Tag: 1960s

Blindness, Race, and Love in ‘A Patch of Blue’

Fifty years later, portraying disability on screen with empathy and respect is still rare. Showing an interracial couple is also extremely rare (Green says that some people sent terrible letters to him about the kissing scene; in fact, it’s reported that in some areas in the south the scene was edited out for theaters).

‘A Patch of Blue’ manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace.

A Patch of Blue movie poster.


This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships. 

Director Guy Green said of the premise of A Patch of Blue: “basically it’s a very corny story, a blind girl falling in love with a Black man.” He credits the writing of the novel it was based upon (Be Ready With Bells and Drums, by Elizabeth Kata) for ensuring that the story, and resulting film, were not corny at all.
The 1965 film centers around a young blind woman, Selina (Elizabeth Hartman), who has been abused and sheltered, and neglected any formal education, by her family–her mother, Rose-Ann (Shelley Winters) and her grandfather, Ole Pa (Wallace Ford). She’s befriended by a Black man, Gordon (Sidney Poitier), and they form a deep relationship, which centers on Gordon’s desire to help Selina lift herself up.
It would be easy to read that synopsis–blind girl falls in love with a Black man–and come to any number of conclusions about the film, especially since it was released at the height of the civil rights movement, but the film manages to capture something much deeper than being a superficial morality play on racism, and it treats Selina’s blindness with care and dignity.
When Selina was five, her father came home unexpectedly while Rose-Ann was sleeping with another man (it’s insinuated that she worked as a prostitute, and still does). Her father killed the man, and when Rose-Ann threw a bottle–a chemical-laden cosmetic–from her dresser at him, it hit Selina in the face, scarring her eyes and leaving her blind.
Elizabeth Hartman wore opaque contacts to simulate Selina’s damaged eyes. Rose-Ann is the only one who berates her “ugliness”; even her grandfather explains that it’s just that people are nosy, not that she is ugly.
Selina’s life circumstances are desperate and miserable, but she is not. The opening shot of the film focuses on Selina’s hands, stringing together beaded necklaces–that’s what she does during the day to help her family (Mr. Faber, her boss, is presented as an important support person in her life). She yearns to spend more time in the park, and Mr. Faber takes her when he can.
It’s in the park that she meets Gordon (a caterpillar dropped down the back of her shirt and she needed help–a problem not reserved for a person who can’t see–and he helps her retrieve it). He’s friendly and gentle without being condescending, and his generosity helps strike up a quick friendship. He buys her sunglasses because she’s self-conscious about her scarred eyes and tells her she looks perfect with them on (this is presented as a generous act for her confidence, not because he actually feels she needs them).
He’s shocked that she’s never heard of braille and was never formally educated: “You haven’t heard of all blind people can do?” he asks, and she is self-deprecating yet unashamed of her lot in life.
Gordon and Selina eat lunch.
While Selina is uneducated (Gordon corrects her grammar when they first meet) and cannot live outside of her home independently, the audience never feels pity for her because she is blind and helpless. Instead, the focus of our pity is on her lack of support–she has an abusive home life and has been neglected. Her blindness isn’t pitiful; her family is.
When Selina is shown doing tasks that she’s been entrusted with–changing linens, washing dishes, cooking, cleaning–she does so perfectly. This is a reminder that her blindness hasn’t been a hindrance to her life and that she is capable of doing what she’s allowed to do.
Hartman, in studying for the part, spent time at a school for the blind to be able to accurately get into character. She wore opaque contacts (Green said they helped because they naturally obstructed her vision), and her family says she wore them constantly and never left character while she was filming.
This careful and empathetic approach to “acting” blind paid off. Hartman’s performance was incredibly convincing and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (A Patch of Blue was Hartman’s first film).
Gordon helps Selina find directions by the sun’s location.
In the film, Gordon attempts to feel as Selina must feel shortly after meeting her. He’s shown at his job–working as a night-shift reporter–getting up from his desk, walking across the room, and attempting to return to his desk with closed eyes (he is unsuccessful, and runs into his coworker’s desk). This short scene is poignant in that it further reminds Gordon–and the audience–what it must feel like to be Selina, if only for a few moments.
Gordon never tries to do things for Selina. From the beginning, he teaches her and empowers her to be able to completely take care of herself. Since it’s clear her limitations are environmental, not innate, she is capable. Her disability–caused and amplified by her family–is not what’s in her way. Her poverty and lack of support system are detrimental to her growth and development.
Gordon could have easily met Selina, befriended her, seen that she could clean and cook, and want to marry her, keeping her dependent and living simply for him. And while his romantic feelings for her are conflicted, he wants her to be independent and educated more than he wants her for himself.
Gordon gives Selina very practical advice (counting steps, listening for traffic) so she can navigate streets by herself–which she finally does, after realizing she doesn’t have to take her home life anymore.
Gordon never belittles or gets frustrates with Selina.
Gordon and Selina’s kiss–one of the first on-screen interracial kisses–was at the same time innocent and deeply passionate. When Selina references the fact that she’d been raped, and wishes she hadn’t so she could be with Gordon, he convinces her that she is not “bad” or “dirty,” like she worries she is. (Someone in 1965 understood how to not blame the victim.)
Their kiss was one of the first on-screen interracial kisses.
The filmography often focuses on Selina’s point of view, and is effective in portraying the sensory details she enjoys (the canned peaches or the music box), and the terrors she lives through–her time alone for the first time on the street, or the memory of being raped (we “see” the man from her perspective–what she could have seen, but only felt).
The racial components of the film are also nuanced and effective. When Gordon tells Selina that “tolerance” is one of his favorite words (and explains that it’s not just putting up with something, but that you don’t “knock your neighbor just because he thinks or looks different than you”), she tells him that he must be full of tolerance. He quietly shakes his head and says that he’s not. He looks deeply affected when white people stare and glare at him and Selina walking together, and clearly has deep inner conflict being a Black man in America in 1965 (of course, these aspects of the film don’t seem nearly as dated as they should be). His brother, a doctor, criticizes Gordon’s desire to help and educate Selina because she is white, and comments on the fact that she comes from a “trash heap” (to which Gordon responds, “She may, but she’s not trash”). Underneath the surface of the film is the fact that socioeconomic factors and family support systems are what determine a person’s opportunities.
Rose-Ann is, unsurprisingly, violently racist. We know that she forbade Selina from spending time with the only friend she ever made because the little girl was Black, so we also know that when Rose-Ann sees Selina and Gordon together, she will erupt–which she does.
The characters to be despised are racist, abusive and neglectful. But Selina and Gordon aren’t perfect–they are complex, sympathetic characters who struggle with their own shortcomings and emotions. Selina is only 18, so her naivety and her quickness to fall deeply in love are believable. Gordon loves Selina as a friend, but is unsure of anything beyond that. He says he’s snapped back into reality after getting lost in their embrace. He deals with anger and frustration, too–not only because of his experiences at the hands of racism, but also because of the injustice of Selina’s mistreatment.
By the end of the film, even the crowd of white people (who before had glared), realize that Gordon is no threat to Selina; Rose-Ann is.
The ending is hopeful, but not saccharine-sweet. The realness of the characters, their struggles and their emotions are highlighted by sparse, black-and-white film and a beautiful soundtrack.
Gordon has called a school for the blind and set up a space for Selina. Before the bus comes to pick her up, she is nervous, and wishes they could just get married. Gordon promises that in a year, they could see if their love has anything to do with marriage. He sits her down to tell her that he’s black, but she already knows.
She says, “I know everything I need to know about you.” As she feels his face she continues: “I know you’re good, and kind, and that you’re colored; and I think you’re beautiful.”
He’s shocked that she knows, and responds “Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite.”
“That’s because they don’t know you,” she answers.
A Patch of Blue portrays disability as a part of a woman’s life that only defines her because she’s grown up with an abusive and neglectful family. As soon as she gets access to a world (literally and figuratively) outside of their little apartment, she thrives, and we know she’s just going to continue to grow. She’s beginning her life–a life that won’t be defined by her blindness.
Her relationship with Gordon allows him to also redefine his own life and helps him see himself for who he is–a beautiful, kind and generous man, who knows how to share life with someone who’s never experienced it.
Fifty years later, portraying disability on screen with empathy and respect is still rare. Showing an interracial couple is also extremely rare (Green says that some people sent terrible letters to him about the kissing scene; in fact, it’s reported that in some areas in the south the scene was edited out for theaters).
A Patch of Blue manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace. It was nominated for multiple Golden Globes and Academy Awards; Shelley Winters won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and notably, Sidney Poitier was nominated for the Golden Globe, but not an Academy Award.
A Patch of Blue is one of those films that manages to stay with you for years after you see it; and then, when you see it again, it’s just as beautiful as you remembered.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

How Home Invasion Films Reinforce Gender Stereotypes and Portray Domestic Violence

A woman’s domain is her home – it’s an archaic idea, but it’s one still perpetuated in today’s horror films, especially the subgenre of home invasion horror. These films serve to scare us because they take place in the one setting we’re supposed to feel safe, and their horror is much more realistic than ghosts or monsters. But how does a home invasion affect men and women so differently?

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This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

A woman’s domain is her home – it’s an archaic idea, but it’s one still perpetuated in today’s horror films, especially the subgenre of home invasion horror. These films serve to scare us because they take place in the one setting we’re supposed to feel safe, and their horror is much more realistic than ghosts or monsters. But how does a home invasion affect men and women so differently? In home invasion films, the female characters are often the ones trapped helplessly in their homes, making them the unlucky prisoners of their own supposed domain.

One of the most suspenseful films of all time, 1967’s Wait Until Dark, was one of the first home invasion films to hit the silver screen. It was also one of the first films to present a heroine who was absolutely helpless, even in her own home. Susy (Audrey Hepburn) is blind after a car accident, making her the perfect vulnerable target for a bunch of criminals trying to find a drug-stuffed doll that Susy’s husband may have. This film prisons Susy in her home to fend off these criminals, keeping her passive while her husband is removed from the drama. But the film’s portrayal of Susy is not negative – in fact, even though she’s vulnerable, Susy manages to outwit the criminals and show her strength when she needs it most.

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In 1997, the famously misanthropic director Michael Haneke made Funny Games, one of the more brutal, violent films in the home invasion genre. Two murderous young men entrap a mother, father, and son in their vacation home to torture and eventually murder them with their sadistic games. Anna is the last surviving victim, forced to watch the brutal slaughter of her husband and son before she herself is killed. Funny Games plays into sexist ideas of women in that it does now allow Anna any agency at the end – she is not allowed to fight for her life at all.

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Sometimes female characters are put into situations that limit their agency, but they end up outwitting the foes in their path to come out on top. This is the case in 2002’s Panic Room. The two main victims are a mother and daughter who are trying to make a life for themselves after a rough divorce. The film initially makes Meg (Jodie Foster) out to be a woman scorned, angry about her failed marriage and trying to win the trust of her daughter (Kristen Stewart), but once the burglars break through their security system and enter the home, she must fight to survive in the titular panic room. This enclosed space offers no communication to the outside, making it both a literal and metaphorical prison for Meg – she’s trapped, and the only way out is through violence.

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In other cases, home invasion films seem to want to keep women in roles lacking agency. In 2008’s The Strangers, a couple on the verge of a breakup must face an intense night battling a group of masked killers who keep finding their way into the house. James, the boyfriend, is the one who consistently takes action while Kristen, his girlfriend, is left screaming and hiding. He’s the one who shoots the gun and calls the shots, and when he can no longer help, Kristen is totally helpless. This is an example of a film that perpetuates the stereotype of the woman who cannot fend for herself.

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Luckily, the past few years have given us horror films with kick-ass heroines who can fend for themselves. In 2011, Sharni Vinson played a survivalist “final girl” in You’re Next who refused to let a group of masked killers assault her in her boyfriend’s country home. Even though the odds were against her, she used her wits and courage to get herself out of trouble, proving that home invasion films don’t always have to trap their heroines in an inescapable situation. However, it’s almost inevitable that the horror genre will continue to perpetuate stereotypes of women and place them in vulnerable roles and in inescapable situations of unnecessary violence. Let’s just hope we’ll see at least some films that go against this outdated trope.

 

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in ‘The Americans’

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

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Elisabeth

This guest post by Dan Jordan appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and torture.

