Women in Sports Week: ‘The Blind Side’: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

Movie poster for The Blind Side
This guest post by Nine Deuce previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 23, 2011.
Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.
Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

Sandra Bullock schools Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

The movie chronicles the major events in the life of a black NFL player named Michael Oher from the time he meets the rich white family who adopts him to the time that white family sees him drafted into the NFL, a series of events that apparently proves that racism is either over or OK (I’m not sure which), with a ton of southern football bullshit along the way. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wife of a dude named Sean Tuohy, played by — no shit — Tim McGraw, who is a fairly minor character in the movie despite the fact that he is said to own, like, 90 Taco Bell franchises. The story is that Oher, played by Quinton Aaron, is admitted into a fancy-pants private Christian school despite his lack of legitimate academic records due to the insistence of the school’s football coach and the altruism of the school’s teachers (as if, dude), where he comes into contact with the Tuohy family, who begin to notice that he is sleeping in the school gym and subsisting on popcorn. Ms. Tuohy then invites him to live in the zillion-dollar Memphis Tuophy family compound, encourages him to become the best defensive linebacker he can be by means of cornball familial love metaphors, and teaches him about the nuclear family and the SEC before beaming proudly as he’s drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

The Tuohy family prays over mounds of food

I’m sure that the Tuohy family are lovely people and that they deserve some kind of medal for their good deeds, but if I were a judge, I wouldn’t toss them out of my courtroom should they arrive there bringing a libel suit against whoever wrote, produced, and directed The Blind Side, because it’s handily the dumbest, most racist, most intellectually and politically insulting movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes the Tuohy family — especially their young son S.J. — look like unfathomable assholes. Well, really, it makes all of the white people in the South look like unfathomable assholes. Like these people need any more bad publicity.

Quentin Aaron puts in a pretty awesome performance, if what the director asked him to do was look as pitiful as possible at every moment in order not to scare anyone by being black. Whether that was the goal or not, he certainly did elicit pity from me when Sandra Bullock showed him his new bed and he knitted his brows and, looking at the bed in awe, said, “I’ve never had one of these before.” I mean, the poor bastard had been duped into participating in the creation of a movie that attempts to make bigoted southerners feel good about themselves by telling them that they needn’t worry about poverty or racism because any black person who deserves help will be adopted by a rich family that will provide them with the means to a lucrative NFL contract. Every interaction Aaron and Bullock (or Aaron and anyone else, for that matter) have in the movie is characterized by Aaron’s wretched obsequiousness and the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned over the head with the message that you needn’t fear this black guy. It’s the least dignified role for a black actor since Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of James Robert Kennedy in Radio (a movie Davetavius claims ought to have the subtitle “It’s OK to be black in the South as long as you’re retarded.”). The producers, writers, and director of this movie have managed to tell a story about class, race, and the failures of capitalism and “democratic” politics to ameliorate the conditions poor people of color have to deal with by any means other than sports while scrupulously avoiding analyzing any of those issues and while making it possible for the audience to walk out of the theater with their selfish, privileged, entitled worldviews intact, unscathed, and soundly reconfirmed.

Kathy Bates wants to fist bump Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Then there’s all of the southern bullshit, foremost of which is the football element. The producers of the movie purposely made time for cameos by about fifteen SEC football coaches in order to ensure that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line would drop their $9 in the pot, and the positive representation of football culture in the film is second in phoniness only to the TV version of Friday Night Lights. Actually, fuck that. It’s worse. Let’s be serious. If this kid had showed no aptitude for football, is there any way in hell he’d have been admitted to a private school without the preparation he’d need to succeed there or any money? In the film, the teachers at the school generously give of their private time to tutor Oher and help prepare him to attend classes with the other students. I’ll bet you $12 that shit did not occur in real life. In fact, I know it didn’t. The Tuohy family may or may not have cared whether the kid could play football, but the school certainly did. It is, after all, a southern school, and high school football is a bigger deal in the South than weed is at Bonnaroo.

But what would have happened to Oher outside of school had he sucked at football and hence been useless to white southerners? What’s the remedy for poverty if you’re a black woman? A dude with no pigskin skills? Where are the nacho magnates to adopt those black people? I mean, that’s the solution for everything, right? For all black people to be adopted by rich, paternalistic white people? I know this may come as a shock to some white people out there, but the NFL cannot accommodate every black dude in America, and hence is an imperfect solution to social inequality. I know we have the NBA too, but I still see a problem. But the Blind Side fan already has an answer for me. You see, there is a scene in the movie which illustrates that only some black people deserve to be adopted by wealthy white women. Bullock, when out looking for Oher, finds herself confronted with a black guy who not only isn’t very good at appearing pitiful in order to make her comfortable, but who has an attitude and threatens to shoot Oher if he sees him. What ensues is quite possibly the most loathsome scene in movie history in which Sandra Bullock gets in the guy’s face, rattles off the specs of the gun she carries in her purse, and announces that she’s a member of the NRA and will shoot his ass if he comes anywhere near her family, “bitch.” Best Actress Oscar.

Sandra Bullock braves the Black Neighborhood

Well, there it is. Now you see why this movie made 19 kajillion dollars and won an Oscar: it tells a heartwarming tale of white benevolence, assures the red state dweller that his theory that “there’s black people, and then there’s niggers” is right on, and affords him the chance to vicariously remind a black guy who’s boss through the person of America’s sweetheart. Just fucking revolting.

There are several other cringe-inducing elements in the film. The precocious, cutesy antics of the family’s little son, S.J., for example. He’s constantly making dumb-ass smart-ass comments, cloyingly hip-hopping out with Oher to the tune of  Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” (a song that has been overplayed and passe for ten years but has now joined “Ice Ice Baby” at the top of the list of songs from junior high that I never want to hear again), and generally trying to be a much more asshole-ish version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. At what point will screenwriters realize that everyone wants to punch pint-sized snarky movie characters in the throat? And when will I feel safe watching a movie in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure a scene in which a white dork or cartoon character “raises the roof” and affects a buffalo stance while mouthing a sanitized rap song that even John Ashcroft knows the words to?

Sandra Bullock reads a story to her child son and Michael Oher

And then there’s the scene in which Tim McGraw, upon meeting his adopted son’s tutor (played by Kathy Bates) and finding out she’s a Democrat, says, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a black son before I met a Democrat?” Who would have thought I’d ever hear a “joke” that was less funny and more retch-inducing than Bill Engvall’s material?

What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if  the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.

I just don’t even know what to say about this movie. Watching it may well have been one of the most demoralizing, discouraging experiences of my life, and it removed at least 35% of the hope I’d previously had that this country had any hope of ever being anything but a cultural and social embarrassment. Do yourself a favor. Skip it and watch Welcome to the Dollhouse again.

Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina.

