Animated Children’s Films: The Two Leading Women of the Muppets Movie

 

This is a guest review by J. Lee Milliren.
I, like many other Americans, grew up with the Muppets. My personal favorite Muppet was always the zany Gonzo; I loved his ridiculous antics. Although what I really wanted from the Muppets was for there to be more female characters because I could never relate to Miss Piggy. I know that must sound so shocking to hear that a little girl could have a completely different personality than the one female cast member of a group.
But that was then and this is now.
For the Muppets Movie I’m going to try to give a brief summary of the plot, and I’ll try to avoid as many spoilers as possible. The movie begins with a new muppet, named Walter, growing up with his human brother, Gary, in a small town. As he grows, up he realizes he’s different from Gary and discovers the Muppet Show. Walter becomes the biggest fan of the Muppet Show while his brother is just happy to spend time with Walter.
Years later, Walter is still a big fan of the Muppets while Gary has been in a relationship with Mary for ten years. To celebrate their ten years together, Gary takes Mary to see California for the first time. He also invites Walter to come along, just so he can visit the Muppet Theater. When Walter tours the Theater he sees that it is falling apart, and he accidentally overhears the evil scheming of our villian, Tex Richman. Richman’s plan is to tear down the theater and drill the land for oil. This makes Walter run out of the theater, screaming in panic for several hours.
With the help of Gary and Mary, Walter is able to meet up with Kermit the Frog and tell him what he overheard. Kermit says that they might be able to save their theater if he could get the whole gang back together, but they haven’t seen each other in years. But through the power of hilarious montages he’s able to gather the whole gang back together except for Miss Piggy. Miss Piggy is now working with Vogue in Paris and doesn’t want to return to the old gang because of her breakup with Kermit.
Now right off the bat, I have to say this movie was amazing. I laughed nonstop throughout it; I loved almost every second of it, and I recommend that everyone get into your cars and go and see it right now.

But.
My issue with this movie comes down to our two leading ladies: Miss Piggy and Mary, who I feel are almost the same character.
Now when I say this, I don’t mean that they act the same, but they do have the same goals and motivations throughout the movie. Which is–marry the man…….or the frog.
Miss Piggy originally refuses to leave Paris because she has a new successful life there. And (spoiler!) when she does return to save the theater, she says she’s not doing it for Kermit but for the theater itself. She also sais that she WILL go back to Paris, the moment their last show is done.
Throughout this movie, it is pretty clear that Miss Piggy still has feelings for Kermit and vice versa. And that Miss Piggy does want to be with Kermit. Which isn’t a really bad motivation for the character, except it seems to be her only motivation. The Miss Piggy I knew would have come back completely for herself and not for anyone else. The Miss Piggy I knew would have come back just so she could “hog” the center stage once more. But that original goal and motivation for who she was doesn’t seem to be there anymore.
Mary is our other leading lady who has been in a relationship with Gary for ten years, and she really wants to marry him. She even goes into a song and dance about it. Of course, I’m sitting there wondering, “Why don’t you ask him to marry you, Mary?”
This is taking place in modern time after all, where you know, it isn’t weird for the chick to ask the dude. ( I swear, I won’t think you’re weird if you do pop the question to him, Mary.)
But Noooo. If she wants a ring, he needs to give her one.
One of my biggest issues with these two having the same motivation is that they both only have One motivation and goal. All the other (male) characters have more than one goal and motivation throughout the movie. Walter wants to save the theater, reunite the Muppets, and find his place. Gary wants to be with Mary, and he wants his brother to be happy but struggles with maybe having to let go of him. Kermit wants to save the theater, be with the family that is the Muppets and re-kindle his relationship with Miss Piggy. Even Animal has two goals: wanting to save the theater AND to control his wild side.

I never felt like Miss Piggy truly wanted to save the theater like all the other characters, so I really do think she had only one goal in the movie, and that is to be with Kermit. And our one other leading lady wants only to be married to Gary. I also want to point out that these two ladies never conversed; there is a song where they’re both singing about being alone, but they’re doing it in separate rooms. So this movie does fail the Bechdel test.
Again, this movie was amazing. I personally loved it. But, I’m also very sad that there still isn’t more to the female characters. When a movie is this good and this amazing to watch, I’m personally disheartened when a little bit more effort wasn’t given to flesh out the leading women. What kind of message is this sending to a whole new batch of little girls who are meeting the Muppets for the first time, when there are only two leading ladies in a BIG cast … who both want to be married?

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J. Lee Milliren is an active feminist currently in her last year at the Art Institutes International Minnesota where she will earn her bachelor degree in Media Arts and Animation. She takes a critical eye to how characters are portrayed in films.

Animated Children’s Films: Anthropomorphism and Sexism in Disney’s The Aristocats*

This is a guest post by Rhea Daniel.
Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, a wealthy retired opera singer, lives in Paris with her cat Duchess and her three kittens Marie, Toulouse and Berlioz. Edgar the butler is surprised to learn that Madame, with no living relatives, plans to bequeath her entire estate to her cats and he is only second in line, all this after his service to her over so many years. Now that is a little unfair, but since the audience’s loyalty would be with the cute set of Aristocats, he becomes the villain when he decides to get rid of cat and kittens at the outset, drugging them and depositing them somewhere outside Paris. Edgar, compared to De Vil, is a bit of diluted villain, so his undoing offers little entertainment. The fun part begins when the Aristocats meet Thomas, a self-professed cat of the free world and make their way back to Paris with his help, meeting many a quirky character on the way.

But (and it’s a big one) in spite of having my undying admiration, Disney almost always manages to do something wrong. Disney’s humanizing its animals is part of its charm, but with that comes the inevitable pressing of human laws of behavior on to the jungle world—take Colonel Hathi bellowing, “A female leading my herd? Utterly preposterous!” in The Jungle Book (1967). Alright, so the Aristocats are household pets, they ought to have absorbed some of the human characteristics of their owners, but then Disney has always been unapologetically sexist, telling from its girls-can’t-draw-but-girls-can-trace rejection letters to aspiring female animators in its early years. The Aristocats aren’t far out of reach of this Disney cliché either. In recent times they’ve been trying to right several wrongs, but they’re still in the process. So, on the insistence that some things are just because, anthropomorphism in Disney cartoons is, safe to say, not just a reflection of the human world but also a reflection of Disney’s sexism.
In the original idea, Duchess isn’t denied agency and protects her children by moving from house to house to escape the villains. But true to Disney law, Duchess does little in The Aristocats beyond flapping her paws and calling “Marie! Toulouse! Berlioz!” every time they get into trouble. Perhaps she’s not used to the rough and tumble of the world outside, being an Aristocat and everything, but do her natural instincts emerge over time? No. Thomas comes along to do most of the work. Though Duchess is curious about Thomas’ world, she is incapable of getting her Aristocatic paws dirty, even if it is to save her children.

At this part when Thomas makes his entrance, though Duchess responds positively to his flirtation, I find his serenading and circling and gawking a tad creepy. I’m unaware if this is a cat ritual, but it so closely resembles human ones that I can’t help but judge Thomas as a bit of a creep. Duchess welcomes the attention with eye contact and by washing herself and giving that trademark Disney lowered eyelashes look. I notice that while her motherly instincts are conspicuously missing (aside from a few gentle admonishments) her sexual ones are intact, especially with her kids nearby. It would all be okay if little Marie didn’t think it was all terribly romantic. It’s cute and harmless when Marie is trying to be like her mother, but not when it’s a child made to imitate adult artifice with no idea of the consequences. We see the same behavior with Shanti in The Jungle Book (1967), pretending to drop her pot as Mowgli is ‘lured’ by her into the Man Village. In the making-of documentary it is revealed that it was what Walt, who took active interest in the making of The Jungle Book before his death, required**. The Aristocats was made after his death but wasn’t too far from his influence, so I take it that this recurring female characteristic is Walt’s legacy. I was a fan of Disney well into my late teens, a large poster of The Little Mermaid (1989) adorning the wall of my room, but as an adult I couldn’t bear to watch it. What changed? Could it possibly the cult built around the Disney Princess, that virginal but seductive monument to girlhood that always seemed unattainable? It seems Disney in 1970 was oblivious to the second-wave feminist movement, still upholding the image of the nymphet. Now that we’ve been screaming it off the rooftops at every opportunity, hopefully they’ve got wind of it.
Which brings me to the second annoying aspect of the movie—Marie. As I watch Marie reinforce her weakness again and again, falling off an automobile, falling into the water, I feel it necessary to point out that her brothers are as the same level of maturity and motor-skill development, so it’s obvious that Marie is chosen to be the weakest link—an essential quality for the lady-in-training. I feel some relief as Marie stands her ground against her brothers when she becomes an object of their derision. Could it be, that in spite of the popular notion that little girls ought to primp, preen and be weak, Marie’s creators have managed to let a bit of spirit trickle into her? They fail again, for if the incorrigible little girl is loud and defensive, it is because she is spoilt, and the adorable Marie, being an aristocat, is definitely spoilt. I ponder a bit longer and look for some respite, but notice a conspicuous lack of female alley cats in that ode to Cathood, Everybody wants to be a Cat. In the real world, an ever-lovin’ female cat of the free world, living off scraps is a troublesome character to deal with. Taking anthropomorphism in all seriousness, she would probably be unkempt, pregnant, a prostitute, or all–not very good kiddy-toon material. If a romanticized feral female feline managed to make it through to the final edit, she would pose, and this I say only within popular notions of how females function, a threat to Duchess. I only consider this briefly as Duchess is regarded with a worshipful gaze yet again and there is no other female to disrupt the feline brotherhood.

