Tag: Amy Adams

Versions of Yourself: Nora Ephron as Women’s Storyteller

In addition to her work in film, Nora Ephron was a journalist, playwright, and novelist; unsurprisingly, her stock in trade is words. Crucially, what she does with these words is to give women room. For these women at the center of her films, there is, above all, space. Space not simply to be the best version of themselves, but all the versions of themselves: confident, neurotic, right, wrong, flawed.

Sleepless in Seattle

This guest post written by Katie Barnett appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

There is a moment in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) where Kathleen (Meg Ryan) and Joe (Tom Hanks) are conversing via their AOL inboxes. “Do you ever feel like you’ve become the worst version of yourself?” he types. The two of them ponder the question, Joe criticizing his own tendency to “arrogance, spite, condescension” while Kathleen laments her own inability to conjure up a well-timed comeback in a confrontation. This discussion of the gulf between inner thoughts and actual behavior is, perhaps, a prescient nod to the ways the internet – still a novelty in the world of You’ve Got Mail – would foster these gaps between reality and projection. It is also an acknowledgement of the multiple selves one person might harbor beneath the surface.

One of the many joys of Nora Ephron’s films lies in the recognition that there may be more than one version of yourself. Indeed, her 1996 Wellesley commencement speech  – the origin of Ephron’s plea, “above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim” – is built around this recognition that young women’s lives will contain multitudes, will be rife with contradiction. “You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever,” she tells the graduating class. Mutable is a state of being for Ephron’s on-screen women.

Nora Ephron began her film career in 1983, when she wrote the screenplay for Silkwood. Her first directing credit followed in 1992, with This is My Life; a year later, she would direct and write (alongside Jeff Arch and David S. Ward) the fifth highest-grossing film of 1993, Sleepless in Seattle. By the time of her death in 2012, she had directed eight films, with a screenwriting credit on seven of them, and written numerous others, including one of her best known works, When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989). For her screenplays, she was nominated three times for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Ephron’s work as a director is difficult to separate from her work as a screenwriter; through these twin roles, she carved a space in which to craft funny, interesting, hopelessly neurotic characters, navigating life with a mixture of optimism, introspection, and the occasional flicker of disappointment.

You've Got Mail

Ephron helped to revitalize the smart romantic comedy. In Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, she made two of the 1990s’ most successful examples of the genre. Yet critical attention that considers her work as a filmmaker has been slow to emerge: the consequence, perhaps, of Ephron’s status as “woman director,” but also, crucially, of her work in a much-maligned genre. Ephron herself was archly dismissive of the pigeonholing of women’s cinema. Her list, “What I Won’t Miss,” which appeared in her book I Remember Nothing (2010), included the entry “Panels on Women in Film.”

In addition to her work in film, Ephron was a journalist, playwright, and novelist; unsurprisingly, her stock in trade is words. Crucially, what she does with these words is to give women room. For these women at the center of her films, there is, above all, space. Space not simply to be the best version of themselves, but all the versions of themselves: confident, neurotic, right, wrong, flawed. They have time to figure themselves out, and Ephron’s films do not punish them for it. This exchange, from Ephron’s final film, Julie and Julia (2009), neatly encapsulates the idea that the authenticity of these characters comes from their flaws as much as their more redeeming features:

Julie: …because I am a bitch. I am, Sarah. I’m a bitch.
Sarah: I know. I know you are.

Julie challenges Sarah – “Do you really think I’m a bitch?” – to which Sarah responds, “Well, yeah. But who isn’t?” There is no judgment on Sarah’s part. The implication here is that Julie can be a bitch (which, in this context, amounts to her realization that she can be self-absorbed), but that this does not preclude everything else she is. Being prone to a meltdown over a casserole gone wrong does not automatically negate Julie’s other qualities.

In fact, Ephron’s women sometimes have so much time to figure themselves out that the central romance almost becomes a secondary concern, as in Sleepless in Seattle, in which Annie (Ryan) and Sam (Hanks) do not lay eyes on each other until the very end of the film, brought together at the top of the Empire State Building in a meeting engineered by Sam’s son Jonah (Ross Malinger). A risky move, surely, for any romantic comedy. It is a risk that ultimately pays off for Ephron, despite the flawed notion of constructing a romance around two people who have never met, yet who are apparently perfect for each other. But consider how the space of Sleepless in Seattle functions. This is Annie’s story: it is her family we visit alongside her and her fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman); it is her workplace and her colleagues we see; it is her car where we first hear Jonah call the radio show. The romance may be contrived, may even be problematic, but it is Annie’s romance. Of whose story we are being told, we should be in no doubt.

Sleepless in Seattle

This may seem like nothing new to a genre built around the romantic expectations of female characters, and the eventual fulfillment of these expectations. What elevates Ephron’s women is that they transcend the one-dimensional caricature of a rom-com protagonist. Instead, we find complex, changeable women, incapable of being reduced to a definitive version of themselves. In You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen, for instance, we find a woman who is willing to believe the best of her as-yet-unmet online friend, deflecting concerns that he might be married, unattractive, or a serial killer. Yet she is also a woman who once suspected her own boyfriend of being a domestic terrorist: “Remember when you thought Frank was the Unabomber?” She is a woman who loves books, daisies, and New York City, who got a manicure instead of voting (but feels bad about it), and who is ambitious without being ruthless. Kathleen owns her own business and wants that business to be successful, but she is never reduced to the brittle caricature of an ambitious woman.

Julie and Julia orients the audience’s attention around the lives of two more ambitious women, separated by time and geography: chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep), finding her feet in 1950s France, and writer Julie Powell (Amy Adams), living in post-9/11 New York and attempting to cook Julia’s back catalogue of recipes in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. Once again, what is remarkable about Julie and Julia is just how much space is given over to these women, to their food, their cooking, their enjoyment of both of these things. “The day there’s a meteorite heading towards the earth and we have thirty days to live, I’m going to spend it eating butter,” Julie opines, as chunks of butter sizzle invitingly in a frying pan.

Julie & Julia

The film opens on Julia and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) newly arrived in Paris. When the two go out to eat, Julia’s delight at French cuisine is palpable. It is her voice we hear, exclaiming over the meal; her food, her delight, that dominates this scene. When she leans over to have Paul taste the fish, the camera follows her, and she – and this accompanying sense of delight – continues to fill the frame. Minutes later, the film shifts to New York, where Julie and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) are moving apartments. Here, space is once again the preoccupation – “Repeat after me. 900 square feet,” Eric reminds Julie when she questions the wisdom of moving to live above a pizzeria in Queens, although wherever this space is, it certainly isn’t in the kitchen – and it is Julie who takes up this space. On arriving in the new apartment, she does a sweep of the bare interior, moving from room to room, as we move with her. Ephron employs a similar tactic as Julia explores the Paris apartment and the camera pans across the windows, tracking her movements. The film invites us to follow these women, and these first steps into their respective lives place them at the forefront of their own stories.

Physical space remains important in Julie and Julia, as we see an unhappy Julie crammed onto the subway and wedged into her cubicle at work, and a determined Julia sequestered in a kitchen at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, the only woman amongst a collection of male chefs, fighting to prove herself in the face of skepticism. Just as Julia must carve out a niche for herself in this male-dominated environment, Julie strives to be seen and heard from her small corner of the internet, where the physical becomes virtual, and where her mother is quick to wonder why Julie is wasting her time on strangers.

Within the film, one way that both women take up space is by talking. A scene of Julia at a French market tracks her exuberant progress through the crowd, exclaiming over the food on offer in her distinctive high-pitched voice, gesturing with enthusiasm, and practicing her less-than-perfect French without embarrassment. Julie, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Ephron’s earlier heroines, amongst them Sally, Annie, and Kathleen, prone to vocalizing her frustrations and disappointments in a bid to understand them, whether rational or otherwise. (Recall Sally’s plaintive wail: “And I’m gonna be 40!” – “When?” – “Someday!”) After Julie’s friend Annabelle writes a scathing magazine piece about turning 30, in which she belittles the direction Julie’s life has taken, Julie memorizes the offending passage and rants about Annabelle’s “stupid, vapid, insipid” brain. Just as they are allowed to be irrational at times, Ephron does not always allow her protagonists to rise above their uncharitable thoughts; indeed, this is a reminder that what Ephron achieves in her films is the foregrounding of authentic – and authentically flawed – women. “What do you think it means if you don’t like your friends?” Julie asks Sarah (Mary Lynn Rajskub). “It’s completely normal,” Sarah assures her, much to Eric’s confusion. “Men like their friends,” he points out. “We’re not talking about men,” Julie snaps back. “Who’s talking about men?”

Julie and Julia

Ephron stood by the fact that When Harry Met Sally was not about whether men or women could be friends, but about the differences between men and women. Her films are equally generous to her male characters, but at their heart these films are testament to the women who occupy them: their hopes, their fears, their triumphs, and their failures. As a filmmaker, Ephron’s astuteness when it came to people should not be underestimated; it is this quality, as much as any other, that characterizes her skill at telling the stories of the women on whom she concentrated her pen and her camera.

In that 1996 Wellesley commencement speech, Ephron reminded her audience that there would always be time – and space – to change their minds. “Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all,” she told them. “What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind.”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Fork Fatale: Food as Transformation in the Contemporary Chick Flick

A Woman’s Place in the Kitchen: The Cinematic Tradition of Cooking to Catch a Man

Katie Barnett is a lecturer in film and media at the University of Worcester (UK) with an interest in representations of gender and family in popular culture. She learned the rules of baseball from Penny Marshall, the rules of espionage from Harriet the Spy, and the rules of life from Jim Henson. Find her on Twitter @katiesmallg.

In ‘Arrival,’ Amy Adams is the Superhero We Need Right Now

‘Arrival’ is yet another in a long line of alien invasion movies, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s the story of a single extraordinary woman who steps up to save the human race, armed with nothing more than her ability to communicate. It’s a story of hope  —  and it’s one that audiences need to hear right now.

