Bitch Flicks – Page 44 – The radical notion that women like good movies

On Racism, Erasure, and ‘Pan’

Apparently, most Hollywood executives and casting directors live in a fictional land called Neverlearn.

This is a guest post by Danika Kimball.

Hollywood has a history of recreating the same stories over and over again. I mean, in recent years audiences have seen remakes of Carrie, Cinderella, and about 18 Spiderman films (18 too many, in my opinion). So it came as no surprise when Warner Brothers announced that they would be making a new version of Peter Pan, entitled Pan. Even less surprising is their casting choice, where they have once again whitewashed a Native American character, hiring Rooney Mara to play the part of Tiger Lily. Apparently, most Hollywood executives and casting directors live in a fictional land called Neverlearn.

Raise your hand if you’re sick of it.

Director Joe Wright reportedly intended the film to be “very international and multi-racial,” but if the characters we’ve seen in this adaptation of Pan are indicative, he very well means “whiter than bleached snow.” Really, if he wanted the film to stand out from the rest of the Peter Pan films, he might have made it a point to create a non-racist one, as it would be the first of its kind to do so. I mean let’s not forget the disgusting racism present in the beloved 1953 Disney classic.

But fear not!

The studio apparently did an exhaustive search in finding the right girl to play the role of Tiger Lily, auditioning both Lupita Nyong’o and Adele Exarchopoulos before choosing Mara for the part. Though both of these actresses are phenomenally talented, name-checking starlets born in Kenya and France respectively hardly counts as an “exhaustive search,” especially when you cast a conventionally attractive white woman in the role at the end of the day.

Though certainly not the first film to completely screw up its casting choices (ahem—Stonewall, Aloha, Breakfast at Tiffany’s), Native whitewashing is particularly problematic. Fashion editors, photographers, and designers frequently appropriate Native culture, sport red face, and hypersexualize women. Though women are sexualized overall in entertainment mediums, the objectification of Native women presents a whole new set of problems. While one in four women is the victim of sexual abuse on average, that number more than doubles for Native women.

Furthermore, when was the last time you saw a film featuring Native Americans that didn’t use a harmful stereotype like “the violent savage,” “magical Native American,” or one who is drunk in a casino? Why are sports teams still using Native American caricatures as their mascots, despite overwhelming public dissent? How is Columbus Day still a thing? Why do we call celebrities our spirit animals?

To the naysayers that argue that Warner Brothers couldn’t find a good Native actress to fulfill the role, please allow me to call bullshit.

2002’s Whale Rider cast an unknown actress, Keisha Castle-Hughes, who went on to receive a well-deserved Oscar nomination. Similarly, Quevenzhane’ Wallis was cast as an unknown talent in 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. That year she became the youngest actress to receive a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards.

Laverne Cox and Peter Dinklage are both testaments to the fact that casting great actors in roles that they authentically embody pays off in the long run. How inappropriate (not to mention ridiculously offensive) would it have been for HBO to continue the practice of “shrinking an actor” in order to depict the role of Tyrion Lannister? Consider the backlash that both Jared Leto, Eddie Redmayne, and most recently Elle Fanning have received for being cast as trans characters, rather than trans actors who could authentically play those parts.

Why on earth is Warner Brothers so hesitant to adopt a more progressive and culturally sensitive casting choice? What more do Hollywood executives need? Casting marginalized actors is not an impossible task, and their hesitation to embrace diversity on screen has real-life consequences.

The film Miss Representation touches on this idea. Adopting the mantra of Marie Wilson, director of The White House Project–“You can’t be what you can’t see”–the film argues that media representation is important. Without visible role models to look to, young people, especially girls and people of color, will be dissuaded from joining certain fields. Minority groups continue to be underrepresented in STEM, politics, leadership, and law enforcement, fields that are currently oversaturated with white men.

This opinion is shared by those who it most severely affects. A recent graduate from Arizona State University, Edilh Gallardo, shared her experiences in pursuing an education with her alma mater, emphasizing that pursuing higher education as a minority can be difficult because “a lot of our children don’t realize the opportunity is there.”

Her sentiments are part of the reason why representation in television film matters so much. If the only representations you see of your race or gender on TV are terrorists, criminals, and savages, rather than doctors, lawyers, or leaders, it might be difficult for you to imagine yourself in those positions later on in life.

There has been a long standing Hollywood cliche that states, the only color Hollywood executives see is green. This excuses the industry from their role in helping maintain white supremacist patriarchy because they are allowed to say, “We’re just giving the people what they want.” It’s clear in films like Peter Pan, Tonto, and Aloha that Hollywood has no qualms with telling the stories of women or minorities. They have no problem with disenfranchised characters, but it has become apparent in recent casting choices that Hollywood is not ready for disenfranchised actors. This kind of transgression is irresponsible at best, and damaging to our cultural fabric at worst. So for the sake of actors, films, and the future of the industry, I hope eventually someone will start listening.

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

Vintage Viewing: Lotte Reiniger, Animation Innovator

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Lotte Reiniger: It’s a Snip

Born in Berlin in 1899, Lotte Reiniger became fascinated by Chinese silhouette puppetry. Beginning her film career working on intertitle designs for Paul Wegener’s Rumpelstiltskin’s Wedding at the age of 16, Wegener introduced her to a collective of animators. At first, Reiniger created special effects sequences for German expressionist films such as Rochus Gliese’s Apocalypse and Wegener’s The Pied Piper of Hamlin. Reiniger had developed and refined her own technique for completely animated films by 1919’s Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart. In 1921, Reiniger married Carl Koch, who became her producer and camera operator, while Reiniger was responsible for concepts, storyboards and silhouette cutting. In 1922 she made Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, demonstrating the magic of Grimm’s fairy tales and the appeal of princess stories, years before Disney abruptly switched from masculine cartoon heroes like Mickey Mouse, to folklore princesses.

A still of Prince Achmed, showcasing its multiplane silhouettes

Reiniger transcended the flatness of silhouette animation by pioneering the multiplane Tricktisch (trick table), in which layers of glass are inserted into a table so that images with layers and depth can be shot through the table’s central hole. Walt Disney’s U.S. patent (no. 2,201,689) for his own multiplane camera would strongly resemble Reiniger’s earlier design. Far from patenting her own work, however, Reiniger wrote and filmed tutorials on her techniques, with a passion for spreading the art of animation. In 1925, Lotte Reiniger completed three years of labor on The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a fully animated feature film drawn from the folklore of the 1001 Nights, followed by 1928’s half-hour Dr. Dolittle and his Animals. That’s over a decade before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves received an honorary Oscar for screen innovation. Reiniger’s visionary contribution continues to receive little recognition in official histories of animation.

Despite this woman’s major significance to the development of the art of animation, Disney would make a notorious company policy that excluded women from creative work in his company. Reiniger, meanwhile, fled Nazism in the 1930s, losing all her original prints (watching copies of copies means we lose a lot of the fine detail in her originals). However, with her small team of collaborators, she continued animating in her distinctive silhouette style, adding color backgrounds to later films, finishing a long and productive career with 1980’s The Four Seasons. The longevity of her career speaks to her skill in carving out and developing her own unique niche and flavor, which survived competition with rival animators who were working on an industrial scale.

Cinderella – 1922

Many feminists find the tale of Cinderella problematic, because of the role that Cinderella plays in accepting her own servitude and being rewarded for this passivity. Reiniger solves this problem in her film’s first frames. We see a speeded-up portrait of Reiniger’s hand and scissors cutting out the figure of Cinderella, before the little figure seizes the scissors for herself. Cinderella will cut the scenes of her own fantasy jaggedly from the film’s black background, as a dress-maker cuts the pattern of their outfit. Is it because the wicked stepsisters pull the tail of their caged bird that Cinderella has a bird army at her disposal? These scenes are far more faithful to the original Grimms’ fairy tale, where birds helped the heroine sort the lentils from the ashes as one of the impossible tasks she was set before she was allowed to go to the ball.

