But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn. So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 comedic horror film Teeth plays to and with the audience’s anxiety about a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. In a town flanked by a nuclear power plant, the main character, Dawn, grows into her sexuality while coming to terms with having a vagina dentata–a toothed vagina. In a time when toothed condoms called Rapex to prevent rape are coming onto the market, Dawn’s travails force the viewer to consider what is necessary for a woman to survive as a sexual being in a climate of violence and rape.
Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.
Tobey loses his penis
Dawn turns to the Internet to learn what has happened to her body (and I suggest you, dear reader, might want to avoid Googling “vagina dentata” if you are faint of heart) and learns that her vagina—something she didn’t want to see the picture of even before the rape—is a tool of terror, in her opinion.
Dawn does some research
In a desire to learn about her body, to confirm what is normal or abnormal biology, she goes to another man whom should be trusted—her gynecologist. During the exam, he also takes advantage of Dawn’s vulnerabilities and assaults her. When he doesn’t listen to her protests, he loses a finger, and Dawn flees screaming at the fear she now has over her own body and it sexual nature. With little to no information about her own body brought upon by her abstinence-only education, Dawn is left confused while her curiosity mirrors that of any young woman starting to learn about sex.
Dawn visits the gynecologist
Viewers finally relax when they see Dawn in the hands of a loving partner, Ryan, who seems to care for her. With loving embraces and tenderness, Ryan takes a nervous Dawn to bed. Her vagina dentata seems to be reserved only for instances in which Dawn needs protection, so Ryan is safe in her embrace. But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn. So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.
Ryan loses his penis
Finally, upon the death of her mother, Dawn starts to see her vagina as a tool not only for survival but also for justice. Her awful stepbrother Brad is the first to be the victim of the vagina dentata used purposefully. Having ignored the cries of his dying stepmother, Brad allows the most important woman in Dawn’s life to die a horrible death. A coy Dawn seduces Brad to punish him. His vicious dog gets to eat the spoils of the sexual encounter Brad had been taunting Dawn with for years.
Brad’s penis (before the dog eats it)
The final scene does the most interesting work in terms of considering Teeth as part of the rape revenge genre (spoiler alert). Dawn has left her home to begin a new life as she can no longer survive in her town. After a succession of men whom Dawn should be able to trust take advantage of her, Dawn finally embraces her toothed vagina and uses it as a tool of resistance and justice as she works to protect other women from the awful men roaming the world. When hitchhiking, she is picked up by the archetypal “dirty old man” that solicits sex from her as his dry tongue licks his even dryer lips.
Dirty old man
In the film’s final moments, the audience sees Dawn smile and go toward this encounter, and we know that Dawn will use her vagina dentata as an act of vigilante justice. She will sever the penis of this man so he cannot use it again and hurt other girls. Instead of being surprised by her vagina or using it as a form of reactive self-protection, Dawn is now being proactive and seeking out the opportunity to use her “teeth” to act as a fighter. She goes toward the encounter and accepts her body for what it is: a powerful sexual being that has adapted to a world that is often harsh and dangerous for the female species.
I have taught this film several times in my college courses. If I were to make a generalization, at the end of the film, the male students groan and the female students cheer. I suppose that is a natural response to some degree. After all, we did just witness a dog eat a severed penis as if it were a Milk-Bone. However, this film always leads me to ask the question: Is this the kind of agency that we as women want—access to violent acts? Is Dawn, as Tammy Oler calls Dawn in her Bitch article on rape revenge films “The Brave Ones,” a “satisfying fantas[y] of power and fortitude”?
Dawn looks powerful
The film seems to argue that Dawn’s growth is a requirement, a form of natural selection–that a young woman growing up in a white, suburban, Christian, capitalist society MUST develop such a “mutation” in order to survive a patriarchal world. Dawn’s vagina dentata is the epitome of her biology teacher’s earlier lesson on natural selection, that along with the help of the effects of the nuclear power plant combined with the need to survive, women will start to adapt and grow vaginal teeth. Though she is still monstrous (the film isn’t called “Dawn,” but is instead named after the thing that makes her a monster), she also has access to mobility—she is leaving—and sexual power—she is about to control the sexual situation for the only the second time in her sexual life. Sadly, though this situation is one of power, not of love.
We do see earlier in the film that she can control her teeth when having sex in a loving environment, so the adaption will not hold her back from having a healthy sexual encounter that is safe for both partners. But when that safety is compromised, the audience is to assume that Dawn will always have the upper hand. Or should we say the upper jaw?
Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.
At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath, the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an ‘artiste’ she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam, that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.
Adult World film poster
At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath–the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an “artiste” she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art, and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.
Of course, where Amy really lives and dreams all her grandiose dreams, a bubble of middle class ennui, stacked accomplishment and precociousness, is far from the real world and it’s the real world she finds herself inadvertently tumbling into as she struggles to keep her head above water post-graduation.
Adult World, named after the mom-and-pop adult video store where Amy (Emma Roberts) finds herself underemployed, follows Amy as she stalks her “favorite living poet” Rat Billings (John Cusack), a morose, misanthropic literary superstar, and attempts to force him into being her mentor. Directed by Scott Coffey and written by Andy Cochran, the film treads similar territory to recent disappointed-artist-post-graduation stories like Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, but delves further into the realm of character study, pulling no punches in its portrayal of a self-absorbed character’s slow, belabored entry into adulthood.
With her hero, Sylvia Plath, looking over her shoulder, Amy contemplates suicide
Amy is a corollary to the kind of self-absorbed man-child character on which entire film genres are built. As a character she’s fairly unique, to the best of my knowledge, her only real kin is the similarly entitled and egotistical Hannah Horvath of Girls, and it’s both refreshing to watch her and depressing to be able to relate.
Similarly to how Hannah’s parents cutting her off provided the impetus for Girls, Amy’s father’s admission that he has serious financial worries and cannot continue to bankroll her lifestyle kickstarts her journey. Poetry, like other arts, is a vocation easily available only to the very wealthy and Adult World positions Amy at the difficult intersection of middle class reality and leisure class values. Unemployed and living in her parents’ house at the film’s start, Amy has $90,000 in student loans, frequently spends thousands on submission fees for poetry contests, and compares riding the bus to going through a war zone. She cancels her car insurance (with a poem), sure that paying submission fees is important in the grand scheme of things.
With her wall of blue ribbons, Amy is clearly not used to failure
Throughout the film it becomes clear Amy expects that being a successful poet will allow her to opt out of all the parts of life she considers tedious and believes anything she has to do in the meantime, such as working at Adult World, is worthy of contempt. She embarrasses and runs off customers by criticizing their sexual interests and in one incidence where she is zoned out, allows a man to steal several things and run off. Her belief that she will be famous one day soon is so pervasive that she believes they are lucky to be graced with her presence and that at the end of the day, she doesn’t really need the job anyway.
Early in the film, Amy visits her college friend, Candace, who is participating in an Occupy protest, but declines either joining in or paying any attention to their message. Though presented as an anarchist and activist, Candace, like Amy, has a supreme sense of entitlement, announcing that the only house in Amy’s price range is a shithole and with a hint of glee, that her parents would be horrified if she lived there. Amy’s response, saying to the landlord, “We’re bohemians,” suggests an attempt at romanticizing poverty.
Both girls are sheltered to a level that is cringe-inducing, something that is shown most clearly through the character of Rubia, a transvestite Amy meets at Adult World, the most exotic figure sheltered Amy can imagine. When she first encounters her in the bathroom, Amy gawks and runs out to tell the other people in the shop, like she just saw a unicorn. Later, Candace complains that as they are not children, but not yet adults, they are an oppressed minority and the camera cuts to Rubia, a real member of an oppressed minority, rolling her eyes (her default mode with Amy).
Amy’s difficult relationship with Rat Billings keeps her from being a cartoon character or drawing the audience’s hatred
As Amy’s reluctant mentor, Rat Billings is jaded and sarcastic, constantly putting her down. Under the belief that he will promote her to the right people and praise her brilliance, she works as his unpaid assistant, cleaning his house, curating his papers and assisting him in his lectures. Though Amy believes this is perfectly normal because “he doesn’t believe in money,” it’s clear to the audience that he’s taking advantage of her.
In her interactions with Rat, a sympathetic dimension of Amy’s character emerges.
She’s a young ambitious woman whose idol turns out to be a jerk but she can’t see it, who believes he has to be impressed just like all her teachers were, who believes him when he sarcastically calls her is muse. It’s incredibly refreshing to have a female character who isn’t a shrinking violet, who stalks her idol to get him to look at her art and without shame or the back stepping that most women are raised to do (“I think it’s pretty good” or “People have told me I’m good”) speaks without a qualifier, insisting “I’m good.” When Candace tells her she is getting published in Anarchist Quarterly, the first time she’s ever submitted writing anywhere, Amy goes off into her room, closes the door and screams.
Throughout the film, Amy’s lack of sexual experience is glaringly apparent. In the first scene, she develops feelings for a boy in her poetry class because he compliments her poems and when she discovers he had friends hiding in the closet filming their make-out session, he knows her well enough to try to use art as an excuse. When she first enters Adult World after seeing the Help Wanted sign, unaware of what the store is, she is scared and embarrassed. Recoiling from a vibrator as if she expects it to attack her, she runs back to her car and sits there for several minutes, shivering as if trying to get the filth off of her.
Job hunter Amy runs from Adult World just as she runs from adult responsibility
Amy uses feminism as an excuse for her discomfort and within the narrative; her views that the videos are sexist and models are being objectified are connected to insecurity over being a virgin, rather than true conviction. She is uncomfortable with people who are secure in their sexuality, looking down on Le Passion magazine’s cover model because her breasts are biggest than Amy’s head, and compensates by placing herself above them, superior as an artist. Holding this view is convenient for Amy as it allows her to dismiss a suggestion by her coworker, Alex (Evan Peters), that she write erotica based on her sexual experiences for the magazine, saying it is a bad idea because she feel anything sexualized is anathema to art not because she doesn’t have any experiences.
To this end, Amy assumes a serious mentorship involves a sexual relationship and one night, Rubia gives her a makeover so she can go seduce Rat. Dressed “like a prostitute,” Amy’s idea of seduction involves, speaking in 40s movie dialogue and tossing her head like cat, preening, while Rat sits watching her like a zoo animal. Here she becomes truly pathetic in his and the film’s eyes, admitting her virginity to him and describing sex in laughable poetry metaphors, a budding delicate flower and a grand voyage, in a stark contrast to the seedy sexuality sold in the store where she works.
Rat does not take her seriously when she insists she is a woman not a child. It’s difficult to watch her throw herself at him, a grown man moaning over his second-hand embarrassment for her and alternately patronizing and laughing at her.
