Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.
Also, you live in a tower and your mom pulls your hair all the time
If you’ve ever read a fairy tale before, the idea that mother figures end up being witches is notexactlynews. Young, beautiful, kind, and loving parents (mothers, especially) are usually MIA or KIA before the action starts, and the child heroes instead interact with angry, powerful fantasy characters who are about the same age their parents would be, and fill some of the same roles their parents would fill, but also want to murder them in shocking and terrible ways.
The clearest example of this is probably Hansel and Gretel, where parents eat their own children through the proxy of a witch, but it’s a theme that repeats itself in children’s literature.
Disney’s adaptation of Into the Woodscontains a smorgasbord of missing parents, one of whom is replaced by a bone-crushing giant, and one of whom is replaced by a witch. The giant comes into play during the movie’s riff on Jack and the Beanstalk, where fatherless Jack meets an oedipal complex a “big tall terrible lady giant” who behaves toward him as a mother would before her husband tries to eat Jack for lunch (as recapped in this song). The witch is a more developed character, and a better example of what Into the Woods has to offer as an adult-oriented fairy tale.
The witch, who isn’t ever named, plays a role in multiple plot lines, but her origin is in Rapunzel. After catching her neighbour trying to make off with her vegetables, she curses him and locks his daughter in a tower, raising the girl as her own. From there, the story progresses in the usual way – Rapunzel meets a prince; the witch becomes jealous and attacks them; Rapunzel is reunited with her prince and leaves the witch behind forever.
Some of the commentary on Into the Woods (both the movie and the pre-Disney musical) has painted the relationship between Rapunzel and the witch as one about parents struggling to let go of their children and wanting to shelter them from the dangers of the world. James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim even introduce the witch’s signature song, “Stay with Me” as a touching song about family relationships that’s supposed to show us a gentler side of the witch.
And, while it’s true that “Stay with Me” presents the witch as an emotionally complex person, it also presents her as a pretty shitty parent. If you listen to the whole thing, including how the scene begins and ends, she’s emotionally manipulative, self-centred, prone to sudden fits of anger, and unreasonably punitive.
Kind of like Rapunzel’s witch mom in that other Disney movie.
Mother knows your weaknesses
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the dynamic in Into the Woods influenced Tangled in some way.
Tangled is a lot less nuanced in its presentation – the witch in Tangled is purely self-interested and doesn’t show any signs of genuine affection for Rapunzel. In this version of the story, Rapunzel unknowingly has the power to rejuvenate people, and the witch wants her to stay in the tower and act as a personal fountain of youth. As part of her plan to keep Rapunzel under control, she systematically destroys Rapunzel’s confidence and self-esteem, convincing her that she’s so ugly, helpless, and stupid that she’d never survive on her own, and no one else would want her.
The turning point in the story comes when Rapunzel, who’s been raised by an abusive parent her entire life, without anything else to compare it to, realizes that her witch mother doesn’t really love her, and that she deserves to be part of a family that treats her with kindness and respect.
Into the Woods, which is intended for an audience of adults, is more layered. It’s clear that the witch feels more than one way about Rapunzel. It’s not a case where she’s just lying when she says she loves her daughter, but she displays a selfish, greedy kind of love that turns Rapunzel into an object whose feelings and needs aren’t important.
In the movie, their story arc ends when Rapunzel rides into the woods with her prince, vowing never to see the witch again. The second act of the musical, on stage, is much more explicit in showing us the long-term fallout of Rapunzel’s awful childhood – even though things are all right for her now, she can’t ever be happy because of the way she was raised. It’s an experience that’s going to haunt her forever.
Treating your children as things you own that exist to make you happy – and treating them as things that are defective, when they don’t make you happy – is an abusive form of parenting that more than one witch mother seems to exhibit.
She was being so nice just a second ago
Other Mother, the villain of Coraline, doesn’t have a pointy hat and a broom, but she’s a supernatural creature with magic powers who stands in for Coraline’s real mother in much of the movie.
In this case, the swap is more literal. Coraline, feeling temporarily neglected by her parents, finds a door behind the wallpaper in her house, leading to a world where everything is way more fun an interesting. The Other world is a copy of the world Coraline lives in, where everything revolves around her, and where she is (initially) welcomed by an alternate version of her mother, who’s far more attentive, warm and happy. The only thing Coraline has to do to stay in the world where everything’s awesome and great all the time is let Other Mother carve out her eyes.
When Coraline asserts herself by politely refusing to do that, Other Mother turns into a monster who rages at Coraline for disappointing her, kidnaps Coraline’s real parents, and tries to trap Coraline in the Other world forever. We then learn that Other Mother controls everyone else in the Other world, punishing them if they don’t seem happy enough, and forbidding them to talk to each other when she’s not there.
When Coraline asks why Other Mother is so determined to keep her in the Other world, one of the other characters explains that she wants something to love that isn’t her – or, possibly, “She’d just love something to eat.”
The story resolves when Coraline escapes from Other Mother, and realizes that her parents, although they’re not perfect, genuinely love her, care about her feelings and well-being, and, unlike Other Mother, would never hurt her on purpose. The smothering, overly-attentive “love” that Other Mother initially displays for Coraline is really a greedy, hungry desire for something to trap and control. Love doesn’t mean giving someone everything you have so as to buy the right to keep them.
This is isn’t what love means, either
In most children’s stories, the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents. Children need their parents to take care of them, which leaves them at their parents’ mercy; even good parents sometimes express sides of themselves that their children find frightening or confusing – stories where children are mistreated or endangered by mother and father figures who aren’t literally their parents provide a way to confront the fear of mistreatment or endangerment while also providing a safety net that says, “Your real mom and dad aren’t like this.” In other words, it’s too awful to think that your mother is evil, so she becomes two people – one that’s nice (and dead or gone) and one that’s really mean.
Because Other Mother looks and sounds just like Coraline’s real mother, the association between nice mom and mean mom is more obvious in Coraline, but the distance between Coraline’s actual mother and the monster behind the wallpaper is clear. One is a reasonable human being and one is an imposter.
Spirited Away, a Japanese film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, offers a more nuanced reading of the switch between nice mom and mean mom, with the witch grandmother Yubaba. Yubaba is murderous and terrifying, but is occasionally replaced by her kindly “twin sister” who invites the movie’s heroine to call her “grandma” and likes to make people tea and knit sweaters. In general terms, Miyazaki’s films seem comfortable with the idea that people aren’t all one way – that there are many, sometimes contradictory sides to our personalities, that are expressed at different times. By the end of Spirited Away, it’s strongly implied that Yubaba and her “sister” are actually the same person, each expressing different aspects of who she is.
The typical witch substitution removes all the negative aspects from mom, and sends them out into the world as a monster that can be defeated. It’s rare to find a mother figure who’s capable of both kindness and cruelty, and rarer still to find one who is predominantly cruel, without being wicked all the way through.
Where Other Mother and the witch from Tangled are pure evil wearing the mask of friendship, the witch from Into the Woods is the rare example of a mother figure who’s mostly bad, with occasional moments of goodness. That fits the story’s more mature approach to fairy tales, and its overarching message that right and wrong and good and bad are not as clear as children’s books would make them seem.
If the child-eaters of children’s stories are monsters, the ones in real life are more likely to be like the witch in Into the Woods: emotionally-immature adults with poor boundaries, who see their children as things that belong to them, like lamps and cars. They can be nice sometimes. They can elicit pity. They can express vulnerable emotions, and they can share common experiences with parents who are mostly good. They honestly do want something to love, but they’d also love something to eat.
We’re so used to seeing negative human qualities externalized into monsters, that’s it’s still surprising when a character is both monstrous and recognizably human. In a story that’s about adulthood, and coming to understand yourself and the world more clearly, the crucial move Into the Woods makes is in allowing Rapunzel’s witch mother to be her “real” mother – the only one she’ll ever know. The childhood projections of nice mom and mean mom collapse into one single person, and the thought that was too terrible to entertain in childhood – that maybe your mom is a witch – becomes real, layered and deepened through the knowledge that witches can also be people.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.
“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”
The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.
This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.
Rosie O’Donnell
“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”
“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”
Still from Dreamcatcher
Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”
As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”
Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein
“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”
While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”
Difret
This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best!will also screen this weekend.
Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”
Beyond the Lights
As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.
I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.
Jodie Foster
“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”
“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood
Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”
The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’sEmily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”
Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.
If Austen’s earlier ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (both written by age 23) seem to represent “unnatural prudence” by justifying and approving the Madonna’s inhibitions, then her later Emma and Persuasion both defend “natural romance.” Between proper “prudence” and regretful “romance” hovers ‘Mansfield Park’; every avenue is intolerable and every gate locked.
