Diablo Cody – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Fine Frenzy: With an Outspoken Anti-Heroine and a Feminist Lens, ‘Young Adult’ Is My Favorite Film of the Year

This guest review by Megan Kearns previously appeared at her blog The Opinioness of the World.

We so often see men as wayward fuck-ups. Ben Stiller in Greenberg, Zach Braff in Garden State, Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets all fill this role. Selfish asshats who do the wrong thing, lack ambition, or screw someone over for their own selfish needs. And yet they’re somehow loveable and charming. You champion them, hoping they’ll succeed and grow…just a little.

Audiences want female leads nice, amiable and likeable. Not messy, complicated, complex and certainly not unlikeable. Heaven forbid! But that’s precisely the role Charlize Theron steps into in Young Adult.

In this witty, hilarious and bittersweet dramedy, Theron plays Mavis Gary, an author of young adult books living in Minneapolis. Mavis’ life is a hot mess. She’s divorced, drinks her life away and the book series she writes is coming to an end. She was the popular mean girl in high school who escaped to the big city. Mavis returns to her small hometown in Minnesota full of Taco Bells and KFCs intending to reclaim her old glory days and her ex-boyfriend, who’s happily married with a new baby. As she fucks up, she eventually questions what she wants out of life.

Young Adult is a fantastic film, the best I’ve seen all year. I seriously can’t say enough good things about it. Diablo Cody’s feminist lens and sharply funny dialogue fuse with Jason Reitman’s knack for bittersweet direction, buoyed by stellar portrayals.

A force of nature, Theron gives both a subtly nuanced and bravura performance. In her Golden Globe-nominated role, she makes a flawed, cranky, bitchy, selfish, alcoholic charismatic and likeable. When she’s doing something despicable (which happens all too often), I found myself cringing yet simultaneously rooting for her. That’s not easy to do. Theron, who’s been called a transformational chameleon, particularly for her award-winning role in Monster, melts into this role. She imbues Mavis with depth, caustic wit, raw anger and vulnerability. It’s hard to see the boundaries where Theron begins and Mavis ends.

Suffering from depression, Mavis tries to drown her sorrows, unleashing a destructive tornado of chaos. Even though Mavis fled her small town, she’s haunted by the prime of her youth. Most of us have moved on from high school. But Mavis hasn’t grown up yet. With unwavering determination and delusion, she thinks if she can recapture the past, all her problems will be solved.

With her popular girl swagger, you can picture how she sashayed down the halls in high school (and probably shoved people into lockers or hurled insults). That same bravado fools her into thinking she can bend the world to her will.

She finds an unlikely ally and confidante in nerdy, sarcastic yet tender Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former bullied classmate in an achingly touching performance. Some of the best scenes contain Mavis and Matt volleying their biting banter.

What made the film brutally funny is Mavis tosses retorts people think but would never dream of actually saying. She says hilariously wrong things. Matt asks her if she moved back to town, she replies, “Ewww, gross.” She shamelessly throws herself at a married man. When Matt reminds her Buddy has a baby, she retorts, “Babies are boring!” And trust me. I’m not doing Theron’s comic abilities justice.

Uncomfortably funny, hilariously heartbreaking, Young Adult passes the Bechdel Test several times. In one scene, the bandmates in the all-female group Nipple Confusion (love that name!), who also happen to be Mavis’ former high school classmates, briefly debate Mavis and her dubious intentions. Mavis confronts compassionate Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), her ex-boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson)’s wife and the object of Mavis’s vitriolic hatred. Also, Mavis confides in Matt’s sister Sandra (Collette Wolfe), who desperately wants to escape small-town life, about the course her life has taken.

I felt a sigh of relief while watching this film. It felt fantastic to have a woman quip snarky comments that maybe she shouldn’t say but she does anyway. Because Mavis doesn’t give a shit what people think. She doesn’t conform to other people’s standards of who she should be. Most movies suppress women’s rage. Not this one. As the awesome Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood wrote:

This film is a fucking bitchy breath of fresh air.

Hollywood purports a double standard that only men can play unsympathetic roles. If a female actor portrays a complex character, she’s too often labeled a bitch. People don’t usually want to see complicated or unsympathetic women on-screen.

Besides the fabulous Kristen Wiig in the hilarious Bridesmaids, Lena Dunham in Tiny Furniture and Julia Roberts in the god-awful My Best Friend’s Wedding (which Young Adult strangely parallels – both contain selfish female protagonists struggling to recapture the past, hoping to break up a wedding/marriage), there really aren’t many examples of women in this kind of unlikeable or flawed role.

In an interview with Silverstein, outspoken feminist (woo hoo!) Diablo Cody shares her inspiration for creating an unlikeable character:

The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters. We’ve seen so many loveable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts. So it was really important to me to try and turn that around.

