Though beautifully shot with surprising and genuine performances, Joss Whedon’s ‘In Your Eyes’ disappoints with its lazy storytelling and ultimately trite plotline.
As a dedicated fan of much of writer/director Joss Whedon‘s work (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Cabin in the Woods, and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog to name a few), I looked forward to watching Whedon’s latest film: Vimeo’s video on demand indie flick In Your Eyes. The film is a supernatural love story, featuring a man (Dylan) and woman (Becky) who live on opposite sides of the country and discover they’ve been psychically linked since adolescence when Becky had a sledding accident.
Young Becky steels herself to face a fearful, snowy descent on her sled
In Your Eyes is beautifully shot with rich colors that starkly contrast Dylan’s arid New Mexico home with Becky’s snowy New Hampshire location. Not only that, but I enjoyed the hip, indie soundtrack, featuring songs from Iron & Wine, Santigold, and The Lumineers (among others). The concept of having a couple telepathically fall in love when separated by great distances poses unique challenges to filming, and those were all handled surprisingly well: mainly the conceit of the characters seeming to carry on conversations with and by themselves while evincing chemistry and a growing affection. This is the equivalent of green screen acting where the performers can’t feed the scene with one another’s delivery or energy. Unlike, say, the new Star Wars trilogy where all the acting was wooden (in part) because of the green screen challenge, In Your Eyes managed to convey a warmth and liveliness to Becky and Dylan’s interactions that are missing from the flatness of their real-life encounters with others in their day-to-day lives.
Through Dylan’s eyes, Becky watches a breathtaking New Mexico sunset.
Interestingly, the vibrancy of Becky and Dylan’s love brings these two oft misunderstood loners together but further isolates them from the outside world. Though both characters evolve as a result of this new intimacy, we find them even further withdrawing from the potential for interdependency in aspects of their “real” lives like work, marriage, and social interactions. Neither of them are happy with their lives, but using a secret, long-distance romance and fantasies of escape as lifelines are not particularly healthy or sustainable solutions. As a writer, I also find this to be lazy storytelling. So many scenes are of our lead characters alone in rooms talking to themselves. Not only that, but the more interesting story is what life looks like once Becky and Dylan don’t have the obstacles of distance and unhappy lives between them. Do they integrate better into the world as a unit? Do they continue to feel compelled to speak to each other telepathically all day, every day if they see each other daily? Is this connection all it really takes to heal each other them? We’ll never know.
Dylan sabotages a date because he’s busy telepathically communicating with Becky
Speaking of lazy storytelling, the psychic premise of In Your Eyes is never fully explored. Why are these two linked? Does this make them soulmates? Do they have other yet undiscovered abilities? Are there others like them in the world? Even the boundaries of their telepathic link are haphazardly explained. For example, we learn that they can hear, smell, and feel things in each other’s environments (as evinced in an awkward mutual masturbation session), but can they physically control things in each other’s environments, too? Does distance matter, i.e. does their communication get stronger when they’re closer and fainter when they’re further apart? Not only that, but Dylan and Becky are simply not that curious for answers. If I discovered a psychic link between myself and a stranger across the country, you can bet your ass I’d be obsessed with understanding the why and how of it.
Becky’s piss-poor friend thinks her isolation is due to an affair
My final and greatest critique of In Your Eyes is how damned trite the story is at its core. When you take away the gimmick of the unexplained and unexplored psychic connection, we have a pretty tame hetero, long-distance love story about two white people who conform to traditional gender roles. Dylan actually hops a plane and ends up in a standard car chase with the cops because he’s white knight’ing it up, on a mission to rescue Becky, the imprisoned/institutionalized damsel in distress. Frankly, that’s boring and uninspired. Simply reversing the gender roles, making Becky the ex-con and Dylan the kept trophy spouse, would have made this story more compelling. I’ve come to expect a lot more from Joss Whedon. At the very least, I expect him to have a more racially diverse cast, amazing dialogue that delights, plotlines that subvert expectations, and, most importantly, empowered female characters.
Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.
These characters challenge our gendered assumptions about sex, trauma, and vengeance, which can make audiences uncomfortable. I was likely too young when I first watched ‘Thelma and Louise’ (Ridley Scott, 1991). However, I remember the surge of adrenaline I felt when Louise shot and killed Thelma’s rapist, how incredibly good it felt to idolize these convict women who had had enough with their monotonous lives, at an age when I couldn’t possibly comprehend patriarchal oppression, the comforts of solidarity and sisterhood, or the concept of escapism utilized not necessarily to run away but rather to find your wildest, most genuine self.
Written by Jenny Lapekas as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.
The rape revenge subgenre, typically within the horror realm, is a topic I’ve thought about a lot. Rape revenge offers catharsis, fantasy, and a feminist departure from the very real patriarchy, where rape is too often underreported or the victim is dismissed as “wanting it” or “asking for it” via her short skirt. The avenger of the rape revenge film appropriates the criminal act for his or her own empowerment, hence swapping gender roles. Because rape is typically perpetrated by men, women who respond with violence in the form of murder or another rape represent a wonderfully complex hero/villain binary. When male perpetrators are violated and/or killed by feminist avengers, what does their feminization mean? That rape is inherently masculine and carried out on the helpless feminine? The agency of violence is also in question within this discussion; how do viewers navigate feminine (feminist) violence? These characters challenge our gendered assumptions about sex, trauma, and vengeance, which can make audiences uncomfortable. I was likely too young when I first watched Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). However, I remember the surge of adrenaline I felt when Louise shot and killed Thelma’s rapist, how incredibly good it felt to idolize these convict women who had had enough with their monotonous lives, at an age when I couldn’t possibly comprehend patriarchal oppression, the comforts of solidarity and sisterhood, or the concept of escapism utilized not necessarily to run away but rather to find your wildest, most genuine self.
Thelma is submissive and looks to the confident Louise as a feminist role model.
Thelma and Louise seems such an obviously feminist movie, which is why I’d like to focus on Thelma’s rape scene, which galvanizes the pair’s journey thereafter. I suggest that the film is constructed, then, around the rape narrative, amidst a postfeminist storyline of female bonding and spiritual awakening. We can easily assess Thelma’s placement as a female character who initially lacks agency; rather, she soothes her husband’s temper tantrums and manages the household. Like many unhappily married women, she hasn’t a clue what to do about her unhappiness or even how to fully recognize or own it. The murder of her rapist unleashes a crime spree, but also the act of radical surrender, from which Thelma acknowledges she cannot and will not recover. This theme of agency is birthed in the rape scene and then climaxes in the famous concluding scene of the women sailing into the Grand Canyon. Both women make the choice to respond to violence with violence, which is the feminist agency found within the rape-revenge genre. Women like Thelma and Louise who carry out these acts of violence in order to avenge a rape challenge our cultural understanding of violence as rhetoric and gendered behavior onscreen.
Thelma under the rule of her short-tempered husband and Louise involved in a complicated relationship, the duo plan their vacation with the most innocent of intentions. We hear Louise call Thelma a “little housewife” in the film’s opening scene, where Louise is introduced to us in her waitress uniform and Thelma is a floral bathrobe. As she’s packing for their getaway, we see Thelma toss a handgun into her bag as if she’s frightened or repulsed by it; she’s clearly aware of the power the classically phallic symbol boasts, even laying at the bottom of her bag. When Louise asks her why she bothered to bring it, Thelma says, “Psycho killers, bears, snakes.” Little do they know that Harlan, the man who attempts to rape Thelma, can be characterized as a “snake,” and they’re the ones who become killers as a result.
I have some trouble taking Christopher McDonald (who plays Darryl, Thelma’s controlling husband) seriously since he’s so incredibly convincing in his roles as goofy characters (see Happy Gilmore [Dennis Dugan, 1996] and Requiem for a Dream [Darren Aronofsky, 2000]). However, the film’s portrayal of Darryl doesn’t inspire any respect for his character.
Darryl finds that he’s unable to adequately care for himself in Thelma’s absence; Hal even points out during questioning that he’s standing in leftover pizza.
We’ve seen men act as the heroes who thwart rape and assault the would-be rapists (see Untamed Heart [Tony Bill, 1993] and Training Day [Antoine Fuqua, 2001]), but it seems important that in this film, the hero is a woman and a trusted friend who interrupts the crime and actually murders the man attempting to violate Thelma. Their guns–one bought by Darryl to protect his wife when alone at night and the other stolen from a police officer–are clear representations of male power and privilege; however, the women become quite comfortable appropriating these as weapons in dismantling the phallocracy that governs their choices, their bodies, and their realities while on their infamous road trip.
The rape scene takes place during the first stop on their trip as the ladies are set to travel to the mountains for a getaway. When Harlan insists that Thelma get some fresh air after a night of drinking and dancing, he tells her that he won’t hurt her, even after hiking up her dress and slapping her in the face. The level of violence intensifies after she slaps him back, and he bends her over a car and begins to unbuckle his pants. Louise holds a gun to Harlan’s neck as he puts his hands up and allows Thelma to collect herself and stand up. It seems that perhaps Harlan will walk away unscathed and even learn a lesson from the experience. However, he seals his fate when he’s compelled to say, “I shoulda gone ahead and fucked her.” When Louise turns and asks him to repeat himself, he responds, “Suck my cock,” a fitting sentiment to preface Thelma’s phallic gun exploding and hitting him in the chest. We gather throughout the film that something happened to Louise in Texas, and it quickly becomes clear that she was the victim of a rape. Gender-based violence is turned on its head as Louise assumes a position of power, and thus a codified male position. Thelma’s situatedness within this hierarchy is slow to align with that of the hot-tempered Louise, but when she does transition from “feminine” to “feminist,” she admits that she seems to “have a knack for this shit.” Shortly before their deaths, Thelma tells Louise that she’s never felt so awake, alerting us that she’s reached a sort of nirvana amidst the mini liquor bottles and desert heat.
We can appreciate Louise’s sense of humor in this moment of tension: “You let her go, you fuckin’ asshole, or I’ll splatter your ugly face all over this nice car.”
Immediately after the incident, Louise cradles the gun in her hands as the two ride away, as if she’s trying to grasp the power the small pistol carries. The naive Thelma believes that they can safely go to the police and explain that it was self-defense, but Louise offers the reality that “we don’t live in that kind of a world.” Rather, we live in a world that punishes women for attracting men and “asking for it” with our clothing or our smiles. “If you weren’t concerned with having so much fun, we wouldn’t be here right now,” Louise accusingly tells Thelma. Although Louise is the one to shoot and kill Harlan, she inevitably blames the entire incident on Thelma’s good looks and also acts as a surrogate Darryl, which Thelma even articulates early on in the trip. Thelma is almost childlike in her naiveté, which calls for a guardian or a mother to constantly reprimand her and correct her behavior. Louise maintains this role as she protects and guides Thelma for most of the film.
The men in the film seem to get themselves into hot water over the lewd and otherwise disrespectful ways they choose to speak to Thelma and Louise.
So, does Louise successfully avenge Thelma’s assault or does she have her own axe to grind? Is Louise, a killer, any better than Harlan or any other rapist slithering through crowded bars or dark streets? Thelma and Louise offers a feminist catharsis for women viewers, particularly those who are rape survivors, but also for all of us who have been cat-called as perpetual objects of the male gaze. How many of us now fantasize about blowing up a semi because its driver was making lecherous comments or gesturing with his hands or tongue? This film serves as a reminder that we deserve to live our lives in peace, free from harassment, and to stop apologizing for ourselves or assuming that our clothing is an invitation for men to put their hands on us. While Louise makes the decision to repress the memory of her own rape, she actively chooses to avenge the rape of her friend. Although a murderer, Louise is a hero as she likely prevents any rapes Harlan would have committed had she allowed him to live.
