Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

BrooklynCover

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

BrooklynRonanOutfit

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

Suffragette

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

The Women of ‘American Ninja Warrior’ Challenge Gender Stereotypes

‘American Ninja Warrior’ may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not.

This is a guest post written by Cameron Airen, who interviewed Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.

“What!? Shut the front door. She’s about to do the impossible for the second time,” shouted the hosts of American Ninja Warrior as millions of us watched 5’0”, 95lb Kacy Catanzaro become the first woman to hit a city finals course. This meant that she was the first woman to qualify for Mount Midoriyama, the finals in Las Vegas consisting of four stages. Catanzaro’s achievement was led by her being the first woman in the history of the show to beat the warped wall and finish a qualifying course. She made history that year on American Ninja Warrior, but she wasn’t the only one.

American Ninja Warrior_Kacy Catanzaro

2014 of American Ninja Warrior was the year of many firsts for women. Michelle Warnky and Meagan Martin were the second and third women to make it up the warped wall and hit buzzers on their city’s qualifying course following Catanzaro. This was the first time this many women qualified for a city’s finals course in the same season.

There are five women veterans on American Ninja Warrior that particularly stand out. Catanzaro, Warnky, and Martin are three of them. Jessie Graff was the first woman to complete five obstacles and the second woman, besides Catanzaro, to qualify for the Vegas finals. Joyce Shahboz was one of the first women to compete on the American Ninja Warrior course and has been participating since season four. At 44 years old, she is also the oldest woman “to make it to Vegas and to the 5th obstacle.” One of the reasons to love American Ninja Warrior is because it represents athletes of all ages. Shahboz told me, “There are things I can do now that I couldn’t do 3-4 years ago and I’m 44 as of today!”

Joyce Shahboz

One of the most captivating aspects of American Ninja Warrior is that the women compete on the same platform as the men, making gender irrelevant. This appeals to Warnky, who said,

“I know many people have made comments to me about having a separate Ninja Warrior for ladies. But for myself and at least several other ladies I’ve talked to, we like that extra challenge, we like the strength that is required, and we enjoy competing with the guys.”

The hosts of American Ninja Warrior, Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila, generally do a good job of not making a big deal of gender in relation to one’s performance on the course. During Martin’s run at the 2014 Denver finals, Gbajabiamila exclaimed, “She’s got the athleticism; she’s got the upper body strength; she’s built for American Ninja Warrior — that’s for sure!” This is a testament of how the course, with different obstacles that benefit different athletic strengths, is made for people of all genders.

American Ninja Warrior_Meagan Martin

By participating on American Ninja Warrior, women get to demonstrate their strength and other abilities, challenging the gender stereotypes placed upon them. There’s no doubt that the women have the strength, including upper body strength, in order to finish all of the obstacles. In fact, the upper body exercises are the women ninjas’ favorites to perform. Shahboz pointed out,

“The upper body challenges are appealing to us. In Japan, the Women of Ninja Warrior course isn’t as upper body intensive, and we all felt that was our forte and wanted more of the physical strength challenge instead of the balance challenges.”

On a tougher course with new obstacles, Jessie Graff was the first athlete to get the farthest on the 2015 Venice finals course. Even though she didn’t complete the course, she came close, making it to the second to last obstacle, giving it her best fight. Only the top 15 qualify for Vegas and she finished in sixth. Graff ended up being the woman who made it the farthest in a city finals course across the nation.

Jessie Graff

There is a huge gender disparity on American Ninja Warrior and that needs to change if we want to see women succeed more than they already do on the show. If there were as many women on the show as there are men, then there would be a greater chance of women making if farther. No woman has made it up the warped wall and hit the buzzer on stage one in Vegas yet in the history of the show. Shahboz believes it’s because of numbers: “We just haven’t had enough of us trying it out or training at the necessary level until now.” In season four, there were four women, Shahboz included, and 96 men competing in stage one in the Vegas finals. Warnky believes that the biggest challenge women face on stage one in Vegas is speed:

“I know Jessie Graff and I had many conversations and really wanted to beat it and knew we both had the ability to. Time plays a big factor in Vegas. In the regional rounds, most of us women play it pretty safe with time and don’t rush ourselves, whereas in Vegas, women are not able to stall much at all and need to go quickly through the obstacles and in-between the obstacles. Also, any time a girl does pretty well, history can be made, so I think we tend to focus on the safer and surer ways to do things, which isn’t really possible in stage 1. But I do think I have the ability to complete it, as do several other girls, we just didn’t make it happen the day it counted. Hopefully we’ll make that change soon!”

Even though the numbers are still low, more women competed in 2015 than any other year. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer of American Ninja Warrior, Kent Weed, said that the producers want more women competing and doing well, and that we will see more women compete as the show progresses. He doesn’t believe that succeeding at the obstacles has to do with gender and is confident that we will see our first woman to complete stage one in Vegas next year in 2016. Warnky expressed, “Hopefully, the show has encouraged other women to push their limits.” The more women see other women competing on the show, the more they will be inspired to train for it and get accepted.

American Ninja Warrior_Michelle Warnky

“Could a woman ever win American Ninja Warrior?” an E! Online interviewer asked Isaac Caldiero after he became the first ever winner of American Ninja Warrior. Without hesitation, Caldiero responded, “Definitely. My girlfriend, Laura, could win it!” Even asking the question shows how far we have come in changing sexist beliefs and attitudes about women’s abilities. When Shahboz competed in season four, she was known for going farther than her husband. She said,

“People who didn’t know me or him would occasionally comment to him about getting beat by his wife. People would ask me, ‘How’d your husband take it?’ It’s still amazing to me that people still have the notion that ‘getting beat by a girl’ is an issue.”

Unfortunately, it is still an issue, otherwise the question of whether a woman could win wouldn’t even have been asked. But, American Ninja Warrior plays a pivotal role in changing all of that.

American Ninja Warrior_Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky

One way that the show doesn’t reinforce gender distinctions, aside from having women compete on the same platform as the men, is by not referencing gender when discussing an athlete’s abilities. During Martin’s performance at the Vegas 2014 finals, Gbajabiamila said,

“I’ve had a lot of sport heroes in my life: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson…Oh, add Meagan Martin to the list, what she did was phenomenal.”

Another way American Ninja Warrior doesn’t emphasis gender is that the athletes are all in support and cheer of each other. Shahboz pointed out that her male ninja competitors “have always been encouraging and supportive, it’s never been a guy vs. gal thing.” It’s refreshing to see a friendly community be positive and supportive of one another despite gender and background. This is definitely a rarity for competition shows on TV.

American Ninja Warrior_Meagan Martin 2

A sense of unity exists among the women of American Ninja Warrior. Even though it is a reality TV show, we don’t see unnecessary drama. It’s a show with friendly competition where the athletes support each other. This is a rarity on TV in general, especially in reality TV where women are often depicted as wanting to tear each other to shreds. It’s quite the opposite on American Ninja Warrior, making it one of those rare athletic competitions where you want everyone to do well. When one ninja falls, the other is sad that her fellow competitor did not make it. The women even travel to other cities to cheer each other on.

