Eva Phillips – Bitch Flicks

Suturing Selfhood: ‘American Mary’ and the Unconventional Feminine Repossession of Self

This violence through language establishes a paradigm that persists throughout the film in which female expression, female control over their anatomy/body and others’ is aggressively and oppressively impugned upon and violated by male domination. Mary’s passion and talent — and thus selfhood — exists imperiled and impeached by the overtures of men.

Written by Eva Phillips, this article is part of our theme week on Women in Horror.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape]

Suturing, as an act, sanguinely carves its way throughout Jen and Sylvia Soska’s 2012 body-modification-centric horror film American Mary. Before we ever see a face or hear a word of dialogue, we watch sinewy, achromatic flesh being sliced open, spread apart, and methodically stitched with black thread by blacked gloved fingers. We watch this, stunned by the juxtaposition between the very focused, dotingly nimble work of the gloved fingers and the grotesquely wrinkled and malleable flesh. We watch this also jarred by the ethereally doleful rendition of “Ave Maria” — importantly and perspicaciously, a hymn that beseeches a female savior to ward off earthly demons and evils — that sonically sutures into the slicing and massaging of the flesh. Before we ever see a face or hear a word, we are informed that this suturing is an act of salvation, not something to be reduced to a simple barbarism. As it is portrayed in the first few moments of the film, suturing is a complex extension of the two selves involved in the act.

These first scenes of suturing — which, as we are shown in an almost whimsical reveal, involve dead turkey flesh rather than human flesh — introduce us to the proclivities of the film’s protagonist, Mary (an unequivocally cool as hell Katharine Isabelle), a profoundly bright and profoundly broke medical student in her final stages of schooling before becoming a surgeon. Before understanding Mary as an individual, we are introduced to the presences in Mary’s life which vex and threaten her in strikingly insidious ways. Specifically, her sniveling, vitriolically brooding professor, Dr. Grant (David Lovgren), is presented moments after we watch Mary carefully and gleefully “operate” on her turkey patient as a direct contrast to the joy she derives from her chosen field. During a slideshow presentation in class, in which Mary’s phone is bombarded with messages and calls from debt collectors for defaulting on her loans, Dr. Grant lashes out at Mary in the middle of class, barking that having her phone out is “fucking rude” and later admonishing her to “stop fucking up.” This violence through language establishes a paradigm that persists throughout the film in which female expression, female control over their anatomy/body and others’ is aggressively and oppressively impugned upon and violated by male domination. Mary’s passion and talent — and thus selfhood — exists imperiled and impeached by the overtures of men.

To juxtapose this, the Soska Sisters brilliantly introduce, through their own masterful process of directorial and narrative suturing, the world of underground body modification and Mary’s unexpectedly intimate and empowering relationship with it. Body modification, which has longstanding cultural values and implications, has emerged as a prominent subculture in which individuals seek to perfect and alter their form to their vision using techniques such as implants, scarification, surgical reconfiguration of particular body parts, and more. The culture is known for a wide array of widely sought after artists — like this guy — and informs many films and television shows, particularly those examining transcendentalism in scientific-modification communities — think Orphan Black — and the multidimensionality of the culture has permeated the filmic consciousness in significant ways.

In American Mary, Mary is thrust into the belly of the beast rather unceremoniously and under non-consensual pretexts: in her interview at a beyond-grimy strip club to secure a job to make more fast cash, Mary is implored by her potential future employer to stitch together an identity-less man who has been brutalized and ripped stem-to-stern by the club’s bouncer. Mary sutures the man’s wound in exchange for five thousand dollars cash, violently vomiting afterword, and in turn imbricates herself into a world which will challenge her to re-conceptualize her notions of autonomy and self-governed craft.

What is significant about Mary’s consequential immersion into the world of body modification is that it is engaged by (very) willing, consenting participants who are firstly and predominantly women. As pertinacious as they are distinct in their appearance, the women who help to “launch” Mary’s body-mod specific surgical career — Beatress (Tristan Risk) and Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg), who seek to surgically modify their appearances to resemble Betty Boop and a human doll — value body mod and surgical transformation as a distinct form of sovereign self-possession that reclaims bodies otherwise controlled or possessed by external forces. Grandiosely, Ruby summarizes the allure and the empowerment of body mod, stating “I don’t think it’s really fair that God gets to choose what we look like on the outside, do you?”

This sort of direct control over one’s physical features, particularly when enacted by women/for women, this craven need for specific suturing that allows Mary to not only hone her craft, but define herself through her knack for flawlessly changing skin and bodies. She articulates her selfhood with each stitch while simultaneously allowing those she operates on to attain their purest selves. It is certainly no coincidence that during Mary’s operation on Ruby, the rendition of “Ave Maria” we hear in the opening scene is woven in to the scene just as effortlessly as Mary’s surgical tools carve and reshape Ruby’s flesh. Both women are symbiotically asserting selfhood through an act often thought to barbarously or carnally be “just for men.”

Themes of feminine self-expression and self-possession take on another dimension in turns of representation when the disturbing element of bodily violation (through rape) is jarringly introduced into the film’s narrative. Mary, who has purchased a new car and clothes with the exorbitant gobs of under-the-operating-room-table money she makes through body mod, attends a party hosted by the repulsively skeevy Dr. Grant, where she is a lone female presence surrounded by lecherous men in her desired field. Already coded as a predator, we are not shocked but nevertheless paralyzingly appalled as Dr. Grant drugs and rapes Mary, all while filming the violent transgression. It would almost seem this act, and the Soska’s directorial choice to unflinchingly present the violation in its entirety (often from Mary’s “perspective”) betrays the trenchant themes of female self-possession and autonomous expression established in the film, and falls into the triggering and tiresome trend of rape and sexual assault in other films. However, keeping with the Soska’s own sentiments conveyed in their 2014 interview with Bitch Flicks, the inclusion of the graphic assault scene is reflective of the prevalence of violence against women — sexual, physical, emotional, and so on — that is often ignored, disputed, or monetized. The violence that is acted upon Mary is not a plot device nor a gratuitous exploitation of the female body — and the ensuing violence she enacts as either retribution or psychological processing is not portrayed as erotic or glamorous. Rather, it is seen as coping — tasteless, merciless, and often directionless coping to contend with an act that defied explanation. What is critical, though, is that Mary never loses nor surrenders her mastery over suturing and the identity she consecrates through that (though, she does relinquish from the male-dominated “legitimate” surgeons’ realm). Even down to her final moments, she is in control of her craft and identity.

I found myself oddly calling upon a seemingly unrelated text during my viewings of American Mary. With each scene, moments from English novelist Frances Burney’s agonizing epistolary non-fiction piece, “Letter to Esther Burney,” began to suture themselves, as it were, to the action of the film. Burney’s groundbreaking and painfully vivid description of her diagnosis with cancer, the complete deprivation of her voice and autonomy over her own body at the hands of countless male physicians both before and during the mastectomy, and gruesome accounts of the gore and pain of the surgery, are eerily connected to the work done in American Mary.

While both the film and text depict outlandish trauma acted on bodies — whether it be Mary’s rape or Burney’s invasive cancer and equally invasive and debasing procedure to remove it — both reinstate women’s voices and female autonomies in unconventional means. Burney is able to champion her suffering by authorially disseminating her trauma in text, and thus re-transcribes herself into the surgical act which initially strips her of her selfhood. Mary, an author in her own right through her magisterial surgical prowess that defies the parameters of her patriarchal field, literally carves out her own voice and her own sense of control (for better and for worse) through modifying the bodies of others (which in turn allows those individuals to inhabit empowered identities) and altering the man who violated her. Both women confront their trauma, the desecration their bodies endure, by refusing to relinquish the crafts which define them and allow them to reclaim their bodies.

The ethics in American Mary are often dubious at best, but as in Burney’s letter the empowerment of the text — as is often the case with what little room women are allowed to articulate themselves in — lies in ferocious audacity sutured in each line or each layer of flesh.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

American Mary: In Praise of the Amoral Final Girl

Talking with Horror’s Twisted Twins: An Interview with the Soska Sisters

Eva Phillips is a relatively recent import to Pittsburgh, PA. She relocated from the crust of Virginia after receiving her BA in English at the University of Virginia to complete her Masters at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests include: representations of femininity and violence in film, refusing to quell her excitement over The Fast and the Furious franchise; having every cat; queer representations in horror and melodrama (both film and television); queer sexuality and religion; and finally getting to meet Sia and maybe wear her wig. In addition to Bitch Flicks, she writes for the good folks at Indie Film Minute, and has appeared in Another Gaze Journal. Her various disintegrations can be viewed at https://www.instagram.com/menzingers2/.

