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Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Mrs. Danvers, or: ‘Rebecca’

Movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

This is a guest post by Amanda Civitello.

There is a trio of women at the heart of Rebecca. There’s a male love interest, to be sure – the dashing, wealthy, ostensibly noble Maxim de Winter – but at its most essential, Rebecca is a story of women: the unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. de Winter; Rebecca de Winter, Maxim’s first wife, whose seeming omnipresence at the de Winters’ country seat, Manderley, haunts her replacement; and Mrs. Danvers, Manderley’s housekeeper, and Rebecca’s personal maid, devoted to her mistress even after death. The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation might be the second Mrs. de Winter, but Rebecca – particularly the novel – doesn’t belong to her in the slightest. Despite a script which departs from the novel in several crucial instances and the talent of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, the story is Mrs. Danvers’s, and the film is Judith Anderson’s.

Rebecca recounts the story of the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), the new bride of the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who married him after a whirlwind courtship. Though not especially acquainted with her frequently secretive, moody husband, she nevertheless adores him and, despite her modest upbringings, resolves to do her best as lady of the manor at Manderley. She meets with resistance, of course, from a likely corner, the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), as well as from a more unlikely one, Maxim’s late wife Rebecca de Winter, who drowned tragically but whose ghost seems to haunt Manderley and its inhabitants in more ways than one. The second Mrs. de Winter finds herself at odds with Mrs. Danvers, who is by turns cruel and falsely sweet, and utterly bent on removing Mrs. de Winter from Manderley, at one point attempting to coax her into suicide. The film is something of a thriller, and so of course there are questions surrounding Rebecca’s mysterious drowning – particularly about Maxim’s part in it. Fortunately for our heroine and her romantic lead, Maxim is miraculously exonerated, in a disappointing departure from the novel, and Mr. and Mrs. de Winter, it is presumed, enjoy something of a happy retirement after the closing titles, despite a final act of revenge.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine)

Rebecca is frequently described as Joan Fontaine’s film, and while she’s excellent in her role, and clearly has the most screen time, her role is not, by far, the most interesting of the film. Her character, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never allowed to grow up: in spite of everything, by the close of the film, she’s much the same frustratingly childlike shrinking violet she was at the beginning. Fontaine carries off the ingénue type very well, and it’s not her fault that her character has bursts of growth – short-lived instances in which she takes her staff in hand, or speaks her mind to her husband – but then, inevitably, regresses. She’s beautiful and even sympathetic in her persistent naïveté, at least to a point, but as a woman, the second Mrs. de Winter is ultimately disappointing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she’s consistently portrayed as the opposite of Rebecca de Winter, who is never seen and never speaks for herself, in the film or the novel. She is the sweetness and light to Rebecca’s coldly Machiavellian, sinister calculation. The second Mrs. de Winter is innocent, concerned only for her husband, and perpetually unsure of herself, which makes her rather nice, but somewhat simpering, and sadly, not especially interesting. Rebecca de Winter is not, by anyone’s account, nice, but she’s certainly more interesting than her wide-eyed replacement, and hers is the silenced voice.

Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, but it’s also caught, somewhat uncomfortably, between genres. It doesn’t quite want to be a true Gothic thriller, because it shies from the moral ambiguity that makes the novel such a rich book, but nor is it a straightforward romance, for nothing is ever straightforward with Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the major casualty of this uncertainty is the novel’s most interesting female character: the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, a brilliant turn by Judith Anderson. In the novel, Mrs. Danvers haunts each page just as much as the ghost of Rebecca de Winter. In Hitchcock’s hands, Rebecca becomes a cross between a Gothic thriller and a mannered romance, ultimately tending towards the latter, but even this does not fully temper Mrs. Danvers’s omnipresence: she is the link between the unnamed protagonist and the unseen antagonist, not the husband they share in common. However, the novel is full of contradictions in its characterization of Mrs. Danvers which the film does not address. Through the second Mrs. de Winter’s eyes we see Mrs. Danvers as “tall and gaunt,” with “great, hollow eyes,” a “skull’s face set on a skeleton’s frame,” and possessing of “limp and heavy, deathly cold” hands. While Judith Anderson’s costuming is not, perhaps, as skeletal as du Maurier intended, she nevertheless embodies the chilly lifelessness of her character. Her Mrs. Danvers is ghostly in her carriage, but terrifyingly real in her interactions with her new mistress. Yet in the film adaptation, the other-worldliness never leaves her, and Anderson plays it masterfully, creating a character who is deeply unsettling and deliciously spooky. But du Maurier’s novel tempers this description; the Danvers of the novel is not always an evil, unbalanced ice queen. She’s desperate and half-mad with grief, still living in the past and passionate about her mistress.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca de Winter’s bedroom

In the film, Danvers is well written, but nevertheless tends towards one-dimensional in the part the script allows her to play; in the book, Danvers’s complexity is far more difficult to ignore. A novel of Rebecca‘s length must necessarily be condensed; the kind of explicated description possible in page upon page of prose is simply untranslatable for the screen. Much of Mrs. Danvers’s complexity in the novel, therefore, is sacrificed so as to streamline the narrative. Where the film paints Danvers as more sadistic than anything else, the Mrs. Danvers of du Maurier’s novel is significantly more multifaceted. She becomes the definite antagonist in the film, the cruelly calculated, disconcertingly creepy nemesis of the wide-eyed ingénue. This is necessary: the viewer needs to believe that, not only would Danvers definitely set fire to Manderley, but that she would perish in Rebecca’s bedroom and deserve it. (On this point, the novel says very, very little, and it’s only one possibility among many that it’s Danvers who torches the great estate, and no mention is made of her fate.)

Hitchcock, however, is a director unafraid of ambiguity and a master of great subtlety, and he addresses the Rebecca-Danvers relationship most decisively in the pivotal bedroom scene, which prompts the second Mrs. de Winter into assuming more control of her household. Throughout, Judith Anderson keeps her delivery crisp and preternaturally calm, conveying Mrs. Danvers’s madness only with her eyes and movement, to great effect. The scene is as utterly disquieting on screen as it is in the novel, perhaps even more so, given the refinement of Judith Anderson’s performance. Danvers catches the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca’s closed-off bedroom in the west wing, and then proceeds to show her new mistress Rebecca’s personal things: her furs, still hanging pristinely in the armoire; her hairbrush, laid in exactly the same place; her nightdress, still laid out for the mistress who won’t return. It’s very easy to make it entirely Gothic in character – a bit of ghostly theatre to unsettle the new bride – but really, there’s much more at play. Again, however, the film and the novel are at odds: in the novel, there’s an undercurrent of grief for the late Rebecca that cuts through Danvers’s cruelty, such that the housekeeper is mad with grief, and motivated by love for her mistress. Death has not relinquished the hold Rebecca had on Mrs. Danvers; in fact, it’s intensified it. Judith Anderson is frighteningly convincing as she caresses Rebecca’s lace underwear, such that the scene is laced with an almost palpable degree of sexual tension and lesbian subtext. Mrs. Danvers’s passion for her mistress is undeniable, and the nature of that passion is left unspecified. The question of a lesbian subtext to the Danvers-Rebecca relationship is one to which the novel alludes as well, and it gives a layer of richness to Mrs. Danvers’s character. If there was a degree of romantic passion on Mrs. Danvers’s part, her grief becomes more sympathetic; her madness, more understandable. But in Rebecca, the scene must be viewed within the context of the film as a whole. Where, in the novel, the reader ultimately feels a degree of pity and sympathy for Mrs. Danvers, despite the assessment of the narrator, on screen, it’s simply, in the end, a briefly penetrating look into an unbalanced, hostile, malicious woman’s madness.

Mrs. Danvers showing Rebecca’s furs to the second Mrs. de Winter, part of the subtext-laden bedroom scene

These perplexing editorial choices in the novel’s adaptation for the screen make for a viewing experience which leaves audiences with a distinctly different perception of the characters and the story. The viewers are denied the absolutely disquieting story of the novel. What’s so disturbing – and so Gothic – about Rebecca isn’t Rebecca herself, and not even the image of Rebecca, the spectre of her, that the different characters construct, but the moral ambiguity surrounding the characters we’re supposed to like and dislike. If a novel – or a screenplay – is meant to be a constructed world, one that functions according to its own rules, then du Maurier’s Rebecca wreaks havoc with that framework. The reader is guided to like certain characters, to dislike others, only to find those perceptions entirely spun on their heads: by the last few pages, the reader realizes that the romantic hero she’s come to like and defend is a murderer. Changing the ending removes the ambiguity around Maxim, and turns Rebecca into a Gothic-tinged romance, and casting Mrs. Danvers as, for the most part, the cruelly sinister, unsympathetic antagonist paradoxically makes Rebecca spookier but far less disquieting, far less unsettling, than the novel.

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Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Sleep Hollow, Downton Abbey and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Comparing Two Versions of "Pride and Prejudice"

Written by Lady T. Some of this piece was originally published at The Funny Feminist.

Is there any literary comfort food better than Pride and Prejudice? No, there is not. Every time I read it (about once a year), I have to force myself not to swallow the whole thing in one gulp. I try to pace myself, but I can’t. Watching the 1995 BBC miniseries presents the same problem. I can only watch it when I have nothing else to do that week because I will watch all six hours in one night if I’m not stopped.

I feel less inclined to watch the 2005 version again. I somewhat enjoyed it the first time I watched it, and especially liked Rosamund Pike as Jane, but when I watched the proposal scenes from both versions back to back, I almost felt embarrassed. The 2005 version just doesn’t compare.

Let’s take a look at the proposal scene from the 1995 version:

I love Colin Firth in this scene. His agitation and struggle is such a marked difference from Darcy’s too-cool-for-school attitude in the beginning of the miniseries. He shows just how much his love for Elizabeth completely rattles and unravels him, and when she rejects him, he’s shocked, shocked, I tell you. He may be in love with her, but he’s so arrogant that he had absolutely no doubt she would accept him. He fully believes that, given the disparity in their connections, he’s doing her a favor by bestowing his love and admiration. Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth is also perfect. She’s all cool civility in the beginning, bowled over by his profession of love, and calmly biting until he pushes her to the edge.

