Emma Roberts – Bitch Flicks

Girls, Consent, and Sex in ‘Palo Alto’ and ‘I Believe In Unicorns’

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.

April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.

Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.

Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.

The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).

Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.

Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”

Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Q3oeHsIj0″]

Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).

Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.

We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.

In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Adult World’: Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Indulgent Brat

At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath, the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an ‘artiste’ she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam, that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.

Adult World Poster — *Adult World* film poster

At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath–the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an “artiste” she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.

When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art, and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.

Of course, where Amy really lives and dreams all her grandiose dreams, a bubble of middle class ennui, stacked accomplishment and precociousness, is far from the real world and it’s the real world she finds herself inadvertently tumbling into as she struggles to keep her head above water post-graduation.

Adult World, named after the mom-and-pop adult video store where Amy (Emma Roberts) finds herself underemployed, follows Amy as she stalks her “favorite living poet” Rat Billings (John Cusack), a morose, misanthropic literary superstar, and attempts to force him into being her mentor. Directed by Scott Coffey and written by Andy Cochran, the film treads similar territory to recent disappointed-artist-post-graduation stories like Tiny Furniture and Frances Ha, but delves further into the realm of character study, pulling no punches in its portrayal of a self-absorbed character’s slow, belabored entry into adulthood.

With her hero, Sylvia Plath looking over her shoulder, Amy contemplates suicide — With her hero, Sylvia Plath, looking over her shoulder, Amy contemplates suicide

Amy is a corollary to the kind of self-absorbed man-child character on which entire film genres are built. As a character she’s fairly unique, to the best of my knowledge, her only real kin is the similarly entitled and egotistical Hannah Horvath of Girls, and it’s both refreshing to watch her and depressing to be able to relate.

Similarly to how Hannah’s parents cutting her off provided the impetus for Girls, Amy’s father’s admission that he has serious financial worries and cannot continue to bankroll her lifestyle kickstarts her journey. Poetry, like other arts, is a vocation easily available only to the very wealthy and Adult World positions Amy at the difficult intersection of middle class reality and leisure class values. Unemployed and living in her parents’ house at the film’s start, Amy has $90,000 in student loans, frequently spends thousands on submission fees for poetry contests, and compares riding the bus to going through a war zone. She cancels her car insurance (with a poem), sure that paying submission fees is important in the grand scheme of things.

With her wall of blue ribbons, Amy is clearly not used to failure

Throughout the film it becomes clear Amy expects that being a successful poet will allow her to opt out of all the parts of life she considers tedious and believes anything she has to do in the meantime, such as working at Adult World, is worthy of contempt. She embarrasses and runs off customers by criticizing their sexual interests and in one incidence where she is zoned out, allows a man to steal several things and run off. Her belief that she will be famous one day soon is so pervasive that she believes they are lucky to be graced with her presence and that at the end of the day, she doesn’t really need the job anyway.

Early in the film, Amy visits her college friend, Candace, who is participating in an Occupy protest, but declines either joining in or paying any attention to their message. Though presented as an anarchist and activist, Candace, like Amy, has a supreme sense of entitlement, announcing that the only house in Amy’s price range is a shithole and with a hint of glee, that her parents would be horrified if she lived there. Amy’s response, saying to the landlord, “We’re bohemians,” suggests an attempt at romanticizing poverty.

Both girls are sheltered to a level that is cringe-inducing, something that is shown most clearly through the character of Rubia, a transvestite Amy meets at Adult World, the most exotic figure sheltered Amy can imagine. When she first encounters her in the bathroom, Amy gawks and runs out to tell the other people in the shop, like she just saw a unicorn. Later, Candace complains that as they are not children, but not yet adults, they are an oppressed minority and the camera cuts to Rubia, a real member of an oppressed minority, rolling her eyes (her default mode with Amy).

Amy’s difficult relationship with Rat Billings keeps her from being a cartoon character or drawing the audience’s ire. — Amy’s difficult relationship with Rat Billings keeps her from being a cartoon character or drawing the audience’s hatred

As Amy’s reluctant mentor, Rat Billings is jaded and sarcastic, constantly putting her down. Under the belief that he will promote her to the right people and praise her brilliance, she works as his unpaid assistant, cleaning his house, curating his papers and assisting him in his lectures. Though Amy believes this is perfectly normal because “he doesn’t believe in money,” it’s clear to the audience that he’s taking advantage of her.