‘The Girl on the Train’: Trauma, Fragmentation, and Female-Driven Resilience

The film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Written by Eva Phillips, this is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Indie Film Minute. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of alcoholism, infertility, abuse, and trauma.]

The Girl on the Train functions, in myriad unexpected ways, as a soliloquy. It is a soliloquy for ineffable, unattended loss; an ode, of sorts, for shattered, misplaced desires, for lives ended or redirected. Most compelling, and most devastatingly at times, the film — directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor — is an unflinching soliloquy for broken women. I have a fair amount of hesitation even considering employing the term “broken women,” let alone assessing a film or any text as a soliloquy for them. So much is insinuated on a personal, social, and even voyeuristic level when the phrase “broken women” is used, and often the overarching implication is women defined and stultified by brokenness, immured in an agony or vulnerability that leads to some fetishizing of these women. In The Girl on the Train, however, the brokenness is not all-encompassing, nor definitive. Aided by the melancholic, complex irreverence of Erin Cressida Wilson and her screenplay (she also wrote Secretary (2002) and 2010’s Chloe), the film captures the self-deconstructions, the collisions, the rebuilding, and the acceptances of women who live with and in spite of brokenness. It functions as a kind of thesis for resilience, and a specific female-driven resilience, unafraid of battle wounds, that often is reserved only for men.

Based on Paula Hawkins’ outrageously popular 2015 novel, much of the film’s upholding of this complex, painful, but intensely refreshing and even invigorating portrayal of femininity lies in the fact that the film is centered around women acting upon, around, in conversation, and in unique matrix with one another. The film is not predicated upon interactions with or justifications from men — either within the film or in the larger, more metaphoric audience — nor does it seek a sympathizing or adjusted response from its audience. This is no more apparent than in a moment of excruciating discombobulation near the end of the film’s action.

The moment is brief but echoes seismically: the titular protagonist, Rachel (an astonishingly brutal Emily Blunt) approaches the wife of her ex-husband’s boss to apologize for a night of blackout-drunk rage, only to be told she did nothing other than slept the night away in a guest room. This revelation allows Rachel to sift through the fractured and blotted out memories of her months of alcoholism, clearheadedly recollecting the abusiveness of her former husband, the vile manipulations he would enact and deceptions he would weave, capitalizing on her depression and drinking to gaslight her into believing her behavior and her blackouts were the cause of their marital disintegration. Rachel is finally aware, critically coinciding with her troubled investigations into a murder that drives the mystery of the film, of the realities of the tempestuous relationship with her husband and the violence and fights he initiated and blamed on her. The film, which interestingly often flirts with the mediated ways in which women are forced to reconcile or contend with their grief and the limitations put on them — obsessive social media behavior and male-orchestrated therapy, as fascinating examples — provides women (most importantly Rachel) their own space to confront the anguishes and often male-driven suppression that stifles epiphanies with their own consciousness.

It is important that this moment of epiphany and awakening — which is not hyperbolically lofty, as Rachel quite literally is awakened to memories and moments that had been occluded throughout the film, either as a result of drinking or trauma — is shared between women and catalyzed by a woman. This is one of the myriad moments and facets of the film that transforms it into a cinematic experience of women viewing, interacting, and behaving in correlation to one another, when it could have very easily been limited and diminished by the unending problem of the omniscient patriarchal glare.

Frustratingly, whenever I would talk about the film or would attempt to look it up, I constantly found myself referring to it as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The two films, aside from sharing the potentially problematic reliance on the designation “girl” — the debates over and problems with “girl” as an identifier for adult women can ignite a discourse that would necessitate pages and pages of writing. For instance, while the “girl” identifier can carry positive resonances for women of color, highlighted by the “Black Girl Magic” phenomenon. “Girl” in the case of The Girl on the Train, works as a curious juxtaposition to the “girl” in the various adaptions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as both present films about feminine ferocity and intuitiveness in the wake of a crime. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functions as piece that emphasizes, both explicitly and implicitly, passivity and fetishizing the violence done to and by women, using “girl” as a nomenclatural tool of disempowering. In contrast, The Girl on the Train could easily be read as a remark on female fragility, female promiscuity, female unreliability, and a gamut of other tropes and disqualifications cast upon narratives involving women, addiction, and depression. Rather, the film transcends these tropes — primarily with the help of the astonishing, female-driven cast, who vivify Erin Cressida Wilson’s devastating and complex screenplay — and the film emerges as a testament to the agonies women endure (and often expected to be silent through) and the elocutions women engage in their handlings with each other, their reconciliation of selfhood, their desires, and so on.

Structurally, the film replicates the fragmented sense of self and the process of reassembling that each woman in The Girl on the Train undergoes or is involved in. The action of the film is conveyed in vignettes from the perspectives of three achingly intertwined women. Rachel, hiding that she lost her job over a year ago as a repercussion of her alcoholism, rides the same train into the city to drink and further descend into the misery of her infertility and disintegrated marriage. When riding the train, she excruciatingly obsesses over the neighborhood which use to be her own, fixating on the gorgeous, enigmatic, and seemingly blissful “new neighbor” Megan (Haley Bennett), and is haunted by the vision of her former home, inhabited by her ex-husband (a delightfully impeachable Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson).

As each woman’s vignette is further explored in brilliantly disjointed episodes and reveals, the possibility of rendering vile, redundant archetypes of each of these women — pathetic, obsessive alcoholic (Rachel); oversexed, cold twenty-something (Megan); narcissistic, type-A “new woman” (Anna) — is obliterated. Haley Bennett portrays Megan with such a compelling amount of brusque aloofness paired with subtle, unbearable pain, that she transforms the character into a tragic heroine, and her murder, that becomes Rachel’s multilayered fixation for most of the film, reads more than just a sacrifice of a woman. Most critically though, Rachel’s character, both through the script and Blunt’s astonishing performance, is presented with such delicate yet overwhelming agony that the woman immured in the savage cycle of alcoholism and relentless depression is not pitiful or an object of scornful gazing. Rather, Rachel is an embodiment of every woman who has been demolished — by those she loves; by the expectations and hopes she had for her own body that “failed”; by the unpredictability of her own psychology; etc. — and finds her form of coping and torment to be indiscernible. Her behavior and missteps are often bleak, but never objectified.

Yet, in her own unceremonious and dangerous way, Rachel perseveres and ultimately triumphs. Each of the three women of The Girl on the Train, by the film’s denouement, have prevailed or are vindicated in some form. What distinguishes the women, however, is they are not vindicated by some unseen but always felt Male Gaze censor: they are not vindicated by some impulse of proving a woman’s worth through her death or her sacrifice or how a man has changed his opinion of her. The men in the film are flailing, meretricious, violent, unreliable, and ultimately impotent. Rather, the female characters are women of incredible worth and mettle; they contend with incredible pain that women are expected to grin and bear. Moreover, the female body and the things done to it — specifically Rachel’s infertility and her consequent addiction — are not vilified or voyeuristically portrayed. Devastation and obsession, bodily and psychological manipulation, are all conveyed as natural, and not symptoms of deviant or fetishized femininity. The women then succeed and emerge validated through their own words, their own actions, and their interactions with and discoveries about one another.

The matrix of women and female dialogues in The Girl on the Train is an exquisite example of the crude diminishing that women experience under the trope-centered expectations of male (and popular) viewership, and the crucial need to allow women to speak, to act, to suffer, to exposit in their own language and their own space.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls

‘The Stepfather,’ Toppling Patriarchy, and Love of 80s Horror Ladies

Stephanie emerges as a poised, perspicacious, and resilient female lead. She is a wonderfully surprising alternative from most of the panoply of horror heroines who are tortured, fight, and scream their way through the terrifying films of the 80s. … Stephanie embodies what each of the archetypally male characters in the film fails to, and in doing so transcends the clutches of gender expectations in the film…

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s. | Spoilers ahead.

