Female Agency – Bitch Flicks

The Chameleon Woman in ‘Dollhouse’ and ‘iZombie’: Personality Swapping and Agency

The problem presented by both ‘Dollhouse’ and ‘iZombie’ is that of the “Chameleon Woman.” Both Echo and Liv carry the metaphor of the expectation that women adapt based on the needs and desires of others. However, both TV series point to this societal issue with two very different takes.

Guest post written by Audrey T. Carroll.

“Would you like a treatment?” This phrase is repeated throughout the course of Joss Whedon’s television series Dollhouse, meant to cue the “Actives” or “Dolls” — people, mostly women, whose personalities have been stripped from them — to let the in-house scientist imprint them with a personality, memories, or skills that someone pays for them to have. After the client encounters, they are again wiped of their memories and personalities. The “Dollhouse,” one of approximately 20 facilities that rents out Dolls, is a human trafficking ring. The Dolls are meant to fulfill the expectations of others, especially (though admittedly not exclusively) male clients and often in a sexual or sexually enticing capacity. For example, in season one episode two “The Target,” the show’s protagonist, Echo (Eliza Dushku), is sent on a date with a man who loves outdoor activities. She is clearly hired in an arousal capacity, which takes a turn for the worst when the guy starts to hunt her.

Echo changes every week. We’re supposed to root for her because she’s the protagonist and Eliza Dushku does a wonderful job infusing the character with as much sympathy as possible. Of course we feel bad for her because of her situation. However, it can be difficult to connect to a character who has to change in accordance with each situation. Echo, in a lot of ways, embodies an ideal of “the chameleon woman.” She changes depending on the needs of the partner who paid for her, a sickening representation of the expectation that women exist solely to service the needs of others, most commonly men — if they like the outdoors, then so must she; if they need a doting wife or neighbor, then she must fit that description; if they need someone cold and calculating, then that’s what she becomes.

Why, out of all of the Dolls in the House, do we predominantly follow Echo? Because Echo is unique in that she has a “defect”: she has the ability to retain some semblance of self and she becomes more self-aware. Because of this, we can root for her as an audience; it gives us some sort of personality continuity that we can connect to emotionally. But the characters in power — scientist Topher (Fran Kanz); Adelle, (Olivia Williams) who runs the Dollhouse; Echo’s handler, Boyd (Harry Lennix) — make it clear that this is a defect, not something impressive or victorious as the audience might perceive it. In fact, this can land Echo in a lot of trouble. Specifically, she can end up in “the Attic,” which serves as a punishment of permanent entrapment and mental torment for Dolls who are “broken” or “defective” (in the view of the Dollhouse).

Echo’s unique skill doesn’t help her to not be stripped of her agency the vast majority of the time. She has no say in what personalities she gets imprinted with, or who her clients are, or even the most basic “yes or no” consent. Even before she was a Doll, when she was Caroline, the head of the Dollhouse essentially backed her against the wall, making Caroline’s agreement to be a doll in the first place ethically compromised even beyond the basic premise of “humans used as shells for the pleasure of people who pay for them.” It was hardly a choice at all. And for some other characters — namely Sierra (Dichen Lachman), who was institutionalized by a man after she rejected him and then involuntarily sent to the Dollhouse — there was literally no choice at all.

Based on the comic books, the TV series iZombie, created by Diane Ruggiero-Wright and Rob Thomas, focuses on the crime-solving medical examiner and pseudo-psychic Olivia “Liv” Moore (Rose McIver). Liv helps Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) with homicide cases. She’s able to do this because, in the process of eating the brains that come down to the medical examiner’s office to keep herself as human as possible, she takes on the memories and personalities of the deceased. This can lead to visions that give Liv clues for Clive to identify the killers he needs to put away. Because of the way that eating brains affects Liv, she changes personalities every week — a dominatrix one week, a frat boy the next.

Liv is able to help in the pursuit of justice, albeit in a highly unconventional way, and she’s able to develop meaningful and consistent relationships not solely centered on sex or her sexual appeal. She has no sexual history nor, as far as the show presents, sexual engagement with most of the other characters: Ravi (Rahul Kohli), her fellow medical examiner; Peyton (Aly Michalka), her best friend; and Clive. It could be argued that Clive benefits from what Liv can do, but he is friends with her outside of her abilities and, while he can be very determined and dedicated, he’s never forced or coerced Liv into a situation or actions that morally compromise her.

Echo’s defect is that she maintains a semblance of self; Liv’s is that she can deviate from her true self. When Liv eats the brains of a deceased hitman, she almost lets Ravi get eaten by a much more monstrous “Romero zombie.” When she’s on vigilante brains, she almost gets herself killed. When she’s on nymphomaniac brains, she cheats on her boyfriend. But most of the time, Liv is still Liv, just with some goofy quirks and moments of zoning out when she sees someone else’s memories. At first, Liv’s voice-over narration in the show reflects her thoughts and demonstrates that she’s still herself. Later, the writers let Rose McIver’s acting and her consistent chemistry with the other actors do the heavy lifting of demonstrating that Liv is always Liv, and that this Liv is who her friends connect to and care about.

Liv is also not robbed of her agency. She chooses to eat the brains of murder victims for many reasons tied to her character, probably the two foremost being that the person is already dead and she wants to help find their killer. She also turns down the “brain mush” from the company Fillmore-Graves, which would give her the sustenance she needs without imbuing her with the personalities or memories of the deceased. Liv chooses to help others, to accept the drawbacks of her current feeding situation so that being a zombie — a state of being that was beyond her control — becomes something that benefits the greater good. Liv is able to make the choice to not let what she is control who she is — zombie Liv is different from human Liv, but she is still at her core Liv.

The problem presented by both Dollhouse and iZombie is that of the “Chameleon Woman.” Both Echo and Liv carry the metaphor of the expectation that women adapt based on the needs and desires of others. However, both TV series point to this societal issue with two very different takes. In Dollhouse, women (who comprise most of the recurring named Dolls) are commodities waiting to have a skin put on them. The framing can make it difficult to create emotional connection to Echo, and all of the non-Dolls are morally compromised because they are either actively involved in the actions of the Dollhouse or otherwise complicit in its continued existence.

The argument could be made that Dollhouse is about women struggling to regain agency. However, there is the example of Alpha (Alan Tudyk), a Doll who escaped and became homicidal because he, like Echo, was remembering personalities that the Dollhouse gave him. He can theoretically be read as a warning for Echo not to be anything more than the childlike drone she is when between personalities. This is to say nothing of the constantly looming threat of “The Attic.” Whether Echo retaining her memories and sense of self is a positive quality is much more ambiguous and comes with a much greater sense of personal danger for the protagonist than is presented on iZombie.

In iZombie, situations can happen to a person that they can’t control but they can still make choices about how to move forward and, in this way, maintain agency. It’s not a flaw; letting the adopted personality control you is the failing. Liv’s zombie boyfriend Justin (Tongayi Chirisa) even tells her, when she cheats on him while on nymphomaniac brains, “I’ve eaten brains before, Liv, and you can fight them if you really want to.” At the end of the day, Dolls are Dolls; they can function as objects or they can be made to disappear. Zombies can become monsters, either the ilk of serial killer criminal bosses like Blaine (David Anders) or mindless and violent “Romero zombies.” But zombies do not have to choose to be monsters.

Both TV series are all about choice, and this becomes colored a certain way with female protagonists. Women are too often robbed of choice, or are presented with choices that range from bad to worse. The struggle for women’s agency seems inextricably linked to the struggle for women’s choices. Examining what women do with choice is a natural extension of this effort. At the end of the day, Dollhouse is about what a woman does with a lack of choice; iZombie is about what a woman does within her realm of choices.

Audrey T. Carroll is a Queens, NYC native currently pursuing her English PhD at the University of Rhode Island. Her obsessions include kittens, coffee, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Queen of Pentacles, her debut poetry collection, is available from Choose the Sword Press, and she can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.

Andrea Arnold’s ‘American Honey’: A Young Woman Reclaims Her Life’s Trajectory

Andrea Arnold’s films largely focus on the female experience, predominantly that of young women transitioning into adulthood. … It is here then, that Arnold’s depiction of female desire and agency warrants praise. Star acts on her own wants and needs, and seeing Jake, acknowledges her longing. She consciously rejects the current trajectory of her life, and intentionally and purposefully seeks a new one.

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

Andrea Arnold’s films largely focus on the female experience, predominantly that of young women transitioning into adulthood. These women often find this experience problematic, particularly when informed or defined through their relationship with the men around them. Fish Tank’s Mia establishes a formative, abusive relationship with the much older Conor, while Cathy Earnshaw, finding herself perpetually torn between both men and social status, is driven to physical illness in Wuthering Heights. While Mia is able to leave behind her experience with Conor, and her unsupportive family, she still finds her freedom through establishing a relationship with a man. While this male character is on equal terms with Mia, and their relationship thus appears to be far healthier, she still needs him in order to remove herself from her current environment.