Thomas is a wonderful father and the British geese add an entertaining subplot, but as you can see, I had issues with this film, perhaps a bit much? It is after all, a cartoon, an oldish one, reeking of the biases of a now dead dude whose work I can’t help but admire. I’ll justify this with a quote from Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.)***:
“Consider how odd it would be if all we knew about elephants had been written by elephants. Would we recognise one? What elephant author would describe — or perhaps even perceive — the features which are common to all elephants? We would find ourselves detecting these from indirect clues; for instance, elephant-naturalists would surely tell us that all other animals suffer from noselessness, which obliges them to use their paws in an unnatural way. […] So when the human male describes his world he maps its distances from his unspoken natural center of reference, himself. He calls a swamp “impenetrable,” a dog “loyal” and a woman “short.””

*I’ve deliberately left out the racist stereotyping in The Aristocats because it’s already been addressed in several reviews.
** But the general opinion is that it was tastefully done, so it’s a non-issue.
*** Stolen from here
Rhea got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/

 

Animated Children’s Films: From the Archive: Fantastic Mr. Fox

After hearing repeatedly that Fantastic Mr. Foxis Wes Anderson’s best film, I gave it a try. I’m not the biggest Anderson fan—I generally find his aesthetic too precious, his characters over-privileged bores, and his daddy issues repetitive and tiresome—but it seemed to me that stop-motion animation might be the ideal medium to capture his intentions.
And, before I say anything else, let me say that the look of the film was great. It was fittingly retro and playful for (an overgrown man-child like) Anderson and (the all-style-no-substance preferences of) his ideal audience. The style, however, isn’t enough to garner the near universally-glowing reviews Fox has received. If you look at the film with anything other than squinty eyes and plugged ears, the problems are immediately evident.
Mrs. Fox. Meryl Streep voices the only female character in the entire cast. Okay, there’s a love interest to bat her eyelashes at the boys, but I don’t even think she had a line. Not only is the lone female character a wife and mother—seen cooking and husband-scolding more than any other activity—but also is a waste of a talented actress. Commenter gmarv on A.O. Scott’s NYT review puts it well:
Note to Wes: if your one female character (wife + mother) is supposed to be a professional artist, could you at least show her working during the DAY in her STUDIO, not cooking all day and painting outside at night with her kid and husband sitting around her?

It’s disappointing that this film incorporates Dahl’s lack of interest in women (that veers close to misogyny). I guess it’s not that much different from other Wes Anderson films that way…but with a little more imagination it could have been so much better.

“Lack of interest in women” seems to put it mildly. Anderson’s films do typically have problems with—and lack of (interest in)—women (the topless intern from The Life Aquatic comes to mind). But, not a single one of the creatures in the big plot to save the Fox family could have been female? Seriously?
While I’m not typically a stickler for accurate adaptations, Amy Biancolli of The Houston Chronicle points out some poignant changes from Roald Dahl’s novel:
1) In the original, Mrs. Fox was complicit all along. 2) Mr. Fox never went on the wagon. 3) Mr. and Mrs. Fox had four cubs, not one little nutcase, and Dahl made no mention of a yoga-bending super-nephew. 4) I’m pretty sure the point of the story wasn’t Mr. Fox’s flagging self-esteem or his strained relationship with his son. But this is cinema in the time of Oprah, when Reductio ad navelgazing is the inevitable narrative arc.

Wouldn’t Mrs. Fox have been so much more interesting and dynamic if she hadn’t been the domesticating, shaming force in the man’s (and boy’s) life? If she actually remained a person after marrying and having a child, who struggles with being a “wild animal” too? The tiny (ha) complication of keeping Mrs. Fox complicit would have done wonders for the story.

Wouldn’t it also have been great if Anderson—who, despite all my negative comments, does have directorial talent—had changed course just a little bit and not made a movie about a strained father-son relationship? Talent grows only when it’s challenged, and perhaps that’s why I keep giving Anderson another chance. After Fox, though, I’m not sure he gets another shot.

Animated Children’s Films: Lilo & Stitch

This is a guest review by Sarah Kaplan.

In the spirit of Whitney Mollenhauer’s bullet point review of Tangled, please enjoy this review of Lilo & Stitch, the most feminist kids’ movie I’ve ever seen, organized by character.

The Grand Councilwoman
The first character we see in this movie is female, powerful, and complex. She appears to be the head of an interplanetary government, and could easily have been a stereotypically pure figure. Instead, she’s a strong woman who makes tough decisions. She’s compassionate but not soft, and, as much as is possible within the framework of a kids’ movie, is shown to be a politician dealing with difficult realities. A hard woman with a temper, she is deeper than some characters in similar roles in adult cinema, such as Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequels and the president in Fifth Element.

Jumba and Pleakley
When Experiment 626, the destructive and very dangerous creation of mad geneticist Jumba Jookiba, escapes a prison ship and crashes on Earth, Pleakley, a one-eyed expert on our planet, suggests that a relative be sent to retrieve the “monstrosity.” Jumba is the closest thing to family that 626 has, so he is sent to do the job, and Pleakley is sent to keep him under control. Their sojurn on Earth involves them masquerading as a human man (Jumba) and woman (Pleakley). I can’t think of another Disney movie featuring crossdressing. And then there’s this scene as the two of them get ready to camp out for the night. 

Pleakley is enjoying his “feminine side” through a wig, and when the more stereotypically masculine Jumba catches him, he wants a turn with it. This movie came out in 2002. When you think about it, this is really quite remarkable.

Lilo
Lilo, shown here with Scrump, a doll she made herself (“…but her head is too big, so I pretend bugs laid eggs in her ear…”), is a feminist’s dream girl character. She is creative, individual, in no way sexualized, and intelligent to boot.

Life isn’t easy for Lilo, whose parents are dead, leaving her sister as her legal guardian. Lilo describes her family as “broken,” and it’s clearly a difficult situation for both sisters. Lilo is aware that her family isn’t normal, but she still considers the concept of “ohana,” family, very important. It’s a central theme in the movie.

Lilo also faces the cruelty of female cliques, despite her young age. In the scene pictured in the screenshot above, other girls her age refuse to play dolls with her. (In a nice touch, the other girls’ dolls, while Barbie-shaped, match their different hair colors. Two of these girls, like Lilo, are native Hawaiians.) To be fair, she had bitten one of them not long before. This movie doesn’t whitewash its protagonists, and it isn’t afraid to show children as cruel and violent at times.

Nani
Lilo’s older sister is also her legal guardian, and they have a realistic relationship. They argue and yell at each other at times (though at one point they agree to only do so on “special occasions” and Lilo says “Tuesdays and bank holidays would be good”), but they also clearly love each other. Central to the plot is Nani’s struggle to keep custody of Lilo. Nani isn’t a perfect guardian. She makes some major mistakes, like leaving the stove on when she isn’t home, and isn’t exactly forthcoming with the social worker (she and Lilo have a rehearsed routine). Nani breaks the Disney mold of either idealized or vilified parents and step-parents in important ways.
Nani also has the movie’s only romantic relationship. Nani doesn’t have time for romance, but Lilo has read her diary and knows Nani is interested in David (“She likes your butt and fancy hair.” “She thinks it’s fancy?”), who asks Nani out during the course of the movie and is implied to become her boyfriend afterwards.

Aside from the strong female characters and the far-from-sexist behavior of every male character in the movie, it’s worth noting that the core themes of Lilo & Stitch are about as feminist as they come. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it highlights the importance of family and the concept that biology is not destiny, though admittedly the latter is applied to alien genetic experiments rather than sexual differences. 