It’s gratifying to witness the transition of the pair’s feminine and feminist identities. While Thelma makes the noticeable shift from a bored housewife planning dinner to a badass outlaw with a gun, Louise comes to recognize her companion as an equal and to surrender some of her power before the two fly into the Grand Canyon in a blaze of girl-power glory. Louise identifies her friend’s rape as her own, and unlike Thelma, she is familiar with what some men are capable of in dark parking lots. The dynamic that propels the plot of Thelma and Louise is friendship, even if that entails a sort of religious awakening on the road (Kerouac style), albeit it via gender equality by way of violence and its appropriation. Notice that the women and their actions are met with disdain when they demonstrate traditionally “masculine” behavior, such as anger, aggression, and sarcasm. When Louise initially orders Harlan to stop attacking Thelma, he ignores her; when Thelma finally tells Darryl to go fuck himself, he slams the phone down in disbelief; when the horny trucker discovers that the ladies expect an apology instead of a threesome, he calls them “crazy.” The women’s actions, then, are met with resistance by most of the men they encounter on their travels, with the exceptions of Hal (Harvey Keitel), the kindhearted cop who longs to help the women, and JD, Thelma’s paramour for one rainy night.
JD steals the money that Louise calls their “future” in Mexico but also unknowingly offers a remedy to their money crisis when he gives Thelma some charismatic lessons on how to rob a store at gunpoint.
I would suggest that these actions are not meant so much to heal or cleanse the two of their pain or their own crimes, but to “right a wrong” even if it means sacrificing their freedom; in this way, the women discover a new sense of liberation that transcends the pursuit of them in their beat up old Thunderbird convertible. Toward the end of the film, Thelma shares with Louise that if Harlan had completed his assault against her, people would think that she was “asking for it,” and that she’s sorry it wasn’t her that pulled the trigger. What we can conclude from this exchange is that any course of events post-rape would leave Thelma “ruined” in some way, but she explains that because of her friend, now she’s at least having fun.
Jenny Lapekas has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, ‘Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang,’ have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are, sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives; instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Unlike a lot of other films discussed this week, the girls of Foxfire are not avenging a particular rape, but are instead rebelling against rape culture in many forms: catcalls, description of women by only their physical attributes, slut shaming, rape and molestation, predatory authority figures and the society that allows men and their opinions more power than women.
While rape revenge films are often criticized for using rape for titillation or as a means to justify nudity and graphic violence, the ideas are invoked here to make viewers think.
In these films, one girl is mocked by a teacher for her appearance and has her intelligence demeaned. One girl is groped while another is shamed. Yet another is offered a free typewriter by her uncle in exchange for sex; a fifth is spied on in the shower. During a trial, the defendant’s promiscuity is the most important factor in deciding her guilt. And when one girl returns home after being raped, her mother’s only response is to tell her to clean herself up before her father sees.
Forming a girl gang allows the characters to stop seeing sexual assault as the problem of each individual victim, but as something that effects all of them. When one girl, Rita, thanks the group for helping her, their leader assures her that she isn’t to blame–if Rita wasn’t the victim, it would have been someone else. Women need to band together instead of shaming each other if they have any hope of changing things.
Both films center on a passionate and androgynous leader, named Legs, who mobilizes the girls, first in a series of pranks and acts of rebellion small enough that viewers can cheer them on, then through several dangerous and criminal acts, before culminating in the kidnapping of a wealthy man at gunpoint. Maddy (Hedy Burress), Legs’s closest confidant, observes the events and acts are narrator, chronicling the group’s rise and fall.
The original 1996 film, starring Angelina Jolie as Legs, is clearly a product of the 90s Girl Power movement, a period known for being overly commercialized, but it’s an earnest effort with a female screenwriter, Elizabeth White and director, Annette Haywood-Carter. It’s also an attempt to modernize the novel, about working class 50s teens in Upstate New York, relocating the story to Oregon and dressing it in grunge fashion, with topics for discussion like sexism, female disenfranchisement, parental neglect, and masturbation. However, as a mainstream film, it’s sanitized, more playful than the book and as the girls are middle or upper middle class, the stakes are less dire. Foxfire never becomes a literal gang or a lifestyle, just an episode in their lives, that facilitates their coming of age.
For the remake, director Laurent Cantet restored the novel’s setting and stuck pretty faithfully to the book, attempting to cram in all the causes Foxfire rebels against, including ageism, racism, animal rights, and economic disparity as well as sexism. Lead by a cast of newcomers, Cantet’s film takes a more cautionary tone, as Maddy’s attempt to redeem Foxfire, now remembered only for their criminal acts, by telling their history and their original noble goals.
While Legs in the remake (Raven Adamson) was a classmate of the other girls who they had known for years, in the original, she’s an outsider, a drifter who enters into their lives one day and helps them find their voices. Legs is given a grand entrance, heralded by thunder and followed as she boldly trespasses through the school halls.
Punishing Mr. Buttinger for abusing Rita is the impetuous for Foxfire’s founding
Like a superhero, she arrives to save one of the girls, Rita (Rilo Kiley front-woman Jenny Lewis) who is being bullied by her teacher, Mr. Buttinger, for refusing to dissect a frog. Legs tells the student to “Make him stop,” and it’s a truly revolutionary idea, that a teenage girl could have any power over an adult. Her dream-like entrance and exit through the window, mark her as powerful and unconstrained by society’s rules, she doesn’t go to the school and Mr. Buttinger can’t punish her.
Legs is clearly marked as Other–she’s aggressive, with a leather jacket, heavy boots and swagger. As the camera pans up her body when she’s first introduced, not showing her face for several minutes, it’s clear viewers were meant to think momentarily, that she was a man. It is unclear why she goes by such a strange nickname, one usually thought of as objectifying; perhaps it is an attempt to reclaim something men have called out to her in the street.
Her relationship with Maddy is marked by obvious lesbian subtext, as they frequently flirt, confess their love for each other and share a bed, but her sexuality is never explicitly discussed. It is problematic that the character with the courage to fight against rape culture is the one given traits marked as masculine, while the girls she recruits, are mostly feminine and/or weak. It is also troubling that Legs’s suggested queerness is paired with her hatred of men, two things which are often falsely equated.
Legs enjoys driving the girls in the stolen car
In both cases, the girls are enamored with Legs, who quickly becomes their hero and undisputed leader. In the original, they are all introduced as broad high archetypes, Violet (“the slut”), Goldie (“the druggie”), Rita (“the fat girl”) and Maddy (well-rounded and popular), characterizations which become more three dimensional as the film goes on.
When the other girls learn Mr. Buttinger has been groping Rita’s breasts during detention, they originally hold her responsible. It’s Legs’s influence that makes them realize there is no excuse for Mr. Buttinger’s behavior and no way Rita could deserve his abuse. In the remake, Legs blames Rita only for not fighting back, telling her, “It’s up to you to decide how men are going to treat you.” Rita takes this message to heart, exposing him as sexual predator by painting statements about his attraction to young girls on his car.
In the original, Legs tells the girls that the only way to stop his is to band together. During Rita’s detention, the girls gang up on him, physically assault and threaten him. Rita begins to come out of her shell, finally gaining the confidence to confront her abuser, threatening to castrate him if she ever touches her again. The next day, the girls are called into the principal’s office and suspended, despite their claims of sexual harassment, which are ignored.
The girls perform a candlelit ritual in their headquarters, during which they give each other tattoos
Legs’s idea, that they can fight against abusive men only if they all stick together, but not as individuals, leads them to start Foxfire as their own collective, their own subculture. Before they had banded together, the girls went to the same school and had shared experiences, but cliques kept them segregated. Maddie, from her privileged perspective as a popular girl, looked at someone like Goldie as a sideshow, dismissed Violet as a slut and disdained Rita’s shyness as pathetic, and the cause of her own problems. Later, when they become friends, Goldie is hurt when she notices Maddie’s art project includes an unflattering Polaroid of her, clearly posed as someone to mock.
They begin to gather in an abandoned house in the woods, which they use to make a community and a safe space. Hanging around in the house, they become real friends and partake in typical teenage bonding practices, drinking, dancing, ogling guys, and laughing together. They cement their bond by tattooing each other’s breasts with a small flame logo, marking themselves as part of Foxfire, grouped together for life.
In the remake, the girls rent a house and live together in their own cloistered society as Legs intends to create an institution that would outlast her. The idea of a formal female gang with a manifesto, rules, ritual tattooing, criminal practices and recruitment, is an example of young women adapting masculine rough culture and altering it to suit them. Gangs are typically the province of disenfranchised youth (usually male), those neglected by mainstream society, such as racial minorities and the working class. Foxfire suggests the characters are disenfranchised as women and it is natural for them to act out against the society that oppresses them, as the men around them, in their own gangs, have been doing for years.
Maddy admires her tattoo
In the original film, rape culture is tied to sports culture, as both are posed as masculine spaces men feel women have no right to infringe on nor attempt to police. Their attack on Mr. Buttinger upset a group of jocks who respect him as the coach of their football team and they resent the girls. The boys begin harassing them, visiting their house in the woods and attempting to attack them, eventually trying to rape Maddy. Struggling to escape the jocks, the Foxfire girls steal a car and are arrested for it. At their trial, is implied that the jocks lied and blamed the girls for everything, leading to a “he said, she said” dynamic where the boys’ testimonies are taken more seriously. Legs in sentenced to juvie, while the others are on parole. For trying to dismantle rape culture and save themselves from attack, they are punished and lose Legs, the heart of the group.
There are also girls who help the jocks; one lures Maddy into an ambush, understanding the goal is to rape her, and lies at their trial. Later she gains some redemption when she confesses to the judge. Early on in the remake, the girls in Foxfire are reluctant to let Violet, a beautiful girl all the boys are crazy about, join. They decide Violet is promiscuous because she attracts male attention, without any evidence she returns their interest, and look down on her for it. In the remake, Legs’s mental state begins to deteriorate as she becomes disillusioned with her vision of women helping each other as a community after watching women fighting each other in juvie.
After juvie, both versions of Legs turn to darker, more violent acts. Narrating the remake, Maddy says the committed many crimes against men but most of their were not reported because their male victims were ashamed of having been attacked by girls. The films suggest revenge is acceptable to a certain level, where it’s exposing men who have who they know to be predators or teaching lessons to men who have wronged them, but is wrong once the focus moves away from specific individuals. When Foxfire starts targeting men in general, moving out of the area of defensible grey morality, Legs moves into villainous territory herself.
The Foxfire girls use their members as bait to rob men
Strapped for cash, Foxfire (in the remake) begins to use its most conventionally attractive girls to bait men, luring them into secluded areas and then ambushing them and stealing money. One girl, Violet, finds she can make more by pretending the man tried to rape her and acting afraid until he gives her money to try and comfort her. Though baiting, these girls attempt to turn rape culture on its head and make it work for them. These acts are justified in their eyes as Foxfire begins to operate with the view that all men are rapists deserving punishment, even casting out any girl involved in a relationship as the enemy.
Out of the group in the original film, only one girl, Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) has a dysfunctional home life. In one scene, her father orders her into his car and hits her while her friends watch. Instead of struggling or hitting back as would be expected from the character, Goldie submits. When the girls discover Goldie has been using drugs, Legs goes to her father, demanding money to pay for rehab. When he refuses, though he can clearly afford it, she kidnaps him at gunpoint and ties him up, continuing to pressure him for money. The girls, as both teenagers and girls, would ordinarily be powerless to help Goldie, here, as in many areas of their lives, they find they can only get results through violence. In these scenes, the other girls surround her yelling that she’s gone too far.
In the end, Legs leaves town to escape arrest, as well as the loss of the other girls’ respect. These girls who had previously viewed Legs as a hero, looked at her with disgust and disappointment and admitted to being afraid of her. In the remake, we get some understanding of Legs’s family and background, as her father, an alcoholic, condemns her at her trial and refuses to let her live with him. Conversely, the original leaves Legs’s origins a mystery. She’s clearly damaged and something must have happened to make her, a teenage girl with a criminal record, no place to live, and roaming from town to town. The easiest explanation, is that she may have left home because of her own abuse and it’s easy to speculate that her anger at society, particularly fierce towards Goldie’s father, comes from projecting her own experiences onto their relationship.
Everything begins to go downhill when Legs is released from juvie
Moreover, the 1996 version is framed as a coming of age story, cast as the year Legs came to town, changing everything, making Maddy question her perfect world and then disappeared never to be seen or heard from again- merely an episode in her life. But while the Maddy is central to the remake as its narrator, her observations of Legs and Foxfire’s history form the thrust of the narrative, rather than her own maturation. Both films end with the mystery of Legs’s disappearance and Maddy’s continuing obsession. In the original, Maddy’s decision not to go with Legs when she leaves town is framed as the one decision of her life she has always looked back on, wondering “what if?”
