Leigh Janiak’s ‘Honeymoon’ as Feminist Horror

The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot. … Are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film…

Honeymoon

This guest post written by Dawn Keetley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Although their numbers appear to be on the rise, women directors of horror are still relatively scarce. I’m always excited, then, when I can add another film to the growing list of exceptional horror films directed by a woman, a list that includes Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) along with her even better The Invitation (2015).

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014), which is currently streaming on Netflix, unambiguously belongs on that list. As well as directing the film, Janiak also co-wrote it, with Phil Graziadei.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZLPNFWLxk

The film focuses on a recently and (seemingly) happily-married couple, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway), who are heading on a delayed honeymoon to the cottage in the woods where Bea grew up. Things go swimmingly until Paul discovers one night that Bea is gone. He eventually finds her (in a highly creepy moment) standing in the woods, in a state of dazed and virtual unconsciousness (think Katie in Paranormal Activity, although it’s even more unsettling since Bea and Paul are deep in the woods, not on a suburban patio). The couple writes the strange event off to sleepwalking — albeit with a hefty dose of anxious self-deception, since Bea has never walked in her sleep before.

From that night on, though, Bea’s behavior becomes increasingly strange. She’s withdrawn, silent, wanders off, and scribbles obsessively in her journal. And she starts to change: she uses words that aren’t quite right (saying she’s going to “take a sleep” rather than “take a nap”). She is apparently unable to remember things about herself, about Paul, and about their relationship. And Paul overhears her practicing ways to tell him she doesn’t want to have sex. Shortly after, events spiral into the horrific.

Honeymoon

It’s never completely clear what happens to Bea, and Janiak brilliantly keeps that question open by evoking several possibilities, not least through covert references to other horror films. Since Bea’s strange behavior begins after she and Paul meet a man from her past, it seems at first that this could be an adultery film (Unfaithful, 2002). Or is it a possession film (The Shining, 1980, Paranormal Activity, 2007)? An alien film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, and the recent They Look Like People, 2015)? A zombie/infection film (The Evil Dead, 1981, Cabin Fever, 2002, or Severed, 2005)? I thought of all these possibilities at different moments, prompted by the film’s rich suggestiveness.

There are also definite hints in Honeymoon of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), both films about paranoia and violence within a seemingly banal domesticity. Janiak’s camera, along with the screenplay, creates a stifling claustrophobia around Bea and Paul as they head off into the woods alone together, the drive overlaid with voiceovers of stories about their first date and their wedding, all signaling an extreme insularity. Indeed, the film starts with a shot of Bea recording herself (somewhat unwillingly) on camera at their wedding, saying: “I guess I’m the first one to do this. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say. I’m now a wife.” These opening lines of the film link her becoming “wife” (about which Bea herself seems incredulous) to an inability to speak, as if marriage has silenced her — and certainly, whatever happens to her later in the woods (is it just her honeymoon, in the end?) disrupts her ability to speak even more violently. As Bea speaks (or tries to) at the beginning, she is visually confined by a camera, by the car, and by the stark lines of roads, overpasses, and trees. The film thus brilliantly puts the everyday (marriage) on a continuum with the horrifying (possession?), connecting the problem of Bea’s troubled self-expression and containment, now that she’s married, to the later seemingly supernatural plot.

Once they get to the cottage, cracks soon surface in Bea and Paul’s marriage — tellingly, around the issue of babies. After their first night together, Paul tells Bea that she needs to “rest her womb,” a strange comment to which Rose reacts badly, saying she isn’t sure she wants a baby. Paul’s comment, which seems to surprise both of them, and which is clearly precipitated by the fact that they are now married, tellingly anticipates all the strange things Rose will say once she is “possessed” (or whatever it is that happens to her). Janiak suggests, more than once then, that perhaps it is marriage that is an utterly alien state.

Honeymoon

It also becomes clear that Bea and Paul have some profound differences: Bea hunts, fishes and embraces the outdoors, and Paul seems more comfortable in the cabin. His constant closeness to her in the many interior scenes seems oppressive, seems to exert a pressure on her to stay with him, indoors. Indeed, the viewer soon senses that the claustrophobia we feel about their relationship (well, I certainly did) may well be shared by Bea.

The claustrophobia that infuses the film, and the sense that Bea is not immune to its grasp, is intensified by one of the clearest intertextual references in the film: Bea starts writing her name and her husband’s name (“My name is Bea,” “My husband’s name is Paul”) over and over in her journal, and the evocation of The Shining is clear, specifically Jack Nicholson’s character slowly losing his grasp on reality when trapped in a snow-bound hotel with his wife and son and with the demands his family inevitably imposes. Bea’s repetitive writing of her husband’s name, and things about their relationship, moreover, mimics the way, early in the film, they had told stories about their relationship, pushing what might have seemed benign in the beginning into the realm of something more disturbing. Bea seems to be trying to paper over the cracks, to convince herself she’s something (“wife”) that deep down she doesn’t want to be.

This is where The Stepford Wives in particular comes in: are the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot symbolic of Bea’s struggles with intimacy and the weighty expectations of married domestic life (sex, cooking, and reproduction)? Janiak’s expert writing and directing definitely leaves open this possible subtext of the film — especially given what happens at the end.
The ending, which I won’t give away, draws on several scenes in the film in which rope figures prominently, as Bea and Paul take turns tying each other up for various reasons. The meanings of these scenes increasingly turns toward the sinister, from play toward overt entrapment. While it’s Bea who gets tied up at first, the tables are turned at the end in ways that could be expressing desires that Bea may not have allowed herself consciously to feel, and that are expressed instead through the plot of her “possession.”

Honeymoon

The use of ropes in the film actually reminded me of the late nineteenth-century short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, the narrator, who has just given birth, is forced to “rest” in bed by her physician-husband (just as Paul tells Bea to “rest her womb”), and the coerced and numbing inactivity of body and mind impels the narrator into madness (raising another possibility for what happens to Bea). At the end of the story, the narrator ties herself up with a rope and is creeping around her room, a scene so horrifying to her husband that he faints. In Gilman’s story, the rope (as well as the entrapping room itself) represents the confines of patriarchal marriage — and I would argue that  uses rope very much the same way, although the film’s final instance of someone getting tied up pretty much completely inverts Gilman’s ending.

The weight of this film rests on its two actors, who are virtually alone, with the fleeting (albeit important) appearance of a man from Bea’s past and his wife. Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway are both absolutely sensational, superbly carrying this weight. Leslie does a fantastic job of expressing a sense of disquiet (in her marriage) well before things turn toward the truly strange — and Treadaway is great at expressing the kind of unambiguous, puppy-dog adoration — the desire never to let his wife out of his sight — that undoubtedly produces Bea’s ambivalence.

While what happens to Rose and Paul may in the end be about forces beyond their control, like every good horror film, Honeymoon exploits the cracks in “normality” before the truly uncanny erupts. Janiak (whose previous credits as director include only a couple of TV episodes) both knows good horror films (referencing them throughout) and knows how to make one.

I should add that it seems Sony has tapped Janiak to direct and co-write (along with Graziadei, her partner from Honeymoon) the upcoming remake of the 1996 cult hit, The Craft. As The Hollywood Reporter points out:

“The news of a female director coming on board to direct a female-centric feature project is welcome news to Hollywood, as it breaks after the studios have come under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union for ‘systemic failure to hire women directors at all levels of the film and television industry.’ Janiak’s hiring was already weeks in the works; the filmmaker impressed execs with her take on a female empowerment tale.”

Like The Craft, I think Honeymoon, too, is a “female empowerment tale,” as well as an extremely good horror tale. Leigh Janiak is definitely a director to look out for!

This post is revised and expanded from a review that appeared on a blog Dawn Keetley co-runs, about all things horror Horror Homeroom. She also teaches gothic and horror literature, film, and TV at Lehigh University in PA and has edited a collection of essays on The Walking Dead entitled We’re All Infected (McFarland, 2014).

Lena Dunham and the Creator’s “Less-Than-Perfect” Body On-Screen

Every time someone calls to question the fact that Lena Dunham parades her rolls of fat in front of her audience, we need to examine why they’re questioning it. Is it because they’re wondering how it serves the narrative of ‘Girls’? Or is it because they’re balking at “less-than-perfection” (according to normative societal conventions) in the female form?

Lena Dunham 'Girls'

This guest post written by Sarah Halle Corey appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

A lot has been said about Lena Dunham’s body. So much has been said, in fact, that upon a simple Google search of “lena dunham body,” I was overwhelmed with viable links to embed in this post. There are articles praising her positive body image and sharing of TMI, and other articles disparaging her for showing so much flabby skin, and even more articles questioning if we should even be talking about her body at all.

Dunham created and stars in the series Girls, a show on which she often presents her own naked body. She’s appeared naked on-screen countless times throughout the series’ five season run, and often in hyper-realistic situations: awkward sex, rolling out of bed in the morning, etc. And every time, Dunham’s “less-than-perfect” (according to normative societal conventions) body is showcased. It’s not uncommon for nudity to be a hot topic among media pundits and amateur critics alike. How much is too much? How much is too little? How does it serve the story? So when a supposed “less-than-perfect” naked body like Dunham’s is presented, it’s outside the norm and people rush to comment all the more because of that.

It makes sense that people love to discuss the bodies of actors: their bodies are displayed in front of us, something to observe and interpret just like the the sets and camera angles that are also presented on screen. Each frame of a movie or TV show is filled with choices that the director made, choices that the director wants the audience to see and connect to some meaning or vision. But what happens when the director makes herself – her body, specifically – one of those on-screen choices?

Every time someone calls to question the fact that Dunham parades her rolls of fat in front of her audience, we need to examine why they’re questioning it. Is it because they’re wondering how it serves the narrative of Girls? Or is it because they’re balking at “less-than-perfection” in the female form? These two issues often get conflated.

And then, when Dunham goes to defend her choice, she often needs to approach it from both perspectives. Dunham is both the creator and the creation itself, the sculptor and the slab of marble. So, not only must she defend the creative choice as a director, but also the existence of her own “less-than-perfect” body as a woman. Her defense is both an artistic one and a personal one.

In a way, Dunham’s predicament is representative of a lot of defenses that women creators find themselves being forced to make. Often times, female creators are seen as women first, creators second. The fact that Dunham puts her body, and thus a part of her womanhood, at the forefront of her art, just makes the defense all the more blatant for her. Women directors often need to take a stand to justify their art, and for Dunham that includes her body too.

