Eva Green – Bitch Flicks

Eva Green vs. Frank Miller: A Feminist Revolt in a Man’s World

Even when Eva Green chooses to take part in obviously bad movies, she somehow manages to carry them to a higher level of quality all on her own. Such is the case with two of her films: ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ and ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.’ …Both of which starred Green in major femme fatale roles, and both of which feel, in part, like pro-feminist reactions to the original films they follow.

Guest post written by Josh J. Bell.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Eva Green is possibly my favorite dramatic performer on the planet. Her striking presence and physicality, that raspy, compelling voice, her often unhinged acting style; she has an amazing talent for raising the entertainment value of anything she’s involved in. Just watch Penny Dreadful, which featured a 10-minute long séance scene: 10 straight minutes of Green writhing around, babbling in weird voices, and somehow it never once becomes tedious. The woman is one of the major unappreciated MVPs of the film industry right now.

Even when Green chooses to take part in obviously bad movies, she somehow manages to carry them to a higher level of quality all on her own. Such is the case with two of her films I’d like to compare and discuss: 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

Sin City and 300 have strangely parallel trajectories as franchises. Both are based on graphic novels written by Frank Miller; both were released in the mid-2000s, and were highly accurate to the source material, recreating panels from the graphic novels down to the tiniest details. Both are post-modern takes on classic film genres no longer very popular at the both office: film noir and sword and sandal historical epics. Both were highly stylized with slow-motion violence and sex, distinctive color-palettes, and heavy use of CGI sets. And finally, both franchises released sequels in 2014, both of which starred Eva Green in major femme fatale roles, and both of which feel, in part, like pro-feminist reactions to the original films they follow. If that all is coincidence, it has to be one of the most stunning series of coincidences in Hollywood history.

Now, Frank Miller is many things but no one would ever describe him as a feminist. He is notorious for writing female characters who are highly sexualized, possess little to no story agency, and usually have some cruel and humiliating violence or death inflicted upon them. In short, he’s about as old school and outspoken a misogynist as you can be and still remain employable in the comics industry (which says more about the industry than it does him, but that’s another essay entirely).

The original Sin City and 300 films did little to remove or minimize Miller’s lack of respect for his female characters. Women such as Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) and Gail (Rosario Dawson) were allowed to be powerful only through their sexuality and violence; they remained passive supporters of their male counterparts’ storylines. The remaining female characters were used merely for window dressing and cannon fodder.

The sequels, flawed as they may be, diverge from their origin films. While Frank Miller has claimed to have a 300 prequel in the works for years, it, like many of his proposed projects over the last few decades, has yet to materialize. Unwilling to wait on the increasingly irrelevant writer, Warner Brothers pushed ahead, and the resulting film was instead written by the first film’s director, Zack Snyder, with Miller’s only contribution being whatever he actually finished of that prequel comic serving as inspiration.

Snyder’s history with writing female characters and feminist ideas into his screenplays is… inconsistent, to say the least. He strikes me as someone who has at least a passing interest and respect for feminism, but isn’t really particularly dedicated to it. When looking at 300: Rise of an Empire and Snyder’s even more controversial Sucker Punch, it’s hard to deny that he isn’t at least making an effort to write an empowering story for women. But most of his films (300, Watchmen, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) ignore the handful of women characters, often seeming annoyed by or even outright hostile to their presence.

Despite the fact that I have yet to fully forgive him for Batman v Superman, I generally try to cut Snyder some slack, because he a) is genuinely talented, and b) does usually seem to learn from his mistakes, however slowly. Case in point, 300: Rise of an Empire, which comes across as almost a response to or apology for the previous film. The film’s protagonist, the Athenian Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), takes a rather dim view of the brutality of the Spartans, as evidenced by a needlessly long scene of a group of Spartans brutally beating one guy during training. Perhaps this was Snyder’s way of addressing the accusations toward 300 that he was promoting fascism and eugenics, not to mention the first film’s racism and ableism. Also, Queen Gorgo is given far more screen time and more to do, including leading a Spartan army to battle, and none of which involves seducing her husband’s rivals for political favor. Now if only Snyder had thought to include a positive queer character as recompense for the blatant and historically inaccurate homophobia of the first film.

But as with seemingly every project she appears in, this is Eva Green’s stage, and the really interesting stuff begins and ends with her. Green plays Artemisia, very loosely based on a real historical figure of the same name. Despite being the villain, she is the true star of the film, and director Noam Murro knows it. The camera often lingers on Green during long pauses, allowing some truly stellar acting moments, even though whenever she’s absent, the film could care less about acting, preferring to keep a kinetic pace from one gratuitous image of violence and sexuality to the next.

Green is nothing short of transcendent in this role, one she’s honestly overqualified for, but Snyder doesn’t exactly leave her with nothing to work with either. Artemisia’s arc is fascinating to analyze and casts the entire film in a different light when viewed up close.

Artemisia is not only the chief villain, completely overshadowing Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), but she is retroactively cast as the true mastermind behind the events of the previous film as well. We are shown that in fact Artemisia is the true power behind the Persian throne, with Xerxes being little more than a puppet ruler she manipulated into invading Greece, even being responsible for his delusions of godhood. As much as I normally hate retcons (see Spectre for the worst example of the hackneyed “secret villain responsible for literally everything” trope), it’s noteworthy that Snyder not only gives Artemisia agency, but in fact makes her responsible for the inciting events of the entire franchise. Without Artemisia, there is no 300.

Artemisia’s backstory and motivation are even more interesting. As a child, she was captured by Greek soldiers who raped and murdered her family in front of her, and then kept her as a sex slave for years before discarding her half-dead in the streets. She is then found by a Persian ambassador (Peter Mensah), who took her in and trained her in combat and strategy. From there she rose through the ranks until she was the most trusted advisor to the Persian King Darius (Igal Naor), favored even above his son Xerxes, and leader of the entire Persian Navy.

Rape as a backstory for violent, vengeful, strong, or ambitious female characters is one of the most overdone plots in modern fiction, let’s admit that right now. It is ridiculous how writers behave as though the only justification or motivation a woman can have for revenge is rape and sexual assault. So Snyder wins no points for dipping into this dry well and employing this trope. However, normally the rape-revenge heroine is a… well, heroine. Rape is a horrific crime; it’s difficult to watch on-screen and is often triggering to survivors, so filmmakers don’t tend to subject characters to that kind of traumatic ordeal on-screen if we’re not meant to empathize with them.

Eva Green’s performance combined with this backstory makes Artemisia by far the most three-dimensional character in either 300 or its sequel (although that’s not saying much). As a result, she’s far easier to identify with and root for than the bland and lifeless Themistokles, who is little more than a Leonidas clone, and Sullivan Stapleton as an actor is so massively out of his league next to Green that it’s laughable. The film’s divisive, aggressive sex scene between them is interesting and over the top all at once, and while the scene’s merits are debatable — whether it sexualizes a rape survivor, empowers her, or both — it’s hard to deny Green owns the whole scene, even if only by virtue of her being a far superior actor than Stapleton.

In the finale, Artemisia and Themistokles face off in an epic sword fight, during which Green delivers one of the all-time great insults (“You fight harder than you fuck!”), which finally culminates in her death at the point of Themistokles’s sword. Now this by itself might be a coincidence, swords are phallic instruments by default and not every movie featuring swordplay is trying to say anything symbolically about sex or gender dynamics. But when the sword goes right into Artemisia’s midsection and she forces it deeper into her, almost seeming to orgasm at the feeling of it, and then falls to the ground in a position mirroring that which her captors left her for dead as a child, while Themistokles (whose appearance looks similar to the hoplites who killed her family) stands over her, there’s no way to argue that this scene isn’t inviting direct comparison to Artemesia’s origin story.

