Drama – Page 5 – Bitch Flicks

Bisexuality and Masculinity in ‘Y Tu Mamá También’

‘Y Tu Mamá También’ points out the elastic, freeing nature of femininity compared to the toxic, fragile nature of masculinity. Over the course of the film, Luisa only becomes a month or so older and finds truth, or at the very least solace for herself, while Julio and Tenoch go from brash young adults to estranged, closed-off adult men, refusing to come to terms with their bisexuality.

This guest post written by Andy Herrera appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.

At first glance, Y Tu Mamá También looks and feels like a classic American sex comedy. You have two ostensibly straight young men desperate for sex who, when suddenly faced with the horrible predicament of not being able to have sex with their girlfriends while they are out of the country, befriend an attractive older women, lie to her about a beautiful beach destination, and both have sex with her. Even from this facile reading of the film, Y Tu Mamá También still invigorates that sometimes tired genre. Unlike American sex comedies, the sexual antics that our main characters, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal), get into are funny by virtue of how oversexed they themselves are and not the sex acts themselves, and the sexual humor is often at the expense of the men, not the women they have sex with.

The camerawork during the sex scenes often feels as lively as the people having sex on-screen as it moves in and out, creating a kinetic feel to each scene. When the movie is not explicitly about sex and sexuality, it’s a lovely travelogue of Mexico, shot beautifully by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and interspersed with small visual reminders of political unrest juxtaposed with the natural beauty of the country. Director Alfonso Cuarón not only created a visually stunning sex comedy, however, he also created a complex character study that often points towards a bisexual subtext between our two leads.

Cuarón specifically cast Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal as the leads, as they have been friends since childhood, and this shows in their natural chemistry on-screen. It’s clear why these two characters are friends and how they compliment each other. Going along with the film’s visual political commentary, there is also classism prevalent in the relationship between Tenoch and Julio. Tenoch’s father works for the Mexican government and Julio’s family is leftist and middle class, already setting up clear political and class conflict between the two boys that they nonetheless have managed to ignore in their friendship. As with other issues laid dormant in their relationship, Tenoch’s classism only comes out during a shouting match late in the film, as he calls Julio “a hillbilly.” The woman they go on a road trip with, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), proves to be the catalyst in unearthing the many repressed issues within their relationship, whether political or sexual.

The trope of an older woman teaching young men about life and love became ridiculous pretty much after Weird Science and it’s strange here too, yet is justified in retrospect at the end of the film, when Tenoch informs Julio that Luisa died a month after the trip and that she knew she had cancer the entire time. While Julio and Tenoch go on that journey with her, just for the virtue of being around an attractive woman that may have sex with them, Luisa went on that journey to find peace and truth within her life and impart wisdom on to someone, anyone, as her entire family is deceased and her husband repeatedly cheated on her. Luisa ultimately succeeds in finding truth for herself and for Julio and Tenoch, but for them the truth permanently fractures their relationship.

At the beginning of their journey, as Julio and Tenoch get to know Luisa, Julio states that “truth is cool but unattainable… the truth is totally amazing but you can never reach it.” Their trip to the beach allows Julio and Tenoch to come close to unearthing deep sexual truths about themselves, but his words become a self-fulfilling prophecy as they never reach the truth. At the beginning of the film, Julio and Tenoch start out as brash and sexually pompous (despite both of them admitting they’ve only had sex with their current girlfriends) young men. Out of a need for sexual intimacy with men she trusts more than her cheating husband, Luisa has sex with both of them and sexual dysfunctions are revealed: Julio reaches climax too quickly; Tenoch has a habit of saying “Mama” when he reaches his own climax. These idiosyncrasies are pointed out to them by Luisa, exemplifying their sexual immaturity and inexperience. It’s soon revealed that both Julio and Tenoch have slept with each other’s girlfriends in a scenario that’s first presented as dramatic and potentially friendship ending, but then is reframed as comedic as more of their sexual dalliances are revealed in farcical fashion. Their friendship remains intact.

As Julio and Tenoch come to a head in their argument over who had sex with whose girlfriend, Luisa becomes angry and leaves, exclaiming, “What [they] really want to do is fuck each other!” This statement, while humorous within the scene, gains weight when read in context with scenes before and after this one. Earlier in the film, Julio and Tenoch play around naked while showering, masturbate together, and even note a picture of a penis together. They remark that they never see a friend anymore since he came out of the closet, but are nonetheless accepting of him, despite their heavy usage of homophobic slurs throughout the film.

After they reconcile, Julio, Tenoch, and Luisa all have sex while intoxicated, which leads to Julio and Tenoch passionately kissing. The revelatory aspect of this threesome scene is that Tenoch and Julio’s kiss isn’t played for gay panic humor as it typically would be in other sex comedies, but rather as tender, loving, and a natural growth of their sexualities. There’s never a doubt that they’re attracted to women, but this scene confirms they are also definitely attracted to each other as more than friends (even Diego Luna can’t stop thinking about it). Luisa, once again, is the catalyst that leads them to this truth, it’s up to them whether or not they accept it.

Due to society’s (and their own ingrained) heteronormativity, Julio and Tenoch do not accept this truth, however. The morning after their tryst, they choose to go home immediately, with Luisa staying behind voluntarily. The narrator states that their girlfriends later broke up with them, they found new women to date, and they eventually stopped seeing each other. Julio and Tenoch only meet once again a year later, to discuss Luisa’s fate, before never meeting again. Luisa finds peace in nature and with her true self, and while she pushed Julio and Tenoch towards some harsh truths, they ultimately rejected them.

Y Tu Mamá También points out the elastic, freeing nature of femininity compared to the toxic, fragile nature of masculinity. Over the course of the film, Luisa only becomes a month or so older and finds truth, or at the very least solace for herself, while Julio and Tenoch go from brash young adults to estranged, closed-off adult men, refusing to come to terms with their bisexuality. The children are Mexico’s (and every country’s) future but even they cannot survive in an oppressive society without obscuring some fundamental truth about who they are.

Andy Herrera was born in New York, raised in Florida, and is now back in New York again. He was raised on TV shows and movies and now all he does is write about them.

The Trope of the Murderous Bisexual Woman

There are a number of films — frequently defined as “erotic thrillers” — which feature bisexual women who are violent, manipulative, and even murderous. … The trope of the promiscuous, aggressive, violent, and unstable bisexual woman is one that truly needs to disappear. Even if directors do not intend any harm to queer people or communities, these inaccurate portrayals lead movie-goers to believe that bisexuality is something dangerous, to be feared.

This guest post written by Angela Morrison appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.

Bisexual characters are rarely represented in cinema, but among the scarce examples, one trope stands out as particularly insidious. There are a number of films — frequently defined as “erotic thrillers” — which feature bisexual women who are violent, manipulative, and even murderous. Femme fatales such as Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct are aggressive and sexually confident, and thus are considered to be dangerous. This trope assumes that if a woman’s sexuality is fluid, then she must be unstable; there must be something wrong with a woman whose sexuality does not fit into a neat little box.

Two of the most prominent examples of this trope come from the aforementioned Basic Instinct, as well as Brian De Palma’s 2012 film, Passion. Both films are directed by straight white men who filter the female experience through their own male perspective, and then through their camera lenses. Their female characters are shown to have some charming qualities, but in the end they are promiscuous and manipulative, never to be trusted.

In Passion, Rachel McAdams plays Christine, an extremely successful advertising executive, who works closely with Noomi Rapace’s character, Isabelle. The women at first appear to have a close friendship and solid work relationship, but this is not a movie about working women supporting one another. It soon becomes evident that Christine does not see Isabelle as her equal, but rather, as someone she has complete control over – in work and in personal life. Christine takes credit for Isabelle’s work to ensure she can move up within the advertising company. Shortly after, she tells Isabelle a sad tale of her twin sister being killed by a car, ending the speech by saying, “I love you,” to Isabelle. This is clearly manipulative behavior.

At various points in the film, Christine kisses and makes mild sexual advances towards Isabelle. Christine is also involved with a man named Dirk (Paul Anderson), whom she has theatrical sexual encounters with, frequently involving power play. The film casually enforces the idea that bisexual women do not abide by the codes of monogamy, but rather, have sexual/romantic relations with anyone they want at any time. Of course, Dirk also sleeps with Isabelle, so I guess straight men are not presented as being much more faithful. This is not to say that monogamy is “normal” or “right” — not at all. But De Palma has not made a film about the joy and beauty of polyamory. Christine goes behind Dirk’s back and makes sexual advances towards Isabelle, because according to De Palma, that is how bisexual women operate.

Isabelle returns Christine’s attraction, and also has sex with Dirk. She is another bisexual character portrayed as promiscuous. At various points in the film, Christine and Isabelle also exhibit dangerous, and even violent, tendencies. [SPOILER] Christine is murdered, and it is revealed that Isabelle killed her, and manipulated everyone around her in order to cover it up. In the world of Passion, bisexual women are criminal masterminds with lots of secrets. Even Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) joins in the fun, professing her love for Isabelle and then blackmailing her into having a sexual relationship with her. All three of these queer women fit into the trope of the femme fatale), which is not necessarily a bad thing. Christine, Isabelle, and Dani are all successful career women who are confident and highly intelligent. However, their fluid sexualities pose a threat in the mind of De Palma, so they are also portrayed as unstable and prone to violence.

Passion is not meant to be taken as a realistic film – De Palma clearly indicates that this slightly humorous and highly stylized film is meant to be over-the-top. The set and costume design are sleek and shiny. Christine wears big, ornate earrings and perfectly-fitting business suits. Everyone’s office is made completely of glass and polished metal. The score uses “stingers” to heighten moments of shock and fear. Characters often bolt upright in the middle of the night, revealing that the previous scenes were just a dream. The film is clearly flamboyant, which is one of its charms. The same can be said about Basic Instinct – the film is full of neon lights, noir-ish twists and turns in the narrative, and equally athletic dance and sex scenes. And of course, Paul Verhoeven is a master of satire – he is rarely serious. Verhoeven is always smirking at the audience through his movies. However, representation is important. These two films are fun and exciting (as B. Ruby Rich notes of Basic Instinct in her essay, “New Queer Cinema“), but for all their satirizing and stylizing, the insidious ideas about queer women are hurtful. Biphobia literally means “fear of bisexuality,” and that fear is amplified by movies such as these.

