on how the filmmakers view Lizzie in relation to her sisters. Even though the representation of women has greatly expanded since Austen’s time, a story that revolves mostly around sisterly relationships remains rare, which makes it even more vital. And while it is true that Austen’s romance has a timeless quality that makes it popular, the narrative of sisterly love remains transcendent.

Recommended Reading: Lizzie Bennett Diaries #2 by Hank Green (on the Lydia Bennet story)

Maddie Webb is a student currently studying Biology in London. If she doesn’t end up becoming a mad scientist, her goal is to write about science and the ladies kicking ass in STEM fields. In the meantime, you can find her on Twitter at @maddiefallsover.

Black Sisterhood in TV Sitcoms

While many Black sitcoms revolve around a family, it’s rare that specific interactions between sisters are depicted. While “sisterhood” here often refers to the strong bond between friends, biological sisterhood is sometimes forgotten. Sisters with strong relationships on television display some of the deepest and truest kinds of family love out there.

This guest post written by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Black sisterhood is an important staple in the lives of many Black women. From birthdays to breakups, it’s vital to have your girls with you in times of happiness and struggle. This relatable dynamic has been prevalent in pop culture for decades. From Living Single to Girlfriends, that deep, unshakable connection and trust between besties has been a common component in countless sitcoms. While many Black sitcoms revolve around a family, it’s rare that specific interactions between sisters are depicted. While “sisterhood” here often refers to the strong bond between friends, biological sisterhood is sometimes forgotten. Sisters with strong relationships on television display some of the deepest and truest kinds of family love out there.

Television shows that focus on a family can easily delve into the intricacies of how that family works; they may be at each other’s throats one episode and playing nice the next. The themes of family are made more complex when the relationship centers around siblings, and even more so between sisters. Between sharing secrets and stealing clothes, there’s just a special bond. Although they remain scarce, the examples of sisterhood in Black television are strong. Whether the sisters are distant or close-knit, the range in the relationships is broad.

In the pilot episode of Sister, Sister, when Tia (Tia Mowry) and Tamera (Tamera Mowry) first meet, both girls are dressed in the exact same clothes by happenstance; there was a sale at the mall and the twins unbeknownst to — and about — the other, grabs the same sweater and hat. When they first get to know each other, asking questions about the other, they discover they’re both in the 9th grade and that they both love The Twilight Zone, particularly the one with the monster on the airplane wing, and compare their situation to the show. Tamera asks if Tia also hates algebra too, but her twin says the opposite; she loves algebra and history.

Already we see the dichotomy of the twins here; although separated for 14 years, they still share distinct similarities, like the same taste in fashion and television series, but their differences are mainly academic, Tia being the “smart” twin while Tamera is the “fun” twin, a common TV trope regarding twins. They both love rollerblading and Beavis and Butthead (and have an affinity for saying the same thing at the same time). Tia has trouble talking to boys, while Tamera can’t seem to stop talking to them. They decide they’re probably not as alike as they first thought, then proceed to cross their legs at the same time and take a bite out of the lemon in their tea. The theme song says it clearly: they look alike, but they’re different.

While the first few seasons mainly focus on how two girls with the same face can be so different and so alike at the same time, the show always includes how much love they have for each other and their willingness to go to bat for the other. The season 1 episode, “The Pimple,” contains the classic twin switcharoo situation; Tia gets a pimple the day she has a date with a boy, so Tamera goes on the date instead, floundering through the entire thing since she and Tia don’t have many common interests. Earlier in the season, the girls make a pact not to go to the school dance if they both don’t have dates. When Tamera gets a date, she offers to make good on the pact since Tia will just be staying home.

If these examples seem juvenile, it’s because they are. Tia and Tamera were 14 years old at the beginning the series and their hijinks and adventures often include things typical of a young high school girl. Regardless of how silly their antics were, they showed each other a special kind of love that carried from their high school dating days to their more grown-up college days. TV shows that feature a family and don’t necessarily focus on sisters don’t often have many moments of strong sisterly bonding. The love is spread throughout the family, not centered around one particular relationship. However, when moments do spotlight the specific sisterly bond, it highlights a few key differences in how sisters interact with each other versus their other relatives.

In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, sisters Hilary (Karyn Parsons) and Ashley Banks (Tatyana Ali) couldn’t be less alike. They are each other’s antithesis; Hilary is the spoiled, selfish, materialistic, oldest sister while Ashley is the more responsible, slightly rebellious, younger sister. They don’t have very many scenes or plots that revolve around the two of them specifically, but their relationship is still shown to be positive. They’re not the closest of siblings, but they still care deeply for one another and look out for each other.

However, in season 6 episode 7, “Not with My Cousin You Don’t,” Ashley is in need of some womanly advice about her boyfriend Derek and with her mother gone on a trip, she looks to Hilary. These sisters rarely ever have serious moments, but Hilary jokes about her “big sister radar” and the two sit to chat. Ashley tells Hilary she thinks she’s in love. While Hilary is happy for her sister, she tells her that she doesn’t think long-distance relationships always work out. The conversation continues onto Ashley’s hesitations about having sex. She says that she’s scared, and Hilary says that it’s normal, everyone feels that way. Her most important piece of advice to her little sister is that “only you know when you’re ready or not.” Hilary tells Ashley that she’s independent, responsible, and smart, and while she doesn’t delve into the details of sex, she lets her sister know that regardless of her decision, she will always be there for her.