I cringe in this scene and feel pity for both characters, but importantly, the comedy still comes through. I can’t help but laugh at Darcy’s mention of how he loved her against his will. “Your family’s an embarrassment. I make much, much more money than your family does. Being united with your family would be shameful and I would be humiliated to be associated with them. But I love you, so marry me?” Oh, Darcy.

Meanwhile, ten years later, we have this:

Marvel at Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy having a passionate conversation in the rain (because people were doing that all the time in the Regency period, don’t you know). Watch as Matthew MacFadyen and Keira Knightley rush through their dialogue and steamroll over each other – I mean, show Darcy and Elizabeth’s deep! passion! for! each! other! Weep as Mr. Darcy gives Elizabeth his best wounded puppy look because he’s so insecure (just like Darcy in the book…riiiiight), and watch as Elizabeth stares wetly back at him looking like she would love nothing more than to kiss him – because she certainly doesn’t completely loathe him at that point in the story.

I had a bad feeling about the 2005 adaptation even before I saw it, because Keira Knightley said something in an interview comparing Darcy and Elizabeth to two teenagers who don’t realize how much they actually like each other…and that’s exactly how she plays it. It’s such a disservice to both characters, especially Elizabeth, to describe them in that way. Elizabeth’s problem is not that she’s SEKRITLY IN LUUV with Darcy from the very beginning but in denial about her feelings. Her problem is that she’s almost as arrogant as Darcy is, so impressed with herself for being a wonderful judge of character, that she doesn’t revise her opinion of him until given evidence that she’s wrong. She’s not a teenage girl who just can’t decide which boy she likes better omg. She’s a grown-ass woman who is more flawed than she realizes. Knightley plays her like a petulant teenager. FAIL. And MacFadyen plays Darcy as insecure and wounded and emo. DOUBLE FAIL.

Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights? Who can tell?

(I don’t think I even need to mention that the movie is just so lush and gorgeous and Romantic with a DOUBLE Capital R, with heightened emotions, Elizabeth and Darcy meeting each other at daybreak on the moors and staring at each other lustfully. Never mind that Jane Austen spent an entire book and a half – Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility – mocking and satirizing all of those Romantic conventions.)

Anyway, long story short, it used to bug me that the 2005 Pride Ampersand Prejudice (as I like to call it, to differentiate it from the superb BBC version) even existed, because it felt so very un-Austen to me. There were too many lingering shots on beautiful countrysides and Elizabeth spinning in her family’s swing, and not enough conversation, when conversation is at the heart of what makes Austen Austen. Looking at the film again, though, I realize that I have another reason to prefer the 1995 version: the treatment of the female characters.

One character I’ve always found fascinating is Elizabeth Bennet’s best friend, Charlotte Lucas: wise and calculating, a careful observer of human behavior and social norms, who won’t have a chance to marry someone worthy of her because of the social restrictions for women during the Regency period. She marries Mr. Collins knowing that he’s a ridiculous fool who can never make her truly happy, but resignedly accepts her fate anyway. She tells her dear friend, “I’m not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only for a comfortable home – and, considering Mr. Collins’ character and situation in life, I am convinced that my chances of happiness with him are more than most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”

Lucy Scott as Charlotte Lucas

Charlotte’s lines in the 2005 Pride Ampersand Prejudice are similar, but with a few key differences. She tells Elizabeth, “Not all of us can afford to be romantic. I’ve been offered a comfortable home and protection. There’s a lot to be thankful for. I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened. So don’t judge me, Lizzy. Don’t you dare judge me.”

The first Charlotte is calm, cool, and collected in explaining her reasons for marrying Mr. Collins. The second Charlotte is bordering on desperate, openly admitting that she’s frightened.

Claudie Blakley as Charlotte Lucas

I understand why Pride Ampersand Prejudice portrays Charlotte in this way. Women in the Regency period had very few options in their lives. Unless they were independently wealthy heiresses, like Austen’s own Emma Woodhouse in Emma, they had to marry well or suffer the consequences. Pride Ampersand Prejudice wants us to feel for Charlotte’s limited circumstances.

But I know Pride and Prejudice too well, and I can’t accept this change in Charlotte’s character. The Charlotte Lucas I know in Austen’s text would never have wanted to be pitied for her marriage. The Charlotte Lucas I know probably would not have been very romantic even if she could afford to be. The Charlotte Lucas I know is entirely practical, unapologetic in her choice of husband, and determined to make a comfortable life for herself – and she does. Charlotte in the BBC Pride and Prejudice is portrayed as less pitiable than the Charlotte in the Joe Wright film, even though the first Charlotte has a much less appealing Mr. Collins to put up with. David Bamber’s Mr. Collins is an inspired comic performance – unctuous, slimy, entirely lacking in self-awareness – while Tom Holland’s Mr. Collins is…short. And kind of awkward.

Watching the Joe Wright film, I can’t help but feel that Charlotte in the BBC version would feel insulted by her counterpart in 2005 (through no fault of Claudie Blakley, who gives a lovely performance). Original Recipe Charlotte would not want people to feel sorry for her, and would insist that she has a perfectly decent life. I’m inclined to agree with Original Recipe Charlotte that her happiness is “more than most people can boast upon entering the marriage state.” Charlotte will certainly be happier than Mr. Bennet, who married a woman just as silly as Mr. Collins, but wasn’t nearly as well-acquainted with his partner’s true character.

Mr. Bennet: less happy in marriage than Mrs. Collins

Charlotte Lucas isn’t the only female character who’s softened or changed for the 2005 feature film, however. Mary Bennet is comforted by her father when she makes a fool of herself at the Netherfield party, presented as nothing more than a little shy and awkward, even though she’s pretty much the female equivalent of Mr. Collins – pompous and not as smart as she thinks she is. Mrs. Bennet has a moment where she’s portrayed as a heroine in disguise (um, NO) who needs to marry her daughters off to protect them. Even Georgiana Darcy rushes to Elizabeth and greets her eagerly when they first meet – even though, in the book, she’s so shy she can barely breathe in front of new people.

When I look at the way the female characters are presented in the 2005 film version, I see Regency characters with modern attitudes thrust upon them. Elizabeth is no longer spirited, but spunky. Charlotte is no longer practical, but pitiable. Mary is no longer pretentious, but geeky and awkward. Mrs. Bennet is no longer a hilarious comic character, but a desperate woman trying to protect her daughters. Georgiana can’t be shy anymore, but a spunky, miniature version of Elizabeth.

I appreciate the attempt to shed some light on the limited options of women during the Regency period, but much of the humor is lost from the original text when turning comic characters into sympathetic ones. I will always prefer the BBC Pride and Prejudice because it remembers that Jane Austen wrote a comedy, and doesn’t feel the need to lament over the fates of her female characters. All things considered, Charlotte Lucas is going to be fine, and it’s okay to be a feminist and still laugh at Mrs. Bennet.

Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘The Uninvited’ (1944) and Dorothy Macardle’s Feminism

Movie poster for The Uninvited

This is a guest post by Nadia Smith.

[contains spoilers]

When I told a horror-fan friend in his early twenties that I was writing about The Uninvited, he said he had seen it. This came as a surprise, since it’s mostly older viewers and film historians who are aware of it. It turned out that he thought I was referring to the recent Korean film The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters, and not the classic haunted house movie that had audiences screaming in the 1940s and drew comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).

The Uninvited (1944), directed by Lewis Allen and released by Paramount Pictures, is an adaptation of a popular Gothic novel by the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958), also a playwright, historian, journalist, and prominent feminist campaigner. It was adapted for the screen by the British writer Dodie Smith, best known for 101 Dalmatians. The Uninvited, which easily passes the Bechdel Test, features some sexist characterizations and a conventional ending, stemming from Macardle’s complex views on gender as well as the demands of commercial romantic fiction and film production. Nevertheless, the film opens itself up to alternative readings and valuations of the characters.

In the film, siblings Rick, played by Ray Milland, and Pamela Fitzgerald, played by Ruth Hussey (who might at first be mistaken for a married couple), learn that the old house in Cornwall they have just purchased is haunted by two ghosts, one warm and benevolent and one cold and dangerous, and investigate the mystery surrounding the house’s previous residents in an attempt to end the hauntings. Rick falls for the much younger Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), whose parents, artist Llewellyn and his wife Mary, had once lived in the house with Carmel, an artist’s model from Spain who had an affair with Llewellyn. The Merediths and Carmel died when Stella was a small child, Mary by falling off a nearby cliff, and the shy, repressed, immature Stella, who idolizes her late mother, lives an isolated existence in the village with Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), her stern, morbid maternal grandfather. The Commander has an unhealthy obsession with his daughter’s memory, and Stella is virtually imprisoned in the house as the Commander tries to mold her in Mary’s image. So far, so Gothic. Local informants, as well as Mary’s friend Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), praise Mary’s virtue and angelic beauty to the Fitzgeralds, and denounce Carmel’s depravity. Rick’s frustration grows as he worries that Stella’s intense emotional investment in her mother’s ghost will lead to a psychological breakdown and prevent her from ever caring for him.

The Fitzgeralds initially think that Mary is the warm ghost, and Carmel the cold ghost endangering Stella, but a séance proves them wrong. Carmel, the warm ghost and Stella’s biological mother, refused to be silenced and unfairly maligned, instead returning to tell the truth, while Mary, the cold malevolent ghost, tried to prevent the exposure of family secrets about her true nature and adoption of Stella after Carmel gave birth in secret. In life, Carmel had been a nurturing mother who truly loved Stella, and Mary had been cold and uncaring, as well as asexual. Rick symbolically kills the “evil mother” Mary, banishing her ghost through ridicule, while Stella’s acceptance of the truth about her biological mother’s identity allows her to move forward and ensures that Carmel will no longer haunt the house. Commander Beech dies, and the film concludes with Rick announcing that he and Stella will marry, while Pamela will marry a local doctor who helped solve the mystery. The final frame shows the two couples together in the drawing room; Stella appears rather uncomfortable, with a forced smile, recalling her discomfort when Rick forcefully kissed her earlier in the film. Whether this was a directorial decision or simply reflective of the limitations of the young Gail Russell’s acting remains uncertain, but it opens up the happy ending to alternative interpretations, as is often the case in Gothic romances.

