Tag: 2013 Oscar Week

2013 Oscar Week: Maya from ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is an Emotional Character

Guest post written by Alison Vingiano, originally published at AGV Notes. Cross-posted with permission.
The movie theater was already packed when I found my seat on Sunday afternoon. When the lights dimmed, the screen stayed dark. Phone calls from September 11, 2001 echoed throughout the room. I don’t think anybody breathed for the first three minutes of the film.
Zero Dark Thirty was one of the best movies I saw this year. The protagonist, Maya, captivated me with her focus and passion. She was a realistic, interesting character to watch, despite how little we learn about her life. At times she was overwhelmed, but she never collapsed with emotion or passion. Maya was no Carrie Mathison. On Monday, still thinking about the film, I read that day’s TIME Magazine piece. The author interviewed Kathryn Bigelow about the deeply perplexing final shot. She wrote:
“You may be wondering why Maya — so stoic and static throughout her years of hunting — breaks down into sobs when the mission is over… All this comes after a decade of ruthless pursuit, in a career to which she has sacrificed her entire life and, for the audience, more than two hours of watching a character display no hint of an emotion other than vengefulness, dedication, patriotism or anger.”
Okay there, TIME Magazine, check yo’self. No emotion other than anger? Stoic and static throughout her years of hunting? Yes, Maya does not cry until the final shot. Deeming her emotionless, however, narrows the complexity of her character. It assumes that a women who does not cry does not feel. It is important to recognize Maya as an emotional character because doing so illustrates the depth of her strength. It shows that emotional women are competent, focused and determined as well.
Maya displays a wide emotional range. In fact, had her character been a man, reviews would likely comment about his brave sentimentality. We would discuss he queazy response to torture, for example, or his frightened reaction to being attacked by gunfire. She is too emotive for a man, yet not emotive enough for a woman.
Jessica Chastain as Maya in Zero Dark Thirty
Let’s look at specific examples of Maya’s emotional reactions. When Maya’s colleague is killed, we see her curled up in her office, paralyzed by (what I interpreted as) sadness and shock. Many scenes later, we see that a picture of Maya with this friend is her computer background. When Maya first experiences the interrogation of detainees, she looks away.  The sight upsets her. In fact, when she is left alone with a detainee and he asks for her help, the audience cannot predict if she will succumb to his request. Finally, she delivers a strong but difficult answer: “You can help yourself by telling the truth.” Later, when Maya is shot at by a group of young men, we see a panicked, unrestrained reaction. When Maya receives the call that US troops are raiding the mansion in Abbottabad, she hangs up the phone with such a fierce expression of fear and excitement that I wanted to hug her.
Maya is a stronger character because of these natural emotional responses; she lets herself feel and fully experience the trauma she endures. She responds like a human being and a CIA veteran, not as some stoic, cold-hearted robot. When Maya cried in the final shot, it was a logical progression of her character’s growth. She just achieved her greatest career goal, while also changing the course of the war on terror. How could she not be overwrought with emotional display? I was not at all shocked, as the TIME article suggests viewers must have been.
We should not assume all female characters will emote similarly. Real women display their feelings in various ways, some of which include “not crying.” It is wrong to see a woman thriving in a high-stress job  – without tears – and think “wow, she is emotionless!” I doubt we would assume that about a powerful career oriented man. We would simply discuss how well he performed his job.
Strength largely derives from how one processes their feelings. Cinematic portraits of powerful women are not just the Catwoman or GI Jane. We also need to see and accept powerful, emotional women in film. Yes, Maya was angry, determined and combative for much of the movie. But she also showed fear, sadness and defeat. The beauty of Maya is that she was written with the same complexity as any male character. And you know why? Because she’s based on a real-life, three-dimensional woman. Calling her emotionless insults the depth of her intricately formed character.
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Alison Vingiano is a writer, comedian, filmmaker and feminist residing in New York City. Her work has been featured on many websites, including Thought Catalog, Feministing, After Ellen and The Jane Dough. Follow her at www.agvnotes.tumblr.com and on Twitter at @agvnotes.

