In her debut feature, 2011’s ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy, a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.
Poster for Sleeping Beauty
In her debut feature, 2011’sSleeping Beauty, director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy (Emily Browning), a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.
As a character, Lucy is defined by what we as an audience don’t know about her, the blank spaces in her characterization that match those in her working life and it is as if we have slept through parts of the film along with Lucy. Her passivity in life mirrors her sleeping, as she moves around, distant from her surroundings and unattached to anyone. She is also indifferent to her job, in one scene she haphazardly applies lipstick and is told to take the work seriously, as “it is not a game.” Lucy’s narrative arc is her process of waking from the stupor she has existed in.
Lucy is shot several other times in silent, passive positions. There are prolonged sequences of her sleeping, both in her original student apartment and her luxury pad, blinded by her sleep mask, as well as sitting alone while waiting at the bar, and on her way to meet her boss, Clara (Rachael Blake). Much of the film actually happens around Lucy while she waits, listens, and sleeps. Even when she is awake, things are done to her and her body: she sleeps with strangers because of a coin toss, endures a painful bikini wax and a test where she is examined like an animal as part of her job interview, and has lipstick roughly applied to her mouth, meant to match her labia. There is a marked focus on Lucy’s mouth throughout the film, from the opening where a scientist puts a tube down her throat as an experiment to the end where she hides a camera in her mouth and is later awakened by mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Lucy’s only real connection is with her ailing friend Birdmann
However, there are moments of rare activity from Lucy, usually brought about by unfortunate circumstances, where is person beneath her icy shell is revealed. She tends to a sickly friend, Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) and gets into bed with him when he overdoses, though she makes no effort call for help. More crucially, she becomes active when she decides, without an provocation, that she wants to know what happens when she is asleep. Though she this would allow the men to be blackmailed, she purchases and smuggles in a small camera.
Early on, the men who will come to be Lucy’s clients are introduced as a dramatis personae at the silver service dinner which suggests they are members of a secret society. This suggests they are microcosms of different types of clients of sex workers, such as the one who is abusive and takes out his frustrations on her as a woman he is allowed to beat inside of a wife, and the one who falls in love with her and just wants to hold her.
At the silver service dinner, Lucy is set apart for her youth and beauty
Lucy is much younger than the other women in the film and her youth, beauty and pale coloring cause her to be placed on a pedestal. As the silver service dinner, she is covered up with virginal white lingerie while the other women wear black bras with cut outs that reveal their breasts. She is the sole women in white and the main attraction, and even when she makes clumsy mistakes, she is continuously praised.
Because of the value placed in Lucy’s beauty, there is a tension between her and Clara. She scoffs at Clara’s suggestion that her vagina is a temple worthy of respect and ignores her warning that the money earned from her work should be seen only as a temporary windfall not a permanent income she can depend on. These scenes suggest Clara may have been in Lucy’s position one day and aged out of the role. In light at the story’s fairy tale connections, it is interesting that a woman, Clara, is the one who puts her to sleep and looks at her as a commodity.
Lucy is examined by Clara before given the job
In the film’s extended and graphic nude scenes, Lucy’s passive, often sedated body can also be examined by aroused audiences, a notion that suggests audiences use nude star as Lucy’s clients do, as she can never know what they do with her image. Once the nude image is out there, it, like Lucy’s consent to be used by the men while sedated, cannot be controlled and consent cannot be rescinded.
In addition, her motivations for agreeing to this work are left unexamined. Unlike films like Belle De Jour, where a bored woman turns to sex work without seeming financial need, it is never suggested that anything Lucy enters into is her fantasy. Instead, it seems to be something she does without thinking, a path she enters down because she cannot think of anything else to do, and only late into it, when she realizes she is making good money, does she begin to live in the luxury it affords her.
Lucy burns her earnings: is the money unneeded or is she unstable?
However, the constant suggestions of traumas in Lucy’s life: her relationship with Birdmann, mentions of her mother, and of the absence of family or friends, as well as her casual proposal to an acquaintance who alludes to parts of her character he finds flawed, may suggest a conflicted or even ailing mental status. In some scenes, Lucy, as a college student, appears to have great need for money, as she allows herself to be used for science experiments, works in an office doing filing and photocopies and lives in grotty apartment with roommates who are openly apprehensive to her about her failure to pay rent. In one scene where she burns the money she has earned from silver service waitressing, suggesting she either feels no need for the money or has become mired in the surreal sort of magic in the film and barely registers the experience was real. Because she stares at the burning money as if it has cast a spell over her, the second possibility seems most likely.
Lucy consents to be used for science experiments
Sleeping Beauty also raises questions of whether sex work is unfairly stigmatized and separated from other menial work. It is suggested that Lucy, highly confident and assured of her attractiveness as she is, has taken her looks into account and believes sex work would be easier and more lucrative than her other jobs. It is also posed as not dissimilar to consenting to be a guinea pig for science experiments with uncertain results, as she had previously done.
Though she has consented to the sexual nature of her sleep work, Lucy is not even given an opportunity to consent to her involvement in her final client’s suicide, plans which were clearly known to Clara as she appears unsurprised he is dead. In this final scene, Lucy realizes that her actions have weight, even if she doesn’t remember them, as she becomes part of these men’s lives. By signing over her body and memory, she allows them ownership of her and knowledge of her as well as agreeing to trust they will not penetrate her. Many of our most beloved fairy tales romanticize passive, sleeping women, such as the original version of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince rapes the unconscious girl. Though Lucy gives her consent, it is unclear whether person can ever consent to something that would happen while they were unconscious as there is no way she can object if she changes her mind or it crosses the line.
It is questionable whether Lucy can consent to things that would happen while she is not conscious
Depending on one’s interpretation of Lucy’s mental state throughout the film, its ending can be taken one of two ways. Either it suggests, Lucy, a literal Sleeping Beauty is waking up to the reality of her life and can begin to live a “normal life” or she is entering into a mental breakdown she has been staving off with her detachment. In addition, the dead man lying in beside her may remind her of Birdmann, whose death she did not fully grieve over and suggests she has been forcing herself not to become attached to him either. With either interpretation, Lucy regains her autonomy and awareness of reality only after negative events, which casts her sex work and her sexual encounters in a wholly negative light. She awakens into the film’s stark reality, where there are no happily ever afters even when the cinematography is this lovely.
As Lucy awakes, not with a kiss but with a slap to the face, it becomes clear that Leigh’s tale of detachment is no fairy tale.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
Characters play a key role in our individual process of self-discovery. Stories have always been there to help us learn, to see from another’s point of view, or think deeper than before. What makes us human is that we turn these lessons into reflections of what we want. Through the pairing of images and concepts, I can wrap together the “idealized” me. But what happens when I cannot find myself in what I see on screen? What happened to those who lived in times when LGBTQI content was more taboo than it is now? We create.
