Doing The Extraordinary in ‘Two Days, One Night’

Women in films are even less likely to engage in this kind of dispirited struggle. Instead an actress usually plays the wife, mother, or girlfriend whose job it is to be “strong” and rub the hero’s back while he battles against his own obstacles. She talks reassuringly to him whenever he doubts himself, the exact same way Sandra’s husband does with her here.

2Days1NightCover

In one of the first scenes of Two Days, One Night, the newest release from the Belgian writer-directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, we see the main character Sandra (played by a dressed-down Marion Cotillard) receive some bad news on the phone. She says out loud to herself afterward, “Don’t cry.”

Sandra, we later find out, has been on sick leave from her job for the past few months because of clinical depression. The phone call is from her friend at work, Juliette (Catherine Salée), who tells her that the rest of the laborers at their place of employment (which seems to be a small manufacturer of solar panels) have voted to accept a €1,000 bonus (about $1,200), which the foreman has offered in exchange for their agreement to lay Sandra off (Western Europe: a fairytale land where a boss asks his workers for permission to lay off their colleague–and offers them money to do so). The overwhelming majority of the workers (all but two of the 16 of them) have voted against her.

Juliette tells Sandra the foreman has misled the others into thinking if they didn’t agree to get rid of Sandra one of them might be laid off instead. So as the plant’s big boss is leaving the parking lot in his sports car to start his weekend, Juliette and Sandra plead with him to hold another vote, with a secret ballot, first thing on Monday morning. He just wants to get out of there, so he agrees.

Two Days, One Night
Sandra (Marion Cotillard) and her husband (Fabrizio Rongione)

For the rest of the film Sandra, with the support of her husband (Fabrizio Rongione), and to a lesser extent, Juliette, tries to convince the others (after finding their home addresses and tracking them down) to let her stay. Of course voting against Sandra was easy when they didn’t have to face her and hear her say that she doesn’t want to be jobless and swear that she’s ready to go back to work (even as we in the audience, who have seen how frail she still is, wonder if she’s telling the truth).

One of her coworkers (part of the handful of Black and brown immigrants also more likely to be let go) is unexpectedly emotional; Sandra looks confused as he weeps about voting against her on Friday and thanks her for the chance to redeem himself. Others, including a woman Sandra had thought was her friend but refuses to see her, are surprisingly cold–or outright hostile. They want that €1,000 and don’t care if getting it means she will lose her job. Some make excuses and tell her they’re not the ones who set Sandra’s continued employment against their bonuses. She replies, quicker and more astutely than we expect, that the choice isn’t of her making either.

2Days1NightCoworker
A coworker begs Sandra for forgiveness

Cotillard, her hair in a straggly ponytail, wears skimpy, summer tank tops, but is so slouched and tense for most of the film, her body is like a backwards “S.” She comes across as both convincingly desperate and working-class (not something all red-carpet actresses are capable of). Like Violette, Two Days, One Night isn’t afraid to show its protagonist at her worst. Sandra, like Violette, hates the thought that the concessions the others are making for her are motivated by pity. She constantly wants to give up, taking to her bed in the middle of the day, even as her husband gently pushes her saying, “Why not try?” and “Don’t give in. You have to fight.”

This film, like Violette, challenges the lie that most films tell, especially those released in time for awards season, that after a few minor setbacks a protagonist will, with uplifting music on the soundtrack, stand up straight and face adversity head-on with courage and maximum photogeneity. But the people who do extraordinary things often do them after a lot of bone-crushing rejection. They feel like miserable failures. They cry. They consider quitting all the time. We all like to think we face the trouble that comes our way like Wonder Woman, but when events take a turn for the worse we’re more like Dr. Smith on the old TV show Lost In Space, crying in an increasingly hysterical voice, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

Women in films are even less likely to engage in this kind of dispirited struggle. Instead an actress usually plays the wife, mother, or girlfriend whose job it is to be “strong” and rub the hero’s back while he battles against his own obstacles. She talks reassuringly to him whenever he doubts himself, the exact same way Sandra’s husband does with her here.

Sandra’s quest is not just an indictment of capitalism but also touches on the responsibility we feel for our fellow human beings–how deep (or not) our empathy runs for the people we talk to and work alongside every day. Seeing Sandra’s surprise at who votes for her and who votes against her makes us wonder how well we know our own coworkers. We see her smile after one small triumph and in her next encounter we see her literally knocked down. We count with her as she accumulates four then five votes and when she talks to a man who just wants his money see her wisely clam up about which coworkers are voting for her. The long, frustrating, seemingly impossible task in front of Sandra could stand in for a number of others: writing a book, staying in a marriage–or making a movie.

And after we, along with Sandra, have nearly given up hope for her getting her job back, we see her become unexpectedly resilient–and the solution to her problem become more complex. Her late transformation reminds me of the redemption of another depressed character in a French-language film, Delphine in Eric Rohmer’s great Summer. Just as we hear the wonder in Delphine’s voice in the last line of that film, we hear a newfound strength and certainty in Sandra’s voice as she talks on the phone to her husband at the end. The two days and one night of the title have changed her, maybe forever.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BNjqSsGqo” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Gibson’s Gonna Be OK: The Comfort of Hypercompetent Heroes

The lead character in BBC’s ‘The Fall’ is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The lead character in BBC’s The Fall is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

Gillian Anderson stars in The Fall
Gibson (she’s gonna be OK)

The second season of The Fall just finished airing on the BBC and, while there’s been a slow decline in quality since the series premiere, it remains one of the only detectives shows – if not the only detective show – to acknowledge that violence against women is a built-in feature of patriarchal cultures rather than a random, strange coincidence. (Rebecca Solnit has a good essay about this in Men Explain Things to Me, if you want to get mad.)

The Fall is about serial killer named Paul Spector and Stella Gibson, the Gillian Anderson-looking detective who hunts him down. In his own mind, Paul is a dark, fascinating genius who’s playing a clever game of cat and mouse with the Irish police force. In almost everyone else’s mind, he’s a loser who hates women, and the police figure out who he is almost as soon as they start looking.

What makes The Fall an amazing piece of television is that it spits in the face of conventional serial killer narratives. Rather than being fascinated with Paul and how tortured and interesting he is, it’s focussed on how his hatred of women fits into a larger societal pattern, and how the lessons we learn about gender inform our beliefs and behaviours in life. It can be heavy-handed, but it’s also refreshing because it’s so different from the narrative we most often see.

The show spends roughly equal time on Spector and Gibson, but it’s Gibson we’re supposed to cheer for, and Gibson who’s built up as the ideal feminist woman. In the middle of a show full of terrifying, realistic, often heart-wrenching violence against women, Gibson’s there to make us feel safe. Not only because we know she’s going to catch Paul Spector and put him behind bars, but because she is completely and utterly awesome at everything. Perhaps unbelievably so.

The main source of tension in The Fall comes from fear and vulnerability. Watching the show, as a woman, you have the same chilling thought you have, as a woman, every time you’re walking alone at night, or hear a sound in your house while you’re sleeping: “What would I actually do if someone attacked me right now?” And the answer, if you’re honest, is that, even if you learned some krav maga one time, you would be just as terrified and just as dead as one of Spector’s victims.

