Bitch Flicks – Page 93 – The radical notion that women like good movies

‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People’, which has its US release (and real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The following is a slightly modified repost.

When Go Fish was released 20 years ago, a straight guy friend who was in his 50s (we had met at a former workplace) couldn’t understand why I liked the film. We usually had very similar tastes in movies: both of us had enjoyed watching Winona Ryder playing a slacker in Reality Bites and had shaken our heads over how overrated Kieslowski’s Blue was. I tried to explain to him why Fish was special: the women in it looked like, dressed like, talked like and even had similar haircuts to the queer women I knew. The writer/star and writer-director were out queer women and their film had a real release and real distribution, instead of just being relegated to festivals or one or two nights at the smallest independent theater in town, the way most other queer films–especially those made by and featuring women–had been. But all his life this guy had been seeing films about straight men, by straight men and starring straight men (or at least men who could convincingly pass as straight), so he couldn’t understand why I would make such a big deal of seeing on the big screen some part of my community recognizably reflected back to me.

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded Dear White People, which opens in US theaters (with real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris: at first I didn’t recognize her in modern hair, dress and light contacts–she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The film’s tagline: “Being a Black face in a white place” is an issue sometimes brought up online (as in the viral “I Too Am Harvard” video) and elsewhere but pretty much never addressed in film: Black students navigating majority white campuses in which individuals, policy and curriculum are often either unfriendly toward or clueless about the needs of students of color. Winchester’s President wants to dismantle the all-Black dorm students gravitate to. He is either misreading the consolidation of Black students as “reverse racism” (Sam later explains to the Dean why there’s no such thing) or fears the Black students banding together will be too strong a foe for his administration.

Sam, although “political” had previously shown no taste for campus elected office but runs as a protest candidate for “head of house” against the incumbent, her ex-boyfriend Troy, who will not fight the administration decision to break up the house. To everyone’s surprise–including her own–Sam wins.

: Sam

Because we’re not used to seeing films that feature more than one Black person (and often not any) in an environment full of both opportunity and microaggressions, we haven’t before observed the different approaches students (and others) take in walking this minefield. Confrontational Sam tells the campus “humor” magazine’s core of white, frat brothers (including the son of the University’s president), “On behalf of all the colored folks in the room let me apologize to all the better qualified white students whose places we’re taking up,” then throws them out of the house’s dining hall. Troy jokes and plays cards with the same group, hoping to earn a byline at the magazine: the president’s son Kurt (Kyle Gallner) brags it’s the main pipeline to Saturday Night Live’s writing staff (which makes “Winchester’s” parallels to Harvard more explicit–and is perhaps one way to understand some of the problems the real-life SNL has had in diversifying their cast of performers and writers).

Coco wants to use the fraternity and magazine to further her own goals, while the brothers use her inclusion to deflect charges of racism–and she doesn’t care what activists like Sam think of her affiliation. Conflict-averse Lionel just keeps moving–from the frat at the very beginning of the film to dorm after dorm hoping the next place he lives is the one where he isn’t the target for harassment: for his sexual orientation at the frat and for not being “Black” enough at Sam’s hall.

There’s more plot (so much more) but all of it is a fairly flimsy pretext for one-liners (many of which feel like they were gathered over a lifetime) and sketches like “The Tip Test” which begins “”Your waitress mistakes you for someone who looks like you–Black–who once ran up a $30 bill and left a dollar tip.”

Like Looking, White People also examines interracial relationships, and as in Looking the white people in those relationships don’t (with one notable exception) come off very well. But I was disappointed that the film didn’t explore the impunity with which racist (or even just microaggressive) white guys will sexually harass, demean and even assault women of color: the film’s main villain, Kurt (whose irredeemability is on the level of Joffrey in Game of Thrones) doesn’t lay a hand on (or even use any slurs to describe) Sam or Coco in spite of his deep hostility to the former and his proximity to the latter. With the barrage of rape threats outspoken women (especially women of color) continue to receive over social media, the film’s neglect to include that kind of backlash in Sam’s storyline makes it seem a little spotty. Tessa Thompson’s perpetually unimpressed but engaged face and clarion voice are the ideal vehicle for Sam’s pronouncements, but the script suddenly asking her, at the end, to become Julia Roberts in Notting Hill also fell flat–and is a missed opportunity to depict how activists need supportive relationships, even ones their peers might not approve of.

: Coco (on the left)

Coco though skillfully played by Parris (her skeptical double takes could populate an entire feature) also seems incomplete. The character is so calculating that only rarely, like at the climactic blackface party do we have a clue what she is really thinking and feeling. She’s also one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to come from an affluent or middle class background and has darker skin than the others, but the script barely addresses this disparity.

Even though Sam is presented as the main protagonist in the film, Simien is better at fleshing out his Black male characters. Nerdy Lionel with his notepad, passive demeanor, huge, messy afro, whom we see from the beginning (when we are introduced to all the different cliques of Black students at Winchester) as a misfit even among the other queer Black people, is a fully formed person and Williams plays him, including his transformation at the end, well. Simien is an out gay man and I’m probably not the only one who wondered how autobiographical Lionel is. Bell’s Troy at first seems like nothing more than a dapper A-student and class officer, but then we learn that he wants to deviate from his father’s carefully laid plans for him–and that in spite of his clean cut persona and protests to the contrary, he spends a lot of time smoking weed.

: Lionel (in front)

Dear White People cites as its influences both Spike Lee’s School Daze and National Lampoon’s Animal House, tackling a lot of thorny issues under the cover of its humor (not all of which is successful) and bringing to light scenes most audiences won’t have seen in movies before. The Independent Film Festival of Boston screenings where I saw White People were packed (as were its screenings at Sundance which were declared “one of the hottest tickets“): if its main release follows suit, many people will be going to and talking about this film. In one scene White People makes fun of the dearth of Black people in movies (one activist demands from the ticket seller at a movie house “I want my $15 back for Red Tails II.”) Perhaps the best thing Dear White People will do, like Go Fish before it, is to become a gateway for films and television in the same vein. In the two decades since Fish’s release series and films from queer women have become an indelible, if still small, part of the larger culture, from Ellen’s “Puppy Episode” to, for better or worse, The L Word–which the filmmakers of Fish had a hand in–and The Kids Are All Right to last year’s fantastic Concussion. Fish’s influence has spread so far that today 20-something queer women themselves, much like my straight friend back in the day, can’t understand why anyone made a fuss about the film in the first place.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so”]

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

Life is a Battleground in ‘Drunken Butterflies’

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, ‘Drunken Butterflies,’ is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, Drunken Butterflies, is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

“Would you rather have Tracy’s extensions or Tracy’s face?”

So begins a conversation between Tracy’s two best friends in Drunken Butterflies, the debut film from UK director Garry Sykes, now available on VOD.

Billed as a cross between “scripted reality TV” and narrative story-telling, Butterflies is a loosely plotted, largely improvised day-in-the-life movie about six fictional Newcastle teens and the shifting friendships between them. The film relied on its cast of young actors to develop and workshop the characters and story, following a 20-page outline, and portions of the footage were filmed directly by the actors, using phones and hand-held cameras.

In other words, it’s a lot like The Blair Witch Project, if The Blair Witch Project contained an extended dialogue about vajazzling and didn’t make you want to puke.

As the story begins, the film’s main character, Chloe, has just had a falling-out with the hard-as-nails Tracy, causing four of their friends to pick sides to the tune of The Pipettes’ aptly-chosen “Judy.”

The next 90 minutes track the group’s movements through the day, following them through minor acts of betrayal, sporadic outbursts of violence, and moments of genuine caring. Their lives are volatile, confusing, and uncertain, but their makeup looks really amazing.

As an experiment in film-making, Drunken Butterflies could have been more ambitious.

The film adopts a style that’s reminiscent of reality TV and documentaries, and there’s a self-referential scene toward the end, where two of the characters talk about how reality shows are all scripted, but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete message about the line between reality and fiction. Butterflies is more of a pastiche of different modes of representation, acknowledging that, in the age of reality TV and social media, the way that we present ourselves has changed. That those things are an extension of the fronts we already put up for the world.

