There are precious few characters of color and particularly women of color on screen. Characters of color usually serve the primary function of helping white characters through dilemmas. If they are given their own plots, expect their storylines to be zany comic relief while the white characters deal with the serious business. …It’s 2013, so I say it’s about time that we allow women of color to shine in their own right without tacking on white ladies as a wink to ratings or as an apology, wouldn’t you agree?
There are precious few characters of color and particularly women of color on screen. Characters of color usually serve the primary function of helpingwhite characters through dilemmas. If they are given their own plots, expect their storylines to be zany comic relief while the white characters deal with the serious business. Orange Is the New Black is a big step in the right direction, but many have been quick to point out that although the women of color are delightfully nuanced and the white protagonist can be downright irritating, the show probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without an affluent white woman as the main character. It’s 2013, so I say it’s about time that we allow women of color to shine in their own right without tacking on white ladies as a wink to ratings or as an apology, wouldn’t you agree?
Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills.
Fortunately, Sleepy Hollow is here to step up to the plate. Lt. Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) could easily go head-to-head with Olivia Pope as far as badass ladies of color. Mills finds herself teamed up with Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), who is mysteriously resurrected nearly 250 years after his death in the Revolutionary War. Crane initially assumes that Abbie is a freed slave, but after a crash course in US history, comes to accept the cultural changes fairly well. Despite the potential for cross-generational discrimination across both racial and gendered lines, Crane values Abbie as a colleague from the very beginning. Of course, it’s questionable how realistic this adjustment is for someone of Crane’s era, pro-abolitionist or otherwise. Regardless, you can’t argue that the immediately established mutual respect isn’t refreshing. By sweeping the time skip under the rug in their relationship, both characters avoid being bogged down in politics. Crane and Abbie depend on each other to defend Sleepy Hollow from a host of ghoulish monsters in a series that merges elements of fantasy, drama, and buddy cop sitcom.
Jenny Mills.
Abbie is allowed to be her own person with her own strengths and flaws. She cares about Crane, but she doesn’t exist to prop him up. They are each other’s intellectual equals who rise and fall together, but they can and do frequently separate on their own adventures. Abbie also has an interesting character foil in her estranged sister Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood). The two girls were orphans in the foster system. One day, they were attacked by a monster in the woods. Abbie encourages Jenny to lie about what they saw, claiming to police that she couldn’t remember anything. Jenny tries to tell the truth and is consequently declared clinically insane and thrown in a mental hospital, while Abbie walks away unscathed before being taken under the wing of a (white male) police officer determined to keep her on the right track. The concept of the white savior certainly comes into play here. Why do white people get to determine who is worthy of redemption and who isn’t when it comes to troubled youth of color? Abbie struggles with her conscience and her position of privileged authority due to the fact that she indirectly caused her sister to rot away in an institution for being honest, which is a rather blunt commentary on the apathy of the state to the plight of the individual. It turns out that the cop had been helping both sisters in secret. Jenny is also 110% BAMF. She, Crane, and Abbie are the Holy Trinity of this show.
Katrina Crane: “No, I really am just a plot device!”
Don’t forget, we have to find a way to shoehorn white femininity in there somehow! Crane’s wife Katrina (Katia Winter) is a witch condemned to purgatory as punishment for casting the resurrection spell over Crane. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a commentary on her power or lack thereof, but it’s definitely an odd narrative choice. She’s allegedly one of the main characters, so it’s weird that the others can only interact with her via dreams or near-death experiences. Additionally, it disconcerts me that Crane’s romance feels like a forced, clunky afterthought to the main action. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big proponent of prioritizing pretty much anything else over a love interest, but if you’re going to keep throwing it at the audience, at least make it convincing or enjoyable. Katrina seems to only exist to shout ominous prophecies at Crane before he regains consciousness. Without spoiling too much, the writers have gussied her up with some plot anvils to force viewers to remain invested in her. I’m not feeling it. She sits in the woods with a smoke machine while Crane runs around yelling her name and sweating. I don’t care and no amount of sudden revelations will make me care. Katrina is embarrassingly extraneous to the action.
Katrina’s absence leaves Abbie to share most of Crane’s emotionally intense moments. Katrina may be influencing things from afar, but the show makes it clear that Abbie is Crane’s true support system and partner. That’s probably the biggest difference between the two women. Katrina sits on the sidelines and Abbie gets shit done. Stereotypical idealized white femininity is delicate and dependent, with some subtle manipulation sometimes thrown in to avoid total passive sexism. In Sleepy Hollow, these traits appear to hinder her appeal instead of amplifying it. Rather than enhancing her enigma or desirability, the essential “whiteness” of Katrina’s characterization renders her a one-dimensional paper doll in a cast of charismatic heavyweights. I can’t complain too much in the end though, because she makes it possible for Abbie and Crane’s relationship to grow outside of the obligatory sexual tension.
Ichabbie 4eva?
With that said, Ichabod and Abbie (dubbed “Ichabbie”) have a sizable fan base that wants them together romantically. I’m torn – on one hand, I think it’s good to have models of strong male/female friendships where their development isn’t measured by whether or not they became a couple. On the other, Katrina has the personality of a shoebox and it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to read subtext into Abbie and Crane’s phenomenal chemistry. At least at this point, they can grow together independently of the romantic question. If the writers do decide to pursue that route, I hope it’s just a spontaneous move and not drawn out for the angst milking. Regardless of who Crane ends up with, I want Katrina to die or preferably turn out evil. Nothing against the actress, but I need her to stop pointlessly wasting screentime.
Amandla Stenburg as Macey Irving.
But wait, it gets even better! Amandla Stenberg (aka Rue from The Hunger Games) plays the police captain’s recently disabled daughter, Macey. Triple representation, fuck yeah! (Apart from the actress not being disabled in reality, but I guess we have to pick our battles.) She’s cute, sarcastic, and sassy. The writers seem to be veering towards the “having a disabled child destroyed my family and could ruin my life” angle for the captain, so fingers crossed that they’ll avoid that stereotype clusterfuck, especially given that they’ve resisted most other cliches. I’m cautiously optimistic.
To sum up, you should all be watching Sleepy Hollow.
Romance, lust, and dramatic intrigue are the antidote to our anxiety that we are just boringly adequate enough to make it through everyday life. The best part is that we can deny any accusations of shallowness or narcissism because at the end of the day, we don’t have to take responsibility for the actions of fictional characters. It’s a win-win!
If it’s true that people watch television and film to escape reality, show runners and writers have to know how to fulfill viewers’ fantasies. Why do you think they cast hot 25-year-olds as high schoolers? No one wants to remember their acne-induced social awkwardness or that time they got dumped the day before prom. The vast majority of viewers want to watch characters who are sexy, smart, and successful. In short, most of us want to be the most desirable person in the room or to be charismatic enough to possess the most desirable person in the room. Romance, lust, and dramatic intrigue are the antidote to our anxiety that we are just boringly adequate enough to make it through everyday life. The best part is that we can deny any accusations of shallowness or narcissism because at the end of the day, we don’t have to take responsibility for the actions of fictional characters. It’s a win-win!
The perpetual Will They Or Won’t They between Ross and Rachel was dragged out for a decade–yawn.
Writers have long capitalized on this escapist craving–and perhaps taken advantage of it to supplement their own lack of originality on occasion–to create hundreds of romances. However, once you make the fateful decision to break the sexual tension, popular belief dictates that happy couples stagnate and just don’t make for great entertainment after a while. You need to up the ante to keep things exciting. Luckily, you have one of the oldest tropes in the book at your disposal: the love triangle! Having two people crushing on a character totally highlights the informed awesomeness of the middle spoke and if you’re thrifty, you might even be able to use it to bypass pesky things like character development and individual growth for any of and up to all three of the spokes.
Coincidentally enough, love triangles tend to reinforce misogyny and uphold masculinity no matter their configuration (shocker). Listed below are some of the more recent love triangle configurations I’ve seen (with the shared love object in the middle) and the examples of them. Believe me, it’s far too many. Their implications predictably reinforce gendered hierarchies.
The Ashley-Craig-Manny love triangle went on for several seasons of Degrassi.
Woman/man/woman (everything ever, but most prominent in media marketed to teens)–two women compete for the attention of a man who often has no discernible personality traits. As we all know, masculine validation must be the keystone of a woman’s existence. If there’s anything we want to drill into young girls’ heads early, it’s that they need a man to assert their worth and social presence. Expect catfights and slut shaming. The phrase “You’re not like other girls” will be uttered at some point because the most romantic way to a girl’s heart is to tell her that her entire gender is largely off-putting and irritating. It’s okay though, since the guy is kind and generous enough to find the chosen girl mildly tolerable! Swoon.
Damon, Elena, and Stefan on The Vampire Diaries.
Man/woman/man (Twilight, The Mortal Instruments, Twisted, The VampireDiaries, True Blood, The Hunger Games, the list goes on)–ah, the “faux feminist” love triangle. Putting a lady in the center means that she calls the shots, right? Let those men fight it out for once. In theory, this configuration feels progressive. Women don’t have to tear each other down to win a man’s approval. Female agency can finally come into play. In reality, it’s about as liberating for female characters as choosing between folding laundry or making a sandwich. Masculine ideologies of possessiveness still dominate the scenario. The guys are hellbent on proving their manhood to each other, but usually don’t seem to care what the girl thinks. She’s preemptively demonized for rejecting whoever she doesn’t pick, while viewers venerate the shunned boy as a tragic nice guy undeserving of her conniving ways. Break out your Fedora–the accusations of friendzoning fly all over the place. Funny how a guy’s decision is respected and unquestioned but a girl becomes cold and callous in the same situation. The girl is set up for failure because the only right choice she can make is not to have one. That’s how we got Twilight.
Interestingly, the cast and crew of The Hunger Games have consistently resisted the media’s attempts to pigeonhole the franchise as romantically driven, arguing instead that the core theme of the films revolves around Katniss’ love for her family and her ability to inspire people. Media, take notes.
Ashley (right) finds herself torn over her feelings for both Aiden and Spencer (left) on South of Nowhere.
Woman/woman/man (Bomb Girls, Lost Girl, Glee, South of Nowhere, Skins ambiguously)–rather than handle queer desire tactfully, writers will often kill two birds with one stone and make both the contested woman and the side spoke female suitor look like terrible people. Double-bladed misogyny that transcends sexuality, yay! If the contested lady is queer, expect a lot of lecturing from both sides about how she needs to “grow out of her phase” of deluding herself into thinking she likes the other gender. This is particularly characteristic of the male suitor since he can’t fathom how bisexuality can exist outside of a performance for the male gaze. The queer lady suitor is portrayed as petulantly possessive or aggressive, whether or not she’s closeted. Alternatively, if it’s a case of incompatible orientation or denialism, you’ll likely see some variation of the butch savior, hopelessly yoked to an unrequited crush and yet still willing to sacrifice everything for a girl who could never love her back. Viewers perceive the woman caught in the middle as uncaring or just plain stupid in her shame or obliviousness. The butch savior is equally dehumanized as a deviant martyr.
Bo (center) with Dyson and Lauren on Lost Girl.
