Bitch Flicks – Page 85 – The radical notion that women like good movies

‘The Babadook’: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale

Jennifer Kent: “I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience.”

This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s feature debut The Babadook is the surprise hit horror film of the year. (Read Sarah Smyth’s review here.) With no stars and a limited budget, Kent cannily tells the story of Amelia (Essie Davis), a widow still wracked with grief over the death of her husband six years earlier, and Amelia’s troubled young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), whose obsessive fear of monsters verges on the manic. One night, Samuel pulls an unfamiliar book from the shelf for his mother to read to him, Mr. Babadook. Amelia reads the book, unleashing the titular monster into their home. The mother and son, and the movie, increasingly retreat into their own horrific private world, terrorized by a fairy tale-like creature that seems intent on driving Amelia into madness.

The narrative is simple, and pointedly familiar, but The Babadook is notable for the complexity of its two main characters, and the remarkable performances that bring them to such vivid life.

We spoke with Kent on the phone about the film’s creation and its success.

Bitch Flicks: Congratulations on all the acclaim that the film is getting.

Jennifer Kent: Thank you. It’s been a real trip. It’s been a long and fantastic journey for this film. It’s been amazing.

BF: How did you get the idea for the film? Are you a parent yourself?

JK: No. No, I’m not. Obviously the mother/child relationship is really important in the film, but what i was really focused on was her, on this woman and her suppression of something she found impossible to face. That was the starting point for me. I feel if you suppress things in life, you don’t just affect yourself; you affect everyone around you. So then the choice to have that little boy in the picture, and to make him a kind of mirror to her was how it worked out. But it wasn’t, for me, entirely a story about motherhood, although that is a really important factor in the film.

BF: I understand what you’re saying about it being a very personal story, and starting with Amelia’s character, and what’s refreshing about it is how complex her character is. She isn’t just one thing. She’s not the type of female protagonist that you see in a typical horror film.

JK: I didn’t start with motherhood being the primary focus, but it is a very important part of the film, and I’m very adamant not to make this woman the evil mother. That’s why I placed the film very much inside her experience. Even when the shit hits the fan later in the film, we’re still experiencing it largely from her perspective, and I wanted her to be complex. She’s trying so hard. She’s a loving person. She’s drowning. She’s a drowning woman in this situation, but she wants to do the right thing, and I was interested in exploring that. I’m the type of person, when I read or hear about these parents killing or harming their kids… Of course it’s a tragedy, and the act of those parents is abominable, but they’re not monsters. They’re human beings. And my empathy and my sensitivity around these things made me curious. How does one get to that place where they become this monstrous mother? How does that happen? And so that’s why, I guess, I feel proud of that character, of Amelia. No one’s saying that she’s a one note character.

BF: Your empathy for the character really comes through. Could you talk a little bit about casting Samuel, and your conception of that character, because again, it’s not a child character that I’ve seen in any other film. He’s a very unique movie kid.

JK: Yeah. If you met [Noah], you’d be shocked, because he’s the opposite of Sam. He’s very quiet and sweet. That’s all acting. And he is an empathetic kid. He really loved Sam. He really felt sorry for Sam, because his mom wouldn’t listen to him. And he was right. And I think the quality that I was looking for in the little boy who would play Sam was that empathy. And of course, Sam’s a strange kid, and very annoying at times, but ultimately, he loves his mom and he wants to protect her. So I needed a child who could embody all those qualities. And someone who could be directed. A lot of kids that come into these auditions, they’re like machines. But they can’t necessarily change and give you a subtle performance. But Noah could, and the key to that for me was improvisation. So we played games and we imagined things with the boys who got down to the final short list. And Noah was a standout in that way: vivid imagination, very emotionally intelligent. And robust. You know, I didn’t want a kid that was going to collapse on the second day of shooting, saying “I wanna go home.” He was there for the six weeks of shooting, day in and day out, and when I think about what he did, it’s an extraordinary thing for a 6-year-old to achieve.

BF: Yeah, that’s amazing. I didn’t know if you’d found a kid who was just sort of like that, or if you’d found someone capable of bringing that character to life without necessarily being that way. That’s interesting.

JK: Yeah, he was really fun and sweet. And in fact, one interesting thing about that process is that kids don’t want to be disobedient, so it was really hard to get him to be that way in rehearsals. I had to give him permission to be naughty, because yeah, kids are socialized — unless they’re brought up badly — to be well-behaved. So yeah, it was a real process for him.

BF: Did you set out to make a horror film? Is that a genre that you’re interested in generally? I noticed the clips from Black Sabbath and House of Exorcism and of course, all those great George Méliès clips that Amelia sees on TV. Is that the type of work that drew you to this type of story?

JK: Yeah. I mean, I love horror. I love it! I even will see most of the modern stuff, and I always hope it’s gonna be good. But I definitely have watched a lot of Italian horror, lot of everything. So it’s in me. It’s in my DNA, but it isn’t the thing that rules me. And I have to say… I can’t speak for other filmmakers, but I imagine it wasn’t something that ruled them either. They start with an idea and a story and that’s what happens. I think there’s a danger in becoming subservient to a genre, going “Oh, I’m going to make a movie that’s going to scare everyone.” I needed to look deeper than that, and that’s why… It’s such an interesting thing, how bad horror can be, and I think when it’s really bad, it’s just made by people who don’t get it. Who don’t understand how powerful it is. You can really discuss deep issues with horror, in a way you can’t through drama. It’s one of the most cinematic genres as well, because it’s very closely linked with dreams. So yeah, I’m a fan.

BF: I agree with you that you can touch on these deep human issue through the genre. It doesn’t just have to be about saying “boo.” Amelia’s grief in the film is such a powerful thing that seems to be the genesis…

JK: Yeah. How would you discover that in drama? It would be very hard to not make it melodramatic. To put it in this realm actually makes people feel what Amelia’s feeling, on some level, and have empathy with her. I’ve noticed that the film doesn’t work with people who have low empathy [laughs] as human beings. It’s not a film for them. The people who it scares have more of that going on in their systems.

BF: Well, I liked it. I thought it was scary. So, I guess I check out on the empathy scale.

JK: So you’re a decent human being. [laughs]

BF: Yeah, I guess. If that’s your barometer for that. It’s really interesting to me. It has these very classical elements to it with the sense of isolation and the darkness and the way the Babadook himself is portrayed. There’s an old-fashioned quality to it. Could you talk about how you decided to visualize this monster?

JK: It was something that just felt right, this kind of childlike world. I’m really drawn to myths, and I guess I wanted to create a new myth in a domestic setting. Old children’s books, old fairy tales — you know, the brutal ones, the real ones — they touch on something very primal. They look childlike and innocuous, but deep down, there’s something really savage and sinister there. So that was my starting point for the world of the film. The book is obviously a very important part of it, so I wanted the Babadook to spring from the book, in terms of its style as well. And there’s something about the old horror that is very childlike, because it’s done in what we would consider now a very simple way, all in-camera techniques, but there’s something still very powerful about that, I think. Sometimes even more powerful than CGI and a lot of complicated post-production work. When something happens in camera, and you’re seeing it with the naked eye, you feel — I feel, anyway — differently. It feels like it’s happening there and it’s more real to me.

BF: I think it’s very effective, and it is an extension of the book in a way that works really well. Could you talk about the book itself? It was great. Very memorable, very vivid work that Alex Juhasz did.

JK: We looked for ages for an artist. We looked at lots of Australian illustrators, and we even worked with a couple in developing the Babadook look, but Alex was unique in that he’s actually an American artist. I saw his work and it was beautiful but really strange. I was drawn to him and his work. He has this thing of being able to keep his work original, but also took direction. So we were able to develop the look of the creature according to how I needed it to operate. So it wasn’t just finding an illustrator to make these beautiful pictures. He really understood the need for it to support the story. He was a good storyteller. And he also had a lot of work in stop motion animation. He designed the opening credits for United States of Tara, and he’d worked a lot with Jamie Caliri, the stop motion animator who did Lemony Snicket‘s end credits. He had a lot of experience that proved invaluable when it came to animating the book. He’s a bit of a genius, Alex.