The fear that men will attack us is something women carry around 24/7; it’s always simmering in the back of our minds, and The Fall forces us to look at it directly. In the middle of that horror, like a lifeline, or a warm blanket, Gibson the Terribly Competent stands impervious to fear. She can’t be intimidated by a bunch of tough guys on the street; she doesn’t freeze in an emergency; she can’t be made to feel ashamed for having sex; she breaks your nose if you don’t back off when she tells you to; she isn’t scared of some guy in a bar, or some guy in a limo, or even some guy who chokes other women to death. She looks at those guys with contempt and moves on with her life, without thinking the problem is her. No matter what, we know, she’s going to be OK.

It’s not actually unusual for the hero of a genre story to be hypercompetent. Like, we all understand that Jason Bourne is not realistic, right? And the guy from Mission Impossible? And that one detective from True Detective who said that time was round like a beer can? He was also improbably good at things.

What interests me about Gibson isn’t that it’s weird for the hero to be competent – it’s that, in this instance, her competence speaks to me and comforts me in way that Rust Cohle didn’t manage. She reminds me of another detective I like.

Kristen Bell sings karaoke in Veronica Mars
One way or another, she’s gonna find ya, she’s gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha

Appropriately, since Veronica Mars is set in high school, the tension in that story’s less about the fear of being killed and more about the fear of public humiliation. And Veronica, its hero, is impervious to all embarrassment.

In The Fall, it’s been implied that Gibson may have been assaulted at some time in the past, and that that’s what motivates her to work with female victims of violence. In Veronica Mars, it’s made explicit from the start that Veronica was the victim of the cruellest forms of high school bullying before she became the cynical, hypercompetent girl we know.

Whenever someone tries to insult, intimidate, or make fun of her, she has a snappy comeback to put them down. Whenever someone seems to get the upper hand against her, she manages to turn the tables somehow, making them look foolish in her place. In maybe the most blatant example, some popular boys she’s investigating put her name on the karaoke list in an attempt to embarrass her and make her back off. With only seconds to think it over, Veronica jumps up and sings the Blondie song “One Way or Another,” turning potential humiliation into a triumph as literally no real person could do.

Knowing that Veronica’s going to land on her feet whenever someone tries to bully her has the same warm blanket effect as knowing that Gibson can’t get scared. It’s not entirely realistic – for all of us, life involves at least some moments of fear and humiliation – but it gives us safe harbour in stories that are otherwise designed to make us anxious. In these particular contexts, Gibson and Veronica always know what to do, and the things they do always work. They allow us to confront the things that make us anxious with the safety net of knowing that it’s going to be OK.

And, if you’re going, “Katherine, that’s what all detectives do,” you’re sort of right.

Hugh Laurie in a promotional photo for House
Remember when House was a thing?

Part of the point of detectives – at least modernist, soft-boiled detectives – is that they bring order to chaos and therefore restore our sense of safety. When Sherlock Holmes became popular, in Ye Olde Victorian England, it was in a context where urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of the British empire had made people feel uncertain about what was happening. The world was changing really fast, there were a bunch of strangers around, and it felt like some random person could just murder you or steal your stuff and disappear into the crowd. (From a more racist point of view, it also seemed like a wizard from India could slip some potions in your tea, but that’s a different discussion from this.)

The calming figure of that era was a man with the superhuman ability to piece together tiny bits of information, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of literally everything that ever was, including scary foreign cultures. He was the safe harbour in the storm of modern living.

Flash forward about 100 years, and the same hero is reincarnated as House, a doctor who knows what’s wrong with you even when Web MD has no idea. Like Sherlock Holmes, House taps into our general fear that there is too much information for any one person to crunch. And, in a world where we are terrified that everything from our water bottles to our genes is trying to kill us in new, incomprehensible ways, the House version of Sherlock Holmes provides some safety, because House can see the pattern, House can understand what’s happening, and House can make some order out of chaos. Even if the MRI machine makes all your veins explode exactly in time for commercials, House will have the answer by the end.

The comfort of watching Gibson is both similar and different to the comfort of knowing that puzzles get solved. It’s the comfort of saying, “There’s someone who looks like me and, day to day, is not afraid to be alive. Someone who lives in the world I live in, that’s full of the terrors I face, and – realistically or not – is showing me what it could be like if I didn’t have to be scared.”

It’s a powerful counterpoint to the Man Kills Loads of Women – Is Special, Tortured Genius story that Spector thinks he’s starring in. This is Woman Is Not Afraid to Walk Down the Street; Woman is Not Afraid to Say No; Woman Isn’t Worried That She’ll Be a Total Drag if She Points Out What a Sexist Jerk You’re Being. It’s a different kind of fantasy than Knowing Lots or Solving Things – it’s Having a Right to Exist, opposite the story of a man who chokes women to death to feel strong. It’s the writers consciously and deliberately preventing this from being a story where you should have carried some mace to the bathroom, if you didn’t want to get killed in your house.

What’s different about Gibson isn’t that she’s extra specially good at stuff – it’s that the forces she’s facing off against are specifically aimed at women. The fear that she’s shielding us from is a fear that most men don’t carry around. The Fall, in its graphic and terrifying depictions of violence, would be unbearable to watch if Gibson wasn’t always at the centre, reminding us what life would be like if we didn’t have to feel afraid.

Different monsters require different kinds of heroes to defeat them. Gibson is the right kind of hero to face this kind of monster, and the strength of The Fall may be that it’s the first show to know which monster we’re trying to fight.

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

‘Mockingbird’: A Unique Approach to Horror, But a Trite Approach to Gender

For filmmakers, the easiest way to make an audience like a character despite the fact that he’s a lazy failure of a human being is to steep that character in privilege. We’re always expected to root for young straight white cis men, whether their laziness makes them waste away their lives, or their ambition makes them endanger their entire family.

Mockingbird-poster

Written by Mychael Blinde.

Unlike every other person who saw this movie, I think Mockingbird is a brilliant found footage horror film experiment. (OK, there’s one other guy who likes it, but most reviewers really really don’t.) Mockingbird takes a unique approach to horror film structure and tone, and it builds to an unforgettable climax. Unfortunately, its approach to representations of gender is totally forgettable and anything but unique.

***The majority of this post is spoiler free; I’ll give you a clear warning when I’m about to discuss the ending all the reviewers hate so much.***

Mockingbird (2014) is the second film written and directed by Bryan Bertino, whose first film, The Strangers (2008), though now beloved in certain horror film niches, was not well received by critics. Mockingbird went straight to VOD and the consensus of reviewers is that the production company buried this film because it’s not a good movie.

From the Mockingbird review on Best Horror Movies:

“How many trailers have you seen for the film? Probably not many. With the fan friendly Blumhouse behind the project, perhaps we should guess that something just isn’t clicking with this one. If there’s any company out there right now that’s definitely going to stand behind their releases, it’s Blumhouse. But they’re not standing behind this one, and yes, there is most certainly a reason for that, Mockingbird just isn’t the picture that fanatics are hoping for.”

Here’s the film as summarized on Netflix: “A woman, a man and a couple each receive a video camera and instructions to keep filming — or face terrifying consequences.”

