Claire Danes – Bitch Flicks

When Friendships Fray: ‘Me Without You,’ ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ and ‘Brokedown Palace’

Not all friendships are built to last. Teenage friendships are little romances between two people–tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships. Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Not all friendships are built to last.

Teenage friendships are little romances between two people–tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships.

These friendships are among the most intense in your life and that intensity often burns out too fast. It can feel giddy and feverish just like a teenage romance, where you can’t bear to be apart, talk all night on the phone, keep boxes of sentimental objects and stay up all night together. But you don’t know then who you really are and this relationship, that you eat and sleep and breathe, can either end up a warm memory or, in many cases, the last barrier to true adulthood.

Though close friendships often form between larger groups, the view of teenage friendships we most often see on film is this singular sort of passionate fire. These films succeed on the strong performances of two leads, as character studies of two highly developed characters. Other people are interesting, but they never seem quite as important.

What is some interesting in these films is how they explore this one difficult question: If you’ve aways been one of two, how do you become one, a singular person without missing something? Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

It can be difficult to tell what these kinds of films are saying about friendships. Are they simply too pure, to beautiful to exist in the real world? Are they things that hold us back, trap us in fantasy worlds so vivid they make real life seem like a dream (see: Heavenly Creatures)?

What about toxic friendships (see: Albatross, Ginger and Rosa) ? Teenagers are so much more vulnerable to these sorts of things because perfect symbiotic connections seem so desirable.

Holly follows along through Marina’s experimentation

In Me Without You, a British film spanning the 1970s and 80s, Holly (Michelle Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel) initially have little in common, but develop a close, almost symbiotic, connection, due to proximity. They’re neighbors and they’re the same age. As they grow up, they follow each other into the same music and subcultures, Marina most often dragging Holly along, and it’s unclear whether they would have liked the same things if they weren’t so closely tied together. Later, when their friendship has broken down, they continue to be tied together, now by their daughters’ friendship.

For most of her life, Holly has lived in Marina’s shadow. Marina is exuberant and witty, outgoing and almost glitters in her everyday wear, more like costumes, pirates and ballerinas, then everyday outfits, she’s impossible to lose in a crowd. Meanwhile, Holly is softer and too often scared. She lives in Marina’s shadow not only because she feels most conformable there, but because Marina demands it. Marina’s brightness fascinates Holly, who casually accepts her cruelty, too nice and too needy to do anything that could hurt her. As Holly begins to come into her own and get noticed for her intelligence and beauty, Marina sees it first and does everything she can to sabotage her.

Mousy Holly feels overshadowed by her friend Marina

The betrayal is a little cliche. Marina sleeps with Holly’s boyfriends and subtly chips away at her self-confidence to keep Holly as her mousy, lesser friend. Throughout the decades, Holly falls in and out of her attraction to Marina’s brother Nat, and it appears that he is her soulmate. Eventually they get together, but not without the cost of Holly and Marina’s friendship.

For Holly, growing up comes to mean realizing that indulging Marina and following her demands isn’t making her happy. As the title says, Holly needs to figure out who she is without Marina and learn to be this person. The friendship ends as she realizes the Marina needs her more than she needs Marina, it’s just holding her back from growth.

Though the viewer is meant to identify with Holly, writer-director Sandra Goldbacher succeeds in giving just enough insight into Marina to understand her rationale. She is not cruel for the state of it, but is hopelessly insecure and jealous of light she sees in Holly. She tries so hard to be exciting and cultivate an alluring persona, but Holly doesn’t even have to try to be interesting. Moreover, as Holly is developed as such a sweet and intelligent, it’s hard to completely fault her judgement. At different points her in life, Marina was the friend she needed. And she loves her, she can’t be all bad.

Alice and Darlene enjoy vacationing together before college

Likewise, Alice (Claire Danes) in Brokedown Palace is the wild, even fearless friend who tries to convince quiet Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) to live a little. You’ve either been this girl or you know her, either way, you’re a little frightened (and thrilled) by her influence. Alice convinces Darlene to take chances she otherwise would have avoided, usually things Darlene had secretly wanted to do anyway. Alice convinces her to go to Thailand, to sneak into the pool at a fancy hotel and hang out with some skeevy seeming guys they meet. This ends up getting the girls sent to a Thai prison for smuggling heroin they (allegedly) had no idea was in their bags.

Suffering through prison together, the girls’ friendship becomes strained

It’s any traveller’s biggest fear and the girls, fresh out of high school, not at all streetwise and sure being American grants them certain privileges, make all the worst possible decision at every juncture, but really the horror of their imprisonment is overshadowed by the horror of betrayal. Alice and Darlene find themselves in (an often pretty racist portrayal of) Thailand where everyone is poking at them and yelling in languages they can’t understand with no one to turn to except each other. But as time passes and it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not just a misunderstanding, they lose their faith in each other. Darlene’s parents have always hated Alice and tell her she deserves to be in prison for being a bad influence on their daughter. Darlene even begins to agree, believing Alice forced her to do things against her will. In the end, Alice pays the price for being the wild friend, accepting for responsibility for the crime, and sacrifices her life for Darlene’s freedom by offering to serve both their prison terms.

Due to the film’s ambiguity, its ultimately unclear whose fearlessness was their downfall. Was Alice telling the truth when she accepts full responsibility or had Darlene attempted to strike at independence and excitement on her own?

The friendship between Sara and Adele feels familiar and realistic

Devyn Waitt’s ethereal indie, Not Waving But Drowning, begins with Adele (Vanessa Ray) and Sara (Megan Guinan) literally breaking apart. High school is over and Adele is leaving their tiny Florida town for New York City, where she imagines bigger and better things await. Sara, the more level-headed of the duo, is staying behind and continuing to live a teenage life, she sleeps in her parents’ house and rides to and from her volunteer job with her father.

Yet through their separate journeys, the girls attempt to maintain the symbiosis that had kept them afloat so far. On their own, they have a host of adventures, both good and bad, that become increasingly difficult to share with each other. For Adele, life in New York is not as glamorous as she imagines, she moves into a messy apartment with four guys she barely knows and gets a job cleaning office buildings. Things seem to improve when she becomes friends with a girl who lives across the street, who seems to have the glamorous life she’d dreamt of.

Meanwhile, Sara teaches art classes at a senior’s centre and finds it difficult to get the residents interested. She is drawn to Sylvia (Lynn Cohen), a rebellious elderly woman who smokes pot in her room and leads trends at the centre.

Not Waving But Drowning cribs from two very different coming of age templates: an older person-young person intergenerational friendship and a silent reaction and recovery from trauma narrative.