Lilo & Stitch
is a wonderful, thoroughly feminist children’s movie, and one of my personal favorite movies of all time. It’s funny, thoughtful, and a surprising treat from Disney.

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Sarah Kaplan is an English major at a Maryland community college.

  

Animated Children’s Films: Is Smurfette Giving it Away? Let Your Kids Decide

My younger daughters are obsessed with their Smurf Village. They build things, create and sustain communities, plant virtual peas that need to be watered. In general, they have an excellent pseudo SIM experience, only with little blue guys. Civilization building is fun for boys and girls. My involvement in Smurfland is limited to checking in now and then to make sure, when my kids are in school, that the plants get watered and don’t die. 
‘Til I heard the question,  “Mom, can I buy Smurfette?”
Of course she wants Smurfette. What girl doesn’t love Smurfette? I loved Smurfette. My sister loved Smurfette. She’s fabulous. She’s fun. She’s blue. Now she’s Katy Perry, for goodness sake.
“What are you buying her for?” I asked. 
Blank looks.  
“What do you mean?”
“Who else can you buy? And what for? ‘Cause your village is filled with hundreds of frantically busy little blue dudes hoeing and hammering?”
I was happy and relieved to hear that other Smurfs were also available for premium purchase: Tailor, Miner, Farmer and a handful of others, almost all eponymously named for their JOBS (a handful for their vices, like Lazy).  
But, the one female Smurf?  
No job. Not even a  personality trait like, Lazy or Vanity (who, by the way is a male, but has a pink mirror, because, please, we all know that vanity is a female trait).
Smurfette?
She’s named for her VAGINA. Know any boys or men with the diminuitive “ette” at the end of their names? It’s usually a dead giveaway. 
She does nothing except be female, the token ‘non-male’ – the one who deviates from the norm, which in this case is 50,000 blue boys with floppy white tams who apparently have magical maleparthenogenesis capabilities. Nada but little tail-wagging lusciousness. I know. I know. It’s just a game, a story, right?
And what, exactly, does the Smurf village story teach boys and girls about being Smurfette? It tells them that:
·      Smurfs are boys 
·      She’s defined by her sex, reduced entirely to her femaleness, which is after all simply not-maleness
·      She was created to wreak havoc on the utopian male world (what else is new?)
·      She doesn’t work, have a job, or serve any “real” function
·      She’s super pretty, did I say that?
·      Oh, I almost forgot, Smurfette is expensive, the most expensive one for sale
My kids get to download apps on my Ipad in exchange for cultural deconstruction credits (woo-hoo, party time in our house!). So, before they could sign on to play in Smurfland, they had to tell me what The Smurfette Principle was. They already knew that it was bad enough that there is only one female Smurf, who, by the way, serves two purposes 1) she was created to sow dissention and jealousy among the males and 2) she’s there to show that the little blue men aren’t…shhh…gay. But, actually selling her, for being female. IT SUCKS. I know, blah blah feminist blah. So boring. 
Don’t I know there are really serious things happening? And Nicholas Kristof, thank goodness, writes about them as much as possible. For example, girls being sold into slavery in other parts of the world. 
That’s right. Slavery. And why?
Because they’re perceived as sub-human. They’re commodities. Something you trade, buy and sell.  Sounding familiar?
“Are you serious???” you say. Cute, innocent, wholesome Smurfs, little blue memes of subtle but virulent sexism? No way. This is America. Not only do women have nothing to complain about, but for some people we’re destroying all the men. At the very least, we’re the good guys and gals. The genuinely most fair and equal place in the world…those are the core tenants of American Exceptionalism. We are better than the rest of the world.   
So, no, it’s not just a story. It’s our culture and we get to make it. Then it makes us. That Smurf story is no different from 80% of the hyper-gendered stories we tell our kids. And if you find that hard to believe go visit The Geena Davis Institute Web Site where you will find hard stats.
‘Cause we’re at the stage in this country where the true hard work of equality has to take place. This is the land where culture’s destructive and dangerous messages about gender hierarchies and power are not delivered with blunt force trauma (like stoning a young girl for being raped, which is so obviously wrong), but rather through fun and entertaining games and movies.
Why would I let my children play culture-shaping games involving the commoditization and sale of the only girl in the land without explaining it? It would be like serving them lard for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then pretending not to know why they were having heart attacks at 35.
Anyway, before saying anything to my daughter (in age appropriate ways, for those of you who are praying for my children’s eternal salvation), I let my daughter purchase Smurfette to see what exactly she would do once unleashed onto the Smurf Village. Turns out she sweetly and innocently skips around town blowing heart kisses and distributing power credits to every little blue boy she swings by.
She should be careful. People will talk.
Besides, I’m kinda stuck on the idea that my daughters and I, my mother and sister, my sisters-in-law, my nieces and my female friends are fully human, not deviant from anything. Silly me. I must be a bitter, angry feminist. Oh, I forgot ugly. And old.

Soraya Chemaly writes feminist satire. She is a regular contributor to The Good Men Project and The Huffington Post. She is also the creator of the retired blogs: Poog, a Goop Spoof and The Guide to Manic Moms


Animated Children’s Films: Megamind: A Damsel Who Can Hold Her Own

Megamind (2010)