There are two ways to interpret this. One is that 300: Rise of an Empire is a violently misogynist movie that vilifies a rape survivor and sees the symbolic rape of her demise as just punishment for her sin of being an ambitious woman. That’s an extreme view, but given our country just elected a racist misogynist who bragged about sexual assault over a potential first woman POTUS, it certainly is still possible for that level of hate to exist in our movies. However, I choose to believe that the film actually subtly condemns our supposed hero, encouraging you to root for the villain and reexamine the sexist roots of the macho power fantasy the first film provided. When the final shot of the film is Themistokles coming right at the camera like a horror movie monster, in fact just like the sea serpent that comes right at the camera during a random dream sequence that otherwise has no clear purpose, it’s not unreasonable to interpret this as a sign that maybe he isn’t really the good guy.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is far less complex and subtle than 300: Rise of an Empire, and as such, is a little harder to find meaning in. It also differs in that Frank Miller clearly had much more influence in the film adaptation. Not only does he once again have a co-directing credit, but he is the only credited writer this time around. However, like Snyder, I think that Miller’s attitude towards women, while clearly outdated and hateful, might be just a bit more complex than he usually lets on. Once again, parts of this film feel like they’re responding to backlash against the first film.

The most obvious example in the final chapter in the film’s anthology, “Nancy’s Last Dance,” in which Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), a passive Damsel in Distress in the last film, is transformed into an unstable, Travis Bickle-esque vigilante. She manages to finally kill off Roarke (Powers Boothe), the big bad of the franchise, which no one ever managed before. It’s not really a good story, Alba just isn’t a strong enough actress to believably pull it off and it renders Hartigan’s (Bruce Willis) sacrifice at the end of the last movie pointless. Killing off Roarke seems like it defeats the point of the Sin City series, where the bad guys always win and the best the good guys can do is ruffle their feathers a bit on the way to the grave. But still, it’s an unexpected place for Miller to take this story.

But once again, Eva Green steals the show; these films live and die on her shoulders. There isn’t really much to unpack with her character compared to 300: Rise of an Empire. Ava Lord (Eva Green) is a pretty standard femme fatale: duplicitous, amoral, using her sexuality to manipulate men into doing her bidding. She does mirror Artemisia a bit, in that both women are sick of living at the whim of men and acquire power through seduction. But Ava has no tragic backstory to motivate her, and in fact, all her claims about being abused are merely lies to garner sympathy (which is incredibly problematic). But I’m a firm believer that even monstrously evil female characters in fiction can be a positive thing if they provide a wider range of roles for actresses; and nobody does bad quite like Eva Green. She dominates this movie so much, it’s no wonder she’s the character the film’s title references. Ava Lord is almost like a slasher villain, in that she’s so much more interesting and fun to watch than her victims; you find yourself rooting for her despite the depths of her evil.

Neither of these films, 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, are particularly good, if I’m being honest. The plots are poorly structured, they both feel a little phoned in, the aesthetics have long lost their novelty since the originals came out, and Green is (in both cases) surrounded by castmates who either aren’t nearly on her level, or simply can’t be bothered to put in the same effort. Neither film is feminist, since — with the exception of the last ten minutes of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For — neither have any actual female protagonists, with the women (aside from Nancy) instead serving as adversaries or supporting players to the men. But it’s a testament to Eva Green’s abilities that she steals so many scenes that you forget the film isn’t actually about her.

I like to recognize effort where I see it, and despite all their failings, there is effort in these films. Snyder and Miller are far from my favorite writers, but there is the faintest scent of self-examination in these scripts that is encouraging. Maybe their treatment of female characters will improve further in time; maybe it won’t. In the meantime, we still have Eva Green. And there is never a bad time to celebrate Eva Green.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Eva Green’s Artemisia Disappoints in 300: Rise of an Empire

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For Review

Josh J. Bell is a freelance blogger and stage actor from Charleston, South Carolina. He has written for The Escapist and The Agony Booth. Follow him on Twitter @joshjbell.

‘Penny Dreadful’: Departure from Heroine

We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. … Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

This guest post is written by Cassandra A. Clarke. | Spoilers ahead.

In battles, there’s an importance not just on the victor but on the amount of effort given by both sides. Perhaps this is why it’s the longest boxing matches that we remember, not for the score, but for the sake of the perseverance in those who step into the ring; that’s what we remember. It is no wonder that Penny Dreadful’s season three finale (and unexpected series finale) left viewers with a bitter aftertaste in their mouth.

“The Blessed Dark” episode was framed as the show’s last battle (including an epic slow motion shot of the team assembling on their way to face Dracula in his Gothic hideout in the dregs of the city), one that viewers had been waiting for since the series’ introduction of Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as the doomed to be cleverest person in the room, facing an eternal battle against the Devil and Dracula, both vying for her soul and flesh. Yet, we received a forfeit: a bequest to finish with all of the battle, with all of the effort, in exchange for calm; or, in more literal terms, she asks Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) to kill her in order for her to find redemption in heaven and leave this earth. Vanessa, the same woman who punched the Devil in the face, who fought for her soul back, relinquishes her life.

In an interview with Variety, Penny Dreadful creator/showrunner John Logan and Showtime president David Nevins, claimed that this ending for Vanessa was actually a message of empowerment for the audience. In Logan’s words, he said Vanessa Ives “owns her death.” While it’s true that Vanessa did ask for her death, the two are missing a bigger point about the show’s view of agency. The series does a marvelous job at toying with the idea of possession to make us question the view of agency for the characters: Are they acting like themselves or another? Are we imagining them to be better than they are? In Vanessa’s last moment, it’s unclear whether or not her agency is fully there or not as moments before she is shot, she tells Ethan, “Vanessa is long gone.” This begs the audience to wonder whether or not her death was something she truly wanted or the desire of her darker parts inside herself and we received no answer. The moment is too brief to provide more clues to her state of mind and wishes; it ends with someone taking her life in their hands and ending it in order to prevent her from having to be hurt (or have others hurt) to survive.

Even if Penny Dreadful is saying that this death, this kind of redemption from her life, is what she sought after, there is still another question that goes unanswered: Why did Vanessa’s death come so easily? In the finale, we see no battle with Vanessa, no decision to harm the creatures that have harmed her. Although she has leveled up to be the Queen of Darkness, we do not see her actually wield her power nor use it to take advantage of Dracula. We are led to believe that she is seduced by him and not of herself, and yet, we see her escape the clutches of this darkness to ask Ethan for help? All of her battle happens under the surface and off-screen, so that we as a audience cannot actually see any of Vanessa’s planning or will or desire, and that is where her death failed us. We do not see the warrior that we have come to know and love, for her ability to not just fight battles, but to align others to fight against their darkest selves and moments for a better world. She has no team to lead, no mission to complete.

