Cate Blanchett – Bitch Flicks

‘Carol’ and the Ineffable Queerness of Being

The potency of ‘Carol’ struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. … The film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times.

This is a guest post by Eva Phillips.

I harbored a tremendous amount of dubiousness for Todd Haynes’ Carol. A lavishly developed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, the film — chronicling the deeply complicated and ferociously passionate romance between two women, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and Therese Belivett (Rooney Mara) — received such unfettered, rabid praise that I, ever the cranky-queer critic, was immediately suspect. Perhaps it was because I had so much personally riding on the film being a pillar of Sapphic excellence (cranky-queer and malignant narcissist — I’m a jack-of-all-trades). As an almost predictably sad, sexually discombobulated — and, importantly, sexually terrified — kid, I could only reconcile my ample feelings about my sexuality through film. My desires, my confusions, my deciphering whether it was okay to have no clue what I was feeling exactly, had no place in my social life, and, moreover, no place to be securely articulated. Media with glimmers of queer characters and themes provided that arena for articulation of the yearnings, the frustrations, and the utter fear I was often consumed by — films were my realm of liminality. So I became a scavenger of any remotely queer cinema, subjecting my computer to countless viruses covertly streaming Better Than Chocolate, ferreting away rented copies of But I’m a Cheerleader to consult after lacrosse practice, secretly stifling a lot of ire about how indulgent the problematic Loving Annabelle turned out to be.

There was an indisputable comfort and benefit to effectively hiding myself in this really, really, really queer canon. These films allowed me a sort of expression and understanding, and, frequently, blissfully demonstrated oh, this is the sex thing, yes, good, good to know. Yet, despite these films salubrious qualities, the sort of discursive shelter they provided, they often seemed too removed or lacking (of course, you could make the argument that “movies aren’t supposed to fix your emotional/developmental crises” and, you’d be right, I suppose, but terribly rude). They seemed to dwell in a sort of microcosmic queer utopia, or, conversely, despotically tragic queer dystopia (Kill the lesbians! Lock the queer gals up! Happy endings are heteronormative! Bisexuality is a myth!) that never quite addressed the comingled anguish and mirth I experienced in my emotionally tumultuous coming-of-age. I would frequently resort to media where I could engineer some kind of unspoken queer subtext — usually anything with Michelle Rodriguez being seductively cantankerous in the vicinity of Milla Jovovich or Jordana Brewster; or my probably unhealthy fascination with a Rizzoli & Isles ultimate partnership. The wordless, even chimerical quality of these attractions in otherwise “straight” cinema often was more rewarding for me, allowing a safeguard in their silence. There was immeasurable pleasure because my desires and their imagined attractions remained equally untellable.

But in a peculiar way, Carol was like my Queer-Film Baby (a baby that really needed an induced labor, since my town’s theatre was stymied by Star Wars–The Revenant fever) — I pined for it to be some prodigious, cinematic gift to Queer Dames (specifically me), something that would satiate and demonstrate the viscera of queer development and craving. But I cynically feared it would royally muck things up like some of its equally revered siblings (lookin’ at you and your emotional/sexual lechery, Blue Is the Warmest Color). Contrary to many depressingly mono-focused proclamations, I did not want Carol to be (or fail to be) the next Brokeback Mountain (though, had Anna Faris inexplicably made a cameo in the film, I would have been completely on board). I wanted the film to exist in its own right, to not be conflated with the masculine machinations of something else, and to not suffer the Brokeback-fate of hetero-appropriation to show “look how attuned I am to the gay folks struggle.” Like any fretful expecting parent, I did copious research on Carol before its release, and remained skeptical at the inundation of sea of mainstream accolades, fearing voyeuristic tokenism or perhaps somber applause at yet another tragic queer ending. Not even cherished and respected queer testimonials could sway me to believe that Carol was going to deliver, so to speak, and transcend the lineage of queer forerunners as well as triumph the beast of my nagging dubiousness.

It really wasn’t until a little less than a third of the way through the film, after several decadent scenes of Therese and Carol getting lost in delectably nervous dialogue and sumptuous gazes and exquisitely drab shots setting up Therese’s mundane, silently craven life, that the potency of Carol struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. As pivotal as it is understated, the moment comes in a brief utterance that is embedded in a scene riddled with delicate class dynamics and clumsy potential “first date” politics and thus is otherwise overlooked. The scene centers around Carol — played by Blanchett with such fastidiousness, exacting the balance between regality and utter petrification — taking the savagely wide-eyed Therese to lunch as an ostensible thanks for returning her abandoned gloves (a most likely intentional accident). Therese observes, acquiescing to the generational gender expectations, that Carol must have thought a man shipped the lost gloves to her home, apologizing that she was, in fact, the anonymous sender. Carol balks at the alternate possibility, delivering the line that so characterizes what I identify as the film’s superb construction of unspeakable desire: “I doubt very much I would’ve gone to lunch with him.”

There is something so simultaneously infinitesimal and yet infinitely meaningful in this moment. The quiet duality of Carol’s comment, her ecstatic implied reciprocation of Therese’s attraction, establishes a precedent for the outstandingly subdued power of the film. Crucially, though, this moment epitomizes what transforms the film from a complex portrayal of unremitting love into a cinematic portrait of the distinct ineffability of queer desire. Carol’s declaration that she would certainly not have gone to lunch with a male employee is not simply the quelling of “do they/don’t they” trepidations so common to most potential “first date” dynamics — it is an implicit affirmation that Therese’s unfettered and uncertain desire (marvelously and tacitly established in the shot-reverse-shots of the first department store interaction between Therese and Carol) is neither misplaced nor forbidden. Merely by saying, “I doubt very much…” the film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times. Does this individual understand (let alone share) my desire? Is this going to be another suppressed attraction? Is this even allowed (or have I jeopardized myself by exposing inklings of desire)? It is an instance which communicates a euphoria distinct and most poignant to a queer audience (particularly this queer, now four-time audience member) of not just having desire requited, but understanding that who you are, how your desire manifests is welcomed and safe.

Thus the lunch exchange socked me in the gut. The narrative and the characters’ machinations ecstatically eviscerated me, so I fully surrendered to the film (even the somewhat aberrant “oops, we forgot a thriller-centric author wrote this, let’s give Carol a pistol” bit). Every touch or grasp of the shoulder — a reoccurring technique brilliantly juxtaposed in the opening dinner scene, as the difference in emotional arousal is palpable when Carol touches Therese’s shoulder rather than the male friend — translates an empyreal, unutterable world. Every longing stare, every coded phrase (“Why not get the suite…if the rate is attractive?” being one of my nearly-cringe-worthy favorites) and even more coded physical symbols (the portentous abandoned gloves, the removed shoes that must hastily be thrown on when Carol’s husband interrupts her first domestic reverie with Therese) are indicative of a particular vernacular of queer longing borne from the uncertainty or inability to directly profess or announce one’s passions, one’s indelible feelings of love. Equally compelling, the non-romantic (or not in the film’s action, at least) female relationship between Carol and her best friend Abby (plucky-as-ever Sarah Paulson) functions as an extension of this inextricable union. Carol and Abby, while open about their past affair, talk to one another in a uniquely cultivated language that both evokes the complexities of their desire (past and current) and the indefatigable, indescribable bond to one another forged through their specific type of union (they share one of the more beautiful and symbolic forgotten moments: shot from behind, the two intertwine arms and support one another down the stairs).

Many details contribute to the dedicated presentation of this ineffability, this new language of necessity and yearning that distinguishes the queer experience in pleasure, euphoria and aching want. Carter Burwell’s lithe lilting score captures the more finite moments of piqued curiosity or plummeting despair that cannot adequately be articulated. The melodramatic mis-en-scène (maybe Haynes’ greatest nod to Douglas Sirk yet, despite Far From Heaven’s ambitions) augments the powerfully silent subversion that Therese and Carol undertake in their romance. But it’s mostly a testament to Blanchett (whose austerity has been woefully misconstrued by some as haughtiness) and Mara, and even Paulson. They do not allow their characters to succumb to over-the-top tropes, but instead manage to recreate those aspects of queer discovery that I had written off as inimitable in films — the stares that communicate every jumbled, blitzkrieg thought, wish, lust but are not over vamped; the gradual transition into comfort with physicality as each more intrepid, explorative touch conveys the longing that often cannot be spoken; the quiet resilience of women who are not damned by the transcendent nature of their love, but reclaim it, making it physically and emotionally more explosive than any other kind of love.