Following the banal images of a brutal murder scene in a quaint, thoroughly 80s suburban living room that kick off the wildly underrated 1987 Josef Ruben film The Stepfather, there is a fantastic tracking shot that careens through a blissfully undisturbed, quintessential American upper-middle class neighborhood: we see the blooming, verdant trees, pristine yards, immaculately manicured homes — the whole shebang. The shot, which as a narration tool serves to show the titular stepfather Henry Morrison/Jerry Blake (unnerving and under-used Terry O’Quinn) exodus from one domicile — or, as the film later shows, one arena for him to futilely commandeer another single mother and her children — and move onto another, as he progresses from home-to-home, insidiously usurping them as he sees fit. But on a more subversive level, this opening tracking shot, which unintentionally parodies idyllic tracking or panoramic shots of 80s and 90s films that featured goofy but affable dad protagonists (think Uncle Buck or Father of the Bride or any film in which kids are shrunk) speaks to the film’s more profound subversive qualities. The shot indicates a sort of potential for undisturbed perfection, but it is a perfection that is violated and infested by the nefarious threat the stepfather symbolizes.

While many of the memorable and crucial aspects of The Stepfather are the flailing, if not furious, impotent attempts at O’Quinn’s menacing nomad in securing some draconian ideal family life, the true power of Stepfather lies with the groundbreaking dynamic between the two women who are preyed upon — Stephanie and Susan Maine (Jill Schoelen and Shelley Hack, respectively) — and the intuitive resilience of the daughter Stephanie in prevailing against her “new dad.” The introduction to Stephanie and Susan, mere moments after the grisly scene by Henry Morrison (who changes his name to Jerry Blake, real estate wizard, like any good homicidal villain would) is one of such unadulterated, unsullied bliss, that in my years of film watching it has yet to be rivaled by any moment of mother-daughter conviviality on screen. The two very jovially, un-eroticized and un-infantilized, play in a leaf pile, genuinely enjoying the frivolousness and love between them. What intrudes upon this mother-daughter euphoria, of course, is Susan’s mention of her new husband — aforementioned, newly reminted killer Jerry — who greets the glowing Susan and the less-than-enthused Stephanie with a puppy (which, mercifully defying the awful tropes 80s horror, LIVES TO THE END) and the hope that he’ll finally make a good impression on his surly stepdaughter.

What is most sensational about this cult classic (which, if it hasn’t officially been elevated to this status, I’m empowering myself to do so) is how, in the wake of the disquietingly erratic invasion of Jerry and his hauntingly traditional family values — the family must get along, the family must eat together, the family must not mind if the new stepfather has a completely savage break in the basement during a cookout — Stephanie emerges as a poised, perspicacious, and resilient female lead. She is a wonderfully surprising alternative from most of the panoply of horror heroines who are tortured, fight, and scream their way through the terrifying films of the 80s. Stephanie’s sexuality originates and exists organically (except when the rapidly unhinging Jerry accuses her crush of “raping” her when they kiss on the front step) and the film never once fetishizes her sexual development, or lack thereof, in the tradition of much of 80s horror cinema — built on a preexisting set of standards for horror women.

More importantly and gratifyingly, Stephanie’s fortitude and cleverness, and her determination to restore the blissful perfection between mother and daughter displayed at the beginning of the film, is in the face of the absolutely bumbling antics or brutal tendencies of the men around her. The men completely fail or are violently disconnected from reality: whether it is the well-intentioned but mainly hapless chisel-faced brother of Jerry’s slain first wife, always 10 minutes too late in trying to sniff Jerry out; the perpetually denying, stagnating police officers; or the earnest therapist who is brutally murdered by Jerry in his foolish attempt to confirm Stephanie’s feelings of unease about Jerry. Stephanie embodies what each of the archetypally male characters in the film fails to, and in doing so transcends the clutches of gender expectations in the film and in a genre that is so often besotted by explicit or implicit gendered presumptions.

Stephanie’s formidability and indefatigable stamina, despite being thwarted by Jerry at many turns throughout the film, is also a sub-textual nod to a profound reversion of a patriarchal predominance, one which looms over the film and certainly taints many films in the 80s horror tradition. The brand of paternal instincts and familial preservation that Jerry is so ruthlessly fixated on is a hollow, ghastly farce. He is joltingly compulsive, and when the family unit does not function as he wants it to (which is to say, in defiance of picturesque happiness and groveling at the shrine of Jerry-Or-Whoever-He-Is), he must resort to abhorrent violence to embody the dismay over the shambolic domestic unit “failing.” Selling real estate and life insurance in his various assumed identities, every orchestrated move Jerry makes is a testament to the meretriciousness of the type of “home” for which Jerry strives. And so, in tandem with this vicious, empty patriarchal presence, is the true domestic perfection that Stephanie stands for — one established and centering around matriarchal and even Edenic love; one based on respect and value and ass-kicking bulwarks of women. Restoring this order is not only the be-all-end-all for Stephanie, it symbolizes the natural order of things and the film, critically, supports this perspective. The culminating, relentless fight scene is cleverly staged like so many chaotic 80s horror slaying scenes: Susan is abruptly and unflinchingly assaulted by Jerry upon realizing his farce and unearthing his true identity. As she stumbles helplessly into the basement, the chiseled brother of Jerry’s former victim swoops in, only to be maniacally stabbed by Jerry. It is only Stephanie who can effectively enter the domestic sphere and overcome her despotic stepfather, ending not only his reign of terror but reclaiming the domestic sphere for herself and her mother.

For a film that gets too frequently billed as a B-Movie, or disregarded or lost in the canon of slasher-centric 80s horror, The Stepfather is outstanding for the distinct feminine strength and unity it lionizes. Moreover, the film is a brilliant experiment in subverting expectations. Despite the title’s implications, the film is not some nauseatingly machismo feature of masculine power and reconstruction in which a destabilized family unit (weakened, of course, by the lack of a “father”) is consumed by the diabolical machinations of a traditionalist murderer. Rather, the film is one of the feminine-centric family unit prevailing, and the love between a mother and daughter being the prized, organic form of love that champions the aberration of the male intrusion and the male buffoonery that ensconces it. The haunting poster for the film shows Jerry pensively staring at a fogged over mirror, the words “Who Am I Here” traced on the glass. It is not so much indicative of Jerry’s delusional mania, but indicates the emptiness and futility of the forced patriarchal order on a domestic sphere. Importantly, too, Stephanie does not function as some Carol Clover-esque horror heroine — her body and her actions exist outside of an eroticized or fetishized realm, and she is not operating within some sort of phallic terror-dome, but, rather, transcends it. And, sure, the movie has some wonky moments: laughably oblivious characters, awkwardly 80s-tastic quips, and perhaps one of the most heinous scores of any 80s horror film (think a synth-focused Def Leppard instrumental cover band with no sense of dramatic irony). But it should be valorized for its uniquely feminist message that is never pandering, unequivocally unique, and woefully difficult to replicate (case in point: the miserably dude-centric 2009 remake). The Stepfather’s sly championing of female strength and domestic reclamation is no more evident than the masterful final scene: Susan and Stephanie, shaken but stalwart, reassess their home in the backyard, as Stephanie takes an ax the birdhouse Jerry erected in the backyard, therein violently and resolutely toppling the specious emblem of his false domesticity, his pseudo-colonization, and literally dismantling the patriarchal presence. Get it, girl.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Patriarchy in Crisis: Power and Gender in ‘The Stepfather’

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murderer conspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

We Need to Talk About Tara: ‘The Walking Dead’ and Queer Body Positivity

…To have a relationship like Tara and Denise’s was such a glorious prize. Moreover, in a time where femininity is so ensnared in the constant rhetoric surrounding the sizing of women’s bodies, and fixating on labels and valorizing or castigating a language of weight and body image that completely reduces feminine identity, to have two strong and two queer women feature prominently in a way that refuses to submit to those standards and dialogues is such a boon in so many regards.

This is a guest post written by Eva Phillips.