Sara indulges her rebellious side by spending time with Sylvia

Separated, they try to be figure out what kind of people to be without each other. For Sarah, this means attempting to replace her more daring friend with this woman who reminds her of Adele. Sylvia even becomes a role model to her, as she is fascinated by a photograph of young Sylvia in New York at her age. Later, when she visits Adele, she attempts to recreate the picture.

Adele’s road is harder. Her new friend Kim (Isabelle McNally) abandons her when she is raped on a rooftop and she spends a long time struggling with the event. She has a hard time connecting to the world she so recently lived in, the world of her friendship with Sarah, riding in cars and singing, trading inside jokes and leaning on each other. In picking Kim, she had attempted to chose a friend completely different from Sarah, someone more like the person she wanted to be herself. As Kim disappoints her, her own view of herself and what she can be is shattered.

Adele struggles to create an identity of her own

The friendship between the girls is strained, but it is not irrevocably damaged. By the end, they’ve had lives apart and have secrets they keep from each other, something they never had before, but they still feel comfortable sleeping in the same bed like children. Sara plans to move to New York, but will this fix things? Can they ever be as close as they once were?

The true test of a friendship isn’t whether is lasts, but who it lets you be. These teenage friendships encouraged a symbiosis that made it impossible for the girls to live alone and that was why they faltered. We need more films that explore the toxic aspects of friendships, particularly teenage friendships, to help us learn to recognize them.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Powerful Realism and Nostalgia in ‘My So-Called Life’

Almost 20 years later, we need more of what My So-Called Life gave us a taste of. We need teenage girl protagonists to be sexual, not sexy. We need honest portrayals of what it is to be a teenager–not only for teenagers who need to see themselves in faithful mirrors, but also for adults who are still trying to figure themselves out.

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Our teenage years are often unfulfilled and disappointing. We relentlessly try to find ourselves, to make things good, but those short years are over quickly, and we don’t truly get it until much later.

These years are much like the short-lived My So-Called Life, which aired from 1994 to early 1995, and was canceled after just one season. The protagonist of My So-Called Life, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), is a powerful representation of those short teenage years. She is self-centered, horny, and emotional. She is pulled from every direction, trying to separate from her parents and evolve with new friends. She has high expectations and deep disappointments. Angela and her friends are painfully accurate portrayals of what it is to be a teenager.

As sad and unjust as it is that the show only lasted one season, there’s something poignant about how it was short and open-ended, yet packed such intensity into 19 episodes. My So-Called Life is, essentially, a mirror image of adolescence not only in narrative, but also in format.

My So-Called Life is a gold mine for feminist analysis–the show includes many thoughtful critiques of what it means to be a young woman in our culture, what it means to be a wife and mother, what it means to be a man, and what it means to be gay. Topics typically reserved for superficial after-school specials (sexuality, drug use, abuse, coming out) are treated with an intensely real humanity that many critics have argued completely changed the genre of adolescent and family dramas.

Being a teenage girl in our culture is fraught with cultural expectations and disappointments. Angela–along with girlfriends Rayanne and Sharon–are portrayed not as caricatures, not as virgins or whores, not as good girls or bad girls. They are complex and sexual; they are selfish and confused; they are wonderful and awful.

Teenagers are typically–biologically–self-centered and sexual, and the power of nostalgia drives us to consider and reconsider our teen years (in them and after them). My So-Called Life stands the test of time because it deals with these issues through characters and plot lines that reflect reality.

Self-Centered

Early in the season, the writers frame most episodes with lessons that the students are learning in school. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is juxtaposed with Angela changing her looks (dying her hair red) and feeling misunderstood by her parents. Angela sits in a class about JFK’s assassination, and says she’s “jealous” that she hasn’t had that defining moment in life that she’ll always remember where she was when it happened. Malcolm X’s words are turned into a lament about a zit. Students flirt and make out, ignoring the art on a field trip to the art museum.

On the surface, these woven-together stories seem jarring–we watch Angela turn everything into an insignificant comparison to her own life. But this is exactly what we do in adolescence. We pout that nothing important has happened in our lifetime without understanding the weight of history because we think that we are the center of history. There is scientific proof that teenagers’ brains function differently–it’s important to remind ourselves of that.

My So-Called Life, specifically through Angela’s narrative, portrays that era of life perfectly. Creator/writer/producer Winnie Holzman said, “I just went back to what it was like to be a teenager for me. Sure, Angela’s me. But at the risk of sounding. . . whatever, all the characters were me.” Holzman researched further by teaching at a high school for a couple of days, and realized that teenagers were “exactly the same” as they always had been (which is perhaps why the show still seems so real).

Defining self — The unending journey to define “self”

This selfishness is not presented with judgment or disdain, though. All of the characters–teens and adults alike–have human motivations, which we sometimes like, and sometimes don’t. Their selfishness is examined through the consequences and normality of being self-centered as a teenager, and how that looks and feels different when one is a parent or teacher. Angela worrying about a zit over Malcolm X’s words seems off-putting, but it’s painfully real.

Angela’s relationships with her friends–Rayanne, Rickie, Brian, and Sharon–also highlight the inflated sense of self that navigates us through those formative years.

Horny

One of my favorite aspects of the show is the way young female sexuality is portrayed. Angela is horny as hell. Those fresh, out-of-control adolescent sexual urges are clear and accurate throughout the series, and the writers deal with teenage sexuality with truth and nuance that is too rare in portrayals of teenage sexuality (especially teenage girls’ sexuality). Angela’s inner monologues about–and eventual makeouts with–Jordan Catalano reveal that intensity.

Angela is clearly sexual, but also struggles with the disappointing reality of teenage male sexuality when Jordan tongue-attacks her with a terrible, awkward kiss, or expects sex before she’s ready. She wants him so much, but the expectations and imbalance of sexual power are crushing. Angela is never anti-sex, but she is nervous. She speaks with her doctor about protection, and opens up to Sharon. Her reasons for not being quite ready don’t have to do with her parents or religion–it’s about her. And that’s just how it should be.

Meanwhile, straight-laced Sharon is getting it on constantly. She shares with Angela that the expectations that disregard female agency are problematic, but she enthusiastically enjoys sex. While Sharon seems the most judgmental and prudish, she has a fulfilling and active sex life. Angela realizes–as do we–that sexual acts don’t define a person, but sexuality is an important part of who we are.

