Dance – Bitch Flicks

‘The Fits’ and the Complicated Choreography of Adolescence

Director Anna Rose Holmer… described her film as portraying “adolescence as choreography.” I personally cannot think of a more apt way to describe the delicate movements one takes throughout the teenage years. One yearns to step into the spotlight and embrace one’s individuality while also fearing the consequences of doing so. It’s a delicate balancing act, wanting to be your own person while also wanting to fit in with everyone else.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton originally appeared at Medium and appears here as part of our theme week on Women Directors. It is cross-posted with permission.

I saw The Fits at a screening at the Museum of Modern Art that was followed by a Q&A with director Anna Rose Holmer, who described her film as portraying “adolescence as choreography.” I personally cannot think of a more apt way to describe the delicate movements one takes throughout the teenage years. One yearns to step into the spotlight and embrace one’s individuality while also fearing the consequences of doing so. It’s a delicate balancing act, wanting to be your own person while also wanting to fit in with everyone else. Just one misstep can ripple throughout one’s adolescence, leading to bullying and ostracizing. Once you’re an adult, you can look back and almost laugh at these things, many of which, in hindsight, seem so little as to barely be memorable; but at the time, these decisions are so massive that they can occupy your entire mind.

The Fits chronicles one girl’s journey to find herself both as an individual and as a part of a group. It’s a unique take on a timeless story, infusing the usual coming-of-age drama with a hearty splash of magical realism. Here, the choreography of adolescence is both figurative and literal. Eleven-year-old Toni, played by newcomer Royalty Hightower, is a quintessential tomboy who spends most of her time at a Cincinnati community center training as a boxer alongside her supportive older brother, Jermaine. One day, Toni finds herself drawn to the award-winning drill dance team that practices in the same building. The team, known as the Lionesses, are a tight-knit clique who barely notice Toni lugging her gym bag as they stream by her in the hall, giggling and glittering. After Jermaine catches Toni dancing around on her own, he encourages her to try out for the team, and despite a hilariously awkward first attempt at the team’s signature clap back call choreography, Toni is accepted as one of the newest Lionesses. However, it becomes clear it will take more than memorizing a few steps for Toni to fit in.

At one of her first rehearsals, Toni witnesses one of the Lionesses’ captains collapse with what appears to be a bout of seizures. Not too long afterward, a similar attack strikes down the team’s other captain. Soon, these episodes of hysteria, dubbed “the fits,” take the girls by storm. They start with the older, more experienced girls, but they gradually make their way down the hierarchy to the youngest and newest recruits. The community’s inability to explain why the episodes keep happening, compounded with the unpredictable way they occur, builds tension in the way of the best horror movies; after all, how can one not be terrified when it appears one doesn’t have control over one’s own body? Yet eventually the fits start to be seen less like a scary sickness and more like a desirable way to mark one’s progression into womanhood. Once one has had the fits, one has something to relate to the rest of the girls about; one truly feels like part of the team.

Having the fits bears a striking similarity to how so many girls feel about starting to menstruate; you’re afraid of it happening, this mysterious and morbid signifier of womanhood, but once it starts happening to everyone else, you can’t help but wonder when it will be your turn. (And, when it still doesn’t happen, if there’s something wrong with you.) At first, Toni is grateful to be spared from the fits, finding them frightening, but eventually, she starts to grow anxious about not having experienced this strange rite of passage. Already a girl of few words, Toni silently listens to her newfound friends gossip together about their own unique experiences with the fits — each attack different and yet somehow the same — while she is deemed unworthy of inclusion in the conversation. As one friend snaps at Toni, “You don’t know anything about it.” Toni grows increasingly distant from her old world of the boxing gym as she devotes more and more hours to perfecting the Lionesses’ choreography, yet because she has not experienced the fits, she remains on the outside of her new world looking in, a face peeking out from behind the backstage curtain. She’s stuck in the middle, with no clear place to belong.

In the absence of the fits, Toni tries to fit in in other ways, incorporating more feminine details into her appearance. However, in the end these are all uncomfortably rejected by her. When a friend applies a temporary tattoo to Toni’s arm, she peels it off; when her nails are painted with gold glitter polish, she picks away at it until the flecks litter the floor of the boxing gym. She even goes as far as to pierce her own ears in the community center bathroom, but eventually removes the sparkling studs, citing infection. In these small ways, Toni maintains some small part of her individuality in a world that values the team over the individual; she’s trying to fit in, but her willingness to do so will only go so far.

Hightower carries The Fits on her remarkably muscular shoulders. Reliant almost entirely on movement and expression, as opposed to dialogue, her performance is remarkably natural and her struggle to fit in relatable. When one learns that Hightower is in fact an experienced dancer who has been a member of the team portraying the Lionesses since she was small, as Holmer told us during the Q&A session, one is even more in awe of the evolution she manages to portray onscreen. I was someone who was incapable of sticking to the choreography growing up, both in my childhood dances classes and in my actual life. In some ways, I was proud of my ability to march to my own oddball tune, but in many others, I longed to know what it was like to be just one of the smiling girls in the line, never missing a beat. Watching Toni walk this tightrope in The Fits hit home for me in a way that very few movies about girlhood ever do.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play and currently reviews television shows as a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Women-Directed Films at the Asian American Showcase

The lineup included The Tiger Hunter, (directed by Lena Khan)… Light (directed by Lenora Lee and Tatsu Aoki), and Finding Kukan (directed by Robin Lung). … Depictions of stories that are absent from an experience that is generally thought to be collective is definitely the point of film festivals like the Asian American Showcase. The film offerings this year illuminated the immigrant experience as an American one. At the same time, the breadth of the experiences represented, while hardly a cohesive or even complete picture, offered nuanced views of stories never heard in textbook discussions…

This guest post written by Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Asian American Showcase is a series of films by Asian Americans or about the Asian American experience alongside an art exhibition. It features a wide variety of films from many viewpoints. Sponsored by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media (FAAIM), this year’s Showcase, which took place March 31st to April 12th in Chicago, featured mostly women-directed films, plus the Sundance Film Festival audience favorite, Gook, and the timely documentary on Japanese internment camps in the U.S., Resistance at Tule Lake. The lineup included The Tiger Hunter, (directed by Lena Khan), Motherland (directed by Ramona S. Diaz), Wexford Plaza (directed by Joyce Wong), Light (directed by Lenora Lee and Tatsu Aoki), and Finding Kukan (directed by Robin Lung).

Light is an artistic interpretation of the beginning of immigrant Bessie M. Lee’s life in America. It melds dance interpretations, poetry, re-enactments, and historical documentation against the backdrop of Aoki’s innovative sound and musical design. While laboring under her master’s oppressive demands, Bessie is told girls like her are a “dime a dozen.” It was an insult that rang true; something too many women have been told, especially while labor was being extorted from them. In this case, an immigrant seemingly without connections in a new country, Bessie, like so many women before her, was working hard while being told she was worthless, as if she should be grateful for her abusive circumstances.

Lenora Lee has created several works about Chinese migrant women and their lives after coming to the United States. In other films, she uses choreography, filmography, and setting to explore the stories of women who were trafficked from China and other women’s lives. Through a combination of projection, fully produced cinema, and live dance performance that references Tai Chi, she expresses narrative emotions as well as historical occurrences. Ultimately, her work elevates and personalizes stories that in a textbook may be a footnote meant to represent the experience of a larger population of people.

Depictions of stories that are absent from an experience that is generally thought to be collective is definitely the point of film festivals like the Asian American Showcase. The film offerings this year illuminated the immigrant experience as an American one. At the same time, the breadth of the experiences represented, while hardly a cohesive or even complete picture, offered nuanced views of stories never heard in textbook discussions of the American experience.

Robin Lung chases in the footsteps of erased Hollywood innovator Li Ling-Ai in Finding Kukan. In 1941, during a war that still in many ways defines the U.S. today, a film produced and funded by an Asian American woman won an Academy Award. Li never received credit for the documentary Kukan, but Lung attempts to discover a copy of the missing story and the full extent of her involvement with the film. Along the way, Lung also attempts to revive interest in the film after a heavily damaged copy is discovered in a basement.

There are several road bumps along the way, and some brick walls. Lung expresses discontent at being unable to prove her theories throughout the documentary. The film becomes as much about her perceptions of what makes a woman a hero, as what made Li a hero. To Lung, she wants to bring to life an active, fearless woman who traveled to China during a war to bravely capture what no one else was showing. At one point, Lung expresses her desire to see Li doing the work alongside the men as an “American” perspective. Yet the film Li has produced shows the women in China supporting the country alongside the men in the way Lung longed for. Adversely, Li lives a cosmopolitan life in New York, tirelessly supporting the film at social events and garnering connections and possible supporters in any way that she can. By the end of the film, Li has taken on the role of a more traditional American producer giving life to a project more meaningful than most in Hollywood could hope for.

Lung is ultimately unsuccessful in garnering American interest in a recovered Kukan. However, after discovering a letter of frustration Li authored to one of her best friends about what would become her book on the lives of her parents, she is reinvigorated and tries a new tact. Traveling to China, Lung brings a videotape of Kukan for a special viewing to a group of historians.