Rarely do the shows that I rapturously and actively nerd-gasm correspond with shows that I eagerly seek out for positive or intriguing queer narratives. With the exceptions of Orphan Black, the ever-confounding subplots on American Horror Story and my nostalgic revisiting of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, my queer reading of nerd-tastic texts is often relegated to the imagined on my part, and infrequently prominently feature explicitly queer characters and storylines for more than an episode or two. Thus, this piece originated as a way of professing my adoration for one of the few queer characters (and her consequent queer relationship) that happened to emerge in one of my most cherished nerd-series of all time (for better or for worse). And then, upon beginning to pen my praises, a really enraging media-kerfuffle transpired involving Amy Schumer, and the irritatingly age-old issue of discussing and analyzing women’s body image and size based on language that strips them of their autonomy resurfaced yet again. My vitriolic response to the uproar then galvanized me to reconceptualize my piece, reexamining my thoughts on the character/relationship I so adored in the context of its statement on body/selfhood positivity and assertion in conjunction with its queer elevation.

So given that buildup, it might seem a bit peculiar that the show that I chose to write on is the oft-beleaguered AMC giant, The Walking Dead. But perhaps halt scorn for a moment. For a show that started off with some of the most flamboyantly misogynistic storylines, machismo engorged characters, T Dogg and “the problem of race”, and manipulatively or even scurrilously portrayed women (the laughably awful attempt to cast Lori as some sort of Lady Macbeth in Season 2? Always a personal “favorite”), The Walking Dead has surprisingly evolved into one of the more complex, multi-persona infused shows. Though it may not be the pinnacle of diversity in the ever-expanding canopy of televisual representation, and it is plagued by some of the worrisome trends of disregarding certain actors (like the irksome detail of Sonequa Martin Green’s late addition to the main credits three season into her stint, compared to Michael Cudlitz’s and Lennie James’ nearly immediate additions).

Tara first appears in the Season Four episode “Live Bait”— which, much to my dismay, was not a standalone episode about a dive-y post-apocalyptic leather bar, but, rather, was a clunky mid-season re-introduction of everyone’s favorite sociopath, The Governor. Fairly pointless things happen throughout the episode’s vignette — he calls himself “Brian,” he gently carries a sickly man, he seems to have a disassociative break from his murderous self, and he develops paternal feelings for a little girl (essentially tacitly promising her a grisly death to continue his pretty dismal parenting record). But aside from “Brian” grumbling around and somehow seducing everyone (how, though? Really? Even Merle had more charisma…) there’s this spunky woman who greets us, pistol at the ready, who hastens to inform “Brian” that she is a star member of the Atlanta police force and has sufficient ammunition to kill “Brian” every day for the next ten years (which, may have not been a terrible idea for a TWD spinoff). This gal with all the chutzpah, of course, is Tara Chambers, significant for being all at once beautifully awkward, savagely protective — she is the watchdog of her niece (the aforementioned little girl, Megan), her father (the aforementioned sickly man), and her utterly milquetoast sister, Lilly — endearingly aggressive yet naïve (she poignantly calls the walkers “monsters,” and shoots them repeatedly, unaware of the “get the brain” rule), and, most importantly, she is profoundly, blissfully queer. Even if, in the final ten minutes of the episode, we weren’t graced with the subtle, all-too-familiar tale exchanged between Tara and Lilly about a camping trip, ‘shrooms, and a confession from a female love interest had a boyfriend, Tara would be the most marvelously encoded queer character to feature in The Walking Dead. Tara swears (at least, by AMC standards) effusively, she is some peculiar admixture of savage, quirky and mournful. She has a belligerent insistence that literally every significant event (including, in her premiere episode, “Brian’s” swift action to put-down her deceased father) must be concluded or heralded with a fist-bump. Actor Alana Masterson efficaciously embodies a character who not only proudly and openly personifies timidly-badass queer femininity, but makes each scene Tara is in meaningful, rather than getting lost in the shuffle of often interchangeable TWD secondary characters (or the, “Are You There God, It’s Me Beth/Bob/Rosita” syndrome that tends to be virulent in the series).

Certainly, there are many praises and vexations to profess when dissecting Tara’s trajectory and character arch, the praise portion of which I would certainly make as rich and embellished as possible because aside from the gorgeous enigma that is Carol, Tara is arguably one of my most beloved characters, living or (un)dead. There’s the really lovely (and it is enraging that character development of queer folk is met with gratefulness) stretch throughout the haphazard, at times brilliant, chaos of seasons four and five, in which Tara develops when she could have been marginalized or left behind. She has some of the most harrowing and compelling storylines. Her entire remaining family suffers the direst walkers’ fate; she realizes the monstrous sociopathy of “Brian’s” vengeance (yelling at her soon-to-perish, then-girlfriend “he chopped a guy’s head off…WITH A SWORD”); upon managing to be one of the two survivors in the husk of the prison, she accompanies, aids and bonds with Glenn; she manages to forge a place in the group and with Rick despite her origins, and develops a quirky little family unit with Rosita, Eugene and Rosita (and later, poor, poor Noah). Not only does her character’s spark never diminish, she is consistently given stellar dialogue, both punchy and sympathetic (her rapport with Eugene is often a highlight), and she rocks some of the most fantastically gay flannel cut-offs that inspire me to greatness.

What is most crucial about Tara, and Alana Masterson’s consistently wonderful portrayal, that really consecrates her deserved spot in the television tradition of marvelously queer Taras, is the space her queerness inhabits and the implicit, resounding body positivity that is manifest in her season six relationship with the affably tragic Denise Cloyd. One of the vexations of Tara’s narrative, and of the show in general, is the virtual nonexistence of queer intimacy and sexuality, particularly given the bevvy of coital exchanges between Maggie and Glenn, and the scantily clad entanglements of Rick and Lori, Rick and Michonne, and even Abraham and Rosita. Tara’s intimacy with her partners is diluted and nearly G-rated, though it is given more attention than her queer peer Aaron and his beau Eric (who, much to my surprise, is still alive — I rewatched the series and thought, “This is surely the episode where Eric dies of a broken ankle or succumbs to scurvy,” but, nope. Still kicking). To address the egregiously dissatisfying matter of disproportionately shown queer sexuality, or the consequent deeming of even queer kisses as “controversial,” would be a really vitriolic and speculative piece all its own.

Rather, what is worth discussing, what I felt so impressed upon to discuss is the way in which Tara’s body exists – she is never exoticized or eroticized, Tara is both beautiful and uniquely, ceaselessly quirky. Her queerness is neither othered nor, arguably more infuriating, forcibly normalized (there is no asinine moment of, “Well, I mean, it’s totally cool that you’re a lesbian.”). Importantly, Tara’s body is allowed to exist in its own right — it is not commodified, positioned, or stylized in a way to be the sexy sapphic chick or the archetypal granola-y/exaggeratedly butch/desexualized lesbian. She is an organic woman with no caricatures clinging to her presentation of self.

This is no more evident and worth celebrating than in the unexpected relationship between Tara and Denise that begins in the season six episode “Now” and flourishes throughout the entirety of the season. Their fire is kindled, so to speak, in the devastating wake of the Wolves attack in “JSS,” and is established on a foundation of moral support (Tara inspires Denise to trust in her medical prowess as she is thrust into the role of Alexandria’s sole doctor), protection and genuine care for one another (Denise asking Daryl to fetch soda for Tara because she talks about it in her sleep is particularly lovely) and just general, unique adorableness. The two even share a winking, encoded, dialogue exchange after Denise initiates the relationship by kissing Tara on the steps, and Denise, presumably referring to, you know, the zombies and all states, “It’s the end of the world,” to which Tara coolly retorts, “No… it’s not.” Amidst all that effulgent splendor and healthiness of a relationship ensconced in decay and turmoil, the most pleasantly surprising element of Tara and Denise (who really need a portmanteau name… Tanise? Rase? Dera? I’ll think of something) is the profound body positivity they embody together and as a couple. Both Tara and Denise — played by the outrageously talented Merritt Wever, who if you are not aware of, you need to familiarize yourself with immediately — are women who may be categorized in certain body types, but to do so would be a blunder. They are beautiful, complex women whose beauty is iridescent in their auras and their fluidity with, attraction to and reliance upon one another. Moreover, they are not hyper-sexualized nor isolated in a realm of frumpy, sexless lesbian portrayal. It is a queer relationship, and a depiction of two women, that thrives on the essence of just being – that is to say that their love and their selves resonate and matter for their own beauty and their own actions; not some essentialized, picked apart, or commodified representation.