With female writers comprising 24% of ALL writers in Hollywood and women in only 33% of speaking roles in films (god that makes me cringe), it’s vital to have more women writing scripts to yield women’s diverse perspectives and stories.

Young Adult is entirely told from Mavis’ perspective. As Mavis scribes the last book in Waverly Prep, a Young Adult series, her writing mirrors events and feelings in her own life. It could have easily veered off course to examine how Mavis’ inappropriate flirting (or rather throwing herself at him) affected Buddy. But the film astutely anchors itself to Mavis, a unique female voice.

I often lament the lack of female-centric films as most either feature men in the spotlight or have women as merely secondary characters. If we want more diverse films, including those where women are front and center, we need to support those films by voting with our dollars and going to the box office.

At first, it seems Young Adult might succumb to the same fate as so many other films and end up revolving around Mavis finding love. Men go on quests and emotional journeys. They learn. They grow. Women often stagnate. Or more common, their lives revolve around men. They wait around for love, seek love, find love, and turn themselves inside out for love…and ultimately a man. We don’t often see them doing things for themselves.

That’s the rare beauty of Young Adult. It’s not really about Mavis finding love. It’s about confronting your mistakes, letting go of the past and growing up. Too many movies reinforce the notion careers and friends don’t count. It’s only your love life that matters. Only love can save you. But sometimes, you can save yourself.

Life is messy, complicated and difficult. Women can be too. It’s about time we see more roles reflecting that on-screen.

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Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Man Men (for our Mad Men Week), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for our Emmy Week 2011), Alien/Aliens (for our Women in Horror Week 2011), and I Came to Testify, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Peace Unveiled, and The War We Are Living in the Women, War & Peace series. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Juno

This review by Amber Leab originally appeared at Bitch Flicks in October 2008.

Juno(2007)

It took me a long time to see the film Juno. I was thrilled when Diablo Cody won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, but at the same time suspicious about her little movie being so lauded. To win an Oscar, the film must be saying the “right” things to the “right” people, a dynamic that rarely favors progressive thinking (see the movie Crash as a recent example). In other words, when too many people love a movie, there’s probably something wrong.

Aside from critical praise and popularity, the topic of teen pregnancy is rarely done without a hefty dose of morality. While we are in a peculiar cultural gray area on the subject—consider the cover of OK Magazine, featuring smiling teen mom Jamie Lynn Spears, or the Republican VP nominee’s pregnant teenage daughter—there seems to be an anti-choice undercurrent running through pregnancy plots, not to mention the culture at large.

The expectations I had going in were also based on reading commentary about the ultra-hip dialogue and soundtrack of the film. While certainly not negative in themselves, coupled with a controversial topic, these features could be enough to couch a conservative, anti-woman message in a hip, fresh film.

It turns out, however, that after an initial adjustment period to the dialogue (and a question about whether the film is set in the early ‘90s), Juno turns out to be planted in a feminist worldview, and is a film that teenagers, especially, ought to see. It was thoroughly enjoyable, funny and touching. I liked it so much that I watched it again, but when I started to write about it, what I liked about the movie became all the more confusing. I loved the music, although Juno MacGuff is way hipper than I was (or am), and I saw a representation that reminded me of myself at that age. I saw a paternal relationship that I never had and a familial openness that I’ve also never had. I saw characters who I wanted as my childhood friends and family.

And while in Juno we have a strong, unconventional female character—and a lead character, at that—the film itself was very, very safe. And I worry whether that’s a good thing. It’s certainly understandable for a first film. A Hollywood outsider would have a much more difficult time making an overtly progressive movie about teen pregnancy, but if she plays the politics safe, and if her own personality is enough of a draw, she just might make it.

I was worried when Juno visited the dumpy abortion clinic and met her pro-life classmate protesting in the parking lot, and I was worried by the very dumpiness of the clinic. I was struck by the notion that a clinic like that would look and feel much more sterile—even in the lobby, as far as Juno went. The thought of fingernails sent her running out of the building. A detail like “fingernails” made the abortion too real for Juno, a teenager, I suppose. Is this a good or bad thing? I don’t know.

Juno, in a rather nonchalant way, seeks permission of the baby’s father, her good friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), for the abortion. Or, rather, she seeks his opinion; she seems to want him to resist her plans. But his lack of resistance causes her to make the following decisions on her own. This straddles the line somewhat. She wants to be told what to do, and rather than seeking out someone smarter and more experienced than she is, she asks the boy whose approval she’s still seeking.

