Amanda Lyons – Bitch Flicks

‘The First Wives Club’ and First World “Feminism”

But the focus on “getting everything” was a little hard to stomach from women living in huge condos in the heart of New York with an interior designer on their payroll. Somehow it felt like the message was getting a little lost in the middle of all the high-society hob-nobbing – there was nothing particularly universal about it, and any feminism that was being communicated was certainly of a rarefied kind that most of us wouldn’t be able to access.

This cross-post by Amanda Lyons previously appeared at her blog, Mrs. Meows Says, and appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In 1996, the year The First Wives Club was released, I was in my mid teens, and it felt like a good, hopeful time to be a young woman. Grunge and riot grrrl seemed to have ousted the need to conform to restrictive conventions of feminine fashion and behaviour. The music charts were full of talented and unique female artists. Movies and television were starting to show more complex, and sometimes even bad-ass, female characters. Looking back, I feel grateful to experience those difficult formative years in such a time.

It was definitely the right cultural climate for this film. I remember it was featured a lot in the media at the time – a story about a group of discarded first wives plotting revenge on their ungrateful ex-husbands definitely had a whiff of the zeitgeist about it. Indeed, so much so that the book was purchased by a movie studio before it was published as a novel. (The more hidebound publishing industry rejected the novel 26 times. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing the author, Olivia Goldsmith, on Oprah talking about this, saying that many of these publishers thought the male characters were portrayed “too negatively”.)

Though I thought this movie sounded like a positive cultural event, and quite possibly also a good wheeze, I missed it at the time. So when it happened to be playing on Foxtel on a recent cold Sunday night, I was more than happy to stay in the lounge with the gas heater all rugged up and warm and make up for my neglect.

What was I expecting? I guess a funny and entertaining revenge romp with a feminist punch? What did I get instead? Well, not that…

Probably the most entertaining thing about it was the long and delightful roll-call of actors I recognised from subsequent other things. Dan Hedaya! Victor Garber! Marcia Gay Harden! And of course the peerless Bronson Pinchot. Yay! That was good fun, and I was very glad they got to be part of something that would have given them a big boost at the time.

The next thing I noticed was the extremely overdone and intrusive score. Guys, I cannot believe this score was nominated for an Oscar. To me it felt like an obnoxious guest at a party who keeps grabbing your arm when you’re trying to talk to other people so he can tell you a really long and boring/offensive story that scares all other guests away from you. Hated it.

My second major hate: Diane Keaton, but I guess that’s probably more of a personal thing, although a t least I know I’m not alone. I get why Woody Allen loved her so much – she’s totally the female version of him. Same schtick in every single role she plays: blinky, quirky, neurotic, and when she’s required to get emotional, shrieky. Also ineffably smug. Teeth-clenchingly annoying.

Next problem: the characters. Was this the fault of the script, the acting, or the direction? I would say an unholy collusion of all three. All the characters are shallow and unlikeable, including the women you are supposed to be rooting for. Nobody seems remotely like a real person – the husbands are drawn as dastardly cardboard villains, the first wives are shrieky caricatures, the second wives are completely one dimensional bimbos. The gags and one-liners are broad, awkward and the timing is just a little bit off every single time. The set pieces are cringey and the plot is just confusing. The revenge plots were a bit unclear and vague to me, as if the writers weren’t quite sure how to pull them off.

I think part of the frustration was that while the story was addressing a real and genuinely affecting issue – the culturally sanctioned discardability of women as they grow older – it opted to bury it inside a combination of broad slapstick and an extremely privileged, neo-liberal kind of feminism concerned solely with economic gain. I was somewhat in wonderment at the moneyed, ten-percenter world these women moved in. Of course separation, abandonment, betrayal, and heartbreak are a great leveller – all of us can suffer whatever our bank-balance. But the focus on “getting everything” was a little hard to stomach from women living in huge condos in the heart of New York with an interior designer on their payroll. Somehow it felt like the message was getting a little lost in the middle of all the high-society hob-nobbing – there was nothing particularly universal about it, and any feminism that was being communicated was certainly of a rarefied kind that most of us wouldn’t be able to access.

Perhaps key is the fact that the movie was written, directed and produced by men – or more specifically, men who shared the publishing world’s squeamishness about “man-bashing”. As producer Scott Rudin stated in The New York Times:

“When I took this on, I didn’t want a feminist manifesto, which it threatened to be,” he said. ”Initially, it made all the men terrible and was kind of anti-marriage. I didn’t want that. The film is really a satire. The amount of moaning and wailing is an object of satire. We’re not taking anything too seriously.”

