2010s movies – Page 5

2013 Golden Globes Week: It’s “Impossible” Not to See the White-Centric Point of View

Written by Lady T, originally published at The Funny Feminist.

So this is a trailer for the upcoming film, The Impossible, telling the story about the 2004 tsunami:

There are a few title cards in the trailer that provide the necessary background for the story. The trailer helpfully tells you, “In 2004, tragedy struck southeast Asia.”

However, I don’t think those title cards are specific enough. I’d like to revise those title cards so they read, “In 2004, tragedy devastated entire nations, but we’re going to focus on one white family that was on vacation there.”

The Impossible is based on a true story of a real family that was separated during the tsunami and eventually reunited, each family member miraculously surviving. I can easily see why this story would appeal so much to filmmakers. “Family separated, in peril, in a devastated nation that is completely foreign to them” is such a great hook that it’s practically Captain Hook. Who wouldn’t be interested in the story of a family who have to survive in a country that isn’t their own?

On the other hand, this is a real-life tsunami that affected entire nations, that devastated the lives of the citizens who lived there, and the first prominent film about the tragedy is about white people who were staying at a hotel?

The family in The Impossible

Landon Palmer at the Culture Warrior has more to say on this:

“There is no reason to say that this experience wasn’t any less traumatic and devastating for those visiting (regardless of their particular race) than the inhabitants (once again, regardless of their particular race) of any of the affected nations. The problem with The Impossible trailer isn’t the depiction family’s experience of the tragedy itself, but its implications about what happens when, say, the film ends. While watching the trailer for the first time, an image kept appearing in my head of an exhausted, scratched-up family sleeping comfortably on a plane returning them safely to their home of origin. Being able to survive and then leave a tragedy is altogether different than having everything that is familiar, including one’s home, fall apart before your eyes. However, years of uncertain reconstruction and rehabilitation doesn’t fit the formula of a Hollywood ending quite like a welcome return to a home far, far away from moving tectonic plates.”

Or, you can read a briefer, much more blunt article at 8Asians here, titled “The Impossible Trailer Features Pretty White People Surviving Indonesian Tsunami.”

There are some who might say that one can’t judge a film before seeing it, but to quote our illustrious vice-president, that’s a bunch of malarkey. The purpose of trailers is to market the film and let viewers decide whether or not they want to see it. If a person does not want to see The Impossible because they don’t want to see, as my friend put it, “the tsunami from the perspective of the 1%,” that is a legitimate reason to not see the film.

You tell ’em, Joe.

As for me, I will probably see The Impossible. Naomi Watts scored a Best Actress nomination for the part , and I’m a huge Oscar fan who likes to see as many nominated films as possible from the Picture, Director, Acting, and Screenplay categories. The film also looks beautifully shot. Who knows? The Impossible could be a legitimately good movie.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the real impossible task is making a movie about tragedies that affect non-white people and expecting the film to get the same attention as one that stars Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.

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Lady T is a writer and aspiring comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

2013 Golden Globes Week: ‘Les Miserables,’ Sex Trafficking & Fantine as a Symbol for Women’s Oppression

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Written by Megan Kearns.

Some writers, like professor Stacy Wolf, have enjoyed yet criticized the film adaptation of Les Miserables for not being feminist enough and turning the female characters into “bit players.” While others have lauded its feminism. Sure it irks me yet another film focuses on the journey, salvation and redemption of a man. We clearly have enough of those. But that ignores the importance of women in Les Mis. It ignores how, as Bitch Flicks writer Leigh Kolb astutely points out, a film featuring poverty and class struggles is feminist.

I have loved Les Miserables for years. After reading it in junior high, the book absorbed me — the horrific tragedy, pain and oppression. The vivid characters and their stories stirred and moved me. I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack, falling under its spell. 5 years later I saw it on Broadway, it mesmerized me. So when I heard a film adaptation of the musical? With Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman? With live singing?? Hearing Samantha Barks as the awesome Eponine belt out “On My Own?” Oh yeah. Saying I was psyched was definitely an understatement.

Sure the numbers 24601 will always be synonymous with Jean Valjean and the cruel incarceration he faced for stealing a loaf of bread. And yes, I love the standoff between Valjean and Inspector Javert or the passion of Enjolras at the barricades. But the person who has haunted me the most throughout the years? It wasn’t any of the men. It was Fantine.

Anne Hathaway embodies the tragic role, giving a phenomenal, powerful and transcendentperformance. She deserves all the hype and accolades she’s received. I’ve always been a fan of Hathaway in anything from Rachel Getting Married to The Devil Wears Prada. But she takes acting to a whole other level in this devastating performance. In “I Dreamed a Dream,” the show-stopping tragic song — which btw, made me weep in ragged sobs in the movie theatre…oh fuck, who am I kidding, even when watching the trailer too — Hathaway pours every emotion, every ounce of herself into the role. She trembles, rages, weeps. Her voice wavering from angelically soft to ragged and hoarse. Her performance alone is reason to watch the entire film. No joke. She’s that outstanding.

Fantine is the archetypal sacrificial mother, giving up everything for her daughter Cosette. But Fantine transcends merely rearticulating tropes and archetypes. Fantine is downtrodden. Life has beaten her down. The tigers at night have torn her hopes apart and crushed her dreams. Hathaway imbues Fantine with a fiery passion balanced with forlorn desperation. She’s angry at her circumstances, angry at her pain, desperate to save her daughter.

Fantine also illustrates the plight of single mothers. Single mothers are 5 times as likely to be in poverty, many working in low-wage jobs without paid sick leave. Fantine struggles to make ends meet to pay for Cossette who lives with the greedy and villanious Thenardiers, at the expense of her own health as she eventually gets ill with tuberculosis.

Fantine works in a factory and is fired after the lecherous foreman discovers through her gossipy coworkers (gee, thanks for the female camaraderie, ladies) that she has a daughter out of wedlock whom she sends money. When she’s thrown out on the streets, Fantine has nowhere to turn. She eventually sells her locket and her prized luscious locks. But then she sells the thing that always makes me shudder. Her teeth. And then, when she has nothing left to sell, she sells her body becoming a prostitute. She sells herself.

Anne Hathaway tried to relate to her character but couldn’t as their lives wildly diverge. But she realized that while Les Mis is a period piece, it parallels the struggles women face today, particularly with Fantine being forced into sexual slavery. Hathaway (who has come out in support of the One Billion Rising campaign to fight violence against women) said:

“There was no way I could relate to what my character was going through. I live a very successful, happy life. I don’t have any children that I’ve had to give up…or keep. So I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. And to do that, I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, and this particular story, I came to the realization that I had been thinking about Fantine as someone who lived in the past, but she doesn’t. She’s living in New York City right now, probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world. So every day that I was her, I just thought ‘This isn’t an invention. This isn’t me acting. This is me honoring that this pain lives in this world.’ I hope that in all our lifetimes, we see it end.”

As Ms. Magazine‘s Natalie Wilson points out, the distinction between prostitute and sexual slave is crucial:

“Her framing of Fantine as a sexual slave, NOT a prostitute, is key, as it refuses to glorify or joke about what is so often swept under the rug regarding sex work: that the majority of women do not “choose” it but are forced into it.”

Traditionally, people view the sex industry in two ways. There exists a range of ways to be in it, either by choice, circumstance or coercion, but regardless it’s work and we must make it safe for sex workers and regulate disease. Or the sex industry is a form of violence against women and girls, exploitative and a form of gender-based violence.

Choice is the keystone in the argument. Do people choose sex work? Or are they forced into it via trafficking? Or do they choose it only because they have no other options or means to earn a living, negating its categorization as a “choice?”

In the book Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn “confront theliberal myth that prostitution is a voluntary vocation for women.” As a reproductive justice advocate, I believe a woman’s body should be her legal and personal domain. While some sex workers may choose their profession willingly, too many women – 3 million women and girls – are forced into sex trafficking. Traffickers coerce, beat and rape women into submission. Trafficking is human slavery, a human rights travesty. Numerous women, children and men are savagely sold. Whether people choose sex work willingly or are trafficked, they shouldn’t face criminalization. People who’ve survived trafficking lose jobs or can’t get jobs due to convictions.

Les Mis fuses these two views. It shows that sexual slavery is exploitative and a human rights violation — Fantine enters prostitution for she has no other choice, she has no other way to earn money. But it simultaneously reinforces that we shouldn’t punish sex workers for their circumstances. Les Mis doesn’t devalue, demonize or erase the humanity of those in sex work.

Some assert Les Mis suffers from outdates gender roles and gender stereotypes. Sure it’s set in 1810s-1830s Paris and Victor Hugo wrote it in 1862. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t critique Les Mis through a current lens, especially considering the film is current. But I don’t think Les Mis is chained to the past.

Sexual slavery and oppression aren’t merely in history books. Women today face poverty, trafficking, domestic abuse, rape, assault. Even if we don’t personally confront these struggles, we all must deal with binding constrictions of sexism and rape culture, which Les Mis illustrates.

