An Audience on the Edge: ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ Morality and Masculinity

Sons of Anarchy
 
 
Written by Leigh Kolb

In 15th and early 16th century Europe, morality plays existed to entertain audiences, but also to teach them lessons. Classic morality plays used allegory to impart lessons about what it means to be good, and what it means to be evil. Typically, virtue always prevailed over vice.
Shakespeare no doubt was exposed to such plays in his early life, and reflections of this genre can be seen (in more complex forms) in some of his plays, including Hamlet. Showrunner Kurt Sutter has said Hamlet inspired Sons of Anarchy, which began its sixth season on Tuesday, Sept. 10.
At a recent press conference, Sutter acknowledged the shocking ending of the season premier, which follows a young boy who takes a KG-9 machine gun into a school and opens fire (the audience hears the shots and screams from inside the building).  Sutter said,

“It is truly the catalyst for the third act of our morality play. It sets everything in motion for this season that will ultimately lead to the end that then will bring us into the final season and what I see as the ultimate comeuppance of everything in terms of the series.”

Viewers were shocked at the scene, and a conservative parents group is calling for Congress to reconsider cable programming distribution methods because of, in part, this episode.
In an article at The Daily Beast, Jason Lynch (who has screened the first three episodes) asserts that the show has gone too far, and that this storyline is “damaging to the series and its characters.”
What is clear at the end of the first episode is that SAMCRO has some connection to the gun and to the child shooter. The child is the son of a woman who is dating Nero’s cousin, and we can assume that the gun used in the shooting came from the Sons, who run guns and produce pornography.
While this episode is horrifyingly violent and disturbing, it’s also this: brilliant.
If we think about Sutter’s influences–Hamlet and his reference to Sons of Anarchy being a “morality play”–something needs to happen this season. That something that needs to happen is that we need to start despising the club, and maybe even Jax (unless he is “reformed” into virtue, as the protagonist of a true morality play would be).
The child shooter–the juxtaposition of virtue (religion, order) and vice (guns, violence), and a case study in toxic masculinity.
At this point (in the action of this first episode), the men of SAMCRO are still operating in some sphere of justice and morality. This is highlighted in the opening women-in-refrigerators plot point when the men avenge the beating and rape of Lyla, who had gotten a job shooting porn that turned out to be violent torture porn.
These disgusting scenes highlight the relative “morality” of the Sons–they run porn and prostitution businesses, but there’s a line that can’t be crossed (women being tortured, raped, beaten or killed). This has been apparent from the beginning of the series. Even when the men were running drugs and guns, their treatment of women reinforced the idea that we are still supposed to be rooting for them.
And the women, of course, (thankfully) aren’t painted as innocent victims needing rescuing. The “Mothers” of Anarchy are forces to be reckoned with, too.
In prison, Tara refuses to see Jax and devolves into violence.
In Hamlet, we know Hamlet has turned when he starts treating Ophelia like shit. How a character treats women is often a litmus test for whether or not we are supposed to support that character. In 2013, the morality play is twisted and turned (the antihero is king, after all), but some archetypes still remain.
Something awful needed to happen on Sons of Anarchy–something so awful that we can’t reconcile our sympathy and support for the characters. While Lynch is disgusted with the turn, I think it’s perfect. Forcing us to turn against our heroes (who we should struggle to see as heroes, in reality) is powerful storytelling.
As this child wields a semi-automatic weapon and goes into his all-boys Catholic school and opens fire, Gemma is gifting Nero’s son with a toy gun (she had one of Nero’s prostitutes wrap it for her). Gemma’s gesture, which is a clear indoctrination of what masculinity means–guns, violence and sex–is made even more meaningful by the boy across town who, amidst violent and disturbing drawings he’s done and the self-harm cut marks on his arm, has gotten access to a man’s gun by his proximity to SAMCRO. What’s the difference between the play gun and the real gun? What’s the difference between fetish porn and torture porn? There are differences, but Sons of Anarchy is asking us to think harder about how different they really are.
Meanwhile, Jax is cheating on Tara and having sex with the madame of a brothel (Sutter notes that Jax is really looking for nurturing and maternal love). Another display of what we consider to be masculinity is cut between scenes of violence. Tara, in prison, is beating a woman for stealing her blanket.
Jax seeks “comfort” from Colette.
All of this is set to Leonard Cohen’s “Come Healing,” a gravelly spiritual that conjures images of Christ and redemption.
Lynch says that Sutter “crossed a line” when he had SAMCRO react in “a callous way” with “no remorse” in the next few episodes.
However, that’s exactly how the club should react. We need to reach a point where we are not rooting for and sympathizing with these men–this is the ugly, unhappy truth of loving a show with an antihero who keeps falling instead of being redeemed.
SAMCRO has always had its own code of justice and morality and we, as viewers, have more often than not sympathized with the men. However, if they see that they are complicit in the mass murder of children, and they do not respond properly–we must rethink our sympathy. We are going to turn against them, as we should.
At the beginning of the episode, Jax is reading aloud a letter he’s writing to his sons. “Examine yourselves as men,” he says, filling the page with cliches.
That’s what’s happening now. What it means to be a man–the overwhelming masculinity of sex and violence–is coming to a head. If Jax falls, which he appears to be doing, so does his brand of masculinity. Hopefully his sons will get that message.
Sutter’s “sons” are examining themselves as men as the series begins its descent. In ancient morality plays, virtue would win, and the sinner would typically be redeemed. In Hamlet, everyone dies in a pile of revenge and tragedy. It remains to be seen how Sutter will ultimately unwind this modern “morality play,” but we will know if we are supposed to stop caring about the Sons. There will be consequences–just as there should be.
We need to examine ourselves as viewers, and recognize when enough is enough–and when we reach that breaking point, we are pushed to the edge and forced to reconcile our obsession with vice and toxic masculinity. The ride into the last act of Sons of Anarchy isn’t going to be an easy one–if it was, then Sutter wouldn’t have gone far enough.
Like the Sons and their old ladies, the audience is going to have a difficult ride in the last act.
________________________________________________________
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She wrote a chapter about the feminine sphere and ethics of care in Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy: Brains Before Bullets.

The Feminism and Anti-Racism of ‘Boardwalk Empire’ (And the Critics Who Don’t Get It)

Boardwalk Empire



Written by Leigh Kolb


Spoilers ahead

Boardwalk Empire returned for its fourth season on Sunday, Sept. 8. This season is poised to continue important representation of struggles involving gender and race in the award-winning show, which is aesthetically gorgeous and well-written.

The few, but incredibly important, female characters on Boardwalk Empire are fascinating. I wrote last year about the remarkable story lines in season 3 that focused on birth control and reproductive rights. Boardwalk Empire has always kept a keen eye on women’s issues–from suffrage to health care.

Season 4 is set up to be more of the same–long-form debauchery and violence with moments of poignant sub-plots featuring the female characters. Gillian is slipping deeper into a heroin addiction, and is selling herself instead of selling her house. Cora escapes a violent bedroom scene (which we will revisit in a moment). A young actress attempts to take Billie’s place in Nucky’s life for her own gain, but he rejects her. Richard has traveled to reunite with his twin sister, Emma, on her farm.

As often is the case in these seemingly masculine dramas, women are essential to the plot, even if they often aren’t the focus of most reviewers, or even the bulk of the action. Nucky is king, Al Capone is pulling strings, and Chalky is set to be a power player.

Drink, talk, shoot, repeat.

But those moments that the women of Boardwalk Empire are on screen are among the best of each episode. Their parts are small. Their scenes are brief. But each is meaningful and powerful. The women characters are complex–evil, moral, conflicted, good mothers, bad mothers, addicts and everything in between. They are three-dimensional. This is a good thing.