By combining the director and her work into one, Dunham simply crystallizes the power of the creator in connection to her creation. Art is personal, and no one exemplifies that more than Lena Dunham.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Lena Dunham, Slenderman and the Terror of ‘Girls’; Let’s All Take a Deep Breath and Calm the Fuck Down About Lena Dunham

Recommended Reading: Considering All “Sides” of the Lena Dunham Debacle: A Reading List

Sarah Halle Corey is a writer, filmmaker, and digital content creator who produces work about pop culture, feminism, feelings, and everything in between. You can find her work at sarahhallecorey.com. Sarah is usually drinking way too much coffee and/or tweeting @SarahHalleCorey.

‘Making a Murderer,’ ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men.

Making a Murderer

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Within the first five minutes of both Fantastic Lies (directed by Marina Zenovich) — the most recent, methodically investigative installment of ESPN’s documentary film series, 30 for 30 — and Making a Murderer (directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi) — the outlandishly popular and blisteringly sensational Netflix original series — impressively grand, birds-eye-view tracking shots are presented of the respective towns that played stage to the respective crimes at the center of the documentaries. Quietly idyllic and quaintly derelict, these introductory shots of Durham, North Carolina — home to Duke University and the young men of the Duke Lacrosse team accused of rape in 2006 — and Manitowoc County, Wisconsin — otherwise unknown home of Steven Avery, accused and exonerated of sexual assault in 1985 and re-indicted for first degree murder in 2007 — are not unfamiliar documentary tropes. However, solidifying their provocative and distinct styles and points of view, the ways in which these women employ their aerial shots of small towns, soon to be ravaged by controversies, are testaments to their acumen, and the disturbingly contentious nature of their films.

The shots would be otherwise unremarkable were it not for the stark juxtapositions and establishing of voice that the cinematic techniques achieve, and what they subtly intimate about the women helming each project. For Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the sweeping captures of Manitowoc County and the labyrinth-esque junkyard owned by Avery’s family (and alleged site of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach) are part of the opening sequence of every episode of Making a Murderer, and are interposed with childhood photos of Avery, extreme close-ups of the decaying Avery home, and portentously ironic court documents and police officers. In the series first episode, these tracking shots nestled in the opening credits come directly after home footage of Avery’s release after his exoneration in 2003, that is jubilant, liberated, but haunted by his cousin’s premonition that, “Manitowoc county is not done with you…they are not even close to being done with you.” In Marina Zenovich’s opening frames of Fantastic Lies, the tracking shots of Durham are prefaced with videos of the Duke men’s lacrosse team suffering an emotional championship loss to Johns Hopkins, and embedded with interviews of parents lauding the boys determination to succeed, and North Carolina Central University professor Shawn Cunningham anthropomorphizing Durham as a city desperately trying to find its identity.

Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich, by using traditional, seemingly innocuous aerial tracking shots of two towns interplayed with foreboding soundbites and poignant videos, achieve a narrative perspective that is as provocative as it is subdued. Creating worlds in which easily reviled or vilified men are at dire odds with (metonymic) towns that detest their very essence, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich as occluded intermediaries — they can at once see the entire town and infiltrate its intricacies and complications, and they can expose the inner workings of their subjects, their virtues and foibles. These women not only position themselves as intermediaries, but as exculpatory executors specifically of men otherwise caricatured and reduced.

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both Making a Murderer and Fantastic Lies, and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men. The alleged perpetrators in each case are from radically different socioeconomic strata (the small town, meagerly educated Avery would balk at the world of the uber-affluent, high-pressure Duke students), though both suffer fraught relationships with the law — the young men at Duke accused of rape but eventually cleared of any guilt; and Steven Avery, though erroneously charged with rape, is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder. But what the men most noticeably share is their almost archetypal “bad guy” aura, and the simultaneously unflinching and accommodating manner in which Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich display every facet of their subjects.

Arguably dealing with more of a moral quagmire (despite their now being cleared of the charges), Zenovich, who brilliantly tackled an equally problematic man in her 2008 Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, opens her film with the barrage of soundbites, even from Duke alum Dan Abrams, citing the brash braggadocio of the men on the lacrosse team — their elitism, their “cockiness,” their hulking physiques and awareness of social prestige, their perpetuating “golf culture with an attitude.” Indeed, as the film progresses, unfolding in the manner the news media first exposed the case, Zenovich leaves no factual, disconcerting detail uncovered — the notorious raucousness and drunken offenses the team was known for; the fact that the boys held the party and intentionally hired exotic dancers (though, the detail of the boys requesting white dancers is skirted away from) and in the throes of profound inebriation, brandished a broomstick in a sexually suggestive manner and spewing racial epithets. Even the outrageously inflammatory and derogatory email — in which a player, referencing American Psycho, “jokingly” tells his teammates he is going to murder, flay and desecrate strippers — is discussed.

Fantastic Lies

But amidst the revelations of the perniciousness of the men’s behavior, Zenovich carefully and seamlessly weaves in tearful, anguished testimonials from the parents of three boys (Reade Seligmann, Colon Finnerty and David Evans) falsely identified by the alleged victim, Crystal Mangum, and stalwart admissions of miscarriages of justice by former teammates. As Zenovich masterfully reaches the climax of the film, gradually and organically constructing doubt as she eventually depicts the overzealousness of prosecutor Mike Nifong and the dearth of physical evidence that would exonerate the players, the boys have been valorized. Moreover, the town of Durham, once an aerial shot at the beginning of Zenovich’s film, is micro-analyzed and cast as the embittered and disenfranchised foe of the boys, represented and led astray by the deceitfulness of Nifong. Zenovich presents a fractious clash of worlds in which a team of white, safeguarded men have the names slandered and privileged unhinged, and emerge triumphant victims.

In true subaltern treatment, Crystal Mangum is dissected by friends, and never speaks (though, as Zenovich shows, the prison where she is being held for an unrelated second-degree murder refused to let her speak to Zenovich despite her desire to) except for recorded media confessions and apologies of her false accusations. Her supposed instability is extrapolated upon, coupled with repeated shots of photos of her staggering and falling at the party. However, Mangum still “stands by her story” of surviving sexual assault and ten years later, speaking to Vocativ, “she maintained that she was assaulted.”

Demos and Ricciardi, whose Making a Murderer project was an arduous, ten year, post-graduate venture (rather than Zenovich’s year long, at times thwarted immersion into the lacrosse scandal), understandably present a much more involved, complicated portrait of their male subject, Steven Avery (and to some extent, his imprisoned cousin and alleged co-conspirator Brendan Dassey). Certainly lacking the prototypical self-impressed, egotistical athlete reputation that adulterated much of the Duke handlings, Avery, as Demos and Ricciardi briefly show (through exquisite cinematography, using letters and rare reenactments, one should add) was plagued with his own demons — arrests for animal cruelty, disorderly conduct, aggressive behavior towards relatives (which, arguably, would spur the false rape conviction), and violent, disquieting threats written to his former wife while their marriage dissolved. Yet in the hundreds of hours whittled down to the expertly directed series, Avery, while often maligned, seemingly simple-minded, ill-behaving but not necessarily menacing, is always shot through a sympathetic (often, emphasizing the pathetic) lens. Much of this is testament to the directing duos unfettered commitment to showing the complete multifariousness of the case as they lived each moment with the family, dedicated to Avery’s case for a decade from the moment they stumbled upon the now infamous New York Times front page article. And much of the fixation and implicit empathy for Avery is a result of Demos and Ricciardi’s pursuit to hyper-focus on the failures of the justice system. But much like Fantastic Lies, Avery (and more pitifully, Dassey) is positioned, much more effectively, as a steamrolled victim of law and order run amok, and a town’s collective antipathy for a man and his family (for much different reasons than with the Duke boys) galvanizing the destruction of a man’s life.

Similar to Fantastic Lies, too, is the quiet lionization of these men in the wake of crimes (whether they are irrefutable or exaggerated and falsified) against women who are noticeably underrepresented in the documentaries. Teresa Halbach, whose body is found on Avery’s property after taking photographs at his junkyard for a car magazine, is shown only through aching archival footage; her family, primarily represented by her brother (who, as a rabid Making a Murderer conspiracy theorist, I find to be suspiciously portrayed), is a minimal presence at best. Though the duo beautifully achieve a scornful eye at the fallible justice system and the prevailing sentiments castigating Avery, a looming partiality ripples through Making a Murderer that problematizes the series as an exculpatory venture.

It should be noted that I am an ardent fan of both Zenovich’s and Demos and Ricciardi’s projects. Foremost I am thrilled that not only two women, but two queer women in a relationship helmed the wildly popular Making a Murderer. Furthermore, I was riveted by its reinvigoration of my childhood fascination with crime sagas, with Demos and Ricciardi’s nuanced and meticulous style, analysis of every detail, and penchant for the gorgeously tragic. Their flawless removal of themselves — seemingly something unachievable by the more egomaniacal strain of sensationalized male documentary filmmakers — but consecration of their voices is haunting, and a tribute to their years of investment and toil (through which, I am flabbergasted, they preserved their loving relationship). I too am elated, and to some degree relieved, a woman directed the masterful reflection on the Duke scandal — an imbroglio I witnessed with conflicted emotions, as a teenager beginning to develop my feminism, as a lacrosse player of eight years, as someone who knew players on the team.

Certainly, these analyses of the bungles and undeniable violations on the part of the justice system need to be examined, and it is a boon that these women take part in the burgeoning presence of women documentary filmmakers (though still infuriatingly small compared to male counterparts). Certainly, too, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich fastidiously show how individuals’ agency is stripped, and their identities elaborately reconstructed by tendentious external powers (media, the legal system, troubled communities). But the lingering effects of these projects, of the specific focus on men in tempestuous situations, and the resonations of these exculpatory endeavors leaves unease. It is the unease that pinches when the only individual to mention the dangers to rape survivors after a false accusation is a media fiasco is a strong-jawed, former Duke lacrosse player on the team during the incident. It is an unease that is as profoundly discomforting and ambiguous as the elements at play in the discombobulated and life-altering cases these women so extraordinarily portray.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murdererconspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

I’m a Lilly – And You’re Probably One Too: All Women Face Gender Discrimination

I’m a woman director who’s been working in Hollywood for nearly 3 decades. I was compelled to bring Lilly Ledbetter’s story to the big screen because her David-and-Goliath battles with an entrenched, American corporation resonated for me politically, professionally, and personally. The truth is that, while Lilly’s life and mine may seem worlds apart, we are both female workers in male-dominated industries — and gender discrimination hurts the same everywhere.

IMG_0332 (1)

This guest post written by Rachel Feldman appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Alabama factory worker or Hollywood film director – all women face gender discrimination everywhere.