Juno wants her baby to have the perfect family; one unlike her own, which her mother abandoned. Her family now consists of her father, her stepmother Bren (Allison Janney), and her half-sister Liberty Bell. Juno doesn’t have a bad deal going. Her folks are markedly working class (they’re both members of the labor class, a group that doesn’t see much Hollywood recognition; he’s an HVAC repairman, she’s a nail technician). Yet Juno imagines a perfect life to consist of two loving parents and a McMansion.Why would she seek out people of this particular class? Is this a case of Juno’s lack of class awareness or the film’s?

The film’s real progressive moment comes when Juno realizes that her idea of perfection isn’t perfect. She realizes that a father who doesn’t want to be there would be as bad as a mother who hadn’t wanted to be there. She sees that a father isn’t a necessity–or perhaps simply that two parents aren’t a necessity. Yet what does this all add up to mean? There’s certainly a moment of female solidarity (and this isn’t the only one, certainly, in the film), and a difficult decision that she makes independently. But, as with other conclusions I’ve made, I’m left with the question of “So what?”

The film does love all of its characters, which is a refreshing change for a high school flick. Juno’s best friend, Leah, is a cheerleader who exhibits some flaky, teenage qualities (her crush on the chubby, bearded, middle-aged math teacher takes a cliché and gives it a twist), but the film loves her nonetheless. Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner) is an obsessional, middle-class mommy blogger type, but we see that she would be a good mother, and the film cares for her. We even have sympathy for Mark (Jason Bateman) who, through his relationship with Juno, realizes that he and his wife no longer want the same thing (if they ever did). There are cringe-worthy moments with Mark and Juno, but none that damn him completely. It’s a rare film that gives us no bad guys, which is a large part of its charm.

It’s easy to want to live in a world like this, where a pregnant sixteen-year-old seems to get by pretty well, with her parents’ support and a relationship with her baby’s adoptive family. She has a sweet teenage love affair and doesn’t seem to struggle much. While teen angst is the stuff of Hollywood cliché, things just seemed too easy for Juno. I wish my teenage years could’ve been a bit more like Juno’s. Hell, I wish my life now could be.

The final question remains, though, about whether we should criticize a movie like Juno. Representations of role models for American girls tend to inhabit the poles; either young girls are encouraged to be the beautiful bimbo or the chaste Christian. This film has a strong personality (that masquerades as strong values—even an ethic) without being preachy or moralistic. That can’t inherently be a bad thing. Yet I find myself asking for more, wanting more–something that steps outside of the realm of safety. Perhaps Juno isn’t the film to give me more.

In all, I fear Juno suffers from the same postmodern condition afflicting so many films today. It strives for a non-message in order not to offend anyone, thus allowing anti-choice advocates to cheer the film as loudly as pro-choice feminists. There’s a problem here. If a film that almost universally passes as hip and progressive is so murky in its values and allegiance that we’re not really sure what to think of it, how can a truly hip and progressive film make it today?

From the Archive: Movie Review: Juno

This review originally appeared at Bitch Flicks in October 2008. With Diablo Cody set to direct her first film, it’s interesting to go back and look at the film that launched her career.

Juno(2007)

Guest Post: Tara is Better Not United

This guest post also appears at Professor, What If… and the Ms. Magazine blog.

As I began watching the second-season premiere of the Showtime series The United States of Tara, I eagerly ask what I always do before an episode starts: “Which ‘alter’ will it be this time?”

Alas, to my dismay, the show’s bubbly focus on a recovered Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) meant that the “alters”–alternate personalities of this 21st century Sybil–were gone, thrown out like the unwanted clothing ceremoniously dumped into a charity bin in the show opener. Instead, we have happy, functioning Tara, and an upbeat musical soundtrack trying to manipulate us to believe that, indeed, all is well in the Tara-verse.

But we soon learn that Tara as one person, no longer suffering from dissociative identity disorder, is not nearly as fun or interesting as she is as five different people. Instead, the “true Tara” now displays some of the most annoying traits of all five of her alters.

She incorporates her Alice-esque alter by donning a 50s-style apron and throwing herself into a dinner party with the neighborhood’s token gay couple. She speaks her mind Buck-style (Buck was a beer-swigging male alter) when a neighbor commits suicide, bragging “The lady with all the personalities is not the most fucked up person on the block.” After the dinner party, her T-proclivities (that was the teenaged alter) come out, and she performs a manic Bollywood number, ending with provocative thrusting in her hubby’s face. Her sister Charmaine assures her new beau that Tara has not actually “transitioned” into the other personality, indicating that perhaps it would be better if she did, while Tara’s husband Max is visibly worried that the new “sane” Tara might be more insane than before.

Given the show’s emphasis on the self as performative, and on the impossibility of performing to societal standards (especially if one is female), this suggestion that Tara’s recovery may not be a step forward is intriguing. Though the show reveals all the difficulties Tara’s disorder causes for her and her family, it also seems to be indicating that the real problem is a society that expects us to perform in very particular, stable and normative ways. These regulatory ideals are so oppressive that we either bind ourselves into limited roles (i.e., Alice-the-50s-housewife) or run the risk of being seen as “crazy”–as “normal” Tara is when she laughs too loud, makes a suicide joke or has too much fun at a dinner party.

