I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.
I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors.
I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.
Her work is so different from what we are used to that, it’s usually depressing to read anything about the making of her films, which always seem to struggle for financing and spend years in development hell.
Harron’s film are like long monologues, focusing on the experiences of a single, larger than life character. In my head, I’ve compared them to less glossy magazine profiles.
These are difficult women to portray in an even handed fashion. Their personas and actions have transcended the truth of who they are and in the cases of Bettie and Anna Nicole, tend to be seen rather than heard. They are also women who have appeared difficult to defend and explain from within a feminist framework.
Harron, who wrote for Punk Magazine in 1970s New York, mixes feminine aesthetics and masculine grit to find beauty in the often ugly experiences of her subjects. She takes daring subjects and portrays them in a formalistically unique style, using different film stocks, gorgeous cinematography and fast kinetic edits to portray different time periods.The Notorious Bettie Page, uses a Wizard of Oz style switch from black and white to lush colour, to portray the character’s feelings of freedom. She lets her actors breathe and inhabit the characters and when her films succeed, they do on the lead character’s stand out performances.
Though it is often unclear what she is trying to say with them. As a whole, her oeuvre does not present a cohesive sense of auterusim or even stick to a specific genre, medium or perspective. Harron’s main interest appear to be intriguing stories.
If her films do have one message, it’s that people are more complicated than we assume. They don’t make a snap judgement about the characters. Mary Harron doesn’t tell us Valerie Solanas was “crazy” or Bettie Page was exploited or Anna Nicole Smith was a gold digger. She says, there are good and bad parts of everyone. What seems to matter is being interesting.
I Shot Andy Warhol is a little art scene movie about Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), a lesbian writer famous more for the delusions that lead her to (non-fatally) shoot Andy Warhol in 1968 than for her feminist treatise, the S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men).
The film is Valerie’s show, portraying her as a desperate person living on the fringes of society and struggling to make a living, who comes face to face with Warhol’s beautiful world and its superstars and hopes to be invited in. She comes to believe Warhol is trying to control and exploit her when she cannot get him to produce a play of hers.
The film doesn’t seem to take a stance on Solanas, but allows the audience to try to understand her based on what they have been shown. We are helped along by Taylor’s performance, intense to the point of being frightening, which makes her character come alive.
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)
In Harron’s portrayal of the life of 50s pin-up Queen, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), we meet a woman who is a living contradiction. She is portrayed as an innocent who doesn’t understand the idea of pornography yet enjoys posing naked. Even the most aggressive bondage scenes where she is tied up and gagged seem to be a great game for her.
Though the film is about pornography, Harron skillfully avoids giving us overtly sexualized or salivating gazes of her star. The nude scenes are either awkward as Bettie fumbles unsure in the beginning or triumphant in portraying Bettie’s proud nudism and her sun-kissed body, glowing. I think Gretchen Mol’s portrayal of Bettie really helps here; she is wide-eyed and perpetually stunned. The way she inhabits the character makes her sexuality seem natural. She enjoys her body and the film’s switch to technicolor emphasizes that happiness.
However, it’s a film with a lot to unpack. Because Harron opens it with scenes of Bettie’s rape and abuse, it’s easy to believe she’s suggesting Bettie’s sexual openness is because of her rape. It’s gets slightly heavy-handed in one point where she is invited to show a private moment in her acting class and she begins to take off her clothes.
The relatively short span of Bettie’s life Harron focuses on cuts out her later mental illness and the extent of her evangelicalism. It’s discomforting to see younger Bettie enjoy her work when contrasted to older Bettie whose conversion suggests she begins to view what she participated in as exploitative.
The Anna Nicole Story is a Lifetime movie, it’s campy and trashy, but it has aspirations. Harron gives Anna Nicole the Marilyn Monroe treatment, telling us that she is a misunderstood bombshell hiding a deep sadness. Though, the device of the ghostly figure of an older glamorous Anna Nicole guiding her through her life is a bit much.
There’s a fine line between campy trashy and exploitation trashy and Harron is fairly successful here. For the last years of her life, evidence that Anna Nicole Smith was mentally unwell and struggling with drugs was turned into a joke and her weight gain was excoriated by men who just wanted her to get hot again. While Anna Nicole was various exploited and exploitative herself, the film tries to rein in her image to something palatable to the viewers at home. Agnes Bruckner tries to make her seem human, but though we are left unsure of the motivations behind many of her stranger actions.
It seemed like every interview Bruckner did for the film was about the enlarged breasts she sported as Anna Nicole. She was asked “How were they made? or “How did they feel?” over and over.
In the finished picture, too much fun is had with Anna Nicole’s breasts, whose size the film enjoys exaggerating and displaying, though this may come with the territory. The scene where she bring cantaloupes to display the size of implants she want is played for laughs, as is the revel of her new large breasts getting her attention at the strip club.
As it’s a Lifetime movie, Harron is hampered by a PG rating, a low budget and shot production schedule, but she still gives us something interesting to explore.
She always has.
Elizabeth Kiy. is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. Someday she will take over the world.
Fat bodies have a curious position in medical drama, reflecting the fatphobia existing within the medical profession. Doctors tend to assume weight always a cause rather than a symptom and overweight patients are either lazy, uneducated or poor. The wealthier we are, the more opportunity we have to strive for thinness. As a class, doctors are incredibly privileged, both highly educated and wealthy, they have the privilege of deciding to be thin that many of their patients do not.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.
Most medical dramas draw from a common well of plots. There’s the amnesiac, the guy who wakes up from a coma after 10 years, the deadbeat dad who wants a transplant from his daughter, and the 600-pound (or thereabouts) man who has to be cut out of his house.
Of course, this man is treated like a monster, the rare patient not worthy of sympathy because it is assumed his condition is entirely his fault, and he has chosen to be unhealthy. Fat bodies on TV as well as in Western culture as seen as shameful and disgusting. The 600-pound man on TV is treated as a medical oddity and a living freakshow that doctors within the program and viewers at home are invited to gawk at, assured that as uncomfortable we may be with our own bodies, at least we’re not that.
On House, the 600-pound man is further Othered by the assumption that he is dead when he is first discovered. When he wakes up, groaning and thrashing around, unsure what is happening to him, he is doubly monstrous, both fat and “undead.”
The 600-pound man is treated as a monster on House
Fat bodies also have a curious position in medical drama, reflecting the fatphobia existing within the medical profession. Doctors tend to assume weight always a cause rather than a symptom and overweight patients are either lazy, uneducated, or poor. The wealthier we are, the more opportunity we have to strive for thinness. As a class, doctors are incredibly privileged, both highly educated and wealthy, they have the privilege of deciding to be thin that many of their patients do not.
The appearance of the 600-pound man compounds on the subtle fatphobia within the medium of television, as all the lead actors, and so all the TV doctors, are attractive and fit.
Lexie Grey’s stress eating and weight gain are treated as cute quirks
Though Grey’s Anatomy stands out from the pack with its inclusion of several lead characters who are a larger size, and are treated as positive figures worthy of love, many episodes also contain fat jokes. In several episodes, Dr. Lexie Grey (Chyler Leigh), one of the thinner characters, is experiencing extreme stress, and her way of coping with it is to binge eat junk food. When she gains a small amount of weight, other characters mock her for it, but it is never treated as a serious problem; the stress goes away and Lexi continues to be thin. The plot line was intended as an in-joke about the actress’s weight gain during her pregnancy, but it stinks of thin privilege that anyone though this was light-hearted comedy.
Fatphobia is the one acceptable prejudice on TV. Characters we are meant to continue to like and sympathize with can be exposed as fatphobic without thought of consequences, such as Dr. Chase (Jesse Spencer), House’s resident heartthrob. In the episode, Heavy, when an overweight 10-year-old girl is admitted to the hospital after having a heart attack during gym class, Chase, usually especially kind to kid patients, is incredibly cruel to her. He laughs at her and suggests that if she wants her health problems to go away, she should “stop shoving her face with food.” He also dismisses her symptoms of fatigue, muscle pain, and difficulty concentrating as due to clinical depression over her weight. The girl, Jessica, has been bullied and is isolated at school and has been abusing exercise and diet pills and the episode is very uncomfortable to watch, even triggering.
Jessica is an overweight 10-year-old, treated cruelly by her doctor
When Chase’s coworker, Dr. Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) attempts to defend Jessica, he laughs at her as well, saying she is fatphobic as well, because she does everything she can to stay thin. She gets by on thin privilege and enjoys the benefits of others finding her attractive. Later in the episode, we learn that Chase himself used to be overweight and because he was able to lose weight and keep it off, believes everyone who can’t is ignorant and lazy. He continues to blame Jessica’s health problems on her weight, refusing to see that it might be a symptom.
However, the show goes on to suggest that Jessica is the rare fat person who is worthy of our sympathy because her weight is not her fault. She maintains a healthy diet and regularly exercises, but is unable to lose any weight. Because of this she is not a “real” fat person so negative stereotypes do not apply. It turns out that she has a pituitary tumor that was causing her to gain weight and the episode ends with a final triumphant shot of Jessica thin and smiling. This shot is notable as House episodes rarely ended with the “cured” patients returning to the hospital or of showing their recovery, its inclusion suggests that the writers though we needed to be reassured that Jessica eventually gets thin.
Jessica is triumphant over losing weight
In House’s 600-pound man episode, attempts are also made to deny him proper medical care as fat jokes are made about him, diagnoses are ruled out without proper consideration because of his weight and he is initially barred from their MRI machine because it is not strong enough to support him.
Grey’s Anatomy’s take on the same plot is handled with a bit more tact. The doctors, most of whom are interns and residents beginning their careers, are given a lecture about proper behavior and sensitivity before they interact with the patient and are warned that anyone who make rude comments will be taken off the case. This rule is strictly enforced, even when the doctors do not feel they’ve done anything wrong. Many of the doctors we are meant to continue to like make fat jokes throughout the episode, but are painted as being young and immature. We are meant to like them, but not support what they are doing.
Doctors are taught to be sensitive about the 600-pound man on Grey’s Anatomy
Yet, the patient frequently makes jokes at his own expense and urges the doctors to lighten up, refusing to admit the seriousness of his condition. What gets through to him is the doctors joining him in making fat jokes. With this in mind, it’s difficult to tell whether the show is saying we need to be more sensitive or less sensitive about weight.
The show Nip/Tuck, focusing on plastic surgeons, already comes from a more superficial place than the typical medical drama, but contains some startling examples of fatphobia. Doctors frequently mock fat patients when they are off-screen and discuss acquaintances who need surgery to even be considered normal looking. In one early plot line, an overweight woman who wants to be thin for her high school reunion to show up her tormenters, is denied liposuction because she is also bipolar, commits suicide. This woman’s sad story is not revisited after the single episode and characters continue to exhibit incredible thin privilege. In another episode, anti-hero Dr. Troy (Julian McMahon) has sex with sex-positive, upbeat overweight woman and finds it incredibly enjoyable. He is horrified and after some soul searching, brutally drags her down into self-hatred, making her feel as unhealthy and unattractive as he believes she should feel.