This is a guest post by E.A. Francis.
I am an other, an in-between. I use the term “gender fluid” and I don’t consider myself a woman or a man.
I am still perceived by the world as a woman, though, and was raised as such. Sometimes people study me in public, trying to figure out what I am. It can be an ostracizing experience to move through the world as a point of people’s interest. But at the same time, I realize the value of my position. Those that glance, stare, and make eye contact are looking for my story, even if only for a second. That story is a long one—coming into my own took time. I’ve moved through stages and terms and confines until I grabbed ahold of me. And that’s what I want to see on the screen: the rawness of what it means to be conflicted and confined within your own skin.
In some ways, we have come a long way. I can now turn on the TV or head to the movies and see gay, lesbian, or bisexual characters. Even more recently, I have even seen multiple transgender characters on shows like Orange is the New Black. But there was a time when these representations were less frequent, confined to art house films. I remember my fascination with transmen characters like Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry or Max from The L Word. I looked at them and wondered, “Is that me?” I used to deny just how much we ingest media into our personalities and our understandings of our physical beings, but I’ve come to recognize how I compare myself to the images presented. Since I have no gender fluid characters, I turn toward the lesbian and trans communities.
Characters play a key role in our individual process of self-discovery. Stories have always been there to help us learn, to see from another’s point of view, or think deeper than before. What makes us human is that we turn these lessons into reflections of what we want. Through the pairing of images and concepts, I can wrap together the “idealized” me. But what happens when I cannot find myself in what I see on screen? What happened to those who lived in times when LGBTQI content was more taboo than it is now? We create.
Just like an author who writes the book they wish to read, our first instinct with storytelling is to speak the truths and questions that are within us as individuals in the hope that others share the same thoughts. But there is a stretch, often very long, between conceptualization and the completed project. I applaud our film and TV communities that have pushed for the stories less told, that show us characters with whom the minority can relate—they assist the majority in understanding that we exist and matter. Understanding another’s plight is what has lead humans to our greatest feats and I believe that some of the earliest LGBTQI movements have taken place in film and TV.
But there is a timeline, more or less, when a queer character is introduced in media. Often they are alone in their queerness and are there only to act as a foil, or as a stereotype, or to confirm that it is easy to place this type of person into a single category. Worse still is the implication that their storylines can be disregarded. The audience is supposed to believe that it is enough that the character is onscreen. I watched it happen on The L Word with Max. Quick scenes of transitioning from a female body to a male body, which is a massive process of its own, and then some confusion from the other queer characters about the authenticity of this “new other’s” experience. Here, I watched fictional lesbians, who had faced stigmas and hatred, turn the same bias to another in their queer community.
In Orange is the New Black, Sophia, who is struggling to stay on estrogen as she transitions from a male body to a female body, has a storyline that includes her son distancing himself from her and her wife moving on to be with an actual man. These points were left behind in season one and in season two we watched Sophia cut other, more “important” characters’ hair in the same salon— as though they filmed all of Laverne Cox’s scenes in one day. Where was the development? Where was her conflict? A single scene of dialogue between her and the nun about her relationship with her son skirts around the actual emotional turbulence of that time.
As an audience member, I was waiting for the moment her son expressed his thoughts to her in person, where the tension could either rise and peak or leave us hanging and thinking. But we were left, instead, to follow the story of the bisexual white woman, Piper. There are still many, many issues that lesbians, gays, and bisexuals face (including having their sexuality constantly challenged), but they are becoming more “mainstream,” more commonplace, and even deemed acceptable for families (as suggested by the popularity of Modern Family). The queer communities that lie outside of that newly developed safe zone are next in line for scrutiny in the public eye though they have always suffered massively and violently.
This is why it is crucial that our community, filmmakers and audience alike, help lift up projects that explore the experiences of a wider array of people. Frankly? I have all the hope in the world that we will accomplish this goal. It will take time, but perseverance will rule out. Let’s do this.
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E.A. Francis is an activist and interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Ill. Their work examines social issues surrounding gender, culture, and politics. E is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing Department. Their current project is Kendra & Obi, which follows an African American couple working to stay together while yearning to understand themselves as individuals. Patch of Prodigy Productions LLC is hosting a live twitter event on Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014 from 1-3 p.m. CT which discusses POC in the predominantly white world of higher education. Join the conversation, which features guest speakers Sophia Nahli Allison (visual storyteller @SophiaNAllison) and Andrea Hart (Teaching Artist @lenifaye) by using the hashtag #kendraobi. Reach out to E on twitter @eafrancis2 or Facebook at Official EA Francis.
The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared towards women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners. And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.
Anna Faris in What’s Your Number?
Man, I wish I knew that What’s Your Number? had a wedding in it back when I was writing weekly wedding movie reviews, because that would have been the perfect excuse to watch it. The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared toward women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners.
And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.
Ally’s number is 19, which is allegedly a problem of some kind
Here’s the sexist premise in full: Anna Faris plays Ally Darling, who gets dumped and fired in the same morning, and then discovers an even bigger problem with her life: she has nearly twice the average American woman’s number of lifetime sex partners, and is one partner away from the scientifically determined unmarriagable boundary of 20. She decides she can’t have sex again until she meets “The One.” Oy.
But for about 90 seconds during the opening credits of What’s Your Number? I got really excited that this might be a stealth-feminist film. The camera pans over pages from women’s magazines, with headlines perfectly illustrating the judgment, shame, contradictory advice and demented priorities that populate those pages: “Change Too Much For Your Man?” “Decorating Your Bedroom *With Him in Mind,” “Does He Only Want You For Your Bod?” and my personal favorite:
“When Your Sister Is Just Plain Better Than You”
This movie gets it! Women’s magazines are sexist trash piles that primarily function to make women feel inferior. Ally is going to learn not to let a magazine define how many sexual partners she “should” have. Ally is going to learn to tell the slut shamers of the world to shove it and then she’ll go bone the hot guy across the hall.
Shirtless Chris Evans in What’s Your Number?
Well, spoiler alert: only the second part happens, and only after lots of get-together plot and mutual declarations of L-O-V-E, which she never would have found with this Chris Evans-shaped charmer who makes her laugh and gets her weird art and is shaped like Chris Evans had she just jumped his bones the first time she saw him mostly naked (which he is, in like, more than half of his scenes, adding another dimension of guilty pleasure. to this movie, because sexually objectifying people is wrong, but…):
I mean seriously. This happens in more than one scene.
Chris Evans-shaped Colin only has one night stands, you see, because he becomes paralyzed with fear of hurting women if he knows any humanizing details about them, such as “she once was a child.” So he loves ’em and leaves ’em to find their own way out of his apartment while he hides out in Ally’s. But there’s no article in GQ criticizing Colin’s sexual behavior, and neither he nor Ally really question it, even though her number teetering at less than one tenth of his has sent her life spiraling. This is one of many missed opportunities for What’s Your Number? to critically engage with its central premise.