The scene includes several of Hilary’s typical humorous air-headed comments, but is ultimately played seriously; this is clearly a big deal to Ashley and her sister understands and gives sound advice. It’s a rare moment for Hilary, to have a serious scene. Other more serious tones are shown for sadder events: when she drops out of school or she reminisces about her deceased fiance. So it’s important that one of Hilary’s fleeting insightful moments is a tender one where she plays the wise older sister.

Ashley is consistently shown to have a strong bond with Will (Will Smith), so it’s telling that she comes to her sister instead of her cousin in this instance. Will even points this out after he accidentally overhears Ashley discussing it with her friends. It’s significant that even though Will is clearly Ashley’s confidante in the family, she felt more comfortable expressing her concerns about sex to her flighty sister Hillary, even though she doesn’t share that same kind of relationship with her. While they may not be as close, the topic of sex was easier to discuss with her sister and ultimately led to a healthy and positive discussion.

In the finale of the show, Ashley and Hilary are both moving to New York City for school and work respectively and the two decide to live together, and they’re both excited about the prospect. Although they were never shown to be incredibly close, it’s definitely an extension of the kind of relationship they’ve always had, and could be an insight into the possibility of them growing closer as they embark on this new stage in life together.

The Cosby Show is often heralded as one of the best Black sitcoms ever. (Although it now has a “tainted legacy”.) With four sisters in the Cosby household, there were many different representations of sisterhood. Since Sondra, Denise, Vanessa, and Rudy varied so much in age, it also presented a distinctive look into how sisters of different ages act with each other.

The personalities of the girls also tied into how they reacted to each other. Sondra (Sabrina Le Beauf), the eldest and most distinguished of the Cosby children; Denise (Lisa Bonet), the free-spirited and carefree teenager; Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe), the nosy and oft rebellious sister; and Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam), the precocious and adorable youngest sibling. From shoving shoulders over stolen sweaters to completely wrecking the kitchen ceiling, their fights varied as much as they did. The girls were all very different from each other and while their personalities sometimes clashed, at the end of the day, the Cosby siblings were all on the same side.

Despite their constant bickering and clear evidence that they were nothing alike, Denise and Vanessa always had each other’s back. In fact, they were even likened to child versions of Cosby matriarch Clair (Phylicia Rashad) and her younger sister. In the episode “Clair’s Sister,” Sara comes to visit, announcing to Clair that she’s engaged. Denise and Vanessa talk about how they want their weddings to be. Vanessa wants hers to be old-fashioned and incredibly fancy, dressed in lace from head to toe with 12 bridesmaids carrying her 20-foot-long train. Denise, ever the feminist, believes traditional weddings are a bit sexist, what with the father “giving” the bride away and the bride’s family having to pay. In stark opposition to Vanessa’s exuberant dream wedding, she says hers will be a small, intimate gathering in the living room where she’ll wear a regular dress and they’ll invite only their closest family and friends and serve sandwiches after the ceremony. Denise and Vanessa tease each other about their dreams a bit before Denise drives Vanessa to a friend’s house. Sara remarks how similar the girls are to her and Clair, and Clair says she remembers it well, not wanting to cart her little sister around town because she was too cool.

Both elder sisters are seen as the cooler ones with more laid-back ideas of the world while the younger sisters are more outgoing and energetic, excited about extravagant things like fancy weddings. It’s a cute comparison that alludes to that idea of sisters with completely divergent personalities being close and supportive of one another despite their differences.

Black sisters aren’t exactly a huge demographic in television. But the shows and episodes that explore that kind of sisterly bond are powerful and exhibits Black sisterhood in myriad ways. These relationships are hugely positive displays of the love within a family. They can be silly or serious, complicated or simple, and a million other things to describe the vast mosaic of different kinds of sisterly love that exist. Regardless of what adjective is attached to them, they’re always marvelous to see.

Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman is a freelance entertainment writer and digital content manager who is obsessed with an absurd amount of television shows. She is an advocate for accessible entertainment and sometimes develops websites. You can find her at @heycheyennehey on Twitter or cheyennecheyenne.com.

Sisters in Catherine Breillat’s ‘Fat Girl’

The core of ‘Fat Girl’ is these two girls, who contrast each other in some very essential ways, but are inexorably bound together by shared experiences. Both are adolescents grappling with the early throes of sexuality, but their divergent appearances and ages leave them in different positions socially, affecting their worldviews.

This guest post written by Tessa Racked originally appeared at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and appears here as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. It is cross-posted with permission.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Fat Girl is a coming-of-age story about two sisters on summer vacation with their family: chubby 13-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) and slender 15-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida). A scene in the middle of the film serves as a cypher for the central paradox of the sisters’ relationship. Elena and Anaïs stand cheek to cheek, regarding themselves in the mirror. “It’s funny. We really have nothing in common,” Elena says. “Look at you. You have small, hard eyes, while mine are hazy. But when I look deep into your eyes, it makes me feel like I belong, as if they were my eyes.” The core of Fat Girl is these two girls, who contrast each other in some very essential ways, but are inexorably bound together by shared experiences. Both are adolescents grappling with the early throes of sexuality, but their divergent appearances and ages leave them in different positions socially, affecting their worldviews. Their different experiences come up in the first conversation we hear between them: Anaïs claims that boys run from her sister once they see that she “[reeks] of loose morals,” while Elena counters that boys don’t come near Anaïs in the first place because she’s a “fat slob.”