This American film that once inspired interest in a horrifying conflict across the world from the U.S., takes on new importance in the People’s Republic of China. While it depicts a Nationalist China, the film contains views of attacks made by Japan from the ground, something these historians had never before seen. Ultimately, while it seems it will be years before Li receives her full due in American cinematic history, her work has taken on new importance in an unexpected way.

Stories told about the general perception of the American Dream all include some tie to our collective immigrant past (aside from Indigenous peoples). Rarely does a film tell that story while holding onto that past as part of the protagonist’s future. While it struggles with straddling at least two comedic audiences, The Tiger Hunter successfully presents a story about coming to the U.S. without distancing itself from its characters’ cultural background.

After years of chasing the fantasy of his father’s hyper-masculinized role in the lives of his village, Sami (Danny Pudi) attempts to impress the father of Ruby (Karen David), his childhood sweetheart. The intimidating General Iqbal (Iqbal Theba) has decided he will only arrange his daughter in marriage to someone who has become successful in the U.S. Director/co-writer Lena Khan presents a classic romantic comedy with Indian American and Indian Canadian leads. It is a hilarious look at the lengths a man will go to marry the woman of his dreams.

While the film focuses on earning the right to marry a woman, she is conspicuously absent from most of the film. At first this appears to be an oversight, or playing into so many classically male-centered heterosexual romance narratives. Pleasingly, Khan eventually turns this on its head.

After forming farcical friendships with other outcasts who fail at being “professional Americans,” Sami sets up a fake home in his boss’ abode to impress Iqbal, and by extension his daughter, who travels with him. It is when the truth comes to light (due to Sami’s inability to keep up the lie for moral reasons) that the object of his desire hits the audience with the element they may or may not have noticed was missing. “It is me you have to marry,” Ruby points out, in light of the many lies he has told to impress her father. While her father has final say, ultimately Sami and Ruby have to share a marital trust that would last them a lifetime. In the end, it is her opinion that truly matters.

The film leaves a lot of questions about the arrangement unanswered, and while the end of the film is endearing, its ambiguity leaves a lot to be desired as far as clear moral heading. Yet it is undeniable that the final confrontation between Sami and Ruby becomes a twist for the role of women in this particular narrative, whether intentional by its creators or not.

There are many more tales to be told and heard by audiences that are sorely in need of them, whether they’re aware of it or not. This year’s Asian American Showcase offered many impressive narratives told and directed by women.

Josephine Maria Yanasak-Leszczynski is a museum educator by day (and often night), and a freelance writer every other time she manages to make a deadline. She can be found on Twitter @JMYaLes.

‘Glitter Tribe’ Reminds Us That Burlesque Is Far More Than Just a Peep Show

‘Glitter Tribe’ (directed by Jon Manning) lays out the argument that neo-burlesque should be considered a bona fide art form within itself and the ensuing 75 minutes certainly make a compelling case. The beating heart of the documentary is evident in the profiles of several Portland-based dancers, who each derive a different meaning and perspective from their performances.

Written by Erin Tatum.

I’ve always been attracted to the alternative and wonderfully wacky ways of expressing identity, so naturally I jumped at the chance to review Burlesque: Heart of the Glitter Tribe. Despite going to college in the Bay Area, my concept of burlesque was still admittedly arcane – I think of borderline cartoonish scenes ripped from Mad Men where hordes of anonymous businessmen in gray flannel suits ogle topless Marilyn Monroe look-alikes in a smoke-filled room (somewhat like this). It goes without saying that burlesque has evolved far beyond merely capturing the attention and lust of emotionally constipated men. Glitter Tribe (directed by Jon Manning) lays out the argument that neo-burlesque should be considered a bona fide art form within itself and the ensuing 75 minutes certainly make a compelling case.

The beating heart of the documentary is evident in the profiles of several Portland-based dancers, who each derive a different meaning and perspective from their performances. Zora Von Pavonine describes sleepless nights of laboring over costumes, fueled by her passion for fashion and rhinestones; Angelique DeVil discusses how her persona is her “megaphone” and an amplified fusion of all her past selves; Babs Jamboree chuckles over the juxtaposition of her no-frills day job and ultra feminine nightlife; Isaiah Esquire recalls that performing helped him overcome severe body image issues. No matter their individual motivations for dancing, one fact quickly becomes clear – obvious connotations notwithstanding, burlesque emphasizes cleverness and humor above all else.

Of course, the standard erotic fare is omnipresent. (Most delightfully, this film has opened my eyes to the existence of “assels” or ass tassels, which are exactly what they sound like.) However, the dancers pride themselves on seeking intellectual engagement with the audience and care about making them laugh more than making them horny. They acknowledge that while sexuality is the cornerstone of their routines, comedy plays a much larger role in their performance. Particularly for the unusual all-male group, the Stage Door Johnnies, personality is key. They poke fun at the fact that they’re men doing something usually dominated by women, but they’re also careful to nuance their humor beyond gawking at the objectification of the masculine.

In some cases, the dancers aren’t afraid to move their art into the realm of the abstract or complete absurdity. Babs Jamboree constructs an entire routine around the concept of a seductive burrito, featuring, you guessed it, herself as a giant personified burrito. She grins alluringly as she slips out of her tortilla coat (amazing) to reveal herself as a sexy jalapeño. Her tongue-in-cheek innovation continues when she spoofs the ridiculous male conundrum of worrying about the mechanics of hypothetical mermaid sex by transforming herself into a reverse mermaid, a decidedly off-putting fish head who has a human woman’s legs for days. I’m pretty sure I have a crush on Babs Jamboree, you guys. Other dancers court overt controversy. I have to say that watching Ivizia Dakini mime fellatio and later direct cunnilingus with a Jesus puppet was… unexpected to say the least, although she rightfully points out that pearl clutching about religion during a burlesque show is kind of hypocritical. Regardless, the performers pour their heart and soul into their routines, from fleshing out their creative visions to spending hours bedazzling shoes and bustiers. Each performance is a manifestation of love, community, and commitment. Ironically, the show becomes less about titillating the audience with physical bodies and more about stimulating their minds with artistic expression.

The performers also address the common criticism that they can’t be feminist because they’re “objectifying themselves.” They assert that performing is their choice and that burlesque provides the opportunity for such complex characters that it’s impossible to objectify their bodies because you can’t take the characters out of their persona or routine. I am of the personal belief that accusing a woman of being anti-feminist because of her personal choices she makes about her own body is an inherently contradictory concept, but I enjoy that they came up with a rebuttal that further emphasizes their love of the art. Angelique DeVil looks crestfallen as she relates how her mother flat-out told her that she was a source of embarrassment for her family (it probably doesn’t help that she was apparently an alternative teen growing up in North Dakota). The editors then decide to pour salt in the wound by immediately following this heartbreaking account of rejection with a cheery montage of basically everyone else talking about how much their parents enjoy the show. These folks are much braver than I, because as much as I love my parents and as liberal as they are, I don’t know if I would want them staring directly at my bejeweled anus. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose!

Above all else, what the performers treasure most across-the-board is the strong sense of empowerment and community that they have found through burlesque. Dancing provides a safe haven and a coping mechanism, helping the dancers overcome everything from alcoholism and drug addiction to processing the scars of childhood sexual abuse. As Isaiah Esquire will tell you, taking ownership of your sexuality through dance is its own kind of agency and power. It’s not about being universally perceived as sexy; it’s about the confidence of knowing your affect on each audience member. With a single motion or glance, you can make someone feel something. That ability to impart an emotion on someone else appears to be far and away the most rewarding experience that the dancers can have. They also become a tight-knit family – just as Angelique DeVil views burlesque as her true home in the wake of familial ostracism, Isaiah Esquire witnesses the generosity of his co-performers firsthand after they band together to raise money for an expensive knee surgery that would have left him unemployed and broke. The love that the performers feel for one another is palpable, and not just because they often canoodle onstage. It’s evident that they genuinely care about and support each other, sharing a deep understanding and commitment that people outside the world of burlesque just don’t have.

Sure, burlesque isn’t always glamorous. The performers are the first to admit that it’s neither a cash cow nor a respected career. Sleepless nights are a regular occurrence; costumes are a labor of love but frequent money pits; romantic relationships often suffer because partners feel that burlesque takes center stage before they do. At the end of the day, however, burlesque transcends being a simple hobby or fodder for a naughty night out. It’s an electricity, a spontaneous bond, a bold personal statement of individuality. All the sacrifice becomes worth it the moment the music starts to play.

Erin Tatum is a Bitch Flicks staff writer. She is a social media marketer and writer. She lives in Pennsylvania with her numerous dogs and birds. Her passions include animals, intersectional feminism, and baking. She is a diehard foodie with a weakness for bad reality TV.