Reiniger also anticipates Disney’s habit of rewarding his virtuous heroines with armies of animals that substitute the girls’ own agency. If Cinderella is the one cutting out her bird army, does this mean she identifies as a caged bird herself? Are the rolling eyes of her stepsisters a true representation, or has Cinderella mischievously cut their silhouettes as grotesques to express their inner ugliness? The farcical padding of the thin stepsister’s bust, and the girdling of the overweight one, show a sharp female eye for the constructed nature of female beauty.

Rather than a fairy godmother, the apple tree growing from her own mother’s grave clothes Cinderella in finery. In a cruel twist, the Prince finds her at her mother’s grave after the fairytale clothes have fallen from her, and is unable to recognize her without her artificial finery. The plan to marry the first woman who fits Cinderella’s abandoned shoe flies out of a courtier’s head as a magic bird–a sly dig at its birdbrained logic? Such witty details are a trademark of Reiniger’s work. Notice the tiny figure of a man on the minute hand of her great clock, and a lady on the hour hand. Though the man moves 60 times as fast, he constantly passes the lady by, just as the prince overlooked Cinderella without her finery. The gruesome slicing off of her foot’s excess weight by the stepsister, to fit the slipper, is a detail kept from the original story, that adds to Reiniger’s darker tone. Only magic birds can provide the prince with the right answer, for fortune favors the unscrupulous. But with a “Snip!” that fate can be changed, when a girl is wielding her own scissors. Her physically abusive stepmother can only huff and puff and blow herself apart. The price, however, is to pass forever the unreal imaginary space of “fairyland.”

Soundtrack Suggestion: Evanescence “Bring Me To Life”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kku75vGDD_0″]

Papageno – 1935

1935’s Papageno uses the new technology of synchronized sound to the full. Mozart’s playful classical music from comedy opera The Magic Flute is brought to life by Reiniger’s rhythmically animated fantasy interpretation. Long before Disney’s Fantasia, Reiniger, a fan of the hyperreal arts of shadow theater and opera, showed that animation could be used to popularize supposedly elite art forms like opera.

Mozart designed The Magic Flute as a popular entertainment, not an elite spectacle, and Reiniger’s “silhouette opera house” restores that sense of accessible magic with her sprightly bird catcher and his magical pan pipes for charming the birds from the trees, who lives in lonely longing for a female counterpart. The film also showcases Reiniger’s development of multiplane depth in her use of detailed backdrops. Great care must have been required to exactly synchronize with the music, as when the parakeets play the bells while Papageno swings on vines and pictures his bird friends as the women that he wished he could charm. From giant snakes to an attempted suicide, this adaptation doesn’t shrink from the darker undertones in Mozart’s libretto and music, while the freedom of animation brings talking birds and a dashing, ostrich-riding heroine to life, enriching the musical fantasy, just as the classic music of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty was brought to more literal life in Disney’s 1959 film of the same name. Working with few collaborators, Reiniger may not have achieved such a lush result, but her work clearly shows her visionary grasp of the medium’s potential.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCR-GFKmMGU”]

Thumbelina – 1954

Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina told the tale of a tiny girl grown from seed to be a companion to an old woman, Reiniger has her Thumbelina born spontaneously and magically from a flower, beholden to none but herself. Without parents to guide her, Thumbelina explores the world and resists all attempts at coerced marriage in her own search for her soul kin. Kidnapped by a bullying toad to be a bride for her son, Thumbelina prays for release from her lily-pad prison and is rewarded by the intervention of kindly fish who tow her to shore, along with a sympathetic butterfly, the first hint of Thumbelina’s kinship with creatures of the air.

After an autumn feeding on berries and playing with the woodland animals, Thumbelina finds herself freezing with the coming of winter and seeks shelter with an apparently kindly, motherly mouse. In exchange for her home, Thumbelina does housework for the mouse, but the mouse attempts to use her leverage to emotionally blackmail Thumbelina into accepting marriage with the neighboring mole, who can bribe Thumbelina with necklaces and jewels that mark him as a good match. Under the pressure of her debt to the mothering mouse, Thumbelina accepts a ring and allows herself to be pushed into bridal regalia, but a late migrating swallow helps her to fly away after hearing of her despair at the upcoming wedding. In Andersen’s original tale, discovering a fairy prince who is her own size makes Thumbelina’s happy ending, reinforcing the idea that Mr. Right must be the ultimate reward. In Reiniger’s retelling, Thumbelina discovers a whole fairy community, who fit her with wings so that she can join them as an equal. It is the final vision of Thumbelina dancing in a line with other fairies that makes Reiniger’s happy ending, not a romantic resolution. In asserting Thumbelina’s right to reject unsuitable suitors and search for her own soul kin, the fairy tale takes on its feminist edge. Thumbelina may be vulnerable, but she struggles for her own desires throughout the tale.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDojanzKKmw”]

Carving out their own unique niche in the filmmaking world was one way for women to resist mainstream pressures that were pushing them out of the directing craft. Lotte Reiniger can lay claim to being the greatest silhouette animator. In the USA, avant-garde, arthouse film was pioneered by Maya Deren. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Maya Deren, experimental eccentric.

Brigit McCone began her film career making stop-motion animation with play-dough, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and watching animations that are supposed to be for kids.

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!

How Shows Like ‘Will & Grace’ And ‘Black-ish’ Can Change Your Brain by Maanvi Singh at NPR

Exclusive: Octavia Butler’s ‘Dawn’ Being Developed for TV, Producer Talks Adaptation and Diversity Behind the Scenes by Jai Tiggett at Shadow and Act

The Resonance and Relevance of ‘Suffragette’ by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

In New Film “Grandma,” Lily Tomlin Scoffs at Abortion Stigma by Monica Castillo at Bitch Media

Nobody’s Damsel Study Looks at Modern Female TV Characters and the People Who Love Them by Carolyn Cox at The Mary Sue

Why Colin Trevorrow Denying His White Male Privilege Is Bad For Women Directors by Rebecca Theodore-Vachon at Forbes

The Comedy About 2 Trans Women of Color You Don’t Want to Miss by Miriam Zoila Pérez at Colorlines

Telluride Film Review: ‘He Named Me Malala’ by Justin Chang at Variety

Grandma, What Big Roles You Have: How Paul Weitz Became a Feminist Director by Paula Schwartz at MovieMaker

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

‘Inside Out’: Female Representation Onscreen But Not Off

It’s therefore unsurprising that the character who most drives the plot of the film is Riley’s dad (voiced by Kyle MacLachlan). In fact, the film is largely one big piece of advice for fathers from fathers.

(SPOILERS for Pixar’s Inside Out)

As pointed out by Natalie Wilson on Bitch Flicks, Pixar’s latest film, Inside Out, about a preteen girl and her characterized emotions, has plenty to enJoy. It’s a female-centric film, with three leading female protagonists – the 11-year-old Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), her leading emotion Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), and Joy’s least favorite co-emotion, Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith). There are also many other female characters, such as Disgust (voiced by Mindy Kaling) and Riley’s best friend Meg (voiced by Paris Van Dyke), and unnamed but still important characters such as Riley’s mom (voiced by Diane Lane). So many female characters with leading or otherwise key roles in the story means that the Bechdel Test is passed in multiple scenes. Nevertheless, while there is much gender diversity, and to a lesser extent ethnic divsersity, there is much less diversity offscreen.