Dreamworks’ animations, in my personal opinion, do some amazing portrayals of their female characters.  Unlike other animation studios, where female characters have a cookie cutter personality and want to find true love, Dreamworks gives their female characters more goals than that. And one of my favorite–and I think one of the best examples of this–is Roxanne Ritchi from the movie Megamind.
The plot of Megamind is that he’s from a planet that was destroyed and his arch rival Metroman is from the neighboring planet which was also destroyed.  While Metroman’s escape vessel lands in a good and wealthy home, Megamind’s vessel lands in a prison yard where he is raised by criminals.  Not only that, but Metroman grows up with great social skills and is incredibly attractive, while Megamind has a hard time pronouncing certain words and doesn’t look at all human so he has a harder time trying to fit in.  Consequently, Megamind grows up to be an evil villain while Metroman becomes the good superhero who always wins.  We also have Roxanne Ritchi, our damsel in distress, who is constantly being kidnapped by Megamind and saved by Metroman.
If this plot sounds at all familiar, it is because it is a lot like Superman–with Superman being Metroman, Brainaic being Megamind, Lois Lane being Roxanne Ritchi and even Jimmy Olsen as Hal Stewart.  I’ve personally always loved Lois Lane since I used to read a lot of the old Superman comics.  Lois Lane was originally created in 1938. She was really dedicated to her work, she was very headstrong and stubborn and she rarely took orders from her male co-workers.  But of course, she has earned the title of being the damsel in distress for being constantly saved by Superman.  The fascinating thing about her, though, is her personality was created in the late thirties when none of those qualities were considered attractive for a woman.  Even Superman wasn’t always attracted to her because of these traits.
Roxanne Ritchi, voiced by Tina Fey
I’m only discussing Lois Lane because of her parallel self, Roxanne Ritchi, who can only really separate herself from Lois Lane because she does not love Metroman/Superman.  Now of course, there have been several different portrayals of Lois Lane where she’s terrified when kidnapped or she is bored of it because it has happened so much.  For Roxanne Ritchi, she’s been kidnapped so much by Megamind that even when she is sitting in a death machine she has no problem taunting the evil villain.  She even blows a spider in his face.
In this specific kidnapping, we see that Megamind has (supposedly) killed Metroman and so he proceeds to take over the city.  What I really love about Roxanne Ritchi comes out during this part of the movie, where she is the only news reporter to question Megamind, she insults him on air, and isn’t willing to stand around and do nothing.
She visits the Metroman-dedicated Museum where she runs into Bernard.  Unknowingly to her, Megamind is also visiting the museum to say his last goodbyes to Metroman.  He disguises himself as Bernard and has a heart to heart with Roxanne about how much he misses Metroman.  It is through this conversation that Roxanne says, “Heroes are not born, they are created.”
Megamind takes this to mean that he can create a new superhero to fight while Roxanne takes her own advice and takes matters into her own hands.  She does this by sneaking into Megamind’s lair, taking pictures, researching who Megamind is and also trying to duplicate the notes she found in his lair to understand what his ultimate plan is.  While she’s doing all this, Megamind is actually accompanying her but is disguised as ‘Bernard’.  Over time, Roxanne falls for ‘Bernard’.
I personally really love that this feeling for ‘Bernard’ wasn’t instant and that she had to slowly move past the mourning of a superhero (who she probably considered to be more of a friend than anything else) in order to really care for ‘Bernard’.
Hal and Roxanne
Now, Megamind has created a new superhero through Hal Stewart who I haven’t really discussed yet.  Hal Stewart is Roxanne’s cameraman who loves Roxanne in that sort of creepy stalker way; he even has a poster of her saying good night to him above his bed.  Roxanne, of course, is not at all interested but when Hal becomes a superhero he thinks everything is going to turn around.  So he tries to woo Roxanne but that is dramatically unsuccessful.  It could have been that he is still not her type or the fact that he was throwing her around like a football; I’ll let you decide on that.
After her encounter with the new Hal Stewart, she rushes to her date ‘Bernard’ and reveals what just happened.  It is through this date that she kisses ‘Bernard’ but his disguise malfunctions and is revealed to be Megamind.  (F.Y.I. This is one of the best kiss scenes I’ve ever seen.) What follows is one of my absolute favorite scenes in any movie ever, where Megamind tries to convince her to come back to him because she said never judge a book by its cover.  Roxanne immediately counters that he killed Metroman, destroyed the city and is in fact evil.  I personally love that Roxanne isn’t going to take any of this crap and does a good job reminding the audience that she has every reason to leave Megamind.
When we get to the end of the movie, Roxanne tries to reason with Hal because he is about to destroy the city.  Hal has proven in very little time that he is much more threatening than Megamind ever was. What ends up happening, though, is that he ties her up to a building and calls out for Megamind to face him.  But even now, when Hal is about to take down the entire building, Roxanne still tries to reason with him.  This is the very essence of what it means to be a strong character.  It is not actually about being physically strong, or incredibly intelligent; it is about still trying to accomplish your goal even when there is no hope.
Of course, Megamind saves her and the big epic fight scene happens between Hal and Megamind.  At a certain point of the fight Megamind is losing and you can see Roxanne running up from behind with a broken metal sign. Which is amazing to see this character still have her goal of stopping Hal.  Unfortunately, that is short-lived because when Hal throws Megamind up into the air, Roxanne drops her sign and gets backed up into a fountain where she has no weapon to defend herself.  I can’t help but slap my face every time at this moment because she had every inch of determination in her face when she had that metal sign.  She was clearly going to wham Hal with it. Even though she was going to lose that fight, she still had that raw determination.
I still don’t understand why she dropped that damn sign.
There is another little detail about this final scene that I’m going to sound like a jerk for pointing out but I really, really, really have to.
Her nails are polished pink.
Why do I point this out?  Because she doesn’t have her nails done in any other scene.  She didn’t have them done when she went out on her date with ‘Bernard’.  So that means that at some point between realizing that the love of her life was actually a super villian and that the crazy stalker co-worker now is destroying the city,   she got her nails done.
Maybe it wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t already established that she didn’t put that much stock in her appearance.  There are two times in this movie where her hair gets messed up or face is really dirty and she doesn’t take the time to fix it.  She just goes on with her job or goes on her date.
But really, I take very few issues with the movie Megamind, and Roxanne is a fantastic character.  She isn’t the main focus of the plot but the people at Dreamworks still took the time and thought to develop who she is, what her goals in life are, and what is going to motivate her through the story.
Even though Roxanne is pretty much the only female character of this movie, I want to take a second to talk about the great background characters.  If anyone else noticed, the background characters, who are both male and female, come in many different sizes and races.  I really want to point this out because there are other females who are bigger, have different shaped faces and don’t all look alike.  Along with this, there are parts where there are a bunch of cops and the number of female cops is equal to the amount of male.  And really, thank you Dreamworks for not putting the women cops in skirts, I really appreciate it.  These all are very small details, but they do register in young kids’ minds.
When you have these small details and a great supporting character like Roxanne, you already have a great movie.  There are many other reasons why Megamind is a great movie but seeing a well-rounded character like Roxanne is just so amazing.  I’m so happy that children saw this movie where even the damsel in distress proves to have so much going on under the surface.
J. Lee Milliren is an active feminist currently in her last year at the Art Institutes International Minnesota where she will earn her bachelor degree in Media Arts and Animation. She takes a critical eye to how characters are portrayed in films.

Animated Children’s Films: Onions have Layers, Ogres have Layers – A Feminist Analysis of Shrek

Shrek (2001)

Fairy tales are important. A longish history of oral tales modified and set in stone by the likes of Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. They don’t just capture children’s imaginations, they form them, setting them down a path towards developing their values and opinions against the background of certain societal expectations and gender specific behavior. Attempt to strip away the layers and one opens a Pandora’s box of underlying meanings: it may sound like a simple story about deviating from the path but we all know what Red Riding Hood is really about. A retelling of the tale, like in Angela Carter’s brilliant The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, lead to interesting interpretations of the same, giving us a clearer picture of may lurk beneath these innocuous sounding tales.
For children however, simplified cartoon depictions of classic stories, told with the impeccable technique of Disney full length animation, made them easier to swallow. The wicked and usually ugly are punished and the good and usually beautiful get to live happily ever after. So, when Shrek the movie came out, it didn’t just turn the standard fairy tale on its head, it gave audiences something that was extraordinary for popular animation.
Artwork by William Steig
In the original story by William Steig, Shrek the ugly ogre hears of the fabled princess who is reputed to be uglier than he is and goes in search of her, quite sure that he plans to love and marry her, a charming and refreshing story deviating from the fairy tale norm. In the movie, however, Shrek isn’t so figured out and neither is the princess. Both live secluded lives; Shrek’s hermitic existence is self-imposed whereas Fiona’s is the result of a curse. The ogre state, its otherness, is shown to be reprehensible from the beginning of the film, with the local villagers out to burn and kill Shrek, who wants nothing more than to be left alone. He is the titular hero of the film, but towards the end we see that the heroine, Fiona, is more than just a secondary character.
Fiona, imagined by Dreamworks
In Jungian psychoanalysis, the shadow of the mind constitutes our unacknowledged weaknesses and instincts. The curse that turns Fiona into an ogre after sunset is a perfect representation of her wild, repressed shadow, one that Shrek, who has had to live with it his entire life, revels in on the surface for the power it brings him, but secretly, as we see in the course of the film, hasn’t comes to terms with either. Both are caught in a patriarchal mire, both possess desirable masculine and feminine qualities that they are loath to give up: she human beauty (Caucasian, specifically) and he the power and fear he inspires. 
Fiona’s wish to put an end to the curse is also a desire for freedom, for then she will be out of the tower and amongst the normal folk. Trapped in the tower since she was a little girl and out of touch with reality, the fairy tale has become reality to her and when things do not go by the book, she is understandably confused. She is a princess but her royal status makes no difference to Shrek and she is hauled against her will through the forest, but towards her ‘true love’ and the destiny that she hungers for. In the course of time, her more ‘unprincessy’ aspects are revealed. She burps unapologetically, enjoys the savory meal of weed rat and doesn’t flinch at pulling an arrow out of Shrek’s bottom. The scene where she fights off Robin Hood and crew gives no explanation for her amazing martial arts skills except that she had a lot of time on her hands in the tower, but I didn’t feel as if the filmmaker was trying to pander to a young male audience, for though a hot young princess who kicks butt is an attractive addition, her other characteristics fall desperately short of established notions of feminine desirability. 
Along the journey, Shrek and Fiona find out they have much in common. Unsure romantic feelings begin to emerge when they reach outside Farquaad domain and they both convince Donkey that he is sick so they can spend more time together. When the sun begins to set, she hides away in an abandoned barn and Donkey, that adorable creature and their go-between, tries to convince Shrek to reveal his feelings. Shrek is the first to reveal his own insecurities about being an ugly ogre to Donkey. Fiona in turn laments her condition to Donkey, the princess condition (if she reveals her ogre-self, she will lose her princess status). Shrek overhears and thinks she is talking about him. In the morning, Shrek rejects her, Farquaad arrives and Fiona abandons herself to fate. The ever-persistent Donkey pursues Shrek and misunderstandings are settled. Shrek, with no clue about Fiona’s ogre-curse, rushes from his swamp and solitude, everything he ever wanted, to stop the wedding. The sun begins to set and the Fiona’s curse begins to take shape. When she shows her transformation openly, it is a tremendous test of inner strength, for weigh this agonizing decision with the risk of being unloved, by both society and Shrek. She is not giving up, a relief at finally exposing one’s dark hidden aspect, but confronting it in its entirety. Farquaad (fuckwad?), so brilliantly voiced by John Lithgow, expresses his disgust as Fiona’s wild equivalent is revealed. That stuffy little creature is dominant culture, trying to compensate for its own imperfections by eliminating, hiding or surgically modifying its ‘ugly’ and unique members. 