BF: The illustrations themselves really set the tone for what’s to come.

JK: They come to life, so they needed to be energetic and have an ambitiousness to them.

BF: For women filmmakers, in the states at least, it can be particularly challenging to get a first film made and shown. Is that something you want to address?

JK: I’m not so much aware. I don’t think of myself — I know I’m a woman, of course, but I don’t feel ruled by it. I think a film is hard to make, full stop. I think a person’s first feature is a real trial by fire, no matter if you’re male, female, or otherwise, and it’s not something that I feel really informed me. It certainly didn’t hinder me. Not in Australia, anyway. And I must say, I’ve had a lot of meetings with various people in America since Babadook premiered in Sundance, and admittedly, I haven’t done any work there yet, but I’ve never felt encumbered or restrained by my gender in that context. I’m not saying sexism doesn’t exist, but I don’t give it much time. I’ve got too much to do.

BF: Do you think, though, that — I don’t know, that scene where Amelia is using the vibrator… I’m not sure there are many male filmmakers that would’ve thought to include a scene like that, but it’s an important scene in terms of understanding who Amelia is and what she’s dealing with.

JK: My gaze and my way of looking at the world is inherently feminine, from a feminine perspective, and there are things in that film that probably wouldn’t be written by a male writer. But I don’t know. Isn’t that the way with all films? They come from the person who makes them. I understand what you’re saying, Josh, I’m just trying to… it’s a complex issue. Yes, there’s sexism in the world and there’s an incredible imbalance of males to females represented in all films. Most films are about male stories. So yeah, maybe I just put a female story out there, and the fact that it’s unique says that we still have a long way to go in terms of making more female stories come to life. I hope I can put a few more out there. Female stories with women at their core.

BF: Me, too. Congratulations on this film. It’s very effective and well done. Do you know what your next project is going to be yet?

JK: I’ve got two films I’m working on, and I’ve come back from America with about 25 scripts to read, so I’ll be plowing through them. And it looks like I’m going to jump onto a TV series, to write and direct in America. A miniseries, but that hasn’t been announced, so I’m hesitant to talk about it. A lot of opportunities have come up. I’m in a very fortunate position at the moment, and hopefully we’ll be making something sooner rather than later.

BF: I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next. Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak with me.

Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.

Lena Dunham, Slenderman, and the Terror of ‘Girls’

This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.

An episode of Law & Order: SVU from earlier this month fictionalized yet another “ripped from the headlines” story–this time the Slenderman murders in which two pre-teen girls stabbed their friend in an attempt to summon the mythic Slenderman.

For those not familiar with Slenderman, he is a tall, thin character in a black suit with a featureless face spawned from a “creepypasta” (online, easily shareable fiction) meme from 2009, making him one of the first urban legends of the modern age. In the May 2014 attempted murder, the perpetrators gave the reason for their attack as wanting to become “proxies” or “acolytes” for Slenderman.

Many a think piece (this one by Rebecca Traister is perhaps the most tempered) and news story were spawned in the wake of the crime, puzzled by young women being so obsessively violent toward one another. You’ll notice that similar arguments are rarely made when boys behave badly toward other boys.

Also in the news of late are the allegations that Lena Dunham molested her younger sister Grace after writing in her recently released memoir Not That Kind of Girl that she would bribe her sister for her affections—“anything a sexual predator might do to woo a suburban girl”—masturbate in the bed she shared with her, and inspected her infant vagina (it later turned out Grace had stuffed pebbles up there) because that was “within the spectrum of things I did.”

I don’t really have a strong opinion about these allegations; I think it’s clear that Lena didn’t molest her sister, who doesn’t identify as a victim. I also think, as Roxane Gay, amongst others, wrote, that Dunham has boundary issues and isn’t always the best at acknowledging her white privilege and where she may have fucked up.

But I think what scared people the most about Dunham’s unabashed confessions is that it prescribes a curiosity and sexuality to children that adults would like to forget. Radhika Sanghani, writing in Daily Life, interviewed child psychologist Dr. Rachel Andrews, about the wider reaction to possible sexual experimentation by young girls. Andrews says, “It’s ‘just one of those things that boys do.’ But you might see a lot of girls who might have their hands down their pants and that be more questioned as to whether it’s normal. In fact it’s quite common. You might notice girls in a high chair rhythmically rubbing against the front of it.”

I remember as a 5-year-old I would mash the smooth plastic between my Barbies and Kens’ legs together and incessantly sing the song “Let’s Talk About Sex” (OK, the chorus; I wasn’t as adept as remembering rap lyrics as I am now!) with my male bestie during quiet time at school. And as many a female writer, tweeter and Tumblr(er?) has pointed out in the wake of all this, exploring our own and others’ bodies is a natural part of childhood. Doctors and nurses or mommies and daddies, anyone?

As we grow older, we start to understand social codes that tell us we should nip this curiosity in the bud and instead be ashamed of our bodies and hide them away. Even in the presence of a monogamous significant other (because sharing it with more than one person is also frowned upon), our bodies should be shrouded by bras, strategically placed sheets and minimal lighting, as Hollywood teaches us. Even in the scarily progressive (for the time) Sex & the City, which showed women frankly talking to each other about sex, Carrie and Charlotte shielded their bodies much of the time with underwear and bedding. In Dunham’s Girls, some of the characters show frightening sides of their sexualities whilst the actresses who chose to remain clothed mirror this by showing equally frightening sides of their personalities. Whilst, like Not That Kind of Girl, the show has some privilege problems to work through, Girls has been revolutionary because it’s not afraid to portray young women as many of them are: people that can sometimes be scary in their cluelessness, narcissism and humanity.

By contrast, we all know there’s nothing more terrifying than women who’ve got their shit together, especially those who don’t fit the conventional mold like the Dunhams. For example, Dunham’s mother’s reaction to Lena finding pebbles in Grace’s vagina was a rational one. She didn’t freak out or get angry or shame her daughters, which no doubt contributed to Dunham’s unabashed comfort in sharing her body and her thoughts with the world. As Dr. Andrews continues, “To have a big reaction about [children exploring their bodies], certainly a child could then go on to think there’s something wrong with them and what they’re doing… It can have an adverse effect.”

In order to keep producing these girls that terrify the status quo, more adults need to take that position and not freak out when they catch their children—and particularly their girls—doing things they apparently shouldn’t. It’s only once we start adding adult meaning to children’s actions that they couldn’t possibly fathom that they start to take a sinister shape. It’s more likely that Dunham’s childhood actions were ones of curiosity than predation. And in today’s internet age, satisfying that curiosity has never been easier, as seen with the Slenderman attempted murder. In addition to understanding that children will start to search for things online that’d make your grandma blush, we also need to discuss them rationally, without shame and guide them to make informed decisions. Otherwise we keep producing literally terrifying girls to match our literally terrifying boys.

Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about feminism, social issues, and pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter.

The Feminisms of ‘Born in Flames’

What is the role of difference in feminism? When in doubt, ask Audre Lorde. In 1980, she delivered a lecture entitled “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (later published in ‘Sister Outsider’) in which she states, “There is a pretense to homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.” It’s no coincidence to me that three years later Lizzie Borden would direct ‘Born in Flames,’ a film that depicts a collection of different feminist voices all aligned in a common goal of resisting what bell hooks terms the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.

What is the role of difference in feminism? When in doubt, ask Audre Lorde. In 1980, she delivered a lecture entitled “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (later published in Sister Outsider) in which she states, “There is a pretense to homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.” It’s no coincidence to me that three years later Lizzie Borden would direct Born in Flames, a film that depicts a collection of different feminist voices all aligned in a common goal of resisting what bell hooks terms the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.