To Lost Girl’s credit, Dyson views Lauren as a legitimate romantic rival for Bo, but masculine supremacy is implied in other subtle ways. Given that Bo is a succubus, she needs a constant supply of sex to keep herself strong, which Dyson (a werewolf) is better able to provide then Lauren (a human). Bo and Lauren’s relationship winds up dissolving simply because Lauren cannot keep up with Bo’s sexual appetites and Bo is literally killing herself trying to remain monogamous. Sure, the writers have a supernatural rationale behind the breakup, but it’s still uncomfortably analogous to both the promiscuous bisexual trope and the idea that queer women can’t have truly satisfying sex unless a penis is involved.
(On Glee) Remember when Mercedes had that cringe-worthy crush on Kurt?
Man/man/woman (most depictions of relationships between a straight woman and a gay man)–The only reason I am excluding bisexual man is because I have yet to see a genuine love triangle with a queer man at the center. The stereotypical desperate hag develops a pathetic crush on her gay friend and spends an episode or two being overly clingy and an effort to convince herself that they might be in a relationship one day. Hell, this is essentially the entire premise of Will and Grace. The woman might be territorial and try to stop guys from hitting on her friend. If he has a boyfriend, the couple will either act annoyed or be completely clueless. We are meant to see the woman’s feelings as sad and embarrassing and take the pointless crush that she has gone too long without a real love interest. It’s not even a love triangle really, it’s just another excuse to make fun of women and trivialize and shame them for their emotions.
Why are love triangles used so frequently? They’re empty plot devices that do little to nothing for character development and in fact can drive the audience to hate the characters involved by bringing out all of their most unflattering and indecisive qualities. Triangles may create titillating drama, but it can’t be that difficult to let characters stand on their own two feet individually or show already existing couples facing normal hurdles or, I don’t know, actually being content.
When women get the short end of the stick in love triangles, it perpetuates the belief that women can only be supplementary players in society and can never really be their own person. Women do not exist as a confirmation of masculine control. Women should not be expected to buoy everyone else’s confidence in their gender roles. Love geometry tries to work out the fear of female autonomy. Rather than subjugating women’s emotion to shore up manhood, triangles should explore everyone’s capacity for caring beyond gendered competition. Misogyny should not be the glue that holds supposedly epic romance together at its inception. When all is said and done, perhaps the ladies should simply choose themselves.
There is one thing that Arnow has in common with James – she really fucking hates the mainstream. Throughout the film, she references not wanting to conform to societal norms and complains that everyone’s disapproval stems from a collective brainwashing scheme to make her like everybody else. She echoed a similar contempt for coming-of-age narratives in the Q&A, saying that she didn’t find it realistic to have a protagonist grow up and have their lives together by learning a clichéd life lesson in the end. I totally agree with that. I think coming-of-age stories are incredibly boring and send the wrong message about what adulthood and maturity is supposed to be. However, there is a fine line between subverting pre-established scripts and just meandering aimlessly with zero narrative.
Many people don’t like to watch documentaries. We crave rational narratives and a steadily progressing plot with climax and resolution. Traditional cinema also sets highly unrealistic expectations of romance for the audience, to the point where it’s become almost mandatory for characters to suspend all reality in favor of a whirlwind love story. Filmmaker Joanna Arnow consciously undercuts these desires and takes great care to deny us a comfortable, comprehensible narrative. The problem is she doesn’t do much else. i hate myself chronicles Arnow’s relationship with “racially charged poet-provocateur” James Kepple (her description, not mine). The purpose of the documentary is allegedly for Arnow to determine for herself and her friends whether or not James is boyfriend material.
James being himself. Get used to this asshole because we’ll be seeing far too much of him.
i hate myself feels as vapid and self-absorbed as an episode of Girls adapted into a college screenplay. Arnow is clearly sipping a bit too much of the Lena Dunham koolaid. Namely, we get to watch an entitled white girl from Brooklyn create her own problems and passively refuse to seize any agency because her “struggle” (which is deliberately never outside of her control) is artistic. James essentially exists to make anyone with an invested interest in equality want to light themselves on fire. He is unapologetically misogynistic and racist to an astronomical degree. He’s a caricature of every 4chan and Reddit troll, right down to the fedora. To top it all off, he has a drinking problem and spends the vast majority of his time on camera drunk or indignant or both.
James drunkenly sings after the woman on his left tells him off for using the N-word.
Making matters worse, Arnow just doesn’t seem to care about anything other than making the film. Her dynamic with James initially appears to be your run-of-the-mill plain Jane selling herself short because of low self-esteem and longing for the wild side of life. By the end, you have no sympathy for her and she winds up looking almost as smarmy as James. According to the live Q&A after the screening, it was Arnow’s intention to highlight that she wasn’t a victim and was complicit in some of the problematic aspects of their relationship. She totters after James with her camera as he frequents the Harlem poetry slam scene, dropping the N-word every 90 seconds and adamantly insisting to every person of color within hearing distance that his knowledge of racial politics is superior to theirs. She does nothing to intervene, forcing us to sit through scene after scene of his delusional, inflammatory diatribes and doubtlessly stroking his ego. There is a difference between having flaws and allowing your partner to shit all over a minority in their own community repeatedly to make yourself seem profound. It’s shock value, but at the expense of whom? Arnow would like to have you believe that she nobly sacrificed her own integrity at the stake of gritty realism, but what about all those people who just wanted to hear some goddamn poetry and were instead assaulted by two white kids with a superiority complex?
Spectators of the poetry slam are fed up with James being a racist dickhead.
The premise of the film is paperthin to start with and deteriorates even further as it becomes increasingly clear that Arnow is simply using the documentary as an elaborate way to thumb her nose at anyone she believes couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of her precious psyche…so conveniently pretty much anyone but her. Her family and friends reiterate numerous times that they think James is a terrible person and she should not be dating him. Some of her friends go as far as calling her out on using the relationship as purposeful self-sabotage to satisfy her need for drama and attention. I think we all have friends like Arnow who are exhausting to be around because they’re compulsively addicted to making every platonic and romantic relationship one big protracted ego wank. Arnow’s fixation on validating her own self-importance goes as far as bullying her parents into watching her sex scene with James during the screening of the final product. It was never about James. It’s about proving that she’s important enough both to associate with someone as exciting as him and to anger her loved ones by pissing away her potential and self-respect by association with this douche.
At one point, James’ emotional abuse reduces Arnow to tears.
There is one thing that Arnow has in common with James – she really fucking hates the mainstream. Throughout the film, she references not wanting to conform to societal norms and complains that everyone’s disapproval stems from a collective brainwashing scheme to make her like everybody else. She echoed a similar contempt for coming-of-age narratives in the Q&A, saying that she didn’t find it realistic to have a protagonist grow up and have their lives together by learning a clichéd life lesson in the end. I totally agree with that. I think coming-of-age stories are incredibly boring and send the wrong message about what adulthood and maturity is supposed to be. However, there is a fine line between subverting pre-established scripts and just meandering aimlessly with zero narrative. Although it may seem unfair that I’m dumping most of the blame on Arnow, she herself acknowledges that most people will find James revolting. Since she seems to have deliberately featured him to get a rise out of the audience, I’m not going to waste any more of my time by exhaustively enumerating the ways that he is the world’s biggest piece of shit because frankly I don’t want to give either of them the satisfaction. The most troubling thing to me is that Arnow thinks her story in itself is a philosophical commentary on the human experience that others can learn from when really it’s pure self-indulgence. Any possible sympathetic resonance that viewers who have also found themselves in unhealthy relationships might feel completely evaporates under the weight of her stubborn apathy.
An unlikely voice of wisdom comes from Arnow’s editor and apparent nudism enthusiast Max Karson, who does not put on a single piece of clothing for any of his scenes. I’m assuming that this was another quirky indie decision for lols, but I do admire his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. I just wish everyone and everything in this movie would stop trying so hard to be offkilter. Anyway, Max spends most of his screen time picking on Arnow and criticizing her personal life choices with very little sugarcoating. You almost wonder why they’re friends. Tellingly, whenever he tries to weasel a definitive opinion on her life or relationship out of her that would admit even the tiniest shred of culpability, she becomes as inarticulate as a bashful kindergartner. At one point he observes, “I think you’re so ashamed of yourself that you manipulate other people into saying what you want to say because you can’t take responsibility for anything.” Way to hit the nail on the head, buddy. Needless to say, Max is the character that I identify most with.
Every time James and Arnow get it on, a feminist’s life expectancy is shortened by 10 years.
In the end, Arnow actually shows the finished product to James. To give you an idea of just how shapeless this film is, when he asks her why she included the sex scene, she giggles and says “because it’s porn!” Like many things in her work, I call bullshit here. You’re the director. You know you consciously chose everything for a reason. Her childish disavowal of any coherent explanation for anything redefines grating. I know her aim is to be defiantly immature, but taken to this ludicrous extreme, it dilutes the impact of the film significantly. To James’ credit, he is disgusted to find out that she forced her parents to watch the sex scene and calls her a sadist. You know if James says you have issues, you’re fucked. They start having sex for no reason and stagger off camera before it finally cuts to black.
The title of the film really speaks to all its issues. The lowercase and the emoticon evoke teen angst and suggest a digital form of communication, alluding to the disconnect that many young people feel between themselves and society and reality. The film’s fatal flaw is not that Arnow failed to grow and progress, but rather that she wasn’t even a primary player in her own story and actively worked to dismantle accountability for any of her life choices by unfairly shifting blame onto people who were trying to support her. You can’t pretend other people are puppeteering your life when you’re the one behind the camera.
Arnow may hate herself, but I really just don’t care.
Everyone loves a feel-good story about an awkward ginger falling in love and bonding with his family! About Time follows the life of Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), a young lawyer whose father (Bill Nighy) informs him on his 21st birthday that he has the ability to time travel. Specifically, that all the men in his family have the ability to time travel. I was a little bit perplexed that the women are kept in the dark about the family secret, but I guess it’s a metaphor for paternal bonding or whatever. Tim immediately endeavors to use his newfound gift to find a girlfriend, which feels slightly immature for a guy who’s out of school and in a steady career. Nevertheless, Gleeson keeps the tone light and heartwarming. Tim soon meets Mary (Rachel McAdams) and makes frequent use of his time travel to ensure that every aspect of their relationship development is perfect.
Everyone loves a feel-good story about an awkward ginger falling in love and bonding with his family! About Time follows the life of Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), a young lawyer, whose father (Bill Nighy) informs him on his 21st birthday that he has the ability to time travel. Specifically, that all the men in his family have the ability to time travel. I was a little bit perplexed that the women are kept in the dark about the family secret, but I guess it’s a metaphor for paternal bonding or whatever. Tim immediately endeavors to use his newfound gift to find a girlfriend, which feels slightly immature for a guy who’s out of school and in a steady career. Nevertheless, Gleeson keeps the tone light and heartwarming. Tim soon meets Mary (Rachel McAdams) and makes frequent use of his time travel to ensure that every aspect of their relationship development is perfect.
Tim initially sets his sights on Charlotte.