When Anne Hathaway infamously (and awesomely!) shut down Matt Lauer’s douchebaggy slut-shaming on the Today Show after paparazzi took a crotch shot of her, she said:

“Well, it was obviously an unfortunate incident. Um, I think — It kinda made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and, rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which brings us back to Les Mis, because that’s what my character is — she is someone who is forced to sell sex to benefit her child, because she has nothing and there’s no social safety net. And I— Yeah, so, um, so let’s get back to Les Mis.”

Hathaway is right, Fantine — and so many other women like her — have no safety net. Without healthcare, education, paid sick leave, adequate day care and social assistance programs, today’s impoverished single mothers have few options.

Les Mis also sheds light on rape culture. After Fantine fights back against a man harassing her, putting snow down her dress, she’s the one punished, not the assailant. Inspector Javert wants to arrest Fantine, reinforcing a victim-blaming rape culture which criminalizes and demonizes women’s behavior and punishes victims/survivors, rather than the perpetrators of abuse and assault. With the global rape epidemic now taking center stage — Steubenville, Jyoti Singh Pandey in India, Notre Dame’s rape cover-up — we must question how we as a society perpetuate and enable violence against women.

Feminism and social justice push us to not only see the world from our own perspective and privilege. But to see it from others’ perspectives and circumstances as well. Now I recognize it’s problematic that Fantine can only achieve salvation and peace in death. Or that she becomes a saintly prostitute, a symbolic Mary Magdalene. But through Fantine’s eyes, we see the horrors of poverty, trafficking, sexism and rape culture. She symbolizes the oppression women combat — throughout history and today.

Fighting oppression, looking at the intersectionality of gender and class, critiquing – these are the core of Les Mis’ message. Isn’t that what feminism is all about?

2013 Golden Globes Week: Does ‘Argo’ Suffer from a Woman Problem and Iranian Stereotypes?

Written by Megan Kearns.

When I saw Argo in the theatre, I wasn’t really expecting to have a whole lot to say regarding gender in the film. In the majority of the trailer, all you see is men, men, brief glimpse of the women, and more men. Did Argo reaffirm my fears of making women silent and invisible?

Based on the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis, Argo depicts the true story of CIA operative Tony Mendez rescuing 6 American diplomats out of Iran.

Argo is an incredibly well-crafted film. It’s taut, suspenseful and at times buoyantly humorous. But style over substance weakens the film. Character development suffers. We never discover the hostages as people. Their lives, their views don’t ever really unfold.

Surprisingly, the hostages aren’t really the focus of the film. It’s Ben Affleck. Oh yeah and Alan Arkin and John Goodman, as a film director and make-up artist respectively. But we see Ben Affleck talk on the phone with his son. Ben Affleck agonize over decisions. Ben Affleck looking pensive.

While I liked the movie, I felt unease throughout. Argo depicts a white, male Eurocentric perspective. There’s no place for a complex depiction of women in this paradigm.

We’re never allowed into the lives or hear the perspectives or opinions of women. None of the women in Argo are given their own identity aside from how they relate to men. The 2 female hostages’ roles as diplomats were connected to their husbands. Because their husbands worked for the government, the women signed up for foreign service too. But that’s not why I have a problem with gender depictions in the film.

We never see hostages Cora Dijek (Clea Duvall) and Kathy Stafford (Kerry Bishe) talk to each other, aside from a group discussion with all 6 of the hostages. The women never reminisce together, never laugh, never express worry, never talk together – unless it’s with the men. Seriously, what is it with films NOT showing women talking to each other?! I’m gonna let you in a little secret, Hollywood. We women? We talk. To each other. Shocking, I know.

Nico Lang asks “where are the women in Argo” and asserts:

“I’m not saying they should create a new role for a woman or magically create a female spy (it’s not Alias, after all), but the women here deserve more than virtual silence. The film doesn’t take place at an all-boys’ school or a magical world in which all of the women have gone mute. It was the 1970’s, not Spike TV. There were women who had relationships to the story, and the film’s desire to marginalize them or cut them out completely shows how little modern Hollywood thinks of female narratives. Movies actually made in the 70’s had better roles for women than this, and the idea that Affleck gets let off the hook for sexism because he made a period piece is insulting…As a movie about movies, Argo wants to hold up a mirror to Hollywood and reflect the craziness of the industry, but in doing so, also perpetuates that industry’s rampant and systemic sexism.”

But what’s interesting is that when Affleck arrives to have the hostages take on fake identities in the film industry, as a Canadian production crew scouting for a film location in Iran, a stereotypical gender reversal occurs.

Typically in a crisis situation, it’s the woman or women who express hesitations or reservations or worries. Not here. No here it’s a dude who does. While Kathy looks (understandably) nervous and tense, the two female hostages remain calm and collected. I initially found it refreshing to see a non-stereotypical gender portrayal in such a mainstream, critically-acclaimed blockbuster. But do they remain calm because they barely have any dialogue? Hmmm, maybe this is a gender fail after all.

Beyond sexism, Eurocentrism permeates the film. At almost every turn, the Americans are placed at the forefront. That might not be such a huge problem if the hostages were actually the focus of the film.While so much was glossed over and inaccurate, I liked that Affleck at least attempted to provide a brief history of Iran. But why did every Iranian have to appear unhinged, brutal and savage breaking down the walls of the embassy? “Argo presents a country of more than 35 million in 1979 exclusively through the lens of terrorism and hostage-taking…” Argo “perpetuates the unfortunate contemporary stereotype that Iranians somehow “hate” Americans. When the hostages are driving through Tehran, surrounded by Iranians, you can feel the palpable tension, thick and constricting. Again they are seen as the frightening enemy. Iranians are lumped together as scary and barbaric.

Argo wants to show the merits of peaceful negotiations, that violent actions don’t need to be taken to resolve conflicts. So why not depict both sides – both American and Iranian – with nuance and complexity? I expected more from a supposedly progressive director and a producer (George Clooney) passionate about social justice.

As Jennifer Epps articulately points out:

“But throughout the film, the Iran we see in the news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed…Argo glosses over the diversity of opinion in Iran and the intellectual ferment before the theocratic lockdown, making the culture look exactly the way an insular American public has come to believe all Islamic countries look.”

Argo is a white film, directed by a white dude (albeit an awesome white dude), with mostly white actors, told from a white perspective. And I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. Except for the fact that Persians and Arabs face so much discrimination in this country. Yes, I love Homelandtoo. And I can’t wait to see Zero Dark Thirty. But do we really need yet anotherfilm or TV show perpetuating Arab and Persian stereotypes?

We know how American women are depicted. So how are Iranian women depicted in Argo?

A woman narrates the opening of the film, providing context of Iranian history. This same woman also speaks for the Iranians holding the American embassy hostages to transmit to news agencies.

The only other Iranian woman we see is Sahar (Sheila Vand), the housekeeper to Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber – aka my boyfriend Jack Bristow, yes I’m obsessed with Alias) and his wife Pat Taylor (Page Jeong). Sahar eventually helps the hostages, lying to Iranian troops to protect their cover.

Interestingly, Ben Affleck told The Huffington Post’s Michael Hogan that the filmmakers changed the gender and nationality of the Taylor’s housekeeper:

“I changed it because I wanted to represent a Persian character that wasn’t a fanatic, that wasn’t railing against the United States, but that’s just somebody like all of us who’s trying to go to work and feed their family and do all the things they need to do, and who’s kind of buffeted by the political winds that are kicked up by others, particularly by others that are higher up than them.”

In his article I quoted earlier, Nico Lang doesn’t expect Affleck to create another role for women. Yet that’s precisely what he did. While I always love more female roles, sadly Affleck’s gender reversal doesn’t fix Argo’s gender (or Eurocentric) problem.

Jennifer Epps calls Sahar “the most important Iranian character in the film.” But she warns:

“But calling her the most important Iranian character is not saying much — and neither is Sahar. Over a handful of scenes she may have a grand total of 3 lines. In this case they are translated, because they are relevant to the plot. Her character, however, is defined by her attitude toward the Americans. She also may be the only kind of Iranian the movie is interested in individuating because she is separated from her society, ensconced in a Western household.”

Yes, Sahar – an Iranian woman – ultimately helps save the Americans. But her employers are suspicious and distrustful of her motives once they think Sahar has discovered their secret of harboring the American hostages. Again Iranians come off as the ominous “other,” to be feared or not trusted.

Just like the other women in Argo, Sahar’s opinions and views are erased. Her importance truly lies in how she relates to men.

Unsurprisingly, parts of Argo are fabricated and not historically accurate. After all, this is a fictionalized movie, not a documentary. But then why not make the hostages more interesting? Why not develop the female characters – show their perspectives and feelings – as people, not just mere props or sidekicks to men? Why not give women a voice?

Argo shows how far we still have to go in gender equity in film. Sure, it’s a well-made movie. But that doesn’t inoculate it from sexism or racism. Awards indicate the art, culture and opinions we value. Just like somany Golden Globes and Oscar-nominated films, Argo revolves around men. Women deserve better. We’re not just satellites orbiting dudes.

Like many Hollywood films, Argo reifies who truly matters in our society. White men.

‘Bachelorette’ Proves Bad People Can Make Great Characters

Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan in Bachelorette

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!]