The film takes place 10 years after a social revolution in the United States (!). However, despite the political structure of a socialist democracy, social and economic justice for the historically marginalized is still a long way off. Filmed in cinema verité style with non-professional actors and against the backdrop of Reagan-era New York City, the post-revolution future looks appropriately gritty, unflinching, and chaotic—much like the film’s narrative. So, too, are the voices of feminist activists that structure the film. First, we meet Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) an African American woman who, along with Hilary Hurst (Hilary Hurst), a white women, leads the Women’s Army. Both are disenfranchised by the government’s “work-fair” program, and we see them work to mobilize their respective communities across racial lines. And most importantly, we see them disagree about how to do it. Adelaide, influenced by her mentor Zella (played by the late feminist activist Florynce Kennedy), weighs the necessity of the Women’s Army to take up arms against the state, which has only ever perpetuated militarized violence toward women, lesbians, communities of color, and the poor in general. Zella tells Adelaide, “all oppressed people have a right to violence.”

4066608,MEUK8_yO5xQdKLkPLgMItWVLCYaIOhhTXdnuy6V36UWbsUfi12hhhizWOkB9UmVzqHPoGdOPBspxn7qZ1hbjow== — Jean Satterfield as Adelaide Norris, Women’s Army

In addition to seeing women converse with and debate one another, we also see them speaking from dedicated feminist platforms on pirate radio. Isabel (Adele Bertei), the DJ of Radio Ragazza, is an outspoken critic of the Women’s Army. She and her community represent the white, anarchist-punk perspective that promotes creative resistance through art. Then there’s Honey (Honey) of Phoenix Radio, a DJ who Adelaide seeks as an ally by extension of overlap of their membership in Black communities. Yet another voice is the Socialist Youth Review, a liberal magazine whose reporters (white women, including a young Kathryn Bigelow) occasionally weigh in to critique the Women’s Army for its agenda and question the need for it to exist at all, given the social gains achieved by the revolution. And finally, a distinctly anti-feminist perspective that provides a counter-narrative to the action unfolding is the voiceover of FBI agents, who aim to take down the Women’s Army, starting with Adelaide Norris. We hear them remark, “We don’t know who to find out who is charge” and “it’s not clear how they function.” These statements reveal just how confounding it is to the very centralized government that a social movement could share authority amongst its members.

borninflames1 — Adele Bertei as Isabel of Radio Regazza

One of the ways that the Women’s Army shares this authority is shared is through collective anti-street harassment activism and anti-rape squads. In a harrowing but triumphant scene, a woman is being assaulted by two women on her way to the subway, and out of nowhere appears a fleet of women on bicycles, blowing whistles and circling the men. The men leave the scene and the Women’s Army come to the aid of the attack victim. What is particularly important about this scene is not just how little things have changed when it comes to the endurance of street harassment and violence against women, but that the Women’s Army creates its own policing solutions to these problems. Instead of acting out carceral feminism, which relies on law enforcement and state violence to combat violence against women, the feminisms of Born in Flames create justice rather than restore “order.”

Though much is made of the differences between the activist groups, one thread runs through the film: the shared experience of work. There are several montages—set to the soundtrack of Red Krayola’s “Born in Flames,” which will get lodged in your brain for weeks—in which close-up shots of hands and all kinds of bodies are engaged in all kinds of labor. From bagging groceries, to child care, to sex work, each act is equated as valuable in its own right. One of the acts of resistance occurs after Adelaide, like many other women who are lower in the social caste, is laid off from her construction job and organizes a demonstration to fight for jobs that have the potential for growth.

The film’s rising action occurs when Adelaide is detained by the FBI on suspicion of arms trafficking—a fabrication intended to stamp out her and the Women’s Army. Without spoiling the film, let’s just say that the different feminist subgroups are called to combine their efforts and create Phoenix Regazza Radio to stand in solidarity as they enact a final act of terrorism. While this particular act is a bit chilling to watch post-9/11, it powerfully symbolizes the danger that will befall society should the marginalization of women and the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy persist.

‘The Fault in Our Stars’ Gus Is the Manic Pixie Dream Boy Teenagers Deserve

I know, I know, you are tired of hearing about Manic Pixie Dream Girls. We feminist critics, we’re always Manic Pixie This, Bechdel Test That, Sexual Objectification of the Other Thing. And I’m tired of hearing about Manic Pixies too, but I’m even more tired of seeing them.

Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in 'The Fault in Our Stars' — Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in *The Fault in Our Stars*

So tired, that when the elusive Manic Pixie Dream Boy appeared on my seatback video player on the long trip back to Cape Town last week, I was so annoyed by him I almost had to turn off The Fault in Our Stars even though I had 12 hours of flight time to fill.

TFiOS’s Augustus Waters is so much of a Manic Pixie he appears on the Wikipedia page for the concept. He’s handsome, “charming,” aggressively quirky. He fully embraces life’s glorious mysteries, he’s completely devoted (for reasons we don’t need to worry about) to the protagonist, and to making her also embrace life’s glorious mysteries (including his boners). He calls her by her first and middle names, Hazel Grace, because of course he does.

John Green, author of the YA novel the film is based on, responds that he was trying to make Gus the kind of character who seems perfect until you realize his whole life is a performance: (this quotation is from a weird podcast over soccer video game playing, so it’s edited down quite a bit):

I don’t think that Gus is really very much like those characters at all. I mean certainly he starts out I think as, you know, as most romantic leads do… like very sort of improbably charming and precocious and quick on his feet…to seem cooler than cool, you know.

I think in a lot of ways Gus is one of those guys who like, the first time you meet him you’re like “that guy’s amazing” and then the second time you meet him you’re like “that guy only has five funny stories about himself” those people who are sort of very performed in their lives… they have those performative qualities but… their charisma is… somewhat superficial and certainly that’s the case with Gus.

This character actually sounds really interesting, if not totally original (I immediately thought of Justin Theroux’s character on Parks and Recreation). And I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if these nuances came across in the text, but in the film adaptation, it’s clear they stopped at “cooler than cool” with their characterization of Gus.

And boy, was I ever irritated with him. He’s the human equivalent of scraping your teeth on a popsicle stick. Everything he does is put-on nonsense he’ll defend in a wordy speech delivered through a perma-smerk. For example: he likes putting unlit cigarettes in his mouth as a “metaphor”: “you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.” Ohhhhhkay buddy.

He’s also from the “Pushy and Persistent” school of wooing, as well documented by Matt Patches in this piece for Vulture. Gus repeatedly disregards Hazel’s rejections because he’s too in love to be held back by something as pesky as her feelings. It’s one of those things where you change the music and it becomes a horror movie, and next thing you know Gus is killing Hazel’s pets.

But. My hatred of Gus Waters comes from the perspective of a 30-year-old woman. The intended audience for this character is teenagers. And I can assure you, that when I was 16, I would have looooooooved Augustus Waters. I would have sticky-tacked a magazine cutout of Ansel Elgort to my bedroom wall. I would have thought about Gus and Hazel Grace when I heard sad love songs on the radio. I would have written “okay” over and over in the margins of all my school notebooks.

I actually went and looked at my diary from when I was 15 (I wrote it on my computer, like Doogie Howser, so I still have an electronic copy), knowing I had made a list of 80-odd things that at the time I thought would make me fall in love with a boy: “He’s fascinated with old maps.” “He can turn a trip to the grocery store into a grand adventure.” “He uses antiquated slang.” I wanted to fall in love with an enthusiastic pile of affectations. I wanted Gus Waters. I wanted a Manic Pixie Dream Boy.

But Teenage Robin would have wanted this.

And I’m no adolescent psychologist, but I think it’s OK for us to have our Manic Pixie fantasies when we’re teens. One of the things I hate most about the MPDG trope is how she is often infantilized to make the man feel above his arrested adolescence while simultaneously making him “feel alive” by encouraging him to continue doing childlike things (committing impromptu misdemeanors and such). This problem really only applies to adults. I’ve gotta say I more or less support teenagers encouraging each other to be little shits, especially teenagers who had to “grow up too soon” because of illness. (Remind me I’ve written this should I ever have to bail out my teenage kid from jail after they egg someone’s house.)

