Animated Children’s Films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The History and the Legacy of Disney’s Original Fairy Tale

This is a guest review by Stevie Leigh Cattigan.

‘Hell, Doc … we just make a picture and then you professors come along and tell us what we do.’ – Walt Disney, Time Magazine (1937)

With the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as their first feature length film in 1937, The Walt Disney Company began negotiations for the complete buy-out of the fairy tale genre. Their venture paid off with profits in excess of $66 million. They capitalised upon this success adapting no fewer than seven more fairy tales to the big screen, and built an entire theme park empire around the idea of their enchanted kingdom whilst making a bomb through the marketing of princesses to little girls. Unsurprisingly, given the seventy year monopoly on fairy tales afforded Disney, many forget the original source tales for these works. Straparola, Basile, Perrault and Madame de Beaumont go unmentioned while Disney still hog the spotlight.

As for the Brothers Grimm, whose tale ‘Schneewittchen’ provided the source for Disney’s adaptation, they fare slightly better in popular culture. In many ways Disney are the natural successors to the Grimms, sharing many of the same conservative values and imparting similar messages about good girls and heroic boys to their audiences. But there are also several differences between the two versions, especially concerning the role of the prince. As is the case in many of the Grimms’ tales, the prince is barely even a character, he just shows up at the end in order to whisk the princess away to his castle. In Disney’s version however, the prince has a more prominent role. As discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, women’s stories are often framed through male discourse and they are, ‘(enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics’. Disney’s prince is the beginning and the end of Snow White’s story; he literally frames her narrative. Then there are of course the dwarfs, so much more prominent in the Disney version than the Grimms’ that they are included in the title. Snow White’s character is so massively one dimensional and underdeveloped that she needs seven little men as a supporting cast (and the Evil Queen) in order to make the film even remotely interesting.

But of course, Snow White is not supposed to be an interesting character. She is a template; a parable for how girls should behave. In the Grimms’ version she is just seven years old. I’m presuming she is older in the Disney version, but the point is irrelevant really. No matter her age she is supposed to be childish, innocent, naïve, unknowing. But most importantly she must be domesticated. In the Grimms’ version the dwarfs tell Snow White, ‘If you will keep house for us, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit and keep everything neat and tidy, then you can stay with us, and we’ll give you everything you need’, to which Snow White replies, ‘Yes, with pleasure’. In the Disney version she offers to ‘keep home’ if the dwarfs let her stay with them. She also shows that cleaning is darn good fun, and I imagine it really would be if you had a troop of woodland creatures doing most of the work for you. Disney’s Snow White is good and obedient, she does what she’s told and she says her prayers before bedtime. Her only act of disobedience occurs when she ignores the strong warning given to her by the dwarfs: ‘beware of strangers!’ She is tempted by the old hag’s red apple, and we all know by now that there are always disastrous consequences when it comes to disobedient women and apples. Unable to bring themselves to bury her in the ground, the dwarfs creepily decide to display her dead body in an ornately decorated glass coffin, so they can always enjoy her beauty. In the Grimms’ tale the prince, who has searched high and low for a dead chick in a glass coffin, says to the dwarfs, ‘Let me have the coffin. I will give you whatever you want for it… Make me a present of it, for I can’t live without seeing Snow White. I will honour and cherish her as if she were my beloved.’ Note how she is simply referred to as an ‘it’ here; she is a mere possession for the prince. In the Disney version Snow White is then awoken by ‘love’s true kiss’, another deviation from the Grimms’ tale and presumably an element borrowed from Sleeping Beauty. Perhaps it appealed to Walt’s romantic side – his creepy, bordering-on-necrophilia romantic side. As a reward for her unrelenting submissiveness Snow White gets to spend the rest of her life in a giant castle with a man she barely knows who calls her ‘it’. Believe it or not the evil Queen’s fate is far grizzlier.

Despite the pervasiveness of the ‘evil step-mother’ as a stock character in popular culture, it is actually the biological parents who play the villains in many fairy tales. Often the Grimms would alter certain tales they had collected, substituting birth mothers for step-mothers, so as not to shock their readers and tarnish the image of the motherhood. In Snow White, her good biological mother dies in childbirth at the beginning of the tale, paving the way for a truly monstrous step-mother. In Disney’s version they go even further by eradicating Snow White’s birth mother from the narrative all together, leaving us with just the good, pure and passive Snow White contrasted with the evil, jealous and powerful Queen. The whole virgin/whore dichotomy thing, which Western culture still cannot get enough of, is prominent in the original tale but is amped to the max by Disney. In versions of the tale pre-dating the Grimms, most notably Giambattista Basile’s ‘The Young Slave’, much is made of the Queen’s jealousy of Snow White’s suitors. Once fairy tales became more exclusively aimed towards children sexual themes began to be repressed, and although The Grimms and Disney still focus on Snow White’s step-mother’s jealousy in their tales, the psycho-sexual undertones are far more subtle. Competition for male approval could be seen to be the most prominent theme of the story. Whether it be for the affection of young suitors, or for the attention of the absent father (In the Grimms’ tale Snow White is not an orphan, but her father is only mentioned once in the text. Child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the rivalry between Snow White and the Queen was oedipal.) Or, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, for the approval of the patriarchal voice of judgment in the mirror ‘that rules the Queen’s – and every woman’s – self evaluation.’ The Queen’s obsession with beauty merely reflects patriarchal society’s own obsession with it. This is still relevant today, and it is still an issue which pits women against each other. Again, Gilbert and Gubar highlight this, ‘female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice in the looking glass sets them against each other.’ Of course, for the Queen there is no happy ending, and she meets a sticky end in both tales. In the Grimms’ far more horrific version she is forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she drops dead. In the Disney version the violence is more sanitised, with her death taking place off-screen. However, her treatment is still harsh and she is pursued by the dwarfs onto a cliff where she falls to her death, destined to be pecked at by wild vultures.

2001 welcomed an alternative to the Disney fairy tale with the release of Shrek, an animated comedy which made fun of the old classics. To date there have been three more Shrek films, as well as other similar animated features such as Hoodwinked and Happily N’Ever After. Even Disney jumped on the bandwagon with the release of their live action feature Enchanted, which tells the story of a fairytale princess transported to modern day New York. In these films fairy tale tropes are lampooned and mocked for being old fashioned and out of touch. In one scene in Shrek the Third the princesses find themselves trapped in prison. Their solution to this problem is to ‘assume the positions’, which means sit around and wait to be rescued. And there is of course the scene where Snow White, accompanied as always by her posse of cute creatures, enchants two guards with her beautiful singing voice, only to then take them surprise by unleashing her song birds as weapons, all to the tune of Led Zeppelin. In Disney’s Enchanted they mock their own little Snow White with a city version of the ‘Whistle While You Work’ scene. This time it is a host of vermin, clusters of cockroaches and swarms of flies that help her with chores. Despite these films making fun of old fairy tale clichés, and trying to create a more modern outlook, they tend to reinforce the same values. They still end happily ever after with a wedding, and they continue to focus on hetero-normative plot points.

After gaining little success with The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, Disney announced in 2009 that they would no longer make fairy tale adaptations. Which I’m guessing they are starting to regret right around now as it seems fairy tales are once again en vogue. There are two new TV shows, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, which deal with the genre, and a whole host of new movie adaptations on the horizon. These include the Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots, and not one but two new Snow White adaptations. The first, Snow White and the Huntsman, seems far grittier with Snow White in armour and a supposedly more active role. Despite this, not one line of dialogue does she get to speak in the trailer. The other adaptation, Mirror, Mirror takes its cue much more from Disney and seems more whimsical and light-hearted. Yet in this trailer Snow White actually gets to speak, and fairytale clichés are made fun of with the prince needing to be rescued instead. However, both trailers still fixate on the monster/angel dichotomy of the two female characters, with no one seeming to understand that this is the most outdated idea of all in the tale. These trailers have prompted much debate over both films’ lack of racial diversity. Considering the wealth of different variations of fairy tales available, from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds, it is completely ridiculous that the only versions we still pay any attention to are those that have been manipulated by upper-class, white guys from the 18th and 19th centuries to suit their own religious and social morals. It would be so easy to put a real spin on the tired old tales, using a more diverse cast and less passive women, because these tales already exist. They are there in the form of traditional folk tales that collectors and publishers chose to ignore, and in the form of post-modern fairy tales, where authors have written out the elitism, racism and misogyny in order to create more exciting tales. Fairy tales are meant to be adapted, manipulated, toyed with and allowed to evolve and to grow. They have travelled from the workrooms of peasants to the literary salons of Paris. They have settled in the nurseries of children and have been adapted to the big screen. They are not meant to be left to stagnate, tracing the same old stories in the same old style. It’s time for change.

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Stevie Leigh Cattigan lives in Glasgow, Scotland and has just graduated with a degree in English and Comparative Literature. Tired of ranting at anyone who would listen about the lack of decent female characters in films, she decided to start at blog about just that called Calm Down Dear (which currently no one reads so take a look if you can!)



Texts used:
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother’ and The Brothers Grimm, ‘Snow White’ both contained in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1999).

Animated Children’s Films: Despite an Intelligent Heroine, Sexism Taints Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’

This guest review by Megan Kearns appears as part of our theme week on Animated Children’s Films.


An intelligent, strong-willed, female protagonist. Who reads books. And seeks adventure. With a heroine like Belle, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, must be a feminist-minded film. Right?? At first, I thought so too. But appearances can be deceiving…

Hailed by critics as a touching romance and one of the greatest animated films ever made, Beauty and the Beast became the first animated movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. When I watched it in the theatre years ago, I too fell under its spell, seduced by its lush animation, whimsical tunes and of course Belle.

It felt refreshing to see an intelligent, outspoken, animated heroine who loved to read. Outspoken and loved books? I was outspoken and loved books! I saw myself in Belle. She was a misunderstood misfit, wanting “more than this provincial life” to which she had been born. I too felt like an outcast, yearning for adventure and freedom. We were kindred spirits.

But it wasn’t until years later that I saw the crack in the veneer. As I got older and embraced myself as a feminist, I began to question things more diligently. Once you start to see sexism, you can’t NOT see it. Sadly, it’s everywhere, including children’s films. Actually it’s possibly most prevalent in children’s films, which often reinforce tired and oppressive gender roles and stereotypes.