What I like about Tim is that he’s flawed in a relatively benign way. While we’ve been conditioned as viewers to see the lead roles as starcrossed lovers, despite Tim’s undeniable love for Mary, he’s indiscriminate. He doesn’t really care who he falls in love with as long as he’s in love. As a testament to this, the film devotes a surprisingly large amount of time to showing his failed conquest of his first love, Charlotte (Margot Robbie). Far from the traditional notions of Hollywood romance, Mary arguably only becomes Tim’s true love because she was the first girl to give him a chance. Tim even goes on an ambiguous date with Charlotte while he’s dating Mary, wherein Charlotte predictably expresses playful remorse for initially rejecting him and makes a move. Tim carefully cuts it off just short of cheating – only by a hair’s breadth – to avoid venturing into unsympathetic protagonist territory. (He conveniently runs home to Mary and spontaneously proposes.) I will say that I’m not a fan of bringing Charlotte back into the narrative to encourage the audience to thumb their nose at her and feed into smug Nice Guy vindictiveness. However, I do like that Tim and Mary are just sort of together out of coincidence because it proves that you don’t always need an epic back story or a lot of angst to be happy with someone.
Tim and Mary.
I have some concerns about female agency in this movie. Tim meets Mary several times with varying degrees of success. He redoes their initial conversation so much that he ironically lands a date with her by using her own opinions verbatim from previous attempts. He discovers through his lackluster interactions with Charlotte that even time travel and the clairvoyance that it brings can’t force someone to fall in love with him, but his experiences with Mary suggest otherwise. Sure, Mary was attracted to him from the start and you could conclude that any little tweaks Tim made wouldn’t have that much of an impact if they truly were “meant to be.” Obsessively manipulating every tiny aspect of your relationship to meet your idealized standards doesn’t exactly feel like you’re allowing the chemistry to develop organically. There’s definitely something uncomfortable about picking a random girl as your love object and then meticulously premeditating everything until she’s basically a blank slate for the perfect partner. That’s not really liberating for Mary. It’s the (500) Days of Summer mentality minus the petulant entitlement.
Tim and Kit Kat stick together.
These problematic aspects are mostly redeemed in that the romance isn’t actually the heart of the story. Refreshingly enough, Tim’s relationships with his family quickly come back to the foreground to pack more of an affective punch than sappy a love story ever could on its own. I’ve never seen the main romance as a faux A-plot in a romcom-esque drama and I couldn’t have enjoyed that twist more. The bond between Tim and his father turns out to be the most emotional aspect of the film. At times, I found Tim’s dizzy sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) airy fairy to the point of being almost obnoxiously childlike, but Wilson and Gleeson have a phenomenal, easy chemistry that evens out her frayed edges. They’re one of my favorite brother/sister relationships in recent memory. Although Tim is clearly protective of her, it’s never overbearing or controlling. When Kit Kat turns to drinking to deal with her abusive boyfriend and gets into a car crash, Tim tries unsuccessfully to undo events before realizing that she needs to make the decision to better her life choices on her own. Somewhat implausibly, she has this epiphany in a few short sentences and finds new love and stability with Tim’s geeky best friend Jay (Will Merrick, bizarrely playing Gleeson’s peer despite a ten year age gap). I much prefer Tim and Kit Kat’s relationship as partners in crime to the romanticized possessiveness of brothers over sisters. I also think the fact that Tim was unable to protect her from all the bad things in life and gently encouraged her to make changes herself is much more realistic. People can get wrapped up in their lives and not notice what’s going on with their family, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they love them any less or should feel obligated to beat themselves up. They can still do the best they can as a support system. The only person I wish had been explored more is Tim’s mom. Oh well, I guess you can’t expect everyone to be totally developed. It’s just strange given that everyone else in his family seems so close.
Tim’s dad comforts him after breaking the news of his diagnosis.
A few unexpected plot twists keep things from becoming stale and work to set limits on the God complex of time travel. Tim takes Kit Kat back in time to stop her from meeting her abusive boyfriend after the car crash, which happened to occur on the day of his daughter’s first birthday. Things appear to go off without a hitch until to his horror, he returns home to a completely different child. His dad explains that he can’t go back in time past the birth of his child because it would effectively create a sperm roulette and produce different children every time, meaning that events are set in stone with the birth of each of his future children. This caveat acquires heart wrenching significance when his dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He and Tim continue to spend time together through time travel after his death, but it isn’t long before Mary announces she wants another baby. The meetings between father and son must come to a close. (Although I’m not quite sure how they happen. He can’t time travel because he’s dead. If Tim travels back, isn’t it just his memory of his dad? How does he continue to live? If he is “alive,” it’s a bit rude to leave your dad in purgatory.) Their final scene together is a massive tearjerker. Tim ultimately decides to stop time traveling altogether and live each day to the fullest. Even if you have the power to live every moment again, sometimes the present is perfect enough.
However, for some reason, the siren song of shock value makes writers unable to let sleeping dogs lie. Happiness (or let’s be real, any positivity) just isn’t authentic enough. Queer characters have a bull’s-eye on their backs because their suffering is interpreted as a commentary on the cruelty of the human condition, even if their death has nothing to do with their identity. It’s symbolic! The potential pathos payoff of a queer martyr is too tempting to worry about silly junk like the importance of representation or overcoming adversity. Queer kids, you can totally have a meaningful future, until your death is required for timely social commentary or for the sake of artistic profundity! But you still kind of sort of existed when it was relevant to other people, so isn’t that enough? Ah yes, you can always depend on that token queer waiting in the slaughterhouse when you’ve run out of ideas and/or creative integrity.
Skins and Degrassi are just two recent examples of this unfortunately common trope.
Queer representation has increased steadily over the past few years. Like all characters, some portrayals are better than others. It unfortunately seems to be an unspoken rule that writers have a lot more room with laziness or clichés when it comes to creating queer characters. The logic behind minority characters and particularly queer characters tends to follow the philosophy of “make ‘em as one dimensional as you want, you get a gold star for just admitting that they exist!” Thus anyone who isn’t a cis, straight, able-bodied white male has a lot of hurdles to climb. Many writers have recently expressed enthusiasm about LGBT community inclusion, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Really, how many unrequited crush storylines can you do? Often, “queer” becomes code for “resident narrative punching bag and straight romance prop.”
Naomi Campbell (top) and Adam Torres (bottom).
Nonetheless, sometimes writers strike gold. Two prime examples include Naomi Campbell (Skins) and Adam Torres (Degrassi), a lesbian and female to male (FTM) trans* guy respectively. Naomi (Lily Loveless) is everyone’s favorite snark knight with an interest in politics and a growing attraction to Emily (Kat Prescott). Naomi grapples with her sexuality, her fear of vulnerability, and fierce opposition from Emily’s twin sister Katie. After a river of tears and several passionate monologues, Naomi and Emily, aka Naomily, finally get their happy ending. They even survive a godawful love square. The queer community fell as deeply in love with Naomi and Emily as they did with each other and the couple was almost universally hailed as the most iconic queer coming-of-age story of our generation. Adam (Jordan Todosey) faces similar obstacles. Although he is confident in his identity, he faces constant opposition from his reluctant mother as well as bullying and harassment from his peers, which drives him to self-harm. He fights for everything from sports participation to bathroom rights. Adding insult to injury, he is rejected by a slew of girls because they can’t accept him as authentically male. In an ironic twist, he ultimately finds himself happy in love with an extremely conservative Christian girl, Becky (Sarah Fisher). Degrassi received tons of positive press for introducing TV’s first transgendered teen.
Of course, the characters and the execution of their representation weren’t without fault. Once you strip away all the jaded hipster dialogue and pretty outfits and tortured sexual tension, Naomily’s storyline is fairly formulaic – one person experiences perpetual gay panic while their dogged love interest gets dragged through the mud and back into the closet. Naomi’s involvement with politics only functioned as a premise for her to interact initially with Emily and then completely disappeared. Naomi and Emily’s sole purpose individually is to be hopelessly codependent on the other, so much so that most fans just refer to them by their portmanteau. They never existed outside of each other’s narratives and their relationship was the entirety of their character development. By the same token, I can’t name an Adam plot that didn’t relate directly or indirectly to him being transgendered. The fact that most of Adam’s love interests bypassed him to date his cisgendered brother Drew sends a painfully deliberate, albeit possibly unintentional, message to the audience. In spite of everything, the incredibly compelling performances of the actresses allowed these characters to transcend stereotypical stumbles and become sympathetic and relatable. Naomi and Adam were clear fan favorites.
Naomi and Emily (top) and Adam and Becky (bottom) being adorable.
However, for some reason, the siren song of shock value makes writers unable to let sleeping dogs lie. Happiness (or let’s be real, any positivity) just isn’t authentic enough. Queer characters have a bull’s-eye on their backs because their suffering is interpreted as a commentary on the cruelty of the human condition, even if their death has nothing to do with their identity. It’s symbolic! The potential pathos payoff of a queer martyr is too tempting to worry about silly junk like the importance of representation or overcoming adversity. Queer kids, you can totally have a meaningful future, until your death is required for timely social commentary or for the sake of artistic profundity! But you still kind of sort of existed when it was relevant to other people, so isn’t that enough? Ah yes, you can always depend on that token queer waiting in the slaughterhouse when you’ve run out of ideas and/or creative integrity.
Here’s where the shit hits the fan. As a longtime devotee of both Skins and Degrassi and someone who was deeply emotionally invested in both Adam and Naomi as individuals and their potential to attest to and bring about an evolving social landscape long overdue, I’m about to get unapologetically salty. Buckle up.
Naomi and Emily finished their original arc with an emotional reconciliation.
Everything had turned out well for Naomi and Emily. Skins changes casts every two years, so we hadn’t seen them since 2010. The show is notoriously scant with mentions of previous characters once they’ve moved on. Fan reaction was thus understandably elated when it was announced that the couple would return for the show’s final “celebratory” season this past July, which claimed to serve as an updated epilogue for a handful of popular characters. Though Naomi and Emily were somewhat nonsensically shoehorned into an episode with another character as the main focus, everyone was excited to see what new challenges they were facing. Optimism is an Achilles’ heel when it comes to the Skins franchise because the writers conflate maturity and character development with total disillusionment and misery. Showrunners and father/son co-creators Brian Elsley and Jamie Brittain passed the torch of Naomily to little sister Jess. Nepotism is always the surefire way to have a job well done! That’s like letting your younger sister play with your favorite Barbie dolls and giving her full permission to toss them down the garbage disposal. Still, Jamie himself stated that Naomi and Emily get married in the future. The outcome couldn’t be too catastrophic, right?
Naomi attempts to comfort Emily as they face the reality of her terminal diagnosis.