American Honey’s Star (Sasha Lane) is, initially, similarly propelled into action through interaction with a male character. Jake (Shia LaBeouf), part of the magazine crew selling subscriptions managed by Krystal (Riley Keough), imparts a vision of a life filled with no responsibility. For Star, whose life currently consists of digging through dumpsters to find food with two young charges, Jake’s offer is difficult to turn down. Initially, she resists, feeling some level of responsibility towards her current life, despite its futility. Quickly though, she recognizes that these children, and indeed the domesticity that she is attempting to uphold despite the harassment she receives from the children’s father, is not her concern.

It is here then, that Arnold’s depiction of female desire and agency warrants praise. Star acts on her own wants and needs, and seeing Jake, acknowledges her longing. She consciously rejects the current trajectory of her life, and intentionally and purposefully seeks a new one.

Her meeting with Jake signals the life that Star seeks. First, she witnesses him travelling on the bus filled with the various adolescent members of the magazine crew. The pair lock eyes. Jake is surrounded by his fellow crew members, while Star holds the spoils of her latest dumpster search, young children beside her. Seeing the bus turn into a supermarket, Star implores the children to join her in visiting the store. Once inside, she watches Jake dance to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” clambering up on the checkout counter to ensure that he’s caught Star’s attention. It is this version of Jake that Star finds entrancing; she seems to revel in his vicariousness and enjoys his physicality.

Take the scene in the parking lot, in which the pair almost face off as if battling one another. The camera constantly moves, weaving and bobbing around between the two as they edge towards and away from one another, not quite ready to trust each other’s intentions yet intrigued by what one another appear to represent. For Star, Jake represents a life lived without constraints, a life in which she has power and control over her own life. For Jake, Star seemingly represents an opportunity to indulge in his own desires.

Later, after spending more time with Jake, Star discovers that in fact, despite the image that he presents, he subscribes to the American Dream in the same way that everyone else does. He becomes disappointingly conventional, and in turn, loses his hold over her. Star has witnessed and lived the drudgery of domesticity and seeks an escape from it.

Jake tries to mold Star to his desires. He wants to have her, and to be with Krystal simultaneously without consequences. In training Star, he attempts to impart his money-making ways upon her, encouraging her to lie. She watches as he profusely insists to a potential customer of his desire to attend college and the subsequent need to sell subscriptions in order to do so. Jake expects Star to act in the same way, using any anecdote regardless of its validity in order to secure a sale. Notably, in training Star, he expects, and Krystal insists (when it is noted that Star is not yet making enough money) to secure sales through lies and blurred facts. This is the way in which Jake has found success, and to him, it is the only way. In teaching Star, Jake assumes the role of experienced, intellectual educator. He instructs Star in the ways in which he has previously found success, never offering Star the opportunity to prove her own worth in her own manner.

When Star, in an attempt to prove her worth, engages with a group of older men and agrees to travel back to their home, Jake immediately questions her actions. To Jake, Star’s actions demonstrate a need to be rescued. He arrives uninvited to the wealthy abode, aggressively insisting that Star join him in leaving. Star, left to her devices, has managed to secure an impressive sale and shows that away from Jake, she is more than capable of interacting with men and maintaining her own power dynamic. Jake struggles to accept this and chastises Star for her methods. It is after this pseudo-rescue that Jake and Star first consummate their burgeoning relationship. It is as if Jake feels the need to reassert his control and power over Star, unable to recognize that she is able to enact her own wants and needs and that she’s able to survive on her own terms.

Jake constantly insists on rescuing Star, particularly from situations that are of her own intentional making. Star agrees to offer her services to an oil worker for a substantial amount of money. There is no real sense that Star feels manipulated or coerced into agreeing to this transaction, but Jake, upon discovering the situation, once again acts aggressively. First, he asserts his masculine power by attacking the oil worker, then by questioning Star’s behavior and displaying his displeasure at her actions. We later discover that Jake regularly sleeps with the girls that he helps to recruit to the magazine crew, but he appears to insist on Star’s fidelity while not displaying any such intention himself.

It is in this moment that Star recognizes that Jake’s conventional nature is prohibiting the life that she has sought for herself. The imbalance of power that has existed cannot be corrected, while Jake still insists on performative gender stereotypes. At the narrative’s close, Jake gifts Star with a turtle. Star, retreating from the group, sets the turtle free, symbolically coinciding with her decision to allow herself to follow her own desires, rather than monitor them to cater to Jake’s needs.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

‘Penny Dreadful’: Departure from Heroine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sex and the Penny Dreadful

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

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

“You Have No Power Over Me”: Female Agency and Empowerment in ‘Labyrinth’

So what distinguishes ‘Labyrinth’ from the Hero’s Journey tropes it so closely follows? Its protagonist. Sarah is the hero of the story. She doesn’t need to be saved because she’s the rescuer, and she carries the plot forward with her resourcefulness, tenacity, and self-actualization. …She navigates a tricky tightrope between fantasy and reality, dreams and goals, past and future, and discovers the kind of woman she wants to be.

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

Adolescence is tough, no matter who you are. Your emotions, perspectives, and body are changing, and the prospect of entering the complex, confusing world of adulthood can seem frightening. It’s especially hard for teenage girls. Life is capable of hideous cruelty: society has pre-set expectations it demands women meet, and there will always be those who attempt to control and oppress female agency. But there’s also freedom — the freedom to choose your own path, to explore, to express, and to discover who you are and the power within you.

Those are the major themes behind Jim Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth. Although it wasn’t popular at the time of its theatrical release, over the past thirty years it’s become a deeply loved cult favorite for its coming-of-age themes, vivacious imagination, and David Bowie’s amazingly outrageous clothes. (Oh, dear David.) But beneath the puffy ball gowns and sparkly technicolor makeup lies a palpably feminist treatise.

On the surface Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly)’s story is about her maturation into an adult, but bound inherently to that is the development, and realization, of her personal agency. When we first meet her she’s a clever, imaginative girl who prefers the company of books, stuffed animals, and made-up fantasy lands over the mundane demands of suburban life. To this end Sarah is also an embodiment of the stereotypical characteristics unfairly assigned to teenage girls — immature, petulant, and selfish. She throws a temper tantrum when tasked with babysitting her younger brother Toby so her parents can, gasp, enjoy an evening out by themselves. Why should she be forced to look after a crying baby when she’d much rather dress up in a flowing white gown and play pretend? Sarah’s defense mechanism against her growing responsibilities is to cast herself into a skewed fantasy where she’s an innocent victim terrorized by evil parents.

It’s immature, yes, but so very relatable. Sarah feels isolated, confused, and jealous of her brother, and fueling the core of those frustrations is the desperate desire to do what she wants. “Life isn’t fair,” she cries when things don’t go her way, as I’ll bet most of us have. She’s a normal adolescent girl yearning for the independence to make her own choices. And that first choice happens to be asking the trickster Goblin King from her play to take Toby away.

Enter David Bowie’s Jareth in a shower of glitter, who offers Sarah a decision of his own design. If she solves the mysteries of his labyrinth within a thirteen-hour window, he’ll return Toby to her. If not, Jareth keeps custody of the baby in his goblin kingdom. It’s Sarah’s choice whether or not to rescue her helpless brother.

This is where Labyrinth dovetails nicely into several synonymous identities. It’s a fairy tale homage with modern-day values; it matches beat-for-beat the plot structure of the typical Hero’s Journey; and it’s a tale of internal strength that’s unabashedly, specifically feminine in nature.

As a fairy tale, admittedly it’s nothing too new. It follows in the footsteps of its predecessors (The Brothers Grimm, The Neverending Story, Where the Wild Things Are, The Wizard of Oz) by imparting life lessons through symbolism — the magical alternate reality is a safe place where our conflicted protagonist can decipher the fundamental difficulties of growing up. As a Hero’s Journey it’s nothing revolutionary, either: the “character embarks on a quest, encounters personal trials to stimulate his/her growth, hits their lowest point before rising up stronger” template has become such a commonplace backbone for popular media you can find it almost anywhere you look. Even Sarah reconciling herself to the obligations of adulthood is a commonly explored arc, from 1977’s Star Wars to 2014’s Boyhood.

So what distinguishes Labyrinth from the Hero’s Journey tropes it so closely follows? Its protagonist. Sarah is the hero of the story. She doesn’t need to be saved because she’s the rescuer, and she carries the plot forward with her resourcefulness, tenacity, and self-actualization.

At first glance it’s easy to write her off as a passive character seemingly helpless to Jareth’s erratic whims and elaborate traps. But although Sarah reacts to the obstacles Jareth throws into her path, she actively resists his narrative, twisting the conflicts around to suit her needs until Jareth becomes the one reacting to her. When he tries to disempower her by casting her in the role of a lost princess needing his protection from a horde of masked strangers, Sarah rejects his fantasy by literally breaking it with her fists. She’s not tempted by the pretty trinkets he offers nor quelled into submission by his magnetism; she’s steadfastly resolute in her goal. Of course she gains quirky Muppet allies along the way, but as she tells her newfound friends, “I have to face him alone. It’s the way it’s done.” And, and — she doesn’t win through brute physical strength, but through an emotional, mental acknowledgment of her own power.

Before the labyrinth, the idea of personal power was all fantasy. A book to read, lines to recite. Sarah has to endure practical life experiences, albeit in a fantastical setting, to recognize the full extent of her capability and then apply that knowledge in order to survive in a treacherous, unpredictable world. A man’s world.