Neither Passion nor Basic Instinct ever utters the word “bisexual.” However, in Basic Instinct, Catherine clearly has an intimate romantic and sexual relationship with Roxy (Laelani Sarelle). Catherine is presented as a threat because she is a confident queer woman, who knows what she wants in all aspects of her life: professionally, personally, sexually. Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) remains suspicious of her for the entire film. A confident, sexual woman must secretly be a murderer. Yes, there are many other clues that point to Catherine being the murderer, but the one thing that is constantly foregrounded is her sexuality – especially in that famous scene. She uses her out-of-control sexuality to manipulate the men around her, because according to Verhoeven, that is what queer women do.

Carrie Nelson at Bitch Media outlines the many biphobic elements of Basic Instinct in her article, “A Look at Basic Instinct.” She notes that Catherine and Roxy’s relationship is framed so that it’s titillating for male viewers. When Catherine and Roxy kiss each other, Catherine has one eye on Nick, gauging his reaction, hoping he’s aroused. Bisexual encounters in cinema are often filtered through the “male gaze”: rather than representing two women enjoying each other for their own pleasure, sexual relations between women are objectified, with the purpose of arousing male viewers. With the release of films such as Basic Instinct and Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, comes the question from young male viewers — “Did you see that lesbian scene?” Whether or not the male directors of these films intend to objectify queer women, it inevitably ends up happening. The queer women in these films are often not given a voice to express their emotional and romantic attachment to their partners. Their experiences are seen as purely sexual, and more often than not, calculating and cold. Catherine, Christine, and Isabelle have sexual encounters in order to manipulate others.

The trope of the promiscuous, aggressive, violent, and unstable bisexual woman is one that truly needs to disappear. Even if directors do not intend any harm to queer people or communities, these inaccurate portrayals lead movie-goers to believe that bisexuality is something dangerous, to be feared. As is widely known, LGBTQ+ activists protested Basic Instinct during filming and then once it had been released. This trope has been criticized since at least the 1990s (and even before, with women’s groups protesting Brian De Palma’s earlier film, Dressed to Kill, for equating female sexuality with violence). But films such as Passion demonstrate that the trope is alive and well. Much work needs to be done to give bisexual characters a voice – bisexual characters should be portrayed as the complex, beautiful, and complicated human beings that they are. Not all of us are secretly hiding ice picks under our beds.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Passion and Crime d’Amour: Women and Corporate Power Plays

Angela Morrison is a feminist cinephile, and she has written for Bitch Flicks before. She lives in Canada and is a recent Cinema Studies graduate. She writes about cinema for fun on her blog.

A Place to Call Home: The Search for Love and Identity in ‘My Own Private Idaho’

In many ways, Gus Van Sant’s ‘My Own Private Idaho’ is a film about duality, weaving together conflicting stories about love, family and the inescapable lure of home, even when it is a place you can never go back to again. And that duality also lends itself heavily to the sexual identities of the film’s main characters, Mike and Scott, two street hustlers with opposite views of their own bisexuality…

This guest post written by Jamie Righetti appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

In many ways, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) is a film about duality, weaving together conflicting stories about love, family and the inescapable lure of home, even when it is a place you can never go back to again. And that duality also lends itself heavily to the sexual identities of the film’s main characters, Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves), two street hustlers with opposite views of their own bisexuality, as well as the fulfillment they receive from their life on the street and where it will ultimately take them.

The film’s primary story follows Mike, a scrappy street hustler prone to frequent fits of narcolepsy during which he recalls memories of his mother and his childhood home. Mike bounces around between Seattle and Portland, living rough on the streets and hanging out with other street kids in the same restaurant to keep out of the cold. Mike hustles out of necessity, making just enough to eat and sometimes weaseling extra money out of clients to get by. On the flip side, there is Scott, the handsome son of Portland’s mayor and the heir apparent. As the rich kid slumming it for fun and (according to him) playing gay for pay, Scott serve as a direct foil to Mike as both a character and a subplot in the film.

It is worth nothing that despite the fluidity present in both characters’ sexuality, the film still tends to use very binary language and coding with its depiction of sex work. Mike and Scott are referred to as “street hustlers” rather than prostitutes, which serves to reinforce Scott’s claim that he “only has sex with men for money.” Having sex for pay helps root their identity within the boundaries of masculinity and serves as a direct contrast to selling one’s body for sex, something presumably only women can do. This is further highlighted in our first glimpse of Mike with a client, during which he is being serviced by a client, rather than the opposite. Furthermore, there is often an erasure of Mike’s bisexuality based on his attraction to Scott. Although Mike is seen with more male clients than female ones, he does go home with an older female client and, prior to his narcoleptic episode, seems both willing and interested in sleeping with her. The duality present in both Mike and Scott’s sexuality is not only central to a film about identity but also in understanding the complexities of both characters, who are not as simple as the gay and straight labels often stuck on them.

The duality of My Own Private Idaho also plays out in strange ways at times. Midway through the film, as the story begins to center on Scott, the dialogue and characters take on a Shakespearean tinge. Van Sant has spoken about the influence of Henry IV and Henry V on the film, which is further explored with the introduction of Bob (William Richert), a Falstaff parallel and father-figure to Mike, Scott, and the ragtag crew of street kids they spend time with. While these scenes might feel slightly out of place, especially alongside the gravity of Mike’s story and the search for his mother, they give important insight into Scott. In a conversation with Bob, Scott reveals that he’s just shy of his twenty-first birthday, which is when he will inherit his father’s money. When this happens, Scott will leave the streets and go back to his old life. Within this context, the antiquated Shakespearean dialogue, which feels forced and hollow, serves as a metaphor for Scott, who is well-liked but truly out of place in a world of misfits who don’t have a comfortable identity to fall back on when they get bored.

But while Scott has willingly turned his back on his family, Mike is desperate to reconnect with his. He brings Scott along to Idaho to see his estranged brother to seek out information about where his mother is staying. Mike finds an odd comfort in his narcoleptic flashbacks and his quest in some way is a search for his first love, the one that nostalgia has deemed pure and simple. By reinforcing the purity of true love, it will allow him to validate not just his feelings for Scott but also his bisexuality as a whole, which is often at odds with his lifestyle, where love is commoditized and quantified, and where his sexual preferences must be fluid for profit but never real.

There is perhaps no greater example of this than in the film’s famous campfire confession, a scene which Phoenix himself rewrote. During their road trip from Portland to Idaho, Mike and Scott are forced to camp out in the desert overnight. As they huddle around a meager fire, Mike struggles to open up to Scott and confess his deep feelings. There is a stabbing ache of recognition that comes when Mike timidly asks Scott what he means to him, as both men are suddenly very aware of the weight behind those whispered words. Scott in turn, declares that Mike is his best friend but nothing more.

Recalling an earlier scene in which Mike and Scott are cover boys on gay magazines, Scott tells Mike that he only has sex for money, despite him not being in need of the cash. Before Mike can object, Scott adds as a hasty afterthought: “And two guys can’t love each other.” For Scott, his sexuality is rooted in flawed logic that as long as he’s providing a service and not ascribing any true emotion to sex, he can have his fun and still identify as straight. But his actions seem to contradict this, as he has chosen to hustle not out of necessity but because he enjoys it. For Scott, his chosen lifestyle allows him the freedom to fully explore and express his bisexuality in a way in which his upbringing could never allow. But the roots of his childhood are too deep for him to fully shake and instead, he must mask his sexuality as a commodity, in order to allow him to eventually return to his former life.

Perhaps seeing through this, Mike counters by trying to poke logic into this theory. “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it. I love you, and you don’t pay me.” There is a purity in Mike that is quite absent in Scott, as he is more than certain that his feelings for Scott are real. But despite this, he is still seeking validation – not only love that is returned but that it can be acceptable as love. Scott, however, is unable to return this affection because it will break his own construction of his sexuality, which can only be cast in black and white.

It’s a brilliant and raw scene in which Phoenix oozes vulnerability and insecurity, even physically turning in on himself to shield himself from Scott’s rejection. In the end, Scott feels bad for his friend and calls him over to go to sleep. The two embrace, with Mike folding into Scott’s arms, dutifully accepting the scraps of affection he’s allowed, while swallowing down his unrequited attraction. The two continue their journey as if nothing has happened, but as an audience we’re now attuned to an extra layer of melancholy that surrounds Mike and his interactions with Scott.

In Italy, Scott and Mike’s stories diverge once again, as Scott falls in love with Carmella (Chiara Caselli), an Italian woman living at the farmhouse where Mike’s mother was last seen. It is Carmella who tells the two that Mike’s mother returned home, making his trip (and the things he did to finance it) pointless. Mike sticks around, waiting for Scott so they can return home but Scott is distracted by Carmella. A brokenhearted Mike is subjected to several nights of overheard pleasure between thin bedroom walls before Scott finally hands him a ticket home and abandons him in Italy. But as with many of Scott’s actions, it feels slightly disingenuous. While he certainly is attracted to Carmella, it also feels convenient that he can use her as a means of escape, thereby blocking any reciprocal feelings for Mike that he might be repressing.

Likewise, the telegram Scott receives regarding his father’s death serves as a final nail in the coffin for his old life. Upon his return to Portland, Scott has stepped into his old shoes, riding around in limousines, wearing expensive suits and shunning anyone from his former life, including his one-time mentor and father figure, Bob. In a beautiful juxtaposition, Scott is attending his father’s funeral service, a demure and somber affair, at the same time that Mike and his former friends are celebrating the life of Bob, who died of a broken heart after Scott’s rejection. Scott eyes his former friends with an almost unreadable look on his face; neither envious nor angry, but perhaps (picking up where Mike left off) simply seeking comfort in nostalgia, while simultaneously knowing it is a place where he can never return.