Moreover, as much as I internally screamed, “Who does that!?” at Gus Waters’ antics, the answer is: teenagers do that. A lot of teenagers are performative and forced-quirky, because they haven’t figured out who they really are, or even if they have aren’t sure it is okay to be that person. And while the overlap between normal teenage behavior and that of a Manic Pixie makes the original trope all the more disturbing, it does make me feel like I should let Gus Waters off the hook. So teenagers, doodle hearts around his name all you want. Someday you’ll realize what a tool he is.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who is glad she grew out of being a teenager.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no such thing as a movie that’s universally hated, or a movie that’s universally loved. No matter how awful something is, there’s always somebody who likes it and, no matter how wonderful something is, there’s always somebody who thinks it’s garbage – that is the wondrous variety of human taste.

That said, if there’s one movie that almost everyone agrees is bad, it’s Neil LaBute’s 2006 re-make of The Wicker Man.

Starring Nicholas Cage at his Nicholas Cage-iest, The Wicker Man is a two-hour exercise in casual misogyny, featuring a confusing and unsuspenseful plot. It’s so bad that the YouTube videos designed to make fun of it literally do nothing but show scenes from the movie, exactly as they played out.

It isn’t hard to find people who agree that The Wicker Man was terrible, and it isn’t hard to find people who agree that it was misogynist – what’s weird is that discussions of misogyny in the film usually begin and end with the statement, “Nicholas Cage dresses up as a bear and punches women in the face.” And, while that is entirely terrible on multiple levels, it’s not the most offensive thing about the movie. The most offensive thing about the movie is that it takes for granted that there’s something disturbing and sinister about women who don’t take orders from men.

Billed as a horror story, The Wicker Man follows a detective who’s investigating a case outside his jurisdiction. That means that, when he travels to the remote community where the mystery’s taking place, he doesn’t have the power to make any of the citizens of that community – who are predominantly female – cooperate with him. Instead of adjusting his strategy and approaching them in a friendlier way, he starts off by screaming at everyone he meets, and then acts surprised when they don’t want to help him. Yet, the fact that the female characters recoil from him rather than scrambling to follow his orders is treated, by the movie, as though it’s a sign that Something Is Wrong.

The movie also features a large number of sequences where Nicholas Cage asks a woman a direct question, and the woman a) gives a vague answer that doesn’t help, b) answers with a total non-sequitur, or c) pretends not to understand what he’s talking about in a deliberate attempt to make him feel crazy. In other words, it’s just like talking to your wife – please, take my wife!

At the very end of the movie, when All Is Revealed, it turns out that Nicholas Cage’s ex-girlfriend purposely got pregnant so that she could guilt him into taking an interest in the welfare of their child, and use that as leverage to lure him to the freaky matriarchy she lives in, so that she and her womyn friends could sacrifice him to their pagan god, ‘cause women be bitches like that.

There’s no shortage of angles to take when you’re discussing the misogyny in this film, but the one that seems to resonate most with mainstream audiences is, “Nicholas Cage dresses up like a bear and punches women in the face” – which he does, for the entire final act – because we have achieved a state of gender-awareness in our culture where dressing up as a bear and punching women in the face is almost universally seen as a bad thing to do. Presenting a worldview in which powerful women are inherently threatening, women’s reasoning ability is suspect, and women use sex and pregnancy as a way to trap and manipulate men is actually more misogynist to me than having a guy dress up like a bear and punch women in the face, but that puts me out of step with the general discussion.

In other words, it’s really easy to get buy-in for the idea that The Wicker Man sucks, but we might not be adding much to the discussion of misogyny when we do that.

In fact, the truth is that I find myself not wanting to argue about exactly why this movie is misogynist, because I’m afraid that, if I start disturbing the soil around that one, I’ll quickly uncover the truth that most people don’t understand that misogyny is more than punching someone in the face. I’m afraid I’ll discover that most people hate this movie because it offends their sense that men should be chivalrous toward women – that they would be totally fine with everything else, if only he didn’t dress up like a bear and start punching.

I’m also afraid that the only reason people are really willing to criticize the content of The Wicker Man is because it’s also poorly made from a technical standpoint. If they were enjoying themselves more – if it were a little better-looking, and, technically, more well-crafted, I’m not sure it would be so easy to toss out this level of scorn.

Sin City is a film that is technically well made (so, one step up from The Wicker Man) and still completely blatant in its misogyny (with racism added to spice things up). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a lot harder to have a conversation about why you hate Sin City than it is to make fun of The Wicker Man.

The first thing that Sin City’s defenders will tell you is that it is hateful on purpose (as though doing it on purpose makes it better). Frank Miller and the movie are imitating film noir – that genre where dames were dames and the hero was a hard-luck, working class guy who was awesome at bare-knuckle boxing, and gay people arrived in a cloud of evil smoke. I get that that’s on purpose, but all it means is that Sin City did a really good job of mimicking something sexist. If it’s not challenging, or examining, or interrogating the sexist thing in any way, then I need another reason for why someone thought that was a good idea.

The problem with criticizing Sin City is that it gets us into a discussion about whether a work of art can be both technically proficient and fundamentally unworthy in some other way. In other words, it gets us into a discussion of what we mean when we say a movie is “good.” Given the history of moral censorship in the United States and Canada, people are rightly cautious of the idea that we should declare things good or bad based on whether or not we agree with their values. At the same time, completely removing yourself from the meaning of a movie, or the ideas it’s trying to express, and focussing just on whether the camera was in the right place, and the pixels were coloured correctly, seems to be missing the point.

Sin City is a staggering technical achievement, and the tone I use when I criticize it is different because of that. It’s not like The Wicker Man, where you can just write it off, and be satisfied that everyone agrees with the broad-stroke message, “This movie was totally bad.” People have passionate feelings about whether or not it’s possible for a misogynist story to be good if it’s also well-executed. They have passionate feelings about whether it’s even appropriate to consider a story’s misogyny (or racism, or homophobia, or other ideological content) in rendering a verdict about it. The truth is, philosophically, I don’t know if it should be possible for a misogynist movie to be “good” – but I know that I can’t quite hear myself saying, “I found this completely hateful and, oh my god, it was the best!”

Just to be clear, for anyone who doesn’t remember the film, Sin City is about three tough, underworld men who interact with subservient women – mostly prostitutes and exotic dancers. The women have no power, no ability to look after themselves, no ability to make decisions – whenever they try to act, they just make things worse. The Black one is “wild” and she thinks it’s sexy when a guy hits her in the face. The Asian one doesn’t talk and carries samurai swords. The one who’s a stripper is told that she’s “strong” because she can really take a beating without screaming or crying about it. All of the women are sexually available to the men at the centre of the story. At one point, the prostitutes tie up one of the men, and it seems like they have the upper hand, but he reveals that he could have escaped at any time and was just humouring them.

It is horrible.

And yet, unpacking the horribleness of Sin City requires a deftness and care that isn’t required for The Wicker Man. You don’t have the automatic buy-in that comes from Nicholas Cage in a bear suit. You have to start talking about what you mean when you say something’s “good.” Imagine how difficult it would be if the misogyny were just a shade less obvious.

Gone Girl is the reason I’m writing this post because, holy shit, it is hard to talk about Gone Girl.

Megan Kearns did an admirable job of explaining what’s wrong with this movie, and I won’t re-tread the same criticisms, but my reaction, watching it opening weekend, was one of total shock. I could not believe the dedication with which this script was trying to score misogynist bingo. Like, I thought it was written by an MRA hate group. The overriding message, intentionally or not, is that, when a woman says a man attacked her, you should never, ever believe her, because it’s probably part of a nefarious scheme she cooked up just to get revenge on him for something, and women are crazy like that.

Unfortunately, we already live in a world where, every time a woman says a man attacked her, a thousand people who don’t even know her rush forward to call her a liar. We live in a world where guys I actually know said this Jian Ghomeshi stuff was probably a lie before any of us even knew what it was. We live in a world where one of the same guys said that whether you need a girl’s permission to punch her in the face during sex is “kind of” a murky issue (it’s not).