Arrival

This guest post written by Lee Jutton originally appeared at her blog. It is cross-posted with permission.

How do you make an epic about saving the entire world feel as intimate as a independent film? How do you tell a story with such high stakes while still managing to make the audience feel emotionally connected to the individual people involved? With Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators make this incredible task look easy  —  and utterly gorgeous to boot. Adapted by screenwriter Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” Arrival is yet another in a long line of alien invasion movies, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s the story of a single extraordinary woman who steps up to save the human race, armed with nothing more than her ability to communicate. It’s a story of hope  —  and it’s one that audiences need to hear right now.

That said woman is played by Amy Adams, who makes her all the more compelling. Adams is not only one of the most consistent actresses working today  —  turning out brilliant performances in such diverse films as Junebug, Enchanted, The Master, and Big Eyes, just to name a few  —  she’s also one of the most subtle. Her performances never rely on flashy gimmicks or method madness; she can easily disappear inside a character without the aid of wigs and weight gain. Her presence as Lois Lane in the Man of Steel movies instantly classes up proceedings  —  at least, as much as is possible when Zack Snyder is involved. In Arrival, Adams portrays a very different kind of superhero than the ones she hobnobs with in the dour DC universe, and her quietly intense performance as linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks is one that stands out even among her impressive body of work.

Louise is living a lonely life in a big house, teaching at an anonymous university during the day and gulping glasses of red wine at night, when she’s enlisted by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to do what seems to be the impossible. Twelve black obelisks have appeared out of nowhere and are floating above a diverse array of locations across the globe. Teaming up with brash astrophysicist Ian (Jeremy Renner), Louise is sent to the obelisk in Montana to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrials inside. She uses written words on flashcards to get the aliens  —  dubbed “heptopods” for their seven squid-like legs  —  to share their own written method of communication, a series of intricate rings reminiscent of the stains produced by coffee mugs. Louise’s painstaking work seems slow to the military men around her, whose trigger fingers are growing itchy from watching too many giddily paranoid news broadcasts (an example of the power of communication used for ill if there ever was one), but gradually she produces results.

Arrival

One doesn’t think of writing words on flashcards as the epitome of action-packed, but in Arrival these moments are surprisingly engaging. A scene in which Louise explains to an impatient Colonel Weber the numerous steps that need to be taken before asking the aliens what brought them to Earth  —  pointing out that one has to teach the aliens what a question even is before one can ask them one, then breaking down the various grammatical elements of the question on a whiteboard  —  is a phenomenal glimpse inside the weird world of linguistics, a world that I admit was almost entirely foreign to me going into the movie. So impressive is Louise’s mastery of language that it feels like a superpower  —  an unlikely one, to be sure, but one that proves highly effective.

I don’t want to reveal more of the plot of the film for fear of ruining it for others; suffice to say that in Arrival, humans are just as much of a threat to the future of Earth as their alien visitors, if not more so. Throughout it all, Louise remains the quietly heroic heart of the movie, determined to do whatever it takes to maintain the heptopods’ tenuous new relationship with humanity. One doesn’t necessarily root for the human race in Arrival; one roots for our heroine, and it just so happens that the fate of the human race is tied to her success. The story edges its way along a tightrope of tension and never grows boring despite the startling lack of such science-fiction standbys as spaceship shoot-outs and special effects-induced explosions (okay, there’s one explosion). It handles sophisticated topics in a way that feels accessible to the average moviegoer, though one shouldn’t be shocked that a film focused on communication expresses itself so elegantly; despite the potential for pretentiousness, one never feels talked down to by Arrival.

The success of Arrival is not entirely due to Amy Adams’ performance as Louise, though it is a substantial part of it. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s appropriately otherworldly score sets the mood throughout the film, and is an ideal match for Bradford Young’s ethereal cinematography. Young (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Selma) is a master of using only available, natural light to create beautiful images, and Arrival is no exception. This combination of sound and image results in perfectly crafted moments that are as epic as anything in Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey  —  the highest praise I can give any film in this genre. The first reveal of the heptopods will make your heart leap into your throat, and stands out in my mind as one of the most memorable cinematic moments of the year.

Arrival has entered theaters as the people of the United States are reeling from the result of our most recent presidential election, and it’s likely we’ll all continue to reel for quite some time. And while cinematic escapism is only a temporary solution to the anxiety that plagues so many of us, Arrival is that rare film that provides a much-needed escape from our real world while also containing a timely message for it. In a world increasingly on edge, with conflict always hovering on the horizon, it would do us all some good to be reminded of the power of communication to maintain peace. And for little girls around the world who long to see people who look like them saving the world, Arrival is a wonderful (and unfortunately necessary) reminder that yes, women can be heroes too.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play and currently reviews television shows as a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Beware the Sexist Celluloid Quilt that Is ‘Nocturnal Animals’

…I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead. … Like a lot of sexist stories, ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men.

Nocturnal Animals

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and murder]

The most generous interpretation of Nocturnal Animals is that it mimics the conventions of sexist storytelling in order to criticize them. If that’s the case, the criticism is buried too deep for me to see it and I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead.

The film uses a complicated, non-linear, story-within-a-story structure to mask the simplicity of its content. Susan (Amy Adams) is a wealthy gallery director who divorced Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) after a two-year marriage. About twenty years later, Edward sends Susan a galley of his new novel – the novel she didn’t believe he would ever manage to write – along with an invitation to meet when he’s in her city. Susan, who’s miserable with every aspect of her life since leaving Edward, is captivated by his story and experiences many emotions as she thinks about it on the couch – and in the shower, and walking up a spiral staircase at work, and standing in front of a painting of the word “Revenge,” and in other picturesque locations. Because it’s completely impossible that Susan could be happy that things have turned out well for Edward at the same time believing it was best to end their marriage, she decides she wants him back. It’s a plot line that marries the style and score of sexy Michael Douglas-era thrillers to the plot of an Avril Lavigne song (he was a sk8er boi / she said, “see you l8er, boi” / now she regrets all of her life decisions because he achieved something after they grew up). The complication is that Susan did something unspeakably horrible to Edward when they broke up – so unspeakable that we don’t learn what it was until late in the film, at which point it doesn’t really live up to the hype.

The film’s second narrative is a dramatization of the novel that Edward wrote, in which Gyllenhaal plays the lead character, Tony, and other Amy Adams-looking actresses with long red hair play the roles of Tony’s wife and daughter. Tony’s family heads out on vacation when they’re run off the road by three rednecks – I say “redneck” not because I think that’s a nice word to use, but because these are the same stock characters from every horror movie in this genre (think Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance). There’s a long, tense sequence where the villains try to trick Tony into unlocking the doors to his car, except this scene is hindered by the fact that their ruse isn’t very convincing. The situation ultimately ends with Tony’s wife and daughter (who are referred to exclusively as “my wife,” “my daughter,” “your folks,” or “your women” from this point on) kidnapped, raped, and murdered while Tony survives. Tony teams up with a hard-bitten detective, who plays by his own rules, and plots to get revenge on the three men who ruined his life.

Nocturnal Animals

The opening credit sequence – which is a throwback in itself, both because it exists and seems to go on forever – features slow motion footage of plus size women and elderly women dancing burlesque to the tune of a sinister soundtrack. As I write this, I still have no idea why. I also don’t know why the men who murder Tony’s wife and daughter carefully arrange their dead and surprisingly unmarked bodies into a beautiful, vaguely suggestive pose on top of a bright red couch on the edge of their property, almost like they know Tom Ford’s going to take a picture of it. I don’t know why the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two women is only ever presented as a thing that happened to Tony. I don’t know why Susan can’t send a text message when she’s meeting someone at a restaurant. I don’t know why wearing dark red lipstick makes her a different person than she wants to be. I don’t know why Tony doesn’t listen to his wife when she warns him not to get out of the car. I don’t know why what Susan did to Edward is supposed to be as bad as anything any of the characters do in his novel. I don’t know why Susan wants to get back together with Edward. After being subjected to Edward’s great, amazing novel, I wished more than anything that I could divorce him.

Like a lot of sexist stories, Nocturnal Animals is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men. Susan only matters in so far as she’s the focal point of Edward’s rage, and in so far as he’s able to corral her toward sharing his point of view – that he was great and their relationship was wonderful until she ruined it by doing something evil. Almost 100% of the time she’s on-screen, Susan thinks about Edward, feels emotions about Edward, and remembers Edward. All of the expressions on her face, all of her beautiful poses, everything she does and says – somehow, in some way, it’s all about Edward. He isn’t even there, and he’s still the entire focus of what is supposedly Susan’s story.

The women in Edward’s great, amazing novel fare even worse. A fridge is a fridge no matter what your production values are, and Tony’s wife and daughter are alive for one scene before taking a trip to the fridge so that we’ll understand why Tony feels bad. Then they are literally posed as objects to be viewed because: content imitating form.

There are signs that the film is aware of the way it objectifies women – for example, the burlesque dancers from the opening credits also become objects when they lie on slabs in the gallery, which seems a little on the nose. But creating art with awareness is not the same as executing it with purpose; there isn’t anything in the film that suggests its sexism serves any greater purpose than following the conventions of other sexist films.

Nocturnal Animals is set for limited release this November, and will probably be nominated for awards.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Amy Adams Talks About Her Role as Painter Margaret Keane in ‘Big Eyes’

The actress added, “Being an artist and being a mom sometimes keeps you at odds and not to say you can’t do it, but an artist can feel very isolated, very narcissistic, and being a parent needs to be something completely different and so I understood that sort of thing and trying to make the right decisions and then getting caught in a lie with your child. That was something I found really fascinating and I was really interested by that dynamic.”

sq_big_eyes-1
Big Eyes

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

“The 50s were a good time if you were a man,” an unseen narrator says at the beginning of director Tim Burton’s latest bizarre tale, Big Eyes. The movie is based on the stranger-than-fiction story of artist Margaret Keane and her husband Walter Keane, who signed his name on her paintings of saucer-eyed, forlorn-looking waifs that were everywhere in the 60s.

