Book Adaptation – Bitch Flicks

Why ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Visuals Should Carry the TV Series to Emmy Victory

‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ which stars Elisabeth Moss as June/Offred, is a hard watch in terms of emotional drama. But the TV series, which is the first prestige drama to focus intimately on a woman’s perspective of a dystopian world, rivals ‘Game of Thrones’ in terms of visual splendor.

Guest post written by Ani Bundel.

When the Emmy nominations for the 2016-2017 television season arrived, for the first time since 2011, there was a huge opening for new “prestige TV shows” to make their mark. For years, the “Drama” category, as well as the myriad of technical awards that are pushed out of the main televised portion of the event, has been dominated by one show: Game of Thrones. But this year, due to a twist in scheduling, HBO’s mainstay is not eligible. In its stead, the opportunity for Best Drama, as well as wins for cinematography, production design, and costumes, should go to The Handmaid’s Tale. In addition to these categories, the series also received Emmy nominations for acting (Elisabeth Moss, Samira Wiley, Ann Down, and Alexis Bledel), directing (Reed Morano and Kate Dennis), writing (Bruce Miller), casting, and visual effects.

The Handmaid’s Tale, which stars Elisabeth Moss as June/Offred, is a hard watch in terms of emotional drama. But the TV series, which is the first prestige drama to focus intimately on a woman’s perspective of a dystopian world, rivals Game of Thrones in terms of visual splendor. Some of the more chilling aspects of the show are drawn directly from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel: the blood red of the Handmaids’ garb, the blue of the Wives. In addition to evoking a sanguine shade, Atwood chose red for the Handmaids to symbolize Mary Magdalene. She also chose the color because prisoners of war were forced to wear red in Canada during WWII “because it shows up so very well in the snow.” In the novel and the series, the Wives wear blue to symbolize the Virgin Mary and feminine religious piety. The particular shades of red and peacock blue used were inspire by nature: a red maple leaf against a teal sky, used to contrast the two groups of women but still be aesthetically appealing visually. The show’s choices with lighting enhance this already striking visual stratification of society. Regarding the costumes’ color symbolism, costume designer Ane Crabtree told Vanity Fair:

“We wanted the Handmaids, as they are the fertile women’s tribe of the story, to flow down the streets of Gilead, leaving a long line of red in the midst of the gray of Gilead. Beyond this, the red is the color of a womb, of a wanton woman, a scarlet kind of mark upon a pious world of dark tones in the visual landscape, and also in a tiny intimate space.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Crabtree said that it was “intense” finding the right shade of red that would look like “liquid blood” as well as look striking on camera on women of all races. Just as the wardrobes stratify the women, the lighting and production design work in tandem to convey the Handmaids’ oppression as well. Director of photography Colin Watkinson told Indiewire: “I want you to feel the light coming from the outside, so it’s based in a reality, but it’s a hyperreality.” Production designer Julie Berghoff told Curbed that visually, June/Offred “should feel like a mouse in a cage.”

Before the series even aired on Hulu, the red of the Handmaids’ costumes along with their bonnets (which work like human versions of horse blinders) had already made an impact. Cosplayers showed up to events (and to political rallies) dressed in costumes taken from the show’s promotional materials, unnerving those passing by and security guards alike. But on-screen, the stark red of their outfits becomes more pronounced with the warm, pink tinged lighting tones.

In scenes like the birthing room, and other moments when all the Handmaids are gathered together with Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), the show turns up the pink highlights. The TV series “uses vaguely Nazi brown for the Aunts.” The skin of the actresses become rosier, more flushed, as if to remind us these women who are forced to serve are alive, full of life, in fact the only ones so alive, they can breed new life.

Contrast that against the green filters used on the wives like Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski). Much like the pink tinged filters, the most obvious moment comes during the birthing scene, with the wives downstairs playacting at labor while upstairs the handmaid Ofwarren (Madeline Brewer) actually feels the pain.

But it is all the more jarring when these green women suddenly invade the birthing room at the end of the sequence, and their green is suddenly lit by the pink filters – a little borrowing of the Handmaid’s inner life while stealing their inner ability to make it. The opposite happens during the afterbirth, when Offred is forced to sit in the green tinged living rooms of the Wives cooing over the baby. The green filters drain Moss of the pink we’ve seen her look previously, as these vampires around her drain it for their own masquerades.

Interestingly, there are two other moments when Offred looks less lifelike. The first is with Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes). He too is lit with a green wash to match his wife. It’s a subtle signaling by the show that he is just as barren as the woman he married, and that in fact, there is no chance he can get Offred any more pregnant than he can Serena Joy. Both Waterfords are always lit in green tones — even during the “before” flashbacks of the Serena Joy episode. Not only are they sterile people — although we don’t actually know if Serena is infertile, as women are the ones blamed for infertility, despite at least the doctor Offred visits knowing it’s men who could be sterile — they are sickly ones who would oppress others and take their happiness.

The other times Offred looks more pallid are whenever she’s down in the kitchen with the Martha character Rita (Amanda Brugel). The Marthas, per the book, are dressed in drab greens, as if to help them fade into the walls. The lighting enhances this, and Wilkinson said for the lighting they “opted for grey diffusion and unbleached muslin bounce.” But the lighting on the Marthas is always unnaturally dim and shadowed, as if to hide them. No wonder they are the servants in Gilead with the most effective network.

There is one time in Gilead that these stratifications are thrown to the side – the trip to the world of the Jezebels where Offred sees Moira (Samira Wiley) for the first time since being assigned to the Waterfords. Those sequences have a golden tinge to them, a deliberate call back to all of the sequences “before” Gilead happened. This is also the time when we see people wearing the colors of pre-Gilead life. It’s noteworthy that these sequences eschew red, greenish blue, and grayish green for browns, oranges, yellows, and blues.

Book readers could have predicted this about the Jezebels sequence – after all, that, like the rest of the world building, is pulled straight from the novel. But what was striking is how much it recalled the flashbacks (which don’t exist quite in the same fashion on the page), as well as our Canadian episode with June’s husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle).

On first watch, this was my least favorite episode. In a show that had focused on the oppression of women and their stories, why were we forced to sit for an hour to watch a man who escaped this world? (Other than the obviousness that this was helping build out space for a second season?) But upon closer inspection, this episode turned out to be the cruelest cut of all, and it was all in the lighting of Luke’s memories.

All the memories of June with their daughter were gold hued and backlit, creating golden halos around June’s silhouette. Now, I understand that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and for Luke to hold on to the past to rescue his wife requires he remember his family as sweeter than perhaps they were in his pre-Gilead life. But this “Mother Mary” image of his wife (second wife, as we should recall) also recalls the scene in the early episodes when the rights of women were first taken away. Luke’s response to June, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

Though he might not be the one trying to take her rights away, it doesn’t bother him that much when those rights are taken. This sexist condescension, which both June and Moira challenge, makes it seem like June was never fully equal or human to him – even a good man, like Luke, has these patriarchal beliefs inside him. No wonder Gilead succeeded. Who is to say that Luke wouldn’t stop bothering to rescue his wife if he was offered a house like the Commander’s, and a Handmaid of his own? Although, Luke would never be offered these luxuries as the government considered him a criminal for marrying a second time.

All this worldbuilding, shown with just a few visual cues. So much said about where our society could head, if we don’t stay vigilant against those who would oppress us. Yet, our society (and others) already headed this way historically with slavery in the U.S. and the rape and forced breeding of Black women. Stealing children occurred in Argentina and to Indigenous people in Canada and Australia. Every oppressive tactic by Gilead in both the novel and the TV series has occurred in real life. Echoing this, director and executive producer Reed Morano told Indiewire:

“I didn’t want it feel like a period piece. That was my fear with the costumes and everything. I pushed very hard that all the uniforms in Gilead had modern elements to them. Period would defeat the purpose. There are women in the world who experience these things today, and this story is a warning it could happen here just like that. It needed to be and feel other.”

The TCAs have already heaped nominations upon The Handmaid’s Tale (along with This Is Us), the first bellwether of how this year’s awards will lean. Let’s hope that the Emmys follow suit and The Handmaid’s Tale wins the awards it rightfully deserves.

Ani Bundel is a TV writer with EliteDaily and Tellyvisions. You can find her on the internet at Anibundel.com, or on Twitter @anibundel. An anglophilic pop culture fashion junkie with a penchant for snark. All posts are approved by her cats.

Concerning the Confusingly Named ‘Love & Friendship’ (Jane Austen’s ‘Lady Susan’)

Whit Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. … Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations… a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer.

This guest post written by Laura Witz is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Witzster. It is cross-posted with permission.

Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship follows the narrative of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan rather neatly and although many reviews seem to be, often ignorantly, telling us that this is Austen with teeth or some such, what I don’t think they realize is that Austen already has teeth. The film is great, but it is great because it is so faithful to tone.

Austen probably wrote Lady Susan when she was about eighteen (although it wasn’t published until long after her death in 1871), already aware that her hyper intelligence may not stand her in good stead as a woman, but long before the much sadder points in her life, when she was also to fantasize about being able to intellectually and physically subject herself to the whim of the man intended to be her superior (Mansfield Park).

Where in Mansfield Park the Lady Susan character (Mary Crawford) is sidelined and punished, in Lady Susan, she is celebrated. I once read that Lady Susan is a fantasy of female power in a world where, legally speaking, women had none. This power is in the most part manifested in the original text by the fact that the story is told through letters, a medium really only upper class women engaged in, and since the women control the letter form, they do in fact control the boundaries of this reality. Whenever men get involved, their letters are short and stilted and ineffective. I would argue that, to a degree, this reality is also an idealized version of a very real subculture that did exist.

Stillman’s adaptation celebrates this power. Taking the text off the page necessarily removes it from the female form in which it is written and therefore extends the realm of female power. The men in the film are useless and defunct, from the wonderfully silly Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett) (my new crush), to the priggish and apparently clever Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and in particular to the “very handsome” Mr. Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin) who, although he appears in several scenes, has no lines, not one.

As in the original text, this is a battle between two women, Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) and her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell). Catherine has her mother (Jemma Redgrave) in her court and Lady Susan has her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny) in hers. Throughout the film, these two vie for power, over Catherine’s brother, Reginald, over Lady Susan’s daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), and arguably over a position as matriarch of the family.

The film is great and so are the actors. Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin made me cry with laughter. And the ending, in particular, is very interesting. The original text finishes with Austen getting slightly bored and making fun of her own narrative form. Stillman’s adaptation sticks very closely to the spirit of the text, ignoring the potentially problematic tone of the final passage, which is arguably written in the voice of Catherine Vernon anyway. And most importantly, this film has steered clear of any attempt to romanticize the story.