“You have no power over me,” she declares to Jareth’s face; thematically, to outside forces at large. Once she claims ownership of herself, she triumphs in her dual goals: rescuing Toby, and finding happiness. A girl declaring what she wants without shame brings down an empire.

When you look closely, even the movie itself emerges from the decision Sarah makes to sacrifice her brother. She regrets her wish immediately, but that doesn’t change the fact she serves as the action’s primary catalyst. That’s rare, in the 1980s and today. Sarah alone directs her destiny by challenging the labyrinth’s infinite parade of decisions, even as she accepts that not all choices are simple, clean, or fair, and all of them have consequences that can’t be neatly resolved.

In that sense Sarah’s Hero’s Journey isn’t treated any differently by the script than if she were a boy — except for the fact her gender identity informs the film’s proceedings. The execution isn’t perfect: her emotional outbursts are treated as juvenile things to leave behind, and her faults (jealously, selfishness) are ones that tend to be assigned only to girls. But Labyrinth’s dramatic tension is centered entirely in a young woman’s mind as she navigates a tricky tightrope between fantasy and reality, dreams and goals, past and future, and discovers the kind of woman she wants to be. Compassionate, quick-witted, and iron-willed, willing to trust others and open to evolution of thought, while also prone to pre-judgment, naivety, and her fear of the unknown — all of which she overcomes. This makes Sarah not a weak token effort at inclusivity but a character who boasts a full, varied emotional life. She’s not there to service a guy’s development, to just be his victim or his love interest.

Which brings us to that pesky Goblin King. My adoration of Bowie aside, my interest in Jareth is in what he represents to Sarah — a deliberately disturbing mix of childishness and sexuality. Arrogant and assured, he first infantilizes Sarah by offering her gifts to win her submission. When charm fails, he tries intimidation, using his age, power, and authority to order her “back to her room” to “play with her toys.” When Sarah’s ingenuity continues to surpass his expectations, he flat-out presents himself as a distraction. Their dynamic becomes (perhaps always was) a choreographed seduction instead of the normal villain-hero relationship. Jareth’s threats read more like flirtations, especially in tandem with Bowie’s preening, charismatic performance and those, err… very tight pants. That blend makes him both a domineering father figure trying to restrict her autonomy and a potential lover.

Sex is mysterious, dark, and completely adult. Playing with lipstick in the bedroom mirror might be the first step of Sarah’s path toward romance (“I’d like it if you had a date,” her stepmother laments, “you should have dates at your age” — somehow I doubt she meant David Bowie), but Jareth personifies the seductive allure of the unknown, that elusive discovery of more. This is a movie with farting rocks and puppet dance parties, though, so the undertones remain subtle. But intentionally or not, Jareth’s both the embodiment of the patriarchy and the loss of Sarah’s innocence — a man dictating to a woman what he deems is the best thing for her, while also introducing an initiation into the sexual world as reward for her coming to heel. Those threats are very real, very relevant ones.

In a normal fairy tale, Sarah’s happy ending would be to marry him. Jareth fits the love interest archetype: rich, powerful, and regal, with control issues to boot. As tempting as his proposal can be from a certain perspective (I do swoon a bit), it’s a tangible power imbalance and unsettling in a way that borders on emotional abuse — of which Sarah is instinctively, if not implicitly, aware. She may have matured in her understanding of how the world works, but her white clothes signify she sees herself as the innocent in a sea of cruel lasciviousness. So despite the reciprocation and recognition of her desire, she knows she isn’t ready for that major step. That could be interpreted as a reinforcement of the damaging notion that a “good” woman must be chaste. But although Sarah rejects Jareth’s advances (and, impressively, his piercing male gaze; the camera never objectifies her), he still functions as the spark to her burgeoning sexual awakening. She’s curious and aware, but it has to happen on her terms at the right time.

For all his, “Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave,” declarations (cool story, bro, but she’s sixteen), in the end Jareth’s just a privileged, lonely, petty man. He doesn’t get the happy ending he wants. Sad Goblin King is sad.

Of the things Sarah discovers along her labyrinth adventure, above all she learns the power of choice. She chooses between bravely confronting the uncomfortable uncertainties of real life or surrendering her free will to a fantasy. She chooses who she wants to be — a healthy balance somewhere between no longer a child but not yet a grown woman. One of my favorite things about Labyrinth’s message is Sarah doesn’t entirely dismiss her material possessions, but rather finds space for creativity and wonder alongside everything else. She can face her nebulous future with clarity, solid in her convictions and rooted in the understanding of her personhood.

Labyrinth teaches us that women have power. We can say what we want no matter the overwhelming pressures otherwise. We can shape a path for our lives and choose what’s right for us at the right time. We alone determine our self-worth; our stories matter.

We just have to remember the words.

Kelcie Mattson is a multimedia editor by morning, aspiring critic by afternoon, and tea aficionado 24/7. She’s been a fangirl since birth, thanks to reruns of Star Trek and Buffy. In her spare time she does the blogging thing on feminism, genre films, minority representation, comics, and all things cinephile-y at her website. You can follow her on Twitter at @kelciemattson, where she’s usually overanalyzing HGTV’s camerawork and sharing too many cat pictures.

‘Pretty in Pink’: A Desire for Autonomy

Re-watching the film recently, it seems apparent that rather than Andie allowing herself to submit to Blane and all that he represents, her narrative arc is really a search for a sense of autonomy rather than a desire to transition into a world of privilege. …Blane represents an opportunity to take control of her life, to become increasingly autonomous in her decisions.

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s.

John Hughes’ ability to represent a believable, empathetic, and most importantly, a realistic teenage experience has long been recognized. His characters are rightly flawed, and often blunder their way through their narrative as they begin to recognise their wants and desires, and attempt to turn these desires into reality.

Pretty in Pink was the first John Hughes film that I saw, and as such, has been especially formative for me, particularly so in terms of the characterization of Andie Walsh (Molly Ringwald). Andie is entirely relatable as she struggles to reconcile her own place in society (being from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’) and her desire for Blane (Andrew McCarthy), whose wealth seems emblematic of the life that Andie could have if she too was gifted with a privileged background. Andie is all too aware of her lack of social status, refusing to allow Blane to see where she lives, or admitting to her principal that she believes that she is lucky to be receiving a good education and as such, her relationship with Blane can be interpreted as an attempt to transcend her social status.

Much of the film’s discussion surrounds the reshot ending (as evidenced by the plethora of tribute videos on YouTube), an ending that, rather than depicting Andie with Duckie, showed her reuniting with Blane, despite his ill treatment of her. Watching this ending on previous occasions, it seemed to stretch incredulity: Why would Andie select Blane, whose embarrassment proved stronger than his own feelings, over Duckie, who has been devoted to Andie throughout her life? Re-watching the film recently, it seems apparent that rather than Andie allowing herself to submit to Blane and all that he represents, her narrative arc is really a search for a sense of autonomy rather than a desire to transition into a world of privilege.

Andie, despite her circle of friends, appears to be lonely and isolated throughout the film and there is a clear sense that she cannot be her true self with anyone she interacts with, aside perhaps, from Blane. She is friends with Duckie, but as seen in her first interaction with him as they walk down the school hallway, she isn’t really interested in what he has to say. Similarly, as she drives home from Cats with Duckie, the pair are barely registering what one another is saying. Ignoring Grice’s Maxims as featured in his theories of Conversation Principles, the pair fail to maintain relevancy, quality and manner in their discussion. Andie regards the palatial houses en route, while Duckie spends much of the conversation complaining about the music, or stating to Andie in response to her admiration of the houses, “You want beautiful, look in a mirror.” Superficially, it might appear that Duckie is engaged in what Andie is saying, but in reality he’s not. Her comments highlight a clear state of dissatisfaction with her life, and notably, come after her interaction with her friends in Cats, in which she posits the idea of embarking on a relationship with a “rich guy,” a suggestion that is rapidly quashed by Jenna (Alexa Kenin). Andie is not happy, despite outward appearances, and it is clear that for her, Blane represents an opportunity to take control of her life, to become increasingly autonomous in her decisions. This dissatisfaction is not recognised by Duckie, and he chooses to redirect the conversation into a sexual sphere, once again stating his admiration for Andie despite her continued disinterest. Duckie’s unheeded desire for Andie, as has been noted by Kevin Smokler at Salon, is not to be encouraged. His belief that Andie is the one for him leads Duckie to feeling that Andie in some way owes him, or should return his affection. Learning of Andie’s forthcoming date with Blane, Duckie reacts angrily, stating that she can’t respect herself if she goes out with him. This mean-spirited reaction is not the response of a kind and caring potential partner, but rather a vindictive character who is unable to afford the object of his desire autonomy. Andie doesn’t want Duckie, but is currently unable to make this clear to him; it is not until she embarks on her relationship with Blane that she begins to assert her own sexual identity and indeed, her own sense of self.

On a simplistic level, it might seem rather tenuous to draw links between Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Hughes’ Pretty in Pink, but their female protagonists both share a clear lack of, and desire for, autonomy. Academic writing on Coppola’s film has regularly noted Marie Antoinette’s lack of voice and in turn, her lack of control:

“Having no equals in the world with whom to share themselves, they are severed from an intellectual life that would allow them to speak themselves into existence” (Lane and Richter, 2011: 197).