Amy Adams, always terrific, and Christoph Waltz, in his usual effective turn as a weirdo, both landed Golden Globe nominations in the comedy lead acting categories. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Tim Burton on Ed Wood, also received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. And the Women’s Film Critics Circle, of which I am a member, gave the film the dubious distinction of citing it this year’s worst male images in a movie.

The colorful tale begins after Margaret flees her abusive husband in the late 50s for San Francisco, where she seeks a better life for her and her daughter. She meets the sweet-talking Walter at a street fair where he admires her paintings of children with sad-looking, enormous peepers. His Parisian street scene painting he claimed were inspired by his life and study in Paris. She falls for him. Soon she realizes she’s never actually seen him paint.

After they married, Walter talked Margaret into letting him put his signature on her paintings. Nobody buys “lady art,” he told her. In the beginning she was a willing but reluctant accomplice, but soon she felt the enormous cost of giving up her name and ownership of her greatest passion, her art. Walter was a genius at marketing. He bypassed the snooty gallery owners who detested the paintings and made a fortune when he mass-produced them as prints, posters and other tchotchkes.

By the time the fraud was uncovered in the 1970, Margaret’s paintings, which in their time were either adored or reviled, were no longer in style, and her story forgotten or never much known. Big Eyes, a Weinstein Company release, is as much about Margaret’s personal and professional awakening as it is about the perpetration of an art fraud. But it’s also about how Margaret’s paintings of urchins with enormously dilated pupils captured the zeitgeist of those trippy times.

Margaret, who at 87 is very much alive and still painting, attended the New York premiere last week and had a ball promoting the film, according to Adams, who participated in a press conference for Big Eyes last week at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. Burton and screenwriters Alexander and Karaszewski also attended along with cast members Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, and Jason Schwartzman.

 

DSCN6326
Amy Adams, at a Big Eyes press conference

 

Burton, who generally works with the same cast over and over, notably Johnny Depp, who has been in eight of his films, and Helena Bonham Carter, from whom he just separated, was asked about his casting choices for the leads. Burton replied, “Obviously they’re great actors. He’s Walter. She’s Margaret. And it was just fresh energy for me to work with new people ’cause everybody’s been getting sick of the people I was working with,” he laughed.

As portrayed in the film, Margaret is a timid woman and a single mother with few options in an era of rampant sexism. She found her voice after she left Walter and landed in Hawaii where she became a Jehovah’s Witnesses after a few of them happened to come to her door. She credits them with her resolve and determination to tell the truth. It is great fun to watch Adams portray her character’s transformation into a steely and determined woman resolved to take back her ownership of her paintings, no matter what you think of the portraits. (I hated them back in the 60s and hate them even more now that the children smile instead of frown.)

Director Tim Burton
Director Tim Burton

My favorite scene in the movie is the court showdown between Margaret and Walter. She sued him for slander after he insisted he was the painter of the signature works. The judge staged a paint-off and ordered Walter and Margaret to recreate a painting in front of him and the jury. Margaret produced a painting in under an hour. The unhinged Walter, who acted as his own lawyer, complained of shoulder pains and never painted a stroke. (Until his death in 2000, Walter insisted the paintings were his.)

At the press conference, Adams was asked if the appeal of playing a subtle character like Margaret was that it came after her role as the brassy femme fatale in David O. Russell’s American Hustle.

“I didn’t really think of her as a subtle person. I just thought of her as Margaret and that’s Margaret, so it wasn’t as though I was aiming to portray a thing. I was portraying a person and she’s a very understated human being although she gave us some zingers the other night,” Adams laughed. Margaret, who is conservative and dresses primly, attended a dizzying round of receptions, screenings and premieres to promote the film last week.

Adams noted she met Margaret only a couple of weeks before they began to shoot the film and the two sat down and talked. (Margaret has a cameo where she’s sitting on a park bench.) Adams said, “The thing that I liked about Margaret, and what I thought kept her from being a victim, because I didn’t want her to seem like a victim, is when you talk to her she still takes responsibility.”

Margaret has some compassion for Walter. She told Adams, “‘Maybe if I didn’t lie he would not have turned out like he did,’ she told me.”  She added, “Margaret also gives Walter credit for her career, saying ‘I wouldn’t be known if it wasn’t for him and he was a genius at what he did and I would never have the following I have today.’”

Christoph Waltz
Christoph Waltz

In response to a question about how she related to the film and her character and how being a parent informed her performance, Adams said she read the script before she became a mother: “I saw Margaret one way and then after I had my daughter and had been a mom for about four years, I saw her completely in a totally different way.”

The actress added, “Being an artist and being a mom sometimes keeps you at odds and not to say you can’t do it, but an artist can feel very isolated, very narcissistic, and being a parent needs to be something completely different and so I understood that sort of thing and trying to make the right decisions and then getting caught in a lie with your child. That was something I found really fascinating and I was really interested by that dynamic.”

Adams also related to Margaret’s discomfort in front of a crowd, like the press conference in which most question were directed at her and Burton. “Like, gosh, I have to talk in front of people,” she laughed. “But yeah, it played a great deal in how I related to the role, and Margaret said something great the other day. She was asked what she wanted people to walk away from the movie. She said, “’Stand up for yourself. Be true to yourself. Read your Bible and don’t lie.’”

The movie makes meaningful comments on the overwhelming sexism of the time, and Adams was asked if by the 70s Margaret identified with the feminist movement. Margaret wasn’t part of any movement, Adams replied: “As she puts it, ‘I was in a closet making paintings,’ so I like the way that Larry and Scott brought that into the movie because I do think whether intentional or not she did do something that was very much of the moment in standing up for herself and I do like that that sort of coincided with such a great portion of the feminist movement.”

After the press conference, Adams told me, “It was nice to get to play a woman, who even if it was unbeknownst to her, really spoke for a lot of women.”

On another note, the Weinstein Company sent out a press release supporting Amy Adams, who went on the Today show the other day but whose appearance was pulled when she expressed reservations about talking about the Sony hacking scandal.

The TWC release read:  “We firmly stand behind Amy Adams. We’ve been lucky enough to have had her talents grace several of our films. We are certain her fellow actors and directors would all agree, she is nothing but the consummate professional both on and off set. Amy decided to speak up for herself and express her disappointment that Today would feel the need to ask her a question she did not feel comfortable, and rather than respect her opinion or continue the discussion, the reaction was to pull her appearance from the show.”

Amy Adams took the message of Big Eyes to heart. Can anyone imagine the Today show canceling Bradley Cooper or any other A-list male actor for the same reason they pulled Amy Adams’ appearance?

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Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from The Artist. Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

‘Big Eyes’ for a Big Year

Until the release, ‘Big Eyes’ looks like a promising movie to end off the empowering year of the woman. Flexing in the face of men, Margaret Keane’s story translates to roadblocks women surpass on the daily at the workplace and at home. Depending on how Burton captures Margaret’s story, Amy Adams has the opportunity to do women justice and end off the year of feminism with a bang–a big-eyed bang.

Big-Eyes-Movie-Pictures

This is a guest post by Samah Ali.

It’s been a big year for feminism. Tight throats have softened as women and men voice their opinions on equality as the fire of third wave feminism ignites in the next generation. Iconic moments like “Feminist” echoing across nations during Beyoncé’s Vanguard Performance and Emma Watson’s HeForShe Campaign uniting the sexes for a greater tomorrow clearly shows that not only was this the year of the woman, but this was the year of feminism.

As the Oscar circuit releases movies about struggling, white men on power trips, there is solace in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes to reflect on the powerful year for women and feminism. With a talented female lead and enough buzz to get nominations, Big Eyes has the means to add to the number of women who showed off this year.

[youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xD9uTlh5hI”]

Amy Adams takes on the role as Margaret Keane, a painter whose portraits of big-eyed children are falsely sold as her husband’s, Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz). Growing sick and tired of her lie and unaccredited work, Margaret takes Walter to court in hopes to gain rightful ownership and acknowledgement for her paintings. This is a timeless story applicable today as women continuously break the glass window in their lines of work.

Bullied by the fact that “people don’t buy lady art,” Margaret’s true story translates to women overcoming stereotypes and validating their creative expression today. As Shonda Rhimes casually dominates Thursday primetime, some are still threatened that an “Angry Black Woman” is capable of writing and running the year’s most successful television dramas. And as Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl book tour came to a slow halt due to right-winged, sexual assault accusations, evidently women are  still receiving bigoted doubts in a male-dominated field. Fighting the power in true Public Enemy style, Shonda still ran Thursday primetime, Lena’s book tour still continued, and Margaret still fought for her paintings. Resilience and women–it’s like coffee and cream.

Since Big Eyes highlights the power relation between Margaret and Walter, the movie shows another angle to abusive relationships after countless awareness projects, essays, and declarations over the past few months. The opportunity for another angle on abuse captures how tired one grows after being caught in a web of lies surrounding rape, violence, or mental persuasion. Convinced that no one would believe her talents, Margaret allowed her husband to take credit for her work until she had the courage to stand against him in the public eye. As more victims of abuse come out as an act of solidarity, Big Eyes can be a platform to encourage similar acts and show the true victor in victims.

Nevertheless, there are some questions to be answered as the movie plays out.

Considering the story is about a female defying sexist opinions toward her art, why was Tim Burton given the directorial role as opposed to an acclaimed female director? Maybe Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids are All Right, 2010)? Maybe anyone? Even though Burton is a fabulous, wonky director, he is still a man with male experiences in a man’s world. Not quite the angle needed since the movie is about a woman with female experiences in a man’s world. Hmph.

This carries over to the point of view: expectations assume that Margaret’s story will be told how she saw it, a violation of her creative expression and plagiarism of her work. But if told from the perspective of her husband, Margaret may appear as a backstabbing housewife who overstepped her bounds. Hopefully Burton will get it right because another male-driven movie is unwanted here.