In the 2007 biopic Becoming Jane, Jane Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy is turned into a period romance, ending with Austen refusing to elope with Lefroy for the noblest of reasons and vowing that her heroines will get the happy ending she has been denied. There is a problem with that theory. James McAvoy’s passionate, mischievous Lefroy resembles Austen’s early hero Henry Tilney, of Northanger Abbey, but is otherwise far closer to the archetypal Unsuitable Suitor: Willoughby, Wickham, Crawford and Churchill. If, as the tag-line of Becoming Jane claims, “their love story was her greatest inspiration,” this suggests not the wish fulfillment of “happy endings,” but intense conflict over the Unsuitable Suitor’s incompatibility with social approval.
In Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ female spin on Jungian psychology, Women Who Run With the Wolves, she chooses the African tale “Manawee” to represent the psychological challenges of romantic union. In the story, a man’s dog must discover the names of twins before the man can marry them, avoiding distractions of the flesh to deliver the names to his master. In Estés’ reading, the dog represents the man’s instinctual self; only by recognizing (“naming”) the civilized and wild aspects of woman as dual but inseparable (“twins”), while avoiding the temptations of instant gratification (“flesh”) in favor of deep knowledge, can man qualify himself as woman’s enduring mate.
The Madonna/Whore complex defines as “Madonna” any woman who wins social approval by conforming to convention, and as “Whore” any woman who violates social convention to act on desire (capitalized to distinguish the concept from sex workers). Patriarchal ideology demands that the Whore be rejected and the Madonna rewarded, to discipline female behavior. By contrast, Jane Austen’s writing has the logic of Estés’ “Manawee” fable: the inseparable duality of Madonna and Whore. Marianne Dashwood loves Willoughby, therefore Brandon must win Marianne by protecting his Whore ward who elopes with Willoughby; Elinor Dashwood loves Edward Ferrars, therefore Ferrars must prove his loyalty to the Whore, Lucy Steele, to win Elinor; Elizabeth Bennet falls for Wickham, therefore Darcy must protect her Whore sister who elopes with Wickham; sibling-doubles Henry and Mary Crawford are dismissive of Whore Maria, therefore must be rejected by cousin-doubles Fanny and Edmund; Frank Churchill loves loyal Jane, who Whorishly defies propriety with their secret engagement, therefore Churchill appreciates Emma; Knightley loves Emma, therefore he is protective of Jane and urges Emma to stop distrusting her; Captain Wentworth shows his love for Anne Elliot by appreciating Louisa Musgrove, whose Whorish passion Anne has suppressed. The pattern is too consistent for coincidence: no hero in any Austen novel wins the heroine without protecting her Whore counterpart. The intense resistance to sexual double standards that this implies is often unappreciated, because of the propriety of its expression.
Sense and Sensibility‘s Marianne is particularly fascinating in this light. Her binary with Brandon’s Whore ward establishes Marianne as Madonna, and therefore entitled to count as heroine. Her binary with super-Madonna sister Elinor, however, establishes Marianne as Whore, flaunting social conventions by writing to Willoughby and flirting openly. By centering dual Madonna and Whore heroines, Austen foregrounds the internal conflict over the love plots. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl“ points to convincing parallels between Marianne’s characterization and the symptoms of female masturbation pathologized as “hysteria” by that era’s medical literature. I’m skeptical, however, of Sedgwick suggesting eroticism in the tension between Marianne and Elinor, rather than drama of the divided self. Elinor’s romantic pain over Ferrars is exactly equal to Marianne’s over Willoughby; she attacks Marianne for daring to express what she herself suppresses, then mourns over Marianne’s fevered body as an inseparable part of herself. As Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, declares: “one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half.”
Andrew Davies, one of the most successful adaptors of Austen, has stated repeatedly that he believes elements of sex and love, even when pushed to the background by propriety, are always important (and faces Janeite wrath for this insight, as in this post dismissing the Whore as an irrelevant “bratty teenager.” As if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures) Davies famously modernized the sexual tension of Pride and Prejudice by adding scenes of Colin Firth bathing and fencing. His version of Northanger Abbey explores the sexual overtones of Gothic horror to portray Catherine Morland’s craving for thrill and exploration as basically sexual curiosity, while JJ Feild’s Henry Tilney does justice to the ideal hero as playful liberator (is there a petition for JJ Feild, James McAvoy or Tom Hiddleston to play all future incarnations of Willoughby, Wickham, Crawford, and Churchill?).
Austen’s own relationship to the Whore is conflicted: Lydia Bennet is foolish for eloping with Wickham, but we’re encouraged to despise Mary’s smug moralizing over woman’s irretrievable virtue. Austen’s early Lady Susan stars a wickedly anarchic Whore, who flaunts society’s ageism and sexual propriety, like a slightly tamer Marquise de Merteuil but without real punishment (summon Diablo Cody to adapt!). Emma marks the full repentance of the Madonna for her self-righteous enforcement of social values. Persuasion lets the Unsuitable Suitor hold the Madonna accountable: “I could think of you only as one who had yielded, who had given me up, who had been influenced by anyone rather than by me.”
We prefer our Austen heroines spunky but not subversive. Elizabeth Bennet is the fan favorite, a spitfire Madonna, mistaken in her judgments but never “one who yielded” to social pressure, nor one who “forgot herself” (i.e. forgot social pressure) by eloping. In Becoming Jane, Anne Hathaway plays Austen herself as just such a spunky tightrope-walker. She would never just “give Lefroy up,” but martyrs herself nobly for his starving siblings. That Lefroy went on to marry elsewhere (whether he named his daughter after Jane or not), rather than waiting until he had independent means to win her, thus reflects poorly on his faithlessness alone. Our heroine is above reproach. The problem with such spunkiness, and the fantasy of social immunity it represents, is that it trivializes social pressure. Spunky heroines suggest any female failure be blamed on their lack of bootstrapping pluck, rather than on crushing social systems. From a patriarchal perspective, Pride and Prejudice, which Austen herself considered “rather too light,” is the most comforting of her novels: dominant ideology is never confronted because the patriarch just happens to be wryly wise, the Eligible Suitor just happens to be desirable and the Unsuitable Suitor just happens to be “one of the most worthless young men in Britain” (though it’s made clear that Elizabeth would heed Aunt Gardiner and reject him regardless).
Andrew Davies presents ‘The Strange Case of Lizzy Jekyll and Lydia Hyde’
Replace noble Darcy with foolish Rushworth, cynical Wickham with impulsive Crawford, and you have the brooding beast that is Mansfield Park, Austen’s most conflicted masterpiece. Instead of Dashwood duality, there are three sisters in the older generation: Lady Bertram married for prestige and became a pointless, pampered shell; Mrs. Price married for passion and became enslaved to her husband in crushing poverty; childless widow Aunt Norris is a nightmare spinster, channeling sexual frustrations and social resentments into interference in others’ lives. Against this universal failure, the younger generation struggles for happiness. Maria tries to choose Rushworth’s prestige, but revolts and pursues passion with Henry Crawford, before being dumped and joining Aunt Norris in hellish spinsterhood. Fanny is paralyzed by danger on all sides and favors her safely protective cousin, who actually craves Mary Crawford’s rebellious fire. Mansfield Park’s romance cannot be dismissed as insipid cousin-love; it offers real passion with the Crawfords, before tearing it apart through inhibitions and internalized whorephobia (if you liked Pride and Prejudice, you’ll LOVE Inhibitions and Internalized Whorephobia!). Though Henry has been amusingly described as the “original Nice Guy” for refusing to acknowledge Fanny’s lack of interest, what fascinates is Austen using her full powers to make us root for Henry, before mercilessly ripping him away. Henry is the hero who fails; he has “the open-hearted, the eager character” so prized in Persuasion, but he fetishizes a purity he cannot possess and disdains the love that sacrificed everything for him. Henry tantalizes with the promise of mental and sexual liberation, but his double standards turn his promise into Dead Sea fruit.
One of the most symbolic scenes occurs with Fanny stuck on a bench, watching Maria strain for liberation from fiancé Rushworth’s grounds. Rushworth runs for the key to properly release her, but Henry proposes dodging the iron gate: “I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.” A locked garden was a medieval allegory for virginity. We can read similar symbolism into Louisa Musgrove’s ruinous leap in Persuasion, which says of heroine Anne: “she had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” If Austen’s earlier Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (both written by age 23) seem to represent “unnatural prudence” by justifying and approving the Madonna’s inhibitions, then her later Emma and Persuasion both defend “natural romance.” Between proper “prudence” and regretful “romance” hovers Mansfield Park; every avenue is intolerable and every gate locked.
Bringing us to Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation, Mansfield Park. In the book, the patriarch Sir Thomas’ trip to the West Indies is an excuse for his family to flirt freely, but Rozema confronts the implication that Sir Thomas is a slaver; his character is given a darker edge, while his eldest son is not feckless but traumatized by flashbacks of slavery. Rozema’s Mansfield Park can thus be compared to Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, which uses Bollywood influences to foreground the colonized India merely mentioned in the book, or Andrea Arnold’s confrontation of racism in Wuthering Heights. It is notable that Austen chose to make her patriarch a slaver, particularly since the novel is commonly read as defending the Park’s “traditional values” against the modernizing Crawfords. In the book, Fanny’s question about the slave trade meets “such a dead silence,” while the estate shares the name of Lord Mansfield, the 18th century Lord Chief Justice who set a legal precedent for abolition. Rozema’s choice to highlight slavery’s implications is bold and refreshing, but her film frustrates with its compulsory spunkiness.