The Illusion of Beauty in ‘Flesh and Bone’

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, the experimental modern ballet in your local theater–audiences are enthralled with elegant women who can dance on two toes. The entertainment industry repeatedly tried to accurately capture the dance world with various results. From Showgirls (1995) to Center Stage (2000), to Black Swan (2010), most of the time it’s a shallow portrayal of the drama in the dance world. In the TV landscape there are the documentaries: Misty Copeland’s A Ballerina’s Tale and Sarah Jessica Parker narrated City.Ballet. Yet the scripted TV shows didn’t fare well. CW had a modest hit with the “reality show” Breaking Pointe, ABC Family tried it with Bunheads, and in the Netflix catalog there’s the Australian show Dance Academy. It’s hard to engage an audience outside the theater. However, the pay cable network Starz likes a challenge and created their ambitious project Flesh and Bone.

The executive-producer, former dancer and brains behind the show is Moira Walley-Beckett who previously wrote for AMC’s Breaking Bad. She recounted to USA Today that for the leading role she was determined to find a dancer who could act, instead of an actress who has to endure rigorous training to execute the complicated ballet routines. It seems like a callback to the dance classic The Red Shoes (1948), which starred the renowned ballerina Moira Shearer. Yet after auditioning over a hundred girls Walley-Beckett became disillusioned. The network and Walley-Beckett decided to cast a wider net, searched abroad and that’s when they found the fabulous Sarah Hay. According to an interview with WWD, Hay was raised in New Jersey by artist parents, and she commuted every day of the week to train – first with the New York City Ballet, and then with ABT itself. After graduating she struggled to fit in because of her “curvy” physique and decided to try her luck abroad and became a soloist at the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany.

Flesh and Bone was created with a multiple season arc in mind and there’s certainly a lot of material to explore. From competitive jealousy to body image issues and pushing your personal limits to get to the top to the realization that your dream is not what you’ve envisioned over all those years. It turned out that the show was quite a gamble for the network and incredibly expensive; think rehearsal time, space, choreographers and physical therapy for the dancers. It seems that other shows in the Starz line up, such as Ash v. Evil Dead, got the preferential treatment. It was only a couple of weeks before the show premiered that Starz announced that Flesh and Bone would be an eight-episode mini-series.

Flesh and Bone centers around the young and talented ballerina Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay) who escapes her tormented family life in Pittsburgh, when she hears the news that her soldier brother Bryan (Josh Helman) returns from Afghanistan, to try out for the fictional New York’s American Ballet Company, which she makes on her first attempt. Once she’s accepted in the corps of the Ballet Company, she struggles with Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), a principal dancer who is almost at the end of her prime, her roommate Mia (Emily Tyra) who isn’t quite as talented as Claire and the larger-than-life artistic director Paul (Ben Daniels) who’s is still dealing with the loss of his own talent and sees in Clair his golden goose to a revitalized career.

Many have described the show as a “dark and gritty” ballet series. Of course there are the obligatory shots of the ruined feet and bloody toenails and the tedious exercises at the barre, but the framework is focused on personal drama. Comparisons are easily made with the aforementioned Center Stage and Black Swan. What they have common is that they’re focused on the art form ballet as the essence of drama. In all three stories, the audience sees the conflict, stress, and the cutthroat competition within a ballet school or company. Yet, compared to the other stories it almost seems that there’s no silver lining in Flesh and Bone.

Flesh and Bone doesn’t avoid the major clichés. Claire is the naïve girl who follows her dream and loses her innocence in the big city. There’s the tough, rich girl Daphne (Raychel Diane Weiner) who also dances as an exotic dancer and who has a questionable friendship with a Russian mobster (Raychel’s tattoo of “Take No Prisoners” inspired the art department). Paul has a Latino rent boy who gives him affection and keeps calling him “Papi.” Claire’s predatory brother has big bad wolf engraved on his forehead. There’s an arc with the overly polite homeless man Romeo (Damon Herriman) (he walked straight out of The Fisher King) who lives outside Claire’s building and develops a small obsession with her; there’s Charlie from Center Stage (Sascha Radetsky) as Ross, who plays a straight bad boy who wants to get in everyone’s tights. And so on.

Since the show is aired on a pay cable network, sex and nudity make an appearance. For some the nudity could be gratuitous in order to give the show a more edgy character. At first glance, it seems that Claire is exploring her sexuality in unconventional ways. In the pilot, the audience is introduced to Claire’s new roommate, Mia, as she rides a nameless guy on the couch, which she later instructs Claire to sleep on. Paul sees no problem in using his dancers as escorts to get what he wants (all for the sake of the company of course), and there’s the exotic dancer subplot. Dancers are relatively comfortable in their bodies so being nude isn’t a far stretch.

The sex isn’t just sex; it’s often revolved around power plays and personal liberation. It’s interesting to see Claire navigate sexuality, because she seems terrified of the men she encounters and looks envious at other women who unapologetically use their sexuality. The crux of the story is Claire’s damaged psyche and how she’s able to free herself from the horrible abuse she endured. It must be said that Hay is an intriguing actress yet sometimes Claire’s passivity throughout the series becomes rather frustrating to watch – especially in the incestuous scenes between Claire and Bryan. The writers tried to incorporate the atrocities of under aged Russian sex slaves into the mix but they didn’t flesh out the characters. So once again a minor storyline fell flat.

So why watch Flesh and Bone? The astute attention to detail in the ballet scenes, the charismatic and talented dancers, the customs, heck even the opening credits are amazing. Hay has a fantastic screen presence and gives it her all with what she has been given. Daniels certainly enjoys his role as Paul and was marvelous in the moments where he was able to show what the stress of such an high-profile job does to a person when the mask is off. Dvorovenko nailed her part as the coke-addicted prima ballerina and Tyra milked her screen time for all its worth as Claire’s bitchy roommate. Despite the cliché role, Herriman is really compelling as Romeo. It’s unfortunate that Starz decided to create a limited series, therefore the (melo)drama was weighed down with loads of clichés and many supporting characters fell flat.

Will Flesh and Bone dance itself en pointe into our cultural lexicon? That remains to be seen. However, a niche audience will always be enthralled with the illusion of beauty in ballet.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8wKm3grIxc”]

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law), and American pop culture. See her blog here.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

10 Movies by Black Women to Stream on Netflix This Weekend by Alexis Jackson at Shine at For Harriet

Our Favorite Funny Women Call Out Sexism in Hollywood at Ms. blog

Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer and Comedy Actress A-List in Raunchy, R-Rated Roundtable by Stacey Wilson Hunt, Michael O’Connell at The Hollywood Reporter

A History Of The Term ‘Chick Flick’ And How It Marginalizes Female Filmmakers by Tess Barker at MTV

7 Queer Female Filmmakers to Watch for in 2015 by Dorothy Snarker at Women and Hollywood

Childbirth is finally getting the cultural treatment it deserves by Elissa Strauss at The Week

New Short Exposes Unique Experience of ‘Brown’ Ballerinas by Qimmah Saafir at Colorlines

Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson Join Cast of HBO’s Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Project by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

‘Gemma Bovery’ Review: Literary Comedy Puts a Feminist Spin on an Old Classic by Alonso Duralde at The Wrap

On Mad Max and The Avengers by Margarita at Plain-Flavoured-English.tumbler.com

The Ecofeminism of Mad Max by Sarah Mirk at Bitch Media

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

Binge Watch This: ‘Dance Academy’

‘Dance Academy’ is a teen soap opera set at a ballet school. So basically, it’s ‘Degrassi’ meets ‘Center Stage.’ That should be enough to have you diving for your remote right now.

The central female characters of 'Dance Academy' — The central female characters of *Dance Academy*

Netflix subscribers, as soon as you’ve gotten through Gilmore Girls (or maybe sooner, should you get GG fatigue once Logan gets in the picture), you need to watch the Australian TV series Dance Academy. My Cape Town bestie KDax has been telling me to watch Dance Academy for months, and now that I’ve finally taken her advice I can only think “so much lost time!” I could be through my third rewatch by now, instead of only having seen one of the three available seasons! Don’t make my mistake: watch this series NOW.

Dance Academy is a teen soap opera set at a ballet school. So basically, it’s Degrassi meets Center Stage. That should be enough to have you diving for your remote right now, but if you need more convincing, here are some more details:

Psst... the joey is a metaphor for Tara! — Psst… the joey is a metaphor for Tara!

Tara Webster is a naive 15-year-old girl from the Australian Outback whose talent for ballet has her plucked out of her small-town life and brought to the National Academy of Dance in Sydney. We see her adjust to life in the big city and going from being the best dancer for miles to a small fish in a big, ultra-competitive pond, while going through the standard coming-of-age drama with the rest of her teenage classmates.

The cast of Season One of 'Dance Academy' — The cast of Season One of *Dance Academy*

There’s her best friend Kat, who grew up in the industry as the daughter of the Sydney Ballet’s prima ballerina, who is as loyal to her friends as she is rebellious against authority. Kat’s older brother, Ethan, is the self-serious choreographer and apparent ladies’ man who Tara instantly crushes on. Kat and Tara’s platonic dude friend is Sammy, equal parts awkward and earnest. Christian, the troubled kid from the wrong side of the tracks, is out on bail after robbing a convenience store (also, distressingly, the only PoC in the main cast of the first season). And finally Tara’s roommate Abigail, the Queen Bitch antagonist, who remains a sympathetic character despite all her cruel manipulations.

