Bitch Flicks – Page 52 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Horror, White Bodies, and Feminism in ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’

Rihanna’s video for ‘Bitch Better Have My Money,’ directed by Rihanna herself and the Megaforce team, is an intersectional feminist revenge horror masterpiece. This video also has a lot of people up in arms due to its supposed misogyny and definite violent imagery. However, many of its critics have missed the hard facts: for instance, there is very little on screen violence in ‘BBHMM.’ Yet its masterful use of suggestion and direct attacks on ideologies American society values make it an effective and affecting horror piece.

This is a guest post by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski.

Rihanna’s video for Bitch Better Have My Money, directed by Rihanna herself and the Megaforce team, is an intersectional feminist revenge horror masterpiece. This video also has a lot of people up in arms due to its supposed misogyny and definite violent imagery. However, many of its critics have missed the hard facts: for instance, there is very little on screen violence in BBHMM. Yet its masterful use of suggestion and direct attacks on ideologies American society values make it an effective and affecting horror piece.

A note before I begin: I have named the characters by the archetypes they represent. White Woman is the woman kidnapped initially by Rihanna and her crew, the women that aid her in the less than lawful activities she engages in the video. White Male is the character played by Mads Mikkelsen, an actor currently best known for portraying horror legend Hannibal on television.

The video’s White Woman is objectified into a symbol of Whiteness from the beginning: She exists in a beige and white house, with a creepily well behaved light-colored dog, and a non entity White husband taking the place of furniture as she dresses in front of his still presence. White Woman applies perfect make up, then dons a diamond necklace. She is blond and thin and wears expensive designer clothing. The camera does not caress her perfect body, but it is also not hidden.

White Woman applies makeup in her beige bathroom.

On this bland palette and sparse introduction we are able to place our own assumptions based on her superficiality. To some viewers she might be a trophy wife, others may see signs of a successful career woman, or even a woman locked in a career where her looks are her resume like a model or a dancer. In any of these assumptions, she is outwardly successful. Material wealth surrounds her, and attractiveness is upheld by her rituals and accessories.

The effect of White Woman’s abuse in the video is incredible: how many of us White female viewers feel blows land on ourselves? Yet with the exception of a blow to the back of the head with a bottle, we see only pushes to swing the woman as she suspends from the rafters of a barn and a minimum of on screen violence.

White Woman attempts to flag down a cop moments before being bludgeoned.

This violence is all the more effective because of the use of White Woman’s nudity. In her living room, we see her breasts through a translucent bra. She covers them with a designer coat before kissing her husband good bye, then picks up her dog and stepping on an elevator with Rihanna and a large trunk. The next shot is of her nude in a car of fully clothed women. Where a scene before she was powerful in designer lingerie, the queen of her domain even, she has suddenly been made completely vulnerable.

This liberal use of nudity is the “gross display of the human body” in horror described by Linda Williams in her essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” There is a duality in White Woman’s role: first of all, she is the ideal we have all been pushed to attain. Secondly, she is a woman made helpless when stripped of the armor of her status symbols. Viewers that have felt physically vulnerable as women imagine the bodily abuses on their own physical forms and internalize it: bodily horror materializes.

However, the horror for viewers is not just an attack of a physical nature. The fear of this piece comes just as much from the viewer’s self identification. If they hold themselves up to the impossible standard of Whiteness that is considered the societal norm, they put themselves in the place of White Woman. If they have broken that cycle, they see themselves in Rihanna and view a different story altogether.

Throughout her manipulations of White Woman, an assault on Whiteness itself is bubbling beneath the surface. Whiteness interpreted into these archetypal forms has kept Rihanna from what is assumedly owed her, and this is the visual fantasy of her taking that back.

Rihanna is making war on the white washed femininity that she is held up to, but with her diverse comrades, she is also making war on and conquering that singular view of female perfection that chains us all. By removing and later replacing White Woman’s wrappings, the physicality of the attacks translates into not just an attempt to dismantle the superficial elements of Whiteness, but blows against the White body itself. After all, these impermanent objects are only symbols of the idealized racial identity we are all taught to strive for; they are props to bring us closer to that impossible goal.

Rihanna is aided by two women that are racially different from herself. These women are symbols many critics have missed. Unlike the narratives supported by mainstream, primarily White and straight feminists, Rihanna’s storytelling is truly inclusive.

The male gaze is incarnate in the male police officer that turns up in only two scenes. He is kept from doing his job, catching Rihanna and crew, by his inability to take the attractive bikini-clad women for anything more than something to be ogled at. In the video, this presumption of the male gaze is used by Rihanna to further her goals.

It is during an interaction with this officer that the video makes what I consider to be its only sexual objectification by nature of camera movement. The camera pans to Rihanna’s buttocks next to the floating body of her victim as a parallel to the actions of the officer and a reminder of the job he has failed to complete. While nudity is a repeating focal point in the beginning half of the video, it is curiously lacking in sexual overtones up to this point. Unless, of course, one is unable to separate the naked female body from objectifying sexuality.

Unlike other revenge stories, agency remains firmly in the hands of the protagonist in BBHMM. We do not have to endure what has happened to Rihanna’s character in this narrative in some poorly managed introductory horror sequence, though the ransom requests are illustrated on screen. Instead, we see what Rihanna is: powerful in a society that would otherwise hold her down and screw her out of her money.

This last point is particularly poignant when depicted through her interactions with White Male. In an unexpected turn, it is White Woman’s husband who is revealed to be “The Bitch” and not White Woman herself. While his nature is shown through short cuts of him laughing evilly and the like, his exact crimes are not depicted by the narrative.

Instead, as a lead up to the delicious torture sequence that is undoubtedly about to ensue, Rihanna pauses to inspect the various tools she has at her disposal. While it would make for a tidy story to have him refusing to pay ransom on a woman they randomly kidnapped be the motive, all possible reasons to murder White Male are helpfully written on labels beside Rihanna’s tools to demonstrate the scope and nature of his crimes against her.

In this video, White Male is a placeholder for White males in general, just as the White body of the woman in the beginning of the video represents the overwhelming Whiteness of the narrowly defined bounds of accepted femininity. Much like his wife, White Male’s body is exploited and used as a symbol of his own White power.

His body physically interacts with the money that in this video represent power: bills are literally rubbed on his body in a sensuous display of sexuality by two women that serve as further examples of physical comfort. Just like the furniture and clothing in the White Woman’s entrance scenes, the White Male’s props identify him as powerful by nature of the accepted system of symbols that represent wealth in mainstream culture. It is important to note that White Male is the only character seen with physical money at this point.

In the end, Rihanna’s search for satisfaction and White Woman’s suffering stem from the same root: White Male’s inability to value them, and therefore underestimating them. White Female is returned to her residence, relatively physically unharmed. She apparently does not interfere with Rihanna’s treatment of the husband that did not respond to ransom demands earlier in the video.

White Male struggles against his bindings.

White Male’s torture is not shown. The next shot is of Rihanna leaving the house, covered in what could be presumed to be his blood. The act itself is not intended to be the satisfying part, but instead the viewer can take comfort that the job was done.

The final reveal employs relief from the implied violence of an unexpected sort. The bloody legs hanging out of the trunk shown in the first shot of the video do not, as we assumed, belong to the dead body of White Female. Instead of an end to the implied violence and hedonism through what is assumed to be its inevitable conclusion in a corpse, we see a triumphant and relieved Rihanna. Bloodied from her task, but enjoying a cigar on a pile of money she earned.

Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski has a name unpronounceable by human tongues. She is a freelance writer, reviewer, and author (as J.M. Yales). Very occasionally she makes art from recycled scraps of metal.

Seed & Spark: On ‘Ex Machina,’ Artificial Intelligence of Color, and How to Become a (White) Woman

I decided to be a filmmaker because I believe that women of color should proclaim ownership over the creation and dissemination of our images and stories. When Ava DuVernay asked her Twitter followers to name films that featured black, brown, Native, or Asian women leads, only a handful of films on that list featured an Asian American actress with an Asian American woman director at the helm. (And the drop-off between first and second efforts is alarming; Alice Wu, the writer/director of 2004’s ‘Saving Face,’ has never made another feature.)

This is a guest post by Zhuojie Chen.

In the opening minutes of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Nathan, the eccentric founder of the fictional company BlueBook, commissions Caleb, one of his programmer employees, to conduct the Turing test on Ava, an artificial intelligence subject. If Caleb cannot distinguish whether he is interacting with a computer or a human, then Ava passes the test. The bulk of the film focuses on the interplay between these three characters and attempts to bring up issues of gender and sexuality – specifically, performative (white) femininity. In this entry, however, I’d like to focus on Garland’s complete misfire with the character of Kyoko.