This solidarity is powerful and creates a positive influence for women and feminism. We need to see more of it onscreen. American Ninja Warrior may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not. Athletics is often viewed as a metaphor for the rest of our lives. What one learns in being able to conquer a physical obstacle can translate to facing obstacles in other aspects of life. The women on American Ninja Warrior are powerful examples of women coming into and owning their own power, whatever that may look like.

Check out a more in depth interview I did with Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.


Cameron Airen is a queer feminist with a M.A. in Anthropology and Social Change. She loves to dissect and write about women and gender in film/TV. Cameron is also passionate about vegan cooking and resides in Berkeley, Calif.

Rape, Consent and Race in Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’

Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’ is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism.

Jessica Jones poster

This guest post is written by Cate Young and originally appeared at her site BattyMamzelle. It is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape culture.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism. There are a lot of great things about this series that speak directly to the ills that women face on a daily basis. Kilgrave, the central villain, is chillingly terrifying, specifically because the only difference between him and your garden variety abuser is his total power to enact his will. The examination of male entitlement in ways both large and small (by contrasting Kilgrave and Simpson for example) are excellent and poignant. But as I watched the 13 episode first season, I was struck by how callously black people’s lives were treated on the show, rendered into convenient plot devices in service of the white female protagonist’s character development. As a black woman viewing the show, it was easy to see that the active pursuit of liberation from abuse was not a struggle that this show believes includes me (an ongoing struggle for Marvel). Ironically, the best parts of the show are its treatment with its villain, while the worst are its treatments with its female anti-heroine.

Jessica Jones 2

While I do have several critiques of the show, there were a number of things that I thought were handled exceptionally well. Firstly, this is a show driven by women about the fears and terrors that women must navigate in the world shrunk down to a micro-level, enabling us an intimate look at the various levels of abuse women routinely endure. The contrast between Kilgrave and Simpson is genius, as it helps demonstrate the full scale of abuse that men knowingly and unknowingly enact on the women around them. The two men are flip-sides of the same coin. While Kilgrave simply takes what he feels he is entitled to by means of his powers of enhanced persuasion, Simpson initially takes a less forceful but no less sinister approach, exemplified in his treatment of Trish after he realizes that Kilgrave has compelled him to murder her. As Stephanie Yang writes in a Bitch Magazine review:

The warning signs are there early on. Under Kilgrave’s control, Simpson assaults Trish inside her own apartment. Once Kilgrave’s control wears off, he’s wracked with guilt and comes back to apologize. The problem is that Trish doesn’t want Simpson’s apology; she wants him to just leave. Trish doesn’t want to be reminded that she was attacked in her own home, or feel trapped by her own high-end security system while her attacker lingers outside. But Simpson is insistent, sitting in her hallway and talking to her through the intercom. Simpson makes his apology about his needs and his absolution, not about Trish’s needs, safety or mental health. It’s entirely understandable, but it’s still wrong.

Simpson and Kilgrave certainly have different motivation for their destructive actions. But as Jessica points out, intent doesn’t matter. Their actions and consequences are what matter. That’s an important distinction that needs to be made at a time when courts and media alike dismiss many real-life cases of abuse because the abuser “couldn’t know” what they were doing was wrong. Violence is a symptom of a culture that indulges bad behavior as being inherently and unavoidably part of masculinity, or even a romantic expression of desire and protectiveness.

I would go a step further and name Simpson’s insistent apologies to Trish as outright abusive on their face, specifically because they prioritize his need for absolution over her need to heal. Trish is the victim in the situation, and yet Simpson manages to find a way to center himself in the story of this trauma. As with Kilgrave and Jessica, Simpson’s abuse is rooted not in a cartoonish hatred of women as we are often led to believe, but rather in prioritizing his own will and desires over Trish’s.

Jessica Jones_Kilgrave

The show’s exploration of rape and consent is also spot-on. Through interaction with Kilgrave’s superhuman abilities, Jessica Jones is able to make plain text of the subtext of rape culture. In one episode, Jessica makes plain that what Kilgrave did to her was rape. She says the word and invokes it over and over, explaining to him that by revoking her ability to consent, he violated her in a profound way that he can never make up for, nullifying any “kind treatment” during that time. For Jessica (and many other victims of sexual abuse) she was raped not only when Kilgrave forced sexual consent by rendering her suggestible, but also by forcing her to display trust and affection for him against her will. We see this idea replicated when Hope demands that she be allowed to abort Kilgrave’s fetus, because “every moment it’s in me is like he’s raping me all over again.”

The other great thing about Jessica Jones is that it is a show ostensibly about rape, that never depicts a rape. It can be argued that the entire engine of the show is powered by the actions of a serial rapist with many, many victims in his wake, and yet the show never feels the need to indulge in crude depictions of trauma to demonstrate how horrifying rape is. Instead, we spend extensive time examining the fallout; following Jessica and Hope as they try to cope with being violated on such a profound level, grapple with their own feelings of guilt and culpability and make it to the other side with their faculties intact. One of the things that made Kilgrave so scary in the initial episodes was the way the memory of him haunted Jessica, always lingering at the edge of her thoughts, out of sight, but never out of mind. It masterfully depicted the way that rape trauma is a burden that doesn’t go away once the act itself is over. In a year that’s been replete with depictions of rape in television, it was refreshing to see a show tackle the true emotional weight of sexual assault without using the violation itself to titillate.

Jessica Jones_Jessica and Trish

On the other hand, the treatment of people of colour in Jessica Jones is often anti-intersectional and openly anti-black. Vulture‘s year end “Best of Television” list cites the show as demonstrating “a racially diverse cast, heavy on women,” a construction that belies that for many people, diversity means “add black men and stir.” To me, it is borderline disrespectful to call the show racially diverse when the only significant, named woman of colour character is dead before the narrative begins and never speaks a word, while the black male characters are all subjected to incredible violence in service of the white female protagonist. This force frames feminist representation as the representation of white women and yet again, erases women of colour from our popular narratives.

With Reva’s character, this is especially glaring. Her death at Jessica’s hands is essentially the inciting incident of the story; the act that allows Jessica to free herself from Kilgrave’s control. Reva is fridged to motivate Jessica’s escape and eventual confrontation with Kilgrave. As Shaadi Devereaux writes in Model View Culture:

[…] One has to wonder what metaphor is offered, that she has to kill a Black woman in order to finally obtain that freedom. She must literally stop Reva Connors’ heart with a single blow in order to experience her moment of awakening, enabling her to walk away from a cis-heterosexual white male abuser. It brings to mind how white women liberate themselves from unpaid domestic labor by exploiting Black/Latina/Indigenous women, often heal their own sexual trauma by performing activism that harms WoC, and how the white women’s dollar still compares to that of WoC. Like Jessica’s liberation is only possible through the violence against Reva, we see sharp parallels with how liberatory white womanhood often interplays with the lives of WoC. Were the writers consciously aware of these parallels, or was it just the same script playing out in their heads?

