Tag: Cali Loria

Women in Politics Week: Homeland’s Carrie Mathison

To quote The Awl’s headline from December 2, 2011, Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakthrough. 
Carrie Mathison burst onto our television screens in October of 2011 as the central narrator to Showtime’s superbly riveting political thriller, Homeland. Based on Israel’s Prisoners of War and driven by the question what homecoming means to the lives of those formerly held captive, Homeland centers on Carrie Mathison, Nicholas Brody, and the cell of people who weave throughout their personal and political spheres. In “Homeland’s Roots,” a short extra via Showtime’s On Demand, series creator Gideon Raff says, “We had really interesting conversations about the differences between American and Israeli societies in terms of their approach to prisoners of war.” Series developer and producer Alex Gansa adds, “We had to find another avenue to tell the story and what we really found was this idea that Brody may have been turned in captivity.” 
Nicholas Brody, played by Damian Lewis, is a returned POW held for 8 years by Al-Qaeda. He comes under Carrie’s radar because she had, ten months prior, received a tip from the bomb maker of Abu Nazir (leader of Homeland’s fictitious terrorist cell) that an American POW had been turned. Carrie adamantly believes that Brody is the man in question and, with little to no assistance from colleagues, begins a tireless trek to bring him to justice and prevent any further acts of terror on American soil. 
Homeland is working with a hefty plotline and tropes often left undiscovered on our televisions. Hunting terrorists or any other version of the bad guy often makes it to our weeknight tubes, what separates Homeland is that not only are we dealing with a specific area of the political sphere (The CIA) with a woman in an important, central place of power, but also our main character is herself suffering: waging a constant battle against her bi-polar disorder and what it means to her as not only a woman but a successful career woman. Homeland writer, Meredith Stiehm, says on writing Carrie, “Carrie being bipolar does make her an unreliable narrator…I think it is interesting to ask the question through her character can you be really functional at the same time as having a serious illness?” 
The answer to this question is the ride that is Homeland. A post by “filmschooled” via Persephone Magazine succinctly summarizes the role of mental illness among women in films like Sucker Punch and The Ward: “These films showcase mental illness both as the affliction of the untrustworthy (see the plea of “I’m not crazy!”) and as a vulnerability, which in turn is framed as an attractive trait.” These are just two examples of the ways in which women in media have often been compartmentalized and sexualized because of mental illness. Watching Claire Danes so exquisitely portray vulnerability, strength, and intelligence is a mesmerizing feat. Carrie Mathison is a character refusing to be sidelined, refusing to be pitied or fall into any of the traps set by society and the men who surround her. We watch Carrie, and throughout season one, trust that she is on to something, while, at the same time, giving pause to the idea that she could, potentially, be wrong. However, we root for her and none of this undermines Carrie because her passion for her job and, eventually for Brody, are the real passions of a woman who, though vastly intelligent, poised, and skillful still has not figured out exactly how to get her shit together. 
We watch Carrie so sure of herself at the beginning of the series and, like the jazz music that accompanies the show’s opening credits and underscores Carrie’s ethos, we ride along the waves as her environment unravels reaching crescendo when she finds a sublime intimacy with Brody. This plotline, allowing both Damian Lewis and Claire Danes to come alive and show their full talents, worked and continues to drive the Homeland story because, as impractical as a union would seem at first, Carrie Mathison is a woman who can and does make her own choices. The plotlines that weave throughout Homeland meet at a crossroads that bridge Carrie’s personal and professional lives in a very dangerous, raw, and enigmatic triangle. In less deft hands than Ms. Danes’ Carrie’s flaws may be standoffish, peevish even, but the exceptional work she puts into bringing this dynamic woman full circle never falter. To the credit of the writers and producers of the show as well, dramatic irony is put into effect at all of the right moments, allowing us to know what Carrie does not: she is right. Even better, as I type this I am watching the most recent episode (12/25) and still find myself asking questions about what is fact and fiction. The one truth I know as a viewer of Homeland is that I trust Carrie and I am more than willing to go along for her ride, wherever it may take us. 
Claire Danes, in British GQ, was asked about her character. She responded, “She’s like my kinky superhero alter ego now. Because as disturbed and troubled as she is, she’s always fucking right. Which is so nice because I so rarely am.” 
It seems even Danes herself is not above the Carrie Mathison catharsis. Responding to writing Carrie for season two, Meredith Stiehm said, “…after we’ve seen her cut so low I take heart in seeing a character who is strong and has an important job and can maintain that as well as handling this illness that she has and after the first two episodes she is the old Carrie that we know.” Where Carrie is headed perhaps only the writers know, but I rest assured as a ready consumer of this Showtime delicacy that watching this character’s evolution will stay with me long after the series ends. As the opening credits relay, in response to Carrie’s mentor Saul’s stoic wisdom “everyone missed something that day” not everyone is Carrie Mathison. 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Glee!’

