Elizabeth Kiy – Page 3

‘They Came Together’ and the Sins of Romantic Comedy

It’s easy to look at the ads for ‘They Came Together’ and expect a straight romcom. The poster and the film are glossy and full of comedic stars. New York is so important to the story it’s like another character. The leads, Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as Molly and Joel, play exaggerations of the roles they could be cast in in any other film. She’s the big-hearted and dangerously clumsy proprietor of a quirky little candy shop that gives all its proceeds to charity, while he’s a big candy executive who dreams of a simpler life, obsesses over sex, and threatens to shut down Molly’s shop. They get together. That much is obvious once you hear it’s a romantic comedy.

It’s easy to look at the ads for They Came Together and expect a straight romcom. The poster and the film are glossy and full of comedic stars. New York is so important to the story it’s like another character. The leads, Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as Molly and Joel, play exaggerations of the roles they could be cast in in any other film. She’s the big-hearted and dangerously clumsy proprietor of a quirky little candy shop that gives all its proceeds to charity, while he’s a big candy executive who dreams of a simpler life, obsesses over sex, and threatens to shut down Molly’s shop. They get together.

That much is obvious once you hear it’s a romantic comedy.

They Came Together, the latest from David Wain and Michael Showalter, the team behind cult pic Wet Hot American Summer, intends to parody these easy conventions, and though an enjoyable film, it’s debatable what it actually accomplishes. Comedy is a difficult matter to critique as so much of what we find humorous is specific to us as individuals, as well as to factors like our culture, class, and age, that it’s nearly impossible for one person to stand up on a soapbox and declare whether or not something is funny. Adding to that, They Came Together is a polarizing film by nature. Its humor is absurdist and jokes zig and zag completely out of left field, sometimes feeling more like an extended sketch than a feature film. There are subtle visual gags, highly telegraphed centerpiece jokes, clever observations about life both in the real world and in the sunny world of the romantic comedy, plenty of raunch and some of those repetition bits that run just long enough to stop being funny and then to get funny again, thrown in for good measure. In short, it’s a comedy grab bag for which both rants and raves are justified.

Joel is given advice by friends, A-list comedians who each represent a different archetype

Much of the romcom references are bang on. The basic plot, cribbed from You’ve Got Mail, pegs an uptight man against a free-spirited woman and tells us he needs her to help him believe in his dreams, while she needs him to help her become more grounded. To stress this point, they’re even given wrong partners as contrast, ever-literal accountant Eggbert (Ed Helms) and perfectly put together Tiffany (Cobie Smulders). All the genre staples we know and are growing tired of are there: Joel gets advice from basketball playing pals who each represent a different point of view (and tell us out-right which idea they represent), they bond over their “quirky” shared tastes, in this case a love of fiction books and a hatred for the complications of modern life, spread their clothes all over Molly’s apartment while making out and fall in love through a montage that shows them buying fruit and playing in fallen leaves.

Joel and Molly fall in love through a montage of cliche activities

There are also some new and intriguing points made by the film about how race and class are portrayed in earnest examples of the genre. For existence, Molly’s assistant is Black woman who appears to have no life other than helping her, even picking up the phone in one scene and assuming the call is for Molly before even asking. Later into the film, it is revealed that Molly has a young son, and has such an easy time being a single mother that his presence in her life wasn’t even noticeable until it was pointed out. The movie fantasy of easy success and money is also briefly deconstructed in the end, when the main character’s business fails and cannot be salvaged.

With the film’s absurdist style, the plot and characters can’t really be dissected at length. But a romcom parody is particularly interesting for its power to point out annoying or offensive staples of the genre, in particular, their portrayals of women. Though a genre geared toward women, female characters in romantic comedies are uniformly portrayed as cardboard cut-outs, needy bleeding hearts or catty and conniving villains. In They Came Together, the one-dimensional nature of the female characters is pointed out as part of the joke. Molly’s business is failing because of her compulsion to give candy away and she never once thinks of changing the way she runs things. Likewise, Tiffany tells Joel point-blank that she is untrustworthy. In contrast, Joel is a complicated character who supports his younger brother, is conflicted about his job, and has strange feelings for his grandmother.

Joel’s ex Tiffany warns him to be suspicious of her morals while seducing him — Joel’s ex Tiffany warns him to be suspicious of her motives while seducing him

The difference between men and women is also boiled down to one point, that men are easy-going and order from the menu, while women are needlessly complicated (like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally) and have impossible specifications for how their food must be prepared. This idea, a common one in romantic comedies that has even bleed into real life expectations, is clearly posed as ridiculous.

But one target the film should have paid more attention to is the derision of the romantic comedy genre without our collective culture. When a new romcom opens, most of us expect it to be terrible, sight unseen. Horror films, another genre that can be cheaply and quickly made, don’t suffer the same derision, perhaps because the genre is generally geared toward a masculine audience. While bad horror is recognized as such, masters like John Carpenter and Wes Craven are still routinely praised, even by film buffs who are not major fans of the horror genre. Meanwhile, giants of romcoms like the late Nora Ephron, are seen as bi-words for schmaltzy “chick” movies no serious person would admit to liking. In my own life, I can’t recall the last time I heard a woman admit to a fondness for the likes of Sleepless in Seattle or Never Been Kissed without adding “as a guilty pleasure” in a knee-jerk reaction.

The ladies of ‘game-changing’ romantic comedy Bridesmaids — The ladies of ‘game-changing’ romantic comedy *Bridesmaids*

That was a big part of the wild success of Bridesmaids and its reputation as a game-changer: while a lot of the story presented wasn’t new, it was the first romantic comedy in a long time that we were “allowed” to like as something more than the garbage film meant for watching alone in sweatpants while nursing a carton of Hagen Daas.

Somehow it got drummed into our heads that the romantic comedy isn’t meant for us.

I’m making some wild generalizations about you as a reader here, but I’m going to guess that you’re something like me. You consider yourself smart, cynical and wary of the phase, “Well if you didn’t like it, that means you didn’t get it.” I’m not generally a fan of romcoms, but I’m starting to wonder how much of that distaste comes from the idea that they’re not “serious movies,” that they’re not worth my time, that I’m not supposed to like them. Sure, I’m turned off by the cutesy modern touches like klutzy women, quirky businesses, the plague of architect love interests (one trope missing from They Came Together) and honestly by the term “romcom” itself, but none of those things are that tied up in my ideas of modern womanhood and my comportment. I roll my eyes at them and I’m over it.

A romantic comedy where characters always succeed regardless of business sense or marketability and end up up happily ever after, is like a fairy tale to me; I don’t feel held to the expectations of women presented in them. But what I do feel constrained by is the idea of a universal taste, the final opinions formed in almost unspoken consensus that this show is a masterpiece or this show is crap, wherein anyone who disagrees loses all credibility.

Genres that cater to women are already disadvantaged in this respect as they’re seen as veering away from the universal, generally masculine path of canonized media. No matter how much important journalism or honest snapshots of our lives women’s magazines present, they’re still seen as trash. Female bloggers that write in a colloquial style that mirrors their style of speech and engages with their female readers are seen as unserious and dumb. Likewise, Girls was only acceptable as a good show after it gained the approval of young male viewers and with the approval of bro-humorist Judd Apatow.

There’s joke I’ve heard a lot recently: “I’m not like most girls”- most girls.

For most young educated women, romantic comedies are for those others, the stereotypical girl we imagine existing somewhere (basically characters played by Mindy Kaling), the one we’re deathly afraid of appearing be. We claim not to diet, we have female friends, we would never force a date to see the latest Jen Aniston movie, we call ourselves low maintenance. Sure, we want someone to love but we don’t see it as the ultimate goal in life.

But in truth? I’m sure we’ve all got “girly” things we truly love that compromise a good portion of identity. And it shouldn’t be shameful to like things that are supposed to be for women, just like shouldn’t be shameful to reject them or to like media geared toward both masculine and feminine audiences.

As in most romantic comedies, Joel and Molly have a meet cute when they wear the same costume to a halloween party

It’s probably taking things too far to say I hope They Came Together will change filmmaking or consumption; it’s a light comedic parody without activist intentions. Still, it’s the kind of film that, intentionally or not, makes you think about what we’re used to seeing on the screen and wonder why we have accepted certain ideas presented to us without complaint. Like why is one genre for women and another for men/everyone?

It hasn’t always been this way. Past romantic comedies from the 30s, even through the 90s where much of the tropes in They Came Together originated from, have been acclaimed as serious films, targeted to a universal audience and even Academy Award-ed. Many of these films were even posed from a masculine point of view, following a male character’s quest for love instead of a woman’s.

Sure They Came Together is parody, but despite its basic romantic comedy structure, it’s aimed at any audience appreciative of its brand of comedy and assumes even male viewers are familiar with the genre. Is it hopelessly naive to wish that the very existence of this film, which takes for granted that the audience will recognize romantic comedy tropes and see them as stale, will lead to some innovations?

See Also: The Romantic Comedy is Dead

________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic. I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”? In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic.

Remember riding your bike around town? Remember waiting at the ice cream truck, or trying on new looks in front of the mirror, driving aimlessly around with a new license, or just listening to music in your room alone and having multiple epiphanies? ‘Tis the season to come of age. To be forever changed.

I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”?

In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Slums of Beverly Hills

Like many coming of age classics, Slums of Beverly Hills is both semi-autobiographical (for writer-director Tamara Jenkins) and set in the recent past. 90s indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a girl struggling with her dysfunctional family, burgeoning sexuality and uncomfortably large breasts (an unusual teenage girl problem in a genre full of girls praying for big boobs), all while constantly moving between seedy apartments in Beverly Hills as part of her father’s plan to allow her and her brothers to attend prestigious schools. Through the course of the film, Vivian not only has her period and loses her virginity, clear markers of ascent into womanhood, but also realizes sex can be pleasurable and she has a right to demand that it is. She also comes to appreciate her eccentric father (Alan Arkin) for the sacrifices he makes to give his children the best futures possible.

Lesson: Learn to be amused, not afflicted. Practice saying, one day this will all go in my memoir.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, like Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mermaids, stars Winona Ryder back when she was the patron saint of “weird girls” who liked to wear black and didn’t talk much in class. Her unfortunately named character, Dinky, is a social outcast who prefers animals to her peers, who constantly taunt and torture her and disappoints her adoptive mother by rejecting feminine clothing. Though sometimes its hard to figure out whether Dinky is ostracized for being antisocial or has learned to be antisocial after years of being ostracized. Stuck in a quirky indie film style town where the childhood home of minor celebrity, Roxy Carmichael, is preserved as a museum, Dinky sets out to validate her existence by proving she is Roxy’s long lost daughter.

Lesson: You can’t develop in a vacuum. Spending time alone is valuable, but you really learn who you are from living in the world you have and getting to know the people around you, not from escaping into the world you wish you had.

Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible.

Margaret

Despite hitting some familiar beats (loss of virginity, teacher-student relationship, first encounter with death), Margaret is a very different type of coming of age story, and to my mind, a truer one, than I’ve seen before. As it begins, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a privileged Manhattan teenager, is just coming into her own. She has new and serious opinions about war and politics and passionately argues them in class and charges around the city casually flirting and testing out her new power. When she distracts a bus driver, contributing to a fatal accident, her grief and guilt lead her to seek the driver’s dismissal, which she feels is the only fair consequence. Here, Lisa shows how young she still is, as she doggedly seeks fairness, blind to the interests of the other parties involved and to any other option. She still sees the world as one where the guilty are always punished and the innocent rewarded, and in the moment where she learns things will not work the ways she imagined, she breaks down into a child-like tantrum.

Lesson: Life isn’t fair, it’s really not fair and sometimes there is nothing you can do to make things right.

Dirty Girl

Danielle Edmundson (Juno Temple) thinks God made her purely for sex. Known as the “Dirty Girl” at school for her promiscuity, Danielle looks down on the girls in her class who fuss over their appearance and wish for their Prince Charmings, and uses the boys to prove to herself she has a talent. In Clark (Jeremy Dozier), a shy, gay boy who also sticks out like a sore thumb in their 1980s Oklahoma town, she finds a kindred spirit and the two hit the road, ostensibly to find Danielle’s father, but really to find themselves. Neither Clark nor Danielle have it all figured out. At first she’s the cooler-than-thou mentor who ups his confidence, but in the last moments he’s the one who helps her figure out who she wants to be. Refreshingly, the narrative doesn’t suggest Danielle’s sexual experience is wrong or that she needs to be celibate, but that it’s not the only thing she has or only way people should define her.

Lesson: The people you want in your life are the people who like you for who you are–the people that encourage you to be yourself, but only the best version of yourself.

Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.

Haunter

Most teenagers feel bored and trapped at some point, in their small towns or in their families. Haunter twists teenage alienation into a ghost story centered around Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), another 80s teen, the only person in her family who realizes they’re dead. I chose to read Haunter as coming of age story, despite the fact that the central character will never get any older because it’s all about what Lisa learns. She becomes responsible for her family as the only one that knows the truth and her world becomes a nightmare none of them are aware of, as she is tormented by an murderous spirit. Unlike most alienated teenage girls she also finds herself through taking on the mission of trying to save the family currently living in the house from being the murderer’s next victims. And Lisa also grows in the expected ways for a coming of age heroine, as she goes from blaming her parents for their weaknesses and feeling superior, to allowing herself to understand, and walk in their shoes.