Watching Gone Girl spin out a misogynist fever dream about the lying liars we call women was unsettling enough, but a cursory search of the internet also revealed that this has been a longstanding argument since the novel came out, and that things seem to have settled in a place where it’s not cool to be annoyed by this story. In fact, trying to have a conversation about why you don’t like Gone Girl is like walking through a mine field that calls you a misandrist bitch. Don’t you believe that some men are trapped in abusive relationships? Don’t you believe that some women lie about rape? Don’t you think that people manipulate each other sometimes? Or can you just not handle the idea that any woman in a movie isn’t perfect? Does every woman in every movie that you deign to like have to be a role model? Can you handle the idea that some women aren’t very nice?

Honestly, it just makes me more entrenched in my original assessment that this wasn’t a very good movie.

Gone Girl is, I think, less well-made than Sin City, but worlds beyond The Wicker Man. What makes it difficult to talk about is that the problems with the story – as I’m choosing to call them – are much less concrete than dressing up like a bear and punching someone in the face. In order to talk about Gone Girl we have to talk about the much more abstract question of whether it seems appropriate, given the current political climate, and the rate of violence against women, and the difficulty women have in being believed when they report being assaulted by men – in that climate, do you think it’s appropriate, or do you think it necessarily constitutes a hostile act, to tell a story where the moral is that women are crazy liars and no one should ever believe them?

That’s harder to deal with than Nicholas Cage in a bear suit.

I don’t know the proper way to talk about movies that suck – or the proper way to determine whether they suck at all – but the answer might be that, instead of deciding whether or not something sucks, or how many stars it should have on a scale of one to five, we should talk about movies not as wholes to be judged, but collections of various elements, some of which are great (or fine) and some of which are problematic.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to say “suck,” and I doubt that I’m going to stop – but it occurs to me that I’m less prepared to argue for why any of these movies sucked than I am to argue for why I found particular elements troubling. I think that might be what I’m talking about, when I talk about suck. And I think I might be more eloquent, if I paid more attention to that.

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

“Crazy” Women Run in the Family in ‘Rocks in My Pockets’

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, ‘Rocks in My Pockets,’ seeks to change that situation. Baumane focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

The “crazy” woman character has been a staple of literature going as far back as Jane Eyre and a staple of films going as far back as Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. Not coincidentally, “crazy” is the adjective most often used to dismiss a woman who disagrees with the opinions or the recounting of events of a man or group of men either online or elsewhere (the second most popular term of dismissal is “angry”). In recent years women writers like Kay Redfield Jamison have documented their own struggles with diagnosed mental illness, and an Australian TV series (on Pivot in the US), Please Like Me, has used the experience of the star and creator, Josh Thomas’s, own mother as a model for the sympathetic and nuanced portrait of the “Josh” character’s mother on the show: she has attempted suicide more than once and spent much of the last season as an inpatient at a mental hospital.

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, Rocks in My Pockets, seeks to change that situation. Baumane (who also wrote the screenplay) focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

Early in the film, Baumane alludes to a longer history of mental illness in the family than the one she details. Her grandmother marries an older man who divorces his first wife so he can have another larger family (he wants 10 more children but ends up with eight) so more little Latvians can inherit what he thinks are his superior qualities. The grandfather’s ego was far greater than his accomplishments; his children in some scenes momentarily transform into DNA double helixes to remind us of how he sees them. But Baumane tells us he didn’t take into account his new wife’s family history, never asking about the members of her family who “died early” and “didn’t live up to their potential.”

AnnaKidsCowsRocks — Anna and her children

Anna’s depression doesn’t manifest until after she starts having children, one after another, in an isolated town with a jealous husband who makes sure his young, pretty wife is far from any male neighbors. The family live on top of a sandy hill, so they cannot dig a well for water. Instead Anna has to travel back and forth up the hill to bring water in buckets from the river below, not just for the family, but also for the two cows and a horse. The animals alone needed 40 buckets every day.

The family goes through much hardship as the country is first annexed by the Soviets and then by the Nazis and then the Soviets again. During her many trips to the river Anna sees in the water a creature that looks like a cross between an oversized teddy bear and a sea monster beckoning her to come in. One day she does, but a poacher spots and rescues her. She had forgotten to put rocks in her pockets to sink.

Anna later sends her children to boarding school, since she can barely provide for them (her husband continues to live at home but we see him literally turn his back on the rest of the family). Sometime after he dies, she overdoses on Valium, the go-to drug of the country’s Soviet era, prescribed for everything from heart problems to the “mental deficiency” the regime considered mental illness to be.

MirandaHusbandRocks — Miranda and her husband

Baumane’s slightly older cousin Miranda has no desire to get married, but a nice man pursues her and she relents. As she gathers wild orchids with a 16-year-old Baumane she tells her that this will be her last summer. Baumane thinks that Miranda means her last summer as a single woman and urges her to cancel the wedding. Miranda tells her she feels obligated to do the things that make the people who love her happy, and marries and has a child within the year. After her son is born, she tries to strangle herself, but her husband comes home early and saves her. “She never forgave him,” Baumane tells us. After spending much time in Soviet-era mental hospitals under heavy medication Miranda succeeds in killing herself when her children are older.

“You can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes,” Baumane narrates. “You have to make your own.” Because Baumane becomes pregnant, her parents pressure her, when she is still young, to marry a man who seems to be descending into alcoholism. After her son is born she visits a psychiatrist and then she too is sent to a mental hospital, but is somewhat reassured when, just before she goes, she looks in a mirror and sees Miranda, who tells her to just drink a lot of water to dilute the medication she is forced to take. After Baumane is discharged from the hospital and divorces her husband, Baumane’s mother decides she is unfit to take care of her own son and raises him herself instead.

Baumane combines traditional hand-drawn animation (she at one time worked with Bill Plympton and some of the film evokes his distinctive style) with sets and some other elements made of paper maché. The exaggerated expressions of the human characters (who are sometimes hard to tell apart), along with Baumane’s narration–which at times, sounds a bit too much like an adult reading a story to a child–can be jarring. Waltz With Bashir and Sita Sings The Blues are two films that had better success in combining conventional animation with complex stories meant for grown-ups (which, like Baumane’s, have elements of autobiography), probably because both had tighter scripts than Baumane does. Baumane’s family history starts with her grandmother’s early suicide attempt in the river, backtracks to Baumane’s own suicidal ideation (she’d make sure to rub with soap the rope she’d hang herself with, so it wouldn’t catch on any edges and would wear adult diapers, so whoever found her wouldn’t have to clean up any urine and feces expelled from her dying body), then goes to the very beginning of the grandmother’s story, a runaround that both exhausts and confuses the audience.

But a lot of the imagery Baumane uses, in both the paper maché (the misshapen human characters and the houses with eyes are standouts) and the animation that has the look of illustrations for children’s books (work that Baumane has also done) like the teddy bear/sea monster, huge bottles of pills invaded by equally huge, long tongues and the psychiatrist’s giant legs bursting from under her desk under her immobile, sedated face, are unforgettable.

The creature who embodies mental illness in all of the women’s lives doesn’t look threatening. In fact, the creature is kind of a solace to several of the women–it dances with a delusional Linda while she wears a wedding dress for a groom who doesn’t exist. The creature’s appearance fits how the women see it themselves; Irbe describes the voices she hears as comforting, because they once warned her off a road before a vehicle came crashing through it.

Baumane, like some mental health activists who have been diagnosed themselves, doesn’t see medication as the answer (at least two of the women in her family were taking prescribed medication when they committed suicide). Her solution: to not withdraw into herself and her own pain when it threatens to overtake her and instead spend time in the company of others, waiting out her worst suicidal impulses seems like an anticlimax. But the method has apparently worked for her–keeping her alive and well long enough to make this vivid and beautiful film she labels a “quest for sanity.”

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

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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

Top Six Anthems Inspired by Kate Pierson’s ‘Mister Sister’

The painfully pungent overtones of Band Aid and Miley Cyrus kept me from appreciating the altruism.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Hey folks, remember that cis-origin trans anthem you didn’t ask for? Kate Pierson’s got you covered!

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZzSgYQl2RY”]

This weekend Pierson released the video for her new single, “Mister Sister.” She’s accompanied by Fred Armisen of Portlandia (and “Estro-Maxx”) fame.

