The Social Network Roundup

Most of the commentary out there on The Social Network focuses on its awesomeness and front-runner status for this year’s Best Picture Academy Award. Plus, the film won its opening weekend’s box office, even though it’s numbers were lower than anticipated. While it very well may be a brilliantly-made film, one thing we can’t ignore is the film’s women. Other people are talking about the film’s misogyny, too, which raises this question:

Is The Social Network reinforcing the misogyny of its subject(s), or is it specifically offering their attitudes about women as critique?
While I hope it’s the latter, much of my reading never makes clear that the film rises above the attitudes of its ivy-league elites. An elitist attitude also seems to creep into articles that criticize  those who note the film’s misogyny, dismissing complaints about yet another film that focuses on upper-class white men as unintelligent.

Here are some of our findings. If you’ve written about the women of The Social Network, or have read something good that we missed, please leave your links in the comments section.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien’s “The Social Network’s Female Props” @ The Daily Beast:

Complaining about misogyny in modern blockbuster cinema is about as productive as lamenting Facebook’s grip on our society. But what is the state of things if a film that keeps women on the outer circles of male innovation enjoys such critical acclaim; indeed, is heralded as the “defining” story of our age? What are we to do with a great film that makes women look so awful?

Tracy Clark-Flory’s “Female programmers on “The Social Network” @ Salon Broadsheet

But, oh, are there groupies: They aggressively undo belt buckles in bathroom stalls, take bong hits while the boys do their important coding work and rip open their blouses so that coke can be snorted off their flat little tummies. They are useless on the technical and business front, as is made clear in a scene where two groupies look on as Zuckerberg has a sudden revelation and begins barking orders to his all-male team. The doe-eyed coeds ask if there is anything they can do to help out — and the question itself is a punch line. Even a nubile Facebook intern who presumably does have some technical abilities is introduced only to party with Facebook’s smooth-talking president, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), at a Stanford frat party. The women are trophies for these male history-makers.

Laurie Penny’s “Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement” @ New Statesman

The only roles for women in this drama are dancing naked on tables at exclusive fraternity clubs, inspiring men to genius by spurning their carnal advances and giving appreciative blowjobs in bathroom stalls. This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.

The territory of this modern parable is precisely objectification: not just of women, but of all consumers. In what the film’s promoters describe as a “definitively American ” story of entrepreneurship, Zuckerberg becomes rich because, as a social outsider, he can see the value in reappropriating the social as something that can be monetised. This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.

Irin Carmon’s The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas @ Jezebel

Hollywood’s solution to Facebook’s unsexy creation story was familiar: Add women as sluts, stalkers, or ballbusters. With very few exceptions, girls don’t even know how to properly play video games or get high off a bong, and they’re gold-diggers or humiliating bitches, and they certainly never come up with anything of value on their own. The result is a fictional Harvard as crudely misogynistic as Hollywood — which, thankfully, it actually wasn’t — and a world in which the best a woman can hope for is to have her rejection create as meaningful a legacy.

Melissa Silverstein’s “The Social Network” @ Women and Hollywood

The film depicts a world where women are crazy groupies, there for amusement, to give you blow jobs in bathrooms at parties, and to snort coke off of, but not to be taken seriously.  The tech world has long been known as a world that favors guys, just this week twitter was all “atwitter” about a women in tech panel that occurred at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in SF.

I guess that is one reason why it is a perfect movie for Hollywood today.   I know there are women doing some seriously important and great jobs in tech, just like I know that there are women doing some seriously important and great jobs in the films business. But we all know that the tech guys are more visible and the movie guys are more visible. 

Steven Colbert’s interview with Aaron Sorkin @ The Colbert Report


The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Aaron Sorkin
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Jennifer Armstrong’s “‘The Social Network’ has a woman problem” @ Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch

The Social Network has turned out to be the rare pop cultural phenomenon that is everything we hoped it would be. Smart, riveting, and very much of our time, it provides endless fodder for intellectual dissection and further exploration. The fact that it has become so all-engrossing, however, makes one glaring fact about it all the more disturbing: Its downright appalling depiction of women.

Roxanne Samer’s “Review: The Social Network” @ Gender Across Borders

Previously, I have argued that in some cases representations of sexism and racism can serve as political critiques of the mistreatment they depict. One could claim that Zuckerberg and his peers’ objectifying of women and fetishization of Asian women in particular is presented in the film as in poor taste. The film is by no means casting Zuckerberg, never mind Parker, as an innocent angel. But in the end one must ask: are these trysts etc. depicted as deplorable or as typical and tolerable 20-something boy behavior?  My intuition says it’s the latter. 

JOS’ “Social Network sexism” @ Feministing

The film follows an interesting pattern I’ve noticed in other work by contemporary male filmmakers (Inception as an example) – it offers compelling insight into sexism while also displaying a sexist perspective in its storytelling.

Cynthia Fuchs’ “‘The Social Network’: Fincher and Sorkin’s Story of Obsession” @ Pop Matters

Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires, and scripted by Aaron Sorkin, the film is already renowned for its breakneck dialogue (especially when Mark speaks, condescendingly and oh-so-cruelly). However fictionalized that dialogue might be (the book imagines conversations as it recounts events mainly from Eduardo’s perspective, and includes luridish party and sex scenes), it represents here an attitude that makes its own political and cultural point, that men and boys in privileged positions tend to see the world in ways that benefits them, that reinforces their privilege.