Rudin, like so many others, accepted the fallacy conflating feminism with hating men rather than its simple belief that women and men “should have equal rights and opportunities.” That this conflation is so often promulgated is tiresome. It’s also tiresome that charges of “man-bashing”against films are so loud and strident when negative, and even harmful portrayals of women in film and television and everything are so commonplace we don’t even notice them most of the time. And the effect of this kind of distaste for anything remotely feminist in the stories we tell can cut the heart – and the ovaries -right out of them.

Feminism is not the only thing that’s diluted in the adaption of this story from book to movie – certainly the differences between the film and the book seem very revealing. For example, the complete excision of Annie’s (Diane Keaton) daughter’s Down Syndrome – she is turned into a lesbian, instead. (and the way she’s portrayed one sometimes wonders if the writers thought they were just swapping one disability for another??). This removes the onus for Brenda (Bette Midler) to become a lesbian herself, clearing the way for her to have a (SPOILER ALERT) reconciliation with her dastardly husband Morty, a strange and sudden reversal in the storyline of the film.

But one of the most interesting differences is how they choose to “avenge” their friend Cynthia, whose husband’s betrayal resulted in her suicide and provided the impetus for the first wives to reunite, rediscover their friendship and begin their club in the first place.

In the book, the women go after Cynthia’s husband and bring him down for insider trading, to his personal and financial ruin. But in the movie, the women decide that personal revenge is not noble enough – so instead they blackmail their ex-husbands into providing money to open a Crisis Centre for Women. This is a safe aspect of feminism; it’s hard to argue against helping the most vulnerable in society, and it’s easy in our culture to accept women in the role of victims – and indeed, the centre is named after their friend Cynthia Swann Griffin, the movie’s ultimate victim and sacrificial lamb.

The final scene – the opening party for the Crisis Centre – is intended to be the triumphal close to the movie, but instead it feels patronising and smug, the worst kind of charity. The party is ostentatious, opulent, and replete with the kind of economic excess that seems to cover the characters’ lifestyles like a thin film of oil. It is of course stuffed with the rich and fabulous, New York high society elite. There is a lot of back-slapping. Ivanka Trump appears, as well as Gloria Steinem, in a vague shout-out to “feminism.” There are no specifics discussed as to what kind of crises the centre will be helping women with, what kinds of women will be helped, or how. The husbands have been threatened with destruction but ultimately this female anger has been contained, and now the men are simply implored to open their pocketbooks. In the final scene the three women engage in a truly embarrassing song-and-dance routine, singing Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” and dancing like your mum doing karaoke at your cousin’s 21st. The ultimate in Boomer smugness, and of course led by the inimitably irritating Diane Keaton.

In the novel, as the American Popular Culture Archive explains,

“Once the women decide to act, they exude power and energy. Brenda asks Elise, ‘Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?’ Elise replies, ‘No. Mostly they liked me passive. But those days are over, my friend. I’m changing.'”

This movie adaption is, quite frankly, a mess, and seems to replace female power and agency with money. I’m no book adaption purist – I accept that the two mediums are different, and changes have to be made in translation. But in this case, it doesn’t seem that the changes were especially serving the ends of telling a story and preserving a message, so much as containing it to make it more marketable. But unfortunately the end result is clunky, unloveable, and not even entertaining. Perhaps it met the zeitgeist in 1996, but I think that it should probably stay there.

Amanda Lyons is a writer from Middle Earth (AKA New Zealand). By day she writes on finance, by night whatever takes her fancy at http://mrsmeowssays.blogspot.co.nz/.

‘Adventure Time’ vs. ‘Regular Show’

There is one thing that, for me, gives ‘Adventure Time’ a bit of an edge over ‘Regular Show’, and it’s been compounded after sitting through a two-hour back-to-back marathon of both shows over the weekend. It boils down to this: while both cartoons are awesome, ‘Regular Show’ is pretty much a bro-zone while ‘Adventure Time’ has a bit more room for the ladies.

This cross-post by Amanda Lyons appears as part of our theme week on Children’s Television.

I probably wouldn’t know anything about either Adventure Time or Regular Show, both awesome cartoons, if I didn’t have a young niece and nephew. Happily, I do, and they have brought these shows into my life. That’s one of the things that’s so great about having children around; they keep you young.

And I don’t think there has to be a winner and a loser – there’s room for more than one at the top, y’know? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Besides, both of these shows are awesome. They’re funny, hip, contemporary, relevant; great for kids but stuffed with adult references and jokes as well, and the animation is really great.