It’s disappointing that the show, knowingly or not, replicates the same cycles of abuse that routinely play out within the feminist movement, by positioning violence against black women as the justified cost of white women’s liberation. Jessica eventually enacts the same cycle of abuse against Luke Cage, her main love interest. Shaadi notes:

After killing Reva, Jessica goes on to stalk Reva’s husband, Luke Cage, in a compulsive and boundary-violating cycle of guilt. She finally sleeps with him…without disclosing how she was implicated in Reva’s death. She both withholds and actively obstructs him from finding out information about his own life, so that she can continue to get what she needs intimately from him. In dealing with her own demons, Jessica violates an invulnerable Black man and lays him a blow that no other character in their universe has the power to. Was this another nod to a complex understanding of gender, race and power, or another trope surfacing in insidious ways?

Jessica Jones_Luke Cage

The issue here is that the show does not give any indication as to whether this is commentary or trope, so we are forced to assume the latter, interpreting the text as presented to us. Jessica makes a habit of using the black men around her, in service to her own ends treating them as interchangeable and disposable, a glaring and problematic oversight given the current political climate, and the historical context of black men being subjected to undue violence for the protection of white women. Jessica’s pursuit of Luke despite her knowledge of her involvement in what we are led to believe in the most painful event of his life replicates the same disregard for his feelings that we saw Simpson demonstrate with Trish. To Jessica, her own need to be in Luke’s orbit because of her overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, supersede his right to be fully informed about the circumstances of his wife’s death, and as Tom and Lorenzo astutely write in their review:

[…] Like it or not, she has the capacity to be a bit hypocritical about Kilgrave’s abilities choosing to think that there’s actually a right way to take people’s control away from them.

And Jessica very literally takes Luke’s control away by not disclosing her involvement in Reva’s death. She takes away his ability to choose not to be with the person who murdered his wife. Later, his choice to forgive is later revoked by Kilgrave, as he is forced to reconcile with her under Kilgrave’s control. Again, the invulnerable black man’s pain is not respected, but rather toyed with and manipulated by the narrative to serve the needs of white characters. As Shaadi again points out, the pattern becomes more uncomfortable and glaring as the series continues:

When her neighbor shares how Black people are more vulnerable to others’ perceptions, it invokes not sympathy but an idea of how she can use it for her own ends. The result is several scenes where she pushes Black men into people to create a scene of chaos, using the opportunity to go unseen as she breaks the law. Instead of challenging oppressive systems directly, she uses them to get what she wants and to center her own survival. We see that she has some guilt about it, but sis willing to do it for her survival and the survival of other white characters.

These scenes demonstrate that as people marginalized along a spectrum, we often leverage violence against others for our own survival, sometimes with full awareness. But is awareness enough? Or as long as power remains unchallenged, will we always be lured by self-priority, the hierarchy of own safety and access? Our hero is willing to take on the mindcontrol of Kilgrave, but not those dangers most affecting the two most important men in her life – both Black. She intimately understands that no one will believe her, but capitalizes on the hierarchy of who has enough humanity to be believed – against other marginalized identities. She can finally walk away from the mind of her abuser, but the gravitational pull of racism is still too much.

As a black woman, I’m left to wonder, is Jessica worse than your garden variety racist for acknowledging systems of oppression only to exploit them? And on a real world level, why is this behaviour heralded by viewers as feminist when it actively takes advantage of people that the feminist movement is meant to protect?

Jessica Jones

My last issue is less a problem with this show specifically and more a general trope in fiction. I expect that very little can be done about this considering the source material, but truly abhor narratives in which a black person’s “power” is that they cannot feel pain or be hurt. It is a direct callback to very pervasive superhumanization bias and stereotypes that still exist and are perpetuated today. As I have written before about this characterization, it feeds into the idea that violence against black people is not traumatic or dangerous as they can withstand the pain, and that this ability positions them as protectors of white characters who often also do them harm. It explains why young black boys are coded by white people as much older than they are, or why they think black people feel less pain. With Luke, we see this reflected in Luke’s fight scenes as person after person escalates the violence against him to no effect. He is easily able to trounce several men at once. Earlier, we also see him take a circle saw to his abdomen in order to demonstrate his power to Jessica. Later still, we see doctors poke and prod him with needles and other penetrating devices ostensibly to save him, but the scenes only reinforce what we have already been told; nothing can hurt him, and so violence against him is justified.

In the end, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the show. The way Jessica Jones deals with consent resonated with me on a deep level, but it also made me question why the show didn’t identify with me as a black woman, when I so easily identified with it. Hopefully in the next season we will see a more intersectional approach to the struggles that women face that treats its black characters with the same care that it affords the white women in the cast.


Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

The Violators

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Wildlike

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

The Violators

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Wildlike

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.


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

2016 Golden Globe Nominations Roundup

Check out the 2016 Golden Globe nominations honoring film and television with links to our reviews and articles providing feminist commentary!

Golden Globe Awards sign image via Flickr

Check out the 2016 Golden Globe nominations with links to our reviews and articles providing feminist commentary!


FILM

Best Motion Picture — Drama

Carol
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight

Best Motion Picture — Comedy

The Big Short
Joy
The Martian
Spy
Trainwreck

Best Director — Motion Picture

Todd Haynes, Carol
Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The Revenant
Tom Mccarthy, Spotlight
George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
Ridley Scott, The Martian

Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama

Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Rooney Mara, Carol
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl

Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Comedy

Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Melissa McCarthy, Spy
Amy Schumer, Trainwreck
Maggie Smith, The Lady in the Van
Lily Tomlin, Grandma

Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama

Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl
Will Smith, Concussion

Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Comedy

Christian Bale, The Big Short
Steve Carell, The Big Short
Matt Damon, The Martian
Al Pacino, Danny Collins
Mark Ruffalo, Infinitely Polar Bear

Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Jane Fonda, Youth
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Helen Mirren, Trumbo
Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina
Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs

Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Paul Dano, Love & Mercy
Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Michael Shannon, 99 Homes
Sylvester Stallone, Creed

Best Screenplay — Motion Picture

Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight
Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs
Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight
Emma Donoghue, Room
Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, The Big Short

Best Motion Picture — Animated

Anomalisa
The Good Dinosaur
Inside Out
The Peanuts Movie
Shaun the Sheep Movie

Best Motion Picture — Foreign Language

The Brand New Testament (Belgium/France/Luxembourg)
The Club (Chile)
The Fencer (Finland/Germany/Estonia)
Mustang (France)
Son of Saul (Hungary)

Best Original Score — Motion Picture

Carter Burwell, Carol
Alexandre Desplat, The Danish Girl
Ennio Morricone, The Hateful Eight
Daniel Pemberton, Steve Jobs
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto, The Revenant

Best Original Song — Motion Picture

“Love Me Like You Do,” 50 Shades of Grey
“One Kind of Love,” Love & Mercy
“See You Again,” Furious 7
“Simple Song #3,” Youth
“Writing’s on the Wall,” Spectre


TELEVISION

Best Television Series — Drama

Empire
Game of Thrones
Mr. Robot
Narcos
Outlander

Best Television Series — Comedy

Casual
Mozart in the Jungle
Orange Is the New Black
Silicon Valley
Transparent
Veep