Dorothy Macardle used a ghost-story plot and Gothic conventions to frame a narrative about troubled marriages and mother-daughter relationships, family secrets that haunt the present, and transgressive sexuality, thereby setting up a critique of domestic ideology. The unsettling implications of such a critique in Gothic romances, though, are foreclosed by conventional endings in which the heroine embraces marriage and domesticity. While the novel refers to several alternative relationships and domestic arrangements, these are closed off at the end in favor of “normalization.” Although Stella has been traumatized by her upbringing—her grandfather was overbearing and repressive and her parents’ marriage was characterized by hatred and power struggles—her impending marriage to Rick is a foregone conclusion that meets the narrative demands of the Gothic romance. However, some readers and viewers of Gothic romances find the endings unconvincing and read beyond the ending, and may imagine that the naïve, inexperienced Stella, like the nameless narrator of Rebecca, will find that her real problems begin with her marriage to an older man she hardly knows, leading to a new Gothic narrative in the formerly haunted house they intend to live in.

Dorothy Macardle

The Production Code affecting films in the 1940s meant that homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and out-of-wedlock births were referred to cryptically in The Uninvited to meet the imperatives of censorship. Viewers learn that Mary “feared and refused motherhood,” and is therefore blamed for her husband’s affair with Carmel. Mary, Carmel, and Miss Holloway are all punished for their respective sexual transgressions – asexuality, heterosexual promiscuity, and lesbianism – with death or, in Miss Holloway’s case, a mental breakdown. The character of Miss Holloway was recognized as a lesbian by the Legion of Decency, whose (male) leaders complained to Paramount executives about the scenes in which she speaks romantically to Mary’s portrait. Lesbian audiences in the 1940s also grasped the inferences and characterizations in The Uninvited, and film scholars note that it became a cult hit with lesbian communities in wartime America. Mary is depicted as asexual or possibly a lesbian by being non-maternal and too close to Miss Holloway, and the novel describes her as “unnatural,” tying in with discourses about motherhood and gender essentialism. Later film scholars have seen even more lesbian connotations, suggesting that the mother-daughter trope in the film can be a cover for lesbianism, since Stella has been in love with another woman, Mary, her whole life, much to Rick’s frustration.

Dorothy Macardle’s views on gender roles and motherhood were crucially shaped by her own family dynamics, and reflected in her Gothic novels. She perceived her English mother, Minnie, as a classic late-Victorian hysteric, or fake invalid, who used her fragility as a weapon to prevail in marital power struggles and prioritize her own needs, and viewed her Irish father, Thomas, as Minnie’s helpless and long-suffering victim. Her fiction is inattentive to alternative power dynamics in marriage; husbands are depicted as generally chivalrous figures vulnerable to abuse by manipulative women feigning fragility, rather than subjecting fragile, vulnerable women to abuse. Her novels all end with the metaphorical destruction of a malevolent maternal figure and her baleful power, suggesting that Minnie, like the vampires to whom a prominent Victorian doctor compared hysterical women, took a lot of killing. Macardle’s fiction overturned sentimental and politically useful Victorian notions of the mother’s gentle influence in the home, as her feminist convictions stemmed from the belief that women’s exercise of power should be transparent and directed outside the home. It enraged her that outwardly conformist women like her mother and the fictional Mary Meredith were praised for their virtue, and she tried to show the transgression and complexity behind simplistic notions of good and bad women in a novel in which an icon of conventional womanhood is exposed as a fraud.

The tensions and limitations of Macardle’s feminism and her use of hostile sexist tropes about predatory lesbians, frigid wives, and bad mothers in her fiction seem to stem not only from her understanding of her family dynamics, but also from her sense of herself as an Exceptional Woman, informed by social class privilege. She never married and spent years living alone or with other women, and spent some of her early life in female institutions, including an all-girls school and a women’s prison (for her Irish republican activism). While she enjoyed being a university-educated, professionally successful unmarried woman with no children, she thought most women should be wives and mothers, with their sexuality safely contained within marriage, a view shared by many interwar-era “maternal feminists” in Europe and the United States.

The two main (living) female characters in The Uninvited are Pamela Fitzgerald and Stella Meredith. Pamela demonstrates wit, assertiveness, and intelligence, especially when she solves the mystery of the two ghosts that had confounded the others. Stella is fragile and childlike, which greatly appeals to the older Rick. The circumstances of her upbringing have created a repressed, insecure personality who idealizes the vague memory of a loving mother. Despite Stella’s timidity, she demonstrates courage at the novel’s end when she confronts and reassures Carmel’s ghost. While normative heterosexuality is restored in the conclusion with plans for marriage, Rick’s love for Stella in the novel is unsettling, as he has constantly infantilized her and describes her as a child.

Miss Holloway, an “unfeminine” single woman and nurse who had been infatuated with her friend Mary and still worships her memory, is significant as a lesbian character in the days of the Production Code. Her name recalls London’s Holloway Prison, where suffragists were incarcerated earlier in the century, and the convalescent home she operates is a prison of sorts where female patients lose agency and autonomy. While Miss Holloway’s narrative seeks to contrast Mary’s moral perfection with Carmel’s depravity, the Fitzgeralds are so put off by this stereotypical sinister lesbian that they begin to think that things were not all that they seemed. The character of Miss Holloway shows The Uninvited’s indebtedness to Daphne du Maurier’s popular Gothic novel, Rebecca (1938; released as a film in 1940), as she bears a strong resemblance to Mrs. Danvers. Both are portrayed as sinister lesbians who idolize the dead woman at the center of the mystery and play a key role in reinforcing her iconization.

Overall, The Uninvited reflects a range of tensions and negotiations that intersected with contemporary discourses about gender, sexuality, feminism, and film censorship. While it falls prey to some hostile and stereotypical female characterizations common in the 1940s and later, it is complex and multilayered enough to allow for a range of readings and interpretations as it attempted to speak the unspeakable and represent the unrepresentable. Now that it’s finally available on DVD, maybe it will become at least as well known as The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters.

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Nadia Smith is a historian and writer based in the Boston area. She is the author of Dorothy Macardle: A Life.

Women in Politics Week: Politics Is a Man’s Game: The Trope of the Great Woman in Early Hollywood Narratives

This is a guest post by Tom Houseman.

Movie still from The Great McGinty

Since the 1990s the sight of female politicians, both in real life and in films and television shows, has become more and more common. Women are making great strides in the American political landscape—when new congressional representatives are sworn in in January there will be a record number of candidates in the House—and the film and TV industries have done their best to keep up with that trend, if not necessarily pave the way. Dramas from The Contender to Commander in Chief and comedies including Veep and even Political Animals show the unique struggles that women face when they rise to positions of power, some more insightfully than others.

This change has been both rapid and recent, as well into the 20th Century women were barely present in politics, at least on the front lines as elected leaders. And while women have been a growing presence in the House of Representatives since 1917, Hollywood was less than progressive in its depiction of women serving in political offices. Politics in films made in the ’40s and ’50s was strictly a man’s world, with the men taking charge as both the heroes and the villains, the bosses of the corrupt political machines and the up-and-comers either succumbing to them or fighting back against them. But these films were not devoid of women, but those women had their own roles to play.

Female characters in these political films found a niche into which they could be fit, a trope on which sufficient variations could be introduced that it ended up showing up multiple times over the decades. When considering this type of character the phrase “Behind every great man is a great woman” comes to mind. That is where the women in these movies stood: behind the man, attempting to push him toward greatness, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. These Great Women did not achieve anything on their own, or draw attention to themselves, but were behind-the-scenes players using the power they had over the protagonist in pursuit of their goals.

The most generic and straightforward example of this type of character appears in the 1940 film The Great McGinty, the directorial debut of Preston Sturges. As blunt a political satire as they come, the film tells the story of a bum who walks the crooked path to political stardom. Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is hired by a political boss to help rig elections, and ends up so impressing his superiors that they keep on promoting him. McGinty is convinced to run for office, and arranges a marriage of convenience with his secretary, Catherine (Muriel Angelus) as a way to make himself more appealing to voters.

But Catherine, who is a widow with a child, does more than just help McGinty’s political status. She begins to exert her influence on him, eventually convincing him to stop his illegal methods. This does not end well for McGinty, who ends up abandoned by his bosses in prison before he manages to escape to the Caribbean. But at least we know that he escaped with his soul, thanks to the conscience instilled in him by his wife.

While the major female character in The Great McGinty is extremely one-dimensional, other films were able to find more interesting ways to explore this type of role. The year before, in 1939, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was released in theaters. While the traditional Great Woman represents the film’s moral compass, Mr. Smith goes in the opposite direction in developing its story. Jefferson Smith is a bright-eyed idealist from the midwest who is chosen to be a United States Senator by a corrupt Governor who assumes Jeff will toe the line. But Jeff has ideas of his own and quickly gets in trouble with the political machine built on bribery and graft.

James Stewart and Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Saunders (Jean Arthur) is Jeff’s secretary, bitter and jaded, announcing at the very beginning of the film her intention to quit. She sees Jeff as a rube and a bumpkin who has no business in politics, and when he comes up with an idea for a bill to turn a stretch of land in the midwest into a Boys’ Camp (using the exact land that his corrupt bosses want to use for a dam) Saunders attempts to put him in his place by explaining to him how difficult getting anything done in Washington is, but she ends up fueling his passion by giving him the knowledge to accomplish his goals.

When Jeff’s idealism clashes with his fellow senators’ cruelty and perfidy, it is Saunders, her faith in democracy restored, who stands up for him and helps him take on the political machine. Several scenes feature Saunders standing in the balcony of the senate chamber, shouting and waving to give Jeff advice on what his next move should be. Of course it is Jeff whose valiant stand and day-long filibuster are able to overthrow the corrupt politicians and save the day, but Saunders is extremely active behind helping and supporting him every step of the way.

Perhaps the most complex and powerful take on the Great Woman character is in the 1956 film A Face in the Crowd, which was directed by Elia Kazan. Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) is a young Arkansas journalist who finds alcoholic bum Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) to perform on her radio show. After she nicknames him “Lonesome Rhodes” he becomes a local sensation, with his folksy charm, homespun wisdom, and disregard for authority making him a star.

