Female Characters – Page 4

“Yes, You Can’t!”: The Happy Failures of Jerri Blank

‘Strangers with Candy’ (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see ‘Wonder Showzen’ (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

Strangers with Candy (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see Wonder Showzen (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.

After Jerri’s father is eaten by rabid dogs, a doctor tells Jerri, “Your father was dead on arrival. No matter what I did, he just kept getting deader.”

I learned rather recently that Jerri Blank is based on a real person: Florrie Fisher was a motivational speaker in the 60s and 70s who traveled to high schools and discussed her history as a prostitute and heroin addict. The series was inspired by Fisher’s public service announcement “The Trip Back,” allowing the birth of Strangers from a fairly dark origin. The “uglification” of Sedaris as she transforms into the recovering addict, Jerri Blank, is possibly most noticeable to new fans of the show. Those who worked on the show’s costume and aesthetics seemingly left no stone unturned in their attempt to make Sedaris as hideous and repulsive as possible. Jerri is a middle-aged woman who returns to high school with a sordid past of drugs and crime–much of which is left to the imaginations of viewers. With a ridiculously exaggerated overbite, strategically placed padding, and several layers of heavy makeup, Jerri is all teeth, hair and hips. Sedaris has done much in the way of writing, feminism, and DIY projects, and she has even been featured on the cover of Bust magazine.

Mr. Noblet talks with his class about the historical role of the clown, a catalyst for Jerri overcoming her grief.

Any fan of the show who is somewhat cognizant of LGBTQ visibility in television and media studies will undoubtedly pick up on the deeply closeted homosexual relationship between Mr. Noblet (Colbert) and Mr. Jellineck (Paul Dinello–whom Sedaris dated for several years). Chuck Noblet is cold, disconnected and married to a woman he loathes while Geoffrey Jellineck, Flat Point’s caring art teacher, is sensitive, sweet, and vulnerable. Although the pair are desperately in love, Chuck continually disappoints Geoffrey in a variety of twisted and unimaginable ways throughout three seasons of absurdity. Besides his refusal to publicly recognize their love, Chuck flees a romantic picnic planned by his lover as Geoffrey is hit by a car, rendering him a faceless monster for the majority of the episode. What we take away from this stagnant relationship is a model for the most dysfunctional gay romance I’ve encountered in a comedy series.

Jerri befriends a blind boy at school and blindfolds herself in an attempt to better understand him.

After exploring all her riveting career options upon graduation, Jerri tells us, “If you’re gonna reach for a star, reach for the lowest one you can.” Jerri lacks the support of her family; her flippant mother would gladly throw her middle-aged daughter under a bus, and Jerri’s closeted brother Derrick is fueled by teen angst and the desire to somehow disparage a woman who has already been defeated a thousand times over by life’s difficulties. Like most protagonists of TV dramas, Jerri is supposed to learn a significant life lesson at the end of each episode, yet the obvious message is forever lost on Jerri. In a two-part episode entitled “Blank Stare,” Jerri joins a cult that has infiltrated Flat Point. After Jerri’s teachers and principal rescue her from the brainwashed gang who are lodging at “Safe Trap House,” they force the 46-year-old high school student to look into a mirror and admit that the cult is merely a group of liars because they’ve told Jerri that she’s beautiful. Furthermore, I don’t think Strangers fans actually want Jerri to evolve and become a better person, because then she simply wouldn’t be Jerri Blank anymore.

Jerri tries out to be a cheerleader but is taunted once the squad discovers that she's illiterate. — Jerri tries out to be a cheerleader but is taunted once the squad discovers that she’s illiterate.

What’s difficult to admit about Sedaris’s character is that Jerri is truly a bad person; she hurts animals, she demonstrates the pinnacle of racist and sexist ideologies and behaviors, and she has clear predatory tendencies toward the high school girls we encounter throughout the show’s run. Jerri is obviously bisexual, and the aggressive fashion in which she proves this to us may cause more conventional viewers some discomfort. In short, Jerri violates gender roles. Sitting outside of Principal Blackman’s (Greg Hollimon) office, Jerri asks a pretty redhead, “Hey Red, carpet match the drapes?” Due to her ability to play a genuinely likable character with such transgressive traits, Sedaris is an important figure for the evolution of women and comedy; we root for Jerri even as we’re hoping she falls. Fans of the show may find themselves disliking her racist behavior, such as calling her best friend Orlando, a sweet Filipino boy, a “monkey,” while also finding that this behavior works for the character and situates her as a feminist anti-hero on Comedy Central. Sedaris successfully satirizes the traumatic high school experience–cliques, bullying, and tough teachers–and de-stigmatizes the negative “sexually aggressive woman” archetype while boasting an identity that has been socially constructed around sex, drugs and alcohol. While Jerri expects us to believe that she’s better for experiencing this depressing lifestyle and then recovering from it, the show’s writers trust us to believe that Jerry is actually a static character throughout Strangers with Candy. How, then, can a television show maintain viewership when a character fails to learn or grow? Simple: we tune in to Strangers to discover the new and twisted ways in which Jerri will fail, sink, and back-pedal; Jerri’s failures are her triumphs. This observation then points up the question: Are we sadists for watching this show? No, because I think we recognize our own flaws in the caricature nature of Jerri, and we find comfort in the onscreen marriage of these flaws and the hilarity of brilliant writing and acting talents like Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello.

Recommended reading: Baking Amy, Tony’s “Strangers With Candy” Companion

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Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on Pinterest and WordPress.

The Quiet Love of Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in ‘The Savages’

Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.

I’ve loved Tamara Jenkins since the first time I saw her film The Slums of Beverly Hills, the 1998 coming-of-age story that put Natasha Lyonne on the map. In addition to being a great movie with top-notch performances by Lyonne, Alan Arkin, and Marisa Tomei, Jenkins shows off her talents as a writer/director willing to show the unsightly, awkward, deeply sad and at once hilarious parts of growing up on the economic margins. The funny moments are made even more so because you don’t seem them coming. As unlikely as you’d be to find a comedic film set in Los Angeles that explores what it means to be a lower-middle-class teenage girl, it would be even more of a rarity to encounter one that delves into what it means to be lower-middle-class adult siblings coping with an estranged parent’s descent into old age and dementia. But that’s just what Jenkins gave us in her 2007 follow-up, The Savages.

If you’re looking to catch up on any Philip Seymour Hoffman films since we lost him earlier this month then that’s reason enough to watch this film—but only one of many. Here’s another: Hoffman plays opposite Laura Linney, who’s always amazing to watch. The two are Jon and Wendy, brother and sister who must wearily confront the necessity of managing the last days of their father’s life. From the first scene we are faced with the reality of the ugliness that is mental and physical decline: we see their father, Lenny, played by Philip Bosco, being castigated by a home health aide, Eduardo, for not flushing the toilet. We then watch as Lenny walks to the bathroom, and then an uncomfortable amount of time passes until Eduardo goes to check on him, only to find that Lenny’s written the word “Prick” on the wall with his feces. From this point forward it is clear that Jenkins is going to put us front and center with the unrelenting intimacy created when family must deal with each other’s shit.

Shortly after the fecal incident we meet Wendy, a woman in her later 30s sitting in a drab office in Manhattan at what can only be a temp job. Like any aspiring artist stuck at a desk, she is surreptitiously pirating postage, photocopying, and miscellaneous office goodies to service her application process to win grant funding; Wendy’s a playwright shopping around a semi-autobiographical work about her childhood called Wake Me When It’s Over. A combination of her life’s accoutrements tells us she’s not where she wants to be: the temp job, Raisin Bran for dinner, a married man whose dog accompanies him to her apartment when he can steal away for a tryst. We very quickly learn that Wendy is not well-practiced at being honest with herself—or those closest to her. She knows the art of telling people the half-truth if it will earn her some sympathy and/or avoid being scrutinized. Wendy gets a call from Arizona to find that her father, Lenny, is “writing with his shit!” (as she exclaims on the phone to Jon), and her overly righteous response tells us even more about her: she wants to rise to the occasion and save the day by caring for her father who never cared for her.