When I saw The Hangover, around the time its sequel came out, I was disappointed they didn’t make the sequel the story of “meanwhile, the bride and her girlfriends had an even MORE wild adventure.” Some of us hoped we’d get something along those lines with Bridesmaids, which certainly was an enjoyable movie and huge step forward for female-focused comedies in mainstream Hollywood, but sometimes felt forced when it veered into the “shocking” territory of ladies pooping.

So three cheers for Bachelorette, which certainly stands on the shoulders of Bridesmaids, but makes it look tame in comparison. Bachelorette doesn’t just have its female characters do shocking things, it has the shocking characterizations. For once, we have a movie full of female characters allowed to be the horrifically selfish jerks that routinely populate dude comedies like The Hangover. It’s delightfully bracing.

For some, the ladies of Bachelorette will be too bitchy, or too similar to sexist stereotypes, to bear. Maid of Honor Regan (Kirsten Dunst) is a Type-A ice queen, joined by bridesmaids Gena (Lizzy Caplan), a self-centered fuck-up, and airhead Katie (Isla Fisher). All three enjoy drugs and casual sex, and all three can be jaw-droppingly mean. All are horrified that the bride Becky (Rebel Wilson) is getting married first among them, because, well, she’s fatter than they are. They still use the cruel nickname (“Pig Face”) they gave her in high school, and spend the first act showing shocking disregard for the her well-being and the success of her wedding. [Fortunately for the bride, there are other women in her bridal party lurking on the sidelines of the story, theoretically taking care of most of the wedding business while these three cause trouble].

Rebel Wilson is unfortunately not given much to do as Becky, but I really enjoyed how the movie didn’t just victimize her as the “fat friend”, subverting that dynamic by making it clear that Becky’s size is much more of an issue for her skinnier friends than it is for Becky herself. Although Gena awkwardly jokes in her rehearsal dinner speech about meeting Becky when she was making herself vomit in the high school bathroom, it’s later revealed that Regan is actually the one with a history of bulimia. It’s made clear that Becky doesn’t tolerate strangers being cruel to her: she puts a stop to her bachelorette festivities the moment the male stripper Katie brought in calls her “Pig Face.” Becky retains her dignity, while Gena, Katie, and Regan pathetically retreat to have their own private coke-fueled hotel room bender without the bride or the other members of the bridal party.

Rebel Wilson as the bride, a well-adjusted foil for the main characters

During this party, the girls cruelly mock the size of Becky’s wedding gown, and Regan and Katie both try to climb into it. But Becky is only twice their size in their demented imaginations, so the gown rips. The rest of the plot follows their misadventures as they attempt to fix the gown before the next morning.

Gena, Katie, and Regan never stop being selfish bitches in their quest to undo this huge wrong. A potential solution is reached when they are able to get into a bridal shop after hours and there’s another dress available in nearly Becky’s size, but it’s rejected because that dress is Regan’s favorite, and she can’t let her friend wear it instead of her. They’re also all distracted by their own romantic subplots, particularly Gena (who is paired against her former Party Down co-star Adam Scott, to the same irresistibly watchable effect).

But through all of this shocking meanness, there’s a true-to-life thread of the genuine friendship between these women. It may be hard to imagine how these characters became friends in the first place, but who didn’t build some unlikely friendships through the happenstance of high school classroom seating charts and locker assignments? And despite all their nasty behavior, it’s not hard to understand why they are still friends after all these years: Bachelorette masterfully illustrates the bond we feel with the people we’ve known the longest, even if they aren’t the closest people in our present lives. Becky and Regan will always have a bond because Becky covered up for her high school bulimia; Regan and Gena will always have a bond because Regan took Gena to get an abortion when her high school boyfriend (Scott) chickened out. In the final scenes, Regan bounces between finally putting her bitchiness to good use by chewing out Becky’s floundering florist, and saving Katie’s life after she overdoses on Xanax. Gena assures Katie’s bewildered suitor that even though he’s right that Regan is a “head case” it’s also true that “she’s a good friend.” It rings true. Regan is the kind of friend you’d never want, but you would nevertheless be grateful for if you did have her in your life.

Bachelorette has a happy ending without absolving the characters

Still, Regan, Gena, and Katie sit out Becky’s wedding ceremony, beat-down and vomit-covered on a bench, unneeded by Becky the beaming Bride. The film ends with a wedding reception coda that’s appropriately joyful, but there’s no clear-cut redemption for our troubled trio. Bachelorette strikes a delicate balance, getting us to like and root for these flawed characters without denying their shortcomings (as The Hangover and its ilk are wont to do). It’s a rare feat for any film, and almost unheard of with a female-centric comedy.

Gender and Food Week: ‘Bridesmaids’: Brunch, Brazilian Food, Baking, and Best Friends

Bridesmaids

Guest post written by Laura A. Shamas.

The rituals of contemporary female friendship are punctuated with food and drink as signifiers in the 2011 comedy hit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig. Many of the key emotional moments of the film involve food and drink. Intimate aspects of female friendship are revealed while eating; a female collective bonds over feasting (and its repercussions); and a developing romance is linked to carrots and cake.

In the opening scene of Bridesmaids, set in Milwaukee, and written by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) is sexually involved with Ted (Jon Hamm). Their encounters are casual, or so they say to each other. When Ted asks her to leave his home in the morning, the disappointment shows on Annie’s face. But later, over brunch with her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), we learn how detrimental “the Ted thing” is for Annie. Annie tries to frame the torrid night with Ted as an “adult sleepover” but Lillian tells her she can do better: “You hate yourself after you see him.” The female friendship ritual of a weekend brunch with a girlfriend is highlighted here. Lillian’s loyalty to Annie is established through her candor, her desire to protect Annie, and her inspiring admonition to Annie to find a better partner. The scene ends with the goofy pair playing with their food, placing it in their teeth — a reflection of the playful nature of their bond and its longevity: they’ve been friends since childhood. They are comfortable and authentic with each other.

In the next scene, as they walk away from the restaurant, Annie’s deeper tie with food is revealed. Lillian and Annie stroll past a deserted bakery named “Cake Baby,” a business Annie opened during the recession. Annie registers sadness as she sees the empty building again. To comfort her friend Lillian comments: “They were good cakes, Annie.”

Annie is no longer a baker. She currently works in a jewelry store as a sales clerk, where she tells frequently customers that love doesn’t last — a philosophy that goes against the “eternal bliss” code needed to sell wedding rings to couples. And her home life is equally unsettled because her male roommate’s sister has moved in to the small apartment; the roommate’s sister is featured in a food-related scene when she pours an open package of green peas on her back in order to calm a new tattoo.

Annie’s one bright spot in life is getting together with Lillian. She brings a bottle of wine over to Lillian’s apartment for an evening in with drinks and magazines. There’s a wire basket filled with apples on the coffee table, and Lillian, holding out her hand in a formal way, says: “I want to eat an apple.” It is then that Annie notices Lillian’s glittering ring. Lillian is newly engaged to Doug. Apples, as symbols, are present in many ancient stories, such as “The Golden Apples” from the Garden of Hesperides or the tale of Adam and Eve. Apples classically represent knowledge; according to legend, this comes from the five-point star present in the apple’s core (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 36). By becoming engaged, Lillian indicates she is ready to move on to another phase, to gain more knowledge, to individuate. This is underscored by the visual and textual reference to apples in this scene. Lillian asks Annie to be her Maid of Honor at the impending nuptials.

When Annie goes to pick up her mom (Jill Clayburgh) to attend Lillian and Doug’s engagement party, her mother gently states that Annie is in a downward spiral: “Hitting bottom is a good thing…because there’s nowhere to go but up.” In Maureen Murdock’s book The Heroine’s Journey, Murdock differentiates the steps of a female hero’s journey from those of a male hero. One of Murdock’s vital points involves a “Descent to the Goddess” to heal aspects of a mother-daughter split. According to Murdock, a woman begins an initiation process on the descent arc of a heroine’s journey: “It may involve a seemingly endless period of wandering, grief, rage, dethroning kings, of looking for the lost pieces of herself, and meeting the dark feminine. It may take weeks, months or years” (8). These steps may be seen in Annie’s journey in “Bridesmaids.” Her fruitless dalliance with Ted, her aimless job and transient home life, her connection to a lost childhood through Lillian (and the mourning of childhood’s end) are all present in the early part of the film. Annie’s meeting of the “dark feminine” in Bridesmaidsis yet to come.

At the subsequent fancy engagement party, another ritual of female friendship is revealed. In a sequence with Annie and the beautiful Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s newer “best friend,” Annie and Helen compete with each other to deliver the best bridal toast, with alternate, escalating praise of Lillian in front of the gathered crowd. There, Annie drinks champagne, and reveals that Annie and Lillian have a ritual of “drunken Saturday nights at Rockin’ Sushi.” Saturday nights are times of revelry and letting loose; Annie and Lillian have a standing BFF hangout restaurant ritual on that night. We later learn that Helen longs for this: an ongoing invitation to female revelry and even the spontaneity involved in such female revelry. It’s something the seemingly perfect Helen doesn’t have.