The film then ends on an appropriately ambiguous note. Mike is once again in Idaho on “his” road, the one that reminds him of a “fucked up face.” He collapses after another narcoleptic fit and is robbed of his things by a passing pick-up truck. Finally, a car pulls up and an unseen person picks up Mike and drives away with him. It is unclear if he has been rescued or if he is in danger but it is clear that either way, he (and Scott) won’t find a happy ending. While Mike has the freedom to revel in the lifestyle and bisexuality that Scott can no longer can afford, he also is lacking the comfort of reciprocal love that Scott now has in Carmella. Likewise, neither can ever go back home, quite literally for Mike and metaphorically for Scott, again. It is a bittersweet conclusion that renders Mike’s fate irrelevant and makes us in turn seek to return “home” to the earlier scenes where both men were free to love without fear.

Jamie Righetti is an author and freelance film critic from New York City. Her work has been featured on Film School Rejects and Daily Grindhouse, as well as in Belladonna magazine. Jamie is the host of the horror podcast, ScreamBros, and she has just released her debut novel, Beechwood Park, which is currently available on Amazon. You can follow her on Twitter @JamieRighetti.

The Conditional Autonomy of Bisexual Characters in Film

The overall implication here is that the bisexuality of a female character is inspired by the male character. Where is the bisexual character’s free will? In fact, where is her bisexuality? All of these films have one thing in common, which is that the sexuality of the character exists to cause strife between the straight man and the lesbian woman that pursues them, and always ends up siding one way or the other.

This guest post written by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A “brassy, brave” lesbian character starts hanging around with a classically femme woman, usually for work related reasons. We assume the femme woman is straight or bisexual, as she is in a relationship with a man, be it husband or boyfriend, or, most commonly, fiancé. The woman who is engaged or married or otherwise in a long-term relationship is dissatisfied with her life, and she starts flirting with the lesbian character pretty hard, usually by praising her “bravery.” This is fair. We lesbians are a brave people. She at some point discloses that she isn’t happy in her heterosexual relationship, and that is all the lesbian character needs to go full tilt into trying to break that relationship right the hell up. Okay, once again; we’ve all been there. I’m not here to judge.

The lesbian character used to be super good at focusing on only work all of the time, but as the plot carries on, she becomes less good at focusing on work because she has a huge crush. The boyfriend is always the worst character, and their personality settings are either “well-meaning but useless” or “abusive.” Either way, they either don’t like women, view women as possessions, fail to understand women, and/or are suffering from a debilitating inferiority complex centered around their inability to understand women — often all of the above. The wife or girlfriend is almost always equally free of complexity, but is usually a lot more likable than their partner. Because it would be impossible not to be. The most likable character is usually the lesbian, but, as said, it’s not too difficult to be the most likable character in these films. The woman breaks off her engagement or what have you, performs some fairly minimal romantic gesture towards the lesbian, and then they end up together. Queue up some outro music that sounds like the Indigo Girls in 2016 and roll the credits; we’ve got a movie.

This is the basic love story or entire plot of I Can’t Think Straight, The World Unseen, Elena Undone, My Little Friend, The Four-Faced Liar, Imagine Me & You, The Gymnast, When Night is Falling, Kiss Me, and It’s in the Water, to name but a few.

For a great many years in film, the trope was two women living secluded, often quite literally on the fringes of society, with their “perverse” love affair broken up by some strapping young man and/or Richard Burton, in movies like Night of the Iguana, The Fox, Les Biches, and so on, and so forth. The woman’s bisexuality is absolved by her romance with a male character, while typically the lesbian character dies to make room for her girlfriend’s life as a straight woman. Or, in the case of The Fox, the lesbian is – wait for it – CRUSHED. By a TREE. An actual TREE.

Queer filmmakers and filmgoers alike were incredibly tired of that story by the late 1980s, so around that time, queer women started making their own movies about queer women, which is good, but then we started to see the inverse of said bisexual erasure trope, which is bad. The problem with inverting a trope is that it’s still a trope, and it’s still problematic. As the bisexuality of a character is erased in the male equivalent of this plot, so is the bisexuality of many characters erased, often by lesbian filmmakers, utilizing the same basic plot to do so. Either way, men are given way too much power in these stories, and the bisexual character is given far too little. By being abusive or at best useless lovers, the overall implication here is that the bisexuality of a female character is inspired by the male character. Where is the bisexual character’s free will? In fact, where is her bisexuality?

All of these films have one thing in common, which is that the sexuality of the character exists to cause strife between the straight man and the lesbian woman that pursues them, and always ends up siding one way or the other. The choice of whether or not to pursue a relationship with a woman is hampered either by consideration of the man’s feelings or consideration of social mores, but seldom if ever is it because the woman is genuinely attracted to the man. Similarly to the classic films where the bisexual character’s queerness is submerged beneath the revelation that she was simply manipulated by the older, more confident lesbian, so then is the desire to be in a hetero relationship blamed on social anxiety rather than the character herself having a genuine attraction to both women and men.

The woman in the hetero relationship tries to stay in her relationship despite a complete lack of interest in her lover. In films like Elena Undone (written and directed by Nicole Conn), we have extended scenes of a married woman swearing to her lesbian lover that she refuses to let her husband touch her despite living in the same house as him. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing because that guy is definitely a jerk, but why is the fact that she doesn’t have sex with him so relevant to the lesbian character? She’s still married to him, still lives with him, and is still dedicated to staying with him, so, honestly, they might as well. But the bisexual characters in these movies are always 100% attracted to the lesbian and 0% attracted to the man they’re in a relationship with. I’m not saying this has never happened, I’m just wondering why it’s such a common and prevailing plot point in so many films. The woman is definitely not a bisexual, it turns out according to these films, because she’s only attracted to just this one woman. Forever. For all eternity. For way after the credits roll. It’s so heteronormative and so immediately claustrophobic that it’s hard to see the difference between the queer relationship and the straight one. How much of a love story is it, really? These films have a tendency to end right around the time when the two women actually hook up, so we tend not to find out if we ever actually liked them as a couple.

To my mind, these stories imply, “Well, it makes sense that the main character is interested in women now, her boyfriend was a dolt, and her girlfriend is amazing.” I want to talk about what that says to audiences. You don’t have to have an oafish boyfriend first in order to be lesbian or bisexual. That’s not how the world works. I need to be clear that women don’t date each other because men suck. Women date each other because they’re attracted to each other. For the life of me, I can never understand why these stories about two women in love are centralized around men, or how or why men appear as the focal point in this way in so many films about bisexual women, nor that the woman’s ability to enter a loving relationship with a woman must exist alongside her discovery of herself as 100% lesbian. I’m not saying that it’s never happened in real life, I’m saying that this specific triangle exists in a sweeping percentage of queer-made films. These films have had the lasting effect of robbing queer women, particularly bisexual women, of their autonomy by suggesting that a bisexual “becomes gay” when the men in her life are THE WORST. There is no equivalent for this story for gay or bisexual male characters in film. For the most part, gay male characters aren’t gay because they were previously in violent or disappointing relationships with women.

The point is, you don’t have to be 100% straight or gay to enter into a stable and loving relationship. A character’s ability to love should not be gauged by their level of attraction to either gender. Neither straight men nor lesbians should expect a bisexual partner to conform in a way that erases their own sexual identity, be it in film or in real life. If they do, then they are not seeing their partner for who they are, and the story will not have a happy ending.

I’m not dismissing the quality of the films I’m mentioning here. Kiss Me (written and directed by Alexandra-Therese Keining) is one of my favorite queer movies ever; this story can be told well. Also, some of the films are based on real-life stories, and real life doesn’t care if it’s a trope or not, it’s just going to keep on keeping on. However, if I’m going to discuss bisexual erasure as a lesbian and as a film critic, I would say that the bisexual representation by many straight male and lesbian filmmakers unfortunately tends to say approximately the same thing about bisexuality, which is that it doesn’t exist.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

10 Reasons to Watch (and Love!) Imagine Me & You

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

Gender, Bisexuality, and ‘Cabaret’: How the Film and Play Deal with LGBTQ Identities

So were bisexual people portrayed positively? Maybe. What we have to consider in the judgment of this question is the context of both the representation of bisexuality in the script, and the way bisexuality was treated at the time the script was adapted to the screen. … After it’s all said and done, Cabaret has aged fairly well in terms of the portrayal of its LGBTQ characters.

This guest post written by Emily Crose appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

I first sat down to watch the movie Cabaret when I was 17 years old. It was possibly a strange choice of movie for a supposedly straight 17-year-old boy to decide to pick up and watch one day in October, but for me it was perfectly in line with the types of movies I have always loved. Based on a Broadway musical? Check. Involves history? Check. Esoteric subject matter?… Yeah, I’d say so. With Liza Minelli playing the female lead and Bob Fosse’s direction and choreography, you’d be hard pressed to find a film more iconic and representative of the LGBTQ community, especially during the 1970s.

Adapted from the 1966 musical written by Joe Masteroff, which was based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin, as well as John Van Druten’s play, I Am a Camera (1951), Cabaret tells the story of a cabaret-show style play house in the Wiemar Republic set in 1931 called the “Kit Kat Club” (no affiliation to the popular candy). It takes place in a time in Germany just before the reign of the Third Reich where sexual freedom wasn’t exactly celebrated per se, but it was tolerated.

The movie opens to a song by one of the primary characters named “Master of Ceremonies” (Joel Grey) or “Emcee” who hosts the show every night. He sings a song titled “Willkommen” as the various members of the show dance around him, the piano and wind band playing raucously nearby. Emcee says to the crowd, “Leave your troubles outside! So life is disappointing? Forget it! In here, life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful!” Indeed, inside the cabaret, everyone is beautiful.

As soon as the opening credits are through, one of the first characters we see on-screen is someone with a non-binary gender presentation. This character, who we never see again in the film, is perfect foreshadowing for the journey that the audience will take as we make our way through the plot. Not 5 minutes into the movie, we get a hint of the sexual tension that is about to unfold as Emcee explains to his audience that every girl in his cabaret is a virgin (And if you don’t believe him, you can “ask [them]!”).

