Female Sexuality – Page 2

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in ‘Magic Mike XXL’

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

“Are you ready to be worshipped? Are you ready to be exalted?”

Oh boy, are we!

Magic Mike XXL, this summer’s sequel to the surprise hit of 2012, Magic Mike, is a celebration of (heterosexual) female sexual desire. Centred on male stripping, Magic Mike XXL thoroughly recognises and foregrounds the pleasure of women within the film and within the audience; women are (finally) recognised as having sexual desire, and of gleefully and ravenously pursuing. In this piece, I will discuss how this celebration of heterosexual female desire creates a new space for the female gaze within cinema. Although exciting and radical, I will also flesh out why this conceptualisation is also difficult and slippery. However, ultimately, I suggest that truly productive message of Magic Mike XXL is in the way in which it creates a masculine image, a male spectacle, to be looked at, affording (heterosexual) women the privilege – and the permission – to look.

Magic Mike followed young and unemployed Adam (Alex Pettyfer) who enters the seedy world of male stripping after being introduced by Mike (Channing Tatum). Although the film contained many blatant strip scenes to be used for the audience’s entertainment, it also attempted to be something other than a gratuitous stripping movie. Directed by Academy Award-winning Steven Soderberg, the film was a Serious Picture, all washed-out colours, mumbled dialogue, and loose camera work. The sequel, however, offers a much more conventional (and sexually entertaining) story. We are reunited with Mike who, after leaving stripping to work full-time on his furniture business, is dissatisfied with his new lifestyle. He decides to rejoin his fellow strippers including Matt Bomer’s Ken and Joe Manganiello’s rather subtly named, Big Dick Richie for one last hurrah. After some quick and unimportant narrative exposition to explain the loss of Pettyfer and Matthew McConaughey (in the first film, he played club owner, Dallas), the boys hit the road to perform one last time at a stripping convention (yes, this is apparently a thing).

More explicitly than its predecessor, Magic Mike XXL is aware of the sexual pleasures to be had from male stripping. The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer. The previous film may not have been an explicit piece of erotic entertainment, but, for this film, the marketers are clear that Magic Mike XXL is to be enjoyed, to be devoured and, most radically, to be looked at.

In Laura Mulvey’s famous account of the male gaze, she posits that, in traditional Hollywood cinema, men are the active bearers of the look whereas women are the passive objects of the look. She argues,

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female… In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

Positioning the audience’s look with that of the (traditionally male) protagonist, the internal and external male gaze constructs the sexualized and objectified image of woman. In this way, the female gaze is dismissed; female sexual desire and the act of female looking do not exist.

In traditional Hollywood cinema, the man is the possessor of the look whereas the woman is the object of the look

Considering the ways in which the female gaze is privileged in the film, Magic Mike XXL productively breaks down oppressive phallocentric structures within cinema. The men perform strip teases and erotic dances several times throughout the film both for the pleasure of the women in the film and for the women in the audience. Their final show is constructed under a flurry of excitement and anticipation, making the final release of their performance all the more satisfying. Most radically, women are actually depicted as in charge of their sexual desires and pleasures. The film introduces a new character, Rome, played brilliantly by Jada Pinkett-Smith. Rome owns a strip club where the majority if not all of the audience are Black women (side note: Has there been a mainstream film in recent years that so explicitly portrayed sexual desire within women who are not white? That alone is worth celebrating). Mike asks Rome to accompany them to the convention as their MC, and Rome commands the entirety of the performance. She calls the women in the audience queens and goddesses; she asks the audience what they want; she is effectively a Black woman in charge of white men. For the sexual pleasures it affords women, and for the autonomy it gives women over these pleasures, Magic Mike XXL offers a radical construction of the female gaze.

However, as much as we can praise Magic Mike XXL for this construction, the conceptualization of the female gaze problematically works within a heteronormative framework. Queer men and women as well as non-binary genders complicate this construction. Are women the only group of people afforded the space to look Magic Mike XXL? Interestingly, the trailer does not exclusively aim its erotic spectacle at women, creating instead a gender-neutral invitation to look at these men. However, the clips in the trailer and, indeed, scenes in the film, locate this primarily within the realm of heterosexual female desire. The people who attend the shows are women, the people who the men talk about entertaining are women, and the people who are invited to look are women. This is not to say that Magic Mike XXL isn’t aware of a possible homoerotic or even homosexual appeal. In one scene, the men attend a drag show where they also participate in a voguing competition. Developed out of queer African American communities in Harlem, the men’s voguing situates them within the framework of queer male spectacles. Also, as part of the film’s promotional campaign, the cast of Magic Mike XXL attended the 2015 LGBT pride parade in Los Angeles. The cynical may say they did so simply for the free publicity. But their willingness to embrace their sexualised roles in queer communities recognises a step forward in traditional ideas of masculinity, and a more fluid construction of the gaze.