While the original film shows what happens when the leader of a group becomes an extremist or is mentally unstable, the remake suggests the whole group, excluding Maddy who defects, has begun to reject the rules and laws of society. Toward the end, most of the other girls are excited by their efforts at baiting and see Foxfire as one big, dangerous game that allows them to reject the limiting framework they grew up in. For her part, Legs always means well, trying, in the only way she understands, to help her friends and women as a whole.
Both endings are bittersweet. Foxfire disbands and the girls stop fighting for their causes, but they’ve helped some people and made their mark. But Legs is gone and it’s uncertain what ideas viewers are meant to come away with. It’s tricky to judge, as the films are full of feminist ideas and urgings for female empowerment, yet have dark endings where characters are hurt and disgraced. A tagline for the original celebrates the girls’ rebellion and encourages the teenage girl viewer to follow suit: “If you don’t like the rules, Make your own.”
In more light-hearted moments, the girls still have fun together
But what are these films saying about young women who dare to break the rules? That their efforts will succeed unless our leader is unstable? That movements for rape revenge will always become uncontrollable and dangerous or that they’ll succeed only while punishing the guilty, but not when attempting to change the culture?
In the end, what the girls of the Foxfire films have is a strength they might not have found otherwise. That strength and the idea of community are what viewers should remember.
More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family and society.
However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person.
More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, take for instance, Law and Order: SVU, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family, and society.
However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person. This structure also creates distance, so the viewer is less likely to identify with the dead girl and feel true fear and sympathy for experiences.
The exploitation of the her person and body is also seen as evidence of sexism in the crime narrative. As in horror movies where the murders of women are more graphic and garner more screen time then those of men, the dead girl usually suffers extreme sexual violence and disfigurement, which are shot it graphic, loving detail. The crime scene or crime scene photographs are frequently shown and her suffering is discussed at length in near fetishistic tones.
Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of Laura, dead and wrapped in plastic
There is an appeal to the public imagination in the image of a beautiful young woman in peril, particularly a young, white women known to be popular among her peers and viewed as sweetly, saintly, and virginal. The much-loved cult TV show, Twin Peaks, originally centered around the investigation of the murder of beautiful, blue-eyed blonde Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and promotion for the series depended on viewers’ investment in the mystery of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” When The Killing premiered in 2011, its advertisements asking, “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” were clearly influenced by Twin Peaks.
Along with the evocative question, the series was known for two iconic images of Laura, the dead girl, that stand in for the show in popular imagination: the homecoming portrait, which shows her rosy cheeked and smiling, and her dead body, fished out of the water wrapped in plastic, shades of gray and blue. The central importance of the portrait, which hangs at Laura’s high school as well as her family home, was inspired for the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura, where a detective fixates on the portrait of a glamorous murdered ad-exec and falls in love with her through it (luckily, it’s a case of mistaken identity and Laura’s not really dead).
Viewers so latched onto the idea of Laura Palmer, that actress Sheryl Lee, originally brought on to appear in a few scenes in the pilot, made reoccurring appearances in flashbacks as Laura and regular appearances as Laura’s look-a-like cousin Maddie Ferguson, as well as starring in the prequel film after the series ended.
In early episodes of the show, it’s suggested that lead investigator FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has romantic feelings towards her and has a dream/prophetic vision of a seductive Laura, sitting with him in a mysterious red room. At the end of the dream, she whispers in his ear the identity of her killer. Though Cooper forgets what she said upon waking, his eventual memory of her words gives him certainty of her murderer’s identity. A victim of incestuous rape, abuse, and murder at the hands of her father, Leland (with an ancient demonic spirit, BOB, inside him–or something), Laura is allowed the satisfying and cathartic opportunity to name her killer and help to catch him.
In the fantasy of the series, this room is described as a sort of way-station to the afterlife, a refuge between good and evil and a part of the dangerous realm of pure evil, the Black Lodge, that holds onto human souls while demons walk the earth in their bodies, so Cooper’s dream is not in fact a dream, but Laura’s first opportunity to speak for herself. Before her death, she wrote in her secret diary (different from her regular diary) about her dream of this same encounter with Cooper.
After her death, the dead girl’s reputation is often changed according to the flawed Madonna/whore dichotomy and her neighbors, family, and peers come to realize she was not the person they thought she was. In procedurals, boyfriends learn their girlfriends had other lovers, and parents learn their daughters had sex lives. Though it’s rare, sometimes there’s the opposite revelation, as the boyfriend who murdered his girlfriend for cheating learns she was always faithful.
When Laura’s body is found in the series, most people in town know her only as the Homecoming Queen, a model for the perfect American teenage girl. Early on, she shows up in flashbacks and home videos, kidding around with her best friend and smiling lovingly at her boyfriend (himself introduced as the perfect American teenage boy). However, as her murder is investigated, the people of Twin Peaks come to see a darker side of Laura, mired in sex, drugs and a heretofore unknown seedy underbelly of their picturesque little town. As Laura is no longer around, and the abuse she had suffered are originally unknown, her reputation is tarnished in the eyes of many townsfolk and she is unable to give any sort of explanation to the people who would condemn her.
Sheryl Lee also played Laura’s cousin Maddie, who meets a similar fate
The duality of Laura is suggested through the character of dark-haired identical cousin Maddie Ferguson. Maddie is everything Laura was not–innocent, naive and close to her family. While Laura is glamorous and sexual, making coy recordings for her therapist and advertising herself in adult magazines, Maddie is mousy and eager to please. Becoming more like Laura (by ditching her glasses and taking more control of her sexuality) gets Maddie killed as Leland mistakes Maddie for Laura.
Though there are other readings of the duality of Sheryl Lee’s two characters, it is easy to see them as Madonna and whore. Unusually for the trope of identical cousins, where the blonde is commonly presented as good and the brunette as bad, Twin Peaks suggests Maddie is the embodiment of goodness and purity. By contrast, Laura, a victim of rape and abuse, has one foot in darkness and is revealed to have had sex or sexualized dynamics with almost everyone she interacted with.
In addition, Laura questions her own goodness and independently seeks out a therapist to help cope. In her last week alive, she quits her position heading up the Twin Peaks Meals-on-Wheels program, suggesting she has given up on trying to help others. In the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it is clear she feels unworthy of salvation, as she tells Donna she believes the angels have abandoned her and she will burn forever. Later on, she watches as angels disappear from a painting in front of her.
This storyline, though suggestive of the self-loathing felt by abuse victims, makes the unfortunate implication that the abuse Laura has suffered has made her a bad person, or at least lesser than Maddie.
Laura realizes she is not a bad person when an angel appears to her in the red room after her death
The film allows Laura to emerge on the other side, in the Black Lodge’s mysterious red room, to see her own angel waiting for her. It ends with her smiling and laughing, assured that being abused did not “corrupt” her or make her undeserving of love, a great relief after watching her suffering throughout the TV series and film.
Focusing on the last week of Laura’s life with her as the main character, Fire Walk With Me has dark undertones of hagiography, the story of the life of a saint, as it revels in her suffering, allowing it to elevate her and cast her as a hero for enduring. It also gives her a chance to speak and show viewers who she was in her private moments, reconciling the two opposing views of her as both a saintly meals-on-wheels volunteer and cocaine-addicted prostitute into a complete person.
Perhaps what endears viewers to the dead girl as a character is our culture’s glorification of female victims, specifically for being tragic and fragile. In an essay at Rookie, Sady Doyle writes, “We love Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic and bright blue, tortured and murdered just as surely as good St. Dymphna.” Accordingly, many dramatic teenage girls look to women like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe as heroes, not for their achievements but for the glamor and depths they see as going along with pain.
However, the film can also be criticized for its unflinching portrayal of the graphic violence visited on Laura and her friend Ronette Pulaski. They are shown tied up, screaming and bleeding, while they are brutalized for extended sequences. At one point, Laura is forced to look at her face in a mirror while she is raped, suggesting her abuser wants to make it impossible for her to pretend to be anywhere else or that this is not happening to her.
In her last moments, Laura is forced to watch her own abuse
There are a lot of reasons fans of the series disliked Fire Walk With Me; most wanted more time with the kooky inhabitants of Twin Peaks and missed its quirky moments. The film is much darker and more violent then the series and almost entirely lacking in comedy. Though it has David Lynch’s trademark surreal touches, the story at its heart is also much more real. The film forces viewers to try to understand the horror Laura has gone through as a victim of incest and abuse, how the Palmer house has become her own private hell and she has watched her death draw nearer, sure it would come for her soon. With this in mind, the film is harrowing and difficult to watch, but its existence is integral to the understanding of Laura’s character as a developed character and complex human being. The release of a book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, intended to be the character’s diary discovered on the show, has a similar effect. It was a best seller, particularly remembered among people who were teenage girls at the time of its release.
Fire Walk with Me is often hard to watch due to Laura’s suffering at the hands of her father
The dead girl continues to be popular figure in crime narratives, though some more recent examples have tried to give her a voice in interesting ways. In the TV procedural Cold Case, the murdered character in each episode was shown in flashbacks throughout the episode, following him/her right until the moment of the murder. However, these flashbacks, and those on several other procedurals with similar narrative styles, are the memories of living characters, filtered through their perception of the events, rather than the way things were experienced by the victim. At the end of each Cold Case episode, the dead character’s ghost appears to watch their loved ones, allowing them a slight voice in the narrative, as if set free by the discovery of the killer.
The dead girl’s ghost hovering around postmortem and giving advice on the investigation is a storyline that’s been used on almost every fantasy series, from Buffy to Charmed. Unlike these stories, where the existence of something supernatural is undisputed, crime narratives often use the ghostly figure of the dead girl to suggest the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. In the first season of Veronica Mars, the titular character’s (Kristen Bell) murdered best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), often appears to her. Like Laura Palmer, Lilly managed to become one of show’s most beloved and enigmatic characters with minimal screen time.
Lilly appears to Veronica in the clothes she was wearing when she died, still bleeding from her head wound
Lilly appears to Veronica to comment on how much she has changed since Lilly’s death, becoming tougher and wiser and to give cryptic hints. In one scene, Veronica sees her out of the corner of her eye, running around the Kane house and leading Veronica to the scene of the crime.
She appears in several flashbacks and at the end of many episodes, in Veronica’s imagining of the murder taking place as she entertains new suspects.
Her appearance is also used as a reward for Veronica after she finally solves Lilly’s murder at the end of the season, when she imagines herself in paradise, lying in a pool full of flowers with Lilly. Lilly’s final appearance is in Veronica’s dream at the end of season 2, as the marker of what Veronica’s life could have been like if she wasn’t murdered. The scene doesn’t successfully give Lilly as voice as it focuses on how Veronica would have been different, not on the tragedy of what Lilly would have been able to experience if she had lived and will now never be able to.
Veronica imagines Lilly set free by the arrest of her killer, allowed to relax in paradise
The posthumous narrator is a rare and interesting devices, used most memorably in American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard, where murdered characters look back on their lives. As it’s already a rare concept, a posthumous female narrator is even more rare. A notable example, The Lovely Bones, focuses on Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)’s family trying to rebuild after her death, rather than the search for her killer. Her murderer is not caught, either with her ghostly help or without, but is punished only by his own accidental death.
The dead girl is an interesting figure in the landscape of crime fiction–one who can easily become a victim or a caricature. Experiments with flashbacks, fantasy, dreamworlds, and narration are intriguing ways to give her a voice and return some humanity to her and the real life victims she mirrors.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
Tip to showrunners: WE KNOW you can kill anyone off. We’ve been watching TV the last ten years. It is not that shocking anymore, and not even remotely surprising when it is a woman or person of color on the chopping block. Some cast members are more expendable than others, and it’s easy to guess who you think they are. Please stop sacrificing representation on the altar of high drama.
Hettienne Park as Beverly Katz
[Spoilers for all the aired episodes of Hannibal ahoy! Yar!]