The ways in which Anaïs and Elena deviate from cultural standards of conduct are notably different. The Criterion DVD of Fat Girl includes an interview with Breillat after the film’s debut at the 2001 Berlin International Film Festival, in which the director describes Anaïs’ fatness as her coping mechanism to deal with having her body and sexuality denied by those around her. It would be liberatory if Anaïs’ body could exist without rationalization, but by now, reader, I think you and I have become used to a fat body paying the admission of meaning in order to be present in a film. Anaïs is frequently shown eating in Fat Girl. When Elena meets her summer love Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) at a cafe, their flirtation and first kiss is paralleled with Anaïs ordering and eating a banana split, “[her] favorite.” The girls’ mother (Arsinée Khanjian) initially defends Anaïs when Elena criticizes her for eating “like a pig.” At the end of the film, however, fed up with her daughters’ adolescent shenanigans, Mother snaps at her for opening a snack after they have a meal. Anaïs’ transgression is explicitly evident on her body, making her an easy target of criticism by her family. Elena’s sexual activity, however, is also transgressively excessive by cultural standards, especially considering her age. She is waiting to have PiV sex with someone special, but has been sexually active with casual partners. Elena is able to have her metaphorical cake and eat it too, satisfying her desire for sex without the effects of those desires physically manifesting on her body that would open her up to criticism and judgment, the kind of which she lavishes on Anaïs. Breillat’s Berlin International Film Festival interview delves more directly into her philosophy of the two sisters:

“Since [Anaïs’] body makes her unlovable, since she isn’t looked at and desired, she’s more intelligent about the world. She can create herself and be herself, with a kind of rebellion, certainly, which is painful, but all the same, she exists. While her sister, to her internal devastation, isn’t able to exist.”

Her analysis reduces the characters to what they experience based on their looks, but it is certainly an applicable factor to understanding not only the girls of Fat Girl, but the majority of female film characters. Anaïs desires sex without romanticizing it, whereas Elena denies her desire for sex because she romanticizes it. Anaïs wants her own sexual debut to be with a casual partner who won’t have the ability to brag about deflowering her, whereas Elena seeks a partner whose love will validate her decision. Fernando is able to coax a reluctant Elena into sex acts through hollow declarations of love. Anaïs, on the other hand, playacts being a manipulative lover, pretending two ladders in their swimming pool are different sex partners of hers. She swims back and forth between each, whispering cliche lies and practicing kissing. “Women aren’t like bars of soap, you know,” she tells her pretend-partner, “they don’t wear away. On the contrary, each lover brings them more.”

Anaïs’ sexual frustration means she observes and contemplates the sex lives of others, namely Elena’s. Her observations are cynical, but more attuned to the film’s reality. The audience may be accustomed to thinking of shots of Anaïs eating as grotesque or pitiable, but would a similar reaction be expected to the very long scene during which Fernando hounds Elena until she consents to anal sex? Elena is too emotionally involved in the scene to see it for what it is, but Anaïs, who watches from across the room, is not. The sex scenes in the film are shot from far away, putting Elena and Fernando on a stage of sorts. We aren’t used to sex scenes looking like this; we usually see closeups of hands and faces – how Anaïs is shot as she tosses and turns in bed, awkwardly watching and trying to ignore the couple. The audience is invited to empathize with her over Elena and Fernando.

Despite all the talk between Anaïs and Elena about sex, the act causes a rift in their relationship. When Elena shows Anaïs the engagement ring that Fernando gave her as a proof of his love, Anais immediately smells a rat and begs Elena not to trust him. While Elena and Fernando “go all the way,” we see Anaïs in her bed in the foreground, quietly crying. Later, Fernando’s mother (Laura Betti) – a tacky woman who is the only other fat character – explains that Fernando stole her ring. The girls’ mother asks Anaïs where Elena is, to which the girl impertinently replies that she is “not her keeper.” Enraged, their mother ends the family vacation early. On the way home, Anaïs attempts to comfort her sister. “It’s sick that people think it’s their business. It’s sick, being a virgin,” she tells Elena, who is worried about their father’s reaction and can’t get over Fernando.

The film’s climax further parallels and separates the sisters. Asleep at a highway rest stop, a trucker murders Elena and their mother, chases Anaïs into the woods, and rapes her. Once again, the introduction of a male character demanding sex disrupts the relationships between the female characters. And, as with Elena’s experience with Fernando, the rape is a desecration of the sex that she wants to have. However, Anaïs’ reaction is to assert agency within the horrible situation. She puts her arms around her assailant. When the police find her in the morning, one tells another, “She says he didn’t rape her,” to which she defiantly adds, “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.” It’s a troubling ending; what first sprang to my mind when I saw it was how fat rape survivors are often met with disbelief or derision. Breillat is a feminist, it would be difficult to believe that she would be dismissive of young girl being raped. The film doesn’t excuse the attacker’s actions, but it does disturb the notion of Anaïs as a passive victim. Elena’s experience was a subversion of her idealized notion of having sex (by her own definition) for the first time with someone she loved; once it became obvious that Fernando had duped her, she felt sadness and shame. But according to Anaïs, “the first time should be with nobody.” What happens to her at the end of the film should never happen to anyone, ever, but given that she refuses to describe it as a rape to the police, it seems she interpreted the trucker’s attack as a removal of the vulnerability she feared from a sexual debut with a future boyfriend. She certainly does not want to be seen as vulnerable by the uniformed men surrounding her and her dead mother and sister. Elena, whose appearance and ideas about sexuality conform to patriarchal values, has been destroyed by the events of the film. But the outsider, Anaïs, defiantly survives.