The spy thriller achieved prominence in the early 1960s as a way to compensate for Western Imperial decline. Often featuring male, upper class agents travelling to exotic but foreboding countries with the use of up to date technology, defeating a foreign villain and exercising their heterosexual prowess over whatever damaged or naïve island nymphs they came across, these fantasies of colonial power achieved global appeal. This is nowhere more evident than the continued relevance and success of the James Bond films. Typically, the narrative follows Bond being somehow symbolically emasculated by M before eventually regaining his authority by crushing the plans of an unwieldy megalomaniac using the latest in spy tech and sexually dominating the Bond Girl. This pattern serves to ritualistically modernise the principally British but more broadly Western national character into a stylish, sadistic macho ideal to maintain a semblance of Imperial authority over increasingly independent countries.

The Americans alters such conventions in its setting of 1980s Washington, DC where American and Russian espionage operations in the post-Cold War race for advanced technology only ever results in a hollow stalemate or opportunities for petty revenge. Also, the influence of second wave feminism, interpreted in Bond as having freed women to choose their submission to men, is instead conceived as granting access to the requisite sexual agency and dominance of the spy thriller to women. The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

The series centres on the lives of married, suburban travel agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell). Though better off than their parents, they still struggle to balance their commitments to their jobs and each other within the changing dynamics of family life. Receiving orders from their native Moscow to infiltrate, undermine and expose the rotten, oppressive soul of capitalism and build a power base for Western communism to flourish as deep cover agents for the Soviet “Directorate S” only complicates matters.

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Family pic

As Philip grapples with maintaining loyalty to The Cause while enjoying the indulgences and privileges life in America grants him, Elizabeth remains committed to making socialists of their children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Salati), using sex to leverage high ranking intelligence contacts and murdering just such contacts in a way that rejects their connection to her mission, her country and her true self.

At first refusing both protection and trust to remain independent and unknowable, Elizabeth’s lack of immunity to the strains of sexual deception and death dealing jeopardises her role as a representative of Mother Russia. Her failure to birth or sustain new revolutions and forge genuine connections with anyone besides Philip leaves her at odds with the mission she committed her life to. In this way, The Americans depicts initially validating, mature and self-sacrificing female violence as increasingly deadening and traumatic, removing the ability to be either a nurturing or controlling mother. However, this internal division is a necessary part of individuality outside the constant cycle of brinkmanship, betrayal and revenge.

Elizabeth’s ability to trust Philip as more than just her fellow agent is central in The Americans’ approach to violent women’s independence. At first, she sees their 15-year marriage as a necessary role play to maintain their cover before acknowledging that he genuinely values her and her choices. We are introduced to the Jennings as they bring Colonel Timoshev (David Vadom), an ex-Soviet defector, home in the trunk of their car having missed his deportation ferry. Awaiting further orders from The Centre, Elisabeth shatters the happy family surroundings by almost stabbing Philip when he tries to kiss her.

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The root of Elizabeth’s distrust of Philip is developed later in the episode, as she confronts Timoshev for beating and sexually assaulting her in combat training, a reference to the mass rapes committed by the Red Army in Germany and Poland after the end of the Second World War. As Tymochev’s transport is continually delayed, Elizabeth uncuffs, fights and defeats him and prepares to cave his head in with a tire-iron to avenge herself. Before doing so, however, she accepts Timoshev’s dismissal of the rape as “a perk” of his position rather than a punishment for her inability to defend herself. As Elizabeth accepts that the experience was as much a part of the job as her family life is, Philip realises exactly what was done to her and kills Timoshev. Having himself considered defection because of the pleasure he gets from his American life, Philip chooses to reject the unchecked, unseen dominance of male authority he was otherwise committing to.

Showing he values Elizabeth’s choice more than a high ranking Soviet officer and that their relationship is more than a job to him, their status as husband and wife becomes more than a meaningless disguise for the first time. The Americans shows that trust does not infringe on the capability of women to avenge and empower themselves over past instances of violation and reduced status but is reliant upon treating choice as not only possible but valuable.

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Sadly, Philip routinely fails to learn this lesson over the course of the first season. By constantly feeling the need to protect Elizabeth from the necessary risks and harm she experiences in the field, he becomes the main source of tension in their relationship. This split between the violent outside world and the Jennings’ house in turn sets up The Americans’ dynamic of false and genuine relationships. In episode five, Elizabeth disguises herself and seduces an FBI intelligence contractor (Eric McKay) to gain access to FBI radio car frequencies. Suddenly and non-consensually, he begins whipping her with a belt. After screaming, crying and begging him to stop, Elizabeth smiles as she stands and faces away from him. The scars she gained from the encounter have given her the visible leverage she needs to probe the contractor for the information she needs, validating her capability and commitment to suffering for The Cause.

When Philip sees the scars back at home and insists on getting revenge, Elizabeth chides him for trying to be her “daddy” and reminds him the violent acts committed against and by her are neither his responsibility nor do they impact on their personal relationship. Further invalidating personal relationships in the realm of counter-intelligence, Elizabeth is then tasked with killing faltering anti-ballistics contractor and KGB informant Adam Dorwin (Michael Countrymen). Having relied on the “friendship” of the head of the Russian embassy to avoid being turned by the FBI, his vulnerability after the death of his wife is comforted by a bullet in the head from Elizabeth. With this, The Americans establishes that genuine connection with the KGB or Elizabeth is unreliable because of their higher connection to Russia and the Communist project.

Elizabeth’s commitment to The Cause is also under-estimated by her and Philip’s KGB “handler” Claudia (Margo Martindale), an older and more experienced representative of Cold War Russia. Elizabeth’s ability to not let physical and emotional turmoil overrule her orders as Claudia eventually does marks her as the more modern and capable generation of Mother Russia. In episode six, Elizabeth is submitted to psychological torture by seemingly freelance counter-intelligence agents. Placed in a disused factory closet decorated with photographs of Paige and Henry, she is confronted by implicit threats being made against them and the falsity of her status as their “real” mother.

Before she is physically tortured in front of Philip, Claudia intervenes and reveals the whole ordeal was a test of their loyalty. The suggestion that her willingly receiving physical harm was the cut-off point for Claudia’s trust infuriates Elizabeth, who savagely beats and water-boards her handler. Inflicting on Claudia what she herself would’ve suffered for her mission, she rejects an older generation’s definition of mercy and, once more, her need for protection. As well, she reveals to Philip she had told The Centre about his considered defection, betraying his trust and invalidating his perceived duty to protect her simultaneously. Elisabeth’s willingness to be harmed, to hurt, kill and betray others for her country fulfill The Americans’ requirements of a true patriot.

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Claudia disguises the wounds of her distrust

However, patriotism in The Americans infringes on the individuals ability to have their own lives and identities outside their ideological commitments, eventually justifying their need for revenge as the righteous will of their country. Elizabeth reaches this crossroad of identity once the head of Directorate S General Zhukov (Oleg Krupa) is assassinated by the FBI in episode 11. Ordered to end the escalation of violence by Claudia, Elizabeth instead abducts the US military colonel Richard Patterson (Paul Fitzgerald) who oversaw the operation that took the fatherly general away from her. Detailing the love she had for the general as she prepares to kills him, the colonel taunts her that living only to feed information to The Centre and undertake ideological revenge shows she doesn’t understand loving or being loved and has no basis for revenge.

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After releasing the colonel, sacrificing her personal relationship with Zhukov and obeying her orders from Moscow once more, Elizabeth discovers this too was a manipulation by Claudia. By giving Elizabeth the colonel’s name and telling her not to go after him, Claudia attempted to prove Elizabeth’s lack of commitment to The Cause when she is damaged emotionally. Instead, Claudia avenges Zhukov herself by murdering the colonel in the season finale. The generational conflict between representatives of Mother Russia past and present is resolved as the jaded Claudia chooses her personal revenge for Zhukov over her commitment to orders and her agents. Elizabeth proves her connection to Russia is more genuine than Claudia and shows the role of Mother Russia in The Americans is based on repeated self-sacrifice.

Even as Elizabeth attempts to avoid becoming Claudia by committing to a trusting, genuine relationship with Philip to stave off a lifetime of trauma, loneliness and betrayal, the comfort they take in each other barely sustains them throughout season two. As Elizabeth recovers from a mortal gunshot wound, she loses influence and power in her home and work lives, forcing her to mould a new agent in the interim. Less willing to use sex to gain information and affronted that Paige is converting to Christianity rather than socialism in her early teens, Elizabeth channels her frustration into mentoring a young Nicaraguan communist named Lucia Chena (Aimee Carrero). On their first mission together in episode two, Elizabeth listens in as Lucia seduces a congressional aide (Nick Bailey) to reacclimatise to the demands of field work after her trauma.

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After securing proof that America is training contra forces after Nicaraguan elections result in a communist victory, Lucia reluctantly agrees to kill the aide on Elizabeth’s order. Lucia now lives by Elizabeth’s demands and must imitate her to establish communism in Nicaragua, her own motherland. Elizabeth’s controlling influence here establishes an uneasy mix of handler and maternal roles, leaving the possibility for genuine connection with other women and new revolutions dependent on self-sacrifice once more.

Not long after, Lucia’s revolution falls to the cycle of revenge as she sets out to avenge her father and forces Elizabeth to sacrifice her role as a nurturer for The Cause. Blackmailing closeted gay military captain Andrew Larrick (Lee Tergesen) into giving them access to the contra training camp, Elizabeth attempts to regain her capability for violence and manipulation remains in the absence of sexual threat Larrick poses. Unfortunately, Lucia does not stop attempting to murder Larig for training soldiers who tortured her father to death. In episode eight, Elizabeth is given the ultimatum to kill Larrick and lose access to the camp or letting him kill Lucia in self-defence. Elizabeth lowers her gun and watches as he chokes her to death.

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As Lucia fails to pragmatically sacrifice her emotions for her mission, Elizabeth must do it instead. Cracks of trauma begin to show at last, as Elizabeth cries alone in her dark house.

Even as Elizabeth’s “recovery” has resulted in a redoubling of trauma, loss and isolation while she loses control over her children’s development, the distractions of her work have led her biological daughter to adopt similar values to her own. Where forcing Paige to do rigorous housework in the middle of the night as Elizabeth did in Russia to learn maturity fails, allowing her to protest the American nuclear weapons programme succeeds in instilling a measure of socialist enterprise into Paige. Elisabeth, having rationalised her unquestioning loyalty to The Cause as adults “doing things that they don’t want to do” learns to support things Paige chooses for herself. Without the need for violence or manipulation that now inevitably result in revenge and betrayal, Elisabeth’s previously fake identity as Paige’s mother has delivered real change. As The Centre send out orders to begin training Paige as a KGB agent at the end of series two, Elisabeth is faced with the final choice of betraying her motherland or betraying her new found motherhood.

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In The Americans, conventions of the spy thriller are altered by the context of its setting to create a crisis of gendered nationalism. As Elisabeth fights for the trust to sustain harm for her cause and remain independent over even the demands of her KGB handler, she becomes increasingly isolated and inhuman. In turn, her investment in genuine relationships limits her influence over her mature, ideological commitment to representing a modern, capable Mother Russia. Neither entirely nurturing or controlling, she slowly recognises the value of her own daughter’s independence as well as her own. In seasons to come, though, she may choose to sacrifice this as well.

See also: “Love, Sex and Coercion in The Americans”

 

Dan Jordan is an insightful, eclectic writer, aspiring media critic and University of Leicester Film and English graduate. Frequently submerged in new and classic movies, TV, video games, comics and criticism thereof, he still finds time to eat and sleep. Follow him on Twitter and at his regularly updated blog The Odd Review.

 

Women in a Man’s World: ‘Mad Men’ and the Female Gaze

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Mad Men is a remarkable portrayal of the 1960s that explores the office and home lives of workers in the New York City advertising industry over the course of a decade. The 60s was a particularly patriarchal and sexist period of history, as was the profession that Mad Men depicts. Advertising, even for women’s products, was driven by the male gaze. Mad Men aims to portray the decade and the world of Madison Avenue advertising as accurately as possible, but does not view it from the patriarchal standpoint of the time.

In the Establishing Mad Men documentary, creator Matthew Weiner states that Mad Men “is about conflicting desires in the American male, and the people who pay the price for that are women.” The leading women in the series who pay that price are Peggy Olson, Joan Harris, and Betty Draper. The struggles of Mad Men’s male characters have ramifications on them. Weiner uses the female gaze of these women to criticize the sexism of the era and profession they inhabit, while rendering fully realized and dynamic female characters. Peggy, Joan, and Betty are depicted as sexual, complicated, and diverse human beings.

In the first season of Mad Men especially, much of the dialogue shows the vast amount of overt sexism in the workplace. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are a smorgasbord available for men’s consumption, objects they can use for their amusement or lust. For most audience members of the 2000s, this blatant sexism is baffling, and some may find it oddly humorous just how much was acceptable or tolerated back then.