Rayanne is known by her peers as promiscuous and “slutty,” but we are also challenged to look beyond that. She wants to define herself, and that’s the label that has stuck–so she decides to be proud of the designation (she and Sharon share sub-plots about their sexual reputations). Her sexual experiences–the drunken night with Jordan being the only time we know she has sex–don’t seem to be healthy or for her. All of the characters needed more seasons to have their stories fully realized, but Rayanne especially needed more than 19 episodes to be explored.

My So-Called Life turns the virgin-whore dichotomy on its head. Young women’s sexuality–the intensity, the confusion, the expectations–is presented realistically, and the message that when it’s good, it’s good, is loud and clear.

Angela and Jordan’s makeout scenes are, well, amazing, and the female gaze is often catered to. When Angela is skipping geometry study sessions to go make out with Jordan in the boiler room, we understand why she’s doing it. That episode has some excellent commentary on young women’s educational motivations, especially mathematics. When an instructor laments that it’s “so sad” when these smart girls don’t try, another instructor says that it’s because of their low self-esteem.

While that’s not an untrue assessment, it’s also important to recognize that in Angela’s case, she was horny as hell. We brush off boys’ behavior–the idea that they can’t stop thinking about sex in their teen years–but girls are right there, too.

As Angela tells a confused Brian, “Boys don’t have the monopoly on thinking about it.”

My So-Called Life reiterates that idea, which is heartbreakingly rare in depictions of teenage girl protagonists.

Commentary on the pressures that teenage girls face are woven throughout the show. — Commentary on the pressures that teenage girls face is woven throughout the show.

Nostalgic

The Greek roots of the word nostalgia are to return (home) with pain. We often think of nostalgia as telling stories with old friends, or looking through old yearbooks as we reminisce. But it’s much more than that.

Angela says, “I mean, this whole thing with yearbook — it’s like, everybody’s in this big hurry to make this book, to supposedly remember what happened. Because if you made a book of what really happened, it’d be a really upsetting book.”

My So-Called Life ends with Angela stepping into a car with Jordan and driving away. Jordan has just met her mother, Patty, and the two sit and visit. Patty has been waiting for her old high-school love interest to stop by for a drink (and a business conversation), but he doesn’t show up. Patty and Jordan share a fairly intimate conversation, and both seem to understand something they hadn’t before.

Jordan comes outside, asks Angela to come along with him, and says that her mom says it’s OK. In understanding her own trajectory from teenager to adult, Patty has released Angela.

It’s sudden, it’s unclear, and it’s vague. It–the show, and adolescence–goes by so quickly, and we can’t fully understand it until we look back at the literal and figurative pictures of our life. Not just the smiling yearbook photos, but those things that remain inside.

We don’t know exactly where Angela is going at the end of My So-Called Life, and neither does she. The restraints and possibilities of adolescence can be overwhelming, and as life changes into adulthood, the restraints and possibilities both tighten and grow. By looking back–in all of its pleasure and pain–into those years of intense growth and confusion, we can better know ourselves.

Angela rides away with Jordan at the end.

When My So-Called Life originally aired, I was in middle school. Our antenna didn’t pick up ABC, so I wasn’t able to watch it in real time. I knew, however, from the occasional Sassy magazine that I wanted to be Angela Chase, and I wanted Jordan Catalano. Years later, after living through almost all of the plot lines of the show, I watched the entire series. And then again, years after that. I’m struck by how much I can still feel what I felt at 15 by listening to Angela’s internal monologue. Good television, like good literature, can do that–take us, through fiction, back to times and places. Whether those times and places are crushing or celebratory, there is a distinct pain in going back–that nostalgia that shapes us and creates our realities.

asdf — Imagine the power in seeing this ad as a teenage girl: “Yes, I DO know how it feels!”

Almost 20 years later, we need more of what My So-Called Life gave us a taste of. We need teenage girl protagonists to be sexual, not sexy. We need honest portrayals of what it is to be a teenager–not only for teenagers who need to see themselves in faithful mirrors, but also for adults who are still trying to figure themselves out.

That season of our lives is fleeting, open-ended, and ends abruptly. It’s meaningful but unfortunate that My So-Called Life so accurately portrayed those particular aspects of adolescence.

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

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

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

Gender Inequality in Film Infographic at New York Film Academy

The Feministing Five: Sunny Clifford by Suzanna at Feministing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popaganda Episode: Funny Business by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Golden Age of Television: Boys Only

Written by Rachel Redfern

The rise of the anti-hero has most TV and media reviewers heralding the past ten years as revolutionary, a “golden age of television.”

And I think it’s true, great television seems to be popping out of the seams of my TV and an ever-expanding “To Watch” list on my desk. In fact, looking at the recent figures for big summer blockbusters (most of which seem to have failed miserably) some (myself included) are wondering if Hollywood studios might be fading into the shadows of networks such as AMC and HBO.

TV, because of its much longer time allowances (12-20 hours of viewing per season) and recently-improved watching options (Hulu, Netflix, DVD releases and, let’s face it, illegal streaming and downloading) seem to create far more interesting characters and way more space for subtle scheming and intrigue in their plot lines. Increasingly, Hollywood opts for a bigger explosion to counteract its total lack of originality and character development.

So, in a word, I would argue yes, I find higher quality entertainment and better stories about life and humanity in television than I do at the movies.

But I don’t see many women in these shows either.

Some of Brett Martin’s “Difficult Men”

GQ writer Brett Martin’s new book Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution from ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ is all about the fabulously conflicted male characters springing up in television: Walter White, Don Draper, Al Swearengen and the others that are the front men for this great revolution. And writing about these complex male characters is important, but the book’s content reveals one of the major flaws within this golden age–where are all the conflicted, complex women and the TV shows that center on their lives?

I can think of only two (please add to this list though in the comments if you can think of any more): Homeland and Weeds, although Game of Thrones has several interesting female characters running around. (It perhaps has one of the better ratios of compelling female and male characters.)

Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison in Homeland

I’m not sure that blaming the producers and writers of these shows is going to get us anywhere because the problem is obviously much deeper than that, and it begs the question, why aren’t women’s stories interesting to producers and writers? Why aren’t female protagonists fascinating and complex?

Do audiences consider stories with female protagonists un-relatable? Uninteresting? Too unbelievable? Or does this lack merely reflect life in that there aren’t any women doing enough “complex” and “darkly-human” things to model the character after?

I don’t believe any of that is true, but that doesn’t change the amount of women headlining an AMC show. In thinking about my favorite shows, I can only think of a few female characters that I would consider unique and groundbreaking. Consider Breaking Bad: while Skyler is an interesting enough character, she’s far less compelling (and obviously secondary) to the character development that Walt is showcasing, often being seen as no more than a “nag” or “hen-pecking shrew” to many viewers (not this one). In fact, the backlash against Skyler (Anna Gunn) has been so intense (consider the meme below as a common example of how the internet seems to view the poor woman) that Gilligan actually addressed the problem in a recent interview.