The show’s underlying critique of such normative ideals, and the relatively freeing notion of embracing the self as performance, is evident in other characters as well. Marshall, Tara’s closeted gay son, tries hard to be serious, smart and talented, but finds that flaunting his identity by sitting at the “gay-ble”–the school lunch table where gays and their allies sit–is a welcome relief, and results in him joining a campaign at his school aimed to raise queer visibility.

Charmaine, Tara’s sister, struggles with regulatory norms in choosing between a relationship with traditional hunk Neil vs. unattractive and vertically challenged Nick, who is personality-privileged and emotionally supportive. Charmaine tried to follow normative requirements in the past by augmenting her breasts to please her then-husband, a choice that resulted in lopsided and off-center nipples. Now that she has had these “corrected,” she seems to believe she can do better than short, balding Nick.

The character of Tara’s teenaged daughter Kate has thus far been largely challenged around the regulation of her sexuality, as indicated with Tara’s concern that she was not able to “micromanage her daughter’s vagina.” Kate’s struggles with a creepy boss and an abusive boyfriend expose a society populated by males wishing for similar micro-managing power.

Max appears to be the character least affected by social norms. He doesn’t seem to care that his wife is far from typical, worrying only about her health and happiness rather than what others think. He does not condemn or regulate his son’s sexuality nor attempt to micromanage his daughter. If any character seems too good to be true, it’s him. This is perhaps why Max is a bit empty as a character: a sort of dad/husband placeholder who comes off as boring and conventional in a cast of otherwise entertaining family members.

While Robert Abele laments at L.A. Weekly that “United States of Tara plays like surface feminism with an added gloss of snark and a bewilderingly blah sentimentality,” I would counter that the snark is integral to the feminist critique the show enacts. The snark reveals that our “normal” selves are “blah,” and thus we should embrace those aspects of our identity that subvert regulatory norms lest we end up living in a world full of bores.

Diablo Cody, the show’s creator, readily admits that she asks of everything she writes, “How am I going to sneak my subversive feminist message into this?” With Tara, she sneaks in this message beautifully, conveying that societal ideals–be they a stable self, heterosexuality or conventional attractiveness–do not an exciting world (or episode) make.

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

Movie Preview: Jennifer’s Body

Jennifer’s Body. Starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried. Written by Diablo Cody. Directed by Karyn Kusama.

imdb synopsis: A newly possessed cheerleader turns into a killer who specializes in offing her male classmates. Can her best friend put an end to the horror?

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People cannot stop talking about the new upcoming Diablo Cody/Megan Fox/Karyn Kusama horror film Jennifer’s Body. A wonderful article titled, “Will Chicks Dig Jennifer’s Body?”, cropped up at Cinematical over the weekend, and the author, Jenni Miller, does a thorough job of distilling the recent Bust Magazine discussion (August/September issue) of Jennifer’s Body. She ends with this:

The question is, ladies and gents, do you think Cody and Kusama can pull this off? Is the male-targeted marketing going to turn off any women who might otherwise be tempted to see it? Or, for that matter, what about folks who are tired of the ubiquitous Megan Fox?

I highly recommend checking out this entire article, as it includes quotes from Diablo Cody (a self-professed feminist) who talks about why Jennifer’s Body is, in fact, feminist, referencing the film’s girl-on-girl crime and how the film deals with the issue of eating disorders.

Miller’s article also brings up Carol J. Clover’s “Final Girl” theory, which we discussed in our preview for Sorority Row:

She argues in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, that slasher films are obsessed with feminism in that they force male viewers to identify with the Final Girl, the one lone girl who doesn’t die, who gets her shit together, who kills the killer.

I’d like to see this movie really satirize the new gratuitous torture-porn reawakening of the horror/slasher genre. I’d like to see this movie really poke fun at the Sexy Megan Fox Hollywood Male Fantasy Goddess trope. I mean, it involves man-eating. Literally. But the unironic male-targeted marketing (Hey boys, check out the Sexy Megan Fox Hollywood Male Fantasy Goddess!) does seem, you know, problematic in terms of entirely pulling off a feminist satire of slasher films.

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Be sure to check out Shakesville’s discussion of Jennifer’s Body, where Liss references the New York Times Article, “Taking Back the Knife: Girls Gone Gory,” which also mentions Carol J. Clover’s “Final Girl” theory. And, watch the trailer at the Bust Magazine blog. A great discussion takes place in the comments section: I Know What Boys Like, I Know What Guys Want.