Colin teaches Ally you can Google people.
The bulk of the plot is a High Fidelity-style tour of exes, as Ally figures out the loophole where she can get back with someone she’s already banged without adding to her number. [Colin helps her track down these guys with “cop family” secrets he has like being on Facebook.] So we get lots of amusing cameos and windows into different ways Ally has changed herself to get a man’s approval, from dressing like a senator’s wife to pretending to be British. And yes, yes, “You’ll be happiest with someone you can be yourself with” is a fine message, but movie, YOU ALREADY HAVE A MESSAGE, that no one should let a magazine tell them how many people they should have sex with. Right? RIGHT?
The caption of this gif is not “I’ll have sex with as many people as I want!”
Sigh, no. The “to hell with Marie Claire!” moment I was waiting for never came (I should have known that Marie Claire wouldn’t have agreed to product placement if that was coming). And worse, in the last scene of the movie, Ally gets a voice mail from one of the guys on the list clarifying their sexual history (they only did it “dry style”), and she can triumphantly declare that Colin “is my 20!” and their love is not doomed. Barf.
But, Hera help me, I still really liked this movie. Anna Faris is just so charming! Chris Evans wears nothing but a tea towel in multiple scenes! They have chemistry! Amusing cameos! Including Anthony Mackie miming handling four penises! No “my younger sister is getting married” panic! Said younger sister is Ari Graynor! Raunchy comedy geared toward the women in the audience and not just to appease their male dates! Sex positivity (yes, seriously, in the movie borne from slut shaming)!
“I’m like, super gay.”
Seriously, this would be a glowing review of an underappreciated gem if you could just cut out the bullshit last scene (although work the words “dry style” into some other part of the script, because that’s hilarious) and throw in some real talk about how ridiculous our obsession with “Numbers” is. We could have had it all, movie. Instead, What’s Your Number? only bumps up my number. My number of Antifeminist Guilty Pleasures. Which is way, way higher than 20.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. Her number is somewhere between negative three and seventeen thousand.
The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19th century. In a reaction to the thought to be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented
Penny Dreadful is a dark gothic horror television show; its main appeal is its excellent cast, which includes Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, and Josh Hartnett, and the fact that it features popular horror characters that are now in the public domain, including both doctor and creature Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Mina Harker, and Van Helsing. The London it portrays is dark and brooding and slides with ease between the unfettered opulence of the rich to degradation of the poor. The show manages to capture the atmospheric blend of strife and ambition that seems to characterize the period of industrialization.
The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19th century. In a reaction to the thought-to-be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented. The latter led to the invention of the vibrator as women were treated for the condition by being stimulated to orgasm by doctors. Ironically, masturbation in men (women were not really thought to be capable) was heavily pathologised and blamed for a vast array of ills. However the obsession with strict sexual morality and the regulation of sexual impulses meant society was obsessed with talking about and policing it, hence the prevalence of sexuality as a theme in both medicine and art during the period. Parallel to the puritanical public standards existed a large private world of sex work and pornography.
The character of Brona Croft, played by Billie Piper, a northern Irish sex worker plagued with consumption, represents the particular paradox of the sex worker in the 19th century. Her life is difficult, she is poor, and there is the ever-present threat of violence which is made apparent on the show by the reports of sex workers being torn apart by what might be the re-emergence of Jack the Ripper. However, Brona also on a certain level exists outside of the highly patriarchal social structures of the day. She makes her own money, she decides how to spend it and chooses her own relationships, freedoms most other women do not have. Brona is a fully realized character in a way that sex workers normally are not on television. We learn that she came to the trade because she was replaced by a machine in her factory job, but she prefers it anyway because the money is better and she doesn’t have to spend her days cooped up inside never seeing the sun. She speaks eloquently about the grim poverty of her childhood and her escape from an abusive relationship. Her sex work is not viewed as a barrier to her having meaningful romantic relationships. Her profession is an aspect of her but it is not who she is. I can’t believe just how refreshing it is to have a sex worker on television that is fully human in her own right and not just a plot device to be thrown away at the writers whims. Brona certainly does not fit into the “happy hooker” trope. There are many issues that she has to contend with that the show addresses; some are due to her work and some are not. What matters though is that Brona’s life is not tragic simply because she is a sex worker, nor is it perfect because she is. For example, she is dying of consumption, but this is portrayed to be more a symptom of her poverty rather than a punishment for her work.
Vanessa Ives (played by Eva Green), on the other hand, is a Victorian lady of leisure. She lives with Sir Malcolm Murray, a famed explorer of the African continent, and their relationship is not explained until mid-season but seems vaguely paternal. What we do know is that Vanessa is in the possession of some super natural abilities and is helping Sir Malcolm to locate his daughter who is currently under the power of a vampire. Vanessa’s sexuality is constantly and consistently pathologised. She ruminates on whether viewing a sexual act for the first time awoken a wickedness inside of her. Her very first sexual experience ended up breaking up two families who had been very close and triggering her first episode, of what is referred to by two different doctors over the course of the season, a “psycho-sexual” illness. The treatments that she is subjected for this illness amount very literally to torture and Vanessa’s mother ends up dying of shock when witnessing a display of her daughter’s sexuality. For Vanessa, her sexuality is not the source of her freedom from restrictive patriarchal norms of the day; it is a curse that she must control with utmost care otherwise the consequences could be devastating. Vanessa’s sexuality is dangerous–not just to her but to the people around her.
Having the two characters on the same show makes for a really interesting dynamic. It seems to capture the sheer obsession Victorian society had with the policing of sexuality and channelling it into the proper avenues while at the same time there existed many women who manage to carve out lives outside the structures of society despite the extreme social disapproval. Overall, the show manages to capture the two sides of the society quite nicely and explores both characters in a way that does justice to their humanity.
Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working class (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the U.S. but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat, rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one village’s striking Welsh miners and their families.
The “feel good” British comedy that also has working-class characters overcoming their homophobia was, for a time, a popular enough genre that it could’ve had its own section in video stores, which were also plentiful then. I’m thinking of films like Kinky Boots, which is now a Broadway musical and starred a pre-12 Years a Slave Chiwetel Ejiofor as the drag queen designer who saves the factory of the working class town, andThe Full Monty, whose lineup of mostly working-class, bored, unemployed guys-turned-strippers by the end included a couple in love. Although I enjoyed The Full Monty (which had an acute enough take on class that it played like a comedic version of Das Kapital–with flashes of skin) by the time Kinky Boots came out, in 2005, I’d had enough of twinkle-eyed, straight characters smiling at their new-found “tolerance.” So I was hesitant to see Pride(which opens Sept. 26) with a plot synopsis (queer people help striking miners in Thatcherite Britain, loosely based on a true story), title, and even a movie poster that easily could have come from the ’90s.
Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working-class, (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the US but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat and rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one Welsh village’s striking miners and their families.
The beginnings of LGSM
I lived in London six months before the events in the film start and Pride gets the period exactly right: the music of The Smiths plays at a queer party and Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” and Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” play at the queer clubs. Post-punk fashions are popular among the queers (as they were among many young Londoners then) but we see the era’s big earrings, shiny shirts, stonewashed jeans, permed hair, and Bo Derek braids (!) on queer characters too. The miners’ strike was big news: when I was back in the US more than one British import record, popular on college radio, included snippets of speeches from striking miners. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, people from most walks of British life had a fierce, abiding hatred of Margaret Thatcher.
Because the film doesn’t have only one or two queers to focus on, its characters, like Dear White People‘s Black characters, show a range of different personalities and life experiences that we’re not used to seeing in mainstream films. Mark is a funny, committed activist with the gift of gab who looks great in a black leather motorcycle jacket. He asks a crowd, when remarking on how the police have started beating up striking miners instead of harassing patrons of queer clubs, “Do you think they got sick of all that Donna Summer?” Reticent, neatly dressed, 20-year-old Joe is a college student who lives with his parents, so even though he spends much of his time doing work with an openly queer group he is not out to any of his family. We even meet a few queer women: Steph (Faye Marsay) in a mohawk and heavy eyeliner becomes Joe’s best friend and two women who are a couple join the group after they hear a rousing speech in a queer London club from village miner Dai (Paddy Considine in an unflattering period haircut).
We first meet Jonathan (Dominic West who played Jimmy on The Wire) trashed and in full drag, who, after a full day and night celebrating Pride, doesn’t quite succeed, despite persistent, enthusiastic attempts, in blowing the whistle around his neck. In spite of Jonathan being the kind of camp character whom other films (especially those made by straight people) rarely use for anything more than a few good quips and some attitude, he does turn out to have a political conscience. And some of the loveliest moments in the film are glimpses of his tender relationship with his partner: quiet, serious Gethin (out gay actor Andrew Scott whom some may recognize played Moriarty on Sherlock), the owner of the gay bookstore where the group meets. West, playing against type, makes us believe in Jonathan as a whole person, not just a caricature, though in one showy scene he can’t quite stop himself from dancing more like a straight man than a queenie, gay guy.
The film also shows nuanced portraits of the women villagers: Sian (Jessica Gunning) looks like a miner’s wife: short and busty, her pretty face framed by a mullet (in those days not just a hairstyle for older lesbians). But she doesn’t act like the little woman. She, along with Dai are the first villagers to argue that the queer group should be invited to the local hall just as the other groups who have supported the miners have been. “Your gays have arrived,” one of the older women from the village tells the two of them when the group comes to town in a van.
The women from the village
During their visit Jonathan coaches Sian on the legal ins and outs of being stopped and arrested for no reason (until relatively recently, police regularly harassed and arrested white queer people as they now do with Black people and trans women of color). Sian then goes to the jail and gets the police to release the illegally detained miners. We also see Imelda Staunton as Hefina show off her considerable comic abilities, quite a change from her work in movies like Vera Drake. The cast is uniformly excellent: Bill Nighy is also on hand, barely recognizable here as a slick-haired, slouched, shy villager.
Films about activism, especially queer activism, usually skip the part about it being great fun as well as a good way to get laid. We see the joy the group gets out of their work and Joe hooks up with the cute guy who asks him at “Pits and Perverts” (which would have been a better title for the movie) a benefit concert organized by LGSM, “Are you going to take my picture too?”
In many ways Pride is a very conventional film. Its script has the regulation triumph-setback-triumph structure that keeps many mainstream films from having the twists and complications that make documentaries like Stories We Tell and One Cut, One Lifegreat. But the mix of real-life characters and events keeps Pride from becoming saccharine. The miners were striking to return to hard work that meant an early death for many of them (as well as repercussions for the environment), but they knew that work and the union were all they had. When they lost the strike the mining communities became impoverished and, with the eventual closure of the mines, remain so to this day.
Unlike a lot of films and TV shows that take place in the past, Pride‘s portrait of the ’80s isn’t clouded by nostalgia. The filmshows that being shunned or kicked out of one’s family for being queer was the norm back then (though in best case scenarios the rift was temporary). A record company receptionist tells the group (when they are looking for bands for the benefit) that they don’t have any queer artists on their label–as we see posters of Elton John (who many forget was briefly married to a woman in the ’80s) and Soft Cell in the hall. And although the screenwriter is a politically aware gay man, he still gets feminism wrong. The script seems to disparage the women who form a separate group the same way the core characters do. But in the 90s I belonged to a queer activist group and gay men talked right over the women, even as we packed up and left to strike out on our own.
In a postscript we find out one of the real-life characters in LGSM died of AIDS two years after the last events of the film–as much of the queer community did in the 80s and 90s. But another real-life character goes back to school and eventually becomes a member of Parliament, continuing to serve there today. Although many will insist on calling the film “feel good” the same way they mischaracterized another film based on a true story, The King’s Speech, the real-life events of both films defy the glibness of any marketing label and in the end prove deeper, more complex and more poignant.
However, Vivian Maier–besides being an obvious genius–remains a mystery. ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ follows the narrative mystery as we pursue the reclusive and eccentric Vivian (or her personas of Ms. Meier, Mayer, Meyer, Meyers, Maier) across the US and through the streets of the 1950s and 1960s, attempting to discover more of a woman who is still unknowable.
In April of 2009, one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century died in a Chicago nursing home. Her passing was quiet and seemingly without notice, and the photographs that she left behind were dusty unknowns, auctioned off at a storage locker in Chicago. The buyer, John Maloof, began posting the photos on the Internet, hopeful that someone would recognize their quality. When the photographs went viral, Maloof began searching for the photographer, just a handwritten name on a few receipts stuck into the boxes, and stumbled upon a woman as fascinating as the art she produced.
Directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier is an award-winning documentary exploring the art and artist discovered on an auction house floor, and whose prolific work has been subsequently shown all over the world. During her life, Vivian Maier produced over 150,000 photographs, as well as films and audio recordings, and did so while keeping her talents and work completely hidden from the world—choosing instead to work as a nanny in New York City and Chicago.
However, Vivian Maier–besides being an obvious genius–remains a mystery. Finding Vivian Maier follows the narrative mystery as we pursue the reclusive and eccentric Vivian (or her personas of Ms. Meier, Mayer, Meyer, Meyers, Maier) across the US and through the streets of the 1950s and 1960s, attempting to discover more of a woman who is still unknowable.