‘The Mortal Instruments’: City of Mansplaining

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Written by Erin Tatum. 
It looks like I’ll be taking the hipster side of things in Women in Sports Week with The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Shadow hunting may not be considered a mainstream sport yet, but then again, most people said that it would be impossible to turn Quidditch into a sport. Those naysayers severely underestimated the number of college kids that would be willing to run around with a broomstick chafing their crotch. I eagerly anticipate the inevitable hordes of geeky/drunk college kids lighting their shadows on fire and stamping them out. Anyway, it’s not like athleticism or any other hobbies are required in City of Bones. If you’re a girl, you barely need to have a functioning brain! Any man within a 50 mile radius will come running to dictate everything you ever wanted to know about life.
Clary and Simon.
Before I get too deep into sarcasm, let’s back up and set the stage for the impending testosterone-saturated wasteland. Full disclaimer that I haven’t read the books, so don’t expect any comparisons. Clary (which sounds suspiciously close to Cassandra Clare, the author) is just a Normal Teenage Girl who has recently been doodling strange symbols everywhere. Her mother Jocelyn (Lena Headey) notices and nervously tries to stop her from going out alone, but Clary (Lily Collins) blows her off to hang out with Simon (Robert Sheehan). Judging by the glasses and khaki jacket, Simon is going to be the geeky friendzoned sidekick. He follows her around like a hopelessly lost puppy, and I’m preemptively gagging at the Anguished Declaration of Love that seems to already be ebbing at the surface. Man, if I could take a second to be shallow, Robert Sheehan is consistently gorgeous, and they have to try really hard to make him frumpy. His career confuses me because he either plays hedonistic pricks or overly romantic saps. Either way, his characters always have lady issues in that he either objectifies them as a Casanova or demonizes them as a nice guy. In case you haven’t guessed, this is clearly going to be a case of the latter.
Jace is 2 pretty 4 u.
Clary drags a reluctant Simon into a club because she recognizes the symbol on the sign as the one she can’t get out of her head, even though no one else can see what she’s talking about. A stranger overhears her and convinces the bouncer to let them through. Inside, Clary sees some odd looking patrons. She watches a mysterious blonde boy kill the stranger and releases a bloodcurdling scream, causing the rest of the club to stare at her in alarm because they once again don’t see what she’s looking at. Clary is rattled, but goes to a coffee shop with Simon the next day. Meanwhile, thugs break into her house and corner her mom, demanding to see an unspecified cup. Jocelyn beats them over the head with a frying pan and barricades herself in the bathroom. She frantically calls the kids. Clary is having a very intense conversation with the blonde boy, Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower). Neither Simon nor Clary picks up her call, which is quite a heavy-handed commentary on how teenagers aren’t emotionally attentive enough to their parents and yada yada. “Kids, pick up calls from your parents on the first ring! You never know if they’re having a near-death experience!” Clary finally answers and Jocelyn tells her she loves her before presumably committing suicide by drinking poison. Kiss that last sweet drop of estrogen goodbye, because it’s more or less a sausage fest from here on out.
“I wonder how soon we can start fighting over her after she wakes up.”
After racing home to save her mom, Clary finds the house abandoned with Jocelyn nowhere in sight. Jace saves her from the last of the demons, brushing off her bewilderment and describing as much of their supernatural world as he can. He and Jocelyn are shadow hunters. This is where the mansplaining starts and it only goes downhill from here. Jace and Clary try and rescue Clary’s family friend Luke from torture, but Clary feels betrayed when Luke tells his captors that he was only cozying up to her family for the cup. Jace tells Clary that they need to go to The Institute, which seems like a poor man’s holographic Hogwarts with more ghosts and less British people. Simon winds up getting dragged along too by coincidence. We can’t have that awkward teen love triangle angst unless all three spokes are shoehorned into the same contrived spectacular battle! Shoving a girl between her socially constipated best friend and a hotter, usually supernatural/sociopathic lust object (or two) has never been done before! Putting a girl in the middle of a heterosexual love triangle may feel progressive in giving the illusion of female agency, but really it just sets her up for failure. Masculine entitlement remains intact; it’s just a question of who she’ll end up with. It’s property ping pong. Clary tearfully collapses on the way to The Institute, reacting quite normally to her life disintegrating in the past 36 hours. Luckily, Jace is there to deliver a rousing monologue about why she needs to do what he tells her, complete with pseudo-eskimo kissing in the pouring rain. They make it to The Institute, where Clary immediately passes out from a demon-inflicted wound. She dramatically faints onto Simon, and then both boys watch in concern as she loses consciousness. Gee, I sure am excited to deal with their circle jerk dynamic for the next 90 minutes!
Alec threatens Clary to keep his secret safe.
Clary’s survival confirms that she’s supernatural. She meets Jace’s tutor, Hodge (Jarred Harris, nearly unrecognizable), who fills her in on the shadow hunters. Everyone seems to like her except Alec (Kevin Zegers). Alec is very possessive of Jace and doesn’t want Clary at The Institute. At this point I joked to my mom that Alec probably had a crush on Jace. What can I say, I try to find homoeroticism in everything when I’m bored or frustrated with a plot. Alec’s sister Isabelle confirms the crush to Clary in the next scene. As excited as I was that one of my crackpot queer angst ideas came true, not even a bisexual love triangle could shake up this hetero snooze fest. It’s a sad day when I type that sentence. For the most part, Alec is portrayed as deeply ashamed of both his orientation and his attraction to Jace, who is oblivious. This might be more sympathetic if they interacted enough to support the original best friend premise. Alec just sort of follows Jace around and tells people to stay away from him but is always belligerent about his motives. Using assumed incompatible orientation as a means for setting up your Alpha couple and fueling Clary’s entitlement complex is lazy and vaguely homophobic in that it establishes Clary as a doe-eyed beacon of femininity wrongfully pitted against the delusional, predatory gay.
Looking hot while defeated is a complicated art form.
The gang has to go to a party at Magnus Bane’s to get answers about why Clary’s memory is blocked. This conveniently involves dressing very provocatively. As the only other remaining female cast member, Isabelle gives Clary tips on how to sex it up. Clary proves her identity as a Good Girl by complaining incessantly that she looks like a prostitute, an opinion immediately confirmed by the men as soon as they leave Isabelle’s room. Nonetheless, Jace compliments her and Simon stares at her dry mouthed. Simon cements his emasculation by being roofied at the party and kidnapped by vampires. Of course, Jace engineers a dramatic rescue because Clary is too distraught to think clearly. Those silly women and their emotions! The vampires attack Jace and company on their way out, leading to some elaborate sword fighting while a weakened Simon pathetically stumbles around in the background, his weight supported by Clary. As soon as Simon loses his claim to masculinity, he also loses his humanity. The worst thing you can be in this movie is feminine or effeminate, unless you’re Clary, and even then you have to have a truck load of special powers to compensate for it. I choose to ignore the gendered fuckery of this scene and focus on the fact that Robert Sheehan is shirtless.
“This is not the sleeping arrangement I imagined.”
While Simon recovers, Clary and Jace take the opportunity to celebrate Clary’s recent birthday because they’re both vapid, self-absorbed people. Jace takes her to some sort of garden room with incredibly crappy CGI effects. They have an Almost Kiss, but Jace cuts it off, which seems anticlimactic until Clary trips and falls into him, leading to a gratuitous make out session. A fantastic drinking game for City of Bones would be to take a shot every time Clary gasps. Girl has an excellent and/or terrible set of lungs. Simon predictably opens his door just as Jace and Clary are leaning in for the farewell kiss. An epic stereo geyser of friendzoned tantrums ensues. Jace is offended by Clary’s attempts to downplay their relationship to Simon, storming off and shouting, “the kiss wasn’t that special to me either!!1!1” Oh, just shut up and kiss Alec already. Simon piles on by giving Clary the profession of love she’s been avoiding the entire movie. As annoyed as I am with the romanticization of male entitlement, my biggest issue lies with what makes people like Jace and Clary worthy of such tortured admirers in the first place. They’re both just pretty faces with zero substance and a bunch of informed attributes. There is no there there. Simon and Alec should hook up instead.
“I’ll never drink from a red solo cup again!”

Every guy continues to tell Clary how she should act and how she should feel and about her past and what she can and can’t handle until some plot has to happen. The implications of deliberately denying a young woman knowledge about her own abilities through memory suppression out of mercy has startling echoes of rape culture and is therefore glossed over by the excitement of the romantic tension in Jace and Clary’s mentor–student dynamic. Alec is gravely wounded by the only prominent woman of color in the film who turns out to be an evil witch because I guess they’re just going for a stereotype smorgasbord at this point. Magnus Bane arrives to heal him, but it will take the rest of the movie, freeing up Jace to go be a hero and avoid any serious discussion of Alec’s feelings. Jace also barely interacts with Alec after his injury, in contrast to Clary, who the narrative would like you to believe almost single-handedly nursed Simon back to health. Some best friend. Also, Clary stole the Mortal Cup back from the witch, and some dude named Valentino comes back, which the audience knows is bad because the whole reason Jocelyn drank the poison was to avoid him.