It also features Alyson Palmer of the band BETTY. Palmer is well-known for her strong opposition to trans inclusion (e.g., her support for Womyn-born Womyn policies) at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival.

Pierson said “I hope this becomes a trans anthem.”

WATCH: The B-52s’ Kate Pierson Is Back With A ‘Trans Anthem’ http://t.co/mekSiGFvjT

— KATE PIERSON (@THEKATEPIERSON) December 5, 2014

Some lyrics from the song:

Hey mister sister

You raid that closet for fish nets

It’s lonely

But you keep wishing

I know there is no one that listens

and these:

You hear the words

You make a beautiful girl

A beautiful girl

And nothing hurts when you are a beautiful girl

A beautiful girl

Wow, she gets it.

I hate to shade Pierson. Her intent seems good, she’s family, and her music resonates with many, including some transgender women. HOWEVER, Pierson is cisgender, and I don’t like it when cisfolks co-opt the trans experience for fun, profit, or even do-goodery. Really, the painfully pungent overtones of Band Aid and Miley Cyrus kept me from appreciating the altruism. To her credit, Pierson has indicated a willingness to have a dialogue on this.

In the meantime, here are some upcoming “helpful” songs soon to be released by your favorite artists!

1. “Feminists are Pretty, Too!” by R. Kelly

2. “I Wanna Touch Your Hair” by Taylor Swift

3. “I Like Mexican Ladies ‘Cus They Salsa While They Make Salsa” by Kenny Chesney

4. “Pink Tutus and Barbie Dolls (The Transgendered Kid at School)” by Macklemore

5. “Do Secular Humanists Even Know it’s Christmas?” by U2

6. “Queers, Am I Right?” by The Fred Durst/Chad Kroeger Steamroller Collective

OK, I’m done. At least James Nichols, HuffPo Gay Voices associate editor, keyed in on what’s really important here: “We’re loving the retro sound of this new single from Pierson.”

Also on Bitch Flicks: “The Joyful Feminist Killjoy” by Leigh Kolb

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about film, television, and current events. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’: An Incomplete Portrait of The Women’s Movement

When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, many women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.

The following is a slightly modified repost.

But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).

Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-funded She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry looks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makers which aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.

We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.

Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.

The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).

While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.

Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”

Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opened in New York on Dec.5, will open in Los Angeles on Dec. 12 and will be open in other US cities from the rest of December through March. See http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/findascreening/ for more info.

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

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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 Woman Directed the Scariest Horror Movie of the Year, Maybe of the Decade by Laura Parker at The Cut

Amy Berg Partnering With Nate Parker for Doc About the “Black Male Crisis” by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Chris Rock Pens Blistering Essay on Hollywood’s Race Problem: “It’s a White Industry” at The Hollywood Reporter

5 Shows That Wouldn’t Be The Same If They Showed The Reality Of Pregnancy Discrimination by NARAL Pro-Choice America at BuzzFeed

Chicago’s Black Cinema House Hosts Rare Screening of Shirley Clarke’s Neo-Realist Film ‘The Cool World’ by Sergio at Shadow and Act

Shonda Rhimes to Be Inducted into National Association of Broadcasters Broadcasting Hall of Fame by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

36% of 2015 Sundance Competition Films Directed by Women by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

“Jane the Virgin” Has a Surprisingly Progressive Take on Sex. by Hannah Steinkop at Bitch Media

Femslash Friday: Sex and the City by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast

Looking Back At The Screen: The First Annual Appalachian Queer Film Festival by Erica Lies at The Hairpin

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

Seed & Spark: “Stop Whining; Woman Up”

If all of those intelligent people who believe that would give these animated films a chance, they would see how incredibly powerful some of these films are for adults as well. However it is actually a fantastic thing that ‘Big Hero 6’ appeals to kids, and I think this might be one of the most important movies for kids to grow up watching. ‘Big Hero 6’ is the start of creating a reality where gender inequality doesn’t exist.

This is a guest post by Shantal Freedman.

I recently saw a movie that blew me away: Big Hero 6 (spoilers ahead). I tend to come across people who don’t think it’s possible to deeply enjoy a “cartoon” or think cartoons are only for kids. If all of those intelligent people who believe that would give these animated films a chance, they would see how incredibly powerful some of these films are for adults as well. However it is actually a fantastic thing that Big Hero 6 appeals to kids, and I think this might be one of the most important movies for kids to grow up watching. Big Hero 6 is the start of creating a reality where gender inequality doesn’t exist.

First, it was really nice to see that Hero’s group of friends was equally split between male and female: two girls, two guys. Disney’s flagpole films have been switching off between a male lead and a female lead yearly. This one was a male lead, yet the female characters were very prevalent and strong. There wasn’t a single female who wasn’t a completely awesome character. Any girl can watch this movie and feel as connected as any guy.

One of my favorite characters in the movie is Gogo. She’s one of Hero’s friends and she is a badass scientist, both in the lab and out. She kills it in all of the fight scenes. Actually, all of his friends equally kill it – not one person was stronger or weaker, they were all equally strong in their own way with their own powers. You’ll see many times in movies that the “badass girl” is either butch and stiff (also in her personality) or a sex object. Gogo is neither, she is the badass girl who is also a human.

Hero has a breakdown partway through the film. He is a teenager trying to cope with his brother’s death and he finally loses it. He even left all of his friends on an island, taking their only means of transportation out of there. They make it back and meet Hero in his garage. One of the crucial things a person can do to help a friend who is depressed, is to be a friend. Gogo understands this, walks up to Hero without saying a thing, and hugs him. She can be tough but also feminine and nurturing. This teaches boys and girls that they can be whatever they want. This teaches the next generation that they don’t need to fit in a box or be ridiculed for being who they are. That’s true for every character in this film.

And my favorite line in the film? Gogo: “Stop whining; woman up.” It was casual and said in a non-obvious way. It didn’t phase any of the characters. It was a line that appeared to be “normal.” I really appreciate something like this in a film. It’s not trying to beat people over the head with their message that “woman up” is the same as “man up.” She says “woman up” a second time around the climax of the film during the last fight out with Professor Callaghan. She was literally speeding up a pillar of microbots. Gogo’s looks are also an interesting thing to note.

In fact, the looks for all of the female characters are extremely important to mention. Clearly, each significant female character looks quite good. They are all attractive. Part of me thought, “well, maybe they could have switched up their body-types a bit.” Then the other part of me thought, “I’m so glad they made all of the female characters really attractive!” Why? Because not a single one of them was defined in any way by their looks. There was no comment about how hot someone was, there was no romantic relationships going on in the group which is something we’ve come to expect, and there was no one hitting on Hero’s hot aunt, which Fred’s character would have totally been doing if this was another movie.

One of the most important elements of the entire movie is the world that they created. The world in Big Hero 6 is a world where all women are treated with respect. Gender inequality wasn’t even an issue. Not to get all dark, but we talk so much about rape culture these days and hopefully everyone knows by now that teaching women to dress more modestly is not how to fix this but rather teaching our sons to respect women. This is what Big Hero 6 does. A kid watches Big Hero 6 and gets invested in a world where the women are respected. All of them. It’s so common for writers and directors to characterize a “bad guy” by him disrespecting a woman in some way, whether it be physical abuse, demeaning insults or just having an entourage of women at the tips of his fingers. Imagine if that wasn’t even an option. Imagine what the next generation will be like if they grew up on films like Big Hero 6? I tear up just thinking about the beauty and impact Big Hero 6 can and hopefully will have on our society.

As a director myself, this film really moves me. One of the things I care very deeply about is the portrayal of women in films. I just finished shooting my latest film, Ticketed, where I, too, created a world where gender inequality just doesn’t exist. I truly believe that if we positively promote these morals, instead of beating people over the head and shaming them for their bad habits, change will happen. I think there needs to be more films out there like Big Hero 6, which is why it’s so important for me to get Ticketed out there.

