Class – Bitch Flicks

Andrea Arnold: A Voice for the Working Class Women of Britain

British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. … [The characters in ‘Fish Tank,’ ‘Wasp,’ ‘Red Road,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’] venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in.

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

If we were to play a game of word association with the offensive word ‘chav’ (a pejorative term that “demonizes” working class people), what would immediately spring to mind? If you’re aware of how the word makes appearances in British tabloids, your words are probably going to be less than savory. ‘Uneducated,’ ‘racist,’ ‘unemployed,’ ‘scroungers,’ and ‘breeders’ are unfortunately likely to be the first among them — horrible stereotypes of poor people. British director/screenwriter Andrea Arnold has three short films and three feature films under her belt, and four out of six of those center on working class people. But Arnold does something unique with this; instead of avoiding the offensive ‘chav’ label, she embraces it and all of its connotations to the characters’ very core, all the while asking the audience: when is it okay to mock these people?

In her Oscar-winning short film Wasp (2003), Andrea Arnold takes on the stereotypes of working class women to an almost unbearable extent. The film focuses on a single mother and her four children over the course of a day. Our protagonist Zoe, a white working class woman in her twenties, drags her kids (and herself) half clothed to a neighboring house so she can attack the mother of a child who attacked her own. When Zoe discovers that the only edible thing she has in her council flat (public housing apartment) is moldy bread, she gives her children a bag of sugar to satisfy their appetites. Later, she leaves her children unattended outside a pub for hours while she stays inside on a date. At first you may be mistaken for believing this is more an advertisement for contraception than a short film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemvMDQaRTo

While doing press junkets for the release of Fish Tank, Arnold stated in an interview:

“There’s a lot of press on hoodies and gangs and single mums and a lot of simplistic things said about these people. Every single person is complicated and if you look at everyone’s life they’re complex… you shouldn’t make assumptions about people, you should look at everyone individually and make no judgments.”

Arnold doesn’t just present these extreme flaws in Zoe; she also grants her the benefit of context. Zoe has four children, but she can’t even be in her thirties yet and there is no mention of support in her life. Where is the father(s) of her children? Zoe’s flat is decorated with glittery memorabilia, she compares herself to Victoria Beckham and hopes to one day find her David (with a magazine picture of him stuck to her wall). Zoe isn’t a grown woman, she’s a teenager stuck in the body of one. No one is there to realize this though, as Zoe’s mother “has a better social life than I do,” and the unasked question on absent men lingers in the air again — where is Zoe’s father in all of this? From the locals inside the pub, she gets criticized for her skills as a mother instead of support. Arnold presents these bread crumbs, not sob stories, to emotionally manipulate the audience. Here are her flaws, and these are the reasons why she has them. She presents us with three-dimensional characters, something absent from the headlines of The Daily Mail centering on working class people.

In the book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, writer and political commentator Owen Jones refers to a speech Prime Minister David Cameron gave:

“We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events, like a plague, or bad weather. Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make.”

Jones comments that:

“Cameron was tapping into sentiments that Thatcherism had made respectable: the idea that, more often than not, less fortunate people had only themselves to blame (page 74).”

This theme pulses through Wasp; is Zoe’s life the consequence of her own choices or of the society that has neglected her?

In Andrea Arnold’s feature length debut Red Road (2006), she doesn’t deconstruct stereotypes like in Wasp, but she still makes working class life visibly present. The film centers on Kathy, a working class woman in her thirties who is a CCTV operator. Through her loneliness, she observes the lives of the people she monitors with more than a professional interest. One day, she notices a man from her past who caused a great trauma in her life. This man is also working class. Kathy has her trials and tribulations to face over the course of Red Road, but being a working class woman isn’t one of them (nor should it always have to be). Arnold exposes viewers to working class life; instead of a drama set in a semi-detached Victorian house, why not a block of flats for a change?

Andrea Arnold’s follow up film was Fish Tank (2009), or as I like to call it, Wasp 2.0. The fish of the story is fifteen-year-old Mia. She spends her days stuck in the tank that is her council estate (public housing complex) in Essex, which just got smaller as she recently fell out with her best (and only?) friend Keeley. There’s not a lot for her to do in the fish tank — she dreams of one day becoming a dancer and practices in empty rooms. When she’s not doing that, she’s leaning against the glass of the tank, staring enviably at families and groups of friends, all the while binge drinking cheap hard cider and chain smoking.

Arnold taps in to David Cameron’s previous statement with the way she uses cinematography to stalk Mia. We the audience follows her, hand held, uncomfortably close like a documentary. We feel Mia’s claustrophobia and how she — and us — beg to break out of the confines of the tank.

The character of Connor preys on the working class. He uses Mia’s mother and emotionally toys with Mia. In one scene, Connor and Mia are in a lake trying to catch a fish. Connor tells Mia to walk slowly towards him so that the fish will go to him also. It is not just the fish that is hypnotized by Connor. The next day, Mia spots the caught fish dead on her kitchen floor, being devoured by her dog. This is a reflection of Connor’s degradation of the working class women at the end of the film. When he realizes that he could be arrested for statutory rape after sleeping with Mia, he discards both women without a word.

What I also admire about Arnold’s direction is that in both Red Road and Fish Tank, both Kathy and Mia’s characters envy other characters that are seemingly fulfilled, but are also working class. I find this detail pivotal, as it shows that Arnold isn’t saying that even though the characters face certain economic and social status restrictions, they aren’t striving to abandon their class. One class is not superior to the other.

In today’s society, the working class are consistently expected to be striving towards the middle class instead of being proud of their own class. In the book Chavs, Jones states that:

“Those labeled ‘chavs’ became frequently ridiculed for failing to meet lofty middle-class standards in what they wore, or how they ate. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was rightly applauded for his crusade to bring healthy food to the British school dinner menu. But it was a campaign marred by tut-tutting at the eating habits of the lower orders. On his Channel 4 programme, Oliver referred to parents who failed to sit around a table for dinner as ‘what we have learned to call “white trash”’. Jonathan Ross asked him on BBC1: ‘Well, do you ever think that some people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents? Like people from council estates?’ It was a ‘joke’ met with cheers (page 144).”

Arnold continued to explore themes of classism in her most drastic departure from her usual style yet, in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011), her first take on a costume drama. Brontë’s Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned.” Yet the ambiguously mixed race character is usually played by white actors. Arnold cast Black actors Soloman Glave and James Howson to portray the young and adult versions, respectively, of Heathcliff in her interpretation. The film introduces Heathcliff as a working class boy found on the streets of Liverpool. Like Mia and Zoe, the words that recur most in Heathcliff’s vocabulary are ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt.’ Arnold constructs the narrative to be solely through Heathcliff’s viewpoint, rather than housekeeper Nelly’s gaze of the pair’s relationship.

Throughout his childhood, the cantankerous Heathcliff always had Cathy as a rock to lean on. It didn’t matter how he spoke or what words he said, because he didn’t need to say anything with her. They communicated with delighted shrieks as they played in the moors. They spoke by holding each other as they shared a bed at night. At one point when Heathcliff’s back is beaten bloody, Cathy shows her sympathy by licking his wounds clean. That changes when Cathy is introduced to middle class society. She distances herself from Heathcliff by withdrawing her body from him and speaking to him condescendingly in her newly adopted manner.

Even though the film is a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff, it is Heathcliff’s narrative that Andrea makes us live through. She deemed the narrative of a working class man of color more vital than that of a white middle class woman. Like the audience feeling claustrophobic with Mia in her fish tank, the audience feels every whip that Heathcliff suffers, every burn from the stick that hits his flesh, every curse that’s thrown his way. The cinematographer isn’t concerned with capturing Cathy’s pain, who is screaming for mercy on behalf of Heathcliff off-screen.

Arnold’s overall message for Heathcliff’s story, and overall her main characters’ entire stories, becomes plainly evident in where she decided to end the film. In Brontë’s novel, we see Heathcliff spiral into villainy over his toxic love for Cathy and eventually die years later. However, Arnold’s version sees Heathcliff walking off into the moors, the fog making his path uncertain, just like his future, after he failed to open Cathy’s coffin to join her in death. Though seemingly grim, this is the optimistic ending that Arnold always offers her characters.

Zoe, Kathy, Mia and Heathcliff all venture off away from the preconceived notions they have been given, away from the stereotypes forced upon them, and the boxes society has trapped them in. Whether those boxes are council houses, fish tanks or Wuthering Heights.

External Sources: Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class. Verso, 2011.

Sophie Hall is from London and has graduated with a degree in Creative Writing. She is currently writing a sci-fi comic book series called White Leopard for Wasteland Paradise Comics. Her previous articles for Bitch Flicks were on Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You can follow her on Twitter at @sophiesuzhall.

‘Black Mirror’ is No More Universal Than ‘Girls,’ You Guys

The first season of the British sci-fi show ‘Black Mirror’ frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s ‘Girls.’ For some reason, though, ‘Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by ‘Girls’ is not.

Written by Katherine Murray. Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of bestiality and sexual assault]

The first season of the British sci-fi show Black Mirror frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s Girls. For some reason, though, Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by Girls is not.

Black Mirror is sort of a cult-hit TV show, so far consisting of two seasons with three episodes each, and a Christmas special starring Jon Hamm. The series first aired in the UK in 2011, but only made its way to North America and Netflix more recently. Much like The Twilight Zone, each episode tells a stand-alone story about a world slightly different from our own, where something creepy and terrible happens. Specifically, Black Mirror is focussed on technology and how inventions like social media, robots, virtual currency, and computer animation can be put to destructive use. The three episodes that make up the first season are “The National Anthem,” “Fifteen Million Merits,” and “The Entire History of You” – each of which follows the same broad pattern: the first twenty minutes are fascinating and unsettling, and then you realize that this entire fabricated universe exists to screw up some guy’s sex life.