In the film’s most disturbing scene, Amy begs Rat to “deflower her”
At this stage in her life, Amy is young enough that her life is still marked by what she hasn’t done. Even as a poet who idolizes Sylvia Plath, Amy does not understand depression, putting it on as a theatrical costume meant to inspire poems, before quickly shedding it to eat a grilled cheese sandwich brought to her by her mother. As such, she constantly measures herself against artists she admires, antagonizing that Rat became famous so much younger than she is now, and in the darkly comic opening scene, sticks her head in the oven and then wonders if this is suicidal plagiarism. Immediately after announcing that she doesn’t do drugs, she does pot because Rubia suggests it is something a poet would do.
Having not had any real pain in her life, nor love or anything exciting or dangerous, it is unclear what Amy has to write about. She is shocked when Rat tells her he made up his poems about heroin when he didn’t use it, feeling that one should only write about what they know. Rat’s admission ultimately leads her to try her hand at writing erotica, a place where her speculative purple prose makes her a mild success.
It’s uncomfortable how the movie surrounds clueless Amy with three men–Rat, Alex and her father–who always know better than her and constantly call her out on her naiveté. Viewers are clearly meant to see Amy as a satirical character and not take her seriously, sharing Rat’s view of her as a silly little girl following him around. When they are trading off quotes and he ends off without attribution, “You’re dumb but you’re not stupid,” she stands there silently for a beat, mulling it over, trying to find something flattering in it. It’s unclear whether we meant to laugh at her submissiveness or feel pity for her as she is being taken advantage of?
Still a child in many ways, Amy throws a temper tantrum after learning of Rat’s deception
She is overjoyed when he accepts her poem into an anthology mostly out of pity, not realizing that he never said he liked it or thought it was good, just that it was uniquely her. The pinnacle of Rat’s cruelty occurs when he reveals that the anthology he published her in is of “hilariously awful” poetry meant for reading on the toilet. Amy’s response, a temper tantrum wherein she breaks his things and screams about how special she is, proves only that she is even less mature than he thought.
Alex, Amy’s love interest, also gets a moment to criticize her work, yelling at her for thinking she’s better than the store, a place where good people work hard to support themselves.
Visiting Alex’s house, she learns he is a talented painter, but unlike her, is also an adult. He works a day job and makes the most of it, he never brags about being an artist, and he doesn’t see fame as his ultimate goal. He sees the purity of art, in making things for yourself, not to share with other people, something Amy realizes, shocked, that she has never experienced.
It’s a little unsettling for the film’s female lead to be contrasted with a man, a love interest, who is presented as superior to her in every way. Amy’s entire identity, as a talented artist, though it was probably inaccurate, is taken from her by these men in her life and she is utterly shattered by them.
Alex and Amy take a quiet moment while working at Adult World to feed their mutual attraction
However, regardless of who delivered these lessons, they were ones Amy needed to be a complete person and an adult. Rat turns out to be the kind of mentor she needed, as he makes her a better writer and gives her a harsh, but necessary wake-up call. She isn’t a bad poet, but she isn’t a good one either, to be anything she needs to go out into the world and experience it.
Alex, though unsettling as both her new role model and first sexual partner, teaches her to be responsible and accept the life she is living now as real life, not just something she’s doing to kill time while waiting to become famous.
Though it was men that taught her these crucial lessons about herself, the film succeeds by presenting the ultimate proof of Amy’s growth as self directed. She doesn’t become an adult by losing her virginity, getting a job, or by getting published, but by reading her shit poem and being able to laugh at it, already so much more grown up that she wonders how she could have ever been so naive. In the last shot, she is an adult reading words she wrote so recently as a child.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
On Aug. 21, 2010, 14-year-old Laura Dekker sailed out of Den Osse, Netherlands for a two-year circumnavigation of the world, alone. By the time she finished her journey, on Jan. 21, 2012, at the age of only 16, Dekker would be the youngest person to ever sail solo around the world. Documentary ‘Maidentrip’ chronicles Laura’s voyage. It’s an emotional coming-of-age story, set as a love letter to the ocean and the transformative experience of encountering a larger world.
On Aug. 21, 2010, 14-year-old Laura Dekker sailed out of Den Osse, Netherlands for a two-year circumnavigation of the world, alone. By the time she finished her journey, on Jan. 21, 2012, at the age of only 16, Dekker would be the youngest person to ever sail solo around the world.
Following her journey was documentary filmmaker, Jillian Schlesinger; from film shot while meeting with Dekker at various points in the trip, and sea-voyage scenes filmed by Dekker’s hand-held camera, Schlesinger has produced an emotional coming-of-age story, set as a love letter to the ocean and the transformative experience of encountering a larger world.
Since there were two Bitch Flicks’ staff vying for the opportunity to review Maidentrip, which premieres Friday, Jan. 17, in New York City, writers Rachel Redfern and Megan Kearns teamed up to produce a special conversation-based review, sharing their reactions to the award-winning documentary.
Rachel: Well first of all, this movie was fantastic! It really hit me on a personal level, since I just returned for two years living abroad in South Korea, and I remember what it was like to really push myself outside of my comfort zone. Watching the changes that Laura goes through and her feelings of loneliness and wonder, it made me relive a lot of my own experiences. But after watching the film, I wanted to go on an adventure again, to leave and challenge myself. Which to me means that it’s a powerful and dynamic film, when it can force audiences to identify with the protagonist, evaluate their own emotions, and then motivate them.
Megan: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!! I completely agree with you. I thought Maidentrip was fantastic too. The film really struck a chord with me on multiple levels. I thought it was incredible to be able to view her journey through her perspective, to see the world through her eyes. It’s rare for a film to show us a woman or girl’s perspective throughout. I was also impressed by her determination and resolve.
Megan: Laura wasn’t doing this for fame or notoriety or money, but that she had a dream as a child that she was determined to fulfill. That she wanted to go after something so passionately. I’ve always wanted to travel the world, but due to finances or school or work, I’ve never been able to travel as much I yearn to. So it was wonderful for her to seize the moment and just do it. I also loved that she didn’t like school because she didn’t like people telling her what to do!
Rachel: Yes, I was blown away by her maturity and how grounded she was, she’s obviously an incredibly mature and independent young woman
Megan: Yes! We need to see more independent young woman like Laura on-screen. It’s so fascinating how she was far more interested in exploring, meeting new people, trying new things, seeing new places.And how comfortable she was with herself and with being alone, yet when she met people, she had these deep connections.
Rachel: That speaks a lot to her personality I think, to be so comfortable disembarking from her boat at the age of 14 and wandering around a country by herself.
Megan: She rejected the narrative of what she’s “supposed to do.” And I love that. It was intriguing to see her journey. It was a moving love letter to travel and to sailing.
Rachel: I absolutely agree. In fact, I thought that the film did a beautiful job of showing the wonder and beauty of sailing, as well as the great community around sailing. The film also did a great job of showing how skilled Laura is as a sailor and her obvious love of sailing. I loved that Laura confesses that only Guppy, her boat, feels like home, but it could also be taken as a criticism of her home life and relationship with her parents
Megan: I also thought it was interesting when she says that true freedom is to not have attachments. It seems like Laura became increasingly comfortable on her own away from people. She seemed to crave solitude.
Rachel: I was really struck by Laura’s development, as she came into herself and became a more private person–obviously not wanting to deal with other people, and loving the moments when she was just alone on her boat. That was one thing I loved about the film was that it was able to really show Laura’s changes; it’s fantastic to be able to see someone grow up in a two hour film.
Megan: Yes, me too! That typically only happens in the arc of a TV series. Not a two-hour movie. AND we typically only see coming-of-age stories with men/boys. Not women/girls.
Rachel: Yes, I found it refreshing! I was really stunned that Schlesinger was able to show so much or Laura’s self-assurance and confidence as the trip progresses. I just felt that it painted a whole and complete picture of an individual really coming of age. And, maybe a weird side note, but I love that we see Laura physically change (her face, she grows up, and dyes her hair).
Megan: That’s a fantastic point! I couldn’t believe that so much was shown, revealed…yet it felt so expansive and not rushed at all. The film really breathed. Although sometimes, with my short attention span, I wanted things to hurry up. But I was so glad that they didn’t. The film really unfolded beautifully. I really felt that I want on this emotional and physical journey with Laura. It’s as if her journey at sea was a physical manifestation of her moving through the liminal stages of childhood/adolescence and into adulthood.
Laura Dekker on the deck of “Guppy”
Rachel: What did you feel that you gained the most from the film?
Megan: I’m glad you asked! I think I’d have to say the most I gained was to stop wasting time or making excuses and go after what you want. To pursue your dreams, whatever they may be. To not give a shit about people’s opinions. To chart your own course. Sometimes we as adults get bogged down in our day-to-day duties and responsibilities. We forget what matters most to us. We put our dreams on the back burner.
What did you gain most from the film?
Rachel: Something similar to you I think; I gained a desire to travel/go abroad again. I guess that it reaffirmed my belief in the power of experiences to change us in really profound ways and the need to be proactive in our lives and really push and challenge ourselves. And challenging yourself can be so difficult, that it seems daunting and overwhelming sometimes. For instance, in the film, when speaking about a difficult time in her journey, her first few weeks alone on the first big ocean crossing, Laura said, “I just couldn’t get any food down, I just feel really strange.” I kept thinking about my own experiences living abroad, and how it can be so expanding, but also terrifying. But then, only a few minutes later, we see her crying as a group of dolphins play alongside her boat and she confesses to the camera how much they mean to her, as company, and as a reminder of the beauty of the world.
Rachel: Laura’s story is an intense one, and has garnered a lot of media attention. It’s great that they are recognizing the accomplishment of this incredible young woman. And in conjunction with that, it was interesting when Laura talked about the two other young woman who tried to do the “Not Stop Around The World” records: Jessica from Australia and Abby from America. Did you notice all three were women? I was curious, if there were also a lot of young men trying to do the same thing?
Megan: Yes, I DID notice that too!
Rachel: I think that it’s telling that there are brave young women so willing, and so focused on their goals, that they’re out there doing these kinds of things.
Megan: Perhaps there’s this notion of getting out there because society so often dictates to women what they can and can’t do. It’s a form of rebellion. A revolutionary act. Maybe even on a subconscious level?
Rachel: Interesting idea. What did you think of the cinematography of the movie? Especially since half of the film was hand-held footage from Laura herself?
Megan: I thought it was stunning, breathtaking. I really felt the majesty and beauty of nature. And I liked that the majority of the footage was shot by Laura. Sure, some of it was choppy. But I thought that added to its charm. It’s a little rough around the edges. But then the camera pans on this exquisite sunset. Seeing the waves crash against the boat in the storm, the dolphins swimming beside the boat. It made me feel like I was right there alongside her. Also, I thought the score was haunting and beautiful, punctuating the story perfectly.