At the engagement party, the rest of the female collective in the film is 3 introduced: the “Bridesmaids.” Newlywed innocent Becca (Ellie Kemper), jaded mother-of-three Rita (Wendi McClendon-Covey), and the intrepid Megan, sister to the groom (Melissa McCarthy) are there. They, along with Helen and Annie, complete Lillian’s assembled group of female wedding supporters. It is through the activities of this group that the “dark feminine” is explored more fully in the film.

In the hierarchy of a wedding, a bride and groom are the most important roles. Bridesmaids, taken as an archetypal female construction, may be seen to represent “sisterhood,” a unified group of female attendants to the bride. If so, the dysfunction of this specific collective, as revealed in Act Two, serves as wry, hilarious commentary on aspects of the dark feminine and our wedding rituals from the female gaze.

Near the end of Act One, Annie is pulled over at night for a violation by a state policeman named Nathan Rhodes, his last name perhaps a commentary of Annie’s own life at a crossroads. Annie’s tail lights need to be repaired, a recurring metaphor reflecting Annie’s inner life. Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) recognizes Annie from her bakery days. He tells her how much he admired her delicious pastries, especially her cream puffs. In this scene we learn that the bakery is connected to emotional pain for Annie — and not just for the financial devastation she suffered when it failed. Her boyfriend, who worked there, left her when it closed. Rhodes reminds her: “I appreciated your cakes.”

After this encounter, a brief baking sequence follows for Annie. In the kitchen alone, she bakes a beautiful cupcake for herself, decorated with a gorgeous flower on top. Annie’s baking skills and her artistry are displayed. Pensively, she eats the single perfect cupcake, alone.

A baker is someone who could be seen to work “alchemically”; the transformation of raw materials into something edible and wonderful involves the use of an oven, which, as an image, could resonate as “womb.” Annie begins, in the scene above, to try to reconnect with her baking skills, and the warmth of the womb.

In Act Two, Annie meets the dark feminine as reflected by the bridesmaids — and her own psyche. It is in perhaps the most famous sequence in the film, involving feasting at an authentic Brazilian restaurant and subsequent scenes at an exclusive couture bridal shop named “Belle en Blanc,” that the dark feminine is revealed in a graphic, scatological way.

The competition between Annie and Helen is highlighted throughout this sequence. Whether it’s over the theme of the bridal shower, or where the bachelorette party should be held, Annie and Helen are at odds. Annie’s taste is seen as déclassé compared to Helen’s standards. After the meal at the Brazilian restaurant, presented as a communal feasting experience, Helen and Annie spar over the selection of the bridesmaids’ dresses. It is then that the group becomes sick with food poisoning, leading to the massive need for a bathroom, including a toilet, a sink, and in Lillian’s case, the city street. When Annie tries to pretend she does not feel sick, Helen tests her resolve by handing her a Jordan Almond to eat.

The juxtaposition of the name of the shop, “Belle en Blanc,” compared to what happens to the collective, suggests an ironic commentary on aspects of the dark feminine. And it is related to food. The food poisoning underscores the feminine spiritual poisoning felt between Annie and Helen, and even Lillian, as revealed by competition and wedding stress. At one point, a character says that one of the dresses at “Belle en Blanc” is so pretty that it makes her stomach hurt.

On Annie’s way home from another Ted encounter, she stops at a small liquor market, and reaches to buy a drink called “Calm.” There, she sees Rhodes again, and he offers her carrots. She ends up eating carrots with him, sitting on a car hood outside. He tells her she should be setting up a new bakery. Annie replies that she doesn’t bake anymore. A carrot is dropped on the ground, and Rhodes says that there is always one lucky, ugly carrot in the bag. He offers it to her. She won’t take it. But their fun continues into the dawn, as he shows her how to use his official radar gun to catch speeders.

When the Bridesmaids return home prematurely — after a disastrous attempt to fly to Vegas for a bachelorette party — Annie encounters Rhodes. They go to a bar. Upon hearing her tale of woe, Rhodes dubs her the “Maid of Dishonor” and urges Annie to start baking again. Annie says it doesn’t make her happy anymore. She spends the night with Rhodes, and they become sexually involved. In the morning, he surprises her by assembling baking supplies to encourage her to bake again: “Your workshop awaits.” Angered, Annie refuses: “I don’t need you to fix me.” She leaves, declaring their encounter a mistake.

After losing her job and apartment, Annie moves back in with her mother. She refuses Rhodes’ calls. Annie tells her mom that she hadn’t hit bottom before. Now, perhaps she finally has. This realization is underscored when she drives by her old bakery and sees the business name “Cake Baby” newly defaced with a sexual slur.

At the elaborate French-toned bridal shower, arranged perfectly by Helen but stolen from Annie’s idea, is a chocolate fountain and a giant heart-shaped cookie. As a shower gift to Lillian, Annie assembled an amazing box of childhood memories. Helen tops Annie by giving Lillian a trip to Paris to meet with the couture wedding dress designer. At the party, Annie breaks down, and in a culminating Act Two event, attacks the giant heart cookie and the chocolate fountain. In a rant, Annie calls out Lillian for participating in such a pretentious social gathering. Lillian responds: she disinvites Annie from the wedding. By attacking the giant cookie heart, Annie embodies her own need to address matters of the heart, and even her “baking.” The dark chocolate fountain is perhaps an ironic visual callback to the dark feminine as seen earlier in the “Belle en Blanc” sequence. Annie’s rage could also be seen as a part of dark feminine power — her own.

After Annie’s car is damaged in a hit and run, she’s depressed. With nowhere to go, she stays inside her mother’s home all the time — the ultimate “Return to the Womb.” Megan comes to visit, with the nine pups she stole from the bridal shower. Trying to encourage her, Megan tells Annie: “You’re your problem and you’re also your solution.”

Annie starts baking. She cracks eggs, whisks, blends sugars. Her car is finally repaired, and it’s all gratis, thanks to a deal Rhodes made with the mechanic who owed him a favor. To show her appreciation, Annie leaves a beautiful cake with a carrot on top at Rhodes’ doorstep, a reference to the lucky carrot he told her about. This is a signifier that Annie is ascending, healing, back on her path. Her descent spiral is over. She can “bake” again. A carrot, in folklore, is related to fertility and seeding; it also is reputed to have medicinal qualities connected to “sight.” The carrot on the cake represents the renewal of Annie’s vision, her “warming,” and her outreach to Rhodes. But Rhodes leaves the box outside on his front step. Annie sees raccoons eating from the box, at one point.

Further Act Three action involves trying to track down the missing Lillian, who has disappeared. Helen locates Annie at her mom’s house, and the two frenemies try to find Lillian. It is in through this activity we learn of Helen’s longing for true female friendship — that she’s never had a long term female friendship like Lillian’s and Annie’s relationship.

Eventually, Lillian is found at her apartment. She walked out on her own rehearsal dinner. She tells Annie: “I outcrazied you.” On the brink of her own life — changing step, Lillian worries about what will happen to Annie in the future.

Annie reassures Lillian: “I’m gonna be fine, I am fine” — an indication that Annie knows she’s better. Then she helps Lillian get ready for the ceremony. The wedding is back on track.

Act Three culminates in entire wedding rocking out to Wilson Phillips’ performance of “Hold On,” an extravagance arranged by Helen. But after it all, Annie invites Helen to a Saturday evening out sometime at Rockin’ Sushi with Lillian and Annie — the ultimate girlfriend ritual. This makes Helen happy, and signals also that Annie has “warmed up” to Helen. Annie wants to include Helen in the drunken Rockin’ Sushi ritual of female friendship, including revelry and spontaneity.

After Rhodes and Annie get together at the movie’s end — when he picks her up after the wedding and reveals “I ate your cake”– a final coda to the film involves Megan and Air Marshall Jon who use food, “a bear sandwich,” in bawdy foreplay. The rituals of contemporary female friendships are underscored by the use and presence of food and drink as signifiers at important emotional moments throughout Bridesmaids. Annie Walker’s journey in the movie, in a downward spiral or “descent motif” is healed through her encounters with aspects of the dark feminine as revealed in the shadow side of “sisterhood” and in her own psyche. Annie’s healing process, after failing at business and at love, is also reflected in her great talent to bake again in Act Three. But this time, she’s not baking for business or commerce — she’s baking to express herself, to be warm, to acknowledge finding the Lucky Carrot.

Works Cited

Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols.

John Buchanan-Brown, trans. London: Penguin, 1996. Murdock, Maureen.

The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Boston: Shambala, 1990.

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Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays.

Gender & Food Week: ‘The Hunger Games’ Review in Conversation: Female Protagonists, Body Image, Disability, Whitewashing, Hunger & Food

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games

This Review in Conversation on The Hunger Games with Megan Kearns and Amber Leab previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on April 19, 2012.

Megan’s Take:
In a dystopian future, the nation of Panem stands where North America once existed. The government at the Capitol, which controls the country, mandates a girl and boy between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected by lottery in each of the 12 Districts as tributes to compete in a fight to the death called the Hunger Games aired on live television. 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers when her little sister Prim’s name is called. But in the Hunger Games, only one person can survive.