We experience this sexism through the eyes and gaze of Peggy Olson, who, much like the audience, is being introduced to the world of Sterling Cooper in the first episode. Peggy ends up being the female character most tied with the nature of advertising- making her way from Don Draper’s secretary to copywriter and then copy chief. But at first she is just another secretary, a new piece of fresh meat for the men. Peggy has never worked in an office before; she is straight out of secretarial school. Raised in a strict Catholic family, Peggy has likely never experienced male ogling at quite this level. By Episode 2, “Ladies’ Room,” Peggy is already fed up: “Honestly, why is it that every time a man takes you out to lunch around here, you’re…you’re the dessert!” she bemoans to Joan. Matthew Weiner uses the female gaze purposefully in the following scene where the camera allows the audience to identify with Peggy as the men’s prey. As Peggy sits at her desk on the typewriter, the camera cuts to many different men in slow-motion gazing at her, with reverse low angle-shots of Peggy. The multiple and unrelenting gazes of men echoes Peggy’s dialogue from minutes before: “It’s constant from every corner.” The low-angle on Peggy heightens her overwhelming feeling of their gaze.

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Peggy’s role puts her in the position of seeing not only the advertising world firsthand, but also the male point of view that it so actively employs, and from her first account, she begins to challenge that point of view. Peggy’s rise in advertising begins with a Belle Jolie lipstick campaign. The Sterling Cooper secretaries are treated to a testing session (viewed by the men behind a two-way mirror) where they can try on as many Belle Jolie lipsticks as they please. The gaggle of secretaries are thrilled, but Peggy sits there unhappily. The camera shows Peggy watching the girls try on lipsticks in slow motion, the seeds of her first copy pitch planting in her brain. Freddy Rumsen asks Peggy why she didn’t try on any lipsticks. Peggy tells him that they didn’t have her color, that she is very particular: “I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box.” The men are failing to see the individuality in women, and instead choosing to see them as a limited whole. Peggy’s observations leads her to be promoted to copywriter for that campaign.

In Season 3, Peggy continues to challenge the male gaze in advertising. In a campaign for Patio, the clients want a shot-for-shot reenactment Bye Bye Birdie’s opening: “She’s throwing herself at the camera. No one seems to care that it speaks to men. Not the people that drink diet drinks.” Peggy asks Don about the faux Ann-Margaret. “It’s not about making women feel fat. It’s ‘look how happy I am drinking Patio. I’m young and excited and desperate for a man,’” Don replies. “I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?” Peggy asks. “Peggy, you understand how this works: men want her, women want to be her.” Don is subtly insisting to Peggy that advertising, even for women’s products, is aimed for men. Don is also hinting to Peggy that if she keeps up the criticisms about the male gaze in advertising, she will lose her job.

Another example is the Playtex ad from Season 2 Episode 6’s “Maidenform.” Kinsey comes up with an idea that every woman is either a Jackie or Marilyn. He points to various women in the office pinpointing which one they are. “I don’t know if all women are a Jackie or a Marilyn. Maybe men seem them that way,” Peggy counters. “Bras are for men. Women want to see themselves the way men see them,” Kinsey insists.

As the series progresses into the mid-60s, we see the gradual shift into (slightly) more open-minded ideals about the roles of women in the workplace. Peggy is promoted and works on many campaigns. In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Peggy makes the biggest change as the series goes on, from a meek, mousy girl to a headstrong woman, though her evolution is no surprise upon reflection. Outside of the office, Peggy is seen many times exerting control over her own sexuality and choice of sexual partners. Peggy’s struggles of putting career over having a family are honestly and sensitively executed by Weiner.

Another female character tied to Sterling Cooper is Joan Holloway (later Harris). No other character experiences the male gaze as much as Joan. In the beginning seasons, the camera flatters and accentuates every curve of Hendricks’s voluptuous body. We see her as the men in the office see her. But one scene turns this on its head, in Season 1’s “Babylon,” at the Belle Jolie lipstick testing. Joan oversees the secretaries wearing a gorgeous skin-tight red dress. The camera views Joan (as the men view her) as she walks across the table, slyly looking at the two-way mirror. The camera then glides over to and fixes on Joan’s bottom as she bends over. Cut to Joan smirking, turning around and looking squarely at the mirror, almost straight into the camera. Joan knows the men are gazing at her, and she takes possession of that gaze by giving them what they want to see. The men think they have the power in being able to gaze at her unknowingly, but the power lies in Joan’s hands as she presents herself to be looked at. When Joan looks into the camera, it is almost as if she is also challenging the audience as well.

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The character of Joan is frequently seen as a sexual object by all those around her. Many of her storylines revolve around the harmful ramifications you experience when you are only viewed by how you look and your body. The men around her, and even Joan herself, tend to use that sexuality as a pawn. Joan knows she exactly how she is viewed and objectified by the men in the office, and she yields that power for better or for worse. Two significant plot points happen to Joan–the rape by her fiancé and the act of prostitution to obtain the Jaguar account and a higher position in the office. As she lies on the office floor with Greg on top of her, or as awful, the awful car salesman kisses her and takes off her fur coat, the camera fixes on only Joan in a close-up. By doing that we are able to empathize with only her instead of focusing on the act. Weiner visually does not reduce these scenes to moments of exploitation. We are not centered on the event itself, but on what Joan is going through.

The show itself does not reduce Joan to just a sexual object as much as the men around her would like her to be so. Joan is a very smart, capable woman that is excellent at her job, more so than some of the men are. She often goes unappreciated until she does obtain her higher-up position. The show’s finale shows Joan running a production company in her home while raising her son.

Outside of Sterling Cooper, but connected to leading man Don Draper, is Betty Draper (later Francis). Betty’s image is one of passive, docile sexuality and complete perfection. Throughout the series, we quickly learn that there is more beneath Betty’s Barbie Doll-esque façade, for Weiner delves deeper than the false image she presents. Betty’s character seems ripped straight out the pages of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a visual personification of “the problem that has no name” that she studied in housewives. Betty’s character allows viewers of modern day to see the nature of those housewives’ lives; there are multiple scenes of the dull drudgery and loneliness Betty deals with day to day alone in the house.

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We first get a glimpse at her underlying sexuality when she tells Don, “I want you so much. I thought about it all day. No I mean it. It’s all I think about…every day. Your car coming down the driveway. I put the kids to bed early. I make a grocery list. I cook butterscotch pudding. I never let my hands idle. Brushing my hair, drinking my milk…and it’s all in kind of a fog because I can’t stop thinking about this. I want you so badly.” From this we learn that Betty is very much at the whim of Don’s actions. One episode delves further into Betty’s brimming sexuality, when we see her pleasuring herself against a washing machine while fantasizing about making love to the air conditioner salesman. In Season 3, after seeing Don sleep with so many other women, there is a scene of Betty controlling her sexuality when she sleeps with a stranger from a bar. Matthew Weiner takes great care in telling her side of the story in the marriage and relation to Don. Betty is not shown to be the demure or child-like woman that Don or others may view her as.

Mad Men is one of the few shows that depicts a successful representation of the female gaze, despite taking place in an era and profession where female’s experiences were often devalued. Weiner does not reduce the women to just mere symbols of the decade’s movements but crafts them as complicated and dynamic human beings living in an equally complicated time. And this is not limited to just Peggy, Joan, and Betty. Mad Men has many women, good qualities and bad, older women, mothers, grandmothers, young girls, teenagers, within the show that Weiner manages–even through small parts–to finely craft. Weiner uses the female gaze as one of many ways to examine the fascinating decade.

 

Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen. 

‘Marnie’: What We’d Like To Forget About Old Hollywood

With all the talk of ’50 Shades of Grey’ in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom ‘Secretary,’ the film that has really been on my mind is ‘Marnie.’ The 1964 Hitchcock outing is about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren, the grandmother of ’50 Shades’ star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in ‘Marnie’ was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy.

With all the talk of 50 Shades of Grey in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom Secretary, the film that has really been on my mind is Marnie . Since I first saw it several years ago, I’m been intermittently perplexed by the film, a 1964 Hitchcock outing about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren , the grandmother of 50 Shades star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in Marnie was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.

Mark dominates Marnie and breaks her down to reveal her weakness
Mark dominates Marnie and breaks her down to reveal her weakness

 

If you didn’t already think Alfred Hitchcock was a horror movie villain , Marnie sure makes this clear. For starters, James Bond himself, Sean Connery plays Mark Rutland, is misogynist and unrepentant rapist who is the movie’s hero. Yes, he’s the hero. A wealthy industrialist and armchair zoologist, who discovers the young woman who just robbed a business acquaintance and blackmails her into marrying him.

As a con artist, Marnie slips and out of identities and hair styles, though blonde is always the constant, the “real” her. The one constant presence in Marnie’s life is her mother, who lives in a poor area down by the docks of an unknown town. She acts as the breadwinner for her mother, painting her as “unnaturally” masculinized. One of the things she brings her mother is a fur coat, a typical gift given by a rich lover at the time.

While Hedren was being abused by Hitchcock off-screen, on-screen Mark finds his new wife is cold and disinterested in sex. In Hitchcock world, this must mean there is something wrong with her. She is after all, the classic ice blonde taken to extremes. She holds her head high and meets men’s gazes and pulls her skirt down over her knees if she feels she is being gawked at. She’s disgusted and afraid of the thought of Mark touching her and extolls her hatred and mistrust of men, which lends the film to queer readings.

The rape scene casts Mark as a hero
The rape scene casts Mark as a hero

 

He rapes her on their wedding night when she refuses to have sex with him. It is not at all ambiguous. She screams and tries to fight him off but he keeps going. It’s as explicit as it could be at the time. Never are we told that what Mark did was wrong, or that it makes him a bad person. Instead, we are meant to sympathize with his urges. He is a red-blooded American man, he can be patient about other things, can treat Marnie as an animal, a case study to be analyzed at arm’s length, but on his wedding night? Moreover, as he is presented as normal while Marnie is damaged, his actions are represented as markers of his psychological superiority. He know Marnie better than she knows herself, he can tell it’s what she wants even when she says no; the standard defense of the rapist, only we’re meant to take it seriously here. Even when Marnie attempts suicide the next morning, it’s portrayed as a symptom of the things that were already wrong with her, not a reaction to being victimized.

In married life, Mark continues to hold Marnie under this thumb. He tells her how to dress and act and forces her to attend parties and act as his supportive partner. She must live in his house, trapped like a captive animal and studied, by her husband, zoology or Freudian text in hand. Privately she screams how much she hates him, how much she wants to get away from him, but he owns her, both as a husband and blackmailer.

And though she puts up a strong act, she seems to need him. The slightest flash of the color red or crash of lightening send her into hysterics and Mark’s arms. She seems to get a sense of sexual release from riding her horse (a hamfisted Freudian touch) and it’s his death that finally breaks Marnie’s spirit, like she is indeed the wild horse in need of taming that Mark viewed her as.

Marnie is only truly happy with her horse
Marnie is only truly happy with her horse

 

This all leads up to the final confrontation with Marnie’s mother, wherein Mark blames her for “ruining” Marnie. It begins when he literally drags her to her mother’s house, crying and weak from the earlier trauma and ends with the heavy-handed revelation that of repressed memories of a near sexual assault in her childhood. Hearing this, grown up Marnie regresses back to her childhood, a little girl crying for her mother’s love and leaning on her husband’s strong shoulder.

In the last scene they walk out into an uncertain future but it seems like things might be all right for these crazy kids. They’re ready to love each other. Mark is our hero, he’s fixed this girl and she can now have a normal sex life. She can be a wife, like a woman is supposed to be.

Marnie is forced to stand by Mark’s side as his society wife
Marnie is forced to stand by Mark’s side as his society wife

 

Of course this is crazy and nauseating and its rightfully a lesser Hitchcock. But the film is beautiful and seductive, dressed up in Classic Hollywood glamour and its easy to be lulled into ideas of the unilateral superiority and wholesomeness of old films. But not everything a great director touches turns to gold. For all the ills of contemporary filmmaking and modern culture, at least you couldn’t make a film like Marnie anymore.

At least, I hope so.

 

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

 

Queens, Princesses, and the Battle of the Sexes in ‘The Lion In Winter’

Their strength lies in being able to laugh at the terrible or dangerous situations in which they find themselves, and this is particularly true of the female lead, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who declares that smiling is “the way [she] register[s] despair.” Indeed, while the 2003 adaptation shows Eleanor’s war with her husband Henry II of England at the beginning of the movie, and shows her in armor and taking part in the action, to take away or lessen Eleanor’s sense of humor is to take away both her greatest weapon and greatest defenses.

Written by Jackson Adler. 