Despite the director’s attention paid to Emcee at the beginning of the movie, the body of the plot revolves around an American living in Germany who works at the cabaret — Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) as she manages a romantic triangle opposite Brian Roberts (Michael York) and Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem).

In one scene, Sally puts on a record and throws herself onto the bed with Brian, asking him if her body “drives [him] wild with desire.” His tepid response leads her to ask him if he even sleeps with girls. Brian recounts his “disastrous” sex life with women claiming ambiguously that his success (or lack thereof) with women has led to his apparent celibacy. The scene ends with Sally and Brian agreeing to be friends, but an odd sexual tension remains.

As the film goes on, the relationship between Sally and Brian continues at a distance until Sally gets a rejection telegram wherein she questions her value. It is there, sobbing and at her lowest point that we’ve seen her so far in the movie, that Brian and Sally finally have sex.

There’s something hanging over the plot though. Sally’s promiscuity hasn’t conspicuously ended Brian’s self-imposed sexual “dry-spell.” There’s much more to the nature of their relationship together and to their sexual peers both male and female, but the full details of both of their sexual preferences is still ambiguous to us.

Enter Maximilian.

The first scene we see with Brian and Maximilian overflows with jealousy as Max boasts about his status as a Baron. It’s clear that Brian does not want Sally involved with Max, but in the very next scene when Max walks into the bedroom where Sally and Brian are sleeping holding three champagne glasses (after what looks like an absolutely exhausting night) we see the first hint of what just might become a polyamorous situation between the three of them.

Max, who clearly has money, continues to flaunt his wealth. He buys fancy presents for both Sally and Brian and takes both of them to expensive dinners. We as an audience are left wondering if Max is exercising some form of dominance over Brian by making him some sort of cuckolded third wheel, or if maybe Max’s intention isn’t to humiliate Brian, but to date both of them instead. It is amidst these questions that the film jumps into my favorite song from the show, “Two Ladies.”

“Two Ladies” is sung by Emcee, who explains how his polyamorous relationship with his two women works. As the song goes, there are two ladies, but Emcee is “the only man (ja!)” The song in the film touches on the nature of what we can easily assume is a bisexual relationship between both women as they all sleep together. There’s even a lyric about them switching partners “daily, to play as [we] please.”

Now at this point in the review, I have to point out an important distinction between the film version of Cabaret and some stage performances of the show.

Throughout the 1972 film version, the gender variant characters were dealt with in the same way that trans people have been for decades — as the butt of cheap jokes. The one named trans woman, “Elka” was used as the target of comic relief in the two scenes that she appears in. In one scene, Brian uses a men’s room urinal at the Kit Kat Club when Elka walks in and stands next to him to his great surprise, and I assume to the amusement of the audience. In a second scene, she acts as a stand-in for Sally as Sally tells an unwanted suitor that she “has the tiniest touch of syphilis.” Then when talking to Brian later adds, “…but wait ‘till he gets a load of what ole’ Elky’s got!” These elements don’t well respect the identities of the characters they are meant to represent, and ultimately stand as the one major criticism I have of the film overall.

While this bit of tired comic relief hasn’t aged well at all, the on-stage versions of Cabaret go a step further in dealing with trans identities. In some versions of the show, one of the aforementioned “two ladies” is through visual and auditory implication, a transgender woman.

In one revival showing in 1994 starring Alan Cumming as Emcee, one of the women adopts a deeper voice implying her background as a trans woman, while another performance starring Michael C. Hall as Emcee shows a man in drag as one of the two ladies. While it’s not a flattering representation of trans women, (read: flat-out awful) it does add an additional level of identity complexity to the relationship of Emcee and his ladies, even if the application of that concept is transphobic under scrutiny. But I digress… back to the film review.

As the film continues, we can see that Brian, Max, and Sally are the poster children for the Bohemian lifestyle. They drink, they smoke, they attend the cabaret, and the more we see Max and Brian together, the more we wonder what’s happening between the two of them. In the beginning, Brian is portrayed as a naive wallflower whose only interaction to the outrageous life in the cabaret is through Sally. Later on though, Sally and Max play the role of ‘the corrupters’ who expose Brian to their concept of free love and excitement. However, it’s not until a party at Max’s estate that we start to get much more direct information to help us understand what Max has in mind for Sally and Brian.

As the Nazis begin to be more visible in the movie, the tension between the three main characters starts to rise with them. Brian’s irritation with Sally’s free-spirited lifestyle piques when she proclaims, “You can’t stand Maximillian because he’s everything that you’re not! He’s rich, and he knows about life!”

“Oh, screw Maximillian!” Brian says angrily, to which Sally responds curtly, “I do.” In a moment of pure bisexual ecstasy Brian glibly retorts, “So do I.” Boom. The mystery is solved. The bisexual love triangle is finally complete, but alas, the revelation of this important detail is short lived. Max leaves Sally and Brian both. He leaves them with 300 Deutsche Marks, a pregnant Sally, and the broken remnants of the love they each had for each other for Brian and Sally to begin to rebuild. We wonder how Brian and Sally will fare with the burgeoning Third Reich approaching, but we can safely assume that the answer to that question is that they probably won’t do great.

So were bisexual people portrayed positively? Maybe.

What we have to consider in the judgment of this question is the context of both the representation of bisexuality in the script, and the way bisexuality was treated at the time the script was adapted to the screen.

Sure, the scene where Brian declares that he is also having sex with Max was handled with a certain amount of requisite gravitas; in retrospect, probably a bit too much gravitas. The face of stunned Sally Bowles after she hears him speak the words works as a gimmick; a cheapened shock value to the audience for dramatic effect that works in the same way that Elka and Brian’s bathroom scene was meant to evoke laughter. It was meant to give the movie an edge. On one hand, Brian’s official coming out to the audience can be construed as a moment without much depth. On the other hand, that edge that his coming out has still exists even in modern screenings of the movie.

We know Brian’s heterosexuality is in question, and we know through early dialogue that Brian is possibly (probably) attracted to men in some way, but the fact that he loved Max in the same way Sally did is a plot twist that would likely be surprising regardless of the gender of Brian’s character.

After it’s all said and done, Cabaret has aged fairly well in terms of the portrayal of its LGBTQ characters. The way the script handles bi/homo/hetero sexuality is respectful, especially for a movie where the concept is so central. Despite my concerns about the script’s treatment of trans identities, I do like Cabaret. I liked it the first time I saw it, and that attraction to the play and movie persists with me today. There’s a good reason why people love Cabaret, but for the faults we see with our modern eyes, an updated version of Cabaret is in order be it on-screen or on-stage.

Emily Crose is a 30-year-old trans woman with a wife and two kids. Her favorite movie is and always will be Ghostbusters (1984). By day she is a Baroness of binary black magic, by night a voracious writer of her own self-important opinions. She loves movies, musicals, baking, and mint tea.

“Don’t You Want Your Girl Hot?”: Bisexual Representation in ‘Rent’

Maureen is worth a second look, particularly at a time in which bisexual women and lesbians are routinely ignored, left out, and killed in television and film. … ‘Rent’ repeatedly comments on Maureen’s apparently untamed sexuality. In “Tango: Maureen,” Joanne wonders if Maureen became involved with other men while dating Mark. Mark confirms these suspicions and Joanne also admits that Maureen cheated on her, suggesting that one person cannot satisfy Maureen’s sexual appetite — a common myth about bisexual people is that they cannot be monogamous.

This guest post written by Olivia Edmunds-Diez appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.

As an avid musical theatre fan, Rent is certainly in my top ten favorite musicals. I was first exposed to the musical through the 2005 film of the same name. From there, I quickly fell in love with the film’s soundtrack and then progressed to the original Broadway cast recording. The show’s music is infectious through its use of rock and more traditional Broadway stylings. I also adored the show’s diversity and attempts to tackle such controversial topics as HIV/AIDS, sexuality, identity, and poverty. But out of all the characters, I never really cared for Maureen, the show’s singular bisexual. Looking back, I think this is largely because she is not written as sympathetic and, as a straight teenager, I found it hard to relate to her voracious sexual appetite as depicted in the show. But Maureen is worth a second look, particularly at a time in which bisexual women and lesbians are routinely ignored, left out, and killed in television and film.

It is important to acknowledge that Maureen’s race is never specified in the show. Idina Menzel, a white performer, originated the role on Broadway and also played Maureen in the film version. Productions of Rent often replicate the racial casting of the original Broadway production. Maureen’s race is worth acknowledging because, as is often the case, when race is not specified, the default is white. This could certainly be viewed as bisexual erasure, particularly when it comes to bisexual people of color. Additionally, as Maureen is the only named bisexual character in the story, the audience is left wanting for bisexuals of color. And so although Rent gets representation right in many ways, bisexuals of color attending Rent, be it the stage show or the film adaptation, will not see themselves reflected in the show or on-screen.

Rent repeatedly comments on Maureen’s apparently untamed sexuality. In “Tango: Maureen,” Joanne (Tracie Thoms) wonders if Maureen became involved with other men while dating Mark (Anthony Rapp). Mark confirms these suspicions and Joanne also admits that Maureen cheated on her, suggesting that one person cannot satisfy Maureen’s sexual appetite — a common myth about bisexual people is that they cannot be monogamous. Later at their engagement party, Maureen and Joanne begin fighting about Joanne’s insecurities about their relationship, namely that Maureen was “promiscuous.” Naturally, this fight breaks out into song, but not before Joanne protests, “You were flirting with a woman in rubber,” prompting Maureen to shout, “There will always be women in rubber flirting with me!” Maureen reassures Joanne, singing, “You are the one I choose / Folks would kill to fill your shoes.” None of the characters seem to accept Maureen’s testimony, possibly because they assume she is unable to commit to any one person given her penchant for any and all persons. At the conclusion of “Take Me or Leave Me,” both women storm off, suggesting that their relationship is over. It is worth noting that in the film, we never officially learn if Maureen and Joanne reconnect and become a couple again. In the stage show, we see the duo reconnect shortly after in the song “Without You.”