Though it’s a comedy, The Mindy Project also has a conflicted relationship with fatphobia. Protagonist Dr. Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) is a bright, bubbly woman who happens to be a bit larger that most actresses on TV, and for the most part she is comfortable with her body. She sees herself as sexy and attractive and is treated as such. Still, she refuses to tell people how much she weighs, describes herself as “anorexic” and as wearing an extra small. Mindy though, is not a character who is meant to be perfect or even entirely likeable. She is instead, an exaggerated example of how many of us feel about our bodies.
Mindy’s attitude on weight
If I were to chose a TV doctor, I think Mindy would make me feel the best about my body. She reserves her fatphobia for herself and tells her patients they look awesome.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
When looked at as a trilogy, the ‘Taken’ films are all about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter as she becomes a woman and he is no longer sure how to relate to her. It’s a common real life situation writ large, and a wholly unexpected through-line for an action franchise.
There are certain movies I watch whenever I visit my father. I would never chose to watch them on my own, but I enjoy them enough with him. These movies are instantly gratifying, explosions of car crashes and car chases, kidnappings and jewel thefts and mistaken identities and usually, the strong, comforting presence of his favorite movie star, Liam Neeson, the new model of masculinity.
With his soft Irish accent, his politeness and grooming, he’s a completely different animal from our old action heroes. He’s muscular but still human looking- not a steroid monster like 80s heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger. He can love, he can cry, but he can still seek revenge or save your life; however, like these old models, his heft still imposes. Though he kicks down doors and ends lives with violence, he’s smart, well-trained and tactical, outsmarting the villains as often as he actually comes to blows with them.
Liam Neeson is the new model for modern masculinity
In Taken, the film that established Neeson as “The New Man,” he’s Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA operative on a mission to save his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace) from sex traffickers who have kidnapped her while on vacation in France. Besides Neeson’s emergence as a one-man killing machine, it’s not a wholly original film; it’s essentially a rape revenge plot where a daughter and her virginity are entrusted to the protection of her father.
However, when looked at as a trilogy, the Taken films are all about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter as she becomes a woman and he is no longer sure how to relate to her. It’s a common real life situation writ large, and a wholly unexpected through-line for an action franchise.
The Taken films are really about Bryan’s relationship with his daughter
He tries to figure out how to balance being sensitive and being manly. He doesn’t know how to talk to his daughter anymore; in the first film, they have a strained relationship. He attempts to get through to her by getting her a meeting with her favourite singer who he is acting as a bodyguard for, but the real way he is able to show his love is by saving her life.
When they return home, she’s ready to love him and talk to him again, becoming so close as a family that she and her mother (Famke Janssen), his ex-wife, visit him in Istanbul in the sequel.
In the third movie, their relationship is showing growing pains again. Kim’s in college and Bryan buys her a giant teddy bear for his birthday, adorably excited about the gift. You can feel his heart break when she rejects the bear because she’s too old for it. He wants her to be his little girl, looking at him with stars in her eyes again; we find out she’s pregnant and there may soon be another little girl to look up to him.
In Taken, Bryan is on a time crunch to save Kim’s virginity as well as her life. While her sexually active friend is almost immediately left to die in a makeshift junkyard brothel with no one to care about her, as a virgin, Kim is saved to be auctioned off to a cabal of wealthy international men, which gives Bryan more time to save her. When Bryan finally tracks her down and takes her home, she seems undamaged by her ordeal. By Taken 3, when Kim discovers she is pregnant, it appears that her virginity was saved for the ultimate purpose of becoming a mother.
Kim helps save her parents
As a trilogy, the Taken films chronicle Kim’s apprenticeship with her father. After being a damsel in distress rescued in the first film, she returns in Taken 2 to fight against men related to her original kidnappers, getting her revenge on them as the attempt to get revenge on Bryan. When Bryan and her mother, Lenore, are kidnapped, Kim follows Bryan’s instructions over the phone, locating him in the city and providing him with weapons at risk of her life, instead of hiding out at the American Embassy like he originally instructs her to. In Taken 3, a riff on The Fugitive, Kim helps hide her father and investigates her mother’s murder. The culmination of her training is an interrogation scene where a cop questions her about Bryan’s whereabouts and his relationship with Lenore; as she answers him, she sounds exactly like her father.
Kim’s training is displayed in her interrogation
Famke Janssen, as Bryan’s ex-wife and Kim’s mother, fares less well across in the franchise. Bryan’s first indication in Taken–that something may go wrong on Kim’s trip to France–is his last minute discovery that Kim and her friend are planning to follow the band U2 on their European tour. It seems to have little to nothing to do with the actual human trafficking plot, but is used to paint Lenore as a bad mother who isn’t careful enough about her daughter’s safety. In the sequel, she waits around to be saved by the combined efforts of her husband and daughter and by Taken 3, she’s barely around, succumbing to Women in Refrigerators syndrome in the first few minutes of the film.
Famke Janssen’s role is to be only a victim and a bad mother
It seems that Kim’s pregnancy is intended to present her a both masculine and feminine, taking in a bit of both her mother (whose only real role was to have a daughter to be saved in the first place) and her father. Taken 3 flirted with Kim’s decision whether or not to have an abortion, though in the end, there wasn’t really a point. Of course, this big budget mainstream action film isn’t going to end with a character deciding to get an abortion, but it’s interesting that it was even presented as an option and that this new model for masculinity supported her right to chose either way.
One can only wonder if Liam Neeson will fight through Taken 4 with his new grandchild strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
While Rory struggled with the myriad of concerns afforded to a main character: her love life, her future, her friendships and family, Lane’s biggest conflict was always her overbearing, uber-religious mother and to a lesser degree, her own Korean heritage. Being Korean is never posed as a positive thing for Lane, it is only a marker of difference.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.
When Gilmore Girls was on it never occurred to me how strange it was that doe-eyed, bookworm Rory was on odd choice for a main character. Rory always carried a book around in her purse and considered an ideal evening to be watching a movie with her mother and eating her weight in junk food; on any other show she’d be a nerd, but her best friend, Lane Kim was undeniably cool. Lane was in a rock band, Lane was a cheerleader, she had an encyclopedia knowledge of music and later, she lived in a virtual frat-house with her bandmates. But she wasn’t Rory, the town’s baby, the golden girl, Snow White. Lane appeared to be just as smart and well-read as Rory, but no one ever suggested Chilton or Yale could be options for her. Rory and her big blue eyes went off to conquer the world and Lane stayed back in Stars Hollow, a few blocks from where she’d grown up, still in her mother’s sphere of influence.
For most of the show’s run, Rory or her mother Lorelai, would have their A-plot adventures, navigating the strange world of wealth and classism their old money background and Rory’s acceptance to Chilton usher them into, while plots for supporting characters like Lane, Rory’s closest friend (besides her mother) since the first day of preschool, popped up occasionally. While Rory struggled with the myriad of concerns afforded to a main character, her love life, her future, her friendships and family, Lane’s biggest conflict was always her overbearing, uber-religious mother and to a lesser degree, her own Korean heritage.
Being Korean is never posed as a positive thing for Lane (played by Japanese American actress Keiko Agena), it is only a marker of difference. Besides Michel, the flamboyant Celine Dion-loving inn concierge, who is Black, there are no other memorable minority characters in the series besides Lane and her mother. Though she is given her share of witty lines and pop culture references, Lane is the token minority best friend who has quirky hobbies, such as obsessively collecting CDs and hiding music and books her mother wouldn’t approve of under her floorboards. Once, when she believes she is being shipped off to Korea with a giant suitcase and a one-way ticket, the unseen idea of Korea, a far away land full of unknown relatives and unfamiliar culture so different from her American identity, is posed as a punishment and a threat.
In the first few seasons, her major hurdle is her mother’s insistence that she only date nice Korean boys, preferably future doctors. In one episode, she finds herself interested in a Korean boy who attends Chilton with Rory and her attraction to him becomes a minor identity crisis, that she handled by sneaking around and acting as if he was a boy her mother would not approve of. The relationship quickly ended before it had really begun because of Lane’s fixation on her mother’s approval, and her often pointless rebellion against her. In a later plot line, Lane discovered another young Korean boy, who she described to Rory as “the male me”, as he was forced to keep his relationship with a white girl secret from his mother. At the time, Lane was dating a white boy ( Adam Brody , who left Gilmore Girls to make his name in The OC), they made a deal to pretend they were dating each other.
If Lane is used as a foil to Rory, Lane’s mother, who is only ever referred to as Mrs. Kim (Emily Kuroda), is contrasted with Lorelai. Lorelai is young and fun, while Mrs. Kim is austere and unyielding; if the show’s thesis is that Lorelai’s parenting style, acting as best friends instead of mother and daughter, is successful and enviable, we can only infer we are meant to see Mrs. Kim’s authoritarian parenting as failing her child. Though her character is given several humanizing moments throughout the series’s run, she retains cartoonish characteristics (notably in seven seasons, she is never given a first name), though this is common among the denizens of Stars Hollow. She talks fast and brusque, “barking” out orders in her heavy accent, scaring and dominating other adults, and single handedly controls Lane’s life, like a less ambitious “Tiger Mom.” Her idea of the life Lane can have is small: attend a religious college, marry a Korean doctor and have children. It’s a life not unlike her own.
Though early seasons hint that there is a Mr. Kim living with Lane and her mother, just offscreen, gradually these hints peter out and Mrs. Kim is left in a strange netherland: She mistrusts unmarried women and considers herself to be married, yet she doesn’t seem to be divorced or widowed. Like Lorelai, she is, or at least acts as, a single mother and along with her dominance, this masculinizes her.
Meanwhile Lane is closer to the stereotype of Asian women as submissive. Though she attempts to be rebellious and independent, Lane’s worldview has been shaped by the mother whose shadow she lives in. As Gilmore Girls began with the tension of whether or not Rory would repeat her mother’s mistakes, sex was always loaded territory in the show. Though Rory is able to grow into an outgoing, sex positive woman, thanks to Lorelai’s example, Lane is never able to enjoy sex. She believes her mother has somehow gotten into her head, convincing her subconscious that she had to wait until marriage to have sex, even though her conscious mind has not made this choice. On her wedding day, she learns that Mrs. Kim believes she is lucky because she only “had” to have sex once in her life, which produced Lane. Likewise, Lane becomes pregnant from her first, grossly unsatisfying sexual encounter.
As a friend, Lane is also subservient to Rory, though part of this is the nature of her role as a supporting character. Rarely does she get mad at Rory for going off to a fancy new school, leaving her at Stars Hollow High, frequently referred to as a nowhere school which prepares students only for trades and sales. Lane is forced to live the life Rory would have lived if not for her rich grandparents’ patronage.
Part of Rory’s new life are her countless new friends, classmates roommates and colleagues (mostly notably frenemy cum BFF Paris Geller), who often seem closer to her than Lane. Even if Lane is Rory’s closest friend, Lorelai is always her best friend, the person she cares about and understands better than anyone else. In contrast, Lane only has her music and she accepts this.
Besides being the only non-white character whose background we are given in detail, Mrs. Kim is also the only religious character, thus her Asian-ness is inexplicably tied to her religiousness, as a Seventh Day Adventist. Her church appears to be mainly Korean and Korean food and instruments are major parts of their gatherings. Though religion is a major source of conflict between Lane and Mrs. Kim, it also facilitates an understanding when Mrs. Kim’s mother comes to attend Lane’s wedding. The grandmother is a strict Buddhist who is unaware that her daughter is a Christian, forcing her to hide her bibles and crosses under the same floorboards where Lane hid her music. Lane is finally able to understand her mother though this rebellion, her Christianity becomes as subversive as Lane’s rock and roll.