One of the nicer internet memes for Skyler White (Anna Gunn)

However, as a whole, with the story centering on and following a female protagonist, the number is proportionately small.

So ladies, either we are far too flat and boring to be on TV, or as it has been for so long, our stories and interactions are still being undervalued. Therefore, we should set some goals for ourselves: be marvelously interesting (sarcasm) and (more importantly) continue to write, produce, direct and support more TV shows about women–because I don’t see many others doing it for us.

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

The Tragedy of Masculinity in ‘Romeo + Juliet’

Written by Leigh Kolb.

The opening scene of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is an intense display of masculinity. While in the original text the Capulet and Montague men draw swords and taunt one another, Luhrmann’s rivals pull guns, rev car engines, smoke, shoot, and light fire to gasoline.

Luhrmann’s 1996 film takes Shakespeare’s text–he stays truer to the language than other modern adaptations–and places it in a decidedly modern world of gang violence, guns, and ecstasy.

It’s Baz Luhrmann. It’s over-the-top and gorgeous, and perfectly encapsulates the timeless themes of the tragic story. At 15, audiences see violent action, young love (lust) and parents who just don’t understand. Older audiences, however, see a tragedy borne out of patriarchy and a culture that expects and respects traditional masculine power.

Capulet and Montague, business moguls and patriarchal forces. Jesus looks on.

While Romeo’s Montague cousins are tied up fighting Capulets and taunting nuns, Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) is emoting on the beach over a recent breakup. His father references Romeo’s “tears augmenting the fresh morning dew,” and Romeo is seen smoking a cigarette, sweeping blond hair out of his eyes. Romeo doesn’t seem to be like his cousins, and even when they play pool together, he’s lamenting his lost love.

The feuding men.

When he meets Juliet (Claire Danes) at her family’s costume ball, they are equally smitten and she is forward with her feelings–“you kiss by the book,” she says, as they attempt to escape her meddling mother (who’s attempting to set her up with Paris, played for laughs by Paul Rudd). In discussions about marrying off Juliet, her father indicates to Paris that while mothers are made at her age, it usually doesn’t bode well for a good life. Her mother–who knows her less than her nurse–seems to want to push her into marriage because she had to marry young. Her bitterness and desire to push Juliet into an arranged marriage and young motherhood is portrayed as villainous.

Luhrmann’s take on the balcony scene isn’t for purists, but it’s great for feminists. Instead of Juliet being separated from him on her balcony, elevated literally and figuratively as Romeo struggles to hang on, Juliet walks down to the pool as Romeo waits for her, and the two deliver their lines in the pool–on equal footing, intertwined.

A nontraditional balcony scene places Romeo and Juliet closer together.

Juliet is continuously more mature than Romeo. While she falls for him as he does for her, she wants to know that he’s serious. Romeo stumbles, he’s clearly much more juvenile than Juliet is. They represent youth, yes, but also a departure from not only their fathers’ patriarchal social order and the gendered expectations placed upon them. Juliet’s world is protected and arranged for her; she’s expected to have a life like her mother’s (arranged and out of her control). Romeo’s effeminate nature goes against his father’s powerful corporate position and his cousins’ violent outbursts.

Romeo changes, however, when Tybalt (John Leguizamo) kills Mercutio (Harold Perrineau). Mercutio is frequently played flamboyantly–he doesn’t adhere to masculine norms and makes bawdy jokes at the expense of both Montagues and Capulets–and he represents a neutral party between the two families. Luhrmann’s Mercutio is played by a black man who convincingly cross-dresses for the costume party and attempts to bridge ground between the families. His death, then, is tragic to Romeo, but it’s also a sense of lost hope to the audience. Romeo gets behind the wheel of his car–he’s now part of this violent, masculine world–and chases after Tybalt. He maniacally shoots him as tears stream from his eyes.

When Romeo enters the violent, masculine sphere, the story changes completely and tragically.

He drops the gun, and the rain that has been approaching finally falls.

This crisis is what leads to the couple’s downfall–Romeo stepping into the patriarchal, violent world of senseless feuds pulls him away from the feminine that he’d so willingly embraced and embodied before.

As Juliet’s father drunkenly promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to Paris, he’s surrounded by guns and mounted hunting prizes on the wall behind him. As Romeo and Juliet sleep upstairs, she, too, is being pulled into the patriarchal order against her will.

When Juliet first refuses, her mother turns away from her and her father throws her to the ground, screaming, “I give you to my friend.” Juliet sobs, begging her mother to delay the marriage–but she refuses, and walks away.

Even those closest to her betray her desires–Father Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) and her nurse (Miriam Margolyes) encourage her to marry Paris.

Juliet goes to Father Laurence and holds a gun first to her head, and then points it at Father Laurence to prove her determination to not marry Paris. Juliet takes control, even when all is working against her. Juliet refuses to bend to the will of the men (and world-weary women) around her.

Noteworthy in Luhrmann’s adaptation is his profuse use of religious symbolism, specifically Catholic iconography. This is another set of patriarchal rules they live under. The images in the film have meaning but not depth; they are as threatening as they might be comforting. Jesus looms over the city (he’s under repair when Tybalt lies dead in the fountain below him). Christianity is present in the city, in Juliet’s room and around Romeo and Juliet’s necks, but it doesn’t save them.

The modernization of key plot points–the certified letter that wasn’t delivered, the dealer that supplies Romeo with poison (fetched from the base of a Virgin Mary lamp), Captain Prince surveying the city in a helicopter–work remarkably well. And the soundtrack–oh, the soundtrack.

In the original text, there is a span of time between Romeo’s suicide and Juliet waking to see him lying dead. Luhrmann plays this scene much more dramatically–she wakes as he’s about to take the poison, and in his shock his hand bumps it into his mouth. They are both alive for a moment, and she kisses him while he’s dying. The lack of bystanders or spectators in this scene makes it more powerful–even a Shakespeare purist could attest to that fact.

The death scene is altered from the original text, and adds to the emotional impact.

Juliet shoots herself with no comment, and the camera pans up, looking at their dead bodies below while flashing back to moments of happiness.

Captain Prince screams “All are punished,” while their dead bodies are put into ambulances and the fathers look on bewildered.

In the original text, Friar Laurence gives a lengthy monologue, explaining all that had happened. Capulet and Montague shake hands and commit to peace.