 Yes, Belle is intelligent, courageous, curious, opinionated…all the things I admire in female protagonists. Disney was painfully aware of the criticism against The Little Mermaid’s Ariel giving up her family, her life, hell even her voice all for a stupid prince. Linda Woolverton, Beauty and the Beast’s screenwriter, drew inspiration for Belle from tomboyish, book-loving, outspoken Jo in Little Women. Belle’s feisty independence heralded a new kind of Disney heroine, paving the way for Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan. And yes, we often see the world from her vantage point, another plus. Although the film begins and ends with the Beast, who also happens to go through the biggest transformation (literally and figuratively) in the film. Despite her awesomeness, there’s still a huge problem with Belle.

Even though Belle possesses admirable traits, her merit still comes down to her looks. The Beast, Gaston, the villagers and the enchanted servants all exclaim she’s beautiful, gorgeous, pretty and “her looks have no parallel.” Girls and women should be valued for their intellect, skills and kindness. But no one in the movie is raving about Belle’s inner beauty. Not only is Belle stunning, which of course all Disney “princesses” must be, and white and thin (god we need some diversity in films). It’s her name. Her fucking name is “BELLE,” which in French means “beautiful!” Despite her intelligence and bibliophile ways, even her fucking name revolves around her looks. Once again, women are subjugated and reduced to their appearances. Disney says sure, it’s okay to be smart, bookish, even a weird outcast…as long as you’re pretty. Ugh.

 In fact, the whole goddamn movie revolves around beauty. Symbols of beauty (mirrors and roses), permeate the film. Ironic since the intended moral of the fairy tale is looking past appearances to seek true inner beauty. But here’s the kicker. Beauty and the Beast would never have been made with a woman as a beast. Again reinforcing that yep, beauty is only skin deep…if you’re a dude. If you’re a woman, you’d best be gorgeous.

The only other female characters in the movie are Mrs. Potts (I heart Angela Lansbury!), the wardrobe (who has no personality) and the French maid feather duster. A grandmotherly type and a sexpot. Of course Disney does their notorious matricide in the form of the protagonist’s mother either dead or non-existent. They demonize stepmothers and solely focus on both daughters’ and sons’ relationships with their fathers. Seriously, Disney, what the hell have you got against mothers?? And yep, I’m aware Mrs. Potts is Chips’s mother. Doesn’t count. Not only is she not Belle’s mother, she’s a fucking teapot for most of the film. Belle has no female friends, no mother, no sister, no female role model. The importance of female camaraderie and sisterly bonding remain absent from the film.

Unlike many female characters in animated films (or annoying rom-coms for that matter), Belle isn’t looking to be rescued or waiting around for her prince. Two reasons that make Belle a feminist in Woolverton’s eyes. Belle rejects the sexist chauvinist Gaston and his numerous marriage proposals, finding him “boorish” and “brainless.” She wants more out of life than shining that jerk’s boots and popping out his babies. But Belle rebuffs one dysfunctional suitor for another.

 A cursed spoiled prince, the Beast imprisons Belle’s father, Maurice, for trespassing. When Belle comes to his rescue, she sacrifices her cherished freedom, for his release. As a “guest” prisoner in the castle, the Beast demands Belle attend dinner with him and forbids her from the West Wing. He screams and throws things at her, his selfish temper raging out of control. Oh, I forgot…the Beast is a romanticized tortured soul. So it’s okay if he’s an abrasive douchebag!

Sure, the sympathetic Beast eventually becomes nicer, giving Belle access to his library and letting birds treat him like a bird feeder. And I do like that Belle and the Beast become friends first before falling in love, which rarely happens in fairy tales. Except for one teeny tiny thing. He’s her captor. Falling in love with the guy who imprisons you, holds you hostage, tells you when to eat, where to go and doesn’t let you see your family?! That’s not love. That’s Stockholm Syndrome, sweetie.

 Poisonous messages about love and relationships plague Beauty and the Beast. Don’t worry, ladies…if you suffer and stick by him long enough, your man will change. Just be patient with a guy who’s controlling or abusive. In her lifetime, 1 in 4 women will suffer domestic violence. More and more teenage girls contend with dating violence. Love should not hurt. Ever. But this movie (and sooooo many others) insidiously tells girls that when they grow up, they should stand by their man. Even if he treats you like shit.

I’ll admit Belle as a female character is a step in the right direction. She’s smart, stubborn, kind and ambitious. But Belle gives up her entire life to live forever in a castle with an asshat prince. What about her goals? Her dreams?? Oh that’s right. She becomes a princess! Yet another princess in the pantheon of princesses clogging up girlie-girl media.

Films and books reinforce gender roles and with a lack of female characters, imply that girls and women don’t count. Out of Disney’s 51 theatrically-released animated movies, only 13 feature a female character as a protagonist (16 if you count co-protagonists), most of them princesses. Princesses only care about their clothes and hair. Their looks matter more than their personalities. It seems society would rather teach girls to obsess over their appearance and how to snag a man.

Couldn’t Belle have opened up a bookshop/café or started a book drive or something?? When Belle sang about wanting “more than this provincial life,” I simply refuse to believe twirling around a ballroom in a pretty gown is what she had in mind.

People might think I’m being silly or overreacting about a Disney movie. Fair enough. But I call bullshit. Listen, when we’re young, books, music, movies, TV shows, advertisements and even toys teach us gender roles and identity. Little boys pretend they’re kings or aspire to be president while little girls yearn not to lead like queens, but to be passive princesses. One film probably won’t have much impact. But when the same sexist messages repeat over and over and over and over…well, then it seeps in.

I’m not going to lie. I still watch Beauty and the Beast, singing along to the songs. When I discovered Disney World was building a Beauty and the Beast themed restaurant and attraction, I admit I felt giddy with excitement. But look beyond the gorgeous animation, catchy show tunes and unique heroine.

Sadly, you’ll see yet another fabulous film tainted by sexism, spreading toxic messages that reinforce damaging beauty norms, violence against women, and suffocating gender stereotypes.

Not all that glitters is gold. Unwrapping the beautiful package can sometimes yield an ugly core.


Megan Kearns is a feminist vegan blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, where she shares her opinions on gender equality, living cruelty-free, Ellen Ripley and delish vegan cupcakes. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned a B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Mad Men (for our Mad Men Week), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for our Emmy Week 2011), Alien/Aliens (for our Women in Horror Week 2011), and I Came to Testify, Pray the Devil Back to Hell and Peace Unveiled in Women, War & Peace series. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor. 

Animated Children’s Films: Cinderella

Cinderella (1950)

I would guess that in its long years of making animated features, Disney has made a mint on the princess formula. There is always a brooding prince, handsome, but distracted by his more worldly pursuits (i.e. war, evil, magic, etc.). There is a beautiful yet tragic young woman who is either on-her-knees humble, completely unaware of her high-class lineage, or else common as dirt. It is this woman’s duty to make trouble—stubbornly, stupidly, and innocently; the prince cleans up her mess, the audience rolling their collective eyes, lovingly amused.
In the case of Cinderella, the silly mistakes of losing a shoe and ignoring an expiring spell bring Prince Charming to Cinderella’s doorstep, ready to find his mate no matter how long it takes. This comes after a long and emotionally torturous journey on the part of Cinderella. In its beginning scenes, we see her struggle with housework under the ridiculous demands of her evil Stepmother and Stepsisters. She washes floors while singing prettily, the bubbles harmonizing her melody. It is revealed to us that she used to be rich and spoiled, but destiny wringed her into this incarnation – selfless, lovely, and dutiful. She is the better for it; look what fate made of those Stepsisters – loud, obnoxious, and ugly.
We see the Stepsisters’ true colors when, having been promised by her Stepmother to attend the Prince’s ball, Cinderella pieces together a gown from her real Mother’s dress and beads and cloth trashed by the Stepsisters and collected by Cinderella’s animals friends. As she cleans and cooks (in her Stepmother’s attempt to make her too late to attend the ball), the mice and birds sew together something passable for her to wear. The Stepsisters, recognizing their discarded materials, rip it apart and flounce off, their bustles comically bouncing after them.
It is shocking to see such a comely, self-possessed woman ripped apart as such. But a fairy godmother replaces the dress with a blue, glittering number, complete with absurd ear-covering headpiece. Cinderella floats into the ball and the rest is history. Beauty trumps power once again.
Watching Cinderella again for the first time since I was a child, it was amazing to me that time and again Disney portrays women as either bitches or victims. Ursula, Maleficent, Snow White’s Queen, the Queen of Hearts and of course Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Tremaine are all evil women, jealous of the beauty and innocence of their younger counterparts. One by one they seek to quell romance, passion, and everything else good from the lives of the eventual princesses by seeking power, wealth, and beauty of their own. Only a man can save these women from their pitiful disputes, damaging though they are. Perhaps the notion of a man wielding this type of power over a young, beautiful woman was a little too akin to rape for Disney’s taste. Either way, the Disney-fication of evil into an older, vindictive woman promotes an attitude that women are either a victim or seeking to be a victim; a mentality that when unleashed in the real world leads to horrific statements like, “She was asking for it.”
Newer Disney movies rely much less on this format; I think of such movies as Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, and Pocahontas whose end result of marriage contradicts a much more liberated adventure. In 1950, however, romance, passion, and entertainment could only be accomplished via marriage. True love was confirmed by a man deigning to step from his elevated social status to marry a woman of common birth. (A scheme that, as it usually turned out, wasn’t necessary because said princess is in fact rich or royal or whatever.) And marriage was enough to fill a plot. Jane Austen’s scheming ladies were a prototype for Disney princess movies. The goal is love, sure, but wealth and security sweeten the deal, too.
The problem I have most with Cinderella, though, is in the sweet density of Cinderella herself. “Have faith in your dreams and someday
/Your rainbow will come smiling through/
No matter how your heart is grieving
/If you keep on believing/
The dream that you wish will come true,” Cinderella croons as she prepares herself for another day of back-breaking, selfless labor. This kind of ignorant rhetoric endorses a blind acceptance of the status quo. Cinderella does not believe she can affect change in her own life. She will wait with faith and something good is bound to happen. Of course, as Disney shows us, it does; Prince Charming really does come and all is happily ever after. It negates a choice and, above all, this is the importance of the feminist movement – to allow the Cinderellas of the world to say “Fuck you” to all the evil power-mongers and be on their way – Prince or no. If women had just kept on believing, their dreams would definitely not have come true. Action in the form of choice is the truest path to liberation.
It is no coincidence that Cinderella was made in 1950. It was the era of writing the standards for the modern housewife; principles of which were impossible for any woman to attain without depression or at least a nasty drinking habit. This archetypal housewife has become the subject of so many books and movies (see The Hours, Far From Heaven, Revolutionary Road, etc.). The era was the springing board for Second Wave feminism. As nostalgia, it is still fun to watch a movie like Cinderella. Perhaps, if nothing else, we can enjoy these movies as a relic of the era – a document of history and ideas that are, luckily, past.
Olivia Bernal is a public school English teacher from Kansas. She reviews books at The Independent Book Review.