Jon is far more pragmatic and less willing to give too much compassionate ground to a parent whose absence meant he had to step up and doing a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting for his younger sister. Like Wendy, Jon studies theater, but from an academic side as a professor in Buffalo, New York—a contrast that Jenkins beautifully maps onto their personalities, but with a light touch. Wendy and Jon are far from types, and their sibling dynamic is one marked by distant respect for each other without the pretense of fully understanding the other’s choices. They are not entirely free of judgment and resentment, but they demonstrate ease and kindness toward one another far more often than ire. At the core of their tense moments is the central issue they must reckon with: their father has dementia and they must put him in a nursing home and watch him die.

When the inevitable does happen, and Wendy and Jon are free of the obligation that brought them together in a shared purpose, they quietly return to their lives. As is often the case in real life, there is no redemption in their father’s death. Jenkins does give us a kind of postscript wherein Wendy and Jon are still themselves, still trying to do the work that defines them, but they are somehow lighter after having endured Lenny’s illness and death. For one thing, they both make progress moving ahead in ways they were previously stalled (I know that’s vague but I don’t want to spoil too much). Most importantly, though, they have arrived as siblings who want to stay connected even without the anchor of obligation; rather than need each other to fit an idea of family, they just want each other to be happy.

The Curse of Token Women in Action Movies – Katee Sackhoff in ‘Riddick’

This reveals one of the key weaknesses of incorporating token women in action movies. Token women are not real characters, they exist to tick boxes so that filmmakers can point to these characters and say “See we aren’t sexist, we had a woman and she even punched a dude in the face!” However because these aren’t real characters they end up being almost exclusively objects for the male gaze and to be fair, for Dahl this was not nearly as bad as it can sometimes be. She has a functional uniform not much different from her male colleagues and she is only subject to a couple of minutes of gratuitous nudity.

Action movies are perhaps the worst and most consistent offenders when it comes to failing the Bechdel Test, a depressingly bare minimum for assessing the female presence in a given film or TV offering. Riddick is no exception; like the other movies in the franchise, it is very much a one man against the world sort of scenario. Previous Riddick movies Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick have at least managed to have interesting women characters. Pitch Black even managed to pass the Bechdel Test. Sadly Riddick does not even come close as it falls back into the old action movie trap of only having one named female character in a sea of men.

In Riddick, Vin Diesel once again takes on the titular role. It takes place shortly after the end of The Chronicles of Riddick where Riddick was made the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers after having dealt to the previous one due to the Necromonger law of “You keep what you kill.” Over the course of the previous movie, The Chronicles of Riddick, we find out that Riddick is perhaps the sole surviving member of a race called the Furyians and he becomes captivated with the idea of discovering more about the history and demise of his people. Riddick opens with him convincing a Necromonger general to give him the location of his home planet Furya, so that he can go have a nosey. Unsurprisingly he is tricked and ends up on an extremely inhospitable planet all alone struggling to survive. He soon has an urgent need to get off planet when he realises the rain poses a very real threat and so activates a beacon on an abandoned bounty hunter ship that alerts nearby mercenaries to his location. They appear speedily as there is a massive bounty on his head and it is worth double if he is brought in dead.

As I watched the first 30 minutes, I was all like, “Huh. They aren’t going to have even a token woman in this movie, interesting.” This would have been sad as the franchise has had some interesting women characters, historically. Then they revealed that one of the mercenary ships had a female prisoner on board. She was cut loose because if they captured Riddick the ship would be overweight. I think she probably had under a minute of screen time that ended with her being shot for sport by the captain of the ship. I suppose it was meant to underscore just how big of a douche the mercenary captain, Santanna, was. However the killing of women on screen to emphasise the evilness of male characters has become so routine that the scene was more mundane than horrifying, we knew she was going to die the moment she was set free. Her death also serves as motivation for Riddick, the unnamed woman was both brown and a prisoner, two things Riddick can identify with I guess. After she is shot we see Riddick looking grim and presumably deciding to kill all of these mercenaries for being heartless assholes toward pretty ladies.

Clearly by this point it wasn’t looking great for women in this movie. As the second batch of mercenaries arrive we are soon treated to the fact that one of them is Katee Sackhoff, most renowned for playing the tomboyish pilot and complicated woman, Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. She plays second in command of the second, less vile mercenary ship. Immediately on arrival she is hit on by Santanna in an unsurprisingly crude manner. Her response is to punch him in the face and then tell him that “I don’t fuck guys.” The statement seemed a little out of place and reads as though he is out of line for hitting on her because she is a lesbian, not because it is rude and annoying in a professional context. But OK, I can happily roll with an openly gay heroine on a mainstream action movie even if it is introduced kind of weirdly. Sadly this is as about as good as the character gets. Throughout the rest of the movie she constantly has to use her fists on Santanna, something that actually makes her look ineffectual as a leader, rather than presenting her as an ass-kicking woman as was no doubt intended. Movies seem to have fallen into convenient shorthand where a woman who is able to exact violence on a man is a good female character because she is not a passive victim. This is not the case, a woman can still kick butt (and in this case it is a pretty nominal amount of butt kicking) and still be a terrible female character.

This is reinforced when Dahl is subject to gratuitous shower scene where we see one of her nipples and Riddick leering in from the window; he is trying to steal her toiletry kit, not harm her, but the threat is there. The implication is that he could do anything to her at this point and she would be powerless to stop it. The whole scene serves to underline how vulnerable she is as a woman despite her ability to repeatedly punch Santanna in the face.

It does get worse though. When Riddick is captured by the mercenaries, he makes a few predictions, the first is that Santanna will not live for more than five seconds after he is free and the second is that he will end up “balls deep” in Dahl but only after she asks him “real pretty like.” This is pretty gross, but not really surprising in an action movie that revolves around a single hyper-masculine protagonist. What transforms it from pretty gross to slimy homophobic misogynist bullshit is later, when Riddick is stranded on a rock surrounded by many creatures who want to kill him, he is rescued by Dahl from a transporter in a safety harness. He grabs her ass and she says to him, “I have something to ask you, real pretty like…” At the end of the movie Riddick says, “Tell Dahl to keep ‘er warm for me.” This is basically embracing with open arms the myth that every lesbian just hasn’t met the right man. This myth is not only demeaning of a woman’s sexuality, but it is dangerous, it is at least partially responsible for the fact that the incidence of rape for lesbians by men is higher than for women generally. I’m sure people could argue that they are simply joking, but I don’t think that flies in the context that Riddick says to her while making a series of predictions that all come true with grave consequences.

It is hard for me not to wonder, is a token woman in an action movie worse than no woman at all? At least then we would not have to deal with the casual objectification and reinforcement of dangerous myths. Of course that isn’t really the answer–women shouldn’t have to choose between shitty representation and no representation at all. A token woman in an action movie is never a real character; she exists as a box ticking exercise, a device by which we can learn things about male characters and to provide fodder for the male gaze. Obviously not every character in every movie can be fully realised but more often than not these two dimensional parts are the province of women and/or people of colour. Riddick was no exception to this except perhaps in that Vin Diesel is not really read as white. I hope that the next movie will return to the roots of the franchise and provide us with female characters of substance and complexity.

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Gaayathri is a writer currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, although this is set to change soon. She is the child of diaspora two times over and is passionate about all forms of social justice. She likes to travel and prefers television to movies; however, she feels a strange compulsion to watch all movies that have fish-eating people in them, no matter how terrible they are. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Auckland and she has spent her formative years working at various types of feminist organisations from the community to the regional in both New Zealand and around Asia. Her work has been featured around the feminist blogosphere including Flyover Feminism, Feministe, and Leftstream as well as in United Nations and NGO publications. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.

Sex Workers Are Disposable on ‘Game of Thrones’

When we are introduced to Ros, she is working in Winterfell but as war approaches she decides to try her luck in King’s Landing expressing the view that if all the men leave for war there is not going to be much for her in Winterfell. Once there she goes from being “just a sex worker” to getting involved in the politics of the realm by becoming the right hand woman of Little Finger and subsequently double crossing him by becoming an agent for Varys. However despite her many interesting qualities and potential for interesting storylines, Ros basically exists for one reason to provide exposition regarding male characters on the show while naked. She is sexposition personified.

While Game of Thrones is frequently problematic, one of the things it does well is having a wide range of interesting female characters. Despite this, there are some women on the show who fall into the roles that are normally reserved for women on film and television; that is, to tell us things about dudes. This is particularly true of the female sex workers on the show. A perfect example of this is Ros. Interestingly, Ros is a character that does not exist in the books. She is an invention of the television show’s writers and producers. It is likely that she takes the place of two other sex worker characters who are women of colour.