The female-centric subplots in Boardwalk Empire are treasures buried in a pile of empty whiskey bottles. Most reviewers, however, focus on the men. Hollywood Life only mentions the male characters (except for the mention of Nucky getting smarter about women). The Huffington Post mentions Gillian briefly and Cora (but not by her name). Rolling Stone does do a better job of fully describing and summarizing the episode.

The fact that critics often ignore or reduce women characters isn’t surprising, although it’s always frustrating. What’s horrifying, however, are a few critics’ responses to the aforementioned violent sex scene.

Just like Boardwalk Empire has woven in subplots of women’s struggles, it has also presented the endemic racial tension in Nucky’s world in a way that makes viewers uncomfortable (especially since our culture is still so steeped in racism). Not everyone seems to get this, though.

From left, Dickey, Cora, Dunn and Chalky.

At Chalky’s new club, he sits watching the new talent with his right-hand man, Dunn, and a white talent agent, Dickey, and his girlfriend, Cora. Cora sketches an erotic drawing of her and Dunn, and asks him to come upstairs. The two start having sex, and Dickey makes himself known in the room as he draws a gun against Dunn. Dunn scrambles to put on his pants, and Cora immediately says he had forced her. This is all a game, though, for Dickey and Cora. Dickey forces Dunn to resume having sex with Cora, and all the while Dickey is throwing racial epithets, heavily peppering his slurs with the N-word and claims about how black men behave.

Dickey starts masturbating. “It’s all just some fun,” Cora says with a smile.

Then Dickey says, “There’s no changing you people.” With this, Dunn breaks a bottle over Dickey’s head and proceeds to stab him repeatedly and viciously. We are surprisingly comfortable with this outcome of the scene, because Dunn’s humiliation and objectification is so visceral, as is the racism. This scene is indicative of not only the racism and degradation of black Americans at the time (echoed by Nucky’s almost-mistress who says the Onyx Girls are “deliciously primitive”), but also the demand that they perform as objects for whites’ entertainment and sexual purposes, without agency. The power that Dickey wields over Dunn–his whiteness, his gun, his hand down his pants–is nauseating and historically accurate. This scene is about racism. This scene is about power, humiliation and resistance when one is caught up against a wall of disgusting degradation.

However, the aforementioned reviewers had a different reading of this scene.

From Hollywood Life:

“…Chalky finds out that being the boss requires a lot of cleanup. Like when after his sidekick Dunn Purnsley (Erik LaRay Harvey), in the most awkwardly violent scene of the episode, murders a booking agent after the guy catches him sleeping with his wife — and then forces Dunn to continue while he watches. Boardwalk Empire, ladies and gentlemen!”

Certainly a brief show recap isn’t always the place for heavy cultural analysis, but to brush off the scene with such flippant commentary? Privilege, ladies and gentlemen! 
Not to be topped, the Huffington Post saw Dunn’s actions as self-defense:

“So Dunn did what he had to do, smashing the guy’s head with a liquor bottle to get himself out of danger. And then he went the extra murderous mile, repeatedly stabbing the guy in the throat with the broken bottle, because it’s Boardwalk Empire.”

Are you kidding me? Dunn murdering Dickey had nothing to do with him being in danger. It had everything to do with him being degraded and humiliated.

Rolling Stone acknowledges Dunn’s true motivations, but still misses the mark:

“He may have moved up the ranks from jail antagonist to kitchen worker to Chalky’s right-hand man, but Dunn doesn’t know shit about doing business, especially with white folks in 1924. I can’t blame him for pounding a broken bottle into Dickey’s face repeatedly – not only was he forced to have sex with Cora at gunpoint, but Dickey degraded him even further with regular use of the n-word and vicious taunts like, ‘There’s no changing you people.’ Except Chalky knows that you can’t go around killing Cotton Club employees (Cora manages to escape) just for ’15 minutes’ worth of jelly.'” 

Yes, perhaps Chalky knows how to do business with white folks, but his “jelly” comment is inaccurate–that’s not what Dunn killed for. Except for killing Dickey (which even this reviewer acknowledges a motivation for), Dunn didn’t really do anything wrong.

And perhaps most egregious, buried in an approximately 2.5-million-word recap from New Jersey:

“‘It’s all just some fun,’ the wife assures. Not to Purnsley who, after they begin the humiliating deed, blasts a whiskey bottle clear across Dickie’s face. It’s doesn’t just stop there, however, the beating continues until the booking agent is dead and his wife, in horror, escapes through the window, naked. Purnsley stands there a bloody mess.”

There are some pretty pertinent details missing here. In this review, Dunn seems to be painted as a savage villain, lashing out for no clear reason. That’s not what happens.

Reviewers saw Dunn acting in self-defense (which further reduces his perceived power), not understanding how to do business with white people (blaming his sexuality and ignorance), or lashing out in savage violence without clear motivation.

Reviewers ignore the implications of racism.

Reviewers sideline female characters.

Reviewers do this because too frequently, the lens they are looking through is of the white male experience. This is privilege.

Even when the artifact itself deals with gender and race in a way designed to challenge viewers, reviewers often overlook it. I was uncomfortable, horrified and excited during the premier of Boardwalk Empire this season. I continue to see complex female characters and pointed commentary on racism.

Sally, Margaret and Gillian.

I’m disappointed, then (and even horrified), when critics ignore these aspects, or get them terribly wrong. Their recaps and analyses help shape the conversations surrounding these shows, and if they just focus on those smoke-filled rooms and the power brokers, without fully paying attention to the other characters, they are insulting women, people of color and those who work so hard to write about and represent them.

However, if we can look past the critics, there is much to be excited for in season 4. Still to come this season, Patricia Arquette will play a speakeasy owner and Jeffrey Wright will play a Harlem gangster who is seeped in the politics of the Harlem Renaissance. These moments that have made Boardwalk Empire exceptional–the moments of clear gender and racial historical context and commentary–are poised to take center stage in season 4. Hopefully we can all look through the clouds of white male smoke to see what lies ahead.

Valentin and Maitland

________________________________________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Millenials These Days

Masthead for Chicana From Chicago, Christine Davila’s blog

 
This is a guest post by Christine Davila.

If you hear someone utter, “Kids These Days,” it’s usually in a disapproving tone toward the younger generations’ fresh attitude or their breaking with tradition (or their tendency to speed while driving). When I think about Kids These Days, though, it is in sheer awe. I am so impressed by their confidence and transcultural expression with which they carve out their bold self-individuality. I don’t remember ever being that loud and proud in my teens. I, like most, just wanted to fit in. But the Millennial generation has spoken: Assimilation is out; non-conformity is in.