That is really at the heart of the matter in why Denise’s savage death in the final episodes of season 6 is so brutal. It’s not simply that it painfully falls into the abhorrent Bury Your Gays trope — Denise gets killed in an attempt to find both soda (for Tara) and inner-strength to be able to tell Tara she loves her (which she resolves to do) — it is that her death signifies the violent and agonizing (not hyperbolic, I’m very attached to these characters) end to a queer relationship that wasn’t steeped in unrealistic or unnecessary stereotyping. Tara and Denise were relatable, despite their outlandishly gloomy environment, and as a couple they embodied a wholly body positive, wholly natural union, albeit forged in the midst of guts and splatter.

The ever-enchanting Merritt Wever, in an interview following the shockwaves of Denise’s vicious arrow-through-the-eye demise (a demise, importantly, intended for Übermensch white dude Abraham in the comics), echoed the heteronormative, unintended privilege of not comprehending the loss of such a character to a queer audience. Beyond her remarks, that there was a sincere failure, in all likelihood, to acknowledge that Denise’s death would be seen as a blight on queer televisual representation, there is a certain melancholy in mourning a relationship that was characterized by body positivity and queer elevation. As a woman who came of age and came to terms with queerness in cooperation with my obsession with television and film, the plethora of queer bodies and queer relationships I watched that fixated on distortedly immaculate physicalities — or, conversely, mocked or marginalized bodies — and reveled in some sensationalized type of sexuality so warped my perception, that to have a relationship like Tara and Denise’s was such a glorious prize. Moreover, in a time where femininity is so ensnared in the constant rhetoric surrounding the sizing of women’s bodies, and fixating on labels and valorizing or castigating a language of weight and body image that completely reduces feminine identity, to have two strong and two queer women feature prominently in a way that refuses to submit to those standards and dialogues is such a boon in so many regards.

Lamenting Denise’s death is certainly deserved, though it should not completely occlude the impact Tara as a character had and will continue to have (once her never-ending supplies run ends after Alana Masterson’s IRL pregnancy). Tara, in her own right, is a formidable character, and as a testament to her character’s appeal and magnificence, she has existed and championed in a series whose literary counterpart she did not even exist in (or so I’m told, because I’m the worst kind of TWD nerd who abstains from the comics). Her flawless presence and uncompromising, uncommodified self and queerness is only the decadent icing on an already pretty phenomenal, fist-bumping cake. Moreover, Tara is one of the few characters that has actually catalyzed me to pine to be fictitious — after all, she’ll probably need a shoulder to cry on after returning to the Negan-sowed chaos in the upcoming season.

‘Making a Murderer,’ ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and the Uneasy Exculpation Narratives by Women Directors

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘Fantastic Lies,’ and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men.

This guest post written by Eva Phillips appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Within the first five minutes of both Fantastic Lies (directed by Marina Zenovich) — the most recent, methodically investigative installment of ESPN’s documentary film series, 30 for 30 — and Making a Murderer (directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi) — the outlandishly popular and blisteringly sensational Netflix original series — impressively grand, birds-eye-view tracking shots are presented of the respective towns that played stage to the respective crimes at the center of the documentaries. Quietly idyllic and quaintly derelict, these introductory shots of Durham, North Carolina — home to Duke University and the young men of the Duke Lacrosse team accused of rape in 2006 — and Manitowoc County, Wisconsin — otherwise unknown home of Steven Avery, accused and exonerated of sexual assault in 1985 and re-indicted for first degree murder in 2007 — are not unfamiliar documentary tropes. However, solidifying their provocative and distinct styles and points of view, the ways in which these women employ their aerial shots of small towns, soon to be ravaged by controversies, are testaments to their acumen, and the disturbingly contentious nature of their films.

The shots would be otherwise unremarkable were it not for the stark juxtapositions and establishing of voice that the cinematic techniques achieve, and what they subtly intimate about the women helming each project. For Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the sweeping captures of Manitowoc County and the labyrinth-esque junkyard owned by Avery’s family (and alleged site of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach) are part of the opening sequence of every episode of Making a Murderer, and are interposed with childhood photos of Avery, extreme close-ups of the decaying Avery home, and portentously ironic court documents and police officers. In the series first episode, these tracking shots nestled in the opening credits come directly after home footage of Avery’s release after his exoneration in 2003, that is jubilant, liberated, but haunted by his cousin’s premonition that, “Manitowoc county is not done with you…they are not even close to being done with you.” In Marina Zenovich’s opening frames of Fantastic Lies, the tracking shots of Durham are prefaced with videos of the Duke men’s lacrosse team suffering an emotional championship loss to Johns Hopkins, and embedded with interviews of parents lauding the boys determination to succeed, and North Carolina Central University professor Shawn Cunningham anthropomorphizing Durham as a city desperately trying to find its identity.

Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich, by using traditional, seemingly innocuous aerial tracking shots of two towns interplayed with foreboding soundbites and poignant videos, achieve a narrative perspective that is as provocative as it is subdued. Creating worlds in which easily reviled or vilified men are at dire odds with (metonymic) towns that detest their very essence, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich as occluded intermediaries — they can at once see the entire town and infiltrate its intricacies and complications, and they can expose the inner workings of their subjects, their virtues and foibles. These women not only position themselves as intermediaries, but as exculpatory executors specifically of men otherwise caricatured and reduced.

What is most remarkable and perhaps most subversively compelling about both Making a Murderer and Fantastic Lies, and about the intentions and directorial choices of their respective creators, is that neither documentary endeavor chronicles the sagas of particularly defensible — or even, to some, at all likable — men. The alleged perpetrators in each case are from radically different socioeconomic strata (the small town, meagerly educated Avery would balk at the world of the uber-affluent, high-pressure Duke students), though both suffer fraught relationships with the law — the young men at Duke accused of rape but eventually cleared of any guilt; and Steven Avery, though erroneously charged with rape, is now serving a life sentence for first degree murder. But what the men most noticeably share is their almost archetypal “bad guy” aura, and the simultaneously unflinching and accommodating manner in which Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich display every facet of their subjects.

Arguably dealing with more of a moral quagmire (despite their now being cleared of the charges), Zenovich, who brilliantly tackled an equally problematic man in her 2008 Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, opens her film with the barrage of soundbites, even from Duke alum Dan Abrams, citing the brash braggadocio of the men on the lacrosse team — their elitism, their “cockiness,” their hulking physiques and awareness of social prestige, their perpetuating “golf culture with an attitude.” Indeed, as the film progresses, unfolding in the manner the news media first exposed the case, Zenovich leaves no factual, disconcerting detail uncovered — the notorious raucousness and drunken offenses the team was known for; the fact that the boys held the party and intentionally hired exotic dancers (though, the detail of the boys requesting white dancers is skirted away from) and in the throes of profound inebriation, brandished a broomstick in a sexually suggestive manner and spewing racial epithets. Even the outrageously inflammatory and derogatory email — in which a player, referencing American Psycho, “jokingly” tells his teammates he is going to murder, flay and desecrate strippers — is discussed.

But amidst the revelations of the perniciousness of the men’s behavior, Zenovich carefully and seamlessly weaves in tearful, anguished testimonials from the parents of three boys (Reade Seligmann, Colon Finnerty and David Evans) falsely identified by the alleged victim, Crystal Mangum, and stalwart admissions of miscarriages of justice by former teammates. As Zenovich masterfully reaches the climax of the film, gradually and organically constructing doubt as she eventually depicts the overzealousness of prosecutor Mike Nifong and the dearth of physical evidence that would exonerate the players, the boys have been valorized. Moreover, the town of Durham, once an aerial shot at the beginning of Zenovich’s film, is micro-analyzed and cast as the embittered and disenfranchised foe of the boys, represented and led astray by the deceitfulness of Nifong. Zenovich presents a fractious clash of worlds in which a team of white, safeguarded men have the names slandered and privileged unhinged, and emerge triumphant victims.

In true subaltern treatment, Crystal Mangum is dissected by friends, and never speaks (though, as Zenovich shows, the prison where she is being held for an unrelated second-degree murder refused to let her speak to Zenovich despite her desire to) except for recorded media confessions and apologies of her false accusations. Her supposed instability is extrapolated upon, coupled with repeated shots of photos of her staggering and falling at the party. However, Mangum still “stands by her story” of surviving sexual assault and ten years later, speaking to Vocativ, “she maintained that she was assaulted.”