I have never been so lachrymal in a theatre (except for Toy Story 3 surrounded by small children and for wildly different reasons) than when Therese fumblingly tries to ask “things” of Carol, to which Carol pleads, “Ask me things, please.” I openly wept because I viscerally knew how it ached to have your love feel so inscrutable, desperate to be quenched yet caught in limbo. I wept, at times agonized from the pernicious self-refusal so brutally portrayed, and at times over-joyed, because I had never witnessed the ineffability I went through (and still continue and will always go through, to some extent) in the various stages of my queer acceptance and pursuits of love so accurately acted out before me. No word or line authoritatively delivered, no movement swift or lingering made is insignificant — these women act each second with the full weight of the balefulness, muted cravenness, and language I and a panoply of others adopted, have been all too intimate with. I had never seen so much of myself, my friends, my partners, laid so brilliantly bare on screen.

All of this is certainly not to say the film is unblemished: there’s that tricky, body politics moment during Carol and Therese’s New Years’ consummation in which Carol, transfixed by Therese mutters about her breasts, “Mine never looked like that;” disconcerting class and gender elements; the insufferable good-ole-boy-ness of Kyle Chandler’s character’s name (Hoage? Hart? Harf? Oh, HARGE. Sure. Whatever). But what is so fascinatingly and stupendously gratifying about Carol, particularly when assessed with other pitifully doomed or categorically wishy-washy queer dame narratives, is that the coded, incommunicable language actually pays off. The film captures that quality of subversion and unuttered, unbridled attraction, but then it allows (and it seems pathetic to have to say “allows”) the protagonists to consummate their love — Therese can rush to Carol’s dinner party and, in a spectacular narrative cycle, return the gaze of their first exchange, but this time to silently communicate the agreement to embark on a real relationship. Speaking of gazes, Carol is valorous in not only exclusively and unwaveringly committing itself to the Female Gaze — no one is (irrevocably) punished! Lady-orgasms aren’t devoured by omnipresent dude-licentiousness! — it renders the once believed indomitable Male Gaze utterly irrelevant and desecrated in the wake of female longing.

I share in the disheartenment that the Academy Awards denied Carol the recognition it so rightfully deserved (thankfully, though, Mara and Blanchett got their dues). However, there is, not at all ironically, a quiet valiance in the film’s success that makes it perhaps more profound than, say, Brokeback Mountain. Carol triumphs in electrifying homogeneous audiences, in gripping the audiences at Vanity Fair and Slate but it never compromises its irrefutable queerness to placate or entice heteronormative expectations. The women are empowered by their ineffable queerness and we are allowed a dialectic palisade in an elegant art-house romance; the film’s realities coexist harmoniously. It’s really all this cantankerous queer critic could ever ask for.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murderer conspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

A Compromised ‘Carol’

If only ‘Carol’ the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘The Price of Salt’) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion.

If only Carol, the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion. On paper Carol is a film I should worship, a love story about queer women, based on a novel by a queer woman and adapted into a screenplay by one. And its director is one of the few people who came out of the new queer cinema of the early ’90s who still works regularly in film.

Haynes’ previous theatrical release I’m Not There was a miraculous rendering of everything I otherwise hate — bio-pics about musicians, Bob Dylan fandom, films set in the Old West and disjointed narratives — into a transcendent viewing experience. Not everything in I’m Not There made sense (no one but Haynes himself seemed to know what was going on in the scenes with the young Black child traveling with a guitar) but when the weird-ass chances Haynes took worked, like casting Cate Blanchett as the Dylan of the mid-1960s, or having a band (made up of current indie musicians) in the Old West section of the film sing “Going To Acapulco” to a corpse propped up on a stage with them, the results were as thrilling as they were original.

I should have known Carol wasn’t for me when, before I had a chance to see the film (which took a month to make its way to my art-house friendly city — and is still in relatively few theaters compared to macho Oscar-bait The Revenant) some well-known, straight women critics who waxed rhapsodic about Carol compared the relationship between young department store clerk Therese (Rooney Mara) and older, married, wealthy housewife Carol (Cate Blanchett) with that of a mother and daughter — or a mentor and her protégé. Even if these critics meant well, their mindset de-sexes queer women (something straight people have a history of doing). What love affairs between women most resemble are… other love affairs. And what any couple needs, if the audience is going to root for them in a film, is chemistry, not vague bonding around sisterhood and lipstick.

As iconic-looking Blanchett is in early ’50s hair and costumes (by Sandy Powell) her performance is so over-the-top she takes us completely out of the movie. Evident even in stills, the way she looks at Mara is how an alien from outer space ready to tear off its human disguise to swallow her whole might, a gaze not dissimilar from the one Blanchett, playing the stepmother, directed toward Cinderella.

In much of Carol Blanchett’s performance she seems to be telegraphing the audience, “I’m acting! In real life, I’m not queer at all,” continuing an ignoble tradition that includes two other talented, blonde movie stars: William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (which won him an Oscar) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless. By 2006, when Hoffman won his Oscar for playing Truman Capote without histrionics, I thought the old method of playing queer characters had gone out of style for good. In brief moments of Carol we see Blanchett reach under the broad surface of the character. Toward the end, in her speech to a room full of lawyers about custody of her daughter she touches us, and early on, when Therese is talking to Carol on a hallway phone and tries to confirm if she’s reading Carol’s interest in her correctly we see Carol’s vulnerability. Therese says, “I wanna ask you things, but I’m… I’m not sure that you want that…,” and Carol pleads in desperation, “Ask me, things… Please…” But through most of this film Blanchett doesn’t mine the depth of feeling the film’s story demands.

Mara’s performance is much more natural, but because she’s playing against Blanchett’s hamminess, her wide-open stare registers more like that of a schoolgirl who hasn’t done her homework gaping at her teacher than the obsessive protagonist of Highsmith’s novel who, on impulse, sends beautiful, rich, Carol a Christmas card after briefly helping her in the store. In the film, Therese instead sends Carol back the gloves she left on the store counter, making the main character (and no matter how the producers campaigned for the film’s acting award nominations, Therese is the main character of both the novel and the movie) more timid and dull. The film’s Therese is also stripped of ambition: the character in the novel, an aspiring set designer, is often networking with people who might be in the position to employ her or ones who can introduce her to someone who can — and never misses a chance to take on a set-designing job, not even to be with Carol. The Therese in the film takes photos and has to be pushed and prodded (by a man, even though in the 1950s, most men were not exactly eager to encourage women in their careers as artists) to have any faith in her own talent. We also aren’t privy to her thoughts as we are in the novel, so we don’t know that even as she remains quiet she’s taking everything in and making shrewd (and sometimes cruel) observations.

Sarah Paulson as Carol’s ex, Abby, is a relief in no small part because Paulson, an out performer who has never seemed fully at ease in previous big screen roles, knows she doesn’t have to overplay to convey the bond between the women. When Abby and Carol talk, Paulson’s smartypants smile and skeptical eyes show the two have the ease of people who have long since forgiven each other’s transgressions. Paulson also reminded me that my favorite part of Far From Heaven, Haynes’ other ’50s set, Douglas-Sirk-inspired drama, was Patricia Clarkson as another wisecracking best friend.

Haynes has in Carol (with art direction by Jesse Rosenthal and cinematography by Edward Lachman) perfected the look of a Sirk melodrama while modernizing it, with the more “realistic” hyper-pigmented reds and mint-greens of 1950s-era color photos along with the fuzzy resolution of snapshots taken at that time. But Haynes seems not to have learned the first lesson from Sirk’s films (or from two other gay male directors influenced by Sirk: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodóvar): tastefulness is the opposite of passion. When Blanchett and Mara have one of countless drinks together, without any part of their bodies “accidentally” touching the other’s, when the film avoids any on-camera exchange of confidences (which do happen in the novel and the screenplay: a blossoming romance between women doesn’t need both touch and talk, but it does need one or the other) the audience doesn’t experience tension, just boredom.