All four producers were men. Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen, a White man and a Man of Color, co-directed and came up with the story. Of the three people who wrote the screenplay, there was one woman (Meg LeFauve), and the music, film editing, and art direction were all done by men, and most of the rest of the crew is male. This is despite the fact that not only does the film feature many female characters, but most of the film actually takes place inside the mind of a girl. And yet, not only was the film mainly created by men, but even the scientific and psychological consultants who were brought on board to help Pixar create an accurate and authentic portrayal of the workings of a girl’s mind, were men. Sure, the daughters of the film’s creators provided the “inspiration” for the story, but it’s not their names on the film. It’s therefore unsurprising that the character who most drives the plot of the film is Riley’s dad (voiced by Kyle MacLachlan). In fact, the film is largely one big piece of advice for fathers from fathers.

Riley’s dad is the one who moves the family from Minnesota to San Francisco for the sake of his start-up business, and it is this move that is the impetus for the plot and the changes that take place in Riley. Though not portrayed as an actual villain, the film puts a fair amount of blame for Riley’s unhappiness on Riley’s mother. It is Riley’s mom who brings in the dad to reprimand Riley’s “attitude,” and the argument between Riley and her dad escalates quickly. It is Riley mom who most encourages Riley to “keep smiling” and be “happy,” putting pressure on Riley to show happiness and optimism whether she feels them or not for the sole sake of making the move easier on her parents. It is this pressure that hurts Riley the most. She feels such pressure to be happy that she even attempts to run away in order to find happiness, and steals money from her mother for her bus ticket.

This pressure on Riley to provide her parents with happiness is emphasized by the subtle but present fact that Riley is adopted, and by her mom’s line, “What did we ever do to deserve you.” Riley is blonde and blue-eyed, while both her parents have brown hair and eyes. When baby Riley “meet[s]” her parents, her mother does not look like she just gave birth, and isn’t sitting in a hospital bed. Riley’s parents adopted Riley to make them happy, and inadvertently put pressure on her to continue to make them happy by feigning constant happiness herself. At the end of the film, it is Riley’s father who gives the strongest lines of comfort to Riley, assuring her that it’s all right for her to miss Minnesota and to be sad. This elevates the role of the dad, while at times even condemning the mother. Though this is slightly balanced by portraying the mother as more intelligent than the father at times, this too emphasizes the kindness and innocence of the father and making the mother look like a downer and someone fast to criticize others.

The film serves a dual purpose: beautifully letting children know that it’s OK to feel sad sometimes, while also encouraging parents (especially fathers) to be more understanding of their children. The bond between fathers and daughters, and the inspiration for the film itself, is emphasized by the fact that while Riley is a complex character, much (if not most) of what makes her that way is her similarity to her father. Her father daydreams about hockey, and Riley plays hockey. Her father at first condemns her anger in their argument despite his leading emotion being anger. (Interestingly, the emotions in the mother’s head are female and the emotions is the father’s head are male, while Riley has emotions of both genders. Evidently, this was done so that the cast was more “diverse” because goodness knows that men need more roles in film…) The toll of the move is shown to be harder for Riley and her father, while her mother encourages Riley to make the move easier for her father by showing herself to be happy. At the end of the film, Riley and her father reunite due to their shared feelings of sadness, while mother’s emotions are given less consideration.

At the end of the film, Riley is problematically put into the male gaze, as not only Riley’s parents but a boy who instantly develops a crush on her watch her play hockey, and the male emotion Anger (voiced by Lewis Black) guides her actions. Despite there being many, many other ways to continue Riley’s story, when the DVD of Inside Out is released, it will contain a short about Riley’s first date (which will be with a boy) and the anxiety that her father feels about it. This further emphasizes Riley’s role in relation to men and boys, and arguably takes autonomy away from her by focusing on her father and the boy.

Male sacrifice is also emphasized by the film. Riley’s imaginary boyfriends constantly state that they would “die” for Riley, and there words are proven to be true statements. A more heartbreaking instance of male sacrifice is the one carried out by Riley’s imaginary friend Bing-Bong (voiced by Richard Kind). So emotional is the character’s storyline that more than one article has been dedicated to him, such as BuzzFeed’s humorous one and Slate’s interview with a child psychologist about Bing-Bong’s role.

I and many others loved Inside Out, and viewed it in theaters more than once due to liking it so much. Its female characters are well-developed and engaging, and pass the Bechdel Test often. The maternal role that Joy feels for Riley is beautiful, especially when Joy is watching a memory of Riley skating, and pretends to skate along with her. However, the film emphasizes the need for women behind the camera, and Hollywood can only ignore the voices shouting for diversity for so long.

The Unsung Female Warriors in ‘Vikings’

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

Heroic ethos has infused entertainment through the ages. From the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, to the half-gods of Greek mythology, to Robin Hood in English folklore, to the pulp stories of the nineteenth century, we are enthralled by heroes who are equipped with power to accomplish impossible tasks. In our age, it makes for slightly pulpy yet super addictive entertainment TV–see Rome, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Game of Thrones. There’s a tendency in fantasy or historical dramas to sideline or fit the female characters into a “traditional” mold. The underrated Vikings offers nuanced female characters to cleanse your palate.

The Canadian-Irish TV series had its debut on the History Channel in 2013. Vikings is the brainchild of Michael Hirst, who has a repertoire of remolding history in digestible, viewable snacks. He worked as a screenwriter for Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and was the executive producer for the Showtime dramas The Tudors and The Borgias. While the History Channel has a track record of traditional programming focused on the link between ancient buildings and aliens (see Ancient Aliens or UFO Files). Vikings is their first foray into scripted TV drama and definitely their showpiece.

Ragnar Lothbrok is a semi-legendary character in Scandinavian history –a rather Arthurian spirit. He was either a Danish or Swedish king, and he raided widely in Britain and France. Ragnar had three wives–Lagertha, Thora and Aslaug, a Swedish princess whom he rescued from two giants serpents. He fathered a number of sons, all whom appear to be “genuine” historical figures, and came to his untimely end when he was killed by King Aelle of Northumbria by being thrown into a pit full of snakes, right. In pop culture, his last depiction was in the movie The Vikings (1958) with Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and narrated by Orson Welles.

Vikings centers around Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel), a Viking farmer living in the fictional rural Kattegat, Scandinavia in the 790s CE. Ragnar is married to the “famous shieldmaiden” Lagertha (Katheryn Winnick). Together they run a small farm and live happily with their two children Gyda and Bjorn (who later becomes Bjorn Ironside). The village is ruled by the stock-villainous character Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne), a totalitarian ruler, and his Lady Macbeth wife Siggy (Jessalyn Gilsig). Haraldson owns the ships that goes into the Eastern Baltic every year to raid Russia. Ragnar suggests that there’s nothing to gain from their trips to the east and that they should go west. The Earl is skeptical to Ragnar’s claims. His friend Floki (Gustaf Skarsgård), a crafty boatmaker, has secretly built a longship for Ragnar, so he can assemble a crew and go wherever he wants. The Earl is against their mission so Ragnar has to act out in secret. Ragnar gets support from his ambitious brother Rollo (Clive Standen). There’s underlying tension between the brothers because Rollo has desire for Lagertha and is hungry for power. On one of their first Viking raids on the British Isles, Ragnar kidnaps the Christian monk Athelstan (George Blagden), who later serves as the audience’s eyes and ears within the Viking culture.

The first season is focused on the rise of Ragnar as Earl of Kattegat and his adventures on the British Isles. We see his growing relationship with Athelstan and his curiosity for Christianity. His relationship with Lagertha crumbles when she doesn’t produce a new heir. During their annual trip to the Temple in Uppsala, where clans gather to worship the Gods, Ragnar meets Princess Aslaug, who holds his interest and can provide him with sons. In the second season, we fast forward four years and find out that Lagertha has remarried to a powerful yet abusive Earl and there’s friction between her new husband and Bjorn. Aslaug reigns with Ragnar and raises his sons. Siggy struggles with her new position in the clan and is in a (political) relationship with Rollo. The third season shows that Athelstan is integrated in the Viking clan but can’t fully submerse himself into the culture. During one of the raids he’s captured and ends up living with King Ecbert, ruler of Wessex. The Viking clan explores the new world and the show is focused on the power struggles between Ragnar, Lagertha, and King Ecbert.