As most people who know me know, I have an ax to grind where it comes to Jane Austen and I’ve been grinding it for the better part of the last seven years. Jane Austen is one of the most, if not the most, famous female authors in the world. Yet, over the course of a series of progressively shittier adaptations made by people who in some cases don’t even seem to have read the source text (Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice), a great comedian and social satirist has been pigeonholed as a romance writer. Now there’s nothing wrong with romance, I very much enjoy a good rom-com (and quite frequently a very crap one). But the fact is that this genre has been sidelined as one that is trivial and silly ever since Austen herself wrote and idle upper class young women got kicks from reading saucy French novels.

Of course if you actually look at Austen’s works, only Pride and Prejudice can reasonably be described as a romance and that romance is running alongside a lot of social commentary and out and out comedy. In particular, look at Sense and Sensibility, where Elinor marries Edward the bland (a far cry from Hugh Grant / Dan Stevens) and Marianne gets Brandon the old. As a rom-com alone, Sense and Sensibility fails since the major love affair of the text remains unfulfilled.

Dickens wrote romances into every book, but nobody refers to him as a romance writer. The name Allan Woodcourt – or I suppose Woodcourt – hasn’t been adopted as a catch-all for everything women desire and everything that is irritating about the romance genre (Bleak House, in case you’re wondering). Because Dickens doesn’t represent a threat because he is a man and therefore it’s okay for him to be a writer and we don’t need to undermine and diminish him.

So what if we make Austen adaptations that don’t conform to that stereotype? What if we write fan fiction that doesn’t include shit fantasies about pseudo-romances with a misunderstanding of Mr. Darcy? What if someone decides to adapt texts Austen wrote that do not conform to this? What kind of writer do we call her then? And that’s where Love & Friendship comes in. It might not seem groundbreaking that there is yet another period drama out there getting some attention and some critical acclaim, but trust me, this film is rocking my fucking world.

And Whit, if you’re reading this, I have an adaptation of the actual Love & Friendship that we can start work on any day. Although the title might be a problem.

Laura Witz is an editor and writer of plays and stories living and working in the UK. She has written plays that have performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Jane Austen Festival in Bath and her articles and stories have been published in a number of institutions and publications, a few of which can be found on her blog. Witz hopes to one day become an aerial clown. You can follow her on Twitter @Charlotte_Prod.

‘The Girl on the Train’: Trauma, Fragmentation, and Female-Driven Resilience

The film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Written by Eva Phillips, this is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Indie Film Minute. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of alcoholism, infertility, abuse, and trauma.]

The Girl on the Train functions, in myriad unexpected ways, as a soliloquy. It is a soliloquy for ineffable, unattended loss; an ode, of sorts, for shattered, misplaced desires, for lives ended or redirected. Most compelling, and most devastatingly at times, the film — directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor — is an unflinching soliloquy for broken women. I have a fair amount of hesitation even considering employing the term “broken women,” let alone assessing a film or any text as a soliloquy for them. So much is insinuated on a personal, social, and even voyeuristic level when the phrase “broken women” is used, and often the overarching implication is women defined and stultified by brokenness, immured in an agony or vulnerability that leads to some fetishizing of these women. In The Girl on the Train, however, the brokenness is not all-encompassing, nor definitive. Aided by the melancholic, complex irreverence of Erin Cressida Wilson and her screenplay (she also wrote Secretary (2002) and 2010’s Chloe), the film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Based on Paula Hawkins’ outrageously popular 2015 novel, much of the film’s upholding of this complex, painful, but intensely refreshing and even invigorating portrayal of femininity lies in the fact that the film is centered around women acting upon, around, in conversation, and in unique matrix with one another. The film is not predicated upon interactions with or justifications from men — either within the film or in the larger, more metaphoric audience — nor does it seek a sympathizing or adjusted response from its audience. This is no more apparent than in a moment of excruciating discombobulation near the end of the film’s action.

The moment is brief but echoes seismically: the titular protagonist, Rachel (an astonishingly brutal Emily Blunt) approaches the wife of her ex-husband’s boss to apologize for a night of blackout-drunk rage, only to be told she did nothing other than slept the night away in a guest room. This revelation allows Rachel to sift through the fractured and blotted out memories of her months of alcoholism, clearheadedly recollecting the abusiveness of her former husband, the vile manipulations he would enact and deceptions he would weave, capitalizing on her depression and drinking to gaslight her into believing her behavior and her blackouts were the cause of their marital disintegration. Rachel is finally aware, critically coinciding with her troubled investigations into a murder that drives the mystery of the film, of the realities of the tempestuous relationship with her husband and the violence and fights he initiated and blamed on her. The film, which interestingly often flirts with the mediated ways in which women are forced to reconcile or contend with their grief and the limitations put on them — obsessive social media behavior and male-orchestrated therapy, as fascinating examples — provides women (most importantly Rachel) their own space to confront the anguishes and often male-driven suppression that stifles epiphanies with their own consciousness.

It is important that this moment of epiphany and awakening — which is not hyperbolically lofty, as Rachel quite literally is awakened to memories and moments that had been occluded throughout the film, either as a result of drinking or trauma — is shared between women and catalyzed by a woman. This is one of the myriad moments and facets of the film that transforms it into a cinematic experience of women viewing, interacting, and behaving in correlation to one another, when it could have very easily been limited and diminished by the unending problem of the omniscient patriarchal glare.

Frustratingly, whenever I would talk about the film or would attempt to look it up, I constantly found myself referring to it as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The two films, aside from sharing the potentially problematic reliance on the designation “girl” — the debates over and problems with “girl” as an identifier for adult women can ignite a discourse that would necessitate pages and pages of writing. For instance, while the “girl” identifier can carry positive resonances for women of color, highlighted by the “Black Girl Magic” phenomenon. “Girl” in the case of The Girl on the Train, works as a curious juxtaposition to the “girl” in the various adaptions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as both present films about feminine ferocity and intuitiveness in the wake of a crime. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functions as piece that emphasizes, both explicitly and implicitly, passivity and fetishizing the violence done to and by women, using “girl” as a nomenclatural tool of disempowering. In contrast, The Girl on the Train could easily be read as a remark on female fragility, female promiscuity, female unreliability, and a gamut of other tropes and disqualifications cast upon narratives involving women, addiction, and depression. Rather, the film transcends these tropes — primarily with the help of the astonishing, female-driven cast, who vivify Erin Cressida Wilson’s devastating and complex screenplay — and the film emerges as a testament to the agonies women endure (and often expected to be silent through) and the elocutions women engage in their handlings with each other, their reconciliation of selfhood, their desires, and so on.

Structurally, the film replicates the fragmented sense of self and the process of reassembling that each woman in The Girl on the Train undergoes or is involved in. The action of the film is conveyed in vignettes from the perspectives of three achingly intertwined women. Rachel, hiding that she lost her job over a year ago as a repercussion of her alcoholism, rides the same train into the city to drink and further descend into the misery of her infertility and disintegrated marriage. When riding the train, she excruciatingly obsesses over the neighborhood which use to be her own, fixating on the gorgeous, enigmatic, and seemingly blissful “new neighbor” Megan (Haley Bennett), and is haunted by the vision of her former home, inhabited by her ex-husband (a delightfully impeachable Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

As each woman’s vignette is further explored in brilliantly disjointed episodes and reveals, the possibility of rendering vile, redundant archetypes of each of these women — pathetic, obsessive alcoholic (Rachel); oversexed, cold twenty-something (Megan); narcissistic, type-A “new woman” (Anna) — is obliterated. Haley Bennett portrays Megan with such a compelling amount of brusque aloofness paired with subtle, unbearable pain, that she transforms the character into a tragic heroine, and her murder, that becomes Rachel’s multilayered fixation for most of the film, reads more than just a sacrifice of a woman. Most critically though, Rachel’s character, both through the script and Blunt’s astonishing performance, is presented with such delicate yet overwhelming agony that the woman immured in the savage cycle of alcoholism and relentless depression is not pitiful or an object of scornful gazing. Rather, Rachel is an embodiment of every woman who has been demolished — by those she loves; by the expectations and hopes she had for her own body that “failed”; by the unpredictability of her own psychology; etc. — and finds her form of coping and torment to be indiscernible. Her behavior and missteps are often bleak, but never objectified.

Yet, in her own unceremonious and dangerous way, Rachel perseveres and ultimately triumphs. Each of the three women of The Girl on the Train, by the film’s denouement, have prevailed or are vindicated in some form. What distinguishes the women, however, is they are not vindicated by some unseen but always felt Male Gaze censor: they are not vindicated by some impulse of proving a woman’s worth through her death or her sacrifice or how a man has changed his opinion of her. The men in the film are flailing, meretricious, violent, unreliable, and ultimately impotent. Rather, the female characters are women of incredible worth and mettle; they contend with incredible pain that women are expected to grin and bear. Moreover, the female body and the things done to it — specifically Rachel’s infertility and her consequent addiction — are not vilified or voyeuristically portrayed. Devastation and obsession, bodily and psychological manipulation, are all conveyed as natural, and not symptoms of deviant or fetishized femininity. The women then succeed and emerge validated through their own words, their own actions, and their interactions with and discoveries about one another.

The matrix of women and female dialogues in The Girl on the Train is an exquisite example of the crude diminishing that women experience under the trope-centered expectations of male (and popular) viewership, and the crucial need to allow women to speak, to act, to suffer, to exposit in their own language and their own space.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls

Eva Phillips is a relatively recent import to Pittsburgh, PA. She relocated from the crust of Virginia after receiving her BA in English at the University of Virginia to complete her Masters at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests include: representations of femininity and violence in film, refusing to quell her excitement over The Fast and the Furious franchise; having every cat; queer representations in horror and melodrama (both film and television); queer sexuality and religion; and finally getting to meet Sia and maybe wear her wig. In addition to Bitch Flicks, she writes for the good folks at Indie Film Minute, and has appeared in Another Gaze Journal. Her various disintegrations can be viewed at https://www.instagram.com/menzingers2/.

Adolescence and Female Friendship in Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in ‘Bend it Like Beckham,’ Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.’ An adaptation of the 1999 novel ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging’ by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson, a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

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

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008). An adaptation of the 1999 novel Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson (Georgia Groome), a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

Georgia falls quickly for the “sex-god” Robbie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a new boy in town, and spends the course of the film trying to win him over. In the film’s opening scene, Georgia’s friend Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson) tells her regretfully, “Boys don’t like girls for funniness.” Taking this questionable advice to heart, Georgia attempts to make Robbie fall for her by hiding her own dramatic attitude and hapless sense of humor that separate her from the other girls in town. By the end, of course, she learns the all-too-important lesson that you don’t need supermodel looks to get a boyfriend, and that your significant other should like you for yourself and not who you pretend to be.