We need to raise the funds to finish the film and complete our post production. We’ve launched a funding campaign on Seed&Spark so anyone who wants to support a non-preachy action-packed comedy with a female lead and mission behind it can do so. You can learn more here: http://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ticketed; www.facebook.com/Ticketed, @TicketedMovie. Email ticketedthemovie@gmail.com.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Big Hero 6: Woman Up

Shantal Freedman is a fema-nazi man-hater who became a director to make a point. Although, she’s not really sure what that point is anymore. Despite all that she is a domestic and international award winning filmmaker whose films have incurred compliments such as “meh” and “the popcorn was good.”

‘Little Miss Sunshine’: Masculinity’s Losers

As each male character tackles a personal problem which has either implicit or explicit links to normative constructions of successful masculinity, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ examines the burden of this masculine ideal. So difficult to maintain yet so embedded in the social, cultural, economic, and political conceptualization of “manliness,” men who fail to embody this ideal inevitably become marked out as “losers.”

Written by Sarah Smyth.

When talking to a group of high school students, Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently claimed, “I hate losers. I despise losers.” Multi-Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia winner, Hollywood mega-star, entrepreneur and Governor, Schwarzenegger dedicates his life to the pursuit of the hyper-masculine ideal and American dream. Wealthy, powerful and incredibly buff, Schwarzenegger embodies the Western conceptualization of a successful man.

The men of the 2007 hit film, Little Miss Sunshine would be, in Schwarzenegger’s eyes, “losers.” Indeed, Michael Arndt, the film’s scriptwriter, claims this troubling quote provided the framework through which he constructed the characters and deconstructed the notion of “loser.” As each male character tackles a personal problem which has either implicit or explicit links to normative constructions of successful masculinity, Little Miss Sunshine examines the burden of this masculine ideal. So difficult to maintain yet so embedded in the social, cultural, economic, and political conceptualization of “manliness,” men who fail to embody this ideal inevitably become marked out as “losers.”

The poster for 'Little Miss Sunshine' — *Little Miss Sunshine*

Little Miss Sunshine tells the story of the Hoover family, which includes the heroin-snorting grandpa, Edwin; the failing motivational speaker father, Richard; the suicidal uncle, Frank; politically mute brother, Dwayne; and stressed mother, Sheryl; as they go on a road trip from Albuquerque to California to support 7-year-old Olive as she competes in a beauty pageant. Along the way, they face many setbacks – some mechanical but many personal – as each character comes to face the primary difficulty in their life.

Before I examine the particular ways in which Little Miss Sunshine deconstructs the image of “failing” or “inadequate” masculinity through the male characters, it is crucial to examine the ways in which this impinges on women. For one, the film most obviously and explicitly highlights and examines the markers of success which are most acutely and destructively felt by women. For another, the metaphor of the beauty pageant which, as I will examine later, comes to define the identification of the “successful” masculine existence, is literalised in the film through Olive’s narrative. Although only seven years old, Olive’s body is subject to the social, cultural and familial surveillance which continues to monitor a woman’s body for the rest of her life, identifying her body as a “success” or “failure.” The opening credits make clear the juxtaposition between Olive’s body and the pageant queen’s body; whereas the pageant queen is “slim,” Olive is “chubby.” Later, after Olive orders ice-cream for breakfast, Richard explains to her that “the fat in the ice-cream will become fat in your body.” Even though Sheryl explains to Olive that “it’s OK to be skinny, and it’s OK to be fat if that’s what you want,” Richard makes clear that in order to be a winner, she must be thin, claiming, “Ok, Olive, but let me ask you this. The women in Miss America: Are they fat or are they skinny?” Despite the rest of the family’s encouragement to not listen to Richard and eat the ice-cream, Olive is visibly shaken by this and later asks her grandpa, “Am I pretty?” She’s upset because, as she says, “Daddy hates losers.”

The film identifies the beauty pageant as "grotesque", and marks Olive's body as "failing" to conform to the beauty standards put forth by the pageant — The film identifies the beauty pageant as “grotesque,” and marks Olive’s body as “failing” to conform to the beauty standards put forth by the pageant

The surveillance of Olive’s body eventually culminates as the family arrive at the beauty pageant. Exaggerated and (arguably) grotesque in fake tan, makeup, big hair and swimsuits, the other pre-pubescent contestants demonstrate the complex way in which we monitor young girls’ bodies. On the one hand, we may identify these bodies as freakish, suggesting our rigid policing of the presentation of the young female body, particularly with reference to sexuality. On the other hand, through Olive, we are also presented with another kind of bodily monitoring which, pitting her body against the other contestants, already marks her out as a unable to fulfill the requirements of being a beauty queen. Anticipating this assertion, Dwayne attempts to protect her by claiming, “I don’t want these people judging Olive.” Not embodying the beauty standards constructed by the pageant – slim, tanned, poised, with big hair and full make up – it’s clear that, within the context of the pageant, Olive’s body is identified as a “failure.”

In some ways, the male characters of the film embody a kind of privilege which makes them exempt from this monitoring and, by extension, marking out as a “failure.” At no point does the male body become subject to the superficial yet extremely destructive bodily surveillance in the film which so rigorously contours the female existence. In fact, the film suggests that male privilege not only makes them exempt from bodily monitoring but actually enables them the authority to construct the ideals through which female bodies are judged. During the ice-cream scene, Edwin tells Olive not to listen to her father because “I like a woman with meat on her bones.” The “success” of the female body, it seems, is still very much monitored by men. However, by presenting the ways in which the “failings” of each of the male character threaten to compromise his socially and culturally constructed masculinity, Little Miss Sunshine demonstrates the way in which his privilege is comprised by other conflicting factors.

Olive already begins to internalize the monitoring of her body

In Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, Lynne Segal claims, “Dominant ideals of masculinity come from social meanings which distinguish these ideals from what they are not.” Therefore, to be “masculine” is to not be “feminine,” “queer” or racially, ethnically or bodily “inferior.” In Little Miss Sunshine, the male characters attempt to battle various “weaknesses” that may comprise their masculine identity. Edwin attempts to maintain a tough exterior despite his aging body. He claims to “fuck a lot of women” and “still has Nazi bullets in [his] ass.” Yet, he cannot escape the fallibility of his body as a drug overdose eventually leads to his death. Dwayne, also, attempts to harden and toughen his body in preparation for joining the hyper-masculine world of the US Air Force Academy. He continually works out in the film and even takes a vow of silence, suggesting the determinacy of his ambition. However, his body also lets him down as he discovers he’s colorblind, shattering his dream to fly planes. Frank, on the other hand, feels threatened primarily through his academic failings. This is particularly significant because, as a gay man, the narrative could have easily slipped into exploring the “failings” of Frank’s masculinity through his queer identity. After all, as Leo Bersani claims in Is the Rectum a Grave?, phallocentrism aligns women and gay men, particularly through their bodies and the way in which they are penetrated. Therefore, dominant images of masculinity must deny these bodily “weaknesses.” However, rather than attempting to commit suicide due to any queer masculine crisis, Frank tries to kill himself after his academic rival, Larry Fisherman, won a genius award, threatening his position as the number one Proust scholar in the USA. Representing a particular image of masculine competitiveness, Frank fears being considered a “loser.”

The men of 'Little Miss Sunshine' all face being marked as a "loser" — The men of *Little Miss Sunshine* all face being marked as a “loser”

Richard, however, most explicitly reflects the masculine anxiety of being marked out as a “loser.” A motivational speaker and life coach, throughout the film Richard attempts to secure a contract to turn his “Nine Steps to Success” program into a lucrative business. For Richard, winning is paramount. At one point, he tells Olive that luck has nothing to do with winning. Rather, it’s about “willing yourself to win.” In fact, he emphasizes the point of winning so much that he claims that “there’s no point going [to the pageant] unless you think you’re going to win.” Richard’s desire to win or, to put it another way, his fear about being marked as a “loser,” explicitly intersects with Schwarzenegger’s definition of “successful” masculinity. Both Richard’s program and narrative uphold the American Dream. Stating that prosperity, success, and upward social mobility can all be achieved through hard work, the American Dream advocates the kind of success represented by Schwarzenegger; despite not being a born-and-bred American, he is the ultimate self-made man. However, maintaining the Liberal and Neoliberal structures of economy which privileges the economic freedoms of individualism and laissez-faire, the American dream, will always privilege the straight white man.