As Lonesome becomes more and more popular his ego inflates drastically, and Marcia watches on as he succumbs to his lust and alcoholism. At the same time she sees how he is blatantly manipulating his audience and using his popularity to become a powerful political figure. Despite realizing that he has become a pedagogue who uses everyone around him, including her, Marcia is too willing to indulge Lonesome because she is in love with him. When he is feeling weak and relies on her for comfort she takes him in repeatedly, against her better judgment.

Lonesome becomes a major political figure thanks to his national television show, and becomes the advisor to a presidential candidate, helping shape his image to seem less elitist and more “of the people.” Marcia realizes how dangerous Lonesome has become, and when he reneges on his proposal to her by having a quickie wedding with an eighteen year-old he meets while judging a pageant, she accepts that she has a responsibility to knock him off his pedestal. During a live taping of his show Marcia turns the speakers on while Lonesome is mocking his audience, destroying his reputation and his political career. As a Great Woman Marcia was unable to turn around the man who had fallen from greatness, and so she had to destroy him, or rather, set him up to destroy himself.

What do these three women have in common, other than that they stay in the background while the men in their lives do great or terrible things? All three women have a power over these men that no other characters in the film have. In The Great McGinty and A Face in the Crowd it is an emotional power; Catherine uses hers to convince McGinty to do the right thing, and Lonesome frequently admits to Marcia that he relies on her, although she is unable to save him from his hubris and instead helps bring about his downfall. In Mr. Smith Saunders becomes the only character that Jeff can trust, and her knowledge and guidance leads him to victory.

Movie still from A Face in the Crowd

None of these three women is overtly sexual, at least compared to the other women we see in the film. Catherine is seen as chaste and pure and even when she and McGinty fall in love there is no hint of lust in their relationship. Saunders intentionally de-sexes herself around her co-workers, none of whom even know her first name, and she deeply resents Susan, the daughter of a corrupt senator who uses her feminine wiles to distract Jeff from the shady dealings going on around him. And while Marcia does have sex with Lonesome (coming out in the ’50s gave the film the leeway to imply, if not show, extramarital sex), the film clearly gives her the moral high-ground over the other floozies with whom he has sex, as well as the very young woman he marries instead of Marcia.

There is even a motherly quality to all three women, each guiding and protecting the men in their lives in a distinctly maternal manner. Even though all three relationships have a romantic undertone, these women’s interactions with the protagonists have a protective, loving yet chiding and slightly condescending quality that is reminiscent of how a mother might treat a child. In Mr. Smith Saunders at one point describes her pride in seeing Jeff take the Senate floor by storm as being like a mother watching a son’s impressive feat. That motherly pride is one of the defining traits of the Great Woman, as a way to differentiate her from the harlots who might try to lead the protagonist away from the right path.

As the ’60s progressed women began taking roles of greater prominence, still often acting behind the scenes, though, exerting their influence outside the public eye. Characters such as The Manchurian Candidate‘s Eleanor Iselin (Angela Lansbury) showed how roles were evolving for women in political films, and would lay the seeds for characters in films from G.I. Jane to Legally Blonde 2, which include female politicians who still pulled strings in the background. But there are still female characters whose roots can be seen in films like The Great McGinty, Mr. Smith Goes to Washingon, and A Face in The Crowd. So every time you are watching a political film and the most important female character is a wife or a secretary or a journalist (think State of Play or The Ides of March), remember the influence of these early films and cringe at how far we haven’t come.

———-

Tom Houseman was born white, straight, male, cis, and rich. He has done a lot of work unpacking and understanding his many forms of privilege. He is far from perfect, but he is learning. He writes film reviews and analysis for BoxOfficeProphets.com. If you want to officially like him, you can do so at Facebook.com/tomhousemanwriting.

Horror Week 2012: A Brief Feministory of Zombie Cinema

I spent my teen years hopelessly addicted to zombie movies. No matter how poorly made, no matter how artistically worthless, no matter how nasty and exploitative, if the movie had zombies in it, I would watch. The first thing I bought with the first paycheck from my first job at seventeen was Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema.

In 2006, it was indeed more or less complete, but a LOT of zombie movies have been made since then.

I should state upfront that I hold no truck with narrow, exclusionary definitions of “zombie.” To me, the zombie is a very broad church: if somebody has ever called it a zombie, it’s a zombie. The Deadites of Evil Dead? Zombies. The Somnambulist in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari? A zombie. The Dead Men of Dunharrow? Zombies. (Don’t even try that 28 Days Later “infected” crap with me. Those are most definitely zombies, and you should trust me on this because I probably know more about zombie cinema than you.) (Unless you’re Jamie Russell, in which case thank you for stopping by, sir, and I love your book, and I wrote a paper about Zombie Jesus if you’d like to read it?)

As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism.

Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.

Stage One: The Pre-Romero Era

The early stage of zombie cinema is the least popular (and it is also my strongest ammunition in the fight against the purists who insist that only the Romero flavor of zombie – the dead, resurrected, flesh-eating variety – counts as a true zombie). For the first 35 years of its onscreen existence, the zombie didn’t eat anybody’s flesh. Instead, a zombie – first seen in 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie – was a mindless slave resuscitated by voodoo.

The words “voodoo,” “1932,” and “slave” all in the same sentence like that has probably alerted you to the most striking fact about these early zombie films, which is that they are hella racist. In White Zombie, Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo master who conspires with a plantation owner to zombify a white woman. I Walked With A Zombie (1943) and Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) also draw on Haitian voodoo and slave plantations. Per Russell’s thoughtful postcolonial reading of these films, they play on colonial fears of white enslavement and Afro-Caribbean magical powers. In all three movies, the great threat posed by the zombies and their voodoo master is the enslavement of a young white woman.

I Walked With A Zombie: SO MUCH horrendous racial and sexual imagery in one little screencap.

In these early films, white women exist primarily to be threatened by a monster with a subtext of sexual violence, suggesting the racist narrative of predatory, animalistic black men preying on lily-white women. It’s pretty stomach-churning to watch, even if it’s fascinating fodder for students of gender, race, colonialism, and the cinema. Luckily, in 1968 zombies were revitalized, and their race and gender aspects completely transformed, by one remarkable movie.

Stage Two: The Golden Age

In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s most obvious innovation was actually cribbed from the Richard Matheson novella I Am Legend (in which the undead bloodsuckers are actually identified as vampires, though often read as zombies). Like their literary predecessors, Romero’s shuffling reanimated corpses fed on the living. The association of zombies with Haitian voodoo, slavery, and colonialism was jettisoned, and pop culture hasn’t looked back.

Calling this period the golden age is almost entirely a matter of personal preference, but good lord are there some terrific zombie films from the 1970s. Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead is the undisputed masterpiece of the era, but there are some wonderful movies from all across Europe: the Spanish Blind Dead series, Lucio Fulci‘s giallo gorefests in Italy (especially the splendid The Beyond), French film The Grapes of Death, the underrated and transnational The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue…

But it was Night of the Living Dead that set the tone for these movies, both in terms of the unremitting bleakness and in the heightened consciousness of social issues. Romero has always claimed that his choice of African-American actor Duane Jones for protagonist Ben was color-blind casting, but his own subsequent filmography displays a clear concern for class and race issues. The role of gender in golden-age zombie films is subtler, but no less present. One of the more shocking moments in NotLD is the reveal of the little zombie girl chomping on her dead father and murdering her own mother. The message is clear: the zombie apocalypse breaks down all social categories. The mother-child bond, so often inviolable in Hollywood, is broken in the most violent way imaginable. A little girl, the archetype of innocence, enacts the violence. Social roles cannot possibly hold in the face of the undead threat; in the end, the zombie makes equals of us all.

No wonder I am terrified of preteens.

Stage Three: The Great Comeback

The eighties and nineties saw a proliferation of slasher flicks, while the zombie fell out of favor. Russell ascribes the zombie resurgence of the past decade to the 2002 double-whammy of 28 Days Later and the video game Resident Evil. Before long, Dawn of the Dead was remade, while Shaun of the Dead gave the genre a simultaneous shot in the arm as the first self-styled “RomZomCom.” By the middle of the decade, zombies were well and truly mainstream.

It’s a curious fact, explored by Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws, that lowbrow genre fare can sometimes push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable by mainstream Hollywood standards. Arguably, the mainstreaming of zombies has actually defanged some of their ability to make interesting commentary on gender.

For example, the largely entertaining and in some ways surprisingly innovative 2009 zom-com Zombielandends with its previously strong, capable female characters screaming on an amusement park ride, needing to be rescued by the male protagonist. While 1970s zombie films didn’t exactly lack delicate fainting ladies, there was an overall thematic sense that the rising of the dead renders categories such as gender roles ontologically insignificant. A film like Zombieland manages to use the zombie apocalypse to actually enforce gender stereotypes. Similarly, I rage-quit AMC’s The Walking Dead after one season, in part based on a scene where the female characters had a discussion along the lines of, “Well, the apocalypse has hit; better revert to traditional gender roles, ’cause cavemen!!”

I still love zombies deeply. I love the wish-fulfillment aspect of imagining yourself as the last brave outpost of survival against the onslaught, creating your own beleaguered little society when this one collapses. I love the multiplicity of symbolic potential in the zombie, the seemingly endless variety of fears for which it can stand: the inevitability of death; infiltration of human-seeming replicants or pod people; fear of brainwashing or enslavement; loss of all particularity or individuality; uprising of the faceless proletariat; the revenge of Gaia; communism; enforced conformity; being overwhelmed by whatever force it is that you fear most (feminism or kyriarchy or theocracy or secularism or or or…).

But I’m experiencing burnout. I don’t enjoy seeing such a rich, challenging, bleak, existential symbol stripped of all its nuance to cater to the same old reductive Hollywood tropes and narratives. I’m sick of the mainstream cultural attitude toward gender and social roles, and I am very sick of seeing things I love harnessed to serve this attitude.

It makes me want to eat somebody’s brains! Which is a thing invented in Return of the Living Dead in 1985.

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

‘Carousel’: A Fairytale Screen Adaptation of the 2012 Republican Anti-Woman Agenda

Movie poster for Carousel

I loved this film. When I was 13 or so.

Re-watching it this week—for the purpose of writing about how much I admired the way it handled domestic violence issues (in 1956, no less)—I realized my 13-year-old self understood jack shit about misogyny in film, and she certainly didn’t understand what constitutes successfully raising awareness about violence against women.