Vikings is a confident show. It’s certainly not without its flaws. Especially the first half of season 1 was very cheesy, predictable, and slow. Even in the later episodes there are still several moments where the dialogue feels stilted. The show is filmed in Ireland and while the production value is not on the same level of shows such as Game of Thrones (Vikings has often been named in the press as “Game of Thrones lite”), it’s a great first-time effort by a basic cable network. There’s a lot of time invested in authentic detail. Whilst a good portion of the show is fictional, many storylines and subsequently the characters are based on recorded events and Norse legends. The show doesn’t hide from religion and portrays hallucinatory interactions between God and men, uninhibited sexuality, and of course the clash between innovation and conservatism.

The show initially flew under the radar – though it got higher ratings with each season. The first impression for many is that the show is male-dominated. That may be, but the women are well-written and not put on an unattainable pedestal. It’s refreshing to see female characters who are allowed to be as nuanced and complex as their male counterparts. Quite often – in this particular genre – they’re either the quiet submissive girlfriend or “Xena: Warrior Princess” types. In Vikings, the women can do anything, be who they want to be, and each one of them has their own particular motivation for their actions.

It can be argued that because of the unique social structure and the pagan religion within the Scandinavian society the women are portrayed differently. There’s no Christian morality and obvious “sense of gender.” Yet, that argument doesn’t hold when you look at other shows such as Game of Thrones. There are no obvious elements of Christianity in Game of Thrones, but the misogyny runs high in the various storylines. Game of Thrones is/was an enjoyable layered show but its sprinkled with “random female nudity.” Vikings has the occasional sex scene but the nudity isn’t arbitrary and supports the storyline.

Ragnar’s (ex) wife Lagertha is a fan favorite and of the more interesting developed characters throughout the three seasons. She’s introduced as a shield maiden, which means that she’s a trained female warrior. Under the purists, there has been some dispute whether there’s clear historical evidence that there were women warriors in Norse society. There’s often an element of male fantasy interjected in shows where the women can be portrayed as tough female characters who ultimately (sexually) succumb to the male hero. That’s not the case in Vikings. Lagertha rejects the proper, subordinate Christian role that’s expected of women. Instead she does it all: mother, farmer, and warrior. It’s a modern (and smart) decision to portray her as a “real” woman and a warrior in her own right.

Lagertha and Ragnar had a healthy relationship in the first season. They were equals in every sense of the word. In the second season, the audience saw Lagertha stab her husband Sigvard in the eye after his failed attempt to sexually harass her in front of the guests. So within three seasons, Lagertha divorced Ragnar, killed her second husband, and flirted with King Ecbert. How’s that for self-confidence and self-worth? There’s an hilarious moment in the second season, that illustrates the changed dynamic between Ragnar and Lagertha. Lagertha became the Earl of Hedeby and hopes to be an alley to Kattegat. Lagertha quips, “Yes, we are equal. I’m sure this is difficult for you.”

It must be said that there’s an excellent progression of all the female characters on the show. One of the primary antagonists (at least in the first season) is the noblewoman Siggy. It’s a nice juxtaposition with Lagertha. Most of the time Siggy was seen sulking around in beautiful outfits. Yet, she’s never portrayed as less compared to the tougher Lagertha. Siggy does what needs to be done in order to survive and she has an insatiable hunger to gain back some of her power.

In season 2 and 3, Siggy develops a bond with Aslaug. Aslaug is in the beginning portrayed as a stiff princess, her relationship with Ragnar differs from the one he had with Lagertha. Ragnar does love Aslaug but merely for her mystic powers and the fact that she provided him with sons. Initially there’s some tension when Lagertha and Aslaug first meet but that is fast and smoothly resolved. Both women recognize each other’s strength and show respect. How the women may differ or disagree, in the end they all support each other. That’s certainly refreshing in the realm of historical dramas.

Vikings is an historical drama with multifaceted characters across the board. It’s an entertaining, compelling show. The only reason your heartbeat will go faster is not because of misogyny or glaring stereotypes, but because of the female warriors who’re the heart of the show.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IARD01_FEq0″]

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law) and American pop culture. See her blog here.

‘The True Cost’: An Ethical Look at an Exploitative Industry

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Warning: this post contains a distressing image.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh on the April 24, 2013 is one of the tragedies of our time. More than 1,100 garment workers lost their lives and many more were injured. The majority of them were young women. It was, in fact, nothing less than industrial murder. The factory bosses were warned about the cracks in the shoddily constructed building, yet the workers were forced to come to work that day. In June this year, the owner of the factory and 40 others were charged with murder. Multinational retailers could also, of course, be said to have blood on their hands. The poorly-paid workers made clothes for well-known global brands like Primark, Mango and Benetton. Some companies predictably took their time but the compensation fund for victims was also secured in June of this year.

The Rana Plaza tragedy inspired director Andrew Morgan to make The True Cost (2015), an ambitious, wide-ranging documentary about the globalized garment industry. We journey with him to world fashion centres and places where most of our clothes are made- Cambodia, India, China and Bangladesh- to meet garment workers, activists, academics and Free Trade representatives. Global brand bosses are conspicuous by their absence.

The True Cost tackles the exploitation of garment workers and the horrendous impact that the clothing industry has on the health of working communities and the environment. Morgan specifically targets the contemporary fast fashion model- the quick-response manufacturing of affordable clothes inspired by high-cost fashion trends. He explains that High Street fashion brands find Bangladesh a particularly attractive place to do business because of cheap labor and interviews a local factory owner who says that he is pressured by retailers to keep costs low. Reflecting on the exploitative, get-out-of-jail-free part played by global brands should make you quietly seethe. Most of Bangladesh’s garment workers are young women and they earn less than three US dollars a day. Workers are abused, even killed, for demanding better pay and conditions. We see footage of garment workers in Cambodia being shot at as they demonstrate for an increase in the minimum wage. Morgan rightly describes the low-cost, exploitative system of poverty wages and dangerous working conditions as “a perfectly engineered nightmare for the workers trapped inside of it.”

In an effort to personalize and make accessible this complex, multifaceted global story, Morgan spotlights the struggles of 23-year-old Shima Akhter, a Bangladeshi garment worker and union organizer who says she was beaten for trying to improve her and her co-workers’ lot. Her personal situation is tough too as she is forced to leave her young daughter Nadia in the countryside with relatives for long periods at a time while she works in the city. Shima is a strong, gracious woman who wants the best for the daughter she adores. She loves her parents and always sports a warm smile. The shots of Shima and her family in the countryside are beautifully observed but it is her words that haunt you: “I don’t want anyone wearing anything which is produced by our blood.”

Morgan equally addresses the industry’s ruinous impact on the environment and health of people living and working in communities serving the industry. He explains, “Fashion today is the number two most polluting industry on earth, second only to the oil industry.” I doubt most of us are aware of this fact and it underlines the obscene enormity of the problem posed by fast fashion. We see landfills overflowing with textile waste- a strange, disturbing sight- and learn of the appalling effect pesticide and fertilizer use has had on physical and mental health in communities in the Punjab region of India.