It would have been nice if the film had done more with that idea, or delved deeper into questions of truth and personal identity – I don’t quite buy the press packet’s claim that “the lines between fiction and reality… crumble to nothing” because of this style – but the movie, I think, still succeeds in capturing something true.

While I didn’t grow up on the “Geordie Shore,” and can’t speak to how real that is, I recognize the girls in this movie as people who could have appeared in my own life – in some cases, as people who could have been me. I remember what it’s like to start a fight with someone just because. To stand there screaming the f-word, self-righteous, because you get off on the drama. To dare someone to hit you in the parking lot.

Ah, youth.

It’s a side of girlhood – and maybe a class-specific side of girlhood – that isn’t represented that often, and often isn’t represented in such a sympathetic way.

This is, first and foremost, a movie about female “toughness” – a quality that’s maybe less required of middle-class women, or is expressed by them in a different way. This is the toughness of physical fights – of being so hard that nothing can hurt you, because there’s a world of hurt waiting outside the front door.

As Butterflies starts to wind down, there are some plot threads that make less sense than they could, and some conflicts that seem to get resolved too easily, but the dominant theme is that life is an ongoing struggle. Each of the characters is fighting a private battle that sometimes puts her at odds with and sometimes makes her best friends with the others.

Life is chaotic and scary, and everyone’s just trying hard to survive.

Butterflies is also the rare film that focuses intently on relationships between girls, treating their interactions with boys as an afterthought. The event that sets everything in motion is the discovery that Chloe cheated on Tracy’s brother, Liam, but this isn’t a movie about whether Chloe and Liam will get back together – it’s about whether Chloe and Tracy will get back together. Liam is – in some cases, literally – pushed to the side while they argue about it.

Although gender isn’t the primary focus of the film, the story takes place in a setting where its heroes are, for the most part, menaced by cat-calls and threats of attack, where they talk to each other in front of a wall of pornography posted by boys. It’s uncomfortable to watch them turn their anger on “soft” targets – like a mild-mannered boy named Chris, whom they corner and bully – but there’s also something about that that rings true, even if the film doesn’t examine it at any great depth.

The decision to mold the characters based on the actors’ personalities means that even those with less experience come across as fairly convincing, and the use of hand-held cameras and cell phone video add a sense of immersion and reality to the experience.

For a film that was made on a pretty tight budget, Drunken Butterflies looks and sounds great – it’s an extremely watchable film that’s visually interesting as well as interesting to think about. Rather than having the freak show vibe that reality TV can carry, it feels like a sincere attempt to understand a particular intersection of gender and class that’s often ridiculed or stigmatized.

In that sense, I think it does achieve its goal of blending reality and fiction, in order to get at the truth.

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

‘It’s A Girl’: The Importance of the Reproductive Justice Framework

The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Written by Max Thornton.

It’s easy to be seduced by the rhetoric of choice. We all want to believe we’re free agents, exercising our will with maximum autonomy. Who wants to be the product of social forces and discursive systems that circumscribe the very possibilities of your existence before you’re even born?

The reality is, though, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, every choice a person makes is radically delineated by a vast web of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and material influences. Systemic change, then, isn’t simply a matter of individuals making different choices; nuanced, contextually-sensitive analysis of the many forces at play is crucial.

Reproductive justice isn’t as simple as choice and can’t be reduced to being “pro-choice.” The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Evan Grae Davis’ 2012 documentary, It’s A Girl, attempts to analyze some of the factors at work in the issue of sex-selective abortions in India and China. The film’s great strength is its clear divide of focus, to examine in turn the different contexts of India and China, showing how the same issue in both countries has a quite distinct matrix of causes.

Fun fact: if you google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh. — Fun fact: if you Google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh.

In India, a heteropatriarchal tradition has united with rampant capitalism to produce a context in which sons are financially valuable while daughters are an economic drain. The payment of dowries is technically illegal, but that hasn’t put an end to the cultural practice of the bride’s family paying the groom’s, sometimes quite extravagantly. Consequently there is immense social, cultural, and economic pressure on women to provide sons.

The limitations of the choice framework are abundantly clear when the film shows a rural Indian woman talking openly and unrepentantly about killing her own female newborns: it’s a choice she made, sure, but this choice was circumscribed by so many discursive and material circumstances, the combination of poverty and patriarchy that keeps women wholly dependent on their husbands, the entrenched devaluing of female life, the failure of law and government authorities to enforce the laws that exist… I can’t help comparing the many women in the US who abort fetuses because they would be born with disabilities. Again, this is a choice they make, and it is (or should be) absolutely the pregnant person’s decision whether or not to continue being pregnant; however, it is a choice enacted in a cultural milieu that considers disabled lives not worth living, an economic milieu that treats disabled lives as a burden, a political milieu in which healthcare is so precarious that many families lack the resources to care for children with disabilities.

Similarly, in India there are very many factors at play, and the film might have benefited from engaging a critique of a few more of them, such as the compulsory heterosexuality and cissexism of treating every infant as though its birth-assigned sex will dictate its entire life course, and the unchecked capitalism that exacerbates the issue.

In China, the situation is quite different. The end result – sons are valuable, daughters are a drain – is the same, but the equation that leads to this result is not heteropatriarchal tradition plus capitalism, but heteropatriarchal tradition plus government control of reproduction. The one-child policy has been in place since 1979, with an exception for rural families whose first child is female – they can try again for a boy. Women who are found to be pregnant illegally face forced abortion and forced sterilization. (Again, I found myself irresistibly drawing comparisons closer to home, this time to the anti-abortion lobby in the US and its campaign to recriminalize abortion, perhaps willfully ignorant of the fact that forced birth is just as dystopian a violation as forced abortion.)

It’s A Girl is particularly strong in its analysis of China’s situation, both its roots and its ramifications. For example, the “gendercide” against female infants has resulted in a generation whose males vastly outnumber its women, and this has led to a spike in sex trafficking and the kidnapping of child brides. Concurrently, there is a young sub-society of undocumented children, who were born illegally and have no official existence and thus no access to healthcare, schooling, passports, and other benefits of citizenship.

Special mention of this supercool woman, who rescued an abandoned infant and who I want to be friends with.

A perfect film would perhaps have committed to a fuller analysis. At 64 minutes, this documentary runs a little short, and could easily have found time for a discussion of, say, the impact of globalization – which might have mitigated the occasional moment of awful hypocrisy and paternalism, such as the one interviewee who outright indicts these countries by comparison with (I paraphrase slightly) “countries where women are fully equal.” (Tell us more, Sam Harris.) Nonetheless, overall It’s A Girl is a solid popular introduction to a fraught topic, and not a bad entrypoint into thinking through reproductive justice issues with nuance and complexity.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. The event where he saw this film was kind of weird, but he made a cool new friend. Hi, Lillian!

‘Broad City’: Girls Walking Around Talking About Nothing

While ‘Broad City’ is about girls, it isn’t “About Girls.” It’s not a show that makes it its mission to make statements about modern young womanhood, it’s a show that makes it its mission to be funny as all fuck and depict an incredibly sweet friendship between two well-drawn female characters. And that’s just as important.

This guest post by Solomon Wong previously appeared at Be Young & Shut Up and is cross-posted with permission.

Comedy Central’s Broad City, created by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, is a show about underpaid 20-something white girls in New York. Kinda like Girls, only Broad City doesn’t give me that rather unpleasant feeling of existential dread that would be probably five times worse if I were a woman. I’ll be honest, that dread kept me from watching past the first episode of Girls, so I don’t have an informed opinion on it. What I will say is that whatever Girls’ place and importance in the TV landscape, Broad City matches in value and exceeds in entertainment. While Broad City is about girls, it isn’t “About Girls.” It’s not a show that makes it its mission to make statements about modern young womanhood, it’s a show that makes it its mission to be funny as all fuck and depict an incredibly sweet friendship between two well-drawn female characters. And that’s just as important.