James Goldman’s 1964 historical play The Lion In Winter: A Comedy In Two Acts has twice been adapted to the screen, first in 1968 starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, and again in 2003 as a made-for-TV movie starring Sir Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close. When Goldman originally wrote his play, he attempted to make it as historically accurate as possible, but time has shown that some of his sources were incorrect in their information. However, the power of these characters is true to their historical counterparts, and Goldman’s dialogue and pacing have stood the test of time. While both screen adaptations are heavy handed with the moments of drama, and the second adaptation forgets that it’s a comedy altogether, which actually takes away from the strength of these characters. Their strength lies in being able to laugh at the terrible or dangerous situations in which they find themselves, and this is particularly true of the female lead, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who declares that smiling is “the way [she] register[s] despair.” Indeed, while the 2003 adaptation shows Eleanor’s war with her husband Henry II of England at the beginning of the movie, and shows her in armor and taking part in the action, to take away or lessen Eleanor’s sense of humor is to take away both her greatest weapon and greatest defenses. Katharine Hepburn’s delivery of Eleanor’s sharp wit depicts a woman of power, strength, and ambition. In the 1964 adaptation, it is not necessary to show Eleanor in battle because we can already tell that she has done much and ruled long just from the way she speaks and carries herself. Glenn Close rages, screams, and cries, but Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor is allowed by her director to simply be a badass and give no fucks, much like Katharine Hepburn herself.

The story of The Lion In Winter focuses on Henry II of England’s midlife crisis during a partial family reunion at Christmas with an incredibly dysfunctional family. The play was finished in 1964, only a year after the release of The Feminine Mystique, and appeared on Broadway in 1966, the year of the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Much of the conflict in the play is between Eleanor and Henry, with Eleanor having been locked up for years by her husband for challenging his rule, much like middle and upper class women were confined to the home after World War II. This comparison would not have been so easily lost on the audience of the 1968 film, especially with Hepburn’s film history in the backs of their minds. The 2003 film could still have been powerful in spite of the different cultural context, but when combined with the lack of humor, and therefore a disruption of the pacing required by Goldman’s dialogue, it falls flat. The 2003 film’s saving grace is Yuliya Vysotskaya as Alais. The French princess Alais was raised with Eleanor and her family since she was betrothed to Henry’s and Eleanor’s second son Richard (the Lionheart). Eleanor was her surrogate mother, but after Eleanor is locked up, Alais becomes Henry’s mistress. Alais does not joke as much as most of the other characters, mainly because there are “Kings, queens, knights everywhere [she] look[s] and [she’s] the only pawn,” and she’s sick of their shit. She has never been permitted to rule any part of land, or any army of the any kind, unlike most all the other characters. As she says “[She] hasn’t got a thing to lose. That makes [her] dangerous.” Vysotskaya’s delivery of these lines of flawless, showing that while she lacks political power of her own, she has fierce determination to keep her self autonomy. The 1968 film attempted to contract Hepburn’s Eleanor with a soft portrayal of Alais by Jane Merrow, highlighting the fact that Henry would in many ways prefer a younger, more docile, and not as uppity female companion. However, this conflicts with how the character of Alais is written. At first glance she may seem and even purposefully act submissive to Henry, but her first act and line in the story are in defiance to Henry, refusing to come down from her room to interact with the family, whom she accurately sees as enemies. Jane Merrow’s portrayal of Alais forgets that she was raised by the powerful and independent Eleanor for a majority of her life, and while she may know how to pretend to be submissive in order to get what she wants, she can be just as fierce as any of the other characters. She proves this by almost getting Henry to lock up his surviving sons for life when the chance arises for Henry to annul his marriage with Eleanor in order to marry Alais and start a line of heirs of their own. Alais’ dream of becoming Henry’s powerful queen almost comes true, largely due to her own actions.

Yuliya Vysotskaya as Alais and Sir Patrick Stewart as Henry.
Yuliya Vysotskaya as Alais and Sir Patrick Stewart as Henry.

 

While the 1968 film does well at depicting Henry’s mid-life crises through his relationships with the women in his life, Alais’ character and her relationship with Eleanor is undermined. In the story, Alais and Eleanor share a particularly beautiful scene that briefly passes the Bechdel Test. In the scene, the true reason why Alais has been so cold to Eleanor in spite of Eleanor’s warmth toward her is revealed. Alais has heard that Eleanor poisoned Rosamund, Henry’s former mistress, and fears that the ambitious Eleanor might do the same to her despite their past mother-daughter bond. When Eleanor claims she never had Rosamund poisoned, Alais throws herself into Eleanor’s arms and starts to cry, and they are mother and daughter once more. Alais literally calls Eleanor by the French “Maman” for “Mom.” Henry interrupts this scene, partly because nothing could threaten him (or the patriarchy) more than the women in his life (or in 1960’s America) working together. Eleanor does not blame or hate Alais for becoming Henry’s mistress, but sees her as a victim of circumstance, though she does seem to have some bitterness for Henry over it. Hepburn is allowed to play all this very well, but Merrow has appeared particularly sensitive and vulnerable throughout the film so that when she becomes vulnerable in this moment with Eleanor, the change is hardly noticeable. Yuliya Vysotskaya was permitted by her director husband to show more of a range of character, and therefore gives a much more stirring portrayal of the princess, and creates a more touching moment between Alais and Eleanor.

Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor and Jane Merrow as Alais.
Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor and Jane Merrow as Alais.

 

The story is not entirely feminist, as it not only centers on Henry, but emphasizes that the two women remain divided, in spite of their affection for one another, because of their romantic love for him. When Alais confronts Eleanor after it appears that Eleanor helped save her sons not only from being locked up for life, but from punishment for almost murdering Henry, Alais says, “You always win, Maman,” and Eleanor replies “Except the prize,” most likely referring to a romantic relationship with Henry.

The ending has conflicting messages, emphasizing the theme of the battle of the sexes between Henry and Eleanor, but also emphasizing Henry’s and Eleanor’s love for each other. When Henry complains about the tragedies of his life, Eleanor calls him out on it by saying, “I could take defeats like yours and laugh. I’ve done it. If you’re broken, it’s because you’re brittle.” Indeed, Henry, their sons, and the patriarchal laws of Medieval Europe have made her life nearly unbearable. Henry shifts in this last scene from feeling sorry for himself to having profound sympathy for his wife. Henry claims that he has nothing, in spite of his political power, land, armies, wealth, and freedom, though what he most likely is referring to is others’ lack of love and sympathy for him. Eleanor, however, responds, “You don’t know what nothing is.” The final scene is absolutely brilliant in the 1968 film, showcasing the chemistry between and the talents of Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. Due to the lack of relief from the drama and darkness of the 2003 one, though, the bittersweet and almost uplifting ending comes out of nowhere, despite featuring the two talented actors, Sir Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close.

The story’s best feminist virtue is that it depicts Eleanor as a complicated and at times particularly sympathetic character, not as a vicious man-eating harpy undermining the glory of an otherwise perfect man. This could easily have been done, as the play is almost a sequel to Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play Becket, or The Honor of God. A film adaption was made in 1964, starring Peter O’Toole, who has said that he could never have played Henry in the 1968 The Lion In Winter if he hadn’t first played the same character in Becket. Anouilh’s Becket implies that Henry had strong homosexual love for his frenemy Thomas Becket (played by Richard Burton in the film), and that Eleanor (barely present in play or film) was an annoyance to Henry, and hardly worthy of being a rival to his manly love for his friend. Pamela Brown’s Eleanor is particularly one-leveled, and it is supposed to be amusing when Henry yells at her and puts her down. However, it seems neither the play nor the film of Becket could deny the historical character’s astuteness, as it is Eleanor who first openly speaks of Henry’s love for Becket, saying that he loves him “like a woman,” to which Henry flies into a rage. In The Lion In Winter, the subject of the late Becket is broached, and while Peter O’Toole’s Henry evidently still has love for him. This time, he has a complicated and fully fleshed out Eleanor in Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal with whom he can have a more nuanced conversation about the subject. When Eleanor falsely claims to have had an affair with Becket, O’Toole’s Henry lividly responds, “That’s a lie!” to which an amused Eleanor responds, “I know it. Jealousy looks silly on us, Henry.” The scene is incredibly different in the 2003 film, which not only lacks the cultural context of the 1960’s, but has no tie to the play or the 1964 film of Becket. Sir Patrick Stewart dismissively, almost as if he is bored, responds “That’s a lie,” undermining the incredible history and emotion that can be present in the scene, and giving little to which Glenn Close’s Eleanor can realistically respond with her next line.

Richard Burton as Thomas Becket and Peter O'Toole as Henry in the 1964 film Becket.
Richard Burton as Thomas Becket and Peter O’Toole as Henry in the 1964 film Becket.

 

While the consistency of the character of Henry through Becket and The Lion In Winter’s can be important for Henry’s character arch and motivations (and, arguably, also for his son Richard, who has a homosexual affair in The Lion In Winter), it’s a relief that the character of Eleanor was given so much more time and substance in Goldman’s story. Eleanor and Alais are not only queen and princess, but complex human beings fighting for self-autonomy as well as love. In this way, they are afforded the same care by Goldman as Anouilh gave in writing Thomas Becket and Henry. Goldman’s Eleanor is Henry’s mental equal and rival, and he loves her very much. However, it is implied that if she is ever “let out” by Henry (or if 1960’s middle and upper class women are ever permitted to leave the home to be equals in the workforce), that her ambitions will cause chaos and war (ignoring the fact that chaos and war had been occurring in Medieval Europe both with and without Eleanor and other women), and Henry will lose any and all of the power that he still possesses. Interestingly, it is also implied that Henry’s reign won’t continue for long, for better or for worse, hence the midlife crisis that he experiences.

Though this is implied in the dialogue, the stage directions of the play are explicit, stating that his physical health is “just before the start of the decline.” Hopefully, the fear that men reliant on the patriarchy (such as Henry) experience when women challenge their authority will diminish, and men and women will continue on the path to and reach equality, when no one oppress or have the other “locked up.”

 

 

As Goes Missouri, So Goes the Nation: ‘The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,’ ‘Rich Hill,’ and ‘Spanish Lake’

Rural poverty and urban poverty are not the same. Individual racism and institutional racism are not the same. However, these forces are woven together as they are fiercely kept separate in our common mythologies of what America means. We avoid difficult stories that disrupt the narratives we’ve come to understand.

Pruitt_Web

Written by Leigh Kolb.

For over a century, Missouri was known as a bellwether state; a politically split swing state (blue urban Kansas City and St. Louis bookend red rural communities), the state’s presidential vote almost always reflected the outcome of the presidential election. In the Civil War, Missourians fought for both sides. Demographically, economically, socially, and politically, Missouri has often been seen as a microcosm of America as a whole.

In an NPR article, the term “bellwether” is defined:

“You might be wondering where the word ‘bellwether’ comes from. Just think about Mary and her little lamb… she’d tie a bell around the neck of a wether (a castrated male sheep) who would lead the little lamb and the rest of the flock around until Mary came back. And when she returned, the bell signaled the flock’s location.”

The bell around Missouri’s neck has been sounding, tuning a nation in to the economic and divisive realities of a nation divided, economically and racially. Three recent documentaries paint a portrait of tragic desperation that is not isolated to middle America; it’s the struggle of a nation faced with the staggering reality of deep divides in class and race.

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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, directed by Chad Freidrichs and released in 2012, tells a more complex version of a modern myth. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing development in St. Louis, built to be a shiny clean alternative to the tenements of the city. It was designed with the goal of “lifting residents out of poverty,” and was built using federal funding after the Housing Act of 1949. The documentary, which succeeds greatly in its usage of historical footage and current interviews with past tenants, paints a picture of a development full of hope. Those interviewed remembered Pruitt-Igoe as an “oasis in a desert,” and their time there had been incredibly exciting and happy. There was also fear, though. A complex portrait is drawn that leaves the viewer wondering, “What happened?”

The complex was segregated. Public housing was racially segregated until 1956; after that, many areas remained or became increasingly segregated due to redlining and “white flight” as suburbs became attractive options and were also subsidized heavily by government funding. Against the backdrop of a post-war economy that was not growing as expected, and the deep racism that permeated the country as schools were desegregated, Pruitt-Igoe was a socialist penthouse built on a racist, shaky free market.

Twenty years after its completion, it was fully demolished. The mythology that has surrounded its failure typically stigmatizes public housing and the residents; however, the real story has much more to do with the lack of maintenance and support, welfare policies that broke apart families, and decaying conditions coupled with increasing rent. While the government built the complex, the maintenance and upkeep was to be paid for with tenants’ rent. This model relied on a vibrant, growing city and economy.

That’s not what happened.