The team exists, but we do not see Vanessa lead them like she has in the past to help defeat witches, demons, and toxic people. Her team is almost completely destroyed by the hands of the creatures of the night and they have no real power in which to defeat Dracula without her assistance. Instead of her power, we see a docile, white-dressed maiden, asking to be sent back to her creator. This feels so wrong because the series tended to show us how sometimes the darkest parts of ourselves can be aligned with good intentions and used for something more. We see that motif exercised plentifully through Ethan, who is able to kill an entire bar of people and yet is still shown to struggle emotionally, returning to London for the good fight. Yet, we do not get a chance to really see Vanessa struggle in and through her darkness. And this also begs another uncomfortable question to ask that the show avoids of her darkness: Did she do enough to win back her God’s faith? Because we don’t see her fight and do see Dracula flee back into the night, we’re left wondering if she earned her redemption. Did she do enough good?

The series carefully avoids answering that question by putting us into a hazy London where we can only imagine the thousands of deaths that Vanessa caused. We do not see her confront that. We see her choose to join Dracula and then hear of her casualties but we do not see Vanessa reconcile these consequences. We do not see her team assemble to do everything they can for her. Instead, we are left with an ending of her friends gathering at her grave, talking about what they learned from her. They are all given a second life to live, post-Vanessa, and she has taught them how to be more wicked than good. Her death becomes a part of their story and creates an allegory of her character; she is not a woman anymore, but a figure to them, something they now own.

Although Logan says this is a “shocking” ending for a show in 2016, as it shows a woman dying for what she believes in, it is not at all shocking to me. Plenty of women characters have been used as a prop to tell other men’s stories, to be their emblem of hope and fear. Penny Dreadful perpetuates the idea that in order to be strong and overcome the life that you were born into, even if it’s unfair, even if it’s theoretically doomed to cause you pain over and over again, it’s more worthy and noble to sacrifice yourself for others as opposed to learning how to channel your efforts into creating a stronger world. Each of the male characters who create monsters literally and kill innocents (including their children and siblings) are able to gain a chance at a new life, but Vanessa was never granted this option.

Logan argues that the only two choices that Vanessa had were eternal Hell on earth or Heaven. I think that is where the show ultimately failed Vanessa and us, because there was no thought to a third alternative for her, to a last battle, or, dare I say, the vanquishing of both evil male-oriented forces in her life. Could we imagine in 2016 a woman who was able to defeat the evils and traumas that plagued her and while changed, becomes stronger? Could we even further imagine a world in which she is not quite all innocent and certainly not eternally good, but a force to be reckoned with and one that could be called upon for future battles of good and evil, thereby earning redemption?

I imagine the Penny Dreadful showrunners heckling, “But you can’t defeat evil!” Yes, Vanessa living through her darkness would be hard. And the forces that seek to control her will always be there, but that’s where her will gets to come in and thrive. Vanessa is the kind of woman who believes that while fighting is harder than succumbing to temptation, it is the more interesting choice to court the impossible for the sake of friendship. If Penny Dreadful aims to thematically tackle oppressive forces, why use her freedom of choice to leave the story? If the show is willing to reanimate a corpse to fight the patriarchy, it could have let Vanessa live to rebuild herself. Yes, oppression will always persist, but that is why her life’s work as an ally to and against evil would offer more power for her and others.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Cassandra A. Clarke’s work’s been previously published in Electric Literature, Word Riot, Entropy, and other speculative places. She has an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and is the Editor in Chief of the new-weird literary magazine, Spectator & Spooks.

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Penny Dreadful,’ seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

This guest post written by Holly Derr is an edited version that originally appeared at her site. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead for Penny Dreadful.

When what film critic David Edelstein called “torture porn” became a trend in 2004 and 2005, its relationship to the growing awareness that the U.S. had become a country that tortures was clear. On-screen representations of people being tortured by evil but human monsters served as a means of taking what had been kept secret about Abu Ghraib and putting it in full view in all its gore. Even films like Hostel and Turistas, that deliberately built their stories around Americans in foreign locations, served as a kind of collective catharsis upon accepting that our country also engaged in such horrific practices.

Twelve years later, with the Saw franchise eight movies in, torture porn has made its way into television. Between American Horror Story and The Walking Dead still going and Penny Dreadful having recently ended, it occupies a fairly important space in the supernatural television landscape.

For this year’s Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, I had the ridiculous idea that I would watch all three of these television series from beginning to end, determining, if not which show is most feminist, at least which is least sexist. I couldn’t do it. I made it through only one show all the way – Penny Dreadful – and in the course of just three seasons I watched women tortured by demons from the inside out, tarred and burned alive, branded, poisoned, smothered and brought back to life, a woman was driven to cut her own throat, and multiple women were shot by their father, creator, and closest friend.

Bringing together characters from Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a werewolf thrown in for good measure, Penny Dreadful’s main theme is that we are all possessed by demons; we all have a monster lurking inside. Creator, writer, and showrunner John Logan uses the Victorian backdrop to great effect. In season one, the Grand Guignol delights audiences with its onstage violence and spurts of blood. Season two features a subplot about a wax museum of gory crime scenes with ambitions of becoming a full-on freak show. Season three features the trusty horror trope of the mental institution in which people are experimented upon. All three elements anchor the show firmly in its gaslight era and constantly remind us that, despite a lot of talk about faith and sin, Victorians were really obsessed with bodies and their physical limits.

The potential for feminism is high. The focus of the show on a woman, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), as its protagonist gives the audience a chance to identify with and follow the story through a woman’s perspective. Patti LuPone’s second-season cut-wife character Joan Clayton – unnecessarily violent depiction of abortion aside – is a strong, single mentor and good witch/doctor. Her third-season psychiatrist, a gender-flipped Dr. Seward from Dracula, is a smart woman succeeding in a man’s world who can handle herself in a fight to boot.

But the show’s feminism falters by treating the female characters differently from the male ones. Though minor male characters in Penny Dreadful are the victims of some pretty horrifying violence, too, the women really get the worst of it, and there are fewer of them to start with. Furthermore, for the male characters, the connection between what haunts them and their sexuality remains the subverted metaphor that it is in the Gothic horror novels in which they were created, with greed, ambition, and failure to be a good father/son mixed into an all-encompassing idea of their sins/demons.

For Vanessa Ives, however, acting upon her sexual feelings literally brings out the demon in her, creating a one-to-one relationship between her sexuality and her dark side. Though her suffering is centered, her character is actually less complex and therefore less fully human than the male ones. Other than one early sexual misstep, she has no flaws at all. To make matters worse, the female character who fully owns her sexuality, Brona/Lily (Billie Piper), one of Dr. Frankenstein’s creatures, is also a fully evil murderer, even when she connects to the early feminist movement and becomes a leader of disenfranchised women.

Finally, the presence of the same female body (Patty LuPone’s) in two different characters (something that is not a recurring aspect of the show, as it is with American Horror Story, but rather only happens with this one actor) keeps female heroism in the realm of archetype. In fact, the most interesting character in the series is not Vanessa Ives but the werewolf, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), whose relationships with three different father figures and his past as a soldier and an adopted Apache give him far more to grapple with than his sexuality (which is interesting as he is a queer character), which, despite the Victorian setting, doesn’t seem to be a problem for him at all.

No possible alternative to her fate is ever implied for Vanessa Ives, for whom acting on her sexual desires is to bring about the end of the world, and the audience is given little opportunity for hope. Accordingly, Penny Dreadful lacks a key component of horror: the moments of relief, whether in the form of humor or love, that are essential to keeping audiences vulnerable to the coming terrors – nothing is so rewarding when watching horror as a laugh that turns into a scream. Torture porn as a genre has very few of those moments, creating a rhythm that is not about suspense and jump-scares but merely about the ongoing horror of watching, head on, what terrible things people will do to people.