When the sex scene finally happens, it plays like something from adolescent fanfiction, after a makeover, when the two women stare steadily and silently at each other in a mirror. We then get tasteful toplessness and (finally) some touching (strictly above the waist) from the two leads. In the novel, which includes neither the makeover nor the mirror, the two women have sex for the first time after they each say, “I love you.” And in roundabout, metaphorical, 1950s parlance Highsmith makes clear the sex is a revelation for Therese. The one redeeming part of the scene in the film is Carol looking at Therese’s naked body and almost smiling as she says, ” I never looked like that…”

What puzzles me most about Carol is: with so many queer people at its helm why does the film come off as enervated and somewhat clueless about queer issues (like Carol seeming to be sincere when she says she likes her therapist, when psychotherapy of the 1950s was invariably conversion therapy)? Carol pales in comparison to two other films centered around queer love stories which didn’t have openly queer people heading their productions: Brokeback Mountain and Blue Is The Warmest Color. Brokeback, which famously shows heated love scenes between its main characters, takes place at least partly post-Stonewall, but is a wrenching portrait of the closet’s effect on the couple. In Carol, even as its bittersweet “happy” ending is kept intact, the film doesn’t acknowledge that if the two women stay together, even in New York, even in “progressive” circles they’ll have to lie to nearly everyone (except other queer people) about their relationship for at least the next two decades (even Highsmith waited many years before she let the novel be republished under her own name, not the original pseudonym). And that secrecy took its toll on queer people, even those in happy relationships, as Edie Windsor (whose relationship with her eventual spouse started in New York over ten years after the one in the film) has stated in interviews. As bad as the naked sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color were, that film did get right the thrill of queer first love (and lust), the sacrifices the main character made for it, and how few straight people she bothered to come out to, even in France, even in 2013.

The makers of Carol know a lot more about queer life than the director and co-writer of Blue does, but I think those behind Carol set out to make a film about queer characters that straight people can congratulate themselves for enjoying. The sex scenes will neither skeeve them out nor turn them on. The homophobia of the time (like that of more recent times — and of now) is softened, present only in characters we don’t feel invested in, so straight viewers are free to ooh and aah over the costumes, cinematography and art direction, guilt-free.

Of course plenty of queer people seem to enjoy this film too: the critics’ group I’m part of gave every award it could to Carol (after the Oscars snub of the film in “Best Picture” and “Best Director” categories). As someone who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s when many of us dutifully went to see every highly imperfect queer film released, I understand the tendency to want to support queer representation in movies. But I much prefer Haynes when he lets his freak flag fly, as in I’m Not There and when he speaks directly and knowingly to a queer audience as in Velvet Goldmine (which should be essential viewing for everyone mourning David Bowie right now). Maybe the lesson here is that Haynes’ features should always be period films about musicians. A glance at IMDb shows that his next film is an as-yet-untitled project about the life of Peggy Lee.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together and a staff writer at Bitch Flicks. Last week at The Toast, she interviewed Deniz Gamze Ergüven, the writer-director of the Oscar nominee ‘Mustang’ which everyone should see.

‘Cinderella’ Or Why Do Mostly Straight, Mostly White Guys Make All The Big Studio Movies?

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this ‘Cinderella,’ but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

As I sat waiting for an evening preview screening of Disney’s latest Cinderella to begin (and because I didn’t have my phone to distract me–everyone had had theirs confiscated in an asinine and outdated measure to prevent piracy), I couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of the audience were a somewhat diverse group of women and queers–except for the guys talking loudly behind me. They were so straight, one of them said Last Tango In Paris was the ideal date movie. Since at least one of these guys talked about having a son I marveled that either man had ever succeeded in getting a woman to have sex with him, even once–and wondered what these two were doing at Cinderella. Then I remembered they were seated in the “press” row: they were film critics.

Film criticism suffers a lot because white, clueless, straight guys like the ones seated behind me make up the majority. These critics all tend to like films about straight, white, male protagonists like themselves (with the occasional, historically inaccurate, white male gay stand-in to show how “open-minded” they are), one of the many reasons this year’s Oscar nominees were nearly all white people (and the Latino who won big awards did so for making a film about a white, straight guy).

But the movies themselves suffer when only straight guys are allowed to make them: not only are Cinderella’s filmmakers, director Kenneth Branagh (Thor and at the beginning of his career movies with Emma Thompson like Dead Again) and writer Chris Weitz (who with his brother, Paul, made American Pie–Weitz is part Latino, but the vast majority of characters in his films are white guys) men, their previous films have been singularly bereft of queer flair–memorable costumes and hairstyles and a sense of how women talk when they’re alone together–that make up the Cinderella story.

Chris Weitz, as a director, took over the Twilight franchise right after the original film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, proved to be a box office bonanza. Since then no women have directed the big YA adaptations, even those centered on women and girl protagonists. Similarly, Sam Taylor-Johnson the woman director of the successful (in both the financial and critical sense) recent Fifty Shades of Grey film (with a built-in audience that is mostly women) seems to be poised to be unceremoniously dumped from the franchise–which I’m sure the producers will be quick to tell us has nothing to do with her being a woman, though, odds are, she’ll be replaced by a man. Even when women directors succeed with big studio films they’re treated like failures.

In feminist documentaries like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, we see that women in the 1960s at newspapers and magazines were unfairly pigeon-holed into writing for the “women’s section,” but women directors now, 50 years later, don’t even get to helm the few “women and girls’ stories” big studios choose to tell.

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this Cinderella, but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

The film chooses the most familiar parts of the stories (Cinderella is a folktale that has many different iterations including some very old ones from Asia) but also tacks on a syrupy-sweet beginning in which “Ella” (played as a child by Eloise Webb and as an adult by Downton Abby’s Lily James) spends an idyllic childhood with her father (Ben Chaplin) and mother (Agent Carter‘s Hayley Atwell, unrecognizable in a blonde wig and eyebrows) before her mother dies from that disease women in films often get that keeps them looking good on their deathbeds. She tells her daughter who, like her, is so virtuous she has no discernible personality, “Have courage and be kind,” a case of the bland leading the bland.

We’re introduced to Ella’s CGI mouse friends (much more creepy than the animated ones in the 1950 Disney Cinderella—as she kept scooping them up I couldn’t help wondering if she washed her hands afterward) with whom she can communicate, as she also does with a farmhouse menagerie of animals running across the yard. The film has a seemingly willful ignorance of why those animals are there; when we see scraps on Cinderella’s plate they’re just vegetables, even though the goose, in the 19th century English setting the nameless, timeless kingdom the film takes place in resembles, would most likely be Christmas dinner.

Ella’s father remarries, bringing into the house the evil stepmother, here called Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett, in a succession of 1940s-inspired gowns, hairstyles and hats that, like her sojourns on the red carpet, show what a great clothes horse she is) and the two stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) who, the film is careful to point out are “ugly” on the inside. With their overcurled hair and pursed lips, wearing busy print dresses, the two aren’t terrible to look at, exactly, just tacky.

When the father dies (some versions of the tale have him survive and take part in Cinderella’s degradation) the stepmother banishes Cinderella to sleep in the attic and to become the household’s only servant. Because she sleeps by the dying embers of the fire to keep warm the stepsisters christen her “Cinder-ella.”

Trying to escape the drudgery of home, Cinderella rides her horse into the forest and meets the Prince (Richard Madden, Game of Thrones’ Robb Stark) who is on a hunt. Cinderella, not knowing who he is, talks him out of killing the stag (another instance of creepy CGI) she has just warned to run away. When they part The Prince says, “I hope to see you again, Miss.” Back at the palace the King (Derek Jacobi) pressures the Prince to take a wife and The Prince asks that the palace hold a ball, open not just to gentry but all the young women in the kingdom, so that he might meet the nameless “country girl” again.

CinderellaHBCarter — Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother

We see Cinderella working on her dress, one of her mother’s that she has altered, and inevitably her stepmother and sisters tell her she is not welcome to attend the ball with them, “It would be an insult to take you to the palace dressed in these old rags.” When they leave Cinderella’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) appears first disguised as a beggar woman, then after Cinderella gives her a crust of bread and milk revealing her true identity. Her wand exudes the same sparkles as that of the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” godmother of the 1950 Disney version, but that effect seems more like laziness (it’s very familiar from other films) than an homage.