Jenni Miller’s “‘The Social Network’ and Sexism: Does the Film Treat Women Unfairly?” @ Cinematical

We’re given a trio of wholly unreliable narrators who do see women as props and prizes and ugly feminists out to get them. They’re emblematic of all the things that the fictional Mark Zuckerberg wants and feels are out of his reach, like the Harvard social clubs. Even Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) questions whether or not Zuckerberg’s screwing him over all boils down to the fact that Saverin got into one of Harvard’s fancy clubs where WASPs cheer on half-naked women making out with each other.

David Ehrlich’s “5 Reasons Why ‘The Social Network’ Does Not Define This Generation” also @ Cinematical

5. It’s a film about men in a generation that’s also about women (I hope).

Alison Willmore’s “The (Homo)Social Network” @ IFC

The suggestion that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher had an obligation to insert a token “strong lady” character in order to make their film more demographically friendly or underline how their own intentions are separate from their characters is condescending to audiences. The film world still leans incredibly toward male perspectives, male characters and male audiences, and the way to fix that is by supporting and encouraging women making and working in movies, not by implying the need for an artificial quota of “go girl”ness.

Dana Stevens’ “Is the Facebook movie sexist?” @ Slate

The Social Network presents an odd paradox in its vision of the war between the sexes (which, like all the conflict in this movie, is a real war, brutal and unattenuated). It’s smarter about the way women circulate as objects of male competition, predation, and fantasy than it is about the motivations of individual female characters. The film’s “women problem” doesn’t lie in the fact that many of the women in it (with the exception of Erica Albright and the lawyer played by Rashida Jones) are shallow, self-serving jerks—so are most of the men. But any film capable of putting on-screen as complex and fascinating a jerk as Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg should be smart enough to do the same for the ladies.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The 40% Figure

Cross posted at Wellywood Woman
 
There’s so much discussion about the Bechdel Test now (see links below for some examples). I love it all, am interested that men are writing about the test. AND I relate to @marnen’s tweet: “I’m feeling snarky enough to propose the Laibow-Koser test: can 2 female writers have a conversation that doesn’t mention Bechdel test? :)”.

And then on Facebook, Scarlett Shepard from the San Francisco Women’s Film Festival (@sfwff) provided the link to an Indiewire article, Summer Box Office Report: Women Rule The Art Houses, by Peter Knegt.

Peter Knegt explains that men directed every one of the 22 summer ‘Hollywood’ films that earned more than $50m, and women actors received top billing in only five, including the three that women ‘flocked’ to: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Eat, Pray, Love and Sex & the City 2. But in the ten top-grossing ‘specialty’ releases* “women dominated: in audience seats, in front of the camera, and, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, behind it.”

Women directed four (40%) of these films: Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right (earned the most to date, $19m, way ahead of Cyrus with $7m); Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give, and Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. In two more, I Am Love (with Tilda Swinton) and The Girl Who Played With Fire (Noomi Rapace) women were also lead characters. I’m interested in the 40% figure, cross-referencing it to the percentage of women directors in contention for this year’s Australian Film Institute’s awards. Has there been some deep shift, not only in women as audiences—the ‘over-25 women’ quadrant was the largest U.S. cinema audience in 2009—but also in women’s participation as writers and directors of feature films?

(And two of the ten top-grossing films, Joan Rivers and Babies are documentaries. Which makes me wonder, again, why—as far as I know—no-one in the U.S. has yet picked up Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. It’s done so well at festivals there and it seems such a no-brainer.)

And I’m curious. Yes, more women writers and directors are making successful ‘specialty’ releases. Yes, a high proportion of these releases have women as leads. Yes, women are going to see these films. But men directed all of the Hollywood films that women ‘flocked’ to see. Any minute now, Hollywood is going to decide to exploit further the potential of women as audiences. But are men always going to be the directors (and writers) they choose for big-budget projects to attract women viewers and to make a lot of money? What would it take for 40% of next year’s $50m- grossing films to be women-directed, and have women as central characters?

*which opened in under 1,000 screens and were released by an independent producer or studio subsidiary

LINKS

I am woman. Hear me…Please!, by Mark Harris. He mentions QUOTAS

Just say yes to Mad Men, by Sophie Cunningham in Meanjin’s SPIKE. Has CLIPS, which I always love, including the classic Bechdel Test clip.

Is the Bechdel Test Overlooking Feminist Films? by Aymar Jean Christian


Marian Evans is a cultural activist filmmaker who holds New Zealand’s first PhD in Creative Writing. She is currently realising her thesis feature script “Development,” about a group of women filmmakers, set in an imaginary corner of Wellywood, New Zealand’s Hollywood. She’d love suggestions about brands that might like to partner the project, and welcomes introductions to anyone who can help.