The song “Tango: Maureen” bears further discussion. Maureen has no lines in the song that bears her name, suggesting that she is not allowed or able to discuss her own feelings and/or actions. With lyrics such as, “Feel like going insane? / Got a fire in your brain? / And you’re thinking of drinking gasoline?” referring to being in a relationship with Maureen, it is clear that Maureen is less than wonderful in a relationship. In the film, an elaborate dance sequence is inserted, with dozens of couples performing the tango, dressed in all black. All of the couples are paired heterosexually, which is curious for a film about LGBTQ characters. Additionally, Maureen is the only character dressed in red, quite obviously cuing to the audience that she is sexual, dangerous, and on the prowl. One difference between the stage show and the film is Maureen’s visual sexual relationships with men. The stage show does not show the audience any instances of Maureen and a man being intimate. But during the song “Tango: Maureen” in the film, the audience briefly sees Maureen kiss both a man and a woman before the trio walks off arm-in-arm. Whether this is to more overtly inform the audience that Maureen is bisexual or to affirm her enthusiasm for any kind of sexual activity, the audience will never know.

There are multiple jokes about Maureen’s new partner, Joanne. In the first of the show’s many overheard voicemails, Mark’s mom calls to wish him a Merry Christmas. But she ends with: “Oh, and Mark! We’re sorry to hear that Maureen dumped you. I say, ‘C’est la vie.’ So let her be a lesbian! There are other fishies in the sea. Love, mom!” Later that same day, Mark and Roger catch up with their friend, Benny, whom they haven’t seen in awhile. Benny asks if Mark and Maureen are still dating, and the following exchange occurs: “She’s got a new man?” “Well, no.” “What’s his name?” “Joanne.” Whether onstage or screen, these moments are played for laughs. We’re left feeling sorry for Mark for one of two reasons: either he couldn’t satisfy his woman so she became a lesbian, or Mark was so unaware he didn’t know he was dating a lesbian. Either way, these jokes inform the audience that Maureen is a lesbian, not bisexual.

It is worth emphasizing that Maureen is never labelled as bisexual throughout the show or film. Not only do the characters never refer to Maureen as bisexual, but Maureen herself does not give her sexual orientation a name. And this fact is poignant. Considering that it is only audiences and fans of the show/film that give Maureen this label, what happens when labels are applied to other people? Do the show and film contribute to bi erasure? Would Maureen even choose the bisexual label? Or might she opt for queer, questioning, pansexual, or lesbian? Might she eschew labels altogether? Perhaps we should take Maureen’s own words, and simply “take me for what I am.”

Olivia Edmunds-Diez is a Northwestern graduate, where she studied theatre and gender and sexuality studies. Her current favorite finds are The Two Faces of January, the Little Women cast recording, and The Blind Assassin. You can follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr.

The Porn Reviewer’s Dilemma: What’s the Right Way to Talk About the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Trilogy?

Most people (rightly) expect more from art than they do from porn; we expect art to offer a perspective or point of view, to have a message, to be more than a spectacle to press the pleasure centers of our brains. … And, while I don’t think it’s wrong to say that ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ fares pretty poorly as art, I do think it’s wrong to single it out, as if our cinemas aren’t full of spectacle already.

Written by Katherine Murray.

“What even is porn, really?” That’s the question I eventually asked myself when I broke my self-imposed boycott on Fifty Shades of Grey. The trailer for the second movie – which looks almost exactly as creepy and aggravating as the first movie, but with more masks – landed last week and, like it or not, a story that began life as an X-rated Twilight fan fiction is now in mainstream theatres, presenting itself as art.

Part of me wants to say it’s foolish to try to talk about Fifty Shades of Grey as if it’s anything but porn. When the novel series first became popular, a lot of the commentary about it involved people who weren’t familiar with fan fiction responding to it as a novelty – with either amusement, curiosity, or some combination of the two. It’s easy to make fun of X-rated fanfic – what turns people on is so idiosyncratic that it almost always seems ridiculous to someone else – but, over the years, I’ve learned to take a live-and-let-live attitude. People can’t control what turns them on, and it’s unkind to argue about it with them. None of us would come off looking awesome if our sexual fantasies were projected on a cinema screen. Even if your fantasy is about men’s domination of women through non-consensual sex and domestic violence – which, let’s be clear, is the central fantasy in Fifty Shades of Grey, even though it’s wrongly presented as BDSM – as long as no one’s getting attacked in real life, your fantasies are your own business and no one should make fun of you or criticize you for them. The world is a terrible place, and it sometimes conditions us to be aroused by things we might not have otherwise chosen. You may as well enjoy it if you can.

When I look at Fifty Shades of Grey as porn, I don’t especially like it, but I don’t judge other people for liking it, either. And that’s where the discussion would stop, if it were playing in an adult movie theatre, instead of a multiplex. The Fifty Shades movies are marketed as R-rated, mainstream dramas – to a certain extent, they’re also marketed as romance, which is a completely different problem, since there’s nothing romantic about this relationship. While it’s very likely the series was marketed this way in order to maximize profits and make the most money possible, it also moves them into a space where they could be considered art.

Most people (rightly) expect more from art than they do from porn; we expect art to offer a perspective or point of view, to have a message, to be more than a spectacle to press the pleasure centers of our brains. Watching Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film adaptation of the first novel (which I have not read), I can see that she tried to make art. The main character goes on a journey from beginning to end – it’s not a very happy journey, but it’s one where she finds the courage to say no to the older, charismatic man who’s slowly taken control of her life – and there’s a sense of finality and completeness. The acting and camera work also convey layers of complexity that the bare bones of the story do not. At the same time, most of it still feels like spectacle. And, while I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Fifty Shades of Grey fares pretty poorly as art, I do think it’s wrong to single it out, as if our cinemas aren’t full of spectacle already.

I get why people hate Fifty Shades of Grey more than they hate other spectacle films, and, in my heart, I kind of hate it, too. Its raison d’être is to let its audience take pleasure in watching a man mistreat a woman and it largely fails to demonstrate a critical understanding of what that means. For a film presenting itself as art, that makes it look pretty misogynist. For a film presenting itself as a beginner’s guide to BDSM, that makes it look ignorant (not even considering the part where the script’s understanding of the physical mechanics of BDSM rates something like -5). For a story that suddenly made fanfic a part of mainstream culture, I think everyone except for E. L. James would have picked a different flagship.

At the same time, the Saw franchise is on movie number eight now, the last Mission Impossible I saw was just about Tom Cruise putting suction cups on a building, I’ve lost count of how many superhero movies only exist to blow things up, and everyone fawned over the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in which, I contend to this day, we were supposed to enjoy watching torture and rape. It seems like there’s a special kind of shame reserved for spectacles that are explicitly intended to turn someone on – and there’s a special kind of misogyny reserved for them too, because we live in an amazing culture – but Fifty Shades of Grey is not so different from other mainstream spectacles designed for enjoyment.

As I watched Fifty Shades of Grey, and tried to figure out what I thought about it, and whether or not it was fair to criticize something as art when its original purpose was porn, I also started to wonder whether or not it was fair to criticize The Avengers as art, or Suicide Squad, or the new Star Trek movies where everyone runs and their ships keep exploding. Even though critics try to ask themselves if a movie succeeds on its own terms – that is, if it’s a good example of what it’s trying to be, usually according to the standards of the film’s genre, regardless of whether what it’s trying to be is desirable – it isn’t always as simple as saying, “Hot Tub Time Machine delivered what it promised, so it’s an amazing movie.” It’s also not as simple as saying, “We deserve more from our culture than Fast and Furious: Furiously Fast Fast Furious 16.” Life is a balance between reflection and indulgence, and I wouldn’t want to eliminate either.

I think the answer might be that there’s room for both types of response to any kind of film – no matter what the main intention was. The story you hear is always the product of an interaction between the storyteller’s mind and yours – it’s never completely the same for two people and, what one person is happy to enjoy as spectacle might be the same thing someone else spends hours analyzing and picking apart. Neither person’s reaction is wrong – it just reflects two different ways of engaging. (Ask me some time about how much I hated Mad Max: Fury Road or how much I’m willing to hand wave every single thing in The 100).

So, what even is porn, really? It’s a class of film intended to be spectacle that we could all still criticize as art. I didn’t particularly enjoy the spectacle in Fifty Shades of Grey, and I didn’t rate it very highly as art. But enjoying the spectacle, in and of itself, doesn’t make you a terrible person any more than enjoying slasher movies or an endless stream of street racing films does. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t make mimicking the actions of its characters any more acceptable than blowing up half of New York or going on a crime spree, either, but, if you want to let it push the pleasure centers of your brain, more power to you.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Boys in the Trees’ Is the Best Movie You Might Not See Next Year

The first feature film from Nicholas Verso, ‘Boys in the Trees’ is a coming-of-age story focused on questions of masculinity and wrapped in a delightful – and visually stunning – cloak of Halloween. …They explore what it means that their friendship fell apart – what childhood loses to adolescence, what adolescence loses to adulthood, what we gain in either case, and what we give away when we stop hoping that something amazing could happen to us.

Written by Katherine Murray.

By the time I walked into my screening of Boys in the Trees, it had a little frowny face beside it in the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) mobile app, and there was a “buy one, get one” sale on tickets. Since premiering at Venice earlier this month, the film hasn’t received more than a handful of mixed reviews. While it’s slated to hit Australian theatres in time for Halloween, I haven’t been able to find any news about distribution in North America. This is very disappointing, because Boys in the Trees is one of the best films I’ve seen in recent years, and I left the theatre wanting to share it with everyone.

The first feature film from Nicholas Verso, Boys in the Trees is a coming-of-age story focused on questions of masculinity and wrapped in a delightful – and visually stunning – cloak of Halloween. I was in love with every part of it, right from the start – the details in the costuming, the weirdly specific soundtrack (which Verso explained was built out of songs that had personal meaning for him), the charismatic performances from its young actors, the incredibly vivid colors in a movie set almost completely at night. Mostly, though, I loved the dark emotional palette the story draws from, and its fearlessness in letting itself and its teenage characters be uncool enough to care about things.