Penny Dreadful comes close to performing feminist work by showing how hard it is for women to live in a society that thinks of their sexuality as dangerous and their bodies as “nasty” and “disgusting,” with blood coming out of their wherevers. In the end, however, it doesn’t just depict the oppression of women, it reifies it, concretizing the idea in audience’s minds by making the women’s suffering disgusting.

I couldn’t get further than one and a half seasons into American Horror Story, which puts even more torture on screen than Penny Dreadful. Though some bad things happen to the men in that show too, the rape, mutilation, deliberate transmission of the bubonic plague, and unnecessary amputations in the episodes I’ve seen are reserved for female bodies. The buzz around this year’s season premiere of The Walking Dead indicates that it has gone from being a means of examining the variety of ways that people form societies and families to a means of examining the variety of ways people kill one another. Some scenes in the premiere were too graphic to be shown during prime time in the U.K.

At this point, our culture is no longer using torture porn to work out our guilt about our conduct abroad. Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of American Horror Story and Penny Dreadful, seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

Perhaps these depictions of torture are a necessary step to take before we finally accept that sexual women are not demonic, the women’s movement is not led by a superhuman killer with a vagenda of manocide, and our bodies don’t need to be tortured to be made pure. If anything good can be said about recent public discussions of sexual harassment, abuse, and oppression, it’s that they are public. Women all over the country are sharing their stories of being grabbed in the pussy and kissed against their will, women are owning the descriptor of “nasty” as a badge of pride, and women are refusing to be seen as anything less than fully human, inside and out.

Unfortunately, Penny Dreadful doesn’t ultimately reject the notion that women need to be tortured to be sure that they’re not evil. I can’t tell you where American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are going because, even though I am a hardened, life-long horror fan, I can’t take any more torture, and I don’t want to keep seeing bodies, and women’s bodies in particular, used to create disgust.

I watch horror because identifying what we are afraid of tells us a lot about ourselves, but also because it’s fun to be scared. As my Halloween binge-watching experiment draws to a close, I’m a lot more scared by what it means that torture porn TV is so popular than I am by torture porn itself.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her Tumblr, Feminist Fandom.

‘White Bird In A Blizzard’: A Storm of Crime, Carnality, and Coming of Age

For months, Kat idly notes her mother Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family. As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, ‘White Bird in a Blizzard,’ is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above.

The poster for White Bird in A Blizzard — The poster for *White Bird in A Blizzard*

Spoilers ahead!

As White Bird in a Blizzard opens, Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is a teenage girl like any other, just at that point where she’s realizing how the life she wants for herself differs from the one modeled by the adults around her.

It’s 1988 and she’s challenging the limits for what she get away with, stomping out of her suburban home in heavy make-up and short skirts, enjoying loud music and lots of sex, and through all of it, fighting with her disdainful housewife-in-pearls mother, Eve (Eva Green, popping in to play a variation of the cold, elegant woman role she’s perfected).

As she matures, Kat begins to see the cracks in her parents’ 1950s style-American Dream-marriage. Her nebbish father Brock (Christopher Meloni) is flailing in his attempts to understand Eve, who is displaying depressive symptoms and acting jealous and even cruel toward Kat.

For months, Kat idly notes Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family.

As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, White Bird in a Blizzard, is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above. The atmosphere, steamed up with Kat’s barely contained lust and Eve’s frosty shadow, dominates.

The real mystery is not who killed Eve or where she disappeared to. In fact, these answers are hinted at early on and are clear to the audience long before Kat even cares to investigate for herself. If a mystery is at important, it’s the mystery of what kind of person Kat will end up being and how her memories of her difficult, often unlovable mother, will shape her in her adulthood.

Eve feels stifled by her role as a housewife

The film follow Kat through two years pivotal years, as she finishes high school and begins college, punctuated with voiceover narration, flashbacks to her earlier relationship with her mother and introspection delivered in appointments with her psychiatrist. For most of this time, Kat is unmotivated to solve the mystery and this plot is sidelined by her burgeoning sexuality.

Things drag a bit in this section, as the film becomes merely a teenager’s sexual odyssey with hints of something darker just offscreen, just outside of her experience. We watch Kat get tired of her dumb and shiny first boyfriend, Phil, the boy next door (Shiloh Fernandez), and move on to the macho cop in charge of her mother’s case (Thomas Jane). Kat is unapologetically sexual. She admits that she is “horny” and excited to have sex again and again, complaining to Phil that it has been too long since they’d last done it. For Kat, this was not true love and she knows it. Her desire is sex itself, not sex with him specifically. In her conscious attempt to seduce of the detective, assuring him she is already 18 and already sexuality active, she is not a lost little girl manipulated by an older man, attempting to use this relationship to make an official move into adulthood. However, besides sex, there is little at stake until the final act.

Kat is overcome by lust and explores her sexual desires

Kat enjoys sex and admires her body, rare things for a teenage girl to be allowed in either movies or in real life. She has reason to be proud, as she has carved and shaped out her body, from beneath the prepubescent baby fat her mother always teased her about. Eve was the kind of mother who tsk-ed at every bite her daughter took, constantly reminding her of how much thinner and more appealing she was at her age. But as Kat relates, her mother only became crueler toward her as she came into her own.

Their dynamic is a Grimm’s fairy tale, the beautiful daughter sucking the life out of her once beautiful mother, slowly killing her and then replacing her as an object of lust. In Eve’s mind, they appear to be in competition. After noticing Kat’s new body, she appears in revealing clothes in front of Phil and flirts with him. She watches Kat dress and do her make-up, hidden in the shadows, and lingers too long to watch her fooling around with Phil. In one harrowing scene, she comes into Kat’s room at night and attempts to physically assault her.

Eve is consumed by jealousy while observing her daughter’s youth

One possible flaw in the otherwise skilled depiction of their difficult relationship is the casting of Eva Green as the mother of Shailene Woodley’s character when she is only 12 years older than her. By casting an actress who is not old enough to be Kat’s mother, the idea of the sexual identity crisis and aging Eve is experiencing is skewed. This is not how she should look at this age, because the actress is not of the right age.

The disappearance of Kat’s mother echoes the conflict between a mother and her daughter as she comes of age. Kat must reject her mother’s influence and ideals in favor of forming her own. Here, Kat’s mother services as a destructive influence on her life, but this influence is pervasive and unshakeable. Kat cannot reject her mother, even when she is sure her mother has rejected her, even that her mother never loved her. Even as she tries to, Eve haunts her memories and she has recurring dream of her naked in the snow and calling out for her.

Kat dreams of her mother vulnerable and in need of her help

Because of their troubled relationship, Kat feels little pain or sadness at her mother’s disappearance. She blames all her and her father’s unhappiness on Eve and encourages him to move on and find a woman who deserves him.

Still, the film resists the temptation to make Eve into a monster. Though Kat struggles to find something redeemable about her mother, some humanity in her that she can love, she never doubts Eve’s essential humanity and that the rational behind her actions. Kat speaks of Eve’s history like a biographer, dissecting her thoughts and motives as if she was there to hear them

As viewers used to suspense plots, we expect from the beginning that something sinister has happened to Eve. With this in mind, Kat’s attempts to reconstruct her mother are shadowed by our idea of Eve as a victim.

This presents a challenge to viewers: Can Eve be both villain and victim? And which is a crueler – the physical violence visited on Eve or the psychological destruction Eve imposes on her daughter?