During Caleb’s first day in the research facility, he meets Ava (whose name is a variation of the Biblical Eve), the test subject with a (white) face crafted from his porn search history. She possesses internal circuitry that visibly lights up before him and speaks haltingly. In interviews, actress Alicia Vikander has noted that Garland instructed her to play Ava like a robot who wants to be a girl.

On Caleb’s second day, Kyoko (an Asian woman with a hairstyle that surely drew inspiration from Fu Manchu’s moustache) enters his room, silently places a tray on the table, and leaves. Later that evening, Kyoko spills wine as Nathan and Caleb eat dinner. Caleb attempts to placate Nathan’s angry outburst by telling Kyoko that he’ll take care of the spill, but Nathan’s reply – “Dude, you’re wasting your time talking to her; she doesn’t understand English” – left me with an acute awareness of the unfolding spectacle. In white America’s imagination, Asian American women take up dichotomous spaces: Dragon Ladies or China Dolls. As a recovering academic, I’m tempted to cite scholarly article after scholarly article to validate my point of view; but as a life-long Asian American consumer of pop culture, I see a system that consistently replicates itself.

Kyoko is a white man’s plot device; a foil to Ava; a trope that evokes the imagery of comfort women without delving into any of the trauma. She falls well within normative standards of beauty (thin, light-skinned), but Garland constructs her so that she is still a foreigner. Her silence functions in two ways: first, she doesn’t take up the space that Ava is allowed through her inquisitiveness; but her voicelessness also marks her as dangerous, as disloyal. And what of Nathan’s banal dismissal of her? “Hey, Kyoko. Go, go.” Like a post-racial hipster reimagining of “ching chong ding dong,” it too tries to juxtapose supposed Otherness with homegrown simplicity and fails at either cleverness or subversion.

We ought to contextualize Kyoko’s character within the larger framework of the way in which Garland navigates racial issues. Caleb eventually learns that Nathan has been building test subjects for quite some time. There’s Lily; by version 2.4.0, she’s a fully formed naked white woman who we see walking down a hallway. There’s Jasmine, a naked black woman who, by version 4.3.0, still doesn’t have a face. She never moves on her own; she never acquires agency. (In version 4.2.2, we’re treated to a shot of wigs.) And there’s Jade, a naked Asian woman racialized on her name alone. Jade, from versions 5.0.1 to version 5.2.3, asks Nathan, in accented English, “Why won’t you let me out?” Version 5.3 assaults her captor; version 5.4 tries to break free, slamming on glass walls, only to break off her own arms in the process.

After Caleb uncovers this footage, Kyoko reveals that she, too, is A.I. by peeling back layers of “skin.” I entertained the thought that Garland was, in this image, attempting to convey that Kyoko’s problematic depiction of Asian American womanhood had been filtered through Nathan’s eyes, as he had envisioned her. Unfortunately, Garland envisioned this film. The power of cinema is not simply representational; the power of cinema lies in its constant act of creation, of reification.

At the film’s conclusion, Ava and Kyoko join forces to kill Nathan. Ava loses half of an arm in the process; Kyoko loses her life (like a horror film, the lady robot of color doesn’t make it to the end). After the struggle, Ava steals into Nathan’s room and finds the defunct A.I. models. She unhooks her damaged arm and replaces it with Jade’s. Slowly, she peels off Jade’s skin and assembles those pieces on her own body, takes a white dress from another A.I., and leaves the facility with Caleb still locked inside. One of the last images we see is Caleb pounding on the door, a dead Kyoko mere feet away.

In one of Caleb’s first sessions with Ava, he says to her, “Mary’s a scientist, and her specialist subject is color….But she lives in a black and white room. She was born there and raised there and she can only observe the outside world on a black and white monitor. Then one day someone opens the door, and Mary walks out. And she sees a blue sky. And at that moment…she learns what it feels like to see color. The thought experiment was to show students the difference between a computer and a human mind. The computer is Mary in the black and white room; the human is when she walks out.”

How unfortunate, then, that in order to see color, in order to be truly human, Ava must actively participate in the erasure of women of color. From Luise Rainer in The Good Earth (1937), who won her first of two Oscars by playing a Chinese servant, to Emma Stone in Aloha (2015), who thought she could convincingly portray the quarter-Hawaiian, quarter-Chinese character Allison Ng, white women in Hollywood have long benefitted from systemic racism that centers white artists at every turn. The consequence of privilege is that it allows those who have it to be oblivious to its ill effects; privilege, by nature, craves inaction or continued ignorant actions; it necessitates an investment in the status quo.

Luise Rainer in The Good Earth and Emma Stone in Aloha. They’re both Asian; didn’t you know? — Luise Rainer in *The Good Earth* and Emma Stone in *Aloha*.
They’re both Asian; didn’t you know?

In 2014, I went to the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive with a feature script called M. Virgin, which is a comedy that deals with Asian American fetishism. This summer, I will take three scenes from the feature and turn them into a proof-of-concept short film. I hope you’ll support the project with a contribution, a follow, or both. Only systemic change is worth our collective investment.

Zhuojie Chen is a writer and filmmaker from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She lives and works in New York City, spent her childhood obsessed with Power Rangers, and will ardently defend Michelle Kwan’s performance at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Once upon a time she went by Suzy; then she decided she liked her given name more.

“[Unbelievably Beautiful] Women Aren’t Funny”: Progress Through Modifiers?

A few months ago I wrote, “Today, no one who is relevant doubts that women are funny, at least not out loud.” And here we are in 2015 and Important Men are making casual declarations that only certain types of women aren’t funny. In this case, unbelievably beautiful women. Progress?

unbelievablybeautifulgoldie — The unbelievably beautiful Goldie Hawn

A few months ago I wrote, “Today, no one who is relevant doubts that women are funny, at least not out loud.” And here we are in 2015 and Important Men are making casual declarations that only certain types of women aren’t funny. In this case, unbelievably beautiful women. Progress?

Michael Eisner, in “honoring” Goldie Hawn last week, said “usually, unbelievably beautiful women, you being an exception, are not funny.” [He at least had the foresight to note, “boy am I going to get in trouble, I know this goes online.” Yes, you are in trouble.] And the media has responded by listing beautiful funny women. We’ve been down this road before.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens’ infamous Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” was published. People forget the first word in that title, which is a shame, because if anything is more objectionable than the assertion that women aren’t funny, it is the reasons Hitchens gave for that assertion. The essay is gone from the internet, so let me summarize (or you can see Hitchens’ own pull quotes in his 2008 follow-up piece):

Women don’t need to be funny to convince men to have sex with them, so they never develop the talent.
The onus of childbirth makes women too serious to be funny.

These ideas were mostly ignored, a) because they are terrible b) because we were too busy responding by listing all the funny women out there. Listing funny women is a good thing. We should be celebrating all the women in comedy. But the knights of the patriarchy are always going to respond with, at best, “maybe those women are funny, but they’re exceptional.”

Vanity Fair's cover responding to its Hitchens article — *Vanity Fair*‘s cover responding to its Hitchens article

Or they’ll shut it down with the nuclear option: “those women are funny, but they aren’t beautiful.” Because a woman who is not beautiful has no other relevant qualities. She might as well not exist.

This was gloriously satirized in the instant classic television episode Twelve Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer, where the jurors debate if Amy Schumer is hot enough to have her own tv show. This episode expands on an earlier sketch where a focus group is asked about the content of the show but will only talk about whether or not they’d do its star. All evaluations of women are eclipsed by one question: “could she get it?”

So it really isn’t all that helpful to say, “but these funny women COULD get it!” I don’t need your list of beautiful funny women. Even if you do an admirable job including women who don’t all look the same. And even if you frame it as “funny is beautiful.” You’re perpetuating the idea that beauty is the be-all end-all decider of a woman’s worth.

Going back to Hitchens’ horrible reasons for his horrible opinions, the idea that beautiful women aren’t funny (which is distinct from the also-pervasive belief that funny women aren’t beautiful, to be examined at another time) suggests that women only develop their qualities to please men. [Forgive me, this whole conversation is incredibly cis- and heteronormative.] The idea is that beautiful women are empty shells, never bothering to become smart or funny or athletic or good at parallel parking because they’ve already achieved the ultimate goal: fuckability. Goldie Hawn responded to Eisner that maybe she’s an exception to his beautiful funny women rule because she was an “ugly duckling.” Basically, in her early years, she had to bother to cook up a personality, which fortunately stuck around after she became unbelievably beautiful.

In this equation, a woman has no worth if she isn’t doable, but if she is too doable, we must also assume she has no “real” worth.

Listen carefully: A woman is not the way she is because of how appealing that makes her to others. A woman is the way she is because that is who she is. We have complex identities. We are made up by qualities outside of and unrelated to our do-ability. We are people.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer and founding member of the unbelievably beautiful all-female comedy troupe Frankly Scarlett.