In most Shakespearian tragedies, while there may be a pile of dead bodies at the end, there’s a sense of closure that things will be better in the future, or that the tragic tale will serve to teach others a lesson.

Not here.

There’s simply bewilderment, and the sense that the patriarchy, the violence, the incessant masculinity of Verona Beach has won, and everyone has lost because of it.

The story, then, isn’t about tragic young love. It’s about the tragedy of adhering to codes of behavior that are inherited and not freely chosen.

Luhrmann–by capturing a time and place that was at the same time specific and completely timeless–reminded a new generation of these messages that are as important and poignant today as they were in 1996, and as they were in 1595.

—–

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

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Hellraisers in Hoop Skirts: Gillian Armstrong’s Proudly Feminist ‘Little Women’

This is a guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

When I think of the inspiring women in the books I read as a kid, I don’t think of the girls my age like Ramona Quimby or Harriet Welsh. No, when I was 10 years old, I wanted, more than anything, to be Josephine “Jo” March, the central character in Louisa May Alcott’s extraordinary 1868 novel, Little Women. While some little girls would bristle at the hoop skirts and Civil War hardship and use of such offensive curses as “Christopher Columbus!” I adored it…in part because I saw the March girls as out of their time, rambunctious, admirable, and most clearly modern. There have been many film adaptations of Alcott’s story, but in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, you feel the modernity first and foremost, as the brilliant screenplay and even more brilliant performances of Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, and the other girls show you what you’ve always suspected: that Little Women is a full-on feminist narrative.

March girls in bed

True, sometimes Little Women looks like “chick lit”—and certainly if it were published today, its cover would telegraph it as such, in curlicue text, pink background, and lacy border. But it was a truly subversive thing to have a female-centric novel in the late 1800s: a book in which the first half is without a wedding, where women talk to each other without needing a man to talk about, and where women rail against the limitations set upon them. Little Women was an extraordinary achievement and a commercial success, and it made Louisa May Alcott a literary icon equal to Jane Austen (who wrote about the rocky road to successful marriages) and the Bronte sisters (who wrote about the tragic consequences of failed romance). If you really want to hate on the “chick lit” classification of Little Women, just remember: before you could be a Hannah/Marnie/Jessa/Shoshanna, or even a Carrie/Miranda/Samantha/Charlotte, you had the much richer pantheon of Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth to choose from.

Winona Ryder as Jo

These young women talk openly about money, politics, education, love, and above all, the expectations set upon them. Jo (Ryder) drives the movie, narrates and controls its pace, and she gives the perfect period performance by a contemporary actress—in part because she doesn’t hide just how modern and unnatural she is in the heavy skirts she’s obligated to wear. She seems genuinely uncomfortable, just as Jo would be, slouching, hunching, galumphing about, talking with her mouth full, stomping her feet in the snow. Jo has bigger ambitions than to be pretty or charming: she has a bright mind, a passion for writing, and a dream of sharing her stories with the world. Ryder’s passion, the gusto with which she delivers every line, sings out, and makes this one of her best performances.

Laurie (Christian Bale) and Jo

Jo’s impulse, in every situation, is to express her true opinions, which makes it difficult for her to imagine conventional love with any kind of traditional man. Her friendship with Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (a smoking hot Christian Bale), the rich boy next door, is grounded in an appreciation of each other’s good humor, intelligence, and kindness. When Laurie and Jo first meet, sparks fly not from physical attraction, but a heady, hilarious exchange of wits. Their relationship is rooted in mutual respect, and a mutual desire to cast off societal expectations for proper behavior. (No coincidence that they both go by nicknames.) Neither of them fit a mold, and so they fit perfectly together. “If only I were the swooning type,” jokes Jo after a night at the theater. “If only I were the catching type,” Laurie retorts playfully. When Jo insists the girls include Laurie in their theatrical enterprises, he’s only allowed to do so by volunteering a means of communication—a mailbox stationed between their two houses, to encourage “the baring of our souls, and the telling of our most appalling secrets.” Because the girls hold the power, they are the ones who decide whether Laurie can be trusted. They are the rulers of their own government, and so, Jo narrates, “And so Laurie was admitted as an equal into our society, and we March girls could enjoy the daily novelty of having a brother of our very own.”

But Laurie, however sibling-like, never gets a relationship as intense as that between the sisters: the girls are fiercely loyal to each other and collaborative in bringing life, culture, and comforts to their home. They write plays and newspapers, sing songs, and rally in times of great poverty and conflict. The first half of the film, focused on their childhood years during the War, brings each girl’s dreams and frustrations into focus, and establishes the characteristics that will follow them into adulthood.

Claire Danes as Beth

A 14-year-old Claire Danes, perfectly suited to her role as a less moody Angela Chase dressed up in gingham, plays Beth. During a recent viewing, I found myself muttering, “Ugh, Beth sucks,” a reaction provoked by her demure, stick-in-the-mud, Mary Bennett-like status. But Beth is daunted by the prospect of having to grow up—and so, she never truly does, remaining housebound by a childhood illness. “I never saw myself as anything much,” Beth says, soft-spoken and sweet even on her deathbed. “Why does everyone want to go away? I love being home.” (Beth’s death scene, a tearjerker by any standard, is especially poignant when you realize that, though Beth’s adventures had a smaller sphere, they were no less wonderful to her.)

Kirsten Dunst as Amy

The youngest March sister, Amy (played, in the first half, by a wonderfully petulant 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst) is constantly looking ahead, making proud declarations about how she plans to reshape her nose and marry someone “disgustingly rich.” “We’ll all grow up someday,” Amy says, “We might as well know what we want.” Amy’s vanity and flightiness are often, but Dunst brings a tender longing to her growing pains, giving real weight to the scene where she reveals that her schoolteacher beat her for trading limes at recess. When Amy tells her family “Mr. Davis said it was as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat,” they unite against him. Amy may be frivolous at times, but she has the same sense of outrage as her sisters.

But these girls are not always lovely in dealing with their problems: they get to have real conflicts, fully violent confrontations, and true arguments. No moment is more frightening than that of Amy’s revenge on Jo after a night out, an attack so specifically crafted that it could only result in a dramatic fight. “Your young ladies are unusually active,” says Mr. Brooke to Marmee (Sarandon), and she smiles coyly in response. These girls are unconventionally free, far from the “gentling influence” that others expect them to be—for better or for worse.