“Halt! I will smite you with my inexplicable appeal!”

I apologize that my summary of the finale will be somewhat brief and scattered. My estrogen-addled brain must not have been complex enough to understand it and I didn’t have a man with me to explain what was happening. The final climax goes on for what feels like years and it just refuses to die. We get some backstory diarrhea in a last-ditch effort to turn Jace and Clary into compelling characters. Basically, Valentino pulls a Darth Vader on Clary and says that he is her father. Hodge is apparently evil and in cahoots with Valentino to get the cup. There is a Seaworld-esque water portal of great significance, which Clary manages to dive into without issue despite the fact that you supposedly need years of training to do so. She’s just that special. Her mom is in suspended animation a la Hercules on the other side. Valentino tells Jace that he’s his father as well, making Jace and Clary brother and sister. This is probably a lie because Hodge pulled the suggestion of said truth bomb out of his ass when he didn’t want Valentino yelling at him, but it might be true, and there’s some flashback evidence to support it. Either way, Jace and Clary’s near sexytimes just became very awkward. Simon and Isabelle have been hanging out a lot and fighting together, so I’m sure he will be settling for her in the future. Clary saves the day when she carves another unknown symbol into her hand to stop the shadow monsters because she realizes she can manipulate anything she points the symbol at. This is both a weird glorification of self harm and a cringe-inducing level of Mary Sueness. No one has ever seen her power before! She patches up things with Luke and rouses her mom from her coma with an apologetic monologue of love. Yawn.

“My head says incest, but my heart says yes!”

All seems well as Jocelyn recovers from the hospital with Luke by her side. Simon says (ha!) sorry for being a pouty douche and delivers the death knoll for his own relevance by voluntarily opting out of the love triangle, at least for now. Clary returns home and uses the same power that she just saved an entire building of people with to tidy the house. Supernatural abilities – good for salvaging humanity and preparing to be a housewife! Jace appears to compliment her domestic skills and calls her an angel. That’s likely foreshadowing, but I threw up in my mouth regardless. The problem with female exceptionalism is it really loses its luster of empowerment if it’s only affirmed by the approval of the male gaze. Jace admits that he doesn’t think the sibling allegations are true and Clary hesitantly wraps her arms around his waist as they ride off on a motorcycle to contemplate their potentially incestuous future.

Women in Sports Week: ‘Edge of America’: Indigenous Communitism on the Hardwood

Movie poster for Edge of America

This is a guest post by Amanda Morris.

The opening images of Showtime’s movie, Edge of America, directed by Chris Ayre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), and inspired by a true story, are of a journey. A car drives through a peopleless desert landscape on an open and carless road. The driver, Kenny Williams (James McDaniel), is the new English teacher for the Three Nations Reservation in New Mexico. Our first view of the reservation is through his eyes as he stops at the edge of a pond and consults his map as he tries to find his way. But the first spoken words we hear are the Navajo language as two tribal women dicker over a price at a roadside stand. This outsider/insider construct continues throughout the movie as Kenny navigates and learns reservation life and culture through his female colleagues and students and especially his players once he agrees to coach the girls’ basketball team.

Movie still of the Lady Warriors on the basketball court
Based on the opening scenes, the viewer might assume that this story is about Kenny, but it is not. This movie ultimately focuses on community, defining one’s own identity, and the grounding strength of women. Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver created the term “communitism” by combining “community” and “activism” in his book, That the People May Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. The concept works well to describe what happens in this movie. Weaver writes, “Native peoples find their individual identities in the collectivity of community” (160). Edge of America is also a good example of representational sovereignty, in which “the Native is self-defining” instead of being colonialist minstrels for the dominant culture (163). The girls that Kenny recruits to play as Lady Warriors certainly face identity challenges in academic terms: None of them performs well academically and so were not allowed to join the basketball team, despite being the best players. As a result, the team is filled with lesser-skilled girls who flounder and have an impressive losing streak. School radio DJ Dwayne (Cody Lightning, Plains Cree), frequently reminds his listeners that the Lady Warriors are “all losers, all the time.”

James McDaniel, Delanna Studi, and Irene Bedard in Edge of America
Being defined as losers is something that the girls struggle to reverse as the movie progresses. Kenny guides them through physically hard practices and mentally hard readjustments of their personal expectations, and the Lady Warriors begin to coalesce into a self-defined community of proud women basketball players, but the road toward this goal is not straight.

This film privileges the indigenous perspective from the start and specifically shows strong women guiding the action either explicitly or implicitly. From Mother Tsosie (Geraldine Keams, Navajo) telling Kenny, “Drive” when he gives her a ride to the res in the movie’s second scene, to Annie Shorty (Irene Bedard, Inupiat/French Canadian/Cree) saving Kenny by giving him a ride to school the first day when his car breaks down, to Carla McKinney (Delanna Studi, Cherokee) teaching Kenny a lesson about humor and stories in his classroom. Each woman that Kenny encounters has something to teach. Annie challenges Kenny’s coaching strategy when he runs the girls hard during basketball practice and again near the end of the film. After the Lady Warriors have made it to the state finals, Annie and Kenny face off in a hotel room over his anger and his inability to accept imperfection in his players. Annie tells him that the girls have done everything he’s asked, from practicing hard and getting good grades, to winning. Kenny asks, “Then you tell me why I’m pissed off.” Annie retorts gently, “Because you’re a black man in America.” Kenny snidely agrees and Annie yells, “Well then get over it. You’re talkin’ to Indian people here. Get over it, get on with it, or get the hell out!”

The Lady Warriors look on as their coach sings the National Anthem
Many scenes involve such confrontations of assumptions, whether subtle or overt. In one softer scene, “Baby” Tsosie (Trini King, Navajo) experiences a traditional healing ceremony by her mother before a practice after she loses her ability to sink a basket, which Kenny disrupts and dismisses, saying, “Look, anybody who’s been witched, stand over there; the rest of us have basketball practice.” The community of women in whose presence this ceremony takes place is broken, and when Mother Tsosie calls African American Kenny a “white man” in Navajo and leaves, Annie asks Kenny, “Are you out of your mind? Insulting an elder like that?”

Kenny may be the English teacher and girls’ basketball coach, but he has a lot to learn about tradition, community, ceremony, and the ideas that are important to Three Nations peoples. In this respect, Kenny is the viewer’s guide, helping us to understand, even superficially, that indigenous peoples still exist and have ideas and practices that may sound and feel unfamiliar–but that resonate with truth. Eventually, a fellow teacher, Cuch (Wes Studi, Cherokee), takes him out into the desert for a talk.

Cuch offers Kenny a new perspective

Judgments and assumptions frequently threaten to subvert or ruin relationships and weaken the strength of community as each scene builds to the final game, but strong women are often the reason those relationships and community sense don’t fall apart in this film. Kenny learns to adapt his colonial assumptions and expectations to the needs of his Lady Warriors and discovers his own identity in the process.

The cast of Edge of America
In the skillful hands of director Chris Ayre, Edge of America presents the idea of indigenous peoples as communities with dignity, humor, intelligence, and skill, which is in direct opposition to the typical Hollywood “Indian.” Truly, this film is a refreshing change from that norm and a more realistic presentation of the realities, challenges, and joys of modern reservation life. Viewers likewise learn to think in new ways about American Indians today, thanks to the vivid storytelling and representations of one corner of indigenous experience in Edge of America.

Watch the trailer here. 

Amanda Morris, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of multiethnic rhetorics at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, and when she’s not writing or wrangling students, she loves shark fishing, gardening, and cooking with her man.