Director Spotlight: Agnès Varda

Agnes Varda
I came to Agnès Varda late and by accident. A couple of years ago, scanning Netflix for something interesting to watch, I found The Gleaners and I, and determined it was one of my favorite movies in a very long time. Only then did I look her up and learn how famous and influential she is—something I would have already known if I’d formally studied film. What I love about Varda is her playful intellectualism. She doesn’t take herself too seriously—and it shows in her films—yet she treats her film subjects with love and great care. Her protagonists are often women who live interesting, difficult, and complicated lives.
Varda’s consuming interest in film as a medium for artistic and sensory inquiry, rather than a mode of entertainment, is a quintessentially French trait. It is also, for this lover and maker of images that live beyond their frame, a trusty bohemian credo.
I have a bit of a difficult time with French New Wave films; while I can see they are beautiful pieces of art, they don’t always capture me—I can’t quite get inside them. They don’t have the kind of heart I’m looking for in a movie. Varda’s films do—they’re beautiful on the surface (form) and below it (content), and manage to do all of this without a hint of pretension. This is one of the reasons why she is my favorite filmmaker. Here is a sampling of her films.

La Pointe-Court (1955)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Daguerréotypes (1976)

Vagabond (1985)

The Beaches of Agnés (2008)

The Flick Off: Fantastic Mr. Fox

After hearing repeatedly that Fantastic Mr. Foxis Wes Anderson’s best film, I gave it a try. I’m not the biggest Anderson fan—I generally find his aesthetic too precious, his characters over-privileged bores, and his daddy issues repetitive and tiresome—but it seemed to me that stop-motion animation might be the ideal medium to capture his intentions.
And, before I say anything else, let me say that the look of the film was great. It was fittingly retro and playful for (an overgrown man-child like) Anderson and (the all-style-no-substance preferences of) his ideal audience. The style, however, isn’t enough to garner the near universally-glowing reviews Fox has received. If you look at the film with anything other than squinty eyes and plugged ears, the problems are immediately evident.
Mrs. Fox. Meryl Streep voices the only female character in the entire cast. Okay, there’s a love interest to bat her eyelashes at the boys, but I don’t even think she had a line. Not only is the lone female character a wife and mother—seen cooking and husband-scolding more than any other activity—but also is a waste of a talented actress. Commenter gmarv on A.O. Scott’s NYT review puts it well:
Note to Wes: if your one female character (wife + mother) is supposed to be a professional artist, could you at least show her working during the DAY in her STUDIO, not cooking all day and painting outside at night with her kid and husband sitting around her?

It’s disappointing that this film incorporates Dahl’s lack of interest in women (that veers close to misogyny). I guess it’s not that much different from other Wes Anderson films that way…but with a little more imagination it could have been so much better.

“Lack of interest in women” seems to put it mildly. Anderson’s films do typically have problems with—and lack of (interest in)—women (the topless intern from The Life Aquatic comes to mind). But, not a single one of the creatures in the big plot to save the Fox family could have been female? Seriously?
While I’m not typically a stickler for accurate adaptations, Amy Biancolli of The Houston Chronicle points out some poignant changes from Roald Dahl’s novel:
1) In the original, Mrs. Fox was complicit all along. 2) Mr. Fox never went on the wagon. 3) Mr. and Mrs. Fox had four cubs, not one little nutcase, and Dahl made no mention of a yoga-bending super-nephew. 4) I’m pretty sure the point of the story wasn’t Mr. Fox’s flagging self-esteem or his strained relationship with his son. But this is cinema in the time of Oprah, when Reductio ad navelgazing is the inevitable narrative arc.

Wouldn’t Mrs. Fox have been so much more interesting and dynamic if she hadn’t been the domesticating, shaming force in the man’s (and boy’s) life? If she actually remained a person after marrying and having a child, who struggles with being a “wild animal” too? The tiny (ha) complication of keeping Mrs. Fox complicit would have done wonders for the story.

Wouldn’t it also have been great if Anderson—who, despite all my negative comments, does have directorial talent—had changed course just a little bit and not made a movie about a strained father-son relationship? Talent grows only when it’s challenged, and perhaps that’s why I keep giving Anderson another chance. After Fox, though, I’m not sure he gets another shot.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Black Play Thing on The Big C

Cross posted at Womanist Musings.

Let me say from the start that I take no issue with inter-racial relationships. I do however have a problem when Black sexuality is used as a device in the media. Much of  last Monday’s episode had to do with sexuality. Cathy, played by Laura Linney, is dying of cancer and is determined to change her life before she dies. The episode begins with her standing up for herself when someone rudely steps in front her and ends with her having sex on a desk with a Black man that she barely knows. While this kind of sexual behavior is out of character from her, I am not certain that anonymous sex as liberation is a positive move for women.

Her son is 14 years old and as such he is beginning to explore his sexuality. He bumps into Andrea, who is played by Gabourey Sidibe, running laps around a track. She tells him to “stop looking at her titties.” When he denies looking at her, she tells him how great hers are and that he probably has never touched “titties” before. Of course, this leads to male bravado, which prompts her to invite him to touch her breasts. When he hesitates she grabs his hand, places it on her breast and then promptly jogs away. Considering that Gabourey’s character is nothing but filler on the show, it gives the impression that Black female bodies exist for the purposes of White male sexual experimentation. This is even further problematic when we consider the brutal history of rape and slavery that exists between White Men and Black women. You cannot divorce this narrative from a scene on television no matter how race conscious the actors themselves are. Furthermore, the language which is utilized in this scene does not inspire a full respect for Andrea’s body.