Lilly Ledbetter was an Alabama tire factory supervisor who learned, after enduring her job for nearly 20 years, that she was earning only half of what men doing the same work received. She sustained myriad harassments during this time while her sole focus was lifting her family into the middle class. Lilly fought through 3 legal battles, winning the first case at $3.8 million dollars — even though the state cap was significantly lower. However, she never saw a penny of this victory, as she lost the appeal, and also the subsequent judgment in the United States Supreme Court.

In that decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a rare occurrence. The Justice felt that the court had made a mistake and entreated Lilly to lead the charge for change. Lilly and her husband, Charles, took the Justice’s words to heart and embarked upon another journey, the road toward activism. Lilly transformed from an aggrieved employee into an advocate on behalf of all women. After many years of lobbying Congress, Lilly became the “face” of Fair Pay when President Obama signed “The 2008 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act” as his first piece of legislation.

I’m a woman director who’s been working in Hollywood for nearly 3 decades. I was compelled to bring Lilly’s story to the big screen because her David-and-Goliath battles with an entrenched, American corporation resonated for me politically, professionally, and personally. The truth is that, while Lilly’s life and mine may seem worlds apart, we are both female workers in male-dominated industries — and gender discrimination hurts the same everywhere. I’m a Lilly. And if your career has ever suffered because of gender discrimination – then you’re a Lilly too.

I first became aware of Lilly, like most folks did, as I watched her on television at the 2007 Democratic Convention. I was mesmerized by her strength and inspired hearing this about how this dealt woman dealt with the terrible consequences of gender injustice in her life. I was heartened by the momentum of her activism, drawn to investigate her story on a personal level.

I soon developed a warm rapport with Lilly and her team: her attorney Jon Goldfarb, and the woman with whom Lilly co-wrote her biography, Lanier Scott Isom. I optioned her story to write and direct a film about her ongoing conflicts with narrow-minded factory workers, powerful capitalists, and the United States government itself. It’s been 8 years since that time and I’m delighted to say that I’m close to seeing this dream become a reality; but the story of getting here has been fraught with continued challenges, many of which are gender related.

***
I’m not a famous director. You don’t know my name and you probably have not seen my work. But I am a director who has paid my dues and knows my craft. I’ve done all the so-called “right” things. I have a Master’s degree in directing from a top film school. I’ve made numerous short films that have won prestigious awards and have garnered coveted grants. I’ve worked in the industry in a variety of positions: as an actor, a storyboard artist, a screenwriter, a branded webisode creator — and ultimately directed over 60 hours of Emmy-nominated television and long-form movies – all while simultaneously raising two children. I’ve also taught directing in the Masters program of one of the most famous film schools in the world, chaired the Directors Guild of America Women’s Steering Committee, and currently mentor hundreds of female directors from a variety of organizations.

Lilly Ledbetter and Rachel Feldman

While this chronology may seem impressive to the uninitiated, the reality is that my career has had huge gaps of unemployment; times when my family has suffered without health insurance and has gone to sleep with the anxiety of not knowing how we’d pay our bills. Being a woman director in Hollywood is far from glamorous.

For many years, even after I’d already directed a great deal of television, producers would say things to me like, “We already had a woman director this season.” Or, “Our cast and/or crew don’t like women directors.” And while I rarely encounter such overt discrimination now, there is still much unconscious bias that persists.

Lilly Ledbetter used the courts and, eventually, the law to bring her issue to light. We women directors may be able to do the same. In the past year, the ACLU and EEOC have affirmed the presence of institutional bias in Hollywood and are investigating the proper methods to rectify the imbalance. Although I believe these actions have led to an increased awareness and activism throughout our industry, there are ongoing, vestigial practices that must change if gender equity ever has a chance.

On my journey to getting Ledbetter made, I’ve had many lovely surprises. The screenplay, co-written with Adam Prince, won “The Athena List,” the Black List competition for scripts featuring female protagonists, run by Melissa Silverstein at the Athena Film Festival. I recently was awarded the “New York Women In Film & Television Ravenal Foundation Grant” for the project, a grant in support of directors over the age of 40. I’ve also received notes from dozens of producers who are fans of the project, urging me on and applauding my efforts, but acknowledging that getting a film like mine made would require Herculean powers.

One of the reasons that films with female leads are tough to get made is that financing is driven by foreign sales which necessitates a superstar to lead your film. While there are many dubious male actors from the ranks of action films who, despite their advanced years, still can drive foreign sales, in the opinion of foreign sales agents, unless you are one of the handful of megawatt female superstars, women do not drive foreign sales. I’m not an expert in international finance and I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of this particular equation, but I’ve been listening and learning long enough to understand that there’s a double standard regarding the value of talent based on gender – and that this is an important default mechanism that must be challenged for the sake of the female actors, filmmakers, and certainly the culture of girls and women around the world.

Another obstacle to getting Ledbetter made is the industry’s perception of my value as the film’s director. There are certainly a handful of women directors whose identities are well known, but generally, even colleagues in our industry, when asked, can only name a handful of female directors. Of course, there are thousands of amazingly talented women directing; in fact there are 1,350 experienced women directors in our Guild, but for the vast majority of us our credits are devalued and we struggle to be seen and heard – just like Lilly.

Despite my resume, I’m often called a “first time director.” First time perhaps in that I have never before directed a film that plays in theatres, but with the many high-level, broadcast television series and long form movie credits over the course of a 25-year career, “first time director” is disrespectful at best. All this is — simply another excuse based on fear. Where is the value for the passion I have for this story, the unrelenting tenacity I have to tell it, and the decades of experiences that have led to a maturity and confidence of vision? And why is there a double standard when a male director can leap from making a single indie project to a huge studio tentpole? WTF?

Last year, I met with a producer who refused to consider me to direct my project because she didn’t believe she could finance a film with a female director. When I argued this point with her, she finally relented that perhaps she could get the film made with the woman who had just directed a musical, her first film by the way, that grossed over $70M that weekend. That discussion clarified for me that the producer’s reluctance was not at all about my ability to direct a great film; it was solely about my lack of celebrity. I believe that this culture of celebrity has become a dangerous cover for gender discrimination. Now it seems to be okay to hire a woman director, as long as she’s already a known commodity.

This is a dangerous slippery slope that we must be vigilant in confronting. At the Oscars recently, the president of the DGA was asked to name 5 women directors and he was proud to name the top directors already on most people’s lips. But in my opinion he should have redirected that reporter, as we must all try to change the conversation, to keep pushing forward the idea that there are thousands of accomplished directors ready to work and that our industry need only to look slightly deeper than the headlines.

Our industry’s love of a sure thing affects women who direct television as well. ABC is a network that tries to do the right thing. Every year they produce an event in conjunction with the DGA to introduce their executives to female directors. Sounds great, right? However, the criteria used to select the invited directors eliminates anyone who has not directed an episode of broadcast television within the past two years! In other words, the very population who needs this kind of support are excluded. Women who are actively directing don’t have trouble getting hired, they have agents and are already on approved lists. But women directors with experience who may be out of the loop for a while are shut out. It’s understandable that swift statistical change will look good, but real progress will only be made when the pipeline expands, not when the mission for gender equity is fulfilled by the same handful of directors.

I do sense change and I am heartened by our thespian colleagues who are speaking up for women behind the camera and signing on to our films. We will gain momentum through this sisterhood. At this very moment, I am searching for my own actor/collaborator with whom I can bring the remarkable character of Lilly Ledbetter to life. Like Lilly, I fight every day to advance our film, and I advocate for women directors like me who have powerful stories to tell, bursting with talent. I urge all of us to keep illuminating injustice wherever we go and to lift up other women. I’m a LILLY, are you?

Rachel Feldman is a director and writer currently in development with LEDBETTER, a suspense thriller about Fair Pay activist Lilly Ledbetter. She recently won the Writers Guild of America – Drama Queens Award for Best Spec Pilot for KINKS. You can learn more about her work at www.rachelfeldman.com and follow her on Twitter @womencallaction.

Individuality in Lucia Puenzo’s ‘XXY,’ ‘The Fish Child,’ and ‘The German Doctor’

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in ‘XXY’ for their gender, Lala in ‘The Fish Child’ for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from ‘The German Doctor,’ who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi.

XXY film

This guest post written by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Regardless of the time period or setting, there is a constant element of moody rebellion in the films of Lucia Puenzo; a deep-rooted distrust of authority that informs them at their core. Characters often become metaphors for larger issues of political strife. Good or bad, each individual’s humanity is shown via their shared vulnerability to forces outside of their control. Her work questions not only the desire to fit in, but asks why humans feel that desire to begin with. There is a tendency in her characters to challenge the status quo by their very existence in some way or another. As of this writing, she has written and directed 3 films, 2 of which were based on earlier novels of hers. She has also written a few screenplays, notably serving as one of the screenwriters on her father Luis Puenzo’s 2004 film The Whore and the Whale. Most recently, she co-created a television series in collaboration with her brother Nicolas for Argentina’s TV Publica called Cromo.

Puenzo’s solo directorial debut was 2007’s XXY, based on a short story by Sergio Bizzio. XXY is the story of an intersex teen who is raised with female pronouns, and how their family, friends, and lovers respond to their choice to stop taking hormones. The story begins with their mother and father inviting a plastic surgeon, his wife, and their son to stay with them in order to solicit advice on Alex. The plastic surgeon has an alienating affect on Alex and their family due to his disturbing lack of empathy for others, but his son Alvaro interests Alex, and they develop a mutual attraction. The narrative follows their interactions with one another as their self-discoveries coincide.

There are a plenty of heart-wrenching scenes in XXY but, in the end, it is most defined by its unwillingness to impose identities on its characters. Rather than defaulting to the gender binary, both Alex and Alvaro are given the option not to change, to exist simply as they are. By introducing another gender fluid character late in the film, Alex is shown in the context of a larger community, and accusations of abnormality from other characters seem to fall completely by the wayside. Up to that point, Alex lives in a world where society imposes an ideology that completely alienates them, and even their well-meaning parents tend to treat it as a burden to bear. Additionally, even their parents seem to believe that adherence to the norm is inevitable. By the time we meet the family, Alex would have been hearing these conversations for their entire life, and their alternating wordlessness or aggressiveness in response to these conversations comes across as understandable. The character studies in XXY are subtle and revealing, and critical response to the film was favorable, with many reviewers praising it for the tenderness with which it treats its characters.