(Also, as an aside, Mr. Meows and young nephew Meows both insisted, before I had seen Regular Show, that I am just like Pops. This troubled me; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Were they making fun of me? When I finally saw it, I still wasn’t sure, but I can tell you one thing: they are right! BTW Pops on sugar is analogous to me on coffee)

BUT. There is one thing that, for me, gives Adventure Time a bit of an edge over Regular Show, and it’s been compounded after sitting through a two-hour back-to-back marathon of both shows over the weekend. It boils down to this: while both cartoons are awesome, RS is pretty much a bro-zone while AT has a bit more room for the ladies.

Don’t get me wrong – RS is great, and I do love it. It’s apparently PG-rated and is often required by the Cartoon Network to be toned down. As far as cartoons go, it’s edgy for sure, definitely the hipster older brother of cartoon shows. It’s packed with knowing references to the 80’s and popular culture that may fly over the heads of my niece and nephew (while still making them laugh) but hit my sense of humor square on the target.

But over an hour of watching RS, though I really enjoyed it and laughed a lot, I also felt more and more left out. RS is hip, magical and weird, but all of this comes from men only. Women are marginal and disappointingly, exist only as glorifed T&A with typical cartoon long lashes. Bros get all the funny lines and all the adventures. Women are passive, side-line decoration.

This is thrown into stark relief when you look at the cast of characters. There’s only one (kind of) significant female, Margaret the red-breasted (huh, huh) robin. She’s a secondary character, and pretty much solely exists as a babe that Mordecai has a crush on. They take this pretty far sometimes – check out this clip – fairly hot and heavy for what is, at the end of the day, a kid’s show. (Update: in the newer episodes, Margaret features more and gets to do more stuff so she seems more rounded. They have also added in her utterly adorable friend Eileen and Muscle Man’s girlfriend Starla who’s pretty bitchin’, although she conforms to that weird cartoon law that boyfriend/girlfriend characters have to look more like brother/sister. At the end of the day though, these females are all secondary and important more for how they relate to the main male characters as girlfriends/love objects rather than characters in their own right.)

I’ve addressed this kind of thing before, in my post about The Hunger Games. Maybe some of you will think I’m being whiny and nit-picky. But I find it really disappointing because I want young girls today to have a different experience from the one I had – in which the world reflected back to me was for men only; where they had all the main roles, made all the jokes, solved all the problems, went on all the adventures, while women/girls just looked on adoringly and batted their eyelashes. And it’s not only girls who are affected by this – think of all the debates recently over whether women can be funny, whether they can possibly be authentic participators in geek culture, whether they can be effective leaders in the business world, blah blah blah ad infinitum. Why is this (still) happening? Because both men and women are affected by a severe lack of positive female role models in our culture – or should I say, exposure of said role models, because they’re there, they just don’t get the air time. As documentary Miss Representation states, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” These cartoon representations may be fictional, but they affect us in our real lives, how we act and how we perceive other people – both boys and girls.

Watching RS I’m taken back to my childhood, to pretend play, and how I would always have to ‘be’ the male characters because they were the ones who were active and funny, they were the ones I admired. RS is the same – I mean, who would want to ‘be’ Margaret?? Sure, she’s cool and all, but she doesn’t do anything except get her norks out!! It worries me the kind of takeaway that kids are going to get from that, and it worries me that kids may already be encouraged to view females as sexualized bodies – it’s all around them already, do we have to put it in cartoons as well?

Oh yeah, there’s also this little gem, from an episode in which Mordecai goes on a series of bad dates. It’s your typical montage of bad date situations, but buried in there is a humorless-looking, unsmiling woman who aggressively asserts, “Oh, so you agree that women are misrepresented in most forms of popular media?” I get that the joke is about people who press their political views on you at inappropriate times, but I feel it’s telling that the writers chose to use a feminist viewpoint, and one that I would consider fairly uncontroversial at that. (Especially as this is a complaint I feel RS could do with taking under consideration – is someone feeling a little defensive? Or worse, do they consider this question annoying or irrelevant?) I also felt like it was a “joke” which had been discarded as passe by 1988, and it was perplexing and disappointing to see it come up in a kid’s cartoon. Do we want to train a new generation of kids to laugh off legitimate feminist concerns as a joke? One wonders how this would come across if they were to replace this “uptight” woman with like, a humorless civil rights activist. Not gonna lie, that did really annoy me (just call me a feminist killjoy) and RS definitely loses a few points for that one.