This concept of lacking an equal with whom, through sharing oneself, a protagonist can become validated seems rather apt when considering Andie’s relationship with Blane. Unlike Duckie, Blane’s desire for Andie is measured and considered. His arrival at Tracks, the record store at which Andie works, is clearly a planned and calculated move. While Duckie almost rather literally screams to get Andie’s attention (intentionally setting off the alarm), Blane seeks her advice on a record, highlighting that he not only values her opinion, but trusts her ability to form one. It is Blane’s attention that provides Andie with the strength to confront the classmates who earlier in the film made their disdain for her apparent. While this strength through male attention could be seen as reductive, Andie’s strength isn’t buoyed by Blane himself, but rather the realization that she too is desirable and worthy of attention.

Later, when going to a party, Andie makes it clear that she doesn’t want to attend but allows herself to be convinced by Blane. As they walk around the party, Blane is clearly attuned to Andie’s reactions; watching her closely, he quickly recognizes that she feels uncomfortable so seeks a space in which the pair can be alone, and thus separate from others. Blane is similarly uncomfortable and similarly accosted when they attend Andie’s venue of choice and it is apparent that the pair’s relationship cannot exist within the confines of the society in which they currently interact with. Initially, this need to be separate proves too difficult for Blane and he succumbs to the pressures excised by his apparent friends. Conversely, the experience for Andie only makes her desire for autonomy stronger, and she declares that she wants to attend prom in order to show that “they didn’t break me.”

Realizing that Blane has attended the prom on his own away from his friends, Andie understands that he has set out to distance himself from the privileged world which he inhabited and in doing so, has also made it clear that he also seeks autonomy over his own desires. This statement of control allows Andie to finally realize her own control over her life and her actions, and in turn, state her desire and love for Blane. Now that the pair have willingly removed themselves from a public sphere and space, they are able to create their own private space (both literally and metaphorically) and gain true autonomy.

References:

Lane, C. And Richter, N. (2011) ‘The Feminist Poetics of Sofia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006)’ in H. Radner and R. Stringer (ed.) Feminism at the movies. Oxon: Routledge.

‘Inside Out’: Does Riley Lack Agency?

Does Riley make decisions of her own, or are her decisions made for her by Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, and Sadness? … If Riley were completely subject to the whim of her emotions, they would be able to control her in any way at any time. However, ‘Inside Out’ repeatedly conveys that there are limits to what they can do when they interact with Riley.

This is a guest post written by Margaret Evans.

A few months ago, legendary animator Don Bluth made an interesting observation about the movie Inside Out. According to Bluth, Riley, the central character, lacks agency. This was a claim that I felt warranted further thought. Does Riley make decisions of her own, or are her decisions made for her by Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, and Sadness?

In order to answer that question we must first take a look at the emotions themselves. They are Riley’s emotions, each one is the embodiment of what Riley is feeling. You would think that this would end the debate there and then. If these characters are the expressions of Riley’s feelings than surely Riley does have agency. However, it should be noted how the emotions talk about Riley. While the emotions talk about Riley’s life as if it is their own, they talk about Riley in the third person. This has the unfortunate effect of distancing Riley from her emotions. Ironically, the well-rounded nature of her emotions works against the story that Pixar is trying to tell. We see her emotions as complete people in their own right rather than extensions of Riley. This isn’t helped by the fact that we see all of Riley’s decisions from the perspective of the emotions, reinforcing the idea that Riley is someone they collectively control.

Despite this, I still believe that Riley does exert some agency in Inside Out. Certain aspects of the film show the emotions being influenced by outside factors that they can’t explain. At the beginning, Sadness finds herself feeling the urge to participate in a way that she hasn’t in the past, much to the chagrin of Joy; a happy memory turns sad at Sadness’ touch and Joy is unable to merely change it back. When asked why she is “acting up,” all of a sudden Sadness doesn’t know why. This clearly indicates an example of Riley influencing how the emotions feel father than the other way around.

In my mind, this is just one way that proves that the emotions are the embodiment of how Riley feels rather than the deciders of how Riley feels. The emotions collectively may have put Joy in charge, but when Riley is sad, the film ultimately proves that they can’t just make Riley happy when it suits them.

Another example of this is the difference between two similar points in the movie. During a scuffle, Joy and Sadness are sucked up into Riley’s mind. Later, Fear tries to get the exact same thing to happen to him but it fails. No explanation within the film is given for this but I would argue that Riley subconsciously rejected Joy and Sadness and retained Fear. She wasn’t happy or sad but she was angry, disgusted and afraid. Finally, at the end of Inside Out, only Sadness is able to have any affect on Riley. Until Sadness gets through to her, the console that the emotions have been using throughout the film becomes completely inoperable.

If Riley were completely subject to the whim of her emotions, they would be able to control her in any way at any time. However, Inside Out repeatedly conveys that there are limits to what they can do when they interact with Riley. The emotions inhabit a world which is clearly governed by rules and they are subject to those rules.

When we watch Inside Out, it’s easy to look at the emotions and think that the personification of how Riley feels starts and ends with them. But it doesn’t. The train of thought that we see is just as important to understanding Riley as the emotions. The ground that Joy and Sadness walk on through their journey is just as much a part of Riley as the emotions themselves.

Ultimately, the reason why it appears that the emotions call the shots is because the way that Riley influences the emotions is much more subtle than the way that the emotions influence her. The emotions affect Riley in a very straightforward way that is easy to see: they press a button or pull a lever. The way that Riley impacts the emotions, however, remains subtle, and therefore much harder to identify. We see Riley’s influence in the rules that govern her mind — we are told that memories fade because she “decides” she doesn’t need them anymore — and when Joy can’t alter a memory near the end of the film. Riley doesn’t lack agency as her agency propels the plot and the choices she makes.

Margaret Evans is a blogger from Godalming, a small town in south England. She currently writes the blog Plot Twists and Continuity.

‘Daredevil’s Elektra and the Problem of Destiny

Ultimately, we are left to conclude that Elektra’s characterization is not based in specific motivations, but in a dangerous, unseemly destiny that shapes her will and revokes her agency. … This trope, in which women’s “destinies” obscure, erase, or negate their agency is one that can be found other places…

This is a guest post written by Elyssa Feder. | Spoilers ahead.

In season two of Daredevil, Elektra Natchios, international assassin and part-time debutante, is one of a pair of foils the show introduces to contrast with the series’ hero, Matt Murdock. While season one saw Matt wrestling with if he should kill Wilson Fisk, season two puts Matt among two antiheroes who have chosen the other side of the ethical line Matt won’t cross — Elektra, and Frank Castle, aka The Punisher. While Frank is given a detailed backstory, Elektra’s motivations are suspiciously obscured. The show then reveals that she is “The Black Sky,” a weapon that a shadow organization called The Hand has been searching for for centuries. Ultimately, we are left to conclude that Elektra’s characterization is not based in specific motivations, but in a dangerous, unseemly destiny that shapes her will and revokes her agency.

This should leave a sour taste. I watched season two of Daredevil in around two days and then I watched it again, mostly because I have a terrible memory and usually need to watch shows twice to retain what happened. But going back and watching with the knowledge that Elektra is a weapon, that that is a designation handed to her by men, that she doesn’t get to choose any of it, and that it serves to explain her characterization while Frank Castle gets all the internal motivation he seeks — that’s very troubling to me.

There are a lot of moments to make your skin crawl about this, but the one that kicked off my concerns about this is all the way in 2×12, “The Dark at the End of the Tunnel.”

Here, Stick, the mentor to little Elektra (and little Matt, as the latter will later learn), explains there is some violent force inside Elektra, one she will have to learn to control. Though I’m not in principle opposed to women having innate power, there’s something off-putting about the way Elektra’s power is described here, and in other parts of the episode. Stick suggests that Elektra and her power are unwieldy, something dangerous and unnatural. And this line comes directly after Elektra almost kills someone — and she ultimately does kill him, later in the episode, an act Elektra explains she did “just to prove she could.” What a sociopathic little girl, we are left to believe.

But the show makes a pretty bad case that Elektra’s a sociopath, which might have let them off the hook for laziness. She’s reticent to leave Stick, her adoptive father figure, and her love for Matthew is genuine. Rather, the show reveals that Elektra is the Black Sky, a strange and mysterious weapon we still haven’t had fully explained. Rather than a real woman with choices, she’s an object. Her violence is, as Stick suggests, deeply a part of her — not because she chooses it but because, at least as most of the men of Daredevil would like to suggest, she’s not really a person. She’s just a shell for something sinister.

There are some fairly grotesque examples of this objectification. Nobu, one of the leaders of “The Hand” repeatedly refers to Elektra as “it.” Nobu is part of a cult that worships the Black Sky, so while one might think he’d be nicer to Elektra, the woman is just a shell, the container of the weapon. Stick, when tied up in Matt’s apartment says, “The Black Sky cannot be controlled, manipulated, or transported.” (Stick seems to have done quite a bit of controlling, manipulating, and transporting of Elektra over the last 3ish decades of her life, but I digress.) There’s a moment after Nobu reveals her identity where you can see the trauma and self-loathing Stick brought to her play out, and she seems to entertain this destiny, even for a moment.