The Fish Child

This tendency towards deeply felt empathy has become a directorial trademark of Puenzo’s. Her follow up to XXY was the also fascinating The Fish Child, released in 2009. The Fish Child is an adaptation of her first novel, and follows Lala, the daughter of an influential judge. Lala is in love with her family’s maid, Ailin, who is roughly the same age as her, but from a much darker and more violent world. Lala’s father has been sleeping with Ailin as well, although their relationship is significantly less consensual. He is murdered, and Ailin is immediately blamed, which lands her in prison. Lala refuses to accept this fate for them, and determines to free Ailin. The film manages to fall into several genres at once; thriller, romance, drama, modern fairy tale. The dreamily in-and-out-of-focus cinematography and non-linear storytelling would even put it in the category of art house film. Connecting this work with her other films is the stylish aesthetic choices, and in this example in particular, the camera’s shifting focus and Puenzo’s meticulously chosen locations serve as characters in and of themselves, equally as defining to the overall tone as the dystopian political climate.

The Fish Child sees the return of Ines Efron, who played the lead, Alex, in XXY. She is equally compelling as the dreamy, naive Lala. The necessarily complicated relationship between Lala and Ailin is wildly endearing, conveyed expertly by both actors via body language as much by any part of the script. The commentary on Ailin’s position in life, and the way her poverty and history of sexual abuse has hardened her and limited her choices, makes her a fascinating character, and it’s easy to see why Lala falls for her. Ailin’s inner resolve and the way she switches quickly into survival mode is highlighted and contrasted by Lala’s optimistic naiveté. The two girls are very similar, but their outlooks and responses to conflict are separated at their very roots by the realities of class privilege, and this element of the film offers a sense of stark realism to this otherwise dreamy tale.

In 2013, Puenzo told her most ambitious story yet with The German Doctor, a fictional account of the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele. For those blissfully unaware, this is the man otherwise known literally as “The Angel of Death” in Auschwitz, where he conducted his famously horrific human experiments during World War II. After the fall of the Third Reich, it is well known fact that Mengele fled to Argentina, where he was protected by local authorities, civilians, and fascists still loyal to Hitler and the false science of eugenics. Based on her 5th novel, Wakolda, the film takes place during the months Mengele spent in or around Buenos Aires after the war. A young girl named Lilith, who is considered to be too small for her age, encounters a mysterious German doctor who promises her parents that he can make her grow. This should probably set off more alarms in her parents than it actually does, but, before long, he is conducting experiments on her as well as her recently birthed twin brothers. Watching this develop onscreen is absolutely chilling for anyone familiar with his history. At one point, he is shown sketching out plans for his monstrous experiments in a notebook while having a casual conversation with a child he intends to inflict them on. Small details such as that one stayed with me a long time after the credits rolled. The German Doctor succeeds in being utterly horrifying without ever even remotely resembling a horror film, which is an individual accomplishment in and of itself.

The German Doctor

Also interesting is the way the development of the film seems to have been curbed at times by its own subject matter. In a 2014 interview with Elle, in anticipation of the film’s release, Puenzo openly discussed some of the conflict of speaking of history that some consider to be best left buried. She was quoted as saying:

“For example, we would have a location, but when we arrived, somebody had made a call and we didn’t have that location anymore. That happened a lot. Whoever was in charge had of course read the novel and knew we were mentioning the German School and that it actually existed before the war, and were very bothered by the idea. Another example was with the hotel that we shot the film in, which is also where we lived. We thought because it was closed for the holidays it would be a great proposition to rent that hotel. But in the beginning we were met with a lot of resistance. And then we found out that this hotel has a lot of German money in its origin — was made with German money. The whole time we were making the film we were confronted with facts of history, which made it very difficult to make.”

The German Doctor is a fascinating film, particularly when viewed as the culmination of the observations first made in XXY and The Fish Child. In XXY, the outside world is pressuring a young person to change something about their own bodies in order to fit in. In The Fish Child, the poor are shockingly vulnerable to the whims of the rich. Consistent with both, Puenzo’s sympathy is with the outsider. Uniquely, The German Doctor shows how the fear of not fitting in can lead to otherwise good people doing horrible things, for instance allowing Nazi war criminals to experiment on not one but three of their children.

In the end, it is this focus on individuality that is the most striking common theme of Lucia Puenzo’s works. Each of her characters undergoes intense scrutiny from outside forces, be it Alex in XXY for their gender, Lala in The Fish Child for her infatuation with Ailin, or Lilith from The German Doctor, who is quite literally forced into a physical transformation by a Nazi. In Puenzo’s films, each of these characters are threatened with the worst of all fates, which is to be just like everyone else. In each case, conformity is presented as being insidiously tantalizing. As in life, these seemingly benign choices will have a sweeping effect what kind of person each character will ultimately become.

This fascination with personal choice shows through in interviews with Puenzo. For instance, when asked in an interview with Indiewire in 2009 how she would define success, Puenzo responded, “Success for any artist is having a personal world that can be seen or felt in whatever they do,” and concluded that, “My personal goal is to be able to keep telling whatever story I want with no speculations but my own desire.” In a world where those outside of the norm are so often left voiceless, films like hers, which prize individuality above all else, are welcome and needed.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

Andrea Arnold: A Voice for the Working Class Women of Britain

British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in ‘Fish Tank,’ ‘Wasp,’ ‘Red Road,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.

Fish Tank

This guest post written by Sophie Hall appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

If we were to play a game of word association with the offensive word ‘chav’ (a pejorative term that “demonizes” working class people), what would immediately spring to mind? If you’re aware of how the word makes appearances in British tabloids, your words are probably going to be less than savory. ‘Uneducated,’ ‘racist,’ ‘unemployed,’ ‘scroungers,’ and ‘breeders’ are unfortunately likely to be the first among them — horrible stereotypes of poor people. British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. But Arnold does something unique with this; instead of avoiding the offensive ‘chav’ label, she embraces it and all of its connotations to the characters’ very core, all the while asking the audience: when is it okay to mock these people?

Wasp short film

In her Oscar-winning short film Wasp (2003), Andrea Arnold takes on the stereotypes of working class women to an almost unbearable extent. The film focuses on a single mother and her four children over the course of a day. Our protagonist Zoe, a white working class woman in her twenties, drags her kids (and herself) half clothed to a neighboring house so she can attack the mother of a child who attacked her own. When Zoe discovers that the only edible thing she has in her council flat (public housing apartment) is moldy bread, she gives her children a bag of sugar to satisfy their appetites. Later, she leaves her children unattended outside a pub for hours while she stays inside on a date. At first you may be mistaken for believing this is more an advertisement for contraception than a short film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemvMDQaRTo

While doing press junkets for the release of Fish Tank, Arnold stated in an interview:

“There’s a lot of press on hoodies and gangs and single mums and a lot of simplistic things said about these people. Every single person is complicated and if you look at everyone’s life they’re complex… you shouldn’t make assumptions about people, you should look at everyone individually and make no judgments.”

Arnold doesn’t just present these extreme flaws in Zoe; she also grants her the benefit of context. Zoe has four children, but she can’t even be in her thirties yet and there is no mention of support in her life. Where is the father(s) of her children? Zoe’s flat is decorated with glittery memorabilia, she compares herself to Victoria Beckham and hopes to one day find her David (with a magazine picture of him stuck to her wall). Zoe isn’t a grown woman, she’s a teenager stuck in the body of one. No one is there to realize this though, as Zoe’s mother “has a better social life than I do,” and the unasked question on absent men lingers in the air again — where is Zoe’s father in all of this? From the locals inside the pub, she gets criticized for her skills as a mother instead of support. Arnold presents these bread crumbs, not sob stories, to emotionally manipulate the audience. Here are her flaws, and these are the reasons why she has them. She presents us with three-dimensional characters, something absent from the headlines of The Daily Mail centering on working class people.

In the book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, writer and political commentator Owen Jones refers to a speech Prime Minister David Cameron gave:

“We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events, like a plague, or bad weather. Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make.”

Jones comments that:

“Cameron was tapping into sentiments that Thatcherism had made respectable: the idea that, more often than not, less fortunate people had only themselves to blame (page 74).”

This theme pulses through Wasp; is Zoe’s life the consequence of her own choices or of the society that has neglected her?

Red Road

In Andrea Arnold’s feature length debut Red Road (2006), she doesn’t deconstruct stereotypes like in Wasp, but she still makes working class life visibly present. The film centers on Kathy, a working class woman in her thirties who is a CCTV operator. Through her loneliness, she observes the lives of the people she monitors with more than a professional interest. One day, she notices a man from her past who caused a great trauma in her life. This man is also working class. Kathy has her trials and tribulations to face over the course of Red Road, but being a working class woman isn’t one of them (nor should it always have to be). Arnold exposes viewers to working class life; instead of a drama set in a semi-detached Victorian house, why not a block of flats for a change?

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold’s follow up film was Fish Tank (2009), or as I like to call it, Wasp 2.0. The fish of the story is fifteen-year-old Mia. She spends her days stuck in the tank that is her council estate (public housing complex) in Essex, which just got smaller as she recently fell out with her best (and only?) friend Keeley. There’s not a lot for her to do in the fish tank — she dreams of one day becoming a dancer and practices in empty rooms. When she’s not doing that, she’s leaning against the glass of the tank, staring enviably at families and groups of friends, all the while binge drinking cheap hard cider and chain smoking.

Arnold taps in to David Cameron’s previous statement with the way she uses cinematography to stalk Mia. We the audience follows her, hand held, uncomfortably close like a documentary. We feel Mia’s claustrophobia and how she — and us — beg to break out of the confines of the tank.

The character of Connor preys on the working class. He uses Mia’s mother and emotionally toys with Mia. In one scene, Connor and Mia are in a lake trying to catch a fish. Connor tells Mia to walk slowly towards him so that the fish will go to him also. It is not just the fish that is hypnotized by Connor. The next day, Mia spots the caught fish dead on her kitchen floor, being devoured by her dog. This is a reflection of Connor’s degradation of the working class women at the end of the film. When he realizes that he could be arrested for statutory rape after sleeping with Mia, he discards both women without a word.

What I also admire about Arnold’s direction is that in both Red Road and Fish Tank, both Kathy and Mia’s characters envy other characters that are seemingly fulfilled, but are also working class. I find this detail pivotal, as it shows that Arnold isn’t saying that even though the characters face certain economic and social status restrictions, they aren’t striving to abandon their class. One class is not superior to the other.

In today’s society, the working class are consistently expected to be striving towards the middle class instead of being proud of their own class. In the book Chavs, Jones states that:

“Those labeled ‘chavs’ became frequently ridiculed for failing to meet lofty middle-class standards in what they wore, or how they ate. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was rightly applauded for his crusade to bring healthy food to the British school dinner menu. But it was a campaign marred by tut-tutting at the eating habits of the lower orders. On his Channel 4 programme, Oliver referred to parents who failed to sit around a table for dinner as ‘what we have learned to call “white trash”’. Jonathan Ross asked him on BBC1: ‘Well, do you ever think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents? Like people from council estates?’ It was a ‘joke’ met with cheers (page 144).”