Clearly intended as a wake-up call, The True Cost looks at alternative ways of doing business and gives voice to those questioning the existing economic system. We meet London-based Safia Minney, founder and CEO of Fair Trade People Tree and LaRhea Pepper, an organic cotton farmer from Texas. Both advocate ethical and sustainable solutions. The most powerful comments, however, come from economist Richard Woolf. He observes, “So America became a peculiar country. You could criticize the education system…you could criticize the transportation system….but you couldn’t criticize the economic system. That got a free pass…Capitalism couldn’t be questioned.” Morgan, further, takes aim at the consumerist mentality that fuels fast fashion but I’m not sure we learn anything new regarding materialism in the Millenium. I had, however, never seen the nauseating You Tube clothes haul videos Morgan features. They, indeed, denote an epic, soulless low.

The True Cost has moments of power but it is not without its flaws. While Morgan clearly supports their struggle, more garment workers and union representatives should have been interviewed. The documentary, further, does not give an in-depth, gender-aware analysis of the lives of female garment workers. The arguments and images employed to critique consumerism are not, it must be said, particularly striking or original. Morgan should, nevertheless be commended for raising awareness of the acute human suffering behind the production of fast clothes. It prompts serious reflection about the vulturism of the industry and our response to economic violence. While it was widely reported, Rana Plaza did not become a social media cause in the same way as other recent tragedies. We know why, of course. Consumer capitalism reigns and the media, even culturally progressive sites, do not seem all that interested in workers’ rights. Hopefully, documentaries like The True Cost will encourage more to break the shameful silence.

How Female Characters in ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Are Represented

Outside of their relationship, the fleeting glimpses of strength illustrated in the women are immediately overpowered by their lack of emotional self control. Alicia’s weaknesses lay in her annoyance and resentment of Nick and Travis. However, Madison’s issues run a little deeper.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

Recently, AMC premiered their new show Fear The Walking Dead to the tune of 10.1 million viewers. We were all introduced to a highly dysfunctional family unit living unwittingly at the outset of a zombie epidemic. The episode began with teenaged drug addict Nick (Frank Dillane), waking up in an abandoned church and discovering that his friend Gloria has eaten at least two people. As he runs away into traffic, he’s hit by a car and hospitalized. These events are also our introduction into the lives of the female characters, Madison (Kim Dickens) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey).

In ideal televised femininity, Madison enters the show juggling a semi-chaotic household and loving relationship with boyfriend Travis (Cliff Curtis). Her initial moments of happiness are interrupted as she and her family are summoned to the hospital for her son Nick. It is obvious she is frustrated with Nick’s addiction, but her overly haughty attitude towards the details of his accident is perplexing. She is initially portrayed as a ball of emotions, both rude and dismissive. Eager-to-please Travis steps up (again and again) as the voice of reason. Although his efforts are initially dismissed by Madison, his rationality allows Nick (who doesn’t seem to like him) to confide in him.

Alicia is Madison’s daughter. We get the sense that she has the potential to be a strong character, but her scenes are relegated to a huffy annoyance at her mother’s relationship with Travis and junkie brother Nick, as well as a puppy love relationship with boyfriend Matt (Maestro Harrell). Unfortunately, the introduction of Alicia is no more than a hackneyed down portrayal of a teenage girl with a modest case of raging angst. It’s a waste of the smart and witty nature we see glimpses of throughout the episode. It is also pretty worrying that Alicia’s relationship with her mother largely concerns the men in their lives. When she’s not offering moody wisecracks about Travis, she is complaining about Nick. The show’s failure to produce a meaningful dynamic between mother and daughter is one of the ultimate fails of feminine portrayals as documented by the Bechdel Test.

Travis is brought front and center due to his role in solving Madison’s problems, despite having a major one of his own. He is solitary in his struggle to connect with his estranged son, yet Madison surrenders to a complete reliance on him. It is also important to note that most of the male characters are well versed in her problems. With the historic premiere of the show, Madison has joined the endless ranks of emotionally delicate women needing to be saved in television. Yes, she’s a working mom and an authoritative figure at her job, but it’s a thin veil of independence written to mask her reliance on the men around her.

Ultimately, the Fear The Walking Dead pilot fails to introduce a strong female character and it’s disappointing. To be fair, its sister series The Walking Dead has suffered notoriously with this as well, despite making modest strides in recent seasons towards the equality of the females in the group. The women of Fear The Walking Dead don’t need to be ruthless zombie assassins in order to exhibit strength. The real strength of character comes from the ability to recognize and deal with their own weaknesses. One can hope the show may address this through future episodes, but it may be too early to speculate. You can catch the show on AMC through cable TV and watch as its female characters unfold (or not).

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

Call For Writers: Sex Positivity

Simply put, sex positivity is the notion that sex between and among adults with enthusiastic consent is healthy. Practicing sex positivity means that we don’t judge ourselves or others when it comes to sex, not the type of sex we enjoy, the number of partners we choose, or the frequency with which we engage in sexual activity.

Our theme week for September 2015 will be Sex Positivity.

Some urge critical analysis of the sex positivity movement because desire exists within our patriarchal landscape and, therefore, cannot be seen as separate or free from that oppressive force. However, it remains very difficult to even find examples of sex positivity in contemporary films and television. For example, the widely discussed film Fifty Shades of Grey showcases sex that pushes the boundaries of convention but has also been condemned as glorifying abusive masculinity. Boys Don’t Cry, on the other hand, is a film that focuses on the female pleasure of Lana (Chloë Sevigny) and the healthy sexual relationship between her and her trans* partner, Brandon (Hillary Swank). Because he is trans*, though, Brandon is tortured and murdered, underscoring the fact that we do not live in a sex positive world.

Show us examples of film and television that practice sex positivity, empowering their participants, or engage in the critical debate that questions whether sex positivity can even exist and whether or not it is compatible with feminism. Because sex positivity is complicated and nuanced, are there iterations of media that, on the surface, seem sex positive but ultimately are not?

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, Sept. 18, by midnight.

The Dreamers

Nymphomaniac Vol. I & II

Hysteria

Bob’s Burgers

Transparent

Spy

Kinsey

Waiting to Exhale

Secretary

Stoker

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The 100

The To Do List

Boys Don’t Cry

Fifty Shades of Grey

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Say Anything

Masters of Sex

Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency

Duke of Burgundy

Parajanov and Puppies: Queering the Soviet Superman

“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first… Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.” – Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s polemic “The Soul of Man under Socialism” offers a prophetic warning about authoritarian tendencies in socialist philosophy, and the need to safeguard individualism, as Wilde attempted to reconcile his belief in social equality with the protection of minority opinion and divergent personalities. The philosophies of Karl Marx advocated radical equality, including gender equality, but through imposed conformity rather than equally accepted diversity. For gender equality, this meant achieving conformity of the sexes by abolishing the female domestic sphere, not integrating it, and by rejecting emotionalism in women, not promoting it in men. The female ideal created by Soviet artists like Vera Mukhina was a distinctly muscular, masculinized one.

If masculinizing the Soviet Superwoman was state orthodoxy, feminizing the Soviet Superman was subversive rebellion. The rejection of appeals to include gay rights in the socialist agenda dates back to Marx and, particularly, to the homophobia of Friedrich Engels. Personal distaste and pointed silence became political persecution and erasure in 1933, when Stalin outlawed homosexuality as “bourgeois deviation” punishable with five years in prison camp (ironically, McCarthyism would stigmatize homosexuality as socialist subversion).