Lesson: Some of your angsty feelings are legitimate, some are self-indulgent. It’s a great skill to know the difference.

Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

The Imaginary World of ‘Mona The Vampire’

The series chronicled the adventures of Mona Parker, a young girl who enjoys dressing up like a vampire and sees saving her town from monsters as her mission in life. The stories are Buffy-lite: a giant bug substitute teacher, a robot babysitter, doppelgängers, a computer virus with mind-control powers, and new cafeteria cooks who aim to poison the school with salmonella. Though the show often pulls out from Mona’s fantasies to reveal the reality of the situation, Mona’s fights against the forces of darkness, usually end up somehow solving the crime or prank, exposing a conspiracy or locating the lost item anyway.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Children’s Television.

As a kid, I had a boundless imagination.

I put on plays in my backyard (notably a bowdlerized Romeo and Juliet) and my friends and I spent our recesses pretending we were princesses, fairies, cowgirls, mermaids and Hogwarts students. I convinced my little sister we were always traveling the world- any clock tower was Big Ben, a local bridge was the Golden Gate and power line towers were always the Eiffel Tower.

In short, I was a lot like Mona the Vampire. Or at least, I see a lot of myself in her.

I’m unsure if the show is at all familiar outside Canada. Here, it ran for four seasons (1999-2003) on YTV (basically our equivalent to Nickelodeon) and I binge-watched it on weekends and as treat whenever I stayed home from school sick.

Though the show often pulls out of Mona’s fantasies to reveal the reality of the situation, Mona’s fights against the forces of darkness, usually end up somehow solving the crime or prank, exposing a conspiracy or locating the lost item anyway.

And Mona is never deterred by rationality, in her mind, everything out of the ordinary has a supernatural explanation and nothing can convince her otherwise.

A typical day in Mona’s world may involve fighting space invaders.

As a lead character on a children’s show, Mona is refreshingly atypical. When deciding on alter ego, she eschews the traditional superhero or princess dress and chooses to be a vampire. As a female character, Mona is also unique in her love of scary stories and late night horror movies, comic books and gruesome creepy crawlies. With her usual costume, which she chose herself and slips on at every opportunity, she tries to make herself as frightening as possible with a wig of wild, gravity-defying braids, plastic fangs and exaggerated purple circles drawn under her eyes.

However, the general effect is more adorable than intimidating and with her high pitched voice, it’s clear she’s still a child, unsure of her place in the world, underneath it all.

In fact, like Batman, she considers her true self to be her caped crusaded identity. Mona Parker, not Mona the Vampire, is the disguise. Though Mona sees herself as a vampire, she never troubled with questions of morality, in her view, she’s a good vampire and that’s that. She doesn’t need to bite people or drink blood, but instead has vampire senses that tell her when trouble is near.

While Mona is a good vampire, Von Kreepsula is a evil one, who must be contained within the pages of a comic book

Unlike the brooding vamps we’re used to, Mona also has a child’s sense of morality. She believes that she and her friends are good while the monsters they fight are all bad. For example, Von Kreepsula is Mona’s nemesis, an evil vampire to match her good.

But like the children watching the program, Mona learns that morality is not so black and white

In several episodes, Mona learns the monster she’s been fighting is merely misunderstood, lost it’s home or separated from it’s family. Even her sense of self is challenged when Mona meets a vampire hunter and has to convince her of her essential goodness.

Though Mona is neither binary extreme of masculinity or femininity, the two options usually available to children’s heroes and heroines, her friends and sidekicks Charley (AKA Zappman) and Lily (AKA Princess Giant) certainly are.

Princess Giant, Zappman and Mona the Vampire — Princess Giant, Zappman, and Mona the Vampire

Like Mona, Charley and Lily are imaginative kids who love to play her games, though it’s a little unclear to what extent they believe in actually believe in the monsters and vampires infesting their town. While both are timid and scared on their own, Mona’s bravery and self-confidence buoys them are draws them into her world.

What I found so refreshing was Mona’s personality as a leader, the Really Rosie type, the Queen of the neighborhood. As a leader, Mona also helps her less confident friends discover their skills and strengths by making them vital parts of her fantasy narrative. She can only defeat the monsters with the help for Charley’s Zapp-A-Rama Gun, his aptitude for science and Lily’s ability to grow.

She introduces them to the highly covetable idea of developing a superpower that makes your weaknesses into strength. Sure Charley is easily scared and often bullied, but with Mona’s encouragement to be the superhero she sees in him and encourages him to see for himself, he’s just like his hero, the Man with Nine Lives. Likewise, without Mona, shy Lily hides behind her hair and lets others push her around and feel her small. When they meet, Mona tells Lily she can have any type of alter ego she wants and chose her own powers. Lily chose to become the braver version of herself that she hopes to grow into, and takes on the power to make herself as big as she wants, so no one can intimidate her and make her feel unimportant.

In their daily lives, Mona and her friends are ordinary elementary school students

Closing out the pack is Mona’s trusty cat and confidant Fang is always there as back-up and a (silent) voice of reason anyway. Fang may have more sense than either kids or adults and his expressions often silently suggests the problems in Mona’s logic that no one else can see.

Mona’s parents are supportive but weary. They believe they are raising a highly intelligent, imaginative child, one who gets in her fair share of trouble but is loyal to her friends and always able to find a way out of a jam. They’re the kind of parents every wildly imaginative kid should have, people who always know there are many reasons to be proud of their daughter and nurture her creativity.

Moreover, Mona’s friends are also posed as underdogs throughout the series. Mona’s nemesis is Angela, the cruel and vain daughter of lottery winners who believes she can win friends by showing off her enormous wealth. George, often Angela’s henchmen, is a crude bully who mainly picks on Charley, but is the Principal’s nephew, so he rarely gets in trouble. In comparison, each episode, Mona shows she can save the day with just her wits and imagination, teaching young viewers their value above all.

As with many children’s shows, the kids on Mona the Vampire are smart and resourceful, solving crimes even the police can’t and speaking and working with adults like colleagues, the ultimate fantasy for most real-life kids. In many episodes, Mona deals with the local chief of police, Officer Halcroft who offers rational explanations to each incident. Each time, she dismisses them as ridiculous and unbelievable.

I also love how improvised the character’s costumes seem, like real things the kids could have gathered from around the house. Mona’s floral cape is an old curtain, while Princess Giant’s long blonde hair is a mop. This small aspect of the series adds realism to their imaginings and suggests that the show’s creators consider or remember the actual mechanics of children’s fantasy games.

The typical effect used to transition between “fantasy” and “reality”

In addition, the show refuses to underestimate children as an audience, the stories are never definitively attributed to natural or supernatural causes and the show never overtly indulges or refutes her world. The transition effect between “reality” and Mona’s fantasy gives viewers room to judge how much of the fantasy is real. Many episodes even end on an uncertain note, with even the adults unable to explain every detail rationally, suggesting there may be some truth to Mona’s imagination.

Mostly I liked the show because it clearly respected and celebrated the dreamworld so essential to childhood and creative, curious children. With imagination like Mona’s, even the ordinary world can be magical.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

A Deep Look at Shallowness: Resurrecting ‘The Comeback’s Valerie Cherish

Through its one and only season, the fake reality show chronicled the life of Valerie Cherish, played by my favorite Friend, Lisa Kudrow, an 80’s has-been trying to make a comeback through her role on an insipid sitcom. Valerie was a perfect reality star, yelling at the cameras, fighting with her co-workers and suffering one dignity after another, to the point where watching the show can be painful at times.

The Comeback is a deeply thought-out, complicated show about shallow television.

But as a scripted series, The Comeback never really caught on. Created by Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King, the cringe comedy only ran for 13 episodes on HBO before cancellation. It has since enjoyed a second life through DVDs and streaming, acquiring a reputation as a cult program. In May, HBO announced The Comeback’s revival for a six-episode limited series set to air this fall.

It’s easy to figure out why the show was unpopular in its original run, as it’s unlike anything else on TV. Valerie is often unlikeable, out-of-touch and incredibly vain, traits not often found in female lead characters. Though there have been female characters like Valerie, they have generally been only supporting figures providing comic relief. Also unusual are the show’s dark tone and raw footage format, which allows Valerie to run through multiple takes of different actions which are supposed to be spontaneous reality, call for time-outs when something is said that she doesn’t want to air and repeatedly tell filmmakers to stop filming (though they never do). It’s important to note however, that similar shows with male leads like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office have been very popular.

The character of Valerie Cherish is well-observed and very specific. She is a Hollywood wife married to a successful executive, carting around her Birkin bag and her loyal closeted hairdresser, Mickey. She’s also incredibly fake, adopting an glamorous, affected attitude, a trendy passion for yoga and eastern spirituality, and a love of dogs and distancing herself from embarrassing friends, to put herself in the best possible light for the cameras.

Valerie’s character is referred to as “sad, pathetic Aunt Sassy”

Early on, Room and Bored, the sitcom Valerie is cast in, originally a show about four single women in their 30s and 40s, is retooled to be sexier and hipper. The leads are given to a former Disney star and a pop star taking on her first acting role, male “hunks” are added, and the sitcom instead focuses on sexy 20-somethings in bikinis sleeping with each other. There is barely space for Valerie, who is cast as Aunt Sassy, an uptight, frumpy woman who wears only pastel jogging suits and usually appears in only one scene of each episode. Still Valerie is unable to accept that she is not the star. While her former TV show, I’m It, is generally forgotten and she hasn’t worked it years, she refuses to admit that she even needs a comeback.

Throughout the series, Valerie often frustrates her co-workers by trying to control the production and writing of Room and Bored and get a larger role for herself. For example, in cast photo session, where she is asked to stand far in the background, she continuously moves forward to stand with the young cast. In another scene, she angers the writers by protesting a joke she feels would make viewers dislike her character and wins the studio audience’s approval by getting them to chant for her to get another take. She is reminded several times to view The Comeback as her show and her main shot and to allow the 20-somethings to have Room and Bored, but she never listens.

Valerie gives her opinions on what is happening in to-the-camera confessionals, a staple of reality TV

Though Valerie is generally well-meaning, she seems genuinely oblivious to the people she uses and takes for granted in her struggle back to the top. She uses a writer named Gigi to get better story lines, even when it complicates Gigi’s job, tries to convince a young gay fan to come out for the sole purpose of using his gushing praise of her on the show, and dismisses Mickey when it suits her. However, this behavior never comes from a place of outright meanness, but instead a lack of empathy.

But what The Comeback gets so right, is its display of Valerie’s humanity. While she’s not always likable, she is always understandable. In Valerie’s nervous, brittle laugh, her frequent clearing of her throat when uncomfortable and her obsession with appearing perfect, a deeply self conscious, even desperate woman emerges. Kudrow’s performance is as much in what she doesn’t say as what she does, and the pain behind her eyes when she experiences a setback and tries to brush it off makes her deeply sympathetic. Valerie absorbs a lot of ridicule and humiliation in 13 episodes, much more than most people could take. Yet she continues to grow and adjust rather than shut down. Rather than lash out at her cruel co-workers and risk her job she smiles and pretends to enjoy being the butt of jokes.

Valerie is also desperate to be liked and is constantly giving gifts and trying to take coworkers out to lunch. She plays out elaborate rituals, jokes and skits to get people to like her and yearns for the approval of her young costars. As her life continues to fall apart, Valerie keeps smiling. When Room and Bored gets bad ratings, she gives a speech to the cat about keeping up hope and trying harder. She’s the closest thing there is to a female Michael Scott: clueless and insensitive but ultimately redeemed through her genuine well-meaning.

Though viewers come to assume things are going to go wrong for her, nine times out of 10 she’s created the trouble for herself. It’s surprising when one of her seemingly delusional ideas works out, such as when she gets Tom Selleck to agree to play Aunt Sassy’s boyfriend. Often watching The Comeback is like watching a horror movie, which forces you to scream at the characters onscreen to stop and think about what they’re doing. While viewers are allied with Valerie and want her to succeed, we understand why she fails and agree with the realism of what happens. In reality, without an all access pass to Valerie’s insecurities and the moments where her persona falters, she would be very difficult to root for.

Reality TV is portrayed as intrusive and unglamorous, as cameras invade Valerie’s private moments

The Comeback has no great love for reality TV. Throughout the series, Valerie is followed around by her reality crew, who are always hoping something awful will happen in Valerie’s real life that will boost ratings. The crew creates chaos following her and require multiple conversations to plan logistics and their presence causes the cast and writers of Room and Bored to resent Valerie. In the final episode, when the reality show is pieced together, it is revealed that much of what Valerie and the people around her have said and done was manipulated in editing and used to created cheap laughs at her expense. Paulie G. (Lance Barber), a writer on Room and Bored who is relentlessly cruel to Valerie is portrayed as a consummate professional who Valerie abuses unprovoked.