I love Bertino’s The Strangers because it combines great horror storytelling with an awesome representation of a female character in a horror film.

Unfortunatly, Mockingbird does nothing to challenge tired, stereotypical representations of gender in film. It presents the wife as the character who freaks out, and the husband as the character who makes a plan and goes for the gun. It relies on the problematically gendered trope of the lovable loser dude.

So, if it doesn’t challenge representations of gender and pretty much everyone who reviewed it says it’s total crap, why on earth would I call Mockingbird brilliant?

Because its triple story structure builds toward the most heartbreaking ending I’ve ever experienced in a horror film.

Let me explain:

Mockingbird intertwines three storylines: two are perfectly parallel, but the third clashes completely with the tone, plot, and pacing of the first two.

While the couple and the woman become increasingly terrified in their own homes…

The couple, Emmy and Tom
The couple, Emmy and Tom

 

The woman, Beth
The woman, Beth

 

…the man is happily running around town dressed like a clown, super enthusiastic about this kooky quest he’s on and dreaming about winning $10,000.

The man, Leonard
The man, Leonard

 

First, let’s unpack the gendered trope of the lovable loser dude, and then I’ll explain why I like and root for Leonard in spite of the fact that he occupies this problematic Slacker role.

For filmmakers, the easiest way to make an audience like a character despite the fact that he’s a lazy failure of a human being is to steep that character in privilege. We’re always expected to root for young straight white cis men, whether their laziness makes them waste away their lives, or their ambition makes them endanger their entire family.

Am I saying that Mockingbird is totally the worst most stupid awful misogynist film ever? Not at all. I’m saying that it does nothing to think outside the box in terms of its approach to men and women in horror.

Am I saying that we can’t like Leonard? Quite the opposite, actually — my positive review of this film is predicated on how much I liked Leonard as a character.

We viewers need to notice the privilege afforded to the Slacker character, and we need to recognize that this is a gendered trope invested in oppressive sociocultural hierarchies. We need to take all of this into consideration, but that doesn’t mean we cannot like and root for Leonard.

There are lots of great lovable losers out there, characters like Parks and Recreation‘s Andy Dwyer — good-natured dudes who exhibit a stupid but endearing exuberance.

Andy Dwyer, loveable loser dude
Andy Dwyer, loveable loser dude

 

Barak Hardley’s Leonard has an Andy Dwyer quality: a zany zest for life couched in total lack of ambition or drive. Like Andy, Leonard doesn’t hesitate to show gratitude to his peers. Like Andy, Leonard expresses his sexual desire for women while still managing to seem like he respects them.

From the moment we viewers are first birthed from the box on Leonard’s doorstep into his grungy world, we are met with his trademark mixture of excitement and nervousness about what he believes to be some kind of sweepstakes contest:

“Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!”

When he finds another box containing a clown costume:

“Yes! Yes! Yes! A clown outfit! Oh! I get to wear clown makeup! Yes!”

Any horror fan worth hir salt circle will realize pretty much instantly that Leonard’s excitement is misguided. Reviewers don’t like that Mockingbird telegraphs its ending so early; they don’t like that it’s obvious where all of these intertwined arcs are headed.

From the Mockingbird review on We’ve Got This Covered:

“Established as a cut-together game show of sorts, Mockingbird eliminates any appearance of legal enforcement since the baddies presumably edited all the remaining footage. From this hint we can immediately start determining how the contest may conclude, a situational assessment that Bertino all-but confirms by telegraphing plot-points hours before they happen (at least it felt like hours).”

But I thought that was the most fascinating aspect of Mockingbird: I knew where Leonard’s story was headed, but clearly he didn’t. Throughout the film, he functioned as the comic relief, but I knew that his comedy would ultimately wind up served back to me as tragedy, tragedy with a side of red balloons.

Leonard’s unbridled enthusiasm broke my heart; he was so excited and grateful to be a part of what he thought was a contest. He had no idea he was in a horror film until the final scene of the movie.

Lines like these in particular pulled on my heartstrings:

“I think this is gonna be a really good night for me.”

“This is without a doubt, the coolest moment of my life.”

And this line just broke my fucking heart:

“OK, just promise me that you guys aren’t just making fun of me. Just please be real.”

Then when he’s practicing his “Surprise!” in the mirror, smiling and nervously counting down — this moment made me SO SAD. Because what happens next is anything but a surprise.

Mockingbird-balloons

*                 *                 *                 *                 *                 *                 *                 *                 *               

Mockingbird reviewers also express frustration with the film’s unoriginal approach to home invasion terror: the boring banging outside the house, the standard-issue found footage shots:

“There seems to be a new film releasing every few weeks at this stage that takes on the same ‘shaky cam’ format, most with little success. Is it completely dead as a sub genre? I think not, as there is still room for greatness to be done. Mockingbird, however, is not the film that is going to win over the naysayers.” (Horror News)
 

I have to agree that the sequences of the couple and the woman bring nothing unique to the home invasion terror table. However, I think the banal nature of this approach to found footage terror serves to emphasize Leonard’s tragic exuberance, the most meaningful and fascinating aspect of the film.

Many films suggest that it’s totally worth it to risk it all and go for the gold; Mockingbird tells us that taking risks can be dangerous, that shooting for the stars can result in tragedy — even for young straight white cis men. It shows us the downside of relentless positivity, which is a surprising thing for a horror film to do.

Mockingbird-house

 

And finally, BIG SPOILER TIME: Let’s talk about that ending everybody hates so much…

…….dun

………………………dun

………………………………………..DUN:

THE TORMENTORS ARE CHILDREN.

Most reviewers absolutely detest the final moments of the film:

“The climax feels insulting to the audience that has gone along for the ride, and is completely devoid of any meaning or merit. It just highlights all the issues you had throughout the viewing experience, and exposes the film for the poorly conceived idea it is.” (Horror News)

“With Mockingbird…I specifically remember that horribly dumb ending that retroactively ruins the best moment of in the movie.” (Horror Movie a Day)

Reader, I will forgive you if your mind can’t stomach the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy this film, because frankly, it is pretty damn ridiculous.

The tormentors are children? Really? Is this believable? NO, absolutely not.

Nor is it believable that Leonard would be so great at applying clown makeup, or that his face would stay so fresh throughout the rainy night. Nor is it believable that these 1995 cameras could sustain the battery power and footage capacity to document so many hours of activity. It’s all totally ridiculous.

BUT — if you can bring yourself to suspend disbelief, then you’ll be able to enjoy the way that Mockingbird turns an established horror story on its head:

Instead of the traditional tale of the Monster Clown attacking innocent children…

Stephen-King-It-movie

…Mockingbird is a story in which the clown is the sympathetic character and the children are the monsters.

And the revelation that the tormentors are children explains so much about strange things that transpire throughout the film:

It explains why Leonard is tasked with juvenile acts like, “I’m farting and I’m peeing in the women’s room,” and being kicked in the balls. It explains why the terror experienced by the couple and the woman consists of childish pranks with sinister twists: ding-dong-ditching, prank phone calls, chalk arrows leading the way.