Shrek is chock-full of uglies, reviled and feared, who find each other and embrace their alternate halves. The one who refuses to embrace his shortcomings, no pun intended, is punished and gets swallowed by a dragon. Shrek speaks to the gulf within the self – to have the courage to embrace oneself or change/hide part of it to feel accepted (or feared). Its motley cast of social rejects make their choice, dashing the conformity of the feature length fairy tale to pieces.

Rhea got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/

Animated Children’s Films: ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

There is plenty to enjoy about How to Train your Dragon. The animation is lovely, the story is energetic, and the landscape feels fresh and inviting. The film also contains a number of plot elements that are far too common in children’s films these days.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Written by Jason Feldstein
How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010) is based on a collection of books written by Cressida Cowell. The story takes place in a small village known as Berk where Vikings have been at war with dragons for three hundred years. The hero is a wisecracking passive-aggressive young boy named Hiccup. He wants to fight dragons to impress his community but he lacks the heart for it. After managing to take down a dragon known as a Night Fury, Hiccup discovers later on that he is unable to kill it. Instead he befriends the dragon, which he names Toothless, and discovers that dragons are not the creatures Vikings have always thought them to be. Toothless is one of the most enjoyable parts of the film. He looks like a cross between a bat, a panther, and a whale and his combat tactics seem to mimic those of a stealth bomber. He may be a destructive dragon, but he is also cute, loyal, and playful. Hiccup attempts to bring peace between humans and dragons but his father (and Viking leader) Stoick the Vast, sees war as the only option.
There is plenty to enjoy about How to Train your Dragon. The animation is lovely, the story is energetic, and the landscape feels fresh and inviting. The film also contains a number of plot elements that are far too common in children’s films these days. Take Hiccup for example. He is the runt of the litter who starts off as the town joke but will eventually save the day because he possesses skills that no one else does. Although he is initially looked down upon by everyone, he will end the film gaining the respect of his father and the affection of the girl he likes. It is almost a given that the protagonists in films like this have father issues. Hiccup wants to learn about dragons while his father views dragon killing as not only a necessity, but also a way of life. Stoick the Vast is a rather tiresome example of a closed-minded alpha male. He is so aggressive, hardheaded, and clueless that it’s tough to take him seriously. This is especially true when he eventually sees the error in his ways. It doesn’t help that his dialogue is so poorly written. I felt no regret when he told Hiccup in a clichéd fashion that he is no longer his son.

The film doesn’t make much use of its female characters. Hiccup’s mother is dead like many mothers in animated films geared towards children. Her only purpose is to provide the male protagonist with some sort of emotional complexity. There is a female elder who picks which student slays a ceremonial dragon but she is only in the film for a few seconds and she has no dialogue. The most prominent female character is a young Viking hotshot named Astrid. She is the star pupil in dragon training who is tough as nails and always on edge. If this character seems familiar it’s because she is. She’s Colette from Ratatouille, Eve from Wall-E, and Tigress from Kung Fu Panda. She is the latest in a long string of female characters that are tough and talented but second in importance to the males. Perhaps the most iconic example of this trend for our current generation would be Hermione from Harry Potter. She’s the brains but not the hero.

Astrid
Tigress
Eve
Colette

 

In the past decade Hollywood seems to have grown fond of girls like Astrid. The most likely reason is that they still consider female protagonists to be a liability, but they don’t want to be seen as backwards. So what do they do? Simple. Write a male protagonist who is gentle and silly and have a female character that is tough and feisty but only second in command. Characters like Astrid are the current solution for an industry that is afraid to have a woman be the lead in a story, but doesn’t want to be viewed by anyone (including themselves) as being antifeminist. The film eventually feels the need to soften Astrid. After Hiccup introduces her to Toothless she goes into Disney Princess mode. When the two of them fly together for the first time it would not be too out of place for them to sing “A Whole New World.” Astrid may be tough but she adds very little to the plot. If every female character were removed from this film it would change almost nothing.

There are a number of other problems with female sidekicks of the types that I have just listed. One is that they are only skilled when it comes to playing by the rules. Characters like Astrid and Tigress are shown as being obsessed with following instructions. They work hard to receive approval from their teachers both of whom are male. Likewise Colette told Linguini that it was their job to “follow the recipe.” Female characters like this are shown operating specifically within the boundaries that have been laid out for them by male superiors. They are not shown to have the insight to break rules and challenge the system the way the male protagonists do. Another problem with these types of female sidekicks is that while they are very talented they often don’t possess the talents that the stories they exist in value. Take Hermione for example. While she is incredibly smart, the story she exists in only treats intelligence as second in importance to bravery, which is what Harry embodies. With How to Train Your Dragon, it’s the same problem. Astrid is strong-willed, physically powerful, and full of fighting spirit, but this is not what is valued in a story that ultimately preaches gentleness and a sense of compassion, which is what Hiccup represents.

The film’s final setback is that it boasts antiwar and antiracism credentials that it doesn’t live up to. While it is true that Hiccup is presented as the symbol of peace between humans and dragons, the story also uses a battle as its climax. Hiccup and Toothless have to save everyone by defeating a giant dragon in combat in a sequence that is clearly set up for audience suspense and enjoyment. Even more troubling is the relationship between the humans and the dragons at the end of the film. While they may be at peace the dragons have become Viking pets. It is a peace that is built on a hierarchy and it makes the film’s message very disturbing if the dragons are to be viewed as a metaphor for another race of people. This movie wants to have it both ways. On the one hand it uses the dragons to tell a story about different races rising above war. On the other hand it portrays the dragons as less intelligent pets because the audience will find this amusing and empowering. The title of this movie is not How to Coexist with a Dragon.

How to Train Your Dragon is an attractive and at times enjoyable movie, but in the end its problems outweigh its charms. The characters are too simplistic, the plots are too familiar, and the politics are too compromised. If a film is going to teach politics to children (or adults for that matter), the film should challenge them, not cater to them.

Jason Feldstein is an NYU graduate with a Master’s Degree in Cinema Studies. He specializes in fairy tale films.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Why Watch Romantic Comedies?

some romantic comedies


This guest post by Lady T previously appeared at her blog The Funny Feminist.

A few weeks ago, I announced my intention to tackle 52 romantic comedies over the course of one year. 2012 is the Year of the Romantic Comedy at my blog, and it shall henceforth be dubbed “The Rom-Com Project.” The Rom-Com Project is a completely serious endeavor, a social experiment, and in no way a cynical ploy to get a book deal by writing about a year of doing something. In my post where I first announced the project, I explained my reasons for focusing on the romantic comedy:
I also think that looking at romantic comedies is a worthwhile feminist project. I want to look at how men and women are represented in these films. I want to look at the way romantic expectations are presented in our popular culture. I want to look at issues of consent. I want to look at the way the comedy genre affects the romance genre and vice-versa.

Readers responded well to this post and left me more suggestions than I needed, to the point where I have to decide whether to narrow down the list to 52, or expand the project to “100 Rom-Coms in a Year.”

But why focus on romantic comedies (one might ask)? Why not focus on comedies that happen to feature women?

Well, just for a lark, I looked at the Wikipedia entry on “comedy film” and took note of the different sub-genres listed under the comedy banner, as well as the examples that were mentioned for each genre.

For the fish-out-of-water genre, the entry lists six examples. 0 of 6 of these examples have female protagonists.

For the parody or spoof film genre, the entry lists three examples. 0 of 3 of these examples have female protagonists.

For the anarchic comedy film genre, the entry lists two examples. 0 of 2 of these examples have female protagonists.

For the black comedy film genre, the entry lists fourteen examples. 1 of these 14 examples (Heathers) has a female protagonist without a male co-protagonist, and fewer than half have a female co-protagonist.

I think you can all start to see the pattern here, but let me continue just to belabor the point.

Gross-out films. 4 examples, 0 female protagonists.

Action comedy films. 9 examples, 0 female protagonists.

Comedy horror films. 9 examples, 1 female protagonist (in Scary Movie).

Fantasy comedy films. 6 examples, 2 female co-protagonists (The Princess Bride, Being John Malkovich), 0 female protagonists without male co-protagonists.

Black comedy films. 3 examples, 0 female protagonists.

Sci-fi comedy films. 8 examples, 0 female protagonists.

Military comedy films. 9 examples, 1 female protagonist (Private Benjamin).

Stoner films. 4 examples, 0 female protagonists.

Some might argue with me on particular examples, but it’s obvious that dominant characters in comedy films are overwhelmingly male. (I also understand that Wikipedia is not an entirely accurate source of information, but the examples that are used to represent these different genres explains a lot about our cultural attitudes.)