Demos and Ricciardi, whose Making a Murderer project was an arduous, ten year, post-graduate venture (rather than Zenovich’s year long, at times thwarted immersion into the lacrosse scandal), understandably present a much more involved, complicated portrait of their male subject, Steven Avery (and to some extent, his imprisoned cousin and alleged co-conspirator Brendan Dassey). Certainly lacking the prototypical self-impressed, egotistical athlete reputation that adulterated much of the Duke handlings, Avery, as Demos and Ricciardi briefly show (through exquisite cinematography, using letters and rare reenactments, one should add) was plagued with his own demons — arrests for animal cruelty, disorderly conduct, aggressive behavior towards relatives (which, arguably, would spur the false rape conviction), and violent, disquieting threats written to his former wife while their marriage dissolved. Yet in the hundreds of hours whittled down to the expertly directed series, Avery, while often maligned, seemingly simple-minded, ill-behaving but not necessarily menacing, is always shot through a sympathetic (often, emphasizing the pathetic) lens. Much of this is testament to the directing duos unfettered commitment to showing the complete multifariousness of the case as they lived each moment with the family, dedicated to Avery’s case for a decade from the moment they stumbled upon the now infamous New York Times front page article. And much of the fixation and implicit empathy for Avery is a result of Demos and Ricciardi’s pursuit to hyper-focus on the failures of the justice system. But much like Fantastic Lies, Avery (and more pitifully, Dassey) is positioned, much more effectively, as a steamrolled victim of law and order run amok, and a town’s collective antipathy for a man and his family (for much different reasons than with the Duke boys) galvanizing the destruction of a man’s life.

Similar to Fantastic Lies, too, is the quiet lionization of these men in the wake of crimes (whether they are irrefutable or exaggerated and falsified) against women who are noticeably underrepresented in the documentaries. Teresa Halbach, whose body is found on Avery’s property after taking photographs at his junkyard for a car magazine, is shown only through aching archival footage; her family, primarily represented by her brother (who, as a rabid Making a Murderer conspiracy theorist, I find to be suspiciously portrayed), is a minimal presence at best. Though the duo beautifully achieve a scornful eye at the fallible justice system and the prevailing sentiments castigating Avery, a looming partiality ripples through Making a Murderer that problematizes the series as an exculpatory venture.

It should be noted that I am an ardent fan of both Zenovich’s and Demos and Ricciardi’s projects. Foremost I am thrilled that not only two women, but two queer women in a relationship helmed the wildly popular Making a Murderer. Furthermore, I was riveted by its reinvigoration of my childhood fascination with crime sagas, with Demos and Ricciardi’s nuanced and meticulous style, analysis of every detail, and penchant for the gorgeously tragic. Their flawless removal of themselves — seemingly something unachievable by the more egomaniacal strain of sensationalized male documentary filmmakers — but consecration of their voices is haunting, and a tribute to their years of investment and toil (through which, I am flabbergasted, they preserved their loving relationship). I too am elated, and to some degree relieved, a woman directed the masterful reflection on the Duke scandal — an imbroglio I witnessed with conflicted emotions, as a teenager beginning to develop my feminism, as a lacrosse player of eight years, as someone who knew players on the team.

Certainly, these analyses of the bungles and undeniable violations on the part of the justice system need to be examined, and it is a boon that these women take part in the burgeoning presence of women documentary filmmakers (though still infuriatingly small compared to male counterparts). Certainly, too, Demos and Ricciardi and Zenovich fastidiously show how individuals’ agency is stripped, and their identities elaborately reconstructed by tendentious external powers (media, the legal system, troubled communities). But the lingering effects of these projects, of the specific focus on men in tempestuous situations, and the resonations of these exculpatory endeavors leaves unease. It is the unease that pinches when the only individual to mention the dangers to rape survivors after a false accusation is a media fiasco is a strong-jawed, former Duke lacrosse player on the team during the incident. It is an unease that is as profoundly discomforting and ambiguous as the elements at play in the discombobulated and life-altering cases these women so extraordinarily portray.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murdererconspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

‘Carol’ and the Ineffable Queerness of Being

The potency of ‘Carol’ struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. … The film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times.

This is a guest post by Eva Phillips.

I harbored a tremendous amount of dubiousness for Todd Haynes’ Carol. A lavishly developed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, the film — chronicling the deeply complicated and ferociously passionate romance between two women, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and Therese Belivett (Rooney Mara) — received such unfettered, rabid praise that I, ever the cranky-queer critic, was immediately suspect. Perhaps it was because I had so much personally riding on the film being a pillar of Sapphic excellence (cranky-queer and malignant narcissist — I’m a jack-of-all-trades). As an almost predictably sad, sexually discombobulated — and, importantly, sexually terrified — kid, I could only reconcile my ample feelings about my sexuality through film. My desires, my confusions, my deciphering whether it was okay to have no clue what I was feeling exactly, had no place in my social life, and, moreover, no place to be securely articulated. Media with glimmers of queer characters and themes provided that arena for articulation of the yearnings, the frustrations, and the utter fear I was often consumed by — films were my realm of liminality. So I became a scavenger of any remotely queer cinema, subjecting my computer to countless viruses covertly streaming Better Than Chocolate, ferreting away rented copies of But I’m a Cheerleader to consult after lacrosse practice, secretly stifling a lot of ire about how indulgent the problematic Loving Annabelle turned out to be.

There was an indisputable comfort and benefit to effectively hiding myself in this really, really, really queer canon. These films allowed me a sort of expression and understanding, and, frequently, blissfully demonstrated oh, this is the sex thing, yes, good, good to know. Yet, despite these films salubrious qualities, the sort of discursive shelter they provided, they often seemed too removed or lacking (of course, you could make the argument that “movies aren’t supposed to fix your emotional/developmental crises” and, you’d be right, I suppose, but terribly rude). They seemed to dwell in a sort of microcosmic queer utopia, or, conversely, despotically tragic queer dystopia (Kill the lesbians! Lock the queer gals up! Happy endings are heteronormative! Bisexuality is a myth!) that never quite addressed the comingled anguish and mirth I experienced in my emotionally tumultuous coming-of-age. I would frequently resort to media where I could engineer some kind of unspoken queer subtext — usually anything with Michelle Rodriguez being seductively cantankerous in the vicinity of Milla Jovovich or Jordana Brewster; or my probably unhealthy fascination with a Rizzoli & Isles ultimate partnership. The wordless, even chimerical quality of these attractions in otherwise “straight” cinema often was more rewarding for me, allowing a safeguard in their silence. There was immeasurable pleasure because my desires and their imagined attractions remained equally untellable.

But in a peculiar way, Carol was like my Queer-Film Baby (a baby that really needed an induced labor, since my town’s theatre was stymied by Star Wars–The Revenant fever) — I pined for it to be some prodigious, cinematic gift to Queer Dames (specifically me), something that would satiate and demonstrate the viscera of queer development and craving. But I cynically feared it would royally muck things up like some of its equally revered siblings (lookin’ at you and your emotional/sexual lechery, Blue Is the Warmest Color). Contrary to many depressingly mono-focused proclamations, I did not want Carol to be (or fail to be) the next Brokeback Mountain (though, had Anna Faris inexplicably made a cameo in the film, I would have been completely on board). I wanted the film to exist in its own right, to not be conflated with the masculine machinations of something else, and to not suffer the Brokeback-fate of hetero-appropriation to show “look how attuned I am to the gay folks struggle.” Like any fretful expecting parent, I did copious research on Carol before its release, and remained skeptical at the inundation of sea of mainstream accolades, fearing voyeuristic tokenism or perhaps somber applause at yet another tragic queer ending. Not even cherished and respected queer testimonials could sway me to believe that Carol was going to deliver, so to speak, and transcend the lineage of queer forerunners as well as triumph the beast of my nagging dubiousness.