The only thing I can think to say about Carousel now, as a 34-year-old woman who’s been both a witness to and a victim of physical abuse at the hands of men, isn’t just that I’m appalled by its sexism or the blasé nature in which it deals with physical abuse (I am), but that I’m seriously freaked out by how a movie musical from sixty years ago manages to feel like a fairytale screen adaptation of the 2012 Republican anti-woman agenda.

A film written, directed, and produced in 1956 will obviously echo the cultural climate of the 1950s, and during that time, rigid gender roles permeated; primarily, men were the breadwinners, and women were the homemakers. And advertisements like this existed:

Women can work outside the home now without the universe exploding (thanks, bros!), but that doesn’t mean we don’t still regularly deal with nonsense I mean gang rape fantasy advertisements like this:

We’ve come a long way, baby? I don’t fucking think so. But I’ll get back to that.

First of all, the plot: Billy Bigelow is a barker (a person who tries to attract patrons) at a carousel, and all the ladies love him, including Mrs. Mullin, the carousel owner. Billy catches the eye of the young, pretty Julie Jordan and helps her onto the carousel like she’s a child, and then stands next to her the whole time, staring at her like a fucking serial killer. The jealous Mrs. Mullin kicks out Julie and her friend Carrie, and when Julie argues about being treated unfairly, Mrs. Mullin slut-shames her for a supposed indiscretion with Billy. The indiscretion? Julie let Billy put his arm around her waist. Floozy!

Billy and Julie in Carousel

Billy appears out of nowhere to defend Julie, and as a result, Mrs. Mullin fires him. In one of the most offensive moments in the film, Billy smacks Mrs. Mullin on the ass and says, “Go on, then, git,” as if she were an animal.

Carrie decides to go home (they have a curfew because apparently being a woman and being a child are the same thing in 1956), but Julie refuses—even though she knows it’ll mean getting fired from her job as a mill worker—because she wants to spend time with this older man whom she knows nothing about, except that he wants to bum money from her; that he’s a womanizer; and that he keeps asking “aren’t you scared of me?” like he’s offended that she isn’t. (Man up, Bigelow!)

This is a movie musical, though, so within the next five seconds Julie and Billy sing a song about love. I’m not going to pretend I don’t love this song.

They get married. Billy can’t (or won’t) find work, so they live off Julie’s aunt. Billy—because he’s so distraught and self-loathing about his inability to find employment—physically abuses Julie (off-screen), but he admits he did it because “we would argue, and she’d be right.” Well then!

Billy basically ignores her for the entire rest of the film in favor of hanging out with his criminal friend Jigger (WTF) until Julie tells Billy she’s pregnant, at which point he caresses her arms and stomach as he helps her walk up like five steps because oh my god delicate flower carrying his spawn.

I laughed in horror at the spawn-song soliloquy that follows; it perfectly encapsulates the creepy gender constraints of 2012 I mean 1956:

“His mother can teach him the way to behave, but she won’t make a sissy out of him. Not him! Not my boy! Not Bill! Bill … my boy Bill; I will see that he’s named after me, I will. My boy, Bill! He’ll be tall and tough as a tree, will Bill!”

The song continues in the same ridiculous fashion, with Billy listing off all the shit His Boy Bill might do when he gets older (e.g. hammering spikes, ferrying a boat, hauling a scow along a canal, becoming a heavyweight champ, or, if that doesn’t work out, maybe becoming the President of the United States, duh). But then, Billy’s all—“Wait a minute! Could it be? What the hell! What if he is a girl?” Actual lyrics.

Let the horror get more horrifying.

Listen. “You can have fun with a son, but you gotta be a father to a girl.” Got it? And this girl, she’ll have ribbons in her hair, and she’ll be pink and white as peaches and cream! We don’t experience the pleasure of hearing about what Peaches and Cream Girl will do with her life, but we definitely get an earful about 1) her looks and 2) all the things Daddy needs to do before her arrival. Suddenly—at the mere prospect of raising a girl child instead of a boy child—Daddy goes all Male Provider on our asses.

Let me not forget to mention this end of the song creep-out moment: “Dozens of boys pursue her. Many a likely lad does what he can to woo her from her faithful dad. She has a few pink and white young fellers of two or three, but my little girl gets hungry every night, and she comes home to me!” What is this—a song from one of those 100% unacceptable for obvious reasons father-daughter purity balls? (That lovely little tradition started as recently as 1998, by the way.)

In the end, Billy dies by falling on his own knife (seriously, fail) when he and Jigger try to steal money from a rich dude. After his death, he passes on to some makeshift Heaven-type situation where he polishes fake plastic stars for all of eternity, and for some reason, the owners of Heaven allow him to return to Earth for a day in order to help Julie and his daughter feel less horrible about him having been an overall shitty husband and criminal. Yay.

By this point, his daughter Louise is fifteen years old. Upon his return to Earth, Billy finds Louise dancing on the beach and, after he realizes everyone keeps making fun of her because of his robbery attempt, he tries to cheer her up—by giving her one of the fake plastic stars he stole (ha ha ha theft again) from Heaven.

But Louise refuses to take it! Because who the fuck is this dude!

And what does she get for refusing a gift from a random man who showed up out of nowhere? A slap on the hand. Literally. The same man who physically abused his wife when he was alive somehow walks out of Heaven and slaps the shit out of his daughter within the first ten minutes of meeting her for the first time. That isn’t even the worst of it.

The worst of it?

She runs inside to tell her mother that a strange man on the beach slapped her—but—but—it didn’t feel like a slap, she says; it felt like a kiss.

Awwwww, that’s sweet, right? Nope! Not for a fucking second. Let me tell you why.

I started this piece by talking about how my thirteen-year-old girl self remembered Carousel as a happy musical that shed light on a bad man who hit his wife. I remembered, too, that he died, but I remembered it as a punishment of sorts, a repercussion caused by living life as an abusive dickface who treated women like absolute shit. I didn’t care about his death. His death felt like a consequence of bad behavior to me, and in a way, it is—stealing money from someone at knifepoint is probably wrong, for the most part, heh. But the ultimate message of Carousel (that I somehow glommed onto as a teenager) isn’t saying to men: “Don’t abuse women, or else.” It’s saying something closer to: “SEE WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON’T MAN UP AND SUPPORT YOUR WOMEN, YOU LAZY BUMS?”

It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of “failing” as a man. It’s oh-so-1956. It’s oh-so-2012.

We’re living in an age in which women’s basic rights—specifically the right to bodily autonomy, including safe and legal access to abortion—keep coming under fire by conservative Republicans and unfortunately aren’t more than half-assedly defended by supposed “progressive” Democrats, either. Further, the arguments against abortion and reproductive rights center around this lie that it’s all about Stopping the Murder of Innocent, Yet-To-Be Born Infants.

Bullshit.

The abortion debate (and now the access to birth control debate—for fuck’s sake!) exists because we live in a culture that time warped to, or possibly never actually left, 1956. Women are still fighting for basic human rights—in 2012—because power-hungry, neo-conservative bullies can’t stop jerking off to the fantasy of living out the rest of their lives in Carousel-Land.

That’s why re-watching this harmless little musical made me absolutely cringe.

It’s a film with dizzying dance sequences and well-known musical numbers to be sure, but it’s also a film in which women are valued and treated with respect only while pregnant, and who are otherwise disregarded, objectified, slut-shamed, abused, or infantilized, and who are expected to accept the actions of the men around them without judgment, regardless of the harm those actions may cause. And there you have it, readers: the 2012 G.O.P. Platform.

Now let’s all cry together:

Women and Gender In Musicals Week: The Surprising Feminism of ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Movie Poster

It’s always difficult to review older movies from a feminist outlook, especially ones that predate not only second-wave feminism, but the civil rights movement as well. On the surface, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is kinda anti-feminist – we have the stereotypical dumb blonde and the smart brunette, the dumb blonde is a blatant golddigger, we don’t get a full Bechdel Test pass (almost all of the conversations are about men), and the film is shot with the intention of emphasizing the lead actress’ sexiness as much as possible (with a few obligatory male gaze shots). Yet I was asking myself why I love this now almost 60 year old film so much. I looked a little deeper, and realized that there is a lot in this film for feminists to celebrate – not only the stars, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, but also the characters’ friendship, their mutual sexual liberation, and how a little song named “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” is not as much about being materialistic as it seems.

Marilyn Monroe has to be one of the most misunderstood household names. When people think of her, sure, they think of her beauty and sex appeal, but they also think of her drug addiction, her early death, rumoured plastic surgery, rumoured promiscuity, her stage name, and her difficulties as a performer. No one ever seems to know about her good points. They seem to think that her dumb blonde sexpot persona is her actual personality, when, in fact, she was acting. She was actually an intellectual who loved reading (and I’m talking difficult texts like Proust and Nietzsche) – her favourite photographs of herself are of her reading. There’s a reason she married Arthur Miller! She was also an early civil rights advocate – Ella Fitzgerald would recollect that Monroe personally called the owner of popular club Mocambo, which at the time was segregated, and demanded that Fitzgerald be booked as a performer immediately, promising that she’d be at a front table every night, and bring the press with her, if the owner did so. Her actions made sure that Fitzgerald would never have to play a small club again. Marilyn Monroe could act (in both comedic and dramatic roles), dance, and sing, and yet all that she is remembered for is her looks and her personal demons. She deserves better, especially as someone I consider to be an early feminist icon.

Marilyn Monroe & Jane Russell in the film’s opening sequence

Jane Russell is another performer who deserved a lot more accolades than she got. Her portrayal of Dorothy Shaw is overtly feminist – sexually and intellectually confident in an era that tried to force patriarchal notions of morality. My Baby Boomer mother also fondly remembers her commercials for the Playtex Cross-Your-Heart 18-hour Comfort Bra (it remains one of Playtex’s most popular products). Here was a well-known star as a spokesmodel for lingerie. Even now, we don’t see famous women (besides the Victoria’s Secret supermodels) selling lingerie – at least not for the sake of promoting comfort over sex appeal. Never mind selling lingerie made especially for larger-chested women. These days, we buy non-sports bras for the look of them or the curves/cleavage they create, not because it kinda hurts to jiggle. Here was an actress who basically stated to the world, “Yes, I have large breasts, yes, I need a decent bra, and so does every other woman out there.”