But what about the romantic comedy?

If you look at the entry on romantic comedies, you see many more films that have female protagonists, or at least female co-protagonists. Especially significant is the list of top-grossing romantic comedies. 22 films are listed. More than half of them have female co-protagonists, some have one female protagonist, and one has (gasp!) more than one female protagonist (Sex and the City).

The romantic comedy genre gets a lot of flak. It’s considered a genre that’s more “shallow” than drama, but not funny enough to be a “real” comedy. Is it any coincidence that the romantic comedy is one of the few film genres, and possibly the only film genre, that regularly features women?

To me, the romantic comedy genre is an example of the struggles women face both as entertainers and as consumers of entertainment.

Love stories are dismissed as “girl stuff” (as though something aimed at women is automatically less than something aimed at men). A male-centric romantic comedy like Knocked Up is something with “mass appeal” when a female-centric romantic comedy like My Best Friend’s Wedding is “girl stuff.” Judd Apatow makes the same type of movie over and over again and gets praised despite the striking similarity in many of his films (down to style, story, and casting), but reviewers of What’s Your Number? can’t resist comparing the movie unfavorably to Bridesmaids, even though “a female protagonist” is almost the only thing those two movies have in common.

It’s a double-edged sword. Romantic comedies are looked upon with scorn, as fluffy and unimportant compared to dramatic films, but also not “edgy” or irreverent enough to be “real” comedies. But if a woman wants to watch a movie that is both a) funny and b) featuring a female main character, she doesn’t have many options available to her.

Sexism is deeply ingrained in our culture. Just look at my last paragraph. I typed the last sentence of that paragraph saying that “if a woman wants to watch a movie…with a female main character…” Then I looked back and realized that I, who tries to make a point of combating stereotypes and gender essentialism, automatically assumed that ONLY women would ever want to watch a movie with a female protagonist. That a man wouldn’t seek out or enjoy a movie with a female protagonist. That a man wouldn’t think a movie with a female protagonist was funny.

I have several problems with the romantic comedy genre. I dislike that women are almost always presented as people who are obsessed with fashion and shopping and shoes. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being obsessed with fashion and shopping and shoes – I would buy Zooey Deschanel’s entire wardrobe if I had the means. I’m only pointing out that we don’t see many female protagonists in rom-coms who are not obsessed with fashion and shopping and shoes, and I would like to see a wider variety of characters.) I dislike that funny women are usually “pretty women in high heels who adorably fall down.” I dislike that women in romantic comedies are almost always teachers and cupcake bakers or art gallery owners or trying to make it in the publishing industry. (Again, not that there’s anything wrong with those careers – I just want more variety.) Or, alternately, these women are high-powered career types whose journeys revolve around letting free-spirited men teach them how to loosen up. (For more of these romantic comedy cliches, read Mindy Kaling’s Flick Chicks, and then pick up Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns. I just finished reading it, and it’s hilarious.)

And yet, despite all of these cliches and stereotypes in romantic comedy films, I still want to spend a year analyzing the genre. I think it’s a worthwhile project because I want to examine our culture’s expectations about men and women and gender and sex and romance, and how romantic comedies play into (or don’t play into) rape culture. I am looking forward to this project.

But I’m not going to a lie. I’m a little annoyed and bitter that, if I wanted to spend a year writing about black comedies starring women, or parodies starring women, or any other comedy genre starring women, I would probably not to be able to come up with a list of 52 movies for any of those genres unless I reviewed a slew of obscure films that most readers wouldn’t recognize.

Final note: Whenever a woman (or a person of color, or disabled person, or gay person, or a person belonging to any marginalized group) writes a piece criticizing the lack of representation in media, it’s only a matter of time before a troll makes a comment along the lines of, “Well, if you think there should be more movies starring [this group], why don’t you write one yourself?” To that, I say, “All in due time. Alllll in due time.” I’m not writing about my super awesome women-centric movie ideas here just yet because I don’t want anyone to steal them. *shifts eyes, holds screenplay closer to chest*

—-

Lady T writes about feminism, comedy, media, and literature at the blog The Funny Feminist. Her essay “My Mom, the Reader” has also been featured at SMITH Magazine. A graduate of Hofstra University, she writes fiction about vampires, superhero girlfriends, and feisty princesses, and hopes to one day get paid for it. She contributed a review of Easy A to Bitch Flicks

Some Scattered Thoughts on Detective Shows and Geniuses

I often joke here about my obsession with streaming Netflix television shows from 1992. Sometimes I find myself wondering what I actually did during the nineties that made me miss so much television, and then I remember I was hanging out with truancy officers, drinking Zima underage, angsting over my first boyfriend, and coming one horrible grade shy of flunking out of high school. Memories. But maybe it’s ultimately a good thing that I let myself get a little media literate before escaping into the mind of pop culture circa 1992. It’s fun to consume an unacceptable amount of television under the guise of “no really, I’m critiquing this shit in my mind, which is important, so it’s totally fine that I haven’t spoken out loud in three days or showered.” See, I work a second-shift job, while everyone I know works a first-shift job, so I often find myself awake in the wee hours with my good friends Adrian Monk, Cal Lightman, and most recently, Allison DuBois. (The reality is that all these shows first aired between 2002 and 2010, so the fact that I think the 90s are the 00s suggests an even larger problem, like, who am I and what year is it.)My routine looks something like this: If I had a crappy day, I like to start my TV marathon with something light, like an episode or two of Monk (which first aired in 2002). For those of you who don’t know, Adrian Monk is a former homicide detective who had a severe nervous breakdown when his wife, Trudy, was killed in a car bomb explosion. He was discharged from the police force because he was so distraught he couldn’t leave his house for three years, and his breakdown brought on a slew of intense phobias associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He eventually goes into business on his own as a consultant for his former colleagues on the police force, but not without a woman slash assistant slash nurse slash babysitter who follows him around everywhere handing him antibacterial wipes and driving him to and from crime scenes (among other degrading tasks). The show is usually hilarious, mainly because of Tony Shalhoub’s brilliant portrayal of Monk, but it certainly contributes to pop culture sexism (and in turn, real life sexism).

After an episode of Monk, I spend some time with Cal Lightman from Lie to Me, a current show in its third or fourth season that centers around an agency called, The Lightman Group, which specializes in reading facial expressions. Apparently, we all have these things called “micro-expressions” that betray us when we’re lying, but only highly-trained people can catch and decode these micro-expressions, (e.g. the employees at The Lightman Group). Dr. Lightman is literally a human lie detector, and it’s fun to watch him get up in the faces of liars and act like a cocky British bad-ass. He, too, works with women who, while brilliant and talented in their own right, spend a significant amount of their screen-time playing sidekick to Lightman and cleaning up his messes.

All this boy drama started to become stifling, so I browsed Netlix and found Medium (which first aired in 2005), a show I’d seen a few episodes of—and liked—but that I never really pursued, probably because of my embarrassing fear of the occult. Medium centers around Allison DuBois, a woman who can communicate in various ways with the dead, and who also has some psychic ability, such as knowing when a person might die, or experiencing creepy flashes of the horrible shit people have done in their pasts. DuBois interests me because, in addition to holding a job as a consultant for the district attorney (similar to Monk’s role in some ways) she’s also a mother of three young girls and has a rocket scientist husband who gets fed up on a regular basis with her mind-reading, afterlife communing talents. He admires her crime-solving abilities but deep down wishes she’d continued to pursue her law degree instead, in the name of normalcy. In this show, the man slash husband plays sidekick.

These three detective characters are similar in that their main role on their respective television shows is to catch criminals. All three of them aid the police force. All three of them often endanger themselves in the process of tracking down criminals. All three of them always succeed (which is the formula for crime dramas), and we’re led to believe that the criminals wouldn’t have been caught without the help of these characters. Monk, for instance, even with all his quirks and the accommodations he requires, is hailed as an absolute genius by his colleagues and is constantly referred to as “the greatest detective in the world” by his assistant. And he is, in fact, a scary good detective, and it’s for that reason that his quirks and his often abusive behavior (while played for laughs) is forgiven—the audience is led to believe that Monk wouldn’t be a genius detective without these eccentricities. (An episode where Monk takes an antidepressant for his phobias and subsequently becomes useless as a detective confirms that theory.)