Though Lane’s Korean identity only ever appears to be a source of discomfort, by the series’ end she seems to have made an offscreen peace with her heritage, as she names one of her twins Kwan.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
In real life, of course, women are wives and girlfriends and to deny the importance of the relationship many of us share with men, would be inaccurate and farcical. Yet, with a media landscape overwhelmingly dominated by films about men being men made by men for men, wife roles are often dim shadows of real women. But it’s hard to list well-written wife characters in male dominated movies; Jessica Chastain’s character, Anna Morales in ‘A Most Violent Year’ and Rose Byrne as Kelly Radner in ‘Neighbors’ are two successes I’ve come across recently.
There’s a particular sadness I feel when I’m reminded of the lack of imagination Hollywood has when it comes to roles for women. At a certain point, between playing ingenues and grandmothers, most actresses inevitably become marooned in the blah, overly beige wasteland that is the wife role.
In theory there’s nothing wrong with this. Wife roles make more female characters, often fairly important ones. In male-driven films they might be the only female characters.
In real life, of course, women are wives and girlfriends and to deny the importance of the relationship many of us share with men, would be inaccurate and farcical. Yet, with a media landscape overwhelmingly dominated by films about men being men made by men for men, wife roles are often dim shadows of real women. Their purpose is mainly ceremonial, obligatory and insubstantial.
There’s generally only one type of wife we see on our screens, an annoying nag who zaps the male lead of his vitality and self-confidence. Think of the fiancee in The Hangover, who refused to understand the gang’s supreme need for male bonding and “just be cool” about their hijinks. Think of Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up or Sarah Silverman in School of Rock or Malin Akerman in The Heartbreak Kid. Think of any dumb old “Take My Wife, Please” “joke” or for that matter think of the women in just about any mainstream film.
If she’s not a nagging wife or girlfriend, a great comedic actress like Lisa Kudrow or Lauren Graham can be wasted on one-note supportive wife roles, women who seem to have nothing important in their lives but acting as a cheerleader for their spouse’s big dreams.
This story is nothing new. If you’re reading this site, I don’t doubt you know all about this, or that you could list scores of other examples. But it’s hard to list well-written wife characters in male dominated movies; Jessica Chastain’s character, Anna Morales in A Most Violent Year, and Rose Byrne as Kelly Radner in Neighbors are two successes I’ve come across recently.
Anna Morales is the woman behind the man
A Most Violent Year A Most Violent Year is a movie about the moral struggles of a businessman, named (perhaps a bit too on-the-nose) Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac ) to remain a good person and a strong, classically “good man” type when corruption is all around him. It is a movie about men and most of the story takes place between them. There are plenty of these kinds of films, made in The Godfather mould, and many of them are great films, but the knowledge that similar films about the epic moral struggles of women are unmade, unacclaimed or under-seen makes them hard to completely enjoy.
A Most Violent Year succeeds in giving a compelling female character in Anna Morales, as well as peppering in small female roles that keep women in the conversation, such as a granddaughter who hopes to take over her family business.
Anna takes care of the accounts
Anna is strong, sure of herself and completely competent, perhaps more so than the men around her, even if her gender forces her work into the shadows. The daughter of a gangster who is often referenced as a bad man and unseen foil to her husband Abel, she takes care of the business’s accounts, records and contracts. As her role is not official, she works through the books at home or when the office is closed, the woman forced to work behind her man. The film is structured around Abel’s attempt to purchase a piece of land from a group of Orthodox Jewish men and Anna is not allowed into the trailer when the official discussions take place, though he frequently makes trips outside to get her advice.
But she gets to do a lot more than that. While she is forced to take a hard line against Abel when she feels that their children and livelihood are in danger, the film is structured so that we understand her point of view and know that even Abel believes she is right. It is Anna who picks up a gun and gives a threatening speech to a nosy cop and Anna who gets to save the day at the end, thanks to her behind the scenes machinations.
Anna is ruthless about protecting her family
Though Isaac gives a striking performance, it’s Chastian’s Anna who commands the film.
Neighbors
Seth Rogan was all set to make his new film, last summer’s Neighbors, when his wife, Lauren Miller read the script.
Miller, the writer-star of great two girls and a phone sex line comedy For a Good Time Call…, pointed out that the original plot, where a 30-something guy and his friends try to take down their obnoxious fraternity house that just moved in next door, made little sense and gave his wife nothing to do. In real life, his friends had no reason to be so passionate, no stakes to keep them involved in increasingly crazy and illegal pranks, but the wife character, worried about the safety and peace of their home, their child and her view of herself as a still young, attractive woman, definitely did.
The Radners try to prove the are still cool
According to Rogan, Miller convinced him that the wife would want to have fun to and that rewriting her character as a lead would give the film something rare: “An actual healthy couple that really likes each other.”
In the finished film, Rose Byrne plays Kelly, as Rogan’s equal partner. She actively participates in both the hijinks and the raunch comedy, when even having her cheer it on from the sidelines would be a relatively game-changing step.
With the new role of Rose Byrne’s character the film becomes about a family
The relationship between the couple became the heart of the movie, elevating it beyond disposable comedy to a light-hearted look at how people and relationships change as they get older and try to settle down. By posing the attempts to take down the fratboys as a partnership, the story of the film becomes the story of the couple, who work and play together.
The pranks in Neighbors are a partnership between husband and wife
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
With all the talk of ’50 Shades of Grey’ in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom ‘Secretary,’ the film that has really been on my mind is ‘Marnie.’ The 1964 Hitchcock outing is about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren, the grandmother of ’50 Shades’ star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in ‘Marnie’ was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.
With all the talk of 50 Shades of Grey in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom Secretary, the film that has really been on my mind is Marnie. Since I first saw it several years ago, I’m been intermittently perplexed by the film, a 1964 Hitchcock outing about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren , the grandmother of 50 Shades star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in Marnie was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.
Mark dominates Marnie and breaks her down to reveal her weakness
If you didn’t already think Alfred Hitchcock was a horror movie villain , Marnie sure makes this clear. For starters, James Bond himself, Sean Connery plays Mark Rutland, is misogynist and unrepentant rapist who is the movie’s hero. Yes, he’s the hero. A wealthy industrialist and armchair zoologist, who discovers the young woman who just robbed a business acquaintance and blackmails her into marrying him.
As a con artist, Marnie slips and out of identities and hair styles, though blonde is always the constant, the “real” her. The one constant presence in Marnie’s life is her mother, who lives in a poor area down by the docks of an unknown town. She acts as the breadwinner for her mother, painting her as “unnaturally” masculinized. One of the things she brings her mother is a fur coat, a typical gift given by a rich lover at the time.
While Hedren was being abused by Hitchcock off-screen, on-screen Mark finds his new wife is cold and disinterested in sex. In Hitchcock world, this must mean there is something wrong with her. She is after all, the classic ice blonde taken to extremes. She holds her head high and meets men’s gazes and pulls her skirt down over her knees if she feels she is being gawked at. She’s disgusted and afraid of the thought of Mark touching her and extolls her hatred and mistrust of men, which lends the film to queer readings.
The rape scene casts Mark as a hero
He rapes her on their wedding night when she refuses to have sex with him. It is not at all ambiguous. She screams and tries to fight him off but he keeps going. It’s as explicit as it could be at the time. Never are we told that what Mark did was wrong, or that it makes him a bad person. Instead, we are meant to sympathize with his urges. He is a red-blooded American man, he can be patient about other things, can treat Marnie as an animal, a case study to be analyzed at arm’s length, but on his wedding night? Moreover, as he is presented as normal while Marnie is damaged, his actions are represented as markers of his psychological superiority. He know Marnie better than she knows herself, he can tell it’s what she wants even when she says no; the standard defense of the rapist, only we’re meant to take it seriously here. Even when Marnie attempts suicide the next morning, it’s portrayed as a symptom of the things that were already wrong with her, not a reaction to being victimized.
In married life, Mark continues to hold Marnie under this thumb. He tells her how to dress and act and forces her to attend parties and act as his supportive partner. She must live in his house, trapped like a captive animal and studied, by her husband, zoology or Freudian text in hand. Privately she screams how much she hates him, how much she wants to get away from him, but he owns her, both as a husband and blackmailer.
And though she puts up a strong act, she seems to need him. The slightest flash of the color red or crash of lightening send her into hysterics and Mark’s arms. She seems to get a sense of sexual release from riding her horse (a hamfisted Freudian touch) and it’s his death that finally breaks Marnie’s spirit, like she is indeed the wild horse in need of taming that Mark viewed her as.
Marnie is only truly happy with her horse
This all leads up to the final confrontation with Marnie’s mother, wherein Mark blames her for “ruining” Marnie. It begins when he literally drags her to her mother’s house, crying and weak from the earlier trauma and ends with the heavy-handed revelation that of repressed memories of a near sexual assault in her childhood. Hearing this, grown up Marnie regresses back to her childhood, a little girl crying for her mother’s love and leaning on her husband’s strong shoulder.
In the last scene they walk out into an uncertain future but it seems like things might be all right for these crazy kids. They’re ready to love each other. Mark is our hero, he’s fixed this girl and she can now have a normal sex life. She can be a wife, like a woman is supposed to be.
Marnie is forced to stand by Mark’s side as his society wife
Of course this is crazy and nauseating and its rightfully a lesser Hitchcock. But the film is beautiful and seductive, dressed up in Classic Hollywood glamour and its easy to be lulled into ideas of the unilateral superiority and wholesomeness of old films. But not everything a great director touches turns to gold. For all the ills of contemporary filmmaking and modern culture, at least you couldn’t make a film like Marnie anymore.
At least, I hope so.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In ‘Wild,’ the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.
Most of the film follows Cheryl as she walks alone.
This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.
Right off the bat, I’m going to say that this essay might be more about me and my neuroses than the actual film, Wild. So I’m sorry for that.
I read Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild: From Lost to Found of the Pacific Crest Trail a few years ago in a time in my life when I was feeling really lost and messed up. It helped me to the degree it could, reminding me of my own writerly quirks, my tendency to sentimentality and (for good or bad) feeding my desire to go off somewhere, somehow and find myself. There were lines I loved, but Strayed’s writing didn’t really get under my skin until I read Tiny Beautiful Things, her collected advice columns written for The Rumpus as Dear Sugar. That, I devoured in one night and cried and cried.
Being a woman and being a writer is a weird and fraught thing. Add to that a certain shyness and a lone wolf tendency and I’m a difficult person to get to know, even harder to like. I see endless versions of myself represented in fiction, in memoirs, as writers tend to write about writing and writing is inherantly isolating, but rarely in films or TV. In a book, we can sink into the central figure’s head and see her as a nuanced figure in multiple relationships and entanglements but in a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks.
In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In the graphic memoir, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life , for example, Ulli Lust writes about her experiences backpacking alone through Italy, where she is told that a woman traveling alone is considered to be a prostitute. In Wild, the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters, particularly with two scary looking hunters who assess her body and make her feel unsafe. She is also frightened hitchhiking as she, like most of us, has been raised to believe that anyone who picks you up while hitchhiking is planning to murder and rape you. I particularly identified with the conflicted guilt she feels when she has to lie to the first man who picks her up, telling him she has a strong, loving husband waiting for her just a few miles up the trail. Though he is very kind to her, this lie is necessary for her to feel safe. She shouldn’t feel guilty for taking these precautions, but she does. She shouldn’t have to take these precautions, but part of being a woman in this culture is being afraid. As well as guilty and stupid for being afraid.