I devoured The Hunger Games trilogy, reading all 3 books in a matter of 2 days. Katniss descends from a line of strong literary female protagonists (Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins, Miyax in Julie of the Wolves, Jo March in Little Women, Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, Hermione Granger in Harry Potter) for young adult readers. The story echoes themes in The Lottery, The Most Dangerous Game, Gladiator, 1984, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Battle Royale, yet forges a new path. The female-centric series’ haunting themes – poverty, war, sacrifice, love, starvation, media influence, government control, class difference, and economic inequity – riveted me. The books’ memorable characters lingered long after I closed the pages. I didn’t want to say goodbye. So my expectations for the film were high when I saw the midnight premiere.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

While other female film franchises exist, no female-centric movies aside from Twilight, Bridesmaids and Mamma Mia have experienced this meteoric success. Some people pit Katniss and Bella against each other as if there isn’t room in this world for both. While I’m no fan of the Twilight Saga (I’ll admit it makes me want to gouge my eyes out), putting them in a dichotomy implies girls and women can only identify with either Katniss OR Bella, not both or neither. Thankfully, others question this comparison.

I thought the movie was fantastic. I often lament the lack of strong female protagonists in film. We desperately need more characters like Katniss on-screen. A skilled archer, Katniss is smart, stubborn, brave, abrasive and self-reliant. She not only fights for her own survival; she’s compelled to protect her family. Living in the most impoverished neighborhood in the poorest of the 12 Districts, Katniss is the resourceful breadwinner, illegally hunting for food to feed her family. She’s a surrogate mother to her sister Prim and even her own traumatized mother, grief-stricken over the death of her daughters’ father. Despite her tough exterior, she possesses a vulnerability. What makes Katniss unique is that she “feels empathy when nobody else does.” She’s compelled to defend others, even her competition.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

Jennifer Lawrence’s powerful performance as the “Girl on Fire” has been lauded by critics. And rightfully so. She’s stunning, perfectly conveying strength, rage, fear, and vulnerability through her body language, a flick of her eyes, never needing to utter a single word. She trained in archery, free running, yoga, climbing and combat. Regarding Lawrence’s casting as Katniss, director Gary Ross, moved by her powerful audition, called it “the easiest casting decision” of his life. Author Collins also fully supported Lawrence as Katniss.

The casting call, however, wanted an “underfed but strong” actor, and was limited only to “Caucasian” women. What. The. Fuck. I mean really, Hollywood?? No, women of color could even audition?! Collins describes Katniss’ appearance in the book as olive skinned with black hair. Hello…that could be tons of female actors of color! Why the hell must she be white?! You’re going to exclude young women of color and, on top of that, you only want malnourished-looking women?! Yes, starvation is a vital issue in the series. But in the book, Katniss says she possesses lean muscles from hunting.

Lawrence is receiving an assload of toxic bodysnarking from the misogynisitc media. The NY Times’ Mahnola Dargis claimed “her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission,”Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy commented on her “lingering baby fat,” Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells accuses Lawrence of being “big-boned” and “seems too big for Hutcherson” as male romantic partners should at least be as tall as their female counterparts (heaven forbid a woman is bigger or taller than her love interest…gasp!). The media constantly tells women we must be skinny. This toxicity destroys women’s body image.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

Amber’s Take:

I agree with all your comments on Katniss being a strong female protagonist, and what a relief it is for a franchise fronted by a young woman to win the box office (as of this writing) four weeks in a row. Although the Twilight comparisons irk me, too, they almost seem inevitable, as so few big Hollywood releases have featured female protagonists. As with so many Hollywood franchises, however, this one takes a small step forward: a strong young woman is in the lead, but she is whitewashed to “play it safe” with the viewing public. Although the film is set in—and was filmed in–modern-day Appalachia, I see no reason why the lead needed to be “Caucasian.”

I have to talk about the “body snarking,” because while I would never call Jennifer Lawrence “too big” to play Katniss, she is older than Katniss. The 17-year-old Lawrence who starred in Winter’s Bone would have been a more convincing 16-year-old Katniss than the actor at age 21. Women in their 20s playing teenagers certainly isn’t a new thing (how many times have you watched a movie or TV show and noticed twenty-somethings playing high school students?), but the tendency for this to happen does create unrealistic expectations for teenage girls and conflate girlhood with womanhood. I think this problem will only become more apparent in the following two films of the series, too.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss

Much has been said about Lawrence’s body, but I’m not really interested in analyzing it—the incessant discussion of female bodies is part of the problem. What I do want to discuss is the film’s handling of food and hunger (a conversation I think many people are sincerely trying to have who end up derailing into critiques of Lawrence’s body). Everyone in District 12 is hungry, including Katniss. Winning the Hunger Games isn’t just about surviving; it’s also about bringing extra food home to your district—especially important for the poorer areas. The Capitol uses hunger as a political tool—a fact that doesn’t come through clearly enough in the movie. (An anecdote: The person who saw the movie with me didn’t understand why it was called The Hunger Games.)

In the book, Katniss eats and enjoys the plentiful food provided to her in the lead up to the game. She finds a particular lamb stew rich and delicious and she enjoys eating it until she’s full. For a girl who’s been hungry much of her life, the food available on that train trip would be irresistible. Yet in the movie, Katniss seems uninterested, even immune to the lavish spread. Is there a reason Katniss can’t enjoy a hearty stew to fortify herself for the impending game? This de-emphasis of food changes the character of the story dramatically. Remember the moment when Gale presents a roll to Katniss in the woods and she exclaims “Is this real?!” and they break the roll to enjoy together? The berries Katniss and Peeta threaten to eat in their Romeo-and-Juliet-style sabotage of the game? The story of nourishment and consumption takes a major hit when the movie doesn’t permit Katniss to eat and enjoy food and, for me, this might trump whatever positive body-image message might be implied by the decision to cast Lawrence without regard to the “underfed” description in the casting call, and without regard to her adult status.

Megan’s Take:

I didn’t really have a problem with Lawrence being older than Katniss. Although I totally agree about the concern for girls “conflating girlhood with womanhood.” But I suppose it didn’t bother me so much because Katniss is never sexualized. She cares about archery, not what she’s wearing. While Katniss receives a pageant-style makeover, so do the male tributes. While it hints at it, I just wish the movie had conveyed the book’s satire of toxic beauty standards.

I could NOT agree more with you on the themes of hunger and food or rather how they’re severely diminished almost to the point of erasure in the film. As a feminist vegan, I’m passionate about food justice and our relationship with food. Food and hunger are vital themes in the trilogy. Food is used as a reward while withholding food a punishment wielded as a weapon against Panem’s citizens. While the movie hints at these themes through the Capitol’s citizens’ garish costumes versus District 12’s simple garb or the lavishness of food at the Capitol, it doesn’t fully capture the book’s themes of food justice, food shortages, hunger and class inequities.

Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket and Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen

It’s rare to see an impoverished protagonist and a film contend with economic inequities. Even within the impoverished District 12, there are class distinctions. In the book, Katniss tells Peeta he doesn’t understand her desire to not owe anyone anything because he’s not from the Seam, the poorest neighborhood in District 12. The reason Gale had his name in the Reaping 42 times was so he could obtain more rations for his family. Katniss continually describes food and she always gorges herself like she’ll never eat again…because she doesn’t know if she will.

Jennifer Lawrence and Amandla Stenberg as Rue

I too didn’t understand the de-emphasis of food and hunger. In reality, 1 in 6 children suffer from hunger. And I too loved Collins’ descriptions of food, like Katniss relishing her favorite nourishing lamb (dislike) stew with dried plums (yum!) and the sweetness of hot chocolate touching her lips for the first time. And of course there was the continual symbol of bread — the warm and fragrant bread accompanied by Prim’s cheese Katniss eats with Gale, or Peeta’s burned bread that saves her life years earlier, or District 11 sending Katniss a loaf of bread for her alliance with Rue (who was from District 11) as a symbol of solidarity and quiet revolution, which the film eliminates, showing the citizens (many of whom are people of color) rioting instead.

Society equates food with morality — healthy food is good, decadent food sinful. While eating should be a sensual experience, through diet ads the media constantly tells us that women shouldn’t enjoy food. Food is constantly a threat to women’s bodies and we must resist its seductive allure. That’s why it was so refreshing to read Katniss’ delight in savoring food.

Beyond nourishment, I saw hunger serving as a metaphor for consumption — consumption of merchandise and media with its gravitational pull of reality TV and celeb culture. To eliminate the message of food, hunger and consumption dilutes its powerful message.

Speaking of parts eliminated from the book, I was disappointed the film eliminated the leads’ disabilities. In the book, Katniss loses her hearing, becoming deaf in one ear, and Peeta has his leg amputated. The movie hints at her hearing loss with sound effects but doesn’t actually address it. People often say that losing their hearing would be the end of the world but Katniss must adapt as a hunter and survive. It’s also a powerful message that in the book the Capitol “fixes” people’s disabilities without their consent. Sadly, it says even more that the film erases disabilities altogether. The fact that a movie can’t have a disabled protagonist or a disabled love interest is pathetic.

Amber’s Take:

The film really diminished a lot of powerful themes and messages from the book, and I couldn’t agree more with you about minimizing injury, or what equates to erasure of disability. Ironic that the book has the Capitol “fixing” disability, but the film itself erases it–making the filmmakers the Capitol. We — the viewers — are already in the uncomfortable position of watching the Games much like the Capitol citizens (something else the film minimizes, I think).