2013 Oscar Week: Cosmology, Gender, and Quvenzhané Wallis: ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’

Written by Max Thornton.
In my studies, I work with the intersection of pop culture and religion. This is a frustrating field: a lot of the discourse from the theological side is exceedingly shallow, and the explicit pop-culture engagements with religion are rarely any better.
Honestly, I often find I can have the richest theological dialogue with popular culture that is not explicitly religious, and Beasts of the Southern Wild is a superb example.
It is, of course, religious in the broad twentieth-century existential sense of “ultimate concern” and “meaning-making.” The film tackles Big Themes of loss, belonging, growing up, but it does so through a very specific story – that of six-year-old Hushpuppy, living with her difficult father in an imperiled swampland community called the Bathtub.
Quvenzhané Wallis is astonishing as Hushpuppy. I own T-shirts older than this girl, but she knocked my socks off and I hope she wins a billion Oscars. Like the film itself, she had to pull off a delicate balancing of the cosmic and the intimate. As the cinematography veers between wide sweeps of polar ice caps and close, intense shots of life in the Bathtub, so Wallis seemingly effortlessly manages both the very embodied work of near-wordless acting and the lyrical voiceovers that punctuate the film. With lines like “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get busted,” Beasts of the Southern Wild reminds me a little of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, but whereas that film bored me rigid, Beasts moved me to tears.
Or, to express that in Internet…

Part of that dynamic is simply that both films exist in an entertainment culture overwhelmingly dominated by white middle-class people. Before The Tree of Life ever came out, I had reached a point where if I never again in my life saw another piece of entertainment about a white suburban family, it would be too soon. A film about a poor, largely African-American community in a Louisiana bayou automatically grabs my attention to a much greater degree (and, let’s be perfectly honest, the fact that it’s 45 minutes shorter than Malick’s endless bloody movie doesn’t hurt).

Interestingly, the film was initially a play about a father and son. Writer Lucy Alibar’s initial choice to distance herself from the young character through the gender-flip is reversed for the screen, and she is not unaware of the politics of gender:

“We made a hero story with a little girl in it, and she is fighting for her family, not her boyfriend. I never saw that growing up, I thought I had to be a little boy to be a hero.” (BlackBook interview)

“I always felt like there wasn’t a blueprint for father daughter relationships — for them or for us. Because what are they supposed to do with us, treat us like boys, or small women, or what? Father daughter relationships are so unique from family to family, and I’d love to watch it explored more onstage.” (Barnes & Noble interview)

Suddenly it makes sense that Hushpuppy’s father encourages her to be “a man”: it’s the only way of relating that he knows. He simply has no other way of expressing his feelings or his hopes for his young daughter.

Hushpuppy, being a man.

The film beautifully navigates the relationship between independence and interdependence. From the very beginning, where Hushpuppy and her father live in separate but adjacent tiny houses, the six-year-old is never babied or coddled in any way; and yet she consistently stresses her understanding of the world and her place in it. She has a remarkably holistic idea of the cosmos, completely lacking in anthropocentrism – her description of a hospital: “When an animal gets sick here, they plug it into the wall” – and astounding in its sense of perspective.

Although the film itself doesn’t directly address the concept of God, it is pervaded with a religious sense. Lucy Alibar again:

“God isn’t this distant thing. God is right here with you all the time. He’s your buddy, and you can talk about everything. And writing this play and working on the film, seeing it, I felt God’s presence. I just had more of a sense of my place in the whole scope of everything.” (Elle interview)

Alibar’s triumph is that the film perfectly walks the line of contradictory impulses, affirming the individual’s “place in the whole scope of everything” without being deterministic, stressing the need to (as Hushpuppy’s teacher puts it) “take care of those smaller and sweeter than you” without being paternalistic, portraying an aching realism through a fantastical story of long-dead beasts. Cinema’s triumph is the emergence of an amazing young talent in QuvenzhanéWallis.

“I see that I’m a little piece in a big, big universe. And that makes things right.”



Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Les Misérables’: Some Musicals Are More Feminist Than Others

Guest post written by Natalie Wilson, originally published at Ms. Magazine. Cross-posted with permission.
While Les Misérables is not your typical musical–or, as this Guardian review puts it, “There’s no dancing, there are no jazz hands and there is next to no speech”–it is typical of the genre in that, like opera, it includes more female characters than do many plays, movies and novels. Regardless if this is due to the fondness for female voices or to the swoon-inducing love ballads adored by so many, this viewer is thankful for the diverse female characters so wonderfully played by Anne Hathaway(Fantine), Amanda Seyfriend (Cosette), Samantha Barks (Éponine) and Helena Bonham Carter (Madame Thénardier).
The film adaptation, based on the musical (seen by over 60 million people), which is itself based on Victor Hugo’s novel, arguably heightens the proto-feminist elements of the original narrative as it allows for a more close-up, more harrowing depiction of the key female characters, all of whom are “miserable” for justifiable reasons.
Though the film has been referred to as a “lobotomized opera,” it can more aptly be described as an operatic musical that not only focuses on macro problems of human existence–morality, freedom, power, forgiveness–but also on how these problems play out at the micro level, particularly how the macro power of men effects women on a micro level. As noted at Democratic Underground, Victor Hugo gets:
“…the plight of women in his society, especially the grisettes (working class young women) and prostitutes, and how they were helpless against not just men of power, but men in general, and how nice poor girls could so easily be discarded and have [their lives] ruined because of becoming pregnant or rebuffing sexual advances.”