I do agree with Breillat that being an outsider allows a critical vantage point; my own adolescent experience of feeling ostracized due to my weight was a major catalyst of my journey to become the faux-academic, buzzword-dropping, far-left feminist you’ve all come to know and tolerate. On the other hand, Anaïs verges on being a didactic mouthpiece at times, and it’s undeniably problematic to suggest that her value system is so outside of the mainstream that she would be okay with being violently raped. Fat Girl provides an effective critique of patriarchal sexual values, but beyond that, only a bleak non-alternative.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Recommended Reading: ‘Fat Girl’: About the Title by Catherine Breillat via Criterion

Tessa Racked blogs about fat characters in film at Consistent Panda Bear Shape. They have had “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” stuck in their head for over a week now.

How Pop Culture Nostalgia Privileges Some and Excludes Others

Nostalgia is not the problem, at least not the main one. … The central issue is that the feeling of nostalgia is often a privilege, and a form of exclusion.

This guest post is written by Manish Mathur.

Hollywood is deeply rooted in franchise culture, where properties from 20 years ago are being resurrected from the dead in order for studios to mine profits from brand recognition. The rise of streaming platforms, digital rentals, and services like Redbox has made movie studios anxious to find ways to bring audiences into the movie theater. Reboots, remakes, and long-awaited sequels are par for the course. Nostalgia is ruling the mainstream pop culture.

Nostalgia is not the problem, at least not the main one. Pop culture, and film specifically, always looks to the past for new ideas even among “original films.” The central issue is that the feeling of nostalgia is often a privilege, and a form of exclusion. The controversy surrounding the woman-led Ghostbusters has been well-documented. Fans of the original Ghostbusters claimed that a reboot of the franchise, and one that stars four women especially, is ruining their childhoods, and a disgrace to the memory of the original film. The backlash was so immense, so loud and hateful, that many pop culture enthusiasts, writers, and critics deduced that the reason behind it was outright misogyny and racism. Their hatred of the movie, fueled by an admittedly lackluster marketing campaign, signaled to me that they were used to pop culture catering to their tastes and childhood memories.

That is a privilege that is slowly being taken away. I can imagine that it’s really frustrating to see stuff these white men love being transformed into something different. Melissa McCarthy, an icon of women who dare to be successful without sexual objectification, replaces Bill Murray, an icon of male eccentricities and aloofness. McCarthy is not only a fabulous comedian and powerful dramatic actress, she’s sexual and desirable without being reduced to a typical masturbation fantasy. The same goes for Leslie Jones, a dark-skinned Black woman who confronts the Angry Black Woman stereotype through her sketches on SNL. Jones has also been facing a perpetual barrage of racist, misogynist harassment. These are two women who dare to be present, without the aid of white male fantasy; they are a definite “fuck you” to the stereotypical male gaze.

Privilege has many definitions, but the one that is most powerful to me is it’s the feeling of despair when something is taken away from someone who assumed it was owed to him. The Ghostbusters fan-boys thought a Ghostbusters 3 or all-male reboot was owed to them; they lashed out when they didn’t get it. Star Wars fans lost their cool when Star Wars: The Force Awakens revealed that Daisy Ridley, a woman, was the protagonist alongside John Boyega, a Black man, with racist fans calling for a boycott. Men complained about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story because Rogue One is the second film in a row of the new phase of Star Wars releases to feature a woman in the lead (Oscar-nominee Felicity Jones). Never mind that Jones is flanked by an all-male, albeit racially diverse, supporting cast. And of course, Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) protested Mad Max: Fury Road for its feminist themes and the horror of a woman as the co-lead with a man.

Disney is giving cult hit The Rocketeer a sequel, this time starring a Black actress (fingers crossed, the sequel will be directed by a Black woman). Comedian Jillian Bell (The Night Before) pitched a gender-swapped remake of the Tom Hanks/Daryl Hannah 1980s comedy Splash, with Channing Tatum in the mermaid (merman?) role.

These examples are mere raindrops in an ocean compared to the countless major movies being made by and for white men. But they stand out as definite attempts to rewrite pop culture history to be more inclusive and better representations of the world as a whole. For some, incremental change can be frustrating, and just as practically unhelpful as no change. Yet these diverse and inclusive steps are viewed by a certain privileged demographic as the pillaging of their childhoods. For some, even small progress is seen as too much, and forests are missed for the trees.