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging has a quite a bit in common with other movies and books in the “teen romantic comedy” genre. It is undoubtedly formulaic, and contains the expected happy ending and all-important positive message of self-confidence. Yet Georgia herself, and her attitude towards life, are what make the book and the film memorable, as Georgia is vividly crafted, full of recognizable flaws. She consistently makes the worst, most embarrassing social errors in nearly any given situation, including being caught spying on Robbie by him and his girlfriend; accidentally exposing her “knickers” to a crowd of partygoers (including Robbie) while fighting off another boy’s advances; or telling said boy that she’s a lesbian in order to avoid having to date him. For Georgia, her parents’ refusal to rent out a club for her fifteenth birthday constitutes the cruelest mistreatment, and she rather callously views her father’s job transfer to New Zealand as little more than an opportunity for her to have only one parent to supervise her misbehavior. (Of course, by the end of the film she realizes that she misses her dad and would rather have her family together.)

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is of opposing minds when it comes to showing how teens deal with their developing sexuality. On the one hand, many such encounters in the film are refreshingly realistic, for the most part eschewing picture-perfect kisses and idealized romantic encounters for true-to-life depictions of what being a teenager is actually like: full of awkwardness, weird mishaps, and lots of saliva. Seemingly over the course of minutes, teenage boys go from disgusting, unsanitary mysteries to objects of fledgling desire — from mere concept to attainable goal. In an early scene, Georgia’s friend Rosie (Georgia Henshaw) instructs their group of friends to sit on their hands to numb them, then to touch their chests over their clothes to simulate getting “felt up” by a boy.

On the other hand, the girls also treat sexuality in a rather cynical way: as a competition to be won, a skill to be taught and learned, and a game to be quantified and scored. Early in the film, Georgia and Jas introduce their “snogging scale,” or ten escalating forms of romantic and sexual kissing, with hand-holding while kissing at number one and “the full monty” at number ten. This scale is referenced consistently in conversations between Georgia and Jas, with them discussing their sexual experiences in terms of what number they earn on the scale. While preparing to make Robbie hers, Georgia visits the home of local boy named Peter Dyer (Liam Hess) to learn how to kiss. Peter is a local “ladies’ man” who apparently teaches snogging to all the local girls, and goes about his work with all the seriousness of a businessman. He sets a thirty-minute timer at the beginning of his lesson with Georgia, delivers questionably-sage advice, and insists that she be honest about her previous experience so that he can “evaluate” her accurately, prompting her to admit her only experience is with “the back of [her] hand.” Where other teen romances might feature the protagonist fantasizing about sharing her first-ever kiss with her crush, in the world of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging kissing — and what comes after — is treated in a much more transactional (and perhaps more practical) way.

Another central aspect of the film’s narrative is the looming presence of beauty standards to which Georgia and her friends feel they must adhere if they have any hope of getting a boyfriend. After realizing that even to her own friends, her large nose diminishes her attractiveness, Georgia continually tries to change her looks in order to make herself more appealing to boys. While in pursuit of the kind of supermodel beauty that will undoubtedly make Robbie hers, Georgia also manages to lose some of her hair by trying to bleach it, accidentally shaves off one of her eyebrows, gives herself the appearance of having pink eye by putting Vaseline on her eyelashes, and turns her legs bright orange with self-tanner, which Robbie notices while the pair are swimming in a public pool. Yet despite Georgia’s perception of herself as unattractive and in need of beautifying, the film’s plot actually belies her claims, revealing her to be rather unreliable as a narrator. In addition to Robbie, whom Georgia wins over by the end of the film, naturally, she has to contend with two other boys who want to date her: the aforementioned Peter Dyer, he of the copious saliva, and Dave the Laugh, a boy she goes out with only to make Robbie jealous. Additionally, both Robbie and Georgia’s father comment disparagingly on her desire to keep changing herself, and that she is fine the way she is. Therefore, despite the early assertion in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging that boys don’t like funny girls, or weird girls, or girls who don’t have the CoverGirl look, Georgia’s own travails prove otherwise, and demonstrate that she really didn’t need to change much about herself at all to get the boy she wants.

However, the film falls into some unfortunate classic teen romance narrative traps as it tries to demonstrate Georgia’s own uniqueness and establish her as the ideal girl for Robbie. Right off the bat, the film immediately draws a contrast between the inexperienced Georgia and “Slaggy Lindsay,” Robbie’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, and thus Georgia’s rival. (“Slaggy” basically means “slutty,” for those not of us speaking the Queen’s English.) Lindsay (Kimberley Nixon) is immediately presented as the enemy even before Robbie is in the picture, and the narrative continually backs up this assertion. Lindsay is the conventionally attractive girl who stuffs her bra and wears a thong (the horror!), while Georgia doesn’t commit those apparently unforgivable acts. Lindsay’s behavior towards Georgia over the course of the movie is presented as needlessly petty and at times cruel, even though Georgia is, admittedly, aiming for her boyfriend. Despite the fact that boyfriends can’t be stolen, it’s still a pretty selfish move on Georgia’s part, and one that manages to avoid diegetic condemnation even as many of Georgia’s sneaky and dishonest maneuvers are properly called out.

While not as prominent in the movie as in the original book, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging also keenly traces the way that girls’ friendships change during adolescence when the specter of boys — and maturity — comes into the picture. Georgia’s “ace gang” of Georgia, Jas, Rosie, and Ellen (Manjeeven Grewal) are presented as the thickest of thieves, ready to go “boy-stalking” together, take beauty quizzes, and encourage one another’s romantic adventures. Yet the very first scene actually undermines the unity of the so-called “ace gang,” demonstrating the kind of social pressures that adolescent girls must contend with, and conquer, in order to maintain their friendships. The film opens with Georgia arriving at a Halloween party dressed as a stuffed cocktail olive, making more of a statement than she’d like in a room full of sexy angels, devils, and cowgirls. We then learn that the rest of the “ace gang” was supposed to go in matching costumes, yet the other three girls have decided to join their peers in wearing sexualized and attractive costumes without telling Georgia. It is both an establishing character moment for Georgia, an olive in a room of nymphets, as well as a recognizable betrayal of friendship on the part of her friends.

The greatest such rift in the film, though, comes from Jas, Georgia’s conventionally pretty “best mate,” who manages to snag Robbie’s brother Tom (Sean Bourke) early on in the film with little effort. She subsequently spends much of the film disappointing Georgia and frustrating her attempts to date Robbie, culminating in a recognizable yet tragic falling-out that lasts until the end of the movie. Jas correctly points out Georgia’s “scheming and pretending” as a cause of why Robbie won’t date her, while Georgia argues (also with some legitimacy) that Jas has been a rather poor friend when it comes to keeping her secrets. Georgia also manages to dig the hole between her and Jas deeper when she criticizes what she views as Tom’s lack of ambition, as Robbie wants to be a rockstar. Jas delivers the classic fatal blow to a teenage friendship when she announces that she will be attending Lindsay’s party instead of Georgia’s, because of course they are on the same day.

Of course, the party at the end — the club party Georgia so wanted at the beginning of the film — allows everything to be solved. Jas and Georgia reconcile (as Jas secretly helped Georgia’s mother plan the whole thing, conveniently fixing their friendship), Robbie and his band headline the party set, Robbie very publicly rejects Lindsay in front of seemingly everyone in town and declares his feelings for Georgia unequivocally, and her father doesn’t end up having to move to New Zealand. Indeed, the ending of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is the least realistic aspect of the movie — nothing in the real world resolves itself quite so easily and painlessly. Perhaps outright condemning (or at least questioning) Georgia’s perpetuation of the Taylor Swift-esque “she wears short skirts / I wear tee shirts” dynamic with Lindsay might have taken the film all the way from cliché to truly lifelike. Still, though, it’s hard not to be pleased for Georgia and her happy ending, if only because there is so much in her (mis)adventures that are very recognizable and true.

Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Twitter and Instagram.

One Woman’s View: Martha Fiennes’ ‘Onegin’

Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel.

This guest post written by Paulette Reynolds appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. | Spoilers ahead.

“A woman’s film is a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman.” — Jeanine Basinger

Although film historian Jeanine Basinger was referring to a particular period of films about women in her seminal book, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, she was also one of the earliest female film critics to hone in on what are the essential elements of the woman’s film. She defines such a film as “…[Where] women actually take on heroic dimensions, bursting forth from the boundaries of female behavior to become “female heroes”…[as] a woman who defies conventional rules and redefines her life on her own terms…” Published in 1993, many of Basinger’s observations are now just breaking through the cinematic glass ceiling, thanks in part to the recent upsurge in the Women’s Movement. This awareness and celebration of female empowerment is growing across multiple media platforms, as a new generation of women artists add their voices to the demand for equal representation in the entertainment industry.

In the spirit of that celebration, I’d like to include Martha Fiennes to Bitch Flicks‘ list of women directors to honor. Fiennes falls into that category of female film directors who holds a scant résumé of two narrative films and a documentary — Onegin (1999), Indians’ Sacred Spirit (1999) and Chromophobia (2005) — yet deserves a second look, especially for Onegin, her directorial debut.

Onegin is based on the 1833 novel, Eugene Onegin, written by what many consider to be the father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. In his celebrated story, he creates a woman of strength and empowerment in Tatyana, the first female hero of Russian literature. Martha Fiennes’ adaptation appears to focus on Eugene Onegin, a bored and aimless Russian aristocrat (portrayed by Ralph Fiennes), who’s forced back to his ancestral roots when his rich uncle dies. He reluctantly takes up residence on his new estate, which include several mansions, villages and serfs. That he is now wealthy beyond imagination — and hence, more powerful — means little to Onegin, who scorns the idle rich (while including himself in his contemptuous worldview).

A chance encounter with a young poet, Vladimir (Toby Stephens), from a neighboring estate makes his stay in the unsophisticated countryside bearable, especially when he meets Tatyana Larina, played by Liv Tyler. Tatyana’s sister, Olga (Lena Headey) and Vladimir are expecting to marry, much to her mother’s annoyance, since she looks forward to both her daughters marrying within their social circle. Onegin, with his worldly experience, can see at once that Olga is rather vain and shallow, and considers her beneath Vladimir’s station, but she suits the young poet’s youthful ego and he eagerly awaits their wedding day. Tatyana however, is not so easily stereotyped, as she is no country girl looking forward to the bridal veil. This serious young woman reads literature, which causes her mother to fear it will warp her feminine sensibilities.

During a small dinner party, Tatyana firmly voices her disagreement with the Russian policy of serfdom, something that Onegin initially shares when he states he will free his serfs and rent them his land to farm. Later, curiosity gets the better of Tatyana and she seeks out Onegin in his library. She asks him if he’ll really free his serfs, and he answers that his idle lifestyle rules out the responsibility of maintaining the land, so he really doesn’t care about the question of serfdom at all. Rather than be offended by his lack of political conscience, Tatyana values his honesty, something that she sees few people display in her small community.