The transformation of the pumpkin, mice, lizards, and goose (actually a gander) into respectively, the golden coach, horses, coachmen and driver–and then back again–is the most magical in the film. Less successful is the transformation of the fairy godmother and Cinderella, whose hair and gowns end up looking more like the garish stepsisters’ than they would in a Cinderella directed by Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, Jane Campion or Gina Prince-Bythewood (the dresses also don’t equal the storybook descriptions of spun gold and silver). It’s like Branagh made a conscious decision to not pay too much attention to “girly” detail like gowns and hair. Also barely adequate, perhaps for similar reasons, is the styling of the Prince. Plenty of women and queer men enjoyed looking at Richard Madden in Game of Thrones (and some of us remember him fondly as the gay EMT in the UK version of Sirens), but here he’s dressed in gaudy jackets, clean-shaven, with his curly hair dyed dark and shellacked into a long pompadour, so that he looks like Zac Efron without the self-tanner. And even though we don’t know where the kingdom is, he’s made to drop his Scottish accent for an English one, that, even to my American ears, sounds shaky.

CinderellaCoach — Cinderella in the golden coach

In spite of her ballgown, James is radiant and doesn’t get stuck in gooeyness of her character, but she has the same odd affect she did in Downton (where she appeared just as I was giving up on the series): even when her character is supposed to be upset she always seems on the verge of breaking into one of her big, bright smiles. Most disappointing is Blanchett, whose stepmother is never given a real reason for her cruelty (besides money, which the movie pays scant attention to, and her own perfunctory rationale that she still grieves for her first husband, which we see no evidence of) so Blanchett has nothing to play except in one brief scene, when she blackmails the Grand Duke (Stellan Skarsgård). Blanchett is talented enough that not only has she convincingly played Bob Dylan, but she made him sexier and more appealing than he’s ever been himself, so Branagh and Weitz really dropped the ball here. The stepmother could have been a great villain, like Ben Kingley’s Snatcher in The Boxtrolls. Instead, she just looks great, like a blonde, chic Joan Crawford in her prime.

An interesting difference between this version of Cinderella and most of the other earlier versions is that it has a little diversity in it. Some of the princesses who arrive at the ball aren’t white. The Prince’s footman (Nonso Anozie) as well as a few of the townspeople are Black. But this tiny, tiny step in the right direction made me wish someone had been bold enough to make the decision to cast a Black actress as Cinderella. Then we would have the reason for the stepsisters’ and stepmother’s irrational and instant hatred of her, no matter how kind she is to them, and also the King and Duke’s reluctance to let The Prince marry her, since, in too many places, those same attitudes survive today. I would have loved to have seen what Lupita Nyong’o (who, like Blanchett, has shown on award show red carpets that she can wear the shit out of great gowns) could have done with the role, but as it has since its beginning, Walt Disney still barely believes in white, brunette princesses, let alone Black ones. I doubt I was the only person in the theater wondering how many more white, blonde storybook heroines I could take.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20DF6U1HcGQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

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

‘Suffragette’: How Many Firsts For Women in Film Can One Movie Achieve? by Alice Lytton at /bent

Lena Dunham’s Stint on SNL Was a Feminist Extravaganza by Isha Aran at Jezebel

The Respectability Politics of Lupita Nyong’o by Zeba Blay at Shadow and Act

Celebrating the Oscar Win for “12 Years a Slave”—While Noting Films that Were Left Out by Nijla Mu’min at Bitch Media

The feminist film-maker who’s taking on Hollywood by Emine Saner at The Guardian

Why Lupita Nyong’o’s Win Matters to Black Women & Girls by Britni Danielle at Clutch Magazine

“Strength” of Character: How the Silver Screen Perpetuates Gender Stereotypes by Emily Layden at Feministe

When Will the Women of the Documentary World Get Their Due? by Tom Roston at POV

It’s time for Hollywood to take advice from Octavia Butler and stretch its imagination by Syreeta at Feministing

The Oscars 2014 Tribute to Wieners, I Mean, Heroes by Roz Y. at The Plot Bunnies

‘Female Films Earn Money’: Cate Blanchett’s Awards-Season Crusade by Ashley Fetters at The Atlantic

100 Ideas That Changed Film by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings

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

The Grumpy Feminist’s Guide to the 2014 Oscars

The 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony aired last night, and a billion viewers around the world struggled to stay awake. The show had a notably slow pace, with more time for introduction clips and acceptance speeches and less “Isn’t Hollywood Grand?” foofaraw (which, to be fair, a lot of people say they want. I happen to really like the foofaraw). Ellen DeGeneres’s hosting was more laid back than I am hosting an Oscar-watching party, and when I take a break to hand out pizza there’s still stuff to watch on screen. And ‘Gravity’ swept the technical awards, giving the overstuffed middle of the show a certain monotony.

If you fell asleep, never fear! I’ll recap for you the bullet points a feminist movie fan needs to know:

The 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony aired last night, and a billion viewers around the world struggled to stay awake. The show had a notably slow pace, with more time for introduction clips and acceptance speeches and less “Isn’t Hollywood Grand?” foofaraw (which, to be fair, a lot of people say they want. I happen to really like the foofaraw). Ellen DeGeneres’s hosting was more laid back than I am hosting an Oscar-watching party, and when I take a break to hand out pizza there’s still stuff to watch on screen. And Gravity swept the technical awards, giving the overstuffed middle of the show a certain monotony.

Ellen DeGeneres hosted the 2014 Oscars — Ellen DeGeneres hosting the 2014 Oscars

If you fell asleep, never fear! I’ll recap for you the bullet points a feminist movie fan needs to know:

Pharrell Williams wears short pants with a tuxedo despite not being a three-year-old ringbearer. — Pharrell Williams wears short pants with a tuxedo , is not a three-year-old ringbearer.

Obsession with women’s bodies and dresses on the red carpet: ongoing

This is a complicated one. Fashion is fun and Red Carpet Style is a vital component to the glamour of the Oscars. But what bugs me is men largely getting a pass from this spectacle. Pharell had to wear SHORTS with his tux on the red carpet to hit ONLY SOME of the Worst Dressed lists.

Look at those shoes! No wonder she fell!

Jennifer Lawrence tripped again, “she’s so fake” backlash threat level: midnight

Jennifer: JUST WEAR FLATS.

Cishet dude wins Oscar for playing trans woman

In 30 years, this is going to be as cringeworthy as white people playing characters of color. At least I hope. Also, said cishet dude was JORDAN CATALANO, and I’ve had over a month to prepare for this inevitability and I still can’t handle it.

Norma Rae one of five or so female heroes the Academy could think of — Norma Rae: one of five or so female heroes the Academy could remember

“Heroes” theme just as bogus as predicted

It essentially meant montages of male protagonists of movies. Being a man in a movie = being a hero. For women to be heroes, well, they have to be Norma Rae or Ellen Ripley, pretty much.

Ellen’s epic selfie breaks Twitter

(Insert 10,000 word thinkpiece on selfies and self-identity vs. self-objectification oh wait there are already a million of those and I don’t really care.)

Jennifer Lopez and Lupita Nyong'o backstage at the Oscars after Lupita won Best Supporting Actress — Jennifer Lopez and Lupita Nyong’o backstage after Lupita won Best Supporting Actress

Lupita Nyong’o wins Best Supporting Actress, continues to be perfect

Expect coverage to focus on her “beating Jennifer Lawrence” instead of her brilliant performance and deeply moving acceptance speech.

This is what Wonder Pets! are, incidentally.

Robert Lopez joins EGOT club, with an asterisk

His Emmys are Daytime Emmys (for the music for a kids show called Wonder Pets!). I am TORN on this because my gut tells me to be a purist and only count primetime Emmys, but seeing as how daytime television is largely geared toward women and children, shouldn’t feminists champion the Daytime Emmys as an equally important award? Anyway, be sure to bring up that argument to any snobs like me who try to downgrade Robert Lopez’s EGOT.

Cate Blanchett: movies about women are not "niche experiences." — Cate Blanchett: movies about women are not “niche experiences.”

Feminists continue to feel conflicted as Cate Blanchett champions women in film, thanks Woody Allen

Her Best Actress acceptance speech deftly compressed months of feminist agita into something short enough she didn’t get played off.