Think again! Naomi and Emily are reduced to window dressing as the primary character Effy enjoys a glamorous life in the London stock investment world. Effy and Naomi are roommates while Emily does a photography internship in New York (the first time Emily has been given an interest outside of Naomi). Proving her mediocrity as a writer, Jess saddles Naomi with cancer and makes her entire plot – a B-plot for crying out loud – about the impact her illness has on Effy. We have less than an hour to get reacquainted with a character that we haven’t seen in three years, you give her a terminal illness in the B-plot, and the fucking plot isn’t even technically about her. Naomi decides to keep Emily in the dark to protect her because that’s ~the noble thing to do, alluding to their fragile trust issues after mutual infidelity. I don’t even understand why Kat was in the credits when Emily has so little screen time. Emily visits Naomi once early on in blissful ignorance and they have sex while moaning pornographically as Effy tries to get it on with her love interest. Haha, the hilarity of gay sex. Naomi then deteriorates super graphically, vomiting in Effy’s lap and eventually being confined to a hospital bed. When it’s confirmed that the unnamed cancer is terminal, Effy caves and tells Emily. The last we see of Naomily is Emily curled up sobbing by Naomi’s side, with Naomi’s fate left ambiguous but pretty much sealed.
The backlash was intense and venomous. Naomily was one of the few queer couples with a solidly positive ending. Sure, plenty of people would argue that their cheating storyline was weak as hell (myself included), but that was redeemed for many when Naomi won Emily back for good. The ink was dry, their chapter was closed, etc. There was no reason to mess with a good thing, save for the obvious elephant in the room: ratings and easy exploitation. Naomily was the piece de resistance of the franchise and their reputation arguably preceded and eclipsed that of the show itself. The PR team knew that Naomily fans were a large demographic. However, the ratings ploy aspect of it isn’t even that logical, since it was already announced that the series was canceled before filming on the final season started. Accusations and mudslinging began to fly. The Brittains have had a remarkably antagonistic relationship to the Skins fan base. We are talking levels of contempt that would put Ryan Murphy and the Glee fandom to shame. As the seasons wore on and the gimmicks got cheaper, fans became increasingly vocal about their disappointment. Given the Brittain’s penchant for routine, pointless character death and the immense outcry that it always provoked, Naomi’s death was seen as a blatant middle finger. Heather Hogan, AfterEllen contributor and former staunch defendant of all previous Skins fuckery due to Naomily’s flawlessness, announced that she would not be reviewing the episode precisely because it needlessly extinguished a shining example for an entire community. When you’ve lost your most irrational stan, that’s when you know you’ve shit the bed. For their part, the Brittain siblings responded to the onslaught of genuine dismay with all the grace and poise of constipated five-year-olds denied their nap time. Jess deleted her Twitter multiple times and in response to Heather calling them out on their contribution to the alarming frequency of queer women character deaths, Jamie tweeted back “I couldn’t care less.”
The wound was so deep that people vowed to turn their backs on the beloved actresses, questioning whether they knew about the outcome of the script when they signed on for the project. On one hand, it’s important to remember that actors are just doing their job and everyone has to make a living. However, the sense of betrayal definitely resonates on some level. If Lily and Kat did know that Naomi would end up on her deathbed, it’s a little depressing to think that they would be willing to self-destruct characters that launched their careers for an easy paycheck, when they themselves have spoken of the overwhelmingly positive response to and significance of Naomily. Jess defended herself by stating that even if Naomi did die, it effectively didn’t matter because Naomi and Emily would always be gay. I tried to make a joke here, but I couldn’t because the argument is too nonsensical. The stupidity transcends my wit. I didn’t know that was possible.
Adam’s departure was equally shoddy. Following the launch of his epic romance, he quickly faded into the background. Rumors were swirling for months that Jordan Todosey wanted to leave Degrassi. There were also concerns about Jordan’s shelf life as Adam, given that several of Adam’s storylines revolved around his decision to begin testosterone treatments and Jordan isn’t trans*. This is one of those instances that underscores the importance of casting someone who actually matches the character’s circumstances in real life, although Jordan’s performance was consistently strong. Normally I loathe casting multiple actors to play the same character, but on this rare occasion, it would have worked, especially since Jordan wanted to leave anyway. They could have gotten a trans* guy to take over the role post-testosterone. I should have anticipated that Adam’s actual resolution would be much more asinine.
Adam has a chat with Imogen and showcases his, um, updated style.
Adam suddenly returns front and center for the early block of season 13 episodes, which should have been our first red flag. All of the previous meticulousness that had gone into making Adam look masculine has vanished and his style throughout his final return is basically just Jordan awkwardly shoved into frumpy layered flannel and baseball caps, making her look more like a lesbian suburban soccer mom than a 17-year-old boy. I know Jordan had been phoning it in with Adam and growing her hair out, but this was just embarrassing. I don’t mean to imply that trans* guys who don’t present as traditionally masculine are less legitimate, but letting Adam running around with a mullet and what appears to be unisex 80s clothing from the local Goodwill does a deep disservice to his character in that his central concern has always been passing as masculine and sometimes even cisgendered.
Don’t worry, this incredibly disturbing visual serves no purpose! He’ll be dead by the end of the commercial break.
Anyway, what better use of Adam’s last few episodes of screen time than a gratuitous and nonsensical love triangle! The writers answered the prayers of many a fangirl in the most unsavory way possible by putting him at the center of a girl-on-girl rivalry as soon as he was in a stable and loving relationship. Long story short, Adam and Becky have a fight, prompting Adam to make out with his friend Imogen. He feels so wracked with guilt that he immediately jumps in the car and texts Becky. The distraction causes him to crash into a tree. We have the lovely treat of seeing him bruised and bandaged in a coma for all of one episode before he quietly passes away. Vomit. Fans were obviously upset. Showrunner Stefan Brogren bailed himself out by advising fans via Twitter not to watch Degrassi if they don’t like it. He must have time traveled all the way back to sixth grade to come up with that zinger. Since Adam’s death, some half-assed attempts to turn him into a sacrificial lamb for texting and driving awareness have fallen flat because a) you could’ve given that plot to any other fucking character b) are you really doubling down on PSA duty with the trans* kid? and c) his original intent in terms of “audience lessons” (if you’re going to reduce him to that) was done with such care and empathy that it makes this plot seem like a bag of horse shit. Letting him by defined postmortem by texting and driving spits on his legacy. I have the urge to insert that middle finger gif every other sentence.
In abstract, the writers’ defenses of their chosen character deaths were lazy yet plausible. The Brittains pointed out that many young people have their lives tragically cut short by cancer and Brogren essentially made the same argument for texting and driving. Both statements are true. In those situations, death does not discriminate. But you can’t sit there and honestly tell me that those decisions were pure coincidence, even if only on the unconscious level. Really, you just happened to kill the LGBT character? That’s like robbing someone’s house and then claiming that they can’t prosecute you because some burglaries go unsolved, despite the fact that you’d been scoping out their house for months and knew they were vulnerable. As for why this explanation is fucking ridiculous on a show specific level, Naomi’s appearance was anticipated to be a 45 min. ratings victory lap about what she had been up to since going to university. You could have shown her cleaning pools, for fuck’s sake, as long as she had a few cute scenes with Emily. We hadn’t seen her in three years and we aren’t ever going to see her again, so why on earth would you choose to nuke the crown jewel of your family franchise with a cliché cancer tragedy fapfest? On a similar note, Degrassi has been known for writing off characters in as little as a single line of dialogue or simply by never mentioning them again. Past explanations for character departure include going to Kenya and moving to Paris to model. You’re telling me you couldn’t send Adam to Europe for a fancy testosterone trial or something?
Overall, the petulant indignation of these writers in response to sincere criticism of snuffing out crucial representation speaks volumes about just how much further the media has to go in terms of its handling of queer subjects. If even the most three-dimensional portrayals can be milked as award bait and then thrown under the bus for any totally non-sequitur issue of the week, it isn’t really all that progressive, is it? Groundbreaking would be showing that queer people have a new chapter worth living for, even if they have to fight for it. Groundbreaking would be showing queer characters happy in relationships without immediately punishing them with supposedly random acts of fate. Groundbreaking would be showing that queer people can and do go on to lead successful, fulfilling lives.
Writers, what you’re doing isn’t groundbreaking. It’s self-serving. You are jumping on a bandwagon and then cutting your own creations loose the second they become inconvenient. You can’t dust your hands off and tell me shit happens. Try again. Push harder. Instead of shocking me with publicity stunts, make me marvel at just how committed you are to actually telling a character’s story authentically . Lastly, don’t you dare fucking tell me to sit down and shut up. You made a big show of initially bringing our community’s “real” stories into the spotlight and now you have the gall to cherry pick our reaction and whine that we should have been grateful for the inevitable shit sandwich all along? We have precious few torchbearers of alternative identity. The capitalization on such fragile issues is sickening and myopically focused on garnering brownie points for the status quo. I can assure you that the impact of these characters transcends the incubator of your tragically narrow mind and maybe that makes you bitter. At the end of the day, in spite of the most idiotic departures you can think of, these characters symbolize an intense hope and tenacity for those who might not have any other allies in their corner.
For all these reasons and more, I will not allow you to quietly bury your queers.
Masters of Sex is the most compelling period drama I’ve seen in quite some time, and trust me, I watch a lot of period pieces. I will admit that sometimes the stiffness of the dialogue and the character interaction can get a bit dry – the audience understands that social conventions were different in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone was robotic round-the-clock. I feel the writers have a tendency to use era authenticity as a cop-out for lack of emotional depth or creativity. Though it’s only been four episodes, Masters of Sex boldly rips the buttons off of the post-World War II stereotype of prudishness and conservatism. Below are just a few of the reasons why you should give the show a try, if you haven’t already.
Masters of Sex is the most compelling period drama I’ve seen in quite some time, and trust me, I watch a lot of period pieces. I will admit that sometimes the stiffness of the dialogue and the character interaction can get a bit dry – the audience understands that social conventions were different in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone was robotic round-the-clock. I feel the writers have a tendency to use era authenticity as a cop-out for lack of emotional depth or creativity. Though it’s only been four episodes, Masters of Sex boldly rips the buttons off of the post-World War II stereotype of prudishness and conservatism. Below are just a few of the reasons why you should give the show a try, if you haven’t already.
1. The show is based on real people.
Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson: fiction vs. reality.
William Masters and Virginia Johnson were a gynecologist and sexologist respectively who pioneered the first study of human sexual response. Their collaboration and the controversy of their subject matter is the basis of the show, which is in turn an adaptation of Master’s biography. Masters and Johnson were later married for 20 years and then divorced. This may or may not be a spoiler for their TV counterparts (played by Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan), judging by the rising belligerent sexual tension established between them. Not to mention they are responsible for much of our common sexual knowledge today.
2. Female sexuality literally takes center stage.
The women are a bit skeptical of Bill’s contraption.
Masters initially becomes curious about women in his study because he cannot fathom how or why a woman would fake an orgasm. He enlists the help of Betty (Annaleigh Ashford), a prostitute, who convinces the other women in her brothel to take part in the research. His primary goal is to delineate the stages of an orgasm, so he and Johnson spend a lot of time watching women masturbate. Admittedly, you should probably watch this show alone because to the unaware observer, it looks a hell of a lot like softcore porn. Also, there is some kind of giant glass dildo that’s similar to a space probe with a camera to observe physiological changes. Talk about invasive.