While Tatyana and Olga are like oil and water, one common belief they share is in the romantic ideal of love, and Tatyana wastes no time in falling for the aloof, brooding Onegin. Her lack of experience encourages her to read about love and romance in books and she tries to make sense of why a cosmopolitan man would hang around the rural shade of an empty estate. The viewer is already aware that Onegin cares more than he’s willing to admit, and Tatyana takes a chance and shares her feelings for him in an ink-smudged letter. Once sent however, she notices her inky hands and slowly wipes them on her white nightgown, and as the quiet moonlight falls upon her we can feel her misgivings giving birth.

Tatyana’s mother invites Onegin to her daughter’s naming party and she takes the opportunity to confront him about his silence. Diplomatically, he tells her that any affair they might have would end in ruination for her, due to his dislike of marriage. “Can’t you see where this leads? A declaration, a kiss, a wedding, family, obligation, boredom, adultery.” He sees her feelings as “romantic imaginations” of a young girl that will ripen into something more meaningful for someone else at a later time. She sorrowfully states, “You curse yourself,” and no sooner are the words uttered than everything goes horribly wrong for Onegin. In the next few hours, he will be forced into a fatal duel with Vladimir and flee Russia for a more peaceful isolation.

Six years later, Onegin returns and happens to spy a woman at a ball hosted by his cousin, Russian Crown Prince Nikitin. His eyes and the camera follow this tall, dark-haired woman, who’s scarlet red gown stands out amid a sea of pale dresses and fans. She casually encircles the entire room, proud and confident, as we realize that it’s Tatyana. Onegin asks the Prince who she is, and is astounded to recognize the girl who once gave her heart to him is now Nikitin’s Princess. He asks for the next dance as a pretext to speaking with her, but she gently rebuffs him and walks away. “It’s true,” her husband confides sadly, “She doesn’t like to dance.”

In the days that follow, Onegin feverishly pursues Tatyana with his own letter and declarations of love, but it doesn’t take much to see that this Tatyana is not so easily swayed. Although she married as society expected her to do, she wisely chose a man who could be happy with an independent woman. Prince Nikitin might one day govern a country, but in the matters of marriage and sex Tatyana rules her world with a calm and steady grace. Onegin is finally able to snatch a few moments alone with Tatyana, where he begs her to run away with him. She tearfully informs him that he’s just a bit too late, finding it ironic that he would eagerly aid in her downfall, now that it is he who feels the sharp pains of unrequited love. The mature Tatyana may still care for Onegin, but she refuses to go against her own standards to ease his suffering and her discomfort. She orders him not to see her ever again and walks away, leaving Onegin to wander alone, yet again.

It might be helpful to the Western gaze to keep in mind that on one level Onegin and Tatyana represent twin aspects of the universal “Russian soul” in literature, blazing with passion just below a cool surface. Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel. Tyler’s well-crafted performance brings Puskin’s female hero forever into our consciousness, where she can add her voice to the growing feminine collective.

References:

Jeanine Basinger. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connecticut | Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993. Print

Paulette Reynolds is the Editor and Publisher of Cine Mata’s Movie Madness film appreciation blog. Film viewing and theory are her passion, but film noir remains her first love. Paulette breathes the rarified Austin, Texas air and can be seen on Twitter @CinesMovieBlog.

Does ‘Pitch Perfect’s Fat Amy Deserve to Be a Fat Positivity Mascot?

It’s great to see a character whose fatness is a part of her identity without being a point of dehumanization, but the films try to make Fat Amy likable at the expense of other characters, positioning her as acceptably quirky, in contrast to the women of color, who are portrayed in a more two-dimensional manner, or Stacie, who is unacceptable due to her promiscuity. Ultimately, the underlying current of stereotype-based humor puts the film’s fat positivity in a dubious light…

This guest post written by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions. An earlier version of this essay appears on Consistent Panda Bear Shape. | Spoilers ahead for Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.

I’ve been writing about film from an intersectional feminist perspective for a little over two years now; most of that writing is unpacking how fat characters function in film on my blog, Consistent Panda Bear Shape. Multiple patterns have been emerging from that work; there are three trends in particular that make it difficult for me to write from an intersectional and/or optimistic perspective. I don’t think, reader, that you will find them too surprising:

Fat characters existing to receive the audience’s contempt, disgust, and/or pity. Mad Max: Fury Road is a great example, where the fat characters are autocrat Immortan Joe and his villainous ally, the People Eater, and the Milk Mothers, who exist as a grotesque example of how Immortan Joe objectifies and exploits the populace under his control.
Likable fat characters having some workaround where they aren’t “actually” fat, so when the character finds confidence or asserts themselves, it can be a feel-good moment without leading the audience to question established standards of acceptable bodies on a broad social scale. Two common workarounds are embodied by Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. While her story revolves around her transgression of physical beauty standards, these standards only apply to the strict, hyperfeminine pageant world; outside that context, her body is within the range of social acceptability. Additionally, actor Abigail Breslin wore a fat suit for the role, further disconnecting Olive’s story from the lived experiences of fat people.
Fat protagonists who are “actually” fat being men, usually of the straight, white variety. Of the 62 films featuring fat characters that I’ve written articles about thus far: 41 of the predominant fat characters were male, 35 of those male characters were white, and only 3 of them were identified as queer within the text of the film. Of the 2 non-human fat characters referred to male in their respective screenplays, both were voiced by white men. (The films I write about haven’t been curated in an objective manner, so take this anecdata with a grain of salt.)

The movies that I watch utilize at least one of these patterns time and time again, if they include fat characters at all. Considering this, when I do see a film featuring a decently-written character in a plot-significant role who is played by a fat actor and isn’t a straight white dude, I start having hopes for a bold new cinematic vision wherein fat people aren’t treated like garbage. Pitch Perfect is a perfect example of the kind of film that will stoke the flames of my high expectations, featuring Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy. When it was making its way into theaters, I remember seeing this exchange all over Tumblr:

This exchange says everything about why I and many others were excited: a female character, played by someone who looks like she gets relegated to the same measly section of clothing stores that I do, being funny and unapologetic about how she gets treated based on her size. (And on a more personal note, Fat Amy is also the cover girl for an AV Club article about humanized portrayals of fat characters that was an inspiration for Consistent Panda Bear Shape.) However, I didn’t actually get around to watching Pitch Perfect until it and its sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, were already out on DVD. I’ve seen a lot of positive press around Fat Amy, but for me, the viewing experience of the two films back-to-back was overall a four-hour anti-climax to my hopes for a new approach to fat representation in a mainstream comedy.

It isn’t all bad. There are some significantly refreshing aspects to how Fat Amy is represented, especially in the original movie. Where a fat body is often employed as visual shorthand for incompetence, she proves her ability as a singer in her introductory scene, impressing Aubrey (Anna Camp) and Chloe (Brittany Snow) with her voice despite their focus on finding women with “bikini-ready bodies” to audition for the Barden Bellas a capella choir. She is also the most self-assured of the Bellas by far. Her sense of humor is often outlandish but her deadpan delivery suggests that she gets more out of confusing the other characters than entertaining them. The majority of comments characterizing Fat Amy as fat are self-referential but, surprisingly, not self-deprecating. She casually remarks at her surprise that her “sexy fat ass” was chosen to be part of the Bellas. Fatness is part of how she sees herself, and isn’t a source of shame or something that needs to be sanitized; rather, it’s a part of her identity that she modifies appropriately to her mood and context. It felt oddly empowering as a fat viewer to hear her angrily threaten to “finish [someone] like a cheesecake.” Another detail that resonated with me was her fearlessness at calling attention to her body. She sprawls and flails. She has a habit of nonchalantly slapping a rhythm on her belly — a woman having fun with her fat! imagine! — or cupping her breasts during a performance. She inhabits her body and her personal space without apologizing or minimizing.

Beyond how Fat Amy is portrayed as an individual, Pitch Perfect also has progressive aspects to how Fat Amy functions as part of the Bellas. As opposed to what one might expect from a fat character in an ensemble cast, Pitch Perfect doesn’t put Fat Amy in a position where she drags the group down. There is a requisite joke about her avoiding physical activity (while the other singers jog, Aubrey finds Fat Amy lying down, or as she calls it, “horizontal running”), but her sloth seems less sinful in contrast to Aubrey’s drill sergeant seriousness about their shared extracurricular activity. Instead, both films focus on Beca (Anna Kendrick) as the problematic member of the group due to her lack of commitment. As a group, the Bellas have to deal with a change in their image from normatively attractive young women to one that includes singers who don’t meet stereotypical sorority girl standards. They are the classic rag-tag underdogs in a story focuses on competition. “I wanted the hot Bellas,” complains a frat brother who books the group to perform at a mixer, when shutting them down mid-song, “not this barnyard explosion.” Even the senior Bellas, thin and preppy Aubrey and Chloe, have bodies that defy expectations of femininity. It’s common to see fat female characters in comedies as a focal point of gross or bizarre body humor, but Pitch Perfect takes a more democratic approach. Aubrey struggles with stress-induced projectile vomiting, and soprano Chloe gains the ability to sing deep bass notes after a surgery to remove nodes on her vocal cords.

Although Fat Amy isn’t presented as more grotesque or cartoonish than the other characters, Pitch Perfect doesn’t extend the favor to other Bellas who aren’t straight and white, as Fat Amy is. The most glaring contrast is Cynthia Rose (Ester Dean), a Black butch lesbian (with an incredible set of pipes) who is also larger-bodied than the average young woman seen in a mainstream comedy. We first meet her at auditions, where she is immediately misgendered. She doesn’t come out as gay to her chorus mates until towards the end of the movie, although we get “hints” to her sexuality via shots of her leering at or groping other women, or other characters making snide comments about her sexual orientation and/or gender presentation. The audition sequence where we meet Cynthia Rose also introduces Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), who embodies the stereotype of the quiet Asian girl through a running gag where she says disturbing things in a soft voice that none of the other characters are able to hear.

Although all of the characters are part of the same underdog team, mining tired caricatures for humor reifies divides in the group via racism and homophobia. And while Fat Amy transgresses stereotypes about fat women, she is straight and white, which within the world of the film, puts her in an uncriticizable position to make snarky comments about Cynthia Rose’s sexuality and other uncomfortable remarks at the expense of marginalized groups (e.g. a clunky improv moment referring to her hairstyle as an “Orthodox Jew ponytail”).