Steve McQueen literally jumps for joy accepting his Best Picture Oscar.

12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Because it was the best picture, not because of white guilt.

Ellen’s joked in her opening chit chat, “Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture. Possibility number two: you’re all racists.” I laughed. It’s got a harsh ring of truth to it. But it sets up a narrative, bolstered by Gravity‘s sweep of the technical awards and Alfonso Cuarón’s win for Best Director, that the Academy only voted 12 Years a Slave Best Picture out of some feeling of obligation. Nope. Nuh-uh. 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture because it was THE BEST PICTURE. Gravity is an astounding film and a technical marvel; it deserved its run of awards. And Best Picture/Best Director splits are not that uncommon—it’s happened six times in the last twenty years. I hoped we put this whole “HOW CAN THEY BE DIFFERENT?” conversation to bed last year with Argo, and I don’t want to see it popping up again as some way to undermine the achievement of 12 Years a Slave.

What else ruffled your feminist feathers or smoothed them back down during this year’s Oscars?

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

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

The Best Super Bowl Tweets from the Real Feminist Bookstore by Melissa Locker at IFC

The Most Terrible Super Bowl Commercials by Rachel Lindsay at Bitch Media

Finally, A Super Bowl Ad Feminists Can Be Proud Of by Elizabeth Plank at PolicyMic

Review: ‘The New Black’ Offers Complex Portrait of Black Same-Sex Marriage Debate by Nijla Mumin at Shadow and Act

Is “The Wolf of Wall Street” Punk Rock? Hardly. by Karina Eileraas and Pye Ian at Ms. blog

Six International Films to Have On Your Radar (Or See this Weekend at PIFF) by Kjerstin Johnson at Bitch Media

The Big O: What’s at Stake for Cate in the Woody Debate? by Susan Wloszczyna at Women and Hollywood

Watching Gonzo Netflix: A Selection of Films I’d Really Like To See by Ella Risbridger at The Toast

Hollywood Needs To Redefine What Makes A Movie “Mainstream” by ReBecca Theodore-Vachon at Film Fatale NYC

Playwright Rebecca Gilman on Feminism, Class and Flawed Heroes by Paula Kamen at Ms. blog

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

‘Blue Jasmine’ and Other Art By Abusers

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it). But I watched ‘Blue Jasmine’ this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award. And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with it.

Movie poster for Blue Jasmine — Movie poster for *Blue Jasmine*

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it.)

The incredibly sad truth of the matter is that switching off art by abusers can feel like switching off art entirely. It’s not just a matter of changing the station when “Yeah 3X” comes on, it means not listening to The Beatles and James Brown. It’s not just a matter of not watching Chinatown or Annie Hall; you have to decide if it is OK to watch 12 Years a Slave because it features Michael Fassbender, whose ex-girlfriend took out a restraining order on him after he broke her nose. Maybe that’s OK because he’s not the “author” of the film. But, well, supporting it supports his career (he got his first Oscar nom out of it), so, well… was my ticket for the best movie of the year, that’s also a landmark achievement for black filmmakers and actors, and moreover a powerful condemnation of systems of oppression intersecting with rape culture, now a betrayal of feminism and human dignity?

Everyone has to make these personal negotiations themselves. Maybe you can choose to tolerate work featuring actors who beat women, but not work “by” them. So watching Sean Penn in Milk is OK, but you must not watch The Crossing Guard and his other directorial efforts. Maybe you will only shun the work of sexual abusers, or maybe only sexual abusers of children, like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

A relatively easy approach is to lean heavily on the word “allegedly.” Other key vocab words: “rumor” and “gossip.” Ignore the myriad failures of the legal system in bringing abusers to justice, ignore that celebrity often compounds those failures, and remind everyone that these artists have “never been formally charged with/convicted of” their crimes. This is very nearly a free pass! [Speaking of free pass: let’s apply a blanket “alleged” to everything in this piece! Don’t sue me!]

I truly respect people who refuse to consume art by abusers, and I hope I can be forgiven for being too much of a pop culture completist to take that hard-line stance. Again, I think this is a choice everyone has to make for themselves, and I think the only wrong answer is the one that Hollywood appears to cling to: sweep the sins of its darling “geniuses” under a rug, so we can enjoy their work without internal conflict. (That is, if those sins were not against Hollywood itself, for that is UNFORGIVABLE!)

So: I watch Woody Allen’s movies, and I like a lot of them (although I feel compelled to clarify, when I wrote that I wanted “the next Woody Allen” to be a woman, I certainly did not mean a woman who is a sexual predator). I watched Blue Jasmine this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award.

blanchettsagawards — Blanchett accepting Best Actress at the SAG awards

In Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress acceptance speech at the SAG Awards last week, she thanked Woody Allen for creating “role after role after role” for women. This praise of Woody Allen as a great giver to women left a bad taste in a lot of feminist mouths. But he has written many great female characters, even the elusive meaty roles for women over 40, like Blanchett. I watched Blue Jasmine because I didn’t want to miss out on a new iconic female character and one of the most-praised female performances of the year.

And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with Blue Jasmine. It’s a solid film, and sort of the polar opposite of To Rome With Love on the “effort expended by Woody Allen as filmmaker” scale. But the cracks still show: the class commentary central to the film can be cartoonish, the Ruth Madoff character analogy feels a bit dated (at least coming from guy who makes a movie every seven months or so), and the pivotal moment in the third act is a chance encounter on the street, which is somewhere on page one of “Hacky Screenwriting for Lazies.”

Jasmine, not only from Allen’s writing but also from Blanchett’s performance, is a captivating character. But she never transcends “character” for me. I took particular issue with the jumbled mental illness cliches cobbled together: Nervous breakdown! Talks to herself! Medication “cocktails”! Excessive intake of actual cocktails! Electroconvulsive therapy! Delusions of grandeur! Relying on the kindness of strangers!

I am a mentally ill person myself, and I saw nothing recognizable in Jasmine. Silver Linings Playbook caught some flack last year (including from me!) for being a little too lighthearted and breezy on the subject of mental illness, but I found the characters in that film PROFOUNDLY relatable. One of the things Silver Linings Playbook did right was craft mentally ill characters not solely defined by their illness. Jasmine’s only other characteristics are being selfish and mean and generally unpleasant, all too easy to conflate with her illness itself.

This hodgepodge characterization makes Blanchett’s acting seem more awards-bait-y than it actually is. She is fantastic in the film, especially because she manages to win some small amount of sympathy from the audience despite her character’s thorough terribleness. Sally Hawkins is also great as Ginger, Jasmine’s semi-estranged adopted sister, and I appreciated that she had her own storyline instead of existing merely as Jasmine’s grounded foil.

Blue Jasmine is the kind of movie I would normally say “is worth seeing” even though I didn’t personally like it very much. Multiply that lukewarm semi-endorsement by the sum of your personal “comfort with consuming art by abusers” coefficient and your awards-season completist factor to determine if you should give it two hours of your time.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.

Older Women Week: ‘Notes on a Scandal’: The Older Woman As Predator and Prey

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Kiy.

“I don’t know. It’s just the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.” –Sheba Hart

Notes on a Scandal film poster

In Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 British psychological thriller, a web of lies and manipulations form around the relationship of two schoolteachers who live very different lives.

Told through her point of view, the film takes viewers into the mind of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an elderly woman whose sweet voice and grandmotherly appearance hide a cunning mind and sinister intentions. She lives alone with her cat and confides only in her journal, whose entries form the film’s narration.

Her loneliness is compounded by this narrative technique, as Barbara is often given no one to play off of and instead watches interactions from a distance, remaining an entirely closed off person with a rich internal life she only reveals in her private writing. For an older woman, whose age, unmarried status and perceived lack of attractiveness leave her virtually invisible and of no value to society, this narration allows her to express her resentment. But underneath her malice is the profound loneliness of a woman who seems to have never learned how to connect to people and to remain in their lives without manipulations.

Barbara only confides her real opinions in her journal

To a degree, her isolation is self imposed as Barbara sees the people around her, students and teachers alike, as uncultured, unwashed and unilaterally badly behaved. That she sees herself as above them is highlighted in an early sequence when she watches the children come into the school from an upper floor window. This is the scene where Barbara first sees Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).