From Kat’s narration, the viewer is compelled to sympathize for Brock and share her hatred of Eve, a strange position for the narrative as it becomes clear to the viewer that Brock had a hand in Eve’s disappearance. The eventual reveal, that Brock murdered Eve, is not subtle, as viewers we expect this, as we are used to stories where the good-guy husband is revealed to be a killer. Kat, from her biased perceptive as his child, perhaps willfully blind to his true character, is more naive than us as an audience and than other characters.

Kat’s milquetoast father seems broken by Eve’s disappearance

In fact, every one around her, from her cop boyfriend to her two friends, tell her father has long been the chief suspect in Eve’s disappearance. At this point, it has never been in the least implied by Kat’s narration, by the story steered by her point of view. We never see hints of her father’s jealousy or his fits of rage, which Kat is told until the last act, instead we make these realizations along with her. For most of the film, Brock seems like a harmless milquetoast harangued by his dissatisfied wife. This is the view Kat uses to introduce us to her father and to contextualize her parents’ relationship, thus it catches the viewer off guard, and even scares us, when he reveals hidden stores of anger and turns them on his daughter, his long-time supporter

Though the voiceover is relayed in Woodley’s voice with infrequent teenager vernacular, Kat’s view on the events, is cold and distanced, full of beautiful prose (most straight from Laura Kasischke’s source novel) and bloodless dissection of her mother’s motives. The wounds of her mother’s disappearance and her complicated adolescence do not seem at all fresh (note that Kat begins her narration with a suggestion of time passing, “I was 17 when my mother disappeared”). Her narration is composed, even going as far to recall her mother’s prim, patrician energy. The blossoming girl Kat has become a jaded woman, still fighting to care about her mother.

Yet, she seems unaware of events until there are revealed and gives no foreshadowing of Eve’s eventual fate. Eve is posed as the villain and Brock is the victim, even though Kat should know how these roles are reversed. While she struggles to see her mother as sympathetic, she seems to make no effort to rectify the two sides of her father.

The real surprise of the film is the ending twist, which is the sort of twist that seems calculated to give viewers something to talk about as they leave the theater. Instead of revealing that Brock discovered Eve was sleeping with Phil and killed her out of jealousy, as most of the film seemed to imply (and is the ending of the book the film is based on), Eve discovers Brock was sleeping with Phil and he explodes in rage when she laughs at him.

Eve sees Kat as her rival and flirts with her boyfriend, hinting at a possibly affair

If you believe in auteur theory, this is a clear example of director Araki putting his own stamp on the material, as he is primarily known for the Queer themes of his films. Though a unique twist, this ending feels tacked on for shock value, rather than organic to material. There are no hints at this twist to look back on, and in fact it seems as if it was just made up on the spot after the rest of the film was shot with the original ending in mind. Much of Eva Green’s performance and the importance of her dynamic with Kat no longer make sense in light of this ending.

Still, as a coming of age film, White Bird in a Blizzard is a success at depicting Kat as a real teenage girl, hovering in that confusing stage of adolescence where she is neither fully grown up but is certainly not a child. It is a quiet, often very beautiful film about growing up and coming to terms with the sins of your parents, figuring out how you will use their lessons and to form your own identity. In the end, Kat has lost both her parents and has reasons to hate both of them, yet she still has to live in the world and try to figure out how she can understand who they were and what they made her.

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

‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ Review

There is so much violence both toward men and women in the movie, but it is so over the top that teamed with the beautiful highly stylized cinematography it is hard to take seriously. This time around, the world of Sin City has a very ethereal dream-like quality that tempers its grittiness a little.

If you are thinking that it’s been a long time since the first Sin City movie came out, you would be right. It first hit the screen in 2005, meaning it has nearly been a full decade before they have graced us with the sequel. A lot has happened in nine years; Brittany Murphy, who was in the original, passed away under mysterious circumstances. Devon Aioki’s brief reign as “Asian It Girl” has faded from our memories and people like Clive Owen and Josh Hartnett have found better things to do.

Despite myself I loved the first Sin City and on re-watching it I still do. I know it is deeply problematic–the lack of agency of the women in the movie, their constant portrayal as victims who must be rescued by big tough violent men, and their overt objectification are all things that drive me nuts. The movie isn’t particularly kind to men either, the vast majority of whom are portrayed as greedy, callous, vicious lechers. Even the good guys are mostly anti-heroes. Overall however, the snappy dialogue and visually interesting hyper-stylized cinematography captured me, and I couldn’t help but love the sex workers of Old Town. They are tough broads, ruled over by Gail played by Rosario Dawson, who live the way they choose, selling what they want and organizing and running their own turf where not even the dirty cops of Sin City can enter without their permission. If there is going to be a third Sin City movie, can it please center on the sex workers of Old Town? I feel like there could be many interesting stories to be told there.

Unfortunately Sin City: A Dame to Kill For woefully underutilizes the prodigious talents of Dawson. There are two core female characters: firstly, Ava Lord, played by Eva Green, who is the titular “dame to kill for” and Nancy Callahan, with Jessica Alba reprising her role from the first movie. Both women, unsurprisingly (this is Frank Miller after all) are highly sexualized. Nancy still works as a dancer at the diner although she is no longer as wholesome as she once was having developed a drinking problem and dreams of revenge following the death of detective Hartigan. Ava on the other hand is a classic femme fatale who uses her body and Dwight’s complete intoxication with her to further her own murderous ends.

One could argue that there are some positives for women’s representation compared to the first movie. Nancy is no longer a passive victim; she turns herself into an avenging demoness in a very dramatic transformation scene and with the help of Marv manages to finally take out the overarching villain of both movies (something no man has ever been able to do despite plenty of trying). I think the whole Joseph Gordon Levitt storyline exists purely to illustrate just how untouchable Roark is and yet there he is, killed by little old Nancy Callahan, former victim of his son and current exotic dancer in the very diner where he plays his high-stakes poker games.

Ava Lord manages to manipulate all the men around her to get exactly what she wants by pretending to be what they want her to be–a fragile woman who needs rescuing from her terribly sad life, someone who needs to be protected from the filth of Sin City. Eva Green is masterful in her handling of the material and manages to bring tonality to what would otherwise be a two-dimensional caricature of a traditional noir vixen. Ava Lord is a woman who is tired of living in a man’s world and so seeks to carve out a place of her own in it through any means necessary. She is also pretty twisted and appears to take much pleasure in the pain of others and is eventually punished for her sins. As far as wicked women go I’m pretty OK with Ava Lord.

We can all agree that Frank Miller is a misogynist toad, but I think Robert Rodriguez has managed to interpret the source material in a way that is not terrible, helped at least in part by his excellent casting decisions. It’s definitely not going to win “most feminist movie of the year,” but for a big budget action movie, a genre that is notoriously terrible for the ways in which it depicts women, I found it to be pretty watchable.

Eva Green’s Artemisia Disappoints in ‘300: Rise of an Empire’

Most disturbing is the message the film conveys (or fails to convey) about rape and war. Artemisia herself presides over the sacking of Athens, during which we see several Athenian women stripped, raped, and hacked to death with short blades. Does Artemisia see this as suitable retribution? Does the memory of her mother’s suffering cause her to feel any empathy for these women? We do not know, because she makes no comment. This was a huge missed opportunity.

Written by Andé Morgan.

300: Rise of an Empire isn’t a movie about conflict – it is conflict.

300: Rise of an Empire (300: ROAE) was released Friday, about seven years after the original film…and that’s going to be it for historical accuracy, because there is precious little in the movie.