I work in a restaurant where I infrequently work night shifts that end at 4:30 a.m.; I don’t mind the work, but I hate having to pay for a taxi home multiple nights. Recently I was talking to a male coworker, kind of idly complaining about this fact. He said, “Well you could always just walk home.” I was stunned at the display of his privilege, that he was so completely unaware that a young woman might feel unsafe walking home, weary, through deserted city streets in the wee hours of the morning. Encounters like this tempt me to avoid precautions, to say, nothing could actually happen to me, that I’m being kind of vain to think I’m a target, but it’s against my programming.
Sometimes she is joined by other hikers along the way, but is always alone again sooner or later.
I have met and interviewed Jean Béliveau , a man who left his home and spent 11 years walking around the world and read about Mike Spencer Brown, the Calgarian who become the world’s most travelled man after visiting nearly every country in the world. These stories fill me with anger and jealousy. When I decided to attend journalism school, my grandmother made me promise that I would not go to one of “dangerous countries” where we were always hearing about terrible things that happened to journalists. In school, I attended a lecture given by Amanda Lindhout, a woman who was kidnapped and tortured in Somalia after going there as a war correspondent. Some of my female relatives even sat me down to watch Taken, framing it as an educational film about what might happen to a woman if she is not careful traveling.
I wasn’t planning on war correspondence, but the idea that it was something denied to me as a woman, made it seem interesting to me. Just like hearing that women were not allowed to be priests the Catholic church made the priesthood seem tantalizing.
So on one hand, I want to see what Cheryl did as a super feminist act, rejecting this idea of special circumstances and extra vulnerability for women but on the other it seems like a deliberate denial of reality. Just because nothing horrible really happened to her, it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have. It doesn’t mean that any other woman, inexperienced in hiking and all alone on the trail, who is inspired by her, could not meet a horrible fate.
Men walk around the world and women are told it is not safe for us to do. We are cowed by these warnings and unsure if by listening we are being smart or letting ourselves be subdued, just as we are uncertain what to do when we are told to dress in modest ways to avoid rape. This should not be our responsibility, and yet isn’t it smart to do all we can to keep ourselves safe, to be realistic?
With these ideas, Wild is very much a woman’s story, taking us deep into Cheryl’s head and her attempts to become a complete person. Though I enjoyed the direction by Jean-Marc Vallée (and as a Canadian, there’s always a tendency to cheer when one of us does a thing) and I’m fond of Nick Hornby, it’s a bit sad that this story of all stories was not given to a female screenwriter or director. That being said, I think the filmmakers did an adequate job addressing this conflict.
On top of this they achieved the near impossible, taking a book about a writer and a writer’s process, a young woman’s tortured internal life being perhaps the least cinematic thing in existence, and making it enjoyable to watch.
Cheryl considers her mother, Bobbi, the love of her life.
The majority of the film follows Cheryl’s hike through the PCT but it is frequently interrupted by flashbacks related to her relationship with her mother, Bobbi (Laura Dern), who she considered the great love of her life. We see her as a towheaded child (played by Strayed’s real life daughter) as her mother becomes her sole protector, whisking her and her brother away from their violent father, as a young woman whose embarrassment over attending college with Bobbi turns into horror over her mother’s sudden sickness and death, and finally as a self destructive grieving daughter, seeking solace in anonymous sex and heroin, both of which contribute to the destruction of her marriage. The idea to hike the PCT comes to her at what framed as her rock bottom, she sees the guidebook with the stunning vista she later visits on its cover, while waiting in line to buy a pregnancy test, sure that if it turns out to be positive, she will have to get an abortion.
In a low point in her life, Cheryl finds the PCT guide book.
In Wild, the use of flashbacks its accomplished with rare skill. They are not popped in arbitrarily, teasing the audience with tidbits of information parceled out through her story, as in many films with parallel timelines. Instead, we see these things as Cheryl is recalling them and become part of her attempts to process what has happened. There is no one single thing that set her on the path careening towards disaster, walking a thousand miles with no real plan for her life post-trail and no money to live on, but a mosaic of things that are revealed to us in and out of sequential order.
Moreover, the line between past and present is blurred by double exposure, images that will later have significance flashing briefly across the screen and the use of music. Diegetic music, music that is actually playing within the world of the film is rare, limited to flashbacks, trail stops and the Grateful Dead tribute she attends, but Wild is saturated with music, most of it, playing through Cheryl’s memory. The music that makes up the soundtrack becomes a hybrid of diegetic and non-diegetic as it is accompanied by Cheryl’s own singing, humming, and voiceover. She also engages with the music she imagines hearing, mentioning in voiceover a song she’d like to hear, that quickly becomes the soundtrack to the scene.
Witherspoon makes college age Cheryl seem real and familiar.
This effect, Cheryl’s coming of age and self discovery is dimmed by Witherspoon’s age. Though she appropriately inhabits the character and her struggles, seeing a 40-something woman go through these things is not as harrowing as seeing a 20-something woman go through them. If Witherspoon’s Cheryl is struggling with the loss of her mother and her loss of self, we’re tempted to see her as a privileged whiner, not a girl suddenly on the brink of life without any life lines. In flashbacks, Witherspoon, aided by unfortunate bangs, also plays college-aged Cheryl. Though we never believe she is actually 22, she skillfully apes the mannerisms and posture of a haughty college kid. She never fully disappears into the character, but we get what she’s trying to do, just like we get that the cast member on Saturday Night Live aren’t able to pass a children but are able to remind us of children. For me, this is aided by her wardrobe, which is full of the sorts of pea coats, boots and denim shirts I wore as a millennial college student and see as signifiers of the breed.
The exploration of privileged is also an important aspect of the film. Though the extremes of Cheryl’s working class background mentioned in the book, that the house she grew up in did not have running water for example, make it into the film, it is still clear that she is not comfortably middle class. In one scene, she and Bobbi discuss their work as waitresses and how hard Bobbi had to work to support Cheryl and her brother on her salary. During her hike, Cheryl is approached by a man writing for The Hobo Times, who declares her the rare example of a female hobo. She argues, sure she has no money, no home, no family, but she is not a hobo, she is not homeless. Hobos are other people, she is just between homes.
As Cheryl becomes an educated woman, we see her begin to look down on her mother and her lack of sophistication, her poverty and her flakiness. As a college student, the first in generations of her family, Cheryl is posed to cross class lines. Her desire to be a writer, in some ways, a frivolous career choice, often seen as only accessible for the leisure classes, recalls this. Her education, which she takes for granted, is contrasted with Bobbi’s late in life decision to attend college alongside her, taking advantage of a program that offers free classes for parents of students. For Bobbi, it is a rush of pure freedom to finally get to read and write and engage with texts in literary theory and Women’s Studies courses.
Cheryl’s break-up tattoo: another writerly trait.
To the extent that Wild can be looked at as a coming of age film, it is about Cheryl’s writing and the slow agonizing birth of her literary voice. The books she reads on the trail become important landmarks for her, such as the James Michener, an author her mother liked who is looked down on by literary types, and the Flannery O’Connor and Adrienne Rich that she sees as glimpses of how she would like to write. When she is told to burn the books she is finished reading, Cheryl recoils in horror; only truly evil people burn books. Though she ultimately begins burning what she had finished reading, Rich’s Dream of a Common Language stays with her the whole way as a talisman. In the book Wild, She keeps a tally of books read and books burnt along the way.
Her decision to get a matching tattoo with her ex-husband, Paul to keep themselves tied together when they get divorced also strikes me as such a writerly thing to do. Getting a break-up tattoo seems bizarre to most people but as writer, I didn’t question it until someone told me it sounded weird. These tattoos make a good story, a symbol of Strayed which she references in various of her writings. They put a cap on her marriage and give it a narrative arc that makes her life seem more like a story, something comfortable and easy to enjoy, easier to gain distance from, than real life.
Cheryl also practicing becoming a writer in the literary quotes she loves in the trail guestbooks, which are set at intervals along the trail, which she attributes to herself as well as the author of the quotes. In this practice she enters into a long tradition of young writers copying out influential texts like The Great Gatsby to the rhythm of the words. In this way, Wild is about Cheryl’s growth and maturation as a writer as well as a woman.
This might be why so many uninformed critiques of the film compare it to Eat, Pray, Love; if you ignore the grit of Cheryl’s desperation, youth and poverty, her trip would seem like a laughably naive attempt to “find herself.” This might be the only way our mainstream culture knows how to categories women’s stories, ghettoizing them as as non-fiction chick-lit.
But Wild is without the scenes of romance or consumerism, or even an assurance that Cheryl will be alright at its end. We see her leave the trail (and symbolically her trials) behind as she reaches The Bridge of the Gods in Portland, and hear her in voiceover reference her future husband and children, but we never see them. The story is not carefully wrapped up in a bow and Cheryl is not perfected. Though she “grows up” to give advice as Dear Sugar and become a celebrated writer, we’re able to like her, to identify with her because she isn’t living this perfect new life of food and love and prayer with nary a nagging worry. As Wild ends with a reprise of Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa,” the film’s haunting “Que Sera Sera” theme, and a montage of photos of the young wild Strayed, her grit is the lasting image of the film.
‘Starry Eyes’ is a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, it is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities about struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Poster for Starry Eyes
Starry Eyes was the kind of film that stuck with me.
It’s a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well-observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, Starry Eyes is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is.
As soon as I saw it, I had to write something about it, which I did in December for our Reality TV theme week. It stuck with me and I wanted to talk about it, I needed to share it with other people.
The great things about being a writer is sometimes, just sometimes, when you have questions about a movie, you get lucky enough to ask some of them. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities of struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Bitch Flicks: Where did the story of Starry Eyes come from? What were some of you inspirations?
Dennis: I guess it came from us, Kevin and I, wanting to do a story about transformation, something about the metamorphosis in it. We always wanted to have a sequence in a film where a person slowly goes through a change. So we first approached it with that basic concept but then we also knew that we wanted to really focus on a strong character, a person who also just mentally goes through a change throughout the whole movie and that the mental choices and decisions and changes are just as big as the physical ones. So it really started there and then it was just about the decision of what she would be changing into. We decided, with the kind of scenes and themes that really interested us, that it might be a good Los Angeles story, and if it was going to be a Los Angeles story it might be really interesting if she began a star or celebrity and we could look at the industry. As filmmakers there’s a sense of being on the outside of the industry and scratching to get in, waiting for your big break. Actors often go through the same thing. It was really about having a message to the film and trying to say something, finding an exciting, really viseral way to tell that story
Kevin: As for influences, we were very influenced by Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession , that was a big influence on the performance, we wanted Alex [Essoe] to capture that raw energy that Isabelle Adjani has in that film. That and other things like Polanski films, such as Rosemary’s Babyand Repulsion, and things like Carrie and The Entity, even things outside of the genre like Boogie Nights were great, those rise and fall stories of people desperately trying to make it in the industry. They might do things in that situation that they never thought they would.