Animated Children’s Films: Nightmare Revisited

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

This Halloween my husband and I stayed in and cuddled up with Funfetti cupcakes and a movie. We capped off our week-long 90’s Halloween movie marathon with a favorite from my childhood, The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve probably seen this film a hundred times. I know all of the songs by heart. I remember watching it on VHS when it first came out, which is making me feel increasingly old. But as is the case with several things from my childhood, some of the nostalgia wears thin when subjected to critical analysis.
For one thing, as I would love to describe to my five-year-old self, the film doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. To refresh your memory, passing the Bechdel test means a film has to have two female characters (with names) who talk to each other about something besides men. That’s it, and yet even this very basic requirement is usually too much for Hollywood to handle. Sally the rag doll and Shock, the witch trick-or-treater, only talk to men. According to Wikipedia, the two witches aren’t given names in the film, only later in a video game. But even without the name part, they only talk to and about Jack. This sends the message to boys and girls alike that female characters do not have anything substantial to contribute to the dialogue or the plot of the film. Girls and women do not, apparently, have anything interesting or relevant to say to one another, and children internalize that very deeply. While this was probably unintentional, the effect is still the same.
Shock
Maybe you’re thinking that’s a bit harsh. After all, the named female characters do seem to have quite a bit of agency. Shock is frustrated with her “dumb” cohorts and seems to be the brains of the outfit. She is quick to point out flaws in their plans and ultimately decides the best method to kidnap Santa Claus. But her development as a character ends with that scene. Shock is a naughty child motivated by nothing apart from her desire to do mischief. While there is nothing wrong with this type of character per se, there is something wrong with the fact that she represents half of the named female cast. And, while Shock is admittedly fun, I feel she does not do justice to Catherine O’Hara’s talent.
This brings me to Sally, also voiced by O’Hara. On the surface, Sally is the perfect heroine. She is constantly outsmarting her doddering caretaker, Doctor Finklestein. She repeatedly slips “deadly nightshade” into his food, putting him to sleep so she can wander free. Her knowledge of herbs and potions is a serious inspiration to Jack in his quest for the meaning of Christmas. He even asks her to make his “Sandy Claws” suit, because she is the only one “clever enough” to do it. She has the foresight to know his plan will be a disaster, so she tries to stop Christmas with fog juice. Then, she rushes to the aid of Santa Claus, leading him to tell Jack, “The next time you get the urge to take over someone else’s holiday, I’d listen to her! She’s the only one who makes any sense around this insane asylum!” Jack eventually realizes that he was a fool not to listen to Sally, or notice her affection for him.
Sally
So, my five-year-old self loved Sally mostly because she is smart and resourceful. But Sally isn’t defined by her intelligence. She is defined by her relationships to the men in the story. Five-year-old me never bothered to question why she was the property of her creepy father in the first place. And while Jack is motivated by his role in the community and a quest for self-discovery, Sally is only driven by her desire to be with Jack. After Doctor Finklestein declares Sally to be too much trouble, he sets about building a new female companion who won’t disagree with him or run away. Sally’s world, which revolves around being with Jack and taking care of him, is at peace when he finally notices her and wants to be with her.
I still like the film. It gets me feeling all fuzzy inside and it serves the double purpose of celebrating Halloween and getting me amped up for Christmas. But I’m not five anymore. We live in a very complicated world where many changes need to take place, and girls and boys need to see these changes in the media they consume. Maybe someday Tim Burton could revamp the film and have Sally take over as mayor of Halloween Town (because seriously, that guy is an incompetent idiot). Maybe Shock could apprentice under the two witches and learn a useful trade to put her wits to better use. Maybe somewhere in Halloween Town, two women could talk to each other about something—anything—and the town could join us all in the 21st century. That sounds more like a Halloween classic I would want children to see.  

Jessica Critcher loves to write about feminism and gender issues, and she is a regular contributor to Gender Focus. While she loves living in Boston, she often misses Honolulu, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English (and forgot that there was such a thing as snow). 

Animated Children’s Films: The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog (2009)
The Princess and the Frog is a Disney milestone for two reasons: it is the first hand-drawn animated motion picture from the company since 2004’s Home on The Range and features an African-American female heroine.
Also keep in mind that the last film co-starring a human princess was 1992’s Aladdin.
But hold that applause.
For these accomplishments mean little once the viewer realizes what is in store.
The poster of a pouting girl holding a frog amongst bugs, an alligator, and a snake amongst a dark, swampy background says it all. No cute fuzzy bunnies, kittens, or deer friends here.
Our characters: Tiana (originally to be Mamie–uh oh!), a two job hustling sassy twang lady with a lifelong dream of becoming a chef/owner of a fine restaurant. The leading man: disinherited, shallow, but very good looking, Prince Naveen. Tiana’s best friend since birth, Charlotte: a rich, apple-cheeked blond with ample curves to die for and a strange obsession with calling her sole parent “Big Daddy.” The villain: a top hat wearing, African mask collecting, voodoo havocking witch doctor with a smooth, seductive albeit evil voice, Dr. Facilier.
A bopping 1920’s New Orleans is where the story takes place.
The opening to the film was irking. After story time, little Charlotte demands a new dress and daddy begs Tiana’s mother to make her a new one. As the camera pans to several versions of the same pink dress, the kind black, very tired seamstress obediently obliges. Sadly, while she and Tiana leave, daddy spoils Charlotte’s silhouette with a puppy.
How cute!
Eye roll.
Tiana and her mom ride the bus back home- nice part of town disappears rather quickly. One does not need to mention where they have a home. Remember these are black people here.
Five minutes later, Tiana and Charlotte grow up. 
(I must also state that I found Charlotte’s treatment of Tiana infuriating.)
At the café, Charlotte just throws all of her daddy’s money at Tiana and demands that she make a boatload of beignets for her Mardi Gras soiree–on that very night! 
Inferiority complex is at play.
Charlotte and her daddy make Tiana’s family work like slaves even though they are paying for them. Much too docile and meek, Tiana and her mother take this dominating behavior and its sickening, even for an animated cartoon.
The plot thickens.
Tiana and Prince Naveen-turned-frog
Thinking her to be a real princess due to the tiara on her head, Prince Naveen-turned-frog begs for Tiana’s kiss. Unfortunately, she isn’t a princess at all. So after a slimy short make out session, she too becomes a frog.
Ah, how wonderful!
Arguing and swapping flies together, these two frogs embark on a journey in the wet, scary marshlands. The quest to finding their lost humanity is supposed to be funny, sweet, and somewhat romantic. Let’s not forget to mention there is a scene in which their long tongues get twisted in a style reminiscent of Lady and the Tramp’s infamous innocent spaghetti smooch. But that connection was due to a bug, not good old-fashioned Italian fare.
As Tiana and Prince Naveen search for the person who could make them “normal” by following a goofy alligator and a bug that is more friend than delicacy, the viewer quickly becomes annoyed and a tad bit infuriated.
By the near end, they are in love and willing to accept each other forever … as frogs!
When compared to the other Disney princesses, Tiana’s story is a bunch of BS. She didn’t have an evil stepfamily, eat a poisoned apple, have graceful legs instead of fins, receive many hours of beauty rest, or become a madmen’s “love” slave.
Does that make her luckier? I think not.
None of those women would wish to be a frog with long, batty eyelashes.
Nope. Not one.
After the green, jumpy lily pad life and having a grand night’s adventure in the bayou, our humanized heroine finally becomes a princess and a restaurateur. The end.
Feeling robbed? 
Yes.
We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is a distasteful metaphor. It kind of makes one feel that all brown-skinned women are frogs and that in order to love them, one would have to be a frog too.
Other notable lowlights: blacks are put in their “respective” places–living in close-knit, modest shacks and taking overcrowded public transportation. As previously mentioned, submissive Tiana and her mother both work diligently for white people and Prince Naveen’s right hand white man transforms into Prince Naveen via Dr. Facilier’s powers. It would almost be a cry for demeaning blackface politics, except Prince Naveen is not a black man.
Loved that an upstanding, loving, appreciative father shared Tiana’s passion for cooking and inspired her ethic. So glad Disney didn’t go with that stereotype about black men being absent from their children’s lives…
Now, Tiana’s mother: only commendable when not complaining about Tiana needing to find a “prince charming” so that she could have grandbabies. Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Jasmine, Ariel, and Belle lacked motherly parenting, which added to their naïveté about men. Little fairies and godmothers are sweet and all, but the genuine love from a mother is a special, sacred bond often missing in Disney films.

As a strong, independent woman, Tiana knew that one does not sit on her butt talking to baby animals and making wishes on stars.
Oh wait, she did wish on a star! Damn.
Still, she dreamed big and worked from the ground up.
Now that is a character for little girls to be inspired by. Too bad Tiana was a frog for so long in the movie.
Overall, The Princess and the Frog is enjoyable for a few laughs, infectious moments, and the trademark watery eye sap. But it takes many steps–backwards, forwards, sideways. One wonders what this film is truly trying to accomplish.
Janyce Denise Glasper is a writer/artist running a silly blog of creative adventures called Sugarygingersnap. She enjoys good female centric film, cute rubber duckies, chocolate covered everything (except bugs!), Days of Our Lives, and slaying nightly demons Buffy style in Dayton, Ohio.

Emmy Week 2011: Here There Be Sexism?: ‘Game of Thrones’ and Gender

I recognize that there’s a difference between displaying sexism because it’s the time period and condoning said sexism. But this IS a fantasy, not history, meaning the writers can imagine any world they wish to create. So why imagine a misogynistic one?

Written by Megan Kearns, cross-posted from The Opinioness of the World

 

When I watched the premiere of Game of Thrones, I almost choked on all the rampant misogyny. I kept watching, lured by the premise and intrigued by the complex plots, curious if things for women would improve. Throughout the first season, which just aired its finale last night, women are raped, beaten, burned and trafficked. I suppose you could chalk it up to the barbarism of medieval times. And I’m sure many will claim that as the show’s defense…or that the men face just as brutal and severe a life. I also recognize that there’s a difference between displaying sexism because it’s the time period and condoning said sexism. But this IS a fantasy, not history, meaning the writers can imagine any world they wish to create. So why imagine a misogynistic one?