While the teen drama plots of Dance Academy are not particularly original, the cast is so natural and likable that the even the most standard material feels fresh. The first season relies very heavily on two intersecting love triangles (I’d say love quadrilateral if two of the points were not siblings, and Dance Academy is not enough of a soap opera to head down Incest Drama Lane). I would have said that another teen love triangle was number one with a bullet on my list of things I never needed to be asked to care about again. But Dance Academy made a liar out of me, by making every character involved compelling, every relationship plausible, and all the shifting degrees of attraction and loyalty make sense within the story.

Similarly, Dance Academy successfully takes on many After School Special-esque “Issue” storylines by committing to the emotion at their core. I was particularly impressed with the handling of the seemingly inevitable eating disorder plot when Abigail responds to her growing breasts with extreme calorie restriction. Dance Academy is able to condemn the ballet world’s absurd body standards without falling into the insulting oversimplification that ballet causes anorexia, and never blames the victim even though she’s the ostensible “villain” of the series. Her eating disorder isn’t confined to a single “Lesson Episode” along the lines of DJ Tanner’s exercise bulimia or Jessie Spano’s “I’m so excited I’m so scared” caffeine addiction; Abigail’s recovery and how it effects her relationships and other emotional issues is an ongoing plot.

Oh, and did I mention how whatever ballet they are working on always has symbolic parallels to the plot? I love this show.

Dance Academy does have a handful of awkward fumbles, though, like the cringe-inducing episode where Christian takes Ethan to “the hood” to show him what Real Hip Hop Moves look like. As painful as that was, I wish the series didn’t shy away from class commentary so much. For the first half of the season it feels like Christian only exists as a character so they can “address” class, which is as unfair to the character as it is to the issue. There’s also a huge contrast between Tara’s rural upbringing and the world of privilege most of her classmates come from, but it is rarely acknowledged. The one episode that really deals with Tara’s embarrassment over her “simple country folk” parents swiftly overshadows cultural class differences by making the story about cold hard cash, when Tara’s mom asks her to defer school to save their finances. This problem is immediately solved with a scholarship and never mentioned again. Meanwhile, Kat and Ethan are never called out on their bratty entitlement (Kat’s my favorite character, but when she complains about traveling the world with her famous mother I seethe).

Pretty much any time they do hip hop it is awkward.

But this is just season one, and every time I’ve made a criticism of Dance Academy, KDax has said, “just you wait.” For example, this would be the paragraph where I’d complain about the universally cis-het cast and grumble some more about the general excess of white people, but I know the subsequent seasons are going to attempt to correct these problems.

Given how much I’ve loved this first season of Dance Academy despite its failings, I have high hopes for my ongoing obsession over the next two seasons. Won’t you come and dance with me?

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who had bits of Swan Lake stuck in her head the entire time she was writing this.

“We Stick Together”: Rebellion, Female Solidarity, and Girl Crushes in ‘Foxfire’

In the spirit of ‘Boys on the Side,’ along with a dose of teen angst, ‘Foxfire’ is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, ‘Foxfire’ is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see ‘Bride Wars’ and ‘Just Go with It’). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘The Other Woman’). When I first saw ‘Foxfire’ around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

This post by Jenny Lapekas appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In the spirit of Boys on the Side, along with a dose of teen angst, Foxfire is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, Foxfire is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see Bride Wars and Just Go with It). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see Bridesmaids and The Other Woman). When I first saw Foxfire around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

Angelina Jolie’s shaggy hair and tomboy style in the film, along with her portrayal of the rebellious Legs Sadovsky, play with gender expectations, challenging our assumptions pertaining to clothing, gait, etc. Legs’ biker boots and leather jacket highlight the general heteronormative tendency to find discomfort in these roles and depictions. An androgynous drifter, Legs oozes sex appeal and promotes the questioning of authority. She teaches the girls to own their happiness, to correct the injustices they encounter, and to assert themselves to the men who think themselves superior to women. Legs’ appearance in Foxfire is paramount; she’s even mistaken for a boy when she breaks into the local high school. A security guard yells, “Young man, stop when I’m talking to you.” We see this confusion repeat itself when Goldie’s mother tells her daughter, “There’s a girl…or whatever…here to see you.”

How can we resist developing a girl crush on Angie in this role?

The film’s subplot involves a romance of sorts between artist Maddy and Legs, the mysterious stranger, while Maddy feels a large distance growing between her and her boyfriend (a young Peter Facinelli from the Twilight saga). The intensity of the “girl-crush” shared between Maddy and Legs is akin to that of Thelma and Louise; while we come to understand that Legs is gay, Maddy’s platonic love is enough for the troubled runaway. Legs also assures Maddy after sleeping on her floor one rainy night, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” Similar to my discussion of the reunion between Miranda and Steve in Sex and the City: the Movie, the two young women coming together on a bridge is heavy with symbolism, especially when Legs climbs to the top and dances while Maddy looks on in horror and professes that she’s afraid of heights: a nice precursor for the unfolding narrative, which centers on Legs guiding the girls and easing their fears, especially those associated with female adolescence and gaining new insight into their surroundings and how they fit into their environment.

This scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as another Romeo and Juliet visual, but we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs. — While this scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as a nice Romeo and Juliet visual, we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs.

In a somber and almost zen-like scene involving Maddy and Legs, they profess their love for one another outside the abandoned home the gang has claimed as their own. Maddy says, “If I told you I loved you, would you take it the wrong way?” Obviously, while Maddy doesn’t want Legs to think she’s in love with her, she wants to make clear that the two have bonded for life and are now inextricably linked in sisterhood. Maddy indirectly asks if Legs would take her with when she decides to move on, and Legs hints that Maddy may not be prepared for her nomadic lifestyle. The platonic romance shared by both young women culminates in tears and heartache when Legs must inevitably leave.

Almost as if to kiss Legs, Maddy tenderly touches her face atop the gang’s house.

Legs is the glue that binds these young women, and she literally appears from nowhere. Her entrances are consistently memorable: she initially meets Maddy as she’s trespassing on school property, she climbs to Maddy’s window asking for refuge from the rain (another Romeo and Juliet moment), and eventually takes off for nowhere, leaving the girls stupefied and yet more lucid than ever. Legs is something that happens to these girls, a force of nature, a breath of fresh air. When she tells Maddy that she was thrown out of her old school “for thinking for herself,” we can safely assume it was just that–refusing to conform to the standards of others. The unlikely friendship that forms amongst this diverse group of girls clarifies the idea that this gang dynamic has found them, not the other way around; the pressed need for the collective feminine is what brings the girls together, rather than some vendetta against men.

Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won't need scars to remember Legs. — Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won’t need scars to remember Legs.

Legs sports a tattoo that reads “Audrey”: her mother, who was killed in a drunk driving accident, and we clearly see in the film’s final scenes that Legs suffers from some serious daddy issues, when she angrily announces that “fathers mean nothing.” Delving briefly into Legs’ painful past, we discover that she never knew her father. The quickly maturing Rita explains to Legs, “This isn’t about you.” Each of the girls has their own set of issues within the film: Rita is being sexually molested by her scumbag biology teacher, Mr. Buttinger, Goldie is a drug addict whose father beats her, Violet is dubbed a “slut,” by the school’s stuck-up cheerleaders, and Maddy struggles to balance school, her photography, and her boyfriend, who is dumbfounded by Legs’ influence on his typically well-behaved girlfriend.

After the girls beat up Buttinger, Legs warns him to think before inappropriately touching any more female students.

In an especially significant scene, the football players from school who continually harass the girls attempt to abduct Maddy by forcing her into a van. The confrontations between the groups progressively escalate throughout the movie, and climax after Coach Buttinger is apparently fired for sexually harassing several female students. Legs shows up donning a switchblade and orders the boys to let her friend go. Of course, the pair steal the van and pick up their girlfriends on a high speed cruise to nowhere, which ends in an exciting police chase and Legs losing control and crashing, a metaphor for the gang’s imminent downfall. The threat of sexual assault dissolved by a female ally, followed by police pursuit and a car crash has a lovely Thelma & Louise quality, as well. The motivation here is to avoid being swept up in a misogynistic culture of victim-blaming. What’s interesting about this scene is that another girl from school, who’s in cahoots with these sleazy guys, actually lures Maddy to the waiting group of boys, knowing what’s to come. Meanwhile, Maddy tells Cyndi that she’d escort any girl somewhere who doesn’t feel safe, highlighting the betrayal at work here. Cyndi, the outsider, exploits Maddy’s feminist sensibilities, her unspoken drive for female solidarity and the resistance of male violence to fulfill a violent, misogynist agenda and put Maddy in harm’s way. Later, in the van, Goldie excitedly yells, “Maddy almost got raped, and we just stole this car!” as if this is a source of exhilaration or a mark of resiliency. Perhaps we’d correct her by shifting the blame from the “almost-victim” to her attacker: “Dana and his boys almost raped Maddy.”