To be fair to Elektra’s internal world, I think we can chalk this up to the trauma of her father figure trying to kill her. Furthermore, Elektra is raised by an older white man who taught her that she was out of control for unknown reasons, her violence is given no rationality, and then it’s ultimately revealed she’s violent because surprise! She’s not a person; she’s a weapon. Destiny and a bunch of guys who worship her said so. But they don’t really worship her. They worship some sort of weird mystical weapon they think is inside her. They see her as an “it.” And, at least for a moment, Elektra thinks, “Makes sense.” After all, was she not raised to believe she was a monster? A thing without reason? A creature out of control?

This sort of burden of destiny — and the irrational, innate violence that goes along with it — is something her natural season-long foils, Matt and Frank, are spared. Though I have my own struggles with the writing of Matt’s motivation (a subject not for this post), one cannot doubt that he is hyper-rational about them, with probably too much thinking and self-flagellation for my taste. Frank is given enumerative motive and rationality in the form of his murdered family, and a personal champion Karen Page who makes sure those motives and rationales come to light.

I should be clear here, when I say rationality I don’t mean, “Frank Castle makes good choices.” What I mean is that there is an internal logic to them; he is a Rational Actor. It is this rationality that allows Karen to argue he wouldn’t target the DA’s family; it goes against Frank’s internal code. I know why Frank Castle does everything he does, in a way I don’t with Elektra because it’s never offered. And there’s a reason this matters too, in the basic vein of “women are people,” and the fact that their choices are circumscribed or erased in all sorts of media is not only a common trope, but a disturbing one. We all know women in the real world make choices, good and bad, moral and immoral, that are grounded in experience. Elektra, the show suggests, makes choices because she can’t help it. Elektra kills people because she was born a weapon. Not much of a choice.

Though there moments where Elektra makes choices in this series, particularly ones that reject her “destiny” and the violence it sparks in her, that unseemly destiny thing has a tendency to intervene. One example is in 2×08, “Guilty as Sin”:

Matthew: Where’s Stick?
Elektra: I made my choice. He didn’t like it. I want to be with you. The only person in this world who believes I’m good.

Then, around three minutes later, Matthew gets attacked by a young member of The Hand and, after beating him single-handedly, Elektra still kills him in this bloody homage to “crazy” lady slasher films.

This line is the most unhinged Elektra is all season by my estimation, not three minutes after she decided to hang up her evil sword and pick up her noble one. Guess that uncontrollable violence got in the way again. She and Matt call it quits for a few episodes, until they’re mostly back together in 2×12, after she decides against joining up with The Hand.

It is in the finale that Elektra makes her last choices, at least for now. When Stick says her decision to fight The Hand is a mistake she says, “Maybe. But it’ll be my mistake, because this is my life.” This is the clearest pronouncement of her own choices and agency Elektra makes all season. It is a choice she makes not because she wants Matt to see her as Good ( I should note the paternalism and white savior complex in this dynamic are important to explore), nor a choice she makes because she’s the Black Sky. It wouldn’t be good characterization or good writing for her to suddenly become a white hat, but she chooses to fight a war because she wants to fight it, because there is something personal and at stake for her in its victory, and because she seeks to reject the destiny the men around her have told her is fated.

This is, of course, for naught. She and Matt fight The Hand on a roof, during which she declares they will kill him “over her dead body,” just to heavily foreshadow what was obviously going to happen. And then, in the latest case of unseemly lady deaths, she runs into a sword to save Matt, taking The Hand’s precious weapon out of the equation. It seems Elektra can only have agency over her destiny by throwing herself on a sword.

These are the few choices Elektra is allowed in Daredevil that contradict her destiny to be a weapon instead of a woman. The final chain of events — choices that are truly Elektra’s and no one else’s, and ones she makes to reject her destiny — leads to her death. The show even has the audacity to suggest her death, one of her few (and problematic, obviously) choices, will be rendered useless in the face of that destiny. Season two ends with Elektra in a coffin designed by The Hand for “the rising.” We are safe to assume Elektra, or something in Elektra’s skin, will return.

This trope, in which women’s “destinies” obscure, erase, or negate their agency is one that can be found other places, each of which could merit their own post, but I’ll give a few examples. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the premise of the show is that Buffy wanted to be a normal girl and no longer can be, because a few millennia ago, a bunch of men forced superpowers into a girl, and now Buffy doesn’t get any choice in the matter. On the spinoff series Angel, though Cordelia is initially given a series of painful visions without her consent, the show suggests in the episode “Birthday” that Cordelia is destined to have the visions. In making the choice to accept some mystical intervention into her life, she sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads to her death (also in the interest of saving the man she loves). In Battlestar Galactica, Kara Thrace is given the destiny of leading humanity to Earth and nearly loses her mind because of it, only to disappear and die (again) once that mission is completed; Laura Roslin’s similar destiny is inextricably linked with her illness and death.

On the other hand, when men are given great destinies, from Harry Potter to Buffy and Angel and beyond, their choices are not sublimated in the face of that agency. Rather, those choices are portrayed as steps along a greater path. Their agency remains intact, and their deaths are rare. Yet, we see patterns where women’s destinies cut off their choices, or where the choices they make in the face of destiny leads to their deaths. (I will note that Dawn Summers, also in Buffy, faces a similar ‘you’re a mystical creation’ scenario as Elektra, but is allowed to retain and enhance her agency throughout the rest of the show.)

It is also worth noting that Elektra’s death appears amongst a series of disturbing choices to kill off women this spring. A few weeks ago, The 100’s decision to kill Lexa, a lesbian character, sparked deep outrage in the fandom, as well as critiques from the broader media as part of a larger pattern of killing off LGBT women on television. This past week on Sleepy Hollow, the show decided to kill of lead Abbie Mills, played by Nicole Beharie. Sleepy Hollow has faced critiques for a few seasons for the continued sidelining of Beharie’s character, a Black female lead on a major network, in favor of white characters on the show. The show’s decision to not only kill off Abbie, but to construct her death as in the service of white lead Ichabod Crane (played by Tom Mison) and his destiny (one they were supposed to share, but seems to have been summarily robbed from Abbie in the service of his), has been roundly criticized, with fans of the show creating a hashtag to cancel the show entirely (which, agreed). Elektra, a woman of color (played by Elodie Yung) who the show forces to sacrifice herself to save a white man, is part of this larger disturbing pattern.

Conveniently for Daredevil, they, unlike many of these shows, have the opportunity to fix the problem they created. When Elektra does return, the writers have a choice as to who they bring back. She can be a thoughtless monster, a weapon known as the Black Sky with no consciousness, and which Matt will inevitably have to either kill or save with his love (dramatic eyeroll). Or she can be Elektra, a woman who tells the men who both put her in the grave and raised her from it to go to hell, and take destiny with them. It would be this Elektra who could be given the opportunity to make the choices she wants, to have an inner world explained by more than “she’s a weapon.” A real, live, breathing woman.

See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘Daredevil’ and His Damsels in Distress

Elyssa Feder has a BA in Women’s Studies and International Affairs from George Washington University, where one day she decided to write a paper about women in the military (on scifi television) and it was all downhill from there. By day, she is a political person doing political things; by night, she can be found lecturing friends and coworkers about television. She also does this by day, if anyone lets her.

Directing One’s Own Life (and Sexuality) in ‘Appropriate Behavior’

‘Appropriate Behavior’ is thus a product and a triumph of female authorship and agency in the male-dominated film and entertainment industry. … Just as Desiree Akhavan went to lengths to ensure her agency and authorship as a filmmaker, Shirin engages with her bisexuality frankly and honestly…

This guest post written by Deborah Krieger is an edited version that originally appeared at I on the Arts. It is cross-posted with permission.

In Desiree Akhavan’s 2014 film Appropriate Behavior, Shirin (Akhavan), the protagonist, struggles to find her place in both her traditional Iranian family and as a newly-single bisexual woman in New York City. In addition to starring as the protagonist, Akhavan also wrote and directed this offbeat, independent drama-comedy film, basing several of the elements of the film on her own life and experiences, although the plot is fictional. The film premiered at Sundance, where it was perceived as a “breakout,” received a limited theatrical release, and is currently available through various online streaming sources, including iTunes and Amazon Prime. While the film was not a financial success, grossing only $46,000, it put Akhavan on the map, earning her comparisons to Lena Dunham, a writer/director/actor of similar comedic material, and earned her a guest role on Dunham’s HBO show Girls, although Akhavan shrugs off the comparison.

Appropriate Behavior features not only a female creator, star, and director, but also a female executive producer (Katie Mustard), producer (Cecelia Frugiuele) — indeed, women make up at least half of the crew of the film. It is thus fair to say that Appropriate Behavior is a classic example of women’s cinema, which refers to films that have women in positions of creative control, as well as films that are geared towards a female audience. In an industry where women comprise only 9 percent of film directors, 11 percent of writers and 20 percent of executive producers in the top 250 films, Appropriate Behavior’s crew is quite impressive in terms of giving women control over the production of the film.