BF: Sarah is a fascinating and complicated character, even when we first meet her, she is not entirely likable. She’s vain and believes she is superior to a lot of the people around her. Can you tell me a bit about the character of Sarah?
Dennis: There’s an unspoken rule sometimes in screenwriting that you have write likable characters, you hear this a lot from people, and in recent years that rule has kind of gone by the wayside. What we feel is that you have to write interesting characters and if someone is interesting and compelling you’ll follow them through all the choices they make, as bad as they are. Look at a show like Mad Men or Breaking Bad and the characters those shows follow, people love to watch characters like those. Strangely in movies this doesn’t happen enough and it should, particularly in independent cinema where you can get away with a lot more and break more rules. So, we like the idea of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. At the beginning of the movie you think you’re watching the girl next door, the girl fresh off the bus, that she’s innocent and sweet and she’s going to be corrupted. You think that you’re watching that person and that all of her friends are just terrible terrible people out to get her, and it definitely seems that way because the movie is very subjective. But we are very conscious of that arc at the halfway point of the movie. As the movie goes along to start to realize that maybe Sarah, the person you’re following is not such a good person. There’s a trail of bread crumbs along the way and the choices she makes that start to define the person that she really is and you start to realize that you’re watching a person who is figuratively a monster and is literally going to become one. In the end, the friends that you perceived as being bad people are just, people who at the end of the day want what’s best for her. The movie cons you in an interesting way and every time we’ve shown it to people there’s usually a point where we realize that the audience is really on Sarah’s side and by the end of movie, no matter what she’s doing and how terrible it gets, they are always siding with her.
BF: In addition, Sarah may be a little unhinged–we see her fits early on and they serve as a prime for the grotesque things we will see happen to her later. Why were these fits important to the character? Can you tell me a bit about your portrayal of Sarah’s self hatred and her violent fits?
Kevin: It’s not that this company takes her and corrupts her. It’s like the company sees this in her, they see that she’s a little unhinged and there’s this rawness within her, that’s what attracts them to her. That’s what gets her what she wants in the end, by acting out this cult’s will. It was sort of like a statement of how a lot of people, in order to make it in these industries that are very dog eat dog, they’re willing to step all over everybody else and do whatever needs to be done, and sometimes they do some horrible things to people. In order to make that statement we wanted to show that the people who are willing to do these things might not be the best put together people. The cult sees this and exploits it to her advantage.
Sarah yearns for an Old Hollywood where she can be discovered
BF: Besides Sarah, many other characters are difficult to like such as Sarah’s boss and her friends Can you tell me a bit about this? Though you suggest character as “Hollywood types” we also learn they three dimensional human beings. Her boss at the restaurant ogles her, but later gives her heartfelt advice, her friends are catty but seem to genuinely care. Why was this important?
Dennis: I think the mistake that a lot of horror movies make is that they feel like if somebody going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be the competition of a villain, then they shouldn’t be three dimensional. We never approach anything like that, every character had to be real. When we were writing that ending of the movie, that violent climax, we really were very conscious of the fact that these needed to be feel like very real people that she was doing this thing to. Because the movie is very subjective, you’re siding with Sarah, she’s in every sense of the movie, Alex Essoe gives a great performance, so its very easy to side with her but if you stop for a moment as an audience member and put yourself in the perspective of any of the other characters, you really can see it from their side. If you put yourself in Erin’s position for instance, that’s the bitchy friend, she clearly likes Danny, the filmmaker friend, feels that Sarah is trying to move in on Danny or Danny’s trying to move in on her, they’re both actors, they’re both the same age, competing for the same parts, and she might be kind of catty to Sarah but Sarah is already standoffish and kind of cold to her. If you put yourself in Pat Healy’s shoes, the restaurant owner, this is a guy who’s just trying to run a business, it’s his dream, it’s what he believes in and he has this girl that’s coming in late, that’s talking on her cell phone, that’s bad at her job and she’s kind of disrespecting him, she quits, she comes back, she slaps him at work, she’s sick at work. It’s kind of funny when you realize that, though you’re in Sarah’s worldview the entire time, there are these moments where you can step outside of her world and realize that everyone is just caught up in her wake. So these characters had to be three dimensional to reinforce the idea that she’s not a good person and there are these people that seem bad but again, they’re just caught up in her wake.
Kevin: It was important that at the halfway point where she goes to the producer’s house and decides that she’s going to give up her pride or self respect in order to achieve her dreams, from that point on the tables get reversed. When she does this one big thing, it clues the audience in that, okay she’s actually not the best person, and from that moment on, watching her you notice these other people aren’t so bad. It changes your perspective. And she actually gets sick physically so you can see her friends are going like “OK, what’s going on, are you alright?” When things get serious, they turn off all their competitive little shots at Sarah and turn on their concern and Sarah’s just getting worse. So at that moment she reveals her true self.
BF: There is a great reverence in the film for Old Hollywood. Sarah has a collage of classic actresses on her walls and aspires to be just like them. Astraeus Pictures seems to have once had golden years and the Producer’s office is decorated like a scene from an old film. What is old Hollywood legend’s place in the story?
Dennis: It’s really about how Sarah is sort of naive. She’s a person who has talent but she’s also a person living in a very modern world where things are done differently but thinking that she can go about them in a very traditional nostalgic way. She’s probably the type of person who thinks she’d be on Hollywood Boulevard at Starbucks and think that she would be noticed by a producer and the producer would cast her in a big movie. So that was to make her feel like a little girl sometimes. She had these dreams of being like these old starlets from the golden age, but the reality is she’s basically being exploited by this company. We like the idea that she would sneer and look down at her friends who just wanted to go out on the weekends and make Kickstarter videos and would look at things and think I’m doing things the traditional way, I’m doing it the way that you’re supposed to do it, I’m paying my dues, and then the irony is that she doesn’t. She basically sells out and takes the easy way out.
Kevin: I would add to that that its sort of the idea that if you look at Hollywood in say the 1930s and whatnot, production companies used to have exclusive deals with actors, and they were like an MGM actor and they worked exclusively for MGM. We wanted her to have that sort of “I’m doing it the traditional way” feel because in the end Astreus Picture kind of owns her.
BF: The basic story of selling your soul for fame is not a new one. Do you feel this story particularly speaks to us today?
Dennis: We did that consciously. The Faustian idea of selling your soul is a very old idea and you can see it in basically any genre of movies. We definitely wanted a short hand to the concept so people were able to wrap their heads around it quickly and that wasn’t overly complicated. This freed us as filmmakers to really dig a little deeper into that theme. I think as filmmakers, especially with movies about movies, you don’t get into the grounded reality of the situation, we usually focus on the machinations of the studio system, the actual making of the movie. Whereas with Starry Eyes we wanted to show younger people today, working a shitty job and coming home to your apartment and crying with the door shut and you have friends right outside in your living room, and going to parties and hiding in the bathroom. We wanted to show a different side of that whole concept.
Gore is used to highlight the horror of Sarah’s transformation
BF: The film can be read as an allegory, for how someone might be corrupted by their desire for fame as Sarah makes a choice to sever her relationships with the people she believes are holding her back. Was this intentional?
Kevin: That was pretty much why we set out to do it. The whole point of taking a transformation tale and putting it in Hollywood was to make it an allegory. A celebrity’s not a kind of monster we’re seen in a horror movie. People ask us all the time, what was she at the end, what was that creature, they almost want some real world answer, like was she a demon, was she a vampire, something like that. And we say, no she got the role, she’s on her way to becoming a star at the end. Sometimes they walk away not satisfied with the answer but the answer works on an allegorical level. The allegorical level of the film is almost more important than what’s going on at the surface level of the film, it’s what’s actually wrapped up in the end, the allegory.
Dennis: I think if you watch the film a second time, you’re see that the film basically bookends itself. It begins with a girl starring at herself in the mirror in her underwear, kind of hating herself and really unhappy with her body, and she’s beautiful and talented and she should be happy but she’s not. She feels like she’s at the end of her rope and she needs to get discovered now before it gets too late. And then through out the movie you’ll see that she constantly returns to that room and kind of beats herself up, looking at the pictures of stars on her walls, and at the end of the movie its the same thing only she’s now gotten what she wants only she’s a phony version of it. Now she’s gotten the role but she’s this bald, shell of a person, she’s come full circle. If you look at the end of the movie she’s completely happy but if you look at her at the beginning of the movie, she’s not. So the movie might be this very bleak tragedy in some ways but not for Sarah, she’s gotten what she wants. As the audience, you realize she just didn’t get it the way you thought she would.
Kevin: The whole movie’s about choice and ambition and what people will turn into a weapon and what people will be willing to do to achieve their dreams. The second she looks in the mirror and likes what she sees, her journey’s complete
BF: This story seems so familiar to young actresses. Did any of the actresses you worked with have their own personal Hollywood horror stories? Did any of them inform the story with their own experiences?
Dennis: Nothing that bad but it seems like actors, men and women, women more so, there’s always this prevailing sense something that when you’re on certain sets or around certain people that there might be a sleaze factor. As far as competition goes? We had actors who told us they had best friends and roommates who were up for the same roles they were, who got the roles and they didn’t. LA is a very big town but it’s also a very small community, I think a lot of actors will relate. With a lot of the actors who came in to read, the second the looked at the script they had a story to tell us about something that happened to them or why it spoke to them so much. We had a guy who came to the premiere in LA and stopped me in the lobby and and told us it spoke to him a lot because he was up for a role and one day the producer took him out and started to kiss him and basically just molested him. I think that stuff, maybe you don’t hear about it as much any more but I think it still goes on.
BF: Why were you drawn to this story? Particularly as men when it focuses so much on Sarah’s experiences as a young woman trying to be a star?
Kevin: I think we knew beforehand, writing it that this was an issue women dealt with more in Hollywood. As far as someone struggling to start their career before they get to old or feeling like there’s a ticking clock, like they have to get going before it’s too late, I feel like that pressure is put on women a lot more than it is on men. You watch movies and you’ll have a 50 year old man and his wife will be played by someone who’s 23. I feel like male actors can continue to have a career as they get older, they can play character roles or even leading men roles and their female counterpart is two decades younger than them. I feel like that pressure to strike while the iron is hot or get your career going before you get too old is real issue that women in Hollywood have to deal with.
BF: What is the film’s stance on Sarah’s decision to perform sexual acts to get the role? Are we meant to judge her for this?
Dennis: It’s tough because if you look at the movie, every decision she makes is her own, this is not a person who is being corrupted. We were really conscious of the fact that if you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Sarah is always in the driver’s seat. If you’re judging anyone you’re judging Sarah, you judge the people around her but you’ll see that they’re only presenting her with options and she’s choosing the wrong ones. We didn’t want her to feel like a victim, the people around her are victims. I think even from the opening shot of the film if you look closely you can see that something is not right with this girl and as it moves on, there’s a series of situations, like when the girl breaks her nose at the pool and she laughs, that she’s just not a great person.
BF: I enjoyed that Sarah was not coerced or tricked into her decision. Though she becomes a victim, with horrific things happening to her body, she continues to have some agency as she has made a conscious decision to do whatever she can for fame. Indeed, instead of killing random people, in the end, she kills the people who she saw as holding her back. Why did you feel it was important to give Sarah this agency?