Hannibal is a show about serial killers, so it’s no shock there’s a high body count. And it isn’t the usual death parade of butchered women that crime thrillers often present. Sady Doyle wrote that Hannibal “takes on the serial-killer cop procedural—one of the most irredeemably woman-hating genres on TV—from a feminist perspective.” Crime shows so often depict women as victims, and victims as bodies. (I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of struggling actresses getting the “break” of playing a cold, naked corpse on a medical examiner’s table, and their families excitedly tuning in to see her silently horizontal in blue-gray makeup, functioning essentially as a prop.)
Hannibal has flipped this archetype. The vast majority of the nameless victims, often naked, usually incorporated into inventively macabre art installations, have been men.
Equal-opportunity artful display of dead bodies.
But women are certainly not spared from violence on this gruesome show: the twist is that Hannibal‘s female victims have mostly been strongly developed as characters before being dispatched. The most devastating deaths on the show have all been women: last season’s long-time-coming murder of Abigail Hobbes, perhaps the only person we’ve seen Hannibal kill with any reluctance, and this season’s huge loss of FBI Agent Beverly Katz.
Even the one-off characters we’ve seen murdered (or at least victimized) have been given complex characterization over the course of their episode, for example the Cotard delusion-suffering Georgia Madchen (Ellen Muth), or Anna Chulmsky’s Clarice Starling stand-in Miriam Lass (recently revealed to be alive, although deeply damaged).
Kacey Rohl as Abigail Hobbs
Because the female victims on Hannibal are well-written, sympathetic, and interesting, the audience grieves for them. They are not merely dramatic beats to generate manpain for the dude heroes. (Will Graham nevertheless suffers epic amounts of manpain. This is his design.)
Hannibal clearly takes the murder of women seriously, and uses it as a source of dramatic pathos, not titillation. But an unfortunate consequence of this pattern is that midway through the second season, only one female character in the regular cast remains: Caroline Dhavernas’s Alana Bloom. And she’s a love interest for both Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter (which is not to say she’s been weakly characterized, but does seem to explain her survival).
Last woman standing: Alana Bloom
Hannibal is also running low on women in the recurring cast. Gillian Anderson’s Bedelia Du Maurier exited early in the second season, and the amoral journalist Freddie Lounds (one of several male characters from Thomas Harris’s novels that series developer Bryan Fuller rewrote as female) has only made brief appearances in two episodes this year.
The loss of Hettienne Park as Beverly Katz is particularly devastating, and not only because she was one of the precious stereotype-defying women of color on network TV. Katz’s sardonic sense of humor provided some much-needed comic relief, and her warm friendship with Will was perhaps one of the only psychologically sound relationships presented in the entire series.
Will Graham and Beverly Katz
And yes, it is immensely frustrating that when the powers that be decide someone important “needs to die” to up the stakes or prove “anyone is expendable” for that someone to be, yet again, a woman of color. (Tip to showrunners: WE KNOW you can kill anyone off. We’ve been watching TV the last ten years. It is not that shocking anymore, and not even remotely surprising when it is a woman or person of color on the chopping block. Some cast members are more expendable than others, and it’s easy to guess who you think they are. Please stop sacrificing representation on the altar of high drama.)
So while Hannibal has a refreshingly compassionate narrative approach to the murder of women (which is a phrase I never imagined I’d write), they’ve got to cool it with killing off the ladies in the cast. And they need to replenish the ranks with more well-crafted female characters, and they’re going to have to stay alive for a while. Because right now we’ve got too many dicks on the dance floor.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer who is now afraid of mushrooms in the wild.
Overall I thought the episode was excellent and I can’t wait to see the next one. One of my favourite things about ‘GoT’ is theorising about who might make what moves next.
This is a recap therefore there are ALL THE SPOILERS
Please note that I recap from the point of view of not having read most of the books.
The episode The Lion and the Rose opens with something that has sadly become a Game of Thrones staple – gratuitous violence against women to prove just how terrible a male character is. It’s not like they spent half of last season showing us just how terrible that character is you know, since we have been treated to him flaying and castrating someone. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Now you have to watch as Ramsay and one of his ladies, Myranda hunt a girl with dogs and arrows. The scene was gross and gratuitous and ends with the girl being ripped apart by dogs off screen. It could be argued that the scene serves to illustrate that Ramsay is not the only sick and twisted one in the Bolton household, but I am unconvinced.
Lord Bolton is similarly unimpressed with Ramsay’s sadistic tendencies and makes no bones about telling him so indicating that Theon was more valuable whole as a hostage. He puts Ramsay back in his place as a bastard reminding him that is name is Snow, not Bolton and that he has taken liberties he was not entitled to. However Lord Bolton sees things a little differently after Ramsay displays the unhesitating obedience of the thing called Reek that was formerly Theon Greyjoy by having him shave him – giving Reek ample opportunity to kill him, something Reek cannot do even when he finds out about the murder of Robb Stark. Bolton is impressed with the information Ramsay has managed to glean from Reek and gives him the opportunity to redeem himself by riding out to capture a vital Northern base Mount Cailin. Also of note is the man who chopped of Jaime Lannister’s hand, Locke is quite chummy with Ramsay.
Speaking of said Lannister, Jaime is unsurprisingly having trouble adjusting to not being the warrior he once was. It is nice to see a depiction of a character dealing with a sudden disability in a realistic way. Too often all we see in pop culture is the unrelenting positivity and determination of the newly disabled to succeed so that they can be inspirations to all of us currently able bodied folk. Depression is a normal reaction to suddenly having to figure out how to work with the body you have rather than the one you used to and it is really nice to see that on a mainstream television show. I also thought it was interesting how he says that he can fight with his left hand but that his instincts as a swordsman are all off with it, illustrating that rehabilitation is about more than just learning how to use the left hand in the way he used the right. .Jaime believes his reputation as Kingslayer puts him at risk in King’s Landing if he cannot defend himself the way he was once able to so Tyrion lends him Bronn to help him train to be as proficient with his left hand as he once was with his right.
Tyrion is only at the beginning of what will turn out to be a really really bad day. Varys “The Spider” informs him that Shae’s comings and goings from his rooms have been spotted and that Tywin has promised to behead the next whore he finds him with. Tyrion comes to the grim realisation that he can no longer protect Shae in King’s Landing. His speech to her ending their relationship, to convince her to get on the ship he has prepared to take her to the safety of a comfortable life is a piece of masterful acting by Peter Dinklage. It captures his grim determination to ensure Shae thinks he is as vile as possible to ensure that she will leave while simultaneously being unable to hide the love for her that seeps out from behind his eyes. We never actually see Shae leave, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns up again although Bronn swears to Tyrion that she has definitely departed.
Today is the wedding of Joffrey to Margaery Tyrell and that means another strenuous social occasion for the more marginalised members of the Lannister household. Joffrey continues to needle Sansa wherever possible with references to the murder of her father and brother. The Pièce de résistance is a mock war of the seven kingdoms by a theatre troupe made up of little people that manages to insult not just Tyrion and Sansa but anyone who was ever fond of Renly Baratheon. Tyrion’s continued refusal to play ball goads Joffrey into ever increasing demonstrations of his superiority, the last of which is to force Tyrion to act as his cupbearer and bring him a glass of wine. This is apparently a fatal mistake as not long after Joffrey expires, bleeding from the eyeballs and choking. It is quite a satisfying death for a character that has been rather one dimensionally vile. The culprit may not have been poisoned wine but the wedding pie which happened to have some dead doves in it. Or maybe it had something to do with the quest for the perfect necklace for the bride to be to wear. Such a juicy mystery! At the moment my money is on Lady Olenna, she is sufficiently crafty and well connected to pull of such a plot. The accusation that fell upon Tyrion also provided the opportunity to quietly spirit away Sansa.
Goodbye, we won’t miss you
Aside from the main event of the wedding there were some interesting side notes. Lady Olenna and Tywin Lannister have a conversation that brushes on a number of things 1) The Tyrells are very wealthy and 2) that the Kingdom is still in debt to the iron bank which is likely to come a calling soon. I cannot get enough of Lady Olenna; she is sharp, hilarious and always always gives as good as she gets.
Cersei Lannister, the woman who nearly had it all, what most woman in Westeros can apparently only dream of, real power over her own life and the lives of others, has watched it all slip from her fingers before it was even quite hers. Jaime is no longer the man she once loved although she will probably engineer the demise of any woman who goes near him. Her son who she hoped to influence turned out to be a socio-path and instead of marrying the biddable Sansa he will take the formidable Margaery Tyrell as his wife. She is reduced to enforcing her will on Maester Pycelle to have the left-over food from the wedding fed to the dogs instead of the poor to assuage her growing fears regarding the loss of her position as Queen Regent. She and Oberyn Martell also engage in some extremely cutting banter that reminds us of the cultural differences between the Dorinish and the fact that her only daughter is in the keeping of the Dornish who luckily frown upon the rape and murder of innocents as much as they here in King’s Landing look down upon the low born.
Elsewhere it is revealed that Bran can move in out of his wolf, Summer’s consciousness at will and that he must go North. He has a vision that seems to imply that his powers are connected to the weirwood heart trees in the Godswoods.
Overall I thought the episode was excellent and I can’t wait to see the next one. One of my favourite things about GoT is theorising about who might make what moves next. At this point anything could happen. I expect the Tyrells will endeavour to secure their position and an alliance with the Martells seems like it could be an option. It has not escaped my attention that the show has killed off it’s most horrible character only to replace him with someone perhaps even more terrible in Ramsay Snow. I am also not very hopeful that Tyrion will survive the aftermath of Joffrey’s death as usually as the show giveth it taketh away.
Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.
‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The titular lovers here are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.
The film poster for Only Lovers Left Alive
Only Lovers Left Alive is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The story spins out in an intoxicating swirl of music and high-culture; at the centre of it, a couple who can’t live without each other but don’t live together any longer. The titular lovers are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.
The film takes ideas we’ve seen in films like Interview with a Vampire , Let The Right One In and Byzantium, and adds commentary on our modern world. What would an elegant immortal being who’s seen it all think of our quick consumer culture and digital devices that allow us to feel to connected to people continents away.
Plus, answers to the question many have wondered. What would vampires think of iPhones? Of Techno-music and videos on Youtube?
Sure to be a cult fav, Only Lovers Left Alive is dark and decadent, saturated by haunting rock music and an unshakeable air of impending danger. Indie-hero Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this vampire tale, pumped full of wry, intelligent humor and some delightfully silly historical references with a stylized production as rich and decadent as it’s story. The Palm d’Or nominated film chronicles the reunion Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), beautiful vampires who have been lovers for centuries and married several times. Recently, they have been living apart: him in a crumbling house on the outskirts of Detroit, her, swathed in silks in Tangiers.
A picture taken of Adam and Eve the third time they got married. Eve remarks: “We looked so young”
Adam is your basic emo-rocker. He’s got the long, unwashed hair, shirts unbuttoned to his navel and the distaste selling out, but underneath, he has the face and sickly-sexual comportment of a romantic poet. Isolated in a town where no one seems to live anymore, he spends his days playing guitar and composing music he isn’t ready to show anyone. He only leaves his home to procure blood for a local hospital, where he struggles to control his thirst around bleeding patients. He relies on Ian (Anton Yelchin) to do errands, bringing him instruments and keeping the fans away. As the story begins, he is considering killing himself and asks Ian to bring him a wooden bullet.
Meanwhile, Eve is an ultra-sophisticated vaguely European jet-setter, drawn to exotic locals and excited by life. While Adam has his music, Eve has literature. In a scene any book lover would adore, she packs suitcases full of books for a visit to Detroit. She gazes over the texts, some medieval with woodcut illustrations, some in ancient languages, some modern, her faces enraptured at the beauty she sees. Her close confidant is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, he keeps a picture of the bard on his wall to throw knives at.
It’s hard to imagine better actors for the lead roles. Swinton and Hiddleston both appear uncanny and otherworldly, in appearance, in the way they carry themselves and in the way they find they inhabit the film’s world, that they seem like members of some unknown species that includes only each other. Swinton in particular has never looks less human, she wanders around Tangiers like some strange white unicorn trying to take on human form.
It is perhaps too on the nose that they are Adam and Eve, but the names highlight the connection between them. They have a mystical connection that draw them to each other, highlighted by Adam playing guitar in Detroit while Eve dances in Tangiers as if she can hear it. Though they are not the first man and woman, through history they seem to be the only couple that always endures, their relationship only thing that will live on as empires come and go.