A while ago, we reviewed Michael J. Fox’s sitcom, The Michael J. Fox Show, and came to the conclusion that while the show was boring, hackneyed, every word for generic and un-creative, its value was in showing it could be done. A cookie-cutter family sitcom where the main character has Parkinson’s. Broad City, on the other hand, is excellent, but similarly, in a field women typically don’t stand in—the genre of slacker/gross-out comedy.

Representation is the big media issue of the past couple years. Women have less than 45 percent of speaking parts in prime time TV, and less than 30 percent of speaking roles in film. Some parts rise to the top—we can all name phenomenal woman characters in television. But it’s rare that a show, particularly a comedy, focused on women gets to be so goofy and small. A friend watched one of the original webisodes (the show is derived from a YouTube series) and read the comment “Who would want to watch a show about girls walking around and talking about nothing?” Well, like, a lot of people. Walking around and talking about nothing is generally reserved for male-dominated casts, and while that’s a combination of words designed to be unattractive, it describes a coveted set-up where the interest comes solely from the characters being themselves. With no gimmicks and no real premise, Broad City draws from its central friendship between Ilana and Abbi to be an intensely character-based show. And let’s be real, they do more than just walk around.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/1WavVwnEFhw”]

That said, one of the show’s biggest strengths is its willingness to be petty. These characters have small lives, and pathetic problems. Abbi has a meltdown over her roommate’s live-in boyfriend recycling her big stack of expired Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons (they don’t actually expire!). There’s a whole episode about Abbi trying to buy weed and Ilana struggling with her taxes. In an episode that takes place during a hurricane, the biggest conflict is that Abbi’s toilet won’t flush after she takes a dump with company over. The pilot is about Ilana convincing Abbi that they have to scrounge up $200 to buy tickets and weed for a Lil Wayne show. Nobody is trying to get or keep a job, the stakes are low, but the characters lead themselves on an adventure anyway, “returning” stolen office supplies to Staples and cleaning an adult baby’s apartment in their underwear.

Small problems, but the kind everyone has. What do people in their 20s worry about? Getting drugs, seeing Lil Wayne, having sex, struggling to come up with the motivation to do anything worthwhile. We all have gross, stupid lives, sometimes. The dialogue is often pointless, but it’s the kind of relatable pointless conversation you and your friends take pleasure in. This show, despite the zany heights its plots reach, is authentic and genuine. Ilana is the kind of pseudo-political millennial we all love to hate, taking issue with Staples playing “What a Wonderful World” because “it’s a slave song, look it up,” and referring to her supervisor as “Mr. George Bush.” At one point, Abbi tells her “Sometimes, you’re so anti-racist, you’re actually…really racist.”

Broad City carries with it the themes of decline and aimlessness and disenfranchisement that a more serious and self-important show might, but they’re part of the fabric of this show, not the focus. Abbi folds towels and cleans pubes out of gym shower drains for a living. Ilana gets high at her telemarketing job. One episode opens with the two strutting into a bank to Drake’s “Started From the Bottom” as Abbi deposits an $8,000 check. At a fancy seafood prix-fixe, Ilana eats as much as possible, despite a serious shellfish allergy. At one point, they call in a locksmith to help them into Ilana’s apartment, but he’s so gross and creepy that Ilana gives a fake name and ends up having him get them into her neighbor’s apartment instead. In a montage of their morning routines, Abbi sits next to an old man reading the same book as her. He takes this as a sign and tries to kiss her, and flips her off angrily when she rebuffs him. These themes aren’t often directly explored, but they’re always there in the background and driving the characters.

At the end of the day, Broad City is just a goddamn delight. Abbi and Ilana have an adorable friendship, and the supporting characters are hilarious, especially Ilana’s fuck buddy Lincoln, a dentist played by Hannibal Burress. It’s confidently pointless and gross, willing to show its protagonists at their worst and most brandy-sick, most unmotivated and selfish. With shades of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Workaholics, Broad City carries on their tradition of ludicrous character-based catastrophe from a perspective that until now has been excluded from the genre.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/jwt3em9NSZk”]

Broad City has been renewed for a second season. Check this show out, please.

Solomon Wong is a writer and a graduate of UC Santa Cruz. He is the co-editor of Be Young and Shut Up, author of the cyberpunk serial novel Stargazer. He likes cooking, fishkeeping, and biking around Oakland.

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!

6 topics for an HBO TV series on Brazil more original than “high end (white) sex workers” by Juliana at Feministing

Laverne Cox and bell hooks Had a Discussion About Gender and Pop Culture by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

Jessica Chastain Deconstructs Strong Female Characters as “A Disservice to Women” by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

Girls on Film: 5 TV actresses who deserve much better movie roles by Monika Bartyzel at The Week

The Root’s Readers Name the 50 Greatest Black TV Shows of All Time by Erin E. Evans at The Root

CIFF 2014 Tribute: Isabelle Huppert by Peter Sobczynski at RogerEbert.com

Lizzo is a Goddess in Her New Web Series & on Letterman by Sarah Thomasson at Bust

‘How to Get Away With Murder’ and ‘Black-ish’ Get Full Season Orders From ABC by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

The Herculean Effort Taken By One Group To Show Hollywood Is Sexist by Walt Hickey at Five Thirty Eight

Where The (Queer) Girls Are Gonna Be On Your TV This Year by Riese at Autostraddle

Cover Exclusive: Jennifer Lawrence Calls Photo Hacking a “Sex Crime” at Vanity Fair

Meet the female producers smashing Hollywood’s glass ceiling by Nicole Sperling at Entertainment Weekly

Shonda Rhimes Opens Up About ‘Angry Black Woman’ Flap, Messy ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Chapter and the ‘Scandal’ Impact by Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter

Malala’s Nobel is ‘for all girl students of Pakistan’ by Naila Inayat and Caesar Mandal at USA Today

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

‘Life After Beth’ and the Trouble With Absent Presence

Poster for Life After Beth — Poster for *Life After Beth*

Horror-comedy Life After Beth is the kind of movie that’s very easy to explain.

Girl dumps Boy, Girl dies and comes back as a zombie with no memory of the break-up, Boy continues to date her even though he’s a little afraid of her.

But there’s not a lot else. Even the titular character is scarcely more than a name. After sitting through the slim 89 minutes of I Heart Huckabees writer Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, I’m still left wondering who Beth is. And what did she care about besides her boyfriend and sex?

Aubrey Plaza plays the dear departed Beth Slocum, cut down by a snake bite during a solo hike, leaving behind her stalker ex-boyfriend, Zach (Dane DeHaan). Zach hasn’t taken her death very well. He dresses in black and ignores his parents and brother, preferring to spend time with Beth’s grieving parents (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon) who treat him like a son. When the Slocums stop contacting him, he stalks and spies on them to find out why. Quickly, he discovers they have been hiding Beth, who has mysteriously returned from the grave, unaware of her own death.

A scheme is hatched. Beth’s parents will continue to cherish “the miracle” of her resurrection and Zach will get his girlfriend back and have a second chance to get it right and take her dancing and on hikes like she always wanted. Keeping Beth a secret is crucial, they will continue to hid her return and keep her in the dark about what had happened to her. But her sudden fits of rage, rotting body, and crazy strength make things difficult.

From Beth’s perspective this would make an intriguing premise; she is confused, strange things are happening to her body, things she can’t control, and that’s the stuff horror movies are made of. Yet, despite her lone presence in the title, the poster, and Plaza’s top billing, the film is never about Beth. The story belongs to Zach.

Beth’s all-consuming lust for Zach is painted as monstrous

Though Plaza gives a committed physical performance, clearly having a ball in monster make-up, it’s really all she’s given to do. She isn’t even given much room to be funny in the supposed comedy. It’s as if Plaza has been cast in a feature length sketch-show, playing all manner of stereotypical “girlfriends from hell.” For a good while she’s the horny girlfriend who needs to be reminded not to rip her boyfriend’s clothes off at any opportunity, then she plays the jealous girlfriend who’s convinced any women her boyfriend talks to is sleeping with him, after that she’s briefly Linda Blair in The Exorcist, before finally ending the film as a rabid dog biting at anything that gets too close. I imagine it on Saturday Night Live: first a short musical theme, “The Girlfriend from Hell,” then Plaza making a snarky comment to her boyfriend and vomiting pea soup all over him.