What Mockingbird doesn’t explain is why these kids are going around making strangers kill each other. Yes, it’s frustrating that we don’t get an explanation, but maybe we should take a page from Leonard’s book: when he’s talking about his reluctance to enter a women’s restroom, he says, “Let mysteries exist. I don’t need to know all the answers.”

Mockingbird-surprise

Have you seen Mockingbird? Did you hate it?

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Mychael Blinde writes about representations of gender in horror at Vagina Dentwata. 

New Comedy Web-Series ‘Black Feminist Blogger’

When you only share narratives from a small percentage of the population, chances are the stories might start to overlap. Only allowing a certain group of people access to representation is merely a way of securing total domination, and normalizing white supremacy. This trend is especially common in the comedy space.

This is a guest post by Aph Ko.

I am the actress, writer, and producer for the new independent web-series called Black Feminist Blogger. The show centers on the protagonist Latoya as she attempts to navigate the competitive terrain of the online feminist blogging marketplace.

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She is a full-time blogger for the online feminist magazine Sapphire Mouth Magazine, which is run by a white woman named Marie. The show comically highlights some current issues within blogging culture such as the exploitation of writers, the overwhelming amount of under-paid writing positions, as well as the overt privileging of white women’s voices over minoritized women.

As the show unfolds, we see all aspects of Latoya’s life impacted by the massive amount of time she spends online catering to Marie’s requests for more sanitized, mainstream, “page-clicky,” commercial material. From not receiving regular paychecks, to having relationships fall apart, Latoya’s world spins upside down as she attempts to find a way to balance her love for feminism and writing, with the exploitative market inherent in many blogging spaces.

The struggles that Latoya faces are not all that different from many other bloggers online. Blogging is still largely seen as a hobby rather than a business, therefore, exploitation runs wild. Additionally, because so much of the labor is invisible to the mainstream, there are rarely any entertainment products that cater to bloggers. The blogosphere functions much like any other workspace, except much of the communication is done online. There are so many funny narratives lurking “behind the scenes” of blogging and I decided that I would start with some of my own stories.

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I think it’s important that young women of color pick up cameras and film their own narratives, regardless if you don’t have a budget or camera experience. Hollywood shouldn’t have a monopoly on creativity and expression. I’m so tired of going to movie theaters or turning on Netflix and seeing that white people (predominantly men) dominate all stories. It’s not right, and frankly, it’s boring as hell.

When you only share narratives from a small percentage of the population, chances are the stories might start to overlap. Only allowing a certain group of people access to representation is merely a way of securing total domination, and normalizing white supremacy. This trend is especially common in the comedy space.

A lot of comedy today is politically, critically, and intellectually bankrupt.

Even when the media product is supposedly “progressive,” it still centers whiteness. Think about the Colbert Report or The Daily Show, where they say some of the most progressive commentary on television, yet they are the first to carry the torch of whiteness and continue on the tradition of white men dominating media. In fact, when I watch these shows, sometimes I feel like they’re explicitly talking to white people, so I laugh, but again, I laugh from the margins.

1

 

The privileging of whiteness is the underlying foundation for mainstream comedy today.

Rocio Isabel Prado from Black Girl Dangerous states:

“Mainstream comedians like Louis C.K. are well known for acknowledging their white privilege, but they continue to use racism in their routines. Because people of color are not the intended audience, we are the targets for jokes.

White comedians’ refusal to acknowledge audiences of color has been painfully consistent. I’m tired of waiting for the Mexican joke to be over so that I can go back to listening to the rest of the show. Instead of hoping for white comedians to validate my experience, I have since begun to actively seek out comedians of color.”

It’s time we disrupt this trend and take over. If you really think #blacklivesmatter, then you should support the hell out of Black independent artists. Waiting for white people to “get it” doesn’t have to be the activism. Actively seeking out Black comedians, artists, musicians, intellectual thinkers, and filmmakers is the activism.

Being able to relax, being able to be entertained (without the drudgery of a thousand side-thoughts about how white-centric or sexist a program is), and being represented is revolutionary.

We must continue to cultivate, foster, and support Black independent media.

As I said on For Harriet:

“Imagination is a powerful tool that white supremacy keeps trying to hijack. When imagination becomes institutionalized, corporatized, or white-washed, it can become a tool of violence that can shape reality. Black independent media is a revolutionary reclamation of imagination.”

Check out the facebook page for Black Feminist Blogger and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Here’s ep. 1, 2, and 3. New episodes are out every Monday.

 

Aph Ko is a contributing writer for Everyday Feminism and For Harriet. She loves merging digital media with social justice. She is also the creator of Tales from the Kraka Tower, a web-series that satirizes diversity in academia.

 

The Female Archetypes Through the Lens of Roberto Rossellini

The character development of Pina and Marina used by Rossellini shows the influence of the war on Italian life and femininity. The suffering women are the epitome of the country at war.

The devout Pina (Anna Magnani)
The devout Pina (Anna Magnani)

 

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares. 

Italian neorealism. Who would have thought that a genre that existed for a short period of time–1944 to 1952 to be precise–could have such a significant influence in the world’s cinematic history? The quintessential works of the Italian neorealist directors such as Vittorio De Sica (Ladri di biciclette), Luchino Visconti (La Terra Trema, Ossessione) and Roberto Rossellini (Roma, città aperta) are now anchored in our cultural lexicon. The genre has influenced the work of  famed directors such as Truffaut, Antonioni and Godard. After all, didn’t Jean-Luc Godard state “All roads lead to Rome, Open City”?

Roma, città aperta, the first part of Rossellini’s neorealistic trilogy, is often cited as the prime example of the neorealist genre. In ravaged Rome of 1945, recovering from Nazism and fascist oppression, Rossellini formed a team with Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei to create two documentaries. Amidei and Fellini encouraged Rossellini to combine the scripts to create realistic fiction. The film was shot on location in Rome on a shoestring budget (mustered with many loans). Rossellini used parts of a 35 millimeter film and the scenes were silently shot–Renzo Rossellini would later post-synchronize the sound. Voilá, Roma, città aperta was born.

The neorealist movement arose as a reaction against the glamorous melodramas that had previously dominated the Italian film industry under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. The fascist Mussolini used cinema as a place where the Italian citizen could dream of the lush–unattainable–images and temporarily forget their own harsh reality a.k.a cinema of distraction.

The neorealist directors sought out to present a degree of unfettered realism that wasn’t presented on the Italian silver screen. The films addressed social problems such as the ravages of war, crime, unemployment, and poverty. The sense of immediacy throughout the film–scenes shot in locations where eight months before the city was occupied by the Nazis–had no correlation with any other Italian film produced in the 40s. Upon its release, Roma, città aperta, was received with mixed reactions in Italy. Luckily the rest of the world was transfixed by this form of new realism. The film won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Fellini, Rossellini, and Amidei were nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“Franchesco”
“Franchesco”

 

Roma, città aperta centers around the plight of the core members of the Italian resistance against the occupational Nazi government. We follow Giorgio Manfredi also known as Luigi Ferraris (Marcello Pagliero), a communist and leader in the resistance who’s wanted by the Nazis. His friend and underground Communist newspaper printer Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet); his fiancée, the widow Pina (Anna Magnani); and the priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi). The trio will help Manfredi get a new identity. Pina’s son, the young Marcello, has been active in the resistance against the Nazis. In the tumultuous events that follow, Francesco is arrested but later manages to escape. While Manfredi gets betrayed by his lover, femme fatale pur sang, Marina (Maria Michi).