Adam and Eve look like an ordinary couple, happy to be together
Adam and Eve are well-developed, each with their own separate but intertwining lives, passions and histories. They seem remarkably real for centuries old vampires, You can easily imagine them roaming around in the dark corners of a dying city. Though they live separate lives much of time, there is a magnetism that pulls them together when they reunite, seeming as if they each want to consume the other, breathe in their air and connect by running their hands along each other’s bodies just to experiences and remember each other. Their intimacy is tasteful and personal, suggesting that on top of sexual attraction, they just want to be near each other and as content to lie beside each other nude as they are to play chess together and eat blood popsicles.
It’s a very romantic tale, both in the modern sense and in poetic tradition. For all his protests, Adam is a romantic hero, lost in a desolate wasteland that mirrors the ravages of his soul. He has isolated himself in the dying city of Detroit, whose loss of the auto industry has made it a virtual ghost town. When Eve visits, he takes her on a tour of its wilderness, showing her where people used to live, taking her to an old gilded theatre falling into ruins. At home, his wall is covered in photographs and portraits of the dead luminaries he has known, so he can never forgot the temporary nature of human life, passing him by.
He is disillusioned with musicians and his old heroes, the scientists, dead and destroyed by the cultures around them. He sees science as destroying human lives, contaminating water with chemicals and blood with diseases and long ago stopped considering himself part of this humanity. He calls humans zombies and decides he can’t be around them anymore, disgusted by their fears of their own imaginations.
Eve is the light to Adam’s darkness, all in white while he’s always in black, yet remains a realistic character because of implied darkness of her own. Swinton plays Eve like an ethereal vision who can’t escape the weight on her shoulders, she always seems struggling to stay afloat. It is this weight and her passionate love for culture, the books she reads through while packing, the Shakespeare volume she sighs after finishing and the rapturous dancing and yen to explore, that keeps her from being a mere servant to Adam’s moods. Eve is so well in synch with the world, that she has slight psychic senses, able to intuit the age of a guitar just by touching it and maintaining a deep connection to the moon. She believes in living and experiencing as much as possible of each era that passes by. THough she is implied to be older than Adam, she is still able to appreciate lie and wax poetic about the lights and color, the dancing and friendship that are all part of the experience.
From her point of view, Adam’s depression is a waste, so she devotes herself to bringing him back into the world, reassuring him that even if the world is destroyed for humans, they’ll still be around. She resents that he treats her like a part in his story, a means to the end, rather than a real person to rely on when in times of need. She feels taken for granted like, he sees her as another one of the transitory zombies who will come into his life and leave it. Despite the specific references to thing like immortality, it’s not unlike the typical conversation between an ordinary couple in any other movies. The supernatural elements added to what is essentially a woman trying to help her depressed partner, serve to make the story larger in scope, more evocative of gothic conventions and tortured love and dangerous.
Adam examines a guitar, showcasing his passion for music
Jarmusch skillfully integrates modern technology into their ageless world experienced as just another culture’s momentary trends. He also includes references to both modern pop culture and ancient history without either seeming shoehorned in. Eve is as taken in with Jack White and David Foster Wallace as Mary Shelley and Marlowe’s ghostwritten Shakespeare plays, while Adam’s doctor disguise includes name tags like “ Dr. Faust ” and “ Dr. Caligari”.
Eve notes all the things she has been through and survived, the different cultures that seemed dangerous that she has watched die around her. She considers modern times no different, an age that any other, with its transitory values that will end and tries to enjoy our technology as part of the experience of this time and place. While Adam uses retro pieces of equipment and hooks his phone up to an ancient TV to talk, Eve is comfortable speaking on her iPhone’s Facetime and interacting with the outside world to make travel arrangements for the pair.
For all his speeches denigrating humanity, Adam has all too human concerns. He is attached to his possessions and secretive about his music, worried about it getting out before it’s ready. As a rock musician, his entire lifestyle and tortured-rocker identity is supported by human fans, ones who his complains about and just wants to leave him alone. While ethereal Eve believes in traveling light and replacing anything tangible, Adam is of the world and tied to his possessions.
After feeding on Ian, Ava’s teeth are extended, making her look monstrous
About midway through and after a lot of anticipation, as Adam, Eve and Marlowe all had dreams about her, Eve’s sister Ava (a spacey-fairy Mia Wasikowska) arrives at Adam’s house decked out like a 60s groupie. Party girl Ava is invasive and impolite, entering uninvited, forcing her way into their dreams and into their house and to Adam’s annoyance, listening to his music without permission. There is a genuine big brother-little sister relationship between Ava and Adam, and as old as she is, she’s a teenager out to have fun, even if it means intruding on an important moment between the couple. She bounces around, jumping on the bed where the couple is sleeping, as if she is their child.
In addition, Ava is an even stronger force than Eve at drawing Adam out of himself. In one scene, Ava is enjoying a TV show that depicts Dracula dancing on psychedelic backdrops. While Eve comes and watches it with her, Adam, perpetually brooding turns off the TV and spoils their fun. In one hilarious moment, the women try to get Adam to go to a club with them. Though Adam insists he is not going to go, the next scene shows the three vamps in dark sunglasses at a hipster bar. Though meant as a joke here, his brooding can become unintentionally humorous at times.
After the night out, Ava bites Ian, killing him and destroying much of Adam’s prized possessions. Ava’s feeding off Ian is played as a clear metaphor for sex, based on the language she uses: “I didn’t mean to do it, but he was so cute. I couldn’t help myself.” It’s suggested that Ava is wild and unable to control her sexuality, and with that it mind it’s a little uncomfortable that she is berated for it. Unlike Adam and Eve, who have figured out ways of constraint, subsisting through hospitals and Marlowe’s connections, she refuses to live by a set of rules and is punished for it when Adam kicks her out of the house.
Scenes of the vampires drinking blood are shot similarly to how scenes of drug use are often filmed, with characters rising in the air and come back down, sighs of euphoria on their faces. This comparison makes a lot of sense within the film as the characters appear perpetually strung out, floating around their environs.
Eve enjoys a dose of blood, drugged by the drink
There’s something dream-like and hazy about the film, like the domestic drama at its core, the basic story of a depressed man and his bon vivant wife visited by her annoying sister at an inconvenient time that causes them to reassess their relationship, is filtered through the mind of someone on a bender. Blood and gore function as necessary ephemeral to a vampire tale, but are never fetishized or allowed to become too much of a focus. The film’s end utilizes feeding to solidify their bond as a couple. In the only real horror shot of the film, we see a close-up of Eve with her fangs full extended and her eyes widening, reminding us that these people are monsters.
I can see how someone might dislike the film’s pacing, as it is often slow and full of silences. Short scenes of dialogue are broken up by what seem like music videos, sequences of actors dancing, driving, pacing, wandering around the city, drinking blood and having sex, while Adam’s curls around them. But it works well, for the hazy, hallucinatory tone of the story, more about characters and feelings than plot. Silences and musical scenes give the characters time to breathe and interact on a deeper level than they could easily put into words, making them feel more alive and complete.
However, there is a certain amount of regression in the relationship between Adam and Eve, who often feel like hipster teenagers looking with distain at everyone who isn’t as cool as they are. They think music sounds best on records, refer to everyone else as zombies and have only ever been friends with people who’s names we know from out history books. At times, their namedropping can begin to feel incessant. I suppose it wouldn’t make an interesting story, but why does every immortal character in fiction travel through the important moments in history like Forest Gump?
All put together for a night out, the lovers are glamorous and ethereal
Strangely, there’s no very much that happens in Only Lovers Left Alive. The only real conflict is Adam’s depression and his contempt for the people around them, who we rarely see. The characters’ fear of contaminated blood, previously a mere quirk of their universe, does become a real conflict, but only toward the end, when they is not much time left to explore it. After much warning that Ava’s going to come and something terrible will happen, she visits for a couple night, kills Ian and is kicked out, never to be see again. Adam and Eve panic about how difficult it will be to hide the body, but accomplish the task with ease and are never caught nor in any danger. Marlowe appears only to impart wisdom, gripe about Shakespeare and die (perhaps in poor taste) of AIDS or some other blood borne disease. There’s no giant battle, no mysterious enemy lurking in the shadows, no finagling their way around the cops and keeping their secret. Instead, it’s a lovely atmospheric meditation on romance, the passing of time, and the impermanence of cultures.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, ‘Perfect Sisters’ isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Based on a notorious Canadian case where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other.
It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, Perfect Sisters isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Sandra and Beth rely on each other for comfort and reassurance
Based on a notorious Canadian case , where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other. These girls have faced a difficult childhood, forced to take care of their younger brother and Linda (Mira Sorvino), their depressed alcoholic mother; they see each other as their one constant. As Sandra says, “It was always me and my sister against the big bad world.”
Until the murder begins to unravel them, the sisters have an appealing symbiosis. They share a made-up language, shared fantasies and Beth knows to corroborate Sandra’s lies unprompted. For their shared point of view on the events, the girls make one singular person, constantly clinging to each other. Sandra also acts as Beth’s mother, holding her when she’s scared at night and fighting off Linda’s boyfriend Bowman (James Russo) when he attempts to attack her. Though they both have love interests, their primary bond is with each other.
Used to moving around when Linda loses jobs and to cramped apartments with roaches, they’ve learned to make the best of it with their rituals of setting up their shared bedroom. They’re quite skilled at interior design, arranging their possessions to mimic faded wealth and glamor, the private castle of two princesses trapped by their mother’s demons.
The girls make the best of their situation by decorating their room, making it into a refuge
The film is reminiscent of Heavenly Creatures–two girls who share a secret world that no one else can understand. As in that movie, also the true story of a murder committed by teenage girls, their fantasies bleed into reality as their lives grow bleaker, becoming more colorful and increasingly violent.
Perfect Sisters has been criticized by people familiar with the case, such as Bob Mitchell, the reporter who wrote The Class Project , the true crime book it’s based on, for playing down greed as a motive, instead suggesting the girls are driven to murder by their difficult circumstances.
Director Stanley M. Brooks has said his aim in the film was to show the sisters as sympathetic characters, not evil or sociopathic, but immature young women who make made bad decisions. He attempted to be accurate to the real events and says he fictionalized almost nothing about the case. Whatever the truth is, this approach is more cinematic, giving viewers likable (to a point) characters and room for discussion over their level of awareness of their actions and the nature of evil.
As in most true crime movies, viewers know going in both that the girls’ mother will be murdered and that they are guilty. The murder is not a shocking climax that has viewers on the edge of their seats and there is no real mystery or suspense, as the these’s never any doubt of the perpetrator. Brooks’ decision to challenge the audience to sympathize with girls we know will become killers is one that adds an intriguing element to the film, each bit of the girls’ inner lives, the minutia of teenage girlhood and idle lunchroom gossip is weighed against the knowledge of viciousness they are capable of.
Before school starts, the sisters give themselves makeovers, each attempting to be someone new and more desirable this year
It’s startling to watch the squeaky clean child stars of Little Miss Sunshine (Breslin) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Henley) move in darker, adult fare, playing the matricidal “bath-tub girls.” Automatically, the audience’s sympathies are aligned with these familiar faces we’re used to seeing as adorable children who believe in magic and fairness.
Here, they’re morbid (in one scene, Sandra is distracted from a kiss by the sight of a dead bird) and jaded. Still, they’re good girls with perfect disciplinary records and honor roll grades. Over the summer, they’ve each reinvented themselves. Beth dyes her hair matte black and wears heavy eye make-up to attract the gothic romance of her dreams, while Sandra yearns to be popular and lose her goody-goody rep. She makes up rumors about herself to get attention, strangely they are the type of things most girls would try to cover up. Sandra wants to be a bad girls, desirable and dangerous, so she tells everyone she’s pregnant by her therapist.
They’re used to their mother’s addiction and they’ve been dealing with it for a long time, propping her up, shuttling her through their routines and taking on her responsibilities. There are several hints that the girls and their brother have experienced earlier traumas because of their mother and her string of abusive boyfriends.