These whiny reactions from the MRA community are amusing for their silliness and for being ultimately ineffective, but they represent a sense of loss within the Mens Rights Activist community. These men feel like their childhoods are being taken away, yet they fail to realize that their childhoods are the only ones that matter to most of mainstream media. They don’t understand that the fact that boy-centric 80s and 90s properties are being brought back to life at all because studios are chasing the white, 18 to 49-year-old, male dollar. Aside from Disney, no other studio is really concerned about women consumers or people of color consumers, even though women, especially Latinx women, purchase 51% of movie theatre tickets. The profits from these marginalized groups are often viewed as lesser, inferior, or irrelevant. This contradicts the countless pieces of evidence that women and/or people of color are a powerful and immensely hungry audience. The Fast and the Furious series became a billion-dollar franchise when it expanded its cast to more women and more actors of color. Diverse movies perform better than those with the typical white male lead. For every half-dozen examples of diverse casting and gender-swapped reboots, there are a hundred other properties made to placate the cis, straight, white man that underperform at the box office. Even among many financial failures, the white male is still the default.

Right now, Hollywood is stuck in a cycle of bringing back old properties. The white male childhood still reigns supreme. The industry will need to experience a seismic change to get out of this routine. However, the best way to combat this narrow view of nostalgia is to create a more inclusive nostalgia for generations to come. I want our kids, of all races, genders, sexual orientations, and religions, to see themselves on the screen. Maybe this current trend of diverse reboots will inspire more marginalized groups to take a chance on a career previously seen as exclusive.

Maybe a young Black woman will become a historian, inspired by Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters. Or perhaps a Korean-American young boy will feel comfortable enough to come out as gay after seeing John Cho in Star Trek Beyond. Pop culture has the ability to shape our future, to inspire the world to be better. It’s time now for all kids to have that privilege of seeing versions of themselves on-screen.

My childhood was sacred, and I cherish those memories. But my childhood is not important anymore. It is of the utmost importance that older generations fosters growth for the future generation. Just look at the picture of Ghostbusters star Kristen Wiig interacting with two young girls in Ghostbusters uniforms at the movie premiere. That photo is a glimpse of the benefits of an inclusive culture, where no one demographic is privileged over the others. Boys, we had our time and it was mostly fine. Now, I (and many others) am hungry for more stories, different characters, and interesting perspectives.

Manish Mathur is a freelance writer in New York, and a major Alfred Hitchcock fan-boy. He writes about diversity and inclusion, Hollywood franchise culture, and analyses of classic films. He’s completely obsessed with Scarlett Johansson. You can read his writing at Mathur & the Marquee, follow him on Twitter @hippogriffrider, and like his page on Facebook.

‘Artemisia’: The Romantic Roots of Rape Culture

The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.”

Written by Brigit McCone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning? Certainly, a feminist viewer wants to admire 1997’s Artemisia, a ravishingly beautiful film about a young girl seizing control of her talent and sexuality in the face of a sexist society, filmed by a female director, Agnès Merlet. It tells the story of the first woman to become an official member of Florence’s Academy of Art and Design, the most famous female artist of the Renaissance, Artemisia Gentileschi. Merlet’s Artemisia is a director before her time in the seventeenth century. She oversees the setting up of her studio with minute detail and assertive power, frames her paintings like movie shots, orders men to strip and model for her, and poses their naked bodies with intense interest. Even as a girl in the repressive environment of a convent school, Gentileschi is studying and sketching her naked body with a mirror, with a heroic immunity to social pressures. She has a lively sexual curiosity, spying on a couple having sex on the beach before fitting herself into the imprint their bodies have made in the sand, and watching the older painter Agostino Tassi’s orgies with fascination. It is she who pursues Tassi to be her teacher, who strips and poses him as a model, who dictates the terms of their relationship. The film begins with a close-up of Artemisia’s rolling eyeball and it is shaped by her gaze. To see the beautiful, youthful Valentina Cervi cast as the artist instead of the muse, stripping and studying men for her own pleasure rather than being stripped, should mark Artemisia as a refreshing feminist delight. If only Artemisia herself were a fictional character.

But Artemisia is a historical figure, and transcripts from her grueling, seven-month-long rape trial have survived and are the major source for the film. It is a historical fact that Artemisia Gentileschi accused Agostino Tassi of breaking into her bedchamber and raping her. Merlet’s film follows the rough outline of what the real Gentileschi described, but reimagines it as clumsy seduction. Artemisia’s refusals are a murmured reluctance, not strong or fearful denials. She returns kisses and submits, before gasping in pain and pushing Tassi away, as he mumbles in apologetic confusion at the misunderstanding over her virginity. Not that virginity is a particularly great concern for the unbelievably socially immune Artemisia. The whole event is miscommunication more than violation. Later, the youthful Artemisia will take the controlling and guiding role in their love-making, posing the submissive and adoring Tassi for her signature portrait of “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” straddling him in seduction rather than attempted murder. For the masterful Tassi, who is accustomed to ordering around his naked female models like pieces of meat, to find himself awed and overcome by the strength of Artemisia’s personality is an interesting role reversal. When her father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, discovers their affair, he tries to force Tassi to marry Artemisia and initiates the rape trial, despite Artemisia telling him that Tassi didn’t rape her but “gave me pleasure.”

Again, one can see a feminist message here, criticizing a society that refuses to acknowledge a woman’s sexual agency or pleasure, yet Merlet is not only twisting the facts but ignoring them, in her need to reinterpret rape testimony as romance. Her Artemisia never accuses Tassi of rape. The fingers of her artist’s hands are bound with chords and torturously squeezed, to force her to confess that she was raped, while Tassi watches in loving agony and confesses himself, merely to spare her pain. In the harsh world of historical fact, Gentileschi was indeed tortured, but it was to force her to withdraw her detailed accusations. Her society pressured women, not to make false accusations but to deny rape. Tassi, meanwhile, defended himself by alleging that Gentileschi was promiscuous and “an insatiable whore.” Whatever their relationship was, it was hardly an epic romance. Why, then, does Merlet, or her intended audience, feel such a need to reimagine it as one? Art historian Mary Garrard and feminist journalist/activist Gloria Steinem protested the film’s inaccuracies at the time of its release. But watching the film, I was struck by more than historical untruth.