Princesses: Gotta Catch 'Em All — Princesses: Gotta catch ’em all

Conversely, Adventure Time is much more female-inclusive. The main two characters are still guys, but at least in their land there are a whole lot of females that get to be a significant part of the story – there are heeeeaps and heeeeaps of Princesses with a range of looks and voices. They are rulers and they have far more characteristics than their physical appearance. There’s also a parallel-universe episode where the main characters swap genders – only a one-shot (well, several-shot) but a fascinating idea, and not just done in the name of cheap gender-jokes, but executed in a way that makes it clear the opposite-gender versions of the characters are every bit the equal of the originals – althoooough the Fionna and Cake stories I’ve seen so far have tended to have a bias towards more romantic story lines, but then Finn isn’t without this either – it’s just that because he’s the main man, he gets more variation, as well.

AT is perhaps not as hip as RS, but it is just as magical – perhaps slightly more so. It’s definitely just as weird, existing in a deliciously surreal and at times kind of disturbing universe.

So, at the end of the day, while I raucously enjoy Regular Show (and identify to a worrying degree with Pops) it’s Adventure Time that really has my heart. Keep representing and taking us on your quests, Adventure Time! I love you for it.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

Official movie poster for We Need to Talk About Kevin

This is a guest post by Amanda Lyons and is cross-posted with permission from her blog Mrs Meow Says.

You know how I said in my review of Into the Wild that it was one of the most recent books I’ve read that disturbed me? We Need to Talk About Kevin is the most recent book I’ve read that disturbed me.

The reason for this (apart from the obvious fact that it’s about a child psychopath that you know is going to do something very, very bad, thus every event, every word is soaked in a weighty, dull dread) is that if you are a woman who is ambivalent about having children, Kevin represents your absolute worst nightmare, the zero sum of all your fears of what could happen once you’ve heaved a child from your bloody body.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in We Need to Talk About Kevin

It’s a fascinating and minutely detailed account from Eva Katchadourian of her mothering of Kevin. It’s also an examination of her own soul and an attempt to parse what she may and may not be responsible for during the long build up to the ultimate flowering of Kevin’s violence.

Eva is a very cerebral person, and accordingly Kevin is a very cerebral book, following Eva’s long monologue (confession?) to her absent husband as she makes a hard and painful analysis of what has happened. In a wider sense, it is also an examination of the cultural notion of a mother’s guilt for the actions of her children—Eva is punished by her community for the crimes of her son and ends up living almost as a fugitive from her old life. She is wracked by guilt and horror, analysing events and their lead-up with painful clarity.

But it is soon very clear that though Eva is aware very early on that something is “wrong” with Kevin, she is isolated both by Kevin’s insidious nature and her very role as a mother—and is utterly powerless to do anything about it. Her All-American, trad values-craving husband Franklin coerces her into moving away from her beloved New York to an extravagantly ugly house in the suburbs for the sake of their “family.” Every time she tries to raise her concerns about Kevin, he is disbelieving, and disapproving—he is easily manipulated by his savvy child; because he is not Kevin’s primary caregiver, he only sees what Kevin wants him to see. On top of this, he is a devotee at the shrine of the inviolable nuclear family and refuses to acknowledge anything that could endanger this dream. Instead, he equates Eva’s misgivings with what he perceives as her untrustworthy wanderlust which he fears will take her away from him.

Tilda Swinton glaring

And this is what was so terrifying to me about Kevin—its worst-case scenario of motherhood. The woman enslaved, powerless, first by the very presence of the baby growing inside her and then trapped in the four walls of the home, slave to a psychopathic child who is the ultimate tyrant. Disbelieved by her partner, having to cope alone, cut off from the socially accepted positive experience of motherhood. Forced to nurture a child that has nothing but hate and contempt for you.

And yet, in a lot of ways Eva and Kevin are very alike. This is why Kevin knows it’s easier to get around Dad, but not around Mum—because she understands him in a way Dad never can. Kevin embodies the darker elements of Eva that she herself is unaware of until she starts her minute analysis in the aftermath of his arrest. This feeds her sense of guilt—but also her understanding of him, and her eventual coming to terms with his nature.

Shriver has obviously done her homework. Her construction of Kevin’s childhood reminded me very much of undiagnosed schizophrenic Nancy Spungen’s in her mother’s memoir And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. And when I read this NY Times article about child psychopaths, I thought right away of Kevin and how much the behaviour of the children in it echoed his. It also made me think of Lionel Dahmer’s memoir and how he searched for the answer to Jeffrey’s crimes in his parenting, the dark twists in his own personality and the ways in which he and his son were alike.