Appropriate Behavior is thus a product and a triumph of female authorship and agency in the male-dominated film and entertainment industry. Essentially, Appropriate Behavior addresses female production and agency not only in the background processes of the film, but also in content, as exemplified through Shirin’s trials and travails over the course of the film. Shirin aims to take control of her life post-breakup and establish her identity in relationship to the world around her. She gets a new job teaching filmmaking to five year-olds, moves into a new apartment, and, most importantly, tries to get over her ex-girlfriend Maxine by seeking out and engaging sexually with partners both male and female, including a leader of a feminist discussion group and a hip swinging young couple. In short, Shirin’s desire to create her own new life post-Maxine is analogous to the process of Akhavan’s making her film independently, serving as writer, director, and star, and exemplifies Shirin’s own sexual and personal agency as an active female character. Both Shirin and the film Appropriate Behavior exist outside of the mainstream: Shirin is a bisexual woman of color in an industry where films are usually made about straight white men (whites making up 70 percent of the protagonists in 2014 Hollywood films, men 88 percent, with LGBT characters only accounting for 17.5 percent of all characters), and Appropriate Behavior is an independently financed and distributed film not made to satisfy commercial needs or beckon broad appeal. At the beginning of the film Shirin starts with nothing — she is unhappily single, in need of a home, and looking for a new job — and must start from scratch, just as Akhavan conceived of the fictional story of the film, beginning, one assumes, with a white blank page. Indeed, when it comes to its depiction of sexuality, Appropriate Behavior through its form and content, center the idea of female agency and authorship, whether behind or in front of the camera.

Appropriate Behavior reflects the choices made by Desiree Akhavan throughout her burgeoning career as a filmmaker to maintain her independence, control and agency over her projects. Filmmaker Michelle Citron, in her essay “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,”[1] creates a divide between usage of the terms “film-maker” [sic] versus “director,” arguing that a filmmaker exercises more “control” over her product than does a director, who trades control for increased “power” within the mainstream Hollywood production structure and, one assumes, the ability to direct projects with larger and larger budgets and commercial appeal further down the line. In the interview with Professor Patricia White preceding the screening of Appropriate Behavior at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, Akhavan spoke about the difficulty of getting Appropriate Behavior financed, since, as both she and Citron point out, the kind of projects Hollywood supports are the kind that have been proven to be revenue-generating in the past.[2] Akhavan noted that even within the niche of more mainstream LGBT films she had little luck, since her film was a comedy, not a drama (in the vein of, perhaps, Brokeback Mountain), and thus did not receive any grants, and because her film centers on a bisexual woman of color and not white gay men, it was harder to find support.

Additionally, while Akhavan did not explicitly reference Citron’s filmmaker versus director argument, she did point out that as a woman behind the camera, she had been offered to direct mainstream comedies — for example, something starring Zac Efron — but that she turned those offers down because she wanted to direct her own her projects, even though by this token she was trading a chance at power within the Hollywood mainstream for control over a much smaller film, as per the Citron model.

In terms of the film’s content, the depiction of Shirin’s sexuality also emphasizes her choices and agency in her (attempted) sexual encounters with both men and women. Just as Akhavan went to lengths to ensure her agency and authorship as a filmmaker, Shirin engages with her bisexuality frankly and honestly, seeking out partners whom she believes will make her happy (or at least satisfied), regardless of how society views her sexual orientation. She pursues a male partner for a one-night stand over OkCupid, a female feminist group discussion leader, and a couple, who invites her into their home for a threesome. In one key scene in the film, Shirin attempts to revive her existence as a sexual single woman by going to a lingerie shop and hesitantly requesting to be shown “underwear of a woman in charge of her sexuality and not afraid of change.”

Despite her attempts to prove otherwise to herself, Shirin’s sexual identity and agency is anything but assured, as the audience learns over the course of the film, and is a source of both happiness and pain for her. In her article “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” which addresses conceptions of female sexuality through a feminist lens, Carole S. Vance cites a “powerful tension”[3] between pleasure and danger. While Appropriate Behavior does not explicitly define itself as feminist or anti-feminist, its take on female sexuality, especially Shirin’s bisexuality, is indicative of the divide between pleasure and danger that Vance addresses. In the film, Shirin’s bisexuality within both straight and lesbian contexts is treated as dangerous and “other”; her straight brother doubts that bisexuality is real and calls her “sexually confused,” while her ex-girlfriend Maxine, in a particularly harsh moment, wonders aloud if their relationship was just a “phase” for Shirin — particularly damning for a bisexual woman, since they are often perceived as experimenting or, indeed, “confused.” Additionally, Shirin’s sexuality is a source of stress — and, indeed, danger — in the film, because Shirin worries about alienating her traditional Persian family if she comes out to them, which is one of the causes of the breakdown of Shirin’s and Maxine’s relationship.

Furthermore, during the discussion with Akhavan, when the topic of filming sex scenes came up, she spoke of her enthusiasm for participating and directing these kinds of scenes, adding that she felt “empowered” by this type of material. However, what was interesting in the interview, vis-à-vis Vance’s discussion of pornography being demonized by certain feminists, is that one of the sex scenes (likely the threesome) worried Akhavan because she thought it was too close to pornography, rather than an honest depiction of sex, and had to be reassured by her producer that it would turn out to be acceptable. In the scene in question, Shirin engages sexually with the couple, then watches awkwardly as they engage with one another, leaving her out. Where the scene becomes “dangerous,” in a sense, for Shirin is the strange connection she makes with the female half of the couple — a connection that so unnerves as disturbs her that she feels obligated to leave the couple’s apartment. Through Akhavan’s intervention, a scene that could have been aimed at the male gaze and meant to titillate like pornography becomes more emotional and meaningful, with the nudity serving to advance the sentiment of the scene as well as the plot of the film. What is emphasized both in the film and in Akhavan’s commentary is the sense of female power and agency in that both Shirin and Akhavan have, and had, the opportunity and luxury of pursuing and expressing their sexuality in or through the making of the film, even if the outcome for Shirin is not what she expected.

Thus, with regards to both the behind-the-scenes processes as well as the narrative of the film, Appropriate Behavior exemplifies and addresses issues of female authorship and agency. Desiree Akhavan asserted herself not only by writing, directing, and starring in her own film, as well as hiring many women to serve on the production team, but also refusing to take on projects that would diminish her agency and control over the process and end result, preferring to be an author and filmmaker rather than a director-for-hire. Similarly, Shirin alternately asserts (and questions) her identity over the course of the film through her displays of sexuality and the choices she makes, ultimately reaching a place where she is feeling hopeful about her own life and ready to move forward, as emphasized by her finally throwing away the strap-on Maxine insisted Shirin take as part of their break-up. In Akhavan’s career as well as the content she creates, it would seem, women’s ability and agency to be sexual, to be oneself and make one’s own choices, to direct one’s own life, as it were, are paramount. Ultimately, Appropriate Behavior succeeds as a feminist film, in my view, insomuch as we can tie female agency and authorship to feminism, because it keenly addresses these concepts both behind and in front of the camera.

Notes:

[1]: Michelle Citron, “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,” in The Gender and Media Reader, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (New York: Routledge, 2012), 177.

[2]: Desiree Akhavan, interview by Patricia White at the Penn Humanities Forum, September 25, 2015.

[3]: Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 1.

Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Instagram.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

“But I Do!”: Releasing Repressed Rage in ‘The Ring’

These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.

If horror films with little girls at their centers express anxieties about puberty, female potential, or the morphing of charming young women into screeching harpies, then The Ring is probably one of the best examples. Its little girl, Samara Morgan, seems to be just plain inexplicably evil.

If recounted chronologically, her “real world” back story goes something like this: Samara was adopted by Richard and Anna Morgan when Anna failed (repeatedly) to conceive. I should note that I’m not talking about the sequels, which to me are clearly made not because we necessarily want to know more about the story and the characters, but because the first film enjoyed some financial success. Anyway, after the adoption, strange things begin to happen at the Morgan’s horse ranch, including the animals going crazy and drowning themselves. Anna begins seeing things, and believes the terrifying images are generated by Samara. The Morgans decide to seek psychiatric treatment for Anna and for Samara; at some point both are released, but Anna is still disturbed. Believing Samara to be the source of her visions, Anna suffocates her daughter and throws her into a well, then leaps off a cliff near their home.

But Samara isn’t dead, and spends seven days expiring at the bottom of said well. Afterward, well, even if she wasn’t evil before, she certainly has an axe to grind. Samara’s supernatural obsession becomes “showing” people terrible “things,” through her strange psychic ability, which gives her the power to create media—this special talent eventually takes the form of a cursed videotape that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Usually this process involves a very waterlogged and very scary-looking Samara crawling out of a leaky television set and looking at the victim with her very angry eye, whereupon that victim also suddenly becomes very scary-looking and waterlogged, but also totally dead.

When I saw the film on its release, I slept with the lights on for seven days. Yes, me: horror film aficionista, one who has seen some pretty intense stuff in the service of her dissertation research. Right. While at the time I was kind of obsessed with figuring out just why the film scared me so much, now I am kind of obsessed with one scene—hell, just a few shots—and one line of dialogue from the movie.