This review by Cali Loria previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our Emmy Week 2011 series.
Not since E! has any one thing on television been so damn exclamatory. Glee! celebrated its everyman song-and-dance style before its slushy flying face-offs ever aired. After a Journey-style breakthrough and myriad episodes featuring pop music gone oh so right, the show ended its first Emmy award-winning season and began a second. Can the plotlines featuring teen pregnancy, teen love, and a bitter gym teacher make it with a little Britney Spears mixed in? The answer is: yes. However, following the line of Britney logic, all its women have had to suffer in the meantime: bitches be crazy (e.g. writing underdeveloped characters who become caricatures of themselves, ending in a mockery of those whose very geekiness Glee attempted to celebrate).

In the beginning Glee made a brand out of celebrating the insecurities, joy, and passions of a group of social outcasts. Quickly, however, Glee called into question its treatment of women, prompting the New York Post to ask “Does Glee! Hate women?” In season one alone a woman is shown to be conniving enough to fake a pregnancy to “keep her man” and another, this time a teenager, grappled with pregnancy until, poof, the storyline magically disappeared. Luckily Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” was able to get into the mix first, or I would have been pissed.

Besides the stereotypical portrayals of women-as-girls-as-GQ-cover-models-being-schoolgirls that this show offers, Glee goes further by, perhaps unintentionally, mocking its characters. Vitriolic gym teacher Sue Sylvester (who eerily resembles my elementary school gym teacher) relies on her bitter use of the pretty girls and exploitation of the token special needs child as a means to succeed to her ultimate end. As their most fully fleshed-out character (and perhaps most accomplished actor) Jane Lynch does a great job being angry but does nothing for the stereotype of the angry lesbian gym teacher taunting kids to make herself feel better. Coach Beiset’s introduction furthered this by presenting this gem of a storyline: no man wanted to kiss her so what was a woman to do but become an angry, middle-aged football coach: the better to scream at you, my dears.

Mixed in with the older women who suffer to fall in and keep love and affection, the teens of Glee keep the teenage dreams coming faster than Katy Perry’s hits. Puck, the number one misogynist/baby daddy/Neil Diamond Crooner and the show’s resident sometimes Gothic sometimes snarky, always shown eating or wrestling, Lauren, are just one of many unconventional couples Glee has drummed up. Lauren’s morbid obesity might once have proven to be a means for character slander, as Puck himself proclaimed when he said to then pregnant Quinn “I’m not breaking up with you. I’m just saying please stop super-sizing because I don’t dig on fat chicks.” Now, however, it is the stuff of fetishistic pop preening. First, Puck serenades his new love interest with a rendition of “Fat Bottom Girls” and, shock, she finds it offensive. To make it better he sings the original number “Big Ass Heart” because it is okay for the organ that pumps our blood and, symbolically, falls us in love to have a “big ass” even though a heart has never won a pie eating contest or needed two seats in an airplane. We get it–there’s a size difference here.

Having a character on TV who does not fit into the mold of being a perfect Westernized ideal of beauty would, in someone else’s hands, be refreshing. Glee, however, focuses on the extremes of women, enjoying the overt and campy hyperbolization of its characters which, in essence, detracts from actual storylines and only serves to render the women flat and one-dimensional: Jewish starlet, slut, dumb blonde, conniving cheerleader, sassy black woman, an Asian, and, now, a full-fleshed female. Glee has a recipe with every ingredient, but stirred together it’s one big lump of heterogeneous stereotypes. I’m not saying this couple should not exist; I am simply implying that it may have been beneficial to give her a love interest that does not appear to be ten seconds from dumping pigs blood over her head at prom.