Rachel: Yes, it made me feel more involved in the film, the traveling and the sailing with the camera rocking around; probably just one more reason that the movie was so powerful. I also thought it was a tribute to Jillian as a filmmaker that she was able to effectively use different elements of storytelling to accentuate Laura’s youth, and the fact that she is searching for herself, her place in the world, and her independence. Yet, all of this is couched within the framework of Laura’s love of sailing. I love how this film was able to speak to both of us on such a personal level, and really connected with us in our past experiences.
Laura Dekker and her home, “Guppy”
Megan: But now you’ve got me thinking… Documentary films are so tricky. Because I’m thinking of the film, framing it as a story, despite it being a true one. Documentaries always have a bias, a perspective that the filmmaker wants you to see. They’re manipulative. Not necessarily in a bad way, but they’re trying to make you see/feel something specific.
Rachel: I think that’s a great point. What perspective/bias do you think Jillian was trying to portray?
Megan: Hmmm…I think she was trying to convey a coming-of-age story. That here’s this incredibly brave, independent, mature, thoughtful young women. Setting out to achieve her dream but also discovering more about herself along the way. There’s this aura of anything is possible.
Rachel: I love that the film brought up Laura’s very conflicted relationship with the press, touching on the fact that the Dutch government tried to stop Laura’s journey, and even have her removed from her father’s custody, especially since Laura never wanted that kind of notoriety for her trip.
Megan: YES. But it’s so interesting that she has a film made about her, yet she values her privacy and doesn’t like journalists with their prying questions.
Rachel: I would be very interested to know how Julian (the director) was able to convince Laura and her father to participate in the project. As a little aside though…I did some research yesterday and found a few articles stating that Laura Dekker is not happy with the film and isn’t supporting it anymore. Which is a very interesting continuation of Laura’s distrust of the media.
Megan: Oh wow.
Rachel: But apparently Schlesinger (the director) has been fantastic about Laura’s refusal to support the film
“Jillian Schlesinger, to her credit, doesn’t seem to be taking Laura’s disapproval too personally. ‘We prefer to respect Laura’s privacy and to let her speak for herself on the matter as much or as little as she’d like to at this time.'”
Rachel: I suppose it would be hard for me to watch a story of my own life journey from kid into adult….To see my mistakes, even if it did end up in a positive place?
Megan: While of course Jillian edited the film and scored it, it’s still a majority of Laura’s footage which I think makes it different than most other documentaries. Perhaps this is naive, but I feel like it makes it a “purer” story. Truer to the source.
Rachel: Especially since it’s all Laura, there are no outside influences going on there.
Megan: You raise a great point about how hard it must be for Laura to watch this, to see her triumphs but also her mistakes, her pain and her growth. What do you think about the film’s commentary on the passage of time?
Rachel: Oh, great question! Because it does cover a full two years in only two hours, I think that it can sometimes be easy to forget just how long two years is, and they end up shortening six weeks at sea into five minutes of footage. Perhaps, whether intentional or not, the film really underscores memory of time, only choosing the parts we consider the most important or significant to remember, when in reality, there might be more to the story. Things that could have been important to someone else, but that we don’t always remember or see or hear about. What do you think that the film is saying about time?
Megan: I agree with you. Also, I thought it was interesting that Laura says, “After 30 days [at sea], time doesn’t exist any more. It was the best feeling…I made peace with it. I was just there, with nature.” That was really powerful. To slow down. To not obsess over the past or worry about the future, but to really live in the moment.
Megan: I know we already talked about the media. But I thought it was interesting and awful to see all the headlines and descriptions of Laura in the media before her voyage. That she was “crazy” and “unstable.” I wonder, would they have said the same thing about a boy her age?
Rachel: The horrific things people were saying about her! Do you remember that one person said, “I hope she sinks” And I just thought, “Really? I mean, really? You thought that was OK to say? Wishing for someone else’s death?!” I was shocked. Hmmm, I’m not sure that they would have, I think they would have been more willing to let him go ahead with the trip.
Megan: Yes, I remember her saying that! That’s disgusting. Why would you wish for someone’s death?! And the media would never say that about a boy. They might say reckless or impetuous or something like that. But not “crazy” or “unstable.”
Rachel: That is one thing I’ve noticed, as a traveler and a woman, People are ALWAYS telling me, “But do you feel safe?” “Don’t you think it would be better to travel with a group?” I think people definitely have this perception that women maybe shouldn’t be traveling alone, because it’s too dangerous, and because of this, many women stop themselves. And while yes, we can’t ignore that it can be more dangerous as a woman, I think it’s unfortunate that so many women stop themselves from opportunities, or are stopped by others, because of fear.
I love that Maidentrip is about a girl taking control of her life and doing what she needs to do.
Rachel: But all that said, would I allow my 14-year-daughter do what Laura did? Probably not. And I think it is a valid point, and one that is underscored by Laura’s own admissions, she didn’t have the best relationship with her parents, making her an incredibly self-assured and independent young woman
Though, I wonder, while I don’t think many 14-year-olds would be ready to leave their parents and go off into the world, history is full of people stepping up at that age and doing incredible things.
Megan: You raise a fantastic point. I wouldn’t let my daughter (if I had one) go on a trip alone at that age. Especially sailing, when there’s so much that can go wrong. But then I think, you can’t live your life in fear. I’m torn. But yes, her loving yet strained relationship with her parents had to have played a role.
Rachel: I think people are far more capable than we give them credit for and Maidentrip is definitely a testament to the human ability to adjust itself to its environment.
One thing, the sea is always thought of as a woman (as is mother nature), perhaps it’s significant that a girl who had a very sad relationship with her mother, would have this typically female symbol (the ocean) guiding her into womanhood.
Megan: YES! And boats are named after women. That definitely makes the film even more powerful on a symbolic gender level.
Rachel: Yes! It becomes an incredibly female film, centered in the female experience.
Megan: Yes, it illustrates Laura’s perseverance, determination and resolve. What a survivor. I also love when Laura says, “There were all these people who looked at me like it was impossible that I had come in with this weather. And then as I finally started to warm up again and to think straight, I realized that wow, that’s actually pretty badass.” Such a powerful declaration — her realization of her own power and agency. She’s not shy or humble or timid about it. She embraces it.
Rachel: It was definitely a moment of self-realization, for her to be able to see that in herself. How powerful for us, and the audience, especially when you think that “sailor” stories always seem to be male ones, (pirates, etc…).
Megan: You’re SO right! Almost all sailor stories — and survival stories in general — are told from a male perspective. Like All is Lost, Castaway, and Captain Phillips.
Rachel: Or Life of Pi and Liam Neesen’s The Grey.
Megan: That’s one of the reasons why I love Gravity. It’s important to see women survivors and explorers too.
Rachel: Yes! And I just thought, “I want more women to have that kind of experience!!!”
Megan: YES! Exactly!! I felt that too.
Rachel: Maybe that’s the true power/message of the film? Hopefully that it could make women (and men) realize that inner ability.
Megan: Laura will never stop searching, never stop being herself. I want every woman to recognize and embrace her inner strength and power.
Rachel Redfern is a Staff Writer at Bitch Flicks. She is a traveler and teacher who spent the last few years living in Asia. Now back in her native California, she focuses on writing about media, culture, and feminism. She writes for Policy Mic and tweets at @RachelRedfern2.
However, the tomboy was a prominent figure in two well-loved films of the period aimed at young girls, though both presented her as a transitional stage in development. My Girl (1991), is the story of precocious 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) who grew up in a funeral parlor and is obsessed with death, while in Now and Then (1995) four childhood friends reunite as adults and remember (in flashbacks) the summer they were 12.
This guest post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
Young girls have little power.
Controlled by their parents and teachers as well as financial and societal restrictions, often their only agency is the refusal to obey and to fit into standard gender roles. In early adolescence, they mature physically and socially but have yet to assume real adult responsibility.
A clear example of the the transitory nature of this period is the frequent presence of the tomboy character in coming-of-age films.
Though in real life many girls maintain masculine identities into adulthood, in these films as in much of society, the tomboy is a temporal figure tied to early adolescence that girls are expected to grow out of it order to be a healthy, happy (and inevitably heterosexual) adult. And in coming-of-age films, a genre where characters go through moral tests and life-changing tragedies and emerge stronger and wiser, the proof of her growth is her adoption of a female identity.
Because of female liberation movements in the 1970s, media scholars tend to see the decade as the heyday of the tomboy character in popular culture, with stars such as Jodie Foster, Christy McNichols, and Tatum O’Neal. Female-focused narratives gradually tapered off at the end of the decade, with a rise in powerful male protagonists, effects-driven blockbusters and action heroes in the 80s. In the 90s, “Girl Power” movements brought about an increase in female-directed media, but with a different framing. Gay and lesbian films encouraged positive portrayal of masculine women, but were directed exclusively to adults and others in the community.
Tomboy Roberta in her element, the lone girl who can challenge the boys
However, the tomboy was a prominent figure in two well-loved films of the period aimed at young girls, though both presented her as a transitional stage in development. My Girl (1991), is the story of precocious 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) who grew up in a funeral parlor and is obsessed with death, while in Now and Then (1995) four childhood friends reunite as adults and remember (in flashbacks) the summer they were 12. The girls each fill a particular character archetype, with Christina Ricci and Rosie O’Donnell playing child and adult versions of tomboy Roberta Martin.
As adolescents, both characters are depicted as going through the early stages of puberty, where their female body and nascent sexuality are becoming impossible to ignore and they must come to terms with their gender identities.
Their tomboyism is only a cause for fear or treatment, when the girl appears to have extreme male identification or her tomboyism threatens to extend into adulthood. In this vein, it is acceptable for Roberta and Vada to climb trees, play sports and dress like the boys, but fear of puberty is a step too far.
Roberta pushes the limits of acceptable tomboyishness by binding her breasts
Roberta is panicked about the growth of her breasts and regularly measures them and binds them. Although it is not explained exactly why she is sensitive about them, the film portrays her anxiety as irregular. The other girls, all more acceptably feminine, tease her about their size and tell her she is lucky because men will like them. In this discussion, Roberta is clearly uneasy and disgusted by the idea.
Similarly, Vada is horrified when she learns about her period rather then feeling pride at becoming a woman as girls often do in coming-of-age narratives. She tells her father’s girlfriend Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis) that it isn’t fair because nothing happens to boys and kicks her friend Thomas J (Macaulay Culkin) out of the house until it is over. As with Vada, a girl’s crisis of gender is because of her difficulty reconciling her view of herself with that of her new sexualized body and differences from male playmates. In both cases however, unease with the tomboy’s female body is portrayed as transitory or naiveté, rather than indication of transsexuality, while her lack of interest in boys is because of her youth, not lesbianism.