In a way, it’s funny that we haven’t really talked about violence, and how — in order to get a PG-13 rating — the film sanitized violence. The books are intended for a Young Adult audience, but are filled with brutal murders. The movie is, too, and I think we could see the de-emphasis of violence as either positive or negative: Positive in that the movie doesn’t glorify violence, or depict it graphically (which movies do too much of in general), but bad in that the movie isn’t as dark or complex as it could have been. While I realize that a filmmaker must make difficult choices when adapting a book (series), every choice made about The Hunger Gamesmade it safer — and more likely to not put off, offend, or disturb mainstream viewers. In essence, making it a successful blockbuster.

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Amber Leab is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a Master’s degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from Miami University. Outside of Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared in The Georgetown Review, on the blogs Shakesville, The Opinioness of the World, and I Will Not Diet, and at True Theatre.

Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Editor and Staff Writer. She’s a feminist vegan blogger and freelance writer living in Boston. Megan blogs about gender, media, food and politics at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site she founded. She writes about gender, media and reproductive justice as a Regular Blogger at Fem2pt0. Megan’s work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Everyday Feminism, Feminist Magazine on KPFK radio, Feministing’s Community Blog, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, A Safe World for Women and Women and Hollywood. You can follow her on Twitter at @OpinionessWorld.

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’: I didn’t get it.

Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Just in case the world does end today, I need to get something off my chest, so I can go to my apocalyptic grave with an unburdened movie-loving conscience: I didn’t get Beasts of the Southern Wild.

When it started picking up mad buzz and heaps of festival awards earlier this year, Beasts of the Southern Wild shot up to the top of my to-see list. A visually-stunning, lyrical American fable centered on the breakout performance of a five-year-old powerhouse of a little girl? Sign me up!

I finally got the chance to see Beasts of the Southern Wild on an overnight transatlantic flight last fall, admittedly imperfect screening conditions. I fell asleep during my first attempt to watch it, lulled by its dreamlike qualities (on top of travel fatigue and a couple 187ml bottles of red wine). So I tried watching it again later in the flight, after the sun had come up. I managed to stay awake this time, but not awake enough to understand WHAT ON EARTH WAS GOING ON.

This is the part of the review where I should offer a brief synopsis of the film, but I didn’t understand what was happening enough to be able to adequately do so. In my memory it goes something like this: Hushpuppy lives in The Bathtub, a simple swampy community isolated from the rest of society. Hushpuppy explains her worldview in poetic narration while Events Occur.

Here’s a few more half-remembered details, bolstered by some research into other reviews: Hushpuppy’s dad is also around, bouncing intermittently between neglect of and tough love survival training for Hushpuppy. And then there is a storm and a forced-evacuation from the suddenly-present government? And Hushpuppy and some other little girls go look for Hushpuppy’s mom, and may or may not find her? And then Hushpuppy wins a staring contest with a herd of gigantic prehistoric animals who floated over from the melting ice caps?

Hushpuppy vs. Auroch

Whaaaat? This all makes The Tree of Life seem like a straightforward piece of traditional storytelling.

What makes Beasts of the Southern Wild so elusive is that it is told from the perspective of its young protagonist, Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhané Wallis, only five years old at the time of filming). Wallis really is a magnetic screen presence, and I wanted to love this movie on the basis of her captivating performance alone. But I also wanted to know what was happening. The sci-fi fan in me was too distracted by the unanswered questions (among them: what year is it?) resulting from the sidelined world-building of The Bathtub to fully invest in the character-driven, loosely-structured story in Beasts, no matter how engaging I found Wallis’s tiny tour de force.

Writing for Bitch Flicks last summer, Megan Kearns suggested,

“Even as you watch the film, you might not understand or fully comprehend the meaning of the unusual plot. But let its poetic beauty, emotions and raw honesty wash over you. Let it sink in.”

I tried. I want to support experimental narratives. I want to support films that showcase marginalized groups like children, women, and people of color (Hushpuppy is a triple threat!). I want to be intellectual enough, patient enough, film-lover enough and feminist enough to enjoy Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I was not.

So if this is the end of days, at least I will go out honestly. Do you have any cinematic confessions to share with the class while you still have the chance?

‘Anna Karenina,’ and the Tragedy of Being a Woman in the Wrong Era

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina

Written by Erin Fenner.

In Joe Wright’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, we are relentlessly stuck in a nineteenth-century playhouse.

Instead of moving through space – sets move around the characters. Everyone is a tool of their society. They’re subject to frivolous, yet harmful social etiquette. And while props whiz past the characters, they are near static – sometimes their only movement is to literally fall backwards into another scene. Whatever personal will characters have is not rational, but instinctual and overwhelming. The characters base their life on propriety but their motivation shifts to a need to seek pleasure, and then a need to simply not suffer.

Anna Karenina is about how love is battered by rigid societal structures – how norms create an appearance of civility, but ultimately destroy individuals.

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is a young married mother. Her husband, Alexi Karenin, (Jude Law) is a well-respected statesman and painfully kind. We meet Anna as she begins her journey to Moscow to see her brother, Oblonsky (Matthew Macfayden). There, her goal is to convince her brother’s wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), to stay in her marriage. Oblonsky has been casually adulterous, and Dolly can’t bear to stay with him.

Oblonsky committed adultery and is only threatened with losing his wife. Dolly, on the other hand, now devastated by a man she devoted her life to, cannot do anything without losing everything. So, she forgives Oblonsky. And he returns to philandering because, as a man, he is exempt from the stringent rules that do apply to women. For men, societal rules are a game. For women, it’s serious. So, while the tragedy in Oblonksy’s family should be his own – his flaw being infidelity – the tragedy is his wife’s. Her flaw is that she is unfortunate enough to be a woman in a culture that denies women autonomy.

Anna convinces Dolly to stay with Oblonsky with a brutally layered argument. She sandwiches love around impending destitution. You love him right? If you leave him you will have nothing. But, don’t worry, because you love him.

This is how we meet Anna – as manipulative as the shifting set around her. She is persuading her sister-in-law with good intentions – but based on a system’s rules that ultimately marginalize.

It is almost immediately after meeting with Dolly that Anna pushes against propriety by dancing all night with the handsome young Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is certainly not her husband. Wright, who also directed Pride and Prejudice¸ uses a device in Anna Kareninen that is reminiscent of a scene from Pride and Prejudice. Anna and Vronsky enter the dance floor and the rest of the dancers are frozen intermittently throughout a song – then the extra dancers disappear leaving us only with Anna and Vronsky. And Anna’s social rationality begins to slip.

Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Anna Karenina

It is after this that Vronsky begins taking extreme measures to seduce Anna. When she returns home from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Vronksy follows her and sets up in her town. He attends the parties she does and regularly indicates his interest in her even though she just as regularly declines him. Stalking has regularly been portrayed as a fundamental (and even romantic) aspect of courtship. Vronsky doesn’t win likability by his entitled, desperate and coercive approach to wooing an unwilling married woman. Of course Vronsky is able to stalk because it won’t damage his reputation, won’t strip him of livelihood or alienate him from his community. Anna has everything to lose. So, when they do consummate their affair, Anna calls Vronsky a “murderer” of her “happiness.”

[Spoilers ahead]

When Anna confesses her affair to her husband, Alexi’s main aim is to defer a scandal. Acting rational in this culture means following irrational rules.

But, when Anna gives birth to Vronsky’s daughter, it’s harder to keep the story mum. Anna almost dies in the process, and on her presumed deathbed she acts as a devoted wife and begs for forgiveness. She embraces demure, until she recovers. It makes sense that Anna could only bear living up (or down, rather) to feminine ideals when she was dying. Being a puppet to a patriarchal society while alive is excruciating for her.

When her affair becomes publicly known, Anna is ostracized by her community. Vronsky begs an old friend of hers to “call on her.” The friend refuses saying, “I’d call on her if she broke the law. But, she broke the rules.”

Because Anna was audacious enough to act on her own desire, she is to be punished. Oblonsky and Vronsky can sleep with whomever they want and receive little more than a reprimand and tongue-clicking. For her marital indiscretion, Anna loses her children, her friends and she is unable to even secure a divorce. Due to her intense isolation and social shunning, Anna breaks down and eventually throws herself onto the train tracks as a train comes barreling toward her.

We, like the characters, are mostly confined within the theater for the duration of the film. Occasionally the camera pans over a real setting – in the country or at a train station – but then we are subjected back to props and shifting sets. It devastatingly returns to the façade – while the agony of the drama is so more poignant. But we are reduced to pretense – and that’s where society wanted to keep Anna. The only way she could escape it was through death.

Where ‘Ruby Sparks’ Goes Wrong

Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

I expected to either love or hate Ruby Sparks depending on where it took its premise. This premise being: sad sack writer creates a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Character named Ruby Sparks, she manifests into his real life, still influenced by what he writes about her, consequences ensue. I suspected I’d hate the movie if the creation of the woman Ruby Sparks was a happy miracle, and love it if it turned out to be a disaster, depicting the limitations of the fantasy applied to real life.