The friendship between Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw is one of the most positive female friendships depicted on film, and is one aspect of the adaptation distinctly improved from the original novella by Anita Loos. (Yes, I’ve read the source material this time.) In the original novella, Lorelei is a flapper who keeps a diary of her daily events and describes both her ambitions of wealth and her attempts to juggle three suitors at once. She is vain, poorly educated (the prose is littered with deliberate misspellings), and disdainful of other women. Dorothy is supposedly her friend, but she often makes sarcastic snipes at Lorelei’s expense (which Lorelei is too dimwitted to pick up on). They’re a lot closer to frenemies in the original, which is a surprisingly misogynistic depiction of women from a female writer. The musical version instead makes Lorelei and Dorothy inseperable. They are absolutely devoted to each other and protective of one another. They disagree on relationships – Lorelei believes in only dating rich men and falling in love with them later, whereas Dorothy is a romantic who keeps falling in love with poor men. Each thinks the other is foolish when it comes to relationships, but they accept each other’s differences and are loyal to each other before any other man in their lives. Sisters before Misters.

Marilyn Monroe & Jane Russell

Another feminist aspect of the film, one which I think is left over from the characters’ original incarnations as flappers, is their complete sexual liberation. Despite what Baby Boomer conservatives would like you to think, there was no such bastion of morality in the 1950s. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes they make it clear that the lead characters are “lower class.” (“We’re just two little girls from Little Rock, we came from the wrong side of the tracks.”) Both are completely confident about themselves and their life choices. It’s heavily implied that neither girl is a virgin, especially in the “Isn’t Anyone Here For Love” sequence, which is littered with innuendo. (The sequence has also infamously been read as subtly homoerotic – there’s a reason the Men’s Olympic team isn’t interested in Dorothy.) Lorelei is a master seductress, whose suitor Gus has to repeatedly turn himself away from because he has trouble resisting her charms. They drink, they smoke (though they are never seen actually smoking, just buying cigarettes), they dance, they party, they stay out late. And while wealthy men like Gus’ father look down on women like Lorelei, they are completely unapologetic about their choices.

The film also depicts the women as unmistakably intelligent, albeit in different ways. Dorothy is very obviously meant to be the “smart” one, who corrects Lorelei’s mistakes, catches on to other people’s insinuations, and is always ready with a witty retort. But while Lorelei might be “book dumb,” she’s not stupid. Together, Lorelei and Dorothy are master manipulators, and she’s far more devious than she lets on. Famously, at the end of the film, she convinces Gus’ father to let them marry through some admittedly clever logic. (“Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?”) Dorothy isn’t entirely smart either, because she tends to think with her heart over her head. She knows that Ernie Malone is a private detective out to ruin her best friend’s life, but falls in love with him anyway. Notably, however, she makes it clear that she chooses loyalty to Lorelei first.


Marilyn Monroe in the “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” sequence

The most famous number in the musical, by far, is “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend,” which has endured for over 60 years and is considered Marilyn Monroe’s signature number. The sequence, depicting her in a hot pink gown against a bright red backdrop, is so iconic it has, amongst other homages, served as the visual inspiration for Madonna’s music video for “Material Girl.” On the surface the song is about being materialistic – that Lorelei’s love for jewels supercedes all other things, and at the surface, yes, it would be a theoretically anti-feminist song. But I think the song is actually about a longing for financial independence. If you pay attention to the lyrics, they describe how the men in Lorelei’s life are generous for a while, but are shallow (“Men grow cold as girls grow old, And we all lose our charms in the end.”). She is actually saying that while she appreciates romantic attention, she relies on their expensive gifts to live. (“A kiss may be grand…but it won’t pay the rental on your humble flat, Or help you at the automat.”) As a duo of showgirls, Lorelei and Dorothy might be fairly successful, but they’ll never earn enough to be truly financially independent. Don’t forget that in the 1950s, women were still expected to be homemakers. Lorelei’s manifesto is that having diamonds will grant her the opportunity to live on her own, feed herself, and be able to support herself along with her showgirl job. She will need that financial independence long after her looks have faded and the shallow men in her life have moved on. (“Cause that’s when those louses go back to their spouses”) This song, above all else, is advocating for women to work and take care of themselves, but until that day when they are allowed to be truly independent, Lorelei’s going to get to her dreams the best way she knows how.

Yes, the film is flawed, especially if taken at its apparently anti-feminist face value. But contextually, I feel that this film’s depiction of women is quite fair for its day. Yes, it would be nice if the girls weren’t stereotypes and Lorelei wasn’t a blatant golddigger, but then, where would the plot be? Not only are its stars, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, important landmarks in feminist history, but their characters are too. Their friendship is absolutely ironclad – they put each other first, even though both are looking for love in different ways. Their confidence in their intelligence, lifestyle, and sexuality is incredibly liberated for what was supposedly a time of suffocatingly patriarchal morality. And lastly, the famous song “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” might be about celebrating materialism, but is really about a woman’s dreams of financial indepdencence. All things considered, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is surprisingly feminist.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: ‘Singin’ In the Rain’

This is a guest review by Deirdre Crimmins.

Singin’ In The Rain (dir. Stanley Donan & Gene Kelly)

Though my first love in cinema will always be horror films, I have such an affection for musicals. The glitzy costumes. The aggressively perky and optimistic characters. The song and dance that always seems spontaneous, and from the heart. This odd, and utterly fabricated world, is always both the complete antithesis, and the perfect compliment to the grimy underbelly of film in which I typically dwell. In fact, you will even find an umbrella just for Gene Kelly nestled in my tattoos amongst the zombies and vampires.

While the genre can whisk you away to foreign lands, and domestic bliss, it is also historically problematic when it comes it its representations of women, and gender in general. Though the men are singing and dancing, they are always men’s men, expressing their gender through ruggedness and emotional unavailability. The women are often window dressing, and pawns in the plot, rather than autonomous people who have actual emotions and ambitions. Singin’ In The Rain suffers from some of the same issues that many musicals have with their treatment of genders, but it does have a surprisingly progressive character as well.

First, we must cover the unfortunate representation of women in the film. Even within the context of a film released in 1952, but portraying the invention of the talking pictures in 1927, it has some nearly inexcusable moments. The worst of which is the “Beautiful Girls” number. The title of this song, crooned by a matinee idol, is just the beginning of my issues with it. The song follows a man describing all of the latest fashions for a modern woman as we see each of these outfits modeled by woman in dioramas to showcase the fashion as it would be worn in the world. Each of the women is frozen in place, to mimic a lifeless, soulless, mannequin, with varying degrees of success in not fidgeting. This transformation from people to objects is enough to put many people into a gender misrepresentation-spin, but my issues with the sequence does not stop there. The culmination of this sequence is when the modern “girl’s” life hits its highest point: the wedding dress. The music soars, and it is clear that all of her outfits and activities have built towards this final costume. When this gown is revealed all of the women come to life, and then surround the singer to frame him as he belts out those last lyrics. Clearly this sequence in particular is communicating the end all, be all of a woman’s life is her wedding. After that there is no more soaring musical numbers, and no more fancy outfits to be had. While this sequence does have major problems ideologically, it is unfortunately not too far from how women are portrayed today as well. If you browse any modern newsstand you will still see these framed female bodies, each frozen in their own dioramas of life with the perfectly corresponding outfit. You will also see the great white wedding dress being sold as the most important object a woman will ever buy. This is why I hesitate to be too critical of the film–we are not too far from these representations. It by no means validates these portrayals, but it does put them in perspective.

Somehow, in the sea of women (all of them far past the age of being called “girl), swaying next to the crooner is our heroine, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Kathy is by far one of my favorite, and the best characterized, women in musicals of this era.

We first meet Kathy when Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) jumps in to her car to escape a throng of overzealous fans. With Kathy driving herself we instantly associate her with independence. And unlike the pursing fans, Kathy can act logically and contain herself.

Inevitably Kathy and Don fall in love, and spend the rest of film ensuring that they are able to stay together while growing their careers.

The thing that I find unique about Kathy’s character is that she is so balanced. She is never a caricature. She is able to keep up with Don and his buddy Cosmo (Donald O’Connor), but she never veers into becoming “one of the guys” by sacrificing her femininity just to match them in comedic timing. She also dances and sings along with them, but never as a partner who is put there to make Don look better. And it seems no matter what else is thrown at her, she remains herself. Being so self aware and content is not always shown for characters in musicals. Frequently the women are shown as aggressive career women who sacrifice themselves for their careers (Majorie Reynolds in Holiday Inn) or women who are put there just to be romanced by the main character. Kathy is strong enough to not only know who she is, but also can be true to herself and pursue both her personal life and her career.

It is this intersection of career and love which makes the final scene in the film heart wrenching. At a film premier Kathy is called upon to continue providing the voice for the shrieking silent film star Lina (Jean Hagen), at the expense of her own burgeoning career. Singing for Lina again would mean giving up any hope for singing herself, but both the head of the studio and Don are threatening her with ending her career if she refuses. She begrudgingly agrees to help them, but tells Don that she can’t love him if he asks her to sacrifice her career for his. Though their love is so strong, Kathy knows that what Don is asking her to do is selfish, and goes against what her desires are. She is clearly pained by the decision, which is refreshing to see. She wants both love and career, and knows that she should not be forced to choose between the two. In the end, Don and Cosmo expose Lina for what she is, and Kathy’s career and love life are saved. I have no objections to the fact that Kathy is saved by the men of the film. Conversely, I celebrate that Don needed to find a way to save Kathy’s career in order to win her back. He could have just let her run away, and then attempt to woo her back after the fact, but in order to win her heart again he needed to prove to her that he took her career as seriously as his own. Had he not prioritized her career, their relationship would be ultimately doomed.

With Kathy’s level-headed portrayal in Singin’ In The Rain it is easy for me to long for other women characters in modern film to be like her. It is her self-assuredness, and strength without stubbornness that make her believable and admirable. And any woman who can effortlessly keep up with Gene Kelly should be considered heroic.