As Lisa Duggan claims in The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, “Neoliberalism, a late twentieth-century incarnation of Liberalism, organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion.” In this way, Schwarenegger’s definition of the “loser,” a definition which is explicitly embedded in the notion of a “failing” masculinity, refuses to acknowledge the privileges afforded to white, heterosexual, able-bodied, economically privileged and cis-gendered men. In this way, it refuses to acknowledge that hard work does not always turn you into a winner. Despite his many privileges, Richard’s program, ironically, fails. For one, as his potential business partner says, “no one’s heard of you.” For another, Richard’s current economic situation compromises his privilege. The success of the program is paramount to keeping the family financially afloat. Money issues plague the family throughout the film – indeed, the reason they travel to the pageant in their van is because they can’t afford flights – and Richard promises that securing this deal will “start generating some income.” Failing to provide for his family, Richard fails to fulfill the traditional male (and masculine) role of the breadwinner. More crucially, however, Richard demonstrates that the American Dream is not available to everyone. Not everybody, it seems, can be a winner.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Embodying ideal masculinity a bit too much...? — Arnold Schwarzenegger: Embodying ideal masculinity a bit too much…?

In the end, Dwayne sums up the problems they all face: “Fuck beauty contests. Life’s one long beauty contest: school, college, work… Fuck that.” The emphasis on external appearance – enormous wealth, a slim body, successful career, big house and beautiful partner – ensures that dominant Western, Neoliberal and hyper-masculine ideals are maintained, and anything that may compromise this – what Segal identifies as “inferior”- remains rigidly monitored and surveyed. However, by “failing” to conform to these standards, by saying “fuck the beauty pageants,” and by willing ourselves to lose, we may find a way to resist these ultimately oppressive and destructive ideals.

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Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who 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.

‘Birdman’ Is ‘Black Swan’ for Boys

‘Birdman’ bears striking similarities to ‘Black Swan,’ both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage.

This review contains spoilers for both Birdman and Black Swan.

Michael Keaton in 'Birdman' — Michael Keaton in *Birdman*

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) bears striking similarities to Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage. Of course, these two films differ in many ways, most significantly in tone (Birdman is a black comedy, Black Swan is a chilling psychodrama if not an outright horror movie). It is in these departures that we see the significance of gender in stories about identity, art, and mental illness.

1. Phase of life

Riggan in front of his dressing room mirror in 'Birdman' — Riggan in front of his dressing room mirror in *Birdman*

Birdman‘s Riggan Thomson is a fading movie star, years after playing the title character in a series of superhero blockbusters (casting Michael Keaton in the role deepens the character tenfold). The play at the center of the film is his own adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which he is also directing and starring in. This vanity project is Riggan’s hope to change his legacy, to transform from the kind of has-been actor who gets attention from tourists to the kind of eternally relevant artist who gets respect from theatre critics.

Nina in front of a mirror in 'Black Swan' — Nina in front of a mirror in *Black Swan*

Where Riggan is in the twilight of his career, Black Swan shows Nina Sayers is at the dawn of hers, as she ascends from the corps to play the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. Nina’s transformation over the course of the film is partially a metaphor for her belated sexual awakening and maturation from girl to woman. This becoming is the crucial moment in Nina’s life; she will never face Riggan’s struggle to stay relevant. As we see from the prima ballerina Nina replaces, Winona Ryder’s Beth Turner, there is no option to age gracefully. This is why, even as Nina apparently dies at the end of the film, it is “perfect.”

2. Perfection vs. Superpowers

Riggan's first appears in Birdman impossibly levitating — Riggan’s first appears in *Birdman,* impossibly levitating

It is the pressure to be perfect that pulls Nina apart in Black Swan. Not only the physical rigors and intense competition of professional ballet, but the paradoxical obligations of womanhood as represented through her dual role as the Swan Queen and Black Swan. But Riggan doesn’t want to be perfect, he wants to be exceptional. His delusions of his superhuman abilities are his way of reassuring himself that his existence is noteworthy, that he matters, that he deserves to be remembered.

Nina hallucinates body horrors and birdlike transformations reminding her of the separation between her human self and the perfection required for her role. Riggan has easily incorporated superhuman abilities into his sense of self. As a man, he is entitled to do so. Nina’s are horrific transformations as she loses her sense of self.

3. Rivals

Mila Kunis as Lily in 'Black Swan' — Mila Kunis as Lily in *Black Swan*

Although early marketing for Black Swan played up the “rivalry” between Nina and Mila Kunis’s Lily, Lily is not so important to the plot as she is a character foil for Nina. Lily represents the raw sexuality and effortless grace that Nina’s drive for perfection precludes her from acheiving. Lily is the Natural Beauty, the girl who can eat hamburgers and stay ballerina slim, party all night and still be perky and gorgeous in the morning, who you’ll never see touching up her lipstick but she’ll always have a perfect glossy pout. No matter how hard Nina works, she’ll never best Lily, because she’s less than her just by having to work for it at all.

Ed Norton as the difficult Method actor Mike Shiner in 'Birdman' — Edward Norton as the difficult Method actor Mike Shiner in *Birdman*

In Birdman, Riggan’s “rival” is a hotshot actor named Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), even though he is known to be difficult to work with. Mike, a rigorous method actor, is the opposite of Lily: his talent comes from his dedication to his craft. And it is Mike’s well-honed skills that make him threatening to Riggan, who landed his career through charisma, good looks, and luck. That’s not the fame Riggan wants. It is the fame of a woman, and he knows he cannot carry it into old age and beyond (see Beth Turner). As a man, Riggan is not only allowed to “work for” his success, he even more respectable for doing so.

Just before opening night, Riggan faces off with theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), who resents a movie star for taking up Broadway stage space that could go to a real artist. Riggan throws back the usual barbs against critics labeling art without making it: “None of it costs you anything. You risk nothing.” Putting on the airs of the hardworking artist he knows he is not, Riggan sounds just like someone denying their male privilege played any role in their success. Because achieved greatness is the highest virtue for a man.

4. Conclusions (the films’, and mine)

Both Birdman and Black Swan end ambiguously, with their protagonists appearing to die by suicide. In Black Swan, we see Nina’s apparent murder of Lily was not real, and that Nina rather stabbed herself. At that point in the film we’re neck deep in duality symbolism and pretty much all accept Nina attacking herself with a shard of mirror glass is a metaphor for killing the innocent side of herself, especially because girlfriend is one heck of a dancer for a stab victim. But in the final moments first Lily, then director Thomas and the other dancers also see the wound and the audience is left thinking Nina’s suicide must have been real. Because, as I mentioned before, dying after a brilliant debut performance is actually perfect for Nina, because she has nowhere higher to go from there.

Nina's apparent suicide in 'Black Swan' — Nina’s apparent suicide in *Black Swan*

In Birdman, Riggan first attempts suicide by replacing a prop gun with a loaded pistol on stage. Apparently, he only shoots off his nose (earning him a superhero’s face mask of bandages). Then, after hearing Tabitha gave him a glowing review and finding personal resolution with his estranged ex-wife, his best friend, and his troubled daughter, he leaps from his hospital room window. When his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) returns to his empty hospital room with an open window, we see her horrified realization that her father probably jumped. But when she looks down to the street level, she appears confused. Then she looks up, to the sky, and her face fills with wonderment. There’s ambiguous hope where Black Swan offers only ambiguous despair. Even in the darkest interpretation, that Riggan actually killed himself on stage and these final scenes aren’t real, we see that Riggan has successfully circumvented his fade to mediocrity. He “wins” in a way that Nina never could.

The more hopefully ambiguous final moment of 'Birdman' — The more hopefully ambiguous final moment of *Birdman*

Looking at Birdman and Black Swan as two versions of the same story highlight the immense differences men and women face in life and in art, in expectation and in reality. It is in large part the significance of gender that makes these two movies that seem to have so much in common ultimately turn out to be quite different.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who cannot fly nor grow feathers.