Though Valerie tries to maintain control over the reality show and of how she is portrayed, she misunderstands what the show is and what viewers want. She decides the director, Jane (Laura Silverman) is her friend and tries to be close to her, getting her a gift bag at the awards show and inviting her to her premiere party. Valerie feels that a friendship with Jane will allow her to be portrayed in a positive way and feels betrayed as a friend and disrespected as the celebrity she feels she is, when she sees how Jane edited the footage. It takes her a long time to respect Jane’s judgement and understand what Jane always knew: that conflict is what makes a good reality show.

Another interesting facet of The Comeback is its portrayal of an adult workplace as full of immaturity and pettiness. In the same way Leslie Knope’s idealism is tested by the baffling ignorance of Pawnee’s city council, Valerie grapples with Paulie G., a fratboy misogynist who sees no value in women beyond sexual objectification. At every turn, Paulie G. tries to thwart Valerie and make rude comments about her, though its clear that if she was 20 years younger, he’d tolerate anything she did. In addition, Paulie G. torments Gigi, the sole female writer, for being overweight.

In one memorable scene, Valerie comes to the studio late at night to bring cookies to the writers and finds them mocking her and portraying her in crude sexual playacting. While she expected Paulie G., who wears his contempt for her on her sleeve, to mock her, she is shocked to see that behind closed doors, the other writers, including Tom Peterman who had appeared to like her, join in on the mockery and call her pathetic.

In an attempt to humiliate Valerie, the writers have Aunt Sassy dream of herself as a giant cupcake taunted for being fat

The show also explores Hollywood’s intolerance of aging women. Valerie is too young to play Aunt Sassy, an under developed character who appears to be written as a senior citizen. As an older woman, Valerie is shuffled off to the sidelines of the show and as Aunt Sassy, is exclusively given lines about how pathetic and sexually frustrated she is. When Aunt Sassy is given a spotlight episode about her romantic life, Valerie relishes the opportunity to flesh out the character and make her more than a punchline. But the episode is quickly cancelled and Valerie is told that writers and producers see giving Aunt Sassy a storyline as a step in the wrong direction.

Though Valerie still feels youthful and attractive, by Hollywood’s standards, she’s ancient. Valerie is married with a step-daughter and prefers staying home to going clubbing, she can’t keep up with the twenty-somethings on her show and along with her husband Mark, worries that she can’t do things like have adventurous sex or do coke anymore. Most of her young costars treat her with distanced politeness, like a visiting relative.

Still, the show allows Valerie to be attractive. In one episode, even Paulie G. drools over a sexy photo of her and briefly looks at her in a new light after seeing her. In another, Valerie wears a low-cut dress to an award show and is complimented for her body.

Valerie shows she is still attractive with her revealing awards show dress

It’s difficult for Valerie to watch everyone fawn over Juna (Malin Akerman), the star of Room and Bored. Juna is young, thin and her attractiveness is constantly discussed and stressed by the show’s direction. In one scene, Juna’s costume, a tiny bikini, is contrasted with Valerie’s dowdy jogging suit. When Juna changes in front of Valerie’s cameras and Valerie notices her young body, she enters a one sided competition with the young star. Valerie is determined to prove herself still relevant and attractive, as shown when, Juna lands the cover of Rolling Stone with a provocative pose and Valerie responds by bringing in topless poster from her own youth.

But Juna proves to be Valerie’s only consistent ally and she eventually decides to put aside her jealously and act as a mentor. Their relationship seems to grow into a genuine friendship, but continues to be frequently manipulative on Valerie’s part as she uses her allegiance with Juna to boost her own star and her place on the show. Her friendship with Juna also helps her to connect with her stepdaughter, Francesca a rebellious teenager who loves Juna and thinks Valerie is cool for knowing her.

Valerie is jealous of young star Juna Milken

The Comeback was a show ahead of its time, but maybe it’s time has finally come. Reality TV is more omnipresent than ever, and with no sign of slowing down.

There’s a retrospectively ironic moment in one of the early episodes, when Valerie sees a magazine cover that asks, “Is Reality TV Dying?” and becomes worried that her show will fail. But by the series’ final episode, it’s clear Valerie Cherish’s comeback will be a huge success, as it offers everything viewers expect from reality TV. I’m looking forward to the seeing how the series will tackle our current media and to catching up with a fascinating female character when it returns this fall.

________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Queer Women as Sexual Beings: ‘The L Word’ and More

Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling towards a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.

A typical 'L Word' promotional image which highlights the sexual aspect of the show, luring viewers by titillation over plot or characters — A typical *The L Word* promo image, luring viewers with titillation

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Sadly, it’s still kind of revolutionary to show two women in love having sex or even kissing on TV or in movies that aren’t super niche or ghettoized as pornographic or gay-interest. However, it’s easy enough to see a nominally straight character go gay for sweeps week or two girls making out for male approval in mainstream media. What’s truly scandalous is when the women like it.

Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling toward a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.

While gay men are often portrayed as hypersexual partiers, gay women in movies and TV are more likely to worry about their kids, sit on the couch reading together or have rare sex. They’re more like best friends who’ve decided to move in and raise children together than romantic partners (though Modern Family was notably criticized for the lack of passion between its gay male couple, Cam and Mitchell, who didn’t kiss onscreen until the second season of the series). It’s a distinction most notable in the common description of The Kids are Alright, a movie where a lesbian couple have only unsatisfying sex and affairs as “The Lesbian Brokeback Mountain,” comparing it to a film where a gay male couple have a passionate and enduring albeit tortured love affair.

Though there have been some notable deviations from this pattern.

Last year, Blue is the Warmest Color exploded into mainstream discussion for its long and graphic sex scenes, but many viewers felt the scenes were steeped in the male gaze (descriptions of the director Abdellatif Kechiche’s behavior didn’t help matters). Some felt the sex scenes seemed like more of a break from the narrative than genuine portrayal of the character’s passion for each other.

On Glee, Brittany (Heather Morris) and Santana’s (Naya Rivera) relationship began with sex, as they described regularly scissoring each other and were shown in bed together before any idea was given of their feelings for each other. All the emotional stuff between them was added in later. However, when they became an official couple, supposedly in love, the characters stopped interacting, and viewers had to fight to get an onscreen kiss.

On Grey’s Anatomy, Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith) was moved to tears after her first sexual experience with a woman, which caused her to reassess the way she had been living her life. She compared it to getting glasses as a child and finally seeing the world clearly, after years of unknowingly looking at blurs and not knowing they were supposed to be leaves.

It also stood out when Emily Fitch (Kathryn Prescott) officially came out in the second generation of British drama, Skins, expressing her sexual interest in women. She didn’t just vaguely “like” girls or want to date them, she wanted to have sex with them and explained, “I like their rosey lips, their hard nipples, bums, soft thighs. I like tits and fanny, you know?”

The L Word, the lesbian drama which ran from 2004-2009 on Showtime, is remembered by queer women for problems like its hackneyed writing, transphobia, and bierasure, or its place in their realization of their sexuality, but it has an important role as perhaps the only mainstream TV series where all the major characters were queer women. It’s also the only program where you can list out its top ten lesbian sex scenes.

Ad for The L-Word comparing it to Sex and The City — Ad for *The L-Word* comparing it to *Sex and The City*

The series was promoted as the queer version of Sex and the City (ads proclaimed “Same Sex, Different City”), and it’s a fairly apt comparison. It focuses on the professional and romantic lives of a group of affluent and fairly feminine queer women in their 20s and 30s living in LA’s gay mecca, West Hollywood, where their lives often intersect with celebrities.

Part of Sex and the City’s enduring position in popular culture is the ease by which the characters, even if you loved them and knew all the particulars of their lives, can be explained by types. We’ve all been asked: are you glamor-loving Carrie, traditional Charlotte, cynical Miranda or sexually liberated Samantha? Likewise, The L Word characters, like uptight power lesbian Bette (Jennifer Beals), earthy valley girl Tina (Laurel Holloman), awkward, closeted athlete Dana (Erin Daniels), social butterfly Alice (Leisha Hailey): the main cast’s only bisexual, and Jenny (Mia Kirshner), a confused midwestern transplant turned sociopath, are such clear types, it’s hard to imagine they’re friends. As THE lesbian show, the series is often posed as representative of lesbian life and love, the awful theme song even proclaims, “This is the way that we live!” Therefore the situations and other characters the protagonists run into are also played as typical.

Jenny’s attraction to Marina changed her life

With a cast (excluding male guest stars and short lived series regulars) of women, the show is ruled by female sexual desire and characters’ libidos and sexual pleasure are integral parts of the plot and of the sex scenes. Characters talk sex over coffee, give each other tips, worry about whether their partner orgasmed, fight attraction so strong it’s all-consuming and, in one episode, debate the meaning of female ejaculation. Most are young and single and spend their nights at parties and clubs, a far cry from the stereotype of lesbians staying home with their cats.

It also worked to debunk commonly held patriarchal ideas that sexual intercourse means penetration or requires a penis as women are shown receiving pleasure from different kinds of sex, involving dirty talk, roleplay, toys, hands and mouths.

A typical image of female pleasure from the L-Word — A typical image of female pleasure from *The L-Word*

In fact, the series is often viewed as a sexual primer, answering the curiosities of straight viewers and teaching basic techniques to baby queers. While women are often portrayed in the media as having sex only because the men in their lives desire it, The L Word characters enjoy sex and participate in it for their own sakes, without men to pressure them. In fact, sex between women in the show is often portrayed as more satisfying because sex scenes between women are longer, more explicit and more intense than scenes with men. A lot of attention is also given to the idea that a woman has superior knowledge of the female body because she has one herself. Likewise, Shane, the lesbian Casanova, is desired by every queer woman and most straight women she meets.

All the girls (even the straight ones) went crazy for Shane

Right off the bat, lesbian sexuality is taken seriously as the first major plot line follows Jenny, consumed by her sexual desire for a woman named Marina despite all logic. By end of pilot, we see them have sex and see it as an amazing eye-opening and life-changing experience for her.

Still, the series can be accused of titillation, and as a mainstream production, it required the interest of straight male viewers to stay on the air. In a season two plot line, the series attempted to address the idea of the male gaze and rape culture with the inclusion of a straight male character who moved in with Jenny and Shane and filmed them without their permission. All the women are gorgeous and feminine (Shane, the most masculine is still thin and stylish), which led to criticism from queer viewers that the show was making the characters more familiar and digestible for straight audiences. On the other hand, The L Word has also been praised for breaking down stereotypes and teaching audiences that not all lesbians are butch.

Still, knowledge that the series came from lesbian creator Ilene Chaiken and involved several queer actresses, guest stars and episode directors allowed queer women to feel a degree of ownership and (often begrudging) affection toward the program. The community complained about it, but still held viewing parties, all hated Jenny together, and voted the stars on hot lists throughout its run.

In season five, the show even pokes fun at the portrayal of lesbian sex in the mainstream when characters get involved in the production of a movie based on their lives. Jenny has to give the cast, who are mostly straight, lessons on how queer women have sex as they have no idea how to portray it accurately. In another episode, a producer gives the ridiculous suggestion that the actresses could have unsimulated sex in the film as the MPAA wouldn’t consider it “real sex.” His suggestion is made more ridiculous by the fact that MPAA guidelines are actually tougher towards portrayals of queer sex than straight sex, and there are numerous examples of scenes of female pleasure garnering NC-17 ratings (as in seen in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated).

Though there are examples of movies and TV where lesbian sexual desire and romance are portrayed along with lesbian sex (and I’m sure I’ve missed some), unfortunately, there isn’t another show with an ensemble full of queer women where their sexual desires and sex lives are taken seriously and given consistent airtime. Love or hate The L Word, its portrayal of queer women as sexual beings was, and still is, important.

____________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

More than Just a Monotone: How Well Do You Remember ‘Daria’?

It’s been more than 12 years since ‘Daria’ ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up lists of best TV shows, cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia. Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years, ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancelation no longer means the end of a series, Daria is often one internet commentators beg for more of. And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.

A memorable shot of an uncaring Daria from the show’s theme song

It’s been more than 12 years since Daria ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up on lists of best TV shows , cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia.
Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancellation no longer means the end of a series (as seen in recent resurrections like Arrested Development, 24 and Veronica Mars), internet commentators often beg for more Daria. In the comments section for College Humor’s video, many implored the website to find a way to make the movie for real.

And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.

On the internet, as in real life, the Daria Morgendorffer people remember is a misanthrope with a monotone voice. An uncaring, almost comatose girl, wandering through the world and hating it indiscriminately.

Aubrey Plaza plays Daria in College Humor’s fake trailer

Plaza plays her this way, never excited, never caring, never attached to anyone or insecure. Several articles about the College Humor video even praised her performance as a perfect Daria impression. But Daria, though often monotone, was much more than that. While she did wander around uncaring through the theme song, in the series proper, she was always running into walls- the people and institutions around her, her world’s expectation of what she should be, and most crucially, her view of herself.

More than anything, Daria wanted to be the girl we remember as unfazed by anything, but instead, kept disappointing herself with her insecurities and the inadvertent connections to people she formed. She was like so many of us as teenagers, deciding what kind of person we were supposed to be while killing ourselves to fit the mold.

But did she cared. Perhaps she cared about things more than anyone else around her. Through five seasons, she fought against fake sincerity, commercialization, and the power and respect given to those with status, money and good looks. She refused to lie about herself for a college scholarship, fake enthusiasm for a part-time job and challenged authorities who threatened the quality of her education, her integrity and her artistic expression. While she scoffed at false values like school spirit, popularity and edginess (a word adults use to sell things to teenagers), she hated them for robbing her generation of meaning and for talking down to youth.