Rozema admits that she finds Fanny “annoying” and was trying to empower her by making her a “wild beast” and witty writer. Giving the lower class heroine a satirical tongue must have seemed like a good strategy for criticizing patriarchal values. But the spunky woman is gender’s Uncle Tom; her psychological immunity to suffering ultimately lets viewers off the hook. If you’re going to confront slavery in your radical Austen adaptation, you must equally confront the psychosexual torture of the Madonna/Whore complex. Instead, Rozema offers a stale reheating of Pride and Prejudice‘s comfort food:Fanny’s a smirking Elizabeth, Edmund’s a duller Darcy and Maria’s a bitchier Lydia. A really radical adaptation would treat Maria’s passion and confusion with the sympathy of Kate Winslet’s Marianne. A really radical adaptation would make Crawford the sexually magnetic center, giving Fanny the painfully paralyzed inhibition of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.
Mira Nair, Andrea Arnold, and Patricia Rozema are pioneering re-imaginings of classic literature, that confront our colonial past. But there can be no definitive adaptation of Mansfield Park, or confrontation of our patriarchal past, until we’re ready to get uncomfortable about sexual repression. Couldn’t Emma Thompson and Ang Lee take a crack at it?
Our theme week for February 2015 will be Unlikeable Women.
Representations of female antiheroines are on the rise. Contemporary audiences love morally ambiguous female characters who are hard, powerful, and determined. The soft-spoken but ruthless Claire Underwood of House of Cards is a prime example of women we love to hate, who push or ignore boundaries to get what they want. The elegant antiheroines who tend to be wealthy, goal-driven, and charismatic (Olivia Pope of Scandal, Patty Hewes of Damages, or Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent), while comparable, are a slightly different breed from the outright unlikeable women who are popping up all over film and television.
Whiny, self-obsessed Piper Chapman of Orange is the New Black and Hannah Horvath of Girls are perfect examples of these downright unlikeable female characters. What sets them apart from the traditional antiheroine archetype? Michelle Jurgen of Mic posits,
“It’s alienating simply because we’re not used to being served up unpalatable women: women who are naked just because, who give themselves terrible haircuts, and who are frank, judgmental and do whatever they want without regard for others. Women who act in a way we’re used to seeing only male characters act, which has unfairly branded them unlikable rather than well-crafted and complex.”
Jurgen further goes on to suggest that it is the humanness of these antiheroines that is difficult for audiences to stomach. Along with Piper and Hannah are characters like Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones and Annalise Keating of How to Get Away with Murder who are equally vulnerable. They’re petty, manipulative, and needy. They make mistakes, often stupid mistakes, and they’re usually in damage-control mode, putting out the fires they either set or caused to be set.
If these unlikeable women are so “unpalatable,” why are they still being created? Why are we still watching them? Why are these productions winning so many awards and accolades?
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.
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‘Starry Eyes’ is a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, it is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities about struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Poster for Starry Eyes
Starry Eyes was the kind of film that stuck with me.
It’s a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well-observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, Starry Eyes is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is.
As soon as I saw it, I had to write something about it, which I did in December for our Reality TV theme week. It stuck with me and I wanted to talk about it, I needed to share it with other people.
The great things about being a writer is sometimes, just sometimes, when you have questions about a movie, you get lucky enough to ask some of them. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities of struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Bitch Flicks: Where did the story of Starry Eyes come from? What were some of you inspirations?
Dennis: I guess it came from us, Kevin and I, wanting to do a story about transformation, something about the metamorphosis in it. We always wanted to have a sequence in a film where a person slowly goes through a change. So we first approached it with that basic concept but then we also knew that we wanted to really focus on a strong character, a person who also just mentally goes through a change throughout the whole movie and that the mental choices and decisions and changes are just as big as the physical ones. So it really started there and then it was just about the decision of what she would be changing into. We decided, with the kind of scenes and themes that really interested us, that it might be a good Los Angeles story, and if it was going to be a Los Angeles story it might be really interesting if she began a star or celebrity and we could look at the industry. As filmmakers there’s a sense of being on the outside of the industry and scratching to get in, waiting for your big break. Actors often go through the same thing. It was really about having a message to the film and trying to say something, finding an exciting, really viseral way to tell that story
Kevin: As for influences, we were very influenced by Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession , that was a big influence on the performance, we wanted Alex [Essoe] to capture that raw energy that Isabelle Adjani has in that film. That and other things like Polanski films, such as Rosemary’s Babyand Repulsion, and things like Carrie and The Entity, even things outside of the genre like Boogie Nights were great, those rise and fall stories of people desperately trying to make it in the industry. They might do things in that situation that they never thought they would.
BF: Sarah is a fascinating and complicated character, even when we first meet her, she is not entirely likable. She’s vain and believes she is superior to a lot of the people around her. Can you tell me a bit about the character of Sarah?
Dennis: There’s an unspoken rule sometimes in screenwriting that you have write likable characters, you hear this a lot from people, and in recent years that rule has kind of gone by the wayside. What we feel is that you have to write interesting characters and if someone is interesting and compelling you’ll follow them through all the choices they make, as bad as they are. Look at a show like Mad Men or Breaking Bad and the characters those shows follow, people love to watch characters like those. Strangely in movies this doesn’t happen enough and it should, particularly in independent cinema where you can get away with a lot more and break more rules. So, we like the idea of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. At the beginning of the movie you think you’re watching the girl next door, the girl fresh off the bus, that she’s innocent and sweet and she’s going to be corrupted. You think that you’re watching that person and that all of her friends are just terrible terrible people out to get her, and it definitely seems that way because the movie is very subjective. But we are very conscious of that arc at the halfway point of the movie. As the movie goes along to start to realize that maybe Sarah, the person you’re following is not such a good person. There’s a trail of bread crumbs along the way and the choices she makes that start to define the person that she really is and you start to realize that you’re watching a person who is figuratively a monster and is literally going to become one. In the end, the friends that you perceived as being bad people are just, people who at the end of the day want what’s best for her. The movie cons you in an interesting way and every time we’ve shown it to people there’s usually a point where we realize that the audience is really on Sarah’s side and by the end of movie, no matter what she’s doing and how terrible it gets, they are always siding with her.
BF: In addition, Sarah may be a little unhinged–we see her fits early on and they serve as a prime for the grotesque things we will see happen to her later. Why were these fits important to the character? Can you tell me a bit about your portrayal of Sarah’s self hatred and her violent fits?
Kevin: It’s not that this company takes her and corrupts her. It’s like the company sees this in her, they see that she’s a little unhinged and there’s this rawness within her, that’s what attracts them to her. That’s what gets her what she wants in the end, by acting out this cult’s will. It was sort of like a statement of how a lot of people, in order to make it in these industries that are very dog eat dog, they’re willing to step all over everybody else and do whatever needs to be done, and sometimes they do some horrible things to people. In order to make that statement we wanted to show that the people who are willing to do these things might not be the best put together people. The cult sees this and exploits it to her advantage.
Sarah yearns for an Old Hollywood where she can be discovered
BF: Besides Sarah, many other characters are difficult to like such as Sarah’s boss and her friends Can you tell me a bit about this? Though you suggest character as “Hollywood types” we also learn they three dimensional human beings. Her boss at the restaurant ogles her, but later gives her heartfelt advice, her friends are catty but seem to genuinely care. Why was this important?
Dennis: I think the mistake that a lot of horror movies make is that they feel like if somebody going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be the competition of a villain, then they shouldn’t be three dimensional. We never approach anything like that, every character had to be real. When we were writing that ending of the movie, that violent climax, we really were very conscious of the fact that these needed to be feel like very real people that she was doing this thing to. Because the movie is very subjective, you’re siding with Sarah, she’s in every sense of the movie, Alex Essoe gives a great performance, so its very easy to side with her but if you stop for a moment as an audience member and put yourself in the perspective of any of the other characters, you really can see it from their side. If you put yourself in Erin’s position for instance, that’s the bitchy friend, she clearly likes Danny, the filmmaker friend, feels that Sarah is trying to move in on Danny or Danny’s trying to move in on her, they’re both actors, they’re both the same age, competing for the same parts, and she might be kind of catty to Sarah but Sarah is already standoffish and kind of cold to her. If you put yourself in Pat Healy’s shoes, the restaurant owner, this is a guy who’s just trying to run a business, it’s his dream, it’s what he believes in and he has this girl that’s coming in late, that’s talking on her cell phone, that’s bad at her job and she’s kind of disrespecting him, she quits, she comes back, she slaps him at work, she’s sick at work. It’s kind of funny when you realize that, though you’re in Sarah’s worldview the entire time, there are these moments where you can step outside of her world and realize that everyone is just caught up in her wake. So these characters had to be three dimensional to reinforce the idea that she’s not a good person and there are these people that seem bad but again, they’re just caught up in her wake.