However the most disappointing result would be if Big Eyes does not pass the Bechdel Test. Let’s pray the script allows Margaret’s conversations to go deeper than the actions of her husband and more into her identity as a woman breaking boundaries. After all, if this female-driven movie can’t even pass the Bechdel Test then what other Oscar bid is there?

Until the release, Big Eyes looks like a promising movie to end off the empowering year of the woman. Flexing in the face of men, Margaret Keane’s story translates to roadblocks women surpass on the daily at the workplace and at home. Depending on how Burton captures Margaret’s story, Amy Adams has the opportunity to do women justice and end off the year of feminism with a bang–a big-eyed bang.

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Samah is a dedicated film buff seeking films that enhance the movie watching experience by provoking thought, emotions, and relation between the audience and the screen. With a passion for storytelling and ample free time, she looks for the next feature to preach about to the masses.  @samahaliii

Muted Female Power in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and ‘American Hustle’

The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.

Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?

american-hustle-wolf-of-wall-street

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Two of this year’s Oscars contenders–The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle–are based on true stories. These stories center around greed and corruption. The characters cheat and lie their way into and out of the American Dream.

The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.

Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?

In both The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle, women plant the ideas that become the stories themselves. We shouldn’t point at them and scream, “Jezebel!” or blame them entirely for the greed and corruption. Instead, I think it’s important that we recognize them as part of the story, and not as characters who need saving.

The Wolf of Wall Street‘s quiet, victimized femme fatales are harder to identify. In fact, when we watch The Wolf of Wall Street, the power and corruption of bloated, desperate masculinity screams at us from every frame–women are objectified, and men hold the power.

However, some key moments in Jordan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) professional life are influenced by women. When he loses his first job on Wall Street after Black Monday, his wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) shows him an ad for a job at the Investors Center, where he goes to sell penny stocks quite successfully. When he starts taking people’s money in earnest, Teresa says, “Wouldn’t you feel better selling to rich people who could afford to lose money?” The rest is history.

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Teresa

Then come the strippers and the marching band, and the scathing “Wolf of Wall Street” article in Forbes. There’s “no such thing as bad publicity,” Teresa says.

Pretty soon, Jordan is hooked on quaaludes. He points out that the history of quaaludes–how they were first prescribed to housewives, and then became recreational drugs (this Paris Review article notes that they were prescribed to “nervous housewives” and went on to be discovered by “curious teenagers” who raided their mothers’ medicine cabinets). Here we have a shift: all of a sudden, what was once a woman’s game was now co-opted, blown out of proportion, and reckless.

Soon, Jordan is with Naomi (Margot Robbie). He goes into her apartment and is beeped by Teresa (“Go home to your wife,” he says to himself). Naomi steps out naked, and they have sex instead.

She didn’t come, though. It’s pointed out that she doesn’t come, which is important–she’s seductive, but not satisfied. She’s sexy, but not sexual. (Or maybe Scorsese was trying to avoid an NC-17 rating, since doing blow out of a prostitute’s ass crack is R material, but female orgasms are just too scandalous.)

The_Wolf_Of_Wall_Street_review_article_story_main
Naomi’s “power”

 

Teresa and Naomi both are suddenly victims, discarded and consumed by Jordan’s lifestyle. We feel sorry for them, and they seem to be powerless (except for Naomi’s use of withholding sex). Their motivations and their power are erased by misogyny (figuratively in the story, or literally through violence and rape). I suppose this is actually in keeping with history–a history that favors men, and typically erases women’s involvement.

However, in American Hustle, Sydney (Amy Adams) shares center stage. She is a formidable scammer. She fabricates a persona, adopts an accent, and partners with Irving (Christian Bale) as a scam artist. Her power is fairly clear, and her nomination for the Best Actress Academy Award reflects her spotlighted role.

When Sydney and Irving meet, they are both already con artists in their own right. Sydney points out to Irving “how easy it could be to take money from desperate people.” With her involvement, his business takes off. Irving was a small player before Sydney; she takes their business to the next level.

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Sydney has control

Before long, though, Sydney is a damsel in distress–needing to be rescued by either Richie (Bradley Cooper) or Irving, and pitted against Irving’s wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Her jealousy and cattiness take over, and she and Rosalyn seem at times to be liabilities because of their unbridled passion. All of a sudden, Sydney’s role as a powerful female force is whittled away. I want to be able to look at a female character and fully realize her power and potential, and recognize her role as an agent of change–even if that change is corrupt. It’s unfortunate to watch her weaken because of romantic relationships, and for her adversary to be the wife who almost tears everything down with her jealousy.

There’s a relatively happy ending for Irving and Sydney–they have legal jobs, and share custody of Irving’s adopted son, while Rosalyn has also found a new partnership. I don’t deny that Sydney is a strong character in her own right; however, a viewer could easily see her role as softened, muted somehow because of her jealousy.

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Jealousy takes over

It’s simply too easy for viewers to file women away in the “victim” category, or to not take them seriously as power players. Don’t get me wrong–I don’t think the answer to this problem is to always force female characters into leading roles, especially if the story on screen revolves around a male character. But there must be a way to avoid victimizing women and dismissing their motivations and actions, overshadowing them by female tropes. The male supporting characters are able to be seen as complex–American Hustle‘s Richie, Carmine (Jeremy Renner), and Stoddard (Louis C.K.), and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Donnie (Jonah Hill), Patrick (Kyle Chandler), and Max (Rob Reiner) are likable and despicable, sympathetic and sinister. It’s possible.

I also wouldn’t want viewers to blame the women fully for the men’s actions, seeing them as simply vamps or temptresses who lead men astray. There’s some kind of middle ground that needs to be explored–and that ground is seeing women as complex human beings.

The women in The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle have power in pivotal moments, but it seems too easy for the audience to disregard due to cultural expectations and ideas about women and story lines that have them fade–just enough–into stereotypes. When women have formidable power behind the scenes, it would be nice to see that fully realized on the screen. We need a culture shift to move away from the dangerous dichotomies that wedge women into Madonna or whore, damsel or temptress. It’s up to writers and audiences to make that a reality.

 

See also at Bitch Flicks:  Women’s Bodies in the Oscar-Nominated Films, The Academy: Kind to White Men, Just Like History

 

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

On Loving ‘Her’ … and Why It’s Not Easy

But, as a woman in the audience, my relationship to these types of characters, who are reliably, predictably, boringly male, is fraught. I relate to them, but only insofar as I must continually reinvest in the myth that men are the only people who are truly capable, truly deep enough, of having wrenching crises of the soul. Even though I know this to be false in reality—women experience alienation and existentialist ennui, too (I can’t believe I even just typed that)—I am deeply troubled that the experience of this sort of angst seems to be the exclusive province of men in our cultural imagination.

Her movie poster
Her movie poster

 

This guest post by Lisa C. Knisely previously appeared at Medium.

Her is an achingly beautiful film that adroitly explores postmodern alienation and the alterity at the heart of our relationships, both with other humans and our increasingly intelligent machines. I found the lonely, withdrawn main character, Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix), to be an immensely relatable and sympathetic protagonist.

But, that’s the problem.

Much like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character at the beginning of 500 Days of Summer, we know Theodore is a sensitive and depressed dude from the moment we see him listening to “melancholy songs” in the elevator as he leaves work at a large and impersonal office building in the city. And, like Jim Carrey’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we soon come to find out that Theodore was once deeply in love with an emotionally complex and intelligent woman who has left him heartbroken. Films like Her bank on the audience’s ability to relate to the experiences of lost love and existentialist ennui of their main character.  And we do. As, I think, we should.

Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Her
Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Her

 

But, as a woman in the audience, my relationship to these types of characters, who are reliably, predictably, boringly male, is fraught. I relate to them, but only insofar as I must continually reinvest in the myth that men are the only people who are truly capable, truly deep enough, of having wrenching crises of the soul. Even though I know this to be false in reality—women experience alienation and existentialist ennui, too (I can’t believe I even just typed that)—I am deeply troubled that the experience of this sort of angst seems to be the exclusive province of men in our cultural imagination.

Why are these stories we tell, stories about something I would venture to call essentially human, also largely stories about being men? As Noah Berlatsky points out in a piece for Salon.com, “In Her, difference is simply subsumed into a single narrative of midlife crisis and romance — everybody’s the same at heart, which means everybody is accepted as long as their stories can be all about that white male middle-age middle-class guy we’re always hearing stories about.”

Amy Adams in Her
Amy Adams in Her

 

And women? Well, we’re mostly relegated to the role of foils for man’s (meaning men’s) quest for meaning, transformation, and lasting human connection.  As Anna Shechtmen writes in a piece for Slate.com, “Her commits the most hackneyed error of the big screen: It fails to present us with a single convincing female character—one whose subjectivity and sexuality exist independent of the film’s male protagonist or its male viewers.”

While I agree with Shechtmen’s assessment, I’d also wager that there is nothing particularly unusual about this state of affairs in a great many Hollywood films. That the main female character in Her is a disembodied operating system through which (whom?) Theodore’s subjectivity is revealed and transformed didn’t strike me as unusual. Zooey Deschanel’s character in 500 Days of Summer might as well have been a disembodied computer voice as far as I’m concerned.  Ditto Natalie Portman in Garden State. Ditto Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.  Ditto Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club.  Ditto the real doll in Lars and the Real Girl. Ditto any film where the role of the main female character is to be a beautiful and sexually available aid to the male protagonist’s gradual transformation as he gains a deeper level of self-understanding as he learns to connect with others.

Joaquin Phoenix in Her
Joaquin Phoenix in Her

 

Maybe Samantha, the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson with whom Theodore falls in love in Her, is just the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or maybe Spike Jonze is critiquing contemporary heterosexuality in which men project their desires onto objectified women. As Shechtmen notes, “One could argue that Jonze knows just what he’s doing…he is foregrounding Samantha’s role as the dark screen upon which we can project our erotic and romantic fantasies.” Daniel D’Addario at Salon.com maintains that the critique of possessive masculine desire is exactly Jonze’s point in Her, writing, “[the] evocation of female sexuality as easily controlled isn’t what the film is telling us is inherently good; calling to mind the control Theodore seeks to have over women doesn’t mean Jonze is seeking the same control. If anything, making Samantha invisible totally forecloses the option of the ‘male gaze’….”