I thought about the transformations Merlet had performed on the historical sources: she silenced Artemisia’s testimony, by denying it was ever given; she painstakingly reimagined the circumstances described in the rape transcripts, in such a way that they could have been romantic misunderstanding or clumsy seduction; finally, she reversed an entire society’s values, to imagine a woman pressured by law enforcement to make false accusations, rather than punished for daring to allege rape. The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.” Why does Merlet feel such a strong compulsion to defend a man who has been dead for over 400 years? Or, is it the image of a vulnerable and exploited Artemisia that she cannot tolerate? What do her rewrites tell us about the mental roots of rape culture?

In an interview by Merlet with the UK’s Independent, two possible reasons are given for Artemisia‘s portrayal. Merlet wanted Artemisia to represent “a more modern kind of feminism, fighting alongside men, not against them,” and she claims that the evidence of the trial can be read in many ways, because there is a “mass of contradictory evidence.” These suggestions need to be considered in more detail. Firstly, what is the contradictory evidence? Perhaps Merlet refers to Artemisia’s testimony that, following her painful rape, she continued to have sex with, and even love, Tassi because he promised her marriage. Regarding this as “contradictory evidence” shows an immaturity in our culture’s understanding of rape, that it must always be the isolated act of a monster, rather than a violation that can take place within a complex relationship. More than that, though, it is a denial of historical context. Deuteronomy 22:28, which claims that a man who rapes a virgin “must marry the girl, for he has violated her,” would have been generally accepted in Gentileschi’s time. To admit that Artemisia could be terrified by the thought of becoming a “fallen” or ruined woman, and could rely on Tassi’s promise to marry her as her only salvation, is to see her as an uncomfortably vulnerable human rather than Merlet’s dominant superheroine. It was during this period, before the trial (not afterwards, as Merlet’s film suggests), that Gentileschi painted her famous portrait of “Susanna and the Elders,” depicting Susanna’s naked body contorted in horror and writhing away from the staring, whispering judgments of the elders looming over her. It is a powerful portrait of female vulnerability under patriarchal scrutiny, but that is precisely the vulnerability that Merlet does not allow Artemisia to feel. So, we return to the question that opened this post: is it possible to admire a woman’s art while denying its meaning?

Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which she painted directly after her humiliating rape trial, is one of the most violent expressions of female rage in art. In contrast to the timid Judith that Caravaggio portrayed, Gentileschi’s women are filled with strength, solidarity and resolution, dominating Holofernes (whose face resembles Agostino Tassi’s) as the male elders had dominated Susanna. Merlet actually cites the power of this painting, and her shock at its female authorship, as the trigger that began her fascination with Gentileschi. Yet she strives to tame the image, presenting it as a loving collaboration between Artemisia and Tassi. By such painstaking reimagining, Merlet reveals the key feature of the 1990s’ “more modern kind of feminism” (or “girl power”): not its willingness to “fight alongside men” (and why should one rapist be representative of “men”?), but its discomfort with female anger and vulnerability. Like Merlet’s film, “girl power” celebrates the positive sexual freedom of women to desire and seduce, but not their negative sexual freedom to refuse and define boundaries; their positive freedom to take charge, not their negative freedom to protest poor treatment. In that, it resembles the freedoms promised to women by the “free love” culture of the 1960s, whose abuses and exploitations prompted second-wave feminism.

Artemisia’s art is certainly celebrated by Merlet’s film through luscious costumes and Caravaggesque lighting, but without its meaning, the art seems hollow and disconnected from the painter herself. When we see Tassi’s image in the real Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings, as the sleeping man whose head is about to be chiseled open by a smiling woman in “Jael and Sisera,” as the leering satyr in “Corisca and the Satyr,” and in numerous variations on the Judith theme, are we to ignore the repeated violence, to allow it to communicate nothing about the feelings and intentions of the woman behind the brush? Women threatened by voyeurs, like Corisca, Susanna and Bathsheba; women escaping male clutches through heroic suicide, like Cleopatra and Lucretia; women murdering men, like Judith and Sisera — these are the figures that populate the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. To deny her rage and vulnerability is to deny the passion and power of her art. Agnès Merlet’s film Artemisia is a beautiful celebration of the positive freedoms of women, that forms a kind of feminist ideal. But without the willingness to explore suffering, or to express anger, it is only half-alive, and a disservice to the full-blooded achievement of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Brigit McCone is still mad she wasn’t taught more about Artemisia in art class. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and getting lost in Vieira da Silva paintings.

The Women Men Rescue (or Choose Not To): ‘The Witness’ and ‘Disorder’

Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero?

Written by Ren Jender.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of explicit, fatal violence against women and rape]

You’d never know from watching movies that statistically men are much more likely to harm women than rescue them. Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are, you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero? Two new films, respectively James D. Solomon’s documentary The Witness and Alice Winocour’s French thriller Disorder, attempt to answer these questions.