Kevin: It was important that at the halfway point where she goes to the producer’s house and decides that she’s going to give up her pride or self respect in order to achieve her dreams, from that point on the tables get reversed. When she does this one big thing, it clues the audience in that, okay she’s actually not the best person, and from that moment on, watching her you notice these other people aren’t so bad. It changes your perspective. And she actually gets sick physically so you can see her friends are going like “OK, what’s going on, are you alright?” When things get serious, they turn off all their competitive little shots at Sarah and turn on their concern and Sarah’s just getting worse. So at that moment she reveals her true self.
BF: There is a great reverence in the film for Old Hollywood. Sarah has a collage of classic actresses on her walls and aspires to be just like them. Astraeus Pictures seems to have once had golden years and the Producer’s office is decorated like a scene from an old film. What is old Hollywood legend’s place in the story?
Dennis: It’s really about how Sarah is sort of naive. She’s a person who has talent but she’s also a person living in a very modern world where things are done differently but thinking that she can go about them in a very traditional nostalgic way. She’s probably the type of person who thinks she’d be on Hollywood Boulevard at Starbucks and think that she would be noticed by a producer and the producer would cast her in a big movie. So that was to make her feel like a little girl sometimes. She had these dreams of being like these old starlets from the golden age, but the reality is she’s basically being exploited by this company. We like the idea that she would sneer and look down at her friends who just wanted to go out on the weekends and make Kickstarter videos and would look at things and think I’m doing things the traditional way, I’m doing it the way that you’re supposed to do it, I’m paying my dues, and then the irony is that she doesn’t. She basically sells out and takes the easy way out.
Kevin: I would add to that that its sort of the idea that if you look at Hollywood in say the 1930s and whatnot, production companies used to have exclusive deals with actors, and they were like an MGM actor and they worked exclusively for MGM. We wanted her to have that sort of “I’m doing it the traditional way” feel because in the end Astreus Picture kind of owns her.
BF: The basic story of selling your soul for fame is not a new one. Do you feel this story particularly speaks to us today?
Dennis: We did that consciously. The Faustian idea of selling your soul is a very old idea and you can see it in basically any genre of movies. We definitely wanted a short hand to the concept so people were able to wrap their heads around it quickly and that wasn’t overly complicated. This freed us as filmmakers to really dig a little deeper into that theme. I think as filmmakers, especially with movies about movies, you don’t get into the grounded reality of the situation, we usually focus on the machinations of the studio system, the actual making of the movie. Whereas with Starry Eyes we wanted to show younger people today, working a shitty job and coming home to your apartment and crying with the door shut and you have friends right outside in your living room, and going to parties and hiding in the bathroom. We wanted to show a different side of that whole concept.
Gore is used to highlight the horror of Sarah’s transformation
BF: The film can be read as an allegory, for how someone might be corrupted by their desire for fame as Sarah makes a choice to sever her relationships with the people she believes are holding her back. Was this intentional?
Kevin: That was pretty much why we set out to do it. The whole point of taking a transformation tale and putting it in Hollywood was to make it an allegory. A celebrity’s not a kind of monster we’re seen in a horror movie. People ask us all the time, what was she at the end, what was that creature, they almost want some real world answer, like was she a demon, was she a vampire, something like that. And we say, no she got the role, she’s on her way to becoming a star at the end. Sometimes they walk away not satisfied with the answer but the answer works on an allegorical level. The allegorical level of the film is almost more important than what’s going on at the surface level of the film, it’s what’s actually wrapped up in the end, the allegory.
Dennis: I think if you watch the film a second time, you’re see that the film basically bookends itself. It begins with a girl starring at herself in the mirror in her underwear, kind of hating herself and really unhappy with her body, and she’s beautiful and talented and she should be happy but she’s not. She feels like she’s at the end of her rope and she needs to get discovered now before it gets too late. And then through out the movie you’ll see that she constantly returns to that room and kind of beats herself up, looking at the pictures of stars on her walls, and at the end of the movie its the same thing only she’s now gotten what she wants only she’s a phony version of it. Now she’s gotten the role but she’s this bald, shell of a person, she’s come full circle. If you look at the end of the movie she’s completely happy but if you look at her at the beginning of the movie, she’s not. So the movie might be this very bleak tragedy in some ways but not for Sarah, she’s gotten what she wants. As the audience, you realize she just didn’t get it the way you thought she would.
Kevin: The whole movie’s about choice and ambition and what people will turn into a weapon and what people will be willing to do to achieve their dreams. The second she looks in the mirror and likes what she sees, her journey’s complete
BF: This story seems so familiar to young actresses. Did any of the actresses you worked with have their own personal Hollywood horror stories? Did any of them inform the story with their own experiences?
Dennis: Nothing that bad but it seems like actors, men and women, women more so, there’s always this prevailing sense something that when you’re on certain sets or around certain people that there might be a sleaze factor. As far as competition goes? We had actors who told us they had best friends and roommates who were up for the same roles they were, who got the roles and they didn’t. LA is a very big town but it’s also a very small community, I think a lot of actors will relate. With a lot of the actors who came in to read, the second the looked at the script they had a story to tell us about something that happened to them or why it spoke to them so much. We had a guy who came to the premiere in LA and stopped me in the lobby and and told us it spoke to him a lot because he was up for a role and one day the producer took him out and started to kiss him and basically just molested him. I think that stuff, maybe you don’t hear about it as much any more but I think it still goes on.
BF: Why were you drawn to this story? Particularly as men when it focuses so much on Sarah’s experiences as a young woman trying to be a star?
Kevin: I think we knew beforehand, writing it that this was an issue women dealt with more in Hollywood. As far as someone struggling to start their career before they get to old or feeling like there’s a ticking clock, like they have to get going before it’s too late, I feel like that pressure is put on women a lot more than it is on men. You watch movies and you’ll have a 50 year old man and his wife will be played by someone who’s 23. I feel like male actors can continue to have a career as they get older, they can play character roles or even leading men roles and their female counterpart is two decades younger than them. I feel like that pressure to strike while the iron is hot or get your career going before you get too old is real issue that women in Hollywood have to deal with.
BF: What is the film’s stance on Sarah’s decision to perform sexual acts to get the role? Are we meant to judge her for this?
Dennis: It’s tough because if you look at the movie, every decision she makes is her own, this is not a person who is being corrupted. We were really conscious of the fact that if you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Sarah is always in the driver’s seat. If you’re judging anyone you’re judging Sarah, you judge the people around her but you’ll see that they’re only presenting her with options and she’s choosing the wrong ones. We didn’t want her to feel like a victim, the people around her are victims. I think even from the opening shot of the film if you look closely you can see that something is not right with this girl and as it moves on, there’s a series of situations, like when the girl breaks her nose at the pool and she laughs, that she’s just not a great person.
BF: I enjoyed that Sarah was not coerced or tricked into her decision. Though she becomes a victim, with horrific things happening to her body, she continues to have some agency as she has made a conscious decision to do whatever she can for fame. Indeed, instead of killing random people, in the end, she kills the people who she saw as holding her back. Why did you feel it was important to give Sarah this agency?
Kevin: I think a lot of times women characters get exploited in movies like films like this, things are constantly being done to them and they’re helpless to deal with it, and that’s just a form of exploitation, which is fine but we weren’t really interested in dealing with that.
Dennis: I don’t think you see enough movies where a female character really owes her own decisions. She doesn’t have to be sweet, she can be terrible. There’s something kind of fun to make a character like this who makes her own decisions and allows herself to be corrupted, who allows herself to be exploited and is be fine with it in the end. There’s something a little bold about how Sarah does all that in the movies. It’s terrible and you can judge her but its her own choice in the end.
In Sarah’s job at Big Tators, she feels exploited each day.
BF: It was interesting that Sarah is already used to being objectified. She works as a waitress at a Hooters-like restaurant which invites customers to ogle her. Why give Sarah this particular day job? Because of this, there is minimal different between Sarah’s daily life and the initial creepiness of her audition process. Tell me about this contrast?
Kevin: It’s like what she says when she’s talking to Danny, “I feel like I’m selling my soul already, it might as well be for something I love.” It kind of helps push her in the direction she makes in movie and also kind of helps seal the believability of her making that decision, that she’s the kind of person who already in her life is taking jobs or doing what she needs to to survive and sometimes it’s not necessarily where she wants to be and she hates it there and feels exploited but she needs to pay her bills- we hear later in the movie that she needs to pay her rent- so it’s sort of like when she took this job at Big Tators you see already that she’s not like one of the other waitresses that’s happily singing the birthday song and stuff, so its clear already she’s not the type of girl who thinks its fun to work in a place like this. so she must feel like she’s exploited working there and that’s why she lashing out at the bosses. She’s doing what she needs to to survive and that job really sets out that character element that she’s someone who will do things that she might not like or might be below what considers her standard but she will do them to survive or if its to get what she wants.