But who was she when she was alive? What does Zach love so much about Beth that he couldn’t get over her, it had to have been more than just her potential to act as a sex robot. What kind of memories do her parents cherish about her?
None of these questions is answered.

To make a film that centers around a death, that death has to mean something to the audience. There are many ways to do this, from the inherently sad (child deaths) to the anguished (and unbefitting of a comedy) mental breakdown of the surviving characters. The main problem with Life After Beth is that the titular character never once felt like a real person, a once living girl who happened to be named Beth. Instead, she felt like a construct invented by writer and quickly named for a catchy title. All she is is a girl named Beth, no more fleshed out in the finished film than she would be in a rough plot line, this guy’s girlfriend and this couple’s daughter. She matters to people but she never achieves personhood herself and so is difficult to care about.

Beth and Zach finally go on the hike they always wanted

While the film opens with a brief glimpse of a scared (still living) Beth lost in the woods and looking for cell service, this is all we see of her. As we are never allowed to know Beth; her presence as a zombie is robbed of any sense of irony or tragedy, which would make it entertaining to watch. The short grief narrative the film opens with only serves to remind us that these stories are about absence. Even when Beth returns, she is absent, a dead girl given a flesh and blood presence, yet never a voice. Throughout the film, Beth is fetishized as a dead girl, and in one scene, Zach masturbates with a scarf she had left behind.

Zach keeps Beth’s scarf and uses it to masterbate — Zach keeps Beth’s scarf and uses it to masturbate

Beth’s constant desire for Zach is meant as a source of humour, notably as she pops out of the roof to ask him to go for a hike. Though he was originally the one obsessively in love with her, even stalking her family, she is seen as the pathetic one. Her lust is uncontrollable and as it morphs into murderous and cannibalistic impulses, and the high female libido is painted as monstrous. Moreover, the destruction of the attractive female body is intended as a source of dark comedy and Beth is de-personified to the point where, when she finally dies again, it’s with Zach shooting her in the head to put her down, again like a rabid dog.

In this light, there is something disturbing about seeing her tied up and chained to washing machine for the last act. In order to handle her, Beth must be trapped and contained, with her boyfriend, a person she had tried to break up with, in complete control and possession of her. The situation continues to be horrific for Beth, but but her character’s zombification means she is no longer a person with a perspective of her own. When Zach finally apologizes for how he treated her as a living person, she’s no longer there and the apology is more for him than her.

As she becomes less human, Beth is kept captive and watched over by Zach

Parts of the Life After Beth reminded me of 2012’s Ruby Sparks, another film about a girlfriend who exists only as a male fantasy and to tell us something about him. However, Ruby Sparks, whether successful or not, played with this idea to expose something troubling about the stories we tell in our culture. Life After Beth makes no such commentary. Sure Zach needs to come to terms with his girlfriend’s death but Beth’s return didn’t do much to change this central fact. Throughout the film he vacillates between refusing to give her up and feeling burdened by her presence. Narratively, the film would have worked better if Beth’s resurrection occurred because Zach made a selfish wish, as would have given both him and Beth room to grow.

Toward the end, the film changes gears completely, as people everywhere begin returning from the dead. This larger zombie apocalypse creates a rift in the narrative, and expects us to shift gears, stop caring about Beth and Zach, and start caring about the fates of Zach’s family and their fight to survive.

Plaza pays an unusual physical role and is allowed to be unattractive

As much as I disliked this movie, I can’t imagine how insufferable it would be without Aubrey Plaza as Beth. She’s obviously enjoying herself, playing a role so different from anything she’s done before, and it’s enjoyable to watch that. There’s definitely some fun in the role of Beth, which allows Plaza to be monstrous and unattractive.

Life After Beth tries to be a romantic comedy and a zombie movie, yet forgets how to deliver either laughs or scares. There are a few bright spots: Mrs. Slocum feeding her hands to her monster-daughter and Beth tumbling down a hill with a stove strapped to her back, but they are few and far between. The running gag, of zombies liking smooth jazz, is one of those touches that seems hilarious on paper but cloying when translated to the screen.

It’s always great to see fresh twists on old stories, but we can’t forget what made the old stories great in the first place. With no build-up of the relationship and no reason for the resurrection, there’s nothing left to care about.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Two Days, One Night’: Marion Cotillard’s Insight From the New York Film Festival

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote ‘Two Days, One Night,’ which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced ‘Two Days, One Night’ to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

In Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays Sandra, a worker in a solar panel factory who returns to work after medical leave for depression to learn she has lost her job after management forces her co-workers to choose between keeping her on staff or receiving their 1,000-Euro bonuses. After the owner of the factory agrees to a revote, Sandra spends the weekend trying to meet with each of her 12 co-workers to plead her case and persuade them to change their minds.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the veteran filmmakers who wrote and directed the film, raise global issues like wage stagnation, financial inequality, and the declining middle class, while focusing their story on a financially strapped woman desperate to keep her job.

“She’s a simple woman and very complicated at the same time,” Cotillard explained at a Q&A Sunday. “She’s just recovering from a very deep depression and she’s fragile and she’s going to discover things about herself that she didn’t expect.”

Cotillard, who received an Oscar for disappearing into her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, in which she affected the singer’s nasal warble and her sickly hunched over physicality, makes Sandra, in her tank top and with her weary eyes, just as believable. A rare combination of movie star and character actress, Cotillard chooses roles in high-profile Hollywood films like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), along with parts in foreign and independent films, notably Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and James Gray’s The Immigrant, just to mention a few.

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote Two Days, One Night, which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced Two Days, One Night to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A. As soon as the discussion ended she glided along the red carpet in the lobby for photographers and posed for selfies with fans, some who got a bit too chummy and close, but she never flinched.

Six things I learned about Marion Cotillard Sunday during the Q&A.

The Dardenne brothers have a long rehearsal process and take lots and lots of takes, and the actress is fine with that:

“Sometimes we would have already done 70 takes and I would ask for more… because some were sequence shots, which have to be perfect because you cannot edit… I trust them (the Dardennes) a thousand percent, so if they would have asked me to do 200 takes I would have done it because I knew there was a reason behind this amount of takes, and that was one of my best experiences as an actresses. They really offered me everything that I had always wanted in terms of relationships with directors, and today when I talk about the amount of takes, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a lot,’ but on set it was never overwhelming, it was never exhausting, it was just the process of getting something, getting what they wanted to have, and for me giving them exactly what they wanted to have.”

On whether she worried about going too deep into a role and how hard it was for her to come back when the movie is over:

“For Piaf it was kind of difficult because it was the first time I went that deep, and I immersed myself entirely for months into somebody else’s… But I’ve learned a lot trying to get back to my life after La Vie en Rose, so now I know that I need a process to come back to my life, and this process is as interesting as getting into someone, and now it’s part of how I work.”

On how she prepared for celebrity:

“I don’t think you are prepared for this very real weird thing actually… But at the same time it, when you’re an actor you’re looking for a connection with a lot of people you might never meet, but you want to tell a story, and you want this story to touch many people as a kind of connection… When I started in acting and people recognized me in the street it was so weird, but I didn’t know how to take it so I would run away. That was super weird. I felt very paranoid. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. And I’m a very sensitive person, and sometimes it would be too much, but I’m kind of used to it. It’s just a different connection to people. (She laughed.) And I like it.”

She admits to being drawn to playing dark and difficult women with big problems. (Next up is Lady Macbeth.):

“Unfortunately yes. When they offered me the role of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, I said yes right away without my brain being involved in this decision, and then I started to think, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, yeah, here we go again. Drama! Drama! Drama!’ I must be, yeah, attracted to the darkness for sure. But sometimes I’m having very sane, not schizophrenic conversations with myself, but still conversations with myself, thinking when are you going to stop playing people who are so fucked up? And I have no answer. I’m just waiting for sudden light. It’ll come. It’ll come.”