The government was also committed to pro-suburb housing policies, where middle class and working class whites went to live. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth does an excellent job outlining the history of economic decline and housing and zoning laws that were often unfriendly to poor and working class African Americans.

Another reality that the film reveals is the “control” that the welfare department had over those in the apartments who received aid, including the anti-family “man in the house” rule, which dictated that if an “able-bodied” man lived in the home, the family couldn’t receive assistance. For some of the interviewees in the film, that meant that their fathers had to leave the state, or hide when agents came to check and see if a man was living in the house. (And just a few decades later, conservatives decry the breakdown of the family as the cause of poverty and crime.) The rules were restrictive–telephones and televisions were not allowed. The theme of “control” runs through many of the former tenants’ narratives–the control that the housing authority attempted to have over them, and the lack of control they felt in their deteriorating living conditions.

Instead of fixing and maintaining the units, authorities made everything “indestructible” (caging in light bulbs for example). One former tenant said that that “made you want to destroy things.” While The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is ostensibly about a housing project, it is also about segregation, masculinity, poverty, distrust of law enforcement, racism, the decline of the American city, and whites’ deep fears of Black poverty and crime (the mythology of Pruitt-Igoe became a scapegoat to uphold those fears).

This iconic footage of Pruitt-Igoe being destroyed was used in the film Koyaanisqatsi. "Koyaanisgatsi" is a Hopi Indian word, and means "life out of balance."
This iconic footage of Pruitt-Igoe being destroyed was used in the film Koyaanisqatsi. “Koyaanisgatsi” is a Hopi Indian word, and means “life out of balance.”

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Rich Hill

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On the other side of Missouri is Rich Hill, a rural town with a population of just over 1,000. A former coal mining town, the economy of Rich Hill has declined rapidly in the last few decades, and its inhabitants are faced with poverty and a lack of employment opportunities.

Filmmakers Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo (who are cousins), grew up visiting family in Rich Hill. They stress the importance of showing poverty in America, and that we cannot keep those living in poverty “at arm’s length.” They directed Rich Hill, a beautiful documentary that focuses deeply on the lives of three young teenage boys who are up against a world that seems hopeless.

Between 2000 and 2010, poverty rates in Missouri doubled, at a rate 3.5 times the national average. Rural areas have been hit by declining manufacturing opportunities. The three boys chronicled in Rich Hill are all faced with devastating family situations. Andrew is good-looking and charming, and seems optimistic amid the chaos of his life–a father who does odd jobs, sings country music, and moves his family around constantly. Appachey lives in rage, and chain smokes at age 12. His mother had him when she was a teenager, and his father left when he was 6. Harley’s mother is in prison because she tried to kill his stepfather after his stepfather had raped him, and the cops did nothing. Harley lives with his grandmother. “I don’t need an education,” he tells us. “I just need my family.”

The film spans a year, and it’s punctuated by Fourth of July celebrations. Toward the end, the fireworks are juxtaposed with scenes of Andrew and his father arm wrestling, and the town chanting “USA!” in celebration. These scenes are stunningly beautiful and deeply sad.

Andrew says, “I keep praying. Nothing’s came yet, but I keep trying…”

Tragos said that in making the film, they were trusted because they had their grandparents’ name. She explains that this was “less of a nostalgia piece than for an urgent piece about these kids’ lives.” It’s clear that the filmmakers were pulled in to these boys’ lives (their website features updates and fundraising links for the boys and other organizations).

The plight of the mothers and grandmothers is overwhelming. It’s difficult to watch the one father who is in the picture; he has delusions of grandeur, and we can see Andrew following in those charismatic, aimless footsteps (although most viewers are completely charmed and heartened by Andrew’s grinning confidence). The boys are all smart and funny, yet they are faced with a system–whether it be the juvenile system, or a free-falling economy–that is completely against them and their families.

Harley
Harley

_______________________________

Spanish Lake

Spanish Lake
Spanish Lake

 

Spanish Lake is an unincorporated township north of St. Louis eight miles away from Ferguson. Filmmaker Philip Andrew Morton lived there until he was 18. When he returned 10 years later, his childhood home and elementary school were abandoned, and he wanted to explore the phenomenon of “white flight” that occurred in St. Louis in the last half century.

He made Spanish Lake, which centers mostly on the white people who left Spanish Lake as they reflect upon the past. While these interviews make up the majority of the film, there is a bit of history that gives some context to the demographic shift. Spanish Lake was kept unincorporated due to anti-government sentiment, which led to a lack of social services and the building of Section 8 apartments, where many impoverished African Americans moved after housing developments like Pruitt-Igoe were destroyed. Realtors redlined neighborhoods, pushing whites in and out strategically. White people–fueled by racism and the lack of what had been strong, unionized labor opportunities–fled to other suburbs or rural areas.

In Spanish Lake, Morton captures a reunion of “Lakers”–former residents of Spanish Lake who have a reunion at Spanish Lake and drink beer while reminiscing about the past. Morton’s motivation in making Spanish Lake was his own nostalgia, as he remembers his childhood in Spanish Lake with a sense of pain and loss. While there’s no doubt that he also has a social awareness (that was certainly heightened as the timing of his film coincided with Ferguson making waves around the world, as Ferguson’s demographic shift has been similar to Spanish Lake’s), the overriding tone of the documentary is nostalgic, peppered with just enough history to give some context.

White former residents talk about the fights, and getting beaten up by “sisters,” and laugh about shooting a Black Santa off a new resident’s roof. The pain in these former residents’ comments is palpable, but it’s left unexamined. The documentary plays for more than 30 minutes before a Black person speaks. There are short clips of Black apartment residents thanking the local police force and their new (white) landlords.

Had Spanish Lake existed in a vacuum, it would have been a fine piece of nostalgic film that briefly illuminated a modern history of segregation and deeply entrenched racism and a decaying middle class as labor and manufacturing opportunities dissolved.

If viewers are looking for a nuanced commentary on “how Ferguson became Ferguson,” Spanish Lake is not enough. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, full of authentic voices that speak to the fear and trauma of growing up in poverty and institutional racism, should be required viewing.

However, Spanish Lake itself does capture how many white Americans react and speak about a recent history of demographic changes, housing segregation, and school desegregation. It’s uncomfortable to hear their voices, but those voices are familiar and loud, all across America.

There’s a lot of talking, but not a lot of critical thinking. And when it comes to talking about race and class in America, that’s a painfully accurate representation.

 

White voices dominate Spanish Lake
White voices dominate Spanish Lake

 

Rural poverty and urban poverty are not the same. Individual racism and institutional racism are not the same. However, these forces are woven together as they are fiercely kept separate in our common mythologies of what America means. We avoid difficult stories that disrupt the narratives we’ve come to understand.

We don’t want to hear how, in so many ways, Pruitt-Igoe was set up for failure, and fit into a narrative that it was the residents themselves who were failures. We don’t want to listen to the young Black man who was a boy in Pruitt-Igoe, who loved quietly watching insects in a field before he saw his brother brutally murdered–then all he could think about was killing.

We don’t want to hear about rural poverty, and how the economy has gutted middle America and left in the rubble children who are failed by their parents, their schools, and the legal system. One audience member at a Rich Hill screening praised Andrew for his faith and encouraged him to keep praying, as if his optimism and charming smile would someday pay the bills.

We don’t want to hear the racism of former residents of a “nice area,” who can’t see that their own anti-government stance helped usher in low-income housing, which they were also against. Then there weren’t social services available–because they were against centralized government–and that lack of social services harmed everyone. In so many ways, Spanish Lake represents an entire nation of people who vote and scream against their own interests without any sense of introspection. What makes Spanish Lake jarring is the modernity of the footage. In The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, the footage of residents and officials of Black Jack, another township north of St. Louis who wanted to keep a certain “element” out of their neighborhoods is in black and white, grainy news reels of a time that seems so long ago. But it wasn’t. In Spanish Lake, former residents make the same arguments in broad daylight in high-definition.

We want to believe that it’s all simple. Segregated housing policies are a thing of the past, and we’re in a “post-racial” society. Poverty is due to laziness. People should just choose to live in better conditions and pull up their bootstraps, and ignore history. We want to ignore history.

That is the American mythology that has a chokehold on us all.

But the chain is tightening around Missouri’s neck, and the bell is sounding. We must leave the mythology in the past and deal with reality.

Because Missouri–its segregation, its poverty, and its denial–is America.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68″]

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/QNp0AuPiZ3Y”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw38xwWu3r4″]

 

See also: “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City”; “St. Louis: A city divided” at Al Jazeera America; For its poverty rate, Missouri should be placed on child neglect registry. at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

 

Self-Made Orphan: Why We Cringe When Karen Cooper Snacks on Her Dad

The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…”

This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

Kyra Schon had exactly one line—“I hurt”—and less than ten minutes of screen time in George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Much of her role consisted of lying supine on a table. Her big scene happened 84 minutes into a 95-minute film. Her character is not a perennial favorite on the creepiest kids in cinema lists. (Although when she does appear, she’s No. 1.) But before Regan MacNeil showed us her infamous head-spinning trick, before Damien took the world’s most sinister tricycle ride, and before Samara hauled herself out of the television and into our nightmares, there was little Karen Cooper, who ate her dad and stabbed her mom with a garden trowel.

Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper
Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper

 

It’s impossible to understand Karen without discussing her parents, Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen (Marilyn Eastman); initially, her family is all that gives her context in Romero’s strange new world. But the Coopers always bothered me in Night of the Living Dead. They didn’t seem to belong. After all, almost half the film passes before they appear. Ben (Duane Jones), our protagonist, has spent a good chunk of screen time securing an abandoned farmhouse against the undead. All the stuff you want a good survivor to do, he does: barricade the doors and windows, look for supplies, and settle the nearly catatonic survivor-girl Barbra (Judith O’Dea) on the sofa. Forty minutes in and we’re all ready to weather the long night of Romero’s undead apocalypse.

And then the Coopers emerge from the cellar snarling with metaphorical significance—i.e., the nuclear family staggers out of the underworld to reassert its importance. We’re what you’re meant to defend, they seem to say. Of course, their presence also highlights the awful truth of any zombie apocalypse film: there are no safe places.

If the dead don’t overrun a stronghold, you will have to deal with the living eventually.

Karl Hardman as family man Harry Cooper
Karl Hardman as family man Harry Cooper

 

By the way, good luck if the living you have to deal with is Harry Cooper. He’s all the worst characteristics of the patriarchy packaged and amplified: aggressive, entitled, self-centered, oddly petulant, and arrogant. He won’t apologize for not coming up to help, despite hearing Barbra’s screams. Instead, he lashes out at Ben for criticizing him. When the others refuse to join him in the cellar, he throws a temper tantrum. He’ll board up that door and leave them to rot, understand? Moments later, he furiously demands they share the supplies Ben’s scavenged from the house. “We’ve got to have food down there,” Harry blusters. “We’ve got a right.” Helen, his wife, is not much more compelling. Bitter and cynical, she can’t resist poking at her husband’s neuroses:

“That’s important, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“To be right and for everyone else to be wrong.”

We know from just a few lines of dialogue that this is no close-knit couple or loving family, for all that its structure might evoke white picket fences and suburban houses. (Note: it’s unclear where the Coopers come from, but they seem neither rural nor urban.) And in case we miss the point, Helen sums up their situation this way: “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”

Marilyn Eastman as Helen Cooper
Marilyn Eastman as Helen Cooper

 

The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…” her father objects to bringing her upstairs. She is, they believe, the thing to be protected, shielded from the horror of the events outside. Like the house itself, if they can get her through the night, it will all be OK.

What no one understands in Romero’s first film is, of course, that the undead have already infected Karen. While audiences of Dawn of the Dead and every zombie movie after know that a bite is a death sentence,  the characters in Night of the Living Dead haven’t fully realized what they will have to sacrifice. The news reports in the background that families “will have to forgo the dubious comfort of a funeral.” But the problem is much more insidious and frightening: families will have to forgo the comfort of family in order to survive.

It only takes a brief moment of contact for the Coopers to lose Karen. And no amount of hand-holding or parental influence will undo the contamination. While many debate the extent to which Night of the Living Dead is a political allegory, Romero has repeatedly stated he wanted the film to capture the social unrest of the 1960s. Once exposed to the chaos of the world outside, Karen is irrevocably changed. She is about to become part of the danger. Only Ben seems at all cognizant of the fact that she may pose a threat to them. “Who knows what kind of disease those things carry,” he points out when her parents acknowledge that she’s been bitten.