Kevin: I think a lot of times women characters get exploited in movies like films like this, things are constantly being done to them and they’re helpless to deal with it, and that’s just a form of exploitation, which is fine but we weren’t really interested in dealing with that.
Dennis: I don’t think you see enough movies where a female character really owes her own decisions. She doesn’t have to be sweet, she can be terrible. There’s something kind of fun to make a character like this who makes her own decisions and allows herself to be corrupted, who allows herself to be exploited and is be fine with it in the end. There’s something a little bold about how Sarah does all that in the movies. It’s terrible and you can judge her but its her own choice in the end.
In Sarah’s job at Big Tators, she feels exploited each day.
BF: It was interesting that Sarah is already used to being objectified. She works as a waitress at a Hooters-like restaurant which invites customers to ogle her. Why give Sarah this particular day job? Because of this, there is minimal different between Sarah’s daily life and the initial creepiness of her audition process. Tell me about this contrast?
Kevin: It’s like what she says when she’s talking to Danny, “I feel like I’m selling my soul already, it might as well be for something I love.” It kind of helps push her in the direction she makes in movie and also kind of helps seal the believability of her making that decision, that she’s the kind of person who already in her life is taking jobs or doing what she needs to to survive and sometimes it’s not necessarily where she wants to be and she hates it there and feels exploited but she needs to pay her bills- we hear later in the movie that she needs to pay her rent- so it’s sort of like when she took this job at Big Tators you see already that she’s not like one of the other waitresses that’s happily singing the birthday song and stuff, so its clear already she’s not the type of girl who thinks its fun to work in a place like this. so she must feel like she’s exploited working there and that’s why she lashing out at the bosses. She’s doing what she needs to to survive and that job really sets out that character element that she’s someone who will do things that she might not like or might be below what considers her standard but she will do them to survive or if its to get what she wants.
BF: Starry Eyes is not a film for the squeamish, there are several scenes of gore and brutal violence. The film also employs body horror to show Sarah’s transformation. Sarah vomits bugs and disintegrates until she looks like a badly strung-out junkie. Can you tell me a bit about Sarah’s transformation and your use of gore to accomplish it?
Dennis: I think body horror is one of the most effective sub-genres of horror because there’s something coming from inside you that you can’t escape. With a werewolf there’s a way to kill werewolves, with a haunted house movie there’s a way to escape a haunted house but with body horror, you can’t escape your own body and I think because the metaphor of this movie was about this actress feeling like she’s at the end of her rope and she had to make it as a star or its too late, for all the reasons of why we chose to focus on a woman instead of man, if you add body horror into that equation it’s ten times worse, especially if you focus on a character who already has bod issues. You can see in the beginning scene of the movie that she thinks she’s too heavy even if she’s very thin. She pulls her hair out when things don’t go right, this is a person that already has a lot of psychological triggers so to introduce body horror into the movie and to hopefully do it effectively, which I hope we did, to us was just physically unnerving and psychologically unnerving. As horror fans, Kevin and I have seen a lot of what there is to see but there’s something about seeing a person pulling their hair out or pulling their nail of that never ceases to kind of skeeze us out.
Kevin: It’s also like when she vomits up worms that’s coming from inside of her, it’s almost like she’s dying from the inside out, so this whole idea of what we call selling her soul, is really her giving up her self respect and we’re just watching her old body crumbling, but in the end she’s going to be rewarded with this beautiful new body that doesn’t have any imperfections or concern for others. That’s sort of what the body horror was representing here.
BF: Starry Eyes was partially funded through Kickstarter. What is it about this story that people will relate to?
Kevin: I think it works as a Kickstarter film because the whole film is really about someone banging their head against the wall trying to get into an industry that’s very hard to get into and here me and Dennis have been working together for 20 years making films and this is the first one that’s ever gotten a real release. We put a lot of that in the movie, our feelings of trying to get into this industry, so I think this story was a great project to be funded, at least in part, on Kickstarter because everyone on Kickstarter is making films at an independent level or a crowd source level because they’re not getting that money or through the traditional means of the Hollywood system. That’s basically what you’re doing on Kickstarter, it’s people trying to make a film without the Hollywood system.
Is Sarah a victim or a villain?
BF: Part of the reason the film works so well is Alex Essoe’s knockout performance in the physically and emotionally demanding role of Sarah. Tell me about Essoe.
Kevin: Working with Alex was great. This is a film where an actor has to use everything in their toolkit. It goes from a girl being insecure and looking in the mirror at the beginning, insecure and emotional, to the monster she becomes at the end. She really goes the full gamut and does just about everything. It was really important when we were looking for somebody to play this role that it wasn’t about talent, we needed somebody who really understood the material and was game to do this. If you get somebody that is going to have to be in every scene of the movie and do the things that you have to do in this movie from four hours of make-up to crawling out of the ground to freaking out on the floor, there’s a lot of things in here that people might shy away from and if you’ve got somebody that’s not down to take on that performance or doesn’t understand the material, and they’re in every scene of the movie, you’re never going to make your schedule because in a low budget film like this, we really had a tight schedule. If somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing or is going “why” or “I don’t get it” or saying “I’m not going to do that it,” you’re not going to make your schedule. So it was really important to have someone who really understood the material and was game to do it. Alex, she knew all the references, all the films we were going to tell her to see, she had seen them all already, she loved them all, she saw this as a chance to do the full spectrum of acting, like “why wouldn’t I want to do this movie, I get to do every thing that I’ve learned how to do as an actor” and we were like, yes, totally. So she was great, she never complained she was down to do everything, she brought a lot of her own stuff to the role, she really elevated the role. It’s tough when you have a script, you have a character on a page that you wrote, you look at people and there’s a lot of talented people out there and they may give a good reading but that’s just two scenes, you never know are they doing to come and set and be this character. And she just came and she brought her own ideas and added a lot of nuance to the character, she just became the character. I watch the movie now and think, yeah, Sarah Walker now exists through Alex Essoe.
BF: What is your next project?
Kevin: We are constantly writing every day. I like in the same apartment complex as Dennis and everyday we work on our scripts. We have a few things we’re working on but getting a film off the ground if very difficult and a lot of elements factor into it. We’ve got a few scripts we’re working on and we would like to do and its all dependent on everything falling in the right place to see which one comes together.
Starry Eyes comes out on Blu-Ray on Feb. 3.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.
I suppose its no coincidence that many coming of age films feature runaways. The coming of age plot is, after all, the search for self realized through the search for something external. It doesn’t really matter what the search was originally for: an old home, a long lost father or a missed connection; in the end, it’s the journey, both literal and figurative, that matters.
Poster for Electrick Children
When I was a kid, I used to run away from home.
I’d pile on all my favorite things, all my most special clothes, until I could barely walk in all the layers and stuff my plastic purses full of necessities for my new life, like Barbie dolls and plastic dinosaurs.
But I only ever got a far as the end of driveway. I just sat in the car and imagined what my family would be reduced to without my presence. Eventually I went in again. After all he point was only to make a scene, I only wanted to show that my emotions were serious.
I suppose its no coincidence that many coming of age films feature runaways. The coming of age plot is, after all, the search for self-realized through the search for something external. It doesn’t really matter what the search was originally for: an old home, a long lost father or a missed connection; in the end, it’s the journey, both literal and figurative, that matters.
In Electrick Children, the 2012 debut of writer-director Rebecca Thomas, 15-year-old Rachel (Julia Garner) leaves her fundamentalist Mormon community to search for the father of her baby, whom she believes is the true love God has chosen for her. Likewise, Blue Car, a 2002 film written and directed by Karen Moncrieff, introduces us to Meg Denning (Agnes Bruckner), a 16-year-old girl who longs for a father figure, a parent who will love her unconditionally and believe in her specialness. Both Meg and Rachel set out on the road, not sure exactly what they’re looking for and what they’ll find standing at its end.
Rachel’s enjoyment of the cassette recalls a sexual experience
Electrick Children has a fiercely original set up: a sheltered religious teenager listens a song (a cover of “Hanging on the Telephone”) on a blue cassette tape. It’s the first rock song, even the first secular song she’s ever heard and as she listens, dancing alone in her nightgown, she experiences great pleasure, suggesting her first orgasm. When she later finds she has become pregnant, she is sure the singer on the tape is the father of the baby.
Despite all the sermons she has grown up hearing, about the evils of rock music and immaculate conception, no one in the community is willing to believe Rachel’s pregnancy is a miracle and religious leaders blame her brother “Mr. Will” (Liam Aiken) for impregnating her and try to force Rachel into a shotgun marriage.
Instead, she packs her things and escapes to the glittering lights of the nearest city, Las Vegas. A lost little lamb in the big city, Rachel limps along until she meets a group of skaters, musicians, and stoners. Naive Rachel and Mr. Will, who follows along behind her, would be easily exploitable prey, but because this is a movie, they are taken in by the group, who recognize them as fellow outsiders in need of their support.
The gang of Las Vegas teens welcome Rachel and Mr. Will
Along the way, Clyde (Rory Culkin), a sensitive skateboarder notices Rachel and they begin to fall in love with each other. Clyde’s friends tease him for desiring Rachel, as a pregnant girl she is “damaged goods,” he doesn’t care.
Electrick Children is a gorgeous film, stuffed with vivid colors and textures, beautiful scenery and indie rock. However, one might view it as troubling that the origin of Rachel’s pregnancy is never revealed. Commenters on IMDb suggest the film hints that Rachel was drugged and raped by her stepfather, the leader of the religious community, though this is never addressed in the film. Though Rachel’s views of both the religious and secular worlds complicate as she begins to think for herself, one thing that never changes is her belief that God fathered her child. In the main text of the film, her relationship with Clyde, who offers to marry her and raise the baby, suggests a modern update of relationship between Mary and Joseph in The Bible.
As his student, Meg relies on Auster to provide guidance
As Blue Car begins, Meg Denning is the new girl at school. Her parents have just separated and she is sullen and depressed. Her mother seems to work all hours, leaving Meg to take care of her troubled younger sister, Lily. Lily is taking their father’s disappearance much harder than Meg, refusing to eat and making delusional statements about her appearance and identity. Meg resents having to look after her and begins to hate her mother for failing to notice both sisters’ unhappiness.
In school, Meg tries her best to fade into the background, but all this changes when her English teacher, Mr. Auster (David Strathairn) begins to take a shine to her. Auster tells her she has the potential to be brilliant poet, if only she will allow herself to express the true depth of the pain and anger she feels and put it into words. He gives her a light at the end of the tunnel, a national poetry competition in Florida that she is a shoo-in to win, as long as she can find a way to get there.
As imagined Meg begins to come into her voice, with Auster’s guidance. Though his influence is initially set up as a positive force, as the film draws on, it slowly becomes clear that Auster’s own goals are tainting Meg’s newly realized talent. Meg constantly clashes with her mother and drives away everyone else in her life who had supported her or attempted to get through her hard exterior. She comes to view her father as a villain for leaving her and her mother as wicked for working, refusing to see them as three-dimensional people with their own lives.
Meg is lost and confused when Auster’s attentions become sexual
From here, the film’s trajectory is familiar. As viewers, we are not surprised when the older teacher takes advantage of his young protege, but Blue Car runs through this familiar plot in a way that is genuinely affecting to watch. The film refuses to allow either Meg or us as viewer to see her parents as cardboard cut-outs. Meg ultimately recognizes her mother is a person as well as a parent, an imperfect, broken person who had made missteps raising her but is trying her best. Even her father, who we only see briefly, comes across as well-meaning and kind, a marked contrast to the picture of him in Meg’s bitter poem.