She did have a brief but memorable appearance in Anchorman 2 starring Will Ferrell and directed by Adam McKay, but it seems she needed help loosening up:

“All these guys are my idols, so that was kind of crazy for me. When they asked me I didn’t even read anything, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I’ll be there.’ I mean being on a set with Will Ferrell was a dream, and I was freaked out in that huge field, and Adam McKay was like super far away giving me lines, like new lines over this megaphone, I could barely understand what he was saying. Can I say that I was hungover? So it was part of me being in a disastrous state and at the same time having a lot of fun.”

She doesn’t think she was that great in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris:

“That was a tough experience for me actually because it took me a long time to actually believe that I was on a set with Woody Allen… I met Woody Allen five days before we started shooting, and we didn’t really exchange things. We discussed a little bit about the vision of this character, but I had very little information, and then being on set with him I was so scared that I wouldn’t be good enough… I was always scared that he wouldn’t get what he wanted because we had talked so little, and I think that I might have misunderstood what he wanted at the beginning, and I knew that he was not very happy, which does stay with me and so yeah, I felt very uncomfortable… It was not very easy for me either to be in front of an actress like an rabbit in the light (sic)… I’m very happy that I worked with him… I could have done better.”

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

Seed & Spark: Fearlessly Pursuing a Film Career at 43

At the age of 40, I returned to school, to Fitchburg State University’s undergraduate film/video production program, to learn the craft of directing films. During my two years at Fitchburg State, I took as many classes as I could, while writing and directing two short films. I also discovered a new passion for screenwriting, which led me to the low-residency MFA program at New Hampshire Institute of Art: Writing for Stage and Screen, where I am currently enrolled.

Left to right: Actor Will Bouvier and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts' short film, Home. — Left to right: Actor Will Bouvier and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts’ short film, *Home*.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Potts.

I am a woman who has never felt the need to conform to the norms of society.

I am my own person doing this life my way and I do not want to ever be the same as anyone else…man or woman. I do not necessarily identify as a feminist, although my husband may proudly tell you that I am a female chauvinist. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. I am myself. And I am a woman. I have strengths and weaknesses. I speak my mind. I am bold and often outspoken. I have secrets. I have fears. I have dreams. I am human and I am going to do this life my way.

At the age of 43, I am launching a career as a screenwriter and film director. In many ways you could say that I am starting over in the middle, but truthfully it is hardly starting over. I graduated from Drew University 23 years ago with a degree in theatre. I put my career on hold to stay home with my four biological children until they started kindergarten. A decision that was, by the way, very unpopular at the time. When my youngest started kindergarten, I looked for opportunities to work in theatre, but the closest professional theatres were over an hour away, and I had small children. I knew that I had to take life by the reigns and build a theatre.

Left to right: Producer, Jessica Killam, and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts' short film, Home. — Left to right: Producer, Jessica Killam, and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts’ short film, *Home*.

I started forming a small theatre company out of a church and, within five years, filed for nonprofit status and was the co-founder of Cornerstone Performing Arts Center in Fitchburg, Mass., with a small professional non-equity theatre. During my time as the artistic director, I produced and directed over a dozen productions, built an arts training program with youth theatre and dance companies, and oversaw the annual season of productions. After 10 years total building this theatre company, I was hungry to grow as an artist.

Jennifer Potts on the set of her short film, Home. — Jennifer Potts on the set of her short film, *Home*.

As I begin to make my own mark on the movie world, I watch a lot of movies. The movies that resonate with me the most always have a story that I just cannot get out of my head like Lars and the Real Girl and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I am also a huge fan of Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom. For me, it all comes down to a really good story that is executed well. I have been experimenting with my own style as a screenwriter and filmmaker. My first two shorts were completely different: a quirky comedy and a suspenseful drama. I am filming my last short movie, Charlie & Poppy, this November. This is a family/coming of age drama that captures the magical relationship between a grandfather and grandson over the period of 20 years. Writing and directing shorts has given me the opportunity to hone my own style before embarking on my first feature film. The screenplay that I am working on right now will be the first feature film that I direct and it will build on the foundation I created with my shorts. I will truly begin to make my mark on this movie industry once I take this giant leap into the world of feature films. I will introduce my voice to the world, the voice of a woman with more than 40 years of stories ready to be told.

Actress, Michele Egerton, on the set of Jennifer Potts' 1st short film, Free Time. — Actress, Michele Egerton, on the set of Jennifer Potts’ first short film, *Free Time.*

I am aware that the road will be tough as a female filmmaker in a male-dominated industry. But what industry isn’t male-dominated? I have spent years navigating my way through life as a woman. I am independent and strong and, when I get rejected and knocked down, I will get up and fight even harder. I know that, at the end of the day, I am the only person who can get in the way of my career and my goals. I am the only person whose actions I have control over.

Someone recently commented on my ability to pursue my dreams stating that I was fortunate to have a husband to support me. The female chauvinist inside me started screaming and kicking and swearing. I did, by the way, choose to marry my husband. I did also stay home and raise the children that he participated in impregnating me with while he pursued his career. I did support him when he returned to graduate school twice. He is a great man – that is why I married him. He is not, however, the reason I am pursuing my career. I am the reason.

Actor, Will Bouvier, on the set of Jennifer Potts' 2nd short film, Home. — Actor, Will Bouvier, on the set of Jennifer Potts’ second short film, *Home*.

I am the woman who wakes up every morning and fearlessly pursues a career where women are lucky to ever be seen or heard. I am the writer who has the discipline to spend every morning writing the stories that have lived in my head for 43 years. I am the filmmaker who pulls together the logistical and creative aspects of the films I make, while boldly asking people for money to support each film. I am the one and only person who can make my dreams happen and I refuse to let someone else take that power away from me. This is my life and I will live it fearlessly.

Film director and screenwriter, Jennifer Potts, graduated from Drew University in 1992 with a BA in Theatre Arts. After running a theatre for years, at age 41, Jennifer attended Fitchburg State University’s film/video program where she wrote and directed two short films and received 2014 Film Student of the Year. Jennifer is working toward an MFA in Screenwriting at NH Institute of Art. Jennifer lives in Fitchburg, Mass. with her husband and five children.

‘Gone Girl’: How to Create the Perfect Female Villain

This is a guest post by Alize Emme.

SPOILER ALERT.

Kudos to the 20th Century Fox exec who decided to market Gone Girl (2014) as a great date movie. This is not a date movie. This is a horror story about the sensationalized pitfalls of a doomed marriage.

As good horror stories go, this one has the perfect villain: Amy Elliott Dunne.

Calculating. Manipulative. Patient. Sinister. Genius. Female.

Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is perhaps one of the greatest female fictional villains portrayed on screen, with bonus points for doing something her male counterparts rarely ever achieve: getting away with it. Dunne, with the help of a highly colored narrative penned by Gillian Flynn, manipulates a vibrant cast of stereotypes as she weaves the perfect crime web and literally gets away with murder.

After feeling like her husband, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), has taken her “pride, dignity, hope, and money,” Dunne sets out with fierce discipline and a detective’s eye for detail to frame her unsuspecting husband for her own murder. She befriends “a local idiot,” tells tall tales about fear and the threat of violence, authors a journal’s worth of history–some true, some false, simulates a pregnancy, lights “a fire in July,” and sets the perfect crime scene. She transforms herself into someone “people will truly mourn.”

The premise of Gone Girl works because it plays off our preconceived notions about loss and tragedy. The Pretty Murdered Wife. We as an audience know this story: she’s missing, feared dead, might be pregnant. The narrative needs no back-story, but we do get a glimpse.

Nick Dunne. He is done. Gone. Finished. We know this about Nick the moment we meet him just by his name as he’s standing in the middle of the street next to garbage bins. He is something to be taken out and disposed of with the trash; he is never getting his life back, and Flynn wants us to be aware. The Nick Dunne we are introduced to is a schlubby, beer drinking, ice cream eating, 5 o’clock shadow kind of guy with a dissatisfied marriage and a concubine on the side.