What drives the film, and what shows its strengths as a female-directed, written-, and produced endeavor, is addressing the complexities of female life even as the film pivots into the March girls’ adult lives. The oldest March sister, Meg (Trini Alvarado) chooses love over fortune when she marries Laurie’s former tutor, John Brooke (Eric Stoltz). Amy (now played by Samantha Mathis, far less feisty in adulthood) travels with Aunt March (Mary Wickes) to France, where she develops her talents as an artist and reassesses her ideas of romantic love. And Jo, when confronted with an unexpected proposal from Laurie, surprises even herself when she declines his offer—not because she doesn’t love him, but because she cannot envision herself as a wife.

Laurie’s proposal is full of admiration for Jo’s specific virtues (“I swear I’ll be a saint,” he pleads. “I’ll let you win every argument”), but Jo cannot see her dearest friend as any kind of conventional beau. Frustrated with herself, with her inability to change and become a traditional woman, Jo breaks down in tears, but soon charges forward on a challenge from Marmee: “Go and embrace your liberty, and see what wonderful things come of it.” The movie shifts to focus squarely on Jo on her own in New York, pursuing any chance to set her writing free, and to find someone who will love her as she is.

Jo and Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne)

While shopping her writing to disdainful publishers, she meets Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne), a professor who bonds with her first by intellect (they exchange lines of Goethe and Walt Whitman) and then by love. Bhaer encourages her to speak her mind, to take and defend her political stances, and to be bold in her writing and in her life. Jo is pushed to go far beyond her fantastical thrillers and to uncover something she truly wants to talk about, to deepen and shape her childhood fancies into real art. Jo finds herself able to love only when she can be loved for herself as she is. “Jo…” Bhaer says, tenderly embracing her at the film’s close. “Such a little name for such a person.”

Meg played by Trini Alvarado

You can see Jo’s journey as the heart of Little Women, and that’s fine. But my admiration for Armstrong’s film truly crystallized when you look at how the movie treats Meg March. Though she possesses great compassion and intelligence, Meg is constantly appraised as a beautiful, eligible young woman ready for a proper beau. Her conflicts with Jo primarily arise over how much she should follow other girls’ examples in proper behavior at parties and balls, and the constant refrain from her Aunt March is that the “one hope for [the] family is for [Meg] to marry well.” However, Meg constantly questions how she’ll negotiate the world when she will always be seen as a pretty girl, whether she must play the part at every turn or strike out on her own. But there is a reason that you have Marmee played by the actress formerly known as Louise Sawyer: in her response to Meg’s questions, Marmee’s message about a woman’s place becomes not just bold, but revolutionary.

Marmee: Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.

Meg: Why is it Laurie may do as he likes, and flirt and tipple champagne…

Marmee: … And no one thinks the less of him? Well, I suppose, for one practical reason: Laurie is a man. And as such, he may vote and hold property and pursue any profession he pleases. And so he is not so easily demeaned.

Meg: […] it’s nice to be praised and admired; I couldn’t help but like it.

Marmee: Of course not. I only care what you think of yourself. If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty—but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind. Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage—these are the things I cherish so in you…. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world.

In this brief scene, Little Women’s focus shifts from being a story about a cozy band of sisters to an examination of where women have been, and where they might take themselves. Marmee says the world is unjust, but that the girls will strive to set it right, and in pursuing love and art in each of their lives, the March sisters manage to redefine, on every level, what kind of stories women might tell.

———-

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

The Best of 2012 (I think)

Written by Rachel Redfern.

New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott said that 2012 was a year of Hollywood heroine worship, and he lists some fabulous movies with strong and unique female characters.

In a similar spirit I’d like to promote my top (female-centered) film and TV show of 2012.

While Turn Me On, Dammit was actually released in Norway in 2011, it wasn’t released until 2012 in the United States, which feels logical enough in posting it in a ‘Best of 2012’ list. Turn Me On, Dammit is cleverly written and hilariously and astutely portrays a young girls coming of age, specifically as she deals with her rampant teenage hormones.

The film has sharp characters, a sex-positive message, and ultimately shows a young woman standing up for herself and her actions. The film is everything that I hope cinema continues to be, original stories with unique female characters and a positive and accurate portrayal of women. You can read my original (and far better) review of the film here.

The category of favorite feminist TV show of 2012 was a bit harder because in thinking about it, I realized that I love lots of shows, but very few should really be considered feminist friendly. So many of the amazingly well-written shows that grace my laptop screen still focus on male stories and male characters. While women obviously play a role in these TV shows (for example, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy) the main protagonists and driving plot forces are still usually only men.

However, there is one show that does fulfill the criteria of strong, unique female protagonist and that is of course, Homeland. Claire Danes is Carrie Mathieson, a brilliant CIA analyst whose obsession with finding terrorists leads her to a recently returned POW who she believes has been turned.

The TV show has been lauded for Danes’ portrayal of mental illness and confident intelligence officer as she battles her way through national security and personal relationships. The show is subtle in a it’s themes of women in politics, sexuality, international affairs and familial relationships and features several prominent female characters other than Danes.

Morena Baccarin is the loyal, yet realistic POW’s wife and Amy Hargreaves as Danes’ doctor-sister and her faithful anchor during her troubles. This award-winning show is one of the best things on TV right now and Claire Danes’ award-winning performance and provacative character is not to be missed. For a longer (and better) review, read Bitch Flicks contributor, Leigh Kolb’s, review here.

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.

Cali Loria tweets @realcaliloria.

Women in Politics Week: ‘Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: A Pulsing Beat of Jazz and ‘Crazy Genius’

Carrie Mathison, a haunted yet brilliant CIA analyst

This post, by Leigh Kolb, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 10, 2012.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.
— Billie Holiday

In the pilot episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), hurries back to her Washington D.C. apartment after a night out, and the audience sees a photo of jazz musicians and pieces of artwork emblazoned with the word “Jazz.” Jazz–the nebulous, wholly American musical genre–is improvisation. It is individualism and collaboration. It is color-outside-the-lines, boundary-pushing rhythm. It is Carrie, a CIA analyst who must push and navigate her way around the patriarchal CIA and her brilliant and bipolar mind.

When adapting an Israeli drama for an American audience, the show’s writers immediately knew they wanted to make their hero a female. While Carrie’s gender is never an explicit issue in the series, the viewer can discern that many of her challenges (and some veiled advantages) are related to her womanhood.

Carrie shows very early on that she doesn’t strictly play by the rules. In the opening scene of the pilot, she is driving around the streets of Baghdad, headscarf down, and talking on the phone with her superior back in D.C. When she gets stuck in traffic, she simply gets out of the car and starts walking, pulling up her headscarf. She doesn’t hesitate to improvise, and is constantly navigating to make inroads that seem impossible.