Legs says, “Let her out, you stupid fuck.”

Obviously, these are young women just blossoming in their feminist ideals, on the path to realization, and just beginning to question the patriarchal agenda they find themselves a part of in this awkward stage of young adulthood. It’s in this queer in-between state, straddling womanhood and adolescence, that we find Maddy, Legs, Violet, Goldie, and Rita, on the cusp of articulating their justified outrage. We may also question, how does one almost get raped? While the girls of Foxfire are young and somewhat inexperienced, with Legs’ help, they quickly obtain this sort of unpleasant, universal knowledge that males can perpetrate sexual violence in order to “put women in their place.” Dana announces, “You girls are getting a little big for yourselves.” We can’t have that. Women who grow, gain confidence, and challenge sexist and oppressive norms can make waves and upset lots of people. While the girls are initially hesitant in trying to find their way and make sense of their lives, Legs is the powerful catalyst for this transition from the young and feminine to the wise and feminist. While the high school jocks attempt to reclaim the power they feel has been threatened or stolen by this group of girls, Legs continues to challenge gender expectations by utilizing violence as well.

As she hitches a ride, Legs tearfully says, “You’re my heart, Maddy.”

Not only does this film pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it almost feels as if it’s a joke when the girls do manage to discuss men–like the topic is not something they take seriously or that boys rest only on the periphery of their lives. While Maddy suffers silently in terms of her artistic prowess and boyfriend drama, Rita–seemingly the prudest and most sheltered of the gang–talks casually about masturbation and penis size. However, it’s important to note that when men do make their way into the conversation, it’s at rare, lighthearted moments when the girls are not guarded or suspicious of the tyrannical and predatory men who seem to surround them. The penis-size discussion between Rita and Violet, we must admit, is also quite self-serving and objectifying. Rather than obsess over their appearances or the approval of boys, the girls’ most ecstatic moment is when Violet receives an anonymous note from a younger girl at school, another student Buttinger was harassing who is thankful for what the gang did. The fact that Violet is so pleased that she could help a friendly stranger who was also a target of the same perverted teacher says a lot about the gang’s goals and identity.

Thanks to Legs, Maddy overcomes her fear of heights.

Maddy and Legs recognize something in one another, and although theirs is not a sexual relationship, it is no doubt intimate and meaningful. With an amazing soundtrack that includes Wild Strawberries, L7 (wanna fling tampons, anyone?), and Luscious Jackson, and boasting a cast that includes Angelina Jolie and Hedy Burress, Foxfire is undeniably feminist in its message and narrative. With the help of Legs, the girls find agency, and with it, each other. Although most of the girls have been failed by men in some way, Legs offers hope in female friendship and lets her sisters know that male-perpetrated violence can be combated with a switchblade and a swift kick to the balls. Legs arrives like a whirlwind in Maddy’s life and leaves her changed forever. The lovely ladies of Foxfire will make you want to form a girl gang, dangle off bridges, and break into your old high school’s art room just to stick it to the man.

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Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

The Horror of Female Sexual Awakening: ‘Black Swan’

What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsy has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

Natalie Portman in Black Swan — Natalie Portman in *Black Swan*

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I settled in to watch Black Swan, long after its theatrical release and subsequent meteoric rise to Oscar stardom. I knew there would be ballet (that quintessential representation of femininity and near-unattainable physical characteristics), and there had been much talk about a lesbian scene. Plus, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that Swan Lake ends in a suicide; there’s quite a lot of that in ballet, opera, or virtually any other artistic, dramatic work produced over a wide range of historical periods. In the words of Tomas, the pretentious (male) genius ballet company director in the film (Vincent Cassel): “in death she finds freedom.” Yep, I can see where this is going.

So I saw the tragic ending of Swan Lake coming, but the tragic ending of the film was kind of a surprise. Or, maybe not so much a surprise as a disappointment. What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsky has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

Natalie Portman is no stranger to this maturation process, and she’s done most of it in the spotlight. She has been acting since age 13, and in her first starring role she portrayed an orphan captured by a hit man in Leon: The Professional (1994). It might also be worth noting that this first role, even, was a strange one in terms of sexuality: Mathilda is quite a precocious young girl, and in a fit of Stockholm syndrome does, weirdly, “fall in love” with her much older (though admittedly endearing) kidnapper, played by French actor Jean Reno. Older man, French accent, I can understand. We might say that she “rocketed” to stardom, however, due to her casting in the Star Wars prequels as Queen Amidala, a role encompassing conventions of action, romance, and motherhood. While those films were slowly driving sci-fi fans mad, Portman was working on a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Harvard, and it’s impossible to ignore the historic links between psychology, madness, and horror when watching Black Swan. We also need to remember, however, that Portman’s character Nina’s journey is viewed through the cinematic lens of a male director, and that seems to only lead… well, nowhere new.

Portman does not portray a young girl in this film, as much as she portrays a woman who has left her sexuality at the door in pursuit of being “perfect” at ballet. When the film opens, she is “getting older,” which, in the world of ballet, means you’re about 25 with no body fat, which makes you look like a young girl. But you certainly don’t feel like a young girl: you are a woman. Nina seems to have missed that memo. She is arguably already imbalanced when the film begins (not to mention frighteningly infantilized by her mother), but when she is cast as the Swan Queen in her company’s production of Swan Lake–a role that must embody both the “beautiful, fearful, and fragile” nature of the White Swan alongside the “dark impulse” of the Black Swan–her delicately constructed vision of herself begins to disintegrate. She sees herself—clad in a pink coat and white scarf— stroll past herself—wearing a black coat and heels— in an alley. Her reflection in the dance studio mirror stops mirroring and takes on a life of its own. These are just some of many moments throughout the film where Nina is faced with her shadowy double. Sometimes that double takes on horror-film qualities, as when she imagines herself as Beth, the ballerina whose place she has taken in the company, stabbing herself in the face with a nail file while screaming, “I’m nothing!” At these moments, things get a little harried in the genre department.

Even given Nina’s sometimes horrifying hallucinations, it might be a hard sell to classify Black Swan as a horror film. When we discuss films as horror, we’re usually talking about narratives chock-full of gore, jump-scares, suspenseful music, shadows, violence, and “stupid girls running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”* We get some of those conventions in Black Swan, but only because, in her stressed mental state, Nina imagines them. Horror films also typically give us a heaping helping of misogynistic, male-gaze visuals, though that might be changing, albeit slowly. I suppose we could say that there are a lot of female bodies to be looked at in a variety of ranges of sexual objectification in this film. Dancers are, after all, performing. The intent is that someone watches.

But these aren’t the real reasons I think it’s a horror film. It’s a horror film not because Nina slowly descends into madness from the pressure of portraying the starring role in Swan Lake. It’s not even because Aronofsy makes use of this madness in amazing visuals that leap over the bounds of realism into the realm of the surreal with scenes where Nina appears to literally be transforming into a swan. It’s because at the very moment when it seems that Nina might recover from this nightmare and become a whole, happy person, the film kills her off in a twist of tragedy that is narratively as old as the hills. Isn’t there any other female story to be told?

All the cracks in Nina’s psyche, which are brought to visual life by the film’s surreal images as well as real-world physical disintegrations—she constantly scratches at herself, picks at hang-nails, bandages her abused feet— viewers can see sympathetically as Nina struggles to find balance between the two sides of her leading role. Some of these struggles manifest themselves in her relationship with fellow dancer Lily, with whom she forms a tenuous bond. When she leaves her house to go “out” with Lily (Mila Kunis), her foray into social nightlife is encouraging— yes, I know she does drugs in this scene, and that we generally want to frown on potentially destructive behavior. But I was happy that in this scene Nina is, in some small way, controlling her own destiny for once, even if it means recognizing that she can use a bit of chemical assistance to escape the many forms of repression and oppression of which she finds herself a victim. Though the drugs could be said to promote a few more slips between Nina’s reality and her fantasy world—where she has a satisfying sexual encounter with Lily, but where she also begins to sprout black swan feathers from her back—I would argue that those fantasies allow Nina to explore her budding sexuality.

It doesn’t help that Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is the ultimate helicopter parent and, it seems, Nina’s only friend until she begins her relationship with Lily. I cheered Nina as she literally bars her mother from her life (read: bedroom) so she can have enough privacy to even fantasize effectively. The mother/daughter relationship in this film reminded me of Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976)—another horror film about a young girl becoming a woman. Nina’s mother not only lives vicariously through her daughter’s success in the ballet, but also tries to control her and prevent her from being a success, a competition stemming from the fact that Nina’s mother was never cast in a starring role. These realities, as well as the creepy portraits her mom paints of her, and that bedroom decorated for a ten-year-old show that the maternal relationship does nothing but stifle Nina, and compound her problem with coming to terms with any type of sexual desire.