The “fat positive” aspects of Fat Amy’s depiction aren’t just positioned against other characters who don’t share her privileged social identities. Stacie’s (Alexis Knapp) function in the group as the humorously promiscuous Bella complicates the praise Pitch Perfect gets for showing Fat Amy’s active sex life. Stacie’s sexuality is coded as excessive, a joke that becomes the majority of her screen time, whether Aubrey is trying to get her to tone down her dance moves or she’s referring to her vagina as a “hunter.” However, we never see Stacie involved with anyone. Fat Amy, on the other hand, is shown in the company of two hunks on her spring break and also makes comments about her own sexual prowess. So why is the line drawn between Stacie and Fat Amy, where one’s sexuality is the butt of jokes and the other’s is an empowering aspect of her character? When we see Bumper (Adam Devine) flirting with Fat Amy and getting shot down or hear Fat Amy talk about how she joined the Bellas because she needed to step back from her busy love life, we see her defying the expectations that we have for fat girls in movies, the assumption that nobody will want to have sex with her or that she won’t have the confidence to approach someone. Stacie, however, is thin and normatively attractive. The audience expects that she has no shortage of willing sexual partners and doesn’t restrain herself in the way she is expected to; thus, she is deserving of ridicule. The inconsistency between how the two characters’ sex lives are valued demeans Stacie and condescends to Fat Amy.

As Pitch Perfect 2 is helmed by a female director and writer with some skin in the game (Elizabeth Banks, who is in a supporting role in both films, and Kay Cannon, who wrote the original), one might hope that the sequel would amend the issues in the original, perhaps by giving more screen time to find some depth in characters like Cynthia Rose and Lilly. Unfortunately, the franchise loses more feminist cred by doubling down on the cheap stereotypes. Cynthia Rose is still a source for jokes about lesbians creeping on straight women, Lilly is still the quiet Asian girl, and now Flo (Chrissie Fit) has joined the Bellas, a Latina woman whose every comment is about how harsh and dangerous her life was in her unspecified Latin American home country.

Even the progressive aspects of Fat Amy’s depiction in Pitch Perfect largely erode in the sequel. The opening sequence is perhaps the most telling, where Fat Amy experiences a costume malfunction during a performance at President Obama’s birthday gala and accidentally exposes her vulva to the TV cameras and the concert audience. Typical to a comedy film, the audience reacts with disgust and terror, some even running away. Although unintentional, her body is deemed excessive and the resulting outcry nearly destroys the Bellas.

A similar scene of disgust comes later in the film, where a romantic moment between Fat Amy and Bumper (Adam Devine) causes his friends to run away in order to avoid looking at the couple. (While Bumper isn’t as outside the normative range of bodies seen on-camera, he is larger-bodied than the other Treblemakers.) The plotline of their relationship doesn’t meet the standards of a romantic partner that Fat Amy sets in the first film, where she brushes off his advances (though she raises the eyebrows of the other Bellas by having his number in her phone). In Pitch Perfect 2, she and Bumper are hooking up. He asks her to date him officially with a romantic dinner; she initially turns him down, saying that she’s a “free range pony who can’t be tamed,” but eventually realizes that she’s in love with him (for no discernible reason) and wins him back with a rendition of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.” The main conflict of Pitch Perfect is the competition between the Bellas and the Treblemakers, which sets up Fat Amy and Bumper as well-balanced adversaries, both confident and ambitious. Fat Amy disdains Bumper’s advances and flirts with aforementioned hunks; Bumper quits school for an opportunity to work for John Mayer. However, in the second film, former antagonist Bumper has been humbled, now working as a college security guard and desperately trying to hang on to his past glory days as a college a capella big shot. It is at this point that he becomes a suitable partner for Fat Amy.

In Pitch Perfect, the Bellas achieve a competitive edge by using Beca’s mash-up arrangements instead of more traditional medley formats in their performances. This works as an apt allegory for Pitch Perfect as feminist films: there are some welcome updates, but ultimately it’s the same song. It’s great to see a character whose fatness is a part of her identity without being a point of dehumanization, but the films try to make Fat Amy likable at the expense of other characters, positioning her as acceptably quirky, in contrast to the women of color, who are portrayed in a more two-dimensional manner, or Stacie, who is unacceptable due to her promiscuity. Ultimately, the underlying current of stereotype-based humor puts the film’s fat positivity in a dubious light, compounded by the erosion of Fat Amy’s status as kickass fat girl, as well as any thematic content about female friendship.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Pitch Perfect and Third Wave Feminism

Tessa Racked can be heard as a guest contributor to film podcasts including Directors Club and Tracks of the Damned, on the Now Playing Network. They are good at modern dance, olden dance, mermaid dancing, and peppering the Internet with cleverness. You can follow them on Twitter @tessa_racked.

Unpopular Opinions in Film: A Critical Re-Examination of ‘Twilight’

My intent is not to claim that ‘Twilight’ is a perfect movie, but rather, I want to argue that it has more virtues than it is given credit for, and to point out that its dismissal is frequently based on pervasive sexist attitudes. I am not speaking for the other films in the series — all directed by men — but rather, the first film, which was written and directed by women (Melissa Rosenberg and Catherine Hardwicke, respectively), based on a novel written by a woman. There are many valid reasons why one may not enjoy ‘Twilight,’ but it is important to recognize that it is unfair and sexist to dismiss the film and its fans based on the fact that it is a romance told from a female perspective.

This guest post written by Angela Morrison appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

“He looks at you like… you’re something to eat,” says Mike Newton (Michael Welch) to his friend Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), regarding her sparkly new beau, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Mike’s comment serves as humorous dramatic irony, while also making it clear that Bella is desired by most of the men she comes in contact with. Mike’s simile is painfully, literally correct – Edward wants to drink Bella’s blood, and she knows it. Well, the foundation of any good relationship is honesty, right?

Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), based on Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel of the same name, deals with teenage romance, vampirism, female agency, and desire. In her brilliant article on Twilight fans, Tanya Erzen outlines exactly who likes the series and how they show their devotion. She writes: “There have certainly been fan crazes before, but what differentiates the Twilight phenomenon is that its fan base consists almost entirely of girls and women.” The specifics of these girls and women – race, class, sexual orientation, religion – is not clear, but one thing is for sure: overwhelming numbers of women are vocal about their passion for the tales of Bella and Edward.

There is an insidious trend in our North American society wherein anything beloved by women – specifically young women – is automatically dismissed. Twilight is frequently looked down upon by both film critics and casual moviegoers, including people who have not seen the film or read the books. Erzen smartly observes that “denigrating these female fans as rabid, obsessed, and hysterical is a favorite pastime for many media outlets.”

My intent is not to claim that Twilight is a perfect movie, but rather, I want to argue that it has more virtues than it is given credit for, and to point out that its dismissal is frequently based on pervasive sexist attitudes. I am not speaking for the other films in the series – all directed by men – but rather, the first film, which was written and directed by women (Melissa Rosenberg and Catherine Hardwicke, respectively), based on a novel written by a woman. There are many valid reasons why one may not enjoy Twilight, but it is important to recognize that it is unfair and sexist to dismiss the film and its fans based on the fact that it is a romance told from a female perspective.

I am personally not a fan of the Twilight books, as I do not connect with Meyers’ writing style. She has many good ideas, but they often do not come across clearly in her writing. Where the book fails, Hardwicke and Rosenberg are successful. Some of the cheesy lines make it into the movie (“You’re like my own personal brand of heroin…”), but it is so well-made that this is easily forgiven. Hardwicke has a strong authorial voice and presence, often focusing her films on young female protagonists experiencing strange and sometimes painful events. Both Twilight and Thirteen (2003) feature washed-out cinematography shot by Elliot Davis, and deal with teenage female protagonists living with a single parent. The similarities between the images and themes in these films represent a through-line across Hardwicke’s filmography. Twilight‘s icy grey-blue and deep green images beautifully portray the damp, rainy, sometimes mysterious setting of Forks, Washington.

Writers, such as Dr. Natalie Wilson, argue that Twilight upholds traditional gender roles, and romanticizes unhealthy behavior in romantic relationships. Twilight sends the message that a woman’s only purpose in life is to love and be loved by the man of her dreams. Bella loves Edward obsessively – towards the end of the first film, she stutters profusely when Edward suggests she spend some time with her mother, and says, “We can’t be apart” Edward is frequently cold and distant, and constantly tells her they shouldn’t be together – while at the same time, proclaiming his everlasting devotion to her. These mixed signals are confusing and painful for Bella, but readers/viewers interpret their relationship as transcendently romantic. Bella is willing to give up her life and her soul to become a vampire, so she can be with Edward forever. This all-encompassing, obsessive relationship is clearly unhealthy, and borders on being emotionally abusive. While I argue that Twilight has merits, it is also important for me to reiterate feminist critiques of its outdated gender roles and dangerous romanticization of heterosexual and heteronormative monogamy as the only option for women.

Bella is frequently dismissed as weak and passive, but she is more interesting and complex than meets the eye. Brigit McCone at Bitch Flicks points out that Hardwicke’s camera privileges Bella’s point of view – the female gaze. Here, Edward is the spectacle to be looked at – he is an alluring, seductive vampire, and Bella spends a lot of time considering her desire for him. Edward takes off his shirt and reveals to Bella that his skin glitters in the sunlight, and she breathlessly tells him, “You’re beautiful.” The camera is with Bella in almost every scene, and the audience experiences things as Bella does. There are simply not many movies where female experiences are centered, especially not big-budget films like Twilight.

The film also features many female characters who support one another, such as Bella’s friends Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and Angela (Christian Serratos). Bella assures Angela she is a “strong, confident woman,” and urges her to subvert gender roles and ask Eric (Justin Chon) to the prom, instead of waiting for him to ask her. Edward’s sister Alice (Ashley Greene) immediately takes a liking to Bella, letting her know that she has seen the future, and they are going to be great friends. Bella also risks her life out of love and loyalty in order to try and save her mother from the violent vampire James (Cam Gigandet). Twilight not only centers individual female experience, but female friendship and support.

I previously outlined some of the ways in which Bella and Edward’s relationship is unhealthy, but what is particularly striking to me is how they get together in the first place. Bella is enchanted by Edward and his golden amber eyes in biology class, and does her best to strike up a friendship with him – she remains pleasant and engaged, even when he is incredibly rude to her. She slowly realizes that there is something different about him – something magical, possibly dangerous — and through her own research, pieces together that he is a vampire. She is active, not passive — she is the one that pursues him most of the time. Bella finds herself faced with creatures out of a horror movie, and instead of running away in fear, she bravely embraces and accepts them (particularly Edward). Edward can read everyone’s mind except Bella’s – this gives one the sense that she has hidden depth, and constantly leaves us questioning why she is not vulnerable to Edward’s probing vampire powers. Bella is open-minded, easily willing to accept that there is more to the world than meets the eye. She follows her heart, and does not shy away from her desires: she wants to be with Edward, so she pursues him. She doesn’t let Edward’s icy glares stop her from being friends with Jacob (Taylor Lautner), and conversely, she doesn’t let Jacob and his father convince her to stay away from Edward. She is played with vulnerability, wit, and quiet passion by the incredibly talented Kristen Stewart, an actress frequently criticized for not conforming to traditional ideas of femininity.