Two other prominent female characters central to Glee’s narrative arc are slutty Santana and dumb blonde Britney. These two rarely have lines, and, when they do, it is solely to enforce these two personas. What they do have, however, is a girl on girl on glee make out session. Of course Glee would need to have two of its beautiful, popular women fall in love and make out, why not? Glee loves Katy Perry and she kissed a girl and, damn it, she liked it. The issue is not girls kissing girls; it is the exploration of lesbianism in a trite and frivolous manner.

The trials and tribulations girls in high school are facing today are by no means easy. From eating disorders to bullying, the very struggle of learning who you are as a woman, inside, out, sexually, emotionally, is a process. Women today are barraged with images of who they should be, how they should act, and whom they should kiss. Glee, in an attempt to make it okay to be whomever you are, has simply created an hour of sing-along to the pain and pleasure of all the versions of themselves  that girls see when they look in the mirror. We are all sexy and scared, stupid and skinny, fat and fabulous–but fleshing out these various facets to frivolous plotlines and self-mocking monologues is akin to giving every girl a Barbie with adjective occupations. Women deserve more than this style of characterization. 

 
———-
Cali Loria is a thug with unbelievable scrabble skills. She is mother to a King and a lover of film, food, and feminism. 
 
 

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Glee!

This review by Cali Loria previously appeared at Bitch Flicks as part of our Emmy Week 2011 series.
Not since E! has any one thing on television been so damn exclamatory. Glee! celebrated its everyman song-and-dance style before its slushy flying face-offs ever aired. After a Journey-style breakthrough and myriad episodes featuring pop music gone oh so right, the show ended its first Emmy award-winning season and began a second. Can the plotlines featuring teen pregnancy, teen love, and a bitter gym teacher make it with a little Britney Spears mixed in? The answer is: yes. However, following the line of Britney logic, all its women have had to suffer in the meantime: bitches be crazy (e.g. writing underdeveloped characters who become caricatures of themselves, ending in a mockery of those whose very geekiness Glee attempted to celebrate).

In the beginning Glee made a brand out of celebrating the insecurities, joy, and passions of a group of social outcasts. Quickly, however, Glee called into question its treatment of women, prompting the New York Post to ask “Does Glee! Hate women?” In season one alone a woman is shown to be conniving enough to fake a pregnancy to “keep her man” and another, this time a teenager, grappled with pregnancy until, poof, the storyline magically disappeared. Luckily Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” was able to get into the mix first, or I would have been pissed.

Besides the stereotypical portrayals of women-as-girls-as-GQ-cover-models-being-schoolgirls that this show offers, Glee goes further by, perhaps unintentionally, mocking its characters. Vitriolic gym teacher Sue Sylvester (who eerily resembles my elementary school gym teacher) relies on her bitter use of the pretty girls and exploitation of the token special needs child as a means to succeed to her ultimate end. As their most fully fleshed-out character (and perhaps most accomplished actor) Jane Lynch does a great job being angry but does nothing for the stereotype of the angry lesbian gym teacher taunting kids to make herself feel better. Coach Beiset’s introduction furthered this by presenting this gem of a storyline: no man wanted to kiss her so what was a woman to do but become an angry, middle-aged football coach: the better to scream at you, my dears.

Mixed in with the older women who suffer to fall in and keep love and affection, the teens of Glee keep the teenage dreams coming faster than Katy Perry’s hits. Puck, the number one misogynist/baby daddy/Neil Diamond Crooner and the show’s resident sometimes Gothic sometimes snarky, always shown eating or wrestling, Lauren, are just one of many unconventional couples Glee has drummed up. Lauren’s morbid obesity might once have proven to be a means for character slander, as Puck himself proclaimed when he said to then pregnant Quinn “I’m not breaking up with you. I’m just saying please stop super-sizing because I don’t dig on fat chicks.” Now, however, it is the stuff of fetishistic pop preening. First, Puck serenades his new love interest with a rendition of “Fat Bottom Girls” and, shock, she finds it offensive. To make it better he sings the original number “Big Ass Heart” because it is okay for the organ that pumps our blood and, symbolically, falls us in love to have a “big ass” even though a heart has never won a pie eating contest or needed two seats in an airplane. We get it–there’s a size difference here.