When Dunne goes missing and morphs into the Pretty Murdered Wife stereotype, Nick Dunne’s general disposition puts him right into the Smug Accused Husband category. He’s too charming; he’s too arrogant; he’s too suspicious. He’s a man with secrets. “He’s being a good guy, so everyone can see him being a good guy,” Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) observes. He’s a man whose marriage has taught him how to fake it, who happens to be surrounded by women. There’s lead detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) who gives him a fair run. A fictionalized Nancy Grace clone, Ellen Abbott, (Missi Pyle) who pulls him apart every night on her nationally syndicated television show, and his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) who’s been with him since before they “were even born” and offers a stable voice of reason.

“I am so sick of being picked apart by women,” Nick Dunne says. And he’s right, that’s exactly what’s happening now that he’s been labeled the Smug Accused Husband. This stereotype exists because there are men who do kill their pregnant wives and then go on TV and lie about it, and society remembers them. The case of Laci Peterson was one of the first things that came to my mind. And Affleck is clear to note that Scott Peterson was one of the models for his character. Even the “Missing” photo of Dunne is reminiscent of Laci’s with the bright smile, dangling earrings, and glossy lipstick. Gone Girl is a story that already lives on the edge of our thoughts.

As a couple, Nick and Amy have been pretending from the start. They have a perfect meet-cute, perfect dates, perfect celebratory rituals; they even buy the same sheets. He plays “hot, doting husband,” to her “sweet, loving spouse.” None of it is real; “I forged the man of my dreams,” Dunne says. And in doing so, she herself became the Cool Girl. Another stereotype of how women manipulate themselves to land a man.

Eating cold pizza, drinking beer, remaining “a size 2.” Dunne tailored herself to fit Nick’s taste. But “Nick got lazy.” Not holding up his end of the bargain was never the deal. When she sees that Nick’s sweet romantic gestures were not improvisations made up for her, but rather a well-rehearsed ruse easily tailored to the girl in front of him, Dunne makes a decision. She realizes her husband is no longer the man she married and decides to teach him a lesson he will never forget. “No fucking way,” she says, “He doesn’t get to win. Grown-ups suffer consequences.” She takes charge. She doesn’t let herself be walked on by this man. “Why should I die?” She asks, “I’m not the asshole.”

It’s an easy, cop-out that barely scratches the surface of accurate to diagnose Dunne as a psychopath. To say she’s an overly emotional, crazy woman who can’t handle daily life and descends into a PMS-filled rage, is falling pry to gender stereotypes. Dunne exhibits a perfectly cool demeanor, her emotions are consistently even, she is meticulous and complex. The layers of this character are masterful; she is the opposite of what every gender stereotype says women should be like. She is simply a great villain. “Show me that Darling Nicky smile,” Dunne coos like the Wicked Witch of the West as she stares at a video of her husband on a computer. She’s fascinated by her own work.

Pike’s performance is mesmerizing; she delivers Dunne’s words in this breathless manner like she’s seductively blowing out a candle. Pike makes us believe from the very beginning that Dunne is both sane and capable of deception. But seeing a female character portrayed so strongly on screen earns Dunne the unfortunate label of “controlling bitch.”

If Dunne were a man, none of these character and sanity accusations would hold true. Male characters that go on rampant murder sprees in movies are never labeled as psychopaths, when clearly they display the same behavior. Dunne is not a psychopath. Crazy people cannot mastermind murders and crimes and not get caught. Even her past acts of “insanity” should be taken with a grain of salt. The ex-boyfriend who calls Dunne a “mind fucker of the first degree,” still keeps a picture of her in his wallet. This woman has allegedly ruined his life, yet he’s still holding her image so close? This calls his authenticity into question while giving Dunne credibility.

Dunne is fiercely intelligent. She has plotted the perfect crime. And while she doesn’t succeed with her original plan, she still sets her husband up for decades of suffering with her pregnancy. For all the betrayed wives out there, Dunne is a hero with the perfect revenge. Her crime is personal, not random, which gets her sanity questioned. Flynn doesn’t touch the subject of Dunne’s mental state. She leaves that up to the audience. David Fincher also helms this story in a nonjudgmental way. He is respectful of Dunne and all the female characters. Dunne is never put on display as a woman, though several male characters make mention of her impressive physical attributes. The supporting female characters, which are all various stereotypes, are never blasted for it; they’re handled with care.

Detective Boney, for example, is the coffee drinking, slick talking lead on Dunne’s missing persons case. She’s an interesting foil to the other female characters that assume Nick Dunne is guilty from the start. Boney gives him the benefit of the doubt, refusing to arrest him because some “blonde dunce” on TV says so. Instead it’s her male partner, Officer Gilpin, who immediately makes up his mind when finding blood splatter in The Dunne’s kitchen that he is guilty.

Through Boney, we are offered the idea that not all women jump to conclusions and hate men. But as the story progresses, we discover that Boney didn’t properly handle her case. “We stained the rug,” she says “with a national spotlight” on her. Had Nick Dunne been left in Boney’s “deeply incompetent hands,” he would be on death row, Dunne conveniently points out. Therefore, Boney’s word is useless in bringing Dunne to justice. Men botch investigations all the time, but for Boney to do so, it’s suggesting a woman can’t properly handle the responsibly of performing a traditionally male job.

Noelle Hawthorne (Casey Wilson) is the wonderfully entertaining suburban mom down the street with triplets and another baby on the way. We know this woman. Everyone has that one inquisitive neighbor that if something were to happen, she would be the first one knocking on the squad car window trying to help the cops. There’s a sense of comedy to this hyperbolic character and her triple-decker stroller, but she is never mocked. We take her seriously. It’s a real feat.

Nick Dunne’s twin, Margo, is a cool girl who’s not the Cool Girl. She drinks bourbon with her brother at ten in the morning, she covers his back with Dunne’s mother, she knows the truth but that doesn’t change her opinion of him. She always speaks the truth with her perfectly snarky comments. “You look like hammered shit,” she tells Nick. He likes her. We like her. She is perhaps the one female character that deviates from a hardened stereotype and could exist in the real world.

Somewhat of a mysterious supporting character, Greta (Lola Kirke) acts as a catalyst for Dunne. She’s complex and calculating just like Dunne; she sees an opportunity, and she seizes it. “Did he put you up to this?” Dunne asks as Greta and her male accomplice rob her blind, “I put him up to it,” she replies. She’s a survivalist and essentially forces Dunne to abort her plan and switch to survival mode herself. Yes, Dunne then murders a man and fakes a sexual assault, but in the world of a villain, she’s just adapting to survive. And as someone who is “skilled in the art of vengeance,” Dunne doesn’t just survive; she thrives.

Dunne, as Nick asks: What are you thinking?

Seeing a female character like Dunne on screen is fantastic–a word she would deem “a little flippant,” but there has yet to be a female villain quite like her. Fincher draws us into this world, Dunne’s world, where everything is this perfect shade of monochrome with tungsten lighting, where the camera moves in slow and methodical push-ins and pull-outs just as calculating as Dunne is, where things change with such swiftness–a kiss to a tongue swab, just like real life. And as we return to real life, we have to wonder: What will Amy Elliott Dunne do next? We’re left with the image of her head, just where we started, much like a few scenes earlier; we are left with Nick Dunne standing before trash cans, just like we started. So much has happened, but what do we really know? And more important, what will we learn next?

Alize Emme is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU and tweets at @alizeemme.

20 Facts Everyone Should Know About Gender Bias in Movies

To discuss their findings, the Institute hosted its second annual Global Symposium on Gender in Media, which I attended. The primary response I had was, how is it possible that people, especially people in this industry, remain unaware of these facts and what they mean? My second was, how do we get this information to audiences who live with the effects of this bias, but are demonstrably unaware?

This guest post by Soraya Chemaly previously appeared at Th e H uffington Post and is cross-posted with permission.