Cal Lightman, too, might be one of the most egotistical characters I’ve seen on television, and he’s immensely likeable. He breaks all the rules and consistently does pretty much the opposite of what anyone tells him to do. His lack of respect for authority often helps him win his cases; his immediate contempt for and suspicion of The People in Charge sends him in unusual directions to solve crimes, so the audience is treated to episodes where he (hilariously) and deliberately does things like checking himself into a mental hospital, or going undercover as a coalminer and threatening to blow up the place if he doesn’t get answers—but we, and his colleagues, respect him more for his unorthodox detective work. Yes, he may step all over the people around him, but that’s just how he does things; who are they to get in the way of a genius in his element? But Cal inevitably leaves some sort of mess behind when he operates outside the box (i.e. pisses off so many authority figures), and it’s no surprise that his colleague, Dr. Gillian Foster, a psychiatrist who partnered with him to start The Lightman Group, gets stuck making amends on his behalf. (I’m very much reminded of the Dr. House/Dr. Cuddy dynamic here from the television show House.)

Interestingly (or not), both Monk and Lightman find motivation and success in their careers because of dead women; Monk is literally obsessed with finding Trudy’s killer (which is the one crime he hasn’t been able to solve), and Lightman wasn’t able to save his mother from killing herself; he watches old video tapes of her, repeatedly pausing them to read and reread her micro-expressions. This “I’m avenging the death of my [insert relationship to woman here]” theme shows up in, like, every movie about a man who achieves anything. In these shows and movies, even the dead women exist as nothing more than plot points to drive the narrative forward. It’s sick and demeaning to women. In fact, I should make a list of the films and television shows in which this trope exists and call it the “I’m Avenging the Death of My [Insert Relationship to Woman Here] Trope.” (I’m doing it.)

Did you think I forgot about Mrs. Allison DuBois? I love her. And oh what a difference gender makes on a detective show. In her world, she’s successful not because she’s eccentric or because she has a god complex but because she has special powers. In her world, even though she solves case after case, and sheds new light on past cases, she must always fight to be taken seriously by her boss, by her family, and often by her husband. The audience watches DuBois struggle both with solving the cases (while trying to raise a family of young daughters and keep her marriage intact) and dealing with the way her job directly impacts her interpersonal interactions. She isn’t, as is the case with Monk and Lightman, surrounded by an endless network of supportive characters no matter what; instead, her kind of “genius” is scary and unnatural and not to be trusted.

I get it. Dead people tell her shit, which is a little different than being aided by obsessive-compulsive disorder and a lucky mixture of intelligence coupled with extreme arrogance and defiance. But DuBois must decode the messages she gets, too. A dead person doesn’t just show up and say, “Hey, that dude killed me, and my body’s buried behind that dude’s house over there. Find me. Thanks.” The occult is obviously way more complex than that (eek!). While Lightman and Monk find themselves surrounded by people who worship them, she deals with the extra struggle of convincing people she isn’t crazy—but like, how many cases does she have to solve before people just admit she’s fucking awesome?

Arguably, DuBois is a much more fleshed-out character than Lightman or Monk. She has a husband, a family, a career, unacceptable sleep patterns, daycare to deal with, a possible alcohol problem, parent-teacher conferences to deal with—a life! The men, though, just kind of do the same shit every episode. Lightman does, however, have a teenage daughter, and season two ends with him flipping out about his daughter losing her virginity. I’m not joking. That’s how the entire season ends—in an episode where Lightman gets upset about his daughter not being a virgin anymore. I’m serious. It’s called “Black and White,” and it’s a horrible episode. (Seriously.)

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in discussing Medium because I’m only familiar with the first season. Perhaps things get better for Allison in later seasons. Perhaps the men in her life stop expressing so much condescension and distrust toward her and endow her with some Lightman- and/or Monk-esque respect. Perhaps she no longer feels compelled to apologize for her own idiosyncratic crime-solving abilities and develops Lightman’s uber-masculine arrogance about it. (But don’t take that confidence too far, Allison—no one wants to work with a bitch.) At the very least, in the first season of Medium, I sort of love her husband. I mean when is a male rocket scientist ever the sidekick, hmmm?

I guess ultimately what concerns me about these portrayals of male and female detectives is that it mirrors real life. Men are geniuses. It’s a fact. I think I once heard someone refer to Sylvia Plath as a genius in a lit class, but it’s absolutely uncommon to hear a woman referred to as such. Being a (male) genius comes with perks, too. You’re forgiven your bullshit, your weirdness, your unorthodox behavior, your screw-ups, your law breaking. I always think specifically of Roman Polanski—a film director who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl, never went to prison, and managed to garner support from thousands in Hollywood who signed a petition on his behalf. He’s a genius! He’s paid his dues! Let him come back to the U.S.!!!!! I also recall the outrage surrounding the Julian Assange rape accusations—men across the globe immediately came to his defense (including “liberals” Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann), arguing: It’s a setup! Those women are lying! He’s a genius! Kneel before Zod!

Even though I really want to end this post on the phrase “Kneel before Zod!” I’d also like to say that while I love DuBois and think she is a genius and want to see her treated as such (in the same manner as her male counterparts) I’d also love to see more regular-ass women characters achieving genius-level shit. We need and love our women with superpowers (Buffy, too, of course), but I personally want to see a woman who looks like me, who does weird and unacceptable shit like me, who sometimes goes out in public wearing sweatpants like me, achieving some genius-level shit. I truly believe, as someone who studies pop culture and media, that we’re not going to make much progress toward ending misogyny in our everyday lives if we don’t deal with the misogyny we’re bombarded with in television shows, music videos, advertisements, films, and children’s programming. If we see it reflected all around us constantly, it becomes the norm. So, we need to call this shit out and keep calling it out, even when it seems like a tiny thing—like douchebag male detectives with unorthodox methods getting a free genius pass while brilliant female detectives with unorthodox methods have to endlessly prove their competence to significantly less competent people.

That right there is fucking patriarchy in action. Now:

Guest Writer Wednesday: Where Do We Go Now?

Arabic movie poster for Where Do We Go Now?

This is a guest post by Kyna Morgan.
Nadine Labaki is a pretty big deal. Following up her directorial debut, the 2007 film Caramel (which she also wrote and starred in), she brought her sophomore directorial effort, Where Do We Go Now? back to the Toronto International Film Festival as co-writer, producer, director and star. I was lucky enough to snag tickets to a 9:45AM showing. While normally I wouldn’t be caught watching films at that ungodly hour of the morning, I couldn’t resist seeing this film. It turns out I hit the mother lode as a movie-lover. In fact, it was evident from the laughs and the sniffles from my fellow movie goers that Labaki’s film affected everyone. It’s a comedy, a drama, a musical, a social commentary! It’s quite simple yet extraordinarily complex at the same time. At the end of the festival it received the Cadillac People’s Choice Award, one of the few awards actually given out at Toronto (a non-competitive festival), and has since gone on to snag a U.S. distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics and break box office records in Lebanon. Earlier in the year, it was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in the “Un Certain Regard” category. I didn’t know what to expect from the film, since I’m often misdirected by film synopses and I hadn’t even heard of it prior to September, but not knowing is one of the most exciting parts for me. Here’s what I found.

The story is set in a small town in Lebanon whose population is divided between Muslims and Christians. They have a mosque. They have a church. They eat together, live beside each other, celebrate together, mourn together, and they have spent many generations in peaceful existence with each other. Religious differences seem to be the least of their concerns when it comes to functioning as a community. The film begins with a group of women dressed in black walking together in a close group, moving in unison with the beat of the music over the opening credits, surrounded by the dry, mountainous land where they live. It appears as if they might almost break out in dance, but in a close shot, we see that they are sad, even grief-stricken, clutching rosaries, bouquets and photos. As the music dies down, they break into two groups. They are in a cemetery and each moves to one side of it, then scatters amongst the graves which they are there to tend. We see that one side of the cemetery is Christian, the other Muslim.

While Where Do We Go Now? has an incredibly strong ensemble cast – actresses as the leads with actors as supporting characters – director Nadine Labaki could be considered the main star. She plays “Amale,” the owner of a small café which serves as the heart of the town where people gather, both Muslim and Christian alike. Her secret love, the painter “Rabih” (played by Julian Farhat) who is there to renovate her café, also secretly loves her. Toward the beginning of the film, this is played out in a scene in which they dance closely and confess their love through song, all of which is Amale’s daydream as she washes dishes while Rabih looks good standing on his ladder stealing glimpses of her in the kitchen. I’ve heard the film called a musical, but this isn’t really the case. The characters don’t really break into song to replace dialogue, but rather it’s used to enhance the dialogue, and there are only about three short “musical” sequences in the film.