Let me break it down:

In “The National Anthem,” the Prime Minister awakens to discover that someone has kidnapped the princess and posted a ransom video on YouTube. The terrorists are threatening to kill her unless he gives into their ridiculous demands and has sex with a pig on national television. This is an extreme situation that touches on a very serious question, about which there is much debate in real life: how do you deal with terrorist demands? There’s a very solid school of thought that says you should never give in to terrorist demands because that makes terrorism seem like a good way to get what you want, and another very solid school of thought that says that, if giving in to small demands could save a person’s life, you have a duty to – wait, that’s not what this story’s about. After about twenty minutes, questions of terrorism are completely pushed aside and the story becomes 100% about whether this one particular guy gets pressured into bestiality and whether his wife will forgive him.
In “Fifteen Million Merits” – which, in fairness, has important things to say about class stratification – working class people peddle bikes all day to supply power to the one percent. Their only hope of escape is to compete on an X-Factor-like TV show, which they have been convinced will allow the most talented among them to become celebrities. A working class guy falls in love with a working class girl who has a beautiful singing voice, and he uses all the credits he’s earned from peddling the bike to pay the super expensive contest entry fee so that she can compete and maybe have a better life. When she competes, the judges tell her that they already have enough singers, but she’d make a really good porn star, and she’s pressured into accepting their offer because she knows this is her only chance to not peddle the bikes. Her life becomes a hellish nightmare of drugs and X-rated encounters with strangers and everyone tells her that she should be grateful – but, wait, this episode isn’t about that. This episode is about how the X-Factor-like TV show robbed the working class man of the one thing that was good and pure in his life and perverted it by making it dirty and a porn star. The whole thing builds to a big, dramatic speech where he complains about everything they took from him, because that’s the most important part of what happened.
In “The Entire History of You,” people have chips in their brains that make objective recordings of everything they see, allowing them to play their conversations and experiences back later, looking for the truth. Imagine all the ways that that technology would change the world! What would become of law, education, history, and politics? What would happen if someone could hack your objective memories? What about the people who decide to forego the implant or have it removed? What an interesting cultural divide – but, wait. This story is actually about how some particular guy gets ridiculously jealous after realizing that his wife’s ex-boyfriend plays back recordings of what it was like to have sex with her when he jerks off. Because, apparently, remembering past sexual encounters when you masturbate is a new technology requiring a brain implant.

All of these stories are told from the really particular point of view of a heterosexual man who’s a little bit weird and anxious about sex, and all larger societal concerns and conflicts are pushed aside in favour of focussing on how world events and technologies will affect whether or not he can be with the woman he wants. “The National Anthem,” particularly, is an unintentionally rich vein of data for psychoanalysis – personally, I’m fascinated by the mind that thought, “My greatest fear about the internet is that terrorists will publically pressure me to engage in bestiality. What do you do in that situation? You basically have no choice!” But the point is that it’s really specific. It’s not actually a representation of universal thoughts and fears and experiences that everybody thinks and feels. And yet, the critical appraisal of Black Mirror would lead you to believe that it’s somehow more reflective of our shared humanity than Girls.

I’m sure I don’t need to spend five paragraphs explaining what Girls is, but, when it premiered, it was a highly anticipated series that met with a lot of backlash. The backlash was mostly because the series was framed – through advertising and pre-premiere interviews – as a story that was broadly about women in generation Y, when the content was actually a very specific, idiosyncratic story about what the show-runner’s life had been like in young adulthood. Like, she even cast her real-life friends in those roles.

While I’ve grown to like Girls a lot in the years since it premiered, I’ll admit that I was one of the people put-off by the opening episodes. There’s one early review that describes the characters as working class, because one of them has an unpaid internship, and that makes me laugh out loud, because working for free is a bourgeois luxury. It’s not something that working class people can do. And, the off-putting thing about Girls, at least in its first season, was that it took very specific experiences like that – experiences that only people with a certain amount of wealth and privilege ever have – and behaved as though they were universal coming-of-age rituals. The scene that really got me was the one in the first episode, where the main character casually asks her parents to pay for her apartment, like that’s a normal thing that happens.

Both Girls and Black Mirror improve after the first season – and Girls is now one of the shows I look forward to most every year – but my visceral reaction to the opening episodes was the same in both cases. I felt like I was being excluded from something I was supposed to belong to, and told that a group loosely defined as “Everyone” did not include people like me.

I know that lots of viewers had a similar reaction to Girls, not only for reasons of class, but also because it’s strange that the characters live in a diverse, densely-populated city like New York and only ever socialize with white people. But, reviews of Black Mirror usually don’t mention anything about the point of view. That’s partly because Girls is called Girls and Black Mirror is called Black Mirror. It’s also partly because both seasons of Black Mirror dropped in North America around the same time, so viewers had a chance to appreciate how the series grew in its second season. But, let’s be real – it’s also because stories about men are routinely accepted as being stories about human beings in general, while stories about women are immediately seen as more particular.

A few weeks ago, Linda Holmes said this great thing on Pop Culture Happy Hour about how one of the narrative devices in The Big Short that was specifically intended to draw in the viewer and make the story more relatable for him backfired and made her feel alienated because it became clear that the filmmakers thought “viewer” was the same as “heterosexual man.” While there are some people who felt alienated from Girls the moment they heard the word “girls,” there are other people, like me, who only felt alienated once it turned out that “girls” meant “heterosexual WASP/white Jewish middleclass women,” at which point it felt like a bait-and-switch. In the case of Black Mirror, my suspicion is that the focus on the sex life of Some Particular Straight Dude is supposed to be a way to draw the viewer into the story, and make the stakes and circumstances of the Big Ephemeral Sci-Fi Ideas concrete, and I think the reason that alienates me is that it reveals an assumption that the viewer is also Some Particular Straight Dude and will be able to relate.

The second season of Black Mirror does expand its focus and tell two of its three stories from the point of view of Some Particular Straight Woman – the first of whom is also a little bit weird about sex and the second of whom is part of the show’s most controversial episode, “White Bear.” Without getting into a lot of spoilers for “White Bear,” I’ll confess that, even though I think it’s a good script, I had a hard time going along with it, because the series had failed to build any trust with me before it took these risks. Because I felt alienated by the first season, I went into the second season full of suspicion, and it was hard for me to figure out whether “White Bear” was a story about the horrific corruption of the justice system or about how creepy-cool it is to watch some woman get tortured for hours and hours.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with making a show that’s just about hamsters chasing themselves through some particular writer’s mind, but I find it a little bit annoying that the hamsters in Charlie Broker’s mind are supposedly more reflective of our shared humanity than the hamsters in Lena Dunham’s mind, when they both look equally foreign to me. There are a few experiences that are truly universal – we all love, we all die, we all face up to certain harsh realities of life – but, in an increasingly global community, and in a world where we are more and more aware of others’ voices, it doesn’t make sense to keep pretending that stories about what it’s like to belong to any specific race or class or gender or sexual orientation are stories that cover the whole territory of what it’s like to be a person. My issue isn’t that Black Mirror and Girls shouldn’t exist – it’s that, when we talk about them, we should recognize that they both have a really particular point of view that includes the experience of some people while excluding the experience of others.

The holy grail of writing a story that speaks to universal themes is still a goal that we can all shoot for, but we have to really scale back on our idea of what’s “universal.”

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

Emily Gilmore and the Humanization of Bad Mothers

They’re complicated women who have both scarred each other over the years, and there’s no getting past that easily. But they both try. And in trying, we get a better picture of who they are as human beings. Like I said in the beginning, there’s something so valuable in seeing a character like Emily who is, unequivocally, a bad mother also be a good person. Because she is a good person. Sometimes. Mostly.

Three generations of Gilmores: Rory, Emily, and Lorelai.

This guest post by Deborah Pless previously appeared at her blog, Kiss My Wonder Woman, and appears now as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers. Cross-posted with permission.

It’s sad, but it’s true. When we talk about “bad mothers” we almost always limit our discussion, intentionally or not, to talking about mothers from lower income families, single mothers, mothers of color, and other women whose motherhood is deeply impacted by the difficulty of their ability to provide for their children.

Most of the “bad mommies” we’ve seen depicted on television fit this trend too, being disproportionately women of color with low incomes and frequently without a parenting partner. It would be really easy to look at the media, especially television, and come to the conclusion that the only real kind of bad mother is a poor one.

It’s arguably even more rare, though, to see a depiction or discussion of a woman who is a bad mother but not necessarily a bad person. A woman who, for all of her faults and genuine failures as a parent, is still a human being with wants and needs. In other words, sometimes women can be bad at being mothers but halfway decent at being people. We accept this readily when talking about fathers, but when it comes to mothers, it’s like we all freeze up. A bad mother must be a bad person. End of story.

Naturally, this isn’t true.

Lorelai and Emily at a Mother-Daughter fashion show. — Lorelai and Emily at a mother-daughter fashion show.

The truth is that reality is much more complex and difficult to understand than we like to admit. It’s so much easier to frame little bubbles of belief around ourselves and only pay attention to the narratives that affirm our understanding of the world. Motherhood is disproportionately valued in our society, which leads to an understanding that women are evaluated on the basis of whether or not we are mothers. If we are mothers, then we seem to think that our value is determined by whether or not we’re good at it. We are the products of our uteruses, and apparently nothing else.