A new study, Gender Bias Without Borders, was released by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media this recently. Conducted by Dr. Stacy Smith and a team at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, it looks at 120 films in the 10 most profitable film markets, globally. These films, rated G, PG, or PG-13.5 or their equivalents, were compared to similar films in the U.S. A category for U.S./UK collaboration was created since it was so common. The U.S. ranks consistently low in almost every metric.

Studies, other studies, show that everyday sexism is invisible to most people. One form that sexism takes, including vis-a-vis media, is that people overestimate the presence of women and their speech. It happens everywhere. It’s not that we think women are necessarily apparent or speaking as much as men, but that we expect them to be, relatively speaking, invisible and not speaking, so, by comparison, any appearance and speech is “too much.” This says a lot about status and mainstream cultural assumptions about social roles and of power.

Despite decades of research, it is apparent that we are, as a culture, so used to women being marginal that we don’t even notice. Women, as Davis points out, are only 17 percent of the people in movie crowd scenes, and yet viewers assume they are almost equally represented. That 17 percent number is super interesting, since it is also roughly the percentage of women found in leadership positions in government and business.

With very small changes, the ratio of men to women in film has remained fundamentally unchanged since 1946. As Davis put it, at this rate, “It will be 700 years before we reach parity” in U.S. media. And that parity is crucially important, not the least of which is because, as she explained, “Eighty percent of media we consume is made in the United States. We are responsible for exporting these images of girls and women to the world.” It is not a pretty picture.

20 Facts About Gender and Film in 2014

Read them and weep.

And then share widely.

Globally, there are 2.24 male characters for every 1 female character.

Out of a total of 5,799 speaking or named characters 30.9 percent were female, 69.1 percent male.

Films for children had similar ratios, with only 29.2 percent having female protagonists.

Less than a quarter of films surveyed (23.3 percent) had a female lead or co-lead.

The U.S./UK hybrids and Indian films were in the bottom third for gender-balance, with less than a quarter of speaking roles going to female characters. In the U.S./U.K. hybrids, 23.6 percent and in Indian films, 24.9 percent.

These on-screen ratios mirror behind the camera realities. Out of 1,452 filmmakers whose gender was identifiable, 20.5 percent were female compared to 79.5 percent who are male.

Females are 7 percent of directors, 19.7 percent of writers, and 22.7 percent of producers.

France has the worse gender ratio, 9.1 men to 1 woman.

Brazil has the best, 1.7 men to 1 woman. The U.S.? 3.4 men to 1 woman.

When women direct films there are 6.8 percent more women in them. When women are screen writers, there are 7.5 percent more women. As the report points out, however, this may not be a good thing. “This explanation reflects the old age, “write what you know.” On the other hand, women maybe given these projects to write and direct that include more female characters. This second and latter explanation is more problematic, as it restricts the range of open directing and writing opportunities given to women.”

How gender is represented is also consistently problematic, particularly when you consider the influence media has on children’s imagination and self-conception. Female characters are more than twice as likely to be wearing sexy and sexualizing clothes (24.8 percent vs. 9.4 percent).

Female characters are more than twice as likely to be skinny (38.5 percent vs. 15.7 percent).

Female characters are more than twice as likely to be either partially or fully naked (24.2 percent vs. 11.5 percent).

In films, comments made by characters that refer to appearance are directed at women at a rate of FIVE times that of comments directed at men.

For films with fictional characters for younger children, in which the characters were aged 13-39, females are equally disproportionately sexualized. Even worse, however, is that in kids films, female characters are even more likely than in adult films to be thin.

In the U.S., for example, although women make up 46.3 percent of the workforce, they are only 23.2 percent of characters who work on film. This is one of the largest representational differences among all the countries measured. Needless to say, nowhere were women overrepresented as working for pay.

India had the smallest discrepancy in depictions of work: women make up 25.3 percent of the off screen workforce and 15.6 percent on the onscreen one.

When researchers looked at characters who were executives, as a marker of leadership representation, women made up 13.9 percent. There were not enough of them to have country breakdowns. While the study notes that “Across the global sample, occupational power is at odds with female participation,” that number, 13.9 percent is actually not too far off the mark. In the U.S. 17 percent of executives in the Top 100 companies are women, internationally that number is 24 percent. Women make up only 3 percent of CEOs globally.

Men are much more likely to be seen as attorneys and judges (13 to 1), academics (16 to 1), doctors and medical practitioners (5 to 1). Just three female characters were represented as political leaders with power. One didn’t speak. One was an elephant. The last was Margaret Thatcher.

Men were represented in STEM jobs area at a ratio of 7 to one. In the U.S., where women make up 24 percent of the STEM workforce, men made up 87.5 percent of STEM job workers.

I am grateful for organizations like the ones that came together (the UNWomen and the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored this work) to do this study, but I am tired of reading statistics like this.

Executives at the meeting I attended, women, expressed being “startled” by the data and I had to ask, “How is that possible in 2014?” Men have disproportionate industry potential to be change agents. Where are they? The room I sat in was 90 percent women. Media and entertainment management, like most other industries’, is lacking in diversity. Men with influence and the ability to raise these questions and do something about them probably strive, as individuals, to be good parents to their kids and make sure their daughters are healthy, happy, educated and ambitious. Not doing anything about this problem, from an institutional perspective, undoes all of that effort. The argument that there is some kind of benign “neutral” position is misguided. Same goes for parents.

Boys and men are done a massive disservice from these media portrayals as well. The flip side of these biased portrays contribute to inhumane, unrealistic stereotypes about masculinity based on control, violence, dominance and the active erasure of empathy as an acceptable emotion. A narrow, frequently violent, power-over-others male heroism comes at a very high price for everyone. As filmmaker Abigail Disney, a panelist, asked, along with women, there is another notable absence, “Where are the men who solve problems by thinking?”

Doing nothing perpetuates a discriminatory and harmful status quo. When progressive movie stars, the most prominent and well-paid being men, sit at a table, when liberal-minded executives review scripts, when open-minded producers are hiring — why is this not front and center? Davis recommends two very simple steps when scripts are being reviewed: change “he” to “she” for characters and make sure crowd scenes are gender balanced.

“Film executives were raised on this media, too. Just as women are underrepresented on screen they are missing in the real world,” explains Davis. These are not unrelated realities.

You may at this point be saying, “It’s all about the money.” Except, it’s not. Films featuring women in meaningful roles make more money. What does that leave us with? Consumer education. When will we draw a line? It’s not just about withholding money, but actively supporting women filmmakers and movies that feature diversity, fully dimensional female characters such as those featured in the annual Athena Film Festival.

Many made the point that, for the most part, moviegoers are unaware of the biases. Consumers are not going to theaters thinking about gender or how its representation impacts their and their children’s lives, boys and girls both. Media is how we train girls and women to have low expectations and train boys to have high ones. Girls to exhibit submissiveness and self-objectification, boys to express dominance and control. This isn’t a passive process.

“Filmmakers make more than just movies,” explains Smith. “They make choices. The choice could be for gender equality.” There is no excuse for not having this information and using it.

Researchers took pains to explain the limitations of their study and make good recommendations for improvement, further courses of inquiry and necessary steps that can be taken to address what is clearly a significant problem in our story-telling, especially for children.

What can you do? Share these facts, talk about them with educators, coaches, family, friends. Family friendly films are among the biggest problems. Talk to your kids. Don’t let this everyday sexism go unremarked upon. Vote with your wallet. Tell your local theatre to improve their programming.

The representation of gender in these films shapes imaginations and identity, aspirations and ambition. These depictions teach girls and boys about how culture sees them: their worth, their relative value, the roles they “should” play. Girls and women, infinitely diverse in their interests, appearance, ambition, ability, aspirations, make up more than 50 percent of the human population, but you would never know any of this watching our top grossing films. Really, how can we continue telling these fundamentally destructive stories to children?

Soraya L. Chemaly writes about feminism, gender and culture. Her work appears in The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, BitchFlicks, Fem2.0, Alternet and Feministe among other media. She considers it a major accomplishment that the people in her house dance with abandon. Follow on Tumblr, Facebook, Feminism’s Fantastic, Twitter @schemaly

What Country’s Film Industry Has the Best Gender Equity?