Sheba’s first appearance presents a sharp contrast. She floats, very blonde and pale in a sea of dark haired students in black uniforms and the viewer’s eye, aligned with Barbara’s, is easily drawn to her. While Barbara, a through disciplinarian in dowdy clothes, fits naturally into the school environment, Sheba is alien within it. It is suggested that she has no authority over the students because she still sees herself as a young person and wants to be their friend. The film also addresses the idea of class difference which further sets Sheba, with her upperclass background, apart from the working class pupils.

The details of Sheba’s life seem comfortable enough; she lives in a large, ornate house with her much older husband (Bill Nighy–who interestingly portrayed a love interest to Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and her two children, a teenage daughter (Juno Temple) and a boy with Down syndrome, but none of it makes her happy. In a telling detail, a photograph of Sheba in her youth, dressed in a punk style, is shown in her studio.

Teenage Sheba was a Siouxsie & The Banshees fan

Like her pottery and the art in her shed, this photograph suggests a life unfulfilled, that she imagined a bigger, more bohemian life for herself. This was the time in her life when she felt most free and most herself, before she was married or had children, and it is this sense of fulfillment she tries to reclaim by ultimately entering into a relationship with one of her students.

Her relationship with 15-year-old Steven Connolly is particularly disturbing because actor Andrew Simpson certainly looks this age. At first, he satisfies her idealism, and helping him develop his potential as an artist makes her feel useful in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time. She tells Barbara it was he who began to pursue her, constantly following her and playing on her sympathy with sad stories about his family life. The first time she leaves her family to meet him, lying about where she is going, the camera briefly lingers on her son and husband, showing her last minute hesitation.

In viewing the situation as one where he pursued her and she was helpless in her desire (whether or not Sheba’s story to Barbara is reliable), she allows herself to feel young, desirable and like a teenager again, experiencing clandestine affairs. In this sense, her much older husband is recast as her father, which Connolly thinks he is when he sees him. Sheba’s relationship with her daughter, who is the same age as Connolly, is also changed as they both enter a similar world of teenage dating.

Teenage Steven Connolly pursues Sheba

In the end, it becomes clear Connolly can’t take the burden of this complicated relationship and the knowledge that she has a family and feels he has been used by her. In her efforts to reclaim her own carefree youth, she has been stealing his and forcing him to grow up. In one telling scene, Connolly looks through her records and is unfamiliar with the artists, highlighting their age gap. The wrongness of Sheba’s actions is brought home to her when Connolly, naked post-sex tries on her son’s hat. At the sight of him, she is repulsed and forces him to take it off.

Though both women struggle with loneliness and are unhappy with their lives, the different ways they deal with similar emotions cast them in degrees as predator and prey.

Alone and undervalued, Barbara rapidly develops an obsession with her younger colleague, which makes her feel more vital and connected to the world. She is fascinated with the exotic character that Sheba seems to be, someone so different from her. She is also jealous of Sheba, as in her narration she says that people like her only think they know what real loneliness is. With this in mind, when she discovers Sheba’s affair with Connolly, she uses it to blackmail her into being her friend.

Though society easily defines a woman like Sheba as a predator, and she is punished with a jail sentence at the film’s end, Barbara’s predatory nature is much subtler and hidden. She looks at Sheba’s life noting how around her family, she acts in a serving position, making dinner and tidying the dining room while the others sit and talk, that she alone has had to take care of the children. This allows Barbara to resent Sheba’s family as a burden placed on her that she’d be glad to be rid of.

Several characters mention Barbara’s old friend, Jennifer, who she doesn’t want to talk about, suggesting she has had these obsessives friendships before. They also suggest Barbara’s attraction to Sheba is actually repressed lesbian desire, unfortunately casting this desire as predatory by connecting it with Barbara’s manipulations. In one scene, the camera, showing her point of view, focuses on an extreme close-up of one of Sheba’s golden hairs falling. Like a lover, Barbara holds it delicately, as if it is precious to her and saves it in her diary.

The camera shows Barbara’s point of view as she gazes at Sheba with lust

In addition, during a moment of casual dancing during her first visit to the Harts, Barbara’s eyes scan up Sheba’s body, and her dancing is shown in slight slow motion, accentuating Barbara’s lustful gaze. This gaze challenges the societal view of an older woman as a sexless grandmother and presents her as someone with active sexual desires.

Sheba is also guilty of manipulating Barbara and dismissing her because of her age. Early on, when she first begins to confide in Barbara, she sees her as a good person to talk to because she assumes she does not have her own life or secrets. She assumes a woman like Barbara would be glad just to have a friend, and dismisses any idea that she could have sinister intentions running contrary to the older woman’s assumed place in society as the grandmother. With this assumption, she begins to prey on Barbara’s loneliness, continuing to see Connolly and buying Barbara gifts to silence her. The viewer begins to feel sympathy for Barbara here as her narration reveals that she lives in a fantasy world, believing she has a wonderful relationship with this loving friend who will take care for her in her old age.

Barbara dresses as a doting grandmother to visit the Harts

Similarly, Barbara shows her first genuine smile when she is first invited to Sheba’s family dinner. Because the film follows her through the minute details of getting ready; buying clothes and having her hair done, the invitation is inflated in importance. As the details momentarily consume the film, the preparations seem to become her whole life, revealing how small, unimportant and lonely it is. The insert shot of her in the mirror, nervously touching her hair stresses her concern about looking a certain way and fitting into the role expected of her.

She emerges wearing pearls and carrying flowers, the very picture of a sweet grandmother.

The film takes great care to show Barbara in an unflattering light, making the signs of her age, her thinning hair, neck fat and heavily wrinkled skin, appear (for lack of a better word) pathetic. It also suggests Barbara’s appearance mirrors her cold-hearted nature. This seems a bit hypocritical, as much of the film can be interpreted to suggest that the older woman should not be dismissed as having none of her own desires and secrets. By aligning the film with Barbara’s point of view and then including scenes, like the overhead shot of Barbara smoking in the bath with her sweaty older body on display, it is suggested not only that she is monstrous, but that she sees herself as monstrous.

Barbara’s “monstrous” older body on display in a purposefully unflattering shot

The older unmarried woman is often portrayed in media in a very cliched fashion, as treating her pet like a child, and this point in Barbara’s character is a bit heavy-handed. Her most vulnerable, “pathetic” moments occur around her cat, Portia, and its failing health. The one time she is explicit about her sexual attraction to Sheba, when the camera, showing her point of view, pans down to Sheba’s breasts, is after she finds out Portia is terminal. Angered Sheba doesn’t reciprocate, she reveals that she fully understands Sheba’s state of mind when she delivers the ultimate insult, telling her, “You’re not young.” When Portia is put down, Barbara is bewildered and irrational and tries to force Sheba into being with her. She goes to Sheba’s house and screams at her, attempting to pull her away from her family exactly when she is trying to reconnect with them.

To Barbara, this final betrayal marks the end of their friendship, as she buries not only her cat, but the silver frame Sheba had given her. Having become completely unhinged, Barbara now wants to possess Sheba and become the only thing in her life, as Sheba is in Barbara’s. With this goal, she reveals Sheba’s relationship with Connolly.

The overwhelming solitariness of Barbara’s life is contrasted with Sheba’s warm family evening, through crosscutting between them, counting down the last moments of Sheba’s happiness. When the affair is revealed, Sheba’s house is swarmed by the media, and her family rejects her. With no one else left, she has to call Barbara and rely on her friendship when she has nothing else.

Sheba, in her punk make-up, discovers the journal

Alone in Barbara’s apartment, Sheba tries to convince herself that she is still young and attractive, by applying punk make-up, finally visually becoming the teenage girl she had felt like.

As she sits, considering herself in the mirror, she discovers ripped pages from Barbara’s diary and, furious and scared, she begins to search for it. The film cuts between Barbara innocently shopping for their new life and Sheba discovering her obsessions and manipulations.

In the end, Sheba returns home to talk with her husband and rebuild her family, while Barbara sits with her new notebook, speculating on the life she could have lived with Sheba. Time passes and Barbara meets a new woman and begins her predatory advances all over again.