Most research on the film–see for example the work of David Forgacs, Peter Brunette, Tag Gallagher–is focused on the politics of filming, the catholic church, or other neo-realist features. Not much is written on the archetypical roles of the women in this film (bar the work of Marcia Landy. The character development of Pina and Marina used by Rossellini shows the influence of the war on Italian life and femininity. The suffering women are the epitome of the country at war.

Fascism encouraged the rise of the so called New Italian Women (Nuova Italiana). During Mussolini’s reign, Italian women struggled with the dilemma of the lure of modernity versus the rut of tradition. Though their freedom was curbed: no voting rights for women, no female participation in the labor market, and a ban on abortion. The role of the women herein was in essence purely to bring forth children. These contradictions were emphasized by the gap that existed between the traditional Italian society of the First World War and the division of modernity that fascism entailed. In 1933, Mussolini’s stated, “ Woman must obey… My idea of her role in the State is in opposition to all feminism. Naturally she shouldn’t be a slave, but if I conceded her to vote, I’d be laughed at. In our State, she must not count.” Right.

Marina (Maria Michi)
Marina (Maria Michi)

 

In Roma, città aperta we are introduced to two archetypes. First, the headstrong Pina, the rock who supports her husband, yet is allowed to be vulnerable. Then there’s Marina, the “weak” and venal woman who will succumb to all her desires. This dichotomy between Pina and Marina is the classic example of the Madonna-whore complex. Marina is presented as the complete opposite of Pina. Pina can be seen as the new Italian woman. Her whole look and attitude throughout the film is that of an ordinary, disheveled woman. She almost seems stripped of her “femininity.” This is a stark contrast with Marina, who works as a showgirl and enjoys her silk stockings, fur coats, and cigarettes – all the finer things in life. Marina seems like the new embodiment of the earlier femme fatales that reigned in the Fascist cinema–women who lived by no discernible laws and destroyed men who crossed their paths. Although, Rossellini’s version of the femme fatale is portrayed as a frail woman. Marina doesn’t fully embody the vivacious and sexual role the previous Italian femme fatales had. She’s doesn’t sashay her way through life, instead she’s considered weak and unable to deny herself any desires. This is also illustrated by Rossellini’s portrayal of her “liaison” with the Nazi Ingrid (and to underline the “moral depravity” during the war). It’s important to note that while Marina is depicted as the sexual deviant, it is Pina’s motherly and devout character who ultimately comes across as impulsive and irrational.

In arguably one of the most famous scenes, Pina runs after a prison truck while shouting “Franchesco!” as her husband is taken by the Nazis. It’s a quick montage of short takes and one very dramatic tracking shot that underlines the abruptness and finality of death – the scene is inspired on a real life event in 1943 where Maria Teresa Gullace participated in a protest and was shot in front of her husband and son.

Roma, città aperta is one the most conventional films of Rossellini, well, at least in terms of narrative and dramatic structure. Through cinematic codes like shot / reverse shot, mise-en-scene, framing, and continuity montage, directors can reveal gender relations. Critic Laura Mulvey refers to it as the male gaze and states that cinema ideally is meant for the male audience. She divides the term in two: active male and the passive female. The problem lies in the fact that the woman is just a lust object on the screen, but that the male viewer meanwhile still has an irrational fear of the woman.

In Roma, città aperta the gaze shifted in the sense that the role of Pina and Marina is dialectical. The strong, motherly and modest woman knows her weak moments. Throughout the film the gaze lingers on the tired face of Pina. Marina realizes what she did, who she betrays and struggles to looks at herself in the mirror. Through this narcissistic gaze, the viewer is also hit with this realization. Pina is portrayed as the caring mother, and Francesco had found the perfect woman to start a family with. Marina is the epitome of the whore; she’s only there for men (or women) to have sex with, but cannot be tied down or feel true love. This is shown in her relationship with Manfredi. Manfredi’s looks and glances at Marina are nothing more than lustful. His gaze holds contempt for the fact that Marina is so weak, she’s willing to sell herself in order to establish a luxury life. Marina is clearly a passive female, but Pina has a more active stance. Nevertheless, her activity was not accepted and she comes to her untimely end.

Throughout the film, Rossellini leaves room for your own interpretation and strengthens the feeling of uneasiness that the story evokes – see the ambiguous “open” ending. The strength of Roma, città aperta lies ultimately in the images of Rome, the “amateur” actors (see the wonderful Magnani and Fabrizi), and the film’s aesthetic. It all lifts the film to the next level. Rossellini’s film depicts the reality of war and the displacement of women out their stereotypical roles during moments of distress.

Roma, città aperta has brought us some of the most indelible images in world cinema.

 

Giselle enjoys googling random things, late night conversations, and can’t stray far from the impulse to write it all down. She writes on fashion, film, and pop culture here.

 

 

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

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Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies.  So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,  the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

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When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of  Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

GirlNightEyeliner

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country.  These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if  Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Life, Death, and Cinema in ‘Benny Loves Killing’

There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and ‘Benny Loves Killing’ is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets.

Written by Max Thornton.

“Why horror?”

“Because I think it’s the most flexible genre…the most malleable genre. You are able to experiment and discuss the text without interfering with the object itself.”

So say Benny and her professor in the first set of dialogue in Ben Woodiwiss’s quietly excellent indie feature Benny Loves Killing, setting the scene for the experimentation and discussion to come. Although it has won at least one award for “Best Horror Film,” Benny Loves Killing isn’t really a horror film as such. Or rather it is, to use Benny’s own words, “a meta-horror film. A horror film about horror film. More importantly, a horror film about cinema.” I think one could argue that, whether or not it’s explicitly meta (and there’s plenty of superb horror that is, from Peeping Tom to Cabin in the Woods), horror is always, to some extent, about cinema. As far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, horror films have been self-consciously Jungian, awash with dreamscapes and archetypes, exploiting the visual and sonic immediacy of the medium to inhabit and unsettle the viewer’s psyche.

Notice how her eyes are obscured.
Notice how, in this most visual of media, her eyes are obscured.

But Benny Loves Killing is a meta-meta-horror film, a film about somebody making a film about film. Benny is a French film student in the UK making a horror film for a class, but we don’t actually see very much of her film. There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and Benny Loves Killing is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely.

“Oblique” is a good word for most of this film’s approach – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets. It’s not quite psychological horror, but the narrative does largely follow Benny’s tenuous state: bumming from one friend to another, refusing to take a shower, stealing from those around her, doing way too many drugs, arguing with her mother, having some fantastically creepy nightmares. The direction of the film is gorgeously stylish and evocative, with uses of chiaroscuro and splashes of red that probably deserve scene-by-scene analysis.