Everything seems to be going well for the townspeople. They have a television set up by a group of young men and the mayor, and once they’re able to get reception (they’re very far away from the nearest big town), the whole town gathers to watch a program. The mayor makes a speech, obviously very proud that this group of young men was able to make this special event happen. He comments on the happiness he feels at having so many years pass living harmoniously with his Muslim friends and neighbors (he is Christian), but then the television program turns to news and the violence that’s occurring elsewhere in Lebanon between rival groups of people. Desperate to preserve their peaceful way of life and ignorance about the outside world full of conflict, the women of the town begin to shout and complain at their husbands and their male neighbors, about whatever they can think of, in an attempt to drown out the noise of the awful news. This is where the story really begins. This film is about a group of women who go to hilarious lengths to prevent the problems of the outside world from entering their own town.

The comedy and the humorous grotesques which Labaki creates are tempered with drama. The turning point in the film comes when several Muslim men find that the door to the mosque has been left ajar and animals have come in, soiling the prayer rugs. No one takes the blame. In fact, it seems as if no one is to blame. It’s an accident, but a few of the men are determined to find who did it and start blaming their Christian neighbors and friends. Later, it is found that someone has retaliated by vandalizing the church, breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary. Something must be done, and the men seem too concerned about who did what that the women must take over. A series of schemes is put into action to distract the men from the problems in the town: a fake miracle experienced by Madame Yvonne (the mayor’s wife) when she hears the Virgin Mary call out various men of the town for their transgressions (including her own neighbor for things she doesn’t like him doing, as well as her husband), hiring a troupe of exotic Russian dancers to pretend to have a bus breakdown so they have to stay in the town for several days (including being relocated to the homes of many of the men and young boys, who couldn’t be happier), and drugging the men of the town by cooking hashish into breads, cookies and cakes which they are served in Amale’s café as they watch a belly dancing show put on by the Russian dancers. It is this final plan that allows the women to use intelligence gathered by one of the Russian dancers to find where the guns are buried which some of the men have been talking about using. Now, in the height of the enjoyment of the hashish-laced baked goods, drink and dancing women, the men’s desire to kill each other is the furthest thing from their minds. The women sneak out of the café to find the spot where the guns are buried, measuring by counting steps from a landmark, fussing over whose feet are bigger and can calculate properly. Eventually they find the stash and carry it to another place in the town to bury, swearing to each other that they will never speak of this to the men.
Labaki brilliantly captures how women speak to each other and treat each other and, what’s more, what they’re willing to do for one another. These are not women who compete with each other for men – most of them are married, anyway – nor compete for attention or status. They are not only neighbors, they are friends, and despite the difference in their religion, they seem to identify first and foremost as members – and even better yet, the leaders – of the community. They don’t let each other get away with anything, and make it clear what they want. They are self-actualized women who know who they are. They are the heart of the community. And they’re funny as hell. They’re a smart, scheming group of women who want to live in peace and are willing to do almost anything to secure it. Labaki shows women apart from men, outside of the definition of these women as wives or mothers, even potential brides (like Amale might be considered by Rabih). There is a strength in this as a storytelling device as well because it allows the women to be women without the constant presence of men to remind us as viewers that these women somehow belong to someone. Yes, they are trying to solve the problems being played out by the men, but it is simply because they know how to solve them and they know they have the power to do so. They are just more than half of humanity, and they act like it!

What drives the drugging of the male population of the town, though, is what happens a bit earlier. All of the hilarity of the schemes and misdirection that the women attempt is tempered with a dramatic scene so beautifully written, acted and shot, it becomes the film’s reality check. While the town is sleeping in the wee hours one morning, Takla’s (one of the main women, played by Claude Baz Moussawbaa) nephew returns on his motorbike with Takla’s son, Nassim. They had gone the day before to a nearby city and spent the night so they could sell the load of goods they had carried on the bike. But Takla finds her son is dead, having been shot by a stray bullet as he and his cousin tried to escape an area where there was a violent conflict. Labaki does not shy away or use some type of cinematographic cop out to avoid the pain this woman feels at realizing her son is dead. She puts the camera on her and lets the woman tell her own story, pulling her son off of the motorbike, cradling him in her arms, rocking him back and forth, wailing. It’s a stunning performance and a sobering moment in the film where the reality that exists outside of the town is dumped right onto Takla’s doorstep. She hides her son’s body in the well. She is determined to not let his death destroy the town and destroy the future she undoubtedly was determined for him to have: peace. Only days later do her closest friends demand to know what has happened (she is sad, reclusive, and they know something is wrong), so she tells them. They all swear not to say a word, and they begin to hatch a plan.

When both the priest and the imam of the town announce on the town’s speaker that all men are required to show up for a meeting at Amale’s café, it is then that the women put their hashish plan into action. Persevering to recover the way of life that existed before the men’s Muslim-Christian hatred came to a boil, one morning their husbands and children find them to have switched religions. The Christian women are now Muslim, the Muslim women now Christian. The mayor wakes to find that there are wall hangings in Arabic and his wife wearing a hijab and praying on her prayer rug, uttering “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great) over and over until he demands to know what’s going on. Takla, whose older son Issam tried to find a gun in Takla’s house so he could find who killed his brother, Nassim, wakes to his convert mother as well (while he is tied up in bed after Takla grazed him with a shotgun to prevent him from trying to kill anyone, then restrained him from trying it again). All of the women of the town convert this morning as they plan for the funeral of Nassim. In the cemetery, with the Muslim and Christian sides separated by a narrow path, the women all dressed in black follow the pallbearers who walk to the end of the path and turn around to face them, still holding Nassim’s coffin. “What?” asks one of the women. One of the pallbearers, knowing each woman is now of the other religion, responds “Where do we go now?”

This is a gorgeous film with a grace and respect for humanity; Nadine Labaki is a tremendous talent. This film is Lebanon’s entry for the 2012 Academy Awards and it deserves to be. Not only does it paint a picture of the world in which we could live, but one in which she should. The leadership role of women is essential not just in this film but in any possible scenario for peace, conflict resolution and sustainable pluralism. It’s just in Where Do We Go Now? the work to solve the world’s problems seems a lot more fun!

Kyna Morgan is the founder and author of Her Film, a blog and global project to build audiences for films by, for and about women, and is a published researcher on the topic of African American women filmmakers of the silent and early sound eras of cinema. She has a background in film studies, entertainment administration and publicity, and spends her free time seeking out the world’s best vegan food while sharing her love of Canada.


Guest Writer Wednesday: Rom-Coms Don’t Suck

This cross-post from Amanda Krauss previously appeared at Risatrix.
Romantic comedies have existed for literally thousands of years; the same historical genre, comoedia, is also responsible for today’s sitcoms.
But romantic comedies, especially, have suffered a great deal in the last few decades. These supposed “chick” flicks (male-authored for millennia, and still mostly male-created) get ridiculously low scores on MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, most “guy” comedies (e.g. an Apatow joint) or action flicks get decent scores, seemingly without even trying.
This is pure and simple sexism. You sure as hell can’t defend action flicks on aesthetic grounds. And any reviewer who accuses a rom-com of being predictable should have their license revoked — of course it’s predictable. So was that action flick, by the way. Oh, didn’t you see it coming that the hero dude was going to save the world? I did.
Unless you’re watching Memento, you just have to accept that most genres are predictable. It’s about execution, not form, but with screwball comedies and rom-coms there’s a general critical consensus that it’s OK to bash them for being exactly what they are (i.e. a set genre with predictable rules). That really pisses me off. Okay, Mr./Mrs. Critic, maybe you’d rather go see a revival of Metropolis at your local arthouse. But right now you’re being paid to review this movie, so don’t be a whiny beyotch about it.
And “guy” comedies (e.g. Knocked Up, Superbad, I Love You, Man) are exactly the same, predictable genre. I’ll even grant you that they’re technically funnier, mostly because the quantity and transgressiveness of the jokes is greater. There’s a complicated set of reasons for this, involving gender, comedy, and socialization. But suffice to say that gendering rom-coms as “chick” entertainment is a relatively recent phenomena and that we’re all socialized to think women are less funny, so I’d really appreciate it if critics would take a little step back when they did their sexist stuff.
Anyway. The generic point of comoedia is integration, no matter how many jokes are made in the middle. That’s why they’re predictable, and that’s, in fact, why they’re comedies.
So can we please stop all the whining about it?
Amanda Krauss is a former professor and current writer/speaker/humor theorist. From 2005-2010 she taught courses on gender, culture, and the history of comedy at Vanderbilt University, and in 2010 was invited to present a course entitled “Humor, Ancient to Modern” at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. While she is focusing on her current blog (Worst Professor Ever, which satirically chronicles issues of education and lifelong learning) some of her theoretical archives can be found at risatrix.com.