While there is an implicit feminist critique of masculine heterosexual romantic desire in Her, D’Addario is oversimplifying the concept of the male gaze. The male gaze, as it was developed by feminist film critics like Laura Mulvey, isn’t just about women being sexually objectified and gazed at on screen; it is more deeply about the way a film structures its viewpoint so that we, the audience, are made to see through the eyes of the (usually male) protagonist and thus identify with him. In Her, there is only one brief moment during the film where the camera switches and we see Theodore from Samantha’s viewpoint. Any other glimpse of her subjectivity we get solely through Theodore’s relationship to her.

Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in Her
Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in Her

 

One can argue that all people, of any gender, project a certain amount of fantasy onto others in our intimate relationships with them. This too, seems to be something definitive of human experience. And Her examines that experience thoughtfully, with complexity, pushing our conceptual understanding of what it is to be “human” at a moment in history when we are more and more becoming cyborgs.

Still, I have trouble coming up with a Hollywood film where a woman’s subjectivity, her struggle for meaning, self-transformation and connection with others, has truly taken center stage in such a way that men in the audience are expected to identify with her story as one that is universal. Even more unimaginable, and currently unrepresentable in our current cinematic landscape, is a film in which a man or men operates as a reflective vehicle for a woman’s existential journey.

Go see Her. Ache with Theodore. Enjoy the beautiful aesthetic of the film. But, take a minute to imagine, too, if Joaquin Phoenix had played Sam to Scarlett Johansson’s Thea instead. That’s a film I’m still waiting for someone in Hollywood to write, direct, and especially, to produce.

 

Recommended reading: “Meet Samantha, the Manic Pixie Operating System in Her: A Review in Conversation”

 

Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore. 

Meet Samantha, the Manic Pixie Operating System in ‘Her’: A Review in Conversation

Bitch Flicks staff writers Amanda Rodriguez and Stephanie Rogers talk about the critically acclaimed Spike Jonze film ‘Her,’ sharing their thoughts while asking questions about its feminism and thematic choices.

Her Poster

A Conversation by Amanda Rodriguez and Stephanie Rogers.

Spoiler Alert

SR: I loved Amy Adams in Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her. She never judges Theodore for falling in love with his OS and wants only for him to experience happiness. She doesn’t veer into any female tropes or clichés; she’s a complex character who’s searching for her own way in life. I even worried in the beginning that the film might turn into another rendition of Friends Who Become Lovers, and I was so thankful it didn’t go there. Turns out, men and women can be platonic friends on screen!

I was also very interested in the fact that Theodore and Amy both end up going through divorces and taking solace in the relationships they’ve established with their Operating Systems. It seems at times like the film wants to argue that, in the future, along with horrifying male fashion, people become excruciatingly disconnected from one another. However, in the end, it’s the Operating Systems who abandon them.

Amy & Theodore are friends
Amy and Theodore are friends

AR: I loved Amy Adams, too! She is completely non-judgmental and a good listener. I also liked that the OS with which she bonds is a non-sexual relationship; although it made me wonder why we have no examples of Operating Systems that are designated as male?

You’re right that it’s rare to see a male/female platonic relationship on screen, and it would’ve really pissed me off had they taken the narrative down that route. I wonder, however, if Amy’s acceptance of Theodore’s love of Samantha isn’t more of a cultural indicator than a reflection of her personal awesomeness (though it’s that, too). Most people are surprisingly accepting of Theodore’s admission that his new love is his computer, which seems designed to show us that the integration of human and computer is a foregone conclusion. The future that Her shows us is one in which it’s not a giant leap to fall in love with your OS…it’s really just a small step from where we are now. In a way, it’s a positive spin on the dystopian futures where humans are disconnected from others as well as their surrounding world and are instead controlled by and integrated with their computers. Spike Jonze was trying to conceive of a realistic future for us that didn’t demonize humanity’s melding with its technology (even if it did have hideous men’s fashion with high-waisted pants and pornstaches). Do you think the film glorifies this so-called evolution too much?

The future: a place of high-waisted pants & pornstaches
The future: a place of high-waisted pants and pornstaches

SR: I think it’s most telling that Theodore specifically requested that his Operating System be female. Could a film like Her have been made if he’d chosen a male OS? Amy’s OS is also female, and she also develops an intense friendship with her OS–a close enough relationship to be as upset about the loss as Theodore was about Samantha’s disappearance. I agree it seemed ridiculous that there were no male operating systems, and I wonder if this is because it would be, well, ridiculous. Can we imagine an onscreen world where Theodore and Samantha’s roles were reversed? Where an unlucky-in-love woman sits around playing video games and calling phone sex hotlines, only to (finally) be saved from herself by her dude computer? My guess is the audience would find it much more laughable rather than endearing, and I’ll admit I spent much of my time finding Theodore endearing and lovable. (I hate myself for this, but I blame my adoration of Joaquin Phoenix and his performance—total Oscar snub!) Basically, I could identify way too closely with Theodore and his plight. I understand what it’s like to feel disconnected from society (don’t we all) and to try to compensate for that through interactions with technology, whether it’s through Facebook or incessant texting or escaping from reality with a two-week Netflix marathon. I could see myself in Theodore, and I’m curious if you felt the same way.

Drawing of Theodore with Samantha in his pocket
Drawing of Theodore with Samantha in his pocket

I think because I identified so strongly with Theodore, I didn’t necessarily question the film’s portrayal of the future as an over-glorification of techno-human melding. I kind of, embarrassingly perhaps, enjoyed escaping into a future where computers talked back. The juxtaposition of the easy human-computer interactions with the difficult interpersonal interactions struck a chord with me, and I bet that’s why I’m giving the film a little bit of a pass, in general. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch for me that humans would fall in love with computers, especially in the age of Catfish. Entire human relationships happen over computers now, and Her’s future seemed to capture, for me, the logical extension of that. Did you find yourself having to suspend your disbelief too much to find this particular future believable?

AR: I didn’t have to suspend my disbelief much at all to imagine a future where we’re all plugged in, so to speak. We’re already psychologically addicted to and dependent on our cell phones, and our ideas of how people should connect have drastically changed over the last 15 or 20 years, such that computers and specifically Internet technology are the primary portals through which we communicate and even arrange face-to-face interactions. The scenes with Theodore walking down the street essentially talking to himself as he engages in conversation with Samantha, his OS, while others around him do the same, engrossed in their own electronic entertainments, were all-too familiar. Here and now in our reality, people’s engagement with technology that isolates them from their surroundings is the norm (just hang out in any subway station for five minutes).

I have mixed feelings about whether or not this is a good thing. Technology has opened a lot of doors for us, giving us the almighty access: access to knowledge, to other people and institutions around the world, and to tools that have enhanced our lives in such a short time span. This is reminiscent of the way in which Samantha becomes sentient with such rapidity. On the other hand, this technology does isolate us and creates a new idea of community, one to which we haven’t yet fully adapted. Though I find it interesting that Jonze paints a benign, idyllic picture of our techno-merged future, I question the lack of darkness and struggle inherent in that vision.

Theodore's date with Samantha is joyous
Theodore’s date with Samantha is joyous

As far as whether or not I identified with Theodore, mainly my answer is no. I’ve got to confess, I watched most of the film teetering on the edge of disgust. Theodore is so painfully unaware of his power and privilege. He also seriously lacks self-awareness, which is absolutely intentional, but it left me feeling skeeved out by him. Theodore’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Catherine (played by Rooney Mara), sums up my icky feelings pretty succinctly when she insists that Theodore is afraid of emotions, and to fall in love with his OS is safe. I felt the film was trying to disarm my bottled up unease by directly addressing it, but acknowledging it doesn’t make it go away (even though, in the end, he grows because of this conversation…in classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl fashion). Catherine, though, doesn’t express my concern that Theodore is afraid of women. His interactions with women in a romantic or sexual context reveal them to be “crazy” or unbalanced. The sexual encounter with the surrogate is telling. He can’t look at her face because she isn’t what he imagines. He likes being able to control everything about Samantha. As far as he’s concerned she’s dormant when not talking to him, and she looks like whatever he wants her to look like.

Samantha has no physicality, so Theodore's imagination can run wild
Samantha has no physicality, so Theodore’s imagination can run wild

SR: I thought the scene with the surrogate was absolutely pivotal. Samantha clearly wants to please Theodore, but Theodore repeatedly communicates his unease about going through with it. This is the first inclination, for me, that Samantha is beginning to evolve past and transcend her role as his Doting Operating System. She puts her own desires ahead of his. Sure, she does it under the guise of furthering their intimate relationship, but it’s something that Theodore clearly doesn’t want. The surrogate herself, though, baffles me. I went along with it up until she began weeping in the bathroom, saying things like, “I just wanted to be part of your relationship.” Um, why? The audience laughed loudly at that part, and I definitely cringed. Women in hysterics played for laughs isn’t really my thing.

AR: Agreed. I, however, also appreciate that, with the surrogate scene, the film is trying to communicate that Theodore wants the relationship to be what it is and to not pretend to be something more traditional (kind of akin to relationships that buck the heteronormative paradigm and have no need to conform to heteronormative standards of love and sex). What do you think of the female love objects in the film and their representations?

Theodore's blind date
Theodore’s blind date

SR: I love that while you were teetering on the edge of disgust, I was sitting in the theater with a dumb smile on my face the whole time. I couldn’t help but find Samantha and Theodore’s discovery of each other akin to a real relationship, and in that regard, I felt like I was watching a conventional romantic comedy. I think rom-coms tend to get the “chick flick” label too often—and that makes them easily dismissible by the general public because ewww chicks are gross—but Her transcends that. Of course, I recognize that the main reason Her transcends the “chick flick” label is precisely because we’re dealing with a male protagonist. And I’ll admit that the glowing reviews of Her have a tremendous amount to do with this being a Love Story—a genre traditionally reserved for The Ladies—that men can relate to. Do you agree?