Ros is the first sex worker we see on Game of Thrones. She is masterfully acted by Esme Bianco who does wonderful things with the limited material she is given. Her portrayal of Ros allows us to view her as intelligent, witty, ambitious, and pragmatic. At first Ros manages to avoid most of the traditional sex worker tropes that exist such as the disposable sex worker and the hooker with the heart of gold. She makes no apologies for being a sex worker and does not consider herself to be a tragic victim of her circumstances. She is simply making money in the most efficient way she knows how.

The very first time we see her she is entertaining Tyrion Lannister at the Winterfell brothel. Their interaction serves to inform us that Tyrion is both famous for being a philanderer and generally a good hearted person who is nice to people who exist on the margins despite his great wealth and power. Next up there is Theon Greyjoy Ros helps reveal to us as the audience a number of things about him. Firstly, that he has a chip on his shoulder about his status in Winterfell. Secondly he is basically a hostage living with the Starks because of his father’s traitorous actions. She helps to reveal his particular insecurities as well as expose some of his backstory, all without any clothes on – handy. In fact Ros basically spends the entirety of season one with her clothes off allowing men to tell her things about themselves. Littlefinger gets to fill in some back story while she is naked on screen. Joffrey reminds us of just how evil he is (again) by forcing Ros to brutally beat her friend and fellow sex worker when Tyrion buys a night with them for Joffrey as a present. On and on it goes.

The saddest part about Ros is that while she mostly exists as a plot device, there was always potential there for her to develop as a character. She had many traits that would have made her very interesting to watch as the story unfolded. However that is not to be, because those who make the decisions decided that Ros had outlived her usefulness. She had proven just how terrible Little Finger and Joffery were and the final flourish was her death. Ros turned out to be a disposable sex worker after all and the way that she is killed off proves it.

It was her compassion for Sansa Stark that is Ros’ downfall. She tells Varys details that only she could know about Littlefinger’s plans for her and despite Varys promising to protect her he finds out and she ends up dead. Her death is graphic and horrifying. We do not see her die, we are just treated to a vision of her corpse as Littlefinger tells Varys that one of his investments had betrayed him and therefore had to be disposed of. We are treated to a vision of Ros tied to Joffery’s bed, semi clothed with arrows piercing her body including her genitals. The camera lingers over the gory details. The idea is clear, as we look at Ros’ ravaged body we are meant to think about Littlefinger and what a horrible person he is. Ros’ death is a simply a footnote in the stories of the great men who she fucks.

Interestingly, Esme Bianco mentioned in an interview that she argued for having less nude scenes so that she could have cool costumes like the other characters on the show. Perhaps due to her self-advocacy, her character ended up with no nude scenes in season three, and it seemed as though she was very much on the verge of becoming a proper character, one that is fully realized and has their own plot. Before that could actually happen, she was killed off as if she didn’t matter at all.

There are many things I enjoy about Game of Thrones, but there are perhaps just as many things that I find problematic within it; their treatment of Ros is definitely one of them. The excuses that Game of Thrones is set in both an extremely patriarchal and extremely violent culture do not fly. I think they are cop-outs. The show has beaten us over the head with the evilness of Joffrey and Littlefinger. I personally feel that the scene where he takes Ros aside when she starts crying in front of one of her clients after the baby of her friend is killed in front of her, is much more chilling than the gruesome horror of her death. Subtlety is obviously not something the show is interested in. At the end of the day, the Game of Thrones treatment of Ros simply reinforces dominant societal narratives about sex workers, i.e. that their humanity is unimportant and that it is a dangerous occupation that women should know better than to take up. This is disappointing from a show that is often progressive in the way that it handles female characters.

Gaayathri Nair is a writer currently located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, although this is set to change soon. She is the child of diaspora two times over and is passionate about all forms of social justice. She likes to travel and prefers television to movies; however, she feels a strange compulsion to watch all movies that have fish-eating people in them, no matter how terrible they are. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Auckland and she has spent her formative years working at various types of feminist organizations from the community to the regional in both New Zealand and around Asia. Her work has been featured around the feminist blogosphere including Flyover Feminism, Feministe, and Leftstream as well as in United Nations and NGO publications. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.

‘Blue Jasmine’ and Other Art By Abusers

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it). But I watched ‘Blue Jasmine’ this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award. And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with it.

Movie poster for Blue Jasmine — Movie poster for *Blue Jasmine*

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it.)

The incredibly sad truth of the matter is that switching off art by abusers can feel like switching off art entirely. It’s not just a matter of changing the station when “Yeah 3X” comes on, it means not listening to The Beatles and James Brown. It’s not just a matter of not watching Chinatown or Annie Hall; you have to decide if it is OK to watch 12 Years a Slave because it features Michael Fassbender, whose ex-girlfriend took out a restraining order on him after he broke her nose. Maybe that’s OK because he’s not the “author” of the film. But, well, supporting it supports his career (he got his first Oscar nom out of it), so, well… was my ticket for the best movie of the year, that’s also a landmark achievement for black filmmakers and actors, and moreover a powerful condemnation of systems of oppression intersecting with rape culture, now a betrayal of feminism and human dignity?

Everyone has to make these personal negotiations themselves. Maybe you can choose to tolerate work featuring actors who beat women, but not work “by” them. So watching Sean Penn in Milk is OK, but you must not watch The Crossing Guard and his other directorial efforts. Maybe you will only shun the work of sexual abusers, or maybe only sexual abusers of children, like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

A relatively easy approach is to lean heavily on the word “allegedly.” Other key vocab words: “rumor” and “gossip.” Ignore the myriad failures of the legal system in bringing abusers to justice, ignore that celebrity often compounds those failures, and remind everyone that these artists have “never been formally charged with/convicted of” their crimes. This is very nearly a free pass! [Speaking of free pass: let’s apply a blanket “alleged” to everything in this piece! Don’t sue me!]

I truly respect people who refuse to consume art by abusers, and I hope I can be forgiven for being too much of a pop culture completist to take that hard-line stance. Again, I think this is a choice everyone has to make for themselves, and I think the only wrong answer is the one that Hollywood appears to cling to: sweep the sins of its darling “geniuses” under a rug, so we can enjoy their work without internal conflict. (That is, if those sins were not against Hollywood itself, for that is UNFORGIVABLE!)

So: I watch Woody Allen’s movies, and I like a lot of them (although I feel compelled to clarify, when I wrote that I wanted “the next Woody Allen” to be a woman, I certainly did not mean a woman who is a sexual predator). I watched Blue Jasmine this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award.

blanchettsagawards — Blanchett accepting Best Actress at the SAG awards

In Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress acceptance speech at the SAG Awards last week, she thanked Woody Allen for creating “role after role after role” for women. This praise of Woody Allen as a great giver to women left a bad taste in a lot of feminist mouths. But he has written many great female characters, even the elusive meaty roles for women over 40, like Blanchett. I watched Blue Jasmine because I didn’t want to miss out on a new iconic female character and one of the most-praised female performances of the year.

And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with Blue Jasmine. It’s a solid film, and sort of the polar opposite of To Rome With Love on the “effort expended by Woody Allen as filmmaker” scale. But the cracks still show: the class commentary central to the film can be cartoonish, the Ruth Madoff character analogy feels a bit dated (at least coming from guy who makes a movie every seven months or so), and the pivotal moment in the third act is a chance encounter on the street, which is somewhere on page one of “Hacky Screenwriting for Lazies.”

Jasmine, not only from Allen’s writing but also from Blanchett’s performance, is a captivating character. But she never transcends “character” for me. I took particular issue with the jumbled mental illness cliches cobbled together: Nervous breakdown! Talks to herself! Medication “cocktails”! Excessive intake of actual cocktails! Electroconvulsive therapy! Delusions of grandeur! Relying on the kindness of strangers!

I am a mentally ill person myself, and I saw nothing recognizable in Jasmine. Silver Linings Playbook caught some flack last year (including from me!) for being a little too lighthearted and breezy on the subject of mental illness, but I found the characters in that film PROFOUNDLY relatable. One of the things Silver Linings Playbook did right was craft mentally ill characters not solely defined by their illness. Jasmine’s only other characteristics are being selfish and mean and generally unpleasant, all too easy to conflate with her illness itself.