As a first generation Mexican-American I’m naturally drawn to bi-cultural narratives because they relate to my own culture dash – American clash. Speaking Spanish at home, making tortillas with abuelita, and my parents’ late night dance and Tequila parties, blasting Sonora Santanera or the passionate cries of Vicente Fernandez, all formed a very specific childhood. There is something really powerful about seeing a reflection of your roots in a contemporary context in the biggest form of entertainment: the movies. You may have read the numbers; there are 55 million+ Latinos in the country, making us the fastest growing and youngest demographic. Brands clumsily chase after this market and miserably try to coin terms to define us like New Generation Latino, Young Latino Americans, Hispanic Millennials. The term Latino attempts to encompass far too many diverse ethnic and social cultures that it is a useless denomination, a limited view failing to recognize the fluidity of our social zeitgeist in the 21st century.
It is critical to adapt with the changing times and engage the new generations of our immigrant nation. It’s time to reframe our notions and classifications on race and identity. Más American is my humble attempt of doing away with outdated and ill-defined terminology like Hispanic or Latino. It is meant to convey the real, inclusive and radical reflection of society’s eclectic fabric found in fiercely independent filmmaker voices. More aptly, it speaks to the transcultural identity and non-conformist spirit of today’s characters and narratives. It’s not necessarily confined to speak about people of “color.” It is about all kinds of shifting identities, from conventional, traditional and sociocultural norms to a more progressive evolution. It is about gender – equality, reversal of roles, gender variant. Filmmakers are out there telling these unique perspectives through independent film. These stories are out there. I can attest to that with some authority because of the volume of screening I do for film festivals year round. Films from underrepresented communities usually have an outsider/insider perspective, which in turn provokes highly original and compelling narratives by its very nature. This emerging class of individualism is what embodies American spirit.
Más American also speaks to the influence Latinos have on non-Latinos. You don’t have to have the blood in order to appreciate or acquire a sensibility of the Latino experience. Many non-Latino filmmakers have made extraordinary films capturing the US Latino experience. It’s only natural considering the countless generations who originate from before the Hidalgo treaty was signed. We are your neighbors, friends, colleagues, lovers, wives, husbands, in-laws, in each of the 50 states. Indeed, a long time ago my mom and I learned to stop talking trash when out in public about non-Latinos in proximity realizing that many people understand some Spanish.
Más American
And so it is with much pleasure, and gratitude toward the filmmakers, the Más American conversation on Seed&Spark is rolling out. These films purely conceive of characters and a world more reflective and authentic of our reality. Perhaps the freshness comes from a subconscious in which they derive and embody a defiant individuality, outside of any identity politics. Más American hopefully is a starting point for a more forward and richer conversation toward genuine, original and underrepresented narratives. I hope to add more titles to the mix in this Conversation, championing filmmakers who get America’s evolving sense of cultural self-identity and who are on the pulse of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist.

In THE CRUMBLES, written and directed by Akira Boch, the acting talent naturally inhabit LA’s Echo Park hipster artist scene in such a sincere and rocking way. The lead happens to be a Latina and her co-lead happens to be Asian. Their color is so not the center of the tragicomic slice-of-life. Yet it does make them who they are: badass rock ‘n roll girlfriends who resist quitting on their dream of hitting it big with their band.

In THE NEVER DAUNTED, writer/director Edgar Muñiz explores the toll and cross a man must bear who can’t conceive, in such a profound, heartbreaking and uniquely creative way. The film explores a modern masculinity more open to vulnerability, clashing with the Western stoic cowboy machismo image imposed on men from boyhood.

GABI – director Zoé Salicrup Junco’s impressive NYU thesis film – centers around its titular business-smart, sexy and confident 30-something woman living an independent and successful life, whose main conflict is the reminder that, in her hometown, her success represents a failure within the context of the marriage, kids and housewife model. 
Seed&Spark logo
In all of these stories, new definitions of traditional norms are celebrated, and scripts are being flipped. I’m thrilled that with Seed&Spark the public at large can discover these rebellious voices.
I want to thank the filmmakers for sharing their inspiring non-conformist narratives on Seed&Spark and for, whether they know it or not, breaking type.

Christine Davila is film festival programmer, festival strategist, script consultant and blogger (chicanafromchicago.com). As a first generation Mexican-American from Chicago, she loves multi-cultural stories and has the privilege of screening hundreds of US Latino and Spanish language films throughout the year as a freelance programmer for film festivals like Sundance, Morelia, Los Angeles Film Festival, San Antonio’s CineFestival, among others. In her blog, Chicana From Chicago, she focuses on the diaspora of American cinema made by people with roots/origin/descendant in Mexico, Central & South America, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. You can follow Christine @IndieFindsLA.

‘Wentworth’ Makes ‘Orange is the New Black’ Look Like a Middle School Melodrama

Wentworth poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Wentworth is an Australian women’s prison drama that is much grittier, darker, more brutal and realistic than Netflix’s Orange is the New Black could ever hope to be. This bleak realism also makes Wentworth‘s well-developed characters and situations much more compelling than its fluffier American counterpart. Don’t get me wrong; I really enjoyed Orange is the New Black. The stories of incarcerated women are always important because they are a particularly marginalized and silenced group. However, the over-the-top, zany approach to characterization that OITNB utilizes for comedic effect renders the characters less substantive overall. Consider the lesbian-obsessed prison worker Caputo who has a mail order Russian bride or the insane abortion doctor murderer and ex-meth addict Pennsatucky Doggett who believes she has a calling from Jesus or the flame-haired Russian mobster cook Red played by my beloved Captain Kathryn Janeway (er, I mean Kate Mulgrew). Very colorful. Very little depth.

Pennsatucky is one craaaaaaaazy lady.

Though OITNB and Wentworth deal with similar themes, Wentworth (based on an Aussie soap opera from the 70’s and 80’s called Prisoner) takes a no-holds-barred approach to subjects like officer sexual exploitation of prisoners, turf wars and hierarchy, sexuality, the inmate code of silence, gang beatings, gang rapes, prison riots, and the brutality of the crimes that landed these women behind bars. Because the Australian prison system is different from ours, my first glimpse of Wentworth Correctional Centre left me comparing the prison to middle school with its catty girls and basic rights stripped from the inmates, much like the ones that are stripped from children, i.e. rules govern when they use the restroom, showers, bed times, how they spend their free time, classes are mandatory, and they are allowed no privacy save that which they sneak. The finale of the first episode (“No Place Like Home”) concludes, however, in a chaotic riot with a body count, leaving a major character dead. I rapidly revised my initial reading, realizing that the women of Wentworth play for keeps in a way that those of OITNB do not.

The show evokes a primal sense of self-preservation amidst the complete absence of the basic human need for safety. It is unflinchingly honest in its representations of women who’ve committed terrible acts, lived complicated lives, and must continue their struggle for survival in the place that’s supposed to give them structure and rehabilitate them but in actuality further hardens and traumatizes them.
The racial diversity of Wentworth‘s cast leaves a bit to be desired. One of the primary prison guards, Will Jackson, is played by Robbie Magasiva, a Samoan New Zealander.

Mr. Jackson escorts our heroine, Bea Smith.
Aboriginal Shareena Clanton portrays the integral matriarchal role of prisoner Doreen Anderson.

Doreen Threatens to cut Bea in order to keep the child she protects on their unit (that’s right, Aussies have kids in prison).

Lastly, there’s Frankie Doyle’s steady girlfriend, Kim Chang, played by Korean Ra Chapman.

Kim walks with her lover Frankie.

To be fair, I don’t know enough about the racial/ethnic composition of Australia to know what would constitute a balanced representation. In addition, though, there isn’t as much lesbianism as one might expect from the show either, though the lesbianism depicted is as graphic as the rest of the series. Though there are more lesbian characters in OITNB, I often wondered why their relationships were so censored on Netflix that can call its own shots…was it an effort to not exploit lesbian sexuality as so many shows typically do or was it to not “turn off” viewers?
On Wentworth, Frankie Doyle is the only major LGBTQ character along with her minor character girlfriend, Kim. We also find that the “Governor” Erica Davidson harbors a secret attraction to Frankie.

Governor Erica Davidson steals a covert look at Frankie.

Erica Davidson is one of the more interesting characters represented in the show. Erica becomes Governor through semi-devious means, but she continues to claim that the welfare and rehabilitation of the female prisoners are her number one priorities. The show constantly pits her genuine empathy for the women against her career ambition. Her sexuality is gratifyingly complex. We are given background on her relationship with her (male) fiance who is very vanilla when it comes to sex. Erica fantasizes about a fetish club she once visited as part of her pre-Wentworth lawyer work. When she asks her fiance to pull her hair during sex, he loses his shit. They don’t have a conversation about it, like, say a couple might if the man requested anal sex or a ménage à trois; instead he issues an ultimatum. They almost end a five plus year relationship because her request makes him feel inadequate. He asserts that she may have picked the “wrong guy.” He stifles her sexual curiosity completely. The repression of her sexual fantasies exacerbates Erica’s desire to step outside the bounds of sexual propriety as is evinced by her lesbian attraction to an inmate, a woman who constantly challenges her authority. The complex sexual power dynamic at work between Erica and Frankie feeds into Erica’s fantasies. The psychological context given for Erica’s sexuality gives her much more depth than, say, Piper Chapman from OITNB, whose sexuality is the cause for much debate but is given little room for its inherent fluidity.