BF: Starry Eyes is not a film for the squeamish, there are several scenes of gore and brutal violence. The film also employs body horror to show Sarah’s transformation. Sarah vomits bugs and disintegrates until she looks like a badly strung-out junkie. Can you tell me a bit about Sarah’s transformation and your use of gore to accomplish it?
Dennis: I think body horror is one of the most effective sub-genres of horror because there’s something coming from inside you that you can’t escape. With a werewolf there’s a way to kill werewolves, with a haunted house movie there’s a way to escape a haunted house but with body horror, you can’t escape your own body and I think because the metaphor of this movie was about this actress feeling like she’s at the end of her rope and she had to make it as a star or its too late, for all the reasons of why we chose to focus on a woman instead of man, if you add body horror into that equation it’s ten times worse, especially if you focus on a character who already has bod issues. You can see in the beginning scene of the movie that she thinks she’s too heavy even if she’s very thin. She pulls her hair out when things don’t go right, this is a person that already has a lot of psychological triggers so to introduce body horror into the movie and to hopefully do it effectively, which I hope we did, to us was just physically unnerving and psychologically unnerving. As horror fans, Kevin and I have seen a lot of what there is to see but there’s something about seeing a person pulling their hair out or pulling their nail of that never ceases to kind of skeeze us out.
Kevin: It’s also like when she vomits up worms that’s coming from inside of her, it’s almost like she’s dying from the inside out, so this whole idea of what we call selling her soul, is really her giving up her self respect and we’re just watching her old body crumbling, but in the end she’s going to be rewarded with this beautiful new body that doesn’t have any imperfections or concern for others. That’s sort of what the body horror was representing here.
BF: Starry Eyes was partially funded through Kickstarter. What is it about this story that people will relate to?
Kevin: I think it works as a Kickstarter film because the whole film is really about someone banging their head against the wall trying to get into an industry that’s very hard to get into and here me and Dennis have been working together for 20 years making films and this is the first one that’s ever gotten a real release. We put a lot of that in the movie, our feelings of trying to get into this industry, so I think this story was a great project to be funded, at least in part, on Kickstarter because everyone on Kickstarter is making films at an independent level or a crowd source level because they’re not getting that money or through the traditional means of the Hollywood system. That’s basically what you’re doing on Kickstarter, it’s people trying to make a film without the Hollywood system.
Is Sarah a victim or a villain?
BF: Part of the reason the film works so well is Alex Essoe’s knockout performance in the physically and emotionally demanding role of Sarah. Tell me about Essoe.
Kevin: Working with Alex was great. This is a film where an actor has to use everything in their toolkit. It goes from a girl being insecure and looking in the mirror at the beginning, insecure and emotional, to the monster she becomes at the end. She really goes the full gamut and does just about everything. It was really important when we were looking for somebody to play this role that it wasn’t about talent, we needed somebody who really understood the material and was game to do this. If you get somebody that is going to have to be in every scene of the movie and do the things that you have to do in this movie from four hours of make-up to crawling out of the ground to freaking out on the floor, there’s a lot of things in here that people might shy away from and if you’ve got somebody that’s not down to take on that performance or doesn’t understand the material, and they’re in every scene of the movie, you’re never going to make your schedule because in a low budget film like this, we really had a tight schedule. If somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing or is going “why” or “I don’t get it” or saying “I’m not going to do that it,” you’re not going to make your schedule. So it was really important to have someone who really understood the material and was game to do it. Alex, she knew all the references, all the films we were going to tell her to see, she had seen them all already, she loved them all, she saw this as a chance to do the full spectrum of acting, like “why wouldn’t I want to do this movie, I get to do every thing that I’ve learned how to do as an actor” and we were like, yes, totally. So she was great, she never complained she was down to do everything, she brought a lot of her own stuff to the role, she really elevated the role. It’s tough when you have a script, you have a character on a page that you wrote, you look at people and there’s a lot of talented people out there and they may give a good reading but that’s just two scenes, you never know are they doing to come and set and be this character. And she just came and she brought her own ideas and added a lot of nuance to the character, she just became the character. I watch the movie now and think, yeah, Sarah Walker now exists through Alex Essoe.
BF: What is your next project?
Kevin: We are constantly writing every day. I like in the same apartment complex as Dennis and everyday we work on our scripts. We have a few things we’re working on but getting a film off the ground if very difficult and a lot of elements factor into it. We’ve got a few scripts we’re working on and we would like to do and its all dependent on everything falling in the right place to see which one comes together.
Starry Eyes comes out on Blu-Ray on Feb. 3.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.
Prince-Bythewood’s ability to draw commentary about the Black family experience in America is so well-integrated we, as the audience, are able to enjoy the emotional ride the characters take us on without the feeling that we’re watching a heavy-handed representation of the social issues of the time.
While the show is not overt, at its core the story is about race and gender relations. Race- and gender-specific language is often omitted from the dialogue, yet the meaning is there. Rhimes takes the White patriarchy of America and individualizes its contributors so that neither (most of) the characters nor the audience realizes that they are contributing to harmful White patriarchal norms and internalizing them until the rare moments when they take a step back from the action.
The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”
What makes Desmond’s unique is its layered and often nuanced portrayal of immigrant Afro-Europeans and their assimilating progeny that are more closely connected to their African roots than any African American TV show I’d ever seen. It also has a cross representation of class in Black British society by showing retired, working class, upper-middle class, college-educated, college-bound, and not college-bound Black people interacting together all the time. Not only are different classes intermingling, but there are also four series regulars who are white, and their whiteness is not the punchline of tired racial jokes.
While many of the film’s events differ from Gardner’s memoir, the film compensates for this with its extremely authentic and loving portrait of a Black father/son relationship that is rarely seen in mainstream media.
When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”
The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason ‘Smart Guy’ comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.
There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society.
The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.
This guest post by Rachel Wortherley appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.
Eve’s Bayou (1997) begins with the haunting lines: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” With this preamble is the expectation of the tragic to occur. While the core of a majority of Black family dramas involves tragedy in the form of slavery, poverty, or mental/physical abuse, Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut reinvents the way audiences view Black families. On a rare occasion, the story of a Black family is allowed to be told through the eyes of a Black female protagonist. Eve’s Bayou is in part a “coming of age” drama.
The history of the Batiste family of Louisiana lies in their ancestry. Eve, an African slave, saved a French aristocrat, Jean-Paul Batiste, from cholera. In return, Batiste granted her freedom and named the island in Louisiana, after her. In turn, Eve bore Batiste 16 children. Ten-year-old Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett), the story’s protagonist, is named after her and is a descendant of Eve and Jean-Paul Batiste. The fact that their ancestry is an integral part of their lives reveals several things: the first being that they clearly know who they are in terms of culture. Through the sordid decades of slavery, Blacks in America have little to no knowledge of their genealogy. It is a part of our past that is not clearly defined. However, in Eve’s Bayou, their background is not only acknowledged but embraced. They can often be heard speaking French phrases throughout the film. The story of Eve also elevates the image of Black women as the foundation of families. This element becomes most important as the film progresses.
The first time audiences meet the Batiste family, we are immediately thrust into a world that is uncharted and unfamiliar for most Black families in motion pictures, as well as the audiences. The hot sound of jazz fills the Victorian mansion, women are dressed in fine satins, and laughter fills the air. The young Eve appears and immediately incites mischief upon her brother Poe (Jake Smollett), while her sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), reprimands them, likening them to William Shakespeare’s Tybalt and Mercutio. Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson) is their father and a successful, beloved doctor in the community. Their mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is a homemaker, whose beauty is referenced throughout the film. There appears to be a strong family dynamic and they are living the quintessential American dream. Here, the Black family to audiences is “normalized” to a general American landscape. This factor becomes a metaphor for the supernatural aspects—the gift of second sight—of the film. Lemmons forces her audience to see beyond what is generally depicted about a Black family in the 1950s.
While the traditional family dynamic is important in the film, the coming of age aspect is even more so instrumental to the plot. When audiences first meet Eve, we see through her eyes how she feels marginalized within the family dynamic. She suffers from the classic “middle child” syndrome. Poe, her younger brother, is the quintessential “mama’s boy” to Roz, while Cisely is the clandestine “daddy’s girl” to Louis. Eve finds kinship in her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan). Both share two qualities: their beautiful red hair and the gift of second sight. Not only do Eve and Mozelle see the future, but they are hyper-aware of their surroundings. This becomes especially significant when Eve becomes cognizant of her father’s infidelity. This realization not only disrupts the harmonious father-daughter relationship, but ultimately changes their family dynamic.
Louis’ penchant for adultery is not something that is usually portrayed in stories about Black families. Largely, Black fathers are either portrayed as: physically/emotionally absent or highly upstanding. In comedies, fathers are most likely the source of comic relief, while his wife is the “straight man” and the situational aspects generally focus on him or he is involved in some manner in the resolution. A current example of this is ABC’s Black-ish, while earlier incarnations are The Cosby Show, and The Jeffersons. I think that in Lemmons’ film, as well as Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, fathers are portrayed as loving, yet flawed. Louis is undoubtedly a serial adulterer, but that does not change his affection toward his children.