The idea that Black bodies can and should be used for sexual experimentation or as a form of rebellion is based squarely in racism. First, Cathy waxes her pubic hair and then she takes off her panties to reveal her vagina to the man she would later sleep with. Throughout the entire episode, he is not even given a name, which of course presents him as little more than a mandigo to sexually satisfy his Missy Anne. What passes between them is not sex, or even a woman finding some form of liberation — but the service of a Black buck for his mistress. Black men have time and time again functioned as a form of rebellion for White women, because our White supremacist society expects them to couple with White males. Even as White women are objectifying Black men and reducing them to roving penises, it is seen as liberation because inter-racial sex is still considered taboo by many. It is a false positive because agency should not involve the repetition of reductive constructions.

There is a difference between a loving relationship between two parties and the objectification of one group by another. Simply because White women are oppressed due to patriarchy, does not mean that they lack the ability to oppress people of colour in various instances. The very fact that their identity often becomes spoiled, once they engage in an inter-racial relationship, furthers the idea that bodies of colour exist as a form of rebellion against the sexist norm. What we learned in this episode, is that for Cathy, liberation means the freedom to break taboos and utilize the Whiteness of her body to her advantage. Considering that this program is largely White with the exception of a few appearances of Sidibe as Andrea, it seems that White woman liberation is little more than the ability to act with the same impunity as White men.

Renee Martin’s blogs include Womanist Musings, Tell It WOC Speak, and Women’s Eye on Media. 

 

Quote of the Day: Ellen Page

I think it’s a total drag. I’ve been lucky to get interesting parts but there are still not that many out there for women. And everybody is so critical of women. If there’s a movie starring a man that tanks, then I don’t see an article about the fact that the movie starred a man and that must be why it bombed. Then a film comes out where a woman is in the lead, or a movie comes out where a bunch of girls are roller derbying, and it doesn’t make much money and you see articles about how women can’t carry a film.

 On the controversy created by Juno:
I was like, “You know what? You all need to calm down.” People are so black and white about this. Because she kept the baby everybody said the film was against abortion. But if she’d had an abortion everybody would have been like, “Oh my God.” I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what’s funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don’t love abortion but I want women to be able to choose and I don’t want white dudes in an office being able to make laws on things like this. I mean what are we going to do — go back to clothes hangers?

Guest Writer Wednesday: THE DILEMMA Preview

Cross-posted at Shakesville.
THIS LOOKS GREAT!!!
(That was sarcasm.)
Here’s the trailer for a fun new movie—coming in January to a theater near you!—from Ron Howard, starring (big voice) Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, and (little voice) Queen Latifah, Jennifer Connelly, and Winona Ryder, about the
conundrum
predicament dilemma (!) in which Vaughn finds himself after discovering that his best friend’s wife is cheating on his best friend.
Even though he calls them, as a couple, his “hero” for their awesome relationship, before uncovering the
quandary
crisis dilemma-producing infidelity, she is only known as his “best friend’s wife,” not, you know, his friend, Geneva. She’s just his best friend’s appendage, not her own autonomous entity with an independent relationship with him, despite the fact they apparently hang out in a big group all the time.
Anyway, the lack of female personhood is probably the least of this movie’s problems, given that the trailer opens with a homophobic joke:


[Transcript below.]
I can’t even imagine what the hilarious reversal is going to be. Is Ryder posing as a beard for James’? Is it an immigration scam? What is the kooky story behind the Very Hot Lady who is cheating on her Stupid Fat Husband?! Boy, I bet it’s a hoot!
With a nod to how awesome our new post-feminist world is, I’d also like to note that Jennifer Connelly has won an Oscar. Winona Ryder has twice been nominated for Oscars. Queen Latifah has been nominated for an Oscar.
Vince Vaughn and Kevin James have both been nominated for Teen Choice Awards.
[Via Andy. As always, I am not discussing the film per se; I’m discussing the trailer, and what I perceive the film to be based on how it is being represented by its own marketing.]

[Vince Vaughn, wearing a business suit, stands in a corporate conference room, in front of a table of other people wearing business suits, giving a presentation.]

Vaughn: Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars [long pause for comedic effect] are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but, you know, my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay. [His business partner, Kevin James, nods in agreement.] B&B engine design can combine the benefits of electric transportation with the rock-and-rollness of Dodge’s current muscle car models.

James: That we all know and love!

[Queen Latifah, part of the group to whom they’re presenting, nods and smiles appreciatively. Vaughn wow-wows the opening riff of Heart’s “Barracuda” while playing air guitar. Cut to Queen Latifah talking to Vaughn and James in the hall after the meeting.]

QL: I’m inspired by what you’re throwing down, and I got some serious lady-wood here. [She gestures to her crotch.] I want to have sex with your words. [James throws a side-eye at Vaughn.] Gotta go! Mommy and me! I’ll call you! [She waves and runs off.]

Text Onscreen: TWO BEST FRIENDS.

[Cut to Vaughn and James at a smoky bar. Vaughn’s girlfriend is Jennifer Connelly. James’ wife is Winona Ryder.]

Vaughn: Nick, buddy, we got the deal.

James [to Connelly]: I’m not gonna lie—I love your boyfriend. Come in here. [They hug and the girls cheer.] This is great.

Vaughn: Don’t ever let me go.

Text Onscreen: TWO PERFECT COUPLES.

[Cut to a restaurant, where the two couples are sitting around a table. Vaughn and Connelly kiss each other.]