This hodgepodge characterization makes Blanchett’s acting seem more awards-bait-y than it actually is. She is fantastic in the film, especially because she manages to win some small amount of sympathy from the audience despite her character’s thorough terribleness. Sally Hawkins is also great as Ginger, Jasmine’s semi-estranged adopted sister, and I appreciated that she had her own storyline instead of existing merely as Jasmine’s grounded foil.

Blue Jasmine is the kind of movie I would normally say “is worth seeing” even though I didn’t personally like it very much. Multiply that lukewarm semi-endorsement by the sum of your personal “comfort with consuming art by abusers” coefficient and your awards-season completist factor to determine if you should give it two hours of your time.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.

Highlights from Season One of ‘Masters of Sex’

The first season of Showtime’s ‘Masters of Sex’ concluded in December last year. The show was well-received, both critically and popularly, and it has been great to see series find its stride over the course of the season. It would have been devastatingly easy for a show that is ostensibly about the study of female sexuality to turn into a series that highlights white male gate-keepers, however Masters of Sex has managed to avoid this pitfall admirably. Michelle Ashford, the show-runner, put together a largely female writing staff, seemingly as a result the show has some of the best, most fully realized, three-dimensional female characters on television today. Below are some of the things that I have personally found to be highlights of the season.

The first season of Showtime’s Masters of Sex concluded in December last year. The show was well-received, both critically and popularly, and it has been great to see series find its stride over the course of the season. It would have been devastatingly easy for a show that is ostensibly about the study of female sexuality to turn into a series that highlights white male gate-keepers, however Masters of Sex has managed to avoid this pitfall admirably. Michelle Ashford, the show-runner, put together a largely female writing staff, seemingly as a result the show has some of the best, most fully realized, three-dimensional female characters on television today. Below are some of the things that I have personally found to be highlights of the season.

1) Virginia Johnson

Lizzy Caplan has sparkled on the screen as Virginia Johnson. Virginia has been such a great character because she is everything that you never expect you will get to see a woman be on television. She has sex because she wants to have sex, not because she needs a man or because her life is empty without one, she seeks what she needs and makes no apologies for being who she is. She is also smart, ambitious and driven; over and over we see how Virginia wants to do great with her life. She wants to leave her mark on the world and is willing to put in the work to make that happen. At the same time she suffers from self-doubt, exhaustion and confusion just like we all do, but she sets her boundaries and sticks to them and manages to maintain her professionalism despite the extremely trying circumstances in which she constantly finds herself. It is nice to see the difficulties she has with juggling her children and her demanding job, dealing with a flakey ex-husband and watxhing her sometimes succeed and sometimes fail and trying to make it all work.

Over the course of the season it has become clear that it is she, not the cold, forbidding, and seemingly emotionless Bill Masters who is able to separate the work from her personal life. This is made clear when Bill suggests that they should participate in the study with each other. She is interested in the data, proving conclusions and ensuring the success of the study. She will do anything to ensure that it is successful including being filmed masturbating and having sex with Bill so that they can explore certain hypotheses before deciding to study them with regular study participants. However, when Bill does something that she feels is demeaning, paying her for the times she has participated in the study as if she was any other participant she understands quite clearly why he has done it, he has feelings for and is trying to assuage his guilt and distance himself from them when he finds out his wife is pregnant. She maintains her dignity by doing what she believes is right, resigning from her work with him and going to work with Dr. Lillian DePaul, someone who she believes is also on the verge of doing great things, even if they will not cause the stir that the sex study will.

2) Margaret and Barton Scully

It came out mid-season that Barton Scully is a deeply closeted gay man who meets with sex workers in cars. His story becomes ever more nuanced over the course of the season. Bill uses his knowledge of him to black mail him into allowing the study to remain at the hospital, he gets stabbed by some homophobes just for parking his car in a known gay pick up spot and decides to seek treatment for his “illness” of homosexuality after his wife catches him meeting a sex worker at a hotel; something he decided to do after deeming that meeting in cars was too dangerous after the stabbing.

We become privy to how the nature of his marriage with Margaret is a hollow shell despite their deep tenderness and mutual regard for one another. After chatting with her friends over Mah Jong Margaret hears about the study and how it has reinvigorated a mutual acquaintance’s life. She decides to sign up because she is long tired of waiting for her husband to come to her bed, the scene that follows where Virginia and Bill question her about her sexual history and it becomes clear that she has never had an orgasm is near heart-breaking. It is impossible not to cheer for her when she begins an affair with the handsome and fickle Dr. Austin Langham.

The whole storyline is a sensitive portrayal of how deeply damaging stigma and homophobia is. Barton married Margaret because he needed to be perceived as “normal” in order to fulfill his career ambitions. As a result of those ambitions and not wanting to live on the margins both he and Margaret have been robbed of a full life. This is one of the few storylines have seen on television that covers homosexuality and homophobia in a period drama in a way that neither sensationalizes it or objectifies the characters involved, but instead is a nuanced look at how it hurts people.

This arc has also resulted in one of the best monologues about stigma and sexuality that I have ever seen on television. When Barton asks Dale, the sex worker that he has being seeing, to participate in his aversion therapy, saying that he will pay him to sit across from him while he takes an emetic to make himself feel ill. Dale responds by elaborating the ways in which his life is difficult and how he often wishes he could change but ending with the line “there’s only one person who gets to be sickened by me, and that’s me. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.” The whole sequence elucidates the complexity and pain of being queer in a straight world.

3) Dr. Lillian De Paul

Dr. Lillian De Paul is one of the characters on the show that is completely fictional and not based on a real person. Initially it seemed as though she was going be a sort of female misogynist, a Margaret Thatcher type who makes it to the top and then instead of helping to break down barriers uses her position to shit on other women. Over time it became clear that De Paul’s coldness towards Virginia was in large part defensiveness based on the slog she has had firstly to become a doctor and secondly in trying to crack into the old boys club in order to get her project, free or low cost pap smears available for women in order to detect cervical cancer while it is still treatable, funded. She is deeply frustrated because she knows the profound impact her project can have on women’s lives and health with comparatively little cost.

She provides an interesting counterpoint for Dr. Masters as they share many character traits but their reception could not be more different. They are both aloof, lacking in charm and awareness of social niceties. In Bill these qualities are perceived as being unsurprising in a brilliant doctor. In Lillian they are simply more evidence of her freakishness and unwomanliness. As a character she explodes the notion of the female harridan superior because we see the struggles that she has had to deal with, and just why she has become the closed off and defensive person that she has, because almost anything else is construed as weakness by her male colleagues. Over time she comes to respect Virginia after realizing that she is not simply using her womanly charms as a substitute for hard work and their growing relationship has been interesting to watch.

Love is an Open Closet Door in ‘Frozen’

Amanda did a brilliant queer reading of Elsa’s powers as a symbol of queer sexuality. While our fantastic commenters proposed additional, equally plausible readings, relating the treatment of Elsa’s powers to society’s fear and suppression of mental illness, disability, and even women as a whole, I think the queer reading deserves a little further exploration. Specifically, I want to look at the recurring motif of doors in Frozen.

Warning: Here be (mild-to-moderate) spoilers.

This weekend, I finally saw Frozen, and I loved every minute of it. I loved it for all the reasons everyone has been talking about, from its female-centered narrative to the subversion of Disney’s own tropes about love and romance. I especially loved that it was primarily a story about sisters. I adore stories about siblings, but it seems to me that I rarely see relationships between sisters taken as seriously in pop culture as brothers.

(Though maybe that’s because, as the middle of three very close-knit brothers, I have SO MANY FEELINGS about Sam and Dean Winchester.)

Our own Amanda did a brilliant queer reading of Elsa’s powers as a symbol of queer sexuality. While our fantastic commenters proposed additional, equally plausible readings, relating the treatment of Elsa’s powers to society’s fear and suppression of mental illness, disability, and even women as a whole, I think the queer reading deserves a little further exploration. Specifically, I want to look at the recurring motif of doors in Frozen.

The symbolism of doors is multifarious: entrances, beginnings, thresholds, transition (though after what happened last time I read as a Disney princess as trans* I’ll step back from explicitly reading Elsa as trans*) (even though I think it totally works) (and actually I really want to read her as a trans girl) (but I’ll leave it to my trans sisters to tease out the details).

Doors have a religious and supernatural element too. Think of the safety of home from the vampire, who can’t cross the doorway uninvited; the placing of the mezuzah on the doorway in Jewish tradition; Catholic ideas of Mary as a holy door.