 

Based on the best-selling A Song of Fire and Ice series penned by fantasy author George R.R. Martin (who interjected a hefty amount of research into the books, including warfare, swordsmanship and medieval life), Game of Thrones takes place in a medieval land, where kings, queens, lords, ladies, warriors, knights, servants, priests, priestesses and prostitutes all play a role in a political battle of wills. Becoming an overnight sensation, the show dubbed “The Sopranos in Middle Earth,” (or fantasy for people who aren’t really into fantasy) packs every episode with political intrigue, compelling characters, subtle acting, rich dialogue and suspenseful plot twists. These are the reasons I love this complex show. But it’s hard for me to ignore all the sexism. Luckily, a multitude of strong, ferocious women DO inhabit this bleak fantasy world.

One of the most complicated characters, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), the meek, docile sister of her creepy pervo pimping brother, accused of having a “gentle heart,” becomes queen, the Khaleesi of the Dothraki. Watching her transformation into a caring yet steely, powerful queen (from standing up for herself against her douchebag brother Viserys Targaryen to defending women healers in a battle and rallying her people), has been one of the most enjoyable parts of the show for me. While she’s one of my fave characters, massive misogynistic problems still exist with her role. Viserys asks his sister:

Viserys: So tell me, sweet sister, how do we go home?

Daenerys: I don’t know.

Viserys: We go home with an army. With Khal Drogo’s army. I would let his whole tribe fuck you–all 40,000 men and their horses too if that’s what it took.

Oh, rape and sexual exploitation all in one. How fucking lovely. Daenerys falls in love with her husband, who her brother sold her off to, the warrior king Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa). Newsflash, no woman would fall in love with the man her bought and raped her. Doreah, one of Daenerys’ handmaidens, teaches her how to seduce Khal Drogo and gain his respect with her sensuality. Oh, that’s how women earn respect?? Silly me, I forgot about good old stiletto feminism.

 

 

Played spectacularly (if a bit underutilized) by Lena Headey (whom I loved, loved, LOVED in The Sarah Connor Chronicles and was the only redeeming thing about 300), Queen Cersei Lannister is the shrewd, manipulative Queen of the 7 Kingdoms, obsessed with power. A cunning and scheming survivor, she orchestrates political machinations. In the book (which I haven’t read), she’s annoyed by the constraints of her gender which don’t allow her greater political power. She also utters the line to Lord Eddard Stark (Sean Bean) that becomes the title of the show (and first book in the series):

“In the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”

Lady Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), is the wise and graceful wife to Lord Eddard Stark, mother of the Stark brood. Yet she’s not afraid to speak her mind and help her son strategize and negotiate in battle. Wherever she goes, particularly in the region of the North, she’s revered and respected. She is the one, almost single-handedly, who’s brokered and negotiated every deal which brings all of the clans of the North together, unifying them in war.

Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), daughter of Catelyn and Eddard, differs from many of the depicted women for she only cares about dancing and getting married (at 13?!) as she simpers and worships douchebag Prince Joffrey (Jack Gleeson). But we eventually begin to see a different side of Sansa after she witnesses a horrific tragedy, brought upon by her poor judgment.

My fave gender-bending character, Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), Sansa’s little sister, is a sword-wielding badass…at the age of 11. A feisty tomboy, Arya is spunky, resourceful and outspoken. One of my fave scenes consists of Arya and her father Eddard Stark when she asks him about becoming a leader. He tells her about the man she’ll marry some day and how she’ll give birth to sons who’ll become lords. Refusing to be defined by gender roles or by her relationship to a man, she retorts, “That’s not me.” My only problem is that Arya is still a child, not yet a woman. Too often, films and TV shows are uncomfortable with authoritative women, depicting female empowerment through teens and young girls instead.

One of the rare times the show passes the Bechdel test (and of course it’s debatable if it actually does pass it in this scene as it’s spurred by the illness of Daenerys’ husband Khal Drogo) is in the season finale when Mirri Maz Duur (Mia Soteriou), the enslaved sorceress/healer and Daenerys speak. Daenerys, furious at Mirri Maz, proclaims that she saved her. But Mirri Maz replies that by the time she was “saved,” she’d already been raped by three Dothraki men, her temple burned down, and townspeople she befriended slain. So she questions what exactly Daenerys saved her from? I thought this was an interesting scene depicting the power of perspective. It disappoints me though that when two women talk with one another on-screen, which doesn’t happen very often, the plot usually pits them against one another, a common trope in films and TV shows.

In addition to Mirri Maz, there are other secondary female characters who we don’t know much about (yet): Ros, Armeca and Shae (sex workers); Jhiqui, Irri and Doreah (Daenerys’ handmaidens); Osha (a wilding – person living north of the Wall – and slave of Winterfell); and Septa Mordane (a priestess who sacrifices her life to protect Sansa).

Many of the women navigate the sexist landscape by playing their parts yet asserting themselves when they can by speaking their minds. Although they are quickly put in their place, with a fist or harsh words, if they speak too boldly, reminding them of where they exist on the social ladder. SPOILERS!! –> When Cersei’s son Joffrey becomes king, it seems that she’s finally going to be able to rule, with her son a mere figurehead. But after he flagrantly disobeys her command, calling her (and Sansa) “soft-hearted,” it’s clear who’s in charge here. Despite all of Catelyn’s strategies and bartering, when it comes down to who will lead the army against King’s Landing, all of the clan leaders proclaim her son Robb Stark the “King of the North,” rather than Catelyn the “Queen of the North.” Arya has to go into hiding, as a boy, to evade the wrath of the king. UBER SPOILER!! -> In the penultimate scene in the finale, we see Daenerys burning a funeral pyre. She frees the Dothraki slaves, proclaiming to them and the Dothraki who’ve remained by her side that they will be her new khalasar (band of people) if they swear allegiance to her. A pivotal scene as she becomes the first female ruler of the Dothraki, marking the first time a woman asserts her power and leadership in such an overt manner. In the final scene, after entering the fiery flames, we see Daenerys survive, only to emerge with the three dragon eggs hatched, the three dragons skittering over her body, resting on her hip, ankle and shoulder. While I was thrilled she survived, my elation quickly soured as I realized the actual implication here: that a woman could not be a powerful ruler on her own merit, she had to have supernatural blood course through her veins with monster minions bolstering her power.

I know I’m being hard on the show. Despite its gender problem (and race problem – very few people of color are characters, except for the Dothraki who are depicted as “primitive” and “savage,” a common racist trope) it is absolutely fantastic and amazing. By the 4th episode I was hooked, eager to see what would happen next. But a show so meticulously made of such stellar caliber shouldn’t suffer from so much sexism. I shouldn’t have to overlook excessive misogyny in order to watch TV. The show seems to remain incredibly faithful to its source material. Interestingly, George R.R. Martin wrote the first book, entitled Game of Thrones, from the perspective of 9 different characters (Will of the Night’s Watch, Lord Eddard Stark, Lady Catelyn Stark, Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen), half from the vantage of the female characters. As delighted as I am with myriad strong heroines, a show devoid of female writers (save for Jane Espenson who co-wrote one episode), directors or producers, can’t help but feel like a testosterone extravaganza.

It would be one thing if the show made a commentary on the sexism that pervades society, a la Mad Men. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here. The women are subjected to misogyny and patriarchy (hmmm…sounds like modern times!). But none of them challenges it, even subversively. When the one female character acts authoritatively, asserting her will and seizing power, she’s diminished by her supernatural powers. Even the women who are bold and strong on the show, except perhaps Daenerys, are tethered to a short leash, ultimately deferential to the more powerful men surrounding them. For a TV show borne of fantasy, it’s time we imagined better. 

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, where she writes about gender in pop culture, sexism in the media, reproductive justice and living vegan. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with her diva cat and more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime. She contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series) and The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series). She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor. 

 

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button occupies a curious space in my imagination. I asked to review it because I have long wanted to view the film—it’s been pretty high on my Netflix streaming queue for more than a year—and yet, every time I sit down to watch something on Netflix, I pass it over. Even though TCCOBB was one of those must-see movies when it came out in December 2008, and as much as it seemed a neat little imaginative tale in reviews and commercials, I just found it really hard to get terribly excited about anything Brad Pitt is in. I’m not an anti-Brad Pitt snob, it’s just that I get enough Brad Pitt coverage in my favorite gossip blogs that I really don’t feel like seeing him any more than I have to.

Once I settled into the movie, however, I was able to enjoy it like the popcorn fare that it is—pleasant, but not terribly complex and with little nutritional value. My very first impression of the film was that it is one of those movies whose story is designed simply to make the viewer cry, and for me, it succeeded quite effectively in that regard. I’m a sucker for stories shaped like sadness. My second impression was to wonder why on earth I was being made to cry about the tragic love story of two imaginary white people against the back drop of Hurricane Katrina, which was a very real and epic tragedy for the city this story is set in (as well as for areas well outside New Orleans). To this second point I will return shortly.

But first, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, bears a family resemblance to another film adaption of a literary source, Forrest Gump, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to find out that screenwriter Eric Roth penned both films. In each film, we follow a quirky white boy in the south from his childhood through his adventures in adolescence and early adulthood and on into maturity. Covering such a large time span, the plots are largely episodic in nature but the feeling of an overarching structure is achieved through the protagonist’s varied and lifelong relationship with a woman he’s known since childhood. Both Benjamin’s Daisy and Forrest’s Jenny are remarkable, I think, only for their beauty and their rare understanding and appreciation of their respective misfit men. Both films also present what I think of as problematically unproblematic racial relationships. I don’t necessarily believe that every film, much less those that are comedic or fantastical in nature, needs to radically explore gender and racial relationships and stereotypes, but I suppose I don’t believe that we’re sufficiently post-racial to be able to gloss over historical struggles without such glossing over itself feeling like a distraction. And I think that’s part of what renders both TCCOBB and Forrest Gump ultimately conservative films.

Before I take on what I think is Benjamin Button’s most interesting relationship—that with Queenie, the African-American woman who adopts him, I want to talk about the film’s magical realism. While TCCOBB is clearly grounded in familiar historical periods and places—1918 New Orleans, Russia pre-World War II, a Pacific marine battle (if I recall correctly), not to mention the frame story set in a 2005 New Orleans on the brink of Hurricane Katrina—the world Benjamin Button lives in is also one of magic and wonder. In the frame story, Daisy’s daughter reads to her mother from Benjamin’s diary as Daisy prepares to die. The narrative in Benjamin’s diary is further framed by the story of Mr. Gateau’s backwards running clock, built out of Mr. Gateau’s desire for his son who died in World War I to return to him. Presumably, this backwards running clock had some kind of magical influence over Benjamin, who was born the size of a baby but with the features and ailments of an old man and, as anyone who is remotely familiar with the film’s concept knows, appears to grow younger as he in fact gets older. [I have to admit that I totally thought Benjamin was going to end up as a man-sized baby at the end, an idea I got from reading too much Dlisted where Michael K would go on and on about Cate Blanchett as an old lady having sex with Brad Pitt as a old man baby. Oh, Dlisted, I can’t believe I believed you! Also, try as I might, I cannot find the posts where Michael K says this, so maybe I imagined the whole thing.]