Best Actress in a Television Series — Drama

Caitriona Balfe, Outlander
Viola Davis, How to Get Away with Murder
Eva Green, Penny Dreadful
Taraji P. Henson, Empire
Robin Wright, House of Cards

Best Actress in a Television Series — Comedy

Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Jamie Lee Curtis, Scream Queens
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin
Lily Tomlin, Grace and Frankie

Best Actor in a Television Series — Drama

Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Rami Malek, Mr. Robot
Wagner Moura, Narcos
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan

Best Actor in a Television Series — Comedy

Aziz Ansari, Master of None
Gael García Bernal, Mozart in the Jungle
Rob Lowe, The Grinder
Patrick Stewart, Blunt Talk
Jeffrey Tambor, Transparent

Best Television Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

American Crime
American Horror Story: Hotel
Fargo
Flesh and Bone
Wolf Hall

Best Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Kirsten Dunst, Fargo
Queen Latifah, Bessie
Felicity Huffman, American Crime
Sarah Hay, Flesh and Bone
Lady Gaga, American Horror Story: Hotel

Best Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Oscar Isaac, Show Me a Hero
Patrick Wilson, Fargo
Idris Elba, Luther
David Oyelowo, Nightingale
Mark Rylance, Wolf Hall

Best Supporting Actress in a Television series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Uzo Aduba, Orange Is the New Black
Joanne Froggatt, Downton Abbey
Regina King, American Crime
Judith Light, Transparent
Maura Tierney, The Affair

Best Supporting Actor in a Television series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Alan Cumming, The Good Wife
Damian Lewis, Wolf Hall
Ben Mendelsohn, Bloodline
Tobias Menzies, Outlander
Christian Slater, Mr. Robot


Image by Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr and the Creative Commons License.


Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Forced Heteronormativity

Irene Adler never needed Sherlock Holmes or any man (including the Czech King who hired Sherlock to face her in the first place), and when she finds love (with a man who is neither the king nor Holmes), it’s on her terms. Irene Adler only appears in one of Conan Doyle’s stories because she has her own life, and it does not rotate around nor even involve Sherlock Holmes. She is a clever, intelligent, resourceful, sex-positive woman in control of her own life, her own body, and her own destiny, and deserves not only a writer to do her justice, but a series to completely center her and all her fantastic escapades.

Trigger Warning for the sexual assault, physical abuse, and murder of female characters.

The BBC will soon be releasing its Sherlock Christmas special called Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, and I know I’m not the only person tired of women in Sherlock being portrayed as “abominable,” less-than Sherlock and the other male characters in the show, and forcibly subjugated – often reduced to tears. Sure, the male characters on the show are often shown as far from Sherlock’s intellectual equal, but the female characters are treated far worse story-wise than the men are. However, the BBC’s Sherlock is far from the only Sherlock Holmes adaptation to treat its female characters badly, often far worse than the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Not only are women subjugated to make the men look better, women are used as props to heteronormatize Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. But women are human beings, just like men, not objects. And Sherlock Holmes has been adapted so many times, while I’m still waiting for a series on the fabulously infamous Irene Adler, one of the only people to ever “outwit” him.

Sherlock_and_Irene_Adler_meet_up_every_six_months_for__a_night_of_passion__reveals_Steven_Moffat

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most frequently portrayed fictional characters of all time, though most often played by heterosexual White British cismen and anthropomorphic animals, with Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking and the upcoming sHerlock being rare exceptions. Conan Doyle’s famous detective can easily be read as any sexuality, mostly because he prioritizes work over everything else, and therefore has practically no love life whatsoever. Story-wise (ignoring Conan Doyle’s excuses for Sherlock’s singlehood), he could very well be asexual, and indeed he is a hero for the asexual community. He could also be bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, or any other sexuality, and could be any combination of those with any romantic orientation – aromantic, biromantic, homoromantic, heteroromantic, etc. Collectively, most of the adaptations of Sherlock Holmes result in erasure of sexual and romantic orientations that are not heteronormative. This is particularly damaging to the asexual community, due to their strong identification with Sherlock Holmes and what they see as his queerplatonic relationship with Dr. John Watson.

tumblr_mzpwbtmOm31rahe8vo2_500

Whether Holmes’ relationship with Watson is queerplatonic, romantic and/or sexual, or more traditionally platonic is up to speculation or interpretation. However, nearly every adaptation forces heteronormativity onto the character one way or another, usually with female characters, and even while sometimes simultaneously queerbaiting the audience, seemingly for both humor and fanservice. This is particularly evident in BBC’s Sherlock (see Erin Tatum’s amazing Bitch Flicks post), Sherlock Holmes (2009), and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (so much queerbaiting, including a lovely choreographed waltz). Meanwhile, in numerous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes canon, including those directly listed above, female characters mainly or only exist to heteronormatize Sherlock Holmes and his friend (or possible “friend”) Dr. John Watson. Occasionally, and more in the past than in the present, Watson’s importance to the narrative is even minimized to make room for Sherlock to have a romance, such as in Sherlock Holmes (1922) starring John Barrymore as the title role, though also in House M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie), to an extent.

Snow Angels

In They Might Be Giants (George C. Scott as Holmes/Justin and Joanne Woodward as Watson) and Elementary (Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson), the roles of Watson and the heteronormatizing woman are combined, as a female Watson to a male Holmes ensures that any close feelings between Holmes and Watson can be read as heteronormatively romantic. This is albeit, thanks to good writing and acting, done in a way in which Watson does have some agency, especially in Elementary, as written about in Robin Hitchcock’s post for Bitch Flicks.

Irene-Adler-Stills-sherlock-holmes-2009-film-9391823-539-358

Despite female adaptations of Watson becoming more popular, Irene Adler, though having only ever appeared in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and briefly mentioned in a few more of them, is most often used when Hollywood or the BBC desires to heterosexualize the detective. Indeed, Irene Adler is often portrayed as the Catwoman to Sherlock Holmes’ Batman, particularly in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), played by Rachel McAdams to Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes. However, women are often objectified in Sherlock Holmes adaptations to the point that they are often damsels in distress (such what Irene Adler was reduced to in the BBC’s Sherlock, played by Lara Pulver to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes) or women in refrigerators, to which Irene is also not immune. In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Irene Adler is (infuriatingly!) fridged in order to make Holmes sad and revengeful and oh so heterosexual amidst all the homoeroticism he has with Jude Law’s “Hotson” (as if the detective couldn’t possibly be bisexual…). She is then soon replaced in his (somewhat) heteronormatized heart by a racist depiction of a Roma woman, played by Noomi Rapace.

1

However, Irene Adler is not the only choice for fridging. For example, in Chris Columbus’ Young Sherlock Holmes, Holmes’ love interest Elizabeth (played by Sophie Ward to Nicholas Rowe’s Holmes) survives until the very end of the film, thereby fridging her for motivational and heteronormative purposes less within the prequel film itself and moreover in the larger Sherlock Holmes storyline. By killing off Elizabeth, this adaptation also seeks to justify Holmes’ singlehood throughout the rest of his life (as Elizabeth was shown to be his one-true-love), as well as to heighten his nemesistic relationship with Moriarty (as he was responsible for Elizabeth’s death).