Joking aside, there are deeper dynamics at play here. Their time spent at the brothel gives the relatively affluent Masters and Johnson a gritty glimpse at working-class life in the struggle for survival. The myth of the ideal 1950s woman as an innocent, almost Victorian vessel of purity also starts to unravel as more and more women of all backgrounds begin to join the study and seem to know exactly what to do when prompted, albeit not without a little embarrassment.
It’s true that Masters solicits women partially because he thinks that no men would be interested in going solo for the study. However, the women turn out to be a gold mine of scientific revelations and sexual understanding.
3. Queer characters are humanized and perceived as equals worthy of respect.
Betty doesn’t have time for your nonsense.
Really, if one more period piece hides behind the excuse of the era and cultural context to get away with another tired “masochistic gay, cue violins” plot I’m going to scream. Luckily for me, the instances of queerness that we do see are pretty bad ass, confident people. Betty happens to be a lesbian, a frank, self-admitted detail that Bill finds perplexing when she asks for the run-of-the-mill Playboy magazines to masturbate to. (Johnson quickly put an end to his grumbling by countering, “Isn’t an orgasm an orgasm?”) Betty even has a lover, although we never see her on screen. She develops a friendship with Johnson and particularly Masters, who both go out of their way to express concern that she isn’t being true to herself or her lover when she starts to contemplate marrying a man for financial stability.
Masters reacts with predictable uneasiness when Betty recruits gay male prostitutes to participate in his study without his knowledge. To his credit, he still doesn’t outright refuse when two of the men offer to “put on a show” for him. He throws a hissy fit about only having data from deviants after his study is repeatedly denied funding, but ultimately rallies to the defense of the everyday men who visit the hustlers, proving that male homosexuality isn’t as deranged as 1950s masculinity would like to believe.
4. The characters are realistically flawed without creating a black-and-white morality.
Libby tries to connect with Bill.
Bill Masters’ Achilles’ heel is that he’s married to his job and his job is all about sex, which naturally deflates his domestic life and his passion for his wife, Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald). Libby has the air of a fresh-faced Betty Draper before the bitterness and alcoholism took its toll. The main source of strain on their marriage is their struggle with infertility. They genuinely try to make the other happy, although Libby is definitely the stereotypical flower of a trophy wife withering under her husband’s lack of communication and emotional availability. She may appear to be a bauble of a woman, but she’s sensitive and perceptive. You aren’t exactly rooting for Bill to stray from her.
Johnson is a single mother of two who holds her head high despite being twice divorced. She doesn’t shy away from casual sex and she has no tolerance for that whiny friendzoned bullshit. She contemplates Masters’ preposition that they should sleep together “for the study.” On one hand, you want them to sleep together to act on their chemistry, but on the other, you hope Virginia is levelheaded and ethical enough to value her budding friendship with Libby over an exploratory one night stand that would lead to the most cliché collapse of bonds between women.
The narrative consistently confuses you since you find yourself supporting potentially bad decisions on the characters’ behalf because you understand their perspective. Sympathy and empathy with flaws in mind – the cornerstone of strong characterization!
5. Masters of Sex isn’t Mad Men…and that’s a good thing.
The Masters cast.
Due to the similarity of the time period, some have drawn comparisons between Masters of Sex and Mad Men. Yes, the style is drool-worthy and good ol’ boys club mentality is in full effect, but the comparisons should end there. There are a few formulaic echoes: the hard working introvert stuck in a dead end marriage partners up with the secretary to discover some deeper philosophy about the human experience via their collaboration. However, Masters of Sex isn’t afraid to display the chaos bubbling beneath the surface of the prim and proper pressures that society presents. Instead of having to hyper analyze every single glance or deadpan line of dialogue for hidden meaning, the characters wear their intentions on their sleeves. They’re lost and determined and uncertain and arrogant all at the same time. It’s glorious.
Masters of Sex is a breath of fresh air for the genre. Each episode is a relished, slow drag on a cigarette.
Berkowitz does a great job of consciously channeling the look and mannerisms of Zooey’s persona as a means of illustrating that Alex and Zooey are birds of a feather, but not in the aloof Manic Pixie Dream Girl way that might be alienating. Alex is endearing by sheer force of her naïveté and conviction. You really do root for her to find Zooey, even if her behavior may sometimes teeter on prompting a restraining order. The series’ charm stems from its full-fledged embrace of its own zaniness. One description on the official website declares that Me and Zooey D. “is about believing in your dreams and pursuing them like a stalker.”
Ari was kind enough to do a little Q&A about the show and even teased us with some possibilities for season two.
Admit it – we all fantasize about meeting a celebrity. Some of us are…a little more determined than others. Such is the case with Alex (Ari Berkowitz), a starry-eyed Ohio native who moves to LA along with her friends Haley (Brittany Belland) and Chris (Ben Smith) in hopes of pursuing careers in show business. Alex’s personal and professional aspirations center around becoming Zooey Deschanel’s personal assistant and eventual best friend. Her efforts to track down Zooey are chronicled in Me and Zooey D., a six-part web series available to watch on YouTube.
Alex sings to Zooey with a ukulele at the end of every episode
Berkowitz does a great job of consciously channeling the look and mannerisms of Zooey’s persona as a means of illustrating that Alex and Zooey are birds of a feather, but not in the aloof Manic Pixie Dream Girl way that might be alienating. Alex is endearing by sheer force of her naïveté and conviction. You really do root for her to find Zooey, even if her behavior may sometimes teeter on prompting a restraining order. The series’ charm stems from its full-fledged embrace of its own zaniness. One description on the official website declares that Me and Zooey D. “is about believing in your dreams and pursuing them like a stalker.”
Ari was kind enough to do a little Q&A about the show and even teased us with some possibilities for season two.
Bitch Flicks: First and foremost, what originally attracted you to the series?
Ari Berkowitz: I watch Elf over Christmas every year. I LOVE how Will Ferrel’s character is so unabashedly excited about everything. He’s super naive, but also full of joy! I wanted to try and write a similar character that was so endearing that their obsession ceased to be creepy or weird. And that’s what I tried to do with Alex!
I picked Zooey because I already had her glasses and bangs –so the hardest part was over. It also helped that Zooey was in Elf. I thought she would be a really fun subject matter, and I relish any opportunity to write original songs…to a ukulele I don’t actually know how to play.
BF: What prompted you to use YouTube as a medium for the series?
AB: We picked YouTube because we wanted it to be available to a larger audience. We considered Vimeo, but casual Zooey fans don’t seem to just stumble upon Vimeo webseries.
YouTube was also great because it allowed us to build our own website (or have our baller webdesigner, Alex Lew, build it). Then we just embed the videos! I think WheresZooey.com is fabulous because it allows us to have our episodes, blog, and contact all in one place!
BF: You play Alex, a girl who is more than a little infatuated with Zooey Deschanel. Do you have any celebrity obsessions?
AB: I did a project with James Franco a few years ago, and I was pretty starstruck for the first few months of that. It helped me to be a little calmer with my celebrity obsessions when I finally moved out to LA. Although, I still have a pretty elaborate daydream about becoming BFFs with Amy Poehler. Also, Barbra Streisand.
BF: The last episode ended on quite the cliffhanger! Are there plans in the works for a possible season two?
AB: We would be so excited to do a second season! We had an awesome team working on the show. My director, Hunter Wolk, is an all-star. He and I have talked a little about what we’d like to do with another season. Let’s just say I’ve been working on my Mindy Kaling impression.
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To learn more about Me and Zooey D., check out their website at WheresZooey.com.
In terms of plot and character, Runner Runner leaves a lot to be desired. Justin Timberlake plays Richie Furst (Rich First, come on), an online gambler who has to risk it all to earn enough tuition to complete his master’s degree at Princeton. After realizing the scam behind a suspicious loss, he finds himself sucked into the seedy poker underbelly of Costa Rica and under the thumb of his ruthless American boss, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). They get territorial over shared one-dimensional love interest Rebecca (Gemma Arterton) to add some manliness. An FBI agent (Anthony Mackle) tries to blackmail Richie with exile in order to take out Block. Eighty percent of the movie is Justin Timberlake looking confused or angry while other people monologue at him. We are supposed to really care about whether or not Richie makes it out of there before the house of cards comes crashing down, despite the fact that he has little to no character depth. Block really likes alligators. Conclusion: Internet poker is even more of a snooze fest than I originally thought.
In terms of plot and character, Runner Runner leaves a lot to be desired. Justin Timberlake plays Richie Furst (Rich First, come on), an online gambler who has to risk it all to earn enough tuition to complete his master’s degree at Princeton. After realizing the scam behind a suspicious loss, he finds himself sucked into the seedy poker underbelly of Costa Rica and under the thumb of his ruthless American boss, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). They get territorial over shared one-dimensional love interest Rebecca (Gemma Arterton) to add some manliness. An FBI agent (Anthony Mackle) tries to blackmail Richie with exile in order to take out Block. Eighty percent of the movie is Justin Timberlake looking confused or angry while other people monologue at him. We are supposed to really care about whether or not Richie makes it out of there before the house of cards comes crashing down, despite the fact that he has little to no character depth. Block really likes alligators. Conclusion: Internet poker is even more of a snooze-fest than I originally thought.
Richie tries to play it cool.
Given the recent media frenzy around the series finale of Breaking Bad, I started to really think about about America’s obsession with (white) white collar crime. It’s no secret that many of our movies and television shows revolve around white guys pulling off meticulous financial schemes or smoothly sauntering their way through government corruption and drug rings. Part of the intended fascination with Runner Runner is the idea that Richie would have to resort to such desperate measures even as a Princeton man. Audiences (particularly white middle-class audiences) are captivated by the idea that all the privilege and power of whiteness and white masculinity sometimes isn’t enough to give you everything you want out of life or, shockingly, control fate. “Turning to the dark side” definitely has a racialized element. Since crime is almost always explicitly coded as nonwhite, especially in media, writers will often go to great lengths to differentiate their protagonist from your run-of-the-mill criminal. As a result, white characters are usually only involved in crimes that are highly cerebral and require an incredible amount of power networking and/or a ridiculously esoteric skill set. Weirdly, Richie represents the epitome of this mindset in his lazy execution. Who needs solid plot or a relatable cast when you get to watch an upper-middle-class white boy throwing his money and future around? Instant scandal!
Block propositions Richie.
The film takes this philosophy and runs with it (har har) in almost laughably stereotypical ways. Upon discovering that he lost all his money in a fixed online poker game, Richie immediately drops everything and flies straight to Costa Rica to confront Block. Block easily seduces him into staying by offering him a hefty salary. If only it were literal seduction, this film would have been a little more interesting. Within three months, Richie is living a comfortable life as Block’s right-hand man. Never mind that he went there not speaking a word of the language and specifically to get the money to pay for his degree. I guess we’re just supposed to assume that his exams and diploma are frozen indefinitely until he decides to return to New Jersey. Welcome to white boy land, where reality can be shaped to cater to your every whim! People of color, both male and female, are used to personify Costa Rica as the nexus of sex and sin. Every other shot shows Richie navigating through substance fueled parties, conversing with greasy, potbellied honchos as they halfheartedly grope gaggles of prostitutes teetering around with champagne. Notably, Richie resists all offers of indulgence with the exception of Rebecca (conveniently a white upper-class woman), designating himself as “pure” and leaving everyone else to be consumed by their own vices. The hypocrisy inherent in such a sentiment is best exemplified when Richie’s father, a doomed gambling addict, nobly offers to sacrifice himself to the bookies so that Richie no longer has baggage preventing his escape. In contrast, the vast majority of people of color who have their lives ruined by similar schemes are portrayed as getting their just desserts.