Anna Gunn Breaks the Fourth Wall in a ‘New York Times’ Op/Ed

Skyler White (Anna Gunn) sheds a light on our society’s misogyny.
It isn’t rare to see an actor or actress to take to the op/ed pages to pen support or disdain for political issues and candidates or to come forward with personal stories to enlighten and advocate. The actor or actress, however, typically speaks as an individual, removed from his or her fictional life. 
However, Anna Gunn (Skyler White on Breaking Bad) took to The New York Times opinion page to tackle an issue that brings the fictional world that Skyler inhabits into Gunn’s personal world. She weaves in the cultural causes and implications of the vitriol directed at Skyler’s character, at Gunn herself, and at certain kinds of women in our society.
In the beautifully written and poignant “I Have a Character Issue,” she describes how she expected, and even understood, that her character was not going to be well-loved at first. After all, she is Walt’s antagonist, and Walt is the protagonist–the greedy, depraved, meticulously drawn anti-hero.
In her analysis of the horrible response Skyler received from Breaking Bad fans (including Facebook pages that we’ve written about at length), Gunn briefly touches upon her fulfillment in playing the role, and her fear for her own safety when online threats and death wishes devolved from using Skyler’s name to actually singling out Anna Gunn–the real person, not the character she played. Her focus, however, is that this response to Skyler is part of a much larger problem in our culture.
Gunn writes,

“My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.”

And with that, she nails it. Feminists have spent a great deal of time suggesting that the hatred of Skyler White (and other notable anti-heros’ wives) is rooted in misogyny. Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and writer, acknowledged this in a Vulture interview last May. He said,

“…I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple.”

For those of us who already knew that, this was a refreshing sound byte. However, there is much more to audiences’ reactions to Skyler, and Gunn’s piece takes that simple reflection on misogyny and unpacks it, giving meaning to our reactions to the fictional world as being indicative of our society as a whole. And she’s right.
Gunn says,  

“…I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”

The Skyler White Rorschach test has certainly revealed a great deal of hideous, blatant misogyny and hatred toward women who don’t conform.

Gunn’s New York Times op/ed breaks through a glass fourth wall. Not only is Skyler White one of the most complex female characters on television, but Gunn also uses her real voice in a national publication to lend force to the idea that the hatred and violence directed toward her character, and toward her, reveals much more about our society than most would be willing to admit.

Art imitates life. Life imitates art. And how we feel about that art tells us a great deal about ourselves. In the case of how much hate is directed at characters like Skyler White, it’s no wonder that the work of women’s equality activists–whether they are fighting for proper representation in the media or working for pro-women legislation–is not nearly done.

________________________________________________________

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

Bitch Flicks Weekly Picks

Gender Flipping in Hollywood by Holly L. Derr at Ms. Magazine Blog

First Annual Studio Responsibility Index Finds Lack of Substantial LGBT Characters in Mainstream Films by Max Gouttebroze at GLAAD

25 Movies by Female Directors Every Aspiring Filmmaker Should See by Michelle Dean via Flavorwire

Will Black Actresses Ever Catch Up To Their Peers? by Aisha Harris at Slate 

Julie Taymor’s 10 Golden Rules of Moviemaking by Jennifer M. Wood at MovieMaker

13 Kickass Women’s Movie Roles Originally Meant for Men by Autumn Harbison at PolicyMic

How Cristina Yang Changed Television by Willa Paskin at Slate

The Skyler White Problem: Can We Accept Complex Female Characters? by Jos Truitt at Feministing

Wonder Woman Can’t Have It All by Alexander Abad-Santos at The Atlantic Wire

Racism within white feminist spaces by Mia at Black Feminists Manchester

On Feminist Solidarity and Community: Where Do We Go from Here? by Mikki Kendall at Ebony

A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast

“The Butler,” My Grandmother, and the Politics of Subversion by Nijla Mu’min at Bitch Media

I Have a Character Issue by Anna Gunn at The New York Times


What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Gender Flipping in Hollywood by Holly L. Derr at Ms. Magazine Blog

First Annual Studio Responsibility Index Finds Lack of Substantial LGBT Characters in Mainstream Films by Max Gouttebroze at GLAAD

25 Movies by Female Directors Every Aspiring Filmmaker Should See by Michelle Dean via Flavorwire

Will Black Actresses Ever Catch Up To Their Peers? by Aisha Harris at Slate 

Julie Taymor’s 10 Golden Rules of Moviemaking by Jennifer M. Wood at MovieMaker

13 Kickass Women’s Movie Roles Originally Meant for Men by Autumn Harbison at PolicyMic

How Cristina Yang Changed Television by Willa Paskin at Slate

The Skyler White Problem: Can We Accept Complex Female Characters? by Jos Truitt at Feministing

Wonder Woman Can’t Have It All by Alexander Abad-Santos at The Atlantic Wire

Racism within white feminist spaces by Mia at Black Feminists Manchester

On Feminist Solidarity and Community: Where Do We Go from Here? by Mikki Kendall at Ebony

A Day In the Life of a Troubled Male Antihero by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast

“The Butler,” My Grandmother, and the Politics of Subversion by Nijla Mu’min at Bitch Media

I Have a Character Issue by Anna Gunn at The New York Times


What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

The Ten Most-Read Posts from July 2013

Did you miss these popular posts on Bitch Flicks? If so, here’s your chance to catch up.
 

“Sixteen Candles, Rape Culture, and the Anti-Woman Politics of 2013″ by Stephanie Rogers

“The Killing and the Misogyny of Hating Bad Mothers” by Leigh Kolb

“Does Hollywood Revolve Around Men? ‘One Man’ Video Says Yes” by Megan Kearns

“Glee‘s Not So Gleeful Representation of Disabled Women” by Erin Tatum

“The Flattening of Celine: How Before Midnight Reduces a Feminist Icon” by Molly McCaffrey

“Cool Robots, Bad-Ass Monsters and Disappointment in Pacific Rim“ by Leigh Kolb

“Am I the Only Feminist Who Didn’t Really Like The Heat? Or Why I Want My Humor Intersectional” by Megan Kearns

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Consent Issues (Seasons 1-2)” by Lady T

“The To Do List: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For” by Leigh Kolb