The Ken Burns Jazz documentary website states,

So while it is true that jazz is a demanding and competitive field for both men and women, it is also true that a woman who shows up for an audition or jam session with a tenor sax or trumpet in her gig bag is greeted with a special variety of raised eyebrows, curiosity and skepticism. Is she serious? Can she play? Time-worn questions about women and jazz buzz through the room before she blows a note.

Carrie’s personal and professional lives weave together–the professional trumps the personal, but her private battles threaten her career.

When Carrie is questioning the American POW Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) for the first time, she is calm and firm, yet her pressing questions make her supervisor question her, as Brody is clearly uncomfortable. The CIA has moved past its extreme “woman problem” of the 80s and 90s, but certainly it’s not immune to continued gender bias.

The audience knows that Saul (Mandy Patinkin) has been Carrie’s mentor, and he continues to be one throughout the series. This older man, who helps guide and protect a young female protagonist, is a popular trope (Ron Swanson, Jack Donaghy and Don Draper, to name a few). It makes sense to the audience that a young woman doesn’t break into the boys’ club alone, so oftentimes these male mentors serve as powerful gatekeepers to gendered worlds. Whether this trope is realistic or reductionist, or somewhere in between, is an important point of discussion (much like the fact that Carrie’s mother is an absent character and her father shares an intense connection with her as they share the same bipolar disorder–this recurrent “absent mother” trope for female protagonists is problematic to say the least).

Saul serves as a mentor to Carrie. (Patinkin has been outspoken about issues of television and feminism.)

While the audience can assume that Carrie has seen and felt many “raised eyebrows, curiosity and skepticism” in her rise through the ranks, her creativity and improvisational talent give her power.

It’s ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.
— Lena Horne

In the aforementioned scene, when Carrie rushes home after a night out, she strips down to a slip and wipes her crotch with a damp washcloth while brushing her teeth. She hurriedly slips off a wedding ring as she leaves to go to work at CIA Headquarters.

Later, she goes to a jazz bar (after laboriously–not pleasurably–putting on black lace) and tells a man in a suit that she wears the ring to “weed out guys looking for a relationship.” After some obligatory flirting, she suggests they leave and go elsewhere.

When Carrie strikes up a sexual relationship with Brody later in the first season (after drunken, raw sex in her backseat), it’s always mildly unclear whether she’s doing so for professional gain. The relationship ebbs and flows in and out of her favor, and the audience realizes that Carrie enjoys sex and some level of human connection. Even when it looks and feels like a chore (as she puts on her black lace, for example), sex is something that Carrie needs. Period.

No strings, no clear ulterior motives, no obsession with marriage. Carrie’s sexual persona is as startling–and as normal–as the crotch-wipe after a night out.

The complexity of relationships and marriages is a central theme in many subplots (Brody’s wife, Jessica, believing her husband dead, has a serious relationship with his best friend; Saul’s wife struggles with his work schedule, although she is a highly successful professional herself). The relationships all reflect very realistic scenarios, and the women–supporting characters, even–are complex and whole.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things — all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
— Nina Simone

When Carrie gets up to leave the jazz bar with her catch of the night, she stops and notices Brody and his family on television. She observes the finger movements of the trumpeter, pianist and bassist, and connects them to the finger-tapping motions Brody is making on his televised press conferences. She leaves her date behind and rushes to Saul’s house, more convinced that Brody has been turned.

Carrie has a wall in her apartment dedicated to unraveling the al-Qaeda terror plot she believes Brody to be operating in. Her personal life and professional life have few boundaries (and her only clear pleasures–jazz music and sex–bleed into her career as well).

Her thought processes are very rarely black and white, as are her male colleague’s. She always seems to be trying to connect new and different dots, and looking at other pieces of stories. When Aileen Morgan and Raqim Faisel were being hunted as prime terrorist suspects, the male agents assumed Aileen was the “terrorist’s girlfriend.” It was Carrie who finally said, “Maybe she’s the one driving this…” And she was. The blonde white woman was the catalyst to their involvement with a terror plot, and Carrie had to point out the possibility that their assumptions (white woman tricked and trapped by a Middle Eastern extremist) were wrong.

A Guardian blog post connected the fact that a Thelonious Monk song was playing as a backdrop when Carrie drove to attend a meeting at the CIA Headquarters. The writer notes,

Monk was hospitalised at various points in his career due to an unspecified mental illness and there has been some debate about whether he could have had a schizophrenic or bipolar disorder. (In fact, jazz and schizophrenia have long been linked. It is argued that New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, the ‘inventor of jazz’, improvised the music he played as his schizophrenia did not allow him to read music, evolving ragtime into a more free form of music in the process.) It is an association that positions Carrie, who takes anti-psychotics, as a ‘crazy genius’ like Monk.

Carrie’s mental and emotional well-being, as is exposed in the first season, is held together by those non-aspirin pills she takes out of the aspirin bottle every morning. Her sister gives her anti-psychotics illegally, since she would not be able to be a CIA agent if they knew she had bipolar disorder. Her tenacity, her genius and her fragility (she sobs to her sister at one point, “I’ve been on my own for a while now…”) are in constant battle. She is, very often, on the edge.

Nick Brody and Carrie develop a complicated relationship, although her theories of his terrorist involvement were correct.

When she got (many) drinks with Brody before they first had sex, she told him,

“When I was a girl, my friends and I used to play chicken with the train on the tracks near our house and no one could ever beat me, not even the boys.”

One can see Carrie’s life as an endless game of chicken, whether it’s with trains, sex, surveillance without warrants or hiding a mood disorder. That constant challenge–not unlike a call-and-response jazz pattern that encourages louder and faster feedback–both energizes and limits Carrie throughout the series.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.
— Billie Holiday

Carrie’s right. She knew Brody was turned, though no one would listen. Brody’s teenage daughter, Dana (in all of her teenage angst), with Carrie’s help, figured it out as well (and some argue it was Dana who really stopped Brody).

However, Brody stopped himself (his conscience and a malfunctioning bomb stopped him, rather, or even Dana’s phone call). He reigns in the public eye as the good guy, the rising politician, and the complexities of his terrorist motives (connected to drone strikes that killed a young boy) are difficult for the audience to make right and wrong out of. (This is, of course, what good storytelling does.)