The film was directed by Noam Murro, and the screenplay was written by Zack Snyder. Snyder also wrote and directed the original film, 300 (2006), and is the writer/director responsible for Sucker Punch (2011) and Man of Steel (2013). The events in 300: ROAE take place before, during, and after the Battle of Thermopylae depicted in the first film, and again represent creative interpretations of key battles of the Greco-Persian wars, namely, the naval battles of Salamis and Artemisium.

Sullivan Stapleton is Themistokles, an Athenian politician-soldier who ascends to power after killing Persian Emperor Darius I at the Battle of Marathon. Rodrigo Santoro and Lena Headey reprise their respective roles as Xerxes, the so-called god-king of Persia, and Gorgo, Queen of Sparta. Eva Green plays Artemisia, commander of Persia’s naval forces and advisor to Xerxes.

300 was groundbreaking. Memorable elements, like the highly stylized costumes and CGI sets, the gratuitous slow motion violence, or Gerard Butler’s beard, have been adapted or satirized in many subsequent works. Unlike the imitators, however, 300: ROAE can lay direct claim to the production design of the first film. So, how has the 300 look fared after eight years?

Well, it turns out that the sequel is not as original as the original.

Everything about 300: ROAE seems bloated. The plot is more complex, which is fine, but the pacing is a tad slow; even the action sequences drag on. The characters have more dialogue, but not much more depth. Themistokles is slightly more well rounded than Gerard Butler’s Leonidas, and Xerxes gets a backstory (daddy issues and something about an evil hermit spa).

The battle setpieces are expanded. We get wider views of Sparta and Athens, and the backgrounds hold more detail. Unfortunately, this realism runs counter to what made 300 so awesome; it was the lack of detail and the claustrophobic camera work that made 300 seem more like a dream or a hallucination than a typical swords-and-sandals blockbuster.

And the blood…oh, the blood.

The original film could be accurately described as bloody, but the sequel is blood-drenched. Ridiculously so. The slow motion decapitations and hydraulic blood-sprays in 300 were a perfect fit for the stylized violence-as-art motif of the first film, but the violence in 300: ROAE is just hokey. Think Mighty Morphin Power Rangers instead of high art.

Indeed. — OK, I will, just put down the sword!

The historic Artemisia is a fascinating figure. Artemisia I of Caria, (aka Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus) was a Greek and the daughter of a Persian magistrate. Her husband was also a ruler; when he died, Artemisia took his throne. During the Greco-Persian war, she contributed several ships to Xerxes’ already massive navy. After distinguishing herself in combat during the battle of Artemisium, an impressed Xerxes praised her skills as a tactician and asked for her advice. The Athenians were quite upset about being beaten by a woman and offered a reward to the man who could capture her alive (so that she could be “shown her place,” I speculate).

By comparison, Snyder’s Artemisia seems to lack the inherent strength of the historical Artemisia. Instead, she exists as a damaged mechanism of vengeance. In 300: ROAE, Artemisia’s family is killed (her mother raped first) in front of her eyes by a group of Greek soldiers. Afterwards, the soldiers rape Artemisia and keep her captive as a sexual appliance in a ship’s hold. These scenes are disturbing, as they should be. Particularly so is the scene where we see the eight-year-old Artemisia (played by 10-year-old Caitlin Carmichael) battered, in chains, and surrounded by a gang of leering men.

Young Artemisia looks on while her family is slaughtered.

Several years later, a catatonic Artemisia is thrown out, like refuse, onto the docks. She’s found by one of King Darius’ kindly warlords,* who takes her in and teaches her the art of war. Eventually, her immense skill as a warrior gains her Darius’ favor. After the king dies from the injury given by the hand of Themistokles during the Battle of Marathon, Artemisia manipulates the grief-ridden Xerxes (who is not at all giant or golden at this point) into disregarding his father’s dying advice by renewing the war with the Greeks. She’s also responsible for planting the “god-king” delusion in Xerxes mind. The resulting dynamic is that Xerxes recognizes his need for Artemisia’s skill, but resents her for it, and for being Darius’ favorite.

Snyder gives us a break from the bloodshed and atrocity by inserting a sex scene between the two main battles. Upset by the failures of her sub-commanders, Artemisia summons Themistokles to her chambers under the pretense of negotiation. Her true intent is to persuade him to defect. She sees his skill as almost equal to her own – between the two of them, Persia would be unstoppable. Themistokles is not having it, however, so Artemisia resorts to seduction.

Wikipedia doesn't have anything on a Themistocles-Artemisia rendezvous. — Wikipedia doesn’t have anything on a Themistocles-Artemisia rendezvous.

The rough sex scene that follows is kind of rapey, and given Artemisia’s background, I found it uncomfortable to watch (it didn’t help that Stapleton and Green lacked chemistry and seemed a bit embarrassed to be in scene themselves). Other commentators have pointed to the fact that Artemisia both initiates and ends the act as evidence of her power, and note that it’s often unclear during the scene who is coercing who. While Artemisia has more depth than the typical fighting fuck toy (FFT), towards the end of the scene the male gaze of the camera puts Green’s breasts front and center and lingers there longer than would be necessary to establish her fearlessness. Artemisia’s costumes are also somewhat impractical and sexualized, but, to be fair, there were one or two men in the film who seemed under-dressed for the weather.

The merits of the sex scene are debatable, but I argue that sexual assault does, unfortunately, define Artemisia. As Kate Conway noted in this 2012 piece for xoJane, rape as backstory is a common trope (e.g., Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I Spit on Your Grave) and it is often utilized by lazy writers attempting to quickly add some depth and motivation to a female character. Often, this woman is a vengeful, violent, female action character (VFAC), i.e., a “badass.” Artemisia is certainly vengeful and violent; in the film, she orders executions and suicide bombings and does quite a bit of skull-cleaving.

A predilection towards violence usually causes critics to reflexively deem a VFAC a “feminist” character. While seemingly directly opposed to the women in refrigerators trope, VFACs often end up as sidekicks or props for the main male character to use to further his own glory. In this way, VFACs usually have the equivalent effect of enforcing, rather than transcending, traditional gender roles. Additionally, VFACs are often killed off as subtle or overt punishment for their perceived masculinity (e.g., the Olga Kurkulina’s Mother Russia in Kick-Ass 2).

Surprisingly, none of the characters in the film comment on the discrepancy between Artemisia’s gender and skills as did the historical Xerxes. After the actual Battle of Salamis, according to Polyaenus, Xerxes said of Artemisia, “O Zeus, surely you have formed women out of man’s materials, and men out of woman’s.” Even Green herself seems to have internalized traditional gender stereotypes. At the red carpet premier last week, Variety quotes Green saying about Artemisia, “She’s so extreme, she doesn’t tolerate people who doesn’t [sic] follow her orders, she has no patience—completely irreverent. She’s a man.”

Unfortunately, during that interview Green also perpetuated the crazy woman stereotype, saying, “I wish I could fight like her or have the courage that she has, but she’s on the edge. She’s crazy.” A similar quote from Green in a USA Today piece reads, “She is a psychopath. I am so far from this in real life.” That article also exemplified the frustrating focus that many reviews have placed on Green’s physical appearance and clothing in the film, rather than on the development or historical context of the character.

r2-v10b17-80213-co3-pulls-01rl-0009-tiff — Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo

Queen Gorgo gets more screen time and much more dialogue in 300: ROAE than in the original. However, much of this dialogue is straightforward exposition. The first fifteen minutes of the film are essentially a voice over – Gorgo giving us the film’s elevator speech. While on screen, Gorgo’s dialogue revolves around either worrying about her husband or mourning her husband. Her presence as a combatant as the Spartan cavalry rides in at the end of the film is welcome. Although – as with Artemisia – her motivation is vengeance rather than ideology or pure lust for conquest. While Gorgo is certainly a strong character, her impact on the narrative is minor.