Sure, she looks helpless…
Sure, she looks helpless…

 

Until the end of the film, Karen remains what she seems: a sick little girl. She dies and rises amidst the chaos of the house being overrun by the undead. After a struggle, Ben shoots Harry, who went for his gun. Harry stumbles down to the cellar and staggers towards his little girl, hand outstretched in what should be a touching scene between parent and child. The next time we see the two of them, Karen crouches over her father—now dead or unconscious— a handful of meat in her hands and his blood on her lips. She does not need his affection, but she will take sustenance from him.

Undead Karen takes a bite out of dear old Dad
Undead Karen takes a bite out of dear old Dad

 

Helen finds them this way and, having drawn Karen’s attention, backs into a corner, horrified. Karen advances and then stabs her mother with a garden trowel in an almost surreal, Hitchcockian sequence. Helen is helpless against her undead daughter. All she can say is “baby,” which Karen does not acknowledge or recognize. Her murder of her mother is ultra-violent; she deals several blows to Helen’s abdomen, thus destroying the origin of her own life.

Romero’s living dead regularly use tools
Romero’s living dead regularly use tools

 

The film and the scene disturbed audiences to no end, and Karen Cooper has become one of the iconic images of Romero’s films. As said, her moment is brief. Yet, it sticks with us. If we compare Karen to the other women in the film, she initially does not seem unlike Barbra, who is mostly helpless and overwhelmed. She must depend on the others for her survival; alone, she wouldn’t make it. Predictably, these young women are fragile, delicate, and need protection. They are not meant for the horrors outside the house.

This appears to be true up until Karen’s point of resurrection. Where Barbra is devoured, Karen is transformed. Unlike her parents, who are trying to hold onto the old social norms, or Ben, who will do anything to survive, Karen joins the restless mob of the undead. Not consciously or willfully, it’s true, but the end result is the same. Although briefly a victim, she becomes the monster and destroys the remains of her family. She cements her status as a member of the undead by consuming her father and increases their numbers by murdering her mother. These two acts definitively separate her from humanity. She neither wants nor needs the shelter of the family unit.

Karen Cooper transformed
Karen Cooper transformed

 

What’s subversive about Karen Cooper, then, is that she doesn’t just die. In the eyes of society, a good, innocent little girl would simply perish when she encounters something so monstrous. Instead, she joins it. Embodied in her, the new generation does not save us or give us hope. Rather, they become part of the chaos. And no amount of reasoning or pleading will sway them.

Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to the Tate Street High Society literary blog. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme

 

 

The Terror of Little Girls: Social Anxiety About Women in Horrifying Girlhood

Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.
Horror films have a long-standing tradition of commenting on the social fears and anxieties of their time.
Another universally recognized truth of horror is that scary children are terrifying–especially little girls.
While an analysis of “creepy children” in horror films usually proclaims that they are providing commentary on a loss of innocence, and it would make sense that a little girl is the “ultimate” in innocence, it can’t be that simple. We wouldn’t be so shaken to the core by possessed, haunted, violent little girls if we were simply supposed to be longing for innocent times of yesteryear.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught–stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection.

In the Victorian era, the ideal female was supposed to be pale, fainting-prone and home-bound. Feminist literary icons Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar write about this nineteenth-century ideal in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:

“At its most extreme, this nineteenth-century ideal of the frail, even sickly female ultimately led to the glorification of the dead or dying woman. The most fruitful subject for literature, announced the American romancer Edgar Allan Poe in 1846, is ‘the death… of a beautiful woman’… But while dead women were fascinating, dying girl-children were even more enthralling… These episodes seem to bring to the surface an extraordinary imperative that underlay much of the nineteenth-century ideology of femininity: in one way or another, woman must be ‘killed’ into passivity for her to acquiesce in what Rousseau and others considered her duty of self-abnegation ‘relative to men.'”

The feminine “ideal” (and its relation to literature) coincided with women beginning the long fight for suffrage and individual rights. It’s no surprise, then, that men wanted to symbolically kill off the woman so she could fulfill her ultimate passive role. There was something comforting about this to audiences.
Rhoda Penmark will not lose to a boy. Or anyone else.
Fast forward to the 1950s and 60s, and the modern horror genre as we know it emerged and began evolving into something that provided social commentary while playing on audiences’ deepest fears (the “other,” invasion, demonic possession, nuclear mutations and the end of the world).
We know that horror films have always been rife with puritanical punishment/reward for promiscuous women/virgins (the “Final Girl” trope), and violence toward women or women needing to be rescued are common themes. These themes comfort audiences, and confirm their need to keep women subjugated in their proper place. It’s no coincidence that the 50s and 60s were seeing sweeping social change in America (the Pill, changing divorce laws, resurgence of the ERA, a lead-up to Roe v. Wade).
Terrifying little girls also make their debut in this era. Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls–not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying–these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
The Bad Seed‘s Rhoda Penmark (played by Patty McCormack in the 1956 film), genetically predisposed to be a sociopath, murders a classmate and the janitor who suspects her. Her classmate–a boy–beats her in a penmanship contest, and she beats him to death with her tap shoes. A little girl, in competition with a boy, loses, and kills. While in the novel Rhoda gets away with her crimes, the Hays Code commanded that the film version “punished” her for her crimes and she’s struck by lightning. It’s revealed that Rhoda’s sociopathic tendencies come from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer. This notion of female murderous rage, passed down through generations and claiming boys/men as its victim, certainly reflects social fear at the time.
In 1968, Night of the Living Dead premiered on big screens and has been seen as commenting on racism/the Civil Rights movement, Cold War-era politics and critiquing America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. However, little Karen Cooper’s (Kyra Schon) iconic scene has long disturbed audiences the most. Infected by zombies, she eats her father and impales her mother with a trowel. A horror twist to an Oedipal tale, one could see Karen as living out the gravest fears of those against the women’s movement/second-wave feminism. Possessed by a demon, she eats her father (consumes the patriarchy) and kills her mother (overtaking her mother’s generation with masculine force).
Little Karen Cooper consumes patriarchy and overtakes her mother.
Five years later, Roe v. Wade had been decided (giving women the right to legal first-trimester abortions), the Pill was legal, no-fault divorce was more acceptable and women began flooding the workforce.
Meanwhile, on the big screen, sweet little Regan MacNeil–the daughter of an over-worked, atheist mother–becomes possessed by the devil.
The Exorcist was based on a novel, which itself was based on the exorcism case of a little boy. Of course, the novelist and filmmakers wanted audiences to be disturbed and terrified, so the sex of the possessed protagonist changed (would it be as unsettling if it was a little boy?).
Chris MacNeil, Regan’s mother, goes to great lengths to help her daughter, and resorts to Catholicism when all else has failed. Regan reacts violently to religious symbols, lashes out and kills priests, speaks in a masculine voice and masturbates with a crucifix. This certainly isn’t simply a “demonic possession” horror film, especially since it was written and made into a film at the height of the fight for women’s rights (the Catholic church being an adamant foe to reproductive rights). Only after Regan releases her demon, which possesses a priest (who flings himself out of a window to commit suicide), does she regain her innocence and girlhood.
Tied and bound, Regan haunts and kills men, and reacts violently to religious images.
What her mother and her culture are embracing–atheism, working women, reproductive rights, sexual aggressiveness–can be seen as the “demons” that overcome the innocent girl and kill men (and traditional religion).
These films are have terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. The musical scores, the direction, the jarring and shocking images–however, they also play to society’s deepest fears about women and feminism. For little girls to be possessed is the ultimate fall.

In 1980, The Shining was released. Yet another film adaptation of a novel (Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of Stephen King’s novel), this film contains two of the creepiest little girls in film history–the Grady girls. The Shining shines a light on crises of masculinity. Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is a recovering alcoholic who has hurt his son, Danny, in the past. When he takes his wife, Wendy, and son with him to be caretakers of a hotel over a winter, his descent into madness quickly begins. Danny has telepathic abilities, and sees and experiences the hotel’s violent past. As he rides his Big Wheel through the hotel, he stops when he sees two little girls begging him to “Come play with us Danny. Forever.” These girls–dead daughters of Grady, a previous caretaker who killed his family and himself–are trying to pull Danny into their world. Danny sees images of them murdered brutally, and flees in fear. Meanwhile, Jack is struggling with his alcoholism, violence and lack of control of himself and his sensitive wife and child. When he sees Grady, Grady advises him:

“My girls, sir, they didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches, and tried to burn it down. But I ‘corrected’ them sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ‘corrected’ her.”

Danny is confronted with the horror of what men are capable of.
In this aftermath of the women’s movement, Jack (a weak man, resistant to authority) is being haunted and guided by a forceful, dominating masculinity of the past. He’s stuck between the two worlds, and succumbs to violent, domineering alcoholism.
But he loses. Wendy and Danny win.
While his predecessor succeeded in “correcting” his wife and daughters, that time has past.
Here, the flashing memories of the ghosts of the past are terrifying. The Grady girls provide a look into what it is to be “corrected” and dominated.
“Come play with us Danny,” the girls beg, haunting him with the realities of masculine force and dominance.
Starting with the late-70s and 80s slasher films (and the growing Religious Right/Moral Majority in politics), the “Final Girl” reigned supreme, and the promiscuous young woman would perish first. Masculinity (characterized with “monstrous” violence and strength) and femininity became natural enemies. These fights on the big screen mirrored the fights in reality. The Equal Rights Amendment was pushed out of favor and was never ratified, and a growing surge of conservatism and family values began dominating American rhetoric.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, we see a resurgence of the terrifying little girl. This time, she is serving as a warning to single/working/independent/adoptive mothers.
In The Ring (the 2002 American adaptation of a 1998 Japanese film), Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) is a  journalist and a single mother. She unknowingly risks her son and his father’s lives by showing them a cursed videotape. A critic noted:

“If she had never entered the public sphere and viewed the cassette in the first place, she would not have inadvertently caused Noah’s death, nor would she have to potentially cause the death of another. Rachel would, perhaps, have been better off staying at home.”

Single motherhood has often been the driving force behind horror plots.
In her investigation into the video, she discovers the twisted, dark past of the video’s subject, Samara, a young girl who started life troubled (her birthmother tried to drown her). She was adopted by a couple, but her adoptive mother suffered from visions and haunting events due to Samara’s powers. They attempted to institutionalize Samara, but eventually the adoptive mother drowns her in a well after Samara cannot be cured of her psychosis. Her adoptive father, Rachel finds, locked Samara in an attic of their barn, and Samara left a clue of the well’s location behind wallpaper. (Bitch Flicks ran an excellent analysis of the yellow wallpaper and the themes of women’s stories in The Ring.)
Samara’s life was punctuated by drowning, which has throughout history been a way for women to commit suicide or be killed (symbolizing both the suffocation of women’s roles and the return to the life-giving waters that women are often associated with). While Rachel “saves” Samara’s corpse and gives her a proper burial, Samara didn’t want that. She rejected Rachel’s motherhood and infects Rachel’s son. Rachel–in her attempts to mother–cannot seem to win.
Rachel “saves” Samara from her watery grave, but she still cannot succeed.
The ambiguous ending suggests that Rachel may indeed save her son, but will have to harm another to do so. This idea of motherly self-sacrifice portrays the one way that Rachel–single, working mother Rachel–can redeem herself. However, the parallel narrative of the dangers of silencing and “locking up” women is loud and clear.
And in 2009’s Orphan, Esther is a violent, overtly sexual orphan from Russia who is adopted by an American family. Esther is “not nearly as innocent as she claims to be,” says the IMDb description. This story certainly plays on the fear of the “other” in adopted little girls (much like The Ring) and how that is realized in the mothers. In this film, Esther is actually an adult “trapped” in a child’s body. The clash of a childish yet adult female (as culturally, little girls are somehow expected to embody adult sexuality and yet be innocent and naïve) again reiterates this fear of little girls with unnatural and unnerving power. The drowning death of Esther, as her adoptive mother and sister flee, shows that Esther must be killed to be subdued. The power of mother is highlighted, yet the film still plays on cultural fears of mothering through international adoptions and the deep, disturbing duality of childhood and adulthood that girls are supposed to embody.
Like Samara, Esther is a deeply disturbed daughter, capable of  demonic violence.
In the last 60 years, American culture has seen remarkable change and resistance to that change. Horror films–which portray the very core of society’s fears and anxieties–have reflected the fears of women’s social movements through the faces of terrifying little girls.
While nineteenth-century literature comforted audiences with the trope of a dead, beautiful woman, thus making her passive and frail (of course, we still do this), twentieth and twenty-first century horror films force audiences to come face to face with murderous, demonic, murdered and psychotic little girls to parallel fears of women having economic, reproductive, parenting and marital (or single) power.
Little girls are supposed to be the epitome of all we hold dear–innocent, sweet, submissive and gentle. The Victorian Cult of Girlhood and Womanhood bleeds into the twenty-first century anti-feminist movements, and these qualities are still revered.
Horror films hold a mirror up to these ideals, distorting the images and terrifying viewers in the process. The terror that society feels while looking at these little girls echoes the terror it feels when confronted with changing gender norms and female power.