But this misses the vast complexity of human experience, and, clearly, devalues women into walking incubators. And when all we see are narratives that enforce this, narratives that equivalence good motherhood with valid personhood, it’s hard to shake the idea that women are only good if we are good mothers.

So, with all of that in mind, let’s talk about Emily Gilmore, a fictional women who, glory of glories, managed to be both a bad mother and an interesting person, all without losing her genuine humanity. While much ink has been spilled over the years about Gilmore Girls and the unconventional relationship between mother and daughter Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore, the undiscovered country of the show is in the characterization of Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), Lorelai’s mother.

Emily Gilmore hits rock bottom on the rocks.

Emily Gilmore could have very easily been a caricature of a certain type of society matron, but she’s saved from that fate by the excellent writing of Amy Shermer-Palladino and the fantastic acting of Kelly Bishop. An upper class woman concerned primarily with image and status, Emily’s not a very nice person when we meet her in season one. She’s angry and bitter and cutting and devious, the sort of woman you would back away from slowly at a party. A running joke is made out of her inability to keep a maid employed (because she keeps firing them for tiny infractions), but the reality is that Emily Gilmore is a deeply unpleasant woman to be around.

The premise of the show actually makes it very clear that Lorelai has no real intention of pursuing a relationship with her mother. The first episode tells us that Lorelai hasn’t spoken to her parents in 15 years or so, having run away at 16, shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Lorelai has been living in isolation from her mother simply so that Emily could not control her life. The only reason she goes back to her parents is because her daughter, Rory, has been accepted to a prestigious private school, and Lorelai lacks the financial resources to pay the tuition.

This in and of itself is a pretty stark statement about the level of their relationship. Lorelai will only speak to her mother when the only other alternative is letting down her own child. That’s bad. It’s also understandable. The show never lets Emily off the hook or tells us she was secretly an amazing mother. While it does make clear that Emily has always cared about Lorelai more than Lorelai perhaps realized, it also gives us lots of evidence that Emily was an awful parent. She was manipulative, controlling, overly critical, and tried to micromanage her daughter’s every move.

What makes Gilmore Girls a great show, though, is that it gives us Emily Gilmore in all of her flawed parental glory, and doesn’t try to excuse or redeem it. Instead, it shows us a story where Lorelai and Emily come to appreciate each other for who they are. Emily doesn’t magically become a better parent, but she does become more and more aware of how terrible a parent she is, and she starts to want to change.

In other words, it’s not so much that Emily Gilmore is a terrible mother that I like, it’s that she’s a terrible mother who realizes she is. And, upon realizing that she has no relationship with her daughter at all, seeks to fix that.

It’s not an easy road, and the show, to its credit, does not give Emily much slack. She has to work for that relationship. Lorelai does too. They’re complicated women who have both scarred each other over the years, and there’s no getting past that easily. But they both try. And in trying, we get a better picture of who they are as human beings. Like I said in the beginning, there’s something so valuable in seeing a character like Emily who is, unequivocally, a bad mother also be a good person. Because she is a good person. Sometimes. Mostly.

At the very least, she’s a fully realized person. Emily Gilmore has all the faults and foibles that real people have. She has enemies and friends and flaws and spectacular good qualities. She yearns for a closer relationship with her husband but has no idea how to get it. She desperately wants to be a good mother, but utterly lacks the tools or understanding on how to relate to her child. She’s complicated, and I love that.

The Gilmores gather to celebrate Rory’s graduation.

It is also worth mentioning, however, that our understanding of Emily Gilmore really does come down along class lines. While it’s considerably less common to see a depiction of a white, upper class woman as a bad mother, it is more common to see women like Emily Gilmore given the benefit of the doubt, both by society and by the media. Still, that doesn’t make the show any less valuable as a depiction of the complexities of motherhood. Just, you know, take it with a grain of salt.

The main thing I want to get at here is simply this: women are not defined solely by our ability to parent. Some women are bad mothers. They just are. Whether because they are too proud to seek help or lack the emotional capacity or simply don’t see how their choices are affecting their children, some women are bad at being parents. And that’s important to admit. If we can’t see that, then we can’t understand women fully as people.

But more than that, if we can’t understand that a woman can be both a bad mother and still a valid, valuable human being, then we have no right to say that we understand the humanity of women. Characters like Emily Gilmore can help us see this, but ultimately it’s up to us. We have to admit the complexity of the world around us if we want it to get any better.

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor in western Washington when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and the search for gluten-free baked goods.

A Gutsy Tribute to the Heroes and Heroines of American Labor: Barbara Kopple’s ‘Harlan County, USA’

Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” –Malcolm X

Directed with great spirit and empathy by Barbara Kopple, the documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) is the story of an eventful strike in eastern Kentucky. The 13-month-long Brookside Strike (1973-4), as it was called, involved 180 miners from the Duke Power-owned Eastover Mining Company’s Brookside Mine in Harlan County. The film chronicles the miners’ fight to join the United Mine Workers of America, a move prohibited by the mining company when they refuse to sign the contract. Their hard struggle for representation, better wages and working conditions is lived and portrayed as a collective one. The men are joined on the picket lines by their wives who play a central role in the story. Their dramatic journey is understood and depicted as a deeply personal and political one.

In the first few minutes of Harlan County, U.S.A, the viewer is transported into the mines. We watch the men labor, and even have a bite to eat, in the grimy, confined spaces before emerging into the light once more. This is proper political film-making. Kopple takes us into the working men’s world. She sides with the miners and we are encouraged to do so too. She gives us a strong sense of how dangerous the job is. The men’s working conditions are appalling. The miners have had black lung for generations and suffer injuries for which they receive no compensation. The living conditions the workers endure are shameful too. Their houses don’t have indoor plumbing and running water. We see one miner’s wife wash her child in a tin bucket. Kopple’s documentation of these inexcusable living conditions may shock both American and non-American audiences watching today- as they, no doubt, must have done in 1976. U.S. popular culture- particularly Hollywood- does such a good job concealing American poverty that when audiences see it, it always comes as a jolt. This is, perhaps, even the case for people who have few illusions about the American Dream. There are, of course, reminders now and again. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, for example, revealed to the world disturbing truths about US economic inequality.

Numbers cited in Harlan County, U.S.A. tell an outrageous tale: coal company profits in 1975 rose 170 percent while workers’ wages rose only 4 percent. As U.M.W. organizer Houston Elmore explains, the miners are victims of a “feudal system.” The story of Harlan County, U.S.A. is one of struggle and resistance to power. The strike rejuvenates and organizes them. It is gruelling, perilous fight too. When they are not being arrested and jailed, they are being intimidated, assaulted and shot at by mining company thugs. Kopple is always with them recording their struggle. At one frightening night-time picket, her camera is attacked. The workers begin to arm themselves too. Tragedy finally strikes when a young miner is murdered. The company soon concedes and the strike ends. While the story of the strike may be a stirring one, and the workers secure their right to unionize, there is neither a neat nor fairytale ending. Some workers are happy with their pay but others express disappointment about their contract. Union compromises like the no-strike clause indicate that the struggle for miners’ rights will continue.

The women of the community play an essential, dynamic role during the strike. As with the men, the struggle strengthens and politicizes them. They join the picket lines too, and block the roads with their bodies to prevent the scabs from getting through to the mines. The women are fully aware of what they are up against. One addresses a judge at court: “You say the laws were made for us. The laws are not made for the working people in this country…The law was made for people like Carl Horn.” Carl Horn was the president of Duke Power at the time. Although the women are not entirely immune from letting personal crap get in the way, they are focused and determined. They are, in fact, incredibly strong. An older lady encourages them to not back down as backing down would mean a return to the dark, hungry days of the 30s. “If I get shot, they can’t shoot the union out of me,” she says. The women are also intimated, assaulted and shot at. The film rightly focuses on the collective but the community does have its characters. The most charismatic woman among them is perhaps organizer Lois Scott. Both an inspiration and a badass, Lois seems frightened of very little in life.

What Norman Yarborough, President of the Eastover Mining Company, says about the miners’ wives at a press conference is extremely revealing. When asked about their role, Yarborough smiles in a patronizing, good-old-boy fashion before conceding that they have played “a big role.” He goes on to say that their activities disturb him: “I would hate to think that my wife had played this kind of role….there’s been some conduct that I don’t think that our American women have to revert to.” Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

The numerous songs featured in the documentary illustrate the central role music plays in their lives of the mining community. They chronicle the history of Harlan as they rouse and unify its people. The most memorable is “Which Side Are You On?.” Widely recognised as one of the great protest songs of the 20^th century, this anthem to worker’s rights was penned by activist, folk song writer, and poet, Florence Reece. A daughter and wife of miners, Reese penned “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan strike of 1931. The great woman herself is featured in Harlan County, U.S.A. singing her iconic song at a strike rally.

The documentary focuses on the 1973 strike in Bloody Harlan but it also manifests an understanding of labor history. The miners, like any other exploited group, remember what was done to them decades before. Kopple connects the past to the present through powerful interviews with older residents, film footage and stills. Remembering is essential work, especially in a country where the silencing of historic abuses has always been routine. As writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Harlan County, U.S.A. is an extremely detailed, multi-layered film. The documentation of other labor-related events and struggles deepen our understanding of the time. Kopple documents leadership challenges and reforms in the union in the early seventies, the extraordinary story of the Mafia-style hit of United Mine Workers President Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter by President W.A. Boyle in 1969, as well as the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia mine explosion, a tragedy which killed 78 men.

