The radical notion that women like good movies
The second season of ‘Orange is the New Black’ is all about respect: how you get it, how you keep it, whether it’s something that someone can give you, or something you hold for yourself. Anchored by a standout performance by Lorraine Toussaint, this season is darker and richer than its predecessor, but still extremely fun to watch.
Yet although the show deals with a number of important social issues, and contains naturalistic elements, its subversive, socio-political power lies in its vivid, carnivalesque interpretation of prison life. It contains heart-breaking incidents but it also honors endurance and joyous resistance. Celebrating individuality, personal expression, and sensual pleasures, ‘Orange is the New Black’ ultimately humanizes women who have been dehumanized.
Why is female sexuality so controversial? Why does it make people (particularly the people who create our media) so uncomfortable? With desire comes subjectivity, which is powerful and subversive for a woman to experience within the context of patriarchy. Regulation of female reproductive rights and rape culture are two techniques used to deny women sexual agency.
Check out all of the posts for Rape Revenge Fantasies Theme Week here.
When considering female agents of violence in a film, there is a troublesome tendency that plays to the audience’s anxiety about a women disrupting the essentialist notion that women are naturally gentle and nurturing: the tendency to have the woman acting in response to sexual violence, that only after a woman is overpowered and assaulted can she find a place of violence in her. Once the naturalness of a woman is disrupted by an outside force—a (usually male) perpetrator—she is no longer required to be viewed as “womanly.”
‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The titular lovers here are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.
‘Shameless,’ Showtime’s irreverent story of working-class hardship, has re-categorized itself as a comedy for awards season. That’s a strange choice when you consider that series star, Emmy Rossum, has spent the whole season knocking it out of the park in what is clearly a dramatic role, and clearly the show’s most serious attempt to engage with its subject matter.
Rape revenge fantasies form a niche that has the ability to empower rape survivors by giving the story a twist that is rarely enacted in the real world. In these films, those who are made helpless, their humanity called into question, take control, fight back, and make their abusers pay for their crimes.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A young woman–poised, talented, above all enthusiastic–performs a scene in acting class and is praised by the teacher. The teacher can’t say enough good things about the student, but the main thing she keeps going back to is, “I think you’d be a wonderful character actress!”
Now, the student can’t help but beam about this, seeing a brilliant career flashing before her, her name up in lights. She steps back into the group and the woman sitting beside her whispers in her ear, “That’s what they call an actress who isn’t pretty.”
Most of the nine films Kate and Spence did together feature battle-of-the-sex plots which, at certain points, blurred or even reversed the roles women and men typically played in marital or committed relationships. These plots suited Kate’s life-long image of herself as inhabiting both female and male traits, particularly in the wake of her older brother’s tragic death.
We agonize over the lack of female anti-heroes in film and television as if women have never been afforded the opportunity to be good and bad on screen. It clearly wasn’t always this way. And in a time when the regurgitated remake rules Hollywood, perhaps it’s time for producers to dust off some old scripts from the 1920s and 1930s so we can get some fresh, progressive stories about women on screen.
I try to be a decent person and a thoughtful film artist. I frequently write films with complex female protagonists, attempt to defy expectations and stereotypes, and cultivate a team of collaborators that both is diverse and thinks diversely. A huge reason I choose to work with Seed & Spark for crowdfunding my first feature, ‘If There’s a Hell Below,’ is because of the awesome team of women running the show there.