A portrait of the artist–Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier hid herself well during her life, and there has been some speculation: is it right to expose her now in death? Would Maier be pleased at the recognition of her talents? Her friends say no, but Maloof disagrees (for obvious financial reasons), arguing that since Maier corresponded with an art printer in France that she was obviously interested in displaying her work at some point.
Finding Vivian Maier embodies an art historian’s meta-dream of art exposing art and reveals the way that art can be lived in a person—empathetic, obviously political, socially conscious, occasionally gritty artwork, reflective of the woman behind the lens.
For photographers there is often the thought that we must be standing in front of the exotic to have something worth photographing; however, Maier exposes women, children, minorities, laborers, and other “background” faces in “normal” cities with a compelling charisma. As one historian states in Finding Vivian Maier, the fact that Maier was able to push so deeply into the personal space of her subjects and then photograph them with such an honest vulnerability, is remarkable. As an artist, her work is not a moment out of time, but instead occupies a contradictory grounded timelessness where we, the viewer, are included in a sympathetic, deeply personal interaction.
One of Maier’s beautiful, inclusive moments from the streets of Chicago
Despite the occasional self-congratulatory tone of the Maier discovery, the documentary is exceptional. Finding Vivian Maier is paced like a mystery film and viewers are drawn in to explore the fractured pieces of Maier’s secretive life along with Maloof. However, in a delicious, almost teasing way, after Finding Vivian Maier is finished, we’re still left with much to wonder about the enigmatic artist and spirited woman that was Vivian Maier.
Additionally, within the past few months a legal battle has surfaced over the right to print, publish, curate and sell Maier’s work by a Chicago lawyer (aptly) named Mr. Deal. Until the case is decided it seems that the unknowns surrounding Maier’s curious life and work will grow even more.
Finding Vivian Maier was released on DVD July 29 and can be viewed in theaters around the country. Collections of Maier’s photographs can be viewed at exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and a host of other cities around the world. To view Vivian Maier’s work online, click here.
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Rachel is a traveler and teacher who spent the last few years living in Asia. Now back in her native California, she focuses on writing about media, culture, and feminism. While a big fan of campy 80s movies and eccentric sci-fi, she’s become a cable acolyte, spending most of her time watching HBO, AMC, and Showtime. For good stories about lions and bungee jumping, as well as rants about sexism and slow drivers, follow her on Twitter at @RachelRedfern2.
For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of ‘Matilda,’ which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison.
Like many a precocious young bookworm, I counted Roald Dahl’s Matilda among my very favorite books from an early age. Matilda was relatable – her classmates classified her as The Smart One; she adored her teacher; she had found her earliest and best friends among books – but she was also aspirational for me: she was kind and well-liked, she was brave enough to stand up to injustice, and the only time she ever loses her temper in an uncontrollable screaming tantrum it’s in an entirely justifiable, even heroic, confrontation with her evil headmistress. In a way, she was my first role model.
For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of Matilda, which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison, with a particular eye to the treatment of class. It had been many years since I last saw the movie, and all I really remembered was hating the changed ending, but I conjectured that a transplantation of a very British story to an American context would illuminate some of the differences in UK and US attitudes toward class.
In the book and musical, Matilda’s parents are, regardless of their precise economic status, clearly lower-class, in the “trashiest” way possible. In Britain, the relationship between social class and economic class is complicated: having money doesn’t necessarily make you middle-class (and not everyone wants to be middle-class, as they seem to in the US – working-class pride is strong, while being middle-class is associated with a certain bourgeois pretentiousness). Dahl codes the Wormwoods as insufficiently respectable from a bourgeois perspective: they use “excessive” beauty treatments and wear garish clothes; they play bingo and eat dinner in front of the TV; they have only contempt for literature and education; they are loud, dishonest, and – worst of all! – proud of their loudness and dishonesty.
Most of these markers of the lower classes make the transatlantic leap, but the film takes care to add some new ones for the US audience: junk food, being overweight, kitschy artifacts. The movie Wormwoods live in a nice house full of nice things, but they commit the unforgivable sin of having bad taste. These class markers are important as signifiers that their American dream is a sham, even on the terms of the American dream itself.
By contrast, Miss Honey is the deserving poor, whose economic misfortune does not reflect her character: she values education, doesn’t own a TV set, doesn’t indulge in beauty products, in fact lives ascetically, like the good poor people who don’t waste their money on smartphones and refrigerators… The musical makes the contrast explicit between Mrs. Wormwood’s anthem “Loud” and Miss Honey’s gentle song “My House.” Miss Honey has a roof, a door, a chair, a table, pictures on the wall, lamplight to read by: “It isn’t much, but it is enough for me.” Matilda’s mother, however, recommends “A little less brains, a lot more hair! / A little less head, a lot more derriere!”
“You’ve gotta be loud, loud, LOUD!
You’ve gotta give yourself permission to shine,
To stand out from the crowd, crowd, crowd!”
Like the children at the beginning of the book and musical, Mrs. Wormwood has self-esteem and isn’t ashamed of it. It’s perhaps not surprising that the theme of “people who have self-esteem but shouldn’t” is cut out of the movie. Back in the 90s, long after the era of normalized institutional child abuse in which Dahl grew up but before all of this tedious media handwringing about millennials being thin-skinned and entitled, we tended to think that self-esteem was a good thing. Well, Americans did – it’s always been considered rather déclassé in Britain. So self-confident Mrs. Wormwood is a villain, while modest Matilda and diffident Miss Honey are the heroes.
The movie excises this “self-esteem is bad” message, and instead amplifies the book’s rather weird messages about women. The villainous women are those who do womanhood “wrong.” Miss Trunchbull is too masculine (even played, in the musical, by a man in drag): she’s athletic, strong, violent, not conventionally attractive; she dislikes children, and objects to the “Mrs. D Mrs. I Mrs. FFI” poem by asking, “Why are all these women married?” – indeed, her own female honorific is usually removed so that she becomes “the” Trunchbull, a monstrous hybrid figure of female masculinity. Mrs. Wormwood, meanwhile, errs on the side of too much femininity: she dyes her hair and uses tons of beauty products, overindulging in the artifice and frivolity that comprise femininity in the misogynistic imagination.
(There’s an undercurrent of transmisogyny here, too: the women who are rejected are either too masculine or too artificially feminine, two modes of attack often used to delegitimize trans women’s womanhood.)
Miss Honey, the “good” adult female character, displays neither masculinity nor “artificial” femininity. She is meek, nurturing, softspoken, gentle, conventionally feminine – and, in the film, is deeply emotionally invested in a doll from her childhood. A good woman, it seems, is infantilized in her femininity.
You’re pretty, so you’re doing womanhood right!!