Queer theory has found its doorways in its affinity with Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, though there’s a risk of theorizing queerness away into nothing if you take this too far. I am particularly taken by the idea of the doors in Frozen as closet doors. So, what happens if we read the film with this in mind?

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YwXff-i1fY”]

The song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” is a heartbreaking portrait of three of Anna’s attempts to reach out to her sister over the years. As a five-year-old, as a pre-teen, and as an adolescent, Anna knocks on Elsa’s door but gets no response. In the very first verse, she sings, “Come out the door,” whereas by the final verse her urging has changed to “Just let me in.” If this door is indeed a closet door, Elsa is unable to do anything as simple as come out, because her parents’ fear of her queer sexuality has taught her that she must suppress it. Elsa internalizes her parents’ lesson that coming out is not an option, but she is equally unable to “let in” the sister who has never been inside the closet and indeed does not yet know of Elsa’s queerness.

And again, when the castle must be opened up for Elsa’s coronation, the opening lines of Anna’s joyful song “For The First Time in Forever” mention doors specifically:

The window is open, so’s that door
I didn’t know they did that anymore

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOReid0vEwY”]

Elsa, however, refers to opening “the gate” rather than any doors, and she tells herself:

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, put on a show
Make one wrong move and everyone will know

Her refusal of a man’s invitation to dance that night, while Anna accepts it, could be taken as indicative of a lack of interest in men at all. (Am I taking it too far if I find evidence of a straight woman’s puzzlement at her closeted sister’s lack of interest in men in Anna’s line, “Why have a ballroom with no balls?”!)

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6nnoWgbdvg”]

The symbol of the door is made most explicit in the delightful number “Love is an Open Door” – the third song in a row to open with a lyric about doors:

All my life has been a series of doors in my face

The brilliant thing about this song is how differently it plays on first watch versus how it plays when you know how the story will turn out. Like the proverbial length of a minute in the bathroom, it depends which side of the door you’re on. Played straight (forgive the pun), this is a song about the exciting opportunity of embarking on a new relationship. But there are also resonances of the importance of honest communication in the success of a relationship and the freedom of leaving the metaphorical closet – both of which become tinged with irony once you have seen the whole film.

Indeed, Elsa’s refusal to bless Anna and Hans’s marriage seems to Anna like the sour grapes of a closeted sister who resents the straightforwardness of hetero romance, but in truth it’s a piece of real wisdom that Anna will come to appreciate. And yet it also leads to Elsa’s unintentional, very public coming-out. She flees in shame, and succumbs to her sexuality in an almighty ballad that is (deliberately?) reminiscent of “Defying Gravity” from that Broadway show most susceptible to queer readings, Wicked.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk”]

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door

– of the (now empty) closet, yes, but also of the open door that is love. Being out isn’t much good if you don’t have love in your life: ultimately, Elsa learns that love is the way to control her powers. It would be possible to do a fairly conservative reading of this – female queer sexuality is acceptable as long as it’s within the confines of a long-term monogamous relationship – but I think there’s a better reading available. Based on the fact that the love between sisters is at the heart of this film, the love that controls Elsa’s powers isn’t romantic love, but familial love: the kind of love that loves you for who you are, not in spite of it.

Frozen isn’t saying that queerness is only acceptable in certain kinds of relationship. On the contrary, its message is that love comes in many different forms, and we all of us – including women, and queer people, and people with mental illnesses, and people with disabilities, and everybody else – need to be loved for who we are, with the kind of love that opens closet doors.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Excuse him while he gets back to writing polyamorous Anna/Kristoff/Hans slashfic.

Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another

OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.” But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow. I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys. She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran. Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.

Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers

This repost by Robin Hitchcock appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

In the final scene of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Season 5, Dawn Summers, Buffy’s never before seen or heard-of little sister, appears seemingly out of nowhere. While she’s completely new to the audience, oddly, it is clear that from the characters’ perspectives that Dawn has been there all along.

Dawn and Tara, fellow outsiders from the Scooby gang, pass time with a thumb war.

To quote my husband’s reaction as we reached season 5 during his (in-progress) Buffy indoctrination: “Why on earth are they doing this?”

Most of the Buffy fandom reacted with the same puzzlement. As Dawn’s character was fleshed out over the first few episodes of the season as the archetypical annoying little sister, the audience was still denied all but the vaguest of clues as to Dawn’s true nature and reason for being retconned into the Buffyverse.

Dawn as annoying little sister.

It was not until the fifth episode of the season, “No Place Like Home,” that the Dawn’s existence is explained: she is a mystical key that opens gateways between dimensions, magically given human form with blood relation to the slayer, woven into her memories and all of those around her so that Buffy would protect her with her life, to keep the evil god Glory from using the Key to destroy the universe.

Unfortunately, the only place the monks’ spell couldn’t reach was the minds of the audience, and Dawn Summers had to win us over without the benefit of false memories. This may have been an impossible feat, given her character is pretty much laid out as an immature, whiny, brat with a tendency to get into trouble.

Dawn in damsel-in-distress mode.

Also, she occasionally does this thing where she piercingly shrieks “Get out, get out, GET OUT!” which ranks up there with nails on a chalkboard, dental drills, and Katy Perry songs when it comes to horrible sounds to endure.

And so it is that Dawn is one of the least-liked characters in the Buffyverse. But not by me. I love Dawn Summers.

I suspect my unusually high tolerance for Dawn comes from my OWN memories. In “Real Me,” the episode which properly introduces Dawn’s character, she writes in her diary/narrates: “No one understands. No one has an older sister who is the slayer.”

Dawn writes in her diary.

But I understand. OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.” But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow. I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys. She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran. Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.

And my big sister was a lot nicer to me than Buffy usually was to Dawn. If the audience found out before Buffy did that Dawn was created to induce the slayer to protect the key, it might have been a little hard to swallow. Buffy shows only hostile resentment toward Dawn for the first half of Season 5. It is only after Dawn learns herself that she is new to the world that Buffy shows her true sisterly love, when she lovingly insists to Dawn that she is Buffy’s “real sister” despite her mystical origins.

“It doesn’t matter where you came from, or how you got here, you are my sister.”

Because I relate to Dawn as a fellow annoying little brat following around her remarkable older sister, I am more forgiving of her character flaws. But I do think viewers without my background ought to take it easier on Dawn as well.

A common criticism of Dawn is that she’s much more immature than the main characters were at the start of the series, when they were close to her in age (Dawn is introduced as a 14-year-old in the eighth grade; Buffy, Xander, and Willow were high school sophomores around age 15 or 16 in Season 1). Writer David Fury responds to this in his DVD commentary on the episode “Real Me,” saying that Dawn was originally conceived as around age 12 and aged up a few years after Michelle Trachtenberg was cast, but it took a while for him and the other writers to get the originally conceived younger version of the character out of their brains. But I don’t need this excuse; I think it makes perfect narrative sense that Dawn comes across as more immature than our point-of-view characters were when they were younger. Who among us didn’t think of themselves as being just as smart and capable as grown-ups when we were teens? Who among us, when confronted with the next generation of teenagers ten years down the line, were not horrified by their blatant immaturity?

Additionally, Dawn starting her character arc as whiny brat lets us watch her grow and mature into a pretty awesome young woman. It is a long road, beset by personal tragedy and a theme of abandonment: Dawn loses her mother and her sister within a matter of months in Season 5, and in Season 6 sees her surrogate parent figures, Willow and Tara, split up just as a returned-from-the-grave Buffy is too detached from humanity to be there emotionally for Dawn. Throughout Season 6, Dawn acts out: lying to Buffy to stay out all night with friends, habitually and perhaps compulsively stealing, and ultimately sublimating her abandonment issues into a curse (with the help of Vengeance “Justice” Demon Halfrek), temporarily trapping the Scooby gang and some innocent bystanders in the Summers’ home.

Dawn’s tantrum in Season 6’s “Older and Faraway”

But Season 6 represents an era of bad choices for almost the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so Dawn should be given as much slack for her missteps as we give the other wayward characters, including Buffy herself. And it is Dawn who finally pulls Buffy out of the emotional purgatory she is suffering in this season. In the Season 6 finale “Grave,” Buffy finally truly regains her will to live and recaptures her complete humanity, and this epiphany comes in large part because she finally sees Dawn as a gift in her life rather than a burden:

Buffy and Dawn hug in “Grave”

“Things have really sucked lately, but that’s all gonna change—and I want to be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. I want to see you grow up. The woman you’re gonna become… Because she’s gonna be beautiful. And she’s gonna be powerful. I got it so wrong. I don’t want to protect you from the world—I want to show it to you. There’s so much that I wanna to show you.” – Buffy to Dawn in “Grave.”