In her interactions with Rat, a sympathetic dimension of Amy’s character emerges.

She’s a young ambitious woman whose idol turns out to be a jerk but she can’t see it, who believes he has to be impressed just like all her teachers were, who believes him when he sarcastically calls her is muse. It’s incredibly refreshing to have a female character who isn’t a shrinking violet, who stalks her idol to get him to look at her art and without shame or the back stepping that most women are raised to do (“I think it’s pretty good” or “People have told me I’m good”) speaks without a qualifier, insisting “I’m good.” When Candace tells her she is getting published in Anarchist Quarterly, the first time she’s ever submitted writing anywhere, Amy goes off into her room, closes the door and screams.

Throughout the film, Amy’s lack of sexual experience is glaringly apparent. In the first scene, she develops feelings for a boy in her poetry class because he compliments her poems and when she discovers he had friends hiding in the closet filming their make-out session, he knows her well enough to try to use art as an excuse. When she first enters Adult World after seeing the Help Wanted sign, unaware of what the store is, she is scared and embarrassed. Recoiling from a vibrator as if she expects it to attack her, she runs back to her car and sits there for several minutes, shivering as if trying to get the filth off of her.

Job hunter Amy runs from Adult World just as she runs from adult responsibility

Amy uses feminism as an excuse for her discomfort and within the narrative; her views that the videos are sexist and models are being objectified are connected to insecurity over being a virgin, rather than true conviction. She is uncomfortable with people who are secure in their sexuality, looking down on Le Passion magazine’s cover model because her breasts are biggest than Amy’s head, and compensates by placing herself above them, superior as an artist. Holding this view is convenient for Amy as it allows her to dismiss a suggestion by her coworker, Alex (Evan Peters), that she write erotica based on her sexual experiences for the magazine, saying it is a bad idea because she feel anything sexualized is anathema to art not because she doesn’t have any experiences.

To this end, Amy assumes a serious mentorship involves a sexual relationship and one night, Rubia gives her a makeover so she can go seduce Rat. Dressed “like a prostitute,” Amy’s idea of seduction involves, speaking in 40s movie dialogue and tossing her head like cat, preening, while Rat sits watching her like a zoo animal. Here she becomes truly pathetic in his and the film’s eyes, admitting her virginity to him and describing sex in laughable poetry metaphors, a budding delicate flower and a grand voyage, in a stark contrast to the seedy sexuality sold in the store where she works.

Rat does not take her seriously when she insists she is a woman not a child. It’s difficult to watch her throw herself at him, a grown man moaning over his second-hand embarrassment for her and alternately patronizing and laughing at her.

In the film’s most disturbing scene, Amy begs Rat to “deflower her”

At this stage in her life, Amy is young enough that her life is still marked by what she hasn’t done. Even as a poet who idolizes Sylvia Plath, Amy does not understand depression, putting it on as a theatrical costume meant to inspire poems, before quickly shedding it to eat a grilled cheese sandwich brought to her by her mother. As such, she constantly measures herself against artists she admires, antagonizing that Rat became famous so much younger than she is now, and in the darkly comic opening scene, sticks her head in the oven and then wonders if this is suicidal plagiarism. Immediately after announcing that she doesn’t do drugs, she does pot because Rubia suggests it is something a poet would do.

Having not had any real pain in her life, nor love or anything exciting or dangerous, it is unclear what Amy has to write about. She is shocked when Rat tells her he made up his poems about heroin when he didn’t use it, feeling that one should only write about what they know. Rat’s admission ultimately leads her to try her hand at writing erotica, a place where her speculative purple prose makes her a mild success.

It’s uncomfortable how the movie surrounds clueless Amy with three men–Rat, Alex and her father–who always know better than her and constantly call her out on her naiveté. Viewers are clearly meant to see Amy as a satirical character and not take her seriously, sharing Rat’s view of her as a silly little girl following him around. When they are trading off quotes and he ends off without attribution, “You’re dumb but you’re not stupid,” she stands there silently for a beat, mulling it over, trying to find something flattering in it. It’s unclear whether we meant to laugh at her submissiveness or feel pity for her as she is being taken advantage of?