It really wasn’t until a little less than a third of the way through the film, after several decadent scenes of Therese and Carol getting lost in delectably nervous dialogue and sumptuous gazes and exquisitely drab shots setting up Therese’s mundane, silently craven life, that the potency of Carol struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. As pivotal as it is understated, the moment comes in a brief utterance that is embedded in a scene riddled with delicate class dynamics and clumsy potential “first date” politics and thus is otherwise overlooked. The scene centers around Carol — played by Blanchett with such fastidiousness, exacting the balance between regality and utter petrification — taking the savagely wide-eyed Therese to lunch as an ostensible thanks for returning her abandoned gloves (a most likely intentional accident). Therese observes, acquiescing to the generational gender expectations, that Carol must have thought a man shipped the lost gloves to her home, apologizing that she was, in fact, the anonymous sender. Carol balks at the alternate possibility, delivering the line that so characterizes what I identify as the film’s superb construction of unspeakable desire: “I doubt very much I would’ve gone to lunch with him.”

There is something so simultaneously infinitesimal and yet infinitely meaningful in this moment. The quiet duality of Carol’s comment, her ecstatic implied reciprocation of Therese’s attraction, establishes a precedent for the outstandingly subdued power of the film. Crucially, though, this moment epitomizes what transforms the film from a complex portrayal of unremitting love into a cinematic portrait of the distinct ineffability of queer desire. Carol’s declaration that she would certainly not have gone to lunch with a male employee is not simply the quelling of “do they/don’t they” trepidations so common to most potential “first date” dynamics — it is an implicit affirmation that Therese’s unfettered and uncertain desire (marvelously and tacitly established in the shot-reverse-shots of the first department store interaction between Therese and Carol) is neither misplaced nor forbidden. Merely by saying, “I doubt very much…” the film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times. Does this individual understand (let alone share) my desire? Is this going to be another suppressed attraction? Is this even allowed (or have I jeopardized myself by exposing inklings of desire)? It is an instance which communicates a euphoria distinct and most poignant to a queer audience (particularly this queer, now four-time audience member) of not just having desire requited, but understanding that who you are, how your desire manifests is welcomed and safe.

Thus the lunch exchange socked me in the gut. The narrative and the characters’ machinations ecstatically eviscerated me, so I fully surrendered to the film (even the somewhat aberrant “oops, we forgot a thriller-centric author wrote this, let’s give Carol a pistol” bit). Every touch or grasp of the shoulder — a reoccurring technique brilliantly juxtaposed in the opening dinner scene, as the difference in emotional arousal is palpable when Carol touches Therese’s shoulder rather than the male friend — translates an empyreal, unutterable world. Every longing stare, every coded phrase (“Why not get the suite…if the rate is attractive?” being one of my nearly-cringe-worthy favorites) and even more coded physical symbols (the portentous abandoned gloves, the removed shoes that must hastily be thrown on when Carol’s husband interrupts her first domestic reverie with Therese) are indicative of a particular vernacular of queer longing borne from the uncertainty or inability to directly profess or announce one’s passions, one’s indelible feelings of love. Equally compelling, the non-romantic (or not in the film’s action, at least) female relationship between Carol and her best friend Abby (plucky-as-ever Sarah Paulson) functions as an extension of this inextricable union. Carol and Abby, while open about their past affair, talk to one another in a uniquely cultivated language that both evokes the complexities of their desire (past and current) and the indefatigable, indescribable bond to one another forged through their specific type of union (they share one of the more beautiful and symbolic forgotten moments: shot from behind, the two intertwine arms and support one another down the stairs).

Many details contribute to the dedicated presentation of this ineffability, this new language of necessity and yearning that distinguishes the queer experience in pleasure, euphoria and aching want. Carter Burwell’s lithe lilting score captures the more finite moments of piqued curiosity or plummeting despair that cannot adequately be articulated. The melodramatic mis-en-scène (maybe Haynes’ greatest nod to Douglas Sirk yet, despite Far From Heaven’s ambitions) augments the powerfully silent subversion that Therese and Carol undertake in their romance. But it’s mostly a testament to Blanchett (whose austerity has been woefully misconstrued by some as haughtiness) and Mara, and even Paulson. They do not allow their characters to succumb to over-the-top tropes, but instead manage to recreate those aspects of queer discovery that I had written off as inimitable in films — the stares that communicate every jumbled, blitzkrieg thought, wish, lust but are not over vamped; the gradual transition into comfort with physicality as each more intrepid, explorative touch conveys the longing that often cannot be spoken; the quiet resilience of women who are not damned by the transcendent nature of their love, but reclaim it, making it physically and emotionally more explosive than any other kind of love.

I have never been so lachrymal in a theatre (except for Toy Story 3 surrounded by small children and for wildly different reasons) than when Therese fumblingly tries to ask “things” of Carol, to which Carol pleads, “Ask me things, please.” I openly wept because I viscerally knew how it ached to have your love feel so inscrutable, desperate to be quenched yet caught in limbo. I wept, at times agonized from the pernicious self-refusal so brutally portrayed, and at times over-joyed, because I had never witnessed the ineffability I went through (and still continue and will always go through, to some extent) in the various stages of my queer acceptance and pursuits of love so accurately acted out before me. No word or line authoritatively delivered, no movement swift or lingering made is insignificant — these women act each second with the full weight of the balefulness, muted cravenness, and language I and a panoply of others adopted, have been all too intimate with. I had never seen so much of myself, my friends, my partners, laid so brilliantly bare on screen.

All of this is certainly not to say the film is unblemished: there’s that tricky, body politics moment during Carol and Therese’s New Years’ consummation in which Carol, transfixed by Therese mutters about her breasts, “Mine never looked like that;” disconcerting class and gender elements; the insufferable good-ole-boy-ness of Kyle Chandler’s character’s name (Hoage? Hart? Harf? Oh, HARGE. Sure. Whatever). But what is so fascinatingly and stupendously gratifying about Carol, particularly when assessed with other pitifully doomed or categorically wishy-washy queer dame narratives, is that the coded, incommunicable language actually pays off. The film captures that quality of subversion and unuttered, unbridled attraction, but then it allows (and it seems pathetic to have to say “allows”) the protagonists to consummate their love — Therese can rush to Carol’s dinner party and, in a spectacular narrative cycle, return the gaze of their first exchange, but this time to silently communicate the agreement to embark on a real relationship. Speaking of gazes, Carol is valorous in not only exclusively and unwaveringly committing itself to the Female Gaze — no one is (irrevocably) punished! Lady-orgasms aren’t devoured by omnipresent dude-licentiousness! — it renders the once believed indomitable Male Gaze utterly irrelevant and desecrated in the wake of female longing.

I share in the disheartenment that the Academy Awards denied Carol the recognition it so rightfully deserved (thankfully, though, Mara and Blanchett got their dues). However, there is, not at all ironically, a quiet valiance in the film’s success that makes it perhaps more profound than, say, Brokeback Mountain. Carol triumphs in electrifying homogeneous audiences, in gripping the audiences at Vanity Fair and Slate but it never compromises its irrefutable queerness to placate or entice heteronormative expectations. The women are empowered by their ineffable queerness and we are allowed a dialectic palisade in an elegant art-house romance; the film’s realities coexist harmoniously. It’s really all this cantankerous queer critic could ever ask for.

Eva Phillips is constantly surprised at how remarkably Southern she in fact is as she adjusts to social and climate life in The Steel City. Additionally, Eva thoroughly enjoys completing her Master’s Degree in English, though really wishes that more of her grades could be based on how well she researches Making a Murderer conspiracy theories whilst pile-driving salt-and-vinegar chips. You can follow her on Instagram at @menzingers2.

LGBTQI Week: Stranger in a Queer Land: How ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ and Susan Sontag Defined My Trembling Identity

This is a guest review by Eva Phillips.

It might come off as a bit absurd, even an effrontery to some, to suggest that a film in which RuPaul must resist the titillation of a faux-fellatio on a pitchfork and bigotry is gleefully bellowed in the hate mantra “Silly faggots, dicks are for chicks!” is the very film responsible for one of my most pivotal coming-of-age realizations. But rarely do we get to choose the moments or media that have the greatest impact upon us. And such was the case with But I’m A Cheerleader.