One of my favorite things about Meyers’ story is its core concept: a family of vampires living in the lush, chilly Pacific Northwest, where one of the vampires falls in love with a human. It is a romantic and interesting, if not particularly unique, take on the literary (and cinematic) vampire tradition. Catherine Hardwicke’s film is the strongest entry in the cinematic series, largely because of the way she privileges the female gaze and point of view. The film is visually beautiful — one can almost feel the cold, damp air of Forks – and it can be seen as part of a larger whole: Catherine Hardwicke’s cohesive filmography. The film is perfectly cast, and features strong performances from many women and people of color (Eric, Tyler, Angela, Jacob, Laurent, and Billy, to name a few). The film was wildly successful at the box office, despite being criticized and dismissed by people who do not take female-centric projects seriously.

Surely, there are ideological problems with Twilight, but it is worth taking a closer look at. There are complexities and subtleties within the film and its performances that are not visible on the surface. Erzen said it best when she noted that critics should “…begin taking the complicated practices and pleasures of female fans seriously.”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Tanya Erzen’s ‘Fanpire’ Blog Tour: Fans of The Twilight Saga

YouTube Break: The Twilight Saga: An Interview with Dr. Natalie Wilson

Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Shishihokodan: Ice Prince/Wolf Rivalry as Female Madonna/Whore

Violence Against Indigenous Women: Fun, Sexy, and No Big Deal on the Big Screen

Angela Morrison is a queer Canadian cinephile and feminist, and she is Team Jacob. She has written for Bitch Flicks before and writes about film on her blog.

‘Certain Women’: Four Women United by Emotional and Under-Recognized Work

‘Certain Women’ belongs to the four women at its core: Laura Dern’s fragile, exhausted stoicism, Michelle William’s neutrality laced with sharp edges, Lily Gladstone’s quietly powerful grasp of the feeling of new love, and Kristen Stewart’s almost-sweet awkwardness, are what make Certain Women worth the trip.

This guest post is written by Deborah Krieger. | Spoilers ahead.

Perhaps 6:30 in the morning is not the best time to take in a film that begins with such a long, gentle shot of a train in the misty Montana morning, but that early hour is when the Vienna Film Festival chose to show it, on the final day of its screening schedule. In a way, Certain Women is an extension of said shot — picturesque, poetic, more than a little “blue,” so to speak — but once the action, as subtle and understated as it is, begins, it’s hard to not get invested in what might be accurately called Emotional Labor: The Movie.

Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt and adapted from Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways Is the Way I Want It, tells the stories of four women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, and Kristen Stewart) in three loosely connected vignettes. While the women come largely from different backgrounds and have different jobs and relationships to their patch of Montana, their stories are united by the emotional and under-recognized work they perform for the others in their communities; hence my (joking) alternate title for this film.

What makes this film memorable is the juxtaposition of tension and understatement, of rising action undercut by mundanity. I kept waiting for something to “happen” — that is, for something to go the way of many feature films and turn bombastic and dramatic for its own sake, regardless of how well such a tendency fits within the style of this particular movie.

In the first segment of the film, Laura Dern’s character (also named Laura), is a lawyer whose client Fuller (Jared Harris), injured in a work-related accident and disgruntled with the useless settlement he received, breaks into his former workplace and takes a security guard hostage with a shotgun. Laura gets the call in the middle of the night, and is sent into the building by the police, with a bulletproof vest hidden under a stylish, simple coat, to coax Fuller into surrendering himself without any violence. As this particular scene unfolded, it must have been all of the conventional dramas and action movies I watched signaling to me that someone was going to die — or at the very least, get shot — but Certain Women, wisely, is not that kind of film. The emphasis in Laura’s story begins and ends with the work, both in the legal and quasi-therapeutic sense, that she must repeatedly do to help Fuller, even though he has no hope of suing the company whose neglect ruined his life.

Likewise, in the segment centering on Michelle Williams’ character, Williams plays Gina, who with her husband Ryan (James Le Gros) and daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier) is looking to build a new home in the Montana countryside. Yet Gina finds that she must be the one to do the dirty work in this business of moving her family into this new life and getting this house constructed: her husband is all too happy to let Gina be “the bad guy,” as she puts it, where Guthrie is concerned; similarly, Ryan is also happy to let Gina do the work of acquiring building materials for their house from an older gentleman (René Auberjonois) in the area, even though said older man insists on talking to Ryan instead of dealing with her directly. In both scenarios, it is clear that Ryan (whom we meet by dint of his having an affair with Laura in the previous segment) is satisfied letting Gina take charge and do the necessary dirty work while he skims the surface — but is it because Gina wants to take charge, or because she feels she must in order to get things done? Like the segment about Laura, I kept waiting for some kind of climax, of some kind of apotheosis where Gina would finally let loose and dare to show a little emotion in the face of her husband’s passivity and her daughter’s petulance, but once again, Certain Women sticks to what is ultimately more realistic — with buried passive-aggression replacing a more fictional-seeming outburst, which is to its credit.

The final segment, which stars Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a ranch hand and a queer Native American woman, and Kristen Stewart, a freshly-minted lawyer named Beth, deals with this idea of labor in more subdued and ultimately more heart-wrenching ways. We meet Jamie moving through the slog of her routine handling horses on a snow-strewn farm; when she accidentally walks into a community college class on education law taught by Beth, Jamie instantly develops what is perhaps the most accurate depiction of a one-sided crush I have ever seen on film. As Jamie invites Beth to dinner after class several times and is content to just smile at her and talk with her sparingly, basking in the warmth of these new feelings, Beth — and the audience — grow increasingly more uncomfortable on both of their behalf. After an almost adorable sequence in which Jamie takes Beth to an after-class dinner on one of the ranch’s horses, Beth stops coming to teach the class — but is it because the class required an eight-hour round-trip and wasn’t even Beth’s real job? Or because Jamie’s obvious but unspoken affection made Beth uneasy? Or both?

Following Jamie’s discovery of Beth’s absence, she drives the four hours to Beth’s town to try and find her — a move that comes off as both sadly creepy and totally understandable. When you develop feelings for someone, you tend to magnify the smaller gestures and minimize the larger ones: a simple dinner at a diner becomes incredibly significant in the narrative of your “love story,” while the inadvisable move of tracking down someone you don’t really know, uninvited, in a town four hours away, seems like less of a bigger deal than it actually is. The scene in which Jamie finally finds Beth, who is unable to return Jamie’s affections, was so recognizable in its use of awkward, potent pauses and shades of things left unsaid that I wanted to sink through the floor with secondhand embarrassment. Yet the theme of labor still holds, as both Jamie and Beth curtail their actions and thoughts — Jamie hoping to not scare Beth, and Beth wanting to let Jamie down as carefully and painlessly as possible. It’s also notable, and refreshing, that this film doesn’t make a big deal out of Jamie’s same-sex crush on Beth — it’s treated with the same gentleness and empathy that a heterosexual romance with all the same trappings would have been given.

The cinematography, by Christopher Blauvelt, is pure loveliness, making rural Montana both desolate and alluring, and the four central performances are all fantastic. In a story about women, the male characters do fall short, especially, sadly, with Fuller’s narrative. Jared Harris is unfortunately miscast in this salt-of-the-earth American blue-collar role, as his accent (Harris hails from London) is all over the place, and is just not as convincing as Laura Dern, especially in the scenes where they play opposite one another. Similarly, James Le Gros does not manage to convey what would make two vastly different women find Ryan so appealing — but perhaps that is intentional.

Certain Women belongs to the four women at its core: Laura Dern’s fragile, exhausted stoicism, Michelle William’s neutrality laced with sharp edges, Lily Gladstone’s quietly powerful grasp of the feeling of new love, and Kristen Stewart’s almost-sweet awkwardness, are what make Certain Women worth the trip.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

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.

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.

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.

‘Sense and Sensibility’: Sister Saviors in Ang Lee’s Adaptation

On first glance, it may well appear that the film follows the usual trappings of the romance genre, in which the young women eventually marry the men that they love, who fortuitously possess more than ample funds to elevate them and their families from poverty, thereby “saving” them. …If we delve a little deeper into Lee’s adaptation it becomes clear that the sisters are not saved by the men they marry, but rather by each other, and multiple times throughout the story.

This guest post written by Melissa-Kelly Franklin appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Much is made of the erotic undertones of recent adaptations of Jane Austen’s work, particularly the wildly popular BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice directed by Andrew Davies, and so it is easy for one of Austen’s most prevailing and insightful themes to be forgotten. Austen is deeply interested in the relationship between sisters and the almost mystical intimacy that stems from it. For Austen’s women characters, this sibling connection is vital in being able to cope with all the trials that family life, social circumstances, and a patriarchal world casts in their direction.

Amidst the clamor of swooning over Mr Darcy’s wet-shirt and Pride and Prejudice’s subsequent pop-cultural appropriations, the importance of the friendship between the eldest two Bennet sisters can sometimes be overshadowed. Indeed, the sensation around the “sexing up” of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice somewhat sidelines the memory of another superb adaptation of the Austen canon, released in the same year: Sense and Sensibility. Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Austen’s novel, beautifully directed by Ang Lee in his English-language debut, focuses on the relationship between sisters Elinor and Marianne, not only to highlight their divergent personalities and thus the “sense” and “sensibility” of the title, but how necessary the sisters are to each other’s survival.

The family of wealthy Dashwood women find their fortunes irrevocably altered on the death of their father, whose home and fortune legally passes to his eldest son from a previous marriage and his selfish, insensitive wife. The four women are left without a home and a mere £500 a year to live on (to put this into perspective, this translates to roughly £16, 980 in today’s currency — $22, 580 in U.S. dollars — according to the National Archives’ currency converter). By the end of the story, the two eldest sisters are happily married: Elinor (Emma Thompson) to a comfortably-off, kind-hearted gentleman turned vicar, and Marianne (Kate Winslet) to an exceptionally wealthy and honorable colonel.

Some may argue that this preoccupation with handsome, eligible men makes it “fluffy” or even unfeminist. On this point, I agree with Samantha Ellis, who recently discussed the application of the Bechdel Test and why it “doesn’t always work.” She believes it is a useful tool in holding us accountable to creating complex female characters, but it should not be the only way in which we measure gender equity in film — indeed this was never its intended purpose. Ellis asserts that “sometimes women’s conversations about men are feminist”; Sense and Sensibility certainly falls under this umbrella. In the film, women’s survival is inextricably bound to marriage, when legal traditions like primogeniture prevented them from inheriting financial independence, and social propriety prevented them from earning money professionally, as Elinor so eloquently expresses to Edward (Hugh Grant):

“You talk of feeling idle and useless; imagine how that is compounded when one has no hope and no choice of any occupation whatsoever… At least you will inherit your fortune, we cannot even earn ours.”