Harlan County USA — Harlan County U.S.A.

Kopple gives an in-depth portrait of the men and women of the mining community of Harlan County as well as a gripping account of the strike that transforms them. She never patronizes the people of Harlan and she can never be accused of exploitative class voyeurism. From the very start, she plunges the viewer into the life of the community, and we are with them every step of the way.

Harlan County, U.S.A. is a stirring tribute to working-class kinship and activism. Although it is a story specifically rooted in the history of Harlan, as well as a very American story, the struggle for economic justice it documents is one that transcends regional and national borders. Koppel’s gutsy film-making was rewarded. Harlan County, U.S.A. won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards that year. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and it should be shown in every school in the United States.

Love and Freedom in The Eisenhower Years: ‘All That Heaven Allows’

But ‘All That Heaven Allows’ is not just a good-looking, affecting melodrama. It can be enjoyed on many different levels. In both indirect and observable ways, Sirk’s weepie targets oppressive aspects of post-war America. For some time now, both film critics and scholars have, understandably, foregrounded the socio-political uses of Sirk’s powerful, immoderate film-making style, as well as the subversive elements in his melodramas. They, in fact, invite socially and gender-aware readings.

Poster for All That Heaven Allows — Poster for *All That Heaven Allows*

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Directed by Douglas Sirk, All That Heaven Allows (1955) tells the romantic tale of Carrie Scott (Jane Wyman), an attractive, wealthy middle-aged widow who falls in love with a young landscape gardener. The object of her affection, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), is a handsome, brawny man in his late 20s or early 30s. He is the very opposite of Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a dull, older suitor Carrie politely tolerates. Carrie, in fact, spends a lot of her time alone although she has two grown children, Ned and Kay. Kay (Gloria Talbott) is a geeky, pretty social work student who loves to share her interest in psychoanalysis with others, even with her dim, sporty boyfriend. As with most ’50s American films, her intelligence is indicated by spectacles. Her brother, immaculately attired, handsome Ned (William Reynolds), loves to make martinis and control people. The other important person in Carrie’s life is her best friend Sara (Agnes Moorehead). She is a bit of a snob but comparatively nicer than the rest of the country club types who populate Carrie’s social life.

Ron Kirby comes from a very different world. He leads a natural, comparatively free, non-consumerist life in the woods. His friends are bohemian types and they too have renounced the reigning materialistic ethos of their place and time. When Carrie is introduced to them, she revels in their warm, unaffected ways. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t turn out too well when Carrie presents Ron to her friends, after announcing their plans to marry. When they’re not disparaging his tan or calling him “Nature Boy” behind his back, they’re mocking his socioeconomic status, and lack of materialistic ambition. It is the children, however, who will force Carrie to give up Ron, for the sake of family, propriety and property. She sacrifices her love for him for her children and convention but soon comes to regret it. Kay becomes engaged and Ned, hoping to study in Paris and work overseas, thinks it would be better to sell the house as it would be too big for his mother. As Carrie acknowledges, “The whole thing’s been so pointless.” A near-tragedy, however, thankfully brings the lovers back together in the end.

All That Heaven Allows is a deeply involving, and satisfying love story. Love stories are always, of course, more powerful when the lovers are faced with barriers to love, and when the romantic and erotic ache is painfully but pleasurably acute. Sirk provides a potent emotional and sensorial experience with All That Heaven Allows. Filmed in Technicolor, the hues of both the natural and human-made objects on the screen have a gorgeous, Expressionist intensity. Some of the film’s images are both over-the-top and wondrous. There is even a Disneysque deer that Ron feeds in winter. True to melodramatic form, he falls off a cliff, and suffers a concussion just when you think the lovers are on the verge of a reunion. All That Heaven Allows has, also, more subtle moments and images, in terms of narrative and style. Sirk’s mastery of shot composition is, equally, always evident.

But All That Heaven Allows is not just a good-looking, affecting melodrama. It can be enjoyed on many different levels. In both indirect and observable ways, Sirk’s weepie targets oppressive aspects of post-war America. For some time now, both film critics and scholars have, understandably, foregrounded the socio-political uses of Sirk’s powerful, immoderate film-making style, as well as the subversive elements in his melodramas. They, in fact, invite socially and gender-aware readings. Filmmakers too, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes have also found Sirk’s work stimulating and inspiring. Far From Heaven (2002) and Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974) both draw from All That Heaven Allows.

All That Heaven Allows can be interpreted, and enjoyed, as an empathetic critique of female alienation in post-war America. Carrie is presented as the ideal, upper middle-class WASP woman of the ’50s–elegant, gracious, attractive, but not too sexual, as well as, of course, loving and maternal. But there is something missing. Carrie feels empty and trapped. Lifeless even. The metaphor that describes her state is first used by her daughter earlier on in the movie when she marvels at the stylish, comparatively sexy red dress her mother puts on for a date with Harvey. Her mother should enjoy herself, she asserts, before elaborating: “Personally I’ve never subscribed to that old Egyptian custom of walling up the widow alive in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with his other possessions.” Kay will, of course, contribute to her mother’s metaphorical walling-up later on. It’s an Orientalist image, of course, but it’s used here to criticize post-war American patriarchy, particularly its puritan need to control female sexuality. When Kay adds that the custom does not exist anymore, her mother quietly replies, “Well perhaps not in Egypt.”

People–both men and women–make deeply personal, gendered assumptions about Carrie. In fact, they’re constantly telling her what she feels and what she wants. Men try to control her sexuality. Even harmless, old Harvey feels he has the right to tell her that she doesn’t really want romance at this stage. “I’m sure you feel as I do that companionship and affection are the important things,” he says. Her own son tries to regulate her sexuality. When Ned first sees that red dress, he tellingly remarks that it’s “cut kind of low.” More on him later. As the sexual target of a sleazy, married man, Carrie is also the object of more demonstratively misogynist control.

All That Heaven Allows takes aim at the nuclear family too. The grown-up kids are appalling. Her daughter thinks she’s hip but she’s as cowardly and conventional as the rest of Carrie’s loved ones. Ned’s a controlling, priggish prick. Kay does apologize for her behavior in the end but even so. In fact, the more you reflect on their efforts to shape their mother’s fate, the more sinister they seem. Her love for Ron represents a new start, a new life, new experiences, but they want her to give up her happiness and surrender her very self. The nuclear family–trumpeted in the ’50s (and even today)–as the be-all-and-end-all of human social units–is shown to be a sick little institution. Her son wants to the kill the love and desire his mother has for this tall, handsome, younger man. Kay playfully alludes to her brother’s Oedipal complex but he’s the real deal. Ned is outraged that his mother’s mate, and potential step-father, is “a good-looking set of muscles.” Ned buys a big-screen TV for Carrie. The television means safe, comfy company, of course. The message is clear: Get your slippers on, Mom, and watch The Ed Sullivan Show. No more pleasure, no more drama, no more love for you. Sit back and sacrifice your life. Watch other people living theirs. He may be young but he’s a true blue patriarchal asshole in the making. He’s also a zealot of the dominant consumerist, classist order.

All That Heaven Allows does address and critique American materialism and classism in a considerably direct fashion. The United States was fast becoming an unapologetically consumerist society in the ’50s. It is what drives nearly everyone around Carrie–apart from Ron and his happy lot. His lack of interest in money is the subject of conversation of the country club set. In his world, Carrie learns about another way of living. The materialist, consumerist life is clearly understood here as a conformist trap. Their spiritual guide is Thoreau. Carrie’s situation is particularly interesting, of course. She is the embodiment of privilege and the ideal consumer, but something is not right. Her alienation is spiritual as well as gender-specific. She is attracted to a different way of being. She does not just fall in love with Ron; she falls in love with his world too.

It’s a pleasurable sport analysing the socially subversive elements in All That Heaven Allows. What’s equally interesting, and gratifying, is spotting, and reflecting on, the historical setting, what is obscured and what is unsaid. The first time I watched it, my thoughts drifted, now and again, to what was going on in America and the world in the mid-fifties. The decade is generally described as a period of confidence and prosperity for America. For White America that is. For Black Americans, it was another story, of course. All That Heaven Allows was released in 1955. It was the year that 14-year-old Emmett Hill was murdered and mutilated in Mississippi and the year that Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks protested bus segregation laws in Montgomery, Alabama. Carrie’s peers do not speak of race. They are not only complacent, narrow-minded products of their age and class; they are also profoundly insular and provincial. There is no talk of Russia and the Cold War either. They are blind to their own nation’s troubles and seem ignorant of the U.S. government’s neo-imperialist involvements in other lands. It is an interesting, yet unsurprising, thing that Ned plans to take up a post in Iran following his Paris scholarship. The American government had already, in fact, paved the way for him. In 1953, the CIA, and the British, got the democratically-elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, ousted in an engineered coup. (He had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian oil company). The CIA finally admitted to its involvement in 2013. You just know Ned’s real-life version would go on to do very well for himself in the latter part of the 20th century. The unthinking, self-interested corporate type Ned represents is the future.