But my feelings were more complicated than I expected. I found Ruby Sparks to be an engrossing film that was very uncomfortable to watch, like a good horror movie. But I was also left unsatisfied and disappointed by the film, wanting both a better take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and a better all-around movie watching experience.

The first problem with Ruby Sparks is that it takes entirely too long to establish its premise. It’s actually a pretty simple idea for anyone hip to storytelling tropes (even if you don’t know the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” you probably recognize one when you see one, and writers with God-like authorial power is nothing new either). While it is realistic that it would take our characters a while to accept this premise was actually happening, it’s frustrating for the audience. We’ve already accepted it before we started to watch the movie, which makes the first forty minute or so of “Yes, REALLY” rather tedious.

I believe this first problem is a symptom of the second and most serious problem with Ruby Sparks: that the writer who creates her, Calvin, is the protagonist. Given the that film was written by a woman (Zoe Kazan, who also plays the eponymous character), co-directed by a woman (Valerie Feris, alongside Jonathan Dayton, the directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine), and centered on deconstructing an antifeminist trope, I was surprised how much sympathy I was expected to have for the man luxuriating in a hyper-real version of it.

The Sad Sack in Need of the Love of Good Woman, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s counterpoint, is a sexist trope in and of itself. It’s rooted in the idea that only men are burdened by the pathos of true adulthood/personhood, that the expectation to be a Great Man is a constant yoke that women will never understand. In the case of Ruby Sparks‘s Calvin (Paul Dano), he’s suffering the terrible burden of being a literary wunderkind who hasn’t been able to follow up the Great American Novel he wrote in his early twenties.

Zoe Kazan as Ruby Sparks

Calvin’s therapist gives him a writing assignment to help with his writer’s block: write about a person who could love Calvin’s shaggy dog, Scotty, despite his flaws (guess what guys: THE DOG IS A METAPHOR FOR CALVIN! Whoaaaa!). Calvin then dreams (literally) and encounter with Ruby Sparks, a pretty, friendly, charming girl who likes Scotty even though she’s unfamiliar with the works of his namesake, F. Scott Fitzgerald. After this dream, Calvin can’t stop writing about Ruby (on a typewriter! In 2012. Ugh, he’s the worst.)

Calvin at his magical typewriter.

Cultural ignorance is only one of the many infantalizing qualities given to Ruby by Calvin: she can’t drive, she doesn’t own a computer, she “isn’t very good at life sometimes” because she forgets to pay bills and the like. Then there are the deficits in Ruby’s true personhood that aren’t by design, but by omission: Calvin writes that she is a painter, but we never see her paint, and neglects to give her a regular job, or any friends or family. The only outside relationships he gives her are memories of inadequate exes: a high school teacher she had an affair with (thus failing to get her diploma), an alcoholic, another age-inappropriate partner. All to make Calvin the more comparatively worthy.

While this is all cutting writing on Kazan’s part, doing its work to highlight what makes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl a problematic trope, within the story of the film it comes out of Calvin, which makes him extremely unsympathetic to the audience. But it is clear we’re supposed to be rooting for him: as he swears off writing about Ruby and she becomes more and more human (and less and less interested in Calvin), we’re meant to worry for him. When he succumbs to the pressure to write her back into being the perfect girlfriend and it backfires, we aren’t supposed to fret for Ruby as she suffers extreme mood swings, but rather for their effect on Calvin. We don’t see how “Real Ruby”‘s friends react to these changes, only Calvin. We see how Calvin’s family responds to Ruby, but Ruby doesn’t have a family, because Calvin didn’t bother to write her one.

I kept wondering if I was reading the film wrong, until the denouement which confirmed that Calvin is meant to be the main sympathetic character. Having “released” Ruby from his magical creativity, Calvin writes a novel recounting this experience called The Girlfriend. It is met with wide acclaim, duhdoy. Then Calvin, walking Scotty, happens upon a woman in the park. A woman who looks just like Ruby. She acts a little bit more like a real person than the Ruby from Calvin’s original dream, but it’s clear Calvin still has the upper hand: she asks if they’ve met before, because he looks familiar to her, and he points her to his photo in her book jacket, as she’s reading The Girlfriend. The scene is extremely reminiscent of the end of (500) Days of Summer, where despite all the self-entitled jerkwad behavior we’ve seen the main male character go through over the course of the movie, we know he’s the one we’re supposed to be rooting for because he meets another (sorta, in this case) girl.

This meeting should have read more like the villain in a slasher flick popping out of his grave to kill again, but it really seemed intended to be a heartwarming second chance for a lovable loser. And trying to make Calvin a sympathetic character when he’s acting more like a monster for most of the film makes Ruby Sparks fall apart. It’s not like we couldn’t have had Ruby as our primary protagonist because she’s “not real”, see Pinocchio. It’s a shame that Ruby Sparks asks us to sympathize more with Calvin than the title character, it weakens the film’s mission and makes it much less enjoyable to watch.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Amber‘s Picks:

Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship by A.O. Scott via The New York Times

Oscars and casting: Hollywood insiders discuss diversity by Solvej Schou via Entertainment Weekly

30 Lessons We Learned From Amy Poehler in 2012 by Krutika Mallikarjuna via Buzzfeed

Megan‘s Picks:

7 Ways Women and Girls are Sexualized, Stereotyped and Underrepresented On Screen by Dana Liebelson and Asawin Suebsaeng via Mother Jones

“There Is an Audience for Our Films”: Four African-American Female Filmmakers Speak Out by Lorenza Munoz via The Daily Beast

Surprise! Attempted Rape Scene in Episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ by Tizzy Giordano via Fem2pt0

TedX Women Talk about Online Harassment and Cyber Mobs by Anita Sarkeesian via Feminist Frequency

Is Historical Accuracy a Good Defense of Patriarchal Societies in Fantasy Fiction? by Dan Wohl via The Mary Sue

Google Grants $1.2M to Help Analyze Female Roles in TV, Film by Angela Watercutter via Wired

Hollywood’s Power 100 Mingle at THR’s Women in Entertainment Breakfast by Sophie A. Schillaci via The Hollywood Reporter

The Divine, Difficult Women of ‘Treme’ and David Simon’s Female Characters by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Dreamworks Animation Is Proud of Having an 85% Female Group of Producers by Susana Polo via The Mary Sue

Sexist Quote of the Day by Bret Easton Ellis Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

What have you read (or written) this week that you’d like to share?

In Praise of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln

When Mary Todd Lincoln, played by Sally Field, first appears in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I got nervous. With a weary voice and a far-off manner, she analyzes one of Mr. Lincoln’s dreams as a portent of doom. Looks like we’re getting the “batshit crazy” take on Mary Lincoln, I thought.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I was particularly upset by this because the characterization of Mary is especially crucial to the success of the film from a feminist perspective, because it is otherwise almost entirely focused on men (although Gloria Reuben is great in her small role and S. Epatha Merkerson brings as much as she can to her even smaller one).

But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that just as it does with her husband Abraham, Lincoln is merely incorporating the legend of Mary Todd—stated eloquently by the character herself as “all anyone will remember of me is that I was crazy and that I ruined your happiness”—into a much more nuanced depiction of a complex character.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I have to admit, my initial reaction to the Mary in Lincoln was not helped by my preconceived opinion on the casting of Sally Field. My issue was not the age difference (Field is 10 years Day-Lewis’ senior, the reverse of the real-life age difference between the Lincolns) that required Ms. Field to fight to keep her role. I was rather concerned with the contrast in acting style between Field and Day-Lewis. I recalled the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, where Marlon Brando’s then-revolutionary method realism left Vivian Leigh’s remarkable (and Oscar-winning) yet much more theatrical performance as Blanche DuBois in Stanley’s dust.

In an interview with Sharon Knolle, Sally Field insists:

“Listen: People don’t know what method is. I am method! I studied at the Actors’ Studio. I studied with Lee Strasberg. That’s where the term “method” came from. Daniel and I work exactly the same way. I always stay in character. Any good actor does that.”

Ms. Field obviously knows her own technique better than I do, but I doubt I am alone as a moviegoer in thinking of her as an actress whose screen presence is largely defined by her personal charm and her ability to turn the melodrama up to eleven rather than an ability to disappear into a character.

But Field’s performance style actually fits in well among a universally strong but stylistically-varied ensemble. While Tommy Lee Jones is uncharacteristically reserved even playing the bombastic abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and the inimitably restrained David Strathairn does fantastic work as Secretary of State William Seward [Tangent: my greatest beef with this film is that Seward is largely absent from the third act—just when his story gets really good!—because it diminishes Strathairn’s awards chances, and I think he’s still owed statues from Good Night and Good Luck]; there’s also plenty of delightful scenery chewing among the supporting cast, from Lee Pace as pro-slavery Democrat Fernando Wood, who ought to have a mustache just for twirling at the appropriate beats in his racist speeches on the Congressional floor, to James Spader’s cartoonishly uncouth political trickster.