On first glance, it may well appear that the film follows the usual trappings of the romance genre, in which the young women eventually marry the men that they love, who fortuitously possess more than ample funds to elevate them and their families from poverty, thereby “saving” them. I would argue however, that if we delve a little deeper into Lee’s adaptation it becomes clear that the sisters are not saved by the men they marry, but rather by each other, and multiple times throughout the story.

When considering which sister is the “savior” of the Dashwood family, Elinor immediately springs to mind. The opening scenes in the film reveal Elinor to be a self-contained, capable young woman, holding together a family falling apart at the seams as she navigates the grief of her mother and sisters. While the others are stricken at the loss of their father, Elinor is already pulling herself together and thinking pragmatically about their physical survival, comforting her mother and even initiating her youngest sister Margaret (Emelie Françoise) into the realities of their situation.

The importance of Elinor’s capability in this situation cannot be overstated: she is the only one of the women who fully grasps the finer details of their financial situation. In a private meeting between Marianne, Elinor, and their mother as they search for a new home, the widowed Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) suggests a small manor house, which is certainly a down-size from their expansive home Norland Park, but Elinor has to remind her that it is well outside what they can afford on their small stipend. Even after they move to the tiny Barton Cottage which is to become their home, Elinor monitors the housekeeping expenses with even greater vigilance, even cutting “beef as well as sugar” from their already meager diets. Without Elinor’s practicality, the Dashwood women may well have found themselves in even more dire circumstances.

As much as Marianne relies on her eldest sister’s good sense to ensure her immediate survival, Marianne’s spirited nature provides Elinor some respite from the gravity of the path that lays before them. Where Elinor would politely hold her tongue at their sister-in-law’s money-grubbing behavior, Marianne refuses to surrender her family home without highlighting the injustice at every opportunity. Marianne is appalled at Fanny’s request for the key to the silver cabinet for example, and rather than keeping her candid remarks between herself and Elinor, she pointedly throws the question across the breakfast table the next day: “How was the silver? Was it all genuine?” Elinor sweeps in to change the subject to something more appropriate, but one cannot help but wonder if she sometimes wished she had Marianne’s free-spirited belief in not “hiding her emotions.” Further to this point, Marianne is an important confidante for Elinor: teasing, probing and encouraging her to open up about her feelings for Edward. The confidences the sisters share when alone become an imperative cathartic release from the social restraints of the day, particularly for the propriety conscious and emotionally reserved Elinor.

The sister’s relationship, like that of any sisters, is fraught at times: their divergent attitudes towards social propriety and emotional openness sometimes puts distance between them. Marianne laments to her mother that at times she does “not understand” her sister, while Elinor privately confides to Colonel Brandon (played with the perfect combination of sensitivity, warmth and tortured sadness by the late Alan Rickman) that “the sooner [Marianne] becomes acquainted with the ways of the world, the better.” Despite her wariness of the way in which Marianne’s free behavior can “expose [her] to some very impertinent remarks,” Elinor remains unwaveringly loyal to her sister. When Marianne espies her faithless lover Willoughby (Greg Wise) across a ballroom in London, it is Elinor who is by her side, sharing in the indignity of being socially snubbed by him and his wealthy new fiancée, and it is Elinor who catches her sister when she faints (unlike that other version in which Brandon, in a cheesy “hero” shot, catches Marianne while glowering in Willoughby’s direction). In Thompson’s adapted screenplay, Elinor is there for Marianne through every indignity and public embarrassment, without agenda and in spite of her private thoughts on her sister’s past behavior.

Marianne similarly supports her sister in potentially uncomfortable social situations. Despite her public humiliation and unequivocal rejection from Willoughby by letter, Marianne leaves the sanctuary of her room and puts aside her grief to greet Edward — the man she knows Elinor is deeply in love with — when he finally visits them. Marianne’s warmth and friendliness towards him is to both make him feel at ease in their family circle, and show her support for her sister’s choice, whatever her humorous misgivings about his passionless reading and reserved nature she expresses earlier in the film. She selflessly dismisses his questions about her own health and redirects the attention to her sister, insisting “do not think of me, Elinor is well you see? That must be enough for both of us.” Little does she know that Edward is secretly engaged to the other woman in the room, Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), an uncomfortable fact that only she is unaware of. At times, Marianne resents the secret she senses that lurks between her and Elinor and accuses her of hypocrisy when probed for the details of her intimacy with Willoughby: “That is a reproach from you, you who confide in no one.” Elinor replies that she has nothing to tell, but the audience knows she would share the secret if only Lucy had not elicited her vow of silence. Marianne retorts: “Nor I, we neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing, and you because you communicate nothing.” However, when the truth comes out, Marianne rallies to her sister’s side, insisting that she for once put her own desires above those of others.

It is not until we see Elinor open up to Marianne as she lays unconscious, begging her to live, that we fully understand that not only does Marianne’s survival depend on Elinor’s practicality and pragmatism, but Elinor’s survival equally depends upon Marianne. In the dead of night, after a day of nursing her sister and the doctor’s warning for Elinor to prepare herself for the worst, Elinor begs her sister to find the willpower to fight for her life. Emma Thompson’s performance in this moment is utterly wrenching; she runs her hand along Marianne’s leg, as if to memorize the details of her beloved sister’s body before gripping her hand. She barely contains the wall of emotion threatening to overwhelm her: “Marianne, try. Please, try. I cannot do without you. I try to bear everything else. Please, dearest. Do not leave me alone.”

The first conscious words Marianne utters after her life-threatening ordeal are, “Where’s Elinor?” which further emphasizes the symbiosis of their lives. Despite their differences and the tensions they create between them, the two sisters could not survive without the succor they provide each other by simply existing, let alone the many moments of tangible support they afford one another when life in many ways, has been unrelentingly hard on them both.

Too often, Jane Austen’s work and its various screen adaptations is dismissed as trivial or thematically narrow; a period “chick flick” chiefly concerned with the pursuit of a husband to save the protagonist and her family from poverty as a result of the evils of primogeniture. It is worth remembering however, that Austen herself was a pioneer in her day as one of the first women to earn a living by her writing. Equally unconventional was her active choice to remain unmarried, after causing quite the local scandal when she accepted and then rejected the proposal of a wealthy neighbor within a twenty-four hour period. She instead chose to live with her beloved sister Cassandra for the rest of her life. Such was the closeness of their relationship, that their mother is reported to have said, “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.”

Austen’s own experiences of sisterhood make her renderings of sisterly relationships nuanced and detailed. Her works explore the complexity and intimacy of that connection — which may make the relationship fraught at times, but no less vital. Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility depicts this beautifully, revealing through Ang Lee’s insightful direction, that the story is much more about sisterhood than it is about romance or finding the right man.

Melissa-Kelly Franklin is an Australian-born, London-based writer and director of independent short films, with an honors degree in English Literature and History. Her feminist period short film Portrait is soon to premiere at international festivals, and she has two other film projects cooking in pre-production. Updates about her work can be found at melissakellyfranklin.wix.com/writer-director/ and she occasionally tweets @MelissaKelly_F.

‘The Virgin Suicides’: Striking Similarities Between the Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

Two sets of sisters, different in circumstance but alike in experience: the four Romanov Grand Duchesses of Russia and the four Lisbon sisters from 1970s Michigan in ‘The Virgin Suicides.’ … Clear links between the two sets can be drawn, but ultimately reveal that in both situations, living in a gilded cage only leaves behind a haunting memory.

This guest post written by Isabella Garcia appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Two sets of sisters, different in circumstance but alike in experience. The first sisters are the four Romanov Grand Duchesses of Russia: 22-year-old Olga, 21-year-old Tatiana, 19-year-old Maria, and 17-year-old Anastasia. The second are the four Lisbon sisters from 1970s Michigan in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides: 17-year-old Therese (Leslie Hayman), 16-year-old Mary (A.J. Cook), 15-year-old Bonnie (Chelse Swain), and 14-year-old Lux (Kirsten Dunst). Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the fifth Lisbon sister, is excluded here because the similarities between both sets of sisters come rushing in after her suicide in the beginning of the film. Clear links between the two sets can be drawn, but ultimately reveal that in both situations, living in a gilded cage only leaves behind a haunting memory.

As Grand Duchesses, the Romanov sisters were normally in the public eye and considered to be the most photographed royals of the early 20th century. From the outside, they were thought to be fashionable, charming, pretty, and inaccessible. Rarely apart, they were seen as a single force rather than individuals, wearing the same white lace dresses and hats. This didn’t seem to bother the girls, and instead, the sisters would reinforce this by collectively referring to themselves as OTMA, the first letters of their names. While the Romanov sisters were continually in the limelight, the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides were under the watch of the neighborhood boys’ eyes. Seen as unattainable and ethereal in their white peasant dresses, much like those that the Romanov princesses wore, the boys fell for them. They become so enamored with the idea of them that at one point after Cecilia’s suicide, the boys pore over Cecilia’s discarded diaries in an effort to get into the sisters’ minds, much like what historians do with the preserved Romanov sisters’ diaries:

“We started to learn about their lives. Coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl. The way it made your mind active and dreamy and how you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

Despite what fantasies others created of them, both sets of sisters were just simple girls. Helen Rappaport’s book The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra sheds light on this very fact, delving into the duchesses’ often speculated private lives. It may come as a surprise that they weren’t treated as royally as everyone thought; instead, they were brought up quite humbly, living rather repetitive lives. In an article about Rappaport’s book, writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya comments on her bewilderment at the fact that “the girls take baths, play hide-and-seek, drink tea, get measles, [and] love each other” when she was expecting something more grandiose and compelling. The Romanov and Lisbon sisters fell in love with unattainable boys, complained about not being able to go out, and silently worried about their future. Even their rooms, which carried an ethereal quality to them, seem to be alike. The duchesses covered the walls with colorful throws and shawls and placed small knick-knacks, icons, and pictures on their bedside tables to make the room more welcoming.