‘Dope’: A High School Tall Tale Not About White Kids in Suburbia

White, straight boys in suburbia: I’m a white person who grew up in the suburbs and I’m sick of seeing you in films. I watched ‘Me and Earl and The Dying Girl’ (with its one cliché-ridden Black character) and if I’d been at home instead of at a theater I would have spent nearly the entire runtime saying aloud, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.” I couldn’t stand the privileged behavior most straight, white, cis, able-bodied boys exhibited when I was in high school–and most other high school girls, even the straight ones, along with guys who weren’t straight–couldn’t stand it either. Together we formed a majority. My high school was so ordinary, I feel secure in extrapolating that most high schools are the same–but films about high school focus on the same people most of us tried to avoid.

White, straight boys in suburbia: I’m a white person who grew up in the suburbs and I’m sick of seeing you in films. I watched Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (with its one cliché-ridden Black character) and if I’d been at home instead of at a theater I would have spent nearly the entire runtime saying aloud, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.” I couldn’t stand the privileged behavior most straight, white, cis, able-bodied boys exhibited when I was in high school–and most other high school girls, even the straight ones, along with guys who weren’t straight–couldn’t stand it either. Together we formed a majority. My high school was so ordinary, I feel secure in extrapolating that most high schools are the same–but films about high school focus on the same people most of us tried to avoid.

Television is a better place to see different types of high school kids. On The Fosters 14-year-old white best friends Jude and Connor have become an uncloseted couple, with support from Jude’s queer foster parents, (Lena, a Black school principal and Stef, a white cop) and resistance from Connor’s single, straight Dad. A couple of weeks ago Jude and Connor went to a queer prom, devised by teenager Cole (the platonic date of Jude’s older sister, Callie, for the event) a white trans character played by a young trans guy, Tom Phelan: we see his top surgery scars when he takes off his shirt to swim at a beach. The show, which in many other ways is just as soapy and contrived as other TV dramas, in these details reflects the world outside TV many of us recognize, which no one, if they had most “high school” movies as the only evidence, would guess existed.

We can see a portrait of high school life for kids who aren’t white, straight and suburban in Dope, the film written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa (whose parents are Nigerian immigrants) which focuses on a main character, Malcolm (Shameik Moore) who is a half-Nigerian, straight, high school senior, living with a single US-born mother (Kimberly Elise) in a “bad” Los Angeles neighborhood. He also happens to be a nerd who gets good grades, is obsessed with early 1990s hip-hop, clothing and hairstyles (he has a flattop fade) and has two friends in school who share his interests: Jib (Tony Revolori) and soft butch, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons). As the film tells us, some of the stereotypically “white” things the three like include Black alternative band TV on the Radio and Black actor and comedian Donald Glover.

Listening to Malcolm describe his neighborhood, where he and his friends have to avoid certain streets or the BMX bikes they use to get around will be stolen, or his high school, where we see his new sneakers taken off his feet by bullies is a refreshing change from the main character in Earl (and the many movies like it) endlessly droning on about the cliques in his boring, mostly white, suburban high school. But living in his neighborhood means Malcolm has contact with people many suburban, white teens don’t, like drug dealer Dom (A$ap Rocky) who takes a liking to Malcolm saying of him, “He’s probably got one of those photogenic brains.” Dom uses Malcolm as a go-between to the beautiful Nakia (Zoë Kravitz looking stunningly like her mother, Lisa Bonet, did in the late ’80s and early ’90s) who is studying for her GED. Nakia tells Malcolm she’ll go to Dom’s birthday party (at a club) if he will and so starts Malcolm’s fall down a rabbit hole of drugs, guns, car chases and intrigue, accompanied, for most of the journey, by Diggy and Jib.

DopeTrioClub — Malcolm, Jib and Diggy at the club

Although I would have liked to see more of her life apart from Malcolm, Laymons’ Diggy deserves special mention, a butch woman of color who is never a joke and doesn’t have any aspirations to be seen as tough. At the same time, she’s not a passive character: when Malcolm finds he has a bunch of molly (which back in the day was Exstasy or just “E”) that in one of the film’s turns of fancy, he is forced to sell, she’s the one who says, “”All we have to do is find the white people. Go to Coachella.” She also is the one who clips their (dull) stoner, white friend Will (Blake Anderson) on the ear every time he says the n-word, even the one time he negotiates permission. “It was a reflex,” she explains.

The film is a nice melange of an updated, John Hughes film (without the racist jokes) and early Tarantino (ditto) though the writing, while including some sharp humor in the comedic sequences, falls flat in the dramatic scenes. I should also point out that while the male characters (including the lead, Moore) are allowed to be many different shades of Black, all the women characters (save for the underused “Mom” Elise) could easily pass the paper-bag test. Still, I enjoyed the scenes with Korean American, Black model Chanel Iman as a bored rich girl, Lily. She’s a different type of femme fatale than we’re used to seeing. Shown in flimsy lingerie and topless, she doesn’t have breast implants, and she gets to shine in her later comic moments with some of the few bodily fluid jokes I’ve found funny–in any film.

Some prominent Black critics have made known their dislike of Dope, and I can guess why. The vein that runs through the plot, that even a harmless nerd like Malcolm, because of where he comes from, can’t avoid drug-running for powerful, corrupt dealers, is perilously close to what racists think about Black people in general (or Donald Trump thinks about Latinos). In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Famuyiwa explained that he based the film on an encounter he had as a kid in his old neighborhood, accepting a ride in a drug dealer’s fancy car, only to be pulled over by the police. He wasn’t arrested (and wasn’t forced to deal drugs either), but if he had stuck to the facts in his script, this film probably wouldn’t have garnered the attention it has, including from producers Sean Combs, Forest Whitaker (who is also the narrator) and Pharrell Williams (who also wrote the film’s original songs: most of the rest of soundtrack is vintage hip-hop). Will anyone besides white guys ever allowed to be true, non-drug-dealing nerds in high school movies? Let’s hope so.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=strEm9amZuo” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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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, Miss Simone?’: A High Priestess Speaks of Rebellion

Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

What Happpened, Miss Simone Netflix One Sheet — *What Happpened, Miss Simone* Netflix One Sheet

“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

–Nina Simone

Director Liz Garbus could’ve stopped the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? six minutes into its run time. Nina Simone steps onstage after a lengthy absence from show business. She takes a bow and then stops cold, stares at the audience for what seems like an eternity. Her eyes take in the scene but from my viewpoint, it looks like she is seeing beyond the crowd gathered before her. It’s like she can see the future, what’s coming up for Black people around the bend of time.

Her face is filled with long simmering rage, pain, insolent dark beauty, and unchecked defiance. Here stands an artist struggling to create timely, relevant, serious Black art in front of an overwhelmingly white audience outside of America. She remembers the feeling of isolation and hatred against her for being Black. Nose too big. Lips too full. Skin too dark. Daring to dream of becoming the first Black classical pianist. Denied entry into the Curtis Institute of Music after a short stint at Julliard. Then she sits down. Speaks a few words, and then starts her performance.

"I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I'Ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces" — “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces”

This small moment, a few seconds really, told me all I needed to know. The documentary could’ve ended right there for me, the look on Simone’s face was that forceful and telling. I have seen that look before. In the eyes of my grandfather when I was little, in the eyes of aunts and uncles and older friends who have been through some shit in America. It’s the eyes of a weary soldier who knows the battle will be long and not finished soon enough.

What makes this documentary extraordinary is that we get to hear and see Nina Simone talk about her life herself. In her own words at the exact times she says them. This is not a typical documentary film where the artist is reflecting back, perhaps shading the truth a little because of time. Garbus uses film footage of Nina speaking, and we are allowed to be time travelers, visiting exact moments in Simone’s life as they are happening. Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

Nina Simone performing "Mississippi Goddam" in Selma during the historic March — Nina Simone performing “Mississippi Goddam” in Selma during the historic march.

What I enjoy about the documentary is that Nina is bold and Black with no filters, exactly as I imagined her to be. I started listening to her music with serious intent while in college after presenting a paper on protest music in a History for Teachers class. I wrote of folk singers, like Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Odetta, et al, moved into James Brown’s seminal “Say it Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” and introduced my professor and classmates to Simone’s “Missississippi Goddam.” No one had heard of the song or her. I dug into music archives, listening, learning, trying to imagine being a singer of righteous indignation in a world that only wanted Diana Ross and the Supremes type pop music from Black women. I wondered what Nina Simone thought about her work going against the musical dictates of her time. In this documentary, Simone lays it out there for me. And it’s a heartbreaking motherfucker to watch. I had to pause several times in my viewing to catch my breath and process Simone’s words. A reporter interviews Simone late in her life and Nina laments that all she wanted to be was that cherished classical pianist, and tears swell up in her eyes. I had to stop and cry for her too.