Other than these very important magical elements, the universe of TCCOBB is relatively realistic, save for its gliding over of both the women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement. What are we to make of this? The way I see it, since TCCOBB works hard to incorporate historic events like World Wars I & II and Hurricane Katrina, (1) the filmmakers don’t think that race and gender figure very largely in 20th century and early 21st century American history; (2) they imagine that in the same magical world where a baby can be born with the features and ailments of an old man, issues of gender and race are magically non-issues; or (3) since this is Benjamin Button’s story, he just doesn’t give a crap about race and gender. Choice three is definitely the least plausible. Benjamin Button is one very nice guy who definitely gives a crap! (Maybe the point is “Here is a really nice white guy!”) He loves his black momma Queenie (as portrayed by Taraji P. Henson)! He loves Cate Blanchett’s Daisy, even when she’s an unlovable prick. I sympathize with filmmakers and writers of all kinds, for that matter, who want to tell stories set in the historic south about something other than race. Must every story set in the historic south be about race? No, certainly, I don’t think so. But when race comes up—as it most definitely does here since Benjamin is adopted by an African-American woman—it seems strangely unrealistic to neglect the complexity of historic race relationships.

Maybe the question I should be asking is what purpose does Queenie’s blackness serve? Does her blackness make her more accepting of Benjamin when even his own father abandoned him and others were repulsed by him? Does it make the film feel integrated and inclusive while still focusing mostly on white experience? Perhaps it’s better to ask what possibilities might Queenie’s blackness have presented in this magical version of historic New Orleans. If historical gender and racial issues are going to be ignored, I think it’s an exciting possibility to think of how they might have been re-imagined altogether. That’s one of the great possibilities of speculative fiction: it allows us an opportunity to imagine how else we might be—both in utopic and dystopic senses. But even as TCCOBB neglects historical oppression, it also fails to present an imaginative alternative, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

Essentially, Queenie, as a black woman, is limited in her employment as a servant to whites. And even though she fully accepts Benjamin as her son and Benjamin does seem to love and appreciate her, he seems to fail to see how the world treats her differently and, as he grows up, he surrounds himself with white people, almost forgetting about Queenie altogether. Ultimately, the stereotype of the nurturing black woman as a loving caretaker of whites is not greatly challenged or expanded upon. African Americans are presented largely as servants. And they are truly only “supporting” characters for the white characters. Benjamin doesn’t seem to see African-American women as potential lovers or mates—only as mother figures, or rather as his mother, since the only African-American woman presented in any kind of depth is Queenie. Most strikingly, he doesn’t use his inherited wealth to get Queenie her own place or otherwise take care of her, and the last time we see Queenie, she serves Benjamin and Cate cake before retiring to bed. My heart broke for Queenie that Benjamin didn’t see to her retirement in the same way that he looked after Daisy. Is TCCOBB saying that a black woman’s motherly love is expected for free but the romantic affections of a white woman are worth money? Certainly, I think the film suggests that while black women may make good enough mothers for white boys, those boys will grow up only to desire white women. Or perhaps the film simply suggests that black women are perfectly acceptable as caretakers, but they aren’t sexually desirable like white women are. If that last sentence seems far-fetched, think about how the black women who are seen as sex symbols in our culture have or affect features often associated with whiteness. At very least, it seems that the role of lover is elevated above that of mother. 

This could have been a more radical movie—and not just one in which a white character has a revelation about what it’s like to know and love black people but one whose very imaginings might show how our racial conceptions and constructions might be otherwise. Instead, we get the opposite: race relations are sanitized of all conflict, while the segregation of family and romantic relations is upheld, with the sole exception of Queenie and Benjamin.

Queenie’s preposterous explanation that Benjamin is her sister’s son “only he came out white”—possibly the film’s most hilarious moment—suggests a missed opportunity. What if in this imagined world black women commonly had white babies and vice versa? Even in our own world, racial designations aren’t as clear cut as we often assume them to be. (See “Black and White Twins”; “Parents Give Birth to Ebony and Ivory Twins”; “Black Parents  . . . White Baby”; and “My Affirmative Action Fail”.) What if TCCOBB totally upended everything we think we know about race and women’s roles in the south of the past? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Moreover, it’s one thing to neglect race and gender issues of the past, but what about in the frame story of the present? All of the nurses and caretakers in Daisy’s hospital are also black women. Daisy is kept company by her daughter, Caroline, and a black woman the same age as Caroline, who eventually leaves to check on her son and never returns to the movie. WTF? Why is she there? Is she Caroline’s girlfriend? A good friend? If we’re not going to see her again, why is she there in the first place? Okay, I looked up the script. For what it’s worth, it specifies that she’s “a young Black Woman, a ‘caregiver,’” though nurses in scrubs are also present and Dorothy dresses in civilian clothes and spends most of her screen time thumbing through a magazine. I so wish that Dorothy had been Caroline’s girlfriend or wife.

And what of Hurricane Katrina? In the end, all we see is water rising in a basement, flooding the old train station clock. There’s nothing about what happened in the hospitals, in the Ninth Ward, in the attics, in the streets, in the Superdome. I don’t even know what to say about that. That the preposterously tragic love of two imaginary white people trumps and erases all the suffering of real, mostly black people? Even through my great big ole sappy tears as Daisy dies, that just doesn’t feel right to me.
 
Finally, I am reminded that part of my reluctance to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lies with its format as a film. Over the past decade, I’ve grown to prefer serial dramas to just about everything—film, books, whatever (though I’ve recently become consumed with popular fantasy and horror novels). HBO led the way and remains at the top of the serious television game. Deadwood and The Sopranos developed true ensemble casts with richly developed morally-complicated characters shaped by their social, historic, and economic milieux, with deft dialogue that could be emotionally moving or belly-shaking hilarious. The mere invocation of Hurricane Katrina makes it impossible for me not to compare the long but ultimately light fare of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which aside from its technical and artistic wizardry is ultimately forgettable, with the robust, lifelike, brilliant work of art that is Treme. Where TCCOBB uses its historical setting like a painted backdrop to affect historic depth without actually engaging history, Treme is a masterpiece of the fictionalized drama of the everyday real life of one of America’s great cities. Where women and African Americans are given roles in TCCOBB that support white stars, every character in Treme’s diverse cast is treated as the star of his or her own life, and they are richly complicated people whose lives are never defined solely by their relationship to white main characters. So that’s my loopy recommendation about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: you’re better off watching Treme.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards in 2009. It won three Oscars for art direction, makeup, and visual effects. It was nominated for cinematography, costume design, directing, film editing, original score, sound mixing, best picture, best actor in a leading role, best actress in a supporting role, and best adapted screenplay. 

Jesseca Cornelson, who has finally finished her damn PhD already, is an assistant professor of English at Alabama State University. Every now and again, she updates her blog, Difficult History, where she writes about all manner of crap. She previously reviewed An Education for Bitch Flicks2010 Best Picture Nominee Review Series.

Avatar: Only Slightly Less Imaginative Than a Bruce Springsteen Song

avatar_ver6

This guest post by Nine Deuce also appears at her blog Rage Against the Man-Chine.

I know, I’m the last person in the industrialized world to see Avatar, but I waited for several reasons. First, I was under the impression that it was based on a video game, rather than the basis for a video game, and if there’s one “artistic” genre I’m less into than films based on comic books, it’s films based on video games. Second, not only do I not go to the movies, but I rarely even watch movies. I don’t go to the movies because I don’t like sitting up for that long, and because somehow I’ve ended up living in America’s hub for people who like to pretend they believe zombies really exist. We all know that people who are into zombies like to make spectacles of themselves in public — hence the existence of the thousand or so “Cons” that take place in this city every year — so going to the movies in my neighborhood often means enduring the presence of unwarrantedly smug drama club dorks who lack senses of humor, analytical skills, and the ability to determine when and where it might be appropriate to make histrionic displays of themselves via affectedly amplified snickering and banal “witty” commentary/audience participation (hint: at screenings of Rocky Horror Picture Show only, which would not even transpire were everyone in America to suddenly sprout good — or at least non-embarrassing — taste). I don’t watch movies because I generally disapprove of the direction the movie industry has been heading in since the late 80s (and, really, since the advent of the industry itself) and can only think of about ten movies that I enjoy watching for the reasons the people who made them intended. Even ten’s a stretch. Third, it’s a James Cameron movie. I pride myself on knowing nil about the movie industry and on my inability to name one set designer or screenwriter despite having spent five years living in LA, but even I know James Cameron is to blame for some of the more egregious examples of pointless cinematographic excess; in addition to having been tricked into seeing both Bruno and Joe Dirt in the theater, I also count Titanic among the tortures I’ve endured under conditions of extreme air-conditioning and Gummi Bear-and-fake-butter-induced nausea. Finally, I like to strike while the iron is between zero and forty degrees. I don’t want my movie reviews getting lost among all the timely ones, do I?

But alas, one night during an HBO free trial in December, Davetavius somehow convinced me that Avatar might be funny. It was, albeit in a very dispiriting sense. Probably most disheartening of Avatar’s many worrisome features was the loud and omnipresent dearth of vision, creativity, or even the ability to imagine anything more than a third of a derivative degree removed from current reality. That fundamental lack underlies both the hilarious tedium of each of the ideas presented and the deep concern the movie’s commercial and cultural success instilled in me, specifically because almost every word of the critical praise it garnered centered on just how original and inspired it was perceived to be by the blunderers we’ve entrusted to tell us what to think about the products of our culture industry.

For those of you lucky enough to have missed the movie, it takes place on a moon of some planet in the Alpha Centauri system called Pandora. It’s called Pandora because, like, when we go there, we, like, get into more than we bargained for. The unnecessarily complicated and terribly developed story is that Pandora is the reachable universe’s primo source for a mineral called (I swear to god) “unobtanium.” It’s called that because, like, it’s really hard to, like, obtain. We aren’t told what it is, exactly, that unobtanium does (or even is — the term is apparently used by scientists and engineers to refer to materials that are as of yet undiscovered that might make theoretical processes feasible should those materials ever be discovered, but in this movie it’s an actual substance that purportedly has an actual use and an actual monetary value), but we are ham-fistedly informed that it’s a BFD because the US has decided to set up a base on Pandora in order to mine it. The only problem is that the atmosphere on Pandora is poisonous to humans. Luckily, by 2154 , we’ve figured out how to make “avatars,” which are fabricated alien bodies linked to human minds via some voodoo mechanism whereby the human mind enters the alien body while the human is asleep and uses the alien body to putz around on the alien’s home turf until the alien gets sleepy, at which time the human wakes up and the alien goes back to bed. (Lord knows why we’ll be able to create living beings that we can operate like robots but won’t be able to come up with a better mechanism for controlling them; I guess it would have screwed up this ingenious story. And lord knows why they’re called avatars; I suppose because James Cameron rightly surmised that an audience of online gamer geeks would mistakenly think it very clever to name these beings after the graphic images they use to represent themselves in virtual worlds despite the fact that they are supposed to be real creatures living on real planets in other solar systems.)