James: I think you can know someone within the first ten seconds of seeing them; I fell in love with Geneva the moment I saw her.

Ryder: Awwww. [She reaches out and strokes James’ cheek.]

[Cut to James and Ryder on the dance floor; James, because he is fat and intrinsically hilarious, is dancing like a complete arse; Vaughn and Connelly watch from a booth.]

Vaughn: When it comes to couples, they’re my hero.

James: Honey, you hear that? Ronnie told Beth I’m his hero! [Ryder gives an “awwww” look. James turns back to Vaughn.] I’m Mean Joe Green; you’re the little boy with the Coke bottle; come on, I’ll throw ya a jersey! Let’s do it! [More ridiculous dancing.]

Text Onscreen: BUT THIS JANUARY.

[Vaughn, now in some tropical location, sees Ryder with young hot stud, Channing Tatum. He spies on them through the foliage, as “Barracuda” swells.]

Text Onscreen: ONE LITTLE DISCOVERY…

[Vaughn ventures deeper into the foliage for a closer look, ignoring a sign reading: “CAUTION Passiflora incarnata DO NOT ENTER. He sees Ryder and Tatum kissing.]

Text Onscreen: WILL CAUSE A BIG DILEMMA.

[Vaughn trips and falls face-first into a bunch of plants. Cut to Vaughn sitting indoors with two other white dudes, his face all fucked up.]

Vaughn: I just saw my best friend’s wife with another man.

Dude #1 (played by Clint Howard, in his obligatory role in every film of his brother’s): You fell in a whole bed of poisonous passiflora incarnatas!

Dude #2: You can expect diarrhea, fever, dry heaving, painful swelling in your gums, and challenging urination, with a possible bloody discharge. [HA! HIS FRIEND’S WIFE’S CHEATING EVEN RUINED HIS DICK!]

Text Onscreen: From Academy Award winning director Ron Howard.

Vaughn [to some other random white dude in another setting]: Let me ask you a question, and this is completely hypothetical, something way out of left field [continuing as voiceover, over images of Vaughn stalking his best friend’s wife and discovering her with Tatum again]: Let’s say that one friend found out that another friend’s wife was cheating on him…

Dude #3: How good a friend?

[Cut to footage of Vaughn and James at a Blackhawks’ game, doing a choreographed move together.]

Vaughn [back with Dude #3]: Let’s just say his best friend. Very best friend.

Dude #3: I wouldn’t tell him.

[Clips of random people responding to, one assumes, the same question. A black woman says: “It all depends.” A young white dudebro says, “He’s gotta tell him. It’s guy code, man. If you don’t tell your friend, then you’re basically doing her, too.” Cut to Vaughn walking with James at a bar or something.]

Vaughn: Nick, I need to talk to you about something.

James: What’s going on with you?

[Random scenes that make no sense, inserted presumably to show that Things Happen in the movie.]

Text Onscreen: THE DILEMMA.

[Scene of Vaughn peeing and screaming.]

Connelly: Are you all right?

Vaughn: Oh, to be honest with ya, honey, I’m feeling a little challenged. [Hilarious callback to being told he will have challenging urination.]

Text Onscreen: COMING SOON.

Melissa McEwan is the founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, which she launched as Shakespeare’s Sister in October 2004 because George Bush was pissing her off. In addition to running Shakesville, she also contributes to The Guardian‘s Comment is Free America and AlterNet.  

Ripley’s Rebuke: The Big C

I decided to give The Big C a try, thinking a television show that stars Oscar-nominated Laura Linney, and the very recently Oscar-nominated Gabourey Sidibe, just might successfully pull-off a series about a woman dying from Stage IV melanoma. Instead, The Big C comes across as a slew of quirky characters competing in the Who Can Be the Biggest Asshole contest.

The show centers around Cathy (Laura Linney), a middle-aged woman diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma. As of the first five episodes, only her neighbor knows that she has cancer, and she refuses to discuss the issue with her immediate family. It’s easy to identify with Cathy’s unwillingness to open up to her husband, son, and brother about her diagnosis; she’s spent most of her life mothering all of them. She wants to avoid their pity. And she wants to avoid the role reversal of going from caretaker to taken care of.

But the show goes way too far in its depiction of Cathy as a cancer-stricken woman who, instead of undergoing treatment, forgoes it in favor of “grabbing life by the balls” (the show’s actual tagline). The writers make her boringly crazy in her new zest for life: “Look, I’m pouring red wine all over my expensive couch!” … “Look, I’m shooting my son with a paintball gun on his school bus!” … “Look, I’m doing cartwheels!” … “Look, I just stole a live lobster from the restaurant tank!” Worst of all, they make her mean, not in a way that showcases her strength or even her fear, but for sheer “comedic” effect, all the while asking the audience to forgive her for lashing out—remember, she’s got cancer for god’s sake!

Check it:

In the first episode, Cathy, who apparently teaches high school (summer school in this case), fat shames Sidibe’s character, Andrea, in front of the entire class. After Andrea makes a joke about Cathy’s recent unfocused and apathetic attitude toward teaching, Cathy responds with:

You can’t be fat and mean, Andrea … If you’re gonna dish it out, you gotta be able to lick it up. Fat people are jolly for a reason. Fat repels people, but joy attracts them. Now I know everyone’s laughing at your cruel jokes, but nobody’s inviting you to the prom. So you can either be fat and jolly or a skinny bitch. It’s up to you.