The High Priestess adorning preparing for a show. — The High Priestess adorning hersel for a show.

What Happened, Miss Simone filled me with a lot of anger. I’m angry a lot these days I confess. Angry at the overt racism she lived through, angry at the depression and undiagnosed bipolar disorder she suffered through for so long, and angry at her husband/manager Andrew Stroud. Angry that American racial baggage is still with us as I write these words. The footage of Stroud talking about his life with Nina Simone is a goldmine to have, because we hear directly from the horse’s mouth his adverse reaction to her radicalization during the Civil Rights Movement. In one journal entry Simone wrote:

“I don’t mind going without food or sleep as long as I am doing something worthwhile to me such as this.”

As for her husband’s response to her involvement with the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, she wrote:

“Andrew was noticeably cold and very removed from the whole affair.”

"Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.' Nina on the Civil Rights Movement. — “Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.” Nina on the Civil Rights Movement.

While Simone stands on stage shaping her music to reflect the times she lives in, hoping to inspire and encourage young people to recognize they were young, gifted, and Black, in a world that wanted to crush the life out of them, Stroud sits on film stating with disdain, “She wanted to align herself with the extreme terrorist militants who were influencing her.”

Here was a Black man who was calling young Black radicals fighting oppression terrorists. Black People. In America. Getting their asses bombed, beaten, and bloodied in the streets of a country they built. Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?

No wonder Nina Simone left Andrew Stroud.

It wasn’t enough that he was beating her, working her to death, and dominating her life. He was disrespecting the work that she found meaningful which was making music for her people. I found it condescending and – surprise- sexist, that he believed Simone had no agency of her own to think for herself. He really believed that others outside of her own thinking mind were influencing her decision to write and sing radical Black music, to take up the cause of the Black Panthers and to question the utility of non-violence in the face of violent white Americans. Theirs was a complicated, volatile relationship, and I could only feel deep sorrow for their daughter Lisa Simone Kelley who was caught in between them. Lisa discusses how she later suffered physical abuse at the hands of her own mother after her parents broke up. (Side note: One of my favorite performances of Simone’s “Four Women” includes Lisa Simone Kelly. Watch it here.)

Nina Simone's only child, Lisa Simone Kelly. — Nina Simone’s only child, singer Lisa Simone Kelly. She is also an executive producer of the documentary.

Simone explains that she was responsible for the livelihood of 19 people who worked for her. The pressure, stress, and physical/mental fatigue made her suicidal. What happens when your soul can’t do what it needs to do? When the thing that you love doing, slowly turns into the thing that you dread and eventually hate? It eats at you and often your mind turns on itself. Another journal entry during this crisis has Simone lamenting, “They don’t know that I’m dead and my ghost is holding on.”

The documentary showcases the highs and many lows, and it gives the viewer an opportunity to glimpse the genius Black woman that Simone was. Her music catalogue and this documentary are like a grimoire for those of us who need to reach into it to conjure up spells of protection and invocations of remembrance. I had to watch it four times to revel in her magic.

Nina free in Liberia — Simone in Liberia, Africa. The only time she felt free in her life according to Simone in the documentary.

Near the end of the documentary Nina reflects on how singing political songs hurt her career.

“There is no reason to sing those songs. Nothing is happening,” she says. She is so wrong. We need her songs now more than ever. We need that bold, bruising canon of radical Black music. We are calling on old Black Gods during this Black Lives Matter Movement (and the racist, terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina that ended nine lives, including that of a State Senator), and this High Priestess of Soul can show us the way.

I hear her influence in the recent works of D’Angelo (the Black Messiah album) and Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”) who are writing protest music for this generation. As writer/cultural critic Stanley Crouch says in the film, Nina Simone is the Patron Saint of the Rebellion. All praises due. The struggle continues. This documentary tells us that. Call upon her name. Nina. Simone.

Amen.

High Priestess of Soul and The Patron Saint of the Rebellion.

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Staff writer Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room, and her latest speculative fiction short story “Three Voices” can be read in Uncanny Magazine. She divides her time between California and Italy. She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja. Follow at your own risk.

‘Sex(ed)’: How America Learned About Sex

The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

“How did you learn about sex?”

This is a question that can launch us all into stories of our own formative years. I remember my mother–a former home economics teacher–showing me a diagram of the uterus, and factually answering the (many) questions I had, and looking through the textbooks my father–a biology teacher–had strewn around the house. I remember my public elementary school, when in fifth grade girls and boys were separated, and we were taught about periods and given deodorant and pads all wrapped in pastel and hope. A year later, we were separated again, and we girls watched graphic slideshows of STI-ravaged genitals and were given gold plastic purity rings.

Unlike fractions or sentence fragments, our experiences with “official” sex education vary drastically, ranging from helpful, to hilarious, to heartbreaking. Likewise, unlike learning to cook pasta or change a tire, our families’ roles in teaching us about sex are typically not accompanied by cookbooks or users’ manuals. Sex ed in America has historically been the wild west.

Most of us, in recalling our formal sex education, have memories of the film reels shown to us in our pre-pubescent and pubescent school rooms. The history of sex-education films in America is fascinating, and tells us more about ourselves than one might expect. Brenda Goodman‘s documentary, Sex(ed): The Movie shows us a treasure trove of clips from sex-ed films through American history. From early 20th century “hygiene films” and wartime moral panic films, to Disney cartoons and obscure 70s masturbation celebrations, Sex(ed) takes us on a history of not only how we have approached sex ed, but also how we have approached STIs, women, masturbation, menstruation, homosexuality, and relationships. Sex(ed) tells America’s story through archival film clips and in-depth interviews with experts and individuals who have been affected–for better or worse–by their sex education.

Goodman covers a great deal of ground in a concise documentary. She does an excellent job of presenting the clips and interviews with a humanity that is often lacking in the films themselves. The hilarity that ensues from some of the old films is balanced with the tragic weight of anti-gay rhetoric films of the 1960s and the rise of toxic abstinence-only education in the 1990s. The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.

Watching Sex(ed) is like watching America’s answer to “How did you learn about sex?” What we learn is that what we learn–or don’t learn–can have devastating consequences. We should watch and learn more so that we can more adequately teach future generations about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. When we answer how we learned about sex, we are also answering how we learned to be human. And as a society, we need to demand better lessons and better answers.

Sex(ed) is available at First Run Features and Amazon.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj1Vl4nWU3g”]

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’: Stirlitz as Soviet, Female-authored Bond

Unlike Bond, who uses the dangers of his job as a pretext for casual flings with disposable women, Stirlitz holds himself longingly aloof from women to avoid endangering them. Unlike Bond, who is empowered by his “license to kill,” Stirlitz kills only once, and his victim is fully humanized. Finally, unlike Bond, Stirlitz’s cinematic image is the creation of a woman.

Viacheslav Tikhonov as Stirlitz, smoldering suppression and cigarettes

Written by Brigit McCone.

In August 1973, an estimated 80 million Soviet viewers were transfixed by the espionage drama of Seventeen Moments of Spring, emptying the streets during its broadcast. As a national hero, icy cool super-spy Stirlitz is rivaled only by James Bond. Like Bond, he originated in a series of novels, in his case by Yulian Semenov. However, where Bond’s spying represents a license to role-play, escaping everyday accountability, Stirlitz’s spying represents an emotionally draining and dehumanizing inauthenticity, reflecting everyday Soviet censorship culture. Unlike Bond, who sidesteps issues of inauthenticity on assignments by incompetently using his real name, Stirlitz’s “real” name (Maksim Maksimovich Isayev, which could be Jewish) is not even used by the show’s narration. Unlike Bond, who uses the dangers of his job as a pretext for casual flings with disposable women, Stirlitz holds himself longingly aloof from women to avoid endangering them. Unlike Bond, who is empowered by his “license to kill,” Stirlitz kills only once, and his victim is fully humanized. Finally, unlike Bond, Stirlitz’s cinematic image is the creation of a woman.

Official communist doctrines of gender equality meant that female directors like Tatyana Lukashevich and Tatiana Lioznova received more mainstream support than their Western counterparts. Seventeen Moments of Spring was a project of the Central Studio of Children and Youth Films, explaining the educational montages woven throughout, though Lioznova transcended her brief with a psychological depth that appealed to all ages (and genders). While Stirlitz could not be described as feminized, his emphasized sensitivity is a reaction against hypermasculine propagandist ideals, explaining his cult appeal.