Erica fantasizes about sex with Frankie within the prison walls.

Lastly, we’ve got Wentworth‘s heroine Bea Smith. Wentworth is a sort of prologue intended to give the backstory for the woman Bea later becomes in the series Prisoner (which many Aussie fans have already watched). In many ways, Bea and Piper aren’t so very different. They’re both women out of their element, gentle by nature. Neither woman wants to rock the boat, but both are possessed of a streak of moral righteousness that alternately gets them in trouble and gains them respect. Both undergo major transitions before the end of their first seasons, the prison setting actually accentuating their buried inner violence and pushing them to acts of vicious aggression.

Bea Smith from Prisoner on the left, and Bea Smith from Wentworth on the right.

Bea’s pre-prison life, however, is not as ideal as Piper’s perfect upper middle class New York existence. Bea is a hairdresser whose husband brutally beats and rapes her on a regular basis. Bea is imprisoned for attempting to kill him when she finally snaps and decides to fight back. Piper’s crime is an isolated incidence of non-violent drug trafficking that she did simply as a youthful thrill and to help out Alex, her then girlfriend. Though she, like Piper, is bewildered by prison culture when she is first incarcerated, Bea is no stranger to darkness. Though Bea and Piper both undergo major personality shifts by the end of their first seasons, Bea’s prior life, her family, and her meek disposition are truly and permanently eradicated by her stay in prison (and she hasn’t even had a hearing, nevermind trial and sentencing, as the first season closes).

Wentworth cast

I think I’m asking too much from Orange is the New Black. In fact, I know I am. It’s a mainstream show that focuses on the marginalized stories of women in prison, many of them LGBTQ. Shouldn’t that be enough subversion to keep me happy? Walking into the show, I’d already watched a couple of seasons of the British women in prison drama Bad Girls, and then after seeing Wentworth, I knew that I wanted more from the trope of women and prison than Orange is the New Black could provide. I didn’t want these important, often untold stories turned into humorous fluff in order to make them palatable to an audience. I didn’t want the complexity of the lives and struggles of these women to be minimized in order to keep them within their pre-determined stereotype boxes for the sake of simplicity and a huge, mainstream audience. I’ll keep watching OITNB, but I’ll keep turning to Wentworth for stories about ostracized women with fascinating psychology, depth of character, and complexity of emotion and motivation. 

There’s a New "Final Girl" in the House—and She’s a Beast: A Review of ‘You’re Next’

Movie poster for You’re Next

Written and Lovingly Spoiled by Stephanie Rogers.

Crispian: Where’s Felix?
Erin: I put a blender on his head and killed him.

You’re Next is sick, and I mean sick like “disgusting” and sick like “badass” because somewhere in my 34-year-old brain, I’m also 12.
It’s no secret if you’ve been reading my posts over the past 6 years that I love horror films and, more than anything, I adore the Final Girl in horror films. I want to be the Final Girl, tripping my way through the woods with a shard of glass sticking out of my leg while the audience roots for me to kill the bad guy. The Final Girl, in fact, might be my favorite iteration of the Strong Female Character in that the writers allow her to show weakness—which makes her desperate acts of murder to save herself even more appealing; she gets to be both the freaked out damsel in distress and the hero of the story.
Erin, the Final Girl, wielding an ax
From a feminist perspective, the Final Girl’s combination of strength and weakness accompanied by the (often male) audience’s ability to identify with her plight, further emphasize her importance. The horror film genre in general affords men an opportunity to identify with a female protagonist, and that rarely occurs in other genres. Go horror.
In Carol J. Clover’s book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, she argues—to quote Wikipedia—“that in these films, the viewer begins sharing the perspective of the killer but experiences a shift in identification to the Final Girl partway through the film.” And in You’re Next, I couldn’t help but smile when Erin bashed in the head of a masked bad guy with a meat tenderizer while the audience cheered. (I smiled because the audience clapped for a female lead, not because I’m a sociopath.)
The quintessential animal masks
The film starts off like an average, run-of-the-mill horror film. The first woman character appears during what looks like pretty unfulfilling sex. My first thought? She’s about to die. Because women characters in horror films always get the death punishment for having sex—which is, I’ll admit, a problematic element of the genre. (A tiny part of me wondered if she might survive given that it wasn’t a steamy sex scene as much as a gross dude getting off while she lightweight grimaced.) Alas, she succumbs to the trope; then the words “You’re Next” appear in blood on the wall before the shitty bedfellow bites it … and so begins the latest incarnation of the Home Invasion journey. 
Get ready for your sex punishment

It may take place in a mansion, but the kitchen and the basement are where shit gets real. The weapons include kitchen knives, blenders, meat tenderizers, and a slew of screwdrivers, as well as a machete (duh) and for some reason a fucking crossbow like it’s The Hunger Games. I liked that the terrorized family members needed to defend themselves with household appliances rather than a random gun they’d hidden for a rainy day. (I almost never buy it when victims pull out their stowed away guns, and those films lean a little too close to a dangerous message: Buy a gun to protect your home, America; otherwise you’ll die at the hands of lunatics, and it’ll be all your fault. The NRA told you so!)
Thank you, You’re Next, for avoiding that convention and making me look at blenders and meat tenderizers in entirely new ways. 
Dude, you are SO next
The film follows a very rich, white, nuclear family whose matriarch (Barbara Crampton) and patriarch (Rob Moran) invite their children (and the significant others of their children) over for a nice, functional (ha) 35th Wedding Anniversary celebration and to see the brand new mansion they purchased. This brand new mansion happens to sit in the middle of nowhere with very limited cell phone service. Oops! And it also becomes clear almost immediately that the three brothers borderline despise one another, and the lone sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz), a total Daddy’s Girl, has been pretty much pampered her whole life. Of course the matriarch, Aubrey, hears a loud-ass noise that shakes the chandelier before the kids arrive, and the husband does that whole, “You’re a crazy bitch, but I’ll check it out anyway just to humor you” thing that always cracks me up in horror films. The message? Listen to women, dumbasses, because they know what’s up. 
Little Sister and Daddy’s Girl, Aimee, freaks out when everyone starts dying
Aubrey, portrayed as a hysterical mess who can’t stop crying, gets a pass from me. I found her response to the creepy loud noises and then the subsequent deaths of her children via crossbow (and a slow-motion sprint that ended with a clotheslining to the jugular) the most normal response of the whole bunch. These take-charge mofos who mindlessly cover their dead family members with a sheet and move on need some serious psychoanalysis. 
One of the masked men looks down on Erin after she jumped through a fucking window on purpose
The father, Paul, the former Man of the House, completely loses his shit at one point, going into a catatonic sob-state that made me chuckle in delight. The witty, suck-up, kind of dick oldest bro Drake (Joe Swanberg) makes incessant condescending comments to the middle brother, Crispian (A.J. Bowen), about his inability to do anything with his life; and Felix (Nicholas Tucci), the youngest, sits back with his girlfriend, rolls his eyes, and observes the dysfunction.

Just your typical dudbro family emasculation sesh.