There is so much else to contemplate and admire in All That Heaven Allows. Jane Wyman gives an exquisite performance as Carrie. It’s a deeply sensitive, insightful portrayal, and we empathise entirely with our heroine’s situation. Wyman conveys her joys and fears beautifully, both the stabs of jealousy Carrie suffers when she fears Ron desires another woman, as well as the feelings of excitement she has when experiencing another way of life for the first time. Rock Hudson is less interesting but charming, and handsome all the same. Most crucially, he represents the promise of something new. The lovers are both good and gracious people, and the actors effectively capture their nobility and kindness as well as the gentle, tender nature of their love. Wyman and Hudson have considerable chemistry. Incidentally, All That Heaven Allows wasn’t the first time the actors had worked together in a Sirk movie. They had been successfully paired the previous year in Magnificent Obsession (1954).

All That Heaven Allows is also ravishing to look at. Visually, it is both intense and inventive. There are some pretty arresting images. Perhaps the most striking, and disturbing is that television Carrie’s kids buys for her. It may be the ultimate symbol of American consumerism and modernity in the mid-fifties but it quite horrifically embodies materialism, conformity, and alienation in All That Heaven Allows. It’s no exaggeration to say that for Carrie it represents a death-in-life existence. It is no less a symbol of oppression and mortality than the Egyptian widow’s tomb Kay talks about earlier in the movie. Although she has to surmount obstacles of convention and chance, Carrie will, thankfully, in the end, resist its darkness. For In All That Heaven Allows, female romantic love is a form of light, liberation, and resistance.

King Vidor’s ‘Stella Dallas’ and the Utter Gracelessness of Grace

These repeated conflicts make for a number of scenes in the film that, as Basinger has also asserted, are painful to watch. Our emotions are in conflict: Stella’s aims are noble, her execution hopelessly flawed. It’s hard to like her when she’s so inept, impossible not to sympathize because her purpose is so noble.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

Melodrama is a film genre that can get a bad reputation: overblown emotions, sweeping musical scores, a lot of “drama.” In its heyday in the 1950s, these films were primarily marketed to women, and (perhaps disparagingly) known as “weepies.” But melodrama is also an island in old Hollywood—an island full of complex, flawed women, the kinds of characters viewers can simultaneously love and hate, dynamic creatures who inspire and who are also cringe-worthy.

For me, one of the best examples of this is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). IMDb gives this one-line summary of the film: “A low class woman is willing to do whatever it takes to give her daughter a socially promising future.” Film scholar Jeanine Basinger, author of A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, takes a more sympathetic tone, calling Stella Dallas a “portrait of a poor girl who marries out of her class,” and notes that film icon Barbara Stanwyck’s performance as Stella is one of “great depth.” I would tend to agree with Basinger, but I must point out that the audience’s relationship to the eponymous woman is a complicated one.

Rather than an elegant, wealthy, and charismatic, Stella is a shameless social climber with no real “taste.” She comes from a ramshackle, cracker-box house and a factory-worker family, where Father and Brother both work at the local mill. Her only obvious female role model is her sallow-faced mother, who seems at once endlessly, admirably sacrificing and a woman who has had the life completely sucked out of her. Stella resists being anything like her mother. She puts little effort into making her brother’s lunch every day, and is instead invested in her looks, her clothes, and her culture (this last illustrated superficially by her enactment of reading a book—India’s Love Lyrics— as mill workers pass by her house). Eventually, Stella identifies down-on-his-luck former millionaire Stephen Dallas (John Boles) as her romantic conquest, and does everything in her power to land him for a husband who will take her away from her humble origins.

But class differences run deep. Though Stephen falls for Stella, perhaps because of her innocence and earthiness, she is unambiguous about wanting to make herself “better,” a cloudy idea she has that includes knowing the “right” people, going to the “real” places, as well as learning how to “talk like” those aforementioned people. The film makes it clear that Stella and Stephen are mismatched from the start—after their wedding and the subsequent birth of their daughter, Laurel, Stella can’t wait to get back to the River Club, and dance the night away with some high-class friends. Starting at this point, Omar Kiam’s costumes do their best to visually identify Stella as a gaudy parody of all things well-bred—she appears in all manner of spangle and print, usually together, and Barbara Stanwyck’s padded physique seems to be literally bursting at the seams of each ensemble. She is excess personified. Embarrassed by her flashiness and uncouth behavior, Stephen recoils from the relationship, finally taking a promotion that keeps him in New York City. Stella welcomes the separation, and yet one of the consequences of this move seems to be that Stella transfers her desire for upward mobility onto Laurel.

So why don’t we like her? What’s wrong with a mother wanting her daughter to have all of the best? Part of what makes Stella unlikeable is her effect on Laurel (played as a young woman by Anne Shirley). On the occasion of Laurel’s 16th birthday (for which Stella has made her daughter a beautiful, appropriate dress—why can’t she apply this savvy to her own clothes??) Stella takes a train to the city to obtain fancy party favors and table settings. She makes this trip in the company of good-hearted but loud, brash Ed Munn (Alan Hale, Sr.), who has lost some of his own formerly respectable class status through gambling disasters; as one country club attendee says, “He’s involved in horse racing.” He’s also clearly infatuated with Stella, though she rebuffs his affections and says, “I don’t think there’s a man living could get me going anymore.” Instead, she intones, all her energy is bound up in raising Laurel—both in the traditional sense of her upbringing, and in “raising” her social status above Stella’s.

Munn and Stella’s antics on the train are then observed by Laurel’s upright teacher and the mother of another girl invited to Laurel’s birthday party. Both of whom immediately pass judgment on the household, and by extension, Laurel, because of Stella’s behavior. The result is that no one attends Laurel’s party, which ends up being just the first in a series of unfortunate events, documented by Basinger in her writing on Stella Dallas, that occur when Stella’s class clashes with the class of those she strives to emulate. These repeated conflicts make for a number of scenes in the film that, as Basinger has also asserted, are painful to watch. Our emotions are in conflict: Stella’s aims are noble, her execution hopelessly flawed. It’s hard to like her when she’s so inept, impossible not to sympathize because her purpose is so noble. Class culture is indicted when viewers are asked to identify with Laurel, even when Laurel herself isn’t on screen—we understand the gap between the young woman’s intrinsic conservatism (which is deployed as a marker of upper-class behavior) and Stella’s inescapable and tragic inability to embody this value. This gap has a profound effect on how Laurel is perceived by the rest of the world, further inciting our sympathy for both women. Stella also articulates her own selfishness in several of these scenes, desiring to dance, shop, and be seen among these “right” people, before she realizes the she is not a blessing for Laurel, but a curse.

There’s a turning point in Stella Dallas that may or may not redeem Stella in the eyes of the audience. After Laurel has narrowly avoided an awkward scene with her mother in an ice-cream parlor, the two take a sleeper back to their home. As each of them pretends to sleep, they overhear other passengers talking about Stella’s larger-than-life appearance at the country club they’ve just left. The gossipy biddies agree that Laurel’s boyfriend will never continue their relationship when he’s made aware of Laurel’s lineage, and Stella slowly becomes aware that she’s a detriment to everything she has ever wanted for Laurel.

For the rest of the film, Stella forgets about her own desires and moves heaven and Earth to get Laurel away from her. This is simultaneously the best thing she could do to achieve her goal of propelling Laurel into the upper-class, and depicted as tremendously cruel for Laurel herself—another reason that, even in her glory as a “sacrificial mother,” there can exist a complicated seed of dislike for Stella. Though she eventually succeeds, it’s at the cost of sabotaging her relationship with Laurel forever, and never seeing her again. In the final scenes, we understand Stella’s plan has been both successful and monumentally hurtful for her daughter, who continues to love her mother in spite of Stella’s rough rejection of Laurel and disappearance from her life.

It’s only in the final scene of the film that we are given the green light on Stella, when we’re finally allowed to wholeheartedly admire her for what she’s done. Stella stands outside a fancy private club where Laurel is about to wed her sweetheart, gathered with other urchin-like onlookers, gawking at the beautiful couple just inside a large picture window. She begs a policeman to remain as he shoos these others away; “I just want to see her face when she kisses him,” she pleads. As the vows are solemnized, Stella’s eyes fill with tears, and she performs a signature act that has punctuated Stanwyck’s performance throughout the film—at moments when she is most conflicted, uncomfortable, and troubled, she reaches for her mouth, worrying her fingers, chipping at her front teeth with a fingernail. Here, she twists a handkerchief with her teeth as she looks on, her now much sleeker-looking physique still bursting, this time with pride. We want to applaud and weep at the same time—Stella’s sacrifice is so terrible, its goals so lofty. Finally, we can like her. But only after relinquishing nearly everything that gave her purpose.

Audiences are hard on women like Stella Dallas. Culture’s ideas of motherly perfection, class values, and models of “acceptable” behavior force them into molds they were not meant to fit in. If anything, Stella Dallas points out the most exacting of those ideals in us, the viewer, and criticizes our potential dislike of Stella. The film’s saving grace is that it allows us, and Stella herself, to leave the film not broken, but stronger for the fight.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

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!

Diversity Wins Big at SAG Awards by Anita Little at Ms. blog

With shows like ‘Empire,’ ‘Black-ish’ and ‘Cristela,’ TV is more diverse than ever by Cecilia King at The Washington Post

‘Ghostbusters’ Reboot Sets All-Female Cast, Release Date by Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone

Let’s Not Stop at Ghostbusters—Let’s Remake ALL Movies with Just Women by Lindy West at GQ

On Wealth and Women on TV by Sady Doyle at The Baffler

Iranian-American Filmmaker Breaks Out Of Boxes, Into The Box Office by Shereen Marisol Meraji at NPR

How the Media Exacerbates and Erases Black Women’s Suffering by Jenn M. Jackson at For Harriet

Lisa Kudrow’s “The Comeback” Shows How the Television Industry Hasn’t Changed by Hannah Steinkop at Bitch Media

TV One Announces Black History Month Programming Lineup Aimed to Honor Legends and Rising Stars by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

MoMA Celebrates the Women’s Film Preservation Fund via Two Weeks of Special Screenings by Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

Hooray for “The Fosters,” the Show About a Dynamic Family With Two Moms. by Riel Lise at Bitch Media

The best films we saw at Sundance by Claudia Puig at USA TODAY

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

Almost Perfect: ‘Attack the Block’

Basically, the alien invasion is a way to explore the idea that poor kids in rough situations might act in ways that look like senseless yob violence to the outside observer, but internally have their own logic and sometimes even heroism. It’s a hell of a response to a mugging.