Watch the Clip

Really, Showtime? You took a gorgeous, talented actress and cast her as The Fat Girl who gets paid $100 by her teacher for every pound she loses? And, of course, it’s important that you make sure the teacher verbally and emotionally abuses The Fat Girl first. And that she chastises The Fat Girl about diet and exercise and her lack of motivation, even after The Fat Girl lists a slew of her past unsuccessful dieting attempts. And that her teacher totally, believably just happens to pull up beside her in a car, immediately pouring The Fat Girl’s giant slushy onto the street. (Because we all know, a Fat Girl can’t say no to a giant slushy.)

What gives, Showtime? Are we supposed to laugh our asses off at Andrea’s apparently disgusting fatness? (Admittedly, it’s just hilarious every time Andrea gets caught with another bag of potato chips that Cathy’s forced to take away from her.) Or, do you just want us to feel bad for Cathy for projecting her own desire to be “healthy” onto a young highschooler who has her whole life ahead of her, earnestly telling The Fat Girl, “I just don’t want you to drop dead before you graduate … “? Read: I might have to die young, but I can make sure Andrea doesn’t!

This is all a hoot, really.

And, if I can take this further, Showtime, what are we to make of The Fat Girl’s willingness to put up with Cathy’s behavior toward her? Oh, I forgot—Fat Girls don’t feel the way “regular” people feel; they’re too busy simultaneously pounding milkshakes and scarfing Big Macs to be bothered with the nonsense of experiencing emotions. The Fat Girl’s abysmal self-esteem must not even allow her to fathom standing up for herself, right? Because all Fat Girls deep down hate themselves and sit on the couch binge-eating pizzas, gaining more and more weight, never getting invited to the prom and, therefore, never deserving authentic love (ie, not the charity-case kind) or self-respect.

Or maybe she just wants the $100 for every pound she loses. Thank god for good, old-fashioned motivation wrapped up in a little Fat Hatred, right?

Really, hilarious.

The thing is, this could’ve been an intelligent show, if it weren’t so desperately trying to avoid sentimentality and any hint of darkness. Heather Havrilesky suggests, in her review over at Salon, that perhaps the show’s creator received direction to make the whole thing a little less dark, a little less … “deathy.” She writes:

I’m going to guess that either show creator Darlene Hunt or Laura Linney or both of them were given the following note at some point: “Lighten it up!” Maybe some test audience thought the story was too gloomy, too depressing, too focused on death. “Death? Yuck!” they said. “We don’t want death! We want zany pot-dealer moms who shrug and slurp on frappuccinos! We want zany multiple-personality-disorder moms who shrug and toss back canned beer! We want zany nurse moms who shrug and pop prescription drugs and have affairs with their pharmacist buddies! But zany control-freak moms who shrug and get naked in the back yard, because they’re about to die? No thank you!”

But the strategy to “lighten up this whole Stage IV cancer thing” ultimately fails in its cliche-ridden execution.

The over the top attempt to prevent the audience from getting too bogged down in death gives us Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), Cathy’s feisty old neighbor who refuses to mow her lawn or watch her dog or interact with anyone, blah. It gives us Paul (Oliver Platt), Cathy’s husband, the witty, schlubby yet lovable man-child in constant need of mothering by his wife. It gives us Adam (Gabriel Basso), Cathy’s son, the angsty, video game playing, mother-hating teenage boy who, in one absolutely necessary scene, gets caught masturbating by his mom. It gives us Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), Cathy’s brother—my favorite, really—an eco-extremist who eats leftover food from the garbage, protests gas-guzzling SUVs with a megaphone, refuses to bathe, avoids the dentist (fuck the system, you know?), and deliberately lives as a homeless person because he’s, like, so above the establishment.

(I find Sean particularly problematic because of the unapologetic excess of white, heterosexual, male privilege, as if there aren’t people who actually don’t have the means to go to the dentist, as if millions of people aren’t actually homeless, and, by the way, who don’t also have the convenient luxury of an upper middle class sister showing up every other day with food and clothing and money. See above for previous examples of the man-child.)

Basically, the show wallows in stereotypes but doesn’t take them far enough to make much of a commentary on … anything. I want the show to say something about class issues and privilege. I want the show to say something about the health care system and how financial prosperity, or lack thereof, might impact treatment decisions. I want the show to say something about victim-blaming, about the very real challenges of a woman living with men who don’t respect her, about aging and how it feels to navigate the world in a body deemed less desirable, less able.

But this show wants to laugh at those things: “Look, I’m setting my expensive couch on fire, because I can.” … “Look! I’m paying the workers double to install my swimming pool immediately, because I can.” … “Look! I’m shaming an obese student into losing weight, because I can.” Perhaps what disappoints me most is that the show expects the audience to root for Cathy in all her reckless, carefree, unacknowledged privilege abandon, like, “Look! She’s totally grabbing life by the balls, just like the tagline said she would.”

Reader Question: Finding movies for girls

Perhaps in response to our Quote of the Day from Geena Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, a reader asks:
As the father of a nearly year-old daughter, I’d be interested in getting some informed takes on children’s movies. We’ll undoubtedly be watching many in the next few years. Can we apply this Bechdel test to some of the classics of the genre or are there more complex forces at …work? If there are other considerations, what would they be?