Having a character on TV who does not fit into the mold of being a perfect Westernized ideal of beauty would, in someone else’s hands, be refreshing. Glee, however, focuses on the extremes of women, enjoying the overt and campy hyperbolization of its characters which, in essence, detracts from actual storylines and only serves to render the women flat and one-dimensional: Jewish starlet, slut, dumb blonde, conniving cheerleader, sassy black woman, an Asian, and, now, a full-fleshed female. Glee has a recipe with every ingredient, but stirred together it’s one big lump of heterogeneous stereotypes. I’m not saying this couple should not exist; I am simply implying that it may have been beneficial to give her a love interest that does not appear to be ten seconds from dumping pigs blood over her head at prom.

Two other prominent female characters central to Glee’s narrative arc are slutty Santana and dumb blonde Britney. These two rarely have lines, and, when they do, it is solely to enforce these two personas. What they do have, however, is a girl on girl on glee make out session. Of course Glee would need to have two of its beautiful, popular women fall in love and make out, why not? Glee loves Katy Perry and she kissed a girl and, damn it, she liked it. The issue is not girls kissing girls; it is the exploration of lesbianism in a trite and frivolous manner.

The trials and tribulations girls in high school are facing today are by no means easy. From eating disorders to bullying, the very struggle of learning who you are as a woman, inside, out, sexually, emotionally, is a process. Women today are barraged with images of who they should be, how they should act, and whom they should kiss. Glee, in an attempt to make it okay to be whomever you are, has simply created an hour of sing-along to the pain and pleasure of all the versions of themselves  that girls see when they look in the mirror. We are all sexy and scared, stupid and skinny, fat and fabulous–but fleshing out these various facets to frivolous plotlines and self-mocking monologues is akin to giving every girl a Barbie with adjective occupations. Women deserve more than this style of characterization. 

 
———-
Cali Loria is a thug with unbelievable scrabble skills. She is mother to a King and a lover of film, food, and feminism. 
 
 

Horror Week 2011: The Sexiness of Slaughter: The Sexualization of Women in Slasher Films

The whores in horror are the signature flesh of the slasher flick.  Women in this genre have long been given the cold shoulder: cold in as much as they are often lacking for clothing.  Often a female character’s dearth of apparel becomes prominent at the pivotal point of slaughter: in cinema, women dress down to be killed. Filmmakers pair scopophilia with the gratuitous gore of killing–leaving viewers to male gaze their way into a media conundrum: When did sexual arousal and brutality towards women pair to become the penultimate money shot?
Doctors Barry Sapolsky and Fred Molitor, in their article “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films” write “Unlike the original horror films, slasher films use graphic violence and sexual titillation to attract audiences.”  This formula has proven to be successful at the box office and keeps these films churning out at a remarkable rate.  The desire to be the next scream siren crossed media paths in the form of the short-lived Vh1 reality show Scream Queens. This reality TV gem promised that:
Over the course of the series’ eight one-hour episodes, those skilled and sexy enough to command the screen survive. Those who don’t will “get the axe” until only one strong, seductive and stellar actress remains, earning the break-out role in “Saw VI” and the title of Scream Queen.

The season 1 winner, Tanedra Howard, won the chance to show audiences just how seductive and stellar she could look while being tortured. 

Cue the Maxim spread.
In a heavily media saturated world, audiences have become overall harder to shock and please.  Sapolsky and Molitor write:
As years passed, young audiences required that gruesome images become more intense and explicit for them to become scared…In 1978, a movie called Halloween not only sold more tickets than any other horror film, it broke all previous box-office records for any type of film made by an independent production company. Hollywood immediately tried to tap into the success of Halloween. Films such as Friday the 13th, Don’t Go In the House, Prom Night, Terror Train, He Knows You’re Alone, and Don’t Answer the Phone were all released in 1980.  These movies, which are some of the first slasher films, were extremely successful. However, with their increasing popularity came strong criticism. Slasher films were condemned for frequently portraying vicious attacks against mostly females and for mixing sex scenes with violent acts.