It’s probably not the scene that immediately springs to the mind of most folks who have seen the film. It’s not the last terrifying moments in Noah’s (Martin Henderson) life where a slimy Samara (Daveigh Chase) slithers out of a television screen and stalks him across his studio apartment to fulfill her awful curse. It’s not even the first of many interruptions of the linear narrative with shocking or weird images: where in the midst of Rachel’s (Naomi Watts) conversation with her bereaved sister Ruth (Lindsay Frost), we’re treated to a brief shot of poor Katie (Amber Tamlyn), the film’s first victim, crouched in a closet with a horrifying look on her dead face. It’s the scene when Rachel, previously rebuffed by Mr. Morgan in her search to discover who Anna Morgan and her daughter were, returns to his farm at night (brilliant move in a horror film) and stumbles upon a videotape of Samara Morgan’s psychotherapy.

We know that something significant is about to happen because—aside from the usual horror film suspense buildup—Rachel is surprised by a centipede as she rifles through a box of the Morgan’s belongings. She’s seen this centipede before in the fabled videotape that kills you, and throughout the film images from the tape seem to intrude little by little onto the real world. These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around. An off-camera doctor indicates that they are in hour 14 of therapy–a therapy where Samara is wired with electrodes, plugged into a wall, and asked a variety of questions. The doctor makes several inquiries before she responds. But the most disturbing and important moment occurs when, just after Samara asserts that she loves her mommy, the Doc indicates that Samara is hurting her. When he says, “You don’t want to hurt anyone,” Samara responds: “But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop.”

A revelation! A young girl supposedly given up by her family, subsequently adopted, and then poked and prodded by medical science and creepy male psychologists admits to having feelings other than love, maternity, and joy? Amazing! So although as a society we might locate a lot of anxiety in the maturation of young girls, this film—at least for a moment—doesn’t repress the idea that young girls might have feelings other than the ones society tells them to have. What’s problematic, of course, is that the film sees this admission as evidence of Samara’s evil. While the film overall may not be very progressive in terms of its depiction of women, and young girls in particular, it does have this ONE MOMENT of openness, like a valve releasing some of the pressure of repression.

In addition to admitting that she wants to hurt people, Samara is plagued by the idea that her adopted father is going to leave her in the institution, that he doesn’t love her. Eventually, her mother kills her, ostensibly because her idealization of what it means to be a mother didn’t come true exactly as she envisioned it. Because her adopted daughter isn’t “sugar and spice and everything nice” all the time. The expectations that society doles out for young girls and for mothers is far from realistic. Is this disconnect the real horror?

I’d like to take a moment to point out that Aiden (David Dorfman), Rachel’s young son, is far from a normal kid. He’s able to channel that creepy-but-probably-our-hero vibe that was perhaps first perfected by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense just a few years before The Ring. Rachel is also probably not up for a Mom-of-the-Year Award; like Anna and Richard Morgan, she and Noah haven’t been the best parents in the world. Ruth Goldberg has written insightfully about the mirroring present in The Ring between Anna and Richard Morgan and Rachel and Noah with Aiden in Barry Keith Grant’s book on horror film, The Planks of Reason. It’s very clear that while Aiden is a model kid—picking out not only his clothes for Katie’s funeral, but Rachel’s as well, and being extraordinarily self-sufficient because Rachel is working all the time—Rachel and Noah are far from model parents. While she certainly doesn’t seem to share Anna Morgan’s homicidal ideas, Rachel’s life is not exactly constructed to be conducive to having a young child; she relies on Aiden’s capable nature to take up the slack. So really, part of the “terror” of little girls has to do with their mothers—the expectations that society heaps upon them for a “perfect” child, and that they must always, under all circumstances (including unrelenting evil) love their offspring. Certainly reality is far more complicated, and motherhood and childhood much more complex. If The Ring is expressing THAT anxiety, then the film’s success should be evidence that this is a conversation society needs to have.

On that note, one final word on sequels. I might have tipped my hand in the paragraphs above about my general feelings for them, but I do at the end of the day have a hard time believing that any film project is mounted for purely financial or business-oriented reasons. I have to think that there’s just too much work involved in an endeavor like filmmaking to justify it with solely materialistic motives. Therefore, if there are sequels to The Ring (which there are, but which I judge to be inferior in many ways to the style of the original—which was not even an “original,” but that’s another essay), then it’s because there’s some deeper driving force behind the need to express the anxieties at their center. So, I’ll tentatively say: onward to The Ring 3! Perhaps the most frightening things about this film in the end are its telling links to some of the more frightening aspects of our own society. If it takes sequels to work those issues out, bring them on.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

“We Stick Together”: Rebellion, Female Solidarity, and Girl Crushes in ‘Foxfire’

In the spirit of ‘Boys on the Side,’ along with a dose of teen angst, ‘Foxfire’ is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, ‘Foxfire’ is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see ‘Bride Wars’ and ‘Just Go with It’). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘The Other Woman’). When I first saw ‘Foxfire’ around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

This post by Jenny Lapekas appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In the spirit of Boys on the Side, along with a dose of teen angst, Foxfire is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, Foxfire is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see Bride Wars and Just Go with It). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see Bridesmaids and The Other Woman). When I first saw Foxfire around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

Angelina Jolie’s shaggy hair and tomboy style in the film, along with her portrayal of the rebellious Legs Sadovsky, play with gender expectations, challenging our assumptions pertaining to clothing, gait, etc. Legs’ biker boots and leather jacket highlight the general heteronormative tendency to find discomfort in these roles and depictions. An androgynous drifter, Legs oozes sex appeal and promotes the questioning of authority. She teaches the girls to own their happiness, to correct the injustices they encounter, and to assert themselves to the men who think themselves superior to women. Legs’ appearance in Foxfire is paramount; she’s even mistaken for a boy when she breaks into the local high school. A security guard yells, “Young man, stop when I’m talking to you.” We see this confusion repeat itself when Goldie’s mother tells her daughter, “There’s a girl…or whatever…here to see you.”

How can we resist developing a girl crush on Angie in this role?

The film’s subplot involves a romance of sorts between artist Maddy and Legs, the mysterious stranger, while Maddy feels a large distance growing between her and her boyfriend (a young Peter Facinelli from the Twilight saga). The intensity of the “girl-crush” shared between Maddy and Legs is akin to that of Thelma and Louise; while we come to understand that Legs is gay, Maddy’s platonic love is enough for the troubled runaway. Legs also assures Maddy after sleeping on her floor one rainy night, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” Similar to my discussion of the reunion between Miranda and Steve in Sex and the City: the Movie, the two young women coming together on a bridge is heavy with symbolism, especially when Legs climbs to the top and dances while Maddy looks on in horror and professes that she’s afraid of heights: a nice precursor for the unfolding narrative, which centers on Legs guiding the girls and easing their fears, especially those associated with female adolescence and gaining new insight into their surroundings and how they fit into their environment.

This scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as another Romeo and Juliet visual, but we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs. — While this scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as a nice Romeo and Juliet visual, we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs.

In a somber and almost zen-like scene involving Maddy and Legs, they profess their love for one another outside the abandoned home the gang has claimed as their own. Maddy says, “If I told you I loved you, would you take it the wrong way?” Obviously, while Maddy doesn’t want Legs to think she’s in love with her, she wants to make clear that the two have bonded for life and are now inextricably linked in sisterhood. Maddy indirectly asks if Legs would take her with when she decides to move on, and Legs hints that Maddy may not be prepared for her nomadic lifestyle. The platonic romance shared by both young women culminates in tears and heartache when Legs must inevitably leave.

Almost as if to kiss Legs, Maddy tenderly touches her face atop the gang’s house.

Legs is the glue that binds these young women, and she literally appears from nowhere. Her entrances are consistently memorable: she initially meets Maddy as she’s trespassing on school property, she climbs to Maddy’s window asking for refuge from the rain (another Romeo and Juliet moment), and eventually takes off for nowhere, leaving the girls stupefied and yet more lucid than ever. Legs is something that happens to these girls, a force of nature, a breath of fresh air. When she tells Maddy that she was thrown out of her old school “for thinking for herself,” we can safely assume it was just that–refusing to conform to the standards of others. The unlikely friendship that forms amongst this diverse group of girls clarifies the idea that this gang dynamic has found them, not the other way around; the pressed need for the collective feminine is what brings the girls together, rather than some vendetta against men.

Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won't need scars to remember Legs. — Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won’t need scars to remember Legs.

Legs sports a tattoo that reads “Audrey”: her mother, who was killed in a drunk driving accident, and we clearly see in the film’s final scenes that Legs suffers from some serious daddy issues, when she angrily announces that “fathers mean nothing.” Delving briefly into Legs’ painful past, we discover that she never knew her father. The quickly maturing Rita explains to Legs, “This isn’t about you.” Each of the girls has their own set of issues within the film: Rita is being sexually molested by her scumbag biology teacher, Mr. Buttinger, Goldie is a drug addict whose father beats her, Violet is dubbed a “slut,” by the school’s stuck-up cheerleaders, and Maddy struggles to balance school, her photography, and her boyfriend, who is dumbfounded by Legs’ influence on his typically well-behaved girlfriend.

After the girls beat up Buttinger, Legs warns him to think before inappropriately touching any more female students.