There are a few conversations where the characters discuss the film they are making, but the meta-commentary never gets inelegant. In one scene, Benny and her colleague Alex argue about the workings of point-of-view shots: “You sympathize with who you’re looking at, not with the eyes you’re looking through,” Benny insists, invoking the classic killer’s-viewpoint horror shot. If up to this point in the film you had overlooked the subtleties of how point of view is used, from here on you would surely notice how often the camera stays on Benny, with her interlocutor barely in frame – especially when these are men, especially men with power (the professor, the board that controls Benny’s funding, a creeper at a party). The effect is a claustrophobically intense focus on Benny, emphasizing her overwhelming and precarious mental state, but there’s also a complex and nuanced commentary here about gender in cinema.

"You sympathize with who you're looking at"
“You sympathize with who you’re looking at”

The most explicit discussion of gender and cinema occurs in the scene where Benny and Alex are screen-testing an actress who admits that their names had led her to expect two men, and then expresses her wariness of the widespread misogyny in the horror genre. Like any filmmaker who cannot step into the text of the film without thereby becoming a part of it, Benny allows the actress to speak without defending herself. There is no great rush to defend the feminist credentials of horror in general or of Benny’s film in particular, simply the opening of a conversation: is the camera necessarily a male gaze, even when wielded by a woman? Is a camera-on-camera the male gaze doubled or reversed or negated? How do the layers of agency and power operate in a male filmmaker’s film about a female filmmaker’s film?

Benny is surely to some degree an avatar for writer/director Ben Woodiwiss, and the different wigs she dons can be seen as a literalization of the different “hats” an independent filmmaker perhaps inevitable wears, as well as the multiplicity of her relationship to the camera eye. While Benny is not unsympathetic, she is certainly no wish-fulfillment self-insert, either in her personal or her professional life. Her cinematic ambitions are grandiose, but perhaps all talk: she constantly says she’s trying to do something innovative, to make a different kind of film, but nothing we see about the film-within-the-film suggests that it’s anything other than a conventional horror film, with its buckets of fake blood and negotiations with actresses about topless scenes. To what extent, the film seems to be asking, can the filmmaker have mastery over her film and its tropes? Or do film and tropes have mastery over the filmmaker?

The film couldn't work without Pauline Cousty's excellent performance as Benny.
The film couldn’t work without Pauline Cousty’s excellent performance as Benny.

The question is deepened by the mother/child imagery throughout the film. Benny’s fraught relationship with her mother doesn’t precisely parallel her relationship with her film, but it echoes it: despite, or perhaps at the root of, their conflicts, Benny comes from her mother, is shaped by her, inherits her flaws and characteristics. A creative work is its maker’s baby, and the mother gives the baby life but also, in the very life itself, life’s horizon of death, natality and mortality intertwined. The unleashing of the creative work into the world marks the author’s death, but for the auteur, it is also the death of her baby through her loss of control over it, birthed and killed at once in the cutting of the umbilical cord.

If Ben(ny) indeed loves killing, (s)he invites us, with a small smile and a gaze directly into the camera, to confront the lens and its powers of life and death: who, exactly, is being killed? And who, exactly, is doing the killing?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

Call For Writers: Black Families

Some questions to consider: What constitutes a Black family in film or on television? Are representations of these families realistic or true to life? What are audiences who consume this media intended to understand about Blackness or the Black experience? What kinds of stories are allowed to be told and which are still suppressed?

Call-for-Writers-e1385943740501

Our theme week for January 2015 will be Black Families.

Though not as prolific as white families, Black families are a popular subject for television and filmmaking. Black family comedy makes up a large portion of that representation, from classic sitcoms like The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to  slapstick films like Are We There Yet? and Dr. Dolittle. Many films like Dr. Dolittle are remakes of older films that originally featured white people but now star a predominantly Black cast (Annie, The Nutty Professor, etc.). There’s even an entire sub-genre of Black comedy that involves men cross-dressing as a matron or the family matriarch (Big Momma’s House, Madea’s Family Reunion, etc.).

On the other hand, there’s a host of critically acclaimed dramas that involves Black families with at least an element of the tragedy (The Pursuit of Happyness, Roots, 12 Years a Slave, The Color Purple, etc.). Many of these celebrated stories deal with serious issues like slavery, dysfunction, poverty, gang violence, and/or abuse.

Some questions to consider: What constitutes a Black family in film or on television? Are representations of these families realistic or true to life? What are audiences who consume this media intended to understand about Blackness or the Black experience? What kinds of narratives are allowed to be told and which are still suppressed?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Jan. 23 by midnight.

Roots

The Pursuit of Happyness

Boyz in the Hood

The Cosbys

12 Years a Slave

Annie

Baby Boy

Beloved

Grey’s Anatomy

Barbershop

The Nutty Professor

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Black-ish

Madea’s Family Reunion

Love & Basketball

Sister, Sister

Big Momma’s House

The Color Purple

Family Matters

Akeelah and the Bee

This Christmas

Moesha

Sparkle

Diff’rent Strokes

Dr. Dolittle

The Secret Life of Bees

American Gangster

Sanford and Son

In the Hive

Eve’s Bayou

Bebe’s Kids

Everybody Hates Chris

Soul Food

Seventeen Again

Are We There Yet?

The Boondocks

Red Hook Summer

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

Crooklyn

The Perfect Holiday

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

A List of All of Women and Hollywood’s End-Of-Year Coverage by Melissa Silverstein and Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Tim Burton Film “Big Eyes” is a Big Indictment of Art-World Patriarchy by Andi Zeisler at Bitch Media

Margaret Keane’s Eyes Are Wide Open by Carl Swanson at Vulture

In Hollywood, It’s a Men’s, Men’s, Men’s World by Manohla Dargis at The New York Times

The Women of Hollywood’s Men’s Men’s Men’s World by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

The Best of Black Television in 2014 by Curtis Caesar John at Shadow and Act

9 Ways The Media Failed Women In 2014 by Alexandrea Boguhn, Olivia Kittel, Olivia Marshall, and Lis Power at Media Matters for America

10 Reasons It Was Actually a Great Year for Women in Movies by Katey Rich at Vanity Fair

How Pop Culture Can Change The Way We Talk About Abortion by Lauren Duca at The Huffington Post

The 10 Most Feminist Ads of 2014 by Brianna Kovan at Ms. blog

 

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

 

 

 

Amy Adams Talks About Her Role as Painter Margaret Keane in ‘Big Eyes’

The actress added, “Being an artist and being a mom sometimes keeps you at odds and not to say you can’t do it, but an artist can feel very isolated, very narcissistic, and being a parent needs to be something completely different and so I understood that sort of thing and trying to make the right decisions and then getting caught in a lie with your child. That was something I found really fascinating and I was really interested by that dynamic.”

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Big Eyes

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

“The 50s were a good time if you were a man,” an unseen narrator says at the beginning of director Tim Burton’s latest bizarre tale, Big Eyes. The movie is based on the stranger-than-fiction story of artist Margaret Keane and her husband Walter Keane, who signed his name on her paintings of saucer-eyed, forlorn-looking waifs that were everywhere in the 60s.

Amy Adams, always terrific, and Christoph Waltz, in his usual effective turn as a weirdo, both landed Golden Globe nominations in the comedy lead acting categories. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Tim Burton on Ed Wood, also received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. And the Women’s Film Critics Circle, of which I am a member, gave the film the dubious distinction of citing it this year’s worst male images in a movie.