While the Bechdel test is certainly a great place to start–seeing whether girls talk to each other about something other than boys–it’s not the end-all of determining feminist media. Female characters with true agency represent real role models for girls. So…avoid Disney? Certainly someone can offer better advice.

Help us out: What specific movies/television programs would you recommend for young girls?

Quote of the Day: Geena Davis

Gender in Media activist and actress Geena Davis

Perhaps best known for her award-winning roles on television and in film, Geena Davis is the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. According to the website 

Five years ago, while watching children’s television programs and videos with her then 2-year old daughter, Academy Award winner Geena Davis noticed a remarkable imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. From that small starting point, Davis went on to raise funds for the largest research project ever undertaken on gender in children’s entertainment (resulting in 4 discrete studies, including one on children’s television).

The research showed that in the top-grossing G-rated films from 1990-2005, there were three male characters for every one female – a statistic that did not improve over time.

The concern was clear: What message does this send to young children?

We’ve highlighted our disappointment with Pixar for its girl problem (WALL-E, Up), but nearly every Disney film deserves the same–if not worse–scorn (and that’s just picking on two production companies). As angry as films make us when they don’t depict real, complex women, the problem really starts with children’s programming–and the solution might, too.
We really learn our value in society by seeing ourselves reflected in the culture–kids more so than anyone. I mean, as they’re learning what their role in society is and what’s their place and value, they’re exposed to massive amounts of media, and the message that boys and girls are getting currently is that girls are not as valuable as boys, and that women are not as important as men.

Kudos to Geena Davis for tackling this important problem. Check out her website, and watch a short interview about her project below.

Disembodied Women Take Three: Leggy Perfection

In 1978, Hustler magazine depicted a headless woman shoved into a meat grinder on their June cover. Thirty two years later, Spike TV chose virtually the same image to promote their television show Blue Mountain State. Also, note the poster image for the film Choke, pictured below. This installment of “Disembodied Women” focuses on the continued use of dismemberment, in this case exposing women’s bare legs, to advertise films. The posters vary considerably, promoting horror films and romantic comedies, as well as foreign films and period pieces. The problem with such advertisements, as media activist Jean Kilbourne argues in her book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, is that this perpetual sexual objectification of women encourages men to think of women as inferior. Additionally, women begin to view themselves as a collection of body parts, where a perceived flaw in only one area of the body leads to an obsessive desire to perfect the whole. For more disturbing evidence, check out our first and second installments, The Rear View and The Headless Woman, and feel free to add to our growing list of offending films in the comments section.

Guest Writer Wednesday: On Sam Mendes’s Almost Feminist Revolutionary Road

Winslet and DiCaprio star in Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road (2008) is almost a feminist film. It also just falls short of being something more than the hackneyed anti-suburbia types of film Sam Mendes revels in making.
A couple, who once fell in love over common artistic dreams, pulls off to the side of a highway to engage in verbal combat, sparked by the kitschy play the wife has just acted in, that threatens to turn physical. Each blames the other.
April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) reflects on their life together throughout the next day. As she drags her metal trash cans to the curb to join the others aligned down both sides of their anything-but-revolutionary road, she recalls her real estate agent introducing her and her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), to their future home, the typically perfect white suburban house. Later, as she looks through old photographs, a second flashback recalls a conversation with Frank where she told him he was the most interesting man she had ever met.
As April reminisces about the hopes of the past, Frank woos a secretary at his cliché-ridden office job in a sales department. He gets her drunk, uses her as a shrink to confess that he has turned into his father despite his best intentions, and—as you already have guessed—sleeps with her. When he returns home past dusk, April meets him with smiles, an enthusiastic apology, and a birthday cake with thirty lit candles. Frank cries as his wife and two children—one girl, one boy—sing to him.
At this point I thought to myself, à la SNL’s Seth Meyers and alum Amy Poehler, “Really? Really? Do we really need to see another suburbia-is-the-ninth-circle-of-hell film? Really?” Hadn’t Mad Men already taken this trite formula to its farcical limits? The irony has lost its whip; there’s no need to tell us that life on Revolutionary Road is the conservative fast lane to Hades. We’ve been wise to the parable for some time: American beauty is anything but.
When I saw Frank washing away his infidelities in the shower, I puked a little in my mouth.
But then something unexpected happened. Instead of Kevin Spacey throwing a plate against a wall and toking up with his teenage daughter’s boyfriend, April lays bare the message of films like American Beauty. Road becomes meta-cinematic when she tells Frank:

Well, I happen to think this (suburban life) is unrealistic. I think it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a place he can’t stand, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things. You want to know the worst part? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and you know what I’ve realized…? We’re not! We’re just like everyone else. Look at us!  We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion. This idea that you have to resign from life and settle down the moment you have children. And we’ve been punishing each other for it.