While usually the focus of heteronormatizing in these adaptations is Holmes, Watson can alternatively be the focus, usually by Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan, such as in the BBC’s Sherlock (played by Amanda Abbington) and in Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (played by Kelly Reilly). This often serves the dual purpose of heteronormatizing the Holmes/Watson relationship and showing Holmes as lonely and more sympathetic. This is particularly emphasized in the 2002 TV film Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (starring Rupert Everett), though in this case Watson (Ian Hart) marries a sex-positive feminist American psychoanalyst named Mrs. Jenny Vandeluer (Helen McCrory).

Helen-Mccrory-in-Sherlock-Holmes-and-the-case-of-the-silk-stocking-helen-mccrory-29563108-459-347

As producer Elinor Day pointed out in the DVD commentary, a sequel in which the three of them were a team – Sherlock, Jenny, and John – would be amazing (though it sadly seems unlikely to happen now). Though the BBC’s Sherlock gets a similar trio-dynamic with the introduction of Mary, Mary is subjugated and ashamed, while Jenny openly defies Sherlock’s misogyny and heartlessness, and he would not have been able to solve his case at all without her. Sadly, though Jenny is an amazing character, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking falls short of being a feminist film. Under the guise of critiquing rape culture, the film in many ways fetishizes the physical and sexual abuse of young women and girls, emphasized by the camera movements and the focus on the helpless sounds the girls make while they are being gagged and suffocated.

Though the upcoming sHERlock, starring Helen Davies in the title role, is certainly exciting, I personally think that instead of the message being “women can fill Sherlock’s shoes” (which they most certainly can), the message could be “women don’t need Sherlock, and are awesome on their own,” especially when it comes to Irene Adler. Irene Adler’s character has been tweaked and even completely reimagined numerous times to fit male-contrived adaptations of the (admittedly male-contrived) Sherlock Holmes canon, sadly often coming short of her original depiction – though also not free from its problems. Irene Adler deserves her own series, whatever the story may be, and whatever part of her life is the focus.

3

Irene Adler never needed Sherlock Holmes or any man (including the Czech King who hired Sherlock to face her in the first place), and when she finds love (with a man who is neither the king nor Holmes), it’s on her terms. Irene Adler only appears in one of Conan Doyle’s stories because she has her own life, and it does not rotate around nor even involve Sherlock Holmes. She is a clever, intelligent, resourceful, sex-positive woman in control of her own life, her own body, and her own destiny, and deserves not only a writer to do her justice, but a series to completely center her and all her fantastic escapades. Women do not exist to heteronormatize men – they exist to lead their own lives. Hollywood and the BBC would do well to learn that, as well as to get over their obvious fear and terrible oppression of anything not heteronormative.

’45 Years’: A Lifetime of Honing Talent

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the unspoken knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia.

45YearsRamplingCover

The end of the year, just in time to qualify for the Oscars, is when we usually get at least a few films that feature actors we first saw when they were young and beautiful (or in the case of a performer like Bill Murray, not so beautiful) who, now that they’re around retirement age, are playing either irascible old coots (and their gender-switched twins: old ladies who swear a lot) or characters who show that life invariably becomes pathetic and tragic for those who age, as the leads in Michael Haneke’s Amour did a few years back. You’d never know from these films that some of the most powerful men in the mainstream movie industry are approaching or are over 70 (women in the business apparently are not allowed to be that age and keep their jobs)–and they aren’t shitting their pants nor have their personalities magically changed into the curmudgeonly but loveable stereotypes their own films are littered with.

Out writer-director Andrew Haigh best known for the film Weekend and as the co-creator of the now-cancelled HBO series Looking has decades before he turns 70, but in his new film 45 Years (opening Dec. 23) which he adapted from a short story by David Constantine, he treats the older, straight, married couple who are the film’s focus with the complexity that other filmmakers reserve for characters under 50. Charlotte Rampling plays Kate, a retired schoolteacher living in a home in rural England with her husband. Confident and warm but with razor sharp cheekbones, she wears boots and jeans for her daily morning’s walk with the dog as if she just stepped out of a Land’s End catalog, senior division.

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the  knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia. She’s the one who knows where to find the German dictionary in their house when he needs one and corrects him when he gets the facts of an old news item wrong. But she doesn’t seem to resent her role as the competent, dependable spouse and brings a lot of tenderness to her interactions with Geoff, holding his hand or bringing him tea when he’s upset and preparing every meal and cleaning up afterward without complaint. I always notice, in films as in life, when women are the ones doing all the cooking and dish washing and 45 Years is one of the few films–and one of the only ones directed by a man–which seemed to notice along with me.

KateGeoff45Years

Kate is also the one who plans their social calendar, including the big party in a rented hall for their 45th wedding anniversary, delayed from the one they planned for their 40th when Geoff had open heart surgery. She’s even sure of the songs that should be played, politely insisting, “No Elton John”

The use of music in this film is some of the best I’ve ever heard–without any of the selections being obscure or surprising. These songs are precisely the ones that would play on an older person’s car radio and for their anniversary party and we’ve heard them many times before, but in this film, especially in the song that plays over the closing credits, we hear them in a new way, just as Kate comes to see her marriage with a new perspective. The other touches in the film are equally expert, from the cinematography of Lol Crawley to a supporting performance by Geraldine James as the couple’s (especially Kate’s) longtime friend.

So many other films (like the the execrable Youth) can’t show older characters without making cheap jokes about their bodies and diminished capacities. Even when we see this couple getting ready for bed and sex the two are never held up for ridicule, though Geoff , slowly pounding around the scar on his bare chest, like a superannuated Tarzan, seems to be making fun of himself. The film is about Rampling’s Kate but it wouldn’t work if Geoff were not equally well-written and Courtenay weren’t such a good foil. His Geoff is not above flattering Kate or playing the fool to appease her suspicions. In an early scene he defuses what in a shorter marriage might have turned into an argument with a wide-eyed admission, “I don’t remember.”

Seeing an older woman in crisis in a film without also seeing her humiliated (or looking very disheveled) is unusual. And we’re affected more by the increasing uncertainty Kate feels because of the calm we’ve seen her radiate in the early scenes. Haigh never robs Kate of her dignity, even during her dinner table confrontation with Geoff, “I’d like to be able to tell you everything I’m thinking,” she says, “but I can’t.”

45YearsBathtub

Haigh does what more filmmakers should do with older performers: incorporate our own memories of them as younger actors into their characters, the way we see in older relatives and friends the traces of their younger selves. Sarah Polley proved she understood this desire when at the beginning of Away From Her (the first film she directed) she showed the woman who will be played by Julie Christie when she was in her twenties–and the young actress had a ’60s hairstyle Julie Christie might have worn and had the young Christie’s energetic and playful presence. Haigh pointedly avoids showing us what Rampling and Courtenay’s characters looked like when they were younger because we (at least those of us who watch British movies) already know–from the films the actors made in the era their characters discuss. The early ’60s which Geoff relives when he gets a reminder of a tragedy that happened then, is also when Courtenay starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The mid-sixties, when Geoff and Kate first met at a dance, was when Rampling made her film debut in Georgy Girl opposite the equally young Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave.