Still a child in many ways, Amy throws a temper tantrum after learning of Rat’s deception

She is overjoyed when he accepts her poem into an anthology mostly out of pity, not realizing that he never said he liked it or thought it was good, just that it was uniquely her. The pinnacle of Rat’s cruelty occurs when he reveals that the anthology he published her in is of “hilariously awful” poetry meant for reading on the toilet. Amy’s response, a temper tantrum wherein she breaks his things and screams about how special she is, proves only that she is even less mature than he thought.

Alex, Amy’s love interest, also gets a moment to criticize her work, yelling at her for thinking she’s better than the store, a place where good people work hard to support themselves.

Visiting Alex’s house, she learns he is a talented painter, but unlike her, is also an adult. He works a day job and makes the most of it, he never brags about being an artist, and he doesn’t see fame as his ultimate goal. He sees the purity of art, in making things for yourself, not to share with other people, something Amy realizes, shocked, that she has never experienced.

It’s a little unsettling for the film’s female lead to be contrasted with a man, a love interest, who is presented as superior to her in every way. Amy’s entire identity, as a talented artist, though it was probably inaccurate, is taken from her by these men in her life and she is utterly shattered by them.

Alex and Amy take a quiet moment while working at Adult World to feed their mutual attraction

However, regardless of who delivered these lessons, they were ones Amy needed to be a complete person and an adult. Rat turns out to be the kind of mentor she needed, as he makes her a better writer and gives her a harsh, but necessary wake-up call. She isn’t a bad poet, but she isn’t a good one either, to be anything she needs to go out into the world and experience it.

Alex, though unsettling as both her new role model and first sexual partner, teaches her to be responsible and accept the life she is living now as real life, not just something she’s doing to kill time while waiting to become famous.

Though it was men that taught her these crucial lessons about herself, the film succeeds by presenting the ultimate proof of Amy’s growth as self directed. She doesn’t become an adult by losing her virginity, getting a job, or by getting published, but by reading her shit poem and being able to laugh at it, already so much more grown up that she wonders how she could have ever been so naive. In the last shot, she is an adult reading words she wrote so recently as a child.

Recommended Reading: Into an Adult World with a Quirky Coterie to Assist

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

Not Another Teenaged Drama: A Review of ‘Palo Alto’

Palo Alto is what would happen if Mean Girls had a major collision with American Beauty. The picturesque neighborhoods with the homes of the screwed up parents of the main characters was entirely reminiscent of American Beauty. The parents’ self-absorption was stunning at times. And every time April’s high school girl classmates talked, it was like nails on a chalkboard (cue: Mean Girls’ Regina George, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith WITHOUT the comedy).

This is a guest post by Atima Omara-Alwala.

The next generation of directing Coppolas has come of age in Gia Coppola’s (granddaughter of renowned director Francis Ford Coppola) teenage angst drama featured in the American suburbs. Palo Alto is from a collection of short stories by actor James Franco (who knew he was a writer?), who stars in the film himself.

The main focus is around teenaged April (played by Emma Roberts, daughter of actor Eric Roberts) and Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val Kilmer’s son) and their parallel existences with occasional touches on the lives of their fellow high school classmates who are obsessed with sex, substances, and suicide. The link between April and Teddy is that April likes Teddy, Teddy likes April–but because they’re teenagers, they never get around to saying it until much later into the film. In between this, April has a short-lived fling with her soccer coach, Mr. B (a very smarmy James Franco), and Teddy has a fling with Emily (Zoe Levin) (read: random fellatio at a house party). Also, Emily has a fling with Teddy’s best friend Fred (Nat Wolff), an all-star sociopathic misogynist.

Indeed, it is a tad heartbreaking to see how quickly Fred jumps back into his jeans after bedding Emily and callously views her deflated face afterwards or, in another scene, how he pushes Emily down to her knees for some oral attention–all the while demanding she tell him what an amazing guy he is. Emily is that girl you knew in high school who you A) thought was cool because she seemed outwardly confident, and sexually precocious (when you didn’t have a clue) and B) was being endlessly slut shamed for it by all the jealous “mean girls”–which, of course, happens in this film.