_____________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

What’s in a Soundtrack? The Sweet Sounds of ‘Romeo + Juliet’

Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is one told by the older generation. Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree was singing “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity–fades.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture (this CD was--OK is--one of my greatest treasures)
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture

 

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

When you are 14, your senses are heightened–music permeates every part of you, a brush of a hand sends shock waves through your body, and the smell of someone’s shampoo and chewing gum is enough to evoke lust. It’s no surprise that for adolescents, music is a powerful, integral part of their self-identity and emotional expression.

I’m thankful that I was 14 in the mid-90s. I know it’s easy to be nostalgic and believe that the moment we came of age was the best moment in the history of the world (“When I was that age…”), but I’m confident in saying that 1996 was really an epic year for being 14.

Riot grrrl was hanging in the air. Female musicians were featured on the airwaves, many male rockers were feminist, and teen films featured complex female protagonists. I was saturated in feminist media. We were riding an idealistic wave of feminism–a new generation of daughters whose mothers had lived through the women’s movement, who lived in a world where Title IX and Roe v. Wade always existed.

When I was 14, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet was released, and the play that has been speaking to and about teens for 400 years awakened my already heightened senses. As someone who identified more with Wuthering Heights than Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, this intense angst really spoke to me. And the music that accompanied the film was woven into the fiber of my life–I imagined it as my soundtrack, not just the film’s soundtrack.

I’ve written before about how I see the film (and Shakespeare‘s text) as challenging patriarchal social orders and revealing the toxicity of masculinity. Luhrmann’s version highlights this, certainly more so than Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

Zeffirelli’s soundtrack featured a score by Nino Rota and its “Love Theme” is known in two versions–“What is Youth?” and “A Time for Us.” “What is a Youth?” is included in the score, and features the lyrics that are sung on screen during the Capulet party when Romeo and Juliet meet. The lyrics to this version focus on how “cupid rules us all,” and that “youth” and the “fairest maid” all fade. In contrast, the lyrics to “A Time for Us” are more hopeful: “…some day there’ll be a new world / a world of shining hope for you and me.” Romeo and Juliet as a text can be read in both ways, of course. It’s important to think about Zeffirelli’s version in the context of the “youth” movement of the 1960s–anti-war rebellion, women’s rights activism, rising counterculture–and what Romeo and Juliet tells us about the utter ignorance and destruction of adults’ decisions.

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

Luhrmann also pulls Romeo and Juliet into the context of an era dominated by youth culture (see aforementioned links and 1,000 Buzzfeed posts about how rad the 90s were). However, this Romeo + Juliet is marked with much more poignant commentary on gender and culture. The “Love Theme” from Romeo + Juliet is sung by Des’ree, a Black woman (she performs on screen at the Capulet party, a nod to the Zeffirelli version). “Kissing You” is a more abstract look at love: “Pride can stand a thousand trials / The strong will never fall / But watching stars without you / My soul cries… Touch me deep, pure and true.” The entire scene, and the song itself, is a more intimate and moving addition to the party scene.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7eH9qnH8TM”]

Luhrmann’s soundtrack (he is, after all, known not only for his showy films but also for his curated soundtracks) was the soundtrack to my teen years. If I want to really feel those 14-year-old feelings, I just need to listen to Romeo + Juliet. The choices of popular musical artists of the time (Des’ree, Garbage, The Cardigans, Radiohead, Butthole Surfers, Everclear, etc.) related the story of Romeo and Juliet through their own eyes, not those of a stodgy old narrator. And the diversity of the artists–male, female, Black, white–also reflects the progressive nature of youth culture.

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is one told by the older generation. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity (eye roll)–fades. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree sings “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain.

Luhrmann’s soundtrack, then, does what we imagine Shakespeare aimed to do with this play–forces us to look critically at love and life through the eyes of youth to critique the patriarchal social orders that cause the tragedy.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is often read in school when students are freshmen in high school. I would imagine the framers of this curricular choice were thinking that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale against rebellion and teen lust. Instead, Romeo and Juliet really is about the absurdity and destructive nature of society’s bullshit norms and rules.

The songs in Romeo + Juliet aren’t just for backdrop; instead, these songs are characters–edgy, angry, beautiful, and poppy representations of the sweeping emotions of youth, love, anger, and rebellion.

Just listen, and be transported to a youth that won’t fade:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4xPXlneCGs”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJbXjIEP6rM”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkXdeUjM1pc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNb93N3-ek”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU6i_JhbVsc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbiG04X3ws”]

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Tragedy of Masculinity in Romeo + Juliet

Recommended reading: Here is what I learned from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet at That’s Normal

 

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

The Sounds of Change and Confusion in ‘The Graduate’

Mike Nichol’s ‘The Graduate’ has one of the most popular soundtracks of all-time. The songs reveal the dynamics of a character, theme, and a moment without the use of dialogue or a backstory, but simply through the lyrics of a Simon and Garfunkel song.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

The marriage of two different art forms- the sounds in our ears and the image on screen- can take a scene far beyond what was written on paper. With a well-placed song, a moment in film can be experienced on all levels, staying in our head long after the credits roll. Lyrics to a song can provide an insight into a character’s mind on a deeper level than just dialogue. Mike Nichols’s The Graduate has one of the most popular soundtracks of all time. The songs reveal the dynamics of a character, theme, and a moment without the use of dialogue or a backstory, but simply through the lyrics of a Simon and Garfunkel song.

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The most renowned song used in the film is “The Sound of Silence,” which acts as the soliloquy of film’s protagonist, Benjamin Braddock. Inspired by the Kennedy assassination, the song became a popular hit associated with the 1960s counterculture and antiwar protests. “The Sound of Silence” holds what is the ongoing and overarching theme of the film–youths rebelling against the middle-class values of their parents’ generation. It also most representative of the inner turmoil Benjamin finds himself on upon graduating college and embarking on his new journey to “the real world.”

The first time the song plays is during the opening scene. The song kicks in after Benjamin’s plane has landed in Los Angeles. The pace of the song follows the speed of Ben’s monotonous progress through the airport. It peaks as he rides an escalator to meet his family and then fades out as the scene dissolves into a close-up shot of Ben at home, sitting unhappily in front of his fish tank, ready for his new life.

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The next few scenes play out the lyrics we have just heard in the opening.

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared disturb the sound of silence.

“Fools,” said I, “You do not know –Silence like a cancer grows.

Hear my words that I might teach you.

Take my arms that I might reach you.”

But my words like silent raindrops fell

and echoed in the wells of silence.

These lyrics echo the graduation party, where Benjamin is surrounded by a stifling crowd of his parents’ friends, all talking and asking him about his future without bothering to hear his answer.  No one listens to his concerns or apprehensions. Benjamin wants to make sense of his world first before worrying about his future, but adults want him to have a plan. In the film’s most famous line, a family friend suggests Benjamin goes plastics.

The older generation wants the younger generation to follow in their footsteps, to conform for the sake of safety and tradition. This is the reasoning for all of Benjamin’s aimlessness and disaffectedness, seeing that his only option seems to be unhappily working in a sterile corporate setting until middle-age. His zombie-like drone in the airport opening reflects the future Benjamin pictures if he follows in his elders’ lead.

“The Sound of Silence” is also featured in a second montage. The song plays right after Benjamin has shut the hotel door to have sex with Mrs. Robinson, his first time. The montage begins with brilliant dissolves and intercuts as Benjamin monotonously (just like the airport opening) goes through the motions of his days at home with his parents over his shoulder and nights alone with Mrs. Robinson. The affair is not the answer he is looking for, though. He still suffers through “the sounds of silence” with no one around to understand or hear him. The song is played again because Benjamin is still as confused as he was at the beginning of the story.

Although “The Sound of Silence” has been told through Benjamin’s point of view, the lyrics can also reflect Mrs. Robinson’s state of being. We learn that she got pregnant before marriage, and that is why she is with Mr. Robinson. Mrs. Robinson was raised in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and the mindset of that upbringing gave her no other choice. The consequences of her actions were that she had to live her life being with a man she did not want to truly be with.

Not only was she stuck in a marriage she did not want, she also makes it clear throughout the movie that she regrets letting her education go to waste. It is a sore spot for Mrs. Robinson, she goes from “I don’t like art” to “I studied art in college” in a matter of minutes.

“Hear my words that I might teach you.

Take my arms that I might reach you.”

But my words like silent raindrops fell

and echoed in the wells of silence.

Mrs. Robinson must have felt the truth of these words throughout the course of her life. Wanting to express to her parents how she did not love Mr. Robinson and did not want to be with him, how she wanted to continue her education. She was, and is, a woman in an unhappy marriage trying to make herself heard. But gender roles in the 1950s meant women were silenced, only expected to do their duties as a housewife, to serve their homes and husbands’ wills.

Mrs. Robinson’s unhappiness manifests itself within her actions in film. These changes in her actions were due to her increasing unhappiness in her mandated role as a housewife. These new ideals and changes of the 1960s led her to understand that women have just as many rights as men do, negating her ingrained mindset of the 1950s that women are supposed to bow to their superiors (men).

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“The Sound of Silence” song ends, and “April Come She Will” quickly picks up as Benjamin lays in the hotel bed, cutting to him bored in his room and then leaving for the pool. The song ends with a clever match cut as Benjamin jumps off of a pool raft and into bed with Mrs. Robinson.

“April Come She Will” is a simple and bittersweet song that represents the seasons of Benjamin’s relationship with Mrs. Robinson.

April, comes she will,

When streams are ripe and swelled with rain

May, she will stay,

Resting in my arms again.

These lyrics represent how smitten Benjamin was with Mrs. Robinson at the beginning of their affair. Mrs. Robinson continues to stay, and their affair goes on for some time.

June, she’ll change her tune.

In restless walks she’ll prowl the night.

July, she will fly,

And give no warning to her flight.

However, their relationship is beginning to change after Benjamin being pressured by his parents and Mr. Robinson to go on a date with their daughter, Elaine.

August, die she must.

The autumn winds blow chilly and cold.

September, I’ll remember.

A love once new has now grown old.

Their relationship is coming to an end, and though the affair was exciting and new at first, it cannot go on forever it will soon dissolve.

The third song in the film is “Scarborough Fair,” and is played several times. It first plays as Benjamin is driving to Berkeley to find Elaine, who he is now newly smitten with.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Remember me to one who lives there

She once was a true love of mine.

This can be read as representative of his journey, Benjamin is searching for what he believes to be is his love, the answer to all of his uncertainty and meandering and questions of what to do with his life.

Between the salt water and the sea strands

(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)

Then she’ll be a true love of mine

The war references represent the battle within him, the questions Benjamin is facing with his love life and whether or not he is going to do something about it. He is here in Berkeley to find Elaine and to convince her to be with him.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

These lyrics play as the film pans on Elaine, the first time we see her at Berkeley. The lyrics question if Benjamin is going to make the choice fight for what he believes he wants in his life? Is he going to go for it?

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An early version of the chart-topping hit “Mrs. Robinson” is another highlight of the film’s soundtrack. Originally written about Mrs. Roosevelt, the title and character of the lyrics was changed to fit the film. The song plays several times throughout the film, most notably throughout the chase scenes as Benjamin heads to Elaine’s wedding.

The lyrics do not directly comment on what is happening on screen, but is instead a further reflection on Mrs. Robinson’s character. It is also a song that again reflects the theme of the film, the old generation vs. the new generation, and the ideals of the 50s vs. the changes of the 60s.

Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes.

Put it in your pantry with your cupcackes.

It’s a little secret just the Robinson affair.

Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.

The entire older generation of the 60s was desperately trying to maintain an unmaintainable false image that they’ve been trying to hold up for years. Hide it from the kids, they’ll rip off the covers and expose everything that’s wrong with their generation’s ideals, which were forcing you to hide your true self or submit to a forced gender role. Work at a job you hate. Give up your education to get married because you are pregnant.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Joe DiMaggio represents the heroes of the past, the traditional American values that were so highly honored in that time. But the ideals the past have given way to the upcoming changes, the defiance of gender roles and roles in society.

The Graduate begins and ends with the same song, “The Sound of Silence.” Elaine and Benjamin’s rebellion against their elders culminates here. Benjamin has stopped Elaine’s wedding and they leave together. They run onto the bus, their smiles and glee slowly turning to lost and forlorn looks as the music starts to play.