Many films have characters who are a little (or a lot!) slow on the uptake, so that the audience can congratulate themselves on how much smarter they are than the people onscreen. Several times during 45 Years we assume Rampling’s Kate is overreacting, but as the movie continues, we understand that a woman married to a man for 45 years knows him better than we do. She questions him and knows what to ask when she feels like he could be hiding something from her. Sometimes Kate second-guesses Geoff so accurately that her intuition seems supernatural, until we realize we are just seeing the result of a very long relationship. And unlike the dreary, hackneyed revelations of By the Sea, what Kate finds out shocks us as much as it does her: it isn’t something Geoff could have “forgotten” to tell her.

When (not if) Rampling is nominated for awards for playing Kate, she’ll be called a “sentimental favorite” but her performance, like the relationship at the film’s center is a culmination of experience. Rampling was a fixture of “swinging ’60s” London who hung out with The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Over the course of her long career, she’s worked with an astonishing list of talents: Visconti and Ozon were her directors and she was the leading lady opposite both Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum. The last look and gesture she leaves us with in 45 Years is the unmistakable answer to a question we’ve been asking ourselves throughout the last scenes of the film. If she wins awards for this role, it will be because she’s earned them, not because she’s outlasted her peers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAnjA9tAnQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

What Happened to ‘Doctor Who’s Clara

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from ‘Doctor Who,’ and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from Doctor Who, and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

name

To recap: there’s an overall pattern on New Who where women who travel with the Doctor end up being destroyed in some way, and Clara Oswald, the Doctor’s companion from mid-season seven to the end of season nine, is no exception. Clara was first introduced as The Impossible Girl, a woman who kept showing up in the Doctor’s timeline and dying while she tried to save him. The reason for this was revealed in “The Name of the Doctor,” where we learned that Clara’s special destiny was/is/will be to throw herself into the Doctor’s time stream so that she can be torn apart and reappear as various women whose only purpose in life is to help him.

After witnessing this heroic sacrifice, the Doctor rescues Clara from the time stream so that she can stop dying forever and be his real companion. Thus begins a long story-arc in Doctor Who that’s unofficially titled, “We don’t know what to do with Clara anymore.”

In season eight, there’s a new Doctor in town and Clara’s story line is that – unlike Amy, who gradually drifted away to lead a normal life (up until she was past-zapped by aliens, because no one can ever be happy) – Clara gradually spends more and more time in the TARDIS, leaving her normal life behind. Her boyfriend, Danny Pink, is worried about the influence the Doctor is having on her, but then he dies, and Clara’s got nothing to keep her tied to her life on Earth.

By season nine, Clara’s fast-talking the aliens and coming up with clever, reckless plans as if she is the Doctor. The bells of foreshadowing start to toll as the Doctor talks about how he wouldn’t know what to do if he lost her, but, no matter how often he says they should be more careful, he can’t resist her when she wants to go on an adventure. At this point, it starts to become clear that, despite the murky character development in season eight, the new point of Clara is that she and the Doctor are a Bad Influence on each other, and that this is probably why the Doctor’s arch frenemy, the Master, played match-maker by introducing them.

Things finally come to a head in “Face the Raven,” when Clara tries to cheat her way out of an alien contract she doesn’t understand and ends up marked for death. The Doctor can’t do anything to save her, and, after a protracted goodbye speech, he’s left to watch as Clara gets killed by a magic tattoo bird of some kind.

 raven

Clara’s death got a mixed reaction from fans, with some thinking this was a stupid way for the character to go out, and some just glad to see her gone after she’d overstayed her welcome. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other about Clara (besides finding her a little bland in season eight), but I was willing to accept “Face the Raven” as the end of her story. Even if she had to die again, and even if her time with the Doctor had to destroy her, just like it destroyed all of his other companions, at least this ending offered us something different than we’d seen before, as well as a new perspective on the Doctor/companion dynamic.

When you watch a TV show like this, it’s normal to imagine yourself in the same situation as the characters and wonder what you would do. Clara’s character arc, such as it was, was a nice way of addressing the daydreams we have of being Really Good at Time Travel and underscoring the difference between the Doctor – who’s basically a god, in this story – and the mortals he travels with. Clara was, for a while, Really Good at Time Travel, and as close to being a Time Lord as anyone can be – but she was still human in the end – still mortal and fallible; still part of a story that can’t last for billions of years. It was annoying that she had to be destroyed like all the others, but it was a thoughtful, interesting destruction all the same.

Except, then she came back from the dead.

The penultimate episode of the season, “Heaven Sent,” delivers one of the best Hell Yeah moments we’ve had in long, long time, when the Doctor spends four billion years punching his way through a wall to escape a Time Lord holding cell and return to his home world, Gallifrey. The season finale, which aired this past weekend, reveals that he did this, in part, so that he could use their technology to violate the laws of space and time and undo Clara’s death.

His plan doesn’t work as well as he’d hoped, though. He’s able to snatch Clara out of time at the moment she before she dies, but she isn’t really alive. She’s walking and talking, but her heart is stopped, and she will ultimately have to return to the day she faced the raven, so that she can die for real. In other words, she’s kind of a time zombie four billion years in the future. Realizing that the Doctor plans to wipe her memory and leaver somewhere safe, Clara out-Doctors him and reverses his mind-wiping device so that it wipes his mind instead. He forgets everything about her, except that she existed, and she visits him one last time, disguised as a diner waitress, to confirm that he has no memory of who she is. And then zombie diner waitress Clara flies away in her own stolen TARDIS with Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, and goes to have adventures before she has to die.

 tardis

I’m not gonna lie – that’s pretty amazing.

As a TV viewer, there’s part of me that instinctively feels ripped off that Clara didn’t really die in “Face the Raven,” especially after all the hullaballoo that was made about it in the episode, and the long, protracted goodbye speech she got to give. But, as someone who’s on record as being bummed out that all the women on this show meet such horrible ends, I’m really happy at this surprisingly positive turn of events. In a way, it’s even more satisfying that’s it’s Clara, the girl who died again, and again, and again, and again during her time with the Doctor, who gets to live forever, through this weird, cosmic loophole, with everything she ever wanted. This wasn’t a story about how trying to be like the gods destroyed a mortal after all – it was a story about how, after she suffered so much for so long, Clara got to be amazing.

The turnaround where Clara escaped the memory wipe is also a really interesting call-back to one of the most brutal companion disposals thus far, in which the Doctor’s companion, Donna, saved the world by downloading his knowledge into her brain, only to discover that that meant he had to erase all her memories of him to stop her mind from imploding. While the general level of pessimism and tragedy in that ending may ring more true to life than the ending we get in “Hell Bent,” this reversal also drives home the point that Clara escaped the fate of all the companions before her – that she escaped even the story’s expectation that attempts to be more than she was would end in tragedy.