But let’s be clear. The film primarily operates in a heteronormative framework whereby heterosexual women desire the men. Perhaps we should turn our attention not to who is afforded the look, but how the look is set up in the first place. In cinema, men are not to be looked at. To do so risks being feminised or homoeroticised; both run the risk of emasculation that traditional conceptualizations of masculinity cannot handle. Yet, here, the men offer up their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. Of course, the men don’t embody the level of objectification conventionally embodied by women. For one, their bodies – all pecs, arms and abs – display the traits of the traditionally successful masculine body. As Richard Dyer claims in his essay, “Don’t Look Now,” “Muscularity is the sign of power-natural, achieved, phallic.” It is this, then, that even as we look, reminds us that these men are not passive objects, but hard, active, and, most crucially, masculine. For another, this passivity also refuses to extend to the narrative. As Mulvey claims, when objectified in cinema, woman “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” As the active protagonists on-screen and with key roles off-screen (the story is based on Tatum’s own life, and he has production roles in both movies), the men refuse to be simply passive objects of erotic contemplation.

But Magic Mike XXL is more subversive than it seems. Even as these seemingly traditional images of masculinity are renewed within the film, they are undercut by the free way in which the men offer their bodies as spectacle, as something to be looked at. As Tatum says in an interview, “We’re definitely trying to make [our stripping movie] a little different and a little bit less misogynistic. I’m not trying to get very meta about it all because at the end of the day, it’s just for fun.” And, ultimately, isn’t this what feminism is about? Sex is not sinful. When there’s mutual consent, enjoying it visually, aesthetically, and physically, is not sinful. Magic Mike XXL finally offers heterosexual women, if not anyone else, the space to enjoy this kind of sex and, if, as Tatum says, you can have fun while you’re at it, well, then that truly is a pleasure.

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”]

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

Sweet Nectar of the Matriarchy: Breastmilk in ‘Fury Road’

Immortan Joe sampling the goods with milk mothers and their machines in the background

This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.

Liquids abound in the otherwise dry landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road: precious gasoline (or “guzzoline”), scarce water, spray-on chrome, blood transfusions, and stolen mother’s milk. A dystopia wrapped around a feminist utopia, Fury Road has been cheered by women’s rights supporters and action film lovers alike. The film’s nightmarish post-apocalyptic world is characterized by a patriarchal power that exploits women’s reproduction and consolidates resources, leaving many in abject poverty. Hard to imagine, I know. It’s no surprise then, that the film was boycotted by MRAs. While rape and forced procreation are the most obvious examples of women’s exploited reproductive labor, breastmilk recurs throughout Fury Road as a symbol of that oppression. We view women imprisoned in milk-pumping machines, much like harrowing images of factory dairy farms. And unlike sex and sexuality, which are left conspicuously out of the film’s uprising, redemption is symbolized through human milk: “Mother’s Milk” anoints Max’s (Tom Hardy) face after his first proactively selfless act in support of Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the “Five Wives,” for example.

We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with breastmilk: on the one hand, there’s an almost fanatical love of it as a healing substance, and on the other, fear and disgust so intense that mothers are routinely shamed for public breastfeeding (it’s supposedly “unsanitary”). Fury Road dramatically and imaginatively reproduces this stance toward breastmilk. The Citadel’s inhabitants worship Mother’s Milk–they chant these words, among others, before Furiosa’s supply run to Gas Town (the implication is that the city exports milk in exchange for gas and therefore it is central to their economy)–but we also see that the women providing milk are chained to breast pumps with their mouths covered, holding sad, filthy baby dolls in their arms meant to stimulate milk production. Women the producers are unsanitary and devalued; the milk they create is holy. Holy and commodified, of course: it’s meant to sustain the patriarch Immortan Joe, his sons, and anyone else he deems worthy, and to keep the hierarchical structure going through trade with neighboring patriarchal cities.