Barbara makes a new friend and the story begins again

Notes on a Scandal is an interesting film to look at through a lens of age, as it portrays elderly and middle-aged women being driven to manipulate each other and those around them by their fear of growing old and being (or feeling) alone. It is complicated in its depiction of lesbianism, its suggestion that a teenage boy is responsible for seducing his teacher, and its often cliched presentation of an elderly woman as a spinster worthy of pity.

Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’: The Addition of Feminine Presence During a Quest for the Ages

Guest post written by Elise Schwartz.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey directed by Peter Jackson is the prequel story to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It begins by introducing the protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, on the day of his 111th birthday, the same day that the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings movie begins. It is the day that Baggins begins writing about the greatest adventure of his lifetime: an unexpected journey. The movie dialogues Baggins’ first encounter with Gandalf the Grey, a host of Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Goblins, while assisting the Dwarves in their quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain.

This Hobbit movie, which will eventually be the first part in a trilogy, is based on roughly the first half of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The book was published in the late 1930s and was intended to be a stand-alone children’s book. The LOTR trilogy only came to be as a request from Tolkien’s publisher. It was during this trilogy that Tolkien really developed Middle Earth and the characters that lived within its regions. It’s possible that due to the fictional world not being truly developed prior to The Hobbit being published, we only meet the 15 male characters that make up the traveling party and their enemies. Jackson took it upon himself to bring the two stories together as a whole movie series by introducing additional characters to the audience of The Hobbit that play a large roles in the LOTR. One main example of this is through the character Galadriel, the Elf Queen.

Galadriel appears in a scene that was created specifically for the movie adaptation. During this scene there is a meeting of the White Council, which consists of Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, Elrond the Lord of Rivendell and Galadriel. The council meets to discuss the mission of the traveling party to take back the Lonely Mountain and the role of Baggins as part of the company. Galadriel remains quiet and watchful during much of the meeting’s discussions. Though, she does interject during a heated debate between Gandalf and Saruman, and insists that Saruman let Gandalf speak. At the conclusion of the meeting, she offers Gandalf guidance and assistance if he were to ever need her help.

The members of the council treat Galadriel in an ethereal, yet mindful way. They show her respect in a manner that almost makes it seem like she should be placed on a pedestal. It is much how she and other female characters are regarded in the LOTR. Jackson was careful to show this in the style that it was intended – with dignity and admiration towards women of power.

Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Many other reviews such as this one have questioned why Galadriel was included in the film, when her character wasn’t introduced in the book. Was this just a way of adding females into the plot line? It’s possible. But we must remember that Jackson is tying the two series together and trying to create cohesion, which will turn into a much grander story overall. So why didn’t he include Arwen or Eowyn? Simply from a historical timeline, this is 60 years prior to the LOTR stories and Galadriel was the only female character Tolkien introduced that was alive at the time. As well, she is a character of authority that can add substance to the overall journey of the series.

So, even though The Hobbit was not meant to hold a well-rounded cast, Jackson’s film adaptation of the first half of the book does an exceptional job of introducing the audience to the world of Middle Earth and the characters within. He was careful to insert only the most necessary characters that needed introduction while sticking to the main themes and plot directions of the book. Though, I’m still curious to know if he will end up pushing the envelope enough with the Hobbit series to take home another Best Picture award in the future.

———-

Elise Schwartz writes at HalloweenCostumes.com and has been known to spend an entire weekend watching the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings films start to finish.

‘The Hobbit’: A Totally Expected Bro-Fest

Written by Erin Fenner

Is there enough dude on this poster for you?

Bad Taste, 1987, was Peter Jackson’s first dip into epic nerd movies and his first film. While he may be best known for his specially affected J.R.R. Tolkien interpretations, I personally will always love Jackson for his exploding sheep and (literally) brain-snatchy/gory aliens in Bad Taste. The film is about a group of investigators who discover that a town is being overrun by aliens who are harvesting humans for their fast food franchise. It was extremely low budget – less than $30,000 – and Jackson recruited his friends to play starring roles. Jackson, himself, actually plays two lead characters in the movie. The aesthetic is that of a film school project – rough and cleverly stupid. It’s gruesome; on of the heroes repeatedly squishes his brain back into his skull and keeps it in with a hat and belt.

Its cheeky absurdity fits snugly into a cult/b-movie-lover’s tastes.

But.

But, it has no female characters. The only women in the film are extras – two extras in huge alien suits.

So, in 2012, one quarter-life-crisis after Jackson’s first feature-length film, we saw a pretty similar problem.

The Hobbit is well acted with predictably great special effects, humorous dialogue and a compelling arc.

But.

But, there is only one female character with a speaking part and maybe a couple female hobbit extras who you see behind a frolicking Frodo (Elijah Wood) or Bilbo (Martin Freeman/Ian Holm).

Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) is the only woman with a speaking part in The Hobbit. And really, her role is little more than a cameo. While men are talking, Galadriel elegantly paces around the room – her gauzy dress seemingly slowing her down by the unnecessarily long train. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) steals a word with her to talk about his plan with Bilbo and the dwarves. She supports him and smiles slowly. While I like the unexpected sexual tension between Galadriel and Gandalf – it’s less than gratifying to see a woman plugged into a movie with no purpose other than to be a magical validator.

This lack of lady in the film has not gone unnoticedor uncontested. But, Alyssa Rosenburg with the XX Factorsaid in her piece, “We Don’t Need Women in the Hobbit” that women shouldn’t be included for the sake of equity. Rosenberg writes:

“All-male spaces and social circles existed in the kind of medieval settings Tolkien was commenting on, they exist today, and stories that are set in those environments aren’t uninteresting to me because I’m a woman — in fact, just the reverse. My hope isn’t that they go away, but that intellectually curious men should be able to find stories about femininity, and female spaces, whether they’re fantastical or not, just as fascinating, even if there aren’t male characters in the mix.”

Unfortunately Rosenburg’s argument is just as indolent as Jackson’s move to include only one woman for less than a ten minute scene to balance the dudeness of The Hobbit, an almost three-hour-long movie.

If Jackson was really sticking to the details of Tolkien’s novel for accuracy’s sake then Bilbo would have been fatter and the dwarves all hairy and large-nosed. While Fili (Dean O’Gorman) and Kili (Aidan Turner) were adorable; their delicate five-o-clock shadows did not resemble anything dwarf-like. So, since Jackson Hollywooded this story up anyway, you think he could have included some women’s voices and stories instead of lazily inserting a suspiciously always-glowing Galadriel.

All male spaces exist, but that doesn’t mean that the surrounding non-male space shouldn’t be included – or that the story shouldn’t be updated to stay relevant. And the idea that women ought to expose themselves to more male-only spaces is giggleable. Since infancy girls are exposed to story books, movies and television shows that have few if any female characters. And hey, what about action movies, Westerns, superhero flicks and on and on. While women sneak a peek into these films here and there; they are usually a romantic interest or the object that can sexily swagger.

Women are a small percentage of the roles in Hollywood movies. In 2011 women made up only 33% of all movie characters of the top 100 domestic grossing films, and only 11% of protagonists were women. In the same year women only made up 18%of writers, directors, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers of the 250 domestic top grossing films.

We do need to include more women in stories that originally didn’t include women because if we’re not proactive about representing women it won’t happen.

So – even though Jackson’s tantalizing nerdy films are pleasing – more needs to be demanded from them. More women.

The Four Mothers of ‘Hanna’

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna

This independent film came and went and while a few friends mentioned it, I didn’t seem to read too much about it, a shame because the film offers a lot for a feminist viewers (Bechdel win!) in it’s portrayal of female friendship, Hanna’s coming of age, a female action hero and an interesting Cate Blanchette as the villain. While the story revolves around a familiar plot of revenge and CIA subterfuge, the screenwriter, Seth Lochhead, always intended for the film to feature elements of fairy tales, specifically the darkness that is featured in any morality tale.

Hanna is certainly suited to a Grimm fairytale ambiance; Saoirse Ronan (Hanna) is cursed with special gifts and raised by her vengeance-fueled father in a faraway land. There is a wicked witch (Cate Blanchette) who cursed her with her special abilities and who must be destroyed, Hanna’s father (Eric Bana) must then push his daughter out into the world to fulfill her cursed destiny, during which time Hanna will ultimately grow up and discover the truth about her mother.