Sigourney Weaver made the ill-advised decision to play Dr. Grace Augustine, the head of the avatar program, who hops into a pod herself every night in order to inhabit the world of the Na’vi, the blue creatures who live on Pandora (creatures that from this point on will be referred to as “blue fuckers”). One of her team dies right before he’s to be shipped out to Pandora. The avatars are expensive to create and are matched by DNA to the humans who they’ll be taking turns with to sleep, but (because shit just works out in the movies) he has a twin brother named Jake Sully, an ex-Marine who has been disabled in combat and displays the kind of machismo, naivete, stupidity, and simplistic morality we dumbasses here in the US seem to think add up to a complex, sympathetic male character. Sully takes his brother’s place, but Dr. Augustine doesn’t think much of him and only takes him out as a bodyguard. His avatar gets lost on an outing away from the base and the real stupid shit begins.

Sully finds himself lost in the forest when a female blue fucker named Neytiri shows up and saves him from some sparkly, terrifying beast. She’s no fan of the avatars who have been hanging around as she and the other blue fuckers see them as warlike dolts who have no understanding of how things work on Pandora, but she decides he’s worth saving when some Pandoran dandelion that floats around in the air and likes to hang around nice people decides it likes him. She takes him back to her parents, who happen tobe the blue fuckers’ high chief and priestess, and explains what occurred in the forest. They decide to let her school him in blue fucker bushido despite the fact that every other avatar they’ve ever met has been an asshole, and an extremely ridiculous montage of warrior training among CGI plants and animals ensues. The montage culminates in the viewer gaining an understanding of just how blue fucker society operates, which can best be summed up as, “whoever can rape a pegasus is one of us, but whoever can rape a pterodactyl can lead us!” (I’ll explain.)

After showing him how to hop around on leaves and sleep in the world’s craziest hammock, Neytiri explains to Sully that the blue fuckers can use their hair, which is basically a USB braid, to connect to their planet and control some of its creatures. She then introduces him to the Pa’li, the creatures that the blue fuckers ride around on to fly around and hunt, which look a lot like blue pegasuses. The way one forms a bond with one’s pegasus is to jump on its back and force one’s braid into a receptacle on the pegasus, after which point one can control the pegasus and use it as an aerial ridiculousness vehicle. Sully manages to rape a pegasus, an event that signifies his mastery of blue fucker bushido, and is then accepted by the blue fuckers as one of their own. That is, until the military-industrial complex fucks everything up.

If you rape the pegasus, you’ll be one of us, Jake!
Sully, while a waking human back on base, is recruited as an informant on the world of the blue fuckers by Colonel Miles Quatrich, head of an organization called Blackwater. Wait, I mean Sec-Ops. Sec-Ops is a private security firm that works for RDA Corporation, and they ain’t got time for Dr. Augustine’s pussy-footin’ around and “learning” about these commie-ass blue fuckers. They want to head straight into the heart of Pandora and blast Hometree, where the blue fuckers live, right out of the ground in order to get at the giant unobtanium deposits that (naturally) lie beneath it. Quatrich, who looks like a real-life version of Chip Hazard, tells Sully he’ll help him get the operation he needs to walk again if he’ll help him figure out how to best part the blue fuckers and their unobtanium. Sully adheres to the deal until he — SURPRISE — falls in love with Neytiri, the blue fuckers, their rugged communal way of life, and their USB connection to Mother Pandora.
A bunch of action-packed bullshit ensues wherein Sec-Ops attacks Hometree, Sully attempts to thwart them, they succeed anyway, and the blue fuckers find out Sully was on the wrong side to begin with and shun him. I thought that the movie might end once all that transpired, leaving us with some kind of inchoate message about militarism, environmentalism, and rich white people’s fanciful and stupid ideas about “traditional cultures,” but I was wrong. It got even more ridiculous and went on FOR ANOTHER HOUR.

Having been shunned by the woman and the blue fuckers he loves, Sully mopes around for a few minutes before — Eureka! — he figures out how to redeem himself. He seeks out the Toruk, a creature that has only been ridden five times in the history of all the blue fucker tribes, and manages to rape it. He then heads over to the Tree of Souls, where the blue fuckers connect their USB cables to Mother Pandora, to convince them that he’s OK after all, and that an endearingly dumb and reckless American ex-Marine is the right man to lead the blue fuckers to a resounding triumph over corporatism and militarism. They stop praying to the celestial DNS server for a few minutes, allow him back into the fold, and then resume chanting and praying to Mother Pandora to not allow a bunch of GI Joes kill them all. Mother Pandora intervenes and the film ends with Sully (who has somehow been made into a permanent blue fucker and no longer wakes up as a human when he goes to sleep) and a few other blue fuckers overseeing the Americans’ shame-faced retreat from Pandora back to their own planet, where they will presumably ruminate over the error of their ways among the ruins of their own long-since plundered ecosystem.

Only the chosen one can rape the pterodactyl!
I told you it was unnecessarily complicated and poorly developed. And blisteringly stupid.
Avatar is a science fiction movie. It admittedly differs from the specimens of the genre that those stranded aboard the Satellite of Love might consider true sci-fi, but the general public puts it under that rubric. In fact, IGN called it the 22nd best sci-fi movie of all time. That’s a problem for the genre that purports to take us beyond the realm of what we can know and into the realm of what we can imagine.

As I watched Avatar, I for some reason (probably because predicting the next thing that would happen got boring once I realized I would never, ever be wrong) began thinking about the first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and asked myself how the genre of science fiction and the movie industry as a pillar of American culture had changed in the time that had elapsed between the two films. What were the general cultural values and concerns being communicated in each of these films? What kinds of stories were being told about the world? How had cinema as a means of artistic communication and social commentary changed since 2001 was released? What do the methods of presentation in both films tell us about the ways in which our society has changed in the era of advanced mass communication? And, of course, how was gender represented?

I came to a few distressing conclusions. Naturally, I’ll get to the feminist criticism first. By the time Avatar came out, we’d traversed 41 years in which women’s status in society had purportedly been progressively improving since 2001 was released, but the change in representations of women in popular media, at least in epic sci-fi movies, doesn’t look all that positive. In 1968, we (or Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke) could imagine tourism in space. We could not, however, imagine women occupying any role in space exploration other than as flight attendants. In 2009 we (or James Cameron) could imagine female scientists and helicopter pilots participating in extraterrestrial imperialism, and we could even tolerate warrior-like blue female humanoid aliens as central figures in the plot of an movie, but we still couldn’t imagine a world in which traditional gender roles and current human beauty ideals aren’t upheld, even when that world is literally several light years and 155 years away from our own.

Provided that we accept the absurd and self-important idea that extraterrestrial creatures would resemble humans at all, why would they look like ten-foot-tall, blue fitness models posing for an elf-fetish magazine?

If that reference seems odd, compare Neytiri to this “night elf” (I rue the day I found out about cosplay — thanks again, Japan):
Both the female and the male blue fuckers are tall, thin, ripped, and look like members of one of the bands in Strange Days, and they’re all wearing goddamned loincloths. There’s a reason Fleshlight makes an alien model that is purported to replicate a female blue fucker’s two-clitorised vulva, and that reason is that James Cameron couldn’t imagine a world in which aliens don’t look like people he’d want to fuck. Don’t believe me? Check out this excerpt from a Playboy interview he did about the movie (google it — I’m not linking to Playboy):

PLAYBOY: Sigourney Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley in your film Alien is a powerful sex icon, and you may have created another in Avatar with a barely dressed, blue-skinned, 10-foot-tall warrior who fiercely defends herself and the creatures of her planet. Even without state-of-the-art special effects, Zoe Saldana—who voices and models the character for CG morphing—is hot.

CAMERON: Let’s be clear. There is a classification above hot, which is “smoking hot.” She is smoking hot.

PLAYBOY: Did any of your teenage erotic icons inspire the character Saldana plays?

CAMERON: As a young kid, when I saw Raquel Welch in that skintight white latex suit in Fantastic Voyage—that’s all she wrote. Also, Vampirella was so hot I used to buy every comic I could get my hands on. The fact she didn’t exist didn’t bother me because we have these quintessential female images in our mind, and in the case of the male mind, they’re grossly distorted. When you see something that reflects your id, it works for you.

PLAYBOY: So Saldana’s character was specifically designed to appeal to guys’ ids?

CAMERON: And they won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine. The point is, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to meet any of the movie actresses they fall in love with, so it doesn’t matter if it’s Neytiri or Michelle Pfeiffer.

PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads.

CAMERON: Most of men’s problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don’t look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we’re forced to deal with real women, and there’s a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let’s face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?

CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?

CAMERON: I came up with this free—floating, lion’s-mane—like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they’re right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we’re going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We’ll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector’s item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea.

Sigh. I’ll take flight attendants in place of a sociopathic obsession with disembodied CGI female body parts that men invent in order to avoid confronting the fact that women are human beings. Fuck, I’ll take stewardesses. Neytiri is permitted to talk, to take an active role in training Sully how to rape pegasuses, and to participate as a warrior in the fight against Chip Hazard and his robotic blue-fucker-ass-kicking devices, but she’s not allowed to not be a sex object. That shit is the real final frontier, and something tells me we’ll be imagining visiting other branes by jumping into bags of Doritos before we’ll imagine women being allowed to be human beings. She’s also not allowed to take an active role in choosing a mate, as we discover when she tells Sully that once one has raped a pegasus and become a real blue fucker warrior, the time has arrived for one to choose a mate. Even though she has already raped a pegasus, is adept enough at it to instruct Sully on the subject, and happens to be the daughter of the blue fuckers’ HNIC, the prerogative to choose a mate is left to him as the man — even though he’s only an honorary blue fucker — to choose her as a mate, at which point she must passively acquiesce. How romantical.
It probably isn’t fair to compare Avatar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, seeing as 2001 is one of the few movies I reluctantly label as “art” and Avatar tops Biodome on my list of the dumbest movies ever made, but it seems necessary. They’re both dubbed “epic science fiction” films, they are both purported to reflect the philosophical problems confronting the societies from which they emerged, they’re both considered to be among the greatest science fiction films ever made, and they’ve both inspired the production of thousands of paragraphs of analysis, criticism, and praise. They should be compared, if only on the basis of presentation and approach, in order to get a grip on the ways in which the medium has changed and the ways in which its message-delivery mechanisms have changed. Both of those changes have a lot to tell us about the trajectory our society has been on since the 60s.