Problem Child – 1954

Tatyana Lukashevich directed at the height of Socialist Realism, a form that placed limitations on style (realism), genre (relentlessly optimistic musicals and romantic comedies, or anti-capitalist propaganda), and theme (the glorification of collective labor). As such, her work is usually dismissed by Western critics as mindless state ideology. But there is passionate individualism striving against her Stalinist limitations. More than any filmmaker of her era, Lukashevich’s work expresses the pain of Soviet suppression of femininity. In The Foundling (1940), a lonely geologist is tempted to adopt a lost little girl, the film dwelling sympathetically on his longing for family and the emptiness of a life dedicated only to work. Written by Agnia Barto and Rina Zelenaya, and directed by Lukashevich, this entirely female-authored film harnesses a man to express its sharpest parental urge. In musical comedy Wedding With A Dowry (1954, mistranslated as “Bride With A Dowry”), scripted by Lukashevich herself, the top workers of rival Kolkhozes (collective farms) are a woman and a man in love. They almost break up over their rivalry as workers, before realizing that that rivalry has created a record-breaking harvest (the joint dowry of the wedding). The film criticizes the role of male insecurity in undermining female talent.

Perhaps Lukashevich’s most interesting film is Problem Child (the Russian title is a pun between “Certificate of Education” and “testimony of maturity”). Problem Child‘s antihero, Valentin, advocates an Individualism remarkably similar to Wilde’s in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Valentin relishes poetry, aesthetics and daydreaming, while shirking manual labor and conventional masculinity. In the film’s Komsomol (Communist Youth) masquerade ball, Valentin arrives costumed as a long-haired Demon, standing on a comrade’s shoulders to tower symbolically above his peers. His costume is revealing: 19th century Romantic Mikhail Lermontov wrote Demon to portray a scorned outcast of heaven, but one who is a sexually magnetic rebel. The appeal of Vasily Lanovoy’s charismatic Valentin is essential to Problem Child. To justify his existence as a character in Stalinist film, he must suffer a public denunciation by his peers for egoism, and be proposed for expulsion from the Komsomol by his best friend, Zhenya (short for Evgeny). The viewer must endure a lesson about Great Lenin’s Komsomol philosophy. Yet the film remains subtly ambivalent about Valentin’s punishment; his accusers are nasal and visibly jealous, and Zhenya’s own mother reproaches him for denouncing his friend: “How could you? … you think shockingly little of each other… it’s no good.”

Modern fans celebrate the relationship between Valentin and Zhenya as “slash” and “the Soviet Brokeback Mountain,” highlighting the role of its female writer, Liya Geraskina, and director Tatyana Lukashevich, in frankly eroticizing the Soviet ideal of brotherly comrades. Taking shelter in a deserted cabin, after a dangerous mountain descent, a soaked Valentin averts his eyes and sighs, “When we descended the mountain, it seemed to me there were only us two in the world,” before his eyes roam Zhenya’s face and linger on his lips, he tickles his nose and the two giggle and hug. Waiting to give a bouquet to his female love interest (Zhenya’s sister), he tells Zhenya blushingly, “I’m revealing the greatest treasure to you. I deeply love…” “Who?” Zhenya demands. Valentin laughs self-consciously (and ambiguously), “What do you mean, who? You, of course!” At the masquerade ball, another boy tries to lure Valentin away with him to “a house he knows,” while one of their peers sneers “look what a tender friendship! Quite the pair – a goose and a loon!” Censors could not risk perceiving homoerotic subtext in such moments, lest they themselves be accused of perverted imaginations.

The Komsomol’s crushing persecution and expulsion of Valentin’s “egoism” can easily be read as a coded persecution of his homosexuality. Just as The Foundling uses a man to express its sharpest parental urge, so Problem Child harnesses a man to express stereotypically feminine romantic tenderness, dissociating its heroine from the stigma of excessive femininity. We can only speculate how it was received by closeted viewers in rural regions of the Soviet Union.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/NDLsL2dbrk4″]

Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) – 1969

“In the USSR, it’s impossible for a person not to be intimidated. But all the same, they didn’t intimidate Parajanov. He is perhaps the only one in his country who embodied the saying: ‘if you want to be free, be free.'” – Andrei Tarkovsky

The bisexual Armenian-Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, who had Ukrainian and Tatar wives, was inspired by the creative freedom of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood to break away from Socialist Realism and create his own unique style, fusing lush camp with mystical symbolism and the cultural distinctiveness of the USSR’s ethnic minorities. His first film in this new style was 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, set in the Hutsulian culture of the Ukrainian Carpathians. His second, The Color of Pomegranat e s (original title: Sayat Nova) dispensed with narrative altogether, to create an idiosyncratic visual meditation on the writings of medieval Armenian poet Sayat Nova. Already convicted of homosexual acts with a KGB officer in 1948, the international success of Parajanov’s new style led to a playful interview in a Danish magazine, in which he claimed to have given sexual favors to 25 Communist party members. He was sentenced to five years’ hard labour for “the rape of a party member” and “propagation of pornography” in 1973. Andrei Tarkovsky and Lilya Brik were among the Soviet artists who campaigned for his release. In prison, Parajanov created hundreds of drawings and collages, now displayed in the Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. His monument in Tbilisi, Georgia, is based on an iconic photograph of the director leaping, as if to take flight, reminiscent of Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1906 novel Wings, which compares its hero’s acceptance of his homosexuality to growing wings.

Released from prison after four years of petitioning, Gorbachev’s glasnost allowed Parajanov to produce two more films, 1985’s The Legend of Suram Fortress, set in Georgia, and 1988’s Ashik Kerib, set in Azerbaijan. Both take place in a vivid and stylized past, like Sayat Nova and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Our tendency to describe Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws as “medieval” is misleading; medieval Russia was remarkably tolerant of gay culture, while gay themes were unusually prominent in pre-revolutionary Russian literature. The role of Marxist ideology in fostering state homophobia in Russia may be compared to the Marxist publication Molla Nasreddin and its role in stigmatizing traditional homoeroticism in Iran as “cultural backwardness” and “elite decadence.” To varying degrees, the same was true of many cultures in Parajanov’s native Caucasus Mountains, which stretch between Russia and Iran, with entire ethnic groups persecuted and deported under Stalin. The relentlessly progressivist rhetoric of Soviet homophobia fostered the link, perhaps counterintuitive to our eyes, between nationalist conservatism and camp radicalism that is observable in Parajanov’s films, conflating ethnic and sexual minority politics. In Sayat Nova in particular, the film’s symbolic meditations on love, wisdom, religion and death – “I am a man whose life and soul is torment” – are accompanied by experimentations in gender bending. Parajanov presents his Georgian actress, Sofiko Chiaureli, in a variety of guises, including both the poet as a young man and the poet’s mother. Cutting hypnotically back and forth between Chiaureli’s masculine and feminine forms, between a woman’s spinning and a man’s reading, a skull and a rose, Parajanov creates a subversive aesthetic of gender fluidity and male femininity.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwhS_b4Df4″]

The Light Blue Puppy – 1976

The Light Blue Puppy is an adaptation of Hungarian author Gyula Urban’s children’s book about a bullied and rejected black puppy, who acts as a metaphor for the USA’s treatment of African Americans (the official anti-racism of the USSR attracted African American intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, though ordinary Russians were frequently racist, despite the Black ancestry of Russia’s beloved national poet, Alexander Pushkin). The cartoon’s writer, Yuri Entin, altered the puppy’s color from black to a “nontraditional” light blue (“nontraditional orientation” is the conventional Russian euphemism for homosexuality). It was apparently after the cartoon’s appearance that “light blue” (goluboi) became standard slang for gay, though it’s unknown how far The Light Blue Puppy influenced this. To those who interpret his “hymn to tolerance” as a satire of homosexuals, Yuri Entin responds, “It’s literally hitting below the belt. I have a huge amount of acquaintances of non-traditional orientation, they are wonderful people that I have the very tenderest relations with. And so I would never have allowed myself to mock them.” (Russian-language source) By transforming the puppy’s stigma from race to male femininity, if not homosexuality (the male puppy is voiced by actress Alisa Freyndlikh, and rescued by a frankly feminized sailor), Entin converted anti-American propaganda into an edgier metaphor for Soviet oppressions. His pink sailor attacks with flowers, recalling Portugal’s pacifist, pro-democracy Carnation Revolution.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To2csb4eK-o”]