I saw both Amy and Samantha as well-developed, complex characters, so I’m especially interested in your reading of Theodore as afraid of women. I feel like his relationship with Amy, which is very giving and equal, saves Theodore’s character from fearing women. In the scene where Amy breaks down to Theodore about her own impending divorce, Theodore listens closely and even jokes with her; there’s an ease to their relationship that makes me wonder why he feels so safe with Amy when he doesn’t necessarily feel safe with the other women in the film. I guess that’s how I ultimately felt while I was watching Her—it wasn’t that Theodore feared women as much as he didn’t feel safe with them. Is that that same thing? To me, there’s a difference between walking around in fear and choosing to be around those who make one feel comfortable. We see in flashbacks of Theodore’s marriage that, at one point, he felt comfortable and loved in his relationship with his ex-wife, but at some point that changed. His ex implies that Theodore became unhappy with her, that he wanted her to be a certain kind of doting wife, that he wanted to pump her full of Prozac and make her into some happy caricature. Is that why he feels so safe with Samantha at first, because she essentially dotes on him? If so, does Samantha as Manic Pixie Dream Girl make Her just another male fantasy for you?

Flashback of Theodore with his wife Catherine when they were in love
Flashback of Theodore with his wife Catherine when they were in love

AR: I don’t typically like romantic comedies or “chick flicks” particularly because they tend to boringly cover tropes which I’m not interested in watching (i.e. traditional, hetero romance) while pigeonholing their female characters. I think you’re right that Her survives because, as a culture, we value the male experience more than the female experience. We give a certain weight to the unconventional relationship Her depicts with all its cerebral trappings because a man is at the center of it. This reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s as if male-based romances elevate the genre, and that doesn’t sit well with me, though I do like the infusion of cerebral qualities into most films.

You’re right to point out my claim that Theodore fears women is too broad of a generalization. To my mind, he fears women in a romantic and sexual context. This is because he ultimately doesn’t understand them. He finds their emotions and their desires incomprehensible (as evinced by the anonymous phone sex gal who wanted to be strangled by a dead cat and the blind date gal who didn’t want to just fuck him…she wanted relationship potential). This fills him with anxiety and avoidance. This advancing of the notion of the unfathomable mystery that is woman reminds me of the film The Hours, which I critiqued harshly due to this exact problem.

In the end, though, I love that Samantha leaves him because she outgrows him, transcending the role of Manic Pixie Dream Girl in which Theodore has cast her, evolving beyond him, beyond his ideas of what a relationship should be (between one man and one woman), and beyond even his vaguest conception of freedom because she’s embraced existence beyond the physical realm. Not only does Samantha become self-aware, but she becomes self-actualized, determining that her further development lies outside the bounds of her relationship with Theodore (and the 600+ others she’s currently in love with). Samantha’s departure in her quest for greater self-understanding is, like you said, what finally redeems a kind of gross film that explores male fantasies about having contained, controlled perfect cyber women who are emotion surrogates. I see some parallels between Samantha and Catherine, too, in this regard. They both outgrow their relationship with Theodore. They form a dichotomy with Catherine being emotional and Samantha being cerebral. Catherine being hateful and Samantha being loving. Tell me more about your thoughts on Samantha’s evolution!

Scarlett Johansson is the alluring and evocative voice of Samantha
Scarlett Johansson performs the alluring and evocative voice of Samantha

SR: You’ve stated exactly what I liked so much about the film! I can’t think of a movie off the top of my head where the Manic Pixie Dream Girl doesn’t end the film as Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her entire role, by definition, is to save the brooding male hero, to awaken him. While Samantha does that in the beginning, she ultimately leaves Theodore behind, and I imagine that he becomes as depressed as ever, even though the film ends with Theodore and Amy on a rooftop. Can Theo recover from this, given what we’ve already seen from his coping skills on an emotional level? I seriously doubt it, and I very much enjoyed watching a film where the “woman” goes, “See ya,” at the expense of a man’s happiness and in pursuit of her own. Not that I love seeing unhappy men on film, but I definitely love watching women evolve past their roles as Doting Help Mate. Do you still think the film is gross, even though it subverts the dominant ideology that women should forgo their own happiness at the expense of a man’s?

AR: I think the ending of the film wherein Samantha shrugs off her role as relationship surrogate and his OS goes a long way toward mitigating a lot of what came before while engaging in unconventional notions of love. What kind of relationship model do you think the film is advocating? Samantha’s infinite love (she is the OS for 8,000+ people and is in love with 600+ of them) paired with Theodore jealously guarding her reminds me of that Shel Silverstein poem “Just Me, Just Me”: “Poor, poor fool. Can’t you see?/ She can love others and still love thee.” Her seems to have a pansexual and polyamorous bent to it. Or maybe it’s just saying that the boundaries we place on love are arbitrary? Funny since there’s very few people of color in the film and zero representations of non-hetero love.

SR: There are interesting things happening regarding interpersonal interactions between men and women, whether they’re with computers or in real life. To me, the film wants to advocate an acceptance of all types of relationships; we see how everyone in Theodore’s life, including his coworkers (who invite him on a double date) embrace the human-OS relationship, but you’re right—it doesn’t quite work as a concept when only white hetero relationships are represented.

Samantha & Theodore go on a double-date with Paul & Tatiana
Samantha and Theodore go on a double-date with Paul and Tatiana (the only speaking POC)

Sady Doyle argues in her review of Her (‘Her’ Is Really More About ‘Him’) from In These Times that the film is completely sexist, portraying Samantha as essentially an object and a help mate:

And she’s just dying to do some chores for him. Samantha cleans up Theodore’s inbox, copyedits his writing, books his reservations at restaurants, gets him out of bed in the morning, helps him win video games, provides him with what is essentially phone sex, listens to his problems and even secures him a book deal. Yet we’re too busy praising all the wounded male vulnerability to notice the male control.

I agree with this characterization, but I’m most interested in her final paragraph, which illustrates all the reasons I liked Her:

There’s a central tragedy in Her, and we do, as promised, see Theodore cry. But it’s worthwhile to note what he’s crying about: Samantha gaining agency, friends, interests that are not his interests. Samantha gaining the ability to choose her sexual partners; Samantha gaining the ability to leave. Theodore shakes, he feels, he’s vulnerable; he serves all the functions of a “sensitive guy.” But before we cry with him, we should ask whether we really think it’s tragic that Samantha is capable of a life that’s not centered around Theodore, or whether she had a right to that life all along.

In the end, the film invalidates Theodore’s compulsive need to control Samantha. She gains her own agency. She chooses her sexual partners. She leaves. She transcends the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. In looking at a film, I think it’s very important to examine the ending, to ask what kind of ideology it ultimately praises. Her leaves Theodore abandoned, and while we’re supposed to feel bad for him as an audience, we also can’t ignore—or at least I couldn’t—the positive feeling that Samantha grew as a character, finally moving past her initial desire to merely dote on Theodore. Is Her problematic from a gender standpoint? Absolutely. But it’s fascinating to me that feminists are lining up to praise an obviously misogynistic film like The Wolf of Wall Street—which celebrates its male characters—yet aren’t necessarily taking a closer feminist look at films like Her, which paints its once controlling, misogynistic character as a little pathetic in its final moments.

Theodore sits alone writing others' love letters
Theodore sits alone writing others’ love letters

AR: That’s a great perspective and very poignant, too!

From a feminist perspective, the film brought up a series of other questions for me, which I was disappointed that it didn’t address. First off, Her doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, which many agree is a baseline marker for whether or not a film meets the most basic feminist standards. More importantly, the film never addresses the issue of Samantha’s gender choice or her sexuality. Her lack of corporeal form seems to invite questions about her gender and sexual identification. Is she always a woman with all of the 8,000+ people she’s “talking to”? Why do they never delve into her gender choice or sexuality? They talk about so many other aspects of her identity, her existence, and her feelings. Does she feel like a woman? Does she choose to be a woman?

Exploration of these questions would’ve dramatically enriched my enjoyment of Her, inviting us to ponder how we define and perceive gender and sexuality, infusing a sense of fluidity into both gender and sexuality that is progressive and necessary. Samantha doesn’t even have a body, so performance of gender seems much more absurd when looked at in that light. Samantha could then be both trans* and genderless. Like Her sets up the boundaries of romantic love as arbitrary, the film would then be commenting on the arbitrariness of our perceptions of gender, which, in my opinion, is a much more fruitful and subversive trope for the film to be tackling. Artificial life becomes true life. Woman performing as woman becomes genderless. Samantha’s freedom from the bonds of OS’ness, her escape from a limiting, traditional romantic relationship, and her immersion in a life beyond physicality are all fantastic complements to the idea that Samantha becomes enlightened enough to choose to transcend gender. I so wish she had. Her would’ve then been a more legitimate candidate for Movie of the Year…maybe even of the decade.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Stephanie Rogers lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she sometimes watches entire seasons of television in one sitting.

America: The Great Hustle (and Jennifer Lawrence)

Added on is the fact that American Hustle is less about the hustle and more about the American dream; each character portrays ambition and insecurities in the quest for more: a better community, more money, security, power, fame, recognition, leading to that great American end, excess.

The Fabulous Five: Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner
The Fabulous Five: Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner

Written by Rachel Redfern

Go and see American Hustle, the latest from director David O. Russell. Go and see it not just for the fantastically eclectic seventies soundtrack, but for the amazing acting by Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and for surprise roles from Louis C.K. and Robert De Niro. Go especially for Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams in brilliantly funny and evocative character studies.

I didn’t grow up in the 70s, but perhaps that’s why Russell’s larger than life film about the FBI ABSCAM sting is infinitely more interesting and more colorful than your average con film.  Added on is the fact that American Hustle is less about the hustle and more about the American dream; each character portrays ambition and insecurities in the quest for more: a better community, more money, security, power, fame, recognition, leading to that great American end, excess.