For Portman, this role is a mix of childlike body type and pubescent girl growing pains. The casting choice brings to mind the warped sense of ageism experienced by dancers, as well as the stunted emotional development often suffered by young performers transitioning into adulthood. Portman would ostensibly know the latter well. It’s a character that is both stuck in girlhood and desperately coveting the transformation that signifies becoming a woman. That transformation is made flesh in the visual shifts that equate Nina with the swans she tries to portray through dance.

On the opening night of the ballet, Nina apparently kills Lily, her understudy, in a jealous rage after almost being replaced. As Nina chokes Lily (and then stabs her with a bit of shattered mirror), she exclaims, “It’s MY turn!” and partially transforms into a swan. Surreal and horrifying: check. A few moments later, she thrillingly dances the Black Swan, and comes completely out of the repressive shell she’s been trapped in for the whole movie. As she moves, she “loses herself” in the dance, her arms transforming into wings, freed from her oppressive prison. These scenes are the climax of the film, employing dizzying 360 shots, dazzling lighting effects, close-ups on Nina’s face, and stunning CG. When she leaves the stage exhilarated, a good few moments are devoted to Nina’s ecstatic face and heavy breathing—it is an emotional orgasm. So imagine my horror when she realizes that rather than stabbing Lily in the dressing room before the performance, she has actually stabbed herself, significantly with that piece of mirror. She becomes not a whole, realized being, but her own fragmented, shattered worst enemy. When she returns to the stage to dance the finale of Swan Lake, she is dancing to her own death. While Swan Lake’s narrative is already known to include a suicide, slowly we learn that Black Swan also requires one. For each to be “perfect,” Nina can live just long enough to complete one perfect performance.

Just for the record, there is a part of me that digs the catharsis and frustration in this ending. I get it. Really. But I am classifying this film as horror for a few reasons: the disturbing imagery, the dark implications of Nina’s downward spiral, her obsession, her crazy mom, and the fact that the poor girl isn’t allowed to have a sexual awakening without dying. Or, more accurately, it’s because she actually HAS that moment of fulfillment and is able to embrace her sexual nature for even an instant, the film punishes her. Aronofsky’s narrative seems, therefore, to argue that women—especially those temperamental dancer-types—are perennially unbalanced, unable to maintain a healthy equilibrium between the Black and White Swans; the virgin and the whore. Once Nina has felt the power of the Black Swan, her signifier for sexual assurance and agency, she can’t escape it; can’t return to the innocence and fragility that society prefers, so she has to be eliminated. She is too dangerous, because she wants to tell another story: the story of a whole woman. You could argue that it’s the classical tragic form I’m railing against, and you’d be right. But this form has repressed and oppressed female characters for hundreds of years. The very use of Swan Lake (circa 1875, people!) as a narrative to tell the story of a contemporary woman points to the fact that we’re revisiting a problem we can’t escape, rehashing the same gendered issues. I hoped maybe this film could move beyond that. Or, we could give it an Academy Award.

*A phenomenon pointed out by another female horror heroine, Sidney Prescott of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Best Documentary Oscar Nominee: Pina

Pina: Feminism in Motion

This is a guest post from Ren Jender.

When I’m at the movies all the usual filters come down: I cry in response to the most manipulative scenes—and even more embarrassingly at coming attractions for films I would never dream of seeing. Fellow moviegoers hear my loud laugh even when the filmmaker doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. I rarely talk back to films (except to the really terrible ones), but near the beginning of Pina, Wim Wenders’ great, 3-D exploration of the late choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch’s work, a long line of dancers trudged toward the camera enacting in unison a series of gestures a woman had explained were a tribute to the changing of the seasons. The dancers slowly made their way along a sheer curtain that bisected the screen and ended somewhere in the audience’s lap. As the dancers stepped forward, trance-like, they seemed to enter the room: the empty seats in front of the stage in the film blended into the empty seats in the first few rows of the movie theater. I couldn’t help myself: I said to the screen, “Cool!”

The rest of Pina never quite equals the wonder of that moment, but it does capture, in original and striking ways, the beauty and mystery of Bausch’s work by bringing us right inside of it. Fred Astaire probably wouldn’t have approved but watching this company of dancers captured separately and up close, with their arms held out to us beseechingly, is nearly as different from watching dance onstage—or dancers filmed as it they were onstage, from a respectful distance, as trying to ice-skate is different from watching figure skaters on TV.

In “The Rite of Spring,” traces of the fresh dirt we see raked onto the stage before the piece begins become visible on the women’s thin, light-colored slip dresses and anguished faces as they offer themselves one-by-one to the group of shirtless male dancers—before running away at the last minute. The last woman dancer to offer herself doesn’t run, but the terror in her eyes and her quaking body—that seems to anticipate the male dancer will soon literally drag her through the dirt—reminded me of the unabashed purity of emotion found in silent films.

Pina isn’t silent, but long stretches pass without words. Intermittent scenes feature members of the company sharing a few memories of Pina herself. Wenders has captured each dancer alone in close-up silently looking at the camera while he or she, in voice over, talks in his or her native language—Korean, Portuguese, Croatian, Russian, Spanish and French as well as German. “You’re just going to have to get crazier,” one woman recalls Pina counseling her, but the film offers no more deep, detailed explanation and analysis of the work, no behind-the-scenes peek or even dances presented in their entirety. Pina is less like a traditional, chatty, dance documentary (of which Frederick Wiseman’s 2010 La Danse is one example) than it is like Koyaanisqatsi, which, with its time-lapsed segments set to a score by Philip Glass, also set a mood where words were superfluous.

Bausch started her company in the early 70s and the sexual politics in her work is unmistakable, not just in “The Rite of Spring,” but in most of the dances shown in the film. A group of younger men put their hands on a withdrawn middle-aged woman. They grab not just at her breasts but also at her hand—to kiss it—and take turns stroking her nose and chin as if she were a very young child. In “Dance Hall” the men in the company reach to grope the women while the women cringe, try to escape and bat errant hands away, a familiar scenario, even though the men are seated and the women stand against the opposite wall.

A man in “Café Müller” tries to force a couple into a Hollywood-style, romantic embrace, repositioning their bodies each time the woman falls to the floor from her partner’s hands, even though their pose has a progressively shorter duration each time the man tries to re-orchestrate it.

But the dances have their light moments as well: a woman in a short, red dress runs across a row of chairs, giving a sweet cry of relief, “Oooooh” as she knocks each one down. She brings to life the idea an older dancer expresses: that being in Bausch’s company is a chance to play as children play—for the rest of one’s life.

In another sequence, slender Azusa Seyama (“extremely thin” like “young” is not, we see, the given for dancers in Bausch’s company as it would be in most of the rest of the dance world) poses and grimaces alongside an impressive set of muscular arms only to pull away and reveal the male dancer flexing behind her. He then puts her arm over his shoulder and launches her into the air, whirling her around and around, an amusement park ride most of us will never get the chance to board.

We see women dancers repeatedly climb seated, male dancers as if lightly dancing up steps. The women end by poking the men’s chests with their toes—and the men smile at them throughout. In this era when so many people make grim trips to the gym part of their weekly routine, seeing beautiful bodies that are toned and sculpted to perform feats of wonder instead of just to look good is a revelation.

Although Bausch’s life’s work and her company of dancers are the focus of the film, Wim Wenders’ inventive yet unobtrusive direction and the work of his team of cinematographers, Alain Derobe, Helene Louvart and Jorg Widmer, provides the gilt frame around the portrait: sweeping crane shots, gorgeous colors and lighting effects that I hadn’t thought possible in 3-D. Color is particularly important in Bausch’s work: the bright pink of the dress first worn by an adolescent girl, then a grown woman then an elderly woman (each standing still in the middle of a line of her peers) in “Dance Hall” stuck with me long after I had left the theater, like seeing the shadow of the sun when one closes one’s eyes to a clear sky. Much of Pina has stayed with me in the same way. In a year when the Oscars have shown so little respect for women, barely nominating them outside of gender-specific categories, Pina—which is nominated for “Best Documentary Feature”—is a film well worth rooting for.

Trailer:

Ren Jender is a writer/performer/producer based in Boston who occasionally projects “radical” phrases on the sides of buildings.

Quote of the Day: Judith Mayne

Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne

We have yet to talk about Dorothy Arzner at Bitch Flicks. But her work demands attention in any discussions of feminist film theory. While I haven’t seen all the films she directed, I can say with confidence that most, if not all of them, pass the Bechdel Test. (Which has become somewhat of a feat these days, with the misogynistic drivel churned out and sponsored by The Never Ending Hollywood Backlash From Hell.)

To give myself a reprieve from summer blockbuster depression, I’ve been rereading Judith Mayne’s book, Directed by Dorothy Arzner, and I’m especially captivated by her take on Dance, Girl, Dance. Of course, that famous speech in the film always gives me chills. But first, a little background:

In the early to mid-1970s, when Arzner’s work was brought to the attention of feminists, her films were deemed particularly important for their criticism of Hollywood films “from within.” Pam Cook and Claire Johnston described how the universe of the male was “made strange” in Arzner’s films, how women’s “rewriting” of male discourse subverted the established conventions of Hollywood. At the time Cook and Johnston’s essays were published, film theory was very much preoccupied with the notion of “making strange,” with the possibilities of a Hollywood film that critiqued itself and its own assumptions. Cook and Johnston brought a strong theoretical approach to Arzner’s work, while other critics of the era were simply delighted to find a woman director among all of the men in Hollywood film history.