Speaking in general terms, season nine wasn’t always strong on story, but its presentation of women was unusually rad. Aside from Clara and Maisie Williams’ character (an immortal who appears in four episodes and is frequently both sympathetic and up to no good), this season also featured really outstanding work from Michelle Gomez as a female regeneration of the Master, Doctor Who’s first deaf character, played by Sophie Stone, and the return of a fan-favourite named Osgood whom I’m not all that into, but everyone else seems to like. What all these characters have in common is that they were cool and interesting and well-acted but didn’t, like, ruin their lives and kill themselves to save the Doctor from his sad existence. In many cases, they were, instead, the characters who made the story happen through their choices, and that was refreshing to see.

This season and last have also taught us that it’s normal for Time Lords to change gender when they regenerate, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor one day. It’s an important step for the franchise to take, not because there’s anything wrong with the Doctors we’ve seen, or because casting a woman will automatically make the show better, but because it’s one really good way to undo the uncomfortable undercurrents in the series so far, where the power dynamic always shakes out to Omnipotent Man – Vulnerable Woman.

Until that day comes, though, I’m very pleased that Clara is an honorary Time Lord. Even if she is a zombie waiting to get killed by magic birds.


Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

recommended-red-714x300-1

 

 

New “Star Wars” trailer, new hope: Leia finally picks up a lightsaber — and the little girl inside me cheers by Sonia Saraiya at Salon

There’s a raging controversy over Princess Leia’s bikini by Elizabeth Shockman at PRI

Teyonah Parris Delivers a Monologue That Gets to the Core of ‘Chi-Raq’s’ Message in New Clip from the Film by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

Decades in the Making, ‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Carol’ Show LGBT Films Aren’t Risky Anymore by Jennifer Swann at Take Part

‘Smile!’ How a villain’s phrase in ‘Jessica Jones’ exposes modern-day sexism by Libby Hill at LA Times

Marvel Show “Jessica Jones” Names a Most Evil Villain: Abuse by Stephanie Yang at Bitch Media

“The Wiz Live!” Finds a Brand New Day on the Small Screen by Nina Hemphill Reeder at Ebony

New Film “Mustang” Explores Young Women’s Vitality–and Patriarchy’s Brutality by Stephanie Abraham at Bitch Media

Why This Film About Pre-WWI London Rings Too True Today by Patricia Nugent at Ms. blog

Barbra Streisand’s First Directorial Project in 20 Years Will Be Catherine the Great Biopic by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

 

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

Meredith Grey’s Woman Problem

Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.15.41 AM


This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.


Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed Grey’s Anatomy, we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

Of course Dr. Cristina Yang was Meredith’s one true love, not McDreamy. Cristina was there for her when she broke down over the execution of a death-row patient even though they were fighting about the intern self-suturing debacle of season five. Cristina helped Meredith with newly-adopted Zola when Derek left her for tampering with the Alzheimer’s trial even though Cristina was having her own relationship and motherhood issues. She was there for her again in season 10, despite Cristina’s resentment toward Meredith for leaning out of work to focus on family. Cristina supports Meredith through her tumultuous life which includes multiple near-death experiences, the death of her husband and mother and sister. (Seriously, how many tragedies can one person handle?!) Despite the actress who plays Cristina, Sandra Oh, departing the series in season 10, she left an indelible mark on Grey’s Anatomy and its title character.

In addition to Cristina’s impact, you’ll notice a recurring thread throughout Meredith’s most trying times: women were involved.

index

 

Meredith’s very existence is in the shadows of her famous and brilliant mother, Ellis Grey, to whom she was never good enough. Her dementia colors the first season of the show and how we come to know Meredith. Ellis’ death in season three also throws Meredith for a loop and reverberates throughout the following seasons, culminating in the arrival of Meredith’s previously unknown half-sister, Maggie Pierce, in season 11, bringing with it a whole host of sister issues Meredith has to work through.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.18.22 AM

 

Which brings us to Lexie Grey, yet another half-sister, this time on Meredith’s father’s side. Introduced at the end of season three as an intern at Seattle Grace (now Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital) before her aforementioned death (and one of the reasons for renaming the hospital) in season eight, Lexie had her fair share of tragedies that in turn affected Meredith.

While Meredith was working as her doctor, Lexie’s mother died which put further strain on her difficult relationship with her estranged father. Lexie also struggled with the Seattle Grace Mercy West (yes, yet another formation the Grey’s hospital took!) massacre that claimed the lives of several fellow surgeons and threatened Derek and Alex’s, Lexie’s partner at the time.

The repercussions from Lexie’s death in a plane crash made the following season one of the most emotionally interesting. Meredith became known as Medusa for her ruthless treatment of her interns while Cristina took off to Minnesota to work at the Mayo Clinic. Meredith also discovers she’s pregnant, without her sister and best friend there to support her through what’s supposed to be one of the happiest times in her life.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.18.57 AM

 

And let’s not forget the most recent woman to shake up Meredith’s world: Callie’s girlfriend, who also happens to be the doctor who treated Derek prior to his death and is a new resident at Grey Sloan to boot! In one of the best episodes of the show’s 12-season run, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Meredith attempts to swallow her grief over her surprise dinner guest and not tell Amelia, Derek’s sister, or Callie that the new woman in the fold is actually one of the last people to see Derek alive.

If these examples aren’t enough to convince you that women influence Meredith and the trajectory of Grey’s Anatomy as a whole, remember the season one cliffhanger that succeeded in throwing Meredith’s life even more off course than her mother’s illness had?

index

 

Addison Shepherd’s—that’s right, Derek Shepherd’s wife!—arrival set the tone for many of the aforementioned women’s introductions into Meredith’s life. They sneak up on her unawares, throw her already messy life into total disarray, but are then accepted into the fold. In a community as close knit as the doctors at Grey Sloan it’s not really surprising that enemies soon become friends.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.21.12 AM

 

What is surprising is how close women like Lexie and Maggie have become to Meredith despite the fact that she kind of treats people like shit. Yeah, we know she’s “dark and twisty” to say the least but, apart from Cristina and sometimes Callie, the interactions she has with these women are usually tense, when she’s speaking to them at all.

But can you really blame her? Everyone she’s ever gotten close to, with the exception of Alex and Dr. Weber, has left her. Meredith doesn’t easily open up to people, but there is some disconnect between how she’s portrayed and the characters she’s supposedly written to be close to. She’s the quintessential unlikable female character.

Grey’s Anatomy, like all of Shonda Rhimes’ creations, is a lesson in depicting people from all walks of life, warts and all. Meredith and her relationships to the women in her life can be tense at times, but Grey’s succeeds in portraying them as the result of many strong personalities and highly skilled surgeons attempting to coexist in a high pressure environment, not because women can’t be friends. The women Meredith does get along with passionately she makes “her person” and will go to bat for them under any circumstances, as we saw in recent episodes when she supports Cristina’s ex Owen in his vendetta against new doctor Nathan Riggs because she told Cristina she would.