The story takes place in a stylized, hyper-real version of 1997, in which a bully and his victim go on a supernatural adventure together on Halloween night. Corey (Toby Wallace), the bully, is also the film’s protagonist, trying to figure out whether following his dreams is worth exposing himself to scorn and ridicule. Jonah (Gulliver McGrath), the victim, used to be Corey’s best friend, before Corey started trying so hard to fit in. Over the course of a night, they explore what it means that their friendship fell apart – what childhood loses to adolescence, what adolescence loses to adulthood, what we gain in either case, and what we give away when we stop hoping that something amazing could happen to us.

The film’s greatest trick is that there’s a false ending roughly 80 minutes in, in which it seems like Corey’s learned everything he needed to learn and wrapped all of his problems up neatly… only to discover that there’s still half an hour in this movie, nothing is as simple as it seems, and sometimes you can’t take back what you’ve done.

At the screening, Verso explained that he’s received mixed reactions from men watching the film. Some hate it passionately, and others told him it’s precious to them because of how it reflects their experiences. In exploring masculinity, Boys in the Trees brushes against sexism, homophobia, latent homosexuality, aggression, vulnerability, kindness, friendship, and strength at various times without seeming like a Public Service Announcement. It’s a story about bullying that isn’t as simple as saying, “Bullies are horrible people,” and a story about friendship that isn’t as simple as saying, “Your friends are the people you always get along with.” The film takes a more layered view of what people can be to each other – what boys can be to each other – and how relationships can change from moment to moment.

Verso’s view of Halloween is also – except for one jump scare – less rooted in terror than in carnival – the idea that there’s one night a year where the regular rules are suspended; when the veils between worlds, both real and imagined, become permeable, and people can cross over. This is the most delicious form of Halloween, and it’s on full display from beginning to end.

The only weakness worth mentioning is a subplot in which Corey earns a girlfriend almost completely at random. This plot line has no relationship to anything else in the movie, slows down the action in confusing ways whenever it appears, and seems to happen just because it’s expected. The girl, Romany (Mitzi Ruhlmann), seems pretty cool, but is also made to speak for her entire gender at various points, and literally only ever appears so that she can be a good influence on Corey. Since Jonah’s already a good influence on Corey and more integral to the plot, it’s not clear what Romany’s adding besides proof of Corey’s heterosexuality.

That’s important, because the much more interesting relationship in the film exists between Corey and the leader of his little gang, Jango (Justin Holborow). Jango’s an asshole, but he also values his friendship with Corey, who draws out a gentler side of his personality. Justin Holborow’s performance captures the sense of someone whose entire demeanor can change depending on whether or not he sees the people before him as human, and there are homoerotic undertones to the frustrated sense of ownership he displays toward Corey. It’s not that Boys in the Trees needs to be an LGBTQ movie in order to tell a good story – it’s just that the film seems a lot more interested in the boys’ relationship than it does in Romany, and it might have been nice if the story had leaned into it more.

Even with the extraneous heterosexual romance running interference, Boys in the Trees still presents a remarkably strong sense of voice, and displays the same strength of its characters in daring to leave itself vulnerable through nerdy acts of caring. Verso took risks with this story and poured himself into it rather than holding back, and that’s something I’d always choose to watch over a perfectly executed, perfectly ordinary film.

Boys in the Trees may or may not ever come to a theatre near you, but, hopefully, we can all stream it online one day.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Daughters of Horror Masters: Examining the Films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch

I’ve chosen to focus primarily on the debut films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch: ‘Scarlet Diva’ and ‘Boxing Helena.’ … Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

This guest post is written by Juliette Faraone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of abuse]

In this essay, I seek to explore the relationship between subject and object. I also seek to better understand how these concepts are influenced and informed by gender and the media. This essay seeks a lot of things. I’m thirsty.

I’m here to discuss the films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch. I’ve chosen to focus primarily on their debut films: Scarlet Diva, made in 2000, and Boxing Helena, released in 1993.

Neither Argento nor Lynch was wholly new to me — I’d come across Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things back in 2005 during my Winona Ryder phase. Ryder had a small part, if I recall correctly – it was during all the shoplifting fuss, and she’d taken sort of a hiatus at that point. I digress. Argento’s acting originally drew me into her work, and I first arrived to her films by way of her father, filmmaker Dario Argento.

Having been a massive Twin Peaks fan, I knew Jennifer Lynch primarily as the author of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Sometime after its publication, she served as a production assistant on her father’s film, Blue Velvet. Now, I have mixed feelings about David Lynch. Actually, I guess my feelings for David himself are mostly positive — it’s Lynch fans I have a problem with. But hey, that’s another topic for another day.

Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

I started with Scarlet Diva. I’ll admit I was turned off by the DVD cover, but decided to give it a shot. The movie itself was surprisingly contemplative – quiet even. Sole screenwriting credit goes to Asia Argento, and though there’s not much dialogue, in my mind that’s a skill in itself. The writing felt minimalist; Meg White on drums minimalist. It was nice – something a 25-year-old woman would make (whatever that means). And it was a road movie, which earned it extra points in my heart. There are probably a great many female-driven road movies, but I can’t really think of any not featuring male leads or love interests. Did you just name one? I’m proud of you — I could only really think of Boys on the Side – at any rate, the number is small. How many female-driven, Bechdel Test-passing, road movies have been made in the past 10 years? Whenever people complain about similarities in women-led films, I try to remind them Hollywood saw fit to release not just one but seven Fast & Furious films, so I think we can probably handle it. Not knocking the Fast franchise, but come on.

In Scarlet Diva, Asia Argento plays Anna Battista, an actress and aspiring director. The title sequence starts with Anna sitting alone on the bus. She stares out the window, observing the scenery but also looking at her own reflection. From the first shot of the film, we witness Anna as both subject and object.

Of course, in broadening our vision, we see Asia Argento not only as dual subject and object, but also as an outside force – the director. She exists apart from her creation, and this is especially important for women. I was once of the mind-set that greater numbers of women directors in film didn’t necessarily equate to progress because it was the content of the film that mattered. This line of thinking now strikes me as, well, pretty fucking stupid. Of course women’s voices matter; representation is crucial.

Asia Argento used a tripod to film many of the scenes in Scarlet Diva herself. Both she and her character display exhibitionist tendencies, but still assert their control over situations. This control is vital to Anna’s character. In one scene, Anna’s co-workers give her drugs. She’s a bit reluctant to take the drugs at first, but her co-workers persuade her to take them. Moments later, Anna awakens in bed beside the man and woman — all three are naked. The room is dark, and Anna is overcome with dread. She’s lost control, and she lets out a scream. This scene was, for me, the most painful in the film.

In moments like this, we learn that while Anna is self-aware, she isn’t omniscient. When Anna derides an actor friend for “selling out” to become a sex worker in L.A., he reminds her that she always said acting is prostitution. Anna’s quick to laugh at herself, and we see a continuation of this love/hate relationship for performance scattered throughout the film.

Boxing Helena began to take shape thirteen years before Scarlet Diva — in 1987, when Jennifer Lynch was just 19 years old. She was chosen to develop the story, written by Philippe Caland, into a film. I’ll admit, on the surface, Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena are two very different films. Scarlet Diva is intimate — confessional, even. A film shot entirely on digital video, it deals with personal subjects in personal settings, with little pretense along the way. Boxing Helena is slick and larger scale. It has the veneer of Hollywood and in parts, plays almost like a fairy tale. Unlike Scarlet Diva, some of the interactions in Lynch’s movie feel false, and Bill Paxton in black leather pants doesn’t help matters. Instead of a first person subjective camera, we are presented with a pretty conventional narrative structure, insofar as the film has a couple of main characters and follows them around from scene to scene. Nevertheless, the two films share ties.

In Boxing Helena, Sherilyn Fenn plays the title character, and if she has a last name, we don’t know it. Viewers aren’t told much about Helena, and we can’t really fault the character for any lack of personal dynamism — the narrative paints her as object from start to finish — even the film’s title suggests she is the receiver of the action.

I’m assuming at this point you’re all low-key aware of the plot of Boxing Helena. Helena spurns the advances of Julian Sand’s character, a doctor named Nick who is — spoiler alert — a major creep. Apparently, Helena and Nick dated for three seconds before she decided he wasn’t the guy for her and he’s been obsessed with her ever since. Helena gets into a car accident outside Nick’s home, and, being a doctor, he performs surgery on her. Pretty okay so far, except, you know, during surgery he amputates both of her legs. Nick keeps Helena hostage in this way throughout a lot of the film, until she’s had enough and tries to hurt him. At this point, Nick thinks it’s a good idea to get rid of her arms too.

Credit where it’s due: Helena gets in some good verbal jabs — at one point, she says to Nick, after witnessing an exchange from another room, “You’re a goddamn joke.” As a female viewer, I took pleasure in that moment. What woman hasn’t experienced the misery of male entitlement? That said, I’m not sure what Lynch was aiming for in terms of general audience response to her film as a whole, which is actually a big part of the reason I fight for it. I like a little confusion every now and then. It reminds me I’m human — neurons firing, gray matter doing whatever gray matter’s supposed to do, etc.

Nick is persistent in his obsession with Helena. Since a young age, he’s been taught anything in life is obtainable with enough perseverance. Nick sees Helena as not just a conquest but also as fulfillment of some childhood goal. He robs her of her limbs. He objectifies her both literally and figuratively, and, as the audience, we’re right there alongside him. Early in the movie, we watch Nick as he watches Helena. In these scenes, Lynch transforms the camera into the male gaze.

Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena were made nearly a decade apart and likely with different demographics in mind. Still, we can sense a trend in critical response. Neither work was well received. Boxing Helena was seen as too extreme – misogynistic, even – with a message that confused viewers (myself included). I’d really like to scratch out the last ten minutes of the movie and pretend they never existed. It’d be a much stronger film. Still, it has its moments. Scarlet Diva didn’t bomb, but it wasn’t exactly a hit with audiences either. I knew the film had been chiefly criticized for being “self-indulgent” – criticism I don’t disagree with. But so what? Of course it’s self-indulgent. And I don’t mean in the “all art is self-indulgent” sort of way. (Or maybe I do, but I tend to hate that argument.) It’s self-indulgent in the sense that sometimes getting noticed requires a little push and shove. Who else is going to indulge a young female filmmaker? And what, we then ask, are women to make films about? What would critics prefer? If these films were the product of real women’s thoughts, feelings, drives, perceptions – why was there such a resistance?