The Witness tracks Bill Genovese, a Vietnam veteran and a person with an amputation who uses a wheelchair, as he tries to find out 40 to 50 years later (the film took a decade to make) what really happened the night his older sister, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death (and although it’s not included in the film also raped by her murderer) in front of her own Queens apartment building in 1964. Kitty Genovese’s killing became the stuff of front page headlines and sociology classes when an apocryphal story in The New York Times stated that 37 (the number was later amended to 38) of her neighbors, awakened by her screams, saw her being stabbed from their bedroom windows but none called the police or offered any other help which might have saved her life.

The truth, uncovered in more recent articles is: although neighbors heard her screams, nearly none of them knew what was going on (some thought she and her killer were a drunk married couple having an argument) especially since the scene was quiet and Kitty was out of sight for some time between her murderer’s initial attack (interrupted when a neighbor shouted at him through the window to get away from her) and when he fatally wounded her (after which a woman neighbor and friend of Kitty’s held her in her arms as she was dying).

The original news story was a manipulation of facts that made a compelling resume builder: Abe Rosenthal, who later became the long-reigning executive editor at The New York Times wrote a sensationalistic book based on the fabricated story. When Bill interviews Rosenthal, he still insists the original account was the correct one. Some other journalists who covered the story when it was still new, like the late Mike Wallace, are more philosophical. “It was a fascinating story,” he says, one that was apparently too good to let the facts get in the way.

What actually happened is more complex. One surviving neighbor Bill interviews on camera says, “I heard someone yelling, ‘Help, help,’ and I called the police,” though no records of her call are on police logs. As Bill explains to us in his narration, we don’t know if the station neglected to write down the call or if the woman is telling this story to make herself feel better about her own actions (or inaction) that night.

We also see, unlike in most narrative films, how uninterested some people are in the truth. Kitty’s killer, Winston Moseley (he has since died) who raped and killed at least one other woman and later, in an escape from prison, raped another and held hostages at gunpoint, refuses to meet with Bill and instead offers in a letter an obviously fictitious story about being framed. Moseley’s son, who was 7 at the time of the murder, is a minister who wears a shiny cross, but seems to believe another of his father’s stories (that contradicts everything we know about the case): that Kitty called him a racial slur and he snapped. The son also seems unwilling to accept that his father was responsible for the other murder (which, like Kitty’s, he confessed to after he was arrested for stealing a television) in which he set fire to his victim while she was still alive. Instead, the son states that, for years, he and the rest of family had believed that Kitty was related to the infamous New York Mafia Genoveses (she was not).

Because most of the memories of Kitty and the analysis of her death come from men, we feel a little removed from her. When one man talks about how his mother (the woman who held Kitty in her arms as she died in the hallway) often had coffee with Kitty and would “talk about whatever women talk about,” it’s as emblematic of the film’s distanced viewpoint, as the blurry, nearly faceless image we see of Kitty in clips from an old home movie which are interspersed throughout the film.

Bill is in nearly every frame of the film’s live action — most of the recreated scenes are rendered in the delicate, evocative animation of The Moth Collective. Even as we see him moving in and out of his wheelchair, wearing gloves to pull himself up the stairs to an otherwise inaccessible apartment and narrating the film, he remains something of a mystery. Why does he wait to find out the real story until 40 years after his sister died? By the time he tracks down the witnesses who testified at the trial, most are long dead. One of the only insights into his mindset comes from his wife: “The choices that he made in his life were all related to the fact that no one helped his sister.”

Bill also has a willful obtuseness when he wonders why Kitty, whom he was close to, never came out to him at a time (she died five years before Stonewall) when people who told their families they were queer were disowned. Kitty being a fairly out queer person (in a highlight, after her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, tells Bill that the patrons at the bar where she worked didn’t know Kitty was queer, two of them tell Bill everyone at the bar knew and considered her “one of the boys”) makes me wonder if Karl Ross, one of the only witnesses who did see what was happening and was close enough to halt the murder, failed to do so because of homophobia — or a fear of police since he too may have been gay. Mary Ann says of Ross, “He knew us.” He owned the pet shop where Kitty bought a poodle for Mary Ann as an apology after an argument.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4irXjYt_LM”]

In Disorder, co-written and directed by Alice Winocour (the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Mustang), the woman in peril is Jessie (Diane Kruger), the wife of a shady and very wealthy businessman, and her protector is a paid bodyguard, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) back from a stint in Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD (as well as some hearing loss, the doctor at the beginning tells him — and us).

We see Vincent try to do work as he deals with the sounds (all the electronic beeps and boops of modern life) and sights that trigger him. Wariness is actually part of his job description, but at first we’re unsure if Vincent’s has more to do with his internal struggles than it does with anything going on around him. Silly us: this film is a thriller. Of course the main guy’s paranoia is justified.

The film manages to squeeze a surprising amount of tension out of a not-terribly-original situation before its first violent incident (which is punctuated, stunningly, by a cracked windshield and a brief blackout) but falls apart soon afterward. The film has lots of overheard conversations and pieces of information that never really come together in coherent form, which might reflect what a paid protector would overhear and understand but doesn’t really engage the audience. The violent aggressors are the opposite of a menace in their cute, black, ninja outfits and masks. No matter what Vincent’s skills as a fighter (never impaired by psychological problems so obvious that Jessie asks his coworker directly, “What’s wrong with him?”) always flatten them, so the action becomes monotonous.