Most disturbing is the mixed message the film conveys about rape and war. We’re shown several graphic scenes depicting the rape and murder of women as natural consequences of war in the ancient world, but Snyder must have been aware that they are just as common today. While narrating Artemisia’s backstory, Themistokles blandly states that it was his fellow Greeks who raped and murdered her mother, but he has no aversion to admitting this. Even more disconcerting, Artemisia herself presides over the sacking of Athens, during which we see several Athenian women stripped, raped, and hacked to death with short blades. Does Artemisia see this as suitable retribution? Does the memory of her mother’s suffering cause her to feel any empathy for these women? We do not know, because she makes no comment. This was a huge missed opportunity.

Similarly, just as Carmichael’s portrayal enables us to feel something of the pain experienced by the young Artemisia as she watched atrocity befall her family, we can also feel the pain experienced by Calisto (Jack O’Connell) as he witnessed Artemisia’s arrow pierce his father, Scyllius’ (Callan Mulvey) heart. Yet, despite what we see, underneath the talk of glory and freedom there is no coherent discussion of the futility of war and no allusion to the mental and physical scars left on the combatants.

Artemisia’s death scene articulates the film’s conflicted non-commentary on rape and war. Bloody, beaten, and anticipating the imminent arrival of the Spartan ships, we see Artemisia on her knees in front Themistokles, the point of his sword at her throat. Rather than accept Themistocles offer of escape, Artemisia chooses death. She feigns attack, and Themistokles stabs her through her lower abdomen. In excruciating detail, we see the sword sawing back and forth through her body. As she pulls Themistokles close, we see an almost orgasmic look cross her face.

While some have interpreted this scene as positive, her refusal to flee or to submit to capture a final example of her autonomy and self-determination, I argue that it instead serves as a capstone, an indirect culmination of the sexual assaults of her childhood, and a direct, forced (by Themistokles) culmination of the sex act that she had earlier delayed in her chambers.

300: ROAE is not a feminist movie, and that is not surprising given the film’s genre. The film fails the Bechdel Test; Gorgo and Artemisia never share a scene nor speak to other women. Snyder’s Artemisia is ultimately a construct of typical VFAC tropes and, despite a skilled and enthusiastic portrayal by Green, doesn’t do the historical Artemisia justice. Moreover, it’s disappointing that Snyder, having chosen rape as a shortcut to an interesting character, didn’t take the opportunity to also provide relevant commentary on the contemporary use of rape as a tool of war.

If you’re looking for buckets of blood, CGI naval battles, and fancy costumes, check it out. If you were hoping for an authentic adaption of the story of one of the ancient world’s most interesting women, you’ll be better off to stay home and curl up with a copy of The Histories instead.

*Coincidentally, the same warlord that Leonidas introduced to the bottom of a pit in the original film while saying the now infamous line, “Watch your step!”

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.

Female Sexuality is the Real Horror in ‘Womb’

Womb poster

Written by Erin Tatum.

Today, I wanted to talk about a little film called Womb. It’s not very well known – Doctor Who fans will recognize it as one of Matt Smith‘s leading roles before his TARDIS fame. The film presents a fascinating introspective on the ethics of cloning while at the same time highlighting the difficulty of differentiating types of love, putting an oddly poignant spin on the sci-fi genre. Above all else, I enjoy director Benedek Fliegauf’s unabashed aggressiveness in deconstructing everything we romanticize about childhood and then punching us in the throat with our own sentimentality.

The symbolism of this fetus is going to get exponentially creepier.

First of all, the setting and cinematography is breathtakingly gorgeous in the most depressing way possible. The characters are constantly surrounded by haunting, saturated bleakness. This proves to be an effective backdrop for the ensuing emotional turmoil while underscoring the overarching question of morality that plagues the main character, Rebecca. The opening voice over is Rebecca’s exhausted yet serene affirmation that “it’s over now” and that her presumably dead lover has left her with a final parting blessing of pregnancy. If you haven’t looked up an overview of the plot, you are probably thinking that this is going to be a powerful romantic drama that ends in the tragedy of death mixed with the hope of the baby’s promise for the future. You’d be about a quarter right. It’s about to get all Freudian up in here.

Savor the wholesomeness while you can.

We begin by watching the blossoming childhood romance between Rebecca and her neighbor, Tommy. They are inseparable, spending all day playing together and developing little rituals unique to their friendship. Everything seems perfect until Rebecca announces that she and her mother are moving to Japan. Tommy awkwardly kisses Rebecca and she runs embarrassed out of the room. It’s genuine and heartfelt enough to make me almost forget my annoyance that we force heterosexuality on children by romanticizing the hell out of every opposite sex friendship, but I’ll let it slide because damn these kids are adorable. Later, he tells her that he has a plan to rescue her in the morning before she leaves. Alas, Tommy fails to show up and Rebecca leaves without saying goodbye.

The one appropriate instance of romantic chemistry in this film.

After completing university, Rebecca returns to her original home in England. Of course, her secret primary motivation is to find Tommy, who just happens to live in the exact same place because apparently childhood defines your entire existence. Tommy dumps his current girlfriend like a sack of hot potatoes the second Rebecca finds him and the two attempt to pick up their relationship where they left off, except now with hormones and stuff. They briefly kiss, but Rebecca puts the brakes on, telling him it feels weird. Oh honey, if only you knew. She insists on accompanying Tommy to protest the opening of a national park filled with cloned animals. While they’re driving, Rebecca suddenly announces that she really has to pee. Tommy pulls the car over so that Rebecca can pee in a bush. He decides to exit the car for some reason and is promptly struck and killed by another car, marking the only time in cinematic history that a full bladder has served as the catalyst for the entirety of a film’s central dramatic plot.

Not yolo? Oh no.

Rebecca feels responsible for Tommy’s death and tells his grieving parents that they can totally bring him back because Rebecca plans to impregnate herself with his clone! Tommy’s mom is rightfully appalled, but Tommy’s dad is just like “Whatever, you do you.” This is the part where this film starts making your skin crawl. It’s really sweet and noble and you know Rebecca is willing to put herself through the inevitable confusion out of love for Tommy. However, it’s shortsighted and selfish and adds a whole new stratosphere to the definition of pedophilia, because it’s obvious that on some level, Rebecca chooses to bring Tommy back out of regret that they never consummated their relationship. Carrying a fetus with the subconscious intention of having sex with that future person somewhere down the line is a part of the id that I never want to think about. That said, this decision marks an important shift in how Rebecca’s sexuality is perceived. She declares herself to be a literal vehicle of perversion. From here on out, her desires are marked as obsessive, predatory, and unnatural, which is a striking contrast to when her innocence and devotion to Tommy was celebrated within the sanctity of revived childhood romance just a few weeks ago.

Just casually huffing my son’s preteen pheromones nbd.