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Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: Bros Before Hoes, or How Kidnapping Makes for Great Dance Numbers: on ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

When Bitch Flicks first put out the call for a review of the movie musical landscape, this was the first movie that came to mind. It has all the elements of a great movie musical: the hummable ditties of Kiss Me, Kate, the buoyant dance sequences of West Side Story, and the Technicolor treatment of the great Pioneer experience of Oklahoma! But when you add blatant misogyny, barn-raisings and male bravado, and taking women by force as the ultimate romantic gesture, you get Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The 1954 movie, directed by Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain) with music by Saul Chaplin and Gene de Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, with choreography from the great Michael Kidd, is often overlooked when considering the movie musical genre. There are, admittedly, many musicals that enjoy examining the battle of the sexes, and most old-school romantic comedies start with a Dude™ and a Chick™ squabbling over their differences. But very few of those ever let the man be so backwards that he equates courtship and conquering, or has a woman responsible for civilizing and subduing men’s worst impulses. It’s like Lysistrata and The Hangover got together and held a barn dance–a big, beautiful Crayola-colored extravaganza.

In 1821, Oregon Territory, Adam Pontipee (the impossibly rugged Howard Keel) is looking to fetch himself a wife—not for the purposes of high-falutin’ romance, family, and lifelong happiness, no. “I’d like best a widow woman that ain’t afraid to work,” he says, at the general store, where he’d just as quickly pick up a mate as he would 25 pounds of chewing tobacco. “There’s seven of us men, me and my six brothers. Place is like a pigsty, and the food tastes worse….” Adam is out for marriage in the purest economical sense: in this new territory, there are ten men for every woman, and so Adam’s priority is availability, not compatibility.

“Bless Yo’ Beautiful Hide,” he booms, and it’s not until he sees Millie (Jane Powell, strong of axe and soft of heart) that he knows he can go out and buy with gusto. She makes great stew, so that’s half the battle, and she is used to tending men in a boarding house, so he considers her the perfect bride.

He offers marriage, she accepts (as she’s fallen for him on first sight), and off they go in his wagon back to his cabin in the mountains, where she meets his six red-bearded, bullish brothers. Millie bristles at caring for her brother-in-laws without some control, and so she withholds a hot breakfast and newly washed clothes until they promise to shave and settle down like gentleman. It seems that what this house has longed for is not an extra hand in the washroom, but a gentle and firm guide to proper etiquette.

What Millie discovers, as she gets to know these boys, is that they long to go out and snatch up girls of their own—which they do, in spectacular fashion, at the town’s barn raising. The brothers Pontipee, all in primary colors, demonstrate through dazzling choreography how dashing and desirable they can be, and sweep the girls off their feet. Just watch how leapfrogging, arm wrestling, log-rolling, and balletic machismo pays off. (This is the most spectacular sequence of the movie, and it’s impossible to watch without a slaphappy grin. Jacques d’Amboise and a very young Russ Tamblyn steal the show as Ephraim and Gideon, defying gravity with every move.)

But of course, the boys get into a fistfight with the girls’ other suitors, and soon they’re back on the farm, suffering through the early days of a long winter. It’s lovely to see these men pining, something so rarely explored outside of the musical theater realm, while maintaining their rugged outdoorsmen personas. (This is, of course, expressed through the delicate art of ax ballet.)

The enlivening force of Seven Brides is male longing, and it makes for great theater. The Pontipee brothers have lived hard, but falling in love is what softens and civilizes them. But all that civilization is for nothing when Adam, modern man that he is, devises a brilliant scheme, pulled straight out of Millie’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives. Why not do like the Romans did with the Sabine women?

And then comes the merriest song about rape ever.

The brothers are shaken out of their depression by the chance to reassert their manhood, and off they go to town, snatching up their girls from backyards and front porches and carrying them off, squealing and crying. An avalanche falls as they are passing through the mountains, preventing the angry families and boyfriends from reaching the Pontipees. Millie, horrified to discover what the boys have done, reasserts her right over the house (the one territory that has become completely hers to control) and sends the boys to the barn for the entire winter, taking the girls inside and keeping them under close watch.

This ends up being a bit of a tease, since the girls get their own dance (about marriage, natch), and Millie discovers she’s pregnant. And though the girls start warming up to the brothers (peeking through windows, running around in their skivvies), the snow that blocks the pass never melts.

Once it does, we get lovely sequences of the girls and boys frolicking together with baby farm animals (no, this movie is not subtle), and Adam stays holed up in his hunting cabin, resentful of Millie’s banishment. But once he learns he has a baby—and at that, a baby girl—Adam breaks down and returns home to be the man he’s supposed to be. Though their families come to retrieve them, and the brothers are ready to set them free, the girls refuse to leave, claiming the newborn as their own. For better or for worse, we get a group marriage of a finale, and a whole bunch of color-coordinated couples once more.

So what do we make of such a strangely backwards story of frontier courtship? For one, that men, without the guiding impulses of a good woman, will behave like savages. Whether they demonstrate that savagery at the breakfast table or at a barn-raising, it’s clear that the Pontipee brothers have impulse control issues, and they just can’t help themselves. Their needs—for food, for dominance, for love—trump almost everything reasonable and refined, and they have been taught, as pioneers of this new and uncharted territory, to take when they can. Though Adam is charming and sexy as hell—seriously, George Clooney and Howard Keel could have a smirk-off—he treats Millie like a servant at best, and property at worst. “It wouldn’t hurt you to learn some manners, too.” she remarks at the barn-raising. “What for?” he counters. “I already got me a wife.”

You can argue that Millie should’ve seen this unfair exchange coming when Adam first walked into her boarding house—and she had no real incentive to get married. Gainfully employed, resourceful, well-liked and respected by her community (especially by the women), Millie could’ve easily stayed on her own in this new country. But she, too, is softened by love, and so she is the one that understands the brothers’ plight, not Adam. You can fault the captured girls a little less than Millie, at least initially—but they too get their attic ballet-in-bloomers about the dream of summer weddings. We are expected, no matter if our house or barn needs tending, to wish for a pairing-off, and the frontier certainly looks less terrifying if you are facing it alone.

But ultimately this is a movie that asks where male compassion comes from—and the last few scenes seem to conclude that it’s when sexual politics are made personal. Holding his newborn baby girl in his arms for the first time, Adam says, “I got to thinking up at the cabin, about the baby. How I’d feel if someone came creeping in and carried her off. I’d string him up the nearest tree. I’d shoot him down as I would a thieving fox.” It’s when Adam has to think about another man out there, treating his daughter like she was property just waiting to be taken, to stir him to a nobler state of mind. Just imagine if a Seven Brides scenario applied to every zealot or backwards politician who questioned a woman’s right to her own body and state of security, if all their wives and girlfriends were subjected to sexual scrutiny. We’ve be living in a very different universe—and this ain’t even Oregon territory.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers can certainly leave you feeling ambivalent, and possibly wondering whether this lovely closing marriage sequence is a symptom of Stockholm syndrome. But what it mostly offers—spectacular dance sequences, memorable songs, and an interesting take on what it means to be “civilized” by love—makes for a rollicking good musical, and an underappreciated classic.

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

Women and Gender in Musicals Week: The Funny Face Always Gets the Big Number: on ‘Funny Girl’

This is a guest review by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

I imagine that at least once a day somewhere in America, some little Jewish girl (or girls with big noses, close-set eyes, skinny legs, and less than model looks) has a benevolent mother, sister, or aunt who pops in a DVD and tells her to sit down. She squirms a bit, but her mom says “Just trust me.” And then up on the screen pops a wildly unself-conscious, funny, brazenly self-confident woman with a voice to stop traffic. Even though she’s seen Glee and watched Lea Michele emote her way through many of these songs, nothing compares to this other creature, the one and only Barbra Streisand, in her debut film, the incomparable Funny Girl.

The 1968 movie is legendary, almost impossible to remake due to Streisand’s unforgettable turn (recreating her role from the 1964 stage musical), and with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill. It’s based on the true story of 1920s entertainer Fanny Brice, one of the major attractions in the golden age of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. Fanny knows she’s a star, but is constantly told that her unconventional looks will keep her off the stage (or as her neighbor puts it, “If a girl’s incidentals/are no bigger than two lentils/then to me it doesn’t spell success.”) But Fanny stands out, because she’s hilariously funny and has a golden voice, and so fame, like anyone who watches the movie, finds her irresistible. What the movie has at its core, is a message about female self-confidence, about self-reliance, about how the world reacts to strong women, and how, ultimately it’s all about chutzpah. Which Fanny (and Streisand) has in spades.

Streisand had only appeared in one Broadway show before then, a small but memorable part in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and she was far from the only candidate to play Fanny. When Jule Styne consulted Steven Sondheim about the development of the show, Sondheim had major qualms about potentially casting a marquee star like Mary Martin. “I don’t want to do the life of Fanny Brice with Mary Martin. She’s not Jewish,” he said. “You need someone ethnic for the part.” And Streisand was ethnic, especially when put up against a bevy of chorus girls that looked like they’d stepped straight out of Beach Blanket Bingo. The other contenders before her included Anne Bancroft, Martin, and Carol Burnett, but Streisand took the ugly duckling premise and turned it on its head every time she sang. (Fanny’s first line to a skeptical producer says it all: “Suppose all you ever had for breakfast was onion rolls. Then one day, in walks… a bagel! You’d say, ‘Ugh, what’s that?’ Until you tried it! That’s my problem—I’m a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls.”) And she stood out among the other Broadway stars at the time, in the same way Fanny did in her day.

Of course, therein you meet the first problem with Funny Girl—that to buy it, you have to believe that Barbara Streisand is ugly.

Yes, I know. You have to believe that this girl…

…is considered unattractive, uncastable, and undesirable.

The real Brice had big gummy features–a clown’s face. And though Streisand looks gorgeous in every shot, even in Fanny’s pre-fame days (check out those amazing nails), she doesn’t lose her undeniably ethnic look. She stands out, especially when surrounded by all the Aryan thin-nosed beauties of the Ziegfeld follies. And so the premise of Funny Girl, of almost every joke, rests on whether you believe that Fanny, despite her face, earns every drop of success because of her extraordinary talent. Each joke has the same structure: someone throws a derogatory comment Fanny’s way. Fanny volleys, with wit and acid and intelligence. The movie provides a model to every girl out there (no matter how attractive she is) about how to deal with a world that doubts you because of your appearance, because of your difference. When everyone’s a critic, especially in the entertainment industry, and you know you’re something special, they will have to accept you as you are, and fall in love with you for what you bring to the performance. Just watch Fanny’s first performance for a theater, and how she bends the audience to her will:

By the time she’s backstage, she’s won over the crowd…and within it, her future love interest, the dazzlingly handsome Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif.)

