The radical notion that women like good movies
‘Girlhood’ starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.
The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.
Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.
Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).
In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.
Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.
Angelina Jolie executive produced ‘Difret,’ a drama based on the true story of a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl, Hirut, who is kidnapped in her rural village by a much older man and kept captive as his future bride. When Hirut, played beautifully by Tizita Hagere, fights back and accidentally kills her captor, she faces the death sentence, as dictated by tribal law.
Whatever the other problems might be with this film (and they are many), my focus for this review is the character Tiger Lily, who was originally conceived as a racist stereotype by J.M. Barrie and who has had her Native identity completely erased in this latest iteration. Is this progress? I think not.
Like waves lapping persistently against the shore, the film is a succession of small, understated moments. Images of water and the sea are trickled throughout while the power of persistence functions on various symbolic levels.
I don’t know yet if we made a good movie, but I’m pretty sure we made an honest movie—and you can’t do that while you, or your characters, are busy pretending to be “strong.” Being vulnerable, and weak, and pushing ahead anyway is what’s interesting about anyone, fictional or real.
Like ‘Frances Ha,’ ‘Maggie’s Plan’ resonates with the gen-Y, mumblecore picture of adulthood that says, “We’re all average, imperfect, confused people trying to stay afloat in a world that feels random and chaotic.” Everything Maggie does comes out of a sincerely-felt – if slightly selfish – desire to be authentic and live truthfully while not having anyone get mad at her. It’s emblematic of a generation full of people who are re-discovering and re-inventing How To Be A Person while ignoring all the models that came before. It’s messy and screwed-up and sometimes stupid-looking, but there’s an optimism to it, too. There’s a sense that we can all cut our own paths through the wilderness, even if we mess it up and go the wrong way.
There is a deeper truth here: by setting high expectations of men and offering models of liberated behavior that can be imitated, a strong male role model can be a young girl’s best mental defense against patriarchal conditioning. In the absence of one, Elizabeth has created an imaginary friend who models her mental resistance, gendering her own inner anarchic impulses as male.