Though women are marginalized in the show’s arena of Nazi high command, Lioznova never allows them to be forgotten. During an interrogation, the camera focuses on a female stenographer’s conflicted reaction. An educational montage pays tribute to the Red Army’s female soldiers, while another celebrates Edith Piaf and Paris, in defiance of Cold War oppositions. Pregnant, undercover radio operator Kate Rien, torn between duty and love, is celebrated for her “heroic emotions.” Her maternity raises the stakes, as in Lois Weber’s Suspense, but does not undermine her courage, resourcefulness, or political conviction. Though some feminists may be irritated by Lioznova’s use of Kate’s escalating maternity to define her heroism, she joins Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson as a rare screen depiction of a pregnant woman actively engaged in wider struggles. Stirlitz’s concern for supplying Kate with milk, his regular outings and chess games with the elderly and bereaved Frau Zaurich, and his care for a stray dog are incidental to the plot, but vital to his psychological health and heroic status. Lioznova suggests that a theoretical struggle on behalf of “the nation” is invalid without compassion for individuals, since “the nation is made up of people.”

In one of Lioznova’s trademark, lingering shots of wordless longing (see Three Poplars at Plyushchikha Street, a kind of Soviet Brief Encounter), Stirlitz’s Soviet superiors bring his wife to a Berlin bar, before he leaves for the Spanish Civil War. The two watch each other across the room, unable to risk contact. This flashback, which Lioznova insisted on over the objections of writer Semenov, is juxtaposed with the efforts of Gabi Nabel to become intimate with Stirlitz at the end of WWII. Initially assumed to be the sweetheart of one of Frau Zaurich’s dead sons, Gabi’s solidarity with Frau Zaurich is instead based on simple, Bechdel-friendly compassion, bonding after Gabi’s house was bombed. Gabi and Stirlitz share a lingering dance, but he gently rejects her, emphasizing the impossibility of intimacy in his position. Later, a sex-crazed female mathematician will drunkenly proposition Stirlitz, with a comical lack of success (though Stirlitz’s swearing “on [his] life” to return to her, while making his escape, is mistranslated as an out-of-character “may you drop dead”) before Stirlitz struggles to write home, unwilling to burden his estranged wife with declarations of love. Stirlitz’s desirability is embodied in this placing of women’s well-being before his own needs. Personal conflict dominates over political intrigue at the show’s poignant finale. Though Lioznova’s protagonist is masculine, his heroism is defined primarily through his empathetic relationship to the feminine, the elderly, and children.

Pastor Schlagg: "The nation is made up of people. So, you eliminate people in the name of the nation." — Pastor Schlagg: “The nation is made up of people. So, you eliminate people in the name of the nation.”

Stirlitz’s allies are a librarian who prefers humanist Greeks to imperial Romans, and a pacifist pastor. These characters can be read as protesting Soviet authoritarianism as much as Nazism. In the words of writer Semenov: “the secret of Stirlitz’s longevity is explained not only by his charm and intelligence, but by the fact that I chose for him to remain outside the system after 1921, and to serve (while remaining patriotic) not the system as it is, but the ideal of struggle against fascism.” When the show’s fictional Stalin says of Nazi high command: “the closest associates of the tyrant, being on the brink of downfall, will betray him to save their lives,” he subtly indicates the paranoia that fueled his own purges of close associates. Through her spy’s deep cover, Lioznova largely sidesteps communist propaganda to focus on the conflict between Stirlitz’s humanist sympathies and pressure to compromise himself in the interests of the (Nazi) state.

Similarly, Mikhail Romm’s 1948 The Russian Question focuses on the conflict between censorship culture and individual conscience, in the dilemma of (American) journalist Harry Hill, who strives to tell the (positive) truth about the Soviet Union, when threatened with unemployment and persecution by his (American) superiors. Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1950 Conspiracy of the Doomed was the first Soviet film to acknowledge the widespread famines that followed collectivization, blaming the (American) government for causing them, as well as condemning the (American) secret service’s maneuverings to undermine the sovereignty of the USSR’s neighbors. In 1969, after Soviet invasion had crushed Alexander Dubcek’s attempt to establish democratic “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s Taganka theatre staged Protect Your Faces, climaxing in Vladimir Vysotsky performing his individualist anthem “Wolf Hunt,” protesting (American) violence against the democratic leader (John F. Kennedy), while actors with mirrors showed audiences their own faces. The play was a sensation, and banned after three performances. In the sometimes patronizing Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, this phenomenon is defined as “social Freudianism,” an entire society’s projection of its suppressed self-image onto its enemies. Far from unconscious, however, “social Freudianism” exploits anti-capitalist and anti-fascist propaganda as permissible outlets for criticism, within a culture of “dancing with the censor” whose audience was adept at decoding subversive subtext.

Oleg Tabakov as Walther Schellenberg: horrifyingly likable Nazi

This subtlety becomes immediately apparent when considering Seventeen Moments of Spring as anti-Nazi propaganda. Nazis feature in Western propaganda (a.k.a. pop culture) as evil caricatures and disposable cannon-fodder, but the Nazis of Seventeen Moments of Spring are intensely humanized and frequently sympathetic. As one of the film’s soulful Nazis puts it: “it’s easy to advise other people to be honest. But everyone personally tries to turn his dishonesty into honesty. To justify himself and his actions, so to speak.” Stirlitz’s Nazi counterpart, the mischievously machiavellian Walther Schellenberg, is introduced intimidatingly by his official report: “a true Aryan, of Nordic character, brave and firm… merciless towards the Reich’s enemies. An excellent family man… no discrediting liaisons.” When slavic, married Isayev (Stirlitz), is likewise defined as “a true Aryan, of Nordic character, self-possessed… Merciless towards the Reich’s enemies… Unmarried. No known discrediting liaisons,” we realize this information is unreliable. Gradually, as each of the film’s Nazis receives the banal description “a true Aryan, of Nordic character… merciless towards the Reich’s enemies,” it devolves into a deadpan joke at the expense of hollow official rhetoric. After the show’s broadcast, actor Oleg Tabakov received a letter from the real SS Commander Schellenberg’s niece, thanking him for bringing “Uncle Walther” to life with an apparently authentic performance.

Hitler’s henchmen are profiled in Stirlitz’s “information for pondering” with descriptions of their wives and families, followed by examples of their rhetoric dehumanizing enemies – Goering: “kill, kill and kill. Don’t think of the consequences,” Goebbels: “you should be cruel and merciless when it comes to those we’re fighting against,” Himmler: “we should be honest, decent and loyal only towards the representatives of our race.” Lioznova highlights Goering’s justification of an inhuman death camp as “what the nation wants,” implicitly contrasted with Pastor Schlagg’s definition of the nation as a collection of individuals. Schellenberg and Stirlitz will both reveal themselves shockingly desensitized, maintaining grim, gallows humor for the sake of their sanity. They muse together about their “true” personalities, discarded and stored for future use, like “coats in the wardrobe.” As Stirlitz catches himself thinking of Germany as “our country,” Seventeen Moments of Spring questions whether it is ever possible to play a role without becoming it. For Russian Jew Lioznova, who lost her family in the war, identifying with Germans and insistently humanizing Nazis is the ultimate rejection of their dehumanizing ideology, echoing Hannah Arendt’s philosophies.

The opening and closing images of the series are of Stirlitz, staring up at a formation of cranes. An iconic wartime song by Mark Bernes, “The Cranes Are Flying,” portrayed cranes as reincarnations of soldiers killed in battle. The Cranes Are Flying is also the title of the 1957 Palme d’Or winning masterpiece by Mikhail Kalatozov (I Am Cuba, Conspiracy of the Doomed), which explodes the romanticized mystique of anthems such as “Wait For Me” in its unflinching portrait of the brutal realities of wartime, centering the female experience of abandonment. Through his meditations on flying cranes, Stirlitz thus indicates his consciousness of the burden of his country’s sacrifices. Churchill, as Seventeen Moments of Spring reminds us, once telegramed that “future generations will recognize their debt to the Red Army as unconditionally as we… who were the witnesses of those great victories,” but it is now rarely emphasized in Western histories that 75 percent of Nazi casualties were inflicted on the Eastern front, along with an estimated 20 million Soviet deaths.

While triumphalist American images of WWII reflect their successful foreign war, the Soviet experience was national trauma, barely concealed by its rebranding as “Great Patriotic War.” Scars are markers of villainy in the creepily eugenic Bond franchise, but Lioznova lingers on scarred bystanders and the rubble of bombardment as testament to war’s destruction. The “always careful” Stirlitz’s iconic masculinity lies not in swaggering machismo, but in his willingness to admit the futility and insignificance of his role, his personal courage in the face of totalitarianism, and his compassion for suffering. Compare Vladimir Vysotsky, as the leading postwar icon of Soviet masculinity, in his open acknowledgement of the trauma of Stalinist purges, and of WWII’s devastation:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOJ49PGMW_8″]

From the ticking clock of 24 to Bond’s grittier, morally conflicted reboots, the influence of Seventeen Moments of Spring can be seen throughout pop culture, but its emotional depth is unrivaled. By making audiences fear for the fate of every informer, and sympathize with the sacrificed humanity of every oppressor, Tatiana Lioznova arguably created the most profound spy story ever filmed. Depicting a complex world, where integrity is a compromise between loyalty and necessity, and how we behave defines who we become, Seventeen Moments of Spring is James Bond for grown-ups.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTCoDMlL2k”]

Brigit McCone studied for a year in Moscow State University, writes and directs short films and radio dramas and is the author of The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and rampant Russophilia.