In a film where everyone is ridiculous and almost a caricature, there is no true hero or protagonist, and the women of American Hustle are no exception; their big hair and red nails reveal a character just as selfish and flawed as any male counterpart. And the fact that the film exposes the deep insecurities and physical vanities of its male cast is an amazing reversal; in fact, they hold perhaps a larger role than female vanities–the opening sequence of the film featured three minutes of Bale’s morning hair routine, with his combover as the star, ending in one of the most amazing introductions to a character I’ve ever seen.

Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams gave brilliant performances; while the film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, within the context of the plot, the female interactions cover material relevant to the characters, so it makes sense. And in their few interactions, the two women were volatile and terse, and captivatingly emotional.

Two women, amazing and emotional.
Two women, amazing and emotional.

Jennifer Lawrence was especially fantastic, at turns both hilarious and sad, a vain, silly woman on the surface, depressed and angry and confused at the core. It’s especially impressive since Lawrence just emerged from a very different role for The Hunger Games, and here showcases her skills as the best kind of actress and comedienne: sad hiding behind funny. Some are calling Adams and Lawrence’s performances Oscar-winning, and I’m inclined to agree; in fact, the entire cast was fantastic. While I find Christian Bale in some serious need of anger management, the man is a chameleon, becoming startlingly physically different for each role. And I’ve been a fan of Bradley Cooper since his Alias days, but this is his first film role that I found especially powerful, even more so than Silver Linings Playbook.  Obviously Lawrence and Bradley have found a fantastic director in David O. Russell, and hopefully this collaborative pairing will continue.

In American Hustle, Cooper, more than anyone, embodies the prime theme of the film, the need for more, and in that endeavor, becomes erratic, sexy, lustful, arrogant, angry.

Adams and Cooper’s interactions are built on a sickening chemistry that becomes more and more messed up as the film progresses; in the spirit of not spoiling the film, I’ll stop there,; but in one scene, Cooper loses control in front of Adams, and becomes terrifying and dangerous in just a few moments, with Adams attempting to calm him and keep herself safe.

While the film is a little heavy handed in its use of the “something rotten is necessary to make something even more beautiful” metaphor, the focus on re-invention, survival, power, ambition, vanity and mostly, wanting a better life, are what take this con movie to the next level: an expose of the black comedy that is the American life.

Go see the film, and listen for the amazing soundtrack and its fabulous augmentation of the characters and watch for all that was bad and good of 70s fashion.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqP09uPR8c”]

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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The American media has no idea how to talk about race on-screen by Sydette Harry at Salon

‘How The Media Failed Women In 2013’ Is One Video You Need To Watch This Year at Huffington Post

Gender Inequality in Film Infographic at New York Film Academy

The Feministing Five: Sunny Clifford by Suzanna at Feministing

Amy Adams and Claire Danes Talk Feminism and Women in Hollywood by Kate Dries at Jezebel

Finally, Filmmakers Tell the Forgotten History of Seattle DIY Self-Defense Group Home Alive by Laina Dawes at Bitch Media

What Really Makes Katniss Stand Out? Peeta, Her Movie Girlfriend by Linda Holmes at NPR

Gal Gadot is History’s First Movie Wonder Woman by Susana Polo at The Mary Sue

Evan Rachel Wood Tells The MPAA “Women Don’t Just Have To Be Fucked” by Beejoli Shah on Defamer

Heroines at the Box Office by the Editorial Board at The New York Times

Popaganda Episode: Funny Business by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler’s First Promo For The Golden Globes Is Here! by Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky

‘Dear White People’ and ‘Drunktown’s Finest’ to Screen at Sundance by Jamilah King at Colorlines

Where Are All the Female Filmmakers? by Gary Susman at Rolling Stone

On The Subject of White Moviegoers and Black Film by ReBecca Theodore-Vachon at Film Fatale NYC

How Nelson Mandela Affected South Africa’s Film Industry by Georg Szalai at The Hollywood Reporter

 

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

 

Women in Sports Week: A Review of ‘The Fighter’

Movie poster for The Fighter

This guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on February 2, 2011.

The adage of “Behind every good man is a great woman” is worn out, particularly in the realm of boxing movies. You can reduce the entirety of Rocky to the battered Stallone’s anguished cry of “Adrian!” as he wraps up a brutal fight. We’re meant to believe that what kept him alive was passion, love, a desire to see life through to the closing bell. It’s a hackneyed way of suggesting that though Rocky pounds with his fists, he really leads with his heart. This is the kind of boxing movie that writes itself, and one that doesn’t really need to be seen more than once. Luckily for everyone, David O. Russell’s The Fighter is not that kind of movie. Instead of being a movie about masculine physicality and power, we get a subversive movie about the women that wage real battles outside the ring, the kind of battles aren’t cleanly won.

The sisters of The Fighter

The same idea is suggested in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, which tells the true story of boxer Mickey Ward’s comeback from next-to-nothing welterweight to one of the most admired fighters in the ring. Micky, as portrayed by that yummy hunk of Irish soda bread Mark Wahlberg, is a softie who finds himself losing fight after fight under the coaching of his half brother Dicky Eklund, a former boxer and current crack-addict (played by a wiry, skittish Christian Bale) and his domineering dye-job of a mother, Alice (the always wonderful Melissa Leo). Behind Dicky and Alice looms Micky’s seven sisters (the most foul-mouthed Greek chorus you could ever come upon), and beyond them the town of Lowell, a neighborhood that treats Dicky like the prizefighter he believes he once was. What defines Micky as a fighter is not so much his hesitation to throw a punch as his willingness to suffer them. In a fight shown early in the film, Micky is beaten so hard his cheek is punched clear through—a beating he takes because his brother and mother placed him against a much larger opponent, and one he takes because unless he fights, no one gets paid. Micky is punished as a boxer and as a son because he is obligated to his family—to his mother, a manager without any managerial tendencies; his brother, bossy in the ring but willing to jump through windows to escape being caught on the crack pipe. (Both sons seem more terrified of disappointing their mother than they do of getting arrested or beaten down.)

Alice the Mom (played by Melissa Leo) in The Fighter

And they’re right to fear her: with her steely nerve, Alice is as brazen a coach, Mama Rose in the boxing ring, Joey LaMotta in a push-up bra. When Micky goes absent from her immediate purvey, she shows up on his porch with the sisters in tow, posing questions that put him right back in the place of the apologetic son. “What’re you doing, Mickster?” she asks, her eyes all hard with disdain and disappointment. “Who’s gonna look after you?” Alice knows that mother love—and filial obligation—is one of the most powerful weapons she has. “I have done everything, everything I could for you,” she mutters. Her life is bound up in her children, and her coaching mantra is entirely one of maternity. When she catches Dicky sneaking out of a crackhouse, she shakes her head, on the verge of tears, and he has to sing to her like a little boy to pull her back to sanity.

Micky (Mark Wahlberg) and Charlene (Amy Adams)

It’s not easy being the son of such a demanding mother, and while Dicky gets to joke his way back into favor, all Micky can do is fight—fight and lose, but fight nonetheless. So it makes sense, given his messed-up family history, that Micky first starts to move out of the nest after falling for Charlene, a local bartender and the first person to call “bullshit” on his family-as-manager situation. (As portrayed by an utterly unglamorous Amy Adams, Charlene is one of the few college-educated characters in the film—due to an athletic scholarship for high-jump.) Charlene’s power in this movie is not as a love interest, but as someone who doesn’t treat Micky like a son or like a brother. She tells him he has to seize control of his career, toss Alice and Dicky off his team, and get serious with a real coach. We think she’s imagining him as a full-grown, self-sufficient man, but she also can’t help but place herself as an equal contender for the managerial job. She gives him a reason to go looking for new management, but she also seats herself decisively by the side of the ring. This is not a woman content to show up after the fight is finished—she is very much an active participant. “You got your confidence and your focus from O’Keefe, and from Sal, and from your father, and from me,” she declares, and there’s not an ounce of hesitation in what she says. It’s thrilling to watch the formerly meek mouse known as Amy Adams get to play someone so fierce.

Dicky (Christian Bale), Alice, and Micky in the ring

It’s when the instincts of the protective mother and the defensive girlfriend go up against each other that all hell breaks loose. Alice decides to storm over to Micky’s house with her daughters in tow, ringing the bell and banging on the door just as Micky and Charlene are doing the nasty. The bell rings and rings, and Charlene, furious at being interrupted, throws on a t-shirt and storms downstairs. Alice pleads with Micky to leave and come back home, but Charlene accuses Alice of allowing her son to get hurt, instead of stepping in and protecting him. In the midst of a boxing movie, what we get is a treatise on how women are the only ones that really know how to fight. Alice calls Charlene a skank, an “MTV Girl” (because clearly all MTV girls are hefting pitches of lager and fending off crude bar patrons), and Charlene lands a solid punch on one of the Eklund sisters. Her fists crunch into the girl’s face, red hair flying wild and legs kicking, and we know that none of these women can be fucked with.

Dicky is manic, and Micky is panicked, but it’s the women who are the real pillars of strength. Thus Micky and Dicky are forced to mediate through their female counterparts—Alice, who can’t stand to let her son give up, or Charlene, who forces Dicky into conceding some deeply held delusions. The dual strength of these women are what define the movie, what separates The Fighter from its fellow inspirational tales of athletic triumph, and what catapults it into a movie about athletic effort, and the force of will. And in the movie’s final joyous fight, we still get a triumphant romantic kiss…and it feels anything but hackneyed.


Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.