It took me approximately ten minutes into the movie to realize this home invasion violence was all about money. Specifically white people with money. And the punishment of white people with money, a la The Purge. Can I just say kudos to Hollywood for taking a step back from the Mancession narrative for five seconds? Before the audience can identify with these rich white people and feel bad for their plight, we’re already laughing at them. They’re ridiculous. And the only seemingly respectable person of the lot is a darker-skinned young Australian woman named Erin (Sharni Vinson) who grew up in a Survivalist Camp and has a crapload of student loan debt.
Sorry, murderers. Your crossbow suddenly don’t mean shit. 
Erin (Sharni Vinson) looking a little worn out
Erin rocks. Erin is possibly my favorite Final Girl ever. That’s right; I’m putting her right up there with Ellen Ripley in Alien and Laurie Strode in Halloween. This Final Girl, while more advantaged than her predecessors with her Survivalist Camp superhero skills, also doesn’t get boxed into what has become a Final Girl trope: a young virgin, or a woman who’s never shown having sex, who’s rarely sexualized, who often appears as the “androgynous nerd” stereotype—Jena Malone in The Ruins is a good example of this—and who plays a straight-laced nondrinker or drug user (Erin insists they stop for alcohol). Erin is the new and improved Final Girl 2.0; the home invaders may run around in creepy Fox, Lamb, and Tiger masks, but Erin is the most animalistic of the bunch.
And that brings me to the women in the film. 
Zee, Felix’s girlfriend, tries some sick shit in this scene
I didn’t like that Felix’s girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn), the mostly non-speaking goth chick, turned out to be a villain. Why couldn’t the sweet, blond sister, Aimee, be a villain? Change it up, Hollywood! But I did like, for what it’s worth, that a woman got to be a villain—a somewhat likeable villain in the end—and that the filmmakers gave the audience an opportunity to identify with both a woman protagonist and a woman antagonist … who, for once, weren’t fighting over a fucking dude.
All in all, I very much enjoyed every dude’s “um wait whut” reaction to Erin’s skillz with a meat tenderizer. I liked that many deaths at the hands of Erin took place in a kitchen, a space where women were—and occasionally still are—forced to serve and clean up after men and children. You’re Next makes Erin queen of the domestic space but in a way that gives her power over her captors. The entire film could, in fact, be read as a cautionary tale for keeping women locked up in the domestic sphere or otherwise. Erin may not have served them in the conventional sense, but they definitely got served. 

 “Lookin’ for the Magic” by Dwight Twilley Band: the theme song from You’re Next

Top Ten Reasons Why I Am Thankful for Lake Bell’s ‘In a World’

Movie poster for In a World …
This is a guest post by Molly McCaffrey.

1) Number one and most important of all, I’m thankful this movie was written and directed by a woman and that it’s a story about a strong, smart, interesting woman.

Director and screenwriter Lake Bell at the Sundance Film Festival

I am incredibly thankful about that.

2) I’m thankful this movie stars an actress who doesn’t look like every other Hollywood actress. Yes, Bell is beautiful, but she also doesn’t have the button nose, full lips, perfect posture, and blond hair that has become so annoyingly ubiquitous among our female movie stars.

Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) sing their guts out in In a World …

And neither do her co-stars…

Louis (Demetri Martin) and Cher (Tig Notaro) watch Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) record a voice-over.

(You also gotta love a movie that has both Tig Notaro and Geena Davis.)

3) On a related note, I’m thankful Bell’s protagonist, Carol Solomon, doesn’t always act like a leading lady—she shuffles, lurches, and acts generally spazzy. She doesn’t always look glamorous either—she doesn’t always wear makeup or look perfectly primped and often wears regular-people clothes (sweatpants, thermal underwear, t-shirts, football jerseys, overalls, ill-fitting dresses, etc.)—just like the rest of us.

Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) hatch plans to take over the voice-over industry.

At the same time, I’m glad Carol looks attractive when she wants to without looking trashy or showing off all the goods.

4) I’m also thankful that several men are attracted to Carol even though she doesn’t know how to dress or stand up straight (and that the men who are drawn to her are attractive but not perfect either).

Carol Solomon’s love interest, Louis (Demetri Martin)

5) I love, too, that this film shows an intelligent, driven, attractive young female protagonist in a relationship, but it isn’t what defines her. Let me say that again: Thank God her relationship doesn’t define her!

I was equally thrilled that Carol had casual sex with some random guy she met at a party and celebrated it. And that she didn’t end up regretting her actions or have something bad happen to her as a result. In this movie, sex was just part of life—no big deal—much like it is in real life.

Louis (Demetri Martin) and Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) karaoke the night away in In a World …

6) I was also head over heels over the fact that the two sisters—Carol and Dani—were so close and leaned on each other for everything.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her sister, Dani (Michaela Watkins)

I was glad, as well, that the person who had an “affair” in this movie was a woman (rather than a man) and that she didn’t actually go all the way.

7) I really appreciate, too, that this movie shows a young person living at home with a parent and that she isn’t doing so because she’s a lazy, lost, unmotivated slacker.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her father (Fred Melamed) argue about her career.

And I was truly blown away by the film’s characterization of Carol’s family—a real family having down-to-earth, regular problems.

No, nobody is dying of cancer, nobody is mentally ill or disabled, nobody is in prison, nobody is an alcoholic. The characters in this movie are just average people with average problems—like jealousy, resentment, miscommunication, and selfishness.

I am very grateful about that.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) and her father (Fred Melamed) on the way to an industry party.

8) I’m thrilled about several things relating to Carol’s job…

I’m relieved Carol works in a non-glamorous industry that we don’t usually see featured in movies—the voice-over industry.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) records a voice-over.

I love, too, that she cares so much about her work even though it doesn’t pay the bills.

And I’m glad that the film shows her having some success in that field without totally dominating it a la every other movie ever made (Erin Brockovich, Jerry Maguire, The Devil Wears Prada, Working Girl, etc., etc.).

9) I’m downright ecstatic about the fact that Carol didn’t have to trip or fall to make us laugh, avoiding the ridiculous formulas that often dominate movies about women.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) surrounded by her work notes in her bedroom at her father’s house.

Thank you for that, Lake Bell!

Tangentially, it was also awesome that Carol was irritated by stupid people doing stupid things and didn’t apologize for that.

10) And last but not least, I’m incredibly thankful this movie made me laugh and feel and, for God’s sake, think.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell)

If only all movies did the same.

 

 
Molly McCaffrey is the author of the short story collection How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters, the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She has worked with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple and received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. Currently she teaches at Western Kentucky University and designs books for Steel Toe Books. She is at work on her first memoir, You Belong to Us, which tells the story of McCaffrey meeting her biological family. 

A (Bad) Teacher

Written by Max Thornton.
  