Both girls are also established as outsiders who are different from their peers and attempt to be independent from them. Roberta is the only one of her friends who is not feminine and who isn’t interested in romance. Likewise, Vada is neurotic and is a hypochondriac who always feels she is sick. In both cases, they have lost a parent, which leaves a gulf between them and their friends that they cannot possibly understand. As such, the masculine girl often functions as a lone outsider rather than as part of an elaborate subcultural group.
Hotheaded Roberta leads the group to fight the local boys
In both films, the tomboy takes on a leadership role within their group as well. Roberta constantly places herself in the front and distributes things to the other girls; she is also the first to act and suggest new ideas. In this fashion, My Girl begins with Vada selling tickets to a tour of the funeral home, attempting both to scare the boys and make money off them. Vada goes a step further, not only being the protector in her group but the protector of a more feminine boy. Tomboy characters are often paired with effeminate male characters, as it reinforces the binary of masculinity and femininity, suggesting there is no grey area between them.
Vada’s tomboyishness is balanced by effeminate Thomas J
Roberta also transgresses into what is consider boy’s territory by placing herself in direct conflict with the boys, most notably after they steal the boys’ clothes. Later at the baseball game, she gets in a physical fight after one of the boys tells her she needs to remember to act like a girl and says she needs a mother to teach her how to be one. She tries to defend her right to be present in the masculine space, but her friends restrain her, supposedly to keep her dignity.
Moreover, both girls grew up without mothers or a feminine influence on their lives. Instead, each has a father who encourages her tomboyishness rather than attempting to suppress it. Vada’s father (Dan Aykroyd) is portrayed as well meaning but incapable of raising her properly alone. The film suggests he has done a fine job to this point, but he does not know what to say about as she is going through puberty. Likewise, Roberta grew up with a father and three older brothers.
This familial structure suggests their tomboyism is acceptable because they have no female role models. It is suggested, at least in Vada’s case, that her tomboyism is because she doesn’t know how be a woman, rather than a conscious decision.
Shelly acts as Vada’s mother, comforting her and teaching her a beauty routine.
That the film begins with the introduction of an older woman to become Vada’s female role model/motherly influence suggests she couldn’t go on living this way without it.
Shelly is the epitome of femininity–she is a makeup artist, well-versed in fashion and romance. Vada sees Shelly as fascinating and exotic and allows her to take on a motherly role, showing her how to put it on lipstick and reassuring her boys will think she is pretty. In the next scene Vada, wearing full makeup, is trying to walk in an exaggerated impersonation of a movie star’s walk and posing for Thomas J. His next line, asking where her bike is, subtly suggests she will begin to abandon her tomboy qualities as she discovers femininity.
The transformed Vada in a party dress and pretty hair
Both Thomas’s death and Shelly’s influence bring her to a point where, by the end of the film she has nearly abandoned her tomboyishness. At the film’s end, she shows up at her last writing class with her hair out its ponytail, having abandoned her t-shirt and jeans for a frilly dress. Yet she retains some of her old self, still riding bikes, even in her dress.
In contrast, Roberta receives no new mother figure or female role model and could be viewed as what Vada might have become with Shelly. The adult Roberta, though straight, is portrayed as a stereotypical lesbian, a doctor who wears masculine clothes, drinks beer, and plays softball.
Adult Roberta continues to dress in a masculine style, while Chrissy is overtly feminine
Despite this, in the scene where Roberta finds the newspaper with her mother’s death notice in it, she remarks at how beautiful she was. Though she is usually portrayed as strong, this makes her cry and because she keeps repeating the comment, it seems as if she is yearning to be like her mother, but she does not know how to get there without her.
The film uses Chrissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore), Roberta’s childhood friend, as her “mother figure.” Chrissy is naïve and sheltered, to the point where most of what she says is clearly something parroted from her mother. She reminds Roberta to “be a lady” rather than fight and reminds her to “act like a girl” when she is splashing in the mud. In a sense, Chrissy’s mother, though not present in these scenes, is sort of a mother figure to Roberta.
Though best friends, Chrissy and Roberta seem to be opposites. While Roberta is a tomboy, Chrissy is the most stereotypically feminine in the group, easily scared and weak. In the future scenes, where Chrissy is having her baby, they are coupled, with Roberta taking on the husband role. While Chrissy’s actual husband only arrives to hold the baby after its born, Roberta drives her to the hospital and delivers the baby. After it is born, rather than sharing a look with her husband, Chrissy and Roberta are shown looking at each other mouthing “I love you.”
Furthermore, in both films, their first hint of romance is used to suggest a softening of their personalities and movement into a feminine disposition. Early on, Roberta is disgusted by the love quiz her friends are completing.
Roberta and Scott bond over basketball
Her kiss with Scott Wormer plays on her need to question masculinity as he tells her she is good at basketball, not just for a girl but for a guy. Though she threatens to beat him up after if he tells anyone about their kiss, it is revealed later that she has stopped taping her breasts as a result.
Likewise, Vada has a crush on her teacher, an impossible object with no real hope of a future. At the same time, she is disgusted by Shelly’s romance novels and doesn’t understand why people have sex and get married.
When she kisses Thomas J, it is approached as an experiment to see what it is like. Magical sounding music plays as they kiss, as if this kiss will result in a big moment where a spell is broken. Though nothing happens immediately afterward, the kiss marks a change as she is now able take him, someone her age, as a realistic love object.
Vada and Thomas J’s kiss and her first step into a feminine adulthood
His death soon after suggests that his function was merely to pull her out of her tomboyishness and introduce her to heterosexual romance. Indeed, only after Thomas J’s death is she able to make her first female friend. In this sense, the kiss could be seen as breaking a spell.
Though these films make no mention of links between tomboyism and lesbianism, as tomboy characters are given romantic subplots in films where more feminine characters are not; it is suggested that these romances are included as proof they are heterosexual.
Though Now and Then shows the adult Roberta as a fairly masculine woman, it reinforces her heterosexuality as she is referred to as “living in sin with her boyfriend.” Interestingly, this character was based on a real person who did grow up to be a lesbian, but all references to this were edited out at the last moment. This inadvertently serves to tell viewers that even the most masculine girl can grow up heterosexual.
As such, these tomboy characters emerge at the end of their respective films with more submissive feminine gender identities, the experience of their first love, and close female friends or role models. Due to this, the young girl viewer is meant to assume they fit comfortably into society and are no longer outsiders or ostracized. As such, she is give the message that she too, can only grow up straight and feminine.
Hopefully she realizes it is in her power to question it.
Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.
Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.
Teeth movie poster
This guest post by Colleen Lutz Clemens appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 comedic horror film Teeth plays to and with the audience’s anxiety about a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality. In a town flanked by a nuclear power plant, the main character, Dawn, grows into her sexuality while coming to terms with having a vagina dentata–a toothed vagina. In a time when toothed condoms called Rapex to prevent rape are coming onto the market, Dawn’s travails force the viewer to consider what is necessary for a woman to survive as a sexual being in a climate of violence and rape.
Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.
Tobey loses his penis
Dawn turns to the Internet to learn what has happened to her body (and I suggest you, dear reader, might want to avoid Googling “vagina dentata” if you are faint of heart) and learns that her vagina—something she didn’t want to see the picture of even before the rape—is a tool of terror, in her opinion.
Dawn does some research
In a desire to learn about her body, to confirm what is normal or abnormal biology, she goes to another man whom should be trusted—her gynecologist. During the exam, he also takes advantage of Dawn’s vulnerabilities and assaults her. When he doesn’t listen to her protests, he loses a finger, and Dawn flees screaming at the fear she now has over her own body and it sexual nature. With little to no information about her own body brought upon by her abstinence-only education, Dawn is left confused while her curiosity mirrors that of any young woman starting to learn about sex.
Dawn visits the gynecologist
Viewers finally relax when they see Dawn in the hands of a loving partner, Ryan, who seems to care for her. With loving embraces and tenderness, Ryan takes a nervous Dawn to bed. Her vagina dentata seems to be reserved only for instances in which Dawn needs protection, so Ryan is safe in her embrace. But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn. So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.
Ryan loses his penis
Finally, upon the death of her mother, Dawn starts to see her vagina as a tool not only for survival but also for justice. Her awful stepbrother Brad is the first to be the victim of the vagina dentata used purposefully. Having ignored the cries of his dying stepmother, Brad allows the most important woman in Dawn’s life to die a horrible death. A coy Dawn seduces Brad to punish him. His vicious dog gets to eat the spoils of the sexual encounter Brad had been taunting Dawn with for years.
Brad’s penis (before the dog eats it)
The final scene does the most interesting work in terms of considering Teeth as part of the rape-revenge genre (spoiler alert). Dawn has left her home to begin a new life as she can no longer survive in her town. After a succession of men whom Dawn should be able to trust take advantage of her, Dawn finally embraces her toothed vagina and uses it as a tool of resistance and justice as she works to protect other women from the awful men roaming the world. When hitchhiking, she is picked up by the archetypal “dirty old man” that solicits sex from her as his dry tongue licks his even dryer lips.
Dirty old man
In the film’s final moments, the audience sees Dawn smile and go toward this encounter, and we know that Dawn will use her vagina dentata as an act of vigilante justice. She will sever the penis of this man so he cannot use it again and hurt other girls. Instead of being surprised by her vagina or using it as a form of reactive self-protection, Dawn is now being proactive and seeking out the opportunity to use her “teeth” to act as a fighter. She goes toward the encounter and accepts her body for what it is: a powerful sexual being that has adapted to a world that is often harsh and dangerous for the female species.
I have taught this film several times in my college courses. If I were to make a generalization, at the end of the film, the male students groan and the female students cheer. I suppose that is a natural response to some degree. After all, we did just witness a dog eat a severed penis as if it were a Milk-Bone. However, this film always leads me to ask the question: Is this the kind of agency that we as women want—access to violent acts? Is Dawn, as Tammy Oler calls Dawn in her Bitch article on rape-revenge films “The Brave Ones,” a “satisfying fantas[y] of power and fortitude”?
Dawn looks powerful
The film seems to argue that Dawn’s growth is a requirement, a form of natural selection–that a young woman growing up in a white, suburban, Christian, capitalist society MUST develop such a “mutation” in order to survive a patriarchal world. Dawn’s vagina dentata is the epitome of her biology teacher’s earlier lesson on natural selection, that along with the help of the effects of the nuclear power plant combined with the need to survive, women will start to adapt and grow vaginal teeth. Though she is still monstrous (the film isn’t called “Dawn,” but is instead named after the thing that makes her a monster), she also has access to mobility—she is leaving—and sexual power—she is about to control the sexual situation for the only the second time in her sexual life. Sadly, though this situation is one of power, not of love.
We do see earlier in the film that she can control her teeth when having sex in a loving environment, so the adaption will not hold her back from having a healthy sexual encounter that is safe for both partners. But when that safety is compromised, the audience is to assume that Dawn will always have the upper hand. Or should we say the upper jaw?
Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.
I’ve recently taken to revisiting some of these forgotten (or culty, depending on who’s looking) classics with a new, more grown-up and feminist eye, and I’ve been examining the lessons that each of these gems showed us. One of my recent new/old film crushes is a 1990 film called Lisa (starring Cheryl Ladd, Staci Keenan, and DW Moffet). It has all the teen angst that a gal could hope for. At first glance you expect this to be a typical thriller, but this film is so much more. It is an open exploration of a young woman coming into her own, exploring her sexuality, rebelling against traditional convention, and if that weren’t interesting enough, Lisa’s story runs parallel to the exploits of a serial rapist/killer. One of the things that makes this film so different is the point at which these two stories intersect, and Lisa proves herself more capable than imaginable and saves herself and her mother from the killer’s clutches. The ending of the film flipped the traditional damsel in distress cliché on its head.
Staci Keenan stars as the teen protagonist in Lisa
This is a guest post by Shay Revolver. Spoilers and Trigger Warning for discussions of rape.
The 90s were a confusing time for pre- and full-on teenage girls. The 80s teen flick era had ended and left us a legacy of lessons on male-female relations that was nowhere near empowering. Mostly girls learned that if a guy really loves you then he’s got to stalk you to show it, and if you love him you’d better take off those glasses and ditch that ponytail. That was the extent of teen girl roles in movies; we were objects and trophies. When the 90s rolled around, girl power (pre-Spice Girls) was bubbling under the skin of society, and we were about to boil over. There are a few movies that I can think of that hinted at the dawning of the age of girlquarius, where teenage girls were thinking for themselves, acting how they wanted, living on screen on their own terms.
I’ve recently taken to revisiting some of these forgotten (or culty, depending on who’s looking) classics with a new, more grown-up and feminist eye, and I’ve been examining the lessons that each of these gems showed us. One of my recent new/old film crushes is a 1990 film called Lisa (starring Cheryl Ladd, Staci Keenan, and DW Moffet). It has all the teen angst that a gal could hope for. At first glance you expect this to be a typical thriller, but this film is so much more. It is an open exploration of a young woman coming into her own, exploring her sexuality, rebelling against traditional convention, and if that weren’t interesting enough, Lisa’s story runs parallel to the exploits of a serial rapist/killer. One of the things that makes this film so different is the point at which these two stories intersect, and Lisa proves herself more capable than imaginable and saves herself and her mother from the killer’s clutches. The ending of the film flipped the traditional damsel in distress cliché on its head.
Staci Keenan and DW Moffett in Lisa
In case you missed this one, Lisa is the story of a super curious 14-year-old girl named Lisa Holland. Lisa has started growing into her sexuality and, like many teenage heterosexual girls, she is more than a little boy crazy. Her sexual awakening is made more complicated by the fact that her mother, Katherine, a single mom who had Lisa at 15 and has raised her on her own, is having no part of Lisa dating–until she’s 16. Katherine understandably doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes, and she is worried that dating will lead to sex, which might lead to her daughter ending up being a single mom. Most films would have taken this situation and made sure that the mother has a horrible life, thoroughly punishing her for her choice to have premarital sex. Instead, the writer and director take a rare approach to female yearnings and desires. The mother comes off sympathetic; she gives guidance more than criticism. There is also no slut shaming. Her mother actually acknowledges that her daughter has these very natural urges. At first glance, the conversations between them might come off as an all-out attempt at suppressing Lisa’s sexuality, but the way it is handled is beautiful. Her mother is honest with her reasoning and is very clear that she feels her daughter is too young to have sex. The openness attached to their conversations is refreshing, and it is kind of nice to see a young woman trying to come to terms with her feelings and sexuality. Katherine, in her role as single mother and successful working woman, who didn’t end up a statistic despite being a young single mother, is even involved in a relationship. She straddles a line, however, and keeps it from her daughter in an effort to protect her.
Staci Keenan in Lisa
Lisa’s best friend is another young woman named Wendy Marks. There is a beautiful contrast between the two of them. Wendy’s parents aren’t as strict as Lisa’s mother. Wendy is allowed to date, and Lisa is fascinated. Having all of these new feelings and no outlet or experience, Lisa creates a fantasy world in which she can express herself and explore these new feelings. She and her friend Wendy keep a scrapbook of men that they see and would like to date, much like the heart covered Mr * Mrs. (or Mrs. & Mrs.) notebook that many of us had when we were growing up. Lisa and her friend Wendy see men they like and follow them to gain more information about them. Sometimes they even phone the men and record their intel in the scrapbook. This notebook helps Lisa explore new feelings in a more private way and allows her to explore the qualities that she wants her future beau to have. She gains her outlet and comes to an understanding of her sexuality and, in some ways, her relationship desires. I also found it lovely that while the girls’ budding sexuality is growing at different rates there is no pressure to compete or follow or judge.
All of these explorations combined with a protagonist portrayed by a young woman trying to figure out relationships and sexuality would have been more than enough to satiate my wish list for a good film, but this thriller threw in a serial rapist and murderer dubbed The Candlelight Killer, who stalks women and then calls and kills them after discovering where they live. This added a whole new level to the film. First of all, the film does something super rare; the rapist isn’t some worn, wrinkled , unattractive guy who can’t get a date. Richard, played by DW Moffett, is a hottie. It highlights a fact that is often overlooked in these types of characters when they are portrayed on TV or film: rape isn’t about a guy who can’t get a date, or about a woman being an undercover seductress who was asking for it. Rape is about power and hatred of women. This fact is reinforced by the psychological torture that Richard inflicts upon these women before he rapes and ultimately brutally murders them. He leaves messages on their answering machine telling them that he is in their house and announces his plans to kill them. He strips these women of the safety that their homes are supposed to provide. It is a clear, honest portrayal–and a parallel to rape itself. Having such a violation of sexuality portrayed in a storyline that runs parallel to the story of Lisa’s budding sexuality is an odd but brilliant choice. It doesn’t just use the message that all men are monsters, or blame the victims for their beauty taunting him. They portray this heinous crime as what it is: an attempt to remove a woman’s power.
You can pretty much see where the story is headed. Richard is going to end up in Lisa’s scrapbook, and she will be punished for her desires. Of course you would think that because that’s the message we’ve been shown. Good girls have no desires; if you have them you will be punished. I would have thought it too, but this film has already bucked every trend. You’ve got an attractive rapist, a former teen mom who is successful and raising a brilliant daughter, and a young woman having her budding sexuality acknowledged. When the stories intersect, they continue this realistic trend. Lisa accidentally bumps into Richard when he’s coming from a kill. He aids her and flirts with her a little bit, and she awkwardly flirts back, making him scrapbook worthy. She goes about her usual routine, follows him and gathers his license plate number and uses that to track him down and get his phone number from the DMV. After another failed attempt at bypassing her mother’s bothersome no-dating rule, she has to turn down a chance for a double date with Wendy and a boy her own age. Lisa locks herself in her room and decides to call Richard. She flirts with him some more, pretending she’s an older woman, and she piques his interest.
Tanya Fenmore and Staci Keenan (as Wendy and Lisa) enjoy some girl talk
Lisa keeps up her game, and with Wendy’s help, she continues to stalk him, which isn’t that smart of an idea, but it is age appropriate and realistic. She even continues her phone conversations after nearly getting caught. The plot progresses as Lisa reveals more and more about herself with every conversation, and soon Lisa realizes her game is going to have to end because Richard begins to push for a face-to-face meeting. The film doesn’t shy away from the more manipulative ways of teenage girls, but it gives a rationale and adds method and logic to the madness. There is no right or wrong, but a whole lot of gray. There is no punishment for Lisa’s actions per se; her actions do cause her mother to become Richard’s next and final victim. But, the film doesn’t end as bad as it could have. Katherine doesn’t get killed. Lisa isn’t punished for having desires or growing up and trying to figure out who she is going to be as a woman. After sneaking away to go on a trip, Lisa returns just in time to see the stage set for her mother’s murder at the hands of The Candlelight Killer, and she is forced to defend her life and the life of her unconscious mother. She doesn’t play damsel in distress or fall down the stairs; she chooses to fight, and even though she doesn’t initially come out on top, her mother wakes in time to come to her aid. The fight and movie ends with Richard going out of the window thanks to a handy baseball bat and the women holding each other in solidarity and love.
There are so many things about Lisa that make it interesting. The honest portrayal of a young woman’s burgeoning womanhood. The open expression of Lisa’s sexuality and desires. The over protectiveness of a single mother that truly rides a fine line between cautionary and plot building without delving into the gray area of slut shaming, a teen pregnancy, or portraying the mother as a failure whose life went wrong because she had sex at a young age. All in all this film , even at its campiest, showed strong women, and in the end, Lisa and her mother saved themselves from the clutches of the killer. They relied on each other to overcome the situation; there were no cops or men rushing to their rescue. And, there is something super awesome about watching two women surviving after killing a serial killer/rapist. Thank you Lisa for giving us a movie that didn’t shame young women for having urges and desires but instead giving us a movie that showed life as it often is: filled with areas of gray. Lisa showed independence and strength in the face of danger. And there is something truly beautiful about a young woman coming into her own, making and learning from her mistakes.
Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac , recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a NY-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator and writer. She’s obsessed with most books , especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in main stream cinema and television productions.. Twitter @socialslumber13
We thought it might be a fun note to end the year on, with the exploration of films like Harry Potter and Matilda, while also taking a closer, more serious look at portrayals of adolescence and girlhood in films and TV. Some questions to think about include, what are Hollywood’s expectations of girls and teenage girls in films and TV? And how do those expectations feed into the public’s acceptance of a teenage girl’s sexuality, for instance. Further, how might a girl character impact a young girl who’s viewing her on screen?
Our final theme month for 2013? Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
We thought it might be a fun note to end the year on, with the exploration of films like Harry Potter and Matilda, while also taking a closer, more serious look at portrayals of adolescence and girlhood in films and TV. Some questions to think about include, what are Hollywood’s expectations of girls and teenage girls in films and TV? And how do those expectations feed into the public’s acceptance of a teenage girl’s sexuality, for instance. Further, how might a girl character impact a young girl who’s viewing her on screen?
We’ve seen very recently how difficult it is for girls to make their transition from young girl star to teenage sex symbol—see Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus for one example. (And why is that always the trajectory for girls and young women, anyway?) We’ve also seen the media’s abhorrent reaction to girl child stars, Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, for one, who got called the C word in a “hilarious” and “satirical” tweet by The Onion.
We’d also like writers to explore how expectations differ for boy childhood stars versus girl childhood stars and the significance of those differences. And lately, it seems that our childhood girl stars get to grow up and play Pick Your Own Princess Movie … why is that?