Andrea Arnold Wuthering Heights

Arnold continued to explore themes of classism in her most drastic departure from her usual style yet, in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011), her first take on a costume drama. Brontë’s Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned.” Yet the ambiguously mixed race character is usually played by white actors. Arnold cast Black actors Soloman Glave and James Howson to portray the young and adult versions, respectively, of Heathcliff in her interpretation. The film introduces Heathcliff as a working class boy found on the streets of Liverpool. Like Mia and Zoe, the words that recur most in Heathcliff’s vocabulary are ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt.’ Arnold constructs the narrative to be solely through Heathcliff’s viewpoint, rather than housekeeper Nelly’s gaze of the pair’s relationship.

Throughout his childhood, the cantankerous Heathcliff always had Cathy as a rock to lean on. It didn’t matter how he spoke or what words he said, because he didn’t need to say anything with her. They communicated with delighted shrieks as they played in the moors. They spoke by holding each other as they shared a bed at night. At one point when Heathcliff’s back is beaten bloody, Cathy shows her sympathy by licking his wounds clean. That changes when Cathy is introduced to middle class society. She distances herself from Heathcliff by withdrawing her body from him and speaking to him condescendingly in her newly adopted manner.

Even though the film is a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff, it is Heathcliff’s narrative that Andrea makes us live through. She deemed the narrative of a working class man of color more vital than that of a white middle class woman. Like the audience feeling claustrophobic with Mia in her fish tank, the audience feels every whip that Heathcliff suffers, every burn from the stick that hits his flesh, every curse that’s thrown his way. The cinematographer isn’t concerned with capturing Cathy’s pain, who is screaming for mercy on behalf of Heathcliff off-screen.

Arnold’s overall message for Heathcliff’s story, and overall her main characters’ entire stories, becomes plainly evident in where she decided to end the film. In Brontë’s novel, we see Heathcliff spiral into villainy over his toxic love for Cathy and eventually die years later. However, Arnold’s version sees Heathcliff walking off into the moors, the fog making his path uncertain, just like his future, after he failed to open Cathy’s coffin to join her in death. Though seemingly grim, this is the optimistic ending that Arnold always offers her characters.

Zoe, Kathy, Mia and Heathcliff all venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in. Whether those boxes are council houses, fish tanks or Wuthering Heights.

External Sources: Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class. Verso, 2011.

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Enemy: Race and Gender in Andrea Arnold’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard for Wasteland Paradise Comics. Her previous articles for Bitch Flicks were on Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can follow her on Twitter at @sophiesuzhall.

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in ‘Marie Antoinette’

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

Marie Antoinette

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation and appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. Cross-posted with permission.

When it comes to 2006’s Marie Antoinette, some reviewers have ridiculed Sofia Coppola for creating “just another costume drama.” This is simply an attempt to discredit Coppola as a masterful auteur.

In reality, Coppola spent years (starting in 2001) researching the life of Antoinette with support from historian/writer Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: A Journey.

Antoinette’s elaborate costuming is much like an ancient grotesque painting, producing both aesthetic endearment and strange sympathetic curiosity at what kind of deficiency the costuming is compensating for. Marie Antoinette herself has become somewhat of a chimera; a piece of the architecture we use to describe decadent aristocracy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Marie Antoinette is investigated to see if her virginity is still intact before being traded from her family in Austria to the French nobility. We see Marie Antoinette as an inmate, not something we would have attributed to her otherwise. Her world is insular and stunted, punctuated by decadent “treats” and passive, objectifying adoration by the court.

What stood out to me as I looked into Marie Antoinette’s life was the politicized severity in her relationships with people who she was supposed to adopt as trusted family. What they had in riches and prestige they lacked in empathy for each other.

As Antoinette approaches Versailles, The Radio Dept. “I Don’t Like It Like This” plays.

Words fail me all the time
I don’t even feel like talking
still I go on and on
I’m dying here and you keep walking

why are you asking me this?
can’t you see I’m trying?
I don’t like it like this
no I think I’m dying

Destined to go on as, more or less, a piece of furniture, this song is a flawless companion to the scene. Coppola’s use of contemporary music to generate a better understanding of Marie Antoinette’s condition is noteworthy. Kirsten Dunst is the perfect Antoinette with her few lines and held-back-ness in affect.

Through costuming, Marie Antoinette was able to attach a feeling of specialness she did not feel otherwise. Surrendered as a bargaining prize by her family at the age of 15, Coppola portrays the intense amount of watchfulness, and little love, she was exposed to.

As much as I am hard on Hillary Clinton, how much of these parallels can be drawn in her life? Here is another woman dedicated to a system of striving which is part of structural and damaging patriarchy. For Marie Antoinette, it was her flamboyance which helped her declare agency. For other women, maybe it’s joining the “boys club” however oppressive that may be (to others and the self).

Coppola shows that Marie Antoinette was merely using the language of power she had available. To delve further, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was attracted to anything which helped her portray the eminence she felt she lacked in personhood.

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was truly a prelude to our DeBordian society of spectacle, or, even more contemporarily (and French) Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl. How different is the reluctant Queen’s high profile folly than anyone else we worship in television or magazines? I’d argue even the modern Kim Kardashian’s life is decidedly martyred and politicized while the cultural roots of her decadence are not so easily scrutinized by the public. The Young Girl is a figure that is both revered and despised.

We can learn much about nobility in this film, whether it is historical past or our nobility at present. As much as people feel dehumanized at the level of working class, we also elevate the “elite” to the level of gods, giving them both immense privilege and unreachable humanitarian expectations.

One reviewer said, “Only an American” would depict Antoinette so sympathetically. But that misses the dichotomy of the grotesque. There is culpability in the culture which creates their iconic demons, the ones which attract and repulse us.

Jason Schwartzman as the reticent ruler Louis XVI says, “Lord God, guide us and protect us, for we are too young to rule.” How true is this of our modern media aristocracy? As we scrutinize politicians and the glitterati alike, shouldn’t we be mindful that they don’t much know what they are doing either?

Marie Antoinette

Coppola shows us Marie Antoinette’s range of human qualities: most movingly that giving up to decadence is easy when love or agency is absent.

In discussions with Antonia Fraser, Coppola reportedly asked her if it was alright for her to leave the political bits out. Fraser remarked that Marie Antoinette would have “loved that.” Funny though, because what I see on screen, at times, is a cleverly wrought political drama in the tradition of “the personal is political.” This phrase becomes much clearer and richer in the life of Marie Antoinette as depicted by Coppola. Here was a girl (then woman) whose entire life was used as a political bargaining chip — from birth it was destined, and her death in an unmarked grave could only be so appropriate for someone whose only told purpose was to be a fancy prop to represent aristocracy.

Coppola’s choice not to show Marie Antoinette’s brutal death instead makes us focus on how cultures worship and dehumanize icons. Coppola does a masterful job of showing how this woman (Marie Antoinette) is only praised when she shows a complete lack of agency (being traded off, marrying someone she doesn’t know, obeying the rules she finds “ridiculous”) and scorned when she does the things which allow her to have agency (buying things, having an affair, having a barn built to experience something new).

Coppola leaves me with questions: why was Marie Antoinette asked to answer to a French public who had monarchs for centuries? Only her? How would they have her respond?

Big questions loom after watching Coppola’s film that defy what we believe about nobility.

Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ Suprisingly Feminist; Sofia Coppola and The Silent Woman

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press,Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Mary Harron’s ‘American Psycho’: Rogue Feminism

When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet ‘American Psycho’ espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

American Psycho

This guest post written by Dr. Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

American Psycho fails the Bechdel Test. Tammy Bruce, coordinator of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), called for boycotting the film’s source material. Gloria Steinem allegedly protested the film in advance of its release. The script, co-written by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, eschews any appeal to women’s empowerment. The film’s actresses play a milieu of secretaries, sex workers, and spaced-out, self-centered socialites. When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet American Psycho espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

Released in March 2000, American Psycho was possibly the first major film release of the new millennium written and directed by women. Director Mary Harron’s previous 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol, cast Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, a sex worker-turned-failed assassin, whose SCUM Manifesto influenced radical feminism. Harron’s exploration of feminist history includes people who are poor, struggle with mental illness, and advocate for genocide against men. In other words, Harron’s is the not the palatable, feel-good, mass market, go-girl feminism of Legally Blonde (2001).

With American Psycho, Harron shot and co-wrote a runaway hit that converted the film’s $7 million budget into $34.3 million international gross. A 5:1 profit ratio is a decent investment return in Hollywood: Harron’s 2006 follow-up, The Notorious Bettie Page, earned less than $2 million. Therein, Harron uses the biopic to transform a sex icon into a voice for women’s issues. Harron might be situated within Camille Paglia’s gladiatorial school of feminism, rather than Steinem’s arguably censorial feminist view.

American Psycho is also one of the new millennium’s first major film releases to express a feminist agenda. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the film’s Wall Street protagonist, is Harron’s portrait of what Valerie Solanas said men contributed to society: mental illness (Patrick’s dissociation from reality), conformity (his obsession with “fitting in”), suppression of individuality (“I’m going to call you Sabrina,” he tells a call girl), prevention of conversation, friendship, and love (arguing about the importance of friends before axing a colleague), and the monetary system (“feed me a stray cat,” an ATM machine tells Bateman). “You’re inhuman,” Bateman’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) argues when he drops her. “I’m in touch with humanity, ” Bateman responds in defense of his extreme personification of neoliberal values. From Syriana to There Will Be Blood, the decade that followed would be rife with films about corrupt people winning at capitalism — usually Machiavellian men, but sometimes women, as it happens in Pretty Persuasion and Black Swan.

American Psycho’s runaway popularity, razor sharp satire, and ontologically vague ending have provoked extensive discussion of the film, but little has been said regarding a subtle but important reference that positions Harron’s work as a feminist response to Hollywood’s entrenched neoliberalism.

American Psycho

In an interview with BlackBook, Harron reported that while Christian Bale was preparing for the Bateman role, he came across Tom Cruise giving a televised interview. Bale was struck by what he thought was Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes,” which shaped Bale’s interpretation of Bateman. Harron neglected to explain how her 1980s-set film corresponds with the film that made Cruise a superstar, 1983’s Risky Business.