Feminist breastfeeding scholars point out that we already live in a world in which breastmilk is a commodity. Linda C. Fentiman argues that human milk is “marketed both literally and figuratively, as a good for sale, a normative behavior, and a cure for a variety of contemporary social and medical problems.” Pediatricians promote breast is best, nonprofit milk banks and milk sharing organizations are popping up everywhere, and even for-profit formula companies use breastmilk in their scientific studies. All of these benefit people; rarely do they financially benefit those providing their milk. In response, Fentiman proposes we make more explicit the market value of breastmilk, because this would recognize women’s labor in milk production. Why not let mothers quantify and sell their milk? Why not give nursing mothers more economic power within the system as it is?

But others, like Fiona Giles, encourage us as a culture to “waste breastmilk.” Our intense fear of “the leaky body,” she says in Breastmilk: The Movie, means that we often treat women’s bodies as “monstrous.” Shaming nursing mothers is one example of how society strives to keep women’s bodies controlled and neat and orderly. Breastmilk (and pregnancy and menstruation, for that matter) threatens to make the leaky body public. Yet at the same time, we have public health campaigns praising human milk as “liquid gold” and dictating diet, sleep, behavior, and more to protect and champion this substance. The conflicted message here, which Fury Road so vividly amplifies, is disgust of the body itself while praising what the body produces. And so why don’t we push back by pouring it everywhere? “Let’s throw it around,” Giles says. “Let’s do what we feel like in it. Have baths. Who cares?” This has a double effect: refusing bodily shame and rejecting the idea of milk as something precious and rare. Or to use Giles’s terms, wasting human breastmilk moves us from a “scarcity model” to a “plentitude model.” In the scarcity model, we see fear of insufficient production, rhetoric that links “good” behavior with breastfeeding, individual responsibility for failure or success in infant nourishment, and anxious hording of backup milk. But why not operate from a place of abundance instead? Resist the system as it is and disrupt “orderly” (read: controlled) public spaces with leaking breasts, unpredictable bodies, and shared milk?

Furiosa, the “Wives,” the Vulvalini, and Max’s triumphant return to the Citadel finds the once chained-to-their-pumps milk mothers now opening the floodgates and pouring water down on the people below. It seems likely that our sheroes and the milk mothers will move forward on the “plentitude model” – bathing in an abundance of sweet, thick human milk, sharing water access, and growing green things from heirloom seeds – rather than continue in the scarcity model exemplified by Immortan Joe, with the milk mothers as capitalists profiting from their own production. In other words, the film suggests these women will build a new economy altogether; I hear echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) and philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes a wildly fascinating theory about the feminist power of liquids in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). For me the promise of this new economy is the film’s most cathartic gesture.

Cathartic, but not perfect. It isn’t human milk that flows at the triumphant end, but water drilled from deep in the earth. Does the milk mothers’ liberation come at the cost of the earth’s resources, I wonder? Or are we meant to conflate maternal women with the earth? Both troublesome suggestions. And of course as controversial as mothering is in our culture, a maternally centered revolution remains less threatening than would, say, any gesture toward sexual pleasure at the heart of the uprising. If we are disgusted by maternal bodies, we are downright terrified by sexually empowered women’s bodies.

Yet, regardless of what happens next in the Citadel, Fury Road’s use of breastmilk both in its oppressive and resistant visions demonstrates that when we talk about human breastmilk we aren’t just talking about feeding human infants, personal choice, or love and bonding. We’re also talking about economics and labor, and our societal fear of unpredictable, leaky female bodies even while society commodifies what those bodies produce. Fury Road concretely and imaginatively re-connects bodies with human milk, making milk-producing breasts very much public. Although the film’s ending is more symbolic than prescriptive, the final scene suggests that prosthetic-free Furiosa, the seed-wielding Wives, and the water-pouring milk mothers are no longer outliers in an otherwise orderly society, but are now the source and foundation of society’s structure. This enables us to imagine a world in which the leaky body is not an object of shame or fear, but instead a source of power and creation.

Colleen Martell is a writer, literary agent, and lecturer of public health and women’s studies based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There’s a place for both breastfed and formula fed babies in her feminist utopia. She tweets about bodies at @elsiematz.