In an especially significant scene, the football players from school who continually harass the girls attempt to abduct Maddy by forcing her into a van. The confrontations between the groups progressively escalate throughout the movie, and climax after Coach Buttinger is apparently fired for sexually harassing several female students. Legs shows up donning a switchblade and orders the boys to let her friend go. Of course, the pair steal the van and pick up their girlfriends on a high speed cruise to nowhere, which ends in an exciting police chase and Legs losing control and crashing, a metaphor for the gang’s imminent downfall. The threat of sexual assault dissolved by a female ally, followed by police pursuit and a car crash has a lovely Thelma & Louise quality, as well. The motivation here is to avoid being swept up in a misogynistic culture of victim-blaming. What’s interesting about this scene is that another girl from school, who’s in cahoots with these sleazy guys, actually lures Maddy to the waiting group of boys, knowing what’s to come. Meanwhile, Maddy tells Cyndi that she’d escort any girl somewhere who doesn’t feel safe, highlighting the betrayal at work here. Cyndi, the outsider, exploits Maddy’s feminist sensibilities, her unspoken drive for female solidarity and the resistance of male violence to fulfill a violent, misogynist agenda and put Maddy in harm’s way. Later, in the van, Goldie excitedly yells, “Maddy almost got raped, and we just stole this car!” as if this is a source of exhilaration or a mark of resiliency. Perhaps we’d correct her by shifting the blame from the “almost-victim” to her attacker: “Dana and his boys almost raped Maddy.”

Legs says, “Let her out, you stupid fuck.”

Obviously, these are young women just blossoming in their feminist ideals, on the path to realization, and just beginning to question the patriarchal agenda they find themselves a part of in this awkward stage of young adulthood. It’s in this queer in-between state, straddling womanhood and adolescence, that we find Maddy, Legs, Violet, Goldie, and Rita, on the cusp of articulating their justified outrage. We may also question, how does one almost get raped? While the girls of Foxfire are young and somewhat inexperienced, with Legs’ help, they quickly obtain this sort of unpleasant, universal knowledge that males can perpetrate sexual violence in order to “put women in their place.” Dana announces, “You girls are getting a little big for yourselves.” We can’t have that. Women who grow, gain confidence, and challenge sexist and oppressive norms can make waves and upset lots of people. While the girls are initially hesitant in trying to find their way and make sense of their lives, Legs is the powerful catalyst for this transition from the young and feminine to the wise and feminist. While the high school jocks attempt to reclaim the power they feel has been threatened or stolen by this group of girls, Legs continues to challenge gender expectations by utilizing violence as well.

As she hitches a ride, Legs tearfully says, “You’re my heart, Maddy.”

Not only does this film pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it almost feels as if it’s a joke when the girls do manage to discuss men–like the topic is not something they take seriously or that boys rest only on the periphery of their lives. While Maddy suffers silently in terms of her artistic prowess and boyfriend drama, Rita–seemingly the prudest and most sheltered of the gang–talks casually about masturbation and penis size. However, it’s important to note that when men do make their way into the conversation, it’s at rare, lighthearted moments when the girls are not guarded or suspicious of the tyrannical and predatory men who seem to surround them. The penis-size discussion between Rita and Violet, we must admit, is also quite self-serving and objectifying. Rather than obsess over their appearances or the approval of boys, the girls’ most ecstatic moment is when Violet receives an anonymous note from a younger girl at school, another student Buttinger was harassing who is thankful for what the gang did. The fact that Violet is so pleased that she could help a friendly stranger who was also a target of the same perverted teacher says a lot about the gang’s goals and identity.

Thanks to Legs, Maddy overcomes her fear of heights.

Maddy and Legs recognize something in one another, and although theirs is not a sexual relationship, it is no doubt intimate and meaningful. With an amazing soundtrack that includes Wild Strawberries, L7 (wanna fling tampons, anyone?), and Luscious Jackson, and boasting a cast that includes Angelina Jolie and Hedy Burress, Foxfire is undeniably feminist in its message and narrative. With the help of Legs, the girls find agency, and with it, each other. Although most of the girls have been failed by men in some way, Legs offers hope in female friendship and lets her sisters know that male-perpetrated violence can be combated with a switchblade and a swift kick to the balls. Legs arrives like a whirlwind in Maddy’s life and leaves her changed forever. The lovely ladies of Foxfire will make you want to form a girl gang, dangle off bridges, and break into your old high school’s art room just to stick it to the man.

_____________________________

Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

Friendship, Fandom, and Female Agency in ‘Lost Girl’

Lost Girl logo.

Written by Erin Tatum.

Supernatural shows and crime shows are a dime a dozen, but something amazing can happen through the fusion of the two. Putting a no-nonsense Action Girl at the center is just icing on the cake for Lost Girl, which has consistently managed to capture lightning in a bottle for four seasons. The show follows Bo (Anna Silk), a succubus, and her human companion, Kenzi (Ksenia Solo), as they unravel the mysteries of the Fae, a secret supernatural society hidden in plain sight. At the beginning, episodes tended to fit the mold of a campy CSI parody. Expect rapidfire snarky one-liners. One of Lost Girl‘s most endearing qualities is its embrace of all things cheesy. Plus, you’ll be treated to countless cameos of every Canadian actor that you’ve seen in anything ever.

Bo doesn't mess around. — Bo doesn’t mess around.

Over time, Bo’s overarching journey to find her identity takes increasing president in the narrative. Torn between the factions of dark and light Fae, she perpetually struggles to retain her independence in a world defined by labels. Drawing obvious parallels to society’s stringent policing of women’s roles, pretty much everyone Bo encounters tries to force her to pick a side or fill her with self-doubt by insisting they know her true nature – evil and manipulative. Her rebellious nature also applies to her sexuality. As a succubus, Bo feeds off sexual chi to survive, meaning that superficial constructions of orientation don’t hold much weight since intimacy is essential. While the idea that a woman literally needs sex to live could inspire a flurry of unfortunate stereotypes with respect to slut shaming and biphobia, no one bats an eye at Bo’s sexual appetites and she has serious romances with both men and women. If anything, her queerness seems to have set off a domino effect of subtle pansexuality in the rest of the cast. Trust me, you won’t find another show with more ambiguous same-sex sexual tension.

Now, it may make you groan to see yet another female protagonist saddled with a love triangle. Lauren (Zoie Palmer), a human doctor, and Dyson (Kris Holden-Reid), a werewolf, vie for Bo’s affections. Their rivalry did feel a little high school-esque for awhile, with many Lauren/Bo fans viewing Dyson as nothing more than a one-dimensional heterosexual love interest for the sake of it (which he kind of is, but to be fair, you can only do so much with the macho personality type). Far more intriguing than Dyson and Lauren’s initial sparring is the budding friendship between the two. Imagine, love interests that don’t have to be defined by antagonism or possessing someone! The fact that Dyson and Lauren discover that they can form a relationship outside of their respective entanglements with Bo is a testament to the writers’ commitment to the characters individually and willingness to explore all types of chemistry, not just romantic.

"Kenzi" flirts with "Bo" (as Dyson). — “Kenzi” flirts with “Bo” (as Dyson).

In keeping with that theme, Lost Girl always finds new terrain to explore, frequently through “alternate universe” episodes where anything goes. There doesn’t appear to be any fandom fantasy that the writers aren’t willing to at least momentarily indulge, particularly with romantic pairings. Sometimes the AUs reach Inception levels of intricacy as a way of nodding to multiple fan bases at once. A recent episode featured Bo traveling through Dyson’s memories via Dyson’s point of view with the caveat that her subconscious would insert people that she knew. As a result, Kenzi flirts with Bo (as Dyson) and Bo has sex with Lauren…as Dyson. Yes, four pairings in one fell swoop. That’s why it’s just plain fun to be a fan of Lost Girl. Fandoms are often maligned by showrunners as rabid, obsessive, and demanding, threatening to destroy coherent narratives by relentlessly pressuring the creative team to cater to their every whim. I’ve been a long-time fan of several shows that I wound up bitterly regretting because the writers develop so much resentment for fan feedback. Lost Girl managed to find a brilliant way to make fans feel heard without derailing story arcs.

The pièce de résistance of the series is Bo and Kenzi’s friendship, which provides a rare shining example of an unbreakable bond between women. Given that Bo’s love life is constantly in flux, she needs someone to be her rock. Kenzi vocally confirms her heterosexuality in the pilot. At first, I was annoyed that it was such an unnecessary #NOHOMO announcement. In hindsight, immediately designating their relationship as arguably the only dynamic without sexual undertones enables Bo and Kenzi to represent an entirely different sort of love. Each of them will drop everything for the other, including partners. Women are always encouraged to see other women as competition and liabilities, so it’s refreshing to see a friendship with such mutual respect. No matter who they end up paired off with respectively, you get the feeling that they’ll always be in each other’s lives. I think we all need a little reassurance that ultimately, true friends never really leave us.

With any TV show, you’re going to have people complain about declining quality. Lost Girl is no exception. However, I have to give the writers credit for not being afraid to try new things. Each season has fallen into the pattern of having a nebulous mega-villain. That admittedly gets a little stale, but I ultimately stay because the interpersonal relationships are so damn charming. My favorite recurring theme of Lost Girl lies in the simple reminder that relationships are complicated and there’s usually a lot more to them than meets the eye. By refusing to pigeonhole anyone’s characterization, the writers allow the cast to form a group connection that feels organic precisely because they’re so mismatched and fallible. If all else fails, it’s always delightful to watch a fiery succubus kick some ass with good old-fashioned girl power.