The study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and a group of partner organizations analyzed 120 films from the 10 countries with the most profitable film industries in the world. On average, women don’t fare much better in films internationally than they do in the United States: only 30 percent of characters with speaking parts or names are women. However, the cinematic gender balance varies greatly between countries. In Korea, for example, 50 percent of leading parts went to women while women played only 10 percent of leading roles in Russian films.

French film "Blue is the Warmest Color" centered on compelling female stories—but behind the camera, men outnumber women in the French industry nine to one. Film still from Sundance. — French film *Blue is the Warmest Color* centered on compelling female stories—but behind the camera, men outnumber women in the French industry nine to one. Film still from Sundance.

This guest post by Sarah Mirk previously appeared at Bitch Media and is cross-posted with permission.

We know that women woefully make up only 30 percent of speaking roles in American films. But a new study looks at how women fare in cinema internationally.

One thing that’s frustrating about this disparity is not just that women aren’t reflected in our media but that films featuring women in speaking roles are often better movies. When a film has few women in speaking roles, that’s usually a red flag to me that it’s a poorly written film. That was backed up by American box office revenues last year: major films that passed the Bechdel test made far more money, overall, than films that failed to have two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men. I’d be excited about a plan for American theaters to follow the example of a few theaters in Sweden that post whether a film passes the Bechdel test—then I’d be able to know which films to skip.

When thinking about gender representation in media, it’s essential to look at who is making our media. Female directors are more likely to work on projects with more women on screen. There’s no country that has gender balance behind the scenes in the film industry, but some do better than others. At the bottom of the pile is France, where male directors, writers, and producers outnumber women nine to one. Brazil is the most equitable overall, but the UK gets the special distinction of being the only film market where women make up a majority of film writers.

The study also looked at how women are portrayed on screen, including what jobs they hold. Discussions of how women are portrayed in film are endless, but I think the most interesting part of this analysis is its number-crunching on the actual jobs women hold in films. The researchers looked at the number of characters who hold jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and other male-dominated careers. The results are telling. In the United States for example, women hold 24 percent of jobs in STEM fields. But onscreen, only 12.5 percent of characters with jobs in STEM fields are women. Women are also absent onscreen from high-level political positions: only 9.5 percent of high-ranking politicians in films internationally are women. These onscreen representations are important because they offer role models for the viewer—not always good role models, of course, but even if women are playing nefarious scientists or politicians plotting global domination, people sitting in the audience understand that women are a vital presence in the laboratories and capitol buildings of the world. As the study notes, “Filmmakers make more than just movies, they make choices. Those choices could be for balance, for less sexualization, and for more powerful female roles. The choice could be for gender equality.”

Related Reading: Sweden is Now Rating Films for Gender Bias.

Sarah Mirk is Bitch Media‘s online editor. Right now, she’s really into watching Elisabeth Moss in Top of the Lake.

Violence Against Indigenous Women: Fun, Sexy, and No Big Deal on the Big Screen

Over and over, violence against indigenous women is made to titillate, built into narratives along with action, suspense, swashbuckling, and romance. Indigenous women become exotic props, and when we are identified with these dehumanized caricatures, it becomes easier to treat us inhumanely.

Captain Hook kidnaps Tiger Lily in Peter Pan — Captain Hook kidnaps Tiger Lily in *Peter Pan*

This guest post by Elissa Washuta previously appeared at Racialicious and on her Tumblr and is cross-posted with permission.

The body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, a member of Sagkeeng First Nation, was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg on Aug. 17. Her murder has brought about an important conversation about the widespread violence against First Nations women and the Canadian government’s lack of concern.

In her Aug. 20 Globe and Mail commentary, Dr. Sarah Hunt of the Kwagiulth band of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation wrote about the limited success of government inquiries and her concerns about other measures taken in reaction to acts of violence already committed, such as the establishment of DNA databases for missing persons. Dr. Hunt writes:

“Surely tracking indigenous girls’ DNA so they can be identified after they die is not the starting point for justice. Indigenous women want to matter before we go missing. We want our lives to matter as much as our deaths; our stake in the present political struggle for indigenous resurgence is as vital as the future.”

Violence against indigenous women is not, of course, happening only in Canada. In the U.S., for example, the Justice Department reports that one in three American Indian women have been raped or experienced an attempted rape, and the rate of sexual assault against American Indian women is more than twice the national average. This violence is not taking place only in Indian Country.

In the Globe and Mail on August 22, Elizabeth Renzetti wrote about three recent murders of First Nations women.

“What unites these three cases is that the victims – Tina Fontaine, Samantha Paul and Loretta Saunders – were all aboriginal women. What else unites them, besides the abysmal circumstances of their deaths? What economic, cultural, historical or social factors? Anything? Nothing?”

Jeffords holding the murdered Sonseeahray

I can’t answer that, but I know that all of these women—and every other indigenous woman in Canada and the U.S.—lives in a society that includes images of violence against indigenous women in its entertainment products. Over and over, violence against indigenous women is made to titillate, built into narratives along with action, suspense, swashbuckling, and romance. Indigenous women become exotic props, and when we are identified with these dehumanized caricatures, it becomes easier to treat us inhumanely.

Take as an example Disney’s Pocahontas. Released in 1995, the cartoon feature has replaced the historical figure’s life story in the minds of many Americans. Much has been made of Disney’s exotification of Pocahontas. John Smith is only compelled to put down his gun because of her beauty. Pocahontas is imbued with animal qualities throughout the film as she scuttles, bounds, swims, creeps, and dives. This reinforces a long-held conception of Native peoples as being “close to nature” at best, “more animal than human” at worst—and the latter is a view that makes us easier to abuse.

Emily and Sam in New Moon — Emily and Sam in *New Moon*

The recent depiction of Emily (a Makah woman) in the Twilight series offers viewers a direct representation of violence in a fictional Native community. Emily’s broad, visible facial scar is said to be the result of her partner Sam’s (a Quileute man/werewolf) outburst of rage: he was a younger werewolf, with difficulty controlling his “phasing” from human to wolf, he became angry, and she was standing too close. The presentation of this story is problematic in its shrugging absolution of Sam of his responsibility in maiming Emily, and the aftermath is heartbreaking: in the more detailed version of the story presented in the Twilight books, after Sam mauls Emily, she not only takes him back, but convinces him to forgive himself. This sends the message that an episode of violence can and should be overlooked for the sake of romance. Emily, a Native woman, becomes expendable. Her safety is of little concern; the fact that Sam has “imprinted” on her, cementing his attachment, is more important than the reality of recidivism.

In a Globe and Mail editorial, “How to Stop an Epidemic of Native Deaths,” the author brings up the many social factors at work in the epidemic of violence against Native women. I bring up the problematic and pervasive imagery above not because I think it is the most problematic issue, but because it is what I know, and because we can start solving it with our individual actions. We don’t need to call Native women “squaws” and joke that they were “hookers” when forced into prostitution, as Drunk History did last year. We can make better choices than “naughty Native” costumes on Halloween. We have the freedom to choose the representations we make in the world, and when we perpetuate damaging stereotypes of indigenous women as rapeable, we are using our autonomy to disempower others.

Karen Warren wrote in “A feminist philosophical perspective on ecofeminist spiritualities”:

“Dysfunctional systems are often maintained through systematic denial, a failure or inability to see the reality of a situation. This denial need not be conscious, intentional, or malicious; it only needs to be pervasive to be effective.”

I’m tired of hearing that these images aren’t harmful. I’d rather see how much they’re missed when they’re gone than continue to listen to the insistence that the image of Pocahontas at the end of a gun barrel is wholesome while, every day, more and more indigenous women die while we are told that this is not a phenomenon, not a problem, nothing more than crime.

Elissa Washuta is an adviser in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a faculty mentor in the MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her first book, a memoir called My Body Is a Book of Rules, was recently published by Red Hen Press.