Sex, Drugs, and Developing Breasts: ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ an Unforgettable Debut

The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, allowing us a panoramic view of Minnie’s inner life through animated versions of her intense and thoughtful comic illustrations, drawn frame by frame. Still, ‘Diary’s best feature is its script. While the lessons Minnie learns are expected ones, they are important and the audience will be deeply pleased to see her arrive there. As Minnie reflects on her changing body, interests, and desires, it becomes easy to empathize with a character so familiar and yet so individual.

This is a guest post by Ariana DiValentino.

When it comes to budding sexuality, movies have frequently told us stories of the trials and experimentations (sometimes with baked goods) of high school boys who can’t hardly wait. Teen girl sexuality, however, gets far less screen time and even less nuance. This is why The Diary of a Teenage Girl, directed by first-timer Marielle Heller, stands out as an exciting rare gem.

Bel Powley stars as the 15-year-old Minnie living in San Francisco in the 1970s, who is simultaneously naïve and precocious—both in her artistic and sexual endeavors. Minnie initiates an affair with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe, played by Alexander Skarsgård, when, after he discloses an untimely physical reaction to some horseplay, she realizes for the first time that a man views her as a sexual being. Though Monroe is two decades her senior, the film manages to turn the Lolita trope on its head by avoiding illustrating Minnie as a deviant teen seductress or vilifying Monroe as a predatory monster. We are along for the ride, alternatingly understanding Minnie’s crush and desire for affection, and cringing at the blatant manipulation she is unknowingly subjected to.

Powley plays a hilariously and touchingly feisty, creative, and confused Minnie, whose bad behaviors are little mystery given the juvenile, wild-partying adults she is surrounded by. Alexander Skarsgård, while initially charming in Minnie’s eyes, portrays an excellent man-child who cannot grasp the impact of his actions on others. Kristen Wiig removes all doubt about her ability to play dramatic roles as Minnie’s loving but deeply flawed mother, Charlotte. Christopher Meloni makes a pleasant appearance as Charlotte’s ex-husband, and the closest thing Minnie has to a protective parental figure.

The film is beautifully shot and highly stylized, allowing us a panoramic view of Minnie’s inner life through animated versions of her intense and thoughtful comic illustrations, drawn frame by frame. Still, Diary’s best feature is its script. While the lessons Minnie learns are expected ones, they are important and the audience will be deeply pleased to see her arrive there. As Minnie reflects on her changing body, interests, and desires, it becomes easy to empathize with a character so familiar and yet so individual. The film finds its humour in its truth, deriving laughs from lines like the dead-serious “I’ve had breasts for three full years now” and genuine, sometimes embarrassing scenes of intimacy.

Not easily categorized, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a deeply dramatic coming-of-age story with moments of sharp, undeniable wit. Minnie navigates the San Francisco of 1976, sharing thoughts and making mistakes that even more recent survivors of adolescence will gleefully identify with. Marielle Heller has proven herself to be a writer-director to watch, utilizing specificity and a deep understanding of people across generations to create a beautiful and deeply human portrait of growing pains.

Ariana DiValentino is a lover and budding creator of all things film and feminism, based in New York. Catch her in action on Twitter @ArianaLee721.

Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist

While America was building its clout as the commercial center of the global film industry, it was France that became the center of film theory, driving experimentation. A key figure in that development was Germaine Dulac.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

The career of Alice Guy, the original film director, straddles two continents. In America, where she made the bulk of her films, Guy mentored Lois Weber, triggering an unparalleled wave of female film directors. But her career began in France, and it was to France that Guy returned in 1922, lecturing on film there for many years. While America was building its clout as the commercial center of the global film industry, it was France that became the center of film theory, driving experimentation. A key figure in that development was Germaine Dulac. Beginning her career as a journalist and drama critic for feminist publications La Française and La Fronde, while exploring photography, the bisexual Dulac was introduced to cinema by her girlfriends, actress Stasia de Napierkowska and writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, founding D.H. Films with Hillel-Erlanger in 1915. Women’s contributions are often erased within their collaborations with male lovers, but Dulac reminds us that sharing goals is a natural romantic development, that goes beyond gender. Like Alice Guy’s Pierrette’s Escapades, Dulac’s early films explore playful gender fluidity, filming a ballet of a crossdressing masked ball. Her lost collaboration with future husband Louis Delluc, Spanish Fiesta, is credited with kickstarting French Impressionist cinema. Her influential The Seashell and the Clergyman, often called the first surrealist film, was released the year before Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s more famous Un Chien Andalou.