Partway through American Psycho, Patrick, posing as murdered colleague Paul Allen, brings a sex worker to his apartment; she sports the same hairstyle Rebecca DeMornay wore in Risky Business for the role of the sex worker, Lana. Risky Business is a pro-capitalist, product placement-laden coming-of-age fable about a teenager, Joel Goodson (Cruise), who succeeds at getting accepted to Princeton rather than floundering at life through risk-taking: specifically, by enterprising as a pimp. Early in the film, when Joel first meets Lana, she tells him, “You’ve got a really nice place, here, Joel.” In American Psycho, Christie echoes this phrase with the same inflection: “You’ve got a nice place here, Paul.” The haircut and the dialogue add a further uncanny dimension to the film reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), wherein the protagonist becomes obsessed with recreating his memory of a woman who never existed.

As with American Psycho, several have argued, however loosely, that Risky Business satirizes capitalism, but its product placements, soundtrack full of then-hot recording artists and upbeat ending inevitably put forward a contrasting statement. Harron references Risky Business to uncover the misogyny the latter film attempts to suppress in its teen-romp approach to sex work. Elsewhere, Bateman works out with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or pornography droning in the background. Later, Bateman will make his own pornographic videos as an exercise in self-directed obsession and take on an identity similar to the cannibal villain Leatherface as he chases Christie and bites her before killing her with a chainsaw. Whereas Bateman can wax poetic about Whitney Houston songs and argue in favor of equal rights for women, behind his admitted “mask of sanity” is the Bateman who says to a bartender, “I want to stab you to death and play around with your blood.” Many of the film’s other characters seem to overlook Bateman’s mental illness, or to misinterpret or ignore his statements, in a setting where everyone — women and men included — seemingly want to pretend his psychosis away. As Bateman’s misogyny and hyper-competitive attitude erupt until he’s literally crying for help, Harron calls attention to a world that would rather deny Bateman’s existence than learn from him as a case study in socially entrenched misogyny, consumer-capitalist psychosis, and the Reaganite ideals returning to fashion this election season.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

Susanne Bier’s Living, Breathing Body of Work

Women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

In a Better World

This guest post written by Sonia Lupher appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Susanne Bier’s camera yearns.

In her film After the Wedding, Bier’s handheld camera lingers on her main characters as shocking family secrets spill out into the open. Bier is interested in the micro-gestures that are revealed in close-ups on expressive body parts (an eye, a mouth, a hand), and her camera pulsates pensively with the tension unfolding onscreen. Rather than dominating the narrative, these shots are inserted in her films like punctuation. These intimate details bring her characters to life, revealing their interiority amid the situations unraveling around them.

In an interview with Mette Hjort, Bier speaks about the eroticism that drives her films. Even if they don’t involve sex, conflicts are fueled by an “underlying erotic drive or erotic frustration” fundamental in determining who they are and what matters to them. In films such as After the Wedding, this latent eroticism comes through in the electric energy between characters, mediated through Bier’s deliberate, but tender, ability to coax nuanced performances from her actors. Bier’s most powerful and critically acclaimed films (After the Wedding among them) are intimate, highly charged family dramas that hinge upon pivotal moments in their characters’ lives. Films such as After the Wedding, Open Hearts, Brothers, and In a Better World oscillate between tense, pensive moments of silence and uncontainable emotion expressed in explosive rage, grief, outrage, and despair.

Brothers

These are just a few pieces that make up Bier’s stunning oeuvre, which includes over a dozen features in English, Swedish, and her native Danish. Bier made her directorial debut in 1991 with the semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Freud Leaving Home, which follows a young Swedish-Jewish woman’s sexual awakening while her family is thrown into turmoil when her mother is diagnosed with cancer. An impressive first work, the film anticipates themes that recur in Bier’s later films: intricate or vulnerable family dynamics threatened by sickness (particularly cancer), adultery, divorce, unsatisfactory gender roles, and extra-familial obligations. Bier followed this up with more family-driven comedy-dramas such as Family Matters and Like It Never Was Before, the latter of which follows a dissatisfied father who must reconcile relationships with his wife and children when he discovers he is gay.

Brothers

Her career took off in the early 2000s with her film Open Hearts, starring Mads Mikkelsen (of James Bond films and Hannibal fame), the 28th contribution to Dogme 95, an art film movement helmed by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that solicited a raw, realist aesthetic from participating filmmakers. She carried several visual and narrative techniques from Open Hearts into her subsequent films, including the lingering closeness to her characters. She has also made two films in the United States: Things We Lost in the Fire and Serena – the latter starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. One of her films, Brothers, was remade in the U.S. Most recently, she directed The Night Manager, a miniseries adaptation of a John Le Carré novel starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie (it premieres in the U.S. on April 19!).

For Bier, expressing a person’s inner world is more important than plot; all of her formal techniques have some bearing on the formation of her characters. Sadness, joy, and humor often emerge simultaneously in Bier’s films, due to her talent for drawing complex performances from her actors. She boldly combines light and dark, reminding us that people and relationships are too complex to feel just one thing at a time. Her 2012 film Love Is All You Need (its Danish title is The Bald Hairdresser) is a romantic comedy about Ida, a hairdresser with breast cancer, who falls for her daughter’s father-in-law-to-be while they assemble for the wedding in Italy. Ida’s cancer, though important, doesn’t weigh down the film, and it certainly doesn’t keep her from interacting with her family or falling in love.

Love Is All You Need

Bier recognizes the importance of strong emotions in making a film that speaks to various audiences; she expresses disappointment in the “intellectual timidity” that keeps filmmakers from making emotionally powerful films. Yet her films are not corny or melodramatically overwhelming. As she said in a 2011 NPR interview, “I’ve always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.” The combination of discipline and drama showcases Bier’s refined instinct for when to hold back and when to let go.

Like those of recognized (usually male) “auteurs,” Bier’s films carry her signature – it is almost as though each film continues where another left off, or follows a secondary character whose storyline failed to flourish elsewhere. But, despite the fact that she is among the most prolific and critically acclaimed contemporary female directors, Bier’s name remains relatively unheralded in the public eye. Film and television scholar Belinda Smaill has suggested that this is because Bier’s films waver between commercial and art film circuits, never quite satisfying the expectations of either audience. Her film’s melodramatic tendencies put her at odds with the art film crowd, but her careful attention to visual composition keeps her films out of the strictly commercial realm. Bier herself consistently expresses her intention to reach a wide audience, rather than constrain her efforts to please one or another. Her films are also overwhelmingly about men, which may complicate her reception among celebrants of women-driven and directed films. On the other hand, films such as In A Better World explore the fragility of a masculine “ideal” within domestic spaces, which may put her films at odds with male viewers as well.

These reasons may all contribute to Bier’s relative obscurity, but even so, Bier’s career illuminates the extent to which “auteur” status is still male-dominated. Kathryn Bigelow’s case is representative of this: she was the first woman to win a Best Director and a Best Picture Oscar in 2009, but, despite her lengthy and impressive career, she is still undervalued as an artist in her own right. Two years before Bigelow won the award, Bier’s After the Wedding was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. In 2011, she was nominated again and won the award for In a Better World. Bier was the third woman to win Best Foreign Language Film, following Marleen Gorris in 1995 for Antonia’s Line and Caroline Link in 2002 for Nowhere in Africa. A handful of films by women have been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film since 1959, including several by critically acclaimed directors including Lina Wertmuller, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Claudia Llosa, María Luisa Bemberg, and Agnieszka Holland.

It is easy to overlook this Academy Awards category, and yet it is the most likely to recognize women for their directorial achievements. Unfortunately, the award’s announcement during the ceremony tends to ignore the director. If you watch Bier’s (too short) acceptance speech, you will notice that her win is presented as a win for Denmark, rather than for a woman director who happens to be Danish. But the fact that several films by women have been nominated for or won the Best Foreign Language Film award is a reminder that women consistently make good films around the world, even if we have to look outside Hollywood to find them. Susanne Bier is one powerful example. Her vivid, probing explorations into family dynamics and tenuous relationships are fiercely suggestive marks of a female auteur that deserves recognition.

See also at Bitch Flicks: In the Hardest of Moments, Susanne Bier Proves That ‘Love Is All You Need’

Sonia Lupher is originally from the Pacific Northwest, but moved east to pursue a doctoral degree in the Film Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is fulfilling her lifelong dream of watching movies for a living, and especially loves horror movies directed by women. You can follow her on twitter @SoniaLupher.

No Apologies: The Ambition of Gillian Armstrong and ‘My Brilliant Career’

However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires.

My Brilliant Career

This guest post written by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

It’s almost impossible to think of Australian cinema without women directors. In recent years with her debut film The Babadook, Jennifer Kent has been declared a director to watch, but there’s also Julia Leigh, Sue Brooks, Cate Shortland, Shirley Barrett and Jocelyn Moorhouse, all of whom have had films play at Cannes and achieved various degrees of success and critical acclaim both in their home country and abroad. Not to mention Jane Campion who, while officially a Kiwi, went to film school in Australia and made some of her early films there.

Shocking then to realize that this flourishing of Australian women directors came after a near fifty year gap, a gap that began after Paulette McDonagh’s now lost 1933 film Two Minute Silence and finally ended in 1979 with Gillian Armstrong’s debut film My Brilliant Career.

The auspiciously named movie takes its title from the 1901 novel of the same name by Australian author Miles Franklin. Though the novel was popular, it wasn’t till the mid-70s that serious efforts were made for it to be adapted into a film. It was at that time that producer Margaret Fink bought the rights and began to cast about for a director that was right for the material. Fink reportedly considered Roman Polanski before setting her sights on Armstrong, a film-grad with a series of internationally acclaimed shorts under her belt who, at the time she met Fink, was working in the props department on another director’s movie.

There is much that is familiar, and loveable, about Armstrong’s first film. Set just before the turn of the century in 1897, it features a plain-looking and plain-speaking tomboy by the name of Sybylla Melvyn living on a farm in the Australian outback and dreaming of a better, i.e. more glamorous, life. Charmingly played by a young Judy Davis, in what was her first leading role in her second ever movie, Armstrong introduces us to Sybylla as she is sitting at her desk on a dusty farm while the rest of her family toils outside, prematurely beginning her memoirs, reflecting back on the career she has yet to even begin. As she pens her foreword she openly proclaims, “I make no apology for being egotistical, because I am.”

But Sybylla is quickly brought back to reality by her mother who supports her right to work; as a servant. Sybylla, despite being the daughter of a penniless farmer, has loftier ambitions of being a pianist (despite her discordant key bashing and minimal skills) or an opera singer (despite her untrained voice and the fact that she knows only drinking songs gleaned from the hours spent with her alcoholic father) or a writer (despite the fact she knows little of the world and her days are filled with drudgery). Armstrong never shows Sybylla as being particularly prodigious at any of the things she wants to do, in fact many times she shows just the opposite. However, Armstrong also doesn’t mock Sybylla’s ambition or treat it as a joke. In Armstrong’s world, the fact that Sybylla has desires and wants outside of marriage and men is treated seriously because Sybylla takes it seriously. She never needs to prove herself worthy enough for her desires.