In both films, the road ends with a discovery that the road never really ends. Self-discovery is a life long project, but at least Rachel and Meg know where to begin.
I’ll just say it, reality TV scares me. It has so much potential to affect the way we live and look at ourselves by showing us how other people live. It can chip away at our idea of strong womanhood by highlighting the successes only of the beautiful, compliant and willing to backstab.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Reality TV.
I’ll just say it: reality TV scares me. It has so much potential to affect the way we live and look at ourselves by showing us how other people live. It can chip away at our idea of strong womanhood by highlighting the successes only of the beautiful, compliant and willing to backstab. We all know the “reality” shown is rarely real, but highly edited: lines are slipped into different contexts and complex people are ironed out into characters to love or hate with no in between.
For me, the idea of what reality TV can do is rife with potential for perfect horror stories. Here are some interesting ones.
Starry Eyes
The recent horror movie, Starry Eyes, focuses on Sarah (Alex Essoe), a wanna-be-actress stuck working at a humiliating Hooters-style restaurant while she runs between auditions. It’s a typical Hollywood story, but Sarah’s difference is clear in her desire for fame and adoration rather than a love of her craft. She’s vain and spends large amounts of time gazing at herself in her bedroom mirror, framed by pictures of classic actresses renowned for their beauty and presence. She has a clear idea of who she wants to be and what she deserves. She is sure little-seen indie films and working a day job are both beneath her.
Sarah auditions for a role
The film is set up deceptively. At first, Sarah is the figurative, yet all too familiar monster, as she’s a young woman willing to do anything for success. She’s an ideal reality star — desperate, pretty and as the saying goes, “not here to make friends.” What’s more, she has frequent fits of self-hatred when she does a poor job at an audition, where she beats herself, screams like an animal and rips out her own hair. These fits initially fascinate the producers in Sarah’s auditions. They hate her by-the-book performance of the script. But like casting agents for a reality show, they are drawn to her as the character of herself, as participants are frequently cast in reality TV based on how much drama they will create or their interesting personal stories.
Sarah tries to decide whether to sleep with a producer for the film role
We believe the question of how far Sarah will go for success is limited to whether or not she will participate in casting couch activities, when an older producer tells her he will give her the part if she performs oral sex on him. She struggles with the decision before eventually agreeing.
But the film is not even really about this decision. It is slowly revealed that the producers are part of an Illuminati-like group that want to use her for some kind of ritual. As she agrees to follow their demands, her body physically deteriorates and she slowly transforms into a grotesque creature, losing her hair and vomiting up bugs. She also becomes increasingly isolated and cut off from her friends, until she begins to murder them.
Elite Hollywood figures use Sarah as a ritual sacrifice
And all through it, an elite group of devil worshipers are pulling the strings and watching Sarah from the shadows as if she is their entertainment. She is their spectacle, becoming a ravenous mutated creature, one who can achieve fame and stand among the idols that frame her mirror.
Black Mirror: Black Mirror is a British TV series that is a sort of modern day update to The Twilight Zonethat focuses on our use of technology. Drawing on the idea of our dependence on our screens (TV, phones, and computers) as a dark mirror reflecting our lives, it delivers engrossing anthology tales, taking on large-scale government crises and conspiracies as well as small scale domestic dramas and love stories.
Naturally, several episodes were reality TV adjacent, particularly “15 Million Merits” in the first season, and “White Bear” in the second.
Bing falls for Abi’s voice and tries to help her become a star
“15 Million Merits” is set in a dystopic future where people are forced to spend everyday riding exercise bikes and playing video games to earn credits to buy the things they need to live. Each person is confined either to their room or to the exercise room where they work and is discouraged from interacting with other people outside of their video game avatars. Unless, they have enough credits to skip them, they have to spend even their free time watching advertisements and watching mandated programs. The only road to live a better life is to win an American Idol-like singing competition called Hot Shot. Unfortunately it costs the titular 15 million merits to even enter.
Bing (Daniel Klaus) is a young man who hates this world enough to complain but not enough to do something about it. He lives a quiet, unassuming life, riding his bike and hoarding his credits, until he meets Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay) and immediately falls in love with her and her singing voice. Bing believes in her talent and buys her an entry on Hot Shot, sure that she will win and get to be happy, even if it is far away from him.
Abi performs for the judges on Hot Shot
Instead, Abi is drugged with a drink called “compliance” and taunted by the aggressive judges and viewers into agreeing to become a porn star. Quickly, Bing becomes disturbingly possessive of Abi and is ashamed of her for taking the offer. He is repulsed and to make it worse, is forced to watch clips of Abi’s performances over and over again.
Through their avatars, viewers voice their approval and disapproval for Abi’s performance and their commands of what they’d like Abi to do. In their frenzies, they display a mob mentality, voicing violent and disturbing fantasies and dehumanizing her.
As an image from a Hot Shot commercial suggests, the events of the episode force Abi and Bing to answer the question, “How low would you go for fame and fortune.” It’s a common question we hear on reality TV.
In the episode “White Bear,” a woman named Toni (Lenora Crichlow) wakes up alone in a house with no memory of what has happened to her. When she approaches any of the people outside, they just ignore her and try to take pictures of her and record her on their phones. Soon, people wearing masks appear and begin chase her through town, trying to kill her.
Instead of helping, the people Toni meets just take her picture
The end twist is probably as Twilight Zone-esque as the show ever gets. Toni is a child murderer and this is a “Justice Park” created to punish her.
The episode brings up similar ideas about the mob mentality in reality TV as “15 Million Merits,” as well as our fascination with violence and humiliation. “White Bear” asks us to think about our bloodlust and the enjoyment we derive from seeing people scared or in pain on reality TV.
For months, Kat idly notes her mother Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family. As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, ‘White Bird in a Blizzard,’ is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above.
The poster for White Bird in A Blizzard
Spoilers ahead!
As White Bird in a Blizzard opens, Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is a teenage girl like any other, just at that point where she’s realizing how the life she wants for herself differs from the one modeled by the adults around her.
It’s 1988 and she’s challenging the limits for what she get away with, stomping out of her suburban home in heavy make-up and short skirts, enjoying loud music and lots of sex, and through all of it, fighting with her disdainful housewife-in-pearls mother, Eve (Eva Green, popping in to play a variation of the cold, elegant woman role she’s perfected).
As she matures, Kat begins to see the cracks in her parents’ 1950s style-American Dream-marriage. Her nebbish father Brock (Christopher Meloni) is flailing in his attempts to understand Eve, who is displaying depressive symptoms and acting jealous and even cruel toward Kat.
For months, Kat idly notes Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family.
As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, White Bird in a Blizzard, is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above. The atmosphere, steamed up with Kat’s barely contained lust and Eve’s frosty shadow, dominates.
The real mystery is not who killed Eve or where she disappeared to. In fact, these answers are hinted at early on and are clear to the audience long before Kat even cares to investigate for herself. If a mystery is at important, it’s the mystery of what kind of person Kat will end up being and how her memories of her difficult, often unlovable mother, will shape her in her adulthood.
Eve feels stifled by her role as a housewife
The film follow Kat through two years pivotal years, as she finishes high school and begins college, punctuated with voiceover narration, flashbacks to her earlier relationship with her mother and introspection delivered in appointments with her psychiatrist. For most of this time, Kat is unmotivated to solve the mystery and this plot is sidelined by her burgeoning sexuality.
Things drag a bit in this section, as the film becomes merely a teenager’s sexual odyssey with hints of something darker just offscreen, just outside of her experience. We watch Kat get tired of her dumb and shiny first boyfriend, Phil, the boy next door (Shiloh Fernandez), and move on to the macho cop in charge of her mother’s case (Thomas Jane). Kat is unapologetically sexual. She admits that she is “horny” and excited to have sex again and again, complaining to Phil that it has been too long since they’d last done it. For Kat, this was not true love and she knows it. Her desire is sex itself, not sex with him specifically. In her conscious attempt to seduce of the detective, assuring him she is already 18 and already sexuality active, she is not a lost little girl manipulated by an older man, attempting to use this relationship to make an official move into adulthood. However, besides sex, there is little at stake until the final act.
Kat is overcome by lust and explores her sexual desires
Kat enjoys sex and admires her body, rare things for a teenage girl to be allowed in either movies or in real life. She has reason to be proud, as she has carved and shaped out her body, from beneath the prepubescent baby fat her mother always teased her about. Eve was the kind of mother who tsk-ed at every bite her daughter took, constantly reminding her of how much thinner and more appealing she was at her age. But as Kat relates, her mother only became crueler toward her as she came into her own.
Their dynamic is a Grimm’s fairy tale, the beautiful daughter sucking the life out of her once beautiful mother, slowly killing her and then replacing her as an object of lust. In Eve’s mind, they appear to be in competition. After noticing Kat’s new body, she appears in revealing clothes in front of Phil and flirts with him. She watches Kat dress and do her make-up, hidden in the shadows, and lingers too long to watch her fooling around with Phil. In one harrowing scene, she comes into Kat’s room at night and attempts to physically assault her.
Eve is consumed by jealousy while observing her daughter’s youth
One possible flaw in the otherwise skilled depiction of their difficult relationship is the casting of Eva Green as the mother of Shailene Woodley’s character when she is only 12 years older than her. By casting an actress who is not old enough to be Kat’s mother, the idea of the sexual identity crisis and aging Eve is experiencing is skewed. This is not how she should look at this age, because the actress is not of the right age.
The disappearance of Kat’s mother echoes the conflict between a mother and her daughter as she comes of age. Kat must reject her mother’s influence and ideals in favor of forming her own. Here, Kat’s mother services as a destructive influence on her life, but this influence is pervasive and unshakeable. Kat cannot reject her mother, even when she is sure her mother has rejected her, even that her mother never loved her. Even as she tries to, Eve haunts her memories and she has recurring dream of her naked in the snow and calling out for her.
Kat dreams of her mother vulnerable and in need of her help
Because of their troubled relationship, Kat feels little pain or sadness at her mother’s disappearance. She blames all her and her father’s unhappiness on Eve and encourages him to move on and find a woman who deserves him.
Still, the film resists the temptation to make Eve into a monster. Though Kat struggles to find something redeemable about her mother, some humanity in her that she can love, she never doubts Eve’s essential humanity and that the rational behind her actions. Kat speaks of Eve’s history like a biographer, dissecting her thoughts and motives as if she was there to hear them
As viewers used to suspense plots, we expect from the beginning that something sinister has happened to Eve. With this in mind, Kat’s attempts to reconstruct her mother are shadowed by our idea of Eve as a victim.
This presents a challenge to viewers: Can Eve be both villain and victim? And which is a crueler – the physical violence visited on Eve or the psychological destruction Eve imposes on her daughter?
From Kat’s narration, the viewer is compelled to sympathize for Brock and share her hatred of Eve, a strange position for the narrative as it becomes clear to the viewer that Brock had a hand in Eve’s disappearance. The eventual reveal, that Brock murdered Eve, is not subtle, as viewers we expect this, as we are used to stories where the good-guy husband is revealed to be a killer. Kat, from her biased perceptive as his child, perhaps willfully blind to his true character, is more naive than us as an audience and than other characters.