Dawn with Buffy during her metaphorical rebirth in “Grave.”

Dawn finds her own self-actualization in the Season 7 episode “Potential,” having once again been shoved to the sidelines of Buffy’s attention by the arrival of a collection of young “potential slayers” who need protection from the Bringers, who have been systematically wiping out the future slayer lineage. While Buffy focuses on protecting and training the potentials, Dawn clearly feels left out, trapped by her own ordinariness and unimportance (a significant change for a girl who was once the key to the fabric between dimensions).

Dawn lurks in the background as Buffy gives a speech to potential slayers.

That all changes when a spell cast by Willow appears to identify Dawn as a potential slayer herself. Dawn is emotionally overwhelmed by the news, mainly because she thinks it means that Buffy must die before Dawn could ever realize this potential (I’m pretty sure the next potential would be called only by the death of Faith, but that’s neither here nor there). A part of Dawn is clearly excited by the news, and given a huge jolt of self-confidence that lets her bravely defend herself against a vampire and then fight off the group of Bringers who come for her classmate Amanda, the true potential slayer identified by Willow’s spell. Dawn handles the news of her lack of slayer potential with perfect grace, saving Amanda’s life and transferring to her the confidence that comes with knowing you are “special.”

At the episode’s end, Xander, the only other remaining character without any superpowers, has a heart-to-heart with Dawn. He shares with her the wisdom he’s gained in seven years in these circumstances:

Xander has a heart-to-heart with Dawn

“They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.” – Xander to Dawn in “Potential.”

Dawn accepts her humanity and finds her maturity.

After “Potential,” Dawn, who began life at age 14, crafted from a ball of mystical energy and a spell creating powerful false memories, is finally defined by her humanity, her normalcy. She accepts this position with dignity, grace, and bravery. And in so doing, Dawn also steps up to her place as a mature young adult. And at least for this one-time bratty kid sister, that makes Dawn Summers is just as heroic and inspiring a character as Buffy herself.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a regular contributor to Bitch Flicks. She is still upset that the Season 5 Buffy DVDs don’t include the awesome “previously on” montage from “The Gift.”

Six Lessons Lisa Simpson Taught Me

…Lisa takes a stand against the sexism spouting from the mouth of the new talking Malibu Stacy doll. Frustrated with the doll’s collection of sexist catchphrases that include “Let’s bake some cookies for the boys,” “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles,” and “My name’s Stacy, but you can call me *wolf whistle*,” Lisa collaborates with the creator of Malibu Stacy to create their own talking doll, Lisa Lionheart. When Malibu Stacy outsells Lisa Lionheart, our creator feels temporarily dejected, until she hears her own voice speaking behind her: “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” She turns to see a girl her age hold a Lisa Lionheart doll in her hand and smile.

Written by Lady T as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Lisa Simpson, influential eight-year-old

The Simpsons, now in its record-breaking 25th season, is one of the most influential comedies of our time with its excellent pop culture parodies, whip-smart writing, and brilliant satire on American culture. But the show is influential in other ways. Lisa Simpson, permanent eight-year-old and the emotional heart of The Simpsons, is an excellent role model for young girls. Here are a few lessons she’s taught me over the years.

“Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” This is the stated message of “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” the famous episode where Lisa takes a stand against the sexism spouting from the mouth of the new talking Malibu Stacy doll. Frustrated with the doll’s collection of sexist catchphrases that include “Let’s bake some cookies for the boys,” “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles,” and “My name’s Stacy, but you can call me *wolf whistle*,” Lisa collaborates with the creator of Malibu Stacy to create their own talking doll, Lisa Lionheart. When Malibu Stacy outsells Lisa Lionheart, our creator feels temporarily dejected, until she hears her own voice speaking behind her: “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” She turns to see a girl her age hold a Lisa Lionheart doll in her hand and smile.

Lisa realizes that, despite the seemingly impossible task of standing up to big businesses, she’s made a big difference in the life of one person, and all of her efforts were worth it after all. And, not for nothing, she co-created a toy at the age of eight.

Lisa's rant against Malibu Stacy — Lisa’s rant against Malibu Stacy

“It’s okay to be sad.” “Moaning Lisa,” one of the earliest episodes of The Simpsons, is surprisingly dark for an animated sitcom. Lisa spends most of the episode in a depressive state. She feels sad and no one knows how to deal with it. Her teachers mock her sadness or brush it off. Her brother, being ten and pretty selfish, doesn’t want to deal with it. Her well-meaning but confused parents tell her to cheer up or repress her sadness so that she can fit in.

Lisa doesn’t start to feel better until she meets a jazz musician named Bleeding Gums Murphy. Finally, she has an outlet for her sadness and someone she can relate to. But it isn’t until Marge, in a burst of passion, tells Lisa that she can be sad as she wants to be, and doesn’t ever have to smile for the sake of another person, that Lisa finally feels happier and has a genuine smile on her face.

The lesson here? It’s okay to be sad sometimes, and girls shouldn’t have to paste fake smiles on their faces. The simple message that people are entitled to their emotions is a powerful one that I’m glad I saw at such a young age.

“Stand up for what you believe in, but respect others’ beliefs as well.” Lisa, like many a young activist, is passionate about many different causes. She’s a feminist, an environmentalist, and a vegetarian, and nothing invokes her ire more than social injustice or lies. Most of the time, she is right to fight for her causes, and is often the only person to stand up for what’s right.

Every once in a while, though, Lisa becomes a bit shortsighted and forgets that everyone around her doesn’t see the world the same way she does. She ruins her father’s barbecue because she doesn’t approve of his eating meat, but she gets a wake-up call when Apu, a vegan, advises her to “live and let live.” Lisa learns an important lesson about tolerance while still remaining true to her beliefs.

Lisa feels moral qualms about eating meat

“There’s no shame in being second.” Because she doesn’t have many friends, Lisa absorbs herself in her music and her academia. She becomes immediately threatened when a new girl shows up in her second-grade class and is a better student and better jazz musician. Lisa becomes jealous to the point where she collaborates with Bart to ruin Alison’s diorama in the school’s Diorama-Rama, admitting to her actions only when the guilt tortures her–and then they both lose to Ralph Wiggum.

At the end of the episode, Lisa finally learns that being “second” to Alison is nothing to be ashamed about. Having overcome her jealousy of Alison, she extends a hand of friendship instead–because why be jealous when you’ve finally found a person your age who shares your passions and interests?

“Follow your passions, even when you experience setbacks.” One of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons is season three’s “Separate Vocations,” an experiment in role-reversal. After hearing their results from a national standardized test about career aptitude, Bart becomes interested in police work and becomes the school’s tyrannical hall monitor. Lisa, meanwhile, discouraged by her test results and stubby fingers, quits the jazz band, stops playing saxophone, and acts out in class. She even pulls off one of the biggest pranks in school history and steals all of the teacher’s edition textbooks from the school classrooms.

When it seems like she’s going to get caught, Bart, in a rare display of brotherly loyalty, tells Principal Skinner that he’s the culprit. Later, he tells Lisa why he took the fall for her: “I didn’t want you to wreck your life. You got the brains and the talent to go as far as you want. And when you do, I’ll be right there to borrow money.” He takes his punishment–600 days of detention–and Lisa plays her saxophone outside to keep him company, enjoying music again.

With the help of her brother, Lisa realizes that the results of a standardized test don’t matter in the great scheme of things. She has ambition, talent, intelligence, and passion, and she’s going to go far in life as long as she keeps trying.

“Have fun and be silly.” If all Lisa Simpson did was moralize about the world and fight for causes she believes in, she’d be a pretty admirable but rather boring character, but fortunately, the show rarely forgets that she’s still a kid and wants to act like one. She watches Krusty the Klown and Itchy and Scratchy with Bart and laughs just as hard at the cartoon violence. She fantasizes about boys named Cory and reads Non-Threatening Boys Magazine. She has sleepovers and reads The Baby-sitter Twins, and even though she’s concerned about the media portrayal of women and girls, she indulges in a princess fantasy from time to time and twirls around in fairy skirts. She’s not the most fun-loving character on The Simpsons, but at her core, she’s still an eight-year-old girl, and a fully realized human character, despite being a cartoon.