When Linda begins dating Bowman, a wealthy man who can support them, she puts up with beatings and cruelty, as well as his enabling of her addiction into a worse state than the girls can remember it ever being. They reach their breaking point when she does nothing to help them when Bowman hits their brother and begins to make sexual advances towards Beth.
It’s suggested that her alcoholism and refusal to leave her abusive boyfriend, even when he turns on her children, stems from low self worth. She doesn’t feel her life matters, so she allows Bowman to beat her. The girls have dealt with this situation so many times before that they are disturbingly able to write off their mother’s life. To their minds, she’s given it up already. They’d be fine to leave her to destroy herself, but as minors who depend on her, if she goes down, she takes them with her.
Together, the sisters imagine a perfect mother who will do anything to protect them
To cope, Sandra and Beth imagine their perfect mother, a vision they both interact with. Their perfect mother is impeccable groomed and shines with a halo of light and offers to make cookies and brush their hair. In their fantasies, she’s always there with to take care of them and provide comfort, something they have to find in each other instead. In reality, Linda is embarrassing. She tries to be her daughters’ friend and jokes around with their friends. At a party in their apartment, she gets drunk and babbles sexual things while their guests laugh at her.
When Sandra is called upon to be the adult of the family and attend her brother’s parent-teacher conference, she wears the same outfit as their perfect mother wears in their fantasies. Dressed in these clothes, Sandra clearly resembles Linda. She takes on her maternal responsibilities, using this perfect image of Linda as a role model and fixation on remaining in control to create as much distance as she can between her and her mother’s embarrassing weakness. Long after Beth has given up on her, Sandra continues to make excuses for Linda and try to understand her. In the wake of the murder, her prized control dissolves and Sandra repeats her mother’s self destructive mistakes, drinking and flirting and sharing her story with anyone who’ll listen. Beth becomes ashamed of her, in one scene saying, “You remind me of Mom.”
Before deciding to kill her, they attempt to find other ways to save themselves. They appeal to both their father and their wealthy aunt, asking to live with them but are denied. The girls quickly lose their faith in social services as they’re told no one can help them until there has been serious abuse. Beth speaks the truth about the cycle of trauma, “By the time they do anything, I’ll be the alcoholic neglecting my kids.” Through this frenzied attempts, Bowman’s threat of rape is treated as an inevitability. It’s a truly terrifying situation, sooner or later, they suppose, Beth will be vulnerable and alone. They have to do something before that happens.
Linda leans on her daughters, forcing them to take care of her even when they need her to take care of them
Though we see them trying to get out of their situation by finding a new place to live, the judge at their sentencing later in the film, rightly points out that there are teenagers who have been in much worse situations and not murdered anyone. After all, Sandra is a senior, soon she’d be an adult capable of living alone. This suggests that they are unwilling to do something hard, like work multiple jobs and live on minimum wage to support themselves. Their ideal situations are either to live on their own with an insurance payout or be taken in by their wealthy aunt.
Perfect Sisters is not afraid to show the cruelty of these girls. They are able to causally plot their mother’s murder, laughing about it with their friends, enthusiastically speculating about the freedom that will be available to them, chatting online and researching the pros and cons of different methods. Planning the murder takes on no more weight than speculating who’s dating who or what’ll be on the next math test. In one scene, the girls form an official “murder club” and gather in a school classroom writing ideas on the board. In another, the group gathers at the sisters’ home and practice attacking each other. It’s never entirely clear if their friends realize plotting the murder is more than just a game for the sisters.
In a darkly comic montage, the sisters crowd around a computer with their friends and watch their mother die over and over again in different scenarios. Part reality TV viewers, part judges scoring a performance, they watch and laugh as their mother is strangled and suffocated, pushed down the stairs and set on fire. In the end, they decide drowning will be quick, easy to make look like an accident, and it’d get the biggest insurance payout.
The murder itself creates a rift between them, when Beth leaves the bathroom while Sandra holds their mother’s head underwater. It also begins to reveal, for the first time, the fundamental difference between the girls, as shown by how they cope. While Sandra immediately panics and appears to regret what she’s done, Beth cries on cue as she calls 911, a smile on her face.
Sandra is crippled by her guilt, haunted by the memory of her mother face under the water
The knowledge of what they did hovers as an open secret through their high school and they reach a higher social status. Some classmates act like they are celebrities, having them pose for pictures, as the stroll down the hallway, while other gawk and retreat, afraid. The murder was so well planned that it seems like they would have gotten away with it if they weren’t gossipy, boy crazy and immature- basically if they weren’t teenage girls.
The last act of Perfect Sisters forms an intriguing portrait of how differently two people react to one event. Beth grows cold and introverted, while Sandra externalizes her guilt, partying and basking in her celebrity. She becomes the sloppy mess everyone secretly laughs at at parties, confessing the murder to anyone who’ll listen. The boy next door type who has loved her for years, biding his time, finally gives up on her and disgusted by what he sees as her lack of remorse, wears a wire to secure her confession.
Of course, they’re convicted and sentenced to jail time, but that’s not the real tragedy in the sisters’ eyes. In the end, they’re literally ripped apart, kicking and screaming by security officers and forbidden from communicating with each other for the duration of their sentences. In trying to save themselves, they each lost the one person who made them feel whole. Both girls are now released and attending college, and due to Canadian law regarding young offenders, their identities are protected (their names were changed for the film).
The girls only realize the gravity of their actions when they are found guilty and forbidden to see each other
In the last sequence, we are shown the girls as children changing in their teenage selves, as onscreen text explains their fates. This suggests the tragedy of their transformation from innocent children into convicted killers.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
You wouldn’t be entirely mistaken to assume ‘Barefoot’ is a light-hearted romcom centering on a free-spirited hippie who doesn’t like to wear shoes, instead of the story of a naive mental patient falling in love with an inveterate womanizer and gambler. The former certainly seems to be what the movie is trying to be.
‘Barefoot’ is emotionally manipulative, full of unchecked exploitation, sexism and ableism and worst of all, portrays a woman who supposedly has severe mental illness as something akin to a fairy tale princess.
You wouldn’t be entirely mistaken to assume Barefoot is a light-hearted romcom centering on a free-spirited hippie who doesn’t like to wear shoes, instead of the story of a naive mental patient falling in love with an inveterate womanizer and gambler. The former certainly seems to be what the movie is trying to be.
Jay falls for Daisy, enchanted by her unique view of the world
Directed by Andrew Fleming (of The Craft ) and adapted from the 2005 German film, Barfuss, Barefoot is emotionally manipulative, full of unchecked exploitation, sexism and ableism and worst of all, portrays a woman who supposedly has severe mental illness as something akin to a fairy tale princess. As Daisy Kensington, Evan Rachel Wood spends most of the movie wandering around slack-jawed and amazed by everything she encounters. She’s scared of airplane toilets, thinks driving a car gets you pregnant, is flattered to be asked to perform a hand job (“I’ve never had a job before!”), and on one occasion, asks her companion and pretend boyfriend if she can “go potty.”
Though she tells her doctor in an early scene that she hears voices, the extent of her mental instability as portrayed in the film appears to be panic attacks and extreme naivete caused by being raised in isolation, only interacting with her recently deceased mother for her entire life. Instead, she’s quirky, she knows how to dance because she watched hours of VH1 growing up, she doesn’t like to wear shoes because they hurt her feet, she has no qualms announcing at a fancy dinner, that foie gras looks like cat food. It’s no wonder, Jay Wheeler (Scott Speedman), the estranged son of a wealthy family falls in love with her. Like any manic pixie dream girl worth her salt, she makes his life better, teaches him to take responsibility for her actions and learn how to love. As a free spirit, she strips away from pretentious facade of his family’s extreme wealth and teaches them to value small moments.
Daisy spends most of the film wandering around amazed by everything she sees, it’s all new to her
And of course, right at the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daisy isn’t crazy after all, so she and Jay can ride off into the sunset together, any complications from her total lack of knowledge of the world or of literary any other person besides him be damned. Watching it, I wasn’t sure to what degree a movie that suggests a character is mentally ill, yet portrays her illness inaccurately for most of the film is redeemed by a last minute revelation of her sanity. Indeed, the revelation comes about from an investigation of Daisy’s past, not from an analysis of her behavior.
Right from the start, Jay is always saving her. Their “meet cute” occurs when he swoops in to rescue her from an orderly who is attempting to molest her, under the pretense of a secret exam. He has no sympathy for Daisy’s innocence or the real issue of abuse suffered by powerless mental patients, instead telling her she needs to learn to take care of herself. Shell-shocked, she escapes the hospital and follows him home, already acting like he is her messiah.
But Jay’s certainly no prize. He’s on probation for assault, holds down a job as janitor at the mental hospital and regularly gives alcohol and pornography to the most catatonic and psychotic patients. He owes thousands of dollars in gambling debts and believes his only option to get the money is to attend his brother’s upcoming wedding with a serious girlfriend, so his family see he’s got his act together.
Originally, he tries to hire a stripper to pretend to be his girlfriend. He’s stunned she considers it degrading and tells him the idea of pretending to be a nurse (used as a fetish object) makes her uncomfortable. A choice quote: “You hump a pole naked for money and this makes you uncomfortable?” Throughout the film, Jay speaks to women like they are children, here insisting the stripper owes him a favor because he is a loyal patron and insinuating that she is unintelligent. After this rejection, Jay sees an opportunity in Daisy, a woman he can easily manipulate.
Jay dresses Daisy in revealing clothing, including “stripper shoes” she can’t walk in
In the film’s world, Daisy’s mental illness gives him permission to talk to her like a child, instructing her that they’re not lying, only pretending and he’ll explain the difference to her later. He is allowed to tell her anything, ordering her to be quiet, to go to sleep, even telling her what to say and how to dress, like his doll. It seems incredibly abusive that he gives her low-cut and revealing clothes borrowed from a stripper to wear on the trip, given that she does not understand their sexual undertones and did not chose to wear them. In one scene, a maid is shown unpacking her suitcase, which included several pieces of sexy lingerie and corsets.
She has to trust him, because he knows things that she doesn’t. When he fleetingly calls her his girlfriend to explain their relationship, she takes him seriously, believing they have an actual relationship. She says it’s always been her dream to be someone’s girlfriend, something her mother told her would never happen. Note that she never refers to the dream of having him as her boyfriend, it’s all she’s ever wanted to be the object, his possession.
When Jay finds Daisy cleaning his parents’ house, he teaches her that she doesn’t have to do favors to earn love
Later on, Jay starts to feel romantic feelings towards Daisy only after she brags about his accomplishments to his family, expanding on the script he gave her. They bond over not being understood, she never went to school and he think of no reason.
After knowing her for only a few days, Jay believes (and is proven right) to have a better knowledge of her condition than her doctor and they quickly become a happy couple, driving around holding hands.
He seems to truly fall in love with her when she tricks a suspicious cop into leaving them alone with her charm, explaining she did it so they can be together. When she despairs that she “can’t do the things other people can do,” he patronizingly explains that by escaping the hospital and helping him lie to his family and evade arrest, she’s been learning how to become a responsible person in the real world.
Near the end, the film flirts with the notion of real consequences when Daisy admits that she was in the hospital because she killed her mother. But alas, she’s only hyperbolic and misunderstood, she didn’t go help her mother when she heard her screaming and thought that meant she killed her. In addition, Daisy never heard voices–her mother did, and kept Daisy isolated because of it.
As Jay spends time with Daisy, he becomes convinced she is perfectly sane and refuses to listen to her doctor
So everything ends up fine. The girl Jay took from the mental hospital isn’t crazy, she shouldn’t even be in the hospital. By taking her, he saved her from misdiagnosis.
Their love is held up as true love. She has no frame of reference, but she knows its’s love because “you just know.” This opinion, which she tells her doctor, is taken as true wisdom. In the end, Daisy is released to begin her real relationship with Jay, instead of going to a group home where she can learn basic skills. In the last scene, her bare feet are highlighted, a sign that she’s still a quirky, free-spirit, even though she’s officially sane.