Mayne points out that Dance, Girl, Dance is probably Arzner’s most well-known film and is a staple in feminist film theory. She summarizes the plot as follows:

The plot of Dance, Girl, Dance concerns the differing paths to success for Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and Judy (Maureen O’Hara), both members of a dance troupe led by Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya). The dance troupe performs vaudeville-style numbers in bars and nightclubs, much to the chagrin of Basilova (who bemoans her status as a “flesh peddler”). Bubbles has “oomph,” a kind of dancer’s version of “it,” and eventually she leaves the troupe and enthusiastically pursues a career as “Tiger Lily White.” Judy, in contrast, is a serious student of ballet, and the protegee of Basilova. However, it is Bubbles who gets the jobs, and she arranges for Judy to be hired as her “stooge,” i.e., as a classical dancer who performs in the middle of Bubble’s act, and thus primes the audience to demand more of Bubbles.

Toward the end of the film, Judy stands on stage and refuses her role as stooge. She defiantly crosses her arms and moves closer to the audience, and she gives the spectators a piece of her mind:

Go ahead and stare. I’m not ashamed. Go on. Laugh! Get your money’s worth. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so’s you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here–with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? And we know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So’s you can go home when the show’s over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just like we do.

I love that moment. I love it because she critiques the men who look at women as sexual objects, and the women who do so as well. I love it because Dorothy Arzner directed this film in 1940. It’s now 2011. And I can’t even imagine a speech like this existing in a current Hollywood film. (If you can think of any that make such astute observations about sexual politics, please, clue me in.)

Mayne further complicates this famous scene in her analysis of it, so I’ll leave you with that, and the always impossible-to-answer questions surrounding self-objectification as either a form of empowerment for women, or as nothing more than internalized patriarchal exploitation. Or neither. Or both. Hmmmm:

I see Judy’s confrontation less as a challenge to the very notion of woman as object of spectacle than as the creation of another kind of performance. Oftentimes the scene is discussed as if the audience were exclusively male, which it is not, even though Judy addresses men in her speech. When the camera pans the reactions of the audience to Judy’s speech, the responses of women are quite clearly visible. Women squirm uncomfortably in their seats just as surely as men do, and when release occurs in the form of applause, it is a woman–Steven Adams’s trusty secretary–who initiates it. Arzner’s view of performance and her view of the relationship between subject and object were never absolute; women may be objectified through performance, but they are also empowered; men may consume women through the look, but women also watch and take pleasure in the spectacle of other women’s performance.

Thoughts?

Review in Conversation: Black Swan

Sometimes a movie needs more than a review–it needs a discussion. See our previous Reviews in Conversation here and here.

Nina is cracking…

Amber’s Take:
There’s a lot to say about Black Swan, and the more I think about it, the fewer definitive, and perhaps positive things I have to say. Before getting too ahead of myself, though, I must say that the performances–particularly Natalie Portman’s–were amazing, the dance sequences were compelling and seemed very well done, and the film was, overall, visually stunning. This is the most intensely visceral film I’ve seen in some time, and simply remembering certain moments still causes me to cringe. I loved the image of the goose flesh appearing on Nina Sayers’ (Portman’s) skin, as she began to physically embody her role as the Swan Queen, and the nod to Cronenberg’s The Fly when thick, black feathers began to sprout from Nina’s skin (as the hairs sprouted from Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle during his physical transformation into, well, a fly).

On a literal level, the film seems to be about the transformation of an artist–in this case, a dancer–into a role. It also is, very specifically, about the physical rigor of ballet, and the lengths an artist will go to in perfecting her performance. Ballet is a physically grueling art form that seems diametrically at odds with the female body. Like gymnasts, from what I understand, a ballet dancer must fight against a mature woman’s body, maintain an impossibly thin-yet-strong physique, and endure at times severe physical pain. On a more metaphoric level, this is what society expects all women to endure, though I don’t think we can read the white swan/black swan as a direct metaphor of the virgin/whore dichotomy or expectation for women in our culture. There are several other things going on in the film, one of the most problematic being (s)mother love.

What on Earth is Barbara Hershey’s character doing in this film? In a near-deranged, over-the-top role, we see a woman who couldn’t make it out of the corps during her own ballet career, and who blames her daughter for the unhappy end to that career. Erica Sayers infantalizes her daughter, dominates her life, pummels her with guilt for under-appreciating her (the cake scene, anyone?), and generally serves as the movie’s biggest villain–worse than an artistic director who sexually assaults and torments Nina. Oh, that’s nothing compared to Mommy Dearest. So what do we make of Nina’s mother–and why was she even in this movie?

Stephanie’s Take:
While I share some of your concerns with (s)mother love, and Barbara Hershey’s character in general, I really enjoyed the film. So before I respond to some of the issues you mention, let me say what I liked so much about Black Swan:

First, a fairly obvious but no less interesting way to read the film is as an indictment of prescribed femininity. Nina’s entire existence is wrapped up in an attempt to be perfect, whether it’s striving to be the perfect ballerina or the perfect daughter. We see what her breakfast looks like, grapefruit and a hardboiled egg (if I remember correctly), and as you mention, the struggle to maintain a child’s body resonates throughout. While that may be particularly important for careers in ballet and gymnastics, it’s also our society’s ideal body type for all women, so I very much like that Black Swan delves into (however metaphorically) the potential consequences of restrictive and unattainable “perfection” in women.

When Nina can’t live up to the casting director’s Perfect Ballerina or her mother’s Perfect Daughter, she basically loses her shit. Thomas (the casting director, played by Vincent Cassel) wants her to embrace her sexuality, to seduce the audience with it (channeling the Black Swan). Erica (her mother) wants her to remain childlike and innocent (channeling the White Swan), and both Thomas and Erica represent the double-edged sword that all women face: be sexy, but not slutty; be sweet, but not a total prude. In the words of Usher, “We want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed.”)

When Nina can’t fulfill both these roles simultaneously, as much as she tries, the film shows us her breakdown: her body betrays her in literal ways, with bleeding toes and scratch marks that suggest self-mutilation (another hallmark characteristic of young women struggling to cope with similar stress); and her body betrays her in ways that suggest hallucinations: pulling “feathers” from her flesh, or ripping off her cuticles, only to discover moments later that her hand is fine. I found that part of the film, the hallucinatory transformation into the Black Swan, super interesting because it seems to happen to her accidentally—as she experiences the transformation, she doesn’t understand what’s happening, and it frightens her.

In fact, I would argue that her body isn’t her own at any time during the film. Thomas wants to control her body in a sexual way, often groping her and kissing her against her will. And when Nina attempts to explore her sexuality, to take ownership of it through masturbation, she suddenly realizes her mother is in the room (to the gasps and laughter of audiences nationwide), and she buries herself under her covers like a child. Erica constantly explores Nina’s body either by looking at her or physically touching her, often insisting that she remove her clothes—creating an inappropriateness in their relationship that I don’t quite know what to do with.

Regardless, I like that Black Swan implies that these ideals for women can’t actually exist without women destroying themselves in the process of attaining them. We live in a society where women’s bodies exist as pleasure-objects for men, as dismembered parts to sell products, as images to be dissected, airbrushed, made fun of, all under a government that continues to chip away at women’s rights to bodily autonomy. In that kind of environment, when does a woman’s body ever feel entirely her own? Black Swan sets up that metaphor quite well, asking the viewer to experience Nina’s struggle to live up to society’s ridiculous expectations for women through several cringe-worthy moments.

That rocks. But I wonder if that effort gets trumped by some of the more objectifying scenes, like the “lesbian sex scene” and the masturbation scene. Is it possible to comment on society’s expectations of women and beauty without also objectifying women in the process? Does Aronofsky linger a little too long at times? And, in response to your second paragraph, why can’t we read the Black Swan/White Swan as a direct metaphor for the virgin/whore dichotomy? (Oh, and yeah, I’ll throw it back to you—what the hell is happening with Nina and her mom?)

Amber’s Take:
You make a lovely and convincing reading of the film as an exploration of the impossibility of society’s contemporary take on womanhood. I think my resistance to this reading—or, more specifically, my dissatisfaction of this being the ultimate reading—has everything to do with Erica Sayers, though neither of us is certain how to exactly read her character. More on that in a moment (ha ha). Though meaning doesn’t end (or begin, necessarily) with a director’s intention, I also think this reading gives Aronofsky too much credit; in other words, I don’t know that the film is that good—that altrustic, that interested in women’s experience—or that cohesive.