Shortly after the dispiriting conversation between mother and daughter, good news arrives. Sybylla is sent to her wealthy maternal grandmother’s home to live a life closer to the luxury she dreamed of. In her grandmother’s house, her grandmother and her aunt Helen attempt to turn Sybylla into a proper young lady; montages involving the brushing of her unruly hair, face masks and various home remedies are applied. Armstrong’s film, and Sybylla herself, aren’t content to simply wallow in luxury however. Filmed standing in a giant bird’s cage or behind a mosquito net, it is clear, even before Sybylla says the words, that she is not exactly happy, still desperate for the chance to prove herself and to develop the career in the arts that she longs for.

Her ambitions are temporarily pushed aside however once her physical transformation is complete. Sybylla is courted by two potential suitors: the first a smarmy trainee of her grandmother’s and the second, and more interesting prospect, Sybylla’s childhood friend, Harry Beecham (Sam Neil). From the start the chemistry between Sybylla and Harry is electric. Sybylla is unwilling to act coy with Harry and he is willing to meet her on her level playing along when she shows her mischievous spirit by capsizing the boat during a romantic river ride. Sybylla declares them “mates” but the term, which Sybylla means in friendship has a double meaning. From almost the first time they meet it is clear that Harry is fascinated with Sybylla and means to marry her. The romance between them falls along conventional beats right up until an exasperate Harry finally proposes, a proposal which Sybylla declines right before whipping Harry in the face with a riding crop when his romantic overtures become too aggressive.

The moment feels as revolutionary to modern audiences as it must have felt when the movie was first screened in 1979. It is one thing for Sybylla to simply say that she doesn’t want to get married or to turn down the advances of a suitor she finds ridiculous. But in Harry, Sybylla finds not only a handsome, rich man but also a peer, someone who is not only at home getting whacked in the face by a pillow but whom she can talk to about the unfairness of the world, someone who easily apologizes for stepping out of line by acting too aggressively, who empathizes with her need to take two years to try to figure out, “What’s wrong with the world, and with me, who I am, everything.” Watching Sybylla say no to what would be considered the height of success in the society in which she lived in order to feed her own ambition is a sight all too rare in cinema. Despite the love Harry feels for her, and the fact that Sybylla feels, or nearly feels, the same way, she becomes through her rejection, a woman who bravely acts according to her own desires, someone willing to risk everything in order to have what she wants and who recognizes that men and romance are not the sum total of her world.

Armstrong never tells us whether or not Sybylla will have the brilliant career she so desperately craves. There are no scenes of an editor appearing to tell her she is a literary genius and no scenes of anyone reading her work and declaring her a prodigy. In the final scene of the film, a calm and confident Sybylla walks to the mailbox of her father’s farm to post the manuscript she has written, its destination a publishing house in Scotland. It might be a masterpiece or it might be junk, but after Sybylla posts her manuscript she turns her attention to the setting sun, her face filled with hope and the confidence that no matter what happens she can take pride in the fact that at least she tried.

My Brilliant Career

It is easy to imagine that Armstrong was filled with a similar feeling as she crafted her debut film. Women filmmakers today still face an uphill battle having their work financed and distributed. At this point in time, gender parity for directors, at least in the U.S., seems like an unrealistic dream. But at the time in which Armstrong was filming, it wasn’t even a matter of a few women directors fighting to get in the room to pitch their ideas to studios or struggling for financing. In Armstrong’s case, there was very little Australian cinema to speak of and a gap of nearly 50 years separating her from the last feature length Australian film directed by a woman. Like her audacious main character, Armstrong carved her work out of pure ambition, uncertain of the future but willing to try.

The movie may leave Sybylla and the audience forever waiting and wondering as to whether she was able to write her way to a better life. But in terms of Armstrong and her career, the answer is much clearer. My Brilliant Career became a seminal part of what was later termed the Australian New Wave (a movement that also included George Miller and his Mad Max series, the first film of which coincidentally was also released in 1979). Armstrong and the film went on to play In Competition at the Cannes film festival, something that to this day is exceedingly rare for women directors. The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and win several awards at the Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards including Best Director for Armstrong making her the first of many female Best Director AFI winners.

Perhaps best known for her 1994 adaptation of Little Women, Armstrong continues to work in film to this day, and has directed cinematic luminaries like Cate Blanchett, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Kirsten Dunst, and Diane Keaton. By anyone’s standards she has had a brilliant career.

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia is a Canadian cinephile. She has previously written for Awards Watch. You can find her on twitter @rhirschgarcia.

OMG a Vagina: The Struggle for Feminine Artistic Integrity in Kimberly Peirce’s ‘Carrie’

Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. … But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her.

Carrie - Chloe Moretz

This guest post written by Horrorella appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

In his 1981 non-fiction work Danse Macabre, Stephen King noted that, “Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality.” That statement is as true in the 21st century as it was in the 1970s, and was directly illustrated in the production of the 2013 adaptation.

The horror community was very divided when MGM and Screen Gems first announced that they would be producing a remake of Carrie. After all, this would be the third direct adaptation of the material following Brian de Palma’s 1976 film and a made for TV movie from 2002, directed by David Carson. In our current culture of remakes, reboots and sequels, fans are experiencing a bit of fatigue when it comes to repackaging known quantities over developing original ideas. De Palma’s film is still considered a classic and is very well respected within the genre, so naturally people began to question just what would make this version different from the ones we had already seen.

Enter Kimberly Peirce. Working from a script developed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the involvement of the director of Boys Don’t Cry instantly made a new adaptation much more appealing. It offered the promise of a new perspective by inviting a woman to helm this story of female adolescence and horror. Carrie is a terrifying and compelling story, but there is certainly something to be gained and perhaps a certain truth to be found in watching the pain of her journey into womanhood as told by a woman director. Particularly, given how underrepresented women are in the industry in general, and specifically in horror.

Despite Carrie‘s promise, we were largely disappointed by the final product. Reviews were mixed, audience reaction was largely negative, and the film garnered a mere 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. Forty minutes were reportedly cut at the request of the studio, and though there were a few changes here and there, the story remained largely the same, following Lawrence D. Cohen’s original script beat for beat. Notable exceptions included the way the film built the relationship between Carrie (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore), making their interactions much more tender and driven by love (albeit, a rather abusive and misguided love) than they were in either the book or in previous film adaptations, as well as more thoughtful symbolism in the role that blood played throughout the film.

One of the many disappointments was the ending of the film. Brian de Palma broke new ground with his shocking finale, which featured a remorseful Sue Snell (Amy Irving) visiting the remains of the house where Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) died after the slaughter at the prom. As Sue leans forward to lay flowers at the base of a “For Sale” sign, serving as a makeshift tombstone, a bloody hand shoots up out of the earth and grabs Sue’s arm. Audience members were terrified and that scene continues to replicated to this day, marking its place in the history of horror cinema.

Carrie - de Palma Ending

The ending of Peirce’s version, again, at the behest of the studio, features a similar scene, showing Sue (Gabriella Wilde) walking towards Carrie’s grave as a voiceover lays out the final sentences of her testimony of the events of the prom, stating that people can only be pushed so far before they break. As she lays a single rose on the grave and turns to go, the ground begins to shake and the tombstone cracks, illustrating the breaking point that Carrie was pushed to and past at the hands of her classmates and tormentors.

It’s not a horrible ending thematically, but it does cause the film to end on a rather uninspired note, especially when compared to its cinematic predecessor. If there is one thing audiences expect from the story of Carrie, it is a strong finish, and this film just fizzled in its final moments. The frustrating thing is, it didn’t have to be this way.

In September, 2014. Peirce gave a talk at AFI Directing Workshop for Women’s 2014 Showcase which was later examined in an article at io9. She discussed the filmmaking process and how her original ending was a bit more intense, and ultimately much more fascinating.

After showing Sue laying a flower on Carrie’s grave, the film jumped forward in time to a delivery room, and a very pregnant Sue laying on the table, about to give birth to the daughter that Carrie had foreseen in her final moments of life. Terrified and panicking, Sue tries to explain to the hospital staff that something is wrong. They try to calm her, telling her to take a deep breath and prepare for one final push. As she focuses her energy, instead of a tiny, screaming infant we see a large, bloody arm, belonging to a fully grown woman (presumably Carrie) making its way out of Sue’s body and back into the world itself. The scene then reveals itself to be a dream as Sue’s mother attempts to wake her from her horrific nightmare, mirroring the final moments of the de Palma ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kGJGQZIduo

This scene is fantastic for a variety of reasons. It is scary, it is certainly unexpected, and within the confines of Peirce’s story, it is elegantly poetic. The film opened with Carrie’s birth, featuring Margaret alone in her home, delivering the infant. Carrie being reborn into the world at the end (even within the confines of a dream sequence), bookends the events of the story nicely. It also casts a dark shadow over the remainder of Sue’s life, indicating that despite any kind actions in an attempt to make amends, Sue will be forever haunted by the role that she played in Carrie’s torment. Additionally, from a more practical standpoint, it gives Carrie’s knowledge of Sue’s pregnancy more of a purpose in the narrative. This would have been a clever and strong ending to a film, helping to set it apart from other adaptations and giving it a certain elegance unto itself.

The problem came when male studio representatives tried to come to terms with exactly what this ending would mean and how they could execute it. Though they agreed that it would be scary and unexpected, they had a terribly hard time articulating just what the scene meant or how it could be achieved. In fact, they had a difficult time discussing the scene at all. Says Peirce:

“When one guy started forming a sentence that should have included the word ‘vagina,’ he would just stop. ‘So when you have to shoot the hand coming out of the, uh, the, uh,…’ and then there was just silence. And giggles. And finally it came out: ‘the Vajayjay.’ (The Vajajay? Really?) ‘The cooter, the hole,’ other euphemisms.”

The voices involved were so terrified of even saying the word “vagina,” it’s no wonder they were feeling trepidation of having one in or even near the final scene of the film. And let’s face it – babies come from vaginas, so there was no way this birthing scene was going to happen properly without at least the implication that one was involved. And really, when you look at the nightmare scenario that is a tormented, angry, telekinetic teenager being reborn, the vagina itself should not be the scary part of that scene.

Despite their fears and stammering, Peirce was given the go-ahead to shoot some test footage of her idea. She storyboarded and filmed a three-quarter body prosthetic from every possible vantage, examining and testing a variety of different ways to execute this shot – from above, from the side, form various angles, and yes – even a straight-on shot aimed directly at the vagina itself.