Both of these women filmmakers have gone on to direct other films. Would this have been possible without their already established family fame? Would they have even been able to get their first efforts funded? And what of the unknown director – what happens to her?

At one point in Scarlet Diva, Anna finds her friend Veronica bound and gagged in her apartment, and she hasn’t eaten in days. We learn Veronica’s boyfriend is responsible for this abuse. After untying her friend, Anna quips, “You’re like the American housewife who gets beaten but doesn’t tell on her husband.” The friend agrees with the comparison — but after all, she’s in love. (Yikes.) Interestingly, in an interview from around the time of Boxing Helena’s release, Jennifer Chambers Lynch described her film “as a love story, not a horror film”:

“Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It’s inviting, exciting, and animalistic. I’ve been there; I’ve been drawn to it.”

I’d be foolish to directly contradict Lynch’s own view of her film. For all I know, she still regards her film as a love story. Nevertheless, it is (in my mind anyway) the duty of the critic to reflect on art and to interpret its role in a larger cultural context. In Boxing Helena, Lynch briefly takes the nightmare in Scarlet Diva to the next level – it’s not just the loss of control to be feared most — it’s resignation. To forget one’s passion and to acquiesce to another’s will is the ultimate self-betrayal.

Taking all of this into consideration, and despite both films being written and directed by women, I’m not comfortable calling either of these films feminist. I don’t think they’re actively misogynistic, but I do think as responsible consumers of art we should be discerning in our application of the F-word. It means something and I want it to keep on meaning something.

There’s a famous Oscar Wilde quote that goes, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” In this age, complex questions of morality have gone out of vogue and have been replaced by a single phrase: “Is it problematic?” This question isn’t inherently harmful, but it does become dangerous when it’s used to avoid thinking critically. Instead of asking if a work is problematic (or at least in addition to it), we must train ourselves to ask a new set of questions: How does the narrative treat those subjects? Does it look on them favorably? Why or why not?

So let’s cut to the chase. If you take one thing away from this essay, let it be this: it’s absolutely imperative for a woman to write her own story.

Are you a woman? Do you have something to say? Of course you do. Write it down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you. You’re the fucking master of your own universe. Believe that with all your heart. I do.

Juliette Faraone studied digital media and film at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College before earning her BA in comparative literature from the University of Evansville. She is an editorial intern at Ms. magazine and a staff writer for Screen Queens. Her work has also appeared at Lesbians Over Everything, Slant and the Zusterschap Collective. In her spare time, Juliette watches a lot of old musicals and talks to her girlfriend and cats.

Beware the Sexist Celluloid Quilt that Is ‘Nocturnal Animals’

…I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead. … Like a lot of sexist stories, ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and murder]

The most generous interpretation of Nocturnal Animals is that it mimics the conventions of sexist storytelling in order to criticize them. If that’s the case, the criticism is buried too deep for me to see it and I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead.

The film uses a complicated, non-linear, story-within-a-story structure to mask the simplicity of its content. Susan (Amy Adams) is a wealthy gallery director who divorced Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) after a two-year marriage. About twenty years later, Edward sends Susan a galley of his new novel – the novel she didn’t believe he would ever manage to write – along with an invitation to meet when he’s in her city. Susan, who’s miserable with every aspect of her life since leaving Edward, is captivated by his story and experiences many emotions as she thinks about it on the couch – and in the shower, and walking up a spiral staircase at work, and standing in front of a painting of the word “Revenge,” and in other picturesque locations. Because it’s completely impossible that Susan could be happy that things have turned out well for Edward at the same time believing it was best to end their marriage, she decides she wants him back. It’s a plot line that marries the style and score of sexy Michael Douglas-era thrillers to the plot of an Avril Lavigne song (he was a sk8er boi / she said, “see you l8er, boi” / now she regrets all of her life decisions because he achieved something after they grew up). The complication is that Susan did something unspeakably horrible to Edward when they broke up – so unspeakable that we don’t learn what it was until late in the film, at which point it doesn’t really live up to the hype.

The film’s second narrative is a dramatization of the novel that Edward wrote, in which Gyllenhaal plays the lead character, Tony, and other Amy Adams-looking actresses with long red hair play the roles of Tony’s wife and daughter. Tony’s family heads out on vacation when they’re run off the road by three rednecks – I say “redneck” not because I think that’s a nice word to use, but because these are the same stock characters from every horror movie in this genre (think Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance). There’s a long, tense sequence where the villains try to trick Tony into unlocking the doors to his car, except this scene is hindered by the fact that their ruse isn’t very convincing. The situation ultimately ends with Tony’s wife and daughter (who are referred to exclusively as “my wife,” “my daughter,” “your folks,” or “your women” from this point on) kidnapped, raped, and murdered while Tony survives. Tony teams up with a hard-bitten detective, who plays by his own rules, and plots to get revenge on the three men who ruined his life.

The opening credit sequence – which is a throwback in itself, both because it exists and seems to go on forever – features slow motion footage of plus size women and elderly women dancing burlesque to the tune of a sinister soundtrack. As I write this, I still have no idea why. I also don’t know why the men who murder Tony’s wife and daughter carefully arrange their dead and surprisingly unmarked bodies into a beautiful, vaguely suggestive pose on top of a bright red couch on the edge of their property, almost like they know Tom Ford’s going to take a picture of it. I don’t know why the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two women is only ever presented as a thing that happened to Tony. I don’t know why Susan can’t send a text message when she’s meeting someone at a restaurant. I don’t know why wearing dark red lipstick makes her a different person than she wants to be. I don’t know why Tony doesn’t listen to his wife when she warns him not to get out of the car. I don’t know why what Susan did to Edward is supposed to be as bad as anything any of the characters do in his novel. I don’t know why Susan wants to get back together with Edward. After being subjected to Edward’s great, amazing novel, I wished more than anything that I could divorce him.

Like a lot of sexist stories, Nocturnal Animals is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men. Susan only matters in so far as she’s the focal point of Edward’s rage, and in so far as he’s able to corral her toward sharing his point of view – that he was great and their relationship was wonderful until she ruined it by doing something evil. Almost 100% of the time she’s on-screen, Susan thinks about Edward, feels emotions about Edward, and remembers Edward. All of the expressions on her face, all of her beautiful poses, everything she does and says – somehow, in some way, it’s all about Edward. He isn’t even there, and he’s still the entire focus of what is supposedly Susan’s story.

The women in Edward’s great, amazing novel fare even worse. A fridge is a fridge no matter what your production values are, and Tony’s wife and daughter are alive for one scene before taking a trip to the fridge so that we’ll understand why Tony feels bad. Then they are literally posed as objects to be viewed because: content imitating form.

There are signs that the film is aware of the way it objectifies women – for example, the burlesque dancers from the opening credits also become objects when they lie on slabs in the gallery, which seems a little on the nose. But creating art with awareness is not the same as executing it with purpose; there isn’t anything in the film that suggests its sexism serves any greater purpose than following the conventions of other sexist films.

Nocturnal Animals is set for limited release this November, and will probably be nominated for awards.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Queer Post-Apocalyptic Western ‘The Lotus Gun’ Director Interview

‘The Lotus Gun’ is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads.

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

The Lotus Gun is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads. Set in a future of wide open spaces, The Lotus Gun is a survivor story about Nora (Lauren Avery), its laconic, independent lead, who escaped from a drug cult and a life of sex slavery.

The cinematography of this film is breathtaking, conveying more about a world long gone to seed than any exposition or carefully placed ruins possibly could. The Lotus Gun critiques collectivism, favoring instead an individualistic approach popular in the Western genre. Here the communal, sharing societies are actually patriarchal, and they commodify women, engaging in sex trafficking and sexual slavery. It is then not surprising that naive Daphine (Dasha Nekrasova), Nora’s partner, is fascinated by a young man who wanders onto their property, while Nora plans to kill him, knowing the threat he poses.

Enter The Lotus Gun.

Guns are often a key feature of the the Western genre, and the relationship between the old West protagonist and his (usually) gun is often a love story. Here, guns are so scarce that few have ever seen them, so the gun itself is a phallic relic. Interestingly, Nora, a woman, is presumably the only person left who has one.

The Lotus Gun is an engaging film with arresting imagery and a plot that took me to surprising places. I look forward to seeing newcomer Amanda Milius’ next projects. My only critique is that the two female leads, being thin, white, blonde women, are not as unique as the story itself. I did, however, appreciate how dirty they were, their skin covered in blemishes and bruises, their clothes ripped and dusty.

I had the privilege of interviewing talented writer and director Amanda Milius.

Bitch Flicks: What made you choose to make this film?

Amanda Milius: I have always been drawn to the things people do when there’s no law around, so in pre- or post- current versions of society or civilization. I had both smaller and larger versions of this particular story I’d had for a while, and at school we got to do these sort of smaller 5-minute films throughout the program. So I explored different aspects of the kinds of people and stories I like, and I just wanted an opportunity to get one fully realized thought out. It happens to be 25 minutes long, which I certainly heard no end about from everyone I know… But I’m glad it is what it is because it wasn’t meant to be 12 minutes long.

I like the idea of these two very different kinds of women and how differently they react to the world and how their basic personality makeups create a conflict just out of that. Nora sees the world as an inherently bad place and Daph feels the opposite. I also just wanted to express my particular style and aesthetic and really have a story where that could be featured… I definitely didn’t want to do anything indoors; I really like people having to survive in nature. I had a very particular visual style I wanted and I used to be a photographer for fashion and music magazines so I’ve had time to sort out the style I like and I wanted a moment to showcase that.

Thankfully, I found a really great team of people who also got it and really expanded on it. Sean Bagley, the director of photography (DP), is just as much a part of it, same with the costume designer Adam Alonso, and the production designers Marcelo Dolce and Katie Pyne — everyone really got it and so it comes together in a very good way, thankfully.

BF: Why do you feel this is an important story to tell?