For all her outward confidence, Emily is really looking to be valued and validated. So it’s even more painfully awkward as a viewer when Emily keeps going back to Fred until finally, in a major pivotal scene, she’s had enough of his verbal and emotional abuse. Meanwhile, April is trying to figure out her “relationship” with Mr. B and her feelings for Teddy. It is hinted that the relationship April has with Mr. B is perhaps due to the lack of attention at home from a less-than-interested mother and an eccentric stepfather (played by Val Kilmer).

This is Gia Coppola’s first movie and not bad all around, but it was not revolutionary, and it is a story line that has been done more times than is necessary already: Y’know, the white middle-class to upper middle-class privileged kids who are bored and reckless–and who have no idea why they are so bored and reckless.

Palo Alto is what would happen if Mean Girls had a major collision with American Beauty. The picturesque neighborhoods with the homes of the screwed up parents of the main characters was entirely reminiscent of American Beauty. The parents’ self-absorption was stunning at times. And every time April’s high school girl classmates talked, it was like nails on a chalkboard (cue: Mean Girls’ Regina George, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith WITHOUT the comedy). There was very little diversity, no people of color except one or two as extras (which is often the case in a lot of suburbs anyway), and the only discussion of LGBT issues was Emily (who is already tagged as a whore) admitting to having done a girl-on-girl thing in a spirited game of “Never Have I Ever” (great).

If you went to high school in the suburbs and want a nowhere near humorous and somewhat awkward reminder of the whole experience, Palo Alto is your film.

Atima Omara-Alwala is a political strategist and activist of 10 years who has served as staff on 8 federal and local political campaigns and other progressive causes. Atima’s work has had a particular focus on women’s political empowerment & leadership, reproductive justice, health care, communities of color and how gender and race is reflected in pop culture. Her writings on the topics have also been featured at Ms. Magazine, Women’s Enews, and RH Reality Check.

The Women of ‘We’re the Millers’: Brats and Strippers

We’re the Millers

When I heard that We’re the Millers was a drug smuggling comedy with a fake family at its center, I knew I would have to check it out. Marijuana has become a trademark of arrested development for men in film, so I was excited to see a comedy that dealt with drug/petty crime issues within the context of a family dynamic, even if they aren’t technically related. Jennifer Aniston’s recent career has been fascinating to me because of how far she continues to go to get away from the Rachel image. Ever since her split from Brad Pitt, it’s apparently been open season for everyone and their mother to talk about how much Aniston fails at womanhood. Every article about her either harps on her looming infertility or bemoans the alleged last dying coughs of her career. It has to be difficult to keep your head up in such an ageist industry while being typecast as the girl-next-door into your 40s. In keeping with that defiance, Aniston plays Rose, a stripper. I have mixed feelings of this as empowering that I’ll get to later.

Emma Roberts delivers consistently good albeit unremarkable performances. We’re the same age, so I remember watching her on Unfabulous and commiserating about middle school angst. I haven’t heard much about her lately. She seems to have skipped the crazy rebel child phase that all the Disney prodigies go through. I googled her before writing this to try and find some relevant links and the only news that popped up was a story about her being denied service after trying to cut a line at a bakery. I’m not kidding. She plays Casey, a runaway teen who starts out as your typical Bratty Teenage Daughter. As for the guys, I’ve found that Jason Sudeikis (David) is a funnier version of Jason Bateman, minus the latter’s dour midlife crisis cynicism. Then there’s Kenny, the obligatory socially inept dork. I’ve never heard of Will Poulter, but he has the weirdest and most immaculately arched eyebrows I’ve ever seen.

(from left to right) Casey, Rose, David and Kenny.

Rose and Casey are established as the brains and common sense to the selfishness of David and the wide-eyed naïveté of Kenny. The women of the ensemble may be smarter, but they are both introduced in the context of their relationship to the male characters. Rose and David resent each other for what initially seems to be unresolved relationship issues given his snide crack at her unseen boyfriend. (Later it’s revealed that the animosity between them stems from David ruining Rose’s favorite painting during a failed first attempt to flirt with her and they were never actually together. I liked that they went out of their way to avoid the cliché, but this is one occasion where the cliché might have made more sense.) Casey is introduced us when Kenny tries to save her from a gang of thugs trying to steal her phone. The gang robs David of his stash instead, prompting the smuggling in order to pay back Brad (Ed Helms), his supplier.