Tommy’s parents decide that watching the clone version of Tommy grow up would be too painful and move away, leaving Rebecca to raise him on her own. She decides to tell her son that his father is the original Tommy, who died in a car accident before he was born. We jump forward to where cloned Tommy is the same age as the original Tommy was when he and Rebecca first met. Rebecca’s affections toward him are thus a bit too intimate – stroking his face a little too long, deeply inhaling the scent of his skin, sitting naked with him in the bathtub even though Tommy is clearly too old to need assistance. Eva Green, the actress who plays older Rebecca, does a great job of representing the bizarre fusion of the butterflies from your first crush with more physical adult desires. These scenes just left me wondering how on earth they explained this dynamic to the child actor. “Okay, you’re going to be in love with a girl your age and then come back later as a cloned version of your character, only now you don’t know that your former girlfriend is actually your mom. She still has a wildly inappropriate crush on you, but just act oblivious until it becomes relevant to the plot again.” I know that sometimes a film crew won’t explain darker themes to child actors to protect them, but surely they had to give him a heads up about this. I would be concerned if I were 11 and the 20-something actress playing my mom was sensuously smelling my neck.

Mother and child reunion…bow chicka wow wow.

My confusion was rather explicitly cleared up soon enough, when a playful mother-son wrestling match quickly progresses into a steamy moment of sexually charged flirting. Tommy pins Rebecca to the ground, forcefully straddling her. With an impish grin on his face, he breathlessly declares, “I could do whatever I want with you,” and there’s a little too much pleasure and excitement in his triumphant tone. The cataclysm of taboos makes this scene the most significant of the film in terms of social commentary on sexuality. For all of the times we want to pathologize Rebecca’s desires as the source of the problem, this exchange very much implicates Tommy in that deviance. The binary between childhood innocence and adult depravity is not as polarized as we’d like to think. Children can be sexual too, a cringe-inducing reality that society desperately tries to bury by creating strict scripts of innocence and chastity for childhood romance, immortalized by Hallmark cards and Hummel figurines.

Beyond making a case for the existence of children’s sexuality, Tommy’s actions also indicate that his desires may be a bit sadistic, only further shattering the haven of pre-pubescence. He clearly enjoys dominating Rebecca, tauntingly putting his face inches from hers knowing full well, even if only subconsciously, that they’re both in the heat of the moment and teetering on some level of sexual release. Again, we’re talking about 11-year-old Tommy. I also think that this is one of those moments that’s supposed to minimize the incest factor by implying that cloned Tommy has some sort of unconscious ESP link to the memories and feelings of original Tommy, but that small scrap of comfort is totally obliterated by the fact that you’re witnessing a completely consensual erotic moment between an adult and a child. Rebecca gasps, “Go ahead,” but the two are interrupted by Tommy’s friend calling his name. Tommy deliberately lets his face hover above Rebecca’s for a few more seconds, seemingly relishing her helplessness and obvious desperation. If you don’t think Tommy is now complicit in whatever freaky dynamic is going on here, you’re delusional. I found myself wishing that he would kiss her just to break the tension and then immediately wanted to drink myself to death for even letting the thought cross my mind. He reluctantly stands up and walks over to his friend, leaving Rebecca sprawled out in the sand and looking uncomfortably close to orgasm.

Genetic engineering: a proven birthday ruiner.

Rumors about Tommy being a clone isolate him from his friends because their mothers don’t want them to be associated with a “copy.” No one shows up for Tommy’s birthday party. The whole idea of clones as a metaphor for any oppressed minority that experiences overt discrimination might be more effective if the main character hadn’t gestated her boyfriend’s clone with the primary purpose of acting out her repressed childhood sexual urges, but at least it’s a valiant attempt. Tommy’s bewilderment at his sudden outcast status does pull at your heartstrings. Conveniently, Tommy’s new lack of social life means that Rebecca will be his only support system growing up. I’m sure that will only make their relationship healthier! Ah, there’s nothing like an incestuous dystopia to carry you through those troubled teen years.

This is awkward enough without the Freudian possessiveness.

Just in case you weren’t horrified enough yet, the unresolved sexual tension between Tommy and Rebecca is about to skyrocket off the Richter scale. Like his mother, Tommy returns to his childhood home, now the same age as when the original Tommy died. Unhappily for Rebecca, he arrives with his girlfriend, Monica, in tow. Rebecca mopes around the house, taking every opportunity to be jealous and pouty. She seems particularly disillusioned when she goes to wake Tommy, only to discover Monica in bed with him and connect the dots that they probably had sex the night before. The implication is that Rebecca has been single and celibate ever since the original Tommy died. On one hand, our sympathy leans toward her because she has sacrificed everything for Tommy and it’s a sad juxtaposition to watch her plateau in loneliness while Tommy’s life is filled with friends and opportunities.

Rebecca sulking over Monica’s failed olive branch pastries.

Still, here Rebecca’s motives start to acquire a distinctly vindictive, bitter undertone that erodes her original justification of everlasting love and devotion. She’s pissed that her relationship with clone Tommy hasn’t magically replicated into her romance with original Tommy, but she forgets that they’re different people and Tommy has no obligation to simply pick up the life of his original where it left off. Plus, her warped nostalgia creates impossibly high expectations on several counts, considering she never told him the truth and she should have anticipated that Tommy isn’t supposed to want to have sex with his own mother. Womb has a weird tendency to humanize incest in ways that make you feel dirty for even contemplating the scenario enough to formulate an opinion.

Giving new meaning to the phrase “sexy fishnets.”

Rebecca’s hostility toward Monica creates tension in Tommy’s relationship with Monica. Monica senses the growing distance between them and tries to keep their relationship alive with lots of flirting and sex, much to Rebecca’s chagrin. Despite Monica’s best efforts, everything falls apart when yet another play fight derails into not-so-subtle passion, culminating in Tommy shoving his head under Rebecca’s shirt. Monica has been watching them and realizes that they both look a little too aroused for family fun, prompting her to storm off. Tommy once again lets his face linger near Rebecca’s before chasing after Monica, giving her a particularly intense Stare of Rediscovered Lust with Inevitably Dramatic Consequences. That Tommy sure knows how to leave a lady wanting more. It’s a shame he only seems to be at the top of this game when he’s fighting off oedipal sexual urges.

This moment is too sad for a witty caption.

The last screw of Rebecca’s fantasy comes loose when Tommy runs into the original Tommy’s mother, feeling an eerie familiarity with her. He can no longer stand Rebecca’s silence and demands concrete answers about his genealogy. Rebecca caves and shows him old footage of the original Tommy protesting. He berates Rebecca for lying to him his whole life. It’s all quite heartbreaking and raw and I had to crank down my sound because Matt Smith’s anguish is so visceral it’s terrifying. The subtext that was once relegated to awkward pauses and unspoken taboos rapidly shifts to fear. Tommy rapes Rebecca and it’s brutally carnal, especially when compared to his naively bewildered romantic interactions as the Doctor (skip to the 2:15 mark and marvel at the sheer volume of flailing). The experience is filled with tears and anger and is so very obviously the opposite of everything Rebecca has been dreaming of for the past two decades.

I’m sure he’s off to more dismal horizons.

Tommy departs quietly and alone soon after the incident. The viewer knows that he impregnated Rebecca. The ultimate consensus of the film seems to be Rebecca making peace with the pain that both Tommys have caused her because now she will have Tommy’s child, which is implied to be the fulfillment she was searching for all along. This bittersweet romanticism appears to gloss over the fact that clone Tommy is a rapist, but I guess that puts us back at sum zero in terms of morality judgments. Rebecca was punished throughout the film for allowing her sexuality to transcend even the laws of mortality. Womb might be insinuating that female desire is the root of all evil, but then again, no one else walks away squeaky clean either.