The colorful tale begins after Margaret flees her abusive husband in the late 50s for San Francisco, where she seeks a better life for her and her daughter. She meets the sweet-talking Walter at a street fair where he admires her paintings of children with sad-looking, enormous peepers. His Parisian street scene painting he claimed were inspired by his life and study in Paris. She falls for him. Soon she realizes she’s never actually seen him paint.

After they married, Walter talked Margaret into letting him put his signature on her paintings. Nobody buys “lady art,” he told her. In the beginning she was a willing but reluctant accomplice, but soon she felt the enormous cost of giving up her name and ownership of her greatest passion, her art. Walter was a genius at marketing. He bypassed the snooty gallery owners who detested the paintings and made a fortune when he mass-produced them as prints, posters and other tchotchkes.

By the time the fraud was uncovered in the 1970, Margaret’s paintings, which in their time were either adored or reviled, were no longer in style, and her story forgotten or never much known. Big Eyes, a Weinstein Company release, is as much about Margaret’s personal and professional awakening as it is about the perpetration of an art fraud. But it’s also about how Margaret’s paintings of urchins with enormously dilated pupils captured the zeitgeist of those trippy times.

Margaret, who at 87 is very much alive and still painting, attended the New York premiere last week and had a ball promoting the film, according to Adams, who participated in a press conference for Big Eyes last week at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. Burton and screenwriters Alexander and Karaszewski also attended along with cast members Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, and Jason Schwartzman.

 

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Amy Adams, at a Big Eyes press conference

 

Burton, who generally works with the same cast over and over, notably Johnny Depp, who has been in eight of his films, and Helena Bonham Carter, from whom he just separated, was asked about his casting choices for the leads. Burton replied, “Obviously they’re great actors. He’s Walter. She’s Margaret. And it was just fresh energy for me to work with new people ’cause everybody’s been getting sick of the people I was working with,” he laughed.

As portrayed in the film, Margaret is a timid woman and a single mother with few options in an era of rampant sexism. She found her voice after she left Walter and landed in Hawaii where she became a Jehovah’s Witnesses after a few of them happened to come to her door. She credits them with her resolve and determination to tell the truth. It is great fun to watch Adams portray her character’s transformation into a steely and determined woman resolved to take back her ownership of her paintings, no matter what you think of the portraits. (I hated them back in the 60s and hate them even more now that the children smile instead of frown.)

Director Tim Burton
Director Tim Burton

My favorite scene in the movie is the court showdown between Margaret and Walter. She sued him for slander after he insisted he was the painter of the signature works. The judge staged a paint-off and ordered Walter and Margaret to recreate a painting in front of him and the jury. Margaret produced a painting in under an hour. The unhinged Walter, who acted as his own lawyer, complained of shoulder pains and never painted a stroke. (Until his death in 2000, Walter insisted the paintings were his.)

At the press conference, Adams was asked if the appeal of playing a subtle character like Margaret was that it came after her role as the brassy femme fatale in David O. Russell’s American Hustle.

“I didn’t really think of her as a subtle person. I just thought of her as Margaret and that’s Margaret, so it wasn’t as though I was aiming to portray a thing. I was portraying a person and she’s a very understated human being although she gave us some zingers the other night,” Adams laughed. Margaret, who is conservative and dresses primly, attended a dizzying round of receptions, screenings and premieres to promote the film last week.

Adams noted she met Margaret only a couple of weeks before they began to shoot the film and the two sat down and talked. (Margaret has a cameo where she’s sitting on a park bench.) Adams said, “The thing that I liked about Margaret, and what I thought kept her from being a victim, because I didn’t want her to seem like a victim, is when you talk to her she still takes responsibility.”

Margaret has some compassion for Walter. She told Adams, “‘Maybe if I didn’t lie he would not have turned out like he did,’ she told me.”  She added, “Margaret also gives Walter credit for her career, saying ‘I wouldn’t be known if it wasn’t for him and he was a genius at what he did and I would never have the following I have today.’”

Christoph Waltz
Christoph Waltz

In response to a question about how she related to the film and her character and how being a parent informed her performance, Adams said she read the script before she became a mother: “I saw Margaret one way and then after I had my daughter and had been a mom for about four years, I saw her completely in a totally different way.”

The actress added, “Being an artist and being a mom sometimes keeps you at odds and not to say you can’t do it, but an artist can feel very isolated, very narcissistic, and being a parent needs to be something completely different and so I understood that sort of thing and trying to make the right decisions and then getting caught in a lie with your child. That was something I found really fascinating and I was really interested by that dynamic.”

Adams also related to Margaret’s discomfort in front of a crowd, like the press conference in which most question were directed at her and Burton. “Like, gosh, I have to talk in front of people,” she laughed. “But yeah, it played a great deal in how I related to the role, and Margaret said something great the other day. She was asked what she wanted people to walk away from the movie. She said, “’Stand up for yourself. Be true to yourself. Read your Bible and don’t lie.’”

The movie makes meaningful comments on the overwhelming sexism of the time, and Adams was asked if by the 70s Margaret identified with the feminist movement. Margaret wasn’t part of any movement, Adams replied: “As she puts it, ‘I was in a closet making paintings,’ so I like the way that Larry and Scott brought that into the movie because I do think whether intentional or not she did do something that was very much of the moment in standing up for herself and I do like that that sort of coincided with such a great portion of the feminist movement.”

After the press conference, Adams told me, “It was nice to get to play a woman, who even if it was unbeknownst to her, really spoke for a lot of women.”

On another note, the Weinstein Company sent out a press release supporting Amy Adams, who went on the Today show the other day but whose appearance was pulled when she expressed reservations about talking about the Sony hacking scandal.

The TWC release read:  “We firmly stand behind Amy Adams. We’ve been lucky enough to have had her talents grace several of our films. We are certain her fellow actors and directors would all agree, she is nothing but the consummate professional both on and off set. Amy decided to speak up for herself and express her disappointment that Today would feel the need to ask her a question she did not feel comfortable, and rather than respect her opinion or continue the discussion, the reaction was to pull her appearance from the show.”

Amy Adams took the message of Big Eyes to heart. Can anyone imagine the Today show canceling Bradley Cooper or any other A-list male actor for the same reason they pulled Amy Adams’ appearance?

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Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Reality TV: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our The Reality TV Theme Week here.

What Would You Do to be Famous?: Looking at Black Mirror and Starry Eyes by Elizabeth Kiy

I’ll just say it, reality TV scares me. It has so much potential to affect the way we live and look at ourselves by showing us how other people live. It can chip away at our idea of strong womanhood by highlighting the successes only of the beautiful, compliant and willing to backstab.

Keeping up with the Kardashians: Looking at Kim Kardashian’s Naked Body by Sarah Smyth

Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?

MasterChef and Internalized Misogyny by Robin Hitchcock

Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training.

Reality TV’s Antecedents: PBS, POV, and Barbara Kopple by Ren Jender

A channel that has been delivering a less tempered version of “reality” TV for many decades is PBS, most consistently and interestingly for over 25 years on POV, which showcases independent documentaries with limited theatrical runs (and many of those films are available online to watch as well). In its history POV has put its spotlight on trans* and queer people, people of color, and people with disabilities often in work directed by people who are from those communities (which is not usually the case in other “reality” programming).