Special effects technology has obviously made astronomical leaps since 1968, but that expansion of capabilities seems to have led to a crippling, rather than an enhancement, of the imagination. 2001 won an Oscar for effects. So did Avatar. Yet one second of 2001 holds more visual interest than more than two hours of film in Avatar. We now have the technology to create realistic images of absolutely anything we can dream up, but Pandora just looks like a sparkly jungle with a few gravity-defying mountains. The visual effects display such a drastic lack of creativity that it appears that Cameron paid more attention to making Neytiri “smoking hot” than to creating an alternative world, even when presented with unlimited possibilities for doing so.

Given that it was made in the late 60s, 2001 unsurprisingly explored humanity’s relationship with technology, the meaning of space exploration for human society, and several other philosophical problems that postwar America found itself faced with in the midst of the Cold War and the saturation of the culture with technology obsession. It did so by urging, expecting, and even requiring the viewer to think about the meaning of what they were seeing. 2001 was carefully executed on every level in order to create a visual and auditory experience that would inspire confusion and immediate identification with the idea that we were facing something big that needed to be grappled with. Visual effects, rather than serving as distractions or “eye candy,” operate as intellectual catalysts, and the laconic dialogue allows the audience to experience the film and consider the ideas being presented without the intrusion of a screenwriter who assumes they are too stupid to understand what is occurring. Nothing is spelled out, nothing is obvious, and nothing is trite, because Kubrick had enough confidence in his audience to entrust the interpretation of the meaning of the film to them. That’s a really big deal.

Avatar also (sort of) approaches some of the major issues facing contemporary aughts/teens society, including the immorality of late-stage capitalism, the disastrous reality and potential of militarism and environmental destruction, and humanity’s relationship with nature, but in Avatar, everything is spelled out, everything is obvious, everything is trite.

Cameron can only seem to conceive of an ideal society five light years and nearly two centuries removed from our own if it exactly mirrors an episode of Fantasy Island in which he’s the guest star, but it’s cool. He’s got a revolutionary political message to communicate: if we don’t all buy Priuses and reject militarism and imperialism right quick, we’ll destroy our planet and rudely intrude upon blue fucker utopias everywhere, thus ruining countless enlightened neo-primitive sex parties attended by the universe’s hottest aliens.

Despite the fact that he sets up the blue fuckers as a foil to all he believes is wrong with modern and future American society, Cameron is obviously a paternalistic racist, though he isn’t exactly unique in that respect. Privileged white urbanites hold some pretty hilarious ideas about “traditional cultures,” don’t they? Cameron clearly based the blue fuckers on his own nebulous and ill-informed ideas of various traditional cultures around the world, conceptions no doubt derived from the romanticized image Hollywood liberals seem to have of ways of life they’d like to convince everyone but themselves to embrace. Cameron repeatedly mentions Mayans in interviews about the movie and compares different facets of blue fucker society to Mayan society — which is no surprise since Mayans seem to be the new Cherokees among kombucha drinkers this week — but I wonder exactly how much he knows about what life might have been like for the typical Mayan. He probably doesn’t care any more than does the average LA dipshit who can be overheard extolling the virtues of some “traditional culture” that he has actually culled from his own narcissistic political and dietary allegiances and projected onto a society he knows nothing about. I’m sure that once the blue fuckers defeated the American war machine, they returned to their traditional ways, ways that include recycling, doing yoga, and having sex parties in their bedazzled jungle, where they drink their own handcrafted glitter palm wine and eat free-range pegasus-milk feta and (non-GMO) space maize tacos. (Maybe we’ll get to see that in the sequel.) Unfortunately, “traditional cultures” (and even their sci-fi/fantasy derivatives) tend to be fairly savage by current LA standards, what with all the pegasus rape and hunting and whatnot, but don’t worry. Traditional hunters and fantastical pegasus rapers thank the pegasuses and dead animals for allowing themselves to be oppressed, and they make sure not to let any dead animal parts go to waste, which they certainly did/do out of an au courant, Stuff White People Like sense of moral duty rather than basic necessity. (Just ask any foodie.)

Cameron’s conception of “traditional cultures” is nearly as nonsensical as his idea of what’s wrong with American culture and his suggestions for how we might reach a utopian neo-primitive future. Sec-Ops and RDA Corporation are obvious, although clumsy, stand-ins for the US military-industrial complex and its ties with big oil, and the blue fuckers and their USB network clearly represent “traditional cultures” and their purportedly closer relationship with the biosphere, but what is the point? I suppose it’s not terrible that Cameron is trying to sell an anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, pro-conservation message to people who are too dumb to have arrived at such ideas on their own, but I doubt it will be effective. In the first place, the blue fuckers only end up defeating Sec-Ops by praying to their goddess, Eywa, to intervene on their behalf. What is the take-home message? That we should pray to some hot goddess so that the military-industrial complex and rapacious corporations won’t succeed in destroying the Earth? That we should all get together and chant in order to bring about world peace and humanity’s harmony with nature? Is there even one person who wasn’t already convinced that imperialism, war-mongering, and environmental destruction are bad that has been swayed by twinkly special effects? I sincerely doubt that CGI can do a job that hundreds of far greater intellects than James Cameron’s have been working at for decades (if not centuries), and it’s fairly offensive that people are claiming he’s breaking any new ground. It’s also pretty snicker-worthy that Cameron is attempting a criticism of exploitative capitalism when he’s carved out a place for himself as the world’s most commercially successful film producer by exploiting and reflecting (and thus abetting) the stupidity of the public in order to enrich himself.
The effects are unadulterated eye candy and do nothing but distract the viewer from whatever hackneyed message Cameron is attempting to beat us over the head with, and the story line and dialogue are so stupid and insulting that I would have been offended if I could have stopped laughing. Even assuming that the issues Cameron pretends to be asking us to explore still hold some ambiguity and some intellectual ore that hasn’t already been mined (they don’t), Avatar won’t prompt anyone to ponder even these picked-over concepts because it’s just too stupid. Americans might have been dumbed down by five decades of television and commercial pop music to the point that we can’t think about large and potentially revolutionary ideas anymore anyway, but even if we have miraculously retained the ability, if the media asking us to do so are insults like Avatar, forget it. There is no room in a philosophical work of cinematic art for manipulative schmaltz, one-liners, video game graphics, tits, or ridiculous inter-species love stories. In the words of my friend Brian, “Avatar makes sure to include every single commercial emotion you could have,” and thus it manages to communicate nothing and inspire even less.

Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina. She previously contributed a review of The Blind Side.

 

Guest Writer Wednesday: Sucker Punch

Sucker punched by “Sucker Punch”– Girls and guns don’t equal female empowerment

This is a cross-post from What Tami Said.

This really is the best movie ever cuz its like hollywood finally said to me Fuk yeah you my man are all we care about heres some awesome shit for you to get off on and everyone else can just go fuk themselves and you get to watch. Read more…

I just “liked” Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson on Facebook solely on the basis of her Sucker Punch review, written in what oddly sounds like the voice of the guy who sat behind me yesterday afternoon when I went to see the movie. Based on the predominately male and middle-aged audience in the theater, I am likely the only woman who fell for the previews and thought Sucker Punch might be some video game or graphic novel-based film about ass-kicking chicks who slay dragons and other cool shit. Well, actually, that stuff does happen, but it’s surrounded by too many other porny, fetishy, gender- and race-biased tropes to be any sort of empowerment tale. The characters were too cartoonish to be relatable. And the fight scenes and CGI weren’t exciting enough to allow me to forget the analysis and enjoy the fun. Sucker Punch comes off like a slightly twisted adolescent’s wet dream–if said wet dream had the benefit of a cool score and awesome computer-generated graphics.
Set some time in the late 50s/early 60s, Sucker Punch tells the story of 20-year-old Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who accidentally kills her little sister, while attempting to save the girl from being sexually assaulted by their stepfather. The act earns Baby Doll, whose mother dies in the film’s first frames, commitment to a Goreyesque Vermont mental facility, and, after her stepfather pays off a weasly orderly, a date with a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, who seriously must be saying “yes” to every acting job now), due at the hospital in five days. As Dr. Don Draper stands poised above a bound Baby Doll, wielding the long, sharp orbitoclast he will pound into her frontal lobe, Baby Doll (and the audience) escapes into the fantasy that is the rest of the movie, including a second world, where Baby Doll and her fellow inmates are enslaved at a “dance club,” where they are forced to offer sexual favors to keep the moneyed, male clients happy.
Let me concede that the dirty, gothic look of Sucker Punch was arresting. The soundtrack, with an ominous cover of the Eurythimics’ “Sweet Dreams,” was fantastic. I’ve already downloaded it. It’ll be great accompaniment when I haul my butt off the couch and start my spring running regimen. Also, I’m gonna need to explore more of actor Oscar Isaac’s oeuvre. The fight sequences in Sucker Punch were pleasingly flashy and loud with lots of leaping and flashing steel and steampunkery, but ultimately they were made hollow by repetition and uninspired choreography. We’re more than a decade on since The Matrix debuted. You gotta give me more than slow motion shots of a character leaping past bullets and dragon fire.
Since Sucker Punch couldn’t entertain me with its sound and fury, I couldn’t help but notice the larger problem in the movie: A disturbing and regressive treatment of women masquerading as “girl power.”
**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**
We can start with the infantilization of the lead character, Baby Doll, a 20-year-old rendered as woman child–tiny but big-headed, with large eyes and white blonde, pig-tailed hair, perpetually dressed in schoolgirl drag. She is mute and trembling through much of the first half of the film. The result is that Sucker Punch plays on “jail bait” fantasies using the cover that its heroine is truly an adult woman.
So too does the film leverage implied threats to women to titillate–particularly sexual threat. From the earliest scenes, when Baby Doll’s hulking stepfather eyes her lasciviously and tries to push his way into her bedroom, Sucker Punch highlights the protagonist’s sexual vulnerability–not to make a point about violence toward women, but to render her more fragile and endangered, and by extension, to underscore her femininity and desirability.
And it must be said here that the key to Baby Doll’s persona and her place in the film is her whiteness. Sucker Punch genuflects to the traditional views of womanhood that have historically been assigned exclusively to white women (to the detriment of ALL women). It is not a mistake that, of the gang of female characters, Baby Doll is the blondest and most alabaster of skin. She is the most innocent. It is she that is reserved for the most special of the fantasy club’s clients, the High Roller. It is her dancing that is so arousing that it hypnotizes the men who witness it. It is Baby Doll that the swarthy pimp/orderly (depending on the fantasy world) must have and who he intends to take by force. (A nasty nod to the white women in danger of rampaging dark men stereotype.) Conversely, it is the women of color in the film–Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens)–who are drawn as the flattest of the flat characters, with no back stories or desires, but to serve Baby Doll. And it is those women whose lives are unwillingly sacrificed (literally) so that one pretty, blonde, white woman can live the life she deserves.
The most obvious sign that Sucker Punch is no female empowerment film–not even a Kill Bill (which I really liked and to which Sucker Punch plays homage)–is the plot itself. The idea that a young woman, who has recently lost her mother and sister; who is imprisoned for fighting against domestic violence; who may have endured rape at the hands of her stepfather or just narrowly escaped it; who is about to endure a forced medical procedure would, for relief from her trauma, retreat into a fantasy world where she is a sexual slave who must dance provocatively for strange men…absurd.