There was a sour taste in her mouth when consuming media directed at youth but written by adults attempting to remain cool. She rejected media directed at teen girls in favor of Conrad, Camus and many political, philosophical and feminist texts, giving 90s teens perhaps their first exposure to classic writers and important ideas. That Daria read these kind of things on her own without a teacher assigning them shows how much she valued learning and encouraged many viewers, myself included, to revisit things we’d been assigned in school and written off as boring.

In her spare time, Daria wrote short stories, acted out No Exit with dolls, made anatomical models, learned about art history from her artist best friend, Jane, and music history from her crush, Trent, and enjoyed watching trash TV–all ways of developing an intelligent mind and broadening her conception of the world outside Lawndale High: her personal idea of hell.

Daria feels contempt for her peers, dismissing them as idiots

I think you can best understand Daria as a character by seeing her as the type of girl who suffers through high school, assuring herself that in college everyone will magically understand her and speak to her on her level. Sadly, when she visits a local college, she realizes that the people there are the same ones she knew in high school; they’re just older.

Like many of us, Daria looks down on her peers, believing she is more intelligent, sophisticated and mature than them. Though in many cases she’s right, as her classmates, particularly the jocks and cheerleaders are often cartoonishly stupid (even for a cartoon). The popular crowd can’t even spell their own names, and they view being a “brain” like Daria as a fate worse than death. She’s different from her peers, and that difference stands out, as in one episode, she and Jane are the target of a witch hunt.

But Daria is often shown that her assumptions of people’s character and her contempt for them are unwarranted. Her vain sister Quinn is capable of writing a vaguely intelligent poem, ditzy cheerleader Britney has moments of insight and a brilliant tactical mind, and infrequently Daria meets intelligent boys who understand her and her weird sarcastic humor. It’s even painted as a character flaw that Daria clings to first impressions and judges everyone around her. She’s never surprised when someone disappoints her, displaying their true self as self-centered, calculating or dense; she’s only surprised when they go along with her joke or give her an intelligent argument. For example, when she finds out Andrea, a would-be friend from summer camp, idolized her, she can only respect Andrea when she stands up to her.

Daria has a crush on Trent, her best friends older brother — Daria has a crush on Trent, her best friend’s older brother

Even Daria herself doesn’t always measure up to her ideals. Though she is a a teenage girl, Daria wants to be so much more than that. Along with her dismissal of her peers and of the media they enjoy, she views being a teenage girl as a weakness and refuses to allow herself to be human. She has a hopeless crush on an older “bad boy” who rarely notices her, even though she’s smart enough to know he’s irresponsible and totally wrong for her. If she’s being logical, she knows he’s not an option for her and the type of life she wants to live, but still she finds him irresistible and even gets a navel piercing to please him; something she would never do otherwise.

She feels ashamed when she realizes she really wants a romantic celebration for her anniversary (like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and her wedding), as she views sentimentality as pathetic. In several episodes, she struggles with her own sense of vanity, attempting to hide a rash across her face and attempting to wear contacts even though they hurt her eyes because she likes how she looks with them. She disappoints herself with her desire for contacts as she feels there is no reason to want them besides vanity.

Within her school, Daria is known as “the brain” and “the misery chick,” identities she never chose for herself, doesn’t completely like but feels entirely lost without. Within her family she’s the smart one, and Quinn is the pretty one. When that balance is disturbed and Quinn is praised for her intelligence, Daria feels threatened. If she isn’t a brain and smarter than everyone else, she doesn’t know who she is. In another episode, she struggles with her peers’ view of her as someone who is always miserable and thinking about death.

Daria briefly gives herself a makeover to look like her sister, Quinn

Though when people meet Daria, they frequently gasp (to an exaggerated degree) in disgust at her appearance, it is frequently suggested that she could easily fit in and be popular if she wanted to. Modeling scouts at the school first zero in on Daria over supposedly more attractive classmates, and in one episode, she dresses like Quinn and her appearance threatens her sister. Through she sees herself as far above her peers, she clearly understands them and knows how to appeal to them, once inciting a riot by manipulating them with a short story.

Daria’s friendship with Jane Lane is one of the greatest things about the show as it portrays them as two people with similar interests and a shared sense of humor, while managing to make them distinctive people with different reactions to the same events. Their relationship also humanizes Daria, as Jane challenges her and forces her to confront her flaws and figure out why she feels certain ways. Without Jane, Daria could easily be that silent girl, observing and judging a world she is unattached to, but Jane gives her reasons to care. Jane also worries less about fitting into a certain image; instead she wants to experience every opportunity she can, believing it will make her a better artist and drags Daria along to house parties, school dances and other parts of teen life she would otherwise ignore. Moreover, Jane doesn’t see being intelligent and sarcastic and joining the track team, getting a boyfriend or auditioning for the cheerleading squad as mutually exclusive. Her attempts to get involved force Daria to attempt to reconcile her contempt for their peers as a group with the existence of Jane, one of her peers who she really likes and respects. It is perhaps Jane’s humanizing influence that make Daria feel guilty about making a video that paints Quinn in the worst possible light and so edits it to be more flattering.

Daria’s best friend Jane is a humanizing influence

Certainly Daria is someone that needs humanizing. In one episode, she confesses to Jane that she often feels superior to other people, sometimes thinking to herself, “You can see things that other people can’t. You can see better than other people.” This reminded me of the first episode of Girls, where Hannah Horvath memorably told her parents she thinks of herself as the voice of her generation. It was an audacious statement, that led many to hate the character, but it was also really unique for a young woman to express grandiose thoughts, to think of herself as great and significant, rather than suppress herself with (often false) modesty as many of us have been taught to. Jane is a great friend for Daria because she takes her confession seriously, values Daria’s opinions, and disarms her, joking (though with a kernel of truth). That this is why she’s proud to be Daria’s friend. It’s great to see characters who are allowed to be audacious.

As she grows up, Daria is able to recognize how difficult she was as a child and how much her parents struggled to raise her. She learns that when she was in elementary school her parents’ marriage was strained as they were frequently called in by the principal to talk about her lack of friends, her refusal to participate and her depressive nature. Toward the end of the series, when she volunteers at a summer camp, she meets a young boy who reminds her of her younger self and is able to see some of her character flaws for herself. She quickly becomes invested in his growth, realizing that she really cares whether she gets through to him. She helps him avoid some of her mistakes, particularly missing out on life by pretending to be uninterested. It’s plain that Daria as she was when the show began would never have been able to see herself so clearly and to connect on this level.

Using a short story Daria imagines the future for her family

We see a glimpse of the future Daria expects (and most will most likely get) when she writes a short story imagining herself and Quinn as adults visiting their parents. Both are happy and have learned to get along and step out of their comfort zones. The story makes Daria’s mother cry and reveals she is more sentimental than even she realizes.

If you’ve never seen Daria, or you haven’t seen it in years, it’s worth a watch to see one of the most memorable and realistic teenage girls I’ve ever seen on TV.

________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Girl Gang Fights Rape Culture in ‘Foxfire’

Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, ‘Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang,’ have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

The girls of Foxfire, 1996 — The girls of *Foxfire*, 1996

Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are, sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives; instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.

Unlike a lot of other films discussed this week, the girls of Foxfire are not avenging a particular rape, but are instead rebelling against rape culture in many forms: catcalls, description of women by only their physical attributes, slut shaming, rape and molestation, predatory authority figures and the society that allows men and their opinions more power than women.

While rape revenge films are often criticized for using rape for titillation or as a means to justify nudity and graphic violence, the ideas are invoked here to make viewers think.

The girls of Foxfire, 2012 — The girls of *Foxfire*, 2012

In these films, one girl is mocked by a teacher for her appearance and has her intelligence demeaned. One girl is groped while another is shamed. Yet another is offered a free typewriter by her uncle in exchange for sex; a fifth is spied on in the shower. During a trial, the defendant’s promiscuity is the most important factor in deciding her guilt. And when one girl returns home after being raped, her mother’s only response is to tell her to clean herself up before her father sees.

Forming a girl gang allows the characters to stop seeing sexual assault as the problem of each individual victim, but as something that effects all of them. When one girl, Rita, thanks the group for helping her, their leader assures her that she isn’t to blame–if Rita wasn’t the victim, it would have been someone else. Women need to band together instead of shaming each other if they have any hope of changing things.

Both films center on a passionate and androgynous leader, named Legs, who mobilizes the girls, first in a series of pranks and acts of rebellion small enough that viewers can cheer them on, then through several dangerous and criminal acts, before culminating in the kidnapping of a wealthy man at gunpoint. Maddy (Hedy Burress), Legs’s closest confidant, observes the events and acts are narrator, chronicling the group’s rise and fall.

The original 1996 film, starring Angelina Jolie as Legs, is clearly a product of the 90s Girl Power movement, a period known for being overly commercialized, but it’s an earnest effort with a female screenwriter, Elizabeth White and director, Annette Haywood-Carter. It’s also an attempt to modernize the novel, about working class 50s teens in Upstate New York, relocating the story to Oregon and dressing it in grunge fashion, with topics for discussion like sexism, female disenfranchisement, parental neglect, and masturbation. However, as a mainstream film, it’s sanitized, more playful than the book and as the girls are middle or upper middle class, the stakes are less dire. Foxfire never becomes a literal gang or a lifestyle, just an episode in their lives, that facilitates their coming of age.

For the remake, director Laurent Cantet restored the novel’s setting and stuck pretty faithfully to the book, attempting to cram in all the causes Foxfire rebels against, including ageism, racism, animal rights, and economic disparity as well as sexism. Lead by a cast of newcomers, Cantet’s film takes a more cautionary tone, as Maddy’s attempt to redeem Foxfire, now remembered only for their criminal acts, by telling their history and their original noble goals.

While Legs in the remake (Raven Adamson) was a classmate of the other girls who they had known for years, in the original, she’s an outsider, a drifter who enters into their lives one day and helps them find their voices. Legs is given a grand entrance, heralded by thunder and followed as she boldly trespasses through the school halls.

Punishing Mr. Buttinger for abusing Rita is the impetuous for Foxfire’s founding

Like a superhero, she arrives to save one of the girls, Rita (Rilo Kiley front-woman Jenny Lewis) who is being bullied by her teacher, Mr. Buttinger, for refusing to dissect a frog. Legs tells the student to “Make him stop,” and it’s a truly revolutionary idea, that a teenage girl could have any power over an adult. Her dream-like entrance and exit through the window, mark her as powerful and unconstrained by society’s rules, she doesn’t go to the school and Mr. Buttinger can’t punish her.

Legs is clearly marked as Other–she’s aggressive, with a leather jacket, heavy boots and swagger. As the camera pans up her body when she’s first introduced, not showing her face for several minutes, it’s clear viewers were meant to think momentarily, that she was a man. It is unclear why she goes by such a strange nickname, one usually thought of as objectifying; perhaps it is an attempt to reclaim something men have called out to her in the street.

Her relationship with Maddy is marked by obvious lesbian subtext, as they frequently flirt, confess their love for each other and share a bed, but her sexuality is never explicitly discussed. It is problematic that the character with the courage to fight against rape culture is the one given traits marked as masculine, while the girls she recruits, are mostly feminine and/or weak. It is also troubling that Legs’s suggested queerness is paired with her hatred of men, two things which are often falsely equated.

Legs enjoys driving the girls in the stolen car

In both cases, the girls are enamored with Legs, who quickly becomes their hero and undisputed leader. In the original, they are all introduced as broad high archetypes, Violet (“the slut”), Goldie (“the druggie”), Rita (“the fat girl”) and Maddy (well-rounded and popular), characterizations which become more three dimensional as the film goes on.

When the other girls learn Mr. Buttinger has been groping Rita’s breasts during detention, they originally hold her responsible. It’s Legs’s influence that makes them realize there is no excuse for Mr. Buttinger’s behavior and no way Rita could deserve his abuse. In the remake, Legs blames Rita only for not fighting back, telling her, “It’s up to you to decide how men are going to treat you.” Rita takes this message to heart, exposing him as sexual predator by painting statements about his attraction to young girls on his car.

In the original, Legs tells the girls that the only way to stop his is to band together. During Rita’s detention, the girls gang up on him, physically assault and threaten him. Rita begins to come out of her shell, finally gaining the confidence to confront her abuser, threatening to castrate him if she ever touches her again. The next day, the girls are called into the principal’s office and suspended, despite their claims of sexual harassment, which are ignored.

The girls perform a candlelit ritual in their headquarters, during which they give each other tattoos

Legs’s idea, that they can fight against abusive men only if they all stick together, but not as individuals, leads them to start Foxfire as their own collective, their own subculture. Before they had banded together, the girls went to the same school and had shared experiences, but cliques kept them segregated. Maddie, from her privileged perspective as a popular girl, looked at someone like Goldie as a sideshow, dismissed Violet as a slut and disdained Rita’s shyness as pathetic, and the cause of her own problems. Later, when they become friends, Goldie is hurt when she notices Maddie’s art project includes an unflattering Polaroid of her, clearly posed as someone to mock.