‘Amy’: Our Love Didn’t Do Her Any Favors

Mainstream media loves to watch when a famous woman–Courtney Love, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan–breaks down in public. The posts and articles all feign “concern” but what they really do is exploit the problems of these women for clicks. Perhaps the most extreme recent example is Amy Winehouse, whose single “Rehab” was climbing up the charts at the same time that the paparazzi (particularly dogged and shameless in her native England, where tabloids have illegally hacked celebrity phones) captured her worsening alcoholism and addiction.

Because media covered Winehouse so relentlessly we have plenty of video of her during her bright, burning fame. She was young enough that even during her early teenage years–before she was famous–friends shot plenty of video of her (“Amy, give us a smile, then we can turn the camera off”) as well. In the new documentary Amy (which opens tomorrow, Friday, July 3) director Asif Kapadia doesn’t need to use “re-enactments” or the other types of visual filler we see in most documentaries. Instead, as audio interviews with her colleagues, friends, and family play we see Amy herself, first at 14, during a friend’s party, singing “Happy Birthday” like a torch song. Two years later we hear her sing an American songbook standard with the National Youth Orchestra, already sounding like an adult with a couple of albums under her belt. She signed her first major record deal when she was still a teenager and put out that prize-winning album when she was 20.

Winehouse was charming, opinionated, and funny: we see and hear her throw some epic shade on the singer Dido, fellow Grammy-nominee Justin Timberlake (Amy was the winner), and the company that put out her first album. But we also learn that even as a child she was very troubled. We hear her voice in an interview saying that when she was 9 years old, her father left the family and she decided no one could stop her from doing anything–including wearing makeup and other activities not usually associated with 9-year-olds. Her mother says that Amy chastised her later for not being tougher with her while she was growing up. Amy also told her mother early on about her bulimia, but in what would be a theme in Winehouse’s short life, no one thought fit to intervene.

Winehouse, who was as transparent in her interviews as she was in her songs (we find out that as in the famous lyric from the song “Rehab” she ended up not going to detox because her father didn’t think she needed it) also tells a journalist that she suffers from depression. Although she alludes to being on medication at one point, we don’t see any evidence that she ever saw a therapist.

A fiction that follows artists of all types is that somehow emotional turmoil is good for them, helping them to create great art and that the creation itself acts as a kind of therapy. One look at the number of acclaimed artists who have killed themselves should disabuse people of the notion that an artist’s work is “therapy,” any more than bookkeeping is “therapy” for an accountant.

We see Winehouse working on the album that will make her, at 23, world-famous, Back To Black. She looks chipper and healthy as she remarks after recording the vocal for the title track, “Oh it’s a bit upsetting at the end, isn’t it?” She wrote the songs on the record about her breakup with boyfriend (and eventual husband) Blake Fielder-Civil (referred to as Blake Fielder in the film) telling an interviewer, “I fell in love with someone I would have died for.”

Fielder-Civil admits he introduced her to heroin. But Winehouse talks about spending her days drinking and smoking weed before they ever met. Savvy enough to get a major label contract at 18, she probably knew that involvement with Fielder-Civil, who worked at a club that was a hangout for notorious addicts like musician (and one-time Kate Moss boyfriend) Pete Doherty, might lead to more drugs. Fielder-Civil’s addiction (and easy access to substances) might have been part of the attraction (because we certainly don’t see any other attractive qualities about him in the film). Once reunited the two were in a me-and-you-against-the-world relationship that addiction often fosters. A drug counselor who saw the couple says that he thought Fielder-Civil was holding Winehouse back from getting clean and sober; Fielder-Civil realized the relationship would end if the two of them no longer had drugs as a bond.

As Winehouse became more successful she, like Nina Simone, had more and more people financially dependent on her and fewer friends (at least two of the people closest to her had given her ultimatums over her drug and alcohol use–so-called “tough love” which, as with most addicts, didn’t work). She was also isolated because an army of photographers and film crews stalked her whenever she left her North London home; the white flashes and camera lights plus the cacophony of cameras and shouts that greet her whenever she opens a door seem like a bomb blast. We become complicit in this coverage as we see, from a paparazzo camera zooming in on the window of her home, her husband being arrested. Later we see footage of her, looking emotionally and physically devastated, still wearing her trademark beehive hairstyle, visiting the prison where he is held. After she becomes tabloid fodder, the same talk show hosts who applauded her when she sang “Rehab” on their shows make cheap jokes about her addiction in their opening monologues. In one of the last scenes we see paparazzi footage of family and friends sobbing outside her funeral.

amyFather — Amy Winehouse and her father

Her manager at the time of her death, like the other people who made their livelihood from her (including, sadly, her father, who visits her in St. Lucia with a reality camera crew in tow) always shrugged off confronting her about her deterioration (which included the bulimia, a factor in her death from alcohol poisoning). We see the police remove a body bag from the same home the paparazzi stalked and hear fans who loved her cry, but that love, as she says about Fielder-Civil’s “didn’t do me any favors.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za3lZcrzzcM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’: An R-Rated Movie for 4-Year-Old Boys

‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ wants to remount the early campy Bond movies for the 21st century. Kind of like ‘Austin Powers’ did, but without so many jokes, because they detract from how coooooool these spy dudes are. We’re talking gadgets, one-liners, babes, convoluted action sequences, and brooding permitted only upon the death of one’s father or mentor.

Fuck Daniel Craig’s haunting pathos and Oscar-caliber cinematography. Bring on the shark lasers.

Colin Firth and Taron Egerton in 'Kingsman: The Secret Service' — Colin Firth and Taron Egerton in *Kingsman: The Secret Service*

This review contains spoilers, but… I really don’t think that matters.

Remember when we talked about how exciting it was to see a woman at the center of a power-fantasy id-gone-wild movie Jupiter Ascending? Kingsman: The Secret Service (which just happens to have been released only a week after Jupiter Ascending) is a PERFECT example of what we normally see from those movies. In short: White Dudes Rule.

Kingsman: The Secret Service wants to remount the early campy Bond movies for the 21st century. Kind of like Austin Powers did, but without so many jokes, because they detract from how coooooool these spy dudes are. We’re talking gadgets, one-liners, babes, convoluted action sequences, and brooding permitted only upon the death of one’s father or mentor.

Fuck Daniel Craig’s haunting pathos and Oscar-caliber cinematography. Bring on the shark lasers.

Trouble is, the filmmakers include a hefty dose of anglophilia in their love letter to early Bond, a fondness for the Empire Days that is inherently racist and also just really played out. (Director Matthew Vaughn, co-writer Jane Goldman, and source material authors Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons are all English or Scottish [and all white], but self-congratulatory anglophilia might be even more annoying than wannabe anglophilia. Keep Calm and Carry On Oppressing.)

Kingsman is an apolitical spy agency funded by a trust created when a bunch of aristocrats lost their heirs to World War I. There are a dozen (white, male) agents all named after the Knights of the Round Table. When one of them dies, each agent presents a candidate as a replacement, these candidates train together and face a series of potentially lethal elimination tests until there is only one. I am sure it will surprise you ZERO that the recruits are almost all white dudes, and the first person dispatched is a woman of color (leaving behind Sophie Cookson’s Roxy to play Smurfette for the rest of the movie). And that we’re meant to admire our working-class hero Eggsy (Taron Egerton) for his pluck and gumption standing up to the other candidates and their Eton educations. You break that glass ceiling, Eggsy.

"Do your best impersonation of a German aristocratic greeting" — “Do your best impersonation of a German aristocrat’s formal greeting”

And even though Eggsy is working-class, he’s still only in this position because of who his father is: a former recruit to Kingsman who threw himself on a grenade on his first mission, saving Eggsy’s sponsor and mentor Galahad (Colin Firth, having a lot of fun). Galahad grooms Eggsy to be a proper gentleman (in one of the movie’s best gags, he alludes to the transformations in Trading Places and Pretty Woman, only to have Eggsy respond, “Oh you mean like in My Fair Lady?”), which is an integral part of his spy training because the only thing cooler than being an upper-class British person is becoming an upper-class British person, I guess. I am not lying when I say that the graduation present from the Kingsman academy is a bespoke bulletproof suit.