Peirce continues:

“Finally I was having a production meeting, and the guy who hadn’t been able to say the word ‘vagina’ said it. A few times. Proudly. “So you’ll shoot towards the, uh, vagina? But not at the vagina?” And then, excitedly, ‘Can you believe we’re all at a work meeting, saying the word ‘vagina’?'”

Bravo, buddy.

Ultimately, although her ending tested well, the studio decided that it would just be too polarizing and went with the much more sterilized, uninteresting ending taking place in the graveyard.

As Peirce notes in her speech, women in film are fighting a constant battle to be heard among their male peers, and it is important to recognize and celebrate the small victories. Though she was unable to complete the film the way she wanted to make it, thanks to a perplexing fear of getting too up close and personal with the female anatomy, it is important to note that she was given the resources and the support to make this film at all. And even though the birth ending was ultimately cut, the studio did encourage her to give it a try, and a completed version of the scene is available as an alternate ending on the film’s Blu-Ray release.

But even in the face of these small victories, we have to wonder how the film would have been different had Peirce been allowed to tell this story without being inhibited by the fear and discomfort of the male voices around her. There is a certain amount of give and take to the creative control of any mainstream film production – the studio is interested in making sure the story appeals to the widest audience possible, and it is not uncommon for decisions to be made to serve that interest more than the creative drive of artists behind the picture.

But, as Peirce’s story illustrates, women filmmakers are more likely to be affected by decisions based around gender rather than simply a financial bottom line. Her discussions with various producers and studio execs demonstrate how this incident went beyond simply trying to get a specific rating or go for a certain tone. They were physically uncomfortable even saying the word, let alone entertaining the notion that a vagina could be directly involved in one of the scenes of this movie – even if it was not explicitly shown.

Art and finances quite often go head to head when it comes to decisions that will affect the final cut of a production, but with all of the hurdles that woman face in the film industry, having to make decisions and changes based around feminine content should not ever have to be one of them. I would like to see the executive who was oh so proud of himself for finally making it through the uttering of “vagina” without stammers and giggles to now take the next step of not being afraid to have a film go near one in the first place, and to allow these women to tell their stories onscreen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrQu2TlGYwQ

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Blood of ‘Carrie’; Controlling Mothers in ‘Carrie,’ Mommie Dearest,’ and ‘Now, Voyager’

Horrorella has written about film for Ain’t it Cool News, the Women in Horror Annual and on her blog at horrorella.com. She geeks out incessently over movies, television, comics and kitties. You can gab with her on Twitter @horrorellablog.

‘Wadjda’: Empowering Voices and Challenging Patriarchy

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in ‘Wadjda.’ This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

Wadjda

This guest post written by Sarah Mason appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Haifaa al-Mansour casts an eye onto the complexity of navigating an autocratic patriarchal society in Wadjda (2012). This bold voice from Saudi Arabia continues to empower voices globally.

I first watched Wadjda in the United Arab Emirates and revisited the film this year. In 2009, I was working for the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi, the same year the Shasha screenwriting grant was awarded to Haifaa al-Mansour for Wadjda.

At the cusp of adolescence, 10 year old Wadjda (first-time actor Waad Mohammed) enjoys the fleeting freedoms of her youth. She wears the quintessential American Chuck Taylor shoes with bright laces that allow her to run to school alongside a male friend; a small freedom that will be further limited as she grows into her adolescence.

Her colourful hairclips are a small statement of individuality, and her shayla is causally placed over her hair, often falling down, blowing in the wind, sometimes lost on the way to school, snatched teasingly by her young friend Abdullah. The frivolity with which Wadjda interacts with the shayla is one of nonchalance; a relationship not yet fully formed by the imposition of its more stringent usage and variations. Soon, she will have to fully conceal her hairline with a tightly pinned al-amira or khimar, and later, societal ‘norms’ will expect her face to be fully covered with the niqab.

At school, the head teacher harshly reprimands Wadjda’s elder peers for speaking too loudly. Other students, with their faces covered to avoid confrontation, scuttle past anonymously. The head teacher, Hessa, commands that it is time for Wadjda to wear full abaya for school and to replace her shoes. It is important to mention that such repression of female voices is not only within the borders of Saudi Arabia. In Turkey, the Deputy Prime Minister announced during Eid al-Fitr in 2014 that women “laughing in public” equated to “moral regression.”

At home, Wadjda compliments her mother’s singing, asking her, “Don’t you wish you were a singer?” Her mother’s sharp intake of breath reflects the audacity of the question. There is no official law banning Saudi women from singing, but it is chastised. Much like the musical bard movement that grew out of censorship in the Soviet bloc, magnitizdat, a similar movement is alive in Saudi Arabia. When the Head Teacher empties out Wadjda’s schoolbag, she finds illegal items: tapes of forbidden songs and bracelets of forbidden colours.

In the movie, Wadjda’s mother straightens her hair and applies make-up, yet as a married mother, she wears full niqab when she exits the home. She climbs into a vehicle packed with other women who need transportation to work. Her commute, her strained relationship with the impatient driver Iqbal and the perils faced by other female commuters in this forced environment, is central to her world and her phone conversations. Their fate is in his hands. Every day.

In the only country in the world that bans women from driving motorized vehicles, as decreed by hard-line clerics, this ‘ban’ does not feature in the Qur’an itself and is not written into law. If it were, why does Saudi Arabia stand alone in this inexplicable interpretation of an ancient scripture? Rotana Tarabzouni, a Los Angeles based Saudi singer, refuses to be silenced. She has already voiced her support of the Saudi Women to Drive movement and continues to garner recognition for her singing career. Activist Loujain al Hathloul defied the ban in late 2014 and drove over the border with a valid driving license, from neighboring United Arab Emirates to her home country. She was detained along with Maysaa al Hamoudi who drove from the UAE to the border to offer support. They were both arrested and held for 70 days without any charge, referred to a specialist court on charges of ‘terror’, and have since been released.

Vocal and mobile women are ‘terror’ for the patriarchs of Saudi Arabia, however, for women in Saudi Arabia, the imposition of a male driver on treacherous roads remains their ‘terror’. In 2014, Saudi artist Manal Al-Dowayan exhibited “Crash” to highlight one of the consequences of the driving ban for women. Commuting female teachers are 50% more likely to be killed in a car accident than the average Saudi. Even in notification of death, journalists kowtow to the conservative trend that avoids mentioning a women’s name in public. Tragically, these women often die faceless and nameless. Alternatively, in 2014, licensed pilots Hanadi al Hindi and Yasmeen Muhammed al Maimani became the first Saudi women awarded commercial pilot licenses and they are allowed to fly within their own country’s airspace.

Wadjda

Equally fixated on mobility, Wadjda has her sets her sights on purchasing a bicycle — without training wheels. She listens to rock music and braids friendship bracelets in the colours of the local soccer teams. She takes full advantage of her pre-adolescent youth, delivering hand-written notes to an older boy; where older girls cannot.

In Wadjda, inter-female relationships are strained. Wadjda and her mother argue about the bike. Her mother implores it is “haram” — not permitted. She implies that it may negatively affect her daughter’s marriage and childbearing prospects. Yet it is clear that her mother’s marriage is under siege in a state that encourages polygamy. Even Wadjda’s own grandmother threatens to be the architect of the family’s demise, by selecting other prospective partners for her son to marry. The first line of matchmaking is always a son’s mother and only men feature on the family tree.

In a bid to impress her husband, Wadjda’s mother goes shopping for a bright red dress. The two enter the toilets to try on the garment. The notion of an unclothed women in a dressing room within a mixed-gender store is not permissible in Saudi Arabia. Wadjda’s mother, in the bright red dress is harshly juxtaposed in the decaying bathroom and next to the advertisement for deodorant, where the smiling model has had an abaya block-drawn over her exposed skin. In a world where women are only and always framed within the context of men, Wadjda’s mother doesn’t ask if she looks good in the red dress. Rather, Wadjda’s mother asks, “Will my husband like it?”

With the prevailing existence of Saudi Arabian austerity, ‘rules’ and not laws of the state, undermine gender parity. Many of these ‘rules’ are excused as ‘cultural’ or ‘traditional.’ However, this ‘culture’ is espoused by hardline, wahhabist conservative male religious figures, which mute any discussion or dissent.

We, professional women the world over, do not accept culture or tradition as a rational justification for discrimination against a racial or ethnic group – rather, we would look for opportunities to challenge such prejudices. So why do we continue to accept gender-based inequality and its consequences? We do not. Citing ‘culture’ as corroboration to argument only serves to preserve aspects of a culture that maintains the proponent’s present privileged position.

The internet and increased global travel challenge the old order. Restricting what can be seen, viewed, read and dissipated is much, much harder to control in the new media age. Saudi Arabia is cautiously embracing positive international recognition in new mediums, while dancing precariously with the messaging it conveys. In 2012, the same year Wadjda was released, athletes Wojdan Shaherkani and Sarah Attar made history competing at the London Olympics as the first Saudi female Olympians. A budding art scene, a burgeoning comedy scene, and a feature film directed by a woman — and with women central to its storyline — are all exhibiting new, bold statements.

Since Wadjda’s release, Arab films have garnered more attention in the global market. Barakah Meets Barakah gently navigates young love in Saudi Arabia. The comedic short captured the imagination of Berlin Film Festival audiences who awarded several prizes to Arab films, filmmakers and actors. I write with confidence that each of the Arab filmmakers recognised at Berlinale in 2016 have seen Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda.

It’s a courageous battle to challenge the norm. In a state that imposes rules based on laws unwritten, perhaps it is time to write our own rules. In Wadjda, Head Teacher Hessa proclaims to Wadjda, “Believe it or not, you remind me of myself at your age.” With the wind in her hair, a young girl dreams of the freedom that riding a bike offers so that she may take control of her direction and destination.

Four years after the release of Wadjda in 2012, there are now many more Wadjdas. They are the Haifaas, the Manals, the Rotanas, the Loujains, the Maysaas, the Hanadis, the Yasmeens, the Wojdans, and the Sarahs. They are you and they are me.

They are enrolled in higher education, writing novels and screenplays, vlogging, blogging, creating art, voicing opinions, singing songs, travelling internationally, competing in sporting events, riding bicycles and flying airplanes. They are also doing it all under existing written law, even in Saudi Arabia, and they don’t seek your approval.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Wadjda’: Can a Girl and a Bicycle Change a Culture?

Sarah Mason is an international producer based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Bristol University, UK.  She consults on Middle Eastern cultural representation in film and art.