Although Field plays most of her scenes against Day-Lewis, they play off each other surprisingly well. Lincoln as a whole walks a fine line between humanizing and further mythologizing one of the greatest figures in American history. Despite Day-Lewis’s historically-accurate adoption of a slouched posture and gentle high-pitched speaking voice, the film unquestionably presents Lincoln as the Great Man of the Lincoln Legend. But these indulgences are brilliantly counterbalanced by having the character aware of his place in history and the inevitable myth-making about him.

Fittingly, this vulnerability is no more apparent than when he is with his wife. Playing off Field, Day-Lewis is perhaps at his most actorly, but the effect is subtly demonstrating to the audience that Abraham is the one acting as the character of President Lincoln when he is politicking and speechmaking. Field’s work in Lincoln makes the central performance and consequently the film itself better, which is exactly what a supporting actor should do. My misgivings about her casting could not have been more wrong.

And thankfully, neither could my first impression of the film’s overall take on the character. While Lincoln‘s Mary is indeed emotionally erratic, occasionally difficult, and haunted by grief, the film doesn’t damn her the way some historical accounts have by making these her only characteristics. She’s treated as an intellectual equal by her husband, we see her watch the congressional debates on the 13th Amendment from the balcony with keen interest, and in Field’s best scene, she epically takes down Thaddeus Stevens with a smile while playing the role of First-Lady-as-Gracious-Hostess.

Field’s best scene in Lincoln

Tony Kushner’s script and Sally Field’s game performance evade the two traps of fictional portrayals of Mary Lincoln: she’s neither the crazy shrew undermining her great husband nor the equally sexist and hoary cliche of the Great Woman Behind a Great Man. Instead, Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln is one of the many compelling elements that make up Spielberg’s excellent Lincoln.

Women in Politics Week: ‘The Young Victoria’: Family Values as Land Grab

Guest post by Erin Blackwell.

I wanted to watch The Young Victoria (2009) because Miranda Richardson’s in it and I’m going through a watch-everything-she’s-in phase. Richardson talked up the film in an interview with the Daily Mail online. And I quote:

“I spent my time cross stitching,” she revealed. “But I made it fun by stitching naughty words into handkerchiefs.” Miranda, 51 [in 2009], wouldn’t be drawn on the exact words, but added, “There were long gaps between filming and I was bored, so it kept me occupied.”

If you have any plans to watch this film, you can’t do better than to follow her lead.

Yes, the film is boring. Yes, Victoria was boring. Yes, the costumes deserve their oscar, if awards are given on the basis of hysterical historic accuracy. And yes, Miranda looks fantabulous in her kooky pre-Victorian wig and ostrich feathers. (See video below.) There’s not enough Miranda in The Young Victoria. There’s not enough Miranda in anything since Dance with a Stranger (1985), so maybe just watch that again.

WHY, WHY, WHY

Why does England have a royal family? France killed its last king in 1793, over 200 years ago. Why is England so backward? Italy and Germany don’t have royals. Why did super-cool super-tool imperialist thug James Bond cross-pollinate its brand with dowdy old Queen Elizabeth to sell the world the London Olympics in 2012?

Why indeed.

Don’t tell me we’re meant to enjoy being subjugated, if only for the length of one of the movies that serve as marketing for, ah, the ruling class.

Why would an American worry about the correct curtsey? Or not speaking to Elizabeth until spoken to? What’s this game we’re all colluding in? Why even capitalize the Q in queen? She’s not our queen.

What possible interest could there be in retracing Victoria’s ascension to a 64-year reign of Britain and the British Empire?

Well, arguably, it’d be nice to have some insight into the psychology of She who reigned longer than any other woman in history, who gave her name to the Victorian Era, and whose personal quirks did much to promote the model of heterosexist monogamy Freud did his utmost to knock the stuffing out of.

That’s not happening here. This is distinctly a movie for the ice-cream cup and toffee crowd.

THE NOSE

Photographs of queen Victoria show us she was a chubby five-feet tall, with bulbous eyes, heavy lids, a bird’s beak of a nose, not much chin until she got older and then, multiple chins. She was never anything resembling a beauty. She needed neither beauty nor brains because she had birth, and progressively, girth. As did that over-fed, underworked letch, her son, Edward the seventh. But that’s all much later. The Young Victoria could almost be called The Virgin Victoria, since it ends abruptly with the birth of her first of nine children. That’s all these royals are good for, really: continuing their own ruddy bloodline.

Emily Blunt is zaftig, juicy, with sensuous features recalling the late princess Margaret, wildcat younger sister of the current queen Elizabeth. Blunt’s Victoria romps about stolidly pursuing some sense of self, trapped as she is in a thicket of interested parties. There’s nothing wrong with this actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this part, with the wrong nose.

THE SCRIPT

Julian Fellowes wrote the mind-bogglingly complex, creaky, slavish, finicky, disjointed, unfocussed script. Yes, he scripted Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) and currently, BBC TV’s Downton Abbey. There’s an arse-licking profile of the smug royalist in December’s Vanity Fair. I devoured every syllable, green with envy. There’s not one word about The Young Victoria, which failed to recoup its $35 million-dollar budget.

In a Daily Mail interview, Fellowes uses some arcane derivative of the royal we to massage Victoria’s obsolescence:

“We live in the remains of a Victorian day. The way we lay the table, the way we sit in the dining room. Our views on marriage are essentially Victorian. Really, our morality, where it exists, is a Victorian morality that has struggled through. And I think you can find much of what is good about our society if you look closely at the nineteenth century.”

THE PLOT

“Her destiny belonged to an empire, but her heart belonged to one man,” heralds the trailer, and I’m afraid that’s a fairly accurate description of the historical Victoria. She really did love Albert with a crazy love — which was disastrous, as he died when she still had 40 years to go. She basically retired from life without abdicating from the throne.

One of the strands of plot is the confection of that romance, which, if you’re the sucker for costumes I am, is not without its charms. German Romantic composer Schubert gets his fair share of air time, with his solid hit, “Standchen” (Serenade).

The second strand of plot involves a Dickens-derivative couple of monsters — her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent (Richardson), and her evil minder, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). They’re enough to write an entire movie about and too complex to understand when demoted, as they are here, to melodramatic villains. They try to swindle Victoria out of her crown and into a regency by which they’d rule in her stead, but are thwarted.

To be honest, there’s a third strand, which I forgot about it’s so boring, starring prime minister Lord Melbourne manipulating young Vicky’s heart and mind until Albert comes along to take over the reins. Paul Bettany plays him like a sandblasted surfer, without an ounce of nuance or neurosis, but really, it’s the dismaying spectacle of weak-willed Vicky that plunges me into denial the scenes even exist.

For all his cleverness, screenwriter Fellowes fails to synthesize historical accuracy, heterosexual imperative, and hero worship into a cohesive statement on the interplay of sex and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

SUPPORTING PLAYERS

Jim Broadbent plays the old king who exerts himself to survive long enough to pass the crown directly to Victoria, thereby bypassing her conniving mum. Perhaps you remember him as the bartender in The Crying Game (1993). That was a better role, but this is a better wig. He has a great moment at the head of an ostentatious dinner table, humiliating the Duchess of Kent.

Harriet Walter, one the greatest stage actresses of her generation, is crystalline as the queen who steps down on Victoria’s ascension. She’s got a long, unlovely face, the right kind of nose, and such clear focus you actually feel while she’s onscreen the film’s going to make sense.

Miranda Richardson doesn’t get too far with the Duchess of Kent, disappearing into the costumes and scenery in the manner of a method actress bored out of her mind after hours of cross-stitching. Or a cupie doll lost among the stuffed toys in a shooting gallery. However, there’s a lively snatch of Miranda-babble as she’s interviewed in full regalia, trying to make sense of what she’s been given to do.

ROLE MODEL

As a teenager, I was entranced with Renaissance virgin queen Elizabeth the first because she danced well, spoke several foreign languages living and dead, wrote sonnets, and was played with great fustian by Bette Davis opposite Errol Flynn. She was also involved in all sorts of intrigues, and had privy counsellors. Shakespeare wrote and performed for her. Wow. She whitened her face with pulverized egg shells, set off by red curls, and her forehead was a forerunner of Paula Broadwell’s. She wore weird gowns studded with precious jewels while telling men what to do.

And, of course, Queenie was breathtakingly portrayed by Miranda Richardson as a tyrannical baby in the comic BBC series, Blackadder. I tried to also like queen Victoria, because she’d been queen even longer, but as a personality she was a dud, obsessed with her own feelings and worse, other people’s morality. Famously, she excised all mention of woman-on-woman action from the landmark English law against homosexuality because, well, it just wasn’t done.

More governed than governing, busier breeding than reading, Victoria was a bit of a stubborn, self-righteous old hog who did nothing to further the political cause of women because she believed, “We women are not made for governing.”

LAST WORDS

It’d be so interesting if somebody would film the life — early, middle, or late — of queen Victoria as it must’ve been, from inside the royal cult, with its weird rituals and exotic entitlements, without concessions to a modern mass audience. Miranda comes closest to suggesting how inbred, uptight, obsessive the whole lot of them were. Not so very unlike the present cast of characters, except that they, post-Freud, have been sexually liberated. Not a pretty picture.

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Erin Blackwell is a consulting astrologer who was raised to regard movies as a form of worship. She blogs at venus11house.