When Eve discovers Louis’ infidelity she and Cisely begin to either cling to or detach themselves from him. Eve accompanies him on his house calls—once he closes the door in Eve’s face to give a patient what can be presumed “sexual healing.” This later prompts Eve to question, “Do you ever want other children besides us?” Louis assures her by telling her that he loves her mother, but the seed of distrust was planted the night of the party when she witnessed his infidelity in the shed with family friend, Mrs. Matty Mereaux. Cisely begins to cling to her father. She waits up for him at night when he arrives home late from house calls and pours him a drink to assuage his stress. Cisely also contends with Roz, who scolds Louis about his late nights. Cisely sees her mother as the antagonist who is driving her father out of their lives. This anxiety arguably prompts the “kiss of death” that transpires between Louis and Cisely.
The kiss that occurs between Cisely and her father is what Eve thinks led to his subsequent death. Cisely confides to Eve that one night, she went to comfort her father and a sexual kiss was exchanged. At her resistance he slaps her to the grown and a look of rage filled his eyes. This admission prompts Eve to procure the local witch, Elzora (Diahann Carroll), to cast a spell of death. However, the night that Louis is killed, something within Eve prompts her to attempt to save her father. In going to the town bar to bring him home, it is likely that Eve has reservations about how he hurt Cisely. But it is hard to not believe her sister when Eve has witnessed her father’s distrust on a number of occasions. Yet, it is too late, Mr. Mereaux in a crime of passion, shoots Louis dead, with Eve as witness. This moment leaves Eve forever changed, even more so when she discovers that Louis did not molest Cisely. Rather Cisely’s prominent memory is that Louis hurt her. Symbolically this means that everything Cisely disbelieved about her father to be true.
It is significant that in the beginning of the film, adult Eve states: “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14.” Whereas at the end she says: “The summer my father said goodnight I was 10 years old, my brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely had just turned 14. ” This changing in lines demonstrates that Eve accepts that her father’s death was not of her provocation, but his own.
The death of Louis allows for several new things to occur. It brings Roz closer to her children, it allows Eve to understand that not everything is “black and white,” and most significantly, women continue to be the foundation of their family. Though Poe is the sole male in their household, perhaps upbringing from Roz, Cisely, Eve, and Mozelle will influence him on how to respect women. However, Cisely and Eve are missing years in their adolescence in which fatherly love and influence is key. Yet there is not the sense that the sisters will stray. The indicator of this lies in the final shot as Eve destroys Louis’ letter in which he reveals the miscommunication between him and Cisely. Ten-year-old Eve assumes the role of her ancestor Eve by nurturing her sister. As they stand together, hand in hand, looking out across the bayou, they intend to deal with this situation and future hardships together. Eve’s Bayou ultimately becomes about how women and sisters look beyond tragedy to find strength in one another.
Rachel Wortherley is a graduate of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York and holds a Master of Arts degree in English. Her downtime consists of devouring copious amounts of literature, television shows, and films. She hopes to gain a doctorate in English literature and become a professional screenwriter.
Black families can be rich and poor and everything in between on TV, but why can’t we show the mental health crises Black families face?
This guest post by Keisha Zollar appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.
When watching Black families in film and TV like Everybody Hates Chris, Soul Food, and Bebe’s Kids, mental illness was/is invisible. I think to myself, which Cosby kid battles with depression? Does Uncle Phil have an eating disorder? And would Dr. Doolittle ever see a therapist?
Are Black families so marginalized in film and TV that we are afraid to show the cracks of mental illness as they actually are?
As many as 25 percent of Americans suffer from mental illness, and some of those Americans are Black.
Growing up in the early-late 1980s and early 1990s, most of the Black TV families I saw were high functioning, white-collar families with an upstanding father figure who was always around, and there was plenty of food on the table. There were also TV shows like Roc, reruns of Good Times, and other tales of the economic divide where I saw a different Black experience. As a kid, my immediate family was more Cosby than Good Times but I did have relatives who were more Roc than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in their day-to-day lives. Growing up, it felt like TV was holding a mirror up to my family but with one exception: why was no one as sad and anxious as I felt? Why did no one talk about overwhelming emotions? The process of dealing with addiction? The pain of divorce?
I also remember the Black movies of my childhood.
My grandparents took my family to watch Do The Right Thing because my Grandma said, “It’s important to support Black artists like Spike Lee.” I remember the story, the realness, the colors–also what we might call nowadays: “grit.” My parents would show me Roots, Bebe’sKids, and Nutty Professor with pride and joy.
The movies and television I watched as a child inspired me to pursue my own journey in entertainment. Entertainment was/is a noble pursuit of truth, exploration, fantasy, and more.
Then the economic bubbles of the 1980s-1990s burst and burst and burst…
“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”
-Ernst Fischer
Then in the early 2000s I became an adult; my parents divorced, I struggled with depression and anxiety, I got in therapy, and realized that the TV and films I loved as a child were missing something. Where was the “Real Talk” about mental illness in entertainment? Where was the entertainment that went beyond just telling Black people to pray, to be strong, to avoid sugar and crack cocaine? Why was everyone being so mean about Uncle Phil’s weight in the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?
Uncle Phil’s weight in the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air always seemed to be the punchline. Episode to episode Uncle Phil is fat shamed–by main characters, auxiliary characters, and even by himself. Every character on the show knew Uncle Phil had a problem with food. The adult in me kept thinking, “Why did no one acknowledge Uncle Phil’s cries for help, his risk factors for diabetes, his possible food addiction?”
Then I thought about Hillary’s shopping addiction!
And of course The Cosby Show…
Denise Huxtable was the “wild child,” or a character on TV who was crying out for help. Denise was a beloved character that couldn’t hold onto a job, then disappeared on the show to go to college, dropped out of college, ran off to Africa, married a man unknown to her parents, then showed up on the Huxtable doorstep with her own family, then tried school again and didn’t finish (the order of events in Denise’s life isn’t fully accurate but I’m painting an impressionistic portrait of Black media from my POV, there you go Super Cosby Fans).
It was a liberating moment on TV to see a main character struggle with education, not because he was “dumb” as a character trait, but because he was flawed. In the episode where Theo found out he had dyslexia he was overjoyed because he had a diagnosis; it was TV saying it was OK to have a learning disorder. It felt like The Cosby Show said it was OK to see if you had learning challenges.
I remember thinking while watching the show when it aired, “This is important, and it’s OK if I have dyslexia too.”
As an adult I know I don’t have dyslexia, but I’m still waiting for my TV moment on an important Black show to describe what I do have: depression and anxiety.
Getting diagnosed has changed my perspective on watching film and TV. I see the PTSD that poverty can cause in cartoon movies. I see eating disorders where I used to see “harmless” fat jokes. I see the stress of being Black in America but no mention of eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and panic disorder.
Now I watch these shows and I think, maybe I’m making up all this mental illness in the Black community, but then I look at Surgeon General’s reports and check out pages like this.
House of Payne shows the ravages of addiction with a recurring crack-addicted mother, and a few other shows seem to tackle addiction but it seems the vast majority make mental illness invisible. It feels like Black TV and film wants us to ignore or pray away the fact mental illness exists.
Black families can be rich and poor and everything in between on TV, but why can’t we show the mental health crises Black families face?
My desire to see Black families explore mental illness in media is not about victimizing the oppressed in media. I just want to see my own Theo moment on TV; maybe some little Black teenager who is smart and capable, but is sad and cries too much goes to see a nice doctor with her parents. This little Black girl gets tested and gets diagnosed as being depressed and she runs home to tell her parents about her depression. Her parents hear the word “depression” and are relieved at a diagnosis and the audience empathizes and learns, and everyone is OK.
Keisha Zollar is an actor-writer-comedienne. Keisha has been seen on Orange Is The New Black, Celebrity Apprentice Season 14, The Today Show, College Humor, Comedy Central, MTV, UCBComedy, and numerous web-series. Currently, Keisha in post production for An Uncomfortable Conversation About Race and she has recently directed her first interactive sketch called Neggers. She is proud of her latest series In Game, a diverse web-series about LARPing (nerd stuff). Learn more at www.KeishaZollar.com.
There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society.
This guest post by Jackson Adler previously appeared at his blog, The Windowsill, and appears as part of our theme week on Black Families. Cross-posted with permission.