For all its mixed messages about class and about femininity, this is ultimately a story most powerfully about two abuse survivors creating a family and finding healing together. As Miss Honey tells Matilda in the film, “You were born into a family that doesn’t always appreciate you, but one day things are going to be very different.” As the tempered nature of this line suggests (doesn’t always appreciate her? Try doesn’t ever), the abuse theme is here rather downplayed. Mara Wilson brings exactly the sort of presence we wanted from a child protagonist in the mid-90s – precociously delightful without being alienating or smug – but her Matilda is a smart kid, and not much more. Book-Matilda and musical-Matilda have a streak of otherworldliness to them, a dissociative tendency perhaps not uncommon among abuse survivors; whereas when movie-Matilda is getting yelled at by her father, she just kind of gives him the stinkeye and then skips away to scheme without seeming to internalize his abuse. Obviously the theme of child abuse is going to get downplayed in a PG family film directed by Danny DeVito, but it’s explored with such nuance and sensitivity in the book, and especially in the play, that it’s rather a shame the movie chose to steer for a tone of purely magical whimsy, rather than magical whimsy with some depth.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of Matilda’s telekinesis. In the book, Matilda’s power is something mystical, perhaps dangerous (in one practice session, she zones out entirely and tells Miss Honey, “I was soaring past the stars on silver wings”); in the film, it’s pure whimsy. This, I think, is why it’s narratively necessary and satisfying for the book to end with Matilda losing her power – the book acknowledges that telekinesis is an astounding, paradigm-shifting power, whereas in the film it is but a wizard wheeze.
I don’t think the film of Matilda is terrible, but I don’t find it particularly good either. It’s resolutely child-friendly, softening the sharpest and nastiest edges that helped make Roald Dahl’s books so compelling and enduring, even as they reproduce some of the most problematic tropes of their society.
Go see the musical if you possibly can; it’s wonderful.
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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Believe it or not, he actually cut a bunch of material from earlier drafts of this piece.
I know the nineties are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss ‘Freddie Got Fingered,’ I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, “Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie?” I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in ‘Freddy.’
I know the 90s are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss Freddy Got Fingered, I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie? I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in Freddy.
In the trailer for Freddy, Green tells us, “If you like acting, then you’ll like Freddy Got Fingered.” The film itself works as a commentary on the movie-making process and essentially laughs in its face. Green’s declaration is meant as a sneer at the generic nature of not only popular film, but the reasons behind that popularity: that many viewers hold low expectations when evaluating movie quality. The mantra throughout Freddy seems to be “I’m a 28-year-old man”: Green’s character asserting his maturity to his parents, who are well aware that their baby is still very much a baby at 28 years old. While his mother would prefer her baby boy to stay at home, Gordy’s father (played by the incomparable Rip Torn) wants to see his son succeed and make something of himself.
When Roger Ebert reviewed this film, he had this to say: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. The movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Then why mention it? It’s clear that Green doesn’t want to be taken seriously. He spends his time satirizing movie tropes and evading the cinematic qualities that define film as a meaning-making process. To discuss Freddy alongside Hollywood blockbusters is apples and oranges.
Even the film’s cover–Green mimicking the gesture filmmakers use when describing their creation or cinematic vision–pokes fun at itself.
When we meet Gordy, his placement as an overgrown child is solidified when we watch him laying in bed, describing the absurd backstories that accompany the comics he’s drawn, which are actually quite good and show a great deal of artistic talent. Gordy’s job at the cheese sandwich factory is a satirical commentary on the struggling artist who works the meaningless, manual labor job while attempting to aspire to something greater in this life. Gordy’s departure from this job also serves to confirm his authentic identity as an animator.
The comical depiction of extended adolescence, especially in men, is seen often in film (see Step Brothers, Slackers, and Young Adult), yet it rarely seems tackled as a topic for discussion. Green’s lunatic brand of surrealist humor (see Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and The Mighty Boosh) and viewers’ not so warm reception of his film are a reflection of people’s desire for logic and the comfort we find in the assurance that gravity still exists each day when we wake. In an interview on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Green even explains that he was trying to make the “stupidest movie ever.”
Green pokes fun at the “feel good” moments we come to expect in films, the moments that inspire us and evoke tears. We see such a moment when Gordy spontaneously delivers a baby and has a revelatory moment about his life (see Mixed Nuts and Saved!), and again when Betty (Gordy’s love interest) invents a rocket-powered wheelchair.
Signature of Green’s absurd humor, he shows up at a swanky L.A. restaurant to track down bigwig Dave Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall) to see if he can score his own television series based on his drawings, all dressed as an English bobby.
The head of Radioactive Animation Studio patiently explains to Gordy, “Your drawings are pretty good, but it doesn’t make any sense, OK? It’s fucking stupid,” which incidentally describes Green’s humor as well as the general theme of Freddy. We have these moments of raucous laughter, but we can’t explain the bizarre satisfaction we gain from watching Green’s stunts, which includes a fair amount of physical comedy in the same vein as Jackass, such as crashing into people and doors as he awkwardly moves around in the film, very much resembling a clumsy, pubescent boy. When Davidson tells him that his characters are lame, Gordy pulls out a gun and puts it in his mouth: more satire relating to the extreme measures artists take when their art goes unrecognized or they fail at becoming rich and successful (see Airheads).
“I’m a loser! I wish I was dead!!!”
Freddy is a hyperbolic look at the consequences of extended adolescence, and several scenes exemplify this theme, particularly those involving Gordy and his dad. When Gordy is forced to move back home, he insists he’s going to eat a fast food chicken sandwich at the dinner table after his mother has made a lovely roast beef dinner. He argues with his father, citing his age as the reason that he can do as he pleases–a sure sign of adolescence–and his father sarcastically tells him how “impressive” it is that he can eat the food he chooses independently. This scene of family dysfunction is so telling and significant; the child-parent relationship is just that: between parents and a temperamental child who desperately wants to convince his parents that he’s not worthless. Gordy’s insistence to his father that he’s an adult and can make his own decisions–at the very least, what he chooses to eat for his dinner–serves as proof that he’s in fact not an adult at all.
Amongst his antics, Gordy dons scuba gear in the shower, where he pretends he’s diving for buried treasure, and he dresses as “the Backwards Man,” a tragic inversion of the savvy businessman his father dreams he could become.
When Gordy decides to quit the “sandwich business” once and for all to fulfill his dreams of becoming an animator, his father even tries grounding him and sending him to his room. Ironically, Gordy’s fed up dad propels his son into success by showing up at his pitch and trashing the office of Davidson, who’s under the impression that it’s all a creative act. Although Gordy spends most of his million dollar check to drug his father and bring him to Pakistan, he finally proves himself by selling his “doodles” and taking on a job.
Aren’t we thankful there’s a movie out there where we can see Rip Torn spanking Tom Green like a naughty child?