With this piece of dialogue, a character within the film’s diegetic reality provides an accurate account of the predicament of the film’s starring couple…near the beginning of the film! Road replaces Beauty’s device of a dead male narrator who knows the foibles of his life only after it is over with a living, breathing, and INTELLIGENT female character who knows them and wants out before it’s too late. In a later scene, she tells one of their neighbors that she actually wants “in” to life, a nice reversal that equates suburban living with death, that favorite topic of anti-consumerist zombie films.
After some initial resistance, Frank agrees with April’s analysis and her diagnosis. They will move to Paris so that he may figure out what he wants to do with his life while she supports the family on secretary’s wages (thanks to France’s fairer treatment of women workers). Although such a plan seems anti-feminist on the surface, and one neighbor says as much upon hearing it, there is something liberating about it. Shots follow of April and Frank almost glowing with the prospect that they will soon be leaving the humdrum rhythms of Eisenhower America.
Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and couples often go awry, and the Wheelers fail to make it to Paris (I mused that their voyage would be cut short somewhere in the north Atlantic anyway). The Wheelers’ plans go awry when Frank comes up with a business slogan that impresses his higher-ups so much that they offer him a promotion. The irony is that Frank’s sudden show of corporate creativity only comes after he has convinced himself to leave. The mere thought of becoming a class traitor opens the wells of inspiration trapped inside him not a moment too late, which is so often the case, but a moment too early. The prospect of becoming a well-compensated company man leads him to waver on his early retirement. As if this were not enough, April discovers that she is pregnant with their third child. Although they convince each other that Paris is still in the cards, the odds seem stacked against them.
Here is where our co-heroes separate into their roles as protagonist and antagonist. I assert that Frank betrays April by buying into the “realist” narrative of his friends and colleagues, i.e. the American middle class. Notably, in the key scene where he dismisses Paris as a pipe dream, he responds to April’s proposal of an abortion like a Right-wing conservative. 
April, a normal woman, a normal sane mother doesn’t buy herself a piece of rubber tubing to give herself an abortion so she can go live out some goddamned fantasy.
He reduces her to a scolded child, the idea of moving to Paris now considered a “childish dream.” Frank promptly resumes fucking his secretary like the mad man that he has become (and unconsciously always was and desired to be despite himself).
The ensuing fight between the Wheelers parallels the one that opens the film with one significant difference: although they both recognize that Truth has just spake, only April refuses to ignore it. She no longer loves Frank precisely because he is no longer the man she married, the man who wanted more from life than a cookie-cutter existence, and she reaffirms this fact. Frank cannot handle the Truth, and does his best to defend against it. He speaks for April, putting words in her mouth that she cannot express because she no longer loves him. April has not grown cold to him because of his unfaithfulness with another woman—April sleeps with another man, too—but his infidelity to himself.
The film should end with the two most disturbing scenes of all.
First, Frank awakens to find April playing Stepford wife. She pauses from cooking breakfast when he enters the kitchen and apologizes, just as she does earlier in the film with the birthday cake and party, except this time her words sound eerily scripted. Because Frank no longer cares about Truth and desires only to live in bad faith, he plays along, a bit surprised but also pleasantly amused. When he leaves, one gets the sense that he has bought into the male-centric American Dream. One knows that April hasn’t.

The second scene finds April crying in front of her mirror after Frank has left. She makes a fitful call where she threatens to break down at any moment to the babysitter watching her kids to ask if she can prolong her duties. The egg yolks that the camera focused on her scrambling in the prior scene retroactively become a foreshadowing moment, as she methodically carries out the abortion. When she descends the stairs, the camera focuses on her unsteady feet. Her face is pale. She goes to the window. The sun shines upon her and she lets out a small smile. Then a drip of blood falls to the carpet. The camera pans back to show a pool of blood expanding on the back of her skirt. She slowly moves out of the frame to make a phone call, “I think I need an ambulance…Yes…One one five Revolutionary Road…”

A perfectly disturbing end, right? No! Mendes cannot help but steal the show from his now ex-wife. Instead of ending with a shot of the blood on the carpet—the blotch in suburbia that betrays it a violent, life-draining lie—and April voicing the title of the film offscreen, Mendes includes a coda, a series of short scenes that a) turn the film anti-feminist and b) reinstate the generic codes of the cinematic anti-suburbia tract. 
Instead of being left with a woman who may or may not be in critical condition, we learn that April dies, and her death acts as a sacrifice to return the men to normalcy. Frank moves to the city with his kids, thus finding some compromise between Paris and the American suburbs. The neighbor, who professed his unrequited love for April after she slept with him, becomes closer with his wife. We might brush these scenes against the grain to argue that they are the most feminist part of all because they show that female sacrifice undergirds the American Dream of the middle class, but they also inspire an unwarranted sympathy for Frank. The men are allowed to mourn almost as an act of contrition.
The final insult comes in the concluding scene where Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) tells her husband about how the new couple who has moved into the Wheelers’ house seems perfect for their abode. When the husband reminds her that she said much the same when the Wheelers moved in, she claims that she always knew that something was not right about the Wheelers, showing us that she, too, continues to live in bad faith by refusing to treat her Truth-telling son as the normal one (and not the folks she sells houses to). In my vote for the platitudinous scene of the decade, the husband is shown turning down the volume on his hearing aid.

Road should resolutely not be framed as a film about all suburbanites remaining deaf to the truth of their existence, as Mendes’s grandiloquent closing sequence suggests. The film is resolutely not about everyone’s bad faith. One woman, in the great tradition of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, remains faithful to reality in an unreal setting and demonstrates her sanity despite her insane husband and unfaithful director.

Kirk Boyle has previously contributed a Flick-Off of The Day the Earth Stood Still to Bitch Flicks.