In Barefoot, Daisy is othered as a mental patient. She and Jay are introduced as being from two different worlds, he has a job and an apartment and responsibilities and she is a patient, unable to take care of herself. Her instability is used as a way to create division between her and Jay and to give him authority over her. It’s used as a way to create a bright-eyed innocent who believes every interaction between a man and a woman is true love and is fully ignorant of the modern world and social mores without entering fantasy dimensions. It’s probably an unsuccessful attempt to avoid being considered sexist: she’s not stupid or childish or an alien fetish object, she’s mental unstable. However, the decision to make this sort of character mentally ill makes an already tired love story truly uncomfortable.
Jay’s mother gives Daisy a makeover, which allows he to fit in at the wedding. That is, until she takes off her shoes
When she has a panic attack at the wedding and Jay’s family learn who she really is, her condition paints her as inhuman, someone that everyone needs to talk to in hushed tones, stop everything they were doing and coddle and stare at her. In one scene, a flight attendant loudly asks Jay while Daisy is present, what is wrong with her, highlighting that she is not an independent person but his charge.
When she is briefly returned to the hospital, Daisy contrasted with the other more patients who present more cinematic markers of mental illnesses, such as delusions, paranoias, unkempt appearance and strange voices, to make it clear that she doesn’t belong there. Only by separating Daisy from the idea of mental illness, does the film gives her back her humanity and develop her. To become no other, a person viewers can identify with, she has to become “not crazy.” We’re only meant to sympathize with her, when the hospital becomes a nightmare she is wrongly trapped in.
Just once, I’d like to see a movie where a person falls in love with someone with a mental illness and realizes their partner is actually ill and needs help they cannot provide alone. Or their partner makes an informed decision to support them and becomes educated in strategies for helping them cope. In Barefoot, mental illness is just quirkiness, a lack of social graces that makes a person honest and selfless, it requires no real adjustment. And as with Daisy, it might not even be real.
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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
Tonight, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.
It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.
Tonight, How I Met Your Motherwill end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, How I Met Your Mother will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.
It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.
Okay, I admit it – I’m exaggerating a little to make a point. I haven’t seen enough shows to determine whether or not it’s one of the most misogynistic sitcoms. But over the years, How I Met Your Mother has devolved into a show rife with anti-woman nastiness, making me grateful that the program is finally coming to an end.
I’m also saddened by the devolution in the show over the years, because once upon a time, I would have considered How I Met Your Mother a more progressive sitcom than most.
Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Ted (Josh Radnor) on their first date
In the first few seasons of the show, I was impressed with the show’s different take on stereotypical gender roles. I liked that Ted was the hopeless romantic who wanted nothing more than to settle down, get married, and have children, while Robin was the more pragmatic, career-minded person who wanted a more casual relationship. I liked that, even in the context of Marshall and Lily’s super-sweet relationship, Marshall was still the more sentimental of the two. I was moved by Lily’s “career vs. romance” subplot in the end of the first season because the show recognized the emotional weight of what she was feeling. I liked that Lily and Marshall’s wedding followed a typical “bride freaks out on a wedding day” plot with an unexpected and very funny “groom freaks out EVEN MORE on wedding day” plot with Marshall shaving part of his head.
Robin Scherbatsky, journalist and career woman
Even Barney, the most problematic character on the show through a feminist perspective, wasn’t so terrible in the first two seasons. Back then, Barney’s womanizing wasn’t the only aspect of his character. Barney was just a person who wanted to make every night legendary no matter what, whether it involved creating elaborate stories to get women to sleep with him, licking the Liberty Bell, paying Robin to say ridiculous things on camera, inventing a drink called the “Thankstini,” setting Ted’s jacket on fire to stop him from drunk-dialing. His treatment of women wasn’t okay, but it didn’t come from a place of showing complete contempt for anyone around him.
Somewhere along the line, all that changed.
Barney became a person whose primary goal was to trick as many women as possible into sleeping with him, and his behavior toward them became increasingly nasty and downright criminal. In season three’s “The Bracket,” he admits to having sold a woman, and in season eight’s “The Fortress,” he shows the feature of a “Ho-Be-Gone” system which wheels one-night stands into a wall. And we’re supposed to be happy that Robin married this man.
Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and his bracket
Unfortunately, the misogyny that has pervaded How I Met Your Mother isn’t just limited to Barney. Here’s a list of just some of the most memorable misogynistic moments from the show’s history:
– Season five’s “Of Course”: Jennifer Lopez appears as a character whose sole purpose is to peddle the “Power of No.” Because we need more characters who affirm the stereotype that women like “playing hard to get.”
– Season five’s “Say Cheese”: Lily, angry that Ted has brought yet another date no one knows to her birthday party, shows him a photo of a previous year’s celebration and asks him to “name that bitch.” Not wanting strangers to attend your birthday party: fine. But what did these women do to Lily to warrant being called “bitches?”
– Season five’s “The Playbook”: All of it. But I’ll get to that later. (/SagetTed)
Barney and his “scuba diver” scam
– Season six’s “Baby Talk”: Marshall worries about having a daughter because he remembers the way he and his high school classmates used to be sexist towards the female students. (Sexual harassment is bad when it’s happening to women you care about, boys, but random bitches are free game and THEN cat-calling is hilarious!)
– Season six’s “Canning Randy”: the men leer at the day-after-Halloween parade of women walking down the street in costumes, guessing at their one-night stands. Could have been a funny gag if it had been the entire gang watching a parade of men and women returning from one-night stands, but as it was, it was just a bunch of guys snarkily judging women.
Ted, Barney, and Marshall (Jason Segel) leer at women
– Season seven’s “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns”: Lily has pregnancy brain and Marshall and Robin treat her like she has the intelligence of a two-year-old, and they prove to be right when Lily gives a stapler to a kid on Halloween.
– Season seven’s “Now We’re Even”: Barney delivers what’s supposed to be a moving monologue about the difficulties of dating a stripper and how it makes him feel to know that Quinn is dancing naked for other men, and we’re actually supposed to feel sorry for him after years of him treating women like dirt.
– Season eight’s “Lobster Crawl”: Robin acts like a simpering idiot when she’s desperate to win Barney back. She continues to be mean to poor Patrice for no reason and it’s supposed to be funny (probably because Patrice is fat).
– Season eight’s “The Final Page”: Barney proposes to Robin after a long con of making her believe that he didn’t want her, and it’s one of the most glaring examples of emotional abuse disguised as romance in recent memory.
Robin reacts to Barney’s manipulative proposal
– Season eight’s “The Fortress”: Like I said – Ho-Be-Gone.
– Season nine’s “The Broken Code”: Robin realizes she has no female friends and acts astonishingly rude to the women around her, finally confirming that she and Barney really are meant for each other, since she hates women just as much as he does.
And those are just a few.
But the biggest examples of misogyny are, of course, Barney’s two books: The Bro Code and The Playbook. Two books that are actual books that people can now buy.
And The Playbook? Is a pick-up artist’s wet dream.
Before anyone argues that it’s “just a joke,” keep in mind that there are actual websites out there dedicated to coaching men on tricking women into sleeping with them – and some of these sites actually use the character of Barney Stinson as a role model.
Yes. This book exists.
How I Met Your Mother isn’t entirely hopeless even at this late stage. The writers handled Robin’s infertility with respect. Season eight’s “The Time Travelers” was one of its best episodes, truly romantic and poignant. Marshall and Lily’s renewed vows were moving. I love everything about the Mother herself and Ted’s relationship with her, proving that this show still has a soul. But the stink of misogyny has tainted what was once one of my favorite sitcoms.
And if, at the end of tomorrow’s finale, it turns out that I dealt with all that anti-woman crap on a weekly basis only to find out that the Mother is dead in the future…if that is the direction the writers have decided to take…then burn it, burn it to the ground.
Ted and the Mother (Cristin Milioti), who had better NOT be dead
Lady T is a feminist blogger, sketch comedy writer/performer, and author of Fanged, a young adult novel available for purchase today.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
Frequently repeated lines:
Keith Mars: Hey…who’s your daddy?
Veronica Mars: I hate it when you say that
If you’re anything like me, you’ve read countless tributes. 1000 words here, 500 there on the class wars , miscarriages of justice and police corruption on the show that got us talking, agonizing and gleefully applying story lines to our own political climate. Tumblr raves praising the series for taking its audience seriously: delivering compelling season-long mysteries as well as episodic ones, developing character far beyond labels of good and bad, rich and poor, and committing to a dark, noir tone not often seen on a teen drama. As explored elsewhere on Bitch Flicks, Veronica Mars was also unprecedented for putting a rape survivor at the centre of a high school-set series.
Mainly though, the movie’s release has reminded us of all the supposedly simple and universal things the show portrayed so well, the things that shouldn’t be notable in today’s movies and TV, but somehow are: a platonic male-female relationship, a strong friendship between teen girls who never came to blows over looks or boys, a willingness to hold its heroine accountable for her flaws, and above all, an amazing father-daughter relationship.
No matter what, Keith will always support Veronica
Sadly neglected in the movie, where Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) stepped in periodically to guide Veronica (Kristen Bell) between set pieces, their relationship was notable for the great deal of understanding within it. Throughout the series, Keith was a great friend to trade sarcasm and snark with, a colleague to discuss investigations with, a partner to help make major life decisions, but never forgot his role as a parent. Even when it led to fights and weeks of radio-silence, Keith was capable of stepping out of his friend role to dish out groundings, forbid self-destructive and often criminal antics, and (attempt to) quash romantic and platonic relationships he believed capable of robbing his bright, shining daughter of her light. He always respected Veronica and her interests, independence and what’s more, genuinely liked and appreciated her as a person. Back in season one, the depth of Keith’s unconditional love was clear when we learned he had been unsure whether Veronica was biological daughter for quite some time though never let the uncertainty color his feelings for her.
It bears repeating that nuanced, complicated and respectful relationships between fathers and daughters are disturbingly rare on our screens these days. As most of us know from our everyday lives, there’s no shortage of great stories within the father-daughter (or father figure-daughter) dynamic.
Sure mother-daughter stories are important too and there are so many movies, so many TV shows that have given us mother-daughter relationships to cherish. And in every variation: jealously of the daughter’s youth coming from the mother, jealously of her mother’s independence from the daughter, disturbing romantic rivalry, close friendship that borders on symbiosis, a mother’s disappointment that her daughter is not a mini-version of herself and the mother who worried that her daughter will make the same mistakes she did (Lauren Graham seems to have made a cottage industry out of these roles in Gilmore Girls and Parenthood), and many more. You name a variation and someone’s made something about it.
All the talk about the Veronica Mars Movie got me thinking about the kind of story lines we generally see between fathers and daughters. The general population of TV dads are bumbling idiots, who don’t know their kid’s bedtimes or whether or not to give them sugary snacks. As a group, they lag behind TV mothers, who are most often called upon to play bad-cop against the over-grown man-children they married.
Fatherhood in movies brings to mind disapproving curmudgeons, gruff off-duty cops wielding a shot gun on their daughter’s dates or an absence commonly used as a ham-fisted explanation of why the female character likes older men or works as a stripper. In a growing sub-genre of action movies, it falls to a father to get revenge for his daughter’s rape or murder or try to save her (Taken, The Limey, Traffic ). 2010’s Winter’s Bone was notable for reversing this common narrative.
A young woman’s relationship with her father is rarely the focus of a narrative unless the mother is out of the picture. Usually she’s been killed off, sometimes she left the family or is somehow ill, often she chose to focus on work over family (a plot line used to make a negative point about women in the workforce).
It seems like his role is only allowed to be prominent in his daughter’s life if he is the sole parent, he can shape her only if there are no other options. Most often the single father as a character is used to explain why the female lead is a tomboy or to delve into his discomfort addressing the sex talk and menstruation. As a character, it’s unusual for the married father to do the heavy lifting or even do his share in an equal partnership. Sadly these story lines may mirror mainstream ideals of real life, where a man taking care of his children or showing an interest in his daughters is seen as effeminate or labelled as “Mr. Mom”.
Thinking about this, I made a list of notable and interesting father-daughter relationships, presented here in no particular order. Got any additions to the list? Let me know in the comments.