They begin to gather in an abandoned house in the woods, which they use to make a community and a safe space. Hanging around in the house, they become real friends and partake in typical teenage bonding practices, drinking, dancing, ogling guys, and laughing together. They cement their bond by tattooing each other’s breasts with a small flame logo, marking themselves as part of Foxfire, grouped together for life.

In the remake, the girls rent a house and live together in their own cloistered society as Legs intends to create an institution that would outlast her. The idea of a formal female gang with a manifesto, rules, ritual tattooing, criminal practices and recruitment, is an example of young women adapting masculine rough culture and altering it to suit them. Gangs are typically the province of disenfranchised youth (usually male), those neglected by mainstream society, such as racial minorities and the working class. Foxfire suggests the characters are disenfranchised as women and it is natural for them to act out against the society that oppresses them, as the men around them, in their own gangs, have been doing for years.

In the original film, rape culture is tied to sports culture, as both are posed as masculine spaces men feel women have no right to infringe on nor attempt to police. Their attack on Mr. Buttinger upset a group of jocks who respect him as the coach of their football team and they resent the girls. The boys begin harassing them, visiting their house in the woods and attempting to attack them, eventually trying to rape Maddy. Struggling to escape the jocks, the Foxfire girls steal a car and are arrested for it. At their trial, is implied that the jocks lied and blamed the girls for everything, leading to a “he said, she said” dynamic where the boys’ testimonies are taken more seriously. Legs in sentenced to juvie, while the others are on parole. For trying to dismantle rape culture and save themselves from attack, they are punished and lose Legs, the heart of the group.

There are also girls who help the jocks; one lures Maddy into an ambush, understanding the goal is to rape her, and lies at their trial. Later she gains some redemption when she confesses to the judge. Early on in the remake, the girls in Foxfire are reluctant to let Violet, a beautiful girl all the boys are crazy about, join. They decide Violet is promiscuous because she attracts male attention, without any evidence she returns their interest, and look down on her for it. In the remake, Legs’s mental state begins to deteriorate as she becomes disillusioned with her vision of women helping each other as a community after watching women fighting each other in juvie.

After juvie, both versions of Legs turn to darker, more violent acts. Narrating the remake, Maddy says the committed many crimes against men but most of their were not reported because their male victims were ashamed of having been attacked by girls. The films suggest revenge is acceptable to a certain level, where it’s exposing men who have who they know to be predators or teaching lessons to men who have wronged them, but is wrong once the focus moves away from specific individuals. When Foxfire starts targeting men in general, moving out of the area of defensible grey morality, Legs moves into villainous territory herself.

The Foxfire girls use their members as bait to rob men

Strapped for cash, Foxfire (in the remake) begins to use its most conventionally attractive girls to bait men, luring them into secluded areas and then ambushing them and stealing money. One girl, Violet, finds she can make more by pretending the man tried to rape her and acting afraid until he gives her money to try and comfort her. Though baiting, these girls attempt to turn rape culture on its head and make it work for them. These acts are justified in their eyes as Foxfire begins to operate with the view that all men are rapists deserving punishment, even casting out any girl involved in a relationship as the enemy.

Out of the group in the original film, only one girl, Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) has a dysfunctional home life. In one scene, her father orders her into his car and hits her while her friends watch. Instead of struggling or hitting back as would be expected from the character, Goldie submits. When the girls discover Goldie has been using drugs, Legs goes to her father, demanding money to pay for rehab. When he refuses, though he can clearly afford it, she kidnaps him at gunpoint and ties him up, continuing to pressure him for money. The girls, as both teenagers and girls, would ordinarily be powerless to help Goldie, here, as in many areas of their lives, they find they can only get results through violence. In these scenes, the other girls surround her yelling that she’s gone too far.

In the end, Legs leaves town to escape arrest, as well as the loss of the other girls’ respect. These girls who had previously viewed Legs as a hero, looked at her with disgust and disappointment and admitted to being afraid of her. In the remake, we get some understanding of Legs’s family and background, as her father, an alcoholic, condemns her at her trial and refuses to let her live with him. Conversely, the original leaves Legs’s origins a mystery. She’s clearly damaged and something must have happened to make her, a teenage girl with a criminal record, no place to live, and roaming from town to town. The easiest explanation, is that she may have left home because of her own abuse and it’s easy to speculate that her anger at society, particularly fierce towards Goldie’s father, comes from projecting her own experiences onto their relationship.

Everything begins to go downhill when Legs is released from juvie

Moreover, the 1996 version is framed as a coming of age story, cast as the year Legs came to town, changing everything, making Maddy question her perfect world and then disappeared never to be seen or heard from again- merely an episode in her life. But while the Maddy is central to the remake as its narrator, her observations of Legs and Foxfire’s history form the thrust of the narrative, rather than her own maturation. Both films end with the mystery of Legs’s disappearance and Maddy’s continuing obsession. In the original, Maddy’s decision not to go with Legs when she leaves town is framed as the one decision of her life she has always looked back on, wondering “what if?”

While the original film shows what happens when the leader of a group becomes an extremist or is mentally unstable, the remake suggests the whole group, excluding Maddy who defects, has begun to reject the rules and laws of society. Toward the end, most of the other girls are excited by their efforts at baiting and see Foxfire as one big, dangerous game that allows them to reject the limiting framework they grew up in. For her part, Legs always means well, trying, in the only way she understands, to help her friends and women as a whole.

Both endings are bittersweet. Foxfire disbands and the girls stop fighting for their causes, but they’ve helped some people and made their mark. But Legs is gone and it’s uncertain what ideas viewers are meant to come away with. It’s tricky to judge, as the films are full of feminist ideas and urgings for female empowerment, yet have dark endings where characters are hurt and disgraced. A tagline for the original celebrates the girls’ rebellion and encourages the teenage girl viewer to follow suit: “If you don’t like the rules, Make your own.”

In more light-hearted moments, the girls still have fun together

But what are these films saying about young women who dare to break the rules? That their efforts will succeed unless our leader is unstable? That movements for rape revenge will always become uncontrollable and dangerous or that they’ll succeed only while punishing the guilty, but not when attempting to change the culture?

In the end, what the girls of the Foxfire films have is a strength they might not have found otherwise. That strength and the idea of community are what viewers should remember.

__________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Portrait of the Dead Girl: Victim, Saint, and Enigma of the Crime Narrative

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family and society.
However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person.

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, take for instance, Law and Order: SVU, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family, and society.

However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person. This structure also creates distance, so the viewer is less likely to identify with the dead girl and feel true fear and sympathy for experiences.

The exploitation of the her person and body is also seen as evidence of sexism in the crime narrative. As in horror movies where the murders of women are more graphic and garner more screen time then those of men, the dead girl usually suffers extreme sexual violence and disfigurement, which are shot it graphic, loving detail. The crime scene or crime scene photographs are frequently shown and her suffering is discussed at length in near fetishistic tones.

Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of Laura, dead and wrapped in plastic

There is an appeal to the public imagination in the image of a beautiful young woman in peril, particularly a young, white women known to be popular among her peers and viewed as sweetly, saintly, and virginal. The much-loved cult TV show, Twin Peaks, originally centered around the investigation of the murder of beautiful, blue-eyed blonde Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and promotion for the series depended on viewers’ investment in the mystery of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” When The Killing premiered in 2011, its advertisements asking, “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” were clearly influenced by Twin Peaks.

Along with the evocative question, the series was known for two iconic images of Laura, the dead girl, that stand in for the show in popular imagination: the homecoming portrait, which shows her rosy cheeked and smiling, and her dead body, fished out of the water wrapped in plastic, shades of gray and blue. The central importance of the portrait, which hangs at Laura’s high school as well as her family home, was inspired for the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura, where a detective fixates on the portrait of a glamorous murdered ad-exec and falls in love with her through it (luckily, it’s a case of mistaken identity and Laura’s not really dead).

Viewers so latched onto the idea of Laura Palmer, that actress Sheryl Lee, originally brought on to appear in a few scenes in the pilot, made reoccurring appearances in flashbacks as Laura and regular appearances as Laura’s look-a-like cousin Maddie Ferguson, as well as starring in the prequel film after the series ended.

In early episodes of the show, it’s suggested that lead investigator FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has romantic feelings towards her and has a dream/prophetic vision of a seductive Laura, sitting with him in a mysterious red room. At the end of the dream, she whispers in his ear the identity of her killer. Though Cooper forgets what she said upon waking, his eventual memory of her words gives him certainty of her murderer’s identity. A victim of incestuous rape, abuse, and murder at the hands of her father, Leland (with an ancient demonic spirit, BOB, inside him–or something), Laura is allowed the satisfying and cathartic opportunity to name her killer and help to catch him.

In the fantasy of the series, this room is described as a sort of way-station to the afterlife, a refuge between good and evil and a part of the dangerous realm of pure evil, the Black Lodge, that holds onto human souls while demons walk the earth in their bodies, so Cooper’s dream is not in fact a dream, but Laura’s first opportunity to speak for herself. Before her death, she wrote in her secret diary (different from her regular diary) about her dream of this same encounter with Cooper.

After her death, the dead girl’s reputation is often changed according to the flawed Madonna/whore dichotomy and her neighbors, family, and peers come to realize she was not the person they thought she was. In procedurals, boyfriends learn their girlfriends had other lovers, and parents learn their daughters had sex lives. Though it’s rare, sometimes there’s the opposite revelation, as the boyfriend who murdered his girlfriend for cheating learns she was always faithful.

When Laura’s body is found in the series, most people in town know her only as the Homecoming Queen, a model for the perfect American teenage girl. Early on, she shows up in flashbacks and home videos, kidding around with her best friend and smiling lovingly at her boyfriend (himself introduced as the perfect American teenage boy). However, as her murder is investigated, the people of Twin Peaks come to see a darker side of Laura, mired in sex, drugs and a heretofore unknown seedy underbelly of their picturesque little town. As Laura is no longer around, and the abuse she had suffered are originally unknown, her reputation is tarnished in the eyes of many townsfolk and she is unable to give any sort of explanation to the people who would condemn her.

Sheryl Lee also played Laura’s cousin Maddie, who meets a similar fate

The duality of Laura is suggested through the character of dark-haired identical cousin Maddie Ferguson. Maddie is everything Laura was not–innocent, naive and close to her family. While Laura is glamorous and sexual, making coy recordings for her therapist and advertising herself in adult magazines, Maddie is mousy and eager to please. Becoming more like Laura (by ditching her glasses and taking more control of her sexuality) gets Maddie killed as Leland mistakes Maddie for Laura.

Though there are other readings of the duality of Sheryl Lee’s two characters, it is easy to see them as Madonna and whore. Unusually for the trope of identical cousins, where the blonde is commonly presented as good and the brunette as bad, Twin Peaks suggests Maddie is the embodiment of goodness and purity. By contrast, Laura, a victim of rape and abuse, has one foot in darkness and is revealed to have had sex or sexualized dynamics with almost everyone she interacted with.

In addition, Laura questions her own goodness and independently seeks out a therapist to help cope. In her last week alive, she quits her position heading up the Twin Peaks Meals-on-Wheels program, suggesting she has given up on trying to help others. In the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , it is clear she feels unworthy of salvation, as she tells Donna she believes the angels have abandoned her and she will burn forever. Later on, she watches as angels disappear from a painting in front of her.

This storyline, though suggestive of the self-loathing felt by abuse victims, makes the unfortunate implication that the abuse Laura has suffered has made her a bad person, or at least lesser than Maddie.

Laura realizes she is not a bad person when an angel appears to her in the red room after her death

The film allows Laura to emerge on the other side, in the Black Lodge’s mysterious red room, to see her own angel waiting for her. It ends with her smiling and laughing, assured that being abused did not “corrupt” her or make her undeserving of love, a great relief after watching her suffering throughout the TV series and film.

Focusing on the last week of Laura’s life with her as the main character, Fire Walk With Me has dark undertones of hagiography, the story of the life of a saint, as it revels in her suffering, allowing it to elevate her and cast her as a hero for enduring. It also gives her a chance to speak and show viewers who she was in her private moments, reconciling the two opposing views of her as both a saintly meals-on-wheels volunteer and cocaine-addicted prostitute into a complete person.

Perhaps what endears viewers to the dead girl as a character is our culture’s glorification of female victims, specifically for being tragic and fragile. In an essay at Rookie, Sady Doyle writes, “We love Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic and bright blue, tortured and murdered just as surely as good St. Dymphna.” Accordingly, many dramatic teenage girls look to women like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe as heroes, not for their achievements but for the glamor and depths they see as going along with pain.

However, the film can also be criticized for its unflinching portrayal of the graphic violence visited on Laura and her friend Ronette Pulaski. They are shown tied up, screaming and bleeding, while they are brutalized for extended sequences. At one point, Laura is forced to look at her face in a mirror while she is raped, suggesting her abuser wants to make it impossible for her to pretend to be anywhere else or that this is not happening to her.