There’s so much to explore with this month’s theme, and those are just a few ideas to get you started. We’ll also include a list of films below that are worth analyzing, but this certainly isn’t an exhaustive list. Please propose your own ideas as well. Animated heroines count, too!
We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know who or what you would like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.
Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.
If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.
Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Dec. 20 by midnight.
“We’ve All Been There” (“we” being young white males).
This guest post by Candice Frederick previously appeared at her blog Reel Talk and is cross-posted with permission.
Lately there has been a lot of attention paid to the new crop of coming of age films turning up everywhere, most recently The Way, Way Back and The Spectacular Now. I get it; we all want to revisit that warm and fuzzy (and sometimes awkward) time in our lives when we weren’t quite sure who we were and what we wanted to become, but we were excited–or fearful–about the possibilities.
But have you noticed that many of these films share one glaringly common theme among them? I’m talking about the fact that in most cases they’re about young white males, or even their older–and apparently still directionless–counterparts. Michael Cera and Paul Rudd aren’t the only ones who could play wondrously clueless wusses on screen. What about all the young girls who struggle with the pains of adolescence, or women who may for whatever reason be looking for a new beginning, or even the characters of color who must contend with a whole other set of challenges as they set out into the world on their own? They’re inexplicably–and unforgivably–being overlooked.
Another white male protagonist.
While Hollywood has promoted and accepted this trend (relying on the fact that some of the themes may be universal), audiences are starting to take notice and voice their discontent about it. Black Girl Nerds posted a piece questioning “Where Are All The Twenty-Something Black Actresses?” The writer lamented over the fact that young actresses of color are rarely sought after for coming of age tales. You’ll also notice that whenever many writers construct a list of the top coming of age films, you’d be hard pressed to find many (or any) where the main character is a female or of color.
So why the imbalance? Is there any need to rehash the fact that Hollywood’s virtually unwavering focus on the white male goes far beyond the coming of age genre? While the industry timidly tries to break out of that pattern with films like Girl in Progress or The Kids Are all Right, the overwhelming number of white male films not only take precedence but are often the ones that garner more critical accolades.
Girl in Progress
I wonder whether the common misconception that females tend to be the more focused and mature gender has anything to do with their virtual absence in the genre. However, Kristen Wiig seems to be single-handedly fighting against that stereotype as she’s carved out her very own “hilariously hot mess woman who desperately tries to get her act together” category of films. I’m just saying, it would be nice to see more stories like that of Eve’s Bayou, Under the Tuscan Sun, or Eat, Pray, Love–imperfect films that at the very least more eloquently illuminate the term “coming of age.”
Pariah — a coming of age film about a young black lesbian.
And I don’t know about you, but I am tired of the so-called coming of age stories featuring characters of color who “come of age” by taking part in some kind of a crime or witnessing something equally devastating. That image has been played to death and is just a crutch at this point (note: that angle is not restricted to films with characters of color, but still). With the critical success of Pariah, you’d think Hollywood would be interested in promoting similar films, ones that illuminate that the drama that comes along with growing pains is often triggered by internal not external circumstances.
Francois Ozon’s In the House (or Dans la Maison) is actually quite good. It’s an intelligent film with brilliantly portrayed, complex, interesting characters along with pathos and moments of poignant humor. The film is very aware of social class dynamics, showing the interplay of working class, middle class, and the intelligentsia. Germain is a jaded teacher who sees the writing talent in his student Claude, a smart, working class kid with a sadistic streak. As Germain nurtures Claude’s “gift,” both their lives spiral out of control. Using an engaging meta-narrative to show the story-within-the-story through its chapters and revisions as Claude integrates Germain’s instruction, Germain becomes obsessed with his student and the story he writes. We begin to wonder about the potential maliciousness of Claude’s manipulations, not only of the family “in the house,” but of Germain himself. Who is really the teacher and who is the pupil? Where is the line between fantasy and reality?
Though I enjoyed the smart plot and fine performances, I found myself on the fence about the female characterizations. First, there’s Esther (played by Emmanuelle Seigner), the matriarch of the Artole family.
Esther sleeps while Claude voyeuristically writes about her feet. Women, he finds, are easier to admire when they’re asleep and can’t challenge him or make him feel inadequate.
Claude is sexually attracted to her, longs for her as a replacement for the mother who left him, and resents and envies her for her class status. Claude mocks her as stupid, painting her in his narrative as coarse and frivolous. Germain isn’t too concerned with the lack of sophistication Claude’s writing exhibits as it turnsEsther into little more than an object of desire (albeit the desire itself is rendered as complex and multifaceted). Germain, instead, insists that the key to the story is the fleshing out of the young Rapha character.
Claude derides and inwardly sneers at Esther for her obsession with the house. She constantly flits through home magazines and goes on about the drapes and building a veranda. Esther’s identity is reduced to the house. Claude never really sees or appreciates her loneliness and the deep, abiding unhappiness in the objective correlative of the house.
Esther folding laundry, noticing Claude staring at her from a park bench.
Claude never realizes that the house is every bit as much a symbol for him as it is for her, though the permutation is different for each of them. For Claude, the house is an escape into another, better life with inhabitants who he’s free to toy with and manipulate to manifest his own desires. For Esther, it is a prison and a life preserver that she continues to beautify in the hopes that she won’t have to keep staring at the bars. Not only that, but Claude never recognizes that Esther is the keeper of this house that he desires so much; she is the one who lovingly cares for its physicality while internally sacrificing much to keep its inhabitants happy and together (even, in the end, giving up the house itself so that her husband can follow his dreams).
Then we have Jeanne (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), Gillam’s intelligent, insightful wife who operates an art gallery.
Jeanne sits in bed contemplating the tale Claude weaves as well as the nature of the weaver himself.
Germain shares young Claude’s chapters with Jeanne, and while Germain becomes engrossed in the boy’s story and writing talent, Jeanne constantly reminds us to think of the troubled boy crafting the tale. Jeanne also observes the way this obsession is affecting Germain, the only one outside the story enough to keep bringing reality back into play. She cites Germain’s loss of sexual appetite, postulating that he may be attracted to his student; Germain’s prioritizing Claude’s writing over the desperate situation at her art gallery where her job is in jeopardy; and Germain’s losing his moral compass as he helps Claude and Rapha cheat in order to keep Claude within the house and writing. She is the one who breaks the fourth wall by inviting the Artole’s to an art opening at her gallery.
Germain is horrified that Jeanne has invited the Artoles, as he’d prefer to imagine them as fictitious.
To Claude, Germain mocks the art Jeanne curates as pretentious. Germain is threatened by her intelligence and effortless insight into the human psyche as proven by her astute grasp of Claude and the characters he portrays. Claude ends up weaving Jeanne into his narrative, ending their encounter with sex, a scene that is dubious in its veracity. This non-consensual representation is a violation of her personhood. Her agency disappears with her as we never find out what becomes of her after Germain murderously chokes her after reading Claude’s rendering of his meeting with Jeanne. Germain’s vicious attack is borderline absurdist in its ferocity, and I was left wondering if the scene was intended to be humorous … I assure you, it was not. Germain’s assault seems more about the loss of another thing that belonged to him (his wife is to his job is to his reputation) due to Claude’s story as well as his own obsession.
Not only does Germain become completely unsympathetic to me in that moment, but the female characters are revealed to be little more than narrative devices. The ending of In the House makes it clear that the film was always and only about the relationship between Germain and Claude. As the two sit together on a bench bereft of everything but each other’s company and their stories, it becomes clear that the narrative was always about the power play between instructor and pupil. Other people were merely obstacles that stood between them to be maneuvered like chess pieces until these two men were on equal footing, a sort of stalemate with only the kings left standing on the board.
At first, I hoped the film was calling attention to the way that both Germain and Claude don’t really see the women in their lives, don’t allow them to be full human beings, but upon further analysis, it becomes apparent that the film itself only uses the female characters as convenient props to help elucidate the male narrative replete with its masculine struggles.
The first time you watch Stoker, it’s something of a perplexing experience because the narrative is such a genre-bender. I spent at least half the movie wondering what kind of movie I was watching. Not to toot my own horn overly much, but I’ve got a bit of an eye for formulas and am pretty good at spotting them. A film that can keep me on my toes like Stoker did is a rare, commendable animal. The direction Stokerdid end up taking was also surprising, unique, and oddly feminist.
Ultimately, Stoker is the coming-of-age tale of a blossoming female serial killer. A “true” female serial killer is not only rare in cinema, but in real life as well. You’re probably thinking, “What the hell is she talking about? There are a slew of female serial killer movies and real-life figures I can think of off the top of my head.” In truth, women serial murderers kill for reasons different from their male counterparts. Typically, women kill for money or revenge, targeting people they know or to whom they’re related. Whereas male serial killers tend to predominantly kill strangers with the motivation being sexual in natural. To clarify, male serial killer motivation surrounds power and usually displays itself in sexualized killings or in the sexual response the killer has to his murders. Not only that, but some of the world’s most famous female serial killers work in partnership with a male serial killer, thus simulating that psychosexuality inherent in their murders.
India Stoker (portrayed by the amazingly talented Mia Wasikowska) meets her creepy serial killer uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), and the more strangely he behaves and the more evidence India has of his murderousness, the more attracted she is to him.
Finds housekeeper’s dead body in the basement freezer. Starts hanging out with Charlie more.
Their unsettling, incestuous flirtation culminates in their joint murder of India’s classmate, Whip. The boy and India make out in the woods, and when she decides she’s had enough of him, the boy tries to rape her. Charlie swoops in to rescue her, and, together, the two kill India’s assailant. The movie makes it clear that Whip is an utter piece of shit and totally has it coming, so there’s little moral ambiguity in this kill, which differentiates it from Charlie’s prior murders (the housekeeper, an aunt, and, at this point, we suspect India’s father). India’s actions of self-defense and the shittiness of the victim leave the lingering possibility that India is not, in fact, serial killer material.
The following scene is the classic post sexual assault shower scene with a twist. We see India hunched over and whimpering in the shower intercut with flashbacks to the assault and Whip’s death. It gradually dawns on the audience that India isn’t weeping, she’s masturbating. This scene is pivotal and is, in fact, one of the major climaxes of the film, which makes the structure of the film itself more feminist. Feminists have noted for many years that the typical story structure with the single climax near the end of the film followed by the denouement more closely resembles the pattern of male sexual pleasure. A more feminist structure would allow for multiple climactic scenes, which Stoker does. (There are more climactic moments nearer the end of the film, which I’ll get into shortly.) Not only is the film’s first climax a scene that ends with a woman actually orgasming, it is a masturbation scene wherein India is pleasuring herself.
That’s a boat-load of female agency right there.
India comes to realize in yet another climactic, pivotal scene that Charlie is mentally ill (perhaps even more than she is herself), that he wants to take her away with him, and that he has always wanted to be with her. Not only that, but the film reveals to the audience what India strongly suspects: Charlie murdered India’s father in order to be with her.