Children’s entertainment became a vehicle for subversion in Russian culture, not only because it wasn’t taken seriously, but because it was permitted fantasy and symbolism. The avant-garde surrealist Daniil Kharms, blacklisted for bitterly surreal satires of Stalinist dehumanization, found refuge in writing twisted children’s literature like a Russian Roald Dahl, before finally starving to death on a psychiatric ward. In the 1970s, when Vladimir Vysotsky circulated tapes of songs about the Stalinist purges and gulags, authorities regularly banned his concerts and film appearances. The heterosexual Vysotsky’s reunion with Parajanov, after his friend’s eventual release from prison, was reportedly tearful. Popular children’s cartoon Nu, Pogodi! (“just you wait!”) features an anti-authoritarian wolf that whistles a Vysotsky tune and is clearly based on his “bandit” persona, in a nod to Vysotsky’s individualist anthem “Wolf Hunt.” The Light Blue Puppy must be read as part of this tradition of coded cartoon subversion. In 2004, Russia produced its first openly queer romcom, You I Love, but current laws against gay propaganda look like a setback toward symbolism. Life, uh, finds a way.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROmlFJamIuY”]

Individualists of the world, unite! Or don’t. Up to you.

Brigit McCone studied for a year in Moscow State University, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and melodramatically declaiming Lermontov.

In Which I Attempt to Convince the World to Watch All Things Tig Notaro

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. ‘The New York Times’ ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Tig Notaro needs your attention. I fell in love with her work in 2012 when I heard a This American Life sketch while driving down a highway.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/jSwzYB545hY”]

I had never heard anything like this sketch; I was enthralled. The timing. The repetition. The silence. Such gorgeous pauses. In a world where it feels like we need to fill every space with some yammering, to hear someone on stage using silence–to be brave enough to use it–made me take notice of this person Tig. And not just me. The New York Times ran a piece about her 13-minute paean to Taylor Dane.

Then a barrage of sadness and struggle came for her. Tig had a life-threatening infection. Her mother died suddenly. Then Tig was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And this all became material for her standup. And the basis for the Netflix documentary Tig.

The set she did after her diagnosis is already the stuff of comedy legend. Comedians in the room that night began to bow at her feet.

Louis C.K. was there and he ended up selling her set on his site.

Directors Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York follow Tig through the aftermath of illness and grief. I particularly appreciate two elements of the documentary: the focus on writing as a craft and the attention to the struggle of fertility issues. Neither seems to get much good attention in films, and Tig offers the reader a look inside the mind of a female writer who wants to mother a child.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Notaro allows the filmmakers to go so deep into her world; she has come to be known a confessional comic after the set heard round the world. The film is heartbreaking and funny, just like Notaro’s standup. At times we flinch with her as she hears a verdict on her one shot at in vitro, the next moment we are cheering for her as she finds love.

Viewers watch her workshopping a bit, practicing it in front of audiences with different rhythms and wording. Rarely do we get to see the hard work of writing in a film (the closest I have seen such work happening is when I watched Fun Home on Broadway). The awareness that writing is hard, that Notaro is producing work that requires time, honesty, attention, and a little bit of bravado reminds viewers that art is hard. Even though on stage Notaro makes it look easy.

So it was satisfying to me to see that one joke–about her breasts revolting against her body–come to fruition in her HBO special Boyish Girl Interrupted. The special serves as a climax to the story of Tig in that it finishes the joke. When Notaro takes on the persona of her grumpy breasts, she nails the timing and the wording in front of the sold out theater.

And she happens to do half of the set without her shirt on, her smooth chest an affront to all constricting ideas about what “woman” means.

I questioned whether I should even post a still from the HBO special since in many ways it is like stealing one of her punchlines. Should I have offered you, dear reader, a spoiler alert? Am I taking something from her by using this picture to represent her text?

Is taking off her shirt salacious? Provocative? Evocative? Confessional? All of the above. I implore you to watch the set and answer that question for yourself. I can tell you this: you haven’t seen anything like what Notaro is doing in the mainstream media.

I thank her for it.

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: The Black Guys Die First

There’s a conservative bent to much horror, but this conflation of real-life police brutality and genuine tragedy with the killing of zombies crosses a line.

The second episode of Fear the Walking Dead was an improvement, in some ways. It seemed to move a little faster, and there were some genuinely strong moments amid the show’s touted “blended” family. (Yes, Kim Dickens is a substantial talent.) But it was also one of the most reactionary pieces of entertainment I’ve seen in years.

The episode picks up right where the pilot left off. Nick (Frank Dillane), Travis (Cliff Curtis), and Madison (Dickens) are fleeing the scene of Calvin’s (Keith Powers) death and re-awakening. They race home, stopping along the way to pick up Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey). While Nick deals with withdrawal (and I have to assume that there is hours of footage of the exuberantly over-the-top Dillane, wailing and rolling his eyes back in his head, that was left on the cutting room floor), Travis drives off to find his son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) (great, another annoyingly petulant teen!) and ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez).

Madison eventually decides that she needs to leave, too. She heads to the school to find some confiscated meds to help Nick through his crisis. There, she runs into young, middle-aged-looking Tobias (Lincoln A. Castellanos), who dispenses more wisdom about the weird apocalypse that’s just started. What exactly is Tobias doing at the school? Well, he came to get his knife back. Yes, he went out during the zombie apocalypse to retrieve the common steak knife that Madison had confiscated from him the previous day. That must be one special steak knife. Maybe he just hates doing the dishes? He also decides to loot a shopping cart full of food from the school cafeteria, with Madison’s help.

As they’re leaving, they run into Madison’s boss, Art Costa (Scott Lawrence), the principal. Art apparently likes to spend his off days roaming around the school jingling his keys and, I dunno, investigating stuff, so yeah, he seems to have been bitten and turned into a zombie. Even though Madison’s had some experience with Black zombies, and there’s blood all over Art’s shirt, she decides to approach him and offer aid. Luckily, Tobias has that steak knife. When that fails, Madison leaps to the rescue and bashes Art’s head in with a fire extinguisher. Congratulations, Madison. You’re the first character on this new show to figure out how to kill a zombie.

After saving Tobias’ life, Madison brings him home and they wish each other luck. At this point, Gidget, my viewing companion, lamented, “All that and he didn’t even get his food.” I realized she was right and indeed, Tobias had neglected to bring all his purloined food home with him. “Who can think of eating after that?” I imagined him saying to Madison as they grimly left the school. But he might regret that decision in a week or two. Hey, at least he got that steak knife back!

Alicia, who’s mostly avoided the horror so far, wants to leave the house to check on her “sick” boyfriend, Matt (Maestro Harrell), but Nick manages to stop her by having a seizure and vomiting everywhere. “Not now!” Alicia exhorts him, but really when is a good time?

Meanwhile, Travis goes to Liza’s and eventually they figure out that Chris is at that big, unplanned protest on TV, and they go to get him. In the chaos that ensues, they find themselves caught between riot police and looters, and convince a barber, Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) and his family to let them hide out in his shop. We can tell Daniel is a man of high character because he insists upon finishing a customer’s haircut before closing his shop due to the end of the world happening outside.

For some reason, Travis doesn’t feel the need to explain to anyone what’s actually going on, with the dead coming back to life and everything. He’s just kind of a private guy, I’m thinking.

There’s a surprisingly effective moment at the end of the episode, when Alicia sees their neighbor across the street attacking some people, and starts to go outside to help, and Madison steps in front of the door and won’t let her leave. It’s a reasonable response, based on everything Madison’s seen, but it’s also a chilling indication of how quickly one can start to lose one’s humanity in a life-threatening crisis.