Carrie, however, has been found out. A hospitalization left her without her medication, and she chooses to undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, or shock treatment, which is becoming more popular in the US, mostly with female patients) to “heal” her mental disorder. The treatment makes her forget much of what she knew, and she can’t realize that she’s helped thwart another terrorist attack. Her intense guilt after “missing something” on 9/11 certainly drove her mania deeper, yet she is compelled to give up the part of herself that drives her forward with the ECT.

Just as the song is truly falling into place in her head, she loses it.

Not to discount the real and debilitating nature of Carrie’s bipolar disorder, one must also reflect upon women’s history in terms of mental illness and the diagnosis and treatment plans women were subjected to. Carrie enters into Season 2 a more domesticated woman (teaching English, gardening, attempting “domestic normalcy”). Treatment for women’s emotional disorders–or perceived disorders–in the late 1800s and early 1900s was often the “rest cure,” when women were isolated and kept away from mental and physical stimulation. This harmed more women than anything, and Carrie being kept from her challenging mental stimulation and work is not, most viewers would argue, good for her. This feminine fragility at the hands of a mental illness isn’t new, nor is the treatment. She’s consistently second-guessed and made to feel insecure, which leads her to doubt herself. However, Saul understands their need for her at this point in Season 2, and will hopefully continue to be her cheerleader and help her navigate the waters.

Carrie’s inner conflicts, starting from her girlhood, are repeated every episode in the show’s opening credits. Dissonant jazz trumpets play in the background, and scenes showing a little girl’s hands playing the piano and trumpet are cut with professionals’ playing. As the audience sees pictures of a young Carrie growing up–in a mask, in a maze, smiling for the camera–news footage from America’s recent history is spliced in (from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, with sound bites from numerous domestic tragedies). Her sleeping eyes dart, and her panicked adult voice repeats her guilt and fear of “missing” something from ten years before. Even from this opening sequence, the audience is left tense and uncomfortable feeling and seeing Carrie’s thought patterns.

Improvising is much more difficult than reading sheet music. Jazz musicians must perform on a much different plane than classical musicians–the uncertainty, the complexity and the unexpectedness of what your fingers, or your band mate’s fingers, might do next is nothing short of terrifying. But in this game of “chicken,” the end result is a masterpiece.

Momentarily, Carrie has been relegated to the padded room of elevator music, soft and predictable.

Carrie chooses to undergo ECT, as she convinces herself in Season 1 that her suspicions about Brody are delusions.

Former CIA covert-operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson, who wrote “The Women of the CIA” nearly two years before Homeland first aired, says of Carrie Mathison:

Carrie does not suffer from the common female need-to-please trait and, in fact, insists she is usually right. She is impulsive in a job that rewards patience and lies to the few people who can tolerate her…You root for her because those very despicable qualities also make her extraordinarily good at her mission. Danes breathes life and realism into a character who, for once, goes against the clichés of what a female CIA officer is supposed to do and look like.

Carrie is back in action in Season 2, and Saul is listening.

Carrie, much like the female jazz musicians before her, does her best to break boundaries and succeed in the boys’ world. Perhaps she could, and hopefully she will, as long as she can both overcome her bipolar disorder while at the same time retaining the impulsive, creative, compulsive thinking that makes her brilliant.

‘Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: A Pulsing Beat of Jazz and ‘Crazy Genius’

Carrie Mathison, a haunted yet brilliant CIA analyst.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

“I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.”

— Billie Holiday

In the pilot episode of Homeland, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), hurries back to her Washington D.C. apartment after a night out, and the audience sees a photo of jazz musicians and pieces of artwork emblazoned with the word “Jazz.” Jazz–the nebulous, wholly American musical genre–is improvisation. It is individualism and collaboration. It is color-outside-the-lines, boundary-pushing rhythm. It is Carrie, a CIA analyst who must push and navigate her way around the patriarchal CIA and her brilliant and bipolar mind.

The Ken Burns Jazz documentary website states,

“So while it is true that jazz is a demanding and competitive field for both men and women, it is also true that a woman who shows up for an audition or jam session with a tenor sax or trumpet in her gig bag is greeted with a special variety of raised eyebrows, curiosity and skepticism. Is she serious? Can she play? Time-worn questions about women and jazz buzz through the room before she blows a note.”

Carrie’s personal and professional lives weave together–the professional trumps the personal, but her private battles threaten her career.

Saul serves as a mentor to Carrie. (Patinkin has been outspoken about issues of television and feminism.)

“It’s ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.”

— Lena Horne

No strings, no clear ulterior motives, no obsession with marriage. Carrie’s sexual persona is as startling–and as normal–as the crotch-wipe after a night out.

“Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things — all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.”

— Nina Simone

A Guardian blog post connected the fact that a Thelonious Monk song was playing as a backdrop when Carrie drove to attend a meeting at the CIA Headquarters. The writer notes,

“Monk was hospitalised at various points in his career due to an unspecified mental illness and there has been some debate about whether he could have had a schizophrenic or bipolar disorder. (In fact, jazz and schizophrenia have long been linked. It is argued that New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, the ‘inventor of jazz’, improvised the music he played as his schizophrenia did not allow him to read music, evolving ragtime into a more free form of music in the process.) It is an association that positions Carrie, who takes anti-psychotics, as a ‘crazy genius’ like Monk.”

Nick Brody and Carrie develop a complicated relationship, although her theories of his terrorist involvement were correct.

When she got (many) drinks with Brody before they first had sex, she told him,

“When I was a girl, my friends and I used to play chicken with the train on the tracks near our house and no one could ever beat me, not even the boys.”

“One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.”

— Billie Holiday

However, Brody stopped himself (his conscience and a malfunctioning bomb stopped him, rather, or even Dana’s phone call). He reigns in the public eye as the good guy, the rising politician, and the complexities of his terrorist motives (connected to drone strikes that killed a young boy) are difficult for the audience to make right and wrong out of. (This is, of course, what good storytelling does.)

Just as the song is truly falling into place in her head, she loses it.

Momentarily, Carrie has been relegated to the padded room of elevator music, soft and predictable.

Carrie chooses to undergo ECT, as she convinces herself in Season 1 that her suspicions about Brody are delusions.

Former CIA covert-operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson, who wrote “The Women of the CIA” nearly two years before Homeland first aired, says of Carrie Mathison:

“Carrie does not suffer from the common female need-to-please trait and, in fact, insists she is usually right. She is impulsive in a job that rewards patience and lies to the few people who can tolerate her…You root for her because those very despicable qualities also make her extraordinarily good at her mission. Danes breathes life and realism into a character who, for once, goes against the clichés of what a female CIA officer is supposed to do and look like.”

Carrie is back in action in Season 2, and Saul is listening.

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