Tilda Swinton looking uneasy

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and disturbing, dread-filled book. It consumed my thoughts while I was reading it and terrorised my brain. There are imperfections that mar its surface, the main one being some narrative trickery that I won’t reveal as it’s something of a spoiler. But I will say that I thought it was a bit gimmicky and a slight betrayal of the reader.

This aside, though, it’s an amazing book: painful, scary, intelligent, and unforgettable.

So when I heard there was a film coming out, I thought, “Crikey! Good luck!”

This is because, as with The Hunger Games, We Need to Talk About Kevin is narrated as an internal monologue. Recreating the same effect in a film is very difficult, if not impossible, to do. But the distinctive voice of Eva Katchadourian is essential to the story, is the story.

However, there was one very positive factor—the film was directed by Lynne Ramsay, who is absolutely fantastic. Her films are always creative, individual, and beautifully made.

Tilda Swinton and tomato soup

But hearing about the casting of Tilda Swinton gave me some pause. Don’t get me wrong—I love me some SWINTON. She is astonishingly awesome. I also really liked her interview with W Magazine about the film, in which she said:

It’s every pregnant woman’s nightmare to give birth to the devil. And every mother worries that she won’t connect to her children. When I had my children, my manager asked me what project I wanted to work on next. I said, “Something Greek, perhaps Medea.” Nobody quite understood what I meant, what I was feeling…

You have twins, who are now 13. Did you worry about becoming a mother?

When I first saw the twins, I really liked them. And, at the same time, there was a ghost over my shoulder saying, What if I hadn’t liked them? Kevin spoke to that feeling. It is that nightmare scenario: What if you don’t feel that connection to your children? There’s no preparation for having children. In Kevin, the woman I play is in mourning for her past life, and yet she looks at this dark, nihilistic kid and knows exactly where he comes from. He isn’t foreign to her; she sees herself. And that is, quite literally, revolting to her.

Predictably the gossip rags were like, “WTF! Bitch be crazy!” but I thought she nailed the hammer on the head (or whatever that saying is). She understood the book perfectly, and it was obvious that Eva Katchadourian was in safe hands.

And of course, she is fantastic in the film. She is such a great actress, so lacking in vanity and unafraid to plunge into whatever is needed for a role. It’s just, that … well, Eva is of Armenian descent. And this is quite important in the books. She’s olivey and dark, and Swinton is a long cool glass of milk.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly and balloons in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Obviously these things can be rectified by certain techniques, and duly Swinton’s hair was dyed, and I’m pretty sure they made her wear dark contacts, an attention to detail which I appreciate.

This might have been okay, if I didn’t feel so uneasy about the casting of the other central characters as well. John C. Reilly, I love you, so please forgive me for this, but I imagined Franklin as handsome (I think he’s actually described as such in the book)—albeit in a ruddy, slightly chunky sort of way, but handsome nonetheless. Not only did Reilly not at all correspond with how I thought Franklin should look, but I just completely could not buy he and Swinton as a couple, no matter how hard I tried. He didn’t do a bad job, but I just did not believe it. And there wasn’t a lot of chemistry between them to help the situation out, either.

And then we arrive at the titular Kevin himself. With Kevin, I had the opposite problem: he is described as being quite good-looking in the books. But movie-Kevin goes beyond this; he looks like an underwear model. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you, Ezra Miller:

Ezra Miller, star of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Once again, though, I must praise their attention to detail. Kevin clearly has zits in some of the shots, and he is wearing the too-small clothes that Shriver describes in the books. But he is just so ridiculously gorgeous that I couldn’t help snorting in the theatre at the sight of him. It’s also impossible to believe that he sprung from the loins of John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton. So some suspension of disbelief issues there.

These issues aside, however, Ramsay makes a solid effort of adapting this story for film. She doesn’t try to oversimplify the story, nor does she bang you over the head with detailed explanation, which I really appreciated. The attention to detail that I’ve mentioned several times earlier shows respect for and a real dedication to the source material. Her technique is as exquisite as her previous films, and I love that the movie isn’t overly shiny looking like so many American movies—she doesn’t try to gloss over the ugly bits.

However, it’s impossible to overcome the central problem—the way the story is told in the book just can’t be replicated in a film. But I also found that having read the book, there was just no tension in the story and the characters didn’t quite gel enough for me to get pulled into their story anyway. It’s a well-made film, but I’ll have to declare the winner unequivocally: BOOK.

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Amanda Lyons is a writer from Middle Earth (AKA New Zealand). By day she writes on finance, by night whatever takes her fancy at http://mrsmeowssays.blogspot.co.nz/.