“The Strong Yet Traditional Women of World War Z“ by Amanda Rodriguez

Revisiting ‘Down In The Delta,’ Maya Angelou’s Only Feature Film

Down in the Delta film poster.
I love, LOVE Maya Angelou.
She is one of my favorite inspirational women of all time, and I could praise her remarkable contributions to writing and activism forever.
When I discovered that she directed only one feature film, a film I had actually seen long ago, I decided to give it another watch and looked online. Thank you, Netflix!
Down in The Delta, with a screenplay by Myron Goble, begins with Loretta Sinclair, an undereducated African American woman strung out on drugs and alcohol, raising two children in a three-generational household, and struggling to find a job in rough Chicago. Upset that she cannot answer a single mathematical equation or find a job sweeping or mopping floors at a corner store, she dives deeper into the free, alluring drug world and her mother has to save her yet again.
In films and television, the poor single mother angle never stops, and adding lack of book smarts becomes a horse beaten to death. I personally didn’t think Angelou would angle into this pigeonholed concept of minority women, but eventually Alfre Woodard turned into a “Phenomenal Woman”–just not in the most congratulatory manner.
Rosa Lyn (Mary Alice) has a big idea that will keep her daughter on the righteous track.
Rosa Lyn, Loretta’s savior of a mother, pawns off a sterling silver candelabra heirloom (which is nicknamed “Nathan”). Loretta looks at it both shocked and hungry–that notorious expression of a drug fiend knowing prize could score ample amounts of desired inebriation. Alas, Rosa Lyn only intends that Nathan be sacrificed in order to pay for bus tickets so that Loretta and her kids have a brighter future down south.
However, Rosa Lyn wants Loretta to earn the money necessary to get Nathan back in the family.
Rosa Lyn (Mary Alice) pawns off Nathan the candelabra for bus tickets to Tracy (Kulania Hessan), Nathan (Mpho Koaho), and Loretta (Alfre Woodard).
Away from tempting drugs and hardship, Earl asks Loretta to work for him at his restaurant, Just Chicken, and teaches her how to make his famous chicken sausages. She has a hard time getting it right, but eventually she does and moves onto playing a bigger role into the restaurant field. This leads to the most disappointing part of the film. She discovers purpose not just in the Delta itself, but inside of a greasy chicken sausage joint. The situation isn’t particularly humorous or exciting. In fact, speaking from a vegan standpoint, I find it pretty distasteful, especially as a climactic point. When the small town bands together to stop the closing of the chicken plant, it becomes a cheesy outstretched manifesto of people proudly boasting about their beloved meat, disregarding slaughterhouses where the most incredibly unimaginable suffering takes place–a sacrificial unwanted suffering so eerily similar to that of Jesse. Chickens are forced into small cages, plucked and boiled alive, and all kinds of other horrors before being murdered, but Angelou praises the long hindered stereotype about African Americans’ adoration of chicken. It is heard so clearly that ears start to bleed from preaching. One wonders if  that passion would remain devoutly strong if fruits and vegetable crops were similarly threatened.
I’m not trying to bash the love of chicken, but the chicken and African American relationship is so difficult to handle that it in itself becomes ludicrously overdone. The closeness to joining hands and singing spirituals left behind a sour taste.
However, the story behind Nathan the candelabra serves as a better narrative and has Angelou’s signature poignancy all over the polished sentimentality. Jesse, a family ancestor, stole the valuable sterling silver antique from his former owners, an act of revenge instilled inside since age six when watching his father get sold off auction block style, as though he were nothing more than a common object, not a human being with mind and beating heart. Candelabra, named Nathan after a father Jesse never found, has been passed down to the male line, but Eddie gives it to Loretta, marking a new sense of tradition, a new entrusted foundation.
Years ago, no one would have ever considered her worthy.
Loretta (Alfre Woodard) and Earl (the late Al Freeman Jr.) have much in common.
Down In The Delta brushes on Alzheimer’s Disease and autism and beautifully weaves how family copes with the two perilous circumstances. In one of Esther Rolle’s final roles, she plays Annie, Earl’s wife. It is wonderful how much Earl cares about Annie and has overprotective need to keep her safe from harm. But he has to keep doors and windows locked, shielding Annie inside a childproof environment.
“First she couldn’t find her keys,” states Earl. “Then she forgot what the keys were for.”
Meanwhile, Tracy, Loretta’s autistic daughter, has screamed, cried, and hollered nearly the entire film, leaving terrified strangers to think her a monstrous and demonic child. In a scene after the bus arrives at a location, a distraught woman blasts Loretta’s parenting skills, blaming her for not being able to control Tracy. Everyone wonders why Loretta keeps Tracy inside of a crib, but like Earl, Loretta is protecting Tracy from endangering herself. Angelou parallels Earl and Loretta’s dealings with disease, their gnawing frustrations and little triumphs, and bridges their connection closer together. It is not romantic, but friendly, familial, and bittersweet, one that succeeds because they provide comfort to each other. 
Loretta also spends time with Annie’s caretaker, Zenia who offers her beer. Now Loretta, appearing uncomfortable and noticeably silent, could have easily declined. Alcoholism is a real disease to master and for her to suddenly kick back and have a chuckle makes light of the real difficulty people have just being around a bottle–having one little drink (or in this case, a whole bottle) is downright impossible.
The late Roger Ebert, however, was one of several critics who enjoyed Down in the Delta:
“Angelou’s first-time direction stays out of its own way; she doesn’t call attention to herself with unnecessary visual touches, but focuses on the business at hand. She and [Myron] Goble are interested in what might happen in a situation like this, not in how they can manipulate the audience with phony crises. When Annie wanders away from the house, for example, it’s handled in the way it might really be handled, instead of being turned into a set piece.”
Down in the Delta ends with the “feel good” message that life can be filled with turmoil and can appear inescapable, especially to a minority woman, but it’s never too late to turn things around. After Nathan is “rescued” from the pawn shop and handed down to Loretta, everyone now trusts her, the threat of drugs/alcoholism disappears, and Earl promotes her to running Just Chicken so that he can spend more time with Annie. Loretta now has reached a positive place. 
As director, Maya Angelou’s spirit floated between the Mississippi-centered delta, but sometimes drifted away like it was never there.
However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want her to make another film. 
In fact, I wish she would.

‘Orange is the New Black’ and Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome


The cast of Orange is the New Black.

Written by Myrna Waldron.

I am not much of a TV watcher. I prefer films for a few reasons – they don’t take as long to watch, plots are resolved, character arcs don’t get derailed, etc. But I’ve started bingeing on Netflix in a smaller window while I work with Photoshop in a larger one. And, upon enthusiastic recommendations from Bitch Flicks Editor Megan and my friend Isabel, I decided to check out Netflix’s original series Orange is the New Black. (Minor spoiler alert, by the way.)

I expected to hate it. I usually avoid tragedies and horror, and since the series is set in a women’s prison I was visualizing Oz-level violence. And then I ended up bingeing on it – not because it was particularly lighthearted (it’s really a drama with a sprinkling of comedy) but because I wanted to know more about Piper’s fellow inmates. I was thrilled that, for once, a TV series was giving voice to the types of women who usually get silenced – black women, hispanic women, lesbian women, trans women, older women, fat women. And they’re all inmates, the types of people that we especially try to ignore. I can honestly say OitNB has the most diverse cast I have ever seen.

And yet it is obvious to me and to others who have written on the show that it painfully illustrates the pervasiveness of privilege, especially white privilege. Piper Chapman is beautiful, thin, passes for straight, is comfortably wealthy, supported by friends, family and a lover, has somewhere to go when her sentence is up, and was convicted for a nonviolent crime. It’s also obvious that although the series has an unusually diverse cast, it only got greenlit because the main character is a pretty white woman.

And oh my god, I hate her.

She’s selfish, she’s spoiled, she’s rude, she refuses to admit guilt for anything, she breaks the hearts of the few people left who support her, she references the Kinsey Scale yet refuses to use the word “bisexual,” and she keeps pretending she’s just a sweet little nice girl who hasn’t really done anything wrong and doesn’t belong in prison.  Fuck that. On her first day in prison, she proves just what kind of person she is by complaining about the food to (unbeknownst to her) the head chef. Lady, you’re getting food for free. Some of these women came from the streets where they had nothing. Suck it up. The chef’s decision to starve Piper for a few days is disproportionate retribution, but it finally starts to give the message to Piper that she’s in prison and she needs to stop thinking that she’s above it all.

Fortunately, the series makes it clear that I’m NOT supposed to like Piper and that she’s in some ways more fucked up than the women sentenced for more severe crimes. But it got me thinking that, in most, if not all of the fictional TV series I’ve watched, the main character is never my favourite – and is sometimes my least favourite. And it drives me nuts when the series focuses so much on a main character I don’t like that much. Stop showing me Piper’s bullshit and tell me more about Sophia!

Since making this realization, I have started referring to my recurring loathing for main characters as “Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome.” Sex and the City operated under the assumption that I was supposed to like Carrie, but I usually fast-forwarded over her scenes because I was going to vomit if I watched her spend thousands of dollars on goddamn shoes again, and then watch her be an absolutely terrible person to the people who (inexplicably) love her. I wanted more Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. And instead I just got lots of Carrie being her neurotic, selfish, irresponsible self. I like Sarah Jessica Parker. I think most of the “horse” jokes about her face are untrue and sexist. But man do I hate Carrie.

I thought about my favourite fictional TV series and where I stand on their main protagonists. (And yes, I watch a lot of animation.)

Sailor Moon – Not my favourite character, she’s pretty close to the bottom. (My favourites are the ones who, comparatively speaking, were in the series the least.)

Futurama – Fry is not my favourite, it’s Bender, and Fry annoys me half of the time.

Adventure Time – Don’t dislike Finn, but I vastly prefer Marceline.

ReBoot – Bob’s okay, don’t like Enzo, but Dot is amazing.