Although the Grand Duchesses would seldom go out, their birthdays were events to be celebrated. Most likely the sisters’ favorite night was Olga’s 16th birthday debut in the Palace in Livadia at the Crimea. Escorted to the ball by her favorite officer Nikolay Sablin, Olga beamed with joy and danced for the rest of the night. Tsarina Alexandra wasn’t fond of frivolous aristocratic balls and only allowed Olga and Tatiana, whom she called the “Big Pair,” to attend three more balls in their lifetime. Even so, this quick appearance from the girls caused partygoers to realize that “despite the limitations of their till now sheltered lives, ‘they were simple, happy, normal young girls, loving dancing and all the frivolities which make youth bright and memorable’.” In much the same way, the Lisbon sisters’ last taste of freedom comes when Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) begrudgingly allows them to attend the homecoming dance with dates from the football squad. The sisters attend the dance wearing four identical white flowery dresses with slight variations, but they don’t complain as they’re too excited to finally get a chance to go to a school dance. During the night, the girls have their first kisses, slow dance with their dates, and Lux and her date Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) win homecoming king and queen. Nearing the end of the dance, the eldest sister Therese turns to her date and delightedly tells him that she’s having the best time. Unfortunately, the girls get thrust back into their restrictive reality after Lux doesn’t make it home with them that night. She spends the night on the football field with Trip and doesn’t come home until the next morning, much to her parents’ anger.

It’s because of this and their exposure to the dangers of the outside world that Mrs. Lisbon and Tsarina Alexandra chose to isolate their daughters from everyone. Seeing it solely as a benefit to their safety and well-being, both mothers tucked them away — into the Lisbon household and the Romanov palaces. For Mrs. Lisbon, she seeks to protect her daughters from the prying eyes and hands of high school boys, while the Tsarina wished to keep OTMA away from the charged political climate of the time and possible assassination threats against the family. Mrs. Lisbon pulls the girls out of school after Lux’s failure to make curfew, while the Grand Duchesses were privately tutored at their home. Both sets of girls didn’t make or have friends their age apart from each other. The Romanov girls could only make friends with their tutors and the soldiers that oversaw their daily lives. Desperate for any contact with the outside world, Anastasia and Maria would routinely ask the soldiers to tell them stories about people on the outside. Rappaport sympathizes with them:

“With hindsight one might say that in being denied contact with young men and women of their own social standing and the life experiences that went with it, the sisters were trapped in a stultifying, artificial world in which they were perpetually infantilized.”

This also applies to the Lisbon sisters where at one point in The Virgin Suicides, Lux tells her mother, “I can’t breathe in here.” To which Mrs. Lisbon responds, “Lu, you are safe in here.” For both Mrs. Lisbon and Tsarina Alexandra, their children are their life. Even Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting Elizaveta Naryshkina recognized this, but knew that Alexandra “does not understand that there are consequences to all mistakes, and especially her own.” Both mothers ardently desired for their children’s safety, but it only did more harm than good: pushing them further away from society. Little did both mothers know that hiding their families away would help incite their downfalls: the Lisbon girls’ suicides and the public’s distrust and then imprisonment and deaths of the Romanovs.

Tsarina Alexandra was quickly disliked by Russian citizens for seeming too distant and cold, which wasn’t helped by the fact that she made her family shy away from the public eye as often as possible. With the revolution breaking out in 1917, Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate while Alexandra and her children were placed under house arrest. It was only a year later when they were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg and ultimately met their demise. While there, the Romanov sisters lived a much stricter life than their house arrest. Like the Lisbon sisters, they weren’t allowed out apart from a stroll in their gated garden once a day. The Romanov sisters noted in their diaries their boredom and monotony, with each day passing just as the day before. Their dreary isolation didn’t go unnoticed by outsiders. Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was the same age as Maria, wrote in her book:

“I suddenly understood that I was much happier than these unfortunate girls: after all, I could run around with the dogs on the street, make friends with the boys, not learn my lessons, make mischief, go to bed late, read all kinds of junk and fight — with my brothers and anybody else…”

After not seeing the Lisbon sisters for a couple of weeks, the neighborhood boys that longed to save them from their confinement believed them to be “living in the dead, becoming shadows.” The girls would have disappeared from their lives altogether if they hadn’t reached out to the boys by speaking with them via Morse code using their lights. When that doesn’t work as well as it should, they take to calling each other and playing songs that represent their feelings — from “Alone Again” by Gilbert O’Sullivan to “Run to Me” by the Bee Gees. When allowed over one night by the girls, the boys believe they’re helping the girls escape, but they end up being witnesses to some of their suicides. Although the Romanov family was under strict lockdown, two boys, Vladimir and Dimitri Storozhev, sons of a priest that would occasionally visit the family, also managed to get in contact with the girls by gesturing and talking over the fence to them. But nothing resulted of this contact. The Romanov family was violently executed by Bolshevik soldiers in a cellar on the night of July 16-17, 1918.

Both sets of deaths, the Lisbon suicides and the Romanov murders, were shrouded in mystery for some time after. For the Lisbon girls, people wondered why they did it; for the Romanov girls, people fantasized that maybe one of them managed to escape death. This theory has since been proven false, but that didn’t stop people from hoping. In The Virgin Suicides, the neighborhood boys describe their confusion about what happened to the Lisbon sisters as having only some “pieces of the puzzle, but however we put them together, gaps remained — oddly shaped emptiness, mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” And yet, only one thing is for certain. Despite being lumped together as a group and despite being seen as ethereal beauties, they were just girls. They wanted freedom to live their lives. They had hopes and dreams for a future taken from them too soon.

References: Rappaport, Helen. The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: St. Martin’s, 2014. Print.

Isabella Garcia is a California-based aspiring TV writer who can be found crying over movies, books, and TV on Twitter @isabellagrca and It’s Just About Write.

‘Little Women’: Learning to Love All of the March Sisters

This guest post written by Allyson Johnson appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.

Few films have shaped my life so far in the way that Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women did. Being one of the very first films I remember watching and seeing Jo (Winona Ryder) and her bookish ways, brazen behavior, and “unconventional” beauty created a role model for me. She was someone I identified with and also strived to be. Our perception of this film (and book) is expected to change as we grow older.

Despite the overabundance of affection I hold for Christian Bale’s Teddy, as an adult, I understand why Jo chose not to pursue him romantically. But that heartbreak of a lessened friendship stings greater. The appeal and natural oozing chemistry between her and Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne) is more tangible to a 25-year-old than a 10-year-old who would see Amy and Teddy’s marriage as a deception. Now, there’s the sorrow of their union along with the joy of Amy getting her girlhood crush — who promised her he’d “kiss her before she died” — and Teddy becoming a member of the March family after all that time.

However, the clearest, most poignant development that comes through growing with the films is how ultimately, the love story between Jo and Bhaer and the unrequited love story between Jo and Teddy mean little juxtaposed to the love shared between the four sisters. They are one another’s hearts and souls, evident as Jo writes her novel at the end of the film. It’s her sisters’ words that fill her memories and come pouring out from her fingertips, to her pen and onto the page, forever marked in ink with the spirits of the women who helped frame who she grew to be.

My idolization of Jo was never much of a surprise, from her tomboy nature to her passion for storytelling. Her burnt dress, her hair being her “one beauty,” her conflicting feelings over growing older and carving out a place for herself in the world, it all struck that resonating chord where I could see pieces of myself for better and worse. She is the character I first truly latched onto and that affection never faded, instead growing over time as her flaws became more apparent and more relatable too. She was human and beautifully imperfect; growing older is learning how to love that imperfection in both yourself and in others.

What has taken longer has been my appreciation for the rest of the March clan, the sisters for the most part. In my childhood, Beth (Claire Danes) had been most notable for her death and how it affected Jo. The scene where she’s gifted a piano never failed to drive me to tears but Beth, as she admits herself, has never been the one that stood out. She was there to listen and encourage; to be Jo’s best friend and confidant. She saw herself as someone who was never really meant to lead but follows in her mother’s and sisters’ footsteps happily. As we grow, we see what made her so integral — beyond her obvious generosity and kindness. Her soul was sweet, to the point that even in her last, dying breaths she comforts Jo, saying that for once it will be her turn to go first before the wind comes, knocking the windows from their latch, and sweeping Beth’s spirit along with it, leaving behind all the lives she has touched. The empathy Beth possessed and the means in which she delivered upon it are highlighted once we’re past the point in our adolescence when selfishness can be somewhat second nature.

Meg (Trini Alvarado) was an even trickier character to relate to because I (as I’m sure many of you did too) saw her as Jo did at the start: someone caught up in what was expected of her rather than someone who proudly owned her identity. It was and is an immature point of view to take on such a world-weary character. As the eldest sister, she’s played second-in-command for her mother for so long, so how do we begrudge her a night of frivolity — of senseless fun? Meg, in the most rudimentary sense of the world, leads the simplest life. She’s married and has children with a good, dependable husband. But one can’t help and wonder what a film told from her perspective might entail as she watches her sisters, one by one, depart from home.

And then there’s little old Amy (Kirsten Dunst and Samantha Mathis). Amy, who has taken me the longest to come around to, but now is a character who I hold dearly with as much adoration as I do for Jo, but in a juxtaposed manner. Curious, clever, and yes, sometimes selfish, as so often little kids are, she is so often poised as Jo’s opposite despite so many similarities. Both artistic but Amy’s painting lends itself more to what is expected out of a woman of that time, as opposed to Jo and her writing. Where Jo bucks at conformity, Amy desperately wants to fit in.

As a child, it was so easy to see Amy burning Jo’s book and label it a heinous crime; a moment where as an eldest sister, seeing a younger sister get away with something so purposefully spiteful was damn near irredeemable. As I grew, I saw the desperation in the act, the malice in Jo’s words towards Amy, and how the two should have been allowed lost time to make up, if their words to one another after Amy falls into a frozen lake mean anything. Amy looks like a doll, is naturally considered beautiful, and falls in line with latest trends, even if they’re as silly as limes. But she’s young and impulsive, and there is something so stiflingly sweet natured about her that allows for her more selfish acts to be forgiven. It just took me growing out of my tweens and teens to find those traits endearing rather than aggravating. It was never Amy’s fault that she was favored, it was society’s and how and who they deemed to be women of value. Amy simply existed in a world where the rules of who women should be and how they should behave were already dictated. Learning that crucial element brings a whole new clarity to Amy and her dynamic with Jo. Amy never tried to beat Jo at anything.

Little Women, both in novelization and cinematic form, is a remarkable story and one that I predict I’ll hold dear to me for the rest of my life; so embedded is Jo in my skin that I can’t fathom a time where I won’t see her influence. When I was younger, I thought that it was Jo’s writing abilities, her understanding of what it meant to be set apart that made her so appealing and a character to be reckoned with. However, I now understand that it’s her relationships with her sisters, her empathy with Beth, reliance on Meg, and protective nature of Amy that makes her so wonderfully tangible. Her sisters and their bond inform her being; it’s only natural that they should also allow her to shine as brightly as she does.

Allyson Johnson is a 20-something living in the Boston area. She’s the Film Editor for TheYoungFolks.com and her writing can also be found at The Mary Sue and Cambridge Day. Follow her on Twitter for daily ramblings, feminist rants, and TV chat @AllysonAJ.