In her last moments, Laura is forced to watch her own abuse

There are a lot of reasons fans of the series disliked Fire Walk With Me; most wanted more time with the kooky inhabitants of Twin Peaks and missed its quirky moments. The film is much darker and more violent then the series and almost entirely lacking in comedy. Though it has David Lynch’s trademark surreal touches, the story at its heart is also much more real. The film forces viewers to try to understand the horror Laura has gone through as a victim of incest and abuse, how the Palmer house has become her own private hell and she has watched her death draw nearer, sure it would come for her soon. With this in mind, the film is harrowing and difficult to watch, but its existence is integral to the understanding of Laura’s character as a developed character and complex human being. The release of a book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, intended to be the character’s diary discovered on the show, has a similar effect. It was a best seller, particularly remembered among people who were teenage girls at the time of its release.

Fire Walk with Me is often hard to watch due to Laura’s suffering at the hands of her father

The dead girl continues to be popular figure in crime narratives, though some more recent examples have tried to give her a voice in interesting ways. In the TV procedural Cold Case, the murdered character in each episode was shown in flashbacks throughout the episode, following him/her right until the moment of the murder. However, these flashbacks, and those on several other procedurals with similar narrative styles, are the memories of living characters, filtered through their perception of the events, rather than the way things were experienced by the victim. At the end of each Cold Case episode, the dead character’s ghost appears to watch their loved ones, allowing them a slight voice in the narrative, as if set free by the discovery of the killer.

The dead girl’s ghost hovering around postmortem and giving advice on the investigation is a storyline that’s been used on almost every fantasy series, from Buffy to Charmed. Unlike these stories, where the existence of something supernatural is undisputed, crime narratives often use the ghostly figure of the dead girl to suggest the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. In the first season of Veronica Mars, the titular character’s (Kristen Bell) murdered best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), often appears to her. Like Laura Palmer, Lilly managed to become one of show’s most beloved and enigmatic characters with minimal screen time.

Lilly appears to Veronica in the clothes she was wearing when she died, still bleeding from her head wound

Lilly appears to Veronica to comment on how much she has changed since Lilly’s death, becoming tougher and wiser and to give cryptic hints. In one scene, Veronica sees her out of the corner of her eye, running around the Kane house and leading Veronica to the scene of the crime.

She appears in several flashbacks and at the end of many episodes, in Veronica’s imagining of the murder taking place as she entertains new suspects.

Her appearance is also used as a reward for Veronica after she finally solves Lilly’s murder at the end of the season, when she imagines herself in paradise, lying in a pool full of flowers with Lilly. Lilly’s final appearance is in Veronica’s dream at the end of season 2, as the marker of what Veronica’s life could have been like if she wasn’t murdered. The scene doesn’t successfully give Lilly as voice as it focuses on how Veronica would have been different, not on the tragedy of what Lilly would have been able to experience if she had lived and will now never be able to.

Veronica imagines Lilly set free by the arrest of her killer, allowed to relax in paradise

The posthumous narrator is a rare and interesting devices, used most memorably in American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard, where murdered characters look back on their lives. As it’s already a rare concept, a posthumous female narrator is even more rare. A notable example, The Lovely Bones, focuses on Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)’s family trying to rebuild after her death, rather than the search for her killer. Her murderer is not caught, either with her ghostly help or without, but is punished only by his own accidental death.

The dead girl is an interesting figure in the landscape of crime fiction–one who can easily become a victim or a caricature. Experiments with flashbacks, fantasy, dreamworlds, and narration are intriguing ways to give her a voice and return some humanity to her and the real life victims she mirrors.

See also on Bitch Flicks:

Hannibal’s Feminist Take on Horror Still Has a High Female Body Count

A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

Apparently Suicide and AIDS are Real Problems in the Vampire Community: ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The titular lovers here are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film poster for Only Lovers Left Alive — The film poster for *Only Lovers Left Alive*

Only Lovers Left Alive is vampire romance for grown-ups. It’s the rare vampire film that tries to convey what it would actually mean to live for centuries, questioning the world around you and turning your nose up at everything human and mortal. The story spins out in an intoxicating swirl of music and high-culture; at the centre of it, a couple who can’t live without each other but don’t live together any longer. The titular lovers are shadowy figures lurking just on the edge of history, indulging in a tortured and eternal love, more believable and sexual than any of the recent rash of tween vampire lore.

The film takes ideas we’ve seen in films like Interview with a Vampire , Let The Right One In and Byzantium, and adds commentary on our modern world. What would an elegant immortal being who’s seen it all think of our quick consumer culture and digital devices that allow us to feel to connected to people continents away.

Plus, answers to the question many have wondered. What would vampires think of iPhones? Of Techno-music and videos on Youtube?

Sure to be a cult fav, Only Lovers Left Alive is dark and decadent, saturated by haunting rock music and an unshakeable air of impending danger. Indie-hero Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed this vampire tale, pumped full of wry, intelligent humor and some delightfully silly historical references with a stylized production as rich and decadent as it’s story. The Palm d’Or nominated film chronicles the reunion Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), beautiful vampires who have been lovers for centuries and married several times. Recently, they have been living apart: him in a crumbling house on the outskirts of Detroit, her, swathed in silks in Tangiers.

A picture taken of Adam and Eve the third time they got married. Eve remarks: “We looked so young”

Adam is your basic emo-rocker. He’s got the long, unwashed hair, shirts unbuttoned to his navel and the distaste selling out, but underneath, he has the face and sickly-sexual comportment of a romantic poet. Isolated in a town where no one seems to live anymore, he spends his days playing guitar and composing music he isn’t ready to show anyone. He only leaves his home to procure blood for a local hospital, where he struggles to control his thirst around bleeding patients. He relies on Ian (Anton Yelchin) to do errands, bringing him instruments and keeping the fans away. As the story begins, he is considering killing himself and asks Ian to bring him a wooden bullet.

Meanwhile, Eve is an ultra-sophisticated vaguely European jet-setter, drawn to exotic locals and excited by life. While Adam has his music, Eve has literature. In a scene any book lover would adore, she packs suitcases full of books for a visit to Detroit. She gazes over the texts, some medieval with woodcut illustrations, some in ancient languages, some modern, her faces enraptured at the beauty she sees. Her close confidant is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the real author of Shakespeare’s plays, he keeps a picture of the bard on his wall to throw knives at.

It’s hard to imagine better actors for the lead roles. Swinton and Hiddleston both appear uncanny and otherworldly, in appearance, in the way they carry themselves and in the way they find they inhabit the film’s world, that they seem like members of some unknown species that includes only each other. Swinton in particular has never looks less human, she wanders around Tangiers like some strange white unicorn trying to take on human form.

It is perhaps too on the nose that they are Adam and Eve, but the names highlight the connection between them. They have a mystical connection that draw them to each other, highlighted by Adam playing guitar in Detroit while Eve dances in Tangiers as if she can hear it. Though they are not the first man and woman, through history they seem to be the only couple that always endures, their relationship only thing that will live on as empires come and go.

Adam and Eve look like an ordinary couple, happy to be together

Adam and Eve are well-developed, each with their own separate but intertwining lives, passions and histories. They seem remarkably real for centuries old vampires, You can easily imagine them roaming around in the dark corners of a dying city. Though they live separate lives much of time, there is a magnetism that pulls them together when they reunite, seeming as if they each want to consume the other, breathe in their air and connect by running their hands along each other’s bodies just to experiences and remember each other. Their intimacy is tasteful and personal, suggesting that on top of sexual attraction, they just want to be near each other and as content to lie beside each other nude as they are to play chess together and eat blood popsicles.

It’s a very romantic tale, both in the modern sense and in poetic tradition. For all his protests, Adam is a romantic hero, lost in a desolate wasteland that mirrors the ravages of his soul. He has isolated himself in the dying city of Detroit, whose loss of the auto industry has made it a virtual ghost town. When Eve visits, he takes her on a tour of its wilderness, showing her where people used to live, taking her to an old gilded theatre falling into ruins. At home, his wall is covered in photographs and portraits of the dead luminaries he has known, so he can never forgot the temporary nature of human life, passing him by.

He is disillusioned with musicians and his old heroes, the scientists, dead and destroyed by the cultures around them. He sees science as destroying human lives, contaminating water with chemicals and blood with diseases and long ago stopped considering himself part of this humanity. He calls humans zombies and decides he can’t be around them anymore, disgusted by their fears of their own imaginations.

Eve is the light to Adam’s darkness, all in white while he’s always in black, yet remains a realistic character because of implied darkness of her own. Swinton plays Eve like an ethereal vision who can’t escape the weight on her shoulders, she always seems struggling to stay afloat. It is this weight and her passionate love for culture, the books she reads through while packing, the Shakespeare volume she sighs after finishing and the rapturous dancing and yen to explore, that keeps her from being a mere servant to Adam’s moods. Eve is so well in synch with the world, that she has slight psychic senses, able to intuit the age of a guitar just by touching it and maintaining a deep connection to the moon. She believes in living and experiencing as much as possible of each era that passes by. THough she is implied to be older than Adam, she is still able to appreciate lie and wax poetic about the lights and color, the dancing and friendship that are all part of the experience.

From her point of view, Adam’s depression is a waste, so she devotes herself to bringing him back into the world, reassuring him that even if the world is destroyed for humans, they’ll still be around. She resents that he treats her like a part in his story, a means to the end, rather than a real person to rely on when in times of need. She feels taken for granted like, he sees her as another one of the transitory zombies who will come into his life and leave it. Despite the specific references to thing like immortality, it’s not unlike the typical conversation between an ordinary couple in any other movies. The supernatural elements added to what is essentially a woman trying to help her depressed partner, serve to make the story larger in scope, more evocative of gothic conventions and tortured love and dangerous.

Adam examines a guitar, showcasing his passion for music

Jarmusch skillfully integrates modern technology into their ageless world experienced as just another culture’s momentary trends. He also includes references to both modern pop culture and ancient history without either seeming shoehorned in. Eve is as taken in with Jack White and David Foster Wallace as Mary Shelley and Marlowe’s ghostwritten Shakespeare plays, while Adam’s doctor disguise includes name tags like “ Dr. Faust ” and “ Dr. Caligari”.

Eve notes all the things she has been through and survived, the different cultures that seemed dangerous that she has watched die around her. She considers modern times no different, an age that any other, with its transitory values that will end and tries to enjoy our technology as part of the experience of this time and place. While Adam uses retro pieces of equipment and hooks his phone up to an ancient TV to talk, Eve is comfortable speaking on her iPhone’s Facetime and interacting with the outside world to make travel arrangements for the pair.

For all his speeches denigrating humanity, Adam has all too human concerns. He is attached to his possessions and secretive about his music, worried about it getting out before it’s ready. As a rock musician, his entire lifestyle and tortured-rocker identity is supported by human fans, ones who his complains about and just wants to leave him alone. While ethereal Eve believes in traveling light and replacing anything tangible, Adam is of the world and tied to his possessions.

After feeding on Ian, Ava’s teeth are extended, making her look monstrous

About midway through and after a lot of anticipation, as Adam, Eve and Marlowe all had dreams about her, Eve’s sister Ava (a spacey-fairy Mia Wasikowska) arrives at Adam’s house decked out like a 60s groupie. Party girl Ava is invasive and impolite, entering uninvited, forcing her way into their dreams and into their house and to Adam’s annoyance, listening to his music without permission. There is a genuine big brother-little sister relationship between Ava and Adam, and as old as she is, she’s a teenager out to have fun, even if it means intruding on an important moment between the couple. She bounces around, jumping on the bed where the couple is sleeping, as if she is their child.

In addition, Ava is an even stronger force than Eve at drawing Adam out of himself. In one scene, Ava is enjoying a TV show that depicts Dracula dancing on psychedelic backdrops. While Eve comes and watches it with her, Adam, perpetually brooding turns off the TV and spoils their fun. In one hilarious moment, the women try to get Adam to go to a club with them. Though Adam insists he is not going to go, the next scene shows the three vamps in dark sunglasses at a hipster bar. Though meant as a joke here, his brooding can become unintentionally humorous at times.

After the night out, Ava bites Ian, killing him and destroying much of Adam’s prized possessions. Ava’s feeding off Ian is played as a clear metaphor for sex, based on the language she uses: “I didn’t mean to do it, but he was so cute. I couldn’t help myself.” It’s suggested that Ava is wild and unable to control her sexuality, and with that it mind it’s a little uncomfortable that she is berated for it. Unlike Adam and Eve, who have figured out ways of constraint, subsisting through hospitals and Marlowe’s connections, she refuses to live by a set of rules and is punished for it when Adam kicks her out of the house.

Scenes of the vampires drinking blood are shot similarly to how scenes of drug use are often filmed, with characters rising in the air and come back down, sighs of euphoria on their faces. This comparison makes a lot of sense within the film as the characters appear perpetually strung out, floating around their environs.

Eve enjoys a dose of blood, drugged by the drink

There’s something dream-like and hazy about the film, like the domestic drama at its core, the basic story of a depressed man and his bon vivant wife visited by her annoying sister at an inconvenient time that causes them to reassess their relationship, is filtered through the mind of someone on a bender. Blood and gore function as necessary ephemeral to a vampire tale, but are never fetishized or allowed to become too much of a focus. The film’s end utilizes feeding to solidify their bond as a couple. In the only real horror shot of the film, we see a close-up of Eve with her fangs full extended and her eyes widening, reminding us that these people are monsters.