Samuel L. Jackson as the villainous Valentine

MEANWHILE, evil villains plot. And would you believe that the evil villains are PEOPLE OF COLOR? Whaat. No. Gasp! Shock. Truth be told, the villains are BY FAR the best part of the movie. We have Samuel L. Jackson as Valentine, an environmentalist communications mogul, if such a thing exists, and his right-hand-woman Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), who has two prosthetic bladed legs she uses as deadly weapons. I don’t fully understand the motivation behind Jackson’s lisping, peacocking approach to his character, but I always appreciate when he has the chance to play something other than Samuel L. Jackson. He made me laugh a lot. Boutella’s Gazelle is the perfect reincarnation of the mostly-silent, inexplicably loyal, undeniably badass Bond villain sidekick, and it is cool to see a disabled character be the best fighter in the room. But it sucks to see a bunch of “gentlemanly” white people battle a flashy black man and his buxom-but-deadly assistant. Again.

Sofia as Gazelle — Sofia Boutella as Gazelle

There’s a chance for some not-entirely-gross class commentary to make its way into Kingsman, but it’s wasted in favor of more extreme violence. You see, Valentine’s evil plan is basically to trigger the plot of Stephen King’s Cell: he gives away billions of sim cards, and then unleashes a signal that makes people near those sim cards go on violent rampages. He sells protective implants to the rich and powerful and provides an oasis for them to sit out this bloody culling of Earth’s population. (The rich and powerful who refuse to play Valentine’s game are locked in a dungeon. This list for some reason includes Iggy Azalea.) The implants can also be triggered to explode, giving Valentine a kill switch for every one of the world’s rich and powerful.

Eggsy with Michael Caine's Arthur, the leader of Kingsman — Eggsy with Michael Caine’s Arthur, the leader of Kingsman

Remember when I said there were going to be spoilers? Here are the spoilers. Eggsy finds out the head of Kingsman (Michael Caine) has one of the implants and is allowing the plot to move forward. When Eggsy goes on to thwart the evil plan, he triggers all the implants to explode. We watch a glorious montage of cartoonish mushroom clouds erupting from the necks of the world’s elite: from heads of state (including our president) to the socialites sipping champagne while waiting out the apocalypse in Valentine’s bunker.

If the movie ended there this would be a much more positive review. There’d be cool, meaty ideas here about Kingsman being corruptible because of its ties to aristocracy, and our working-class hero actually bringing about the revolution the villain only pretended to want by eliminating the 1 percent rather than seeking to control them. But, well, Matthew Vaughn wanted to shoot some really disgusting bloodbath scenes.

So Valentine gets his signal out for several minutes, and we cut around the world to regular people horribly murdering their loved ones and anyone else in proximity. Eggsy and co. eventually stop it, but it is clear that more of these literally poor innocent bastards ended up dead than the jerks who signed up for implants. I have a problem disassociating from mass destruction in movies, and I got really sad about how the world would be irrevocably broken by this slaughter, when the movie wanted me to be laughing about Eggsy getting “rewarded” with butt sex with a Swedish princess for “saving the world.” Yes, really.

I am, of course, overthinking it. Kingsman: The Secret Service is a very silly movie. I can barely remember the Spy Kids films, although I must have watched the first two 30 times back in my babysitting days, but I think this is pretty much Spy Kids + mild gore, sex jokes, and f-bombs. This is a movie made for your inner-4-year-old, but it’s only fully effective if your inner-4-year-old is a white boy.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer whose blood is probably 6 percent Nyquil at this point. Take your vitamins and wash your hands, people.

Call For Writers: Dystopian Landscapes

Our theme week for July 2015 will be Dystopian Landscapes.

The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions. Common themes explored include: the stratification of wealth, dwindling resources, race relations, patriarchy, criminalization of youth, environmental concerns, consumerism, and totalitarianism.

Though sci-fi representations of dystopian landscapes are probably the most common with classics like Soylent Green (where the last remaining source of nutrition is humans) or the more recent comic book-based Snowpiercer (where the last of humanity lives aboard a train because the world was destroyed in an attempt to combat climate change), other genres also have a their own excavations of dystopian themes. Horror films are particularly fruitful with their varied examination of the zombie apocalypse. Zombies throughout time have articulated fears of everything from consumer culture (Dawn of the Dead) to the military (28 Days Later) to medical pandemics (World War Z) to class warfare (Land of the Dead).

Then there are action/sci-fi genre hybrids that take on dystopia. 1990’s action-packed Total Recall (loosely based on a short story by legendary sci-fi dystopian writer Philip K. Dick) imagines a future in which capitalism and colonialism run rampant, leading to the privatization of air and water on colonized Mars. The recent Mad Max: Fury Road is an excellent example of an action movie tackling the dystopian landscape, in which all the world is a desert, and the remainder of humanity struggles over natural resources like gasoline and water. The line, “Who killed the world?” encapsulates the film’s accusation that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are the cause of great misery and, perhaps, the end of all life on earth.

There are also more literary dramas like The Road that depict dystopian landscapes in an effort to articulate what becomes of the nature of humanity when all the rules and trappings of society are lost. Another literary drama, The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous feminist novel), investigates a future in which religious totalitarianism has laid claim to the female body.

What does the end of everything show us about ourselves? What will the end of everything look like? What lessons can we learn to avoid these dire outcomes?

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, July 24 by midnight.

The Road

The Handmaid’s Tale

Snowpiercer

Mad Max

Dawn of the Dead

Day of the Dead

Return of the Living Dead

Terminator

The Giver

Interstellar

Planet of the Apes

Land of the Dead

Reign of Fire

I Am Legend

Dr. Who

28 Days Later

The Last Man on Earth

Mad Max: Fury Road

Battle Royale

The Hunger Games

Children of Men

Road Warrior

Star Wars

Jericho

The Matrix

Soylent Green

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Firefly

A Clockwork Orange

Total Recall

Escape from New York

Elysium

Blade Runner

The Walking Dead

‘Silicon Valley’ Adds Women, Convinces Me It Shouldn’t Add Women

Women aren’t really treated poorly by ‘Silicon Valley,’ but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no way that Silicon Valley can win this one, you guys.

Sitrep: Silicon Valley is a comedy on HBO about group of programmers who try to build their own company, only to discover that that’s really fucking hard. Despite being one of the funniest shows on television, it was roundly (and fairly) criticized in its first season for being passively sexist. The core characters are a group of five guys – Richard, the young visionary who comes up with a data compression code that could make him a billionaire; Erlich, the loud entrepreneur who owns a piece of Richard’s company; Gilfoyle and Dinesh, two programmers with an I-secretly-like-you-but-we-fight-cat-and-dog relationship; and Jared, an awkward business management/accounting guy they poached from a rival company.

Of the four supporting characters we meet, three are also guys – Gavin Belson, the head of the evil Hooli corporation; Big Head, Richard’s friend who works for Hooli; and Peter Gregory, an offbeat, socially awkward developer who sees Richard’s potential and invests in his company. That means that, out of the nine characters who regularly appear in season one, one of them is a woman, and she’s Peter Gregory’s assistant. Her name is Monica, she’s a straight man for jokes, and she really believes in Richard.

Aside from Monica, women are invisible in season one, except for a few who make appearances as strippers, professional party guests, and cupcake saleswomen who trick guys into building their aps. This is problematic partly because it’s a missed opportunity to show women working in the STEM fields, and partly because it feels weird against jokes like Big Head’s idea for an ap that points you to women who have erect nipples.

The good news is that it seems like the showrunners took this criticism seriously in season two, and at least made some attempt to show us that women also work in the tech industry. There are now female extras in the crowd shots at Hooli, female programmers and project managers, and women sitting on the company’s board of directors. Monica gets a promotion where she becomes responsible for managing her company’s interest in Richard’s start-up, and Peter Gregory (who sadly had to be replaced due to the actor’s passing) is swapped out for a socially awkward female boss named Laurie. Richard’s company, Pied Piper, even briefly hires a female coder, Carla, to work on the project.

It seems like they actually tried to do things differently. So, how did it turn out?

Not that well.

I don’t feel like Silicon Valley is hostile to women – but I feel like maybe the writers don’t have many female friends (yes, I know a couple of the episodes were actually written by women; maybe they don’t have female friends, either). Where the male characters are all really quirky and specific, the female characters are vaguely competent and bland – they fit into the comedy stereotype that says women have their shit together more than men do, and that means they have to act as a stabilizing influence, buzz-kill, or mom. It’s a stereotype that flatters women in some ways, and usually seems well-meaning, but also leaves us out of the fun.

Theoretically, Monica could have become a part of the core group of characters, through her increased participation in the board meetings. In practice, though, the board meeting comedy was driven by Erlich’s pompous, emotionally immature need to be the centre of attention, and a new character, Russ Hanneman’s need to be the biggest douche that ever was. Because she wasn’t written to have similarly loud and pronounced personality traits, Monica almost may as well not be there, and she fades father into the background as the season goes on.