Fantine is the key character to have her life ruined in such a manner. Abandoned by the man who impregnates her, she is working in the 19th century version of a sweatshop when we first meet her in the film. She ultimately turns to sexual slavery so as to continue sending money to the unscrupulous caretakers (the Thénardiers) who, unbeknowst to her, are abusing and exploiting her young daughter, Cosette.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables
Fantine is portrayed sympathetically in the text and musical, but the film adaptation emphasizes the horrors of forced prostitution, something the musical renditions of the song “Lovely Ladies” frequently belie. Often performed in an upbeat, jokey manner, in the film the song instead becomes a battle cry against sexual slavery, with the costuming, make-up, sets and lighting bringing the horrors behind the lyrics to life as the sickly, starving, cold, tattered and abused women sing:
Lovely ladies
Ready for the call
Standing up or lying down
Or any way at all
Bargain prices up against the wall

After her hair has been cut, her teeth removed and sold, Fantine joins the song, singing,
Come on, Captain
You can wear your shoes
Don’t it make a change
To have a girl who can’t refuse
Easy money
Lying on a bed
Just as well they never see
The hate that’s in your head
Don’t they know they’re making love
To one already dead!

Widely lauded in the role (as here, here, and here), her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” further encapsulates the pathos and desperation of her character–something which is sometimes lost in more “Broadway” renditions of the song (a la Susan Boyle).
Of playing Fantine, Anne Hathaway notes,
“What I did was I tried to get inside the reality of her story as it exists in our world. … I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of documentaries and news clips about sexual slavery. And for me, for 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. She’s probably less than a block away. This injustice exists in our world, and 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 and I hope that in all our lifetimes — like, today — we see it end.”

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

Regardless of what can be said about Hathaway’s weight loss for the role (critiqued here), 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–a realization emphasized by Hugo but often lost in musical renditions. Hugo writes of Fantine,

“What is the history of Fantine? It is society buying a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, from cold, from loneliness, from abandonment, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a bit of bread. Misery makes the offer, society accepts … it is said that slavery has disappeared from the European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists: but it weighs now only upon woman, and it is called prostitution.”

The film, like Hugo’s novel, blames society for sexual slavery, rather than individual men or women. Each also portrays her “choice” as that between life and death for her and her daughter.
Hugo’s progressive view of sexual politics, as well as his critical attitude towards “polite society” (discussed here) imbue his work in other Les Mis plotlines as well–as with his depiction of the vengeful Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) and the valiant prisononer 24601, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), imprisoned 19 years for the crime of stealing bread. Though these two males are at the center of the story, the females are just as (if not more) memorable (and certainly outperform and out-sing Crowe in his bombastic version of Javert).

Amanda Seyfried as Cosette in Les Miserables
Cosette, both as the child abused by the Thénardiers and then as the adult who falls for the revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne), is also a micro picture of a macro problem — the abuse of female children, especially those in foster care and/or poverty, and the fact that one of the few “escapes” offered to such women is love and romance. The same “escape” is the only one that similarly maltreated Eponine is forced into. As noted here, she is “Raised by sociopathic parents and then forced into a life of poverty and crime” and “only wants the man she loves to love her, and sacrifices all to prove her love.”

Samanta Barks as Eponine in Les Miserables

The Funny Feminist takes issue with this plotline in particular, noting that Eponine has sadly become “the international spokeswoman for girls crushing on their male best friends, who swoon over the richer, more popular girl.” Like a 19th century Bella Swan, Eponine is hopelessly devoted to her Edward, in the form of Marius, but he only has eyes for Cosette. If the musical falters in its quasi-feminist politics anywhere, it is here, with the strong , resilient Eponine belting out her song of unrequited love, “On My Own,” while the male revolutionaries prepare to fight for a more egalitarian France–or, as the Funny Feminist puts it “when the poor folk rally against the 1 percent and the Mitt Romneys,” Eponine is busy singing a  “pity me, my life is so sad” song. To be fair, while she is indeed lovestruck, she also disguises herself as a boy in order to join in the revolution, and ultimately gives her life to save Marius.
While some reviews slam the film for not being political enough, as here (where the film is described as “a picturesque 19th-century version of Occupy Wall Street” lacking political context), I would counter that the film drips with politics, especially the micro politics captured in the feminist mantra “the personal is political.” From the tragic Fantine to the orphaned Cosette to the maltreated Eponine, the film depicts a story that is still all too true, and does so better than any musical version I’ve seen, showing that women–revolution or no–are all too often beaten, abused, exploited, raped and murdered. While it’s long ranked as one of my favorite musicals, it now holds the number one spot in this feminist heart for best musical film ever.
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Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.