I can see how someone might dislike the film’s pacing, as it is often slow and full of silences. Short scenes of dialogue are broken up by what seem like music videos, sequences of actors dancing, driving, pacing, wandering around the city, drinking blood and having sex, while Adam’s curls around them. But it works well, for the hazy, hallucinatory tone of the story, more about characters and feelings than plot. Silences and musical scenes give the characters time to breathe and interact on a deeper level than they could easily put into words, making them feel more alive and complete.

However, there is a certain amount of regression in the relationship between Adam and Eve, who often feel like hipster teenagers looking with distain at everyone who isn’t as cool as they are. They think music sounds best on records, refer to everyone else as zombies and have only ever been friends with people who’s names we know from out history books. At times, their namedropping can begin to feel incessant. I suppose it wouldn’t make an interesting story, but why does every immortal character in fiction travel through the important moments in history like Forest Gump?

All put together for a night out, the lovers are glamorous and ethereal

Strangely, there’s no very much that happens in Only Lovers Left Alive. The only real conflict is Adam’s depression and his contempt for the people around them, who we rarely see. The characters’ fear of contaminated blood, previously a mere quirk of their universe, does become a real conflict, but only toward the end, when they is not much time left to explore it. After much warning that Ava’s going to come and something terrible will happen, she visits for a couple night, kills Ian and is kicked out, never to be see again. Adam and Eve panic about how difficult it will be to hide the body, but accomplish the task with ease and are never caught nor in any danger. Marlowe appears only to impart wisdom, gripe about Shakespeare and die (perhaps in poor taste) of AIDS or some other blood borne disease. There’s no giant battle, no mysterious enemy lurking in the shadows, no finagling their way around the cops and keeping their secret. Instead, it’s a lovely atmospheric meditation on romance, the passing of time, and the impermanence of cultures.

See also on Bitch Flicks: Guest Writer Wednesday: Melancholia, Take 2

________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

When Girlhood Fantasy Turns Murderous: ‘Perfect Sisters’

It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, ‘Perfect Sisters’ isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Based on a notorious Canadian case where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other.

Sandra and Beth rely on each other for comfort and reassurance

Based on a notorious Canadian case , where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other. These girls have faced a difficult childhood, forced to take care of their younger brother and Linda (Mira Sorvino), their depressed alcoholic mother; they see each other as their one constant. As Sandra says, “It was always me and my sister against the big bad world.”

Until the murder begins to unravel them, the sisters have an appealing symbiosis. They share a made-up language, shared fantasies and Beth knows to corroborate Sandra’s lies unprompted. For their shared point of view on the events, the girls make one singular person, constantly clinging to each other. Sandra also acts as Beth’s mother, holding her when she’s scared at night and fighting off Linda’s boyfriend Bowman (James Russo) when he attempts to attack her. Though they both have love interests, their primary bond is with each other.

Used to moving around when Linda loses jobs and to cramped apartments with roaches, they’ve learned to make the best of it with their rituals of setting up their shared bedroom. They’re quite skilled at interior design, arranging their possessions to mimic faded wealth and glamor, the private castle of two princesses trapped by their mother’s demons.

The girls make the best of their situation by decorating their room, making it into a refuge

The film is reminiscent of Heavenly Creatures–two girls who share a secret world that no one else can understand. As in that movie, also the true story of a murder committed by teenage girls, their fantasies bleed into reality as their lives grow bleaker, becoming more colorful and increasingly violent.

Perfect Sisters has been criticized by people familiar with the case, such as Bob Mitchell, the reporter who wrote The Class Project , the true crime book it’s based on, for playing down greed as a motive, instead suggesting the girls are driven to murder by their difficult circumstances.

Director Stanley M. Brooks has said his aim in the film was to show the sisters as sympathetic characters, not evil or sociopathic, but immature young women who make made bad decisions. He attempted to be accurate to the real events and says he fictionalized almost nothing about the case. Whatever the truth is, this approach is more cinematic, giving viewers likable (to a point) characters and room for discussion over their level of awareness of their actions and the nature of evil.

As in most true crime movies, viewers know going in both that the girls’ mother will be murdered and that they are guilty. The murder is not a shocking climax that has viewers on the edge of their seats and there is no real mystery or suspense, as the these’s never any doubt of the perpetrator. Brooks’ decision to challenge the audience to sympathize with girls we know will become killers is one that adds an intriguing element to the film, each bit of the girls’ inner lives, the minutia of teenage girlhood and idle lunchroom gossip is weighed against the knowledge of viciousness they are capable of.

Before school starts, the sisters give themselves makeovers, each attempting to be someone new and more desirable this year

It’s startling to watch the squeaky clean child stars of Little Miss Sunshine (Breslin) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Henley) move in darker, adult fare, playing the matricidal “bath-tub girls.” Automatically, the audience’s sympathies are aligned with these familiar faces we’re used to seeing as adorable children who believe in magic and fairness.

Here, they’re morbid (in one scene, Sandra is distracted from a kiss by the sight of a dead bird) and jaded. Still, they’re good girls with perfect disciplinary records and honor roll grades. Over the summer, they’ve each reinvented themselves. Beth dyes her hair matte black and wears heavy eye make-up to attract the gothic romance of her dreams, while Sandra yearns to be popular and lose her goody-goody rep. She makes up rumors about herself to get attention, strangely they are the type of things most girls would try to cover up. Sandra wants to be a bad girls, desirable and dangerous, so she tells everyone she’s pregnant by her therapist.

They’re used to their mother’s addiction and they’ve been dealing with it for a long time, propping her up, shuttling her through their routines and taking on her responsibilities. There are several hints that the girls and their brother have experienced earlier traumas because of their mother and her string of abusive boyfriends.

When Linda begins dating Bowman, a wealthy man who can support them, she puts up with beatings and cruelty, as well as his enabling of her addiction into a worse state than the girls can remember it ever being. They reach their breaking point when she does nothing to help them when Bowman hits their brother and begins to make sexual advances towards Beth.

It’s suggested that her alcoholism and refusal to leave her abusive boyfriend, even when he turns on her children, stems from low self worth. She doesn’t feel her life matters, so she allows Bowman to beat her. The girls have dealt with this situation so many times before that they are disturbingly able to write off their mother’s life. To their minds, she’s given it up already. They’d be fine to leave her to destroy herself, but as minors who depend on her, if she goes down, she takes them with her.

Together, the sisters imagine a perfect mother who will do anything to protect them

To cope, Sandra and Beth imagine their perfect mother, a vision they both interact with. Their perfect mother is impeccable groomed and shines with a halo of light and offers to make cookies and brush their hair. In their fantasies, she’s always there with to take care of them and provide comfort, something they have to find in each other instead. In reality, Linda is embarrassing. She tries to be her daughters’ friend and jokes around with their friends. At a party in their apartment, she gets drunk and babbles sexual things while their guests laugh at her.

When Sandra is called upon to be the adult of the family and attend her brother’s parent-teacher conference, she wears the same outfit as their perfect mother wears in their fantasies. Dressed in these clothes, Sandra clearly resembles Linda. She takes on her maternal responsibilities, using this perfect image of Linda as a role model and fixation on remaining in control to create as much distance as she can between her and her mother’s embarrassing weakness. Long after Beth has given up on her, Sandra continues to make excuses for Linda and try to understand her. In the wake of the murder, her prized control dissolves and Sandra repeats her mother’s self destructive mistakes, drinking and flirting and sharing her story with anyone who’ll listen. Beth becomes ashamed of her, in one scene saying, “You remind me of Mom.”

Before deciding to kill her, they attempt to find other ways to save themselves. They appeal to both their father and their wealthy aunt, asking to live with them but are denied. The girls quickly lose their faith in social services as they’re told no one can help them until there has been serious abuse. Beth speaks the truth about the cycle of trauma, “By the time they do anything, I’ll be the alcoholic neglecting my kids.” Through this frenzied attempts, Bowman’s threat of rape is treated as an inevitability. It’s a truly terrifying situation, sooner or later, they suppose, Beth will be vulnerable and alone. They have to do something before that happens.

Linda leans on her daughters, forcing them to take care of her even when they need her to take care of them

Though we see them trying to get out of their situation by finding a new place to live, the judge at their sentencing later in the film, rightly points out that there are teenagers who have been in much worse situations and not murdered anyone. After all, Sandra is a senior, soon she’d be an adult capable of living alone. This suggests that they are unwilling to do something hard, like work multiple jobs and live on minimum wage to support themselves. Their ideal situations are either to live on their own with an insurance payout or be taken in by their wealthy aunt.

Perfect Sisters is not afraid to show the cruelty of these girls. They are able to causally plot their mother’s murder, laughing about it with their friends, enthusiastically speculating about the freedom that will be available to them, chatting online and researching the pros and cons of different methods. Planning the murder takes on no more weight than speculating who’s dating who or what’ll be on the next math test. In one scene, the girls form an official “murder club” and gather in a school classroom writing ideas on the board. In another, the group gathers at the sisters’ home and practice attacking each other. It’s never entirely clear if their friends realize plotting the murder is more than just a game for the sisters.

In a darkly comic montage, the sisters crowd around a computer with their friends and watch their mother die over and over again in different scenarios. Part reality TV viewers, part judges scoring a performance, they watch and laugh as their mother is strangled and suffocated, pushed down the stairs and set on fire. In the end, they decide drowning will be quick, easy to make look like an accident, and it’d get the biggest insurance payout.

The murder itself creates a rift between them, when Beth leaves the bathroom while Sandra holds their mother’s head underwater. It also begins to reveal, for the first time, the fundamental difference between the girls, as shown by how they cope. While Sandra immediately panics and appears to regret what she’s done, Beth cries on cue as she calls 911, a smile on her face.

Sandra is crippled by her guilt, haunted by the memory of her mother face under the water

The knowledge of what they did hovers as an open secret through their high school and they reach a higher social status. Some classmates act like they are celebrities, having them pose for pictures, as the stroll down the hallway, while other gawk and retreat, afraid. The murder was so well planned that it seems like they would have gotten away with it if they weren’t gossipy, boy crazy and immature- basically if they weren’t teenage girls.

The last act of Perfect Sisters forms an intriguing portrait of how differently two people react to one event. Beth grows cold and introverted, while Sandra externalizes her guilt, partying and basking in her celebrity. She becomes the sloppy mess everyone secretly laughs at at parties, confessing the murder to anyone who’ll listen. The boy next door type who has loved her for years, biding his time, finally gives up on her and disgusted by what he sees as her lack of remorse, wears a wire to secure her confession.

Of course, they’re convicted and sentenced to jail time, but that’s not the real tragedy in the sisters’ eyes. In the end, they’re literally ripped apart, kicking and screaming by security officers and forbidden from communicating with each other for the duration of their sentences. In trying to save themselves, they each lost the one person who made them feel whole. Both girls are now released and attending college, and due to Canadian law regarding young offenders, their identities are protected (their names were changed for the film).

The girls only realize the gravity of their actions when they are found guilty and forbidden to see each other

In the last sequence, we are shown the girls as children changing in their teenage selves, as onscreen text explains their fates. This suggests the tragedy of their transformation from innocent children into convicted killers.

_________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

Quirky Free-Spirit or Mentally Ill?: The Mystery of ‘Barefoot’

You wouldn’t be entirely mistaken to assume ‘Barefoot’ is a light-hearted romcom centering on a free-spirited hippie who doesn’t like to wear shoes, instead of the story of a naive mental patient falling in love with an inveterate womanizer and gambler. The former certainly seems to be what the movie is trying to be.
‘Barefoot’ is emotionally manipulative, full of unchecked exploitation, sexism and ableism and worst of all, portrays a woman who supposedly has severe mental illness as something akin to a fairy tale princess.

You wouldn’t be entirely mistaken to assume Barefoot is a light-hearted romcom centering on a free-spirited hippie who doesn’t like to wear shoes, instead of the story of a naive mental patient falling in love with an inveterate womanizer and gambler. The former certainly seems to be what the movie is trying to be.

Jay falls for Daisy, enchanted by her unique view of the world

Directed by Andrew Fleming (of The Craft ) and adapted from the 2005 German film, Barfuss, Barefoot is emotionally manipulative, full of unchecked exploitation, sexism and ableism and worst of all, portrays a woman who supposedly has severe mental illness as something akin to a fairy tale princess. As Daisy Kensington, Evan Rachel Wood spends most of the movie wandering around slack-jawed and amazed by everything she encounters. She’s scared of airplane toilets, thinks driving a car gets you pregnant, is flattered to be asked to perform a hand job (“I’ve never had a job before!”), and on one occasion, asks her companion and pretend boyfriend if she can “go potty.”

Though she tells her doctor in an early scene that she hears voices, the extent of her mental instability as portrayed in the film appears to be panic attacks and extreme naivete caused by being raised in isolation, only interacting with her recently deceased mother for her entire life. Instead, she’s quirky, she knows how to dance because she watched hours of VH1 growing up, she doesn’t like to wear shoes because they hurt her feet, she has no qualms announcing at a fancy dinner, that foie gras looks like cat food. It’s no wonder, Jay Wheeler (Scott Speedman), the estranged son of a wealthy family falls in love with her. Like any manic pixie dream girl worth her salt, she makes his life better, teaches him to take responsibility for her actions and learn how to love. As a free spirit, she strips away from pretentious facade of his family’s extreme wealth and teaches them to value small moments.