A prime example of this type of gore porn occurs in Jason Goes to Hell.  In one of many kill scenes, a man and two topless women are shown camping, though frolicking in the woods may be the more appropriate scene description.  While the man and one of the women return to their tent to get it on, lonely naked girl #1 goes and gets herself killed.  Cut to the tent couple where, naturally, they begin having sex.  There is a brief bit about whether or not to use a condom, ending in the decision that this time they can get freaky sans protection.  This, itself, is foreshadowing the fate of these fornicators.  Nudity abounds as Deborah straddles her man, moaning with pleasure and close to orgasm, when, bam, she is sliced from breast to collar bone.    This sneak slaughter attack first arouses and excites with the feel of cheesy porn and then ends with the kill you know is bound to come: a woman cut almost cleanly in half.  What a bummer to the audience’s boner.

Maxim Magazine, known for its portrayal of scantily clad women, picked the following clip as its number one horror movie kill.

This popular kill from Jason X involves scientist Andrea getting her face dunked in liquid nitrogen.  While struggling with Jason, Andrea’s shit (half of what could be a sexy scientist Halloween costume) rides up revealing to the audience the bottom of her full breasts.  While this small glimpse does not equate itself to the arousal of an all-out sex scene, it is intentional.  From costuming to blocking, every aspect of the character’s femininity in this scene was meticulously plotted.  The fact that filmmakers, audiences, and Maxim find a kill scene more enticing if the woman is sexy and almost shirtless speaks to the fact that modern horror films sexualize slaughter.

The Scream franchise, produced by Wes Craven, poked fun at the overarching tropes common in horror films–particularly the fact that women who have sex will die.  Don Summer’s book Horror Movie Freak writes explicitly on the rules of survival in a horror movie.  Making the cut at number 1 is: Don’t have sex.  Sex = death.  This is especially true for women.  Women’s sexuality is often exploited in horror with the knowledge that the bad girl will more than likely die.  It is a throwback to the most popular book ever published, The Bible.  
Within this trope lies a distinctive problem: the pairing of violence and sexuality in a fetishistic binary.  Sapolsky and Molitor write:
Social scientists have expressed concern over the negative effects that slasher films may have on audiences. In particular, exposure to scenes that mix sex and violence is believed to dull males’ emotional reactions to filmed violence, and males are less disturbed by images of extreme violence aimed at women (Linz, Donnerstein & Adams, 1989). These effects on male viewers are said to derive from “classical conditioning”. 

Sapolsky and Molitor rebuff this idea, believing that the pairing of sex and violence does not occur often enough for classical condition to occur.  However, they further state:

The concern over potential negative effects of exposure to slasher films remains. Possibly, depictions of violence directed at women as well as the substantial amount of screen time in which women are shown in terror may reduce male viewers’ anxiety. Lowered anxiety reduces males’ responses to subsequently-viewed violence, including violence directed at women. Accordingly, the desensitizing effects of slasher films may result from a form of “extinction” and not from classical conditioning.”  

It appears that no matter how you slice it, this pairing, on unconscious level, does not leave viewers unaffected.

Slasher films thrive on their gratuitous gore.  Adding sex is a natural way to titillate the audience and bring in viewers hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite actress’s nipple.  A question that must be asked of this pairing is what comes next?  When it is no longer enough to simply have naked women and gory kills in our films, how will filmmakers reinvent the horror genre?  One thing I know for sure, whenever I’m on a date that is leading to sex, I’m going to be little black dressed to kill.
Cali Loria is a thug and the mother of a King. She tweets as @realcaliloria.  



Emmy Week 2011: Glee!

Not since E! has any one thing on television been so damn exclamatory. Glee! celebrated its everyman song-and-dance style before its slushy flying face-offs ever aired. After a Journey-style breakthrough and myriad episodes featuring pop music gone oh so right, the show ended its first Emmy award-winning season and began a second. Can the plotlines featuring teen pregnancy, teen love, and a bitter gym teacher make it with a little Britney Spears mixed in? The answer is: yes. However, following the line of Britney logic, all its women have had to suffer in the meantime: bitches be crazy (e.g. writing underdeveloped characters who become caricatures of themselves, ending in a mockery of those whose very geekiness Glee attempted to celebrate).