Avatar the Last Airbender – Aang annoys me. I prefer Toph and Zuko.

Young Justice – No real main character here, but there was too much Superboy and Miss Martian and not nearly enough of everyone else.

Star Trek TOS – Boo Kirk. Yay Spock.

The only series I can think of where I don’t dislike or feel neutral towards the main character(s) are the ones with balanced ensemble casts, like Downton Abbey, Community and Slayers.

And the more I think about it, the more I wonder why I tend to dislike main protagonists so much. Is it because series tend to focus so much on the main character that I get sick of them? Is it because I crave more of the stories of the characters that don’t get told? Am I just a rebel or something?

And is it just me who experiences “Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome?”



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 and @Misandrificent.



‘Breaking Bad’ and the Power of Women: Skyler, Lydia and Marie Take Control

Skyler is calling the shots now.
Written by Leigh Kolb
Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Throughout the last five seasons of Breaking Bad, the female characters have played key roles–from playing adversaries to aiding and abetting–yet they are often overlooked as secondary characters. In fact, a recent article in The Atlantic doesn’t even mention any of the female characters (save for a passing mention of Jane being a “lovely” secondary character in an infographic). While Walt and Jesse are the focus of the series, and they operate in a largely masculine and man-centric world, without Skyler and Lydia, they would have been stopped long ago. 
Skyler thought of the car wash. She got the car wash. She laundered the money and kept it safe. She kept the IRS away from her boss and her household. She is consistently rational and protective of her life and her family.
Lydia provided an “ocean” of methylamine. She had threats to the business taken care of. She expanded the operation overseas, and won’t settle for disappointed customers. She is fiercely in charge of her business.
Marie figured out the details of Skyler and Walt’s deceptions quicker than Hank did. She’s willing to attempt to steal–baby Holly this time, not a spoon–to punish Skyler and protect her niece.
Is there a new holy trinity in Albuquerque? 
We can’t help but think about the juxtaposition of scenes in last summer’s “Fifty-One” when Skyler submerges herself in the pool and we cut to Lydia at an electrical grid. Each episode, these two become increasingly invested in and in control of producing and protecting Walt’s legacy. Skyler confronted Lydia at the car wash, but that was her home turf. Surely they’ll meet again–and that meeting (like the water and electricity) could be deadly.

(It’s important to note that this most recent episode, “Buried”–perhaps the most woman-centric of the series–was also directed by Emmy-nominated Michelle MacLaren, who some critics consider the show’s “best director.” Another fun fact? A female chemistry professor is the show’s “lead meth consultant.”)

However, the male characters (and audience members) habitually underestimate the women. Hank assumes Skyler is an innocent victim. “Ladies first,” Declan says to Lydia. 

In “Buried,” Skyler and Lydia are rising to the top of their prospective enterprises. 
Skyler covers a sickly Walt with a feminine quilt, comforting him, and nursing him back to health. “Maybe our best move here is to stay quiet,” she says, acknowledging that to keep the money and keep all of them relatively safe, they need to not talk. She reassures Walt that Hank seemed to have “suspicions, but not much else.” (She knows this because Hank corners her in a diner and tries to get her to talk and give him something–she refuses, screaming “Am I under arrest?” to get out of the situation.) Hank calls her a victim. By the end of the episode, it is clear that Skyler’s no victim. How far could Walt have gotten without her?
The feminine is highlighted in “Buried,” and given great power.
Lydia visits the meth lab in the desert, where Declan and company are making meth that is not up to her or her Czech clients’ standards. “It’s filthy,” she says of the lab. “What are you, my mother?” Declan responds. They underestimate Lydia. If they would have listened to her and followed her pure-meth protocol, perhaps they would have survived. She covers her eyes as she walks past the carnage that she ordered (she was brought to the desert blindfolded, and chose to leave blindly). She steps next to corpses with her feminine, red-soled Christian Louboutins.

If the cooks had listened to Lydia, things would have ended differently.

Lydia often isn’t focused on as a main character, but those Louboutins are carrying her into a pivotal role. But will she be taken seriously? A critic at Slate said, “Her girliness is annoying—calling Declan’s lab ‘filthy’ was sure to make him reference his mom—but she also happened to be right. The man had no standards.” Would Walt have been “annoying” if he had critiqued the way a lab was run? Probably not. 
Even with Skyler and Lydia’s power plays and scheming, too many are still focused on the likability of the female characters. (In a thread on Breaking Bad‘s facebook page right now, hoards of people are calling for Skyler to be beaten or killed.) Lydia is too “girlish.” And Marie? “She is so annoying that she deserves to die.”
Critics and audiences wring their hands over who we’re “supposed” to like in Breaking Bad. If we operate in high-school superlative absolutes of “most likable” and “most hated,” how would Vince Gilligan have us categorize the characters? Are we truly supposed to feel good about liking anyone but Jesse?
In reality, we’re allowed to like male characters who maim, kill and hurt children. We’re allowed to root for male anti-heroes and revel in their dirty dealings. The women? Well, if they’re not likable, Internet commenters want them dead. 
In “She Who Dies With the Most ‘Likes’ Wins?” Jessica Valenti argues,

“Yes, the more successful you are—or the stronger, the more opinionated—the less you will be generally liked… But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it… Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using the cues of the actors around you to determine your next line rather than your own script. It means that your self-worth will always be tied to what someone else thinks about you, forever out of your control.”

And while I’m fairly certain Valenti wasn’t cheering on money launderers, murderers, or meth dealers, the women of Breaking Bad have appeared to break bad. Their moves will undoubtedly decide the course of the rest of the series.
Audiences, though, too often want to box female characters into “likable” and “hate and kill” categories. While Skyler populated the latter category for years, it seems as if people are now–to an extent–trying to wedge her into the “likable” category. (This critic lauds her as the “best character” on Breaking Bad, and describes her as a wife and mother and extols the virtues of her as a moral center–why does she have to be moral to be a good character? Is it because she’s a woman?) 
The Breaking Bad social media team coined #Skysenberg after “Buried,” showing that Skyler has crossed over and fully enmeshed herself with Heisenberg. (This is awfully and misguidedly close to her taking her husband’s name and adopting his characteristics. Because Skyler isn’t necessarily doing what she’s doing to protect Walt.) 
This symbolic move into Walt’s court, though, won her some new fans: 
Ugh, awful women.
High five, bro!
Heisenberg is sacred–no girls allowed!
And that’s what’s most important.
Yes. You’re right. Everything he did was for her.
Ding ding ding!
Skyler doesn’t care if you like her. Neither does Lydia. Or Marie. Gilligan himself recognizes the hatred and has said, “I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple.” Skyler, Lydia and Marie are poised to decide the outcome of Breaking Bad. Skyler is calling the shots instead of Heisenberg. Lydia is decimating–and will certainly replace–a drug cartel. Marie desperately wants to see Walt and Skyler punished; her desire for revenge seems to overshadow Hank’s desire to protect his career.

In the excellent “I hate Strong Female Characters,” Sophia McDougall points out that

“If Strong-Male-Character compatibility was the primary criterion of writing heroes, our fiction would be a lot poorer. But it’s within this claustrophobic little box that we expect our heroines to live out their lives.”

Skyler and Lydia especially are clearly breaking out of these boxes, and Marie isn’t very far behind. But aren’t women supposed to be moral centers? Aren’t their roles as “wife” and “mother” supposed to define them? Aren’t they supposed to not get their hands dirty? We are so accustomed to enjoying and eagerly watching male antiheroes, but watching female characters embody the same traits has been, until now, incredibly rare.

At this point in the series, though, these complex female characters are calling the shots. (“The men are basically just sitting around diddling themselves,” my husband said.)

We don’t need to like female characters for them to be well-drawn and powerful (just like we don’t need to like Walt). We need to get over that. Skyler, Lydia and Marie aren’t just wives and/or mothers anymore. The are characters–not just female characters, or worse yet, “strong female characters.” They are effective and compelling, just how characters who happen to be women should be.