Aronofsky has a clear interest in the limits of the human body. While watching Black Swan, I thought about his previous movie, The Wrestler, and the ways in which that solitary person pushes his body to limits most us of (those of us who aren’t professional wrestlers or ballerinas) find absurd and painful to even see. We could extend our conversation indefinitely by bringing in other movies as objects of comparison (The Red Shoes), but I do see some structural similarities between Black Swan and The Wrestler that warrant at least a cursory comparison–and I’m sure others have done this comparative work in reviews around the web.

An important question to ask when we’re trying to figure out Black Swan is this: How do we see Nina Sayers at the end of the film? Is she a victim of her society/mother/creative director? Or is she victorious, in that she conquered the perceived limits of her body to achieve her own stated goal: to be perfect in her Swan Lake performance. (Did we see the protagonist of The Wrestler as victorious or defeated in his final leap?) Nina masters her performance, nailing the Black Swan to the point she imagines her arms transforming into wings. This was the most thrilling sequence in the film—her performance was beautiful, and much more impressive than any of the other dance sequences. Is the Black Swan a villain? In the ballet, yes, and the White Swan is the tragic heroine. Films generally tend to do a better job of making the villain more compelling than the hero, but if both roles are (metaphoric) unattainable goals, how do we read those final moments?

It’s not that I disagree with your reading—I really want that to be what the movie is ultimately about, but there are too many half-baked ideas competing with each other to allow me to say Okay, it’s about X. And, frankly, there’s an awful lot of pleasure to be had by gazing at tormented bodies in the film for me to wholly believe its feminist message. Before Nina gets the lead role in Swan Lake she looks hopefully at a woman walking toward her at a distance, and sees herself in the face of a stranger. So, she’s looking for her a reflection of herself, evidence of her own existence in other people. I don’t think this is a statement about a woman’s unstable identity; I think it’s what an artistic performer does. And possibly a person grappling with mental illness. What about Lily (Mila Kunis)? Her cheeseburger, ecstasy, and alcohol-fueled night with Nina, leading to empowered club dancing (sarcasm), random dude-kissing, and imagined sexy lesbian action between the two, does…what, exactly? Neither the skeezy artistic director’s advice (masturbate!) nor San Francisco Lily’s trite transgressions work to sexually liberate Nina…or do they? At least they bring her into active conflict with her mother.

Now. Nina lives with a mother who is basically a lunatic. I mean, let’s just say it: Nina’s mother is fucking nuts. Why (in the world of the film) does Nina need to have a mother who is fucking nuts? Couldn’t she have been moderately nuts, like most of us, with contradictions, who acts in moderately selfish ways which can moderately mess up a daughter? That would’ve allowed the themes we’ve discussed to be played out just as intricately and interestingly. How does this character fit into the movie? Taken literally, Nina’s mother is at fault for her child’s problems. As mothers tend to be in films made by men, and as psychiatrists believed in the 1960s (I’m thinking of the concept of the schizophrenogenic mother here–the idea that an oppressive mother could actually cause schizophrenia in her children). While we might be seeing a version of Erica Sayers from Nina’s untrustworthy perspective, what good is it—even if it’s not an accurate representation—for Nina to see her mother this way? Taken metaphorically…what? There’s no feminist reading I can discern in a film that I want to be feminist.

Stephanie’s Take:
I completely agree that it might not be useful, or even possible in a film as complicated as Black Swan, to come up with a definitive reading. But I still believe so much is at stake with regards to women and identity and the fluidity of that identity, in a culture that forces women to possess multiple, often contradictory identities. Maybe I’m giving Aronofsky too much credit, but I disagree with your suggestion that Nina’s literal reflections aren’t a statement about a woman’s unstable identity.

Yes, this film comments plenty on the artist and how performance can impact an artist’s life, how the artist must take on certain traits to enhance her performance, and how that act might impact her life when she isn’t on stage. However, given the fact that we’re all “performing” our identities to an extent (like the prescribed gender roles we’re taught from birth to perform), it’s worth looking at how Nina, a character whose identity seems so wrapped up in the expectations of those around her, copes—or doesn’t cope—with the pressures of womanhood and what’s required of that particular role.

It’s impossible not to notice Nina’s reflection everywhere. She sees herself reflected in mirrors as she dances, or when she’s reading the word “whore” on the bathroom mirror of the dance studio, or when she sees her face in the subway car windows. And as you mentioned, she sees her face superimposed on the faces of strangers in public—and even in the mirror at her own house, where she and Lily’s faces are superimposed.

It happens again during the sex scene; Lily’s face becomes Nina’s own face at one point, and we can hear Lily creepily whispering the words of Nina’s mother, “my sweet girl” over and over. Since we learn later that this sex scene is most likely Nina’s hallucination (and I think there’s enough evidence to even make the argument that Lily’s entire existence is a hallucination), it’s useful in interpreting the film to think about why Nina sees Lily, hears her mother’s words, and even sees her own image during a sex scene.

All this swapping of voices and faces (identities, if you will, haha) lead me to read all these people, Erica, Beth (Winona Ryder), and Lily as facets and projections of Nina’s identity. Beth, Thomas’s first “little princess,” is the aging ballerina who gets replaced by Nina, the younger ballerina. Erica, her mother, is the ballerina who slept with her director, got pregnant, and had to end her dancing career as a result. And Lily is the ballerina who embodies everything Nina tries so desperately to find within herself. She’s a carefree, sexual woman who repeatedly threatens Nina’s role in the ballet. Both when Nina is late to rehearsal and when Nina is late to the show’s opening—Lily stands in the background, threatening to take Nina’s place.

Keeping that in mind, it’s interesting that Nina “murders” Lily; on one hand, Nina seeks to absorb Lily’s empowerment, but on the other, the only way she can ultimately accomplish that is by killing it. Since murder is a pretty empowered act, I guess I get that. In fact, I think I liked it. Because Nina basically says Fuck You to the idea that Lily, who represents Nina’s unattainable sexual identity, is separate from herself, her whole self. In that moment, Nina transforms fully into The Black Swan, allowing Lily’s metaphoric death to push Nina to do what she previously thought herself incapable of accomplishing.

You argue that the alcohol-fueled, “imagined sexy lesbian action between the two” does nothing to really sexually liberate Nina. I struggled with this scene in the film probably more than any other scene because it feels exploitative and objectifying in the same way most Hollywood faux-lesbian sex scenes do. But I also believe it’s important to pay attention to all the stuff I mentioned previously. There’s tons of identity-shifting in this scene. Nina’s eventual sexual liberation (if we equate her successful transformation into the Black Swan with sexual liberation) begins here; when identities become interchangeable in this scene, we get the first images of the gooseflesh appearing on Nina’s skin. Something empowering seems to be happening. Whether it’s actual sexual liberation or the first signs of Nina embracing all these facets of herself (Beth, Erica, Lily), it complicates things. But what does it mean?

Well! I’ll go back to my original argument: Black Swan implies that these ideals for women can’t actually exist without women destroying themselves in the process of attaining them. How many identities can we effectively perform before we forget entirely who we are? Women struggle with that in a way that men never will. More often than not, it’s women who have to give up careers for children (Erica). They get pushed out of their professions when they get older (Beth). They’re expected to balance innocence with sexuality and to know when (and when not to) express them (Nina/Lily). And the attempt to balance, express, and suppress these prescribed roles often doesn’t work without having a detrimental impact on women individually and as a whole.

Interestingly, Nina and Lily both “die” in the end. So women in this film end up visibly crazy, hospitalized, or dead. In a less complex film, that would seriously piss me off. But the death and/or disappearance and/or insanity of these women make a larger point: if they’re all separate facets of Nina’s own personality and identity, which I believe they are, it’s necessary to watch each separate character struggle—it reinforces the idea that these performed identities aren’t possible without sacrificing one’s entire self.

You asked: If the Black Swan/White Swan “roles are (metaphoric) unattainable goals, how do we read those final moments?” Good question. It fascinates me most of all that Nina claims, after the White Swan’s suicide, that her performance was perfect. But, it wasn’t. She fell down in the middle of the damn ballet. To a gasping and appalled audience (not to mention, director). If her “I was perfect” claim applies only to the ballet, then she’s referring only to her performance as the Black Swan; after all, it’s the Black Swan whose dance partner whispers “wow” as she’s walking off stage; it’s the Black Swan whose audience gives her a standing ovation; it’s the Black Swan whose director beams with pride when she leaves the stage.

So yeah, I see Nina as a victim at the end of the film. Because she wasn’t perfect; she was never perfect. The conquering of her role as the Black Swan comes at a great sacrifice to her role as the White Swan (her fall during the ballet and her metaphoric death at the end of it). The two identities can’t coexist perfectly, as much as she wants them to. In the end, she still hasn’t attained the superhuman ability to perform competing identities for a critical audience. Sure, the audience may have loved Nina’s empowered, sexualized Black Swan, clearly enough to forgive the earlier screw up as the White Swan, but that isn’t surprising if you read the audience as a metaphor for society (why not?), a society that loves more than anything to be seduced by its women.

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We still have more to say! Let the conversation continue in the comments section, and leave links to reviews you’ve written or read.