By combining the roles of critic and practising filmmaker, Dulac developed a theory of film that was uniquely coherent for its time, shaping the thinking of France’s cinematic avant-garde. Dulac was a firm believer in cinema as a director’s vision (Antonin Artaud fought publicly with Dulac over the liberties she took with his screenplay for The Seashell and the Clergyman). In a 1923 interview, Dulac declares: “cinema comes from palpable emotion… To be worth something and “bring” something, this emotion must come from one source only.” She explicitly demanded recognition as “author” (“auteure” – a term not then used of cinema) of The Seashell and the Clergyman, laying the foundation for the auteurism of the French New Wave in the 1950s. With the advent of sound, Dulac abandoned her impressionist and surrealist “visual symphonies” to become an artistic director and documentary filmmaker at Alice Guy’s old studio, Gaumont. She played a key role in nationalizing the French film industry in 1935, taught cinema at the Louis Lumière school and helped to establish the Cinémathèque Française, whose archives and program of organized screenings educated many of the French New Wave’s directors. After her death in 1942, a magazine apparently attempted to censor her obituary, out of discomfort with her “nonconformism”. Dulac’s historical significance has been marginalized, often limited to “the first feminist filmmaker” (a label which manages the impressive double whammy of limiting the scope of Dulac’s achievement while erasing Alice Guy, Lois Weber and Marion E. Wong). This marginalization resembles that of Agnès Varda, whose 1955 film La Pointe-Courte launched the French New Wave, before male directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were allowed to dominate international coverage of the movement.

The Smiling Madame Beudet – 1923

“Only by using ideas, lights, and the camera was I able, by the time I made my first film, to understand what cinema was, art of interior life and of sensation” – Germaine Dulac

Theatre struggles to stage inner worlds. We watch characters onstage as we watch people in life, from the outside. Traditionally, women suffered most from realist depictions, because women were expected to play passive roles, easily dismissed as decorations or overlooked altogether. In Dulac’s best-known film, her subject matter is passivity and suppression itself: a frustrated housewife who does not, actually, dramatically murder her husband. Dulac creates tension from this static premise, in the conflict between Madame Beudet’s outer passivity and her vibrant inner life. Cinematic effects of slow motion, distortion and superimposition allow easy shifting between reality and vivid fantasy, confirming cinema’s potential as Dulac’s “art of interior life.”

Opening on a tranquil small town’s facade, Dulac takes us first inside the house and then inside the head, as the sparkling lake in Madame Beudet’s mind mirrors the mood of the music she plays, establishing her sophistication and artistic appreciation in a few strokes. Isolated in a black vacuum, Madame Beudet fantasizes of escape by fast car, or a burly tennis player kidnapping her mocking and controlling husband, who emotionally blackmails her with faked suicides. He locks her piano to assert his power, anticipating Jane Campion’s The Piano. The older, married Madame Labas ogles magazine pictures of attractive sportsmen, while the housemaid’s inner smile, as she fantasizes of her lover, is contrasted with her outwardly dutiful expression, emphasizing that the passions of women are independent from their social value. A running conflict over the placing of a vase of flowers shows the banality of hellish incompatibility.

Madame Beudet’s own imaginary lover is blurred, a vague aspiration, while the grinning face of her grotesque husband is tauntingly clear, haunting her from every angle, hanging in mid-air, leaping in the window in slow motion and whizzing around the house speeded up. She loads his gun, dooming him to die if he pulls another fake suicide. While jokingly throttling a doll, Mr. Beudet clumsily breaks it, because “a doll is fragile, like a woman.” Careless ignorance does as much damage as deliberate spite. In the end, Madame Beudet is only human, and shrieks when her husband seems about to really shoot himself. Can the impulse be judged, when not acted on? In her husband’s crushing embrace, “together by habitude,” the Beudets walk the streets of their small town’s picturesque façades. Traditional womanhood is an iceberg: nine tenths lie beneath the surface. La Souriante Madame Beudet is a classic feminist work, not because it depicts what should be, but because it clarifies the stifling frustration of what is.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKiyxv88CKE”]

Invitation to the Voyage – 1927

“the intellectuals and the filmmakers should develop a closer kinship to one another, for it is only nuances between words that irremediably keep them apart” – Germaine Dulac