Kat’s milquetoast father seems broken by Eve’s disappearance
In fact, every one around her, from her cop boyfriend to her two friends, tell her father has long been the chief suspect in Eve’s disappearance. At this point, it has never been in the least implied by Kat’s narration, by the story steered by her point of view. We never see hints of her father’s jealousy or his fits of rage, which Kat is told until the last act, instead we make these realizations along with her. For most of the film, Brock seems like a harmless milquetoast harangued by his dissatisfied wife. This is the view Kat uses to introduce us to her father and to contextualize her parents’ relationship, thus it catches the viewer off guard, and even scares us, when he reveals hidden stores of anger and turns them on his daughter, his long-time supporter
Though the voiceover is relayed in Woodley’s voice with infrequent teenager vernacular, Kat’s view on the events, is cold and distanced, full of beautiful prose (most straight from Laura Kasischke’s source novel) and bloodless dissection of her mother’s motives. The wounds of her mother’s disappearance and her complicated adolescence do not seem at all fresh (note that Kat begins her narration with a suggestion of time passing, “I was 17 when my mother disappeared”). Her narration is composed, even going as far to recall her mother’s prim, patrician energy. The blossoming girl Kat has become a jaded woman, still fighting to care about her mother.
Yet, she seems unaware of events until there are revealed and gives no foreshadowing of Eve’s eventual fate. Eve is posed as the villain and Brock is the victim, even though Kat should know how these roles are reversed. While she struggles to see her mother as sympathetic, she seems to make no effort to rectify the two sides of her father.
The real surprise of the film is the ending twist, which is the sort of twist that seems calculated to give viewers something to talk about as they leave the theater. Instead of revealing that Brock discovered Eve was sleeping with Phil and killed her out of jealousy, as most of the film seemed to imply (and is the ending of the book the film is based on), Eve discovers Brock was sleeping with Phil and he explodes in rage when she laughs at him.
Eve sees Kat as her rival and flirts with her boyfriend, hinting at a possibly affair
If you believe in auteur theory, this is a clear example of director Araki putting his own stamp on the material, as he is primarily known for the Queer themes of his films. Though a unique twist, this ending feels tacked on for shock value, rather than organic to material. There are no hints at this twist to look back on, and in fact it seems as if it was just made up on the spot after the rest of the film was shot with the original ending in mind. Much of Eva Green’s performance and the importance of her dynamic with Kat no longer make sense in light of this ending.
Still, as a coming of age film, White Bird in a Blizzard is a success at depicting Kat as a real teenage girl, hovering in that confusing stage of adolescence where she is neither fully grown up but is certainly not a child. It is a quiet, often very beautiful film about growing up and coming to terms with the sins of your parents, figuring out how you will use their lessons and to form your own identity. In the end, Kat has lost both her parents and has reasons to hate both of them, yet she still has to live in the world and try to figure out how she can understand who they were and what they made her.
Movies where young girls are victimized are generally our idea of real world horrors, movies that are too sickening to sit through, but as much as they unsettle us, we expect them. We see these stories in the news every day. What is made truly terrifying and shocking in our culture is the advanced young girl already aware of her powers, and what she can get with them–a girl who knows how to move, how to dress, and how to manipulate.
This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.
The unnerving poster for Orphan
It is very rare for a child to be a horror movie villain outside of a supernatural context. While we can turn off the movie, comforted that the children in Village of the Damned or the devil in The Omen’s Damien are fictional, we can’t entirely dismiss a child who simply goes bad, even if the narrative is as far-fetched as demonic possession and werewolves.
It frightens us because we know that an ordinary child going bad is somehow our fault, either as individuals or as a society. We have failed to intervene and save them before they were irredeemable.
Movies where young girls are victimized are generally our idea of real world horrors, movies that are too sickening to sit through, but as much as they unsettle us, we expect them. We see these stories in the news every day. What is made truly terrifying and shocking in our culture is the advanced young girl already aware of her powers, and what she can get with them–a girl who knows how to move, how to dress, and how to manipulate.
In this light, Vladimir Nabokov’s novelLolita continues to captivate literary discussions due to its unreliable narrator. Humbert Humbert defends himself, saying 12-year-old Dolores Haze seduced and manipulated him. He excuses his sexual relationship with her based on the fact that she had already lost her virginity and therefore he was not corrupting her; she was already to be considered somehow adult. Though most scholars view Humbert’s explanations as lies told to diminish his culpability, it is our tendency as readers to believe our narrator and identify with him (a major reason why the book is so disquieting).
Dominique Swain is a grubby, bratty Lolita
When the 1997 remake of Lolita appeared in theaters, amid protests of its sexual depiction of a child, this reading of the character as the seducer and the party deserving of blame was used as a defense. Likewise, in 1959, novelist Robertson Davies famously described the story as “not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child.” Despite the fact that “a corrupt child” is still a child who cannot consent to sexual activity, this view is mirrored in many real life court cases, where the abuse of young girls is excused because “she looked old for her age,” “she was already sexually active,” or that most horrifying of excuses, that paints a girl in a training bra as a whore in waiting: “she seduced me, she knew what she was doing.” If our culture finds the sexual desire of an adult woman to be monstrous and abhorrent, what are we to think of a child, this horror movie bogeyman-figure who seeks to ruin the lives of successful men, whose cries of victimization fall on deaf ears?
It’s a popular misogynistic narrative: the teenage femme fatale turns into a horrific stalker figure, bent on possessing a poor well-meaning man, usually a father figure or teacher. We’ve seen it time and time again in films like Poison Ivy, Devil in the Flesh, and The Crush, all with actresses of safely legal age for viewer lust and obvious attractiveness, and gratuitous shots of their bodies. There’s no question we’re meant to identify with the man and see him as an innocent victim, unsure why this monster-girl has seized upon him, as Joey Buttafuoco attempted to portray himself in the trial of Amy Fisher, the teenage mistress who shot his wife and was thereafter known as the Long Island Lolita.
Sue Lyon plays a glamourous, conventionally attractive Lolita
But this viewer-identification is only safe as long as we the audience feel comfortable lusting after the girl at its center. Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version of Lolita upped the girl’s age from innocent 12 to an ambiguous early teens and eradicated glimpses from the book of Dolores’s gross childishness–the gum she was always chewing, her sticky fingers and snotty nose–that would disgust the audience and make Humbert clearly abhorrent. In addition, while still underage, actress Sue Lyon is of a more mature and glamourous physical type than the book’s Lolita, which makes viewers more comfortable with her sexualization. Dominique Swain in the remake, is the clumsy, sticky child that does (and should) turn us off and makes Humbert, not Lolita, the clear monster of the story.
The Colemans are charmed by sweet Esther
When it was released in 2009, Orphan was painted as a simple evil child movie, The Good Son with pigtails and a controversial anti-adoption stance. For awhile the narrative is conventional; Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is a charismatic girl who can control and manipulate weaker children, like her new sister, Max, and adults. She attacks the girl who bullies her, kills a nun who promises to look into her back story and puts her adoptive brother in intensive care.
But the use of Esther as an advanced child, not only causally murderous but strangely sexual, adds a new dimension to this tale, marrying the evil child with the sexual stalker. Esther flirts with her adoptive father and attempts to kiss him and shocks her adoptive mother by stating matter-of-factly that she knows babies are made by men and women “fucking.”
There’s enough maternal and familial angst in the film to initially distract from Esther. The Colemans, a wealthy Connecticut family, decide to adopt a child to fill the void left after a miscarriage. Kate (Vera Farmiga) in particular feels the loss. Her husband and children are already wary of her because of her depression and alcoholism and refuse to believe her suspicions that something is very wrong with the angelic little girl they’ve brought into their home.
Through the film’s multiple acts, our view of Esther dramatically changes. Initially she is a perfect model child bullied for being sensitive and desperately in need of love, then she is a sociopathic child who hurts others without remorse, and finally, she is a crazy seducer, refusing to accept that she is not a sexy mature-bodied woman. In the film’s final act, we learn she is really a 33-year-old escaped mental patient with a pituitary disorder who has been posing as a child to be adopted by families and seduce the fathers.
Esther is made grotesque when she is revealed to be a 33-year-old woman
However, we see her strange sexual behavior before we learn that she is an adult woman, and it is clearly used to make us uncomfortable. As stated above, our culture’s fear of an overly sexualized child is rooted in our sense of guilt. We assume a child with this behaviour must be damaged in some way, must have fallen through the cracks of social services. Even if a child like Esther is a villain, we are obligated to feel sorry for her and speculate on the abuse she must have experienced. Orphan introduces Esther as a lonely, distanced child who has a difficult time relating to other people and children her age. It’s a narrative we’re already familiar with about children shuffled though orphanages and foster care, because in many cases it is a real life horror story.
Esther attempts to seduce her adoptive father
As such, we would ordinarily be wary of punishing Esther for her actions or question the degree of blame she deserves. A adult or teenage murderer must be killed or incarcerated to be disarmed, but what can we do with a little girl?
When The Bad Seedcame out in 1956, The Hays Code put filmmakers in a difficult situation. Evil Rhoda (Patty McCormack) was not allowed to triumph, as she did in the source novel and play, as the code did not allow crime to pay, so the ending was rewritten to with Rhoda dying after being struck by lightening. Still, ending a film with the death of a child and using it as a cause for celebration would not sit well with audiences. A slapstick coda was pasted on, where Nancy Kelly, who played Rhoda’s mother, delivers a spanking to McCormack, intended to stress that it was only a movie and all meant in good fun.
In Orphan, the solution is to reveal she is not actually a little girl, and thus, can be punished harshly. We don’t need to worry about her parents or her upbringing or possible rehabilitation. We don’t need to feel sorry for her. She is officially a monster, a freak, so we can hit her with a shovel or throw her across the room and breathe satisfied. The reveal of her actual face, beneath the make-up and freed from her false teeth is horrifying in itself, as she suddenly looks like an adult woman. With this reveal, she becomes a legitimate monster, an adult face on a child’s tiny body, wrinkled and malformed, crawling around and fighting like an animal.
Esther views herself as trapped inside the body of a child and unable to live the life of a grown woman with a family and a lover. Because of her appearance, any attempt of hers to be a sexual being is automatically perverted.
Kate and Esther become rivals
Her jealousy of Kate, who has everything she is denied, contributes to the uniquely antagonistic relationship between them. Because Kate is able to see through Esther’s act, she is marked as her rival early on, even while Kate still sees Esther as her child. When Esther says “fuck,” she poses it as a challenge to Kate. If Esther is a child, there is nothing Kate can really do to her and not seem like the criminal. In most cases, being a child means you’re the one to be believed.
By the film’s end, as it devolves into a classic chase/fight scene, Esther and Kate become equals and Esther is validated as a romantic rival. These final scenes mirror chase/fight scenes between adult romantic rivals, like Fatal Attraction and Single White Female. It is very rare that an “evil kid” movie ends with the mother fighting the child, in these films the mother is usually killed earlier, as in The Omen.
In the end, movies like Orphan and stories like Lolita challenge our morality and our idea of what a child can be found guilty of. Orphan’s final twist allows us some relief from this uncertainty. If Esther’s not a child, if Lolita is aged up and filled out, we’re not allowed to be uncomfortable, even if it doesn’t change the meat of the story.