Sucker Punch is no female fantasy. Sucker Punch isn’t about women at all, despite the female leads. Josh Larsen of Larsen on Film describes exactly what Sucker Punch is:

…it’s the fantasy of a 14-year-old boy steeped in kung fu, “Call of Duty” and online porn. Read more…

And this is why I should start reading film reviews before I see films not after.
Tami Winfrey Harris writes about race, feminism, politics and pop culture at the blog What Tami Said. Her work has also appeared online at The Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ms. Magazine blog, Newsweek, Change.org, Huffington Post and Racialicious. She is a graduate of the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism. She spends her spare time researching her family history and cultivating a righteous ‘fro.

Guest Post: Deciphering Island Patriarchy: Finding Feminism in Lost

This guest post originally appeared at Girl with Pen!
With the 6th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?
Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.
Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”
Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of your priority list.
While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.
Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders – what a feminist concept!)
McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:
“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”

However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).
This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.
The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).
Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)
Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either – she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts about The United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie.

Movie Preview: Bluebeard

Written and directed by Catherine Breillat, Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue) likely explores the same themes that Angela Carter highlighted in her retelling, “The Bloody Chamber.” Read the original fairy tale by Charles Perrault here and Angela Carter’s version here.

Variety‘s Leslie Felperin:

Having built a career on provocative, sexually explicit yet cerebral fare (“Romance,” “Sex Is Comedy”), Catherine Breillat shocked auds with her 2007 period piece, “The Last Mistress,” because it was not all that shocking. Now the Gallic helmer’s latest, “Bluebeard,” features considerable blood but no sex. This offbeat but compelling take on the tale, arguably the first serial-killer yarn, emphasizes sisterly bonds but still gets to the original story’s heart of mysterious darkness with impressive results. 

The New York Times‘ Manhola Dargis:

In “Bluebeard,” a sly rethink of the freakily morbid fairy tale, the filmmaker Catherine Breillat makes the case that once-upon-a-time stories never end. Divided into two parallel narratives — one focuses on Bluebeard and his dangerously curious wife, while the other involves two little girls in the modern era revisiting the tale — the movie is at once direct, complex and peculiar. It isn’t at all surprising that Ms. Breillat, a singular French filmmaker with strong, often unorthodox views on women and men and sex and power, would have been interested in a troubling tale about the perils of disobedient wives. Ms. Breillat never behaves.

You can watch the trailer here.

Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Starring Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, and Billy Burke. Written by Melissa Rosenberg (screenplay) and Stephenie Meyer (novel). Directed by Chris Weitz.

Critics have rightly argued that Twilight gives off a certain metaphor for teen abstinence vibe. Edward desires Bella so much that he refuses to let himself lose control with her. So, the audience gets a couple of scenes of passionate, intense kissing before the two melodramatically pull away from each other and decide to spoon innocently on the bed instead. If they decide to fornicate, after all, Bella could easily end up wounded by Edward’s thrusting vamp-strength or sucked completely dry. Of her blood. By Edward, her lover, who would of course be entirely unable to stop himself from sucking.

(For those of you unfamiliar, the Cullens, who are Edward’s vampire family, only drink the blood of animals to survive, even though they prefer human blood. The other, evil vampires in the movie, murder humans at will. Tsk, tsk.)

Twilight portrayed Bella as the passive object of vamp-Edward’s desire, who needed constant saving by him, from other vamps and from other men and from runaway cars, and who couldn’t make any decisions on her own throughout most of the movie. It shifts a little in the end, when Bella runs off to save her mother, ignoring the advice of the vampires who want to protect her. But by becoming an active subject in that scene, she’s punished, ultimately finding herself in a situation where Edward must save her yet again, literally by sucking poison from her blood.

But New Moon! How did you make me like you? It makes no sense—Bella still ends up in constant need of boy-saving, and she loses her freaking mind for months when Edward breaks up with her, which is not melodramatically showcased at all I swear, ha, by her constant nighttime screaming fits that force even her dad to run to her rescue. For the most part, Bella seems powerless, at the mercy of Edward, at the mercy of her nightmares, and eventually, at the mercy of the evil vampires who want to kill her (as punishment for Edward, who killed a vampire in Twilight).

So why did I find myself finally turning into an uber-fangirl as I watched? Because this time, the film is, dare I say … complicated.

Enter Jacob, Bella’s good friend who just happens to be a werewolf and who just happens to have the most incredible abs I’ve seen since Brad Pitt in Fight Club and who just happens to walk around with his shirt off constantly. And let’s remember the early scene in the school parking lot, where Bella watched as Edward walked toward her in exaggerated slow-motion, hair and button-down shirt blowing wistfully in the breeze, the camera steadied on him as Bella and me and fangirls across the country, yes, I’m going to say it, swoon. And then I started to wonder, “Is Bella entirely powerless?”

Not necessarily.

Because what strikes me most about the men in the Twilight saga is their desire to be looked at by Bella, which (fangirls everywhere unite!) positions Bella as the active subject (the gazer) and the men as passive objects (the gazed at). In the first film, Edward removes his shirt in the sunlight, revealing his twinkling vampire skin, and, upon seeing it, Bella says, “You’re beautiful.” She uses those words again in New Moon, this time with Jacob. When he says something along the lines of, “Why are you looking at me?” She responds with, “You’re sorta beautiful.”

Interestingly, (fangirls everywhere unite!) this direct physical objectification of women doesn’t exist in either movie—for instance, we don’t get traditional scenes of scantily clad girl-vamps trying to seduce men who they eventually eat (played as girl-power when it’s really just male fantasy).

But Bella isn’t without self-scrutiny. In the opening scene of the film, Bella dreams of herself as an old woman with Edward still at her side. That scene reveals an important plotline: fear of aging. Bella sees herself through the eyes of Edward (and therefore, men in general). She sees herself getting older while he stays young and twinkly-beautiful. She says, “You won’t want me when I’m a grandmother.” These feelings stem from living in a society that devalues aging women, and I like that the film explores the issue. Edward’s response? “You obviously don’t understand my feelings for you, Bella.”

Okay, so this is a total fangirl fantasy, right? I mean, a beautiful man loving you for what’s on the inside? I mean, honestly, we’re smarter than that, right? Right?! (Am I kidding?)

Still, in New Moon, even though Bella performs reckless acts, like jumping off a cliff and wrecking a motorcycle, just so faux-Edward will magically appear in some wavy fog-mist to male-dominate and tell her it’s dangerous, she still performs reckless acts. She makes decisions. She risks her life. For love! Ha. Of course, the fact that Edward can no longer save her—he isn’t physically there for real—means Jacob must step in. He does nice things … like taking off his shirt to reveal his Brad Pitt in Fight Club abs and to coincidentally wipe the blood from her forehead. He turns into a werewolf and saves her from one of the bad vamps. He performs CPR. Oh Jacob!

But then, after all this constant being saved by vampire-men and wolf-men, something amazing happens. Bella saves Edward. And even after she saves him, she saves him again, by convincing the Lead Evil Vampire God or Whatever to kill her instead of Edward. He doesn’t kill Bella, of course, because he becomes interested in—check out this awesomeness—her immunity to vampire powers. That’s right: the vampire mind readers can’t read Bella’s mind and the Dakota Fanning vampire can’t inflict mystical pain on Bella just by looking at her. It’s like Bella’s a vamp’s version of a superhero!

Look, is the film flawed? Yes.

The objectification of the men, for instance, also becomes an objectification of The Other (vampire/werewolf). Bella wants Edward to turn her into a vampire so they can be together forever but also because she doesn’t want to age (i.e. become undesirable). Bella can’t function when Edward leaves her, and she risks hurting herself just to get a glimpse of him again. Edward is 106 years old and she’s 18—would that work if the genders were reversed? And, when Edward agrees to turn Bella into a vampire, he insists that they marry first, which plays an awful lot like some creepy, conservative, let’s-get-married-before-I-take-your-virginity nonsense, creating that metaphor for teen abstinence vibe again.

But Bella isn’t a one-dimensional character anymore. In New Moon, she’s much more fleshed out, and perhaps most importantly, she doesn’t have to take her clothes off or perform a certain kind of femininity to get the boy. Edward falls for her because he finds her intriguing: he can’t read her thoughts (see True Blood), and he’s drawn to her because she smells delicious, sex metaphor? Jacob falls in love with Bella after they spend significant time together; it’s not some love-at-first-sight fantasy where he sees Bella, and the camera pans from her feet all the way up her legs and finally to her face where she either smiles coyly or looks down shyly.

As Dana Stevens writes in her review of New Moon:

The feminist in me wishes a lot of things. But say what you will about the Twilight films; they take female desire as seriously as a grad student from the early ’90s. The whole overcooked vampire vs. werewolf mythology (which also involves packs of shirtless wolf-boys and a sort of vampire Pope, played with camp glee by Michael Sheen) is, in essence, an excuse to place the viewer in Bella’s Timberland boots: torn between two flesh-eating monsters, feelin’ like a fool. Haters may construe Bella as a passive victim eager to be served up as vampire meat, but she’s the subject of this love story, not its object; she’s the lover while Edward and Jacob are her diametrically opposed beloveds, one hot-blooded (Jacob runs a constant body temperature of 108 degrees), the other pale and cold as stone.

Be sure to check out the Salon article, “Could New Moon Be a Feminist Triumph?” where Kate Harding argues that the movie’s box office gross could be a game-changer for the future of women in film.