In the beginning Glee made a brand out of celebrating the insecurities, joy, and passions of a group of social outcasts. Quickly, however, Glee called into question its treatment of women, prompting the New York Post to ask “Does Glee! Hate women?” In season one alone a woman is shown to be conniving enough to fake a pregnancy to “keep her man” and another, this time a teenager, grappled with pregnancy until, poof, the storyline magically disappeared. Luckily Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” was able to get into the mix first, or I would have been pissed.

Besides the stereotypical portrayals of women-as-girls-as-GQ-cover-models-being-schoolgirls that this show offers, Glee goes further by, perhaps unintentionally, mocking its characters. Vitriolic gym teacher Sue Sylvester (who eerily resembles my elementary school gym teacher) relies on her bitter use of the pretty girls and exploitation of the token special needs child as a means to succeed to her ultimate end. As their most fully fleshed-out character (and perhaps most accomplished actor) Jane Lynch does a great job being angry but does nothing for the stereotype of the angry lesbian gym teacher taunting kids to make herself feel better. Coach Beiset’s introduction furthered this by presenting this gem of a storyline: no man wanted to kiss her so what was a woman to do but become an angry, middle-aged football coach: the better to scream at you, my dears.

Mixed in with the older women who suffer to fall in and keep love and affection, the teens of Glee keep the teenage dreams coming faster than Katy Perry’s hits. Puck, the number one misogynist/baby daddy/Neil Diamond Crooner and the show’s resident sometimes Gothic sometimes snarky, always shown eating or wrestling, Lauren, are just one of many unconventional couples Glee has drummed up. Lauren’s morbid obesity might once have proven to be a means for character slander, as Puck himself proclaimed when he said to then pregnant Quinn “I’m not breaking up with you. I’m just saying please stop super-sizing because I don’t dig on fat chicks.” Now, however, it is the stuff of fetishistic pop preening. First, Puck serenades his new love interest with a rendition of “Fat Bottom Girls” and, shock, she finds it offensive. To make it better he sings the original number “Big Ass Heart” because it is okay for the organ that pumps our blood and, symbolically, falls us in love to have a “big ass” even though a heart has never won a pie eating contest or needed two seats in an airplane. We get it–there’s a size difference here.

Having a character on TV who does not fit into the mold of being a perfect Westernized ideal of beauty would, in someone else’s hands, be refreshing. Glee, however, focuses on the extremes of women, enjoying the overt and campy hyperbolization of its characters which, in essence, detracts from actual storylines and only serves to render the women flat and one-dimensional: Jewish starlet, slut, dumb blonde, conniving cheerleader, sassy black woman, an Asian, and, now, a full-fleshed female. Glee has a recipe with every ingredient, but stirred together it’s one big lump of heterogeneous stereotypes. I’m not saying this couple should not exist; I am simply implying that it may have been beneficial to give her a love interest that does not appear to be ten seconds from dumping pigs blood over her head at prom.

Two other prominent female characters central to Glee’s narrative arc are slutty Santana and dumb blonde Britney. These two rarely have lines, and, when they do, it is solely to enforce these two personas. What they do have, however, is a girl on girl on glee make out session. Of course Glee would need to have two of its beautiful, popular women fall in love and make out, why not? Glee loves Katy Perry and she kissed a girl and, damn it, she liked it. The issue is not girls kissing girls; it is the exploration of lesbianism in a trite and frivolous manner.

The trials and tribulations girls in high school are facing today are by no means easy. From eating disorders to bullying, the very struggle of learning who you are as a woman, inside, out, sexually, emotionally, is a process. Women today are barraged with images of who they should be, how they should act, and whom they should kiss. Glee, in an attempt to make it okay to be whomever you are, has simply created an hour of sing-along to the pain and pleasure of all the versions of themselves  that girls see when they look in the mirror. We are all sexy and scared, stupid and skinny, fat and fabulous–but fleshing out these various facets to frivolous plotlines and self-mocking monologues is akin to giving every girl a Barbie with adjective occupations. Women deserve more than this style of characterization.

Cali Loria is a thug with unbelievable scrabble skills. She is mother to a King and a lover of film, food, and feminism.