Winocour’s film was apparently influenced by her suffering PTSD from a traumatic childbirth experience (she and her daughter are fine now), a phenomenon women I’ve known have also experienced, but something I have never seen captured on film. I desperately wished Disorder was about women’s trauma instead of the tired cliché of a male soldier’s suffering. The film also doesn’t give us any insight into Jessie’s point of view. She looks great in the backless floral evening dress she wears to a party early in the film, but in every scene she is so much an object she might as well be tied in pink ribbon. This lack of attention to the character is especially shocking and disappointing because Winocour co-wrote Mustang, an instant feminist classic that is flawlessly attuned to its girl protagonists.

Additionally the husband and his cohorts are all from the Middle East: the only person of Middle-Eastern descent who doesn’t seem sinister is Ali, Jessie’s Keane-eyed, curly-haired, young son. France’s traditional anti-Arab sentiment and more recent anti-Muslim policies (on the same beaches where Jessie and Ali frolic) make the ethnicity of the bad guys seem not strictly coincidental and more than a little racist. Skip this film and see Mustang (again) instead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMThvaCTAm0″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘The Neon Demon’: Objectification and Rape Culture

‘The Neon Demon’ brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession… I’m glad for ‘The Neon Demon,’ because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

This guest post is written by Holly Thicknes.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and rape culture]

The Neon Demon threw up a lot of questions when it regurgitated Elle Fanning’s eyeball.

Yes, Nicolas Winding Refn made a surrealistic film about a 16 year old It-Girl model who gets slowly engulfed by the horrific monster that is the fashion industry via a bunch of envious flesh-eating model competitors. It’s the Donald Trump card of controversy at cinemas right now. But it also – pretty neatly, despite its gory appearance – epitomizes a society that is at once compelled and revolted by its need to consume.

Refn is obviously obsessed with women. He’s in awe of them. He thinks they’re intangibly beautiful. His entire filmic career can be seen as an expression of his distraction with how the female body differs from the male, and how that inspires violence. Jealousy, protectiveness, impotency: it’s all there in the scopophilic text of his films, skirting around the ankles of his uber-masculine figurines that dance perfect executions of violent, sexual acts.

It’s no wonder his latest film, a departure from the likes of Drive and Only God Forgives in that its central character is a woman, but in which his obsession shines through stronger than ever, has been deemed by many a gross, misogynistic ululation, or else pure unashamed spectacle. I can’t help but wonder if, had a heterosexual woman made a neo-porn movie detailing all of her perverse, beautiful desires, anyone would be eager to finance it. But I don’t begrudge Refn for making it, just as I don’t begrudge Hitchcock’s unapologetic spunking of his inner most fantasies on cinema’s walls. It’s not about limiting human creativity, censoring what could be deemed a negative influence or pointing the finger at what someone truly feels.

The Neon Demon brings to light the dual narcissism of our culture: the simultaneous, reciprocal reality created when consumers come into contact with images. The images exist so long as we look at them, and all Refn has done is reify our culture’s unhealthy obsession – what he himself is unhealthily obsessed with.

I’m glad for The Neon Demon, because it solidifies something that was already there: a hundred ornate mirrors reflecting back a society complicit in rape culture.

Reducing someone to an object makes it easier to harm them. More than this — it incites violence. Rape culture is a culture that dehumanizes. It normalizes rape and abuse while simultaneously blaming rape and sexual assault victims/survivors for their actions and behaviors.

This is embedded in the fabric of The Neon Demon. It sets up a gorgeously glowing, electronically scored, Americana world in which beauty “isn’t everything – it’s the only thing,” and women strive to mold themselves into non-human visions. The predatory danger of this nightmarish place, which young Jesse (Elle Fanning) is so keen to be part of, is crucial to the first part of the film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a rapist motel owner by the name of Hank, preying on young disenfranchised girls who are forced to live there. As Jesse presses her ear to the wall of her room and listens to the 13-year-old girls being raped next door with tears streaming down her face, the margins of her power close tightly around her. She is reduced to nothing but a porcelain doll – her beauty and youth her only bargaining tools of worth.

But, alas, every effort the first half of the film makes to incredulously depict moments of degradation and objectification – so promisingly linked directly to rape in the above scene — melts into nothing. It is disappointingly superseded by what it sees, like a magpie destined to be drawn from one shiny artifact to the next. Refn gets entirely distracted by the surface of the movie, pushing the mesmerizing spectacle to its all-consuming limit and in doing so, dissolving all of its efforts towards saying something interesting, memorable and, crucially, progressive.

Perhaps it is enough to address the link between objectification and rape at all, and Refn’s second-act descent into style obsession — there are some painfully drawn-out shots of pure fantasy indulgence — only reiterates his pointing out how far our image illness has gone. But somehow, I don’t think so. I feel it has the effect of switching off swaths of audiences who find themselves in the middle of one of Refn’s wet dreams. The film negates its previous commentary by becoming hypnotized by its own evil.

We cannot blame Refn for articulating an ugly truth. We are all complicit in our culture. If the eyeball-eating scene is the only one that survives The Neon Demon, let it be not for its shock factor, but because it fills us with as much disgust as do rape culture and our own mass consumption of women’s bodies.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organize themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter @girlsonfilmLDN.