The title, admittedly, has very little to do with the plot of Freddy, if we can get away with claiming that the film does indeed have a plot. Gordy accuses his father of molesting his brother, Freddy, which is, of course, untrue. In accordance with this theme of extended adolescence, the 25-year-old Freddy–ambitious and cocky, and hence Gordy’s polar opposite–is taken into custody by Child Protective Services, and we see him in an orphanage watching television with young children. Gordy also makes sure to downplay his little brother’s success by telling him over breakfast, “You work at a bank. Am I supposed to be dazzled? You live in a tiny little shit hole, and you can’t afford breakfast, so you come here and eat for free.” Gordy has a point and manages to cast doubt on Freddy’s pride and sense of accomplishment. Despite Gordy’s talent as a troublemaker and Freddy’s work ethic, Gordy somehow remains the favored of the two sons.
Gordy tries to impress Betty by pretending that he works as a stockbroker.
The role of Gordy’s love interest, Betty, is interesting. Betty is in a wheelchair and is called a “retard slut whore” by Gordy’s dad, representing a demographic that mistakes physical disability with mental impairment. Gordy purchases a ridiculous bag of jewels that he presents to Betty after stepping off a helicopter on top of a building, and she rejects them, claiming, “I don’t care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock.” We’re confronted with an image of female sexuality that many viewers find problematic; disabled female characters tend to be desexualized in film and TV, and we’re also faced with the challenge of negotiating Betty’s voracious sexual appetite with our own misgivings about kink, foreplay, and sadomasochism.
While attempting to give Gordy a blow job, Betty finds his umbilical cord taped to his stomach, a clear reference to his permanent infantilization, which he seems to simultaneously embrace and loathe.
So why watch Freddy? How does the “stupidest movie ever” redeem itself for viewers unwilling to understand surrealist humor? The meta moments we find in the film culminate in the grand conclusion that “the Hollywood movie” can be interpreted as a pretentious joke, and Green is not taking his own film seriously enough to even stumble upon any form of success. Green’s treatment of this concept undermines critics’ ability to evaluate his film.
If you’re still skeptical, watch Freddy if only for Julie Hagerty’s performance. Hagerty, who’s always fabulous as “the mom” (see Just Friends, She’s the Man, and Storytelling) plays Gordy’s nervous, overprotective mother, even though Gordy is practically 30 years old.
At the advice of Gordy, Julie Brody leaves her husband and begins sleeping with Shaq.
Green explains that the point of the movie was to be polarizing and that he found further humor in the highly divisive viewer responses. Green makes us question our own sense of rationality and how we’ve constructed reality thus far in our lives. Freddy is funny for its unpredictable and nonsensical nature, not its inability to paint a picture of logic and reason. If viewers feel violated after watching a subversive film that simply cannot be explained away or dismissed, there are plenty of movies that contain tired tropes and stereotypes (see The Women–Bechdel Test, anyone?–and every Tyler Perry movie ever).
In the film’s trailer, Green even tells us, “I don’t really know how to make a movie.” When Gordy shows Davidson his drawings, he schools Gordy on narrative structure: “There actually has to be something that happens that’s actually funny. What the fuck is happening here?” We may ask that very same question about Freddy. What’s going on here? Using surrealist humor to question social contracts and deride an audience that is too entrenched in the trite, the cliche, and the creatively irresponsible, that’s what.
Moments before the film ends, a self-deprecating meta reference.
Any “hard-hitting” criticism of Freddy or movies like it is like judging the lasagna some nut brought to the National Pie Championships. Ebert was right: Freddy doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel, because Tom Green is too busy wearing the barrel on his head and making everyone uncomfortable to notice. Green’s movie inherently resists critique, which in fact makes this review, in a certain philosophical sense, nonexistent.
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Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.
Most surprising of all was the content. ‘Bojack Horseman’ is a late night style comedy that doesn’t shut anyone out. Though the series abounds with the typical crude humor, it’s threaded through with a surprising amount of feminism, nothing I’d expect at first glance.
There’s no shortage of fascinating female characters, both major and minor.
Bojack Horseman, my latest comedy binge-watch, was a real surprise. I’d heard nothing about it before it showed up on Netflix, but I gave it a try. I’m glad it I did, it was super fun time that left me wanting more. Thankfully, Netflix has already renewed it for a second season.
Theme song image from Bojack Horseman
Everyone’s favorite magician, Will Arnett, stars as Bojack, a formerly famous 90s sitcom star, conceited womanizer, and literal man-horse struggling through a strange version of Hollywood that keeps our pop cultural touchstone and ads anthropomorphic animals. Cats chase dangling strings on the treadmill, birds at the window are paparazzi, and two dogs converse like stereotypical annoying TV women about how much they love chocolate even though it could kill them.
Arnett is joined by a great cast, a veritable who’s who of beloved comedic actors, among them Alison Brie, Kristen Schaal, Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt, and Amy Sedaris. Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul takes a comedic term and gives an unexpected, often scene-stealing performance as Bojack’s slacker roommate who’s obsessed with composing a rock opera.
Most surprising of all was the content. Bojack Horseman is a late night style comedy that doesn’t shut anyone out. Though the series abounds with the typical crude humor, it’s threaded through with a surprising amount of feminism, nothing I’d expect at first glance.
Bojack’s agent and girlfriend Princess Carolyn often has complicated schemes
There’s no shortage of fascinating female characters, both major and minor. First off, Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris, who should really be in more things) is, in addition to being a giant pink Persian cat, Bojack’s agent and on-again/off-again girlfriend. She’s is driven and goal-obsessed, and in her dynamic with Bojack maintains the unique skill of compartmentalizing, speaking to him either as agent or lover. With her Machiavellian schemes and air-tight manipulations, she might even be the closest thing the series has to a villain, besides Bojack’s colossal ego. Sadly, her role begins to peter out towards the end of the season, though her remaining plot line, about unknowingly dating Vincent Adultman, three kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, is worthy off-the-wall material.
Diane gives Naomi Watts tips on how to play a complex character
As a show set in a Hollywood, Bojack Horseman also makes several stirring points satirizing celebrity culture. Naomi Watts shows up for a episode to play a role in a movie based on Bojack’s life, ironically because she is tired of getting complicated, three-dimensional roles. When the role becomes much meatier, she gets frustrated and loses interest in the movie. Much seen but little remembered character actress Margo Martindale appears multiple times as a sort of actress for hire. Fed up with the limited roles normally offered to her as an older woman, she accepts roles offered to her by Bojack, which include posing as a bank robber and pulling off a real bank heist. Ultimately she turns to a life of crime and relishes her time in jail because she considers it the role of a lifetime.
Most fascinating are Sarah Lynn (Kristen Schaal) and Diane Nygen (Alison Brie), the most important women in Bojack’s life. Sarah Lynn was his TV daughter on the sitcom Horsin’ Around and today is a washed-up former pop princess, crucified by the media who have no use for her now that she’s turned 30. In flashbacks to her teenage years, we see her as a self-obsessed young woman attempting to rebel against the cutesy little girl image with songs that twist her TV nickname, prickly pear into a vaginal euphemism. All her music is about sex and she announces on a talk show that she plans to be sexy forever. But when she hits 30, she’s replaced by new it-girl Sextina Aquafina. Sextina says she grew up with Sarah Lynn’s music, but she is now irrelevant and has no reason to be famous anymore.