What was most profound and even revitalizing for me the first time I watched—quite literally hunkered in my basement as if I was viewing a contraband edition of Cannibal Holocaust (for which I would provide a link, but I think the title alone is umbrage enough to the nature of its content)—But I’m A Cheerleader was not that it featured a panoply of beautiful shots or striking cinematography, nor that it was steeped in witty yet complex banter. Before it seems like I’m vilipending the film, I certainly don’t want to underplay it’s merit—it’s terribly amusing, sneakily provocative, peculiarly heartwarming, and, OH, YEAH, IT HAS RUPAUL AND CATHY MORIARITY IN THE SAME DAMN CAST. However, the film instantly became my most cherished nugget of queer cinema for reasons that pertained to the movie’s machinations in my life outside the film, and it’s hand in my self-construction of a queer identity. But more on that shortly. The film’s diegesis is certainly worth exploring and even worth praising. Jamie Babbit–who would later go on to direct such Sapphically scintillating films as Itty Bitty Titty Committee (a film which also appealed to my naughty nursery rhyme sensibilities, though I was disappointed it was not some salacious re-envisioning of a Dr. Seuss universe)—emerged from her short film cocoon to direct, and conceive of the story for, Cheerleader, her first feature length released in September of 1999. And, my, what an ostentatiously-hued emergence it was. Centering around the foibles and frustrations of an ostensibly “normal” (or, heteronormal, as the film exploits) high school cheerleader Megan, the narrative rests on the peculiar, raspy-throated charm of Natasha Lyonne.

Let’s pause for a moment to give due reverence to Miss Lyonne. Yes, she’s had her fair share of indecencies aired as fodder for the public eye in the years since Cheerleader and American Pie. But if ever there was an underappreciated icon for blossoming queer sexuality, it’s Lyonne, at least for my money. She’s got the vibe of that moderately unbalanced, untraditionally gorgeous upstairs neighbor who knows every Dario Argento film that you encounter when you first arrive to Chicago, downtrodden but full of potential, who fearlessly flirts with you and subtly teaches you how to be audacious and open in your amorous and creative passions. (Sometimes I go on run-on tangents when I imagine my future….). She made the gravely-voiced-teen rad long before Miley Cyrus and her “I’ve-been-chain-smoking-for-30-years-even-though-I’m-17” droning. And she has a Rufus Wainwright song penned in her honor. Come on. Give the girl a shot.

But I digress. Megan, who lives in an ultra-saturated world—filmed brilliantly with an idyllic tint that gives the perfect every-town suburbia a feel of being all too artificially ideal—begins to show the terrible, if not purposefully clichéd, symptoms of Lesbianitis. She ogles her fellow coquettish cheer-mongers, she loathes the kiss of her quintessentially-90s-studly beau (although, his frenching finesse leaves a lot to be desired), her locker is adorned with images of other gals, and, if those weren’t sufficient red flags, she’s a Melissa Etheridge enthusiast (Yes. It’s perfectly acceptable to grimace. Subtlety is not a bosom buddy to Babbit or screenwriter Brian Wayne Peterson. But that’s sort of why I love it.). After being confronted by her disconcerted parents (cast as the drabbest Norman Rockwell caricatures imaginable) and haughty, disgusted friends (wait a minute, is that Michelle Williams??? Could this movie be any more deliciously 90s??), Megan is shuttled off to a reparative therapy camp—which, with it’s flamboyant heteronormative decadence, must’ve been a throwback to Miss Lyonne to her days on the Pee Wee’s Playhouse set—despite her refusal that she is “plagued” by homosexuality. Megan is brusquely welcomed by the equally sandpaper-toned Cathy Moriarty as the Hetero-Overlord Mary Brown, and told she must accept her sexuality so she can begin to overcome it. From then on much merriment at the expense of heteronormative parodying ensues: Megan meets her fellow recovering homosexuals—including the blithe Melanie Lynskey (and heavens knows I adore Kate Winslet, but I can’t help but feel a twinge of anguish that Lynskey’s career didn’t flourish as brilliantly as Winslet’s post-Heavenly Creatures)—goes through a series of absurd therapy treatments, including Edenic-Behavioral 101; and falls in love with Graham, played by the utterly incomparable Clea DuVall. Without delving much deeper into a plot analysis, let’s just say the film has the gayest of all endings. Think Cinderella in the back of a pickup-truck.

But to fully appreciate why this film is the most important piece of queer cinema for me, it’s necessary to ponder for a moment its Sontag-ian merit. That’s right, Susan Sontag, or S-Squared as nobody calls her. Even typing it I acknowledge how flimsily pretentious it seems to throw her name around–it’s like the fledgling English major who arbitrarily wedges Nietzche into every conversation, or that one guy who insists on wearing tweed and skulks in the shadows of your dinner party only to utter things like “You don’t know jazz. You can’t until you listen to Captain Beefheart. He teaches you to HEAR sound.” But Sontag, a stellar emblem of queer genius, and the extrapolations she makes on the aesthetic of “camp” are particularly fitting when unpacking Cheerleader and why, to this day, it still holds such a prized place in my heart. Sontag was a woman who had her fingers in many pies (which is not necessarily meant to be innuendo, but in her case the tawdry joke is also applicable), and her theories like that on the role of modern photography on cultural memory solidify her as one of the preeminent minds of the 20th century. She also had a longtime romance with Annie Leibovitz. And she had an affinity for bear suits.

But her groundbreaking insights on the style of camp, (a fully fleshed out adumbration of which can be found here) are most manifest in Cheerleader. A sensibility that is dependent on the grandiose, on double-entendres, and on the flamboyant satire of normalcy, camp is a rampant in Cheerleader. RuPaul teaches outdated masculinity adorned in the skimpiest shorts imaginable (and rightfully so, with those sensational gams); Cathy Moriarity barks, in one of the film’s many remarkably self-reflexive moments, “You don’t want to be a Raging Bull Dike!”; Megan woos Graham with a saccharine cheer at the mock hetero-graduation. Furthermore, the film’s style and wardrobe was inspired by John Waters, the reigning Emperor of camp and anemic mustaches. But what left such an indelible mark on me was the film’s campiness and the world of artifice it created that gave me a safe space to explore my identity. Certainly, it was ludicrous at the moment. But often times the preposterousness of it made it much more provocative to me. Moreover, the films tinkering with style and double meanings lit a spark in my fourteen-year-old cinema-phile self that led to my passion for film criticism, for the Mulvey’s and Sontag’s of the world that could offer me a deeper appreciation of cinema, and most critically, ignited the feminist fervor in me that has served me so well to this day.

But attesting to the notion of safe-space, outside of the film’s beloved campiness, But I’m a Cheerleader is my unrivaled top piece of queer cinema because it was the first film I felt secure watching, enjoying and acknowledging images of sexuality that I had previously abnegated. My existence up until that point had been one of self-imposed exile in a very dismal, skeleton littered closet, in which I, like Megan, vehemently denied the glimmers of “alternative attractions” that flittered (and by flittered I mean stampeded) across my mind daily. I firmly believed that if I were to witness any acts of same-sex canoodling or affection, I would instantly be emblazoned with some Scarlet-Letter-esque marker, so that all my peers would know I’D SEEN THE GAY AND NOW I WAS ONE OF THEM (fear not, I’ve evolved). The closest I came to queer cinema prior to Cheerleader was when I superimposed my own ideations on particular scenes in the film Nell in a hotel room in Florida, only to have to flee said hotel due to a hurricane besieging the coast. I thought the elements were literally chasing the queerness out of me. But then I mustered up my courage and watched But I’m a Cheerleader. And then I watched it again. And again. And so on. And so forth. And I had the epiphany that I was not meant to be punished for queerness, and that there was a place, even if I felt my feelings to be ineffable, where I could watch and develop my own sensibilities without the fear of judgment that I so often quaked in the shadow of. I give Cheerleader absolute credit for this. So, sure, it’s brash and occasionally tacky. Sure, the soundtrack has the insufferable whine of so many 90s queer-cinema-compilations. But it’s got moxie and balls (neon, tightly-clad balls). And it gave me the queer sanctuary I so desperately needed at fourteen.

And if nothing else, YOU GET RUPAUL.

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Eva Phillips may or may not be the unapologetic leader of the Milla Jovovich Adoration Army. When she is not studying every one of Madam Jovovich’s films, she is earning her degree in English at the University of Virginia. With an affinity for film, obsessive alphabetizing, and listening to infomercials for possible auguries of the impending apocalypse, she also cherishes writing poetry and convincing everyone of the merits of rescuing physically handicapped felines (of which she’s adopted several). She is not ambidextrous and is damn bitter about that, too.