Anyway, what did I mean by “reactionary”?

Most blatantly, it’s a cliche these days that the Black characters are killed off first in horror movies and TV shows. There are Tumblrs about it and everything. The trope has been ridiculed in more than one horror film, but the creators of Fear the Walking Dead, in what seems almost a willful avoidance of political correctness, have just been killing off one Black man after another. First, in the opening moments of episode one, it was a nameless dude getting his face eaten in the church, then there’s Alicia’s boyfriend Matt, who vanishes, and then, of course, there’s Calvin, the evil murderous drug dealer wild-eyed Nick kills, multiple times, in self-defense. I thought it was unfortunate that the show’s creators made these choices, but based on how badly the original series dealt with non-white and women characters, especially early on, I wasn’t really surprised.

Episode two, though, doubles down on the trope to an extent that did kind of surprise me. First, we learn that Matt has indeed been bitten by a zombie, and is not long for this world. He nobly insists that Alicia leave him to die. The next character we see transformed is Art:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7hdK9UW8Qc”]

So that’s three Black speaking roles, and every one of the characters is a zombie in the first two episodes. That’s almost impressive in its obliviousness, assuming there isn’t some more conscious decision being made about the type of show this is. Even the homeless dude zombie gunned down by the cops offscreen (the incident that provokes the spontaneous protest) turns out to be a Black man.

Here’s an interview with the show’s co-creator and showrunner, Dave Erickson, where he essentially says that they wanted a diverse cast, and that they didn’t know who was going to die when they cast those roles. When The Hollywood Reporter is challenging you about decisions like this, you have to know you’ve done something wrong, right?

Beyond that, I found a couple of things disturbing. While Travis is on his way to see Liza, they speak on the phone. He makes it clear that he has to see Chris immediately. She launches into a tirade about abusing his visitation rights. The thing is, Travis doesn’t make a real effort to explain the situation, and under normal circumstances, she’s absolutely within her rights to demand that he limit his visits to when they’ve been scheduled, but my sense is that we’re not supposed to look at it that way. We’re supposed to see Liza as shrewish, controlling, and short-sighted. The brief scene made me wonder if the writer had gone through some sort of bitter custody battle with his ex, and I’m not prone to that type of personal speculation.

We see Chris arrive at the scene of a police shooting. Eyewitnesses are saying that the police shot an unarmed homeless man. Chris videotapes the aftermath of the shooting, and is told by the cops to turn his camera off. It’s not particularly clear why they insist on not being filmed, when the violence is already over. In any case, the mob gets increasingly upset, and again, under normal circumstances, their outrage would be perfectly understandable. They DON’T KNOW there’s a zombie apocalypse. But the show presents their actions as reckless and stupid, and then some punk rock girl zombie gets shot in the eye by a policewoman, and the riot cops show up, and all hell breaks loose. There’s a conservative bent to much horror, but this conflation of real-life police brutality and genuine tragedy with the killing of zombies crosses a line. There are nefarious reasons for the militarization of police departments across the country, and for police shootings of innocents, rooted in racism. The coming zombie apocalypse doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Key moments like this make it harder for me to enjoy the show as fun Sunday night entertainment. I imagine they’ll make it difficult for some viewers to engage the series at all. Nevertheless, I’ll be back next week with another recap.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

On Breathing, Not Breathing, and Forms of Abuse That We Don’t Have the Words to Express

‘Breathe,’ the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Breathe, the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Based on a YA novel of the same name, Breathe (also known by its French title, Respire) follows an average, decently popular girl named Charlie as she is befriended and then betrayed by the exciting new girl at her school, Sarah. Sarah at first seems to be the perfect companion – her attention makes Charlie feel special, and they become close friends very quickly. As time goes on, though, and Sarah gets bored, her easy-going always-affable mask starts to slip, revealing an angry, demanding, hypercritical face underneath. Charlie, shocked by these changes, scared and uncomfortable, tries to figure out what she did wrong, why Sarah is acting this way, and what she can do to repair their relationship. When her efforts fail, Sarah gets more and more hostile, until their relationship reaches a jarring conclusion.

What makes Breathe so fascinating to watch is that it gets the nuances of abusive relationships right. Sarah honestly believes herself to be the victim in this friendship, and her confidence and sense of entitlement are enough to make Charlie question her own judgement. It isn’t that Sarah’s cold and calculating – she’s not the smooth-talking criminal mastermind that sociopaths are often portrayed to be – she’s just so self-absorbed that whether or not she hurts someone else isn’t a blip on her radar. She gets closer to Charlie whenever she wants something, and callously disregards her feelings again once she has it.

In the film’s most notable sub-plot, Charlie’s mother is facing a similar situation with her estranged husband. Outside observers keep telling her he’s just an asshole, but she argues that he’s never hit her, so she can forgive him for all the emotional abuse. Charlie finds herself acting out the same scenario with Sarah – forgiving her, even once Sarah’s made it clear that she isn’t a friend, trying to explain why Sarah is this way – feeling pity and compassion for her, because of her terrible home life – trying to be the bigger person and move on. In both cases, it’s clear to the audience that these relationships should end, but the question Breathe holds out to us is “Why don’t they?” Why are Charlie and her mother so unwilling to cut these ties; why don’t they just walk away? Why don’t we have the right words to talk about abuse when it doesn’t involve physical violence?

The performances from Joséphine Japy and Lou De Laâge as Charlie and Sarah are what make the movie. Breathe is, for the most part, about subtle forms of emotional abuse – about how the way you say something carries a message; the way Sarah teaches Charlie not to have boundaries by turning a few degrees cooler every time she encounters one; the way she uses a condescending tone to say things that aren’t true. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie understated, but it’s patient and careful in the work it’s trying to do, and so are its actors. Even though the story moves forward quite slowly, we’re drawn in by the characters – we want to understand what’s going on between them almost just as much as Charlie does.

Laurent’s similarly patient direction creates an effectively dark mood, like storm clouds gathering on the horizon – something that’s also captured in the international trailer. It’s not accurate to say that this is a world you want to live inside, as you’re watching, but it’s a world that’s interesting enough that you’ll want to sit with it and watch events play out.

One of the issues the film grapples with well is what constitutes bad behaviour – at what point you can accuse someone of having wronged you – and its subtlety and ambiguity plays into that. Often, our standard for whether someone has done something wrong lies in whether they’ve done something they didn’t have the legal right to do, but so much of human interaction is subjective that it isn’t (and can’t be) a crime to be mean to someone. It would be very hard for Charlie to objectively demonstrate that Sarah’s behaviour is harmful – that all the little things Sarah does have damaged her in some way – but we can see very plainly, watching this friendship play out, that Sarah is slowly destroying Charlie’s entire life. We can see very plainly that she’s doing something wrong, though it may be hard to say what it is.

There’s also a sense in which, watching this film as an adult, you want to say, “OK, she’s not your friend. Move on,” but that would be missing the point. Breathe is about exploring relational dynamics that we don’t have a framework for talking about – it’s about following the characters into a murky area full of confused and conflicted emotions, and watching how that confusion works against Charlie to stop her from just dumping Sarah and walking away. If I’m honest, there was certainly a time in my life when I also believed – as Charlie seems to believe – that someone had to do something objectively wrong in order for me to decide we weren’t friends. It couldn’t just be because I felt bad when we were together.

Breathe, like many YA stories, is a bit like watching someone wrestle with life problems I’ve already solved, but it’s also an important attempt to articulate those problems in an understandable way – to bring them out into the open and give us a new lens to see them through, and a new touchstone that we can use to discuss them.

If you want to feel uncomfortable in a good way and sink inside this insightful, carefully-constructed film, Breathe opens in New York on Friday, Sept. 11, and in Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.