Written by Max Thornton.

Since I moved to the US, I find myself getting a little wistful every Nov. 5. It’s not that I want a Catholic monarch on the British throne, or that I’m anything other than deeply suspicious of dudebros in the mask – it’s the cultural traditions I miss. I have a lot of fond memories of attending the neighborhood bonfire (with the first mulled wine of the season flowing freely), and of sneaking through locked parks after dark to find the best place for watching the fireworks. The Fourth of July just isn’t the same, not just because it lacks the crisp crackling autumnal chill, but also because of the quintessentially British ambivalence surrounding Guy Fawkes Night. Are we celebrating the fact that a man tried to blow up Parliament, or the fact that he failed? Are we cheering on the apparent anarchism of the act, or the conservatism behind it? Or is it just that he tried to do something big and failed, which makes Guy Fawkes a very British hero?

America is not very interested in having these conversations with me. So I deal by watching Attack the Block, one my favorite movies of the past few years.

Attack the Block is a British science fiction/horror/action movie about an alien invasion of a South London council estate, and the whole film unfolds over the night of Nov. 5. A young woman named Sam is mugged by a gang of kids on her way home, but as the night progresses she finds herself forced to work with the kids to combat the aliens attacking their block.

Writer-director Joe Cornish has said that the origin of the story lies in his reflections on his own experience of getting mugged. He wanted to humanize his attackers and understand their actions without excusing their violence. This foundational compassion and empathy is evident throughout the film, even in the attitude toward the murderous aliens, who, in a nifty parallel, can only be effectively resisted once their motives are understood.

There is a split-level social consciousness to the film. If you’re on the lookout for it, there is an ongoing commentary about race and class in the UK, from the biting observation that Sam’s absent boyfriend is only interested in helping poor children in “exotic” foreign lands, not the ones struggling at home, to Moses’ theory that the aliens are the next logical step, after drugs and crime, in a government conspiracy to eliminate black boys. If you want to ignore these moments, though, you can just enjoy an engaging SF action romp whose characters are all poor and mostly people of color. Although the film begins with the sympathetically endangered, middle-class-accented white woman presented as our protagonist, it’s a clever bait-and-switch for the white middle-class viewer, because the real hero is Moses – a black, working-class-accented gang leader. (Bear in mind that accent is still the major indicator of social class in Britain, with hundreds of subtleties indistinguishable to the non-British ear.)

Moses (John Boyega) having to be a hero.

It is not only in his name that Moses echoes the biblical Moses. He kills the first alien, just as the biblical Moses killed the Egyptian overseer, and then has to go on the run and be a leader for his people, despite being what many would consider a less than ideal leader figure. Of course, a major difference is that Attack the Block‘s Moses is not leading his people into exodus. On the contrary, he’s helping them defend their home. The “block” plays the role of the spaceship in much of futuristic SF (and the names of the block and its street are nods to classic British SF writers: Wyndham, Ballard, and so on). It is the characters’ home, the one place in the vast void that they can call their own; they feel solidarity with the others who live there, even if they don’t know them; they want to protect it from the outside threat, but there are elements threatening it from the inside too.

My one real complaint about the movie is its paucity of female characters. Sam winds up being a kind of Smurfette among the boys, and the brief scene with some of the kids’ sisters and female friends is sufficient to convince me that there’s an incredible parallel movie to be made about a gang of working-class girls protecting their block from alien invasion. So there certainly are named, speaking female characters, but I would want a bit more a female presence in the film for the absolute perfection I want from it.

Plus, for how low the budget was, the aliens are pretty damn scary.

Other than that, however, I consider Attack the Block a more or less flawless film. This Nov. 5, consider watching it, even if that means subscribing to Netflix DVD solely for this purpose. It’s worth it. Believe it.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

‘Matilda’: Women, Class, and Abuse on Page, Stage, and Screen

For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of ‘Matilda,’ which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison.

Written by Max Thornton.

Like many a precocious young bookworm, I counted Roald Dahl’s Matilda among my very favorite books from an early age. Matilda was relatable – her classmates classified her as The Smart One; she adored her teacher; she had found her earliest and best friends among books – but she was also aspirational for me: she was kind and well-liked, she was brave enough to stand up to injustice, and the only time she ever loses her temper in an uncontrollable screaming tantrum it’s in an entirely justifiable, even heroic, confrontation with her evil headmistress. In a way, she was my first role model.

For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of Matilda, which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison, with a particular eye to the treatment of class. It had been many years since I last saw the movie, and all I really remembered was hating the changed ending, but I conjectured that a transplantation of a very British story to an American context would illuminate some of the differences in UK and US attitudes toward class.

In the book and musical, Matilda’s parents are, regardless of their precise economic status, clearly lower-class, in the “trashiest” way possible. In Britain, the relationship between social class and economic class is complicated: having money doesn’t necessarily make you middle-class (and not everyone wants to be middle-class, as they seem to in the US – working-class pride is strong, while being middle-class is associated with a certain bourgeois pretentiousness). Dahl codes the Wormwoods as insufficiently respectable from a bourgeois perspective: they use “excessive” beauty treatments and wear garish clothes; they play bingo and eat dinner in front of the TV; they have only contempt for literature and education; they are loud, dishonest, and – worst of all! – proud of their loudness and dishonesty.

Most of these markers of the lower classes make the transatlantic leap, but the film takes care to add some new ones for the US audience: junk food, being overweight, kitschy artifacts. The movie Wormwoods live in a nice house full of nice things, but they commit the unforgivable sin of having bad taste. These class markers are important as signifiers that their American dream is a sham, even on the terms of the American dream itself.

By contrast, Miss Honey is the deserving poor, whose economic misfortune does not reflect her character: she values education, doesn’t own a TV set, doesn’t indulge in beauty products, in fact lives ascetically, like the good poor people who don’t waste their money on smartphones and refrigerators… The musical makes the contrast explicit between Mrs. Wormwood’s anthem “Loud” and Miss Honey’s gentle song “My House.” Miss Honey has a roof, a door, a chair, a table, pictures on the wall, lamplight to read by: “It isn’t much, but it is enough for me.” Matilda’s mother, however, recommends “A little less brains, a lot more hair! / A little less head, a lot more derriere!”

“You’ve gotta be loud, loud, LOUD!
You’ve gotta give yourself permission to shine,
To stand out from the crowd, crowd, crowd!”

Like the children at the beginning of the book and musical, Mrs. Wormwood has self-esteem and isn’t ashamed of it. It’s perhaps not surprising that the theme of “people who have self-esteem but shouldn’t” is cut out of the movie. Back in the 90s, long after the era of normalized institutional child abuse in which Dahl grew up but before all of this tedious media handwringing about millennials being thin-skinned and entitled, we tended to think that self-esteem was a good thing. Well, Americans did – it’s always been considered rather déclassé in Britain. So self-confident Mrs. Wormwood is a villain, while modest Matilda and diffident Miss Honey are the heroes.

The movie excises this “self-esteem is bad” message, and instead amplifies the book’s rather weird messages about women. The villainous women are those who do womanhood “wrong.” Miss Trunchbull is too masculine (even played, in the musical, by a man in drag): she’s athletic, strong, violent, not conventionally attractive; she dislikes children, and objects to the “Mrs. D Mrs. I Mrs. FFI” poem by asking, “Why are all these women married?” – indeed, her own female honorific is usually removed so that she becomes “the” Trunchbull, a monstrous hybrid figure of female masculinity. Mrs. Wormwood, meanwhile, errs on the side of too much femininity: she dyes her hair and uses tons of beauty products, overindulging in the artifice and frivolity that comprise femininity in the misogynistic imagination.

YOU'RE doing womanhood wrong!! — YOU’RE doing womanhood wrong!!

(There’s an undercurrent of transmisogyny here, too: the women who are rejected are either too masculine or too artificially feminine, two modes of attack often used to delegitimize trans women’s womanhood.)

Miss Honey, the “good” adult female character, displays neither masculinity nor “artificial” femininity. She is meek, nurturing, softspoken, gentle, conventionally feminine – and, in the film, is deeply emotionally invested in a doll from her childhood. A good woman, it seems, is infantilized in her femininity.

You're pretty, so you're doing womanhood right!! — You’re pretty, so you’re doing womanhood right!!