Movie poster for A Teacher
People sure like to make movies about teacher-student relationships. It’s always incredibly skeevy, of course, to watch someone in a position of authority abuse their power, but cinematic representations are rarely as nakedly awful as the reality.
A Teacher consciously downplays the really appalling aspects of intergenerational classroom romance without ever intimating that it’s anything other than a very bad idea. As suggested by the title, the film focuses entirely on young English teacher Diana Watts (played by Lindsay Burdge), for whom the relationship is at least as destructive as it is for Eric, the pupil (who is, if it makes a difference, a high-school senior and significantly bigger physically than she is).
The total focus on Diana is signaled from the opening classroom scene, where the camera stays fixed on her, regardless of who is speaking. This directorial choice recurs throughout the film, and it serves to highlight her naïve solipsism. It’s tricky to maintain audience empathy for a viewpoint character while also drawing attention to her self-centered immaturity, so props to director Hannah Fidell for finding a deft way to put us inside Diana’s head (hearing other characters’ dialogue from her perspective) while still maintaining an outsider’s gaze (looking at her face).
Lindsay Burdge as Diana.
Overall, both style and acting contribute to an odd sense that Diana is not the one doing the victimizing in this circumstance. Factor out her job, and this movie would just be the story of dumb puppy love, a young woman so hopelessly smitten with the very idea of romance that she’s heedless of the realities of the situation. But, of course, her job is the point – the movie’s called A Teacher – and the experience, knowledge, and wisdom implied by that position are dramatically at odds with her incredibly adolescent attitude toward the whole relationship.
Early in the film, while hooking up with Eric in his car, Diana reminisces about similar trysts from her own high-school days. It’s a tellingly sad and uncomfortable little moment that kicks off a spiral of nonstop sadness and discomfort: Watching a grown-ass woman sext and Facebook-stalk a teenage boy is both tragic and kind of disturbing. There’s something Carey Mulligan-esque about Burdge’s face when she’s in bed with Eric, evoking (as does the title) another film in which the questionable sexual relationship is the other way around, age- and power-wise.
Perhaps the echo is deliberate. Diana never seems to have any power in this relationship, never acts like the teacher or the one giving the education. Even in the bedroom, Eric calls the shots (“Take your clothes off.” “Come here.”), and, while driving his car, he describes feeling as though his penis is getting bigger, coming into its own, “powering up.” For him, sex with an attractive young teacher is a power fantasy come true. The lovelorn look of the infatuated is notably absent from his face throughout the film, even as Diana is distracted from grading papers by soft-focus fantasies of him.
Oh girl.
Diana doesn’t have to be alone in these delusions of romance. The hand of friendship is consistently extended by her coworker and her roommate – both of whom are women, the latter of whom is even named Sophia– but she ignores this potential salvation in order to continue down the self-destructive path of reliving her high-school sexuality and daydreaming of underage man-meat.
That’s not really an unfair assessment of Eric, who is little more than a cipher. He’s just there to be strong and silent and sexy, a backdrop for Diana’s nostalgic projections, whose actual personality she never seems to take into account. Almost everything he says to her is to do with sex. By contrast, Sophia tells Diana she cares about her. In a heartbreaking pre-Thanksgiving scene, Sophia monologues anxiously about the upcoming holiday with her family, and Diana completely ignores her in order to text topless selfies to her teenage boyfriend.
Ultimately, the film’s lesson is of the value of companionship and empathy, and the danger of total self-absorption. Someone who only chases empty nostalgia for her former self (check her name, Diana, and in case you didn’t get it her brother’s called Hunter), and never bothers with the richness of female friendship that is right there in her life, is not going to end happily. A shallow focus on finding hunkitude in all the wrong places, instead of paying attention to your friends, is not the pathway to a fulfilling life. 
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He can never format this bio line correctly.

‘Touchy Feely’ Explores the Link Between Physical and Emotional Contact

Written by Lady T.

Josh Pais and Rosemarie DeWitt in Touchy Feely

A free-spirited massage therapist develops a powerful aversion to touch, alienating herself from her clients, her boyfriend, and even her own body. Meanwhile, her straitlaced, reserved brother develops an almost miraculous ability to heal jaw pain in the patients of his dental practice.

This is the premise of Touchy Feely, a new film by writer-director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister). Rosemarie DeWitt plays Abby and Josh Pais plays Scott in a story where sister and brother find themselves abruptly switching roles. Abby becomes isolated from the people around her, and Scott connects with his patients for the first time and finds a new source of energy and inspiration in his life.

Abby examines her hands after developing her aversion to physical contact

Shelton uses extreme close-ups of the human body to show the source of Abby’s fear of contact, focusing on thin, fine hairs and cracks in the skin. Her approach to depicting Scott’s sudden gift for healing is a little different, giving us a montage of grateful patients hugging the awkward dentist after he cures their problems.

As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Abby and Scott, though sharing relatively little screentime together, are two sides of the same coin. Their emotional health and sense of well-being are directly linked to their comfort with physical contact. Abby is emotionally connected to others and at peace with herself when she can make physical connections with people, and cut off and withdrawn when physical contact sends her running into the bathroom.

Sometimes, actual touch isn’t necessary to feel a connection. Inspired by his recent successes at work, Scott meets with Abby’s friend Bronwyn (Allison Janney) to learn about the Japanese art of reiki, where little hand-on-skin contact takes place. Abby, meanwhile, experiments with ecstasy, and while it doesn’t immediately cure her aversion to touch, she experiences the world in a different way, with her senses of sight and smell heightened. Jenny (Ellen Page), Scott’s daughter, is one of the only characters who can put her desire for human contact into words, saying, “Do you ever want to kiss someone so badly that it hurts your skin?”

Scott learns about the practice of reiki from Bronwyn (Allison Janney)

Shelton’s direction is careful, patient, and intimate, lingering on her actors’ faces and bodies, letting their physicality do the talking rather than overwhelming the viewer with dialogue. It’s a wise choice in a film that’s so focused on the relationships the characters have with their bodies and their comfort with physical contact.

What’s missing from Touchy Feely is the motivation. We know

Lady T is a writer with two novels, a screenplay, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

She’s Too Old: Sexuality and the Threat of Aging in ‘Adore’

Adore film poster.

Written by Erin Tatum.
The original title of Adore was Two Mothers, which should give some indication of its Freudian undertones. Best friends since childhood, Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) remain close throughout their lives. They have sons the same age: Roz has Tom (James Frecheville) and Lil has Ian (Xavier Samuel). We see Lil’s husband pass away when the boys look to be about 10, the exposition also establishing the friendship between the kids. The boys soon grow into handsome, muscular young men. Roz’s husband Harold already accuses her of being emotionally distant in their relationship and implies she and Lil are secretly lovers. Multiple people assume that Roz and Lil are lesbians throughout the film, much to their amusement. Ambiguous lesbianism is arguably the only running joke. The fact that Roz and Lil look almost identical (minus hair length) and are constantly perceived as having romantic tension makes the ensuing pseudo-incest even creepier.

Lil (left) and Roz (right) raise their sons together.
Adore is about wanting what you can’t have and the resulting guilty titillation when you not only get what you want, but seemingly have total control over the situation. You could see the whole cougar betrayal thing coming a mile away, as soon as the two mothers talk about how collectively hot their sons are immediately after the age up transition. I would hope that my parents and my friends’ parents wouldn’t sit around calling us sexy the second we were legal. The social dynamics of the film are a bit off – are we really supposed to believe that two 18-year-old boys spend their entire day drinking on the beach with their moms? – but it’s that sort of isolation that sets up the forbidden fruit paradigm. Cross-generational lust is most exciting when there’s sexual or emotional deprivation going on, because apparently the only way we can fathom desire across a large age gap is to make one or both partners psychologically deprived.
Roz and Lil admire their genetic handiwork.

Lil’s husband is dead and Roz’s husband conveniently just accepted a new job far away, so the two women are ripe to…pick the fruit of each other’s loins. Yikes. Yes, they both sleep with the other’s son. If “Motherlover” didn’t pop into your head at this point, my review is a failure. I’d be more okay with this development if the two boys hadn’t grown up as next-door neighbors. Maybe Roz and Lil could have reunited for the first time since having kids and each is blown away by their attraction to the other’s child. I’m cool with a lot of weird shit, but you fundamentally shouldn’t have sex with someone you’ve known and cared for as a parental figure since they were in diapers. This isn’t Buster Bluth and Lucille 2. Ian makes a move on Roz for pretty much no reason. The justification for both May-December romances is essentially that it’s scandalous to watch a young man pursue an older woman, which insinuates that they’re tragically wasting their time and potential for masculine privilege by doing so. That has some extremely unfortunate implications as to the perceptions of older femininity, which is why I could never quite get on the cougar bandwagon here, even though the film tries really hard to convince its audience that older women are seductive and love is indiscriminate to age.