Many new small screen offerings, such as Orange is the New Black, Broad City and Playing House, take a page out of Grey’s Anatomy’s book and center on the close and complex relationships between women. Sure, Grey’s may have started out as a romance gone awry but, as in real life, relationships evolve and sometimes the most intense and long-lasting ones can be between female friends.

 


Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.22.25 AM

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

 

 

‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Youth’: Why We Need To Stop Giving White Guys Oscars

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and ‘Transparent’) which explains why we now have ‘The Danish Girl’ in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

danish-girlCover

Nearly five years ago, when Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech swept the Oscars I wasn’t displeased. Sure it was yet another film by men about men in which the women barely had speaking parts, but Colin Firth gave a great tortured performance in the lead and the screenplay–like the film itself–seemed to understand it wasn’t telling the “feel good” story many critics and audience members mistook Speech for: the screenwriter has said that when he told the Queen mother (the film depicts when she became Queen) that he was working on the script, she asked him to not make a film of it until after she was dead–because it would bring back too many bad memories.

I skipped Hooper’s next film: Les Misérables because it gave every sign of being the kind of gooey movie I would detest. It also had Eddie Redmayne in it and after sitting through the supposedly “based on a true story” nonsense of My Week With Marilyn in which Redmayne starred (opposite an underrated Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe), I had had enough of him. Last year Redmayne won an Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking in the bio-pic The Theory of Everything proving that an able-bodied actor has a good chance of getting an Academy Award for playing a disabled person (and as long as the able-bodied keep winning, disabled people will never be cast to play these roles themselves).

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and Transparent) which explains why we now have The Danish Girl in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like Blue Is the Warmest Color before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

ProfileDanishGirlGerdaLili

The whole film feels very dated (and not just because it takes place in the early 20th century) but also, in spite of it being “based on a true story”, false. Like a bad TV movie made ten or twenty years ago, this film posits that Lili (who starts out as Einar) had a wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) who had no idea her husband was anything other than a regular guy, even though Lili was a longtime model for Gerda’s work as an illustrator and painter. When Lili wants to transition, Gerda is surprised and hurt saying, “But Lili doesn’t exist. We were playing a game.” and later cries, “I need my husband! I need to hug my husband,” just like the suburban wife of a trans woman might say on Maury.

The real-life Gerda Wegener was queer and, while the couple lived in Paris, did not keep secret her relationships with women, so the film misses the opportunity to show that the feminine qualities of Lili may have been what attracted Gerda in the first place, a possibility shows like Maury and movies like this one never consider. The film also gives short shrift to the gender politics of the time, never detailing the obstacles a woman artist like Gerda would face in that era and downplaying Lili’s decision when she transitions to stop painting–even though she had won acclaim as an artist when she was “Einar”.

This film fails on so many levels, it’s hard to pick any one aspect, but Eddie Redmayne deserves special mention. A man in a dress playing a trans women is always objectionable, but Redmayne is so woefully miscast in this role, I’ll go to any protest of the awards he will probably be nominated for. Lili Elbe was one of the first people to undergo gender affirming surgery and the toast of Paris, going to parties and modeling for Gerda in the latest, revealing fashions but Redmayne’s Lili is a whispery, skittish, drag queen full of shame (at least at first) who wears matronly dresses that come up to the neck and stretch down nearly to the ankle. Other trans woman pioneers (in the US, a generation after Elbe) were not shy, retiring or ashamed: think of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera: they, along with many femme gay men of the time became more open in their presentation as they became more outspoken in their advocacy: they developed pride in themselves to deflect the shame mainstream culture thought was their only option. In this way and many others, their mindset was much more in keeping with the rest of us in 2015 than that of anyone associated with The Danish Girl.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d88APYIGkjk” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Nearly two years ago Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty won an Oscar for best foreign language film and again, even though it was a film made by men about men, I’d enjoyed it and was happy. I didn’t know then that award would give Sorrentino the momentum to make one of the worst films I’ve seen in a theater in a long time: Youth.

WeitzYouth

In a lot of ways Youth takes the indulgences I could ignore in The Great Beauty: the whining of pampered, older, male characters and the fascination with the grotesque (but of course never, ever combining the two to find the grotesque in pampered, main older male characters) and proceeds to make an entire movie out of them. And the whisper of misogyny in Beauty becomes a scream in Youth. Michael Caine is the lead, a retired composer, and his vocal intonations are so familiar from the acting he’s phoned in through the years that, even if he were giving a good performance, at this point we wouldn’t notice. Harvey Keitel is wasted (except very briefly in the reading of one of his last lines) as his best friend, a film director, as is Rachel Weisz as the composer’s grown daughter and Jane Fonda as an aging actress wearing too much makeup (I can’t believe people are talking about nominating Fonda for an award for this role. Her part isn’t a character, it’s an incoherent tempter tantrum). Like The Great Beauty, Youth has great cinematography (again by Luca Bigazzi) but when the results are this loathsome, I’m reminded of how much I would rather see a dimly lit, poorly shot film with a great script than another monstrosity with great stills. As other critics have pointed out, if this film is a leading contender for an Oscar we’re in trouble–or maybe it’s the Oscars, and their increasing irrelevance, which are.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T7CM4di_0c” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

Call For Writers: Interracial Relationships

Are depictions of interracial relationships on the rise due to a diminished stigma around interracial dating? How much is colorism still in play? Do the success of shows with racially diverse casts and the growing success of dark-skinned performers mitigate colorism? How do the very real and present ramifications of slavery and colonialism affect these interracial dynamics?

Call-for-Writers-e13859437405011

UPDATE: We will be postponing this theme week until February 2016. So please keep sending us your pitches and submissions!

Our theme week for December 2015 will be Interracial Relationships.

Representations of interracial relationships in film and on television have seen an increase over the years. It is ever more common to see, in particular, a Black female lead or love interest dating a person (usually a man) of another race (often white) (Scandal, The Bodyguard, Parenthood). Many such productions give little mention to the interracial nature of the romance. Colorism (the practice of favoring lighter skinned people of color over darker skinned people of color) is often at play in these scenarios, as the most successful women of color in Hollywood cast to play out romances with white characters frequently have lighter skin. Conversely, race is often a major issue in productions featuring Black male characters dating white women (Jungle Fever, Othello, Save the Last Dance).

Are depictions of interracial relationships on the rise due to a diminished stigma around interracial dating? How much is colorism still in play? Do the success of shows with racially diverse casts and the growing success of dark-skinned performers mitigate colorism? How do the very real and present ramifications of slavery and colonialism affect these interracial dynamics?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Dec. 18, by midnight Friday, February 19, 2016 by midnight Eastern Time.

Othello

The Bodyguard

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Jungle Fever

Scandal

Orange is the New Black

Jessica Jones

Devil in a Blue Dress

The L Word

Belle

Monster’s Ball

Dear White People

Pretty Little Liars

Save the Last Dance

The Flash

Grey’s Anatomy

Love Actually

The Feast of All Saints

Sense8

Made in America

Fools Rush In

How to Get Away With Murder

White Men Can’t Jump

The Fosters

Girl Fight

Mississippi Masala

Corrina, Corrina

Romeo Must Die

Jackie Brown

The Vampire Diaries

Parenthood