Chris Eska’s independent film The Retrieval (2013) is a coming of age/road trip/period drama in which a young teenage boy named Will and his uncle Marcus are forced into working for white bounty hunters to “retrieve” escaped slaves during The American Civil War. There is a lot said in this film without dialogue, and without anything spoken within the first few minutes of the film. Most of the African American characters have an unspoken sense of solidarity, one which Will eventually learns to hear. The film explores how Black families are often torn apart and turned against each other by the pressures of a white patriarchal society. Will needs the money not only to get by, but also to reunite with his father. He and Marcus know that if they do not do as they are told, they could very well be murdered by their employers. When Marcus sees that his nephew is beginning to feel empathy for Nate, a man they are hired to “retrieve,” Marcus points to Nate and says, “That’s money.” Marcus encourages Will to see fellow African Americans as less than people for the sake of his own gain, as well as to make it easier to set aside his guilt. However, Will learns solidarity through his interactions with other African Americans in the film, and creates surrogate families in spite of the pressures of white patriarchy. Though most of the film focuses on Will, Marcus, and Nate, women play crucial roles in the story. It is mostly through the example of women that Will begins to understand that African Americans need to support and stand up for each other.
The escaped slave whom Will betrays, played by Charissa Jarrett.
At the very beginning of the film, a white woman with a shotgun offers safety on the Underground Railroad to Will, thinking he is a runaway slave. Once hidden, a Black woman offers him some of the little food she has. He betrays these women, but the memory of his betrayal haunts him and sets the foundation for his actions throughout the rest of the film, particularly toward Nate. Marcus and Will tell Nate that they were hired by his sick brother to help him travel south safely in order to visit his brother before he dies. This is a lie, as the brother is already dead and Will’s and Marcus’ true employers have evil intentions, but Nate believes it and goes on the journey with them out of loyalty to his brother. When Marcus is shot and killed by a white soldier, Will realizes he has to make up his own mind about what to do. While Nate and Will are traveling, a second Black woman accepts them into an all-Black camp in the woods, giving them food and a feeling of community. While there, Will meets a girl his age and they share an emotional connection. Will is offered the chance to stay with this community, where African Americans look out for one another and are one family. Though he and Nate end up travelling on, Will has become more humanized by the camp, and encourages Nate to visit his “woman,” Rachel, whom he was forced to leave years before at the risk of re-enslavement or death.
Will (Ashton Sanders) and Nate (Tishuan Scott)
Rachel’s new “man” is the one to first greet Nate, accompanied by Will, at Rachel’s house. There is no animosity between Nate and this man as they talk, but a warm and sad understanding – no explanations needed. While left unsaid, it is the White patriarchy that broke up Nate and Rachel, and Rachel is not blamed for finding comfort in someone else. When Rachel and Nate see each other, Rachel is at first upset that Nate never came back for her to help her achieve freedom – “Why now?!” However, each understands that the other has had to make a new life for themselves. Once again, no explanation is needed, and no blame to be had between them – only upon the hateful and harmful society in which they live. Will soon finds he is not just an observer in this, as Rachel asks Nate, “Are you responsible for this boy?” She says that Will and Nate sound so much alike that they might as well be father and son, though she knows they aren’t. This comment seems to resonate with Will. It also seems to touch Will when Rachel mothers him for a bit, checking his clothes and hair. For a moment, it is like the three of them – Rachel, Nate, and Will, are family. Shortly after this scene, Will attempts to bail out of his assignment, but is scared into doing so when his boss confronts him. Will is aptly named, as it is his will to do right by his fellow African Americans, especially Nate, that eventually makes him turn against his employers. However, when he does so, his boss and his posse are already approaching. Nate, knowing that Will faces death if his boss finds out about the betrayal, stabs Will in the leg to make it look as though Will tried to keep him from running. Will’s attempt to save Nate results in Nate saving Will’s life. Though Will’s actions do not spare the life of his newfound friend and father figure, Nate dies with dignity and on his own terms due to Will’s actions. At the end of the film, Will returns to Rachel, who takes him in.
Black families are still torn apart by systems that were built on the backs of slavery. African American women are still especially marginalized. In America, Black families are still heavily oppressed and pushed to make difficult choices. Police violence threatens their lives, and low minimum wages keep their children hungry. The Retrieval is incredibly relevant to today’s world, as solidarity is needed behind every movement, and every person needs the welcoming warmth of a family. In the film, Will learns what a Black family truly is – one of solidarity and support in the face of those who would break and oppress them.
Jackson Adler is a transmasculine aromantic bi/pansexual skinny white middle class dude with an Auditory Processing Disorder and a Weak Working Memory who enjoys cartoons, musical theatre, and vegan boba drinks. Jackson has a BA in Theater, and is a writer, activist, performer, director, teacher, and dramaturge.
The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason ‘Smart Guy’ comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.
This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.
As a proud child of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to grow up with some of the best sitcoms on television. Perhaps my nostalgic love of these shows have clouded my view on whether or not these shows were any good, but I still stomp my curmudgeonly feet around and shout, “These kids today don’t know good TV!” I grew up in a lower-middle class family in an extremely diverse community, so I’ve always been exposed to multi-cultural families. Hell, my mom named my (white, red-headed) sister after a guest-starring character she loved on Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper. Disney Channel used to show re-runs of a lot of shows I loved growing up, and I distinctly remember running home off the bus to make sure I wouldn’t miss the “newest” episode of Smart Guy.
I. Loved. Smart. Guy. Growing up, I was a gifted child, so T.J. Henderson was a boy after my own heart. He was living the life I always dreamed of having. I probably wasn’t high school smart at 10 years old the way he was, but all I could think about was how awesome it would be to outsmart all of the older kids that picked on me for being so little. T.J. had a super-hip older sister named Yvette who was a staunch feminist and loved the fine arts. I saw a lot of myself in Yvette, even at a young age. T.J.’s older brother Marcus was the big man on campus, and I idolized how cool he was. The patriarch of the family was Floyd Henderson, the most caring father on TV (next to Danny Tanner of Full House), but was way, way cooler than Danny Tanner could ever hope to be.
One of the biggest criticsms people seem to give Smart Guy, is that it’s “racist” against white people. First of all, “reverse racism” doesn’t exist, so I’m not going to even go into that argument. However, critics tend to site Marcus and Mo’s (Marcus’ best friend) white pal Mackey to be one of the major reasons the show is “racist.” Mackey is one of the few major white characters, and he’s a giant doofus. He consistently tries to “fit in” with Marcus and Mo, usually to no avail, and had a tendency to respond to his failures with, “It’s because I’m white, isn’t it?” The entire cast would nod their head in agreement and the canned laughter would play. Smart Guy isn’t racist, but it wasn’t afraid to race-bend a “token” character usually reserved for a Black man on a sitcom, and instead attach the attributes to a white character. The humor isn’t meant to put down white folks, but rather poke fun at the very real actions of white guys who attempt to adopt Black culture simply because it’s “cool.” This sort of behavior has existed in “white sitcoms” for nearly a century (making the Back character the “token” of the show) and it seems the only reason Smart Guy comes under fire is because white critics are now seeing the characters they identify with in positions that aren’t of power or virtue.
Smart Guy definitely fell into the “Huxtable Effect” of making Black families palatable for white audiences at times, but it was never afraid to point out the indifferences and injustices Black families face on a day to day basis compared to white folks. It was a safe and “beginner’s guide to systematic racism” for white audiences. For example, in the episode “Working Guy,” T.J. gets a job working on (at the time) a brand new product called a DVD. As expected, Marcus is invading T.J.’s new gig and T.J. is left to explain to his coworker (an old white guy) to ignore Marcus, because he’s just T.J.’s brother.
“Oh, I get it – it’s a Black thing,” the guy exclaims. He raises his fist. “Righteous!”
“No, he’s my actual brother,” T.J. explains. “Same house, same parents… similar genetic coding.”
This is a common situation of a white person trying to relate to a Black person with limited knowledge of their culture, as well as the ever-popular trope of an older person trying to interact (and failing) with a younger member of society. However, Smart Guy’s influence is something far more important than allowing black families to be seen as something other than token.
Unlike many sitcoms, Smart Guy focused on a single-parent household. In particular, Smart Guy focused on a household headed by a single, Black father. For the last two decades, the media has tried to paint Black fathers as absent, neglectful, and violent. Smart Guy showed a Black father not only successfully raising three children on his own, but also managing to keep the needs of his wildly different children in check. We all know the importance of representation, but the fact Smart Guy was picked up by The Disney Channel after its WB cancellation is absolutely vital to its existence. This means that Smart Guy was thrown onto one of the most popular and wildly accessed channels for children at the peak of its popularity. The people who grew up watching Smart Guy on their televisions as children are the same people who are now of voting age.
Smart Guy was also a little bit ballsier compared to shows like The Cosby Show. T.J. was a child of the new millennium, and the show wasn’t afraid to explore things like internet predators, systematic racism (like shoplifting accusations), and pre-teen sexual awakenings. At only 51 episodes, Smart Guy covered more topical situations than just about every other show on television at the time.
The ever popular statement of “racism isn’t something you’re born with; it’s something you’re taught” rings especially true for the audiences that grew up watching Smart Guy. By allowing children to see a Black family as something other than what Fox News wants to make them out to be, it gives children a starting point to develop their own beliefs and understanding of families that may look a little different from their own.
BJ Colangelois the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.