AM: Because even though society does exist and keeps us safe, there are things we take for granted as reality when they are only just imposed on us from society. So how real are they? How is equality between people maintained? How do the weak stand up to the strong or groups of people when they are outnumbered? I maybe have more of Nora’s point of view of the world: I don’t think people will act the way they do now when civilization is gone, and so then how will people decide what’s right and wrong? What kind of women will survive and how? How will men and women interact? I think it’s important now. I think it’s a good thing to figure out what your values are as an independent person with an independent morality.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about loyalty and relationships. In two-person relationships, there’s always a power dynamic, which isn’t bad, but it exists. I wanted to deal with ideas about “possessiveness” and ownership and freedom within relationships. Dash splits because she maybe thinks she will find freedom elsewhere. And in this particular world and situation, she finds out she was free before. Nora already knows this, so the way she deals with the betrayal is interesting… how she really does kind of treat Daph as a pet, like she doesn’t know any better. But she saves her and that’s what matters, she still makes sure she has a life. The idea was not that how all these people act is necessarily what I or we would think is correct or right, but in this world it’s what happens.

BF: Why did you choose to make your film a Western?

AM: Technically it’s not a western because it doesn’t take place in the Old West but it is a variation. I chose to place it in a broken down world after civilization for the reasons I mentioned above but I also really like Westerns and the things about people you can explore in those kinds of stories: what people get up to when there’s no real law around, when it’s just people deciding for themselves how to live and what’s right and wrong. I also really like how Nora is basically Clint Eastwood combined with my friend Jennifer Herrema (singer from 90s indie band Royal Trux); there’s no better character than that for me! It’s cool having her be strong in a sort of reserved, silent, resolved, and complicated way. A lot of the “strong” women in films these days, which seems to be the new thing, they are so annoying. I’m not saying people shouldn’t try to have more of those characters, but I haven’t seen one I really liked since Alien or Terminator, which is funny because no one was trying so hard then to make great female characters. That’s probably why there’s not a lot of them, but those two are such great examples and no one notices. Now they have the girls always doing kung fu or something; it’s so awful.

BF: Could you talk about your choice to make the women a couple in the film?

AM: I liked the idea of this sort of sensual relationship in a Blue Lagoon kind of way between the women in their undisturbed environment and how that gets disrupted and altered when the new element shows up.

Basically, they are a couple but that could be seen as being by default, as they are the only two people out there for years together… the idea was that it was a vague kind of non-defined thing where they were best friends and family and probably lovers in this kind of survivalist, futuristic way. When Mike shows up, it can be questioned whether or not Daph is necessarily gay exactly or if she wavers between attraction to the competing personalities in front of her at that moment. He is new, so is it the newness and strangeness that she’s attracted to, or the fact that he’s a guy? I wanted the girls’ relationship to be almost transcendent of a distinct type of relationship; they are every relationship to each other in a way.

BF: Could you tell us about the significance of the gun (the Lotus Gun) in your film and why you chose it?

AM: The gun itself is kind of like an Excalibur thing, since there’s none around… the idea is both guns and women are rare and therefore of value in this world. But the way they are ‘”valued” is as objects, commodities, things you need to stay alive. The gun is special because the backstory (which you’ll see if I ever get to make the feature or serialized version of this!) is that Dennis, the commune / cult leader, collects artifacts from the past civilization, and this gun is a particular rarity. He had it for some time, and during that time, he had his guys engrave over the original engraving to represent his world. Shotguns like that usually have ducks or dogs or other kinds of hunting imagery on them, really beautiful actually. A lot of those guns have some really amazing art on them. Anyway, so he has this guy crudely engrave his snake image and the Datura flowers they use in their drug ceremonies and weed leaves. Which alone is a cool idea, a shotgun engraved with hippie iconography is so cool. So that’s how it becomes the “Lotus Gun” and it has a sort of mythology pop up around it in this world when it supposedly disappears. When Nora digs it up, it’s a whole new world for her. She has something no one else has, and it’s almost like it was meant for her. No one else ever shot it that we know of, so it’s like Excalibur in that the gun was always waiting for her because she’s the rightful owner of it. Now there is a different balance of power that didn’t exist before.

BF: Could you share a bit about your experiences as a female film writer and director?

AM: I don’t really think about it much, so I can just say that being a writer and a director is great because as of yet, no one has ever taken one of my stories and ruined them, as I’m told will happen when someone finally buys a script from me! I know what you mean though. So far, I guess I’ve been very lucky to work with some very cool people because I hear there are difficult situations for women in this field, but I’ve really loved working with everyone I’ve worked with. I know there are definitely people out there who think maybe someone doesn’t know what they are talking about because they’re female or something, but I just wouldn’t be around that. As a director, for sure I wouldn’t tolerate it, so I just don’t think it would ever get to that. Because that kind of person wouldn’t even be around me anyway. Plus, I made this movie in school, so I had the ability to work with my best friends. Maybe I’ll have more to say on it as I progress through the profession.

I think women in this industry should remember that there are lots of different kinds of women and to not hold us to some idea about ourselves, because it will limit us. We ourselves need to be supportive of other women in a real way, which means supporting all different kinds of films and people. Not box ourselves into one way of thinking. I think women’s film festivals are a great idea because they show that women make very different kinds of films and can excel across all genres. At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of separating films out based on the gender of the director, but actually I think they make an interesting statement that’s important.

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.

‘Colossal’ and ‘Lady Macbeth’ Tell Similar Stories of Violence and Empowerment at TIFF

Both Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, ‘Colossal,’ and William Oldroyd’s period piece, ‘Lady Macbeth,’ are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) saw the world premieres of Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, Colossal, and William Oldroyd’s period piece, Lady Macbeth. Both of these are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

In Colossal, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) struggles with problematic drinking, got fired from her job, and kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment. She moves back to her home town to get her life together, but soon discovers that she’s psychically linked to a monster that appears in South Korea every morning to blindly stumble into skyscrapers, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. This sounds like a completely bizarre and preposterous premise, but it works really well in the film. At first, it seems that Gloria will have to pull back on her drinking and behave in a more responsible way to deal with the monster, but it slowly becomes clear that there’s another antagonist in this story. At the risk of revealing one of the best twists in the film, it turns out that Gloria’s nice guy childhood friend, who initially seems destined to be her romantic interest, is actually a Nice Guy childhood friend – in that he secretly hates and fears women, and only pretends to be friends with them because he’s angling for sex. The second half of the film is about him getting increasingly vile and misogynist while she struggles to stand up to him.

At the screening I attended, Vigalondo explained that he’d been editing the film right up until the premiere and joked that all he could see were the mistakes he made. However, the mistakes don’t really show. There’s a little bit of fuzzy logic about the monster, and its origin story is built up to be more than it is but, overall, the film seems technically well-made and takes us on an understandable and unexpected emotional journey. The degree to which you enjoy this movie will be mediated by your Matrix quotient – meaning, if you were annoyed that Neo and Trinity killed a bunch of innocent people so they could look cool in The Matrix, you will be annoyed that Anne Hathaway’s monster kills a bunch of innocent people by drunkenly stumbling into a skyscraper. Colossal makes more of these deaths than The Matrix did, but not as much as it makes of the pain Gloria suffers herself.

That said, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Colossal and, even though I’m about to question the film’s use of violence as a path to power, this is a movie that deserves to land a distributor, so as many people can watch it as possible. There are interesting conversations to be had about the film, once it’s part of the cultural landscape.

Lady Macbeth is complicated, in that it’s an adaptation of an opera that was an adaptation of a Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which does not, itself, have anything to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Set in England, in the 1860s, the film follows Katherine (Florence Pugh), a woman who marries into a modestly wealthy family that hates her. The first act of the film depicts Katherine’s life as an endurance test – physical discomfort, humiliation, isolation, boredom, sleep deprivation, celibacy – that will apparently go on forever. By the time the murders start – and there are lots of murders in this film – we’re on her side.

This is Oldroyd’s first feature film (written by Alice Birch), after working mostly in theatre and, although everything looks gorgeous, there’s an overall broadness to the movie that would work better on-stage. All of the physical violence in the film is blocked and shot in ways that reveal it as pantomime; every line of dialogue and sound effect is crisp and loud as though there’s a chance we might not hear it.

Katherine intentionally goes from being sympathetic to villainous over the course of the film, and there are unanswered questions about some events – including what looks like a possible gang rape. The best explanation for the story came from Naomi Ackie, the actor who plays Katherine’s servant, Anna. During a Q&A, Ackie explained that to her, Lady Macbeth is about the choices people have when they’re oppressed, and how intersectionality leaves each of the characters with different options. The option Katherine chooses is to kill anyone who threatens her freedom and – without giving away too much – Gloria eventually resorts to violence in Colossal, too.

On the one hand, it feels great to watch these women fight back against men who threaten violence or have used physical violence to make them subservient – I got really emotional watching Colossal, and appreciated the care Vigalondo took developing the situation and exploring the misogynist undercurrents in what initially appears to be harmless behavior. There’s also a great moment in Lady Macbeth where Katherine stares at her father-in-law impassively during an outburst, and you can tell it’s because she’s already planned his death – it’s a much-welcome change after watching her bow to his wishes earlier in the film. On the other hand, watching these women meet violence with violence reinforces the idea that the best or only way to have power is to beat or kill someone else, which is an idea that’s bad for women (and many men) in the long run.

Men’s domination of women has historically hinged on physical strength and threats or deeds of violence. Although both Colossal and Lady Macbeth seem to propose that the best way for women to end their oppression is also through violence, the biggest gains women have made collectively in society didn’t happen because we started to beat men up – they followed from cultural change that placed more value on freedom, democracy, and equality. Some may argue that it’s important for women to learn to physically defend themselves, but the best way for us to ensure that women are treated like people rather than property is through dismantling intersecting systems of oppression and claiming an equal share of political, economic, and social power. Until we have that, women’s rights are an experiment that men can end at any time.

As committed to empowering women as both of these movies are – and I don’t doubt their commitment – the road to power on-screen looks a lot different than the road to power we’ve taken and probably should continue to take in life.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV, and video games on her blog.