Skyler isn’t Skysenberg. She’s Skyler. And she’s got this.

Are we done here?

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

‘Elysium’: A Sci-Fi Immigration Parable

Elysium Movie Poster
I was surprised that I not only liked, but was impressed by Elysium. I had my doubts because it’s a Hollywood blockbuster, and their interpretation of the tenets of sci-fi usually leaves much to be desired. Also, I just really, really don’t like Matt Damon and his…face. The film centers around a poverty-stricken dystopian Earth and the lavishly constructed off-world satellite habitat, Elysium, where only the rich and powerful are allowed to live. Elysium doesn’t do much that’s interesting with gender, but its focus on class and race relations, particularly on immigration, is the heart and soul of this film.
There are only three women of note in Elysium. Matt Damon’s character, Max, is an orphan raised in a religious orphanage. There is one nun who doesn’t see him as a hopeless trouble-maker with no hope of a future. The film implies that many impoverished children who turn to crime have little in their home lives to bolster them and give them a sense of self-worth. This nun instills in young Max a sense of purpose, insisting that he has a destiny every bit as important as anyone on Elysium. Though this nun is compassionate, she exists primarily to show why Max is at his core a good person despite the hardness of his life and in spite of his path of crime. 
Then there’s Alice Braga’s Frey, a nurse who was Max’s childhood sweetheart. Frey has “made something of herself” and has a daughter, Matilda, who is dying. Frey, too, exists only as Max’s love interest and a symbol of motherhood. Frey is constantly under threat of rape by psychotic ex-military Kruger (played by Sharlto Copley) and his men who have kidnapped her in order to force compliance from Max. The looming threat of sexual violence only exists to showcase the effect such an eventuality would have on our hero. Frey would also risk everything to get her daughter to Elysium where healing machines are readily available in every home to cure her daughter of her terminal illness. The selfless, sacrificing mother is not a new or even interesting trope in cinema.
Frey becomes increasingly distressed as her daughter slips into a coma.
Finally, we have Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, Elysium’s Secretary of Defense. Delacourt is cold and casually cruel. Her power is not only emasculating, but she is a dangerous nationalist who resorts to illegality in order to protect the purity of Elysium from “illegals” who land on the satellite’s surface in rogue shuttles before scattering in the hopes of blending with Elysium citizens or at least acquiring medical care before being deported back to Earth. Delacourt has a great deal of power that she exercises freely, and she is extremely intelligent and even brilliant in the machinations of her overblown patriotism. However, the severe, emotionless, tyrannical female power figurehead is also not a new trope, and there’s little that makes Delacourt a complex or engaging character.
Jodi Foster’s sterile white pantsuit blends with the sterile white walls of Elysium’s “Administration.”
What is interesting about Elysium, however, is its overwhelmingly non-white cast. Most of the characters are Latino or Black, and it seems the primary language on Earth is Spanish. Our Earth setting is Los Angeles. Many of these disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth (including Max) are employed in manufacturing, spending their days making the very robots that secure Elysium against them. (They were pretty fucking cool robots, though.) Aside from Matt Damon, most of the white characters are either privileged people of wealth or figures of authority who are shown in a negative light. In fact, all the white characters with speaking roles are coded as “bad guys.” The racial dynamics in this film crystallize its sci-fi allegory for immigration. 
Technological genius and champion for immigrant citizenry, Spider, proposes a dangerous job to Max and his friend Julio.
After showing the desolation of Earth and the dire, unequal plight of its inhabitants, what is the solution Elysium poses to the so-called “immigration problem”? Indiscriminate citizenry for all. The tale becomes a fantasy of upending a brutal system that favors the wealthy few over the needs of the many, of destroying a government that privileges whiteness, denying rights and quality of life from people of color. That is a powerful, subversive fantasy that strikes very close to home. That, my friends, would mean revolution.

It certainly bothers me that Hollywood thinks our hero, Max, must be a white dude in order for his story to resonate with audiences, in order to lay bare the atrocities of the U.S’s immigrant situation (with Mexico in particular) in such a way that audiences can understand it. Without completely shifting the racial dynamics, Elysium becomes a version of White Man’s Burden, assuming that audiences can’t empathize with a hero of color and cannot put themselves in the hero’s shoes unless they can racially identify with him. There are two fallacies in this notion, 1.) that the default human being is a man, and 2.) that the default human being is a white man.

Elysium orbits Earth.

I can only hope that one day, Hollywood will realize it’s wrong about its insistence on white male leads in films…and that Hollywood will actually be wrong about it.  Hey, a blockbuster that wears its immigration agenda on its sleeve is something you don’t see very often, so maybe we’re getting closer to the day when we don’t have to hide behind genre to tell a topical political tale and the day when we don’t need to have a white man tell us such an important story.

‘Elizabethtown’ After the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

DVD cover for Elizabethtown
This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello.
When she was ten, my little sister pronounced herself a “Young Feminist in Training” and authored an editorial for a school newspaper entitled, “Sarah Palin: Feminist? No!” I was surprised, then, when she said last week that she wanted to watch Elizabethtown for our girls’ movie night. “Really?” I asked. “The film that launched the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” She shrugged, and, as she predicted, I loved it. I loved it for what it is: a fun little moralistic summer movie with a good soundtrack and an interesting – if somewhat farfetched – premise, as well as an incredibly moving final fifteen minutes. The story of a failed shoe designer whose plans for suicide in the wake of his “fiasco” are foiled by his father’s premature death, writer/director Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown stars Orlando Bloom as Drew, the brooding architect of a catastrophic business failure, and Kirsten Dunst as Claire, the woman who descends from the sky – practically literally; she’s a flight attendant – to rescue him from his melancholy with an overabundance of quirky good cheer. But rather than find it a guilty pleasure, something I liked in spite of the inadequacies and disappointments of its manic pixie of a female lead character, I found that Claire didn’t really merit the MPDG moniker at all.
From its first appearance, in a review of Elizabethtown by film critic Nathan Rabin, the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” seemed preternaturally possessed of staying power. It had two things going for it: a catchy name and truth. There are too many films in which a female lead seems to exist solely to improve the outlook of the male lead with a winning combination of pep, quirkiness, and vintage clothing. Unsurprisingly, it’s very easy to find a plethora of examples of characters fitting this trope.
Kirsten Dunst (Claire) and Orlando Bloom (Drew) in Elizabethtown. This is just before Drew tells Claire she needn’t make jokes to be likeable.

 

The idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was, at the beginning, a critique of those films that view women through an unabashedly male gaze, in which the viewer identifies primarily with the leading man and is therefore predisposed to regarding the leading lady as an extension of the man. (Elizabethtown makes Drew the identifiable character from the first few moments, which consist of voiceovers from Orlando Bloom. We’re definitely supposed to watch Claire, not stand in her shoes.) In many cases – as in the case of Elizabethtown, as Nathan Rabin so rightly argued – the female character does serve to remind the male of his zest for life, and that’s all she seems to do. The MPDG was meant to describe a phenomenon of the male gaze as evident in scripts written by men and films made by men, as Rabin explicitly stated: “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” At its inception, therefore, the MPDG was all about critiquing men. In recent years, however, as writers have pointed out, the MPDG label has expanded to become more broad. It’s often used to describe a kind of woman, rather than how she is written/seen by a man, and to incorporate characters and films – like Annie Hall – without good reason, and has actually been used to describe real women. It’s even become shorthand for one real woman in particular: Zooey Deschanel. It’s ridiculously simplistic and extraordinarily misogynistic to reduce a real woman to a trope.
For me, then, the MPDG label, while it started out as a catchy, if somewhat simplisti, truthism, turned problematic and even pejorative in recent years. (As a side note, because it isn’t really germane to this post: using the word “manic” is troubling as well. After all, “manic” is a weighty word, associated as it is with bipolar disorder. There are other, but less memorable, words that could better describe the kind of peppy, preternatural cheerfulness that hangs about these characters. My discomfort with the use of “manic” is compounded when the character demonstrates depressive tendencies, as does Claire in Elizabethtown. When the term is applied to real people with real conditions it’s even more troubling, as it is here to Edith Bouvier Beale, who suffered from a stress-related condition with tragic consequences.) It was, therefore, with great relief that I read the many articles this past spring/summer heralding the demise of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You don’t need me to summarize them, so check out these posts from Jezebel and xojane, and let’s get back to Elizabethtown, because now that we have poked holes in the trope itself, and others have concurred or found other reasons to get rid of it, I think the film that launched the MPDG deserves a second look.
“Do you ever just think, ‘I’m fooling everybody?'” — Claire
Elizabethtown is an interesting little indie-esque effort from Cameron Crowe. By and large, it succumbs far too readily to mistakes that detract from the enjoyment of the film. The great moments – and there are two – manage to redeem it in my estimation. The first is a long conversation between Drew and Claire, in which Bloom and Dunst really manage to capture the joy of recognizing oneself in someone else, and in which Crowe effectively contrasts their discussion – alternately probing and amusingly shallow – with the ordinary tasks we all do while on the phone. The second sequence is Drew’s cross-country road trip with his father’s ashes, following a map that Claire has (mostly unbelievably) made for him. The stops on Claire’s map are all places of historic, national, or cultural importance. Drew scatters some of his father’s ashes in the waters of the Mississippi and along a stretch of flat American highway surrounded by farmland. He visits the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel and Earnestine and Hazel’s Bar & Grill in Tennessee. It’s a reminder of all the things worth seeing and visiting in this country (and, like lots of other reviewers, has made me totally game for a road trip). Drew’s trip is juxtaposed with memories of his childhood, and we see little Drew dancing and roadtripping with his dad, and it’s this connection – the idea that someone’s dad can be to him as great a man as Martin Luther King, Jr. – that is really compelling. But these effective and moving scenes are hampered by the many, many scenes that don’t work, most notably Drew’s mother Hollie’s (Susan Sarandon) big moment at her husband’s memorial. That, unfortunately, is the victim of poor editing: the first part of her scene is a comedy routine detailing all the things she’s tried to learn since her husband’s death, and at one point, borders on the ridiculously crass (it is a memorial service, after all). The second part, the part that should have stood mostly on its own, with only a few words of introduction, is a moving little tap dance she performs to their favorite song. Like the road trip that follows, it’s a quiet, personal moment that’s deeply rooted in the little things that give life meaning.
With regard to its female characters, Elizabethtown has far more issues. Of the three female characters – Claire, Drew’s sister Heather, and their mother, Hollie – each is the victim of poor writing. The characterization of Heather in particular is downright egregious: it seems that her only personality trait is a kind of modern-day hysteria. She’s a woman who begs her brother to “handle everything” with regard to their father’s death because he’s the only one capable of it, who watches her mother flit from activity to activity in a frantic display of unmoored grief, and occasionally widens her eyes and throws up her hands and shrieks. While deep, raw grief is to be expected, as a grown woman with a kid, Heather is the caricature of the stereotypical woman who just can’t deal with it, because she’s just too darn emotional.
Drew and Claire

 

Claire, on the other hand, is at least compelling in spite of her faults. She’s interesting, and she has an admittedly underdeveloped back story. She’s a self-described “helper” and a “substitute person.” She invents trips to Hawaii and waxes on about boyfriends that don’t exist. She is, at her heart, immersed in much the same pursuit of happiness as Drew. She has her own struggles which we grasp only tenuously. The problem with Elizabethtown is that it doesn’t explore that complexity nearly enough – but not that it doesn’t exist in the first place. Claire isn’t a vacuously vapid MPDG; she has beginnings of a complex characterization that the writer only hints at, but doesn’t seem to think is worth developing. There were opportunities to do so: Why doesn’t the conversation about Claire’s unnecessary jokes continue? Why don’t we get to see an answer to Drew’s confrontation about the faux-boyfriend? Why, when we know as well as Drew that she has something slightly darker lurking beneath the quirky veneer, do we not get to see it? In my book, that’s a bit worse than creating a one-note plot device of a character.
So: did Claire deserve to be the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl? I don’t think so. I think it was perhaps a fair assessment upon a single viewing. But tucking her neatly into the MPDG box denies vital aspects of Claire’s character. True, we don’t know much about her ambition or life apart from Drew. That’s absolutely a failing on Cameron Crowe’s part as screenwriter. And for part of the film, Claire certainly does fill that role for Drew. She’s there to answer the phone when he wants someone – anyone – to talk to, happy to sit on hold waiting for him while he bounces between his fuming ex-girlfriend and crying sister, neither of whom – credit where it’s due – particularly like being kept on hold. Claire is the placid one, patiently waiting her turn to work her magic, as Drew expects. What saves Elizabethtown is that Drew comes to recognize that his sort-of girlfriend is not an MPDG.
“I’m impossible to forget, but I’m hard to remember.” — Claire

 

When Drew says, “You don’t have to make a joke. I like you without the jokes,” he pinpoints Claire for what she is: a complex character hiding behind a cheerful façade. Midway through the movie, he realizes that he doesn’t need Claire to be anything but who she is. He calls her out for the jokes he previously found engaging and attractive and confronts her about her imaginary boyfriend Ben. It’s a shame that Elizabethtown doesn’t show us this new Claire. We’re presented with a glimpse of the real woman, and then she slips away. This most interesting shift, when Drew realizes that he doesn’t want an MPDG for a girlfriend anyway, is given the least amount of exploration, because the film almost immediately switches to the long closing sequence of Drew’s cross-country road trip, back to the overarching theme of grief.
Drew isn’t the only one to think this way. Claire’s theory of “substitute people” actively refutes the MPDG pigeonhole. In describing this theory – which basically sounds a whole lot like Manic Pixie(-ish) Dream People – Claire is asserting that she knows perfectly well the image she projects. The implication, of course, is that it’s nothing but an image. She knows just as well as Drew that what she’s saying is a convenient label, nothing more. She’s aware of it in much the same way as is Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although Clementine is far more direct in her refutation of the MPDG label: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.”
“You shouldn’t be a substitute for anybody.” — Drew

 

Elizabethtown’s major problem is that it makes a halfhearted attempt to be a love story, when really, it’d have done far better to focus on grief. It would have been a much more compelling movie, because the moments that shine are the ones which have Drew – sometimes with Claire – facing the full implications of what happened. Would we have read the film differently from the start if there’d been no sex scene, no agonizing introspection over whether or not they’re dating? I think so. And it would have been refreshing to see a movie featuring a male/female friendship that wasn’t aching to become more.
In the end, from the oversaturated colors to the overwhelming (but expectedly awesome) soundtrack and the entirely implausible narrative, Elizabethtown is a kind of fairy tale: the kind of story that sticks with you in spite of its tenuous grip on reality, the kind of confection that you enjoy even though it falls apart when you look too closely. Cameron Crowe would have been better to structure Elizabethtown like 500 Days of Summer. 500 Days of Summer works because of its nonlinear narrative and impressionistic array of short scenes. Where Elizabethtown explicates far too much, spelling out each character’s thought process and motivation, 500 Days of Summer allows for the audience to draw conclusions and make connections between scenes. When the story is written in such a way, when there’s no need to explain everything, the characters can be more spontaneous. They can have moments in which they do not conform to our expectations of them. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind works, in part, for the same reason. ESotSM and 500 Days of Summer are not passive films. They require far more thought from the audience than does a film like Elizabethtown, where all plotlines seem to find a neat little happy ending. They work precisely because they’re impressionistic, which is, at least in my opinion, the most effective way to treat a modern fairytale.
Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has contributed reviews of Rebecca, Sleepy Hollow, and Downton Abbey to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.