While the selling point of “the Millers” relies on the oddball factor, the film predictably only references Rose and Casey’s past lives to highlight the zaniness of their situation instead of pointing out why a stripper and a homeless girl would be far more willing to risk everything for some drug money. That’s understandable given the genre, but Rose and to a lesser extent Casey are constantly passive aggressively reminded of how useless and expendable they are by David. The insults decrease in proportion to David’s growing affection for them. Why is it that female characters are only respectable to the extent that male characters see fit to humanize them? David calls Rose a cheap stripper for the majority of the film. It’s telling that he and Rose have their first scene of genuine romantic chemistry after Rose admits her real name is Sarah. Strippers clearly aren’t viable romantic options or even real people until they tell you their true identity! Casey is little more than a petulant annoyance until David starts to feel paternalistic towards her. Hell, he even jokes about killing Casey himself as a drug cartel holds a gun to their heads in what is supposed to be the emotional climax of the film.

Rose and David get a little more than they bargained for while camping.

Beyond that, issues of masculinity are fairly banal and played for laughs at the guys’ expense. Nick Offerman delivers a fantastic performance as a big bear of a DEA officer looking to spice up his marriage with his wife through swinging (and hitting on David, no less!). Taking pity on Kenny after witnessing his disastrous attempts to flirt with the swinging couple’s daughter, Melissa, Casey decides to teach him how to kiss. David and Rose walk in and Rose decides that she will also kiss Kenny to help him diversify his technique and then the two women compare notes by trial and error. The result is arguably the funniest scene of the film. Kenny goes back and forth between Casey and Rose in a veritable table tennis of kissing as David provides feedback while lazily munching potato chips. That sort of nerd’s wet dream might be predictable, but the way it’s executed is hilarious. Why else would you put a virgin with a stripper and a streetwise homeless girl? Jennifer Aniston was not pleased. Of course, Melissa comes over at that exact moment to visit Kenny and thinks that she’s stumbled upon foreplay to an incestuous orgy. Given my piece last week, I was relieved that I could laugh at this. At least they’re not actually related this time!

Rose does an impromptu dance in a warehouse.

Rose’s profession inevitably comes in handy during the first action climax. Cornered by the drug cartel, Rose realizes that she’s been passing as a suburban mom a little too well and offers to prove herself by literally stripping for her life. Really, you are lying to yourself if you thought the powers that be would waste any opportunity to showcase Jennifer Aniston’s legs. The ensuing montage is pure wet, slow-motion fan service. The dance ends with Rose releasing a steam valve, disorienting their captors enough to let their “family” escape. I’m torn about this scene because although it’s trying almost too hard to show that strippers can be smart and intuitive, Rose’s most valuable asset is still her body and her ability to be objectified. I take issue not so much the objectification itself so much as the fact that the definitive aspect of Rose’s character seems to be “LOL WHAT 40+ and still hot?!?”. Certainly Aniston’s boldness and athleticism are praiseworthy, but given the amount that the actors talk about it in interviews, you would think the strip routine was her sole appearance.

Will We’re the Millers be remembered as anyone’s iconic role? Probably not. However, it was thoroughly entertaining and ended on an unexpectedly heartwarming note as the Millers start their new life together in the suburbs as part of the witness protection program. Rose and Casey becoming David’s wife and daughter respectively can feel blasé in light of their colorful histories, but all is not quite as it seems The close-up of the marijuana plants growing in the backyard before the cut to the credits indicates that although their hardships may be a thing of the past, their comically gray morality will always be close at hand.

Horror Week 2012: The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’

Guest post written by Jeremy Cornelius. Warning: massive spoilers ahead!!

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.


Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4

In the original 1996 Scream film, which Scream 4 constantly refers to and reconstructs, a masked killer known as Ghost Face begins terrorizing a predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood in rural Woodsboro, California. Sidney is the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who is dating a boy named Billy. Her mother, Maureen Prescott, is mysteriously murdered one year before these serial murders and the film starts in Woodsboro. And Gail Weathers (Cox), a TV journalist, covered “last year’s hottest court case,” and the fame-obsessed Weathers is in the process of finishing up a book on the murders entitled, The Woodsboro Murders. Meanwhile, Deputy Dewey Riley (Arquette) is the bumbling deputy on a (usually) failed mission to look after Sidney. Dewey’s character is in the tradition of Craven’s depiction of the two bumbling cops in his first film, and commonly known exploitation flick, The Last House on the Left. Drew Barrymore has a brief cameo at the beginning of the first film (she was the original pick for the character of Sidney) and is the first victim. The unseen killer calls her as she is home alone about to watch a scary movie. After much stalker-esque dialogue between the killer and Barrymore, she is viciously stabbed and hung from a tree outside of her house, where she is left for her parents to discover her body, leading to the first chilling scream as the title comes across the screen.

Sidney is constantly stalked by the killer and becomes an attempted target in her house, but she eventually manages to stop him and take refuge in her room. Time passes and characters develop a little more before the final scene during a house party at Sidney’s schoolmate, Stu’s house. The killer attacks the kids at the party, and Sidney is left alive to confront, who she discovers, are two killers: her boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu. They confess to having raped and killed her mother one year before. Gail comes in and briefly deters the two killers from killing Sidney, but in the end Sidney manages to kill both of them, declaring, as her surviving friend Randy comments, “Be careful, they always come back for one last scare,” and just as Billy sits up surprisingly, Sidney shoots him in the head, and she states, “Not in my movie,” claiming the construction of the Final Girl as a place of productive empowerment for girls and violent defense against women-hating men.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream 4

The gaze of Wes Craven’s Scream 4 intrudes on white girls’ domestic spaces. Technology facilitates the killer’s murderous rampage. The killer attempts to terrify them into panic and submission, but they resist this submission to fear such as in the first scene: two girls are alone in a house watching Stab 7 (a thinly veiled, meta-movie franchise with the Scream storyline within the Scream series). One girl goes upstairs because she hears a noise, but then prank calls her friend downstairs with the Ghost Face app on her iPhone. When she goes downstairs after the call is cut short and wanders around the house calling her friend’s name, she gets a call. Assuming her friends’ disappearance is her friend trying to get back at her for scaring her, she assuredly answers the phone, but the killer calls her on her iPhone and tries to scare her into terrified submission by saying, “you’re the dumb blonde with the big tits, whose part is about to be cut,” but she quickly retaliates with “I have a 180 IQ and a 4.0 GPA, asshole.” Of course, in the end, in the Scream tradition of the slasher theme, the killer prevails by stabbing the girl before the title of the film dramatically flashes onto the screen with the Swedish band The Sounds playing in the background.

Carol Clover theorizes about gender in slasher films in her well-known book Men, Women, and Chainsaws and addresses the concept of masochistic gazing in horror films. Watching these films, though it could be read as sadistic to consume slasher films, are a mascochistic form of “perverse pleasure” through gazing and seeing what “should not” be seen. The audience can identify with the victim in the Scream films and feel the terror that they feel. The camera shows them reacting to the killer’s calls, and the audience sees and hears the same as the victim. So with every suspenseful moment for the character on screen, the audience feels the same emotion of fear. Carol Clover compares the affect of pornography to horror films, saying:

“Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.”

The affect of terror and pleasure, though, seem to also be blurred when thinking about slasher films. Audiences are entertained by the desire to see violence that is unseen. They get a horrific glimpse into the pain inflicted between humans (mostly men killing women), but one productive element of the Scream series presents a productive feminist subversion of these elements of pleasure, pain, humor, and gender. Clover qualifies the commonly found surviving girl at the end of horror films in her essay, “His Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”:

“The image of a distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl.”

And this position of the final girl in horror films is destabilized in Scream 4, as the final girl and masked killer are the same person.

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes about the feminist potential in the first three Scream films in her book, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:

“According to the logic of realism, Scream might well be seen as endorsing violence in the hands of a teen girl. But when viewed in its cinematic context, the film, like the slasher genre in general, provides an opportunity to examine cultural and individual fantasies as they relate to gender and power.”