Then the joke changes—how could a guy as perfect and beautiful as Arnstein fall for a gummy-faced girl like Fanny? Because he knows what the rest of the world doesn’t—that she has a spark, she stands out, and that’s a sign she’s going to be a star. But the movie, as it traces Fanny’s rise to stardom, constantly returns to the presumably unassailable fact that she can’t hold Nick, or anything, in place simply by being female and beautiful. And so the movie becomes a commentary on what an unconventional woman does to keep herself successful in a world that doesn’t immediately recognize her talent.

Fanny, blessedly, has little time for people who insist she behave conventionally. Even when she lands the dream job, as a featured player among the glittering chorines of Ziegfeld’s follies, she balks at behaving like any other starlet. When Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon) puts her in the star spot in the closing number, she says, “I can’t Fanny: I can’t sing words like: “I am the beautiful reflection of my love’s affection.” I mean… Well, it’s embarrassing… If I come out opening night…telling the audience how beautiful I am, I’ll be back at [my first job] before the curtain comes down.” When he refuses to do so, Fanny concedes, but finds her own special twist for the number:

And of course it pays off—Fanny becomes a huge star, but it doesn’t change the kinds of jokes thrown our way. When Nick finally attempts to seduce her, every line of his advance is played for laughs. Pitting Nick’s debonair style against Fanny’s neurotic dodging is meant to underline just how unlikely this pairing is…and to make the viewer as skeptical as Fanny.

Even when Fanny hooks Nick, and even after she gets to sing a ditty about how great it is to be “Sadie, Sadie,” married lady, the story continues to treat Fanny as a liability. When Nick finally starts showing his shortcomings as a card shark, he is too insecure and prideful to ask Fanny to bail him out. He is thrown into prison, and Fanny gets the news just as she’s heading out of the theater for the night. “You still love him, Miss Brice?” the reporters shout. “The name’s Arnstein,” she replies defiantly. This is a woman who refuses to let her critics define her—even if it means putting the joke on her.

What ultimately carries Fanny, and Funny Girl, as one of the greatest musical comedies ever (and makes Fanny one of the best characters, male or female, ever written for Broadway) is that her weapon is always her strength, her self-reliance, that aforementioned chutzpah. Fanny truly believes that she can do or accomplish anything, including saving her own doomed marriage, if someone just gives her the chance. When she and Nick decide to separate after his release from prison, she is utterly heartbroken. But even in that moment, she pulls herself up and delivers a superb performance, looking more beautiful and elegant than ever. And that’s where the message of Funny Girl really sings out: NOTHING is as radiant as self-confidence.

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Reagan as a Role Model in ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’

Diana Lynn and Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo

I believe the GOP is using Bedtime for Bonzo as a template for how to govern the U.S.

The Republican National Convention brought out the best of the “we built it” catch-phrase slinging moralists. And they – in front of a crowd that was comprised of a high proportion of restrictive-gender-norm-appreciators– sought to influence a constituency by pushing the idea that “traditional values” and laissez-faire capitalism are inextricably connected.

This is how I get to Bedtime for Bonzo. It involves both the god of trickle-down economics and a fictional experiment that proves traditional gender roles are necessary for raising a good human being. Or, raising a good ape for that matter.

Bedtime for Bonzo is one of those antic-filled flicks where the protagonist inevitably yells out the name of the main pet/animal/kiddo in a prolonged agonized tone. It was released in 1951 and starred Ronald Reagan. That means, among other indignities in the movie, our 40th president is featured whining angrily at a chimpanzee, “Bon-zo!”

Mr. President Protagonist, Peter Boyd (Reagan), is a psychology professor at Anytown University. To impress his should-be father-in-law he aims to prove that nurture has more sway than nature by teaching an emotionally distraught chimpanzee, Bonzo, the difference between right and wrong.

And, boy does he. Through lessons in table etiquette and much finger-wagging, Peter helps Bonzo becomes a good upstanding citizen. But, implicit from the beginning is that Bonzo needs a “mama” to make the shift between unruly depressive (we first meet Bonzo trying to commit suicide by jumping off a building) to a healthy contributing member of society.

The “mama” that Peter finds is pretty-young-thing, Jane (Diana Lynn). She maintains a peppy version of the maternal ideal while also swinging her impressive bust-waist-hip ratio into the role of romantic (can you say Fa-Fa-Freud?) interest.

Through Jane’s sensual domesticity and Peter’s academic masculinity – the pair manages a successful experiment and domesticates the ape by the power of traditional values.

Which brings us back to the RNC.

The conservative agenda remains consistently exclusive to Leave it to Beaver norms. This maintains a strong unified base that continues to vote in an obviously broken economic system. To keep up the agenda and unity, the GOP needs to also keep up the myth of “tradition=virtue” and make that appealing to women voters.

This year both parties knew they would have to talk about those notorious “women’s issues.” The Democrats lined up an obviously pandering (but still appreciated) group of women speakers highlighting the values of equal pay and reproductive rights. Republicans did not go the same direction. But, Ann Romney did speak on behalf of her husband. And she delivered a cozy message about how women are super important. As long as they have reproduced.

“It’s the moms who always have to work a little harder, to make everything right. It’s the moms of this nation – single, married, widowed – who really hold this country together. We’re the mothers, we’re the wives, we’re the grandmothers, we’re the big sisters, we’re the little sisters, we’re the daughters,” Romney said.

This does at least two things: reiterates the conservative narrative of women as relational beings (existing only as supporting characters) and pushes the notion that motherhood itself is more effective in its traditional state.

See, the GOP needs a “mama” to keep its base complacent and well-behaving. And “mama” is just the outmoded ideal of motherhood and womanhood.

Why "It Was Just the Times" Doesn’t Cut It When Challenging Sexism in Older Films

Here’s something I have run up against repeatedly when challenging sexism in older films and media (for the sake of the argument I will just discuss sexism, but this applies to all shapes and sizes of bigotry):

“It was just the times…”

To be clear about this “the times” theory: in various old movies, blatant sexism percolate and penetrate. But, when these bigotries are pointed out by a riled-up feminist, many distance themselves from the debate entirely. They don’t argue that there isn’t sexism, but that it is irrelevant because the time period in which the film was produced was sexist and ergo all media resulting from it is exempt from criticism on the basis that it could only be un-sexist if it was “ahead of its time.” As in: it is unfair to call out bigotries in an “old” movie because those bigotries were so ingrained in the culture that no media could escape the influence.

Firstly, this presumes that sexism exists in the mythical “back then.” It suggests sexism was a problem in “the times” when women were expected to stay home, weren’t considered for the same jobs as men and/or couldn’t vote. Sexism existed when people still thought ridiculing people based on their gender was funny. Or it was when women weren’t paid fairly for their work. It existed before abortion was legal – when politicians still thought they had more of a say over what a woman did with her body than a woman did. Those nasty generalizations and gender-based misbehaviors belong to our grandparents or parents or older siblings: not us. But, if you noticed: Women still don’t get paid as much as men. Our right to bodily autonomy is regularly challenged by politicians who presume to know what’s best for a person’s uterus. People are still singled out and/or demeaned for their gender. This is a feminist blog, so I don’t feel the need to go into detail. But, here’s a list of sexisms that still flourish today: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, cat calls, assault, sexualization, objectification, old boys’ club disassociation (aka employment discrimination), lack of media representation, gendered interpretations, overall debasement, pink&blue aisles and more and more and more.

Sexism isn’t something that is over. And if we look at contemporary media, we see it there as well. Disney movies didn’t stop featuring childish and passive female characters after Roe v. Wade. Romantic comedies didn’t stop perpetuating the notion that women need to be saved from themselves by a man. Women haven’t stopped being portrayed as sexual conquests in action flicks.

Which ties me into the next point: old film isn’t irrelevant. Some fatalistic viewers may postulate that the media has already been created. Neither the movie nor the culture from which it was created from can be changed at this point, so criticizing sexism is futile.

But, we can’t appreciate contemporary media without understanding what built up to it. Also, viewers don’t stop watching old films after they’ve circulated a certain number of decades. Media lasts, and continues to be a part of the cultural conscience. In many ways, older films can be more relevant than newer ones.

Newer movies are timelier. They play a part in the 24-hour-cycle that automatically elevates import. But, that doesn’t mean they ultimately have more influence than older film, they just have more exposure. Stanley Kubrick’s presentation of women – especially in Clockwork Orange – might be worth noting a bit more than Michael Bay’s presentation – say in Transformers. Both exploit women, but Kubrick’s portrayal comes from a respected and canonized director. Michael Bay’s portrayal comes from a director whose notoriety comes from explosion size.

Another crucial point: critique is not necessarily antagonistic. If anything it’s an expanding of the existing material. Media – like other cultural artifacts – is relative to the culture observing it. Historical context should orient it, but it should not dictate our appreciation of it. And, challenging sexism within it does not devalue it. Instead it can actually make it more worthwhile to talk about. Instead of passively viewing film, we should be active in our consideration.

Calling out sexism gives us a fuller picture of our history. To better understand ourselves, our culture and the film; we need to analyze and point out the flaws. This is why I enjoy focusing on older films: the movies that have been with us a while, and have influenced contemporary directors. I think they are more pertinent the longer they last. Looking back will always give us a chance to reevaluate how culture in “the times” affects culture in these times.

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Erin Fenner grew up in small-town Idaho where she took solace in cult cinema. Her burgeoning feminist ideals didn’t dampen her approach to viewing even the most obviously gender-norm-dependent films, but created another angle of intrigue. She went to the University of Idaho where she grabbed a Journalism degree. There she was a student blogger, radio show producer and self-described feminist activist. Now she lives in Portland, Oregon, and works remotely for the reproductive rights organization Trust Women where she writes about the state of pro-choice-politics for their blog. She also says she is a poet, but refuses to publish, perform or share lest someone offer “constructive” critiques.