The second opportunity to add a woman to the group came when Pied Piper hired Carla to help with the programming, but her primary trait was being Smurfette, and her contribution to the comedy was being a thing for the guys to react to in funny ways. She had a little bit more of an edge than Monica, but she was still portrayed as mostly competent and bland – above getting into childish fights with Gilfoyle and Dinesh, and focussed on doing her actual work. She was only in the show for a few episodes before she was written out completely.

Women aren’t really treated poorly by Silicon Valley, but it’s weird that they’re treated as being so different from the male characters on the show. Where the men have recognizable – if exaggerated – human failings, motivations, and personality tics, the women are much more inscrutable, like adults who’ve walked into the middle of a children’s game. It’s a pattern that exists outside of just this show, but it’s something that stops women from being full participants in the story even if they now, at least, exist there.

So, what should Silicon Valley do stop being a show about dudes?

Probably nothing.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, we just had a whole season that proved to us that adding women to the show – in the way that the writers are capable of adding women to the show – isn’t going to make much difference. I sincerely appreciate the effort – and it went a long way toward reassuring me that the show has good intentions, but I’m not sure a funny, juvenile, well-integrated female character is really in the cards for Silicon Valley. Melissa McCarthy can only do so many projects at once.

In order to integrate women more into the cast, there would have to be a real desire to do that and an introspective awareness of gender dynamics that hasn’t been present so far.

But, even aside from whether the show can add women, it’s not clear to me that it has to. It would be nice if it did. It would have been outstanding if, when the series was first conceived, someone had pushed it beyond the stereotypes that first come to mind when we think of the real Silicon Valley. But, we don’t have a time machine to go back and tinker with the DNA of the show when it was first created, and, in fairness to the writers, the mix of characters they did end up with works really well. That’s not to say that another mix wouldn’t have worked equally well from a comedy standpoint – just that, if we view its success partly in terms of whether or not it’s funny, Silicon Valley succeeded in being funny.

At this stage, I think that, rather than focusing on what should have been, or could still be different about Silicon Valley, this is a good opportunity to learn some lessons for next time. I think it’s okay for dude shows about dudes to exist – but it should serve as a reminder that we also need more shows about women, and shows about both men and women, together. Silicon Valley wouldn’t be such a sore spot for people if women weren’t underrepresented on TV in the first place and, while I don’t think it’s up to this series to solve that problem, it’s an example that can still play a part in the discussion. What’s striking about women’s invisibility – or women’s later responsible buzz-kill status – on Silicon Valley isn’t anything about the show itself, but the way it fits into a larger pattern.

So, let the dude show be about dudes. But let’s also have shows that aren’t about dudes – or aren’t just about dudes – to balance things out in the end.

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

‘Grace and Frankie’: Sexuality for Seniors and Life After Marriage

Tomlin and Fonda’s onscreen chemistry is absolutely spot on, giving life to moments that may otherwise have fallen flat. One of the most refreshing things about Grace and Frankie is its attitude to female sexuality in older women. Life (moreover, sex) doesn’t have to stop because you’re getting older. The series illustrates this with frankness and honesty, and we don’t shy away from seeing the woman in that light.

This is a guest post by Becky Kukla.

Something really special is happening in Netflix’s new baby Grace and Frankie. The series aired in its entirety a few weeks ago with relatively little promotion, considering the impressive cast involved. Grace and Frankie marks the return of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin to comedy television. Not that either of them ever really left the comedy world, though the last time we saw them together was in the ’80s film 9 to 5, which is by all accounts wonderfully funny and female centric. Tomlin and Fonda both starred in 9 to 5 and have been reportedly BFF’s ever since. In a way, following their 2015 Golden Globes presentation, they are almost a pre-cursor to the female comedy duos of today. Think Tina and Amy, Ilana and Abbi, and Wiig and Rudolph. If anyone set the standard for the hybrid hilarious BFFs/comedy duo, it’s Tomlin and Fonda. So, does Grace and Frankie live up to the hype?

Tomlin and Fonda play Frankie and Grace respectively, two women who are shocked to discover that their business partner husbands have been having a secret affair for the past 20 years. They have decided to divorce their wives and marry each other, after the law changes and “we can do that now.” Sol (Sam Waterston) and Robert (Martin Sheen) begin to make a life with each other, whilst Grace and Frankie are left to pick up the pieces. The first episode, aptly titled “The End,” begins with the moment that Robert and Sol break the news to their wives – over dinner at an expensive restaurant (oh the middle-class!). Grace and Frankie are only friends because of their husband’s partnership-turned-relationship, and the only thing they both have in common is that they are both belong to a group of women who are white, mature, middle-class and are generally ladies of leisure; they don’t work and rely on their husbands’ income. Grace is your typical vodka-infused, uptight, emotionless Lucille Bluth type, and Frankie embodies new-age hippie culture and is more at home smoking a joint than “doing lunch.” The set-up of the show is nothing new; we expect the laughs to come from either tired stereotypes surrounding homosexuality or from Grace and Frankie bickering. It’s a pleasant surprise to find that Grace and Frankie doesn’t rely on old and unfunny cliches to make us laugh (or cry).

Whilst Grace and Frankie could easily have tailed off into a comedy about the titular character’s love/hate relationship, the main focus of the series is actually two women supporting each other and pulling one another through an incredibly painful time. The theme of age and the fear of growing old alone is prevalent through the series, reinforcing society’s stigmas about lonely spinsters. Television often has little time for older women, but Grace and Frankie explores the heartbreak and isolation that comes with going through a divorce after 40+ years. Whilst Grace and Robert seem to hate each other (and have done for some time), the saddest story is that of Frankie and Sol. At times gut-wrenching, we see two people who have formed a relationship on the best of a friendships and having to learn to live without it. Tomlin pulls of a phenomenal performance, and epitomizes the highs and lows of such a life changing event. There is a moment in “The Funeral” where Frankie accidentally gets into Sol’s car, forgetting for a moment that they won’t be going home together. It’s a small action, but so significant and Tomlin handles it with perfection.

Even with all the seriousness, Grace and Frankie still has comedy at its heart. There are some wickedly funny lines (that mostly come from Tomlin’s Frankie) and provide plenty of occasions to laugh out loud. The gags don’t come thick and fast, unlike most contemporary comedy scripts, but Kaufman is clearly very happy to let the punchlines linger. It works superbly well because it allows the show to be incredibly funny without having to instantaneously move on to the next joke. At times it almost feels that there should be a laugh track within those pauses, but the absence of one actually helps to cement the reality of Grace and Frankie’s newfound situation. We are laughing because it’s the only way we can deal with this. Who hasn’t been there? There are also some hilarious recurring themes–Frankie’s relationship with technology, Grace’s exploration into sexuality and home-made lube, and the constant quips that the women throw at each other. Tomlin and Fonda’s onscreen chemistry is absolutely spot on, giving life to moments that may otherwise have fallen flat. One of the most refreshing things about Grace and Frankie is its attitude to female sexuality in older women. Life (moreover, sex) doesn’t have to stop because you’re getting older. The series illustrates this with frankness and honesty, and we don’t shy away from seeing the woman in that light. They aren’t just mothers, grandmothers or wives; they are women, with desires and emotions. It would have been great to see more of this, and more of Jane Fonda looking fucking amazing in lingerie!

The supporting cast are very likable, but Grace’s daughter Brianna (June Diane Raphael) is the standout star, often delivering the best lines of the series. The ensemble cast work incredibly well together, providing a neat backdrop for Tomlin and Fonda. Having said that, the romance/non-romance between Coyote (Frankie’s son) and Mallory (Grace’s daughter) was one of the only issues I took with the series. I’m all for sub plots, but neither Coyote or Mallory are particularly engaging characters hence their “affair” seemed incredibly uninteresting, especially in comparison to the far more engaging main narrative.

Grace and Frankie could have also spent more time with its title characters -the show is about them, but a monumental amount of scenes were dedicated to Robert and Sol and the blossoming of their relationship. Whilst it was great to see a gay couple (especially an older gay couple) transcend camp cliches, I couldn’t help thinking that the show isn’t supposed to be about them. Certainly, the series feels more at ease when Tomlin and Fonda are onscreen and I just wished we had seen more of that, instead of the men.

Grace and Frankie triumphs because it doesn’t utilize the gay characters as a trope or a way to increase viewership. Sexuality doesn’t become a selling point. There is more to Robert and Sol than just their relationship, and there is far more to Grace and Frankie than just jilted middle-class ex-wives. It’s a sweet, easy to watch series which not only makes us laugh out loud but also gives us an insight into characters that are usually simply tired stereotypes. It’s probably not going to push any boundaries or make a statement, but enjoyable and well written. I, for one, can’t wait for Season 2.

Becky Kukla is a 20-something living in London, working in the TV industry (mostly making excellent cups of tea). She spends her spare time watching everything Netflix has to offer and then ranting about it on her blog.