Rebecca spends a lot of time looking glamorous and contemplative.
Women are also given the short end of the stick, to the point where there is almost nothing to analyze to begin with. Rebecca is the most watered down high-stakes damsel in distress that I’ve seen in recent memory. She may as well be a figment of Richie’s imagination because she only seems to float in and out when he needs advice or encouragement. They have sex once after a flurry of coy banter and beyond that share a few private conversations about the impending implosion of the scam while looking seductive. There is no basis for any alleged emotional connection between them at all. We’re told that Rebecca can’t leave Block and we are meant to feel sympathetic towards her plight, but the narrative never bothers to give her any background, motive, or ambition. Her sole purpose is to reinforce the hero/villain dichotomy between Richie and Block by exaggerating feminine vulnerability. It makes it hard to cheer when Richie and Rebecca finally escape Block’s clutches and fly off on a private jet into the sunset. This couple is about as compelling as a pair of used napkins.
If the film had actually taken the time to examine the inner workings of online gambling, it may have been suspenseful or at the very least informative. Instead, we are forced to contend with lukewarm machismo and endless male posturing from start to finish. Director Brad Furman really should’ve known when to fold.
Barbara retains her mystique as long as she continues to refuse to sleep with Jon, meaning that he actually has to put effort into courting her. Upon discovering her fascination with romantic comedies, Jon playfully gripes in the voiceover about how she’s delusional and those things never happen in real life. From that point onward, like any good self-deprecating genre film, the same swelling music plays any time Jon and Barbara share a romantic moment. Additionally, the same thumping club music pops up whenever Jon sizes up a new conquest. Jon and Barbara both use media as a crutch to validate fantasies about relationships, yet are comically incapable of recognizing their shared escapism because they insist that the other’s pastime is a bastardization of social dynamics, which neither of them actually understand. Oh, you two!
I’m a big Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan, so needless to say I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Don Jon, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. From its premise, Don Jon sounds like an edgy deconstruction of the typical Hollywood love story: Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a porn addict, falls for Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who is obsessed with romantic comedies. Naturally, both of them claim that the other’s fixation is unhealthy and fake. I was curious to see which genre would ultimately end up condemned, since these types of romances usually only work if one person “reforms” the other. The result is unexpected, but the film manages to pole vault over the stereotypical trappings of both the narrative and the genre.
Jon attends church with Barbara and his family.
First and foremost, Jon is a Jersey boy to the core. His family is strictly Italian Catholic and almost never shown outside of church or having family dinner over pasta in the living room. In particular, the presence of the church is ubiquitous throughout the film. Jon diligently attends confession every week, despite having no intention or desire to change his porn habits. His punishment is always the same – reciting 20 prayers. Later on, he even expresses disappointment that the consequence remains unchanged even after he truthfully admits that he hasn’t masturbated all week. The faceless, monotone priest allegedly giving him moral guidance on the other side of the sliding grate is a clear commentary on the apathy of religious institutions in terms of the lack of investment in the individual. For all his swagger, Jon is a man who craves structure and validation. His disillusionment with the church is the catalyst to his realization that maybe he isn’t the only one who sees what they want to see.
Jon wastes no time with seducing Barbara.
Jon’s porn addiction represents a merger between the instant gratification of the digital age with masculine entitlement, spawning his sexual existentialist crisis. He confesses to the audience he can’t understand why he doesn’t find real sex as satisfying as porn, even though he regularly gets laid. While he rationalizes this compulsion as a commonplace marker of manliness, his inability to get total pleasure from anything other than Internet clips also creates a distinct anxiety around his masculinity. As a result, Jon and his friends are predictably and almost methodically misogynistic as they routinely comb the clubs for the next conquest, rating women on a scale of one to the mythical perfect 10, which they call a “dime.” Barbara enters and captures Jon’s attention. She acts coquettish but resists Jon’s attempts to close the deal, leaving him intrigued. Of course, not immediately sleeping with someone signals a female character’s potential for exceptionalism to both the protagonist and the viewer, especially in a film where sex objects and exploitation are (excuse the pun) a dime a dozen. While the objectification of women rages unchecked, homophobia remains surprisingly absent or unmentioned, relegated to an offhand comment by Jon about how it’s annoying to accidentally climax right when the camera pans to the man.
Jon enjoys some “personal time.”
As a brief side note, while the film is primarily a critique on society’s relationship to women, sex, and pornography, I do admire Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s consistent examination of male objectification in film. I fell in love with his dorky charm in (500) Days of Summer (more on that phenomenon in a minute) and his understated suaveness in Inception. For someone who is so damn attractive, the man sure has a knack for making moments of supposed erotic titillation consciously unsexy. He turns the cinematic gaze back on itself. While we get plenty of cleavage, short dresses, and backside shots from the women, the voyeurism of Jon only goes as far as repeatedly watching him masturbate. It’s true that you could chalk this up to typical Hollywood gender conventions, but it’s worth noting that Joseph Gordon-Levitt implicates the viewer in Jon’s passive absorption of porn. There’s something more than a little intrusive about being forced to watch his blank faced expression until he ejaculates without emotion. It has none of the intimacy or romance of idealized sex in Hollywood. Perhaps Joseph Gordon-Levitt is suggesting that the general moviegoing experience is somewhat masturbatory in that many of us watch movies to escape reality and disconnect our brains, just as Jon uses porn to fuel unrealistic expectations of women and avoid emotional vulnerability.
Cue cheesy music.
Barbara retains her mystique as long as she continues to refuse to sleep with Jon, meaning that he actually has to put effort into courting her. Upon discovering her fascination with romantic comedies, Jon playfully gripes in the voiceover about how she’s delusional and those things never happen in real life. From that point onward, like any good self-deprecating genre film, the same swelling music plays any time Jon and Barbara share a romantic moment. Additionally, the same thumping club music pops up whenever Jon sizes up a new conquest. Jon and Barbara both use media as a crutch to validate fantasies about relationships, yet are comically incapable of recognizing their shared escapism because they insist that the other’s pastime is a bastardization of social dynamics, which neither of them actually understand. Oh, you two!
Never has a college discussion been this raunchy.
Their relationship progresses quickly, with Jon even introducing Barbara to his family. A great Don Jon drinking game would be to take a shot every time Joseph Gordon-Levitt or especially Scarlett Johansson call each other “baby”. Mother of God, these two drop the B-word more than a Justin Bieber music video. For a while, the plot veers toward your typical “good woman reforms troubled man” fanfare as she compels him to alter his way of life through subtle encouragements. Some of them seem a bit controlling, like her insistence that Jon can’t clean his own apartment anymore and must hire a maid. Others point towards Barbara acting as cheerleading girlfriend wanting her boyfriend to better himself. She convinces Jon to take a night class to further his education during a steamy dry humping session in the hallway outside her apartment, working him up until he agrees and then rewarding him by deliberately causing him to jizz his pants. Barbara exposes the hypocrisy in Jon’s perception of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. She might withhold sex, but that doesn’t mean that she’s above using seduction to manipulate people into getting what she wants. I just like the idea that rushing into sex isn’t classy, but intentionally making your boyfriend ejaculate in public is totally okay with them. What is this, a middle school dance?
Esther introduces herself to Jon.
Jon tries to hide his porn from Barbara even after they start sleeping together, knowing that she disapproves. She ultimately catches him in the act and dumps him. At the night class, Jon meets Esther (Julianne Moore), who mocks him for struggling to watch porn in secret on his phone. She gives him a classic German stag film in an attempt to broaden his horizons and increase his taste level. Given Esther’s aging flower child demeanor, I thought that she was just going to act as Jon’s porn Yoda until she rehabilitated him enough to send him running back to Barbara. Jon and Esther begin an unusual courtship that contains all of the physical spark and emotional intimacy that he was trying to convince himself he had with Barbara. Esther reminds him that sex is a two-way street and reveals that her husband and son recently died in a car accident. This confession leads into the most poignant sex scene of the film, signifying Jon finally “losing” himself and appreciating his partner. I can honestly say that I never thought I would see Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Julianne Moore in bed together, but they have excellent chemistry. It’s weird that Esther is the “true” love interest when the trailers largely never mentioned Moore.
Esther bonds with Jon.
What’s really peculiar is the flat resolution of Barbara’s character. Don Jon almost feels like two different films sutured together because of the complete mood shift between leading ladies. Rather than Esther serving as an introspective fling or love triangle fodder, she helps Jon realize that he wants nothing to do with Barbara. The exes have a brief conversation for closure at a café, during which Barbara appears vapid and callous. Jon scolds her for expecting her partner to sacrifice everything and do whatever she wants, a criticism she brushes off with pouting indifference before vanishing for good. It is disappointing that Barbara’s infatuation with romantic comedies was only used to create a zany opposites attract vibe with Jon’s porn addiction. I was anticipating a story about a couple working through their misunderstood idiosyncrasies together. We don’t really see Barbara’s perspective at all and in fact she is vilified as the delusional, overly controlling girlfriend while Jon is vindicated and gets the girl, albeit a different one than he expected.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the ending because I genuinely didn’t see it coming (no pun intended). Pigeonholing Barbara felt a little lazy and unnecessarily misogynistic, but Jon’s romance with Esther is refreshing and endearing. The parallels in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s creative career choices are an interesting commentary on the spectrum of cultural misinterpretations of relationships. Just as Tom believes he’s fallen in love with Summer in (500) Days of Summer, Jon believes he’s fallen in love with Barbara. Viewers sympathize endlessly with Tom as the lovelorn nice guy and it would be easy to write Jon off as a sleazy womanizer. However, the two characters might have more in common than we’d like to admit. The flaw in the logic of both men is that they’re allowing women to stand in for projections of a given ideal (Summer for love and Barbara for sex) instead of actually falling in love with the women themselves. We shouldn’t go into relationships expecting other people to function as mere extensions of ourselves and our desires. If boy meets girl, it doesn’t necessarily mandate that they stay together, even on the silver screen. Sometimes, as Jon and Barbara suggest, they’re better off growing apart.
Let me start by saying that I love Avatar: The Last Airbender. I’ve watched it since its original run in 2005 and I continue to re-watch it. The themes are relatable and they always will be. Yes, it’s a kids’ show, but it has genuine appeal across all ages, and not in the same tongue-in-cheek way as Adventure Time or My Little Pony. Set in a world where people can “bend” (control and/or manipulate) the elements–water, earth, fire, and air–the series borrows heavily from martial arts and eastern spirituality. We follow the long lost Avatar, Aang, as he and his friends attempt to restore peace after a hundred-year world war. The animation is gorgeous and the action scenes are impeccably well choreographed. Most of all, the narrative and characterization are emotionally balanced and unexpectedly poignant given its target demographic.
Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Critics noted that A:TLA was unique for the children’s genre in its incorporation of serious romantic themes. Most of the characters have long-term love interests and complex moral or emotional turmoil relating to their relationships, rendering them much more nuanced. This was a radical departure from the usual crush fluff, probably due in part to the fact that the characters were in a perpetual war zone. The writers did a phenomenal job of devoting proper attention to the military conflict while providing the audience just enough fodder to keep us invested in the characters’ personal dynamics. Ultimately, the war always superseded romantic angst in importance.
Korra on her way to steal yo man.
In theory, The Legend of Korra initially seemed full of potential. A strong female protagonist! A woman of color! A woman who could easily be reinterpreted as queerly coded! Unfortunately, the execution is less than stellar. Korra and her friends are 17-20, as opposed to the 12-17 age range of the A:TLA cast. The writers took advantage of the age jump to make the sequel series the Y7 equivalent of Hotter and Sexier, which apparently means piling on the hormones. Whereas in A:TLA, relationship tensions had a slight influence on the action, the conflict in The Legend of Korra serves as mere white noise to the Love Drama of the Week. I almost feel like I shouldn’t bother explaining the alleged overarching premise because it frankly doesn’t matter. A civil war is brewing between benders and non-benders and Korra (the reincarnation of Aang) must again fight to restore balance. While this could have been a fantastic commentary on class struggle, what’s really important is who Korra dates! Accordingly, the plot is consistently suffocated by a love square so forced and melodramatic that I was honestly embarrassed that this was considered quality enough to inherit the legacy of the franchise.
The Legend of Pheromones: Mako and Asami (front) with Korra and Bolin (back).
Long story short, Korra finds herself torn between the affections of two brothers, geeky Bolin and brooding Mako. That sound you hear is me slamming my head against my desk. Korra pines after Mako, who represents a botched attempt to recapture the popularity of Zuko, resident bad boy and puberty catalyst of the A:TLA universe. Mako gets a girlfriend, Asami, who is actually really nice and arguably more sympathetic than Korra, but we are supposed to irrationally hate her because she’s blocking the Official Couple. Sexism ensues. Mako is a douchebag who cheats on Asami by kissing Korra and never taking accountability for it or apologizing to Asami and Bolin. Korra saves the city via a last-minute deus ex machina and Mako tells her he loves her. Essentially, we spend 10 episodes watching the beautiful love story of two emotionally unavailable teenagers with anger issues passive aggressively refusing to date each other until they do. Cool.
Bolin accurately captures my reaction to Mako and Korra’s brief PDA.
With this in mind, I was reticent to say the least about giving the second season a try. Apologists insisted that the choppy quality was attributable to the fact that The Legend of Korra was originally planned to be a standalone miniseries, so I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s not that Friday’s premiere was necessarily worse, it’s just that the characters continue to be bogged down by needing overt romantic storylines to validate any narrative movement. Six months have passed and more trouble is on the horizon. Korra needs to decide whether or not to go to the South Pole to advance her Avatar training. Korra and Mako have a lot of arguments about whether or not he is being supportive enough because she’s confused and he won’t make a decision for her. Ninety percent of their interaction is arguing. If there’s anything young fans want, it’s to excitedly pair up with your crush and then immediately skip to the part where you’re jaded and irritated with each other.
Luckily for Korra, she has plenty of other men eager to tell her what to do. Her mentor, her dad, and her uncle fight about what’s best for her the entire episode while Korra huffs and pouts. This is supposed to make her more sympathetic by again painting her as an average (gifted) girl who has her precociously cunning intuitions stifled by myopic adults who unfairly underestimate her. I am less inclined to believe this since she never seems to do anything other than either begrudgingly following orders or deliberately doing the opposite and claiming it’s her idea because she’s pathologically incapable of admitting she can’t take anyone’s advice. She has had virtually zero character growth since the pilot, which is a real travesty in light of the extensive personal evolution in A:TLA. I guess Mako came along and made her Distracted by the Sexy.
Korra uses firebending to stop a Spirit from attacking the town.
Korra has a new enemy in the form of angry spirits. The combat scenes are, as usual, visually stunning. I’m in this for the Scenery Porn. True to form, Korra punches her way through everything, choosing to bypass more meticulous styles of bending in favor of brute strength. The problem with LOK is that Korra’s stubbornness and aggression are marketed as female empowerment in that they seem to be the self-aware antithesis to traditional femininity. Korra even pigeonholed Asami early on as prim and proper because she was a girly girl. Why is femininity still considered the enemy or an embarrassing relic to move past? Masculinized traits on their own don’t automatically equal a liberated female protagonist. Reversing the stereotype doesn’t necessarily make the resulting portrayal a positive one. Having a strong point of view is all well and good, but you should have a vague grasp of your identity. We still have no idea who Korra is and it’s the second season. She’s actually quite a disappointing cliché if you think about it. She can only understand herself and her potential for progression through her relationship with Mako. The various conflicts and the bending are simply bells and whistles to distract from the fact that she still feels the need to define herself through a man.
Asami faces down an intimidating businessman.
Asami is kicking ass and taking names as the new head of her father’s company. She and Bolin close a business deal together and it’s awesome. I want to be excited, I really do. Alas, I’m sure she’ll only reappear to tease romantic subtext between her and Bolin. The scene came off as a bit forced and I think the writers wanted to throw Asami in briefly to respond to the criticism that she wouldn’t have a shelf life after the love triangle. I hope she stays a regular. Also, Mako is now a motorcycle cop, despite the series being very clearly set in the Jazz age. Just in case you needed more confirmation that he’s the golden boy. Mako’s irresistible charisma allows him to transcend the pace of human innovation! Maybe he should use his charm to inspire someone to cure cancer 40 years sooner.
Eska sizes up Bolin.
After getting his heart stomped all over by Korra, Bolin had to be given a new love interest fast or risk losing all relevance to the LOK universe. Seeing that he was relegated to one-dimensional comic relief to eliminate him as a threat to precious Mako for Korra, it’s fitting that Bolin’s girlfriend is… one-dimensional comic relief. Korra’s nearly identical twin cousins, Desna and Eska (boy and girl respectively), come to town and Bolin is instantly taken by the beauty of both twins, although he quickly changes his tune when he realizes that Desna is a guy. Eska’s deadpan, monotone delivery reminded me of Aubrey Plaza and then I saw that Plaza actually does voice Eska, so that’s badass. Eska instantly takes a shining to Bolin’s flirting and suddenly they’re “dating” within a few lines of dialogue. Genuine development is reserved for main characters, which Bolin has apparently been demoted from indefinitely.
Eska breaks up the hug between Bolin and Korra (source).
Many viewers have already raised concerns that Bolin and Eska’s relationship is abusive and claim that fangirls are overlooking Eska’s problematic behavior. In particular, they cite the moment towards the end of the episode where Eska uses waterbending to forcibly separate Bolin and Korra when he tries to hug her and then demands an explanation. Eska’s oddly formal way of speaking and morose goth girl personality, once literally coupled with Bolin’s hapless Idiot Hero shtick, indicates that their dynamic exists almost solely to be played for laughs. I’m not sure if it’s actually funny yet because it screams try hard. Either way, Eska has risen to fandom darling overnight. Funny how traits that would’ve been red flags for assholes where men are concerned translate into quirky and adorable qualities for girls to have. It might be too early in Bolin and Eska’s supposed relationship to determine concrete abusive tendencies, but possessiveness is never cute or attractive, regardless of your gender. You know that if it had been Mako blocking Korra from hugging Bolin, fandom would be in an uproar. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl really is catnap to young audiences, especially if you put her in sheep’s (or rather, goth’s) clothing.
Jinora gazes at a statue of Aang.
I’m the most intrigued by the plot given the least attention. This episode foreshadowed Aang’s granddaughter, Jinora, having special connections to the Spirit World. She is too young to be given a boyfriend yet, so I have faith that she might be one female character to grow and develop as an individual, but only by virtue of prepubescence. Sigh.
It’s extremely frustrating because anyone who has seen A:TLA knows what Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko (the creators of A:TLA and LOK) are capable of. Sure, the romance in A:TLA was enjoyable, but LOK pushes it to soap opera extremes. They seem to be hooked on the thrill of ship wars to the point where it perputually eclipses everything else in LOK. There are already rumblings of a Bolin-centered love triangle with Asami and Eska. Just stop using nonsensical romantic angst to fill narrative space. Not only is reliance on triangles a very amateur writing move, but it signals that you are so uninspired by your own characters that the most compelling thing you could come up with for them to do is fight over each other. That’s stale and frankly depressing.
Lastly, stop leaving Korra in the lurch. One of the last exchanges in the episode gave us this little steaming turd of a gem:
Korra: It’s hard being the Avatar.
Mako: It’s harder being the Avatar’s boyfriend.
(cue forced chuckling and hug)
A dramatic reenactment of my response to the above dialogue.
Is there such a thing as sexism bending? Because it should be certified as a fundamental element of the LOK universe.
The Legend of Korra should be about Korra’s journey. It’s not The Legend of Mako and Associates. Mako and the others can help Korra, but they don’t need to compulsively define her every step of the way. Let her find herself and stumble a bit on her own. I guarantee that she won’t scrape her knees too badly if Mako isn’t there to hold her hand. Korra is strong, so give her a little backbone. The Avatar deserves more than just being somebody’s girlfriend.
The original title of Adore was Two Mothers, which should give some indication of its Freudian undertones. Best friends since childhood, Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) remain close throughout their lives. They have sons the same age: Roz has Tom (James Frecheville) and Lil has Ian (Xavier Samuel). We see Lil’s husband pass away when the boys look to be about 10, the exposition also establishing the friendship between the kids. The boys soon grow into handsome, muscular young men. Roz’s husband Harold already accuses her of being emotionally distant in their relationship and implies she and Lil are secretly lovers. Multiple people assume that Roz and Lil are lesbians throughout the film, much to their amusement. Ambiguous lesbianism is arguably the only running joke. The fact that Roz and Lil look almost identical (minus hair length) and are constantly perceived as having romantic tension makes the ensuing pseudo-incest even creepier.
Lil (left) and Roz (right) raise their sons together.
Adore is about wanting what you can’t have and the resulting guilty titillation when you not only get what you want, but seemingly have total control over the situation. You could see the whole cougar betrayal thing coming a mile away, as soon as the two mothers talk about how collectively hot their sons are immediately after the age up transition. I would hope that my parents and my friends’ parents wouldn’t sit around calling us sexy the second we were legal. The social dynamics of the film are a bit off – are we really supposed to believe that two 18-year-old boys spend their entire day drinking on the beach with their moms? – but it’s that sort of isolation that sets up the forbidden fruit paradigm. Cross-generational lust is most exciting when there’s sexual or emotional deprivation going on, because apparently the only way we can fathom desire across a large age gap is to make one or both partners psychologically deprived.
Roz and Lil admire their genetic handiwork.