Finding Faith and Feminism in The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns by Max Thornton

Nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. In medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.

Playing with Fire: “Compulsory Heterosexuality” in The Hunger Games by Colleen Clemons

While my conversations with my friends’ 12-year-old daughters about the trilogy always began with “Team Peeta!” or “Team Gale!” our conversations in the classroom focused on the scholarship of female collectives and violent resistance; we didn’t need Gale and Peeta as fodder for conversation. But on the last day of class, I introduced Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality to complicate the larger conversation in which readers—and viewers—find themselves forced to choose a camp, just as Katniss is forced to do.

‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’: Looking at Kim Kardashian’s Naked Body

Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?

Written by Sarah Smyth as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

Kim Kardashian is, arguably, one of the most visible celebrities of the 21st century. She’s prolific in all forms of popular media including the tabloid press, television, social media, and other internet outlets, and her recent attempt to “break the internet” demonstrates her power and command over these sources. Yet, her prolificacy resides not only in the sheer outlandishness, excess, and controversy of her fame. Rather the success of her celebrity status is situated in the hyper-visible presentation of her body. In particular, through the continual display of her naked body (something in which certain magazines are particularly interested), Kardashian quite literally embodies the complex construction of the female body as something to be looked at. And with her body being so readily, excessively, and continually put on show, can we help but do anything but look?

kim.paparazzi
Who’s looking at you, Kim?

 

Using Kardashian’s hit reality television show, Keeping up with the Kardashians, as a framing device for the presentation of her body, in this article, I will attempt to unpick the multiple ways in which Kardashian’s naked body becomes looked at. Looking at three examples of her nakedness, her sex tape, Playboy photo shoot and Paper photo shoot, I will demonstrate how Kardashian both internalizes and reasserts the strict social and cultural monitoring of the female body’s naked display, as well as the construction of the naked female body as a sexually objectified and fetishized image for the male gaze.

Firstly, I will consider the way in which Kardashian’s naked body becomes looked at through her sex tape. In the pilot episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, appropriately named, “I’m watching you”, Kardashian worries about going on The Tyra Banks Show to discuss her sex tape. Eventually she does – who can turn down that free publicity?! – but only to show remorse and regret for her “inappropriate” actions. She tells Banks, “[The tape] was [made] with my boyfriend of three years that I was very much in love with, and whatever we did in our private time was our private time, and never once did we think that it would get out… I made it. I need to take responsibility for what I’ve done. I have little sisters. I need to teach them what not to do.” Kardashian’s worries about going on the show and her eventual plea for forgiveness demonstrate the way in which we rigidly monitor and discipline the presentation of the (naked) female body and female sexuality. Leading social critic and philosopher, Michel Foucault explains in his book, Discipline and Punish, that we are not only surveyed by various forms of authority and power, but that we also learn to internalise this surveillance causing us to discipline ourselves. Using the structure of the Panopticon, a kind of prison where the prisoners are constantly watched by guards who are themselves hidden, Foucault demonstrates the way in which we are constantly monitored in our everyday life to the extent that we learn to maintain and embody a kind of self-surveillance.

Although not in a literal prison, Keeping up with the Kardashians reflect this monitoring in several ways. Firstly, as Lucia Soriano claims, “In Foucauldian terms, the viewer [of the show] takes on the role and monitors the Kardashians’ bodies to “assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits.” Foucault conveys that “the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” hence, “the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.” In other words, when we think about Keeping Up with the Kardashians, regardless if the camera is on or off, they are conditioned to continuously inspect themselves.”

However, the show is not the only place where this monitoring occurs. Kardashian’s appearance on The Tyra Banks Show also demonstrates this surveillance, both by the viewers and by Kardashian herself. Attempting to emphasize her long-term relationship with her partner, as well as her position as a role model for other young girls, Kardashian is aware of but crucially never challenges the societal and cultural demand for women to embody and also present a private and heteronormative constructed naked body.

Kimplayboy
Playboy legitimizes the display of Kardashian’s naked body

 

This moment directly contrasts with a later episode, “Birthday Suit,” in which Kardashian now struggles with the decision of whether or not to pose naked for Playboy magazine. Again, Kardashian demonstrates an awareness of the socially and culturally sanctions placed on women’s presentation of their bodies as she worries about how the nude shoot would impact on her image. She claims, “Ever since the sex-tape scandal, I have to be really careful in how I’m perceived.” Kardashian, it seems, has internalized the wider monitoring of her body to the extent that she now places boundaries and sanctions on the presentation and visibility of her naked body. In the end, she decides to do it. Again, this kind of publicity is too good to pass up.

The difference in this situation, however, is that, framed within male sexual desire, Playboy legitimizes her naked and sexual(ized) body through what Alexandra Sastre calls the normative and regulated sexual practice of posing for Playboy. As Laura Mulvey argues in her famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (heterosexual) men have the authority of the look. Examining film in particular, Mulvey argues that male protagonist is the active subject in contrast to the women who functions as a passive and erotic object. Functioning as the identificatory anchor for the (assumed) male spectator, the man is the bearer of the look whereas the woman is there to be looked at. In this way, through Playboy’s conventional heteronormative and phallocentric structures of looking, the magazine legitimizes the display of Kardashian’s naked body. Whereas Kardashian’s sex tape suggests an authority and autonomy over the creation of the tape which makes ambiguous the intended spectator  – Kim jokingly says on the show that she made it because “[she] was horny and [she] felt like it” – Playboy reasserts normative and accepted forms of looking at Kardashian’s naked body.

Although both my examples occurred in an early part of Kardashian’s career, the way we look at her naked body continues to be a point of discussion, controversy, and criticism. The backlash surrounding her now famous photo shoot for Paper magazine demonstrates the way in which Kardashian’s body or, perhaps more accurately, the display of her body is still a site for intense scrutiny, monitoring and judgment. Some, including this Bitch Flicks piece, explored Kardashian’s use of cultural appropriation by presenting her body in a similar way to “freakish” yet fetishized Black bodies. Not only is this particularly disturbing and offensive in itself, but it also adds another complex layer as to how we look at Kardashian’s naked body. In her essay, “Eating the Other,” bell hooks discusses the way in which “ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is white cultural.” What particularly interests me is the way in which hooks discusses the young white male’s fascination and desire to have sex with women from ethnic minorities. She says, “To these young males and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the Other…  They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier…”

What becomes disconcerting, then, when considering who is looking at Kardashian’s naked body in Paper is the way in which her cultural appropriation directly feeds into the fetishizing, objectification, and commodification of the black female body in particular by white males. In this way, her body continues to function as a complex and ambiguous site of problematic form of looking. As Kardashian’s body continues as a hyper-visible image in the collective cultural consciousness, we can only hope that we learn to break down the ways of looking at her body in order to dismantle our complicity in the policing, objectification and fetishization of her naked body.

Kardashian's photo shoot for "Paper" magazine was heavily criticized for its appropriation of black female bodies
Kardashian’s photo shoot for Paper magazine was heavily criticized for its appropriation of black female bodies

 

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Sarah Smyth recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.