From the popularity of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Ruses to the paintings of Henri Matisse, Orientalism saturated early 20th century Paris. Edward Said has criticized its distortions and stereotypes but, under the pretext of representing real cultures, the “Orient” allowed Parisians to role-play alternative social values, as scifi and fantasy worlds do today. In particular, the Persian homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, Omar Khayyam and Rumi made Orientalism an important codifier of gay identity. Novelist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and dancer Ida Rubinstein led a heavily orientalized lesbian counterculture in Dulac’s Paris, while Dulac’s own lover, Stasia de Napierkowska, played Cleopatra on film and danced with the Ballets Ruses. Rather than disdaining popular Orientalism, Dulac explores it as an imaginary French creation, representing a striving for sexual liberation. In Dulac’s six-part serial, 1920’s Âmes de fous, a French heiress is liberated from her oppressive stepmother by adopting the persona of an Egyptian dancer while, in 1928’s Princesse Mandane, the Orient is the hero’s dream, where his rescued princess elopes with her female bodyguard, playfully thwarting his assumed entitlement to her. In Antonia Lant’s assessment, “it was the pleasure of the Islamic as a visual and cultural code, transformed through recyclings within contemporary French urban culture, that fascinated Dulac.”

Invitation to the Voyage was born as a poem by Charles Baudelaire, where the poet seeks “to love at leisure, love and die in a land that resembles you.” Dulac’s film makes the metaphorical nature of the voyage clear, by converting it into the theme of a bar that our inhibited heroine furtively enters. Veiled by her fur stole, her eyes devour the scene with enigmatic desires, though she flinches from sexual propositions. She pictures her home life, sewing wordlessly while her husband reads. Their child’s cot materializes between them – an obligation binding them? Clocks tick meaninglessly in her husband’s repeated absences on business (rendez vous d’affaires), echoing Madame Beudet’s stagnation. The heroine smiles hungrily at dancing couples, including fleetingly glimpsed interracial and lesbian pairings, then allows herself to join them. Rolling seascapes blend with her admirer, associating his sexual promise with escape, while Oriental musicians play. Yet, just as Madame Beudet fails to kill her husband, so the lonely wife returns home with dreams unconsummated.

Soundtrack suggestion: Billie Holiday’s The Best of Jazz Forever

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

The Seashell and the Clergyman – 1928

“Lines and surfaces evolving according to the logic of their forms, and stripped of all meanings that are too human to better elevate themselves towards abstraction of sentiments, leaving more space for sensations and dreams: integral cinema.” – Germaine Dulac

The Seashell and the Clergyman, an impressionist portrait of a clergyman’s lustful desire for a general’s wife, shares many themes with Dulac’s earlier work. Repressive hypocrisy and stifling convention are represented by clerical celibacy, while the violent fantasies of Madame Beudet are recalled in the priest’s violent fantasy of throttling his rival, the general, until his head tears apart. As with Invitation to the Voyage, the sea suggests sexual release. However, Dulac’s imagery in this film is far more abstract, evolving an aesthetic of surrealism by empowering the viewer to make their own meanings. Dulac’s theories of “pure cinema” called for all the elements of film – the rhythm of camera movement and cutting, the shape of forms portrayed, the flow between movements – to combine in their own “visual symphony” beyond narrative logic. Through the possibilities of slow or speeded motion, running film backward and jump cuts, cinema allows for time itself to become another element to sculpt with. In her 1928 film Thèmes et variations, Dulac eliminates narrative altogether, playfully juxtaposing a ballerina and factory machinery, feminine and masculine, elite and working class, before allowing them to flow together in a pure poetry of motion. In The Seashell and the Clergyman, that sense of visual poetry combines with a fever dream of erotic repression, fantasy, possessiveness and conformity. Dulac’s clergyman feels trapped as a disembodied head in a jar, surrounded by caretaking women, but ends up imaginatively trapping the woman in his place. This version is tinted and set to “The Dreams” by Delia Derbyshire (legendary electronica pioneer and composer of the Doctor Who theme tune).

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO60-cvUFmk”]

Germaine Dulac was hailed as the “first feminist filmmaker” for harnessing cinema to visualize the fantasies of women, but she was not the first to do so. In 1916, Chinese-American filmmaker Marion E. Wong wrote, directed and produced The Curse of Quon Gwon, featuring a fantasy sequence that uses dissolves and superimposition to visualize its heroine’s fears of marriage. The ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston are among the only other vintage footage online that is directed by a woman of color. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Zora Neale Hurston, Open Observer. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone wishes she could pull off that sophisticated French look, but does not recommend you take up smoking. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and learning new things.