The girl violence in the Scream films takes a new direction as Jill takes on the role of the killer and enacts violent murders against mostly white teenage girls, a black man, and her own mother in the film, symbolically, hyperbolically constructing post-feminist girl power gone horribly wrong. Jill’s performs a coy demeanor and unassaultive character at the beginning of the film, which is starkly contrasted after her unveiling to Sidney as the killer in the second to last scene of the film. She asserts her position as the “empowered” female remake of Billy as the killer and Sidney as the victim, saying “I don’t want to be like you. I want to become you,” right before she stabs Sidney, thinking she murders her. Jill then proceeds to stab herself, throw herself onto a glass coffee table (evocative of a scene out of Fight Club) as a way to bodily victimize herself.

Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4

J. Jack Halberstam in his article, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” describes the temptation wrapped up in the symbol of Apple products in relation to the creation myth. Halberstam discusses cybernetics’ relationship to gender and deconstructs the symbol of the Mac apple, and he claims,

“We recognize the Apple computer symbol, I think, as a clever icon for the digitalization of the creation myth [. . . ] The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.”

He discuses the temptation of biting into the forbidden fruit, which Eve does despite the prohibitions offered by God to her and Adam in Eden. Halberstam relates this Biblical story to the marketing of Apple products with the bitten apple logo on Apple products representing a capitalist seduction of consumer technology and information. Craven takes this concept one step further by having most every character in Scream 4 tote around some Apple product. The Ghost Face killer calls different characters on their iPhones before each murder. The killers use Apple technology to facilitate and capture the murders on film by using webcams to record each murder and post them onto their blog, reconstructing a do-it-yourself remake of the first Scream film within the sequel. The placement of Apple products throughout the film could be read as a synergistic business pursuit by the film makers, and in some ways, people probably were influenced to purchase a new iPhone after seeing this movie. The film also skillfully challenges the obsessive (mis)use of technology, and the Apple products, to use Halberstam’s analysis, symbolize capitalist seduction and female exploitation through violent murders. In “The Scream Trilogy: “Hyperpostmodernism” and the Late Nineties Teen Slasher” by Valerie Wee, she deconstructs the hyperpostmodernism in the Scream films:

“This shift to hyperpostmodernism was motivated by several factors: (1) the development of new media technologies such as cable, video, and an increasing range of digital media; (2) the emergence of a new teen demographic in the United States; and (3) the entertainment industries escalating commitment to cross-media promotional and marketing practices.”

As Wee argues, the Scream franchise’s insistence on including new media, promotion, and adjusting to the “emergence of a new teen demographic” applies perfectly to Scream 4’s hyperpostmodernism as a next step in the evolution of the series.

L-R: Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) in Scream 4

The teenage girls in Scream 4 are constantly on their iPhones in the film and are connected to Ghost Face through their phones. In the first scene of the film, there is a comment made that there is now a Ghost Face app. for the iPhones so anyone can replicate the killer’s voice as a prank call to friends. Female bodies become fused with technology: they become as fused with it as it is their source of survival and simultaneously the killer’s invasion into their white middle-class spaces. Halberstam writes:

“The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable — at the site of the female body.”

Viewers disidentify with Jill and see the violent masochistic pleasure in watching Scream 4. This poses an interesting dilemma of white girl power manifesting in violence and aggression targeted against other white girls, black men, and mothers. Jill symbolizes the ultimate pursuit of individual identity and separation from her community. She manifests her rage and expectant media fame by slaughtering her friends, her mother, and others in her community to escape it. Jill embodies the ideology of post-feminism and exceedingly demonstrates her white neoliberal pursuit of a murderous “girl power” at the violent expense and exploitation of people in Scream 4.

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Jeremy Cornelius, a queer feminist writer and aspiring women’s and gender studies academic making his way in Philadelphia. Common activities include zine making, obsessively watching b-horror movies on Netflix, dressing like a gay sailor from the 1920s, and writing about queer childhood (to take the phrase from J. Jack Halberstam and Kathryn Bond Stockton) and coming from the U.S. South. Common pen name for zines and social media accounts is Riot Robin because of the Robin (from Batman) tattoo on his left arm.