When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”
This guest post by Atima Omara appears as part of our theme week on Black Families.
In 12 Years of Slave, the theme of family is a tie that binds throughout the story. While the film depicts the life of Solomon Northrup, a freeman captured and sold into slavery, and his struggle to get back to his life and his family. 12 Years also reflects the lives of other slaves he meets who too are separated from their families. 12 Years is very tightly focused on the systematic dehumanization of Black people in the American South during slavery. This film defines the subhuman view of the Black family in the antebellum South that remained pervasive post the Civil War and into the 20th Century where its effects have filtered into many films and TV shows.
12 Years A Slave is an autobiographical account told from the perspective of Solomon Northrup, after his capture into slavery. While sitting in his first prison, awaiting to be moved into the South, Solomon meets another slave, Eliza, who was essentially treated as a wife by her previous slave owner with whom she also has two children. After his death, Eliza and her two children are sold away and it is there, awaiting the auction block, she meets Solomon. When Solomon, Eliza, and her two children are both sold, she is sold away from her children. Their new slave owner, William Ford, (Benedict Cumberbatch), feeling guilty when he hears Eliza’s sobs of protests, tries to buy the children, but the auctioneer refuses to sell the them. William Ford takes Solomon and a devastated Eliza to his plantation, where she continues to cry on the journey to the plantation. When Ford’s wife, Mistress Ford, hears of new slave Eliza’s plight she callously responds, “Oh poor thing, well she’ll get over it in a day or two.”
Director Steve McQueen beautifully wove in the humanity of Northrup and the other slaves, which made their enslavement that much more heart-wrenching. When Eliza still sobs days later on the Ford plantation because she misses her children, Solomon tries to silence her. She chides him, “Have you stopped crying for YOUR children?!” He retorts, “They are as my flesh…..I survive…I will keep myself hardy until freedom is opportune.” And Solomon does, ingratiating himself to his Master, William Ford, for his work, he receives a violin in which he engraves the name of his wife and children. They are never far from his mind as he tries to desperately find ways to become a freeman again.
Eventually, because Eliza’s crying becomes to annoying to Mistress Ford, she is removed from the plantation. Mistress Ford’s dismissive comments and subsequent removal of Eliza from the plantation is reflective of the antebellum’s American South’s view of the Black person and the view of their family. There was the economic and biblical justifications for slavery, but eventually enslaving other human beings birthed an American ideology of race inferiority. Nineteenth century US Senator John C. Calhoun famously said, “Never before has the Black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”
In the minds of white slave owners and their supporters, slavery was a favor to Black people, who could not have lives of their own or feel loss or pain. This ideology is understandable when you consider the horror of what they were justifying. To acknowledge the humanity of Black people would have forced one to acknowledge that slavery was wrong.
Through the evolution of American film and later television, we see the variations of this view that the white slavers have of their Black slaves filter into the lens of white directors, producers, and writers of films and TV shows featuring Black people and their families.
The film that has the distinction of being the first 12-reel full motion picture film in America is D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915. Commercially successful, the film was controversial due to its portrayal of Black men as unintelligent, barely human and sexually aggressive. The first talking motion picture in 1929 was Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, where Jolson performed as a white actor in Black face, recalling the minstrelsy
With those promising precursors films, films in the 1930s hardly shifted. With Gone with the Wind or The Littlest Rebel, audiences never knew the stories of the Black slaves who were supporting characters to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara or Shirley Temple’s little Virginia Carey. Scarlett’s Mammy (played by Hattie McDaniel) we know nothing about, whether she had husband, children, or siblings. Nor do we know much of Virgie’s Uncle Bill (Bill Robinson). Because Mammy and Uncle Billy do not need a family, because their duty is to serve their white families.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” these images of Black people and their families improve barely, especially when theaters refuse to show films with prominent Black leads. Look at the 1950s interpretation of Imitation of Life with actresses Lana Turner and Juanita Moore. At first glance, it is a story of two single women raising their daughters together. Lana Turner’s Lora is a struggling young actress with a daughter who befriends Sarah, the daughter of Juanita Moore’s Annie, who is a homeless Black widow. Because of the girls’ friendship, the women move in together. While you do see the humanity of Annie and the love she has for her daughter Sarah, you realize you don’t see much of Annie’s life outside of that. Annie becomes a maid to Lora and her daughter and is a momma to Sarah. Like Mammy or Uncle Bill, we know little of Annie’s friends, if she ever finds love again, in comparison we do see the love life of Lora’s, her friends, and her career become successful.
The height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the conscience shift of the country raised awareness as to the plight and actual humanity of the Black American. With that it brought in some changes and new opportunities for Black characters in film. Actors like Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, and others challenged the perception of the Black experience in film. In 1961, Black playwright Lorrain Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, about a young Black man (Sidney Poitier) trying to find a better life for his family became a film. Behind the scenes it was a play that almost never happened, because it was a predominantly African American cast it took a long time to secure funding for its debut. And even with its final success on Broadway there was much argument between critics who were primarily white as to whether the experience was “universal” or particular to African Americans.
While the movie industry addressed race glacially, television as a newer medium moved at a faster pace in providing more opportunities for Black family portrayal. In 1968, CBS debuted Julia, with Black actress Diahann Carroll as its lead. It was the first show to depict a Black woman in the lead of a show that was a non-stereotypical role. Julia was a single mother and nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam. Today, it’s considered “groundbreaking.” Then, critics (again mostly white) derided it for not being “realistic.” Used to seeing nothing but Black poverty on the news, critics held Julia up to that as the standard for Black American life. The Saturday Review’s Robert Lewis Shayon wrote that Julia’s “plush, suburban setting” was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.” Other critics implied the show was a “cartoon.” Unsurprisingly, Ebony Magazine, whose magazine’s readership and staff are Black Americans, appreciated its significance in showing a “slice of Black America.”
The 1970s brought more Black family focused television; of significance was Good Times and The Jeffersons, both where productions from white liberal showrunner Norman Lear. The portrayals of the Black family vastly improved, if by virtue of the fact that they were getting time on major network television, some shows still would never entirely escape the stereotypical trope in the 1970s.
Good Times featured actors Esther Rolle and John Amos in the lead roles. They played Florida and James Evans, heads of a working class Black family who live in housing project in Chicago. Notably, African American writers conceived the idea and the initial script of the show Norman Lear picked up. Actors Rolle and Amos signed up for the project, interested in a regular series with a Black working class family at the center. Not too long into the show, one of the children of the Evans family, JJ Evans, became a popular character for his phrase “Dy-NO-mite” and his funny antics. As the show progressed, it increasingly focused on him and crazy antics, which recalled the days of Black minstrelsy shows in the early 20th century, where usually white actors in blackface exaggerated real-life Black circumstances in a cartoonish way and reinforced stereotypes of Black people. The Evans family, particularly JJ, became subject to the long line of stereotypical portrayal of African American family life much to the chagrin of actors Esther Rolle and John Amos. Behind the scenes Esther Rolle left the series in frustration and John Amos was fired.
Lear’s The Jeffersons in comparison was an improvement upon Good Times, in that it showed a working class Black family, who made good and moved to the wealthy neighborhoods of New York. Even though the show took on political topics, it is notable for featuring more of the everyday life of this Black family with its colorful patriarch George Jefferson, played by Sherman Helmsley. The show enjoyed a successful 10-year run. In some ways, The Jeffersons was the grandfather of later Black family-centered shows like The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with Sherman Helmsley reprising his role as George Jefferson to appear on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
As the 1980s dawned there were more Black family-centered shows like 227 and Amen, but one would be remiss in not mentioning the The Cosby Show in the 1980s, which came out of already established comedian Bill Cosby’s stand up act about his family. The Huxtables were an upper-middle class Black family who lived in Brooklyn. Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) and Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad) were the parents to their five children. The show was revolutionary for the Black family because it was distinct in featuring the everyday occurrences, drama, and humor of family life. The Cosby Show occasionally dealt with serious issues like dyslexia or teen pregnancy, but it was not a show that focused on racial politics; indeed, that may have been the point. Some criticized the lack of discussion around race or racial politics in the series, fearing that white audiences who embraced the show would consider “racism” a thing of the past. What is certain is that The Cosby Show was viewed as seminal in Black family portrayal on television. When it ended in the early 1990s, there was an influx of Black family-centered comedies that were greenlighted for major network television like In Living Color,The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, Roc, Hanging with Mr. Cooper, Sister, Sister, and the list goes on. Notably many of these shows had African American creators or writers, which allowed for more Black family storytelling.
We have come a long way in the normalizing of the Black American family, but given the diversity of the Black American family experience, it is clear we still have a long way to go in Black family storytelling.
Atima Omara is a political strategist of 10 years who has served as staff on eight federal and local political campaigns and other progressive causes. Her writings focus on gender, race, and politics but also how gender and race are reflected in film and popular culture. In her sparetime, she reads, watches movies and documentaries, and attends film festivals when she can. You can find more of her writing at www.atima-omara.com. She tweets at @atima_omara.
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