India goes through the stack of Charlie’s letters addressed to her over the years. She realizes that though Charlie claims to send them from around the world, in fact, they’re all sent from a mental institution.
Despite her realization that Charlie is insane, India agrees to leave with him because his presence and guidance have triggered her coming-of-age and shown her that she isn’t alone in her proclivities. It turns out, though, that a prerequisite for running away with Charlie is allowing him to kill off her mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). Because India and Evelyn have a difficult relationship in which they don’t relate to one another with no love lost between them, Charlie supposes this is an easy enough task to get out of the way before spiriting his beloved India away. While he brutally strangles Evelyn with his belt, India calmly puts her rifle together, aims her sights (at who? Evelyn or Charlie?), and fires.
Let’s take a quick second to examine Charlie and India’s choice of weaponry. Charlie favors a belt, stolen from his brother/India’s father, with which he strangles his victims to death. India, we learn, favors her hunting rifle. Not choosing the tool of her mentor differentiates her from him, allowing her an identity unique to him despite their overwhelming similarities. Not only that, but you could get all psychoanalytic on this shit and view their weapon choices as a form of gender role reversal. Charlie’s belt, which encircles and constricts could be viewed as vaginal, while India’s gun with its shape and its firing of bullets is a common phallic symbol. Within our world that views masculinity and masculine symbols as superior, India’s weapon of choice subtly establishes her dominance over Charlie, a fact that is further reinforced when she kills him.
In spite of the sexual connection India has with Charlie, in spite of their shared interests and secrets, in spite of the estranged relationship she has with her mother, India chooses to save Evelyn and nonchalantly shoots and kills her uncle. I admit I was worried for a minute because it’s not a very strong feminist statement when a young girl must essentially murder her mother in order to come into adulthood and into her sexual identity, even if we’re talking about a budding serial killer. India, unlike her mother, does not choose a man fresh on the scene over the woman with whom she’s been sharing a home and life for 18 years. Neither, though, does India stick around to live out the rest of her life trapped in a mother-daughter dynamic wherein neither one of them is capable of loving the other. Instead, she takes off in her new black pumps wearing her father/Charlie’s belt with her rifle and her uncle’s flashy convertible. If it’s unclear which path she’s chosen, we have a final climactic moment in which India shoots the sheriff (har, har) who pulls her over for speeding.
India with the rifle
The more I think about this movie, the more I like it, and the more feminist tropes I see in it. The Freudian parallels, genre subversion, and feminist subtext (or just regular text?) didn’t happen by accident; director Chan-wook Park is meticulously deliberate about his imagery, symbolism, and delivery of dialogue. The strict, generally accepted, masculine definition I gave above for what constitutes a serial killer is, in itself, a gender-biased, sexist definition that gives legitimacy and near rockstar status to men who murder multiple people (predominantly women) in order to feel a sexualized rush of power. By this definition, serial killers are an elite boys club of He-Man Woman Haters who don’t allow female participation. Trying to make a woman fit into this masculine mold is a dubious honor, but I can’t help but appreciate the deft skill with which Park makes this a believable possibility. Not only is India a multifaceted character, but she is strong, smart, independent, and finds her own path while creating her own moral code outside the patriarchal strictures that Charlie attempts to impose upon her. India may transition from heroine to anti-heroine throughout the course of Stoker, and she may be a scary-ass serial killer, but she is, nonetheless, a powerful, feminist figure.
If I were asked to describe my reaction to Stoker using an acronym, I’d go with “WTF,” although I definitely experienced some “OMG” and “STFU” moments here and there. By the end, I could hear myself mentally reviewing the film and toying with the idea of titling this piece merely, “OFFS.” That’s the overall reaction, distilled, I had to Stoker from the first five minutes of watching the film all the way to the final credits. I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t like it. Or even love it. Or possibly want to find all existing film reels (and whatever digital incarnations exist) and set them on fire. I just won’t be able to tell for a few months or so. It’s one of those movies.
Uncomfortable mother-daughter interaction
In a lot of ways—okay, like, two—it reminded me of Silver Linings Playbook. Its genre-mixing, unpredictability, and innovative storytelling, particularly with how it illustrates the hereditary aspect of mental illness, works incredibly well. Of course, while Silver Linings Playbook can make a person joy-cry at the end, Stoker’s ending (and beginning and middle) should come with a Serious Trigger Warning for depictions of violence, sexual assault, and incest. I plan to address those things in this review as well, and I’ll also add a Spoiler Alert, if only to avoid writing a horrible paragraph like this ever in my life:
It’s hard to avoid spoilers at this point, but let’s leave it at this: India discovers that her parents have been concealing something very important regarding her uncle—and, given her emotionally close relationship with him, something very important about herself, about character traits that are a part of her own blood. When the truth comes out, her world is overturned, her monsters are unleashed, and she finds herself without the solid footing of character, self-knowledge, and moral clarity to fight them.
(It’s probably not nice to make fun of Richard Brody of The New Yorker, but since Vida’s Count recently showed us in its annual illustration of literary journals that unapologetically refuse to publish women writers or review the work of women writers, The New Yorker can go fuck itself. Also: “her monsters are unleashed” … No.)
Evie (Nicole Kidman) and India (Mia Wasikowska)
Seriously though, what the hell did I just watch? One could categorize Stoker as any of the following: a coming-of-age tale, a crime thriller, a sexual assault revenge fantasy, a love story, a murder mystery, a slasher film, a romantic comedy (I’m hilarious), or even an allegory about the dangers of bullying, parental neglect, or keeping family secrets. Throw a recurring spider in there, some shoes, a bunch of random objects shaped like balls, along with a hint of incest, some on-screen masturbation, imagined orgasmic piano duets, and a handful of scenes that rip off Hitchcock so hard that Hitchcock could’ve directed it (see Shadow of a Doubt), and you’ll have yourself a nice little freakshow!
Seriously though, shoes and balls are really important in this movie.
Saddle Shoe (girlhood!) and High Heel (womanhood!)
Unlike this review, Stoker starts off straightforwardly enough. Mia Wasikowska (our favorite) plays India Stoker, a comically quiet teenager reminiscent of Wednesday Addams, at least until she evolves into a full-blown psychopath, who hates to be touched, gets bullied by boys at school—they call her “Stroker”—and mourns her father (Dermot Mulroney) after his suspicious death in a car accident on her 18th birthday. Nicole Kidman plays Evie, India’s mother, in typical Kidman as Insufferable Ice Princess casting, and there’s pretty much nothing redeeming about her. She gloms onto her dead husband’s estranged brother Charlie at the funeral (played by Matthew Goode), whom she’s never met and never once questions the presence of, and when Mrs. McGarrick, her housekeeper of a million years mysteriously vanishes, she says things like, “Oh no, what will we do for dinner now!” with earnest incredulity.
Evie loses her shit on India (finally!)
I realize Evie isn’t supposed to be likeable, that we’re meant to roll our eyes at her upper-class privilege and displays of affection toward her husband’s mysterious younger brother, that maybe we’re even supposed to feel a tiny bit sorry for her. But I despise one-dimensional women characters onscreen, and Evie is just that, a collection of simplistic tropes used to move the narrative forward: a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad boss (like, aren’t you even going to look for your missing housekeeper?), and a bad niece-in-law (Aunt Gin needs to talk to you alone for a reason, you idiot.) Her obliviousness to everything happening around her doesn’t read as the dissociated or even unstable response of a wife in mourning; it reads as the selfish and feigned cluelessness of a generally awful person.
Goodbye, Auntie Gin
Evie—hats off to Nicole Kidman—eventually delivers one of the scariest monologues I’ve ever seen on film. It’s the first time she utters anything longer than a few sentences at once (which are usually about the importance of polite behavior and playing the piano), but this monologue, I mean, chills. It’s also the only time Evie exhibits just as much overt “crazy” as the other characters, and I found myself savoring that moment. Isn’t it funny how a character can become interesting once she’s allowed to do things other than comment on etiquette and pass out drunk?
I wish we got to see that less passive side of Evie earlier in the film because, the thing is, we don’t need to dislike Evie in order to feel sympathy for her daughter. It’s certainly possible to make characters bad and villainous while also making them complex and even charming. The makers of this film know that, too. You know how I know that? Because Charlie Stoker exists.
Evie and Charlie (Matthew Goode)
This fuckin’ guy. He rolls onto the family estate during his brother’s funeral like he’s been there all along, and somehow, “I’ve been travelling the world for 20 years” seems like a reasonable excuse for his lifelong absence. Naturally, he decides to move in with Evie and India because why not, I’m sure everyone will be totally fine with that, nice to meet you! And they are. Except for Aunt Gin and Housekeeper McGarrick, who genuinely—rightfully—fear this bro, even with all his charisma and sexy-sheepish smiles. They know some shit. India mistrusts him at first, too, but the more she learns about him, and the creepier (and more murderous) he becomes, the more India identifies with him. Queue The New Yorker’s Richard Brody: her monsters are unleashed.
Accompanied by a few feminist themes.
India imitating a yard statue, accompanied by saddle shoes
For one, I don’t think it’s possible to not read Stoker as a coming-of-age tale, mainly because it puts so much emphasis on India’s burgeoning womanhood. We see her in flashbacks as a young girl, a semi-tomboy who hunted birds with her dad, who wore the same pair of black-and-white saddle shoes all her life—she received a bigger size every year on her birthday (remember, shoes and balls are really important in this movie)—who never identified with her beautiful, quintessentially feminine mother, and whose experiences with boys include stabbing one in the hand with a sharpened pencil (loved that) when he and a group of friends sexually harass her behind their high school.
These fucking shoes!
That foreshadows India’s upcoming attempted rape … because what would an onscreen coming-of-age tale of burgeoning womanhood be without an attempted rape scene? (I’m only half-joking here; considering one in three women lives through a sexual assault in her lifetime, and most films seek to reveal some Truth About Humanity, I’m surprised the issue of sexual assault and rape isn’t addressed more often—and accurately—onscreen. Oh wait, I forgot we’re talking about women’s stories here: UNIMPORTANT.) Um.
In my mind, the film exists in two parts: everything that happens before the attempted rape and everything that happens after it.
I’m sure this is a 100% acceptable uncle-niece interaction
Stoker addresses India’s sexual feelings early on; she clearly feels an attraction toward her uncle, and she seeks out a boy from school immediately after she catches her mother and uncle kissing. The juxtaposition of these scenes—India watching two people engage in sexual activity and her subsequent desire to do so herself—touches on a couple of familiar adolescent emotions. One could read India’s reaction to discovering her mom and uncle’s indiscretion as a big Fuck You to both of them. One could also read India’s reaction to discovering her mom and uncle’s indiscretion as an attempt to behave like an adult, to emulate what she sees (remember: coming of age!). Both of those responses ring true to me, and Stoker effectively captures the confusion inherent in leaving the familiarity of girlhood and entering a not-yet-entirely-defined womanhood.