Things get steamy between Lil and Tom.
Shockingly, Tom witnesses his mother leaving Ian’s room sans pants and marches right over to Lil’s house to exact revenge. He awkwardly kisses Lil and tells her flat out that he’s doing it just to spite Ian and his mom for sleeping together. Tom is kind of a tool, but Lil eventually gives in after he silently climbs into her bed (boundaries???). Roz and Lil and have a heart-to-heart the next day. They are both surprisingly okay with having boned each other’s children, but they agree that the shenanigans need to stop. Naturally, both couples immediately have sex. They settle into dating and continue to hang out in their creepy foursome, their friendships strengthened by the new exchange of bodily fluids. The narrative then jumps forward two years to let us know that both couples are still together and it wasn’t just a summer fling.
Ian comforts Roz about her aging anxieties.

Although you would think that the length of their relationships would be a testament against shallow fears, the threat of aging continues to plague Lil and Roz. Lil frets over her wrinkles in the mirror as she notices Tom’s attention straying towards a young theater ingénue. Ian sensuously traces his fingers up the back of Roz’s bare thigh as she remarks with chagrin that soon she won’t allow him to see her naked anymore. Ian assures her playfully that he won’t let her age. This type of garbage is supposed to be romantic, but I say fuck you, Ian. Validating your partner’s internalized insecurities, no matter how humorously, is not endearing or sexy. People always worry that their partner will leave them if they get old or gain weight or become disabled. Is your “true love” really that genuine if it could so easily be decimated by such superficial factors? As much as Adore attempts to champion the cougar, Roz and Lil walk a very fine line between empowered women with a healthy libido and self-martyrs consumed by their own overambitious sexuality. Tom cheats on Lil with the theater girl. That’s pretty ballsy, considering that Tom had to convince Lil to be bored/lonely enough to date him in the first place. Tom is a dick.
Roz comforts a distraught Lil after Tom cheats.

Lil is devastated, so in solidarity, Roz agrees that they should each dump their boyfriends at the same time since they agree it’s inevitable that they will both be ditched for a younger woman. Ian bitterly protests this decision because Tom fucking around is not his fault. I feel for him. Ian displayed a sincere passion for Roz from the start and remained committed to her, whereas with Tom, Lil was always merely a lukewarm personal pet project to piss off Roz and Ian. Tom gets married and Roz remains firm on her break up with Ian. Ian soon begins a fairly unenthusiastic courtship with a younger woman to spite Roz and try to move on. I’m glad everyone has such healthy coping mechanisms when it comes to relationships! Ian resolves to break up with the new girl until she tells him that she’s pregnant. Cringe.
Roz and Lil take their granddaughters to the beach.

A few years later, the boys each take their young daughters to the beach along with their respective wives and mothers. I half expected a flash forward to when the girls were legal and trying to seduce each other’s dads. Family fun. The dynamic is uncomfortable to say the least and the wives clearly dislike spending time with Roz and Lil. Long story short, Ian catches Tom and Lil having sex and is so outraged that he blurts out their entire history to the horrified younger women. Disgusted, they pack up the grandkids and leave, warning the group to never contact them again. I don’t think that’s how custody works. Roz and Lil decide they can’t fight fate and the foursome is shown sunbathing together once more, presumably coupled up again. Even if they had to jump through some stereotypical hoops, it’s nice to see relationships between older women and younger men taken seriously and given a legitimate future.

Bitch Flicks Weekly Picks

How Cartoons Inform Children’s Ideas About Race by Federico Subervi at Huffington Post

TV can make America better by Jennifer L. Ponzer at Salon

“Where’s the female Woody Allen?” by Heather Havrilesky at Salon

There’s No Excuse For Misogyny In Space by Helen O’Hara at Empire Online
Pondering Roseanne on its 25th Anniversary by Alyssa Rosenberg at Women and Hollywood
What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

How Cartoons Inform Children’s Ideas About Race by Federico Subervi at Huffington Post

TV can make America better by Jennifer L. Ponzer at Salon

“Where’s the female Woody Allen?” by Heather Havrilesky at Salon

There’s No Excuse For Misogyny In Space by Helen O’Hara at Empire Online
Pondering Roseanne on its 25th Anniversary by Alyssa Rosenberg at Women and Hollywood
What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

The Bronies Documentary is Borderline Propaganda


Professor Pony educates the audience about “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”



Written by Myrna Waldron.

I watched My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic for two seasons. It’s a genuinely good show, with influences from Powerpuff Girls, Sailor Moon, and other television intended for young girls. It occupies an important cultural spot, since we all know just how hard it is to find well made, well written and non-condescending entertainment for young girls. Having been born in the mid-80s, I did watch at least one of the earlier generations of My Little Pony, but all I can really remember of it was that I found it pretty saccharine, (and I couldn’t have been older than 5 at the time, so that’s saying something). Lauren Faust, the original creator for MLP: Friendship is Magic, is a self-proclaimed feminist, who explicitly intended to create a series depicting female friendship. So thumbs up to the show just based on that.

Unfortunately, on the internet, the show isn’t really known for its quality. Nope, it’s known for its vocal teen/adult male fanbase. I commend these adult male fans (known as “Bronies” – bro + pony) for being willing to ignore traditional gender roles, and appreciate a show aimed at young girls, for what it is. “Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Male Fans of My Little Pony” is a feature-length documentary exploring these fans (and was financed by them via Kickstarter), and was executive produced by Lauren Faust (the series creator), Tara Strong (VA for Twilight Sparkle, the main protagonist) and John de Lancie (VA for Discord, a Q-like villain in the first two episodes in the 2nd season). de Lancie’s intent with this documentary was to provide a contrast to the strongly negative media depiction of Bronies and depict them positively. This documentary was also intended to serve as an introduction to the fandom for those unfamiliar with Bronies.

Unfortunately for them, I’m already familiar.

I honestly tried to come at this documentary with an open mind, knowing that much of the negative media attention is directed at Bronies simply because they are men who like a thing intended for little girls. I know a few Bronies and consider them friends, so I’m well aware that many Bronies are perfectly decent people. It’s also not really THAT rare for adult men to like cute things for little girls. Hell, go into any anime convention and you’ll stumble over guys like this everywhere you go.

But it’s very hard to shake my generally negative opinion of Bronies – at least, my negative opinion of the bad ones. And there are a lot of bad ones. The fandom started on notorious forum 4chan, when the first fans decided to watch the show as a joke and ended up loving it. 4chan is a hive full of racism, sexism, ableism and just about every other “ism” you can think of (mainly because posts are automatically anonymous – anonymity turns people into assholes so easily), so it’s not surprising that there are some shitty people amongst Bronydom. A few months back on Tumblr, someone asked me to explain why I have a generally negative opinion of Bronies. I am yet to see any sort of improvement on that front, and every time I speak out against shitty Bronies on Twitter, someone always inevitably replies to my tweet and complains that “We’re not ALL like that!” as if I wasn’t aware. Not one of them has ever said to me, “Yes, there are a lot of terrible people. And if I see someone acting like that, I’m going to call them out on it.” It’s always defensiveness rather than proactive behaviour to genuinely try to improve Bronies’ reputation.

This film sets out to present Bronies as decent people who are inspired by the show’s messages of friendship to be kinder, friendlier, and more accepting of people. Okay, great. I’m all for that. But this film is unfortunately borderline propaganda, because there are some editorial decisions that blatantly come off as disingenuous to anyone who actually pays attention to the media they consume. As I said after finishing my livetweet of the film earlier this week, this film would have been so much better if it were honest. It tries so hard to solely present Bronies as great people that it’s just insulting. It’s been a long time since documentaries had any sort of obligation towards objectivity, but there’s a limit.

THE GOOD:

  • I genuinely liked the Bronies they decided to interview for the film. I sympathized with how each one felt like a social outcast before discovering the series, and how much they appreciated how the fandom introduced them to friendships they never would have had otherwise. I was expecting to want to loathe these guys, (especially since within a minute of the film’s beginning there was already a stereotypical fedora) but, I didn’t.