Lisa and Bart, horrified to hear they won't be going to Itchy and Scratchy Land — Lisa and Bart, horrified to hear they won’t be going to Itchy and Scratchy Land

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Lady T is a feminist blogger, sketch comedy writer/performer, and author of Fanged, a young adult novel available for purchase today.

Does ‘Gravity’ Live Up to the Hype?

Gravity survives on the merit of its spectacle. It’s beautiful, terrifying, and gripping. The characters, while feeling real, are underdeveloped. The story itself is one big metaphor for Stone’s journey into isolation and despair after suffering personal tragedy. It is an epic allegory about the journey toward life, toward connection with the earth. I couldn’t tell you what kind of card player Stone is, though, or what made her want to become a doctor. Her life is a blank because she’s not an individual; she’s an archetype.

"Gravity" Movie Poster — *Gravity* Movie Poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Spoiler Alert

Alfonso Curon’s Gravity is primarily an experience. It’s an edge-of-your-seat survival tale set in the vastness, the darkness, the solitude of space. I was eager to review this film because I love sci-fi, and I love women in sci-fi flicks. I can take or leave Sandra Bullock (mostly leave her), but her performance in Gravity‘s opening sequence sold me:

It’s silent in space. Astronauts are working on the exterior of a space satellite. George Clooney as astronaut Matt Kowalski is floating about making pleasant conversation. We can hear the labored breathing of Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). Her heart rate is elevated, and she’s not taking in the majesty of space because she’s too focused on her work, too focused on keeping herself under control. Dr. Stone is not an astronaut. She’s a civilian medical engineer who’s designed some special program that NASA wants to use. Trained solely for this mission, she’s fighting not to have a panic attack while perched outside the world, and then she is violently wrenched from that perch, from that narrow margin of the illusion of safety into…chaos.

Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone desperately holds on as a debris storm destroys everything around her. — Sandra Bullock as Dr. Ryan Stone desperately holds on as a debris storm wreaks havoc.

No other film has communicated to me the desolation of space the way that Gravity does. Dr. Stone’s vulnerability and lack of awe translate into a visceral feeling within this audience member of the true terror and anxiety of being in space, the smallness of the human animal, and the rawness of her grip on survival.

Gravity‘s cinematography is stunningly beautiful. The film is shot with such a unique style, and its zero gravity environments faced so many challenges that the movie’s innovations are being lauded as “chang[ing] the vocabulary of filmmaking.” They used puppeteers for Christ’s sake! How cool is that? Some shots did seem indulgent, perhaps trying too hard to convey Cuaron’s metaphor. The best example being when Stone makes it into a damaged space station that still has air. She disrobes in slo-mo from her suit, and the exactness of her body’s poses are anime-esque in their echoing of the fetus in the womb and birth metaphors.

Though in booty shorts, Stone is never stripped to her bra & panties. — Though in booty shorts, Stone is never stripped to only her bra & panties.

I liked Ryan Stone’s vulnerability and her constant battle with blind panic (that she sometimes loses). It made her and her experience more accessible. It’s iffy whether or not Gravity, though, manages to be a feminist film. Gravity certainly doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, but to be fair, there are very few characters at all in the movie. The only personal detail we’re given about Stone is that she was once a mother who lost her daughter to a tragic accident. This irks me because it casts Stone as the grieving mother archetype. Boooorrriiiinggg. It too simply explains her unhappy adventure beyond the ends of the earth. It forgives her for being a woman who would give up familial ties to go into space because she, in fact, has already lost those ties. Because her loss consumes her, Stone’s despair and lack of connection, in fact, justify her trip.

Clooney's Kowalski calmly tows an oxygen deprived Stone to safety. — Clooney’s Kowalski calmly tows an oxygen deprived Stone to safety.

Veteran astronaut Kowalski is a bit too perfect, too in-control, and too optimistic. When we contrast his cool command with Stone’s panic attacks, freezing up, and bouts of giving up from which he must coax her, Kowalski seems like more of the hero. That leaves Stone to be the basketcase woman whom it is Kowalski’s chivalrous duty to rescue. Stone finally encounters a situation that seems unbeatable, and she resigns herself to death. She hallucinates Kowalski comes to rescue her and gives her the information lurking in the back of her memory that she needs to save herself. He is her savior even within her mind. Not only that, but as she rouses herself from her hallucination, she says something like, “Kowalski, you clever bastard.” This leaves open the interpretation to spiritual types that she may not have, in fact, hallucinated; instead she may have had a supernatural experience in which her friend’s ghost did save her life from beyond the grave deus ex machina style. Frankly, that is just poop. Either way, Clooney as the noble, infinitely calm and self-sacrificing astronaut dude is just spreading it on a bit too thick for my taste.

Kowalski helps a flustered Stone speed up her slow work.

Gravity survives on the merit of its spectacle. It is beautiful, terrifying, and gripping. The characters, while feeling real, are underdeveloped. The story itself is one big metaphor for Stone’s journey into isolation and despair after suffering personal tragedy. It is an epic allegory about the journey toward life, toward connection with the earth, which is a poignant, compelling story, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of card player Stone is or what made her want to become a doctor. Her life is a blank because she’s not an individual; she’s an archetype. If Gravity could have accomplished its visual feats, told its epic story about survival and rediscovering the self all the while giving us rich characters, I would have loved this movie. Instead, I merely like it for its grandness of vision and its ideas; I like it in spite of its tepid storyline and lukewarm characterizations.

We Need A Different Game: ‘Tiger Lily Road’

From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to contemporary men-are-from-Mars neurobabble, there has been a Western cultural tendency to view male-female relations in military terms, as a “battle of the sexes.” As a veteran of both teams, and even more so as a feminist who disputes gender essentialism, binarism, and cissexism, I find this framing deeply tiresome and hopelessly passé, and it’s hard to know what to with cultural products that revisit it.

“You can’t force him, Louise.”

“Why not? If it was you or me tied up in there, they wouldn’t hesitate. It’s why they join the army, so they can rape and pillage and–”

“He’s not in the army!”

“He’s in the army of men. And he’s a prisoner of war.”

From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to contemporary men-are-from-Mars neurobabble, there has been a Western cultural tendency to view male-female relations in military terms, as a “battle of the sexes.” As a veteran of both teams, and even more so as a feminist who disputes gender essentialism, binarism, and cissexism, I find this framing deeply tiresome and hopelessly passé, and it’s hard to know what to with cultural products that revisit it.

If this is true, what am I? Benedict Arnold?

This is why I absolutely cannot make up my mind about Michael Medeiros’ film Tiger Lily Road, which is so oddly pitched that I can’t decide how to read it. Medeiros has averred that “Dark comedy can illuminate aspects of the soul usually left in shadow in lighter treatments,” but I’m not entirely sure what aspects of the soul are being illuminated here, unless they’re ones that are hugely more cynical about human nature and gender relations than I am.

The IMDb plot outline runs thus: “Two small-town women accidentally capture a handsome young fugitive.” Blonde, gentle veterinarian Annie and vampish brunette Louise are both middle-aged, single, and disillusioned with romance. When douchey young criminal Ricky stumbles into their lives, they find themselves acting in unprecedented ways.

Both within the film and in the director’s statements, the allusion to Thelma and Louise is made explicit. From Tiger Lily Road‘s Facebook page:

This film, which could not exist without Callie Khouri’s ground-breaking screenplay, Thelma and Louise, asks the question: where are we now? Are we still frozen in mid-air as in Ridley Scott’s boldly edited ending? Or have we crash-landed in some new and twisted territory…

Thelma and Louise is certainly still depressingly relevant some twenty-odd years later: rape survivors still get scrutinized, mainstream films that pass the Bechdel test are still vanishingly rare, men are still inundated with violent power fantasies and women are not. The awesome thing about Thelma and Louise is its portrayal of the titular women’s friendship – as Sophie Standing wrote last year, “nothing is more important than their loyalty to each other, and they are empowered by their freedom and refusal of male domination.” I’m not fully convinced that the women of Tiger Lily Road even like each other. Certainly there’s far more onscreen evidence of bonding between Annie and Ricky than between Annie and Louise.