But India decides during her make out session in the woods with the rapist that she doesn’t want to do anything more than kiss, at which point she tells him she wants to go home. He ignores her, physically assaults her, and attempts to rape her. And that’s when her monsters are unleashed. (I can’t stop saying it.)
India as Hunter
I won’t reveal what happens during this scene because—damn—but believe me, it changes everything for India, for everyone. From here until the end of the film, Stoker explores India’s equating of death and violence with sexual awakening, and it looks at the relationship between power, innocence, and what it means for a young woman to lose both. It also asks a question about choice, about how much power we really have over ourselves, our actions, over who we become.
The film opens with a voiceover (that bookends the film) of India telling us, “Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free.” This, contrasted with what the film reveals about Charlie’s past and India’s present—and the similarities of both—raise an important, albeit subtle point regarding mental health and the genetic predisposition of mental illness. Stoker takes it even further though, with a welcomed feminist slant; because, while India seems to make difficult choices to protect her mother and herself from violence at the hands of men, we’re ultimately left wondering just how much of a choice—like many women in relationships with abusive men—she really has.
Jennifer’s Body, the 2009 horror chick-flick that was a coming-of-age for sex goddess Megan Fox after hyper-lucrative, career-building toil under the aegis of Michael Bay’s teenage-boy-centric Transformers franchise, now enjoys a cult following outside the Transformers demographic. And yet, on release, Jennifer’s Body was widely panned by reviewers who were oddly outraged by its unworthiness. (Maybe they were bought off, but that would be another story.)
Maybe the male critics and audience somehow sensed this was the break-up film. Simultaneous to its release, Fox untied her tongue in interviews, famously comparing the Transformers director to Hitler, a salvo that sealed her fate with the franchise and, at least initially, its fans. They felt betrayed.
Megan Fox as Jennifer
They were right, they had been betrayed: by their own phallocentric delusion that women exist to serve men, and its tributary delusion that Megan Fox enjoyed performing the objectified sidekick to Shia LeBoeuf’s action hero, and more poignantly, that she intuited from the far side of the screen how hot she made them, each guy individually, and that meant something to her beyond a sense of power and a pay check. She was their admission-priced, inaccessible, fantasy, group girlfriend. Until she wasn’t any more. Sorry, Boys. Game over.
It took chutzpah to give Bay that well-publicized kiss-off. The same year Jennifer’s Body, directed by Karyn Kusama, grossed $30 million worldwide on a $15 million budget and uniformly dismal reviews, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed by Michael Bay, grossed $400 million on a $200 million budget. (But that’s yet another story.)
SPOILER ALERT: Out of respect to writer Diablo Cody’s wondrous storyline, I’m not pretending this movie is only worth seeing once and in total ignorance. In fact, it must be seen at least twice to be fully appreciated. Call it complex storytelling, hidden depth, flaws in the plot structure and/or direction, or all of the above.
Jennifer’s Body is the story of a lush cheerleader ritualistically murdered by the cute lead singer of boy band Low Shoulder, in a pact with the Devil for fame and stardom. Unfortunately for the teenage males of suburban Devil’s Kettle, the cheerleader is thereby transformed into a bite’em’n’eat’em serial killer, selecting, seducing, and isolating male classmates before offing them at their most pathetically tumescent — on the brink, they think, of experiencing the private pleasures of her flesh. Bummer for the guys onscreen and a refreshing, amusing twist for a jaded female audience.
Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox)
Demon-Jennifer is a bodacious avatar of female rage — plus other less righteous emotions, hormones, and vanities. Her story is told by best friend Anita, nicknamed Needy, the gawky sidekick in glasses who’s a bit smitten by Jennifer’s “saltiness.” Needy eventually figures out her friend is “actually evil.” For her boyfriend Chip’s sake, Needy is forced to fight her to the death. As narrator, Needy frames the action, told in flashback, from her prison cell. This formal device complicates the plot but pays off in a clever denouement shown in a montage of stills and video under the closing credits. As I write that sentence, I have to wonder why this vital piece of story — Needy’s revenge massacre of Low Shoulder — is relegated to an afterthought.
So, it’s a (media) story within a (movie) story, a star within a character, and a film within a genre or two. Any way you slice it, Jennifer’s Body is disputed territory — which gives that awkward title the post-modern cachet of multiple readings. Is it slasher? Chick flick? Coming-of-age? Vampire? Feminist? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It’s even vampire-lesbian, a tease it declines to exploit; teen psycho, cultural satire, and New Romantic.
Amanda Seyfried as Needy
Two things make the film hard to watch, or clearly “see.” First, Megan Fox’s bravura glamour. As Needy, Amanda Seyfried is every inch an actress and holds her own, but Kusama’s camera gives Fox’s fearsome symmetry the kind of attention ultimately detrimental to a storyline. No one’s going to complain, but droolworthy Fox detracts from Needy’s story, and that’s a problem because Needy is our low-profile protagonist, and she bookends the film. For the script to work, we have to root for both halves of this dynamic duo, until we let go of Jennifer and follow Needy, whose rage is less psychosis and more personal-is-political focus.
Second, Diablo Cody’s free-form plotting, with its gratuitous flashbacks and ill-timed exposition, impedes the film’s forward drive. The most glaring example comes three-quarters in, when Jennifer suddenly decides to let Needy and the audience in on the details of her own heinous murder. We don’t know why we’re suddenly watching a missing narrative chunk in flashback, but the footage is compelling and when it’s over, Jennifer suddenly comes on to Needy in their much hyped lesbian moment. Heat trumps logic, just like in high school. Are they going to do it? No. Was it actual lesbian heat? Um. Can hormonally unstable Jennifer’s power plays be assigned a stable orientation other than “on?”
Demon Jennifer
Since Jennifer herself is clueless how she returned from the dead, Needy makes a trip to the Occult section of the campus library to discover “demonic transference happens when you try to sacrifice a virgin to Satan who isn’t an actual virgin.” Great. Now Needy’s best friends with a demon. She tries to warn Chip, who, as her boyfriend, is the obvious next victim on Jennifer’s list of perversions.
Needy: Jennifer’s evil.
Chip: I know.
Needy: No, I mean, she’s actually evil. Not high-school evil.
Such stock-in-trade dialogue wherein the danger to an individual or the community is willfully ignored, is kept to a minimum, yet it’s one of the treats of the monster genre. Remember the original Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi? It’s worth a look, in sumptuous black and white. Yes, it’s ham-fisted, stilted, stagey, featuring a bat on a string, but it’s pretty authoritative about Transylvanian vampire lore — sleeping habits (coffin, native soil, diurnal), telltale signs (no reflection in mirrors, fear of sunlight), and remedies (garlic, crosses, stake through heart). Tracking and dissecting vampire quirks is half the fun of having them around.
Vampire trope
The pleasure of recognition, that ghastly chill down the spine, is mostly missing here, because this is less a genre movie than a rite of passage dressed-up in the tropes of horror. Emotion, intuition, everyday telepathy between close friends are on a sliding-scale from everyday reality to full-blown inexplicable mayhem. Rules governing demons are introduced piecemeal, and Jennifer’s sudden new talents — like projectile vomiting black goo — are momentary gross-outs devoid of gravitas. Such tricks work less well a second time. Worse, Jennifer’s ability to rise in the air and hover is abruptly revealed in the climactic fight scene to no strategic advantage. Surprising but not really satisfying, the hovering trick later powers Needy’s prison escape. Is that why it was introduced when it wasn’t necessary?
So, okay, Cody’s script is loose-weave. It’s also fresh, grrrl-centric, fed-up with male ego/privilege, and full of satiric touches. And yeah, Megan Fox overwhelms the cast and crew with her performative beauty, but she’s both a great icon for most-popular-cheerleader-with-perfect-cheekbones and a recognizable teenager: a bipolar wreck under her foundation, an insecure bitch seducing her best friend’s boyfriend, a naive groupie seeking validation from a small-time boy band “from the city.”
The central pleasure of Jennifer’s Body — the confusing love Needy feels for Jennifer, and the trouble she takes to clarify that feeling, and act on it (revenging Chip), then act on it again (revenging pre-demon Jennifer) — might be precisely what turned off male reviewers. For all the promise of eye candy going in, this is a story about young women negotiating the horrors of the adolescent-to-adult obstacle course with some dignity, loyalty, and social conscience intact. The infamous male gaze has to work harder to appropriate a film told from the p.o.v. of cute but bookish, shy but self-respecting Needy, whose closest bond is, and might ever be, her friend Jennifer.
The two girls have four big scenes together:
Date with Destiny: Jennifer uses Needy as a disposable date in her quest for the Low Shoulder lead singer, to the annoyance of Chip, who had a date with his girlfriend. When bad things start to happen at the rustic Melody Lane Tavern, Jennifer ignores Needy’s screams to leave. Oblivious to danger or perhaps unconsciously courting self-destruction, Jennifer gets into the band’s scuzzy retro van. Cue: loss of innocence.
Jennifer and Needy’s much-hyped lesbian moment
Same-Sex practicum: Jennifer hides in Needy’s bed, confesses her own murder, then starts making love to Needy, who lets herself go until she jumps off the bed screeching, “What are you doing?” By scene’s end, Needy knows she has to be the adult.
Prom Night from Hell: in a swampy, abandoned public pool, Jennifer kills Chip and fends off a tongue-lashing from Needy before slithering away without eating his flesh. This climactic scene is less exciting than it should be, crushed under the weight of an overly elaborate set and Jennifer’s ho-hum hovering, but signals the beginning of the end.
Liebestod: Jennifer’s bedroom, when Needy comes in through the window to kill her. In this passionate encounter, the two young women fight like wildcats on the bed and in the air. The fight is physical, metaphysical, and deeply emotional. When Needy rips the BFF locket from around her neck, Jennifer’s eyes register defeat, loss, submission. If she’s not Needy’s best friend forever, what’s the point of immortality? With suddenly slack lids, she gazes into Needy’s eyes in eroticized surrender. How do you spell Romantic death wish? Finally, Needy has topped Jennifer. Maybe that’s all she ever wanted. Then comes the death blow: box cutter to the heart. Wow.
Online movie review clearinghouse Rotten Tomatoes gives Jennifer’s Body a measly 43% rating, which I take as an indication of factors, like misogyny and male entitlement, beyond the reach of wonderful filmmaking. Their summary judgment: Jennifer’s Body features occasionally clever dialogue but the horror/comic premise fails to be either funny or scary enough to satisfy. I guess it all depends on who you’re trying to “satisfy.”
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Erin Blackwell is a practicing astrologer who blogs at venus11house and pinkrush. Congratulations to Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green on their new baby boy.