  • A main objective of the film was to demonstrate how the series inspired creativity from its fans. “The Living Tombstone”’s music didn’t do a thing for me, but I could see why people liked it. There was one Brony who created custom laser shows, which were really cool. The lone female Brony (or Pegasister – more on her later) they interviewed also creates custom figurines for the characters. There’s an enormous amount of talent shown here, and it’s great that they found something that inspired them.

  • Two teenage Bronies who were extensively interviewed (one from Bar Harbour, another from England) have wonderfully supportive parents. The parents admit they don’t completely understand their children’s hobby, but they did what they could to make their sons happy. The Bar Harbour Brony’s parents actually came with him to BronyCon, and his father had an extensive conversation with another father of a Brony, and ended up enjoying the show when he finally sat down to watch it.

  • The English Brony also happens to have Asperger’s, which is depicted fairly here. Much of his “storyline” is concerned with his solo trip to the UK Brony convention in Manchester, and how he was trying to avoid as much social contact with others as possible until he got to the con. I wondered how this was going to work, since if he was too petrified to even ask for directions, how was he going to handle interacting with hundreds of strangers in an enclosed space? The happy ending to this was that he realized that asking strangers for directions was no big deal, and having met tons of other like-minded people, it gave him confidence he’d never had before. The latter event didn’t surprise me, as I’ve seen lots of introverted people blossom into confident and exuberant people while at geek cons. The drawback to this, though, was that they regressed back to their “usual” selves once they were back in the real world.

THE BAD:

  • Another teenage Brony, this time from North Carolina, had ordered some pony decals which he’d put in his car’s rear windshield. Unfortunately, a gang of rednecks accosted him while he was driving, and started bashing up his car with baseball bats and tire irons, and smashed in the rear windshield. This was a borderline hate crime, since the rednecks demanded that he give up his “gay Pony shit” (if I’m quoting them correctly). This was awful enough to hear about, but how the Brony decided to deal with this incident made me feel a further combination of sadness and anger. Instead of telling his father the truth, he told him that he’d gotten into an accident. He also did not report this crime to the police. I can certainly sympathize with how ashamed and mortified he must have been feeling, but his lying probably cost his parents extra in insurance costs, and allowed those rednecks to go on to attack someone else. He lives in a small town – he wasn’t obligated to report the crime, but he would have had an easier time than others identifying the perpetrators. I fear for those rednecks’ next victim, because I know there will be one.

  • More than a few of the Bronies were willing to lie to their parents about their hobby. And I see this as a failure on the parents’ part, because they should be willing to accept any of their children’s interests and not immediately jump to the “He’s gay/He’s a pedophile” conclusions. If there’s that little trust over merely liking a children’s television show, something’s broken there.

  • Near the beginning of the film, a “Professor Pony” (who is implied to be de Lancie’s character Discord in disguise) gives a quick run-down of the previous generations of My Little Pony. And bashes every single one. There were fans of the earlier generations of the show before Bronies came along. And he just insulted them. Film, meet finger. It was played off as comedy, but he actually refused to discuss the third generation of MLP entirely. The Professor Pony is supposed to be giving facts, not opinions. That whole “LOL the previous generations sucked” thing just put a bad taste in my mouth.

  • At no point did any of the fans discuss how they felt about the characters, their interactions, go in-depth about the messages of the show, etc. It was all “This show is good and it makes me want to be a good person.” None of them talked about how they gained a new appreciation or respect for girls/women. It was only a writer on the show who expressed that she liked that Bronies were learning that girls/women are capable of doing awesome things just as much as boys/men are. I would have liked to hear that from a BRONY.

THE UGLY:

  • I get that the film was about the unexpected male fans. But to ignore the female fans for a show intended for GIRLS was just insulting. There were two “Pegasisters” interviewed: “Purple Tinker,” the founder of BronyCon (so, not an average fan) and Nadine, a fan from Germany. Wanna know why Nadine was interviewed? Because she met her future fiance at a Brony meetup. (facepalm) And she was the fan designated to bring cupcakes to this meeting. (double facepalm)
  • And it got worse. Midway through the film, a quartet of female ponies interrupted the Professor Pony and angrily pointed out that Pegasisters contribute to the fandom too. Professor Pony stutters that “Girls liking ponies is expected.” And…then no examples of the Pegasisters’ creative efforts are explored, beyond Nadine’s figure sculpting. SERIOUSLY? A few female fans are interviewed at BronyCon, but NONE of them are named. Not one. Not even the one who discussed how the show helped her cope with cancer treatment. If I were a Pegasister I would have been insulted.
  • The subtitles used for some of the dialogue were inconsistent and even condescending/insulting. “The Living Tombstone,” a musician Brony from Tel Aviv, had every one of his lines subtitled, even though he was speaking ENGLISH. And his accent wasn’t that strong. I understood what he was saying just fine. Nadine’s stepfather was expressing a negative reaction to MLP and his stepdaughter’s hobby, but his words were not subtitled. For god’s sake, do they think the audience is stupid? His body language was angry/exasperated, and I understand enough German to know he wasn’t saying good things. Crap like that is why I consider this film borderline propaganda.
  • The Professor Pony briefly references fanfiction shipping and “clopping.” Clopping is masturbating to Rule 34 porn of the characters, sort of like “yiffing” for furry porn. But although the class halts and looks horrified, the Prof just skates right past the reference and ploughs on. Yeah, no. If they’re going to comedically reference the darker side of the fandom, it’s disingenuous to deliberately ignore it.
  • And that is my biggest issue with this film. It’s dishonest. It doesn’t acknowledge the racist, misogynistic, pedophile, homophobic, transphobic etc ponies. Purple Tinker is a transwoman, but they never discuss the hatred some Bronies have thrown at her. They don’t discuss the torrents of Brony abuse that was thrown at fanartist yamino because of the mistaken belief that she had something to do with Hasbro changing the in-show depiction of fan character “Derpy Hooves.” (I JUST checked her deviantART page and someone had actually posted a comment within the last few days saying “You killed Derpy. I hate you.” Oh my god.) Speaking of Derpy, they show her in the front row of the university scenes, but they don’t discuss her at all. Probably because she’s a creation that is ableist as hell and the producers know that if they bring that shit up it’ll make Bronies look bad.


There is merit in pointing out that there’s nothing wrong with adult males liking a well-made show for young girls, and there’s definite merit in trying to break down the gender barriers of entertainment. But I don’t like many of this documentary’s editorial decisions. If I were a Brony, I would have felt uncomfortable that each one who was interviewed was a social outcast, which perpetuates a nasty stereotype. If I were a Pegasister, I would have been insulted at how little the producers valued my contributions to the fandom. As an outsider with a large amount of familiarity with the series and its fandom, I’m insulted at how stupid the producers appear to think their audience is. If this is supposed to change public perception of Bronies, it’s doing a terrible job.

—-

This will be my final column for Bitch Flicks, at least for now. As I mentioned earlier this summer, my chronic illness is making it more and more difficult for me to write, and to keep to a regular schedule. I do not intend to stop blogging, but any future posts from me will be on my personal blog and will not be subject to any kind of deadline. (I may cross-post some of them however) The last few months have been much too stressful for me, and my condition is so unpredictable. I had to make a tough call, and reluctantly decided to walk away. But this is an “indefinite hiatus” as opposed to a “goodbye forever.”

I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with like-minded feminist film fans, and I’m grateful to every person who reads my work. I am hoping that someday my fibromyalgia will go into remission and I can go back to regular blogging, but for now, I have to put my health first.

Thank you.



Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and can be reached on Twitter under @SoapboxingGeek.