Not that Annie and Ricky’s relationship is healthy (the Misery allusion might have tipped you off). If this film is meant to be an empowerment fantasy, it’s a creepy and depressing one where women’s relationships with men are cast as either the mother, with blonde Annie’s 50 Shades of Grey emotional fixer-upper thing (“He’s damaged!”), or the whore, with dark-haired Louise raping Ricky using the physical means of Viagra. If it’s a cautionary tale exploring the perils of a “battle of the sexes” worldview, it’s certainly stylishly made, particularly one standout sequence near the end, but it’s very strange tonally.

But then, maybe the point is to unsettle us. Pop culture is full of male empowerment fantasies that are objectively creepy and depressing, but we’re so inured that we don’t take them seriously. Maybe the reason this one discomfits me is because I’m just not used to it. Or maybe because I know the writer-director is a man, and I’m not certain that his portrayal of gender relations is a helpful one.

In the end, even though he’s a nasty piece of work who manipulates Annie’s trust and naivety with film quotes, Ricky perhaps makes the film’s best point. Annie shows him a picture of a co-ed soccer team from their childhood and laments growing up and separating along gender lines: “We couldn’t be on the same team anymore.” Ricky replies, “Maybe you just need a different game.”

Amen to that.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

10 Fascinating Female TV Characters Who Are Often Overlooked

Written by Rachel Redfern

As a spin-off from last week’s discussion about the female characters and the rise of the male anti-hero on TV, I thought that today I would point ten of the most interesting female characters on television within the past ten years (although I’m sure there are many more out there), many of whom are only side characters and might have been passed over.

Note, this is not about the most bad-ass female characters, or even the ones I would consider to be role models (though some are); this is about the most interesting female characters. Just as it can be limiting to find male characters as always the knight in shining armor, or the action hero superstar (hence the darker, more varied male characters on television), I think it can be the same for women since they are often placed into their own boxes.

So here it is, ten female characters that I find unique and fascinating, and unfortunately, often overlooked (please add any more you think of in the comments).

Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica

Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff)

Starbuck was a man in the original Battlestar Galactica series and Ronald Moore’s decision to revamp the character into a woman for the remake was pretty traumatic; Sackhoff even reported that she had death threats after the casting decision had been made. However, Starbuck quickly became a show favorite and with good reason. Starbuck is one of the most diverse female characters on TV, ever.

She smoked cigars and drank to excess, got into a lot of fights, struggled with commitment, but loved her husband and friends deeply. She was fearless and talented as a pilot, but conversely sensitive to music and painting because of her relationship with her absent father.

Moore gave her a pretty intense back story as well, showing the physical and mental abuse that her mother submitted her to as a child, and her struggles with pain, having children, and the intense developments her character was subjected to.

Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane and Kim Dickens as Joanie Stubbs in Deadwood

Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens)

Deadwood has a few strong and interesting women, but Calamity Jane and Joanie Stubbs and their relationship have often been overlooked.

Robin Weigert was masterful as the blustering, loyal, drunk Calamity Jane, managing to display both bravado and a deep frailty. Weigert consistently portrayed Jane’s insecurities and sadness, effectively showing her as a sensitive and lonely outcast.

Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) was an elegant whore who has spent her whole life under the physical and sexual control of men, first her father, then her unstable and dangerous boss, Cy Tolliver. But Joanie’s search for freedom and escape from her past life became very painful and difficult to survive and understand her own place in the Deadwood camp.

The fact that the two women, both on the fringes of acceptable society, both damaged and distraught, find each other and develop a strong friendship (with it growing into a possible romantic one) was a beautiful subplot for the show.

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as Selina Meyer in Veep

Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss)

Selina Meyer (Julia Louis Dreyfuss) from HBO’s Veep is intensely unlikable, and I love that. She’s selfish and oblivious, whiny and incompetent (the perfect politician) and treats her employees and staff horribly.

But there is something very important about such unrelatable and unlikable characters–not all women in the world are pleasant, but despite her flaws, Selina is a deeply human character in a competitive world.

Yunjin Kim as Sun Kwon in Lost

Sun Kwon (Yunjin Kim)

Sun, at least in the beginning of Lost, seemed to be a minor character, one whose sad smile and soft voice suggested a submissive and lackluster personality being pushed around by her husband. Of course, that wasn’t the case, and it became apparent through later episodes that she was a strong, intelligent, forceful character, willing to do what was needed in order to survive.

Sun’s character and backstory provided a fabulous look into how humans change, seeing her first as the sweet, naïve bride, then the angry, bitter woman desperate for her freedom, and finally as a strong survivor in later seasons.

Maggie Siff as Tara Knowles in Sons of Anarchy

Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff)

Gemma, the great matriarch of the Sons of Anarchy clan, often gets most of the attention, and she is an amazing character: strong, fierce, and dangerous. But I also find Tara, Jax’s wife, to be complicated and compelling character. As opposed to Gemma, whose whole life has been the motorcycle club, Tara is a respected young surgeon attempting to raise her children in a normalized environment.

But then she changes and starts to exhibit a darker side, a change that heralds in her own deep conflicts with her healing career but destructive personal life. In season five she takes a wrench to another woman for possibly endangering her husband; a few episodes later she’s performing delicate surgery on an infant.

Liza Weil as Paris Geller in Gilmore Girls

Paris Geller (Liza Weil)

Gilmore Girls is sometimes dismissed as being light entertainment, an opinion that does a disservice to a snappy show with amazing dialogue and clever, quirky characters.

One of these characters being of course, the hyper-intelligent, aggressive, irrepressible, intense Paris Geller. Originally, Paris was only intended for a few episodes in the first season, but quickly grew into a main character because of the unique perspective that her personality offered to the show.

Paris’ character, that of an elitist academic loaded with money, quick temper, and fast-talking, clever comebacks, can’t really be found in any other show. She was a mashup of brilliance and so many neuroses and problems that it’s almost overwhelming, but also funny and sad.

The truth is, women like her, passionate, intense and bossy, are often completely hated and overly stereotyped, whereas Gilmore Girls managed to present her as a lovable and competent women, albeit with a few idiosyncrasies.

Rutina Wesley as Tara Thornton in True Blood

Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley)

Sookie gets all the attention in True Blood, both on- and off-screen. Which is a shame, because Tara Thornton, Sookie’s best friend from childhood is an angsty, wisecracking southern girl who always took the show to the next level.

Intelligent and well-read, but dealing with her mother’s alcoholism (and intense religiosity) and poverty, makes Tara full of emotional issues and anger, but also passionately loyal. Tara is astute and honest and not afraid to tell other characters when they’re being stupid. The world probably needs a lot more people like her.

Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones

Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer)

The rich world of Game of Thrones has several noteworthy women–so many in fact, that some of the minor, but equally interesting female characters, can get passed over. For example, Margaery Tyrell (most prominent in the third and last season) is actually far more dynamic in the TV show than in the books, and much more unique.

Margaery is an incredible politician; she’s manipulative, cold, ambitious, charismatic and astute. I love how each action is carefully planned out, revealing a methodical and calculating nature, one that is far more dangerous than Cersei (I think) because of her ability to control her temper.

I love a good ambitious character; powerful women who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty fascinate me. In fact, I would argue that Margaery Tyrell is a born leader, one with an innate understanding of politics and power.

Vote for Margaery?

January Jones as Bretty Francis Draper in Mad Men

Betty Francis Draper (January Jones)

Mad Men’s women are incredibly varied, from sexy, confident Joan, to naïve, talented Peggy, but often pushed to the side is Don’s beautiful and bitter ex-wife. Mad Men’s portrayal of her obvious loneliness, and her (deserving) anger over Don’s behavior is incredibly sad, but also poignant.

Rather than sugarcoating her character and painting her as a distressed angel, Betty builds upon the difficulties that pushed her way, and her flawed decisions are thrown in with attempts to pull her life together.

Sometimes redemption is hard; so is pulling yourself out of cycles of pain and resentment. Betty is therefore complex and interesting, incredibly frail and static, but also unbending and aggressive in her life choices.

Nicolette Sheridan as Edit Britt in Desperate Housewives

Edie Britt (Nicolette Sheridan)

Desperate Housewives‘ Edie is probably no one’s role model, and at first she seems like the perfect stereotype of a wealthy, self-absorbed, boy-crazy blonde. She sleeps with everyone, has multiple affairs, and has no qualms about manipulating people.

However, she was also hilarious, clever, and often incredibly honest and realistic. She made no bones about who she was or her actions, and more than once was the voice of reason.

And sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with being a little selfish.

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection; however, she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.