For all its mixed messages about class and about femininity, this is ultimately a story most powerfully about two abuse survivors creating a family and finding healing together. As Miss Honey tells Matilda in the film, “You were born into a family that doesn’t always appreciate you, but one day things are going to be very different.” As the tempered nature of this line suggests (doesn’t always appreciate her? Try doesn’t ever), the abuse theme is here rather downplayed. Mara Wilson brings exactly the sort of presence we wanted from a child protagonist in the mid-90s – precociously delightful without being alienating or smug – but her Matilda is a smart kid, and not much more. Book-Matilda and musical-Matilda have a streak of otherworldliness to them, a dissociative tendency perhaps not uncommon among abuse survivors; whereas when movie-Matilda is getting yelled at by her father, she just kind of gives him the stinkeye and then skips away to scheme without seeming to internalize his abuse. Obviously the theme of child abuse is going to get downplayed in a PG family film directed by Danny DeVito, but it’s explored with such nuance and sensitivity in the book, and especially in the play, that it’s rather a shame the movie chose to steer for a tone of purely magical whimsy, rather than magical whimsy with some depth.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of Matilda’s telekinesis. In the book, Matilda’s power is something mystical, perhaps dangerous (in one practice session, she zones out entirely and tells Miss Honey, “I was soaring past the stars on silver wings”); in the film, it’s pure whimsy. This, I think, is why it’s narratively necessary and satisfying for the book to end with Matilda losing her power – the book acknowledges that telekinesis is an astounding, paradigm-shifting power, whereas in the film it is but a wizard wheeze.

I don’t think the film of Matilda is terrible, but I don’t find it particularly good either. It’s resolutely child-friendly, softening the sharpest and nastiest edges that helped make Roald Dahl’s books so compelling and enduring, even as they reproduce some of the most problematic tropes of their society.

Go see the musical if you possibly can; it's wonderful. — Go see the musical if you possibly can; it’s wonderful.

____________________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Believe it or not, he actually cut a bunch of material from earlier drafts of this piece.

Bourgie White People Problems and Fat Shaming in ‘Enough Said’

To put it bluntly, I hated ‘Enough Said.’ The theme was trite, the characters were insufferable with their selfish pretensions, and there was a whole lot of fat shaming going on. Frankly, I’m surprised that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been getting such high praise for starring in this turd, and I’m disappointed that I can’t be more supportive of a film written and directed by a woman: Nicole Holofcener.

"Enough Said" Movie Poster — *Enough Said* Movie Poster

Though guest writer Heather Brown wrote a Bitch Flicks review of Enough Said, I felt compelled to weigh in because my opinion of the film was the exact opposite. To put it bluntly, I hated this movie. The theme was trite, the characters were insufferable with their selfish pretensions, and there was a whole lot of fat shaming going on. Frankly, I’m surprised that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been getting such high praise for starring in this turd, and I’m disappointed that I can’t be more supportive of a film written and directed by a woman: Nicole Holofcener.

Director Nicole Holofcener with stars Julie Louis-Dreyfus & Catherine Keener. — Director Nicole Holofcener with stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Catherine Keener.

Though I’d love to congratulate a female writer and director (especially one who employed kickass actresses like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Catherine Keener, and Toni Collette), the storyline itself fell flat. Enough Said is about a massage therapist who ends up dating a man while giving massages to his ex-wife. Once she learns of the connection, she continues to probe the ex for information about her new beau despite the moral ambiguity of building a false friendship and essentially spying on her new boyfriend. Doesn’t that sound like a snore-fest sitcom episode of misadventure where you know the guilty party will be found out in the end and then realize the error of their ways? Well, that’s pretty much what happens. The themes admirably touch on the desire to make smarter relationship choices, to understand why relationships fail, and to avoid committing to the wrong person. In the end, though, the film claims that relationships, human compatibility, and chemistry are all a mystery…that over-thinking it doesn’t do us any favors. Talk about making a really simple point seem complex enough to warrant an entire movie. It’s also a very privileged upper-crusty perspective. Breaking out of destructive or abusive relationship cycles does require a good deal of introspection, honest analysis of choices, and recognition of personal patterns as well as a willingness and commitment to change. This movie basically pisses on the reality of the lives of people who aren’t wealthy (or at least financially comfortable), straight, white people. It pisses on the people who’ve faced major life struggles, crises, and trauma.

Speaking of which, the cast of characters is astoundingly shallow and self-involved with boring upper class bored-people pseudo-problems. Main character Eva’s best friend, Sarah, obsessively rearranges the furniture in her house and can’t bring herself to fire her (of course) Latin maid. Sarah’s husband, Will, has the least interesting or complicated case of middle child syndrome ever; he is simply obsessed with fairness.

Eva probes Marianne for dirt on her new boyfriend (& Marianne's ex-husband) Albert. — Eva probes Marianne for dirt on her new boyfriend (and Marianne’s ex-husband) Albert.

Eva’s new friend, Marianne, reveals that her marriage failed because she was annoyed by her husband Albert’s (played by James Gandolfini) annoying little habits and his weight.

Is there such a thing as oblivious daughter replacement syndrome? Eva's got it. — Is there such a thing as oblivious daughter replacement syndrome? Eva’s got it.

Eva herself comes off as sweet at first, but we learn she hates most of her massage clients, is selfishly and obliviously trying to replace her daughter, Ellen, who is going off to college with one of Ellen’s friends. Plus, she cultivates a faux-friendship with Marianne just to get dirt on Albert, which she then uses to humiliate him at a dinner party.

Eva gets drunk and humiliates Albert, the only nice person in the film.

Eva’s behavior at that dinner party sealed the deal for me. I wanted her to get everything that was coming to her. I wanted the incredibly sweet, gentle, intelligent Albert to realize he was dating a horrible person and ditch her ass. Eva’s callous treatment of Albert doesn’t end with her general mockery of his inability to whisper or her distaste for the way he eats guacamole. No, she fat shames him in front of her friends. Fat shaming is never okay, but this seems particularly cruel because Albert sheepishly admitted to her beforehand that he has a complicated relationship with his weight and wants to lose some. She picked a very sensitive point of insecurity for Albert and exploited it because she was insecure about their relationship and about how people would think of her for dating a fat person. How is that ever okay or forgivable? If Eva had been a male character and Albert was female, would people be so quick to excuse that fat shaming? I hope not. Not only that, but Eva is ignorant. She is oblivious to the struggles of people who navigate the world with bodies different from her own, bodies of which the world doesn’t approve. How is her fat shaming any better than if she’d mocked Albert had he been a person of color, trans*, or differently abled? It is not different. She is an inexcusable bigot.

Eva is appalled by the way Albert eats popcorn when they go see a movie.

What it boils down to is that the character problems in Enough Said are a function of class. They say more about how much money and comfort these people have than about the state of the human condition. Movies that advocate for hateful bigots like Enough Said‘s fat shamers, even the ones who learn their lesson in the end (can you say Shallow Hal?), appeal to people who have “isms” of their own. Seeing a lead character bully another character due to their marginalized status (whatever it may be) allows the audience to vicariously indulge in that behavior and to vicariously feel solidarity in the character’s eventual contrition. It doesn’t necessarily help the audience inhabit the Othered, marginalized character.

Another important point that I’ve been dying to make for years is: Understated performances from people who’re typically in comedies…does not good acting make. I’m so tired of people “breaking out” of their comedy typecast to reap countless praise for roles that simply didn’t have them laughing or cracking jokes or…emoting. I’m thinking of Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, almost every Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, or Adam Sandler “serious movie” ever made. Acting like a normal human being isn’t range. Don’t get me wrong, I think Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a stellar actress, but I don’t think bourgie, fat-shaming, linoleum Enough Said showed that.

——-

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

Conspicuous Consumption and ‘The Great Gatsby’: Missing the Point in Style

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Written by Leigh Kolb

Critic Kathryn Schulz, in “Why I Despise The Great Gatsby,” bemoans the acclaim that the novel receives in literary circles. She says, “It is the only book I have read so often despite failing—in the face of real effort and sincere intentions—to derive almost any pleasure at all from the experience… I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent…”

Well, yes.

Isn’t that the point?

Had Schulz replaced The Great Gatsby with “The American Dream” (rags-to-riches wealth and power and the reward of lavish lifestyles and romantic fulfillment), then she would have been spot on, and would have captured the exact message that The Great Gatsby has conveyed to generation after generation, ceaselessly beating us against the current… sorry.

I was looking forward to Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby, because I love his Romeo + Juliet so much it hurts. He got it so right, so I figured he could get this right too, especially with Leonardo DiCaprio on board.

Cheers, indeed.

He kind of got it. The first half of the film is lavish and screams “Baz Luhrmann.” It was exactly what I wanted. Jay-Z’s “100$ Bill” captured the 1920s “Jazz Age” aesthetic of white people co-opting black music. The driving hip hop in the first few scenes exemplified the “hip-hop fascination with money, power, violence and sex,” that soundtrack executive producer Jay-Z saw in Jay Gatsby.

But something changes. It seems as if Luhrmann wanted too badly to include most of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s text, and his own style was lost in that translation. I wanted the film to be jarring and fast, or painfully slow, with experimental music and filmography throughout. During the second half of the film, the soundtrack became more traditional and subdued. Luhrmann seemed to flirt with style—the typed letters at the end of the film (that I’d like to forget), the slow-motion shot of Tom hitting Myrtle—but there was something lacking in consistency.

That said, Luhrmann does let us focus—even temporarily—on some poignant themes of the novel. Tom’s destructive masculinity (his trophy room and his racism expose his character) go unpunished in his patriarchal society. Daisy’s vapidity highlights the expectations of a beautiful, wealthy woman, when her hopes for her daughter are that “she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Daisy herself attempts to live that role, and she escapes punishment because of who she is. Tom and Daisy’s privilege shields and protects them. Their “old money,” in contrast to Gatsby’s “new money,” shows the impenetrable American truth that you might be detestable, but you call the shots when you have money and connections. Gatsby’s desperate drive for that green light—to be loved—can be bought only momentarily.