Bojack tries to fix his TV daughter, Sarah Lynn
Today, Sarah Lynn is like many of our former child stars. She’s dramatic and out of control, and spends her time popping pills, partying, and trying to kill herself when her boyfriend breaks up with her. Her relationship with Bojack is incredibly complicated, though she’s always looked at him as a father figure and he sees her as a surrogate daughter, they end up sleeping together when Bojack decides to try to “fix her.” Sarah Lynn rightfully calls him out on this, yelling at him for claiming to know how she feels and trying to be her savior. She tells him she has been exploited her whole life, first by her mother, a stage-mom, then by the scores of men who write her every day to tell her she is the first person they ever masturbated to. Bojack, she feels, has no right to try to be her father or her lover.
Young Sarah Lynn looked to Bojack as a father figure
Diane is a writer who meets Bojack when he hires her to ghostwrite his memoirs. Though she is meant to be desirable and is described as attractive, Diane is drawn with an average woman’s body and wears a boxy jacket and thick glasses. In fact, she looks a lot like Daria, a show she’d probably love. The main character and others, fall in love with her and most of the first season is a love triangle revolving around her. Although love triangles are a bit of a tired plot device, it was refreshing to see one involving such a realistic idea of a woman. Diane is no two dimensional dream girl. She’s a writer with a thriving career and intense interests and opinions. She’s sarcastic and well-informed, but she can also be self-centered and brutally ambitious, such as in plot line towards the end of the season where she attempts to publish an unflattering portrayal of Bojack without his permission. It’s crucial that Diane is never made to look like an evil seductress who manipulates Bojack. She’s just a person and even though she is eventually vindicated, it’s acknowledged that it was a terrible thing to do.
Bojack falls for his ghostwriter, a third wave feminist named Diane
Diane identifies as a third wave feminist, but is unsure what that means for her. In one scene, she enters into a long monologue about pop singer Sarah Lynn who she claims not to think much about. She’s conflicted, on one hand she appreciates how Sarah Lynn has reclaimed her sexuality but on the other, she questions whether it is truly possible to do so in a patriarchal society.
Diane is also an interesting conversation point for discussions of race in animation. The character is Vietnamese, yet she is voiced by a white actress. Though I loved Alison Brie in the role, this casting made me question whether there is a distinction between racebent casting in live action and animated programs. Unlike stereotypical animated characters, like Apu on The Simpsons, Diane does not have either a subtle or exaggerated Vietnamese accent, so there’d be no specific distinction between her and a Vietnamese actress in the role. But does it matter whether white actors lend their voices to animated POCs?
We must not forget that any media project, especially these days, has a meta-textual component, such as interviews, photo shoots, recommendations, and career opportunities for its stars and creators. Though Brie is excellent, this could have been a great opportunity for a Vietnamese actress to make a name for herself. I’m not sure what to think on the issue or whether it is indeed an issue, it just occurred to me as an interesting idea to consider. Kudos to the team behind Bojack for creating an Asian-American woman character to play such an integral part of the story regardless.
Diane is often frustrated with her happy-go-lucky boyfriend Mr. Peanut Butter
Though on multiple occasions the show mentions an in-world personality test, “Zoe or Zelda,” that reduces each person to one of two types, the women on the show are not so easily reduced to virgins or whores. Sensible Diane has a vibrant sex life with her dog-boyfriend Mr. Peanut Butter, while sex-pot Sarah Lynn has given a great deal of thought to her image and desires to control it. It’s great touches like these, and its intricate animal-person analogies that make Bojack Horseman worthy of a watch. Other than its covert feminism, the most unique thing about the program is its sequential story. Unlike most adult animated comedies, that tell one-off self-contained stories, the first season unfolds as a complete a well-paced story arc.
Of course, if you’re not into late night comedies, Bojack may not be the show for you. But I recommend giving it a chance. It starts slow, but only gets better.
Directed by Jerry Rothwell, ‘Town of Runners’ is a 2012 documentary about promising young athletes from the highland town of Bekoji in Ethiopia. It’s a very special place, Bekoji. A remarkably high number of world-class runners have been trained there, including the great 10,000 and 5,000 meter Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, and 10,000 meter sporting pioneer, Derartu Tulu, the first African woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
Directed by Jerry Rothwell, Town of Runners is a 2012 documentary about promising young athletes from the highland town of Bekoji in Ethiopia. It’s a very special place, Bekoji. A remarkably high number of world-class runners have been trained there, including the great 10,000 and 5,000 meter Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, and 10,000 meter sporting pioneer, Derartu Tulu, the first African woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
Hawii
Distance runners are greatly celebrated in Ethiopia. Running is bound up with national identity and pride. A scene at the beginning of Town of Runners, showing a group of young people watching the Olympics on television, movingly illustrates the romantic hold the sport has in the country.
Alemi
Town of Runners follows the careers of two talented teenaged girls from Bekoji who are seeking to emulate their famous compatriots, best friends Hawii Megersa and Alemi Tsegaye. Their story is charmingly narrated by an ambitious young boy called Biruk Fikadu. The girls are both competitive and good-natured. Their equally engaging coach, Sentayehu Eshetu, is a hugely supportive, down-to-earth man with an extraordinarily successful record in training Olympic gold winners. Encouraged by Eshetu, the girls are offered places on training programs in another part of the country. Their farming families do not prevent them from pursuing their dreams. Running offers a life of independence as well as an escape from poverty. It’s not easy road though. The specter of unfulfilled promise, of course, shadows young athletes all around the world but those in poorer countries face extra challenges such as lack of funding, poor lodging and neglect. But the girls’ dedication to the track never wavers. Greatness is born on overgrown tracks in Ethiopia.
Coach Sentayehu Eshetu
Town of Runners is not, it must be said, an expose of exploitation in African sport. It is not an overtly political documentary. Rothwell does not tell a tragic tale. Nor does he provide the viewer with a socio-cultural analysis of the role of athletics in Ethiopia. He takes an observational rather than polemical approach. There are shortcomings. Although Town of Runners records signs of change, while offering glimpses into enduring aspects of Ethiopian culture, such as faith, and family, the viewer is not given much historical context. The documentary, moreover, does not provide in-depth analysis of why the town has produced so many sensational runners. Nevertheless, it paints an empathetic portrait of female talent while paying homage to a blessed place. What’s more, it’s refreshing to see a Western film-maker tell a largely positive story about contemporary Africa. Town of Runners is a compassionate, beautifully made documentary with universal appeal.