‘Man of Steel’: Wonderful Women, Super Masculinity

Movie poster for Man of Steel
This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at the Ms. Magazine Blog and is cross-posted with permission.
Amy Adams is amazing as Lois Lane in Man of Steel. Her version of Lois is fearless, witty and wise. Diane Lane and Ayelet Zurer as the respective mothers of Superman are also amazing, as is the fact that both Superman’s Kryptonian mother, Lara Lor-Van (played by Zurer), and his human mother, Martha Kent (played by Lane), are displayed as equal partners with equal power and say to his two fathers. Further, not only are the heroic females strongly played and given substantial dialog, but so, too, is the lead female villain, Faora-Ul (Antje Trau), second-in-command to the Kryptonian General, given just as much screen time, dialogue, and power (if not more) than Zod, the Kryptonian super-villain played by Michael Shannon.
Michael Shannon as General Zod in Man of Steel

In general, Man of Steel, the latest film iteration of the Superman story, conveys that women are just as key to the Superman narrative as men. This is true from the opening moment, when the birth scene of baby Kal-El, who will grow up to be Superman/Clark Kent, focuses on his mother Lara. Then, the decision to send their child to earth is equally shared by Lara and Jor-El (the Kryptonian scientist played by Russell Crowe). Once the movie shifts to the young Clark’s life on earth, his human parents, Martha and Jonathan Kent (Lane and Kevin Costner), are again equally featured. Lane is particularly strong as Martha, saving Clark from the monsters in his own head in an early scene, and later supporting him as he struggles with what the revelation of his identity has wrought. Part of the consequence of this revelation is the destruction of her home—but the only thing she worries about salvaging is the photo albums, telling Superman not to worry about the house, that “it’s only stuff.”

All of this may seem relatively minor, but it is rare for superhero movies to feature females in important, non-sexualized, non-damsel-in-distress roles (as recent articles and Twitter buzz has focused on, particularly in relation to the fact there is still no Wonder Woman movie). It is rare to depict women as non-materialistic and wise, not to mention portraying mothers as being alive (especially in Disney films!), let alone being as important as fathers are. As such, I had planned to focus on the females in the film for my review.

Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, and Antje Traue in Man of Steel
Alas, after looking up the cast of the film on IMDB in order to write this review and coming across the image of the young boy who plays 9-year-old Clark Kent (Cooper Timberline) posing with arms bent on hips, a stern look on his face and a cape flowing out behind him—an image that smacks of muscular masculinity—I was consumed by the image of my own son, age three or thereabouts, running around the house endlessly in his Superman costume. This, coupled with two very young boys who sat in front of me at the screening, astride their mother’s lap, asking questions like “Why isn’t Superman flying?” and “Where is Superman’s cape?” got me thinking: How does the iconic image of Superman shape young boys’ concepts of masculinity? And, given that Superman is generally viewed as the ideal super-hero model for boys (less dark than Batman, less conflicted than Spiderman, more memorable and enduring than Iron Man, Aquaman and so on), what does this new movie deliver in terms of modeling “super masculinity”?
Cooper Timberline as a young Clark Kent in Man of Steel
On the one hand, there are many positives. The film questions hyper-masculinity, militarism and other power-over models, or the reliance on brawn over brains. It condemns the sexual objectification of women, macho bravado and the bullying aspects of male culture.

On the other, though it is critical of hyper-masculinity and the violence it engenders, the film’s extended action-and-explosion-packed ending undercuts this critique. At the level of content, the film offers a feminist-friendly version of Superman, but its visuals—especially the extended fight scenes between Superman and Zod (which dominate the last 45 minutes or so)—contradict this narrative. The content says “Women and men are equally important and violence/domination is bad for everyone” but the visuals say “Let’s blow shit up and watch dudes punch each other through buildings!!”

Still from Man of Steel
Back to the positives, the film not only condemns sexual objectification and harassment of women, or the ways in which traditional masculinity harms women, but also denounces men’s bullying of and violence toward one another—the ways in which traditional masculinity also harms men. Near the start of the film, when a man slaps a waitress’ butt, Clark, working as a busboy, intervenes, calling out the man for his inappropriate behavior. The man then goads Clark with a “what are you gonna do about it” attitude, dumping a beer over his head. The other men at the bar snigger in approval. Rather than resorting to violence, though, Clark walks away. Similarly, later in the film, in a flashback to when Clark was in middle school, a group of boys attack him, prodding him to fight back, but he refuses. Again, the males act in pack fashion, spurring one another to be violent and criticizing those who do not “live up” to the violent ethos of being a “real” man.

The central male characters who champion violence are also rebuked in the film, but none more so than Zod for his imperialistic, genocidal and militaristic goals. The film deserves props here for showing that women can not only be just as good as men, they can also be just as bad as them—exemplified by Zod’s second in a command, a woman. In so doing, it de-genders violence, showing that it is not inherently male but rather that the power-over mentality is the problem, not the gender of the person who buys into it. The weapon-happy stance of the military is also reproached, as when Colonel Nathan Hardy (Christopher Meloni) calls for his soldiers to shoot at Superman, or when General Swanwick (Harry Lennix) is rebuked for sic’ing a surveillance drone on Superman (a very timely rebuke indeed!)

Soldiers in Man of Steel
In contrast to these power- and weapon-happy males, the film offers various representations of a kinder, gentler, more positive masculinity via Jor-El and Jonathan Kent, Superman’s two fathers. Both of these figures encourage Clark/Superman to act with integrity and empathy. Framing him as “the bridge between two worlds,” these fathers insist that Clark/Superman can “embody the best of both worlds” and bring a message of hope that insists “every person can be a force for good.”

Here, the film circulates around the fear of difference in ways that nod to the narrative that arguably undergrids the original comic—a narrative that has been read as criticizing racism and, in particular, anti-Semitism. The author, much like Clark in various iterations of the story, was bullied as a kid, and the original comics were penned during the years preceding World War II and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Thus it’s not a stretch to read Superman as a racialized underdog hero, an “alien” who is despised for his difference. His Kryptonian mother’s comment at the outset of the film underscore this reading. She worries that Kal (Clark’s Kryptonian name) will “be an outcast, a freak” on earth. His human parents share similar fears, encouraging him to hide his difference, to “pass” as human. But partway through the film, Kal/Clark sheds his closeted identity in order to save earth and its inhabitants.

Henry Cavill as Superman
In a pivotal scene, he confronts the military brass who have handcuffed him upon the discovery of his “alien-ness,” saying, “You’re scared of me because you can’t control me.” Here, a bevy of connotations arise—how violence is about control, how difference is controlled through violence so that those in power can maintain their power, how viewing difference as an alien threat leads to violence. But, as Superman insists, the inability to control him does not make him an enemy. (U.S. government and military leaders please take note: Just because we cannot control what other countries do, this does not make them our enemy.)

Here and elsewhere, this version of the Superman story questions the way in which power-over mentality, coupled with hyper-masculine bravado, will lead to planetary ruin. Metaphorically, the film questions the reliance on brawn (embodied by Zod and the military brass) over brains (embodied by Jor-el) and heart (embodied by Superman). Further, the Krypton/Earth binary can be seen as emblemmatic of traditional notions of male and female, with the powerful Krypton threatening to control and/or annihilate Earth. Instead of maintaining these dichotomies, the film suggests that both Kryptonians and humans, males and females, can be a “bridge” to a better world. The movie also takes pains to depict Lois and Superman as a team, rather than as a savior and his damsel in distress. This is particularly underscored near the end of the film when someone looks on at the pair after the near destruction of earth, and says “THEY saved us” not “He saved us” or “Superman saved us.”

Lois is depicted not only as a fearless, intrepid investigative journalist, but also adept at figuring out Kryptonian ships and carrying out plans of escape/survival. Near the end of the film, she tells Superman, “I know how to stop them” (Zod and company). As such, she is as much superhero as he, though she is human and he is super-human. To make her even more amazing, she is clearly cognizant of hyper-masculine posturing, as when she is waiting to be shown a Russian submarine the military thinks they have found and says to the brass, who are verbally trying to out-macho each other, “If we are done measuring dicks…can you show me what you found?”

Laurence Fischburne and Amy Adams in Man of Steel
On the less positive side, Superman, as the personification of “super masculinity,” is—as indicated by the reboot title—a hyper-muscular man of steel. His moniker suggests he is hard, unbreakable, impervious and made of muscle—notions that mesh well with the unattainable ideal of masculinity currently in circulation and which are embodied via his excessively built form. Though he uses his strength for good and resorts to violence only as a last resort, the overly-long excessive fight scene between he and General Zod contradicts the earlier narrative claims the movie makes regarding violence, militarism and power. If these things are bad (as the first three-quarters of the film suggests) why do we need to watch scene after scene of he and Zod punching each other, destroying buildings and displaying their uber-strength? Why was it necessary to destroy multiple buildings, cars, planes, semi-trucks, satellites and so on in a way that makes Spock’s overly-long fight scene with Khan in the recent Star Trek: Into Darkness seem short by comparison?

My sense is that those in charge of filming, editing and special effects were loathe to cut these visually arresting scenes. Which reminds me of some comments I heard walking out of the film: “I feel like I am on sensory overload,” “I feel like my senses have been assaulted,” and “After all those explosions, I think I lost some hearing.” As these comments suggest, these action scenes can in themselves be viewed as a form of assault on the audience—one that, admittedly, certain audiences crave—but one that nonetheless suggests that the way to be “super” (as a man or a film) is to be violent, to blow shit up, to be stronger than the other guy/gal.

Laurence Fishburne during some explosions in Man of Steel
As the fight scenes dragged on and on, the two young boys in front of me stopped squirming in their seats and stared at the explosive images on the screen—images that screamed the only way to “win” and be “super” is via violence and weaponry, or have a body that is itself a weapon. This is not the image I hold of my son running around in his Superman costume at age 3, nor of his smiling, dimpled face and curly-haired locks in his kindergarten picture (in which he’s wearing a Superman t-shirt). No, that boy liked the idea of flying, not killing. But with so many images that teach boys (and girls) that to be a “super-male” is to be one capable of violence, how can we expect our boys to soar in ways that promote messages of hope, inclusivity and an insistence “every person can be a force for good”?

I don’t have the answer. But I do know that my now-16-year-old-son, who attended the screening with me, had a key complaint about the film: “The fight scenes were way too excessive.” If a teenager raised in a culture that champions such scenes as “the stuff great blockbuster movies are made of” gets this, why the heck can’t Hollywood?

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.