Lil’s husband is dead and Roz’s husband conveniently just accepted a new job far away, so the two women are ripe to…pick the fruit of each other’s loins. Yikes. Yes, they both sleep with the other’s son. If “Motherlover” didn’t pop into your head at this point, my review is a failure. I’d be more okay with this development if the two boys hadn’t grown up as next-door neighbors. Maybe Roz and Lil could have reunited for the first time since having kids and each is blown away by their attraction to the other’s child. I’m cool with a lot of weird shit, but you fundamentally shouldn’t have sex with someone you’ve known and cared for as a parental figure since they were in diapers. This isn’t Buster Bluth and Lucille 2. Ian makes a move on Roz for pretty much no reason. The justification for both May-December romances is essentially that it’s scandalous to watch a young man pursue an older woman, which insinuates that they’re tragically wasting their time and potential for masculine privilege by doing so. That has some extremely unfortunate implications as to the perceptions of older femininity, which is why I could never quite get on the cougar bandwagon here, even though the film tries really hard to convince its audience that older women are seductive and love is indiscriminate to age.
Things get steamy between Lil and Tom.
Shockingly, Tom witnesses his mother leaving Ian’s room sans pants and marches right over to Lil’s house to exact revenge. He awkwardly kisses Lil and tells her flat out that he’s doing it just to spite Ian and his mom for sleeping together. Tom is kind of a tool, but Lil eventually gives in after he silently climbs into her bed (boundaries???). Roz and Lil and have a heart-to-heart the next day. They are both surprisingly okay with having boned each other’s children, but they agree that the shenanigans need to stop. Naturally, both couples immediately have sex. They settle into dating and continue to hang out in their creepy foursome, their friendships strengthened by the new exchange of bodily fluids. The narrative then jumps forward two years to let us know that both couples are still together and it wasn’t just a summer fling.
Ian comforts Roz about her aging anxieties.
Although you would think that the length of their relationships would be a testament against shallow fears, the threat of aging continues to plague Lil and Roz. Lil frets over her wrinkles in the mirror as she notices Tom’s attention straying towards a young theater ingénue. Ian sensuously traces his fingers up the back of Roz’s bare thigh as she remarks with chagrin that soon she won’t allow him to see her naked anymore. Ian assures her playfully that he won’t let her age. This type of garbage is supposed to be romantic, but I say fuck you, Ian. Validating your partner’s internalized insecurities, no matter how humorously, is not endearing or sexy. People always worry that their partner will leave them if they get old or gain weight or become disabled. Is your “true love” really that genuine if it could so easily be decimated by such superficial factors? As much as Adore attempts to champion the cougar, Roz and Lil walk a very fine line between empowered women with a healthy libido and self-martyrs consumed by their own overambitious sexuality. Tom cheats on Lil with the theater girl. That’s pretty ballsy, considering that Tom had to convince Lil to be bored/lonely enough to date him in the first place. Tom is a dick.
Roz comforts a distraught Lil after Tom cheats.
Lil is devastated, so in solidarity, Roz agrees that they should each dump their boyfriends at the same time since they agree it’s inevitable that they will both be ditched for a younger woman. Ian bitterly protests this decision because Tom fucking around is not his fault. I feel for him. Ian displayed a sincere passion for Roz from the start and remained committed to her, whereas with Tom, Lil was always merely a lukewarm personal pet project to piss off Roz and Ian. Tom gets married and Roz remains firm on her break up with Ian. Ian soon begins a fairly unenthusiastic courtship with a younger woman to spite Roz and try to move on. I’m glad everyone has such healthy coping mechanisms when it comes to relationships! Ian resolves to break up with the new girl until she tells him that she’s pregnant. Cringe.
Roz and Lil take their granddaughters to the beach.
A few years later, the boys each take their young daughters to the beach along with their respective wives and mothers. I half expected a flash forward to when the girls were legal and trying to seduce each other’s dads. Family fun. The dynamic is uncomfortable to say the least and the wives clearly dislike spending time with Roz and Lil. Long story short, Ian catches Tom and Lil having sex and is so outraged that he blurts out their entire history to the horrified younger women. Disgusted, they pack up the grandkids and leave, warning the group to never contact them again. I don’t think that’s how custody works. Roz and Lil decide they can’t fight fate and the foursome is shown sunbathing together once more, presumably coupled up again. Even if they had to jump through some stereotypical hoops, it’s nice to see relationships between older women and younger men taken seriously and given a legitimate future.
Farewell, My Queen has been on my to-watch list for a while. I’m a sucker for the opulence and pretty costumes of period pieces. Really, you could assemble the worst cast imaginable and I’d probably still watch to drool over the outfits. The narrative chronicles events in Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution from the perspective of the Queen’s reader, Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux). Sidonie displays fervent loyalty towards Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger) and jealously monitors the ups and downs of her intimate friendship with Gabrielle de Polastron, Duchess of Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen). Personally, I loathed Sofia Coppola’s airheaded incarnation of Marie Antoinette and found Kirsten Dunst to be insufferable. I understand that there is a popular perception of Marie Antoinette as childish and self-indulgent, but there’s a difference between that and feeling like you’re watching the 18th century equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl drop a tab of acid and run through fields for two hours while rap music plays in the background. Anyway, I digress. The point is that I was excited for an authentically French take on the story.
Marie Antoinette (left) and Sidonie (right) bond over medical treatment.
The trailer for the film would lead you to believe that the central plot is the lesbian love triangle to end all lesbian love triangles. As such, for once I may have gone into a film with my queer expectations a little too high. Sidonie has an ambiguously romantic obsession with Marie Antoinette, who in turn is fixated on Gabrielle, although none of the women’s feelings for each other are ever made explicit. Neither Marie Antoinette nor Gabrielle seems to notice their admirer in that way. This always ends well. Sidonie’s official duties include reading aloud to the Queen, which is a gangly metaphor for the former’s intellectualism and the allegedly cerebral bond between the two. Sidonie’s infatuation with the Queen is ignited after Marie Antoinette insists on rubbing rosewood oil on Sidonie’s pesky mosquito bites. Only in the personal hygiene vacuum of the 1700s would this gesture be considered sensual or sexy.
Sidonie takes a ride on a gondola and the suave gondolier attempts to hit on her by sharing juicy Versailles gossip. He mentions Marie Antoinette’s preoccupation with Gabrielle and insinuates that he has been sleeping with Gabrielle, all the while still trying to smooth talk his way into Sidonie’s stockings. Was it really that easy to sleep around in the 1700s? I’m assuming it’s meant to be a commentary on the boredom and hedonism of the French upper-class, but still, given the religious zealousness of the time, it’s difficult to believe that adultery is idle chit chat. Sidonie pouts in response to the outside confirmation of her worst fear – that Marie Antoinette loves someone else. The most bizarre thing is that we’ve barely been introduced to the women or any of their dynamics at this point, so her wounded reaction feels unwarranted.
Sidonie approaches a group discussing a propaganda pamphlet.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the palace becomes tense when everyone gets word of the storming of the Bastille. This is truly the heart of the film’s main thrust, as servants, aristocrats, and the royal family alike wait for their gilded world to come crashing down around them. The atmosphere teeters between nervous anticipation and chaos, even as the lavish rituals continue as normal. Farewell, My Queen really comes into its own as a critique of the vacuous and self-destructive denial of the elite with regard to the shifting status quo, which would have been more than substantial enough to carry the premise. I don’t understand why the love triangle was marketed and propped up as the core drama of the narrative, other than for poetic depth. Whether or not you buy into the rumors that Marie Antoinette was queer, the idea is undeniably fascinating. As a society, we tend to view Marie Antoinette’s lifestyle as the pinnacle of our materialistic fantasies, so it’s titillating that the woman who has it all would only find true fulfillment in love objects that were doubly forbidden by way of lesbianism and adultery. However, the execution is lukewarm and its intrigue pales in comparison to that of say, I don’t know, the French Revolution.
Everyone starts leaving the palace in droves as they fear the collapse of the government. Nonetheless, Sidonie repeatedly pronounces loyalty to the Queen and refuses to leave her despite the protests of her more levelheaded peers and superiors. Using this love triangle as the overarching B-plot doesn’t quite work because we get a lot of telling and not showing. Sidonie constantly talks about her devotion to the Queen and other characters comment on it, but we don’t see any interaction other than the early rosewood oil scene to justify her obsession. Maybe that’s the point. Infatuation requires very little kindling. Sidonie is falling in love with her own imagination and who she projects Marie Antoinette to be – not who Marie Antoinette actually is. The exact nature of Gabrielle’s relationship with Marie Antoinette is also unclear, but the Queen and Sidonie appear to be birds of a feather in that both women worship a mirage. This isn’t so much a love triangle as it is a chain of unrequited emotional overinvestment.
The Queen laments that Gabrielle is leaving her behind.
The king and queen hold court to announce they will not be leaving the palace. Gabrielle rushes up to the Queen for a dramatic embrace. They press their foreheads together in unspoken intimacy, ignoring the spectators as the rest of the court watches uncomfortably. Marie Antoinette pulls Gabrielle aside for a more private goodbye and Sidonie follows to eavesdrop. After some coquettish banter, Marie Antoinette abruptly changes the tone of the conversation to insist that Gabrielle leave Versailles. Gabrielle reluctantly agrees, causing Marie Antoinette to angrily accuse her of abandonment before sobbing uncontrollably. What a drama queen! Haha, bad monarchy puns.
Although Sidonie is discouraged by the clear extent of Marie Antoinette’s affection for Gabrielle, she remains determined to prove herself. The Queen asks her to go on one last, very important mission. She instructs Sidonie to dress in Gabrielle’s clothes and escape with Gabrielle and her husband in disguise so that any potential assassins will mistake Sidonie for Gabrielle and attack her instead. Sidonie balks at this plan and Seydoux effortlessly portrays the slow encroachment of betrayal and disillusionment across her features. She realizes too late that Marie Antoinette perceives her as little more than an expendable pawn to be manipulated to protect those whom she actually loves. Adding insult to injury, Marie Antoinette orders Sidonie to strip on the spot. A moment that may have once been erotic becomes filled with powerlessness and shame for Sidonie as the Queen carelessly glances over her nude body with disinterest.
Marie Antoinette pulls Sidonie back in for a little more humiliation.
As Sidonie prepares to exit Versailles as the decoy Gabrielle, Marie Antoinette calls her back. She asks Sidonie to tell Gabrielle that she’ll never forget her and gives her a chaste kiss on the lips. Given how much Sidonie purported to care for the Queen, the exchange is heartbreaking because it’s very obviously meant for someone else. The fact that the kiss is devoid of passion and occurs while Sidonie is passing as Gabrielle just pours salt in the wound. For all her starry eyed daydreaming, Sidonie learns that Marie Antoinette is just as callous and self-serving as everyone else. The Achilles’ heel of infatuation lies in the fact that you’re falling in love with your own self-constructed idea of the person and not the actual person in reality. Against the odds, Sidonie goes across the Swiss border unscathed with Gabrielle and her husband. In voiceover, she claims that she will be a nobody now since acting as the Queen’s reader was her whole identity. I guess old habits die hard.
title card.