Specifically, it was the portrayal of parents, mothers especially, that I found really interesting in the film. There are three mothers portrayed, Hanna’s mother, Hanna’s grandmother, and the mother of Hanna’s friend (Olivia Williams), all of which are shown to be absent mothers to their daughters.

Motherhood is tricky in Hollywood; films about the subject usually involve a lot of tears and yelling and misunderstandings. It’s understandable, this confusion over the topic, since there is no definitive model of what a perfect mother would look like; however, there is usually one characteristic that we do all seem to seek in our perfect mother: her presence. I can name dozens of films that feature the absent mother: perhaps she is dead, or ill, or a drug addict, or even (gasp) the clichéd, power-hungry career woman.

In the case of Hanna, there are other forces that drive mothers and daughters apart; for Hanna’s mother, it’s her unwanted pregnancy and then later, her involvement in a top-secret government program (which is just a more complicated version of the guilty mother trying to give her kid a better life plot). Hanna’s mother ultimately fails in this task though; all her attempts to “make her baby special” (enter fairytale queen asking the witch for some special gifts for her kid) leads to Hanna’s cursed nature (abnormal abilities) and itinerant loneliness. Hanna is so lonely that she follows around a traveling family, amazed at their family life and obviously longing for the things she cannot understand.

Olivia Williams plays the ultimate bohemian mother; her fifteen year-old daughter is given leave to run around Europe on the back of a moped with a few boys she met at the pool. This sentence alone would probably give my mother a heart attack. Williams believes so wholly in the purity of independence that she allows her entitled daughter complete and total rein, even allowing her to engage in activities, which could be harmful. Yet Williams still considers herself to be a maternal protective figure in her choice to take in Hanna, believing her to need some parenting (of which she doesn’t seem to do much). In the end however, despite her daughters friendship with Hanna and her own desire to help her, William’s character closes off their family to Hanna, pushing her away yet again from another mother figure.

Hanna’s grandmother is a different kind of woman, solid and gentle, who longs to know where her granddaughter is and whether she is safe. She is so pure and innocent in her serene motherhood that she allows herself to be killed, rather than reveal any information about her granddaughter’s whereabouts. It’s a powerful scene of what I imagine we think of for ideal motherhood: self-sacrifice and love.

Cate Blanchette as Marissa Weigler

Cate Blanchette, who plays the villain, in a way even struck me as a type of mother, which could be read in one of two ways. Either she’s no mother at all—the anti-mother if you will, the woman who is negative mother space in that she considers the progeny which she helped to create to be disposable tools. Or perhaps she is instead the great mother figure who tries so hard to control her children, to mold them into her image that she ultimately destroys them or must be destroyed.

Startlingly, in order for Hanna to thrive, all of her mothers must die, forcing her to experience extreme independence. After which she crosses over into her own womanhood, freed from the four women whose influence has controlled her life.

The intended morality of this dark fairy tale was not that mothers should be killed, however the intersection of independence, self-discovery and loneliness was pivotal for Hanna to grow up and discover her self.

This is only one facet of the film though; the film almost reads like a backpackers love song to Europe, exploring the little known and “off the track” places in much of Southern Europe. As a bonus, look for Tom Hollander (of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) as a brilliantly creepy, Eurotrash thugs, all whilst wearing absurdly small shorts.

Notes on ‘Notes on a Scandal’

Moviegoers seeking a simple, erotic film laden with illicit trysts between a teacher and student may be left unsatisfied with Notes on a Scandal. While an affair between a teacher, Sheba (Cate Blanchett), and high school student, Steven (Andrew Simpson) serves as a definitive catalyst, Notes largely centers around the ambiguous relationship between Sheba and Barbara (Dame Judi Dench), a seasoned teacher at the same London comprehensive school.

Sheba is free-spirited and idealistic about her ability to make a difference in her pupils’ lives. Having been in the education system for decades, Barbara is slightly less optimistic. Despite their different schools of thought, when Barbara offers the fresh-faced Sheba disciplinary advice, a hopeful friendship develops between the two. Unknowingly, Sheba has consented to serve as a replacement for one of Jennifer, Barbara’s former friend who left under unclear circumstances.
Notes is a film that can be continuously (and pointlessly) picked apart in search of a clear protagonist and antagonist. Their relationship mirrors Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When Sheba is guilty of infidelity and statutory rape, Barbara also becomes guilty of blackmail. When Sheba sees the best in others, Barbara does as well. When one woman keeps secrets, so does the other. Neither woman can be exclusively deemed saint or sinner.

In cinematography, perhaps this is the highest possible form of feminism. Despite featuring a promiscuous adult and older woman, Notes does not typecast female characters into unrealistic “slut”, “wife material”, and “old bag” categories. Sheba’s husband, children, and paramour are rarities on-screen. In fact, upon his discovery, Sheba reassures her husband that the affair has nothing to do with him. There is minimal focus on Steven and Sheba’s sexual acts. Viewers are forced to wade through action, subtext, and their own gut feelings in search of a clear answer that refuses to reveal itself.

In a memorable scene where Barbara smokes a cigarette while bathing, the following journal entry serves as a voiceover:

“People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely. Bot of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it’s like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand send a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”

While Barbara stagnates in her lonely past, Sheba is shrouded in the pleasantry of hers. In a parallel scene, she listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees while applying thick black eyeliner as her youthful lover stands near.

However, when Steven dons a hat that she’s made for her son, Sheba snaps. The children, the son with Down Syndrome and the adolescent daughter, come into focus. The illusion of the past becomes shattered.

Just as an aside, Juno Temple—the young actor who plays Sheba’s daughter—aces her role as a petulant daughter. For those interested in intense, incidentally homoerotic dramas about academia, loneliness and sexual taboo, her role in Notes on a Scandalevokes her performance in Cracks.)

For those seasoned lesbian subtext detectives who—like me—have religiously watched Xena: Warrior Princess and Rizzoli and Isles, there is significant evidence in favor of Barb wanting more than passionate friendship from her colleague:

In her initial journal entries about Sheba, Barb expresses her belief that she is “the one”; that they could become “companions.”
During a moment where Sheba is stressed, Barb runs her fingers up and down Sheba’s hands and arms, reminiscing on a time in her schooling where she and her female peers “used to stroke each other.” It makes Sheba uncomfortable.
When Sheba discovers Barbara’s diaries during the height of her statutory rape scandal, she yells, “So what it it, Bar? You want to roll around the floor like lovers? You want to fuck me, Barbara?” (She also calls “Virginia-Friggin’ Woolf”, yet there are arguably more similarities between Barb and the protagonist of Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness.”)
Barbara is pre-occupied with gold stars.

When picking apart subtext, last names are also relevant. Barbara Covett covets Sheba Hart, who has a lot of heart for her students, including Steven Connelly, who consher into believing that his feelings are much more than pubescent lust.

When Barb accusingly asks Sheba while she continues her relationship with Steven even after Barb blackmails her, Sheba responds, “Secrets can be seductive.” Ultimately, Sheba is hardly the only one guilty of infidelity. Barb’s journals—which inevitably certify her as insane in Sheba’s mind—are well-hidden from her previous and current “companion,” and document her every manipulative action and thought.

Barbara’s one true love is fittingly ambiguous in gender and sexuality: Paper. Even while pursuing Sheba, she still carries on an affair with the notebooks that inevitably speeds up the destruction of her connection with Sheba.

Amid all the ambiguity, only one this is definite: Despite wanting all of her friend, there are still parts of herself which Barbara is unwilling to unveil.

***

While she doesn’t quite have the accent, Sarah Fonseca’s been known to accidently type ‘ya’ll’ in her articles. Thank g-d for copyeditors.

Sarah runs frantically between writing and feminist club meetings on her university’s campus. Fortunately, those two spheres collide more than one would think. She is heavily involved with National Organization for Women, Creative Writing Club, and Random Acts of Poetry at Georgia Southern University.

Sarah is a staff writer for Georgia Southern’s George-Anne newspaper, and occasionally contributes to other publications within the community. Her fiction has been published in The Q Review and recognized by the Harbuck Scholarship committee.

Sarah is currently applying for fellowship with Lambda Literary, and plans to present her paper entitled On the Queering of Hair at next year’s National Women’s Studies Association Conference.