Atticus and Scout
Scout and Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) is really a prince among fathers. Determined to teach his children to be good citizens who believe in fair treatment for all and are willing to take a stand for it, Atticus provides a great example. As a father to Scout (Mary Badham), he respects her tomboy identity and tries hard to allow her to have a childhood fun of innocent games, in the midst of important lessons. But he knows the way to raise her right is not shield her from tragedy and allow her to be naive about the injustice in the world. Notably for the time period, he doesn’t hold Scout and his son Jem to separate standards or unduly protect Scout as a member of the ‘weaker sex’. He holds both his children to a high standard and expects them use what they have learned in the adult world.
Howard and Samantha Newly, Samantha Who: In a twist on a common rift between fathers and daughters, Howard (Kevin Dunn) explains to an adult amnesiac Samantha (Christina Applegate), that they stopped being close when she hit puberty and stopped being the bright eyed little girl who followed him around and wanted to inherit his chicken farm one day. Unfortunately for Howard, the changes in Samantha went further than a concern for boys and fashion and she became a truly vile person, attempting to humiliate her parents at every opportunity. Rebuilding her life and trying to becoming a better person, Samantha must make amends with her father and gradually teach him to trust her again.
Richard and Olive
Richard and Olive Hoover, Little Miss Sunshine: Though he’s striving to be a motivational speaker, Richard (Greg Kinnear)’s greatest challenge may be supporting his seven-year old daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), who wants nothing more than to be a beauty queen. Like every father, he wants to believe his daughter is the most beautiful little girl out there, but the very fact of a beauty pageant makes it clear to him that she can’t compete and he’s certain she will be humiliated. But Olive has a trick up her sleeve, a risqué dance performance and the uproar caused by it, leads Richard to abandon his worries and join her on stage, preventing official from stopping her. Richard truly becomes a supportive father, after, when instead of lecturing Olive, he tells her how proud her late grandfather would be of her.
Tony and Meadow
Tony and Meadow Soprano, The Sopranos: Tony (James Gandolfini)’s relationship with his daughter is complex: on one hand, she’s his smartest, most hard-working child, the one who reminds him of all the things he likes about himself, but on the other, she’s the girl. In the world of old-fashioned, frequently misogynistic values Tony inhabits, this means she’s always going to be second best and must be kept virginal. Like other fathers with Tony’s value system, protecting his daughter drives him to do despicable things, like threatening her half jewish, half black boyfriend. But the degree to which Tony values Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and sees her as his great hope for a legacy (he dreams of her becoming a pediatrician), is one of the areas where he chafes against his mob lifestyle throughout the course of the series.
Mel and Cher Horowitz, Clueless: As a modern day update of Jane Austen’s Emma, Beverly Hills schoolgirl Cher (Alicia Silverstone) plays nursemaid to her father (Dan Hedaya), reminding him of his high cholesterol, planning his wardrobe and his birthday parties. A successful litigator, he scares and intimidates nearly everyone he comes into contact with, except Cher, who has learned to use negotiation tactics against him and usually gets her way. As no mention is made of Cher’s college prospects or the value she personally sees in good marks, her efforts to raise her grades seem intended to make him proud of her, something she values above all else.
Matt with Alex and Scottie
Matt and Alex and Scottie King, The Descendants: It takes an accident that leaves Elizabeth, his wife, comatose to bring Matt (George Clooney) together with his daughters. Alex (Shailene Woodley), his elder daughter is a rebellious teenager that he was previously unable to understand, while Scottie (Amara Miller) behaves inappropriately with other children. The real story of the movie, is Matt’s connection to Alex which strengths through the tragedy as he comes to respect his daughter and she her as a person independent from him. In the search for Elizabeth’s lover, Alex reveals her ingenuity and her continuing loyalty to him even when their bond was troubled. Ultimately restructuring their family as a three-person unit, the King’s learn to rely on each other and find solace even in the hardest times.
Mac and Juno MacGuff, Juno: Mac (J.K. Simmons) supports Juno (Ellen Page) through two adult situations she is in no way prepared for: having a baby and falling in love. He’s always there for her and his wise, though ornery talks help her to work towards mature decisions and provide turning points for her character. He has a sense of humor about everything that’s happening, something he’s clearly passed down to his daughter and provides just the right balm to soothe, (though realistically not eliminate) her pain.
Homer and Lisa
Homer and Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons: Homer (Dan Castellaneta)’s struggles to connect with Lisa (Yeardley Smith), lead to some of the most heart-warming episodes of the series. Homer is cartoonishly dumb even for a cartoon and Lisa’s genius IQ and sophisticated interests make her completely alien to him. On several occasions he breaks his back to make her dreams come true, notably taking a demeaning second job to get her the pony of a little girl’s dream. When he becomes temporarily intelligent after removing a crayon from his brain, Homer is able to see what Lisa’s life is like and comes to respect her strength in a way that was impossible before. Likewise, in each Homer-Lisa episode, Lisa gains a new appreciation of the sacrifices Homer makes for her happiness. However, because of the show’s format, any progress Homer and Lisa make understanding each other, resets by the end of the episode.
Clancy and George Lass, Dead Like Me: It is only after her death that grim reaper George (Ellen Muth) comes to understand her father, a man she hasn’t given a lot of thought to since she was a child. Sitting in on the poetry class he teaches, she comes to understand him as a person and to identify with him. Clancy (Greg Kean) is never shown as a great dad, already introverted to a fault, his grief over George’s death leads him to shut everyone out and ultimately, he has an affair and leaves his wife and surviving daughter. But George’s glimpse of him as an imperfect person, who loved her very much but had no idea how to show it, mirrors the realizations many of us have about our parents at some point as we grow up.
Jack and Andie
Jack and Andie Walsh, Pretty in Pink: To a teenager’s mind, anything wrong in her life her parents’ fault. As the chief conflict in Pretty In Pink is Andie (Molly Ringwald)’s status as a girl from “the wrong side of the tracks”, it’d be easy for her to see her underemployed father as a one-dimensional villain, keeping her from a better life. But through a painful confrontation scene, it becomes clear that Jack (Harry Dean Stanton) is still depressed about Andie’s mother leaving them and is so broken he is unable to move on and give his daughter what she needs. So far in her life, Andie has been the more mature of the pair, the one who’s forced to take care of him. It’s a difficult situation, but it’s an honest one and Jack and Andie’s conversation gives hope that things might get a least a bit better in the end. As Andie prepares her new look for prom, attempting to change her life, it’s clear Jack has also changed, symbolically moving on from his wife by putting her picture in a drawer.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
The ‘Veronica Mars’ movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.
The Veronica Mars movie delivers on many of the promises made to fans of the TV series, but less so on the promises of the hard-boiled detective story at its core.
Warning: This review contains partial spoilers for both the movie and the TV show.
When Veronica Marspremiered in 2004, the conceit of the series was simple – it was a classic, hard-boiled detective story, moved to a high school setting, where the role of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe was played by a cute teenage girl. What made the series stand out is that, rather than treating the premise as a joke, the writers took it completely seriously and used the conventions of the genre to build a topical, neo-noir world in which the corruption of the justice system comes through in its treatment of women and people of colour, and class struggle comes through in bullying that begins in the schoolyard.
Veronica is introduced to us as a rape survivor whose claims were never investigated by the police, which goes a long way toward explaining her prickly demeanour and suspicion toward the authorities. Her father, Keith Mars, is a P.I. who lost his position as Sheriff after accusing the town’s most powerful man of a crime. Together, they spend most of the first season investigating the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Lily Kane – a case that reveals the ways that the wealthy have tried to conceal the truth. When Lily’s killer is eventually caught and sent to trial, he’s found Not Guilty, in part because the jury is convinced not to believe Veronica’s testimony for reasons of suspected promiscuity. It’s clear that the only kind of justice in Chinatown Neptune is the justice you make for yourself, and the show successfully mixes the tropes of the hard-boiled detective with depictions of very real social and political injustice to create a story that resonates.
In the second season, Veronica investigates a bus crash and uncovers an even deeper spread of corruption, culminating in the discovery that the mayor is a pedophile, and Veronica’s rapist is one of the boys he molested. Families that appear to be normal and wholesome are revealed as harbouring child abuse, and Veronica loses the person she loves and the scholarship that would have let her go to Stanford as the price for trying to do the right thing.
The third season drops the plot a little, but ends on a suitably downtrodden, hard-boiled note – Keith, who regained his position as Sheriff, is about to be kicked out of office again, and Veronica returns to her status as a social pariah after some rich boys make and distribute a sex tape of her. Despite trying, for three years, to help Neptune’s underclass find justice, the Mars family is back where it started, and the powerful forces against them are still gaining strength.
The movie checks in with Veronica nine years later and, while it does fans (who funded it through Kickstarter) a solid by giving them a chance to reconnect with the characters and tying up loose ends, Veronica Mars the movie is considerably less interested in all of this grimdark sociology stuff.
It turns out that Veronica walked away from the detective business after the series ended and started a new, normal life, attending law school, and moving in with her bland third season boyfriend, Piz. When she gets a call from her more exciting ex, Logan Echolls, she does what we want her to do – she throws Piz and her burgeoning career as a lawyer away and returns to the seedy underworld of Neptune to continue the doomed fight for justice as a P.I. The voiceover frames this as an addiction – to Logan (who has lost all of the personality traits that made him addictive and dangerous in the TV show) and to the adrenaline rush of living in the gray zone between light and dark. There’s a subtext, though, in which this is also a moral decision – Veronica was about to “escape” from Neptune at the price of working for the very, very rich, who’re holding everyone down; when she sees the corruption in Neptune’s police force, she realizes that this is where the battle’s being fought and, therefore, where she needs to stay.
The A-plot of the story concerns Veronica trying to solve a murder for Logan, which reconnects her both with her passion for him and her passion for solving crimes. The B-plot, though, is where the hard-boiled detective story lives, and it’s living on life support – barely hanging in there from beginning to end.
In the B-plot, the police force of Neptune has become even more blatantly (and ham-fistedly) corrupt than before. They’re conducting stop and frisk searches, planting evidence, and making wrongful arrests. One of the best and most topical scenes in the film occurs when Keith and Veronica see the police Taser a teenage boy and Keith gets out of his car to make sure they know that he’s filming it all on his phone. This is how the little people fight back in 2014, and it’s a moment that resonates both with contemporary culture and with the hard-boiled aesthetic of the series.
Veronica’s sometime-friend, Weevil, is later shot and booked for a crime on false evidence, after he stops to help someone in trouble. In the TV series, Weevil was Veronica’s primary criminal contact – a gang leader with a conscience who carried out a violent form of justice for the underclass. He left the gang when they lost the mission, but ended up in jail. When the movie checks in with him, we learn that, like Veronica, he’s been a law-abiding citizen for years, with a job, and a family – carefully building a life for himself that distances him from his origins. After the events of the film, the last we see of Weevil is that he’s gone back to the gang. Like Veronica, he puts on his old costume and gives up the idea of walking away.
That story about how Neptune is losing the war against corruption, and how its heroes are drawn back to the darkness to fight it? That story that engages with the genre concerns of the series and invigorates them by making them relevant and part of a morally complex world? That should have been the A-story.
What we get instead, for most of the film, is a throwback to Veronica’s high school days (framed by her ten-year reunion). The mystery concerns her wealthier classmates (some of whom we know and some of whom we don’t) and the discovery of a crime that may have been committed in their youth. It’s totally disconnected from the police corruption story and mostly serves as an excuse to get the band back together, leading to scenes like Veronica punching out one of the high school mean girls, and plot points concerning invitations to parties and after-parties, or who’s dating whom. In terms of fan service, this makes sense – in superficial ways, it gives us more of the show we loved: more high school; more of our favourite characters; more cute, funny moments between them. In terms of letting us visit with old friends, Veronica Mars delivers in spades.
In terms of giving our old friends something of interest to say, the movie delivers less. While the bar was admittedly set pretty high by the series, the movie doesn’t reach the same heights in terms of using the genre to say something meaningful about the world we live in. Veronica is still a great character, but the movie loses touch with her hard-boiled roots and gets lost in nostalgia rather than digging for the gritty, hard-to-stomach truth.
In the end, there’s plenty of laughter, and tense final scenes with the killer – and the movie is crammed full of in-jokes, and nods to the fans – but something’s still missing. The spark that made it relevant is gone, and now it’s just a trip down memory lane with someone who happens to be a detective.