The fact that “The Great Gatsby Still Gets Flappers Wrong” didn’t bother me, really (although Hix’s article is incredibly informative). Having an independent, empowered woman in The Great Gatsby would seem as false as the magical typewriter. No one in The Great Gatsby is supposed to be a character we want to identify with or aspire to be. The men are problematic, and so are the women.

Nick, Gatsby, Daisy and Tom at one of Gatsby’s parties.

Luhrmann’s characters are often more sympathetic than the novel’s, but the core of who they are and what they represent is stable.

Jordan Baker’s role was minimized, but she was still a foil to Daisy’s carelessness.

I would like to deny the storytelling technique that Luhrmann employs with Nick Carraway, but I cannot. I don’t think I would have minded if he’d framed the story as Nick writing a memoir; maybe I even would have forgiven the floating type if it had been consistent (but probably not). However, the fact that Nick begins telling the story to his therapist, who then encourages him to write it down, seems ridiculous. Nick seems just self-aware and self-involved enough to know he has a good story—he wouldn’t have needed someone to persuade him to write it down.

Tobey Maguire’s Nick has a doughy personality. He’s not too likable, but we don’t actively dislike him. Maybe we roll our eyes at him sometimes. He’s true to the novel, that’s for sure.

DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mysterious, beautiful, reserved and is able to elicit sympathy from the audience.

Why yes, you can buy this headpiece from Tiffany’s.

Carey Mulligan’s Daisy is not quite as off-putting as she is in the novel, which seemed to be Luhrmann’s goal. He didn’t completely deny the existence of the emptiness and disappointment the novel conveys, but he clearly wanted us to be swept up in the fashions and romanced by the gorgeous settings and people (and shirts!).

That (along with the inconsistent style) was my biggest problem with the film—it wasn’t depressing enough. Perhaps it was the lack of Gatsby’s father showing Nick little Jimmy’s meticulous plans, or the lack of a funeral scene, or maybe it was the floaty letters typing out Nick’s thoughts—I didn’t feel the empty weight of the futility of the American Dream, and the bitter disappointment of a life spent wanting more.

Luhrmann gets caught up in the “romance.”

I know Luhrmann can do it—he did it with Romeo + Juliet, with its era-bending dialogue and music, stylized filmography and heart-wrenching ending—but I think he got too caught up with the romance of Gatsby’s lifestyle (just like Nick did).

And that’s the great reverse dramatic irony of stories like Gatsby—yes, maybe audiences get on some level that Jay Gatsby’s story isn’t meant to be aspirational. But they relish it in anyway. Donald Trump’s hotel is offering the Trump Hotel “Great Gatsby” Package (for $14,999 you can live like an ill-fated socialite?); Brooks Brothers has “The Great Gatsby” collection. Gatsby is like Don Draper; their true legacy—disappointment, emptiness and the tragic nature of a re-imagined life that isn’t a dream come true—is packaged in fashion and good looks. That life looks exciting, we think. I want hosiery like Daisy’s, and parties like Gatsby’s. Conspicuous consumption is idolized.

But that’s not the point.

The American Dream is disappointing. Wealth is disappointing. Idealized romance is disappointing.

And then you die. And no one cares.

All of this is meaningless.

Luhrmann’s film and the marketing ploys surrounding it don’t seem to quite get at that. While I was let down, I suppose I’m not surprised. We live in a society obsessed with wealth, status and pulling oneself up from one’s bootstraps. To topple all of that over into an ash heap would be problematic for both the core of American mythology and for Hollywood.

Because if we focus on the tragedy of Jay Gatsby’s aspirations and the injustice of Tom and Daisy’s escape, then we would have to face the fact that the party is really over. But we can’t, and we don’t, so we go on, endlessly dazzled and distracted by shiny things (which women are especially interested in, evidently).

And perhaps that’s what Nick’s final words mean—we keep trying to go back, over and over, to this belief that the green light is obtainable, and it will make us happy. However, that light was not real in 1922, and it’s not real now. It’s just in 3D.

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

Counterreading ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’

Reality television has never held much appeal for me. I get plenty of reality in reality, thanks – I like my TV fictional. Besides, hasn’t the last decade or more of respectable journalism assured me, in the shrillest possible tones, that reality TV is the very lowest form of entertainment, positively reveling in the filth of humanity’s worst, most voyeuristic excesses: a Coliseum for the digital age?

SATIRE!!!1111!1

Even without watching it myself, I’ve become less and less comfortable with the traditional critiques of reality TV as I’ve sharpened my critical apparatus. For a start, it seems predicated on the notion of a hierarchy of art, the assumption that some forms of entertainment are somehow innately higher or better than others. It’s a terribly condescending form of knee-jerk moralizing.And if you don’t ever watch it, it’s a bit presumptuous to be judgmental about the whole genre.

I’ve tried to stay in the moral middle ground, having no real opinion on reality TV other than that it’s not for me. I’d likely have continued my reality-TV-free existence, had it not been for this excellent piece at the incomparable Womanist Musings.

Renee and Sparky watched TLC’s infamous Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the reality show about six-year-old beauty pageant contestant Alana and her working-class Georgia family, and their reaction was not necessarily what you’d expect. They make many terrific points about how repugnant the show is as a piece of television, how it “other[s the family] at every turn,” but they also offer an invaluable counterreading. They like this family – the four daughters aged between six and seventeen, the quiet father figure, and heroic matriarch June – and they’ll continue to like them, no matter what the show’s structure seems to want us to think.

I love them all, but “Pumpkin” is my favorite.

If you consume entertainment and have any conscience at all, you are a practiced counterreader. You have to be, if you’re going to stand up to the hateful kyriarchal bullshit with which 21st-century westerners are bombarded every minute of the day. All responsible entertainment consumption requires a risk assessment, weighing the potential value to be gained against the potential harm to be done, and everybody’s evaluation is slightly different. For one person, well-rounded white female characters but no characters of color is worth the trade-off; for another, it simply isn’t. And sometimes performing an adequate counterreading requires you to marshal all your critical resources.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is not a text that welcomes counterreadings with open arms. Operating well within the established format of reality television, it utilizes an arsenal of techniques – both subtle and not so much – to impel voyeurism. TLC makes it very, very easy to sneer at and judge Honey Boo Boo and her family. You have to work quite hard to counteract this compulsion. You really have to be on the critical ball the whole time. And is that okay?

All summer the debate has raged as to whether, or to what extent, the show is exploitative. Having watched all of it inside of a week, I’m still undecided. There are moments when June and the girls express a self-awareness and a confidence that has me cheering them to the skies, sure that their assertions of not caring what people think of them are sincere. At times, though – especially when outsiders arebrought in to interact with the family, an etiquette teacher or a pedicurist, and get all flustered and shocked by them – the whole thing seems enormously exploitative and gross.

It’s this indeterminacy, this openness to a multiplicity of different interpretations, that has the national conversation about Honey Boo Boo going so fiercely. As Time’s James Poniewozik observes:

…overall, she has a kind of sassy sweetness to her. In the second episode, she gets a pet teacup pig as consolation for losing a pageant and decides to dress him as a girl, which she says will make him gay. The ensuing argument with her older sister is both ridiculous and oddly wise in a 6-year-old way: “It’s not gonna be gay.” “Yes it is, because we’re making it a girl pig! And it’s actually a boy pig!” “O.K., but it’s not gonna be gay.” “It can if it wants to. You can’t tell that pig what to do.”

You can’t tell that pig what to do. See, you can look at that scene, like you can most of Honey Boo Boo, several ways. You can laugh at the intensity of Alana’s conviction that she’s right. You can tut-tut at the gender-role signals this pageant girl must be getting to conclude that you can “make” someone or something gay by dressing it in girl clothes. But you can also see something kind of remarkable in it: a little country girl, whatever confusion and misinformation she has in her mind, fervently arguing a teacup pig’s right to determine its own sexual identity.

AWWW

There are plenty of other interesting aspects of this show (Salon considers the race angle; Slate tackles the class issue), but the two that can’t be ignored are the gender dynamic and the class factor. The gender dynamic is pretty glorious: five strong, opinionated women who love each other deeply and don’t take anyone’s shit. They do what they want to do, they look how they want to look, and they are happy. Dare I suggest that one of the reasons the country’s spent its summer in thrall to these people is that we just don’t see women like this in our scripted entertainment?

Of course, it’s rare to see poor white people portrayed sympathetically on US TV at all. My understanding of class in the US is much less nuanced than my understanding of the British class system, but I’m aware of this country’s distaste for its own working poor. “Rednecks” appear in the media as rapists, as racists, as the butt of jokes and the object of revulsion. Voyeurism and disgust motivate hate-watching in our culture to an obscene degree, and that is why I think it’s important to perform a counterreading, to celebrate this family and refuse to let your responses be dictated by classism and hatred. If you want to be truly horrified by your fellow humans, check outthe comments on this Gawker article (I hope you have a strong stomach). To me, this is the aspect of Honey Boo Boo that’s truly awful – not a happy family letting a camera crew into their lives in exchange for some money they surely need, but the legions of haters who judge Honey Boo Boo and her family to be less human, less worthy of dignity and respect for their life choices, than themselves.

The family certainly does not reciprocate that sentiment. Even in the throes of labor agony, when asked, “Do you recommend to anybody else to get pregnant at 17?”, oldest daughter Anna replies, “Do whatever you want to do.” She just refuses to tell anyone else what to do with their body or their life. The rest of America – from legislators to judgmental internet commenters – could learn something from her.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.