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“The Sound of Silence” also speaks to Elaine’s character. Elaine has surely felt the “sounds of silence” as Benjamin has. She is also struggling with the idea of not wanting to spend her life being dictated and controlled by the ideas of her parent’s generations. Elaine must have felt pressure from her father and mother to marry this man, a perfect man to secure her future. Who needs an education from Berkeley when you can get married? But Elaine is not going to be doomed to repeat her mother’s mistake of being in a loveless marriage. What better way to out rightly and outrageously defy her parents than running away on her wedding day?

Although Benjamin and Elaine have succeeded in doing everything to defy their parents, now they ask “What are we left with?” What do they do now? Are they going to repeat the mistakes of the past and stay together without really loving or knowing each other? Benjamin’s questioning of what to do with his life is no different now than at the beginning of the film. He is just as confused and directionless as ever. The film ends as it began, book-ended with the famous Simon and Garfunkel tune.

The Graduate changed the world when it became one of the first films to reuse popular music for a film, as well as one of the first representations of counterculture youth. It proved that music could be used to comment and highlight themes and characters of a film. The songs impeccably fit with a film that first represented the future changes that would rock the country.

 

Caroline Madden is a recent graduate with a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory. She writes about film at GeekJuice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

A Feminine Fire Burns Behind ‘Mad Men’

However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of ‘Mad Men’ like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.

The women of 'Mad Men'
The women of Mad Men

This guest post by Danielle Winston appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

The glossy backdrop for AMC’s Mad Men is the high-stakes Manhattan advertising game, namely the office of Sterling Cooper.  Set right smack dab in the feminist revolution, when season 1 takes off, it’s 1960: the year birth control pills received approval by the FDA.

Mad Men’s stylized universe revolves around the Jagger of the ad world: the ever-enigmatic Don Draper (Jon Hamm).

Fascinating women surround Don at Sterling Cooper. And sometimes just looking at Mr. Tall Dark and Dreamy can steam up their Ray Bans, but more often, he’s so exasperating they struggle with the urge to whack some sense into him with their clutch purses.

 

The infamous Don Draper
The infamous Don Draper

 

In between writing copy for Lucky Strike, pitching the Cool Whip clients, and lunching at the automat, the men of Sterling Cooper swig scotch and flirt so unabashedly with the secretaries, their actions often cross over into sexual harassment territory, which is totally cool, since it hadn’t been invented yet. Meanwhile, the lucky ladies at the receiving end usually proffer demure smiles, and make sure to reveal just enough ankle real estate to warrant their attentions. As these women partake in the flirtation-dance, their longings are kept under wraps, not unlike the tattered copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which magically opens to the “good parts by itself,” and is tossed around amongst the giddy secretarial pool behind closed doors.

Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) arrives at Sterling Cooper fresh out of Miss Deaver’s Secretarial School with a bouncy ponytail and can-do attitude.  Given the demanding position of Donald Draper’s latest secretary, Peggy is uneasy when she finds herself flooded with salacious stares from countless male coworkers. Soon Peggy becomes so distressed by an unwanted sexual advance from a copywriter, she can’t do her work. When she confides in her supervisor, Joan, instead of being met with empathy, Joan tells her that a plain-Jane like Peggy should enjoy her “new girl” status, considering the extra attention surely won’t last. What Joan doesn’t realize is, however naïve Peggy may appear, she is far more clever than her facade suggests, and will zoom up the corporate ladder like no woman ever has at Sterling Cooper.

A young and eager Peggy Olsen
A young and eager Peggy

 

The first hint into Peggy’s sexual attitude is her visit to a gynecologist, where she hopes to procure a prescription for birth control pills. But with sexual freedom comes the price tag of humiliation. While in the stirrups, the smarmy male doctor advises Peggy that pills are “$11 a pop,” so she shouldn’t become “the town-pump just to get her money’s worth.” And if that’s not enough to scare the sexy out of Peggy, he adds with a smirk that if she dares to “abuse the privilege,” he will revoke her prescription.

Peggy doesn’t scare easily. She’s highly complex. In perhaps in the first glimpse into her private desires, while alone in the office with Don, Peggy places a warm hand atop his, and lets it linger a beat too long. Put off by the advance, Don tells her, “I’m not your boyfriend,” and sends her a strong message to never to veer into this territory again. Don’s reaction is tricky to comprehend, especially since he’s established as a philanderer. Is this sudden bout of professionalism sincere? Is Peggy simply not his type? Or is the mere fact that Peggy made the first move such a turnoff it immediately labels her as undesirable?

Peggy doesn't scare easily
Peggy doesn’t scare easily

Even more curious is Peggy’s experience with another maddening man: Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser).  When she first meets the engaged but overly flirtatious account man who is known for his poor manners with women, Pete’s overtures makes Peggy so uneasy she refuses to wait alone with him, even for a few minutes. The encounter takes an unexpected turn when later that evening, Pete shows up at Peggy’s apartment door, drunk, and confesses he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Instead of sending him away and/or slapping the sleaze out of him, Peggy takes him to bed. Was Peggy so flattered by Pete’s desire it awoke her own? Perhaps Don’s rebuff caused Peggy’s powers of sexual reasoning to be muddied. Then, when the liaison leaves her pregnant, Peggy hasn’t a clue.  She believes she’s merely gotten fat. It’s not until the startling episode where she gives birth that Peggy discovers the truth. Afterward, she gives the baby to a relative to raise and resumes her life as a single woman. 

Soon Don recognizes Peggy’s creative talents, promotes her, and she becomes a successful copywriter. As Peggy evolves, she rises through the ranks on merit, and along the way has a potpourri of unsatisfying boyfriends and love affairs. 

Fast-forward to season 6: Peggy’s new boss, the earnest (and married) Ted (Kevin Rahm), confesses romantic feelings for her.  During this time, Peggy’s desire is illustrated, as she longs for the man she can’t have. Unable to resist Ted, Peggy falls hard for him. In a love scene where she finally surrenders to her feelings, we witness Peggy’s intense burn. Sadly, instead of finding love, her hopes are dashed the next day when a guilt-ridden Ted leaves New York and decides to stay with his wife. More insight into her desire: Peggy can’t shake lingering feelings for Ted, and they carry over into season 7. So passionate is Peggy when she believes Ted has sent her long-stemmed red roses, she all but shreds them in front of her secretary, Shirley (Sola Bamis), only to discover that they were never hers in the first place, much like dear, old Ted. 

The commanding Joan Holloway
The commanding Joan Holloway

 

When we first meet the head secretary, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), she’s the scarlet-haired bombshell showing Peggy the ropes. Joan’s girlish tips to Peggy include that she should reveal more ankle and put a paper bag with eyeholes over her head. Peggy should then stand in front of a mirror naked and assess the plusses and minuses. Joan has learned to use her womanly wiles to her advantage but it’s her keen intuitive sense and expert problem-solving skills that make her an indispensable asset in the workplace. 

Carefree about her sexual persona, Joan often dresses in red to accentuate her ample curves, and early in the show’s run, she enjoys an affair with her married boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), and chooses to keep a no-strings-attached vibe. This woman has lovers, flirts with ease, and when she doesn’t feel like paying for lunch, allows the men in the office the privilege of treating her. 

After playing the field with finesse, Joan falls in love with a handsome medical student, Greg Harris (Gerald Downey), and it looks as though she’ll have the American dream, something we never dreamed she ever wanted. But all goes sour when Greg discovers that Joan has been intimate with a host of other men before him, and in a fit of rage, he rapes her. Instead of leaving him, as we would expect from the strong-willed, take-no-bullshit Joan, she does the unthinkable… and marries him. And then, even though she is unfulfilled in her marriage, with the exception of a quickie with her ex-lover Roger after they’re both mugged (this is less about desire and more about comfort), Joan is faithful to her husband the whole time he is away in the army.

Later in the series, in a rare scene, Joan and Don play hooky from work, and over cocktails at a bar, Joan asks him if he was ever interested in her. With a whiskey buzz, Don confesses when he met Joan that she scared the pants off him. Not surprising. Even though Joan is a portrayed as a highly sexual being, her longings are mainly alluded to, leaving very little of Joan’s desires reflected on screen. Instead we are given a few heated sighs and eyebrow-raises in Don Draper’s direction, and left to wonder about what might have been. Perhaps Joan is just too much woman for even the writers who created her to deal with, and the notion of a scene that fully realizes her sexual persona would scare the pants off them, too.

In season 7, Joan turns down a chance to settle into a loveless marriage with her gay friend before her “expiration date” at age 40. Joan confides to him that she wants more, and intends to hold out for real love. Vixen façade aside, it would seem Joan is a romantic at heart.  

 

A tousled Betty
A tousled Betty

 

At the beginning of the series, Betty Draper (January Jones), a passive aggressive former model, is Don’s wife. Betty, devoid of self-awareness, lies in bed after making love, stares at her gorgeous sleeping husband, her entire universe… and doesn’t understand why he is not just enough. Betty’s longing goes far beyond the sexual realm; she aches to have a sense of self, submerges her feelings, and overeats to fill the void. When very pregnant, Betty meets the distinguished Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), a local politician, at a charity event; Henry makes it clear that he’s attracted to Betty while he caresses her belly. The incident causes Betty’s desire to spike in a new way: afterward, she fantasizes about buying a decadent rose satin chaise lounge, even though it clashes with everything in her home. And romantic daydreams of Henry haunt her married life. Finally, when he doesn’t appear at a function in her home, Betty storms into Henry’s office. Flushed with white-hot rage, she throws papers at him and demands to know why he didn’t show up. Then Henry confesses that he was waiting for her to make the first move because she is married. What follows is a kiss that uncorks the bottled-up longings Betty has squelched throughout her relationship with Don. At that moment we see Betty as a sensual creature, hungering for a man other than her husband. 

 
Megan and Don
Megan and Don
 

By season 5, Don has split up with Betty and is married to Megan Draper (Jessica Pare), who seems the polar opposite of Betty. A French Canadian, willowy brunette in her early 20s, Megan represents the new generation of women. She is free-spirited enough to reject a successful career in advertising alongside Don to pursue her dream of being an actress, much to the bafflement of those around her. Unlike passive aggressive Betty, Megan knows what she wants, and possesses the drive to get it. 

Naturally, Megan’s uninhibited attitude translates to her sexuality.  In the much talked about season 5 episode, “A Little Kiss,” Megan throws Don a surprise 40th birthday party, and invites his coworkers. As a romantic gift, she sings Don the French song about love and kissing, “Zou Bisou Bisou,” and dances coquettishly in his direction, dressed in an elegant black chiffon mini-dress.  Megan’s performance is far more sweet than salacious, and yet the gesture serves as such an aphrodisiac, consequently men’s throats go dry, and overheated couples flee the party. And Don?  He becomes so embarrassed he can hardly look at his lovely wife. After a playful and refreshing display of feminine sexuality, Don is left feeling so raw and exposed that he refuses to have sex with his wife as punishment for her unladylike actions. Interestingly, Don wasn’t the only one who overreacted. The episode’s aftermath caused the twitterverse to go bizerk.  #ZouBisouBisou erupted with such Nascar speed, anyone who hadn’t seen the show simply had to know what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, on HBO, scads of Dawn Age women were lounging around naked on Game of Thrones, and sadomasochistic vampires were having unsafe vamp sex on True Blood, not causing half the stir. How is this possible? Is female longing really that shocking? Or, are we so desensitized to the objectification of women and simultaneously starved for a glimpse into real female desire that when a moment finally makes it on screen, it proves intensely provocative.

Megan sings and dances at Don's birthday party
Megan sings and dances at Don’s birthday party

 

In another bold move by Megan this season, after she discovers Don has been lying to her for a year about his job, she stands up to him and tells him, “This is how it ends.” Then, in a perplexing following episode, not only is there is no mention of their breakup, it’s as though a Stepford-Megan has stepped into Megan’s heels. No longer assertive, she appears wilted and insecure, when under the guise of kindness, she pays off a pregnant quasi-relative of Don’s to leave town, worried he might be attracted to her. And if that’s not enough for us to wonder where the actual Megan Draper has gone, she invites her girlfriend over and convinces Don to have a ménage a trois with them, even though Don seems rather bored with the whole idea. Sadly, instead of a display of desire, this appears a last ditch act of desperation to spice up her marriage by acting out a cliché male fantasy. 

Many of Mad Men’s most compelling moments exist in the quiet, and that’s part of its brilliance. However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of Mad Men like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.

 

Danielle Winston is a Manhattan-based freelance writer, screenwriter/director. Her latest project is a psychological thriller called Hands of Fate. Find her on twitter @winstonwrites @Handsoffatefilm.