Daisy spends most of the film wandering around amazed by everything she sees, it’s all new to her

And of course, right at the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daisy isn’t crazy after all, so she and Jay can ride off into the sunset together, any complications from her total lack of knowledge of the world or of literary any other person besides him be damned. Watching it, I wasn’t sure to what degree a movie that suggests a character is mentally ill, yet portrays her illness inaccurately for most of the film is redeemed by a last minute revelation of her sanity. Indeed, the revelation comes about from an investigation of Daisy’s past, not from an analysis of her behavior.

Right from the start, Jay is always saving her. Their “meet cute” occurs when he swoops in to rescue her from an orderly who is attempting to molest her, under the pretense of a secret exam. He has no sympathy for Daisy’s innocence or the real issue of abuse suffered by powerless mental patients, instead telling her she needs to learn to take care of herself. Shell-shocked, she escapes the hospital and follows him home, already acting like he is her messiah.

But Jay’s certainly no prize. He’s on probation for assault, holds down a job as janitor at the mental hospital and regularly gives alcohol and pornography to the most catatonic and psychotic patients. He owes thousands of dollars in gambling debts and believes his only option to get the money is to attend his brother’s upcoming wedding with a serious girlfriend, so his family see he’s got his act together.

Originally, he tries to hire a stripper to pretend to be his girlfriend. He’s stunned she considers it degrading and tells him the idea of pretending to be a nurse (used as a fetish object) makes her uncomfortable. A choice quote: “You hump a pole naked for money and this makes you uncomfortable?” Throughout the film, Jay speaks to women like they are children, here insisting the stripper owes him a favor because he is a loyal patron and insinuating that she is unintelligent. After this rejection, Jay sees an opportunity in Daisy, a woman he can easily manipulate.

Jay dresses Daisy in revealing clothing, including ‘stripper shoes’ she can't walk in — Jay dresses Daisy in revealing clothing, including “stripper shoes” she can’t walk in

In the film’s world, Daisy’s mental illness gives him permission to talk to her like a child, instructing her that they’re not lying, only pretending and he’ll explain the difference to her later. He is allowed to tell her anything, ordering her to be quiet, to go to sleep, even telling her what to say and how to dress, like his doll. It seems incredibly abusive that he gives her low-cut and revealing clothes borrowed from a stripper to wear on the trip, given that she does not understand their sexual undertones and did not chose to wear them. In one scene, a maid is shown unpacking her suitcase, which included several pieces of sexy lingerie and corsets.

She has to trust him, because he knows things that she doesn’t. When he fleetingly calls her his girlfriend to explain their relationship, she takes him seriously, believing they have an actual relationship. She says it’s always been her dream to be someone’s girlfriend, something her mother told her would never happen. Note that she never refers to the dream of having him as her boyfriend, it’s all she’s ever wanted to be the object, his possession.

When Jay finds Daisy cleaning his parents house, he teaches her that she doesn’t have to do favors to earn love — When Jay finds Daisy cleaning his parents’ house, he teaches her that she doesn’t have to do favors to earn love

Later on, Jay starts to feel romantic feelings towards Daisy only after she brags about his accomplishments to his family, expanding on the script he gave her. They bond over not being understood, she never went to school and he think of no reason.

After knowing her for only a few days, Jay believes (and is proven right) to have a better knowledge of her condition than her doctor and they quickly become a happy couple, driving around holding hands.

He seems to truly fall in love with her when she tricks a suspicious cop into leaving them alone with her charm, explaining she did it so they can be together. When she despairs that she “can’t do the things other people can do,” he patronizingly explains that by escaping the hospital and helping him lie to his family and evade arrest, she’s been learning how to become a responsible person in the real world.

Near the end, the film flirts with the notion of real consequences when Daisy admits that she was in the hospital because she killed her mother. But alas, she’s only hyperbolic and misunderstood, she didn’t go help her mother when she heard her screaming and thought that meant she killed her. In addition, Daisy never heard voices–her mother did, and kept Daisy isolated because of it.

As Jay spends time with Daisy, he becomes convinced she is perfectly sane and refuses to listen to her doctor

So everything ends up fine. The girl Jay took from the mental hospital isn’t crazy, she shouldn’t even be in the hospital. By taking her, he saved her from misdiagnosis.

Their love is held up as true love. She has no frame of reference, but she knows its’s love because “you just know.” This opinion, which she tells her doctor, is taken as true wisdom. In the end, Daisy is released to begin her real relationship with Jay, instead of going to a group home where she can learn basic skills. In the last scene, her bare feet are highlighted, a sign that she’s still a quirky, free-spirit, even though she’s officially sane.

In Barefoot, Daisy is othered as a mental patient. She and Jay are introduced as being from two different worlds, he has a job and an apartment and responsibilities and she is a patient, unable to take care of herself. Her instability is used as a way to create division between her and Jay and to give him authority over her. It’s used as a way to create a bright-eyed innocent who believes every interaction between a man and a woman is true love and is fully ignorant of the modern world and social mores without entering fantasy dimensions. It’s probably an unsuccessful attempt to avoid being considered sexist: she’s not stupid or childish or an alien fetish object, she’s mental unstable. However, the decision to make this sort of character mentally ill makes an already tired love story truly uncomfortable.

Jay’s mother gives Daisy a makeover, which allows he to fit in at the wedding. That is, until she takes off her shoes

When she has a panic attack at the wedding and Jay’s family learn who she really is, her condition paints her as inhuman, someone that everyone needs to talk to in hushed tones, stop everything they were doing and coddle and stare at her. In one scene, a flight attendant loudly asks Jay while Daisy is present, what is wrong with her, highlighting that she is not an independent person but his charge.

When she is briefly returned to the hospital, Daisy contrasted with the other more patients who present more cinematic markers of mental illnesses, such as delusions, paranoias, unkempt appearance and strange voices, to make it clear that she doesn’t belong there. Only by separating Daisy from the idea of mental illness, does the film gives her back her humanity and develop her. To become no other, a person viewers can identify with, she has to become “not crazy.” We’re only meant to sympathize with her, when the hospital becomes a nightmare she is wrongly trapped in.

Just once, I’d like to see a movie where a person falls in love with someone with a mental illness and realizes their partner is actually ill and needs help they cannot provide alone. Or their partner makes an informed decision to support them and becomes educated in strategies for helping them cope. In Barefoot, mental illness is just quirkiness, a lack of social graces that makes a person honest and selfless, it requires no real adjustment. And as with Daisy, it might not even be real.

____________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

____________________________________________________________________

Also on Bitch Flicks: , Crazy Bitches Versus Indulgent Little Girls: The Binary of Mad Women in Girl, Interrupted

Whatshername as a Great Actress: A Celebration of Character Actresses

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A young woman–poised, talented, above all enthusiastic–performs a scene in acting class and is praised by the teacher. The teacher can’t say enough good things about the student, but the main thing she keeps going back to is, “I think you’d be a wonderful character actress!”
Now, the student can’t help but beam about this, seeing a brilliant career flashing before her, her name up in lights. She steps back into the group and the woman sitting beside her whispers in her ear, “That’s what they call an actress who isn’t pretty.”

Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A young woman–poised, talented, above all enthusiastic–performs a scene in acting class and is praised by the teacher. The teacher can’t say enough good things about the student, but the main thing she keeps going back to is, “I think you’d be a wonderful character actress!”

Now, the student can’t help but beam about this, seeing a brilliant career flashing before her, her name up in lights. She steps back into the group and the woman sitting beside her whispers in her ear, “That’s what they call an actress who isn’t pretty.”

Though overly simplistic, this is an unfortunate truth about mainstream movie-making. In Hollywood, an actress who doesn’t meet a certain unrealistic beauty standard or fall into an extremely small definition of beauty (generally white, thin, and tall with delicate features and mid-size breasts), she need an addendum to be referred to as an actress. Or, more accurately, she’s not allowed to be a proper actress, the type that plays the everywoman lead we’re all meant to identify with.

Like their male counterparts, a character actress plays eccentric, off-beat characters. Usually they’re defined by distinctive voices, unusual features and a certain look, that allows casting directors to easily picture them as a type. Other descriptions for character actresses include, “Hey, I know that woman,” “whatshername,” and “that girl who’s in everything.” You usually don’t know her name, but you know her face. She’s not going to be named above the title or on the poster, but she’s great, a legend at what she does though she’ll probably never fall in a tradition pantheon of acting greats.

Character actresses are also easily typecast and in some ways, their livelihoods rely on being typecast. Their careers can involve steady work in a variety of genres across TV and film, and the typical character actress has a long filmography full of small, memorable roles in amazing productions. Usually that means being a type, like the valley girl, the woman with an annoying voice, a woman with absurdly large breasts, with a weight problem, or a port wine stain birthmark.

It must take a lot of self-confidence and backbone to be a character actress. Imagine being on the shortlist of names called in when a production needs “a fat girl” or a woman with a crooked nose or teeth the main characters can make fun of. Imagine being an actress whose career will (probably) never move beyond playing different iterations of the “sassy Black friend” who objectifies all the male character or the stiff older lady who disapproves of everything, the sexless soccer mom, or the unattractive high school girl the male leads would only date as favor (“C’mon you owe me, she said she’ll only go out with me if her fat friend has a date”) or a dare.

The basic idea behind character acting is pretty insulting. On the most simple terms, the term posits two types of actresses: “normal” actresses who can play ingenues, femme fatales, or warm mothers, and character actresses who play the exotic or unattractive other. While the female lead has her unattractive flaws ironed out, leaving only acceptable “likable” flaws like clumsiness, shyness, or a lack of awareness of her beauty, as the lead, the character viewers are supposed to identify with.

Though usually seen as simplistic roles easily explained in one or two words (e.g. nasal voice), because a character role generally has messy and inconvenient flaws, in some ways she is a more realistic idea of a woman. Is it a coincidence that these roles are referred to as “characters,” a common dismissal of a woman who attempts to speak her mind.

Whereas male character actors are beloved and recognized as adorable or, as a friend of mine was once fond of saying, handsome in an offbeat kind of way, female character actresses fade into the background as mothers, maids, and nosy neighbors. They’re generally considered unattractive both in appearance and personality, while the part played by male character actors are not generally telegraphed as unattractive or unappealing. Female character roles rarely get a love interest.

Female character roles are defined more by perceived deficits in appearance, while male character roles can be better described by certain jobs: a mob guy, a military guy, a fashion designer. Even characteristics that would forever limit an actress to character roles can be found in leading men. There’s no shortage of meaty roles for older men, who continue to be considered sexy and powerful as they age, there are many prominent overweight A-List men (although most of these actors star in TV shows or are comedians).

Melissa McCarthy is held up as the counterpoint to any such argument these days, but she’s just one person, and though a great comedic actress, most of the roles she’s played have used her weight for humor or cast her as unattractive, butch, or otherwise unkempt.

Character roles do provide opportunities for women of color and women over 40, although in extremely limited roles, which must be frustrating to a talented actress who wants to showcase her range. In an interview with USA Today, Oscar nominee Viola Davis said that before The Help, “ I had to channel my talents in narratives that were incomplete, and those two or three scenes in a movie, I’ve had to try to make them work, flesh them out as real human beings. I haven’t had the benefit of a full journey, a character who’s been in every frame of the movie.” The character roles offered to women of color, things like the subservient Asian woman, the selfless lady’s maid (usually a Black woman), or the otherworldly wise native woman, also display Hollywood’s racist attitudes of the types of roles that can be played by women of color.

However, it’s hard to give a precise definition of who counts as a character actress. Is a woman a character actress if the general public knows her name? If she plays a lead role? What about a woman who plays a lead role, but continues to pop-up in thankless character parts? Is there a point where she ascends out of the character acting ghetto and becomes a leading lady, or by virtue of the roles she pays, by her appearance and personality will she always be a character?

Is that necessarily a bad thing? Many actresses, like Holly Hunter , Jennifer Jason Leigh , Frances McDormand, and Kathy Bates have said how much they enjoy playing character roles and playing these imperfect characters who display a wider conception of what a woman can be.

And some character actresses are recognized for their roles with Oscar wins or nominations in Best Supporting Actress category, one which allows for more quirky characters and underrepresented populations of actresses. Some of these women include Melissa Leo, Marcia Gay Harden, and Octavia Spencer .

So it’s debatable.

A Partial List of Character Actresses:

Beth Grant
Audrey Wasilewski
Kathy Baker
Judy Greer
Sherri Shepard
Cleo King
Elsa Lanchester

Beulah Bondi
Thelma Ritter
Hope Emerson
Agnes Moorehead
Mary Wickes
Ellen Corby
Eve Arden
Conchata Ferrell

Mildred Natwick
Ruth McDevitt
Miranda Richardson
Margo Martindale
Missi Pyle
Carol Kane

Jennifer Coolidge
Catherine O’Hara
Illeana Douglas

Arguably Ascended Character Actresses:
Viola Davis
Marcia Gay Harden
Melissa Leo

Octavia Spencer
Kathy Bates
Frances McDormand
Jane Lynch
Catherine Keener

_________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.