‘Viy’: Incestuous Mother as Horror Monster

'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film'Viy' was the USSR's first horror film — *Viy* was the USSR’s first horror film

Trigger Warning: Discussion of maternal incest, paternal incest and the rape of men.

Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol disassociated himself from his 1835 story Viy by framing it as an unaltered “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) folk tale, but it is actually a strikingly original, vividly visual and deeply felt Gothic horror that bears only slight resemblance to folklore. Though Mario Bava’s 1960 Black Sunday is officially based on Viy, the most faithful adaptation is a 1967 Soviet production with effects by stop-motion legend Aleksandr Ptushko. I’m analyzing this classic, not the recent remake.

Trainee monk Khoma Brut “never knew his mother,” while the story’s vampiric witch (she drinks baby’s blood) is introduced in a maternal, housewife role. As Katherine Murray discusses on Bitch Flicks, “the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents.” Gogol’s major source is Zhukovsky’s translation of Robert Southey’s “A Ballad, Shewing How An Old Woman Rode Double, And Who Rode Before Her,” where a monk reads prayers over his cursed mother’s corpse, while demons lay siege to the church. Though not literally mother, Viy‘s vivid witch is the archetype of horror’s monstrous mothers. In 1893’s The Death of Halpin Frayser, the hero blunders into the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!” While struggling with his undead mother in a haunted forest, Halpin dissociates and views events “as a spectator” before dying horribly. In Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 horror classic, Vampyr, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s alluringly lesboerotic Carmilla is reimagined as a menacing, maternal vampire-hag, while in “Lies My Parents Told Me,” (Season 7) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike vamps his mother and she accuses him of sexually desiring her, forcing him to stake her. The event is so traumatic that Spike can be controlled by it, until he defuses his trigger by facing the memory (contrast the show’s dismissive treatment of Faith’s attempted rape/murder of Xander in Season 3’s “Consequences” and Buffy’s violation of Spike’s stated sexual boundaries in Season 6’s “Gone”).

In her discussion of the female Gothic, “The Madwoman’s Journey From The Attic Into The Television,” Bitch Flicks‘ guest writer Sobia notes, “while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues. I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other.” Just as Godzilla‘s semi-goofy lizard embodied Japan’s nuclear trauma, so Gogol’s fantasy creations are not necessarily trivial, as unreal displacements of real anxiety. Viy parallels the female Gothic’s allegorical approach to rape, contrasting sharply with unreal yet realist rape fantasies like Murmur of the Heart (flippant maternal incest for shock value), White Palace (Susan Sarandon’s rape of an unconscious James Spader, who refused consent before passing out, as romantic liberation), and Wedding Crashers (Vince Vaughn’s rape by Isla Fisher as hilarious).

Nikolai Kutuzov's witch transfixes Khoma — Nikolai Kutuzov’s witch transfixes Khoma

The boisterous tone of Viy‘s opening fades rapidly, as three seminary students, lost in the dead of night, draw up to a housewife’s misty gates and are allowed to stay on condition that they sleep separated. Leonid Kuravlyov’s robust and jolly Khoma beds down alone in a stable. His placid chewing is paralleled with the stable’s cow, reducing him metaphorically to livestock. Initially, Khoma views the looming witch as a joke: “It’s getting late, Granny, and I wouldn’t corrupt myself for a thousand in gold. *laughs* You’ve gotten old, Granny.” Gogol’s prose: “the sophomore [lit: ‘philosopher’] shrank back; but she still approached, as though she wished to lay hold of him. A terrible fright seized him, for he saw the old hag’s eyes glitter in an extraordinary way.” Filming the witch’s stare in uncomfortable close-up, the Soviet adaptation achieves a viscerally uncanny effect, intensified for hetero-male audiences by male actor Nikolai Kutuzov’s playing the witch, until the stumbling Khoma knocks the cow’s yoke symbolically onto his own neck. Khoma appears stunned. In Gogol’s prose, his reaction is more clearly tonic immobility, or freeze response: “the sophomore tried to push her away with his hands, but to his astonishment he found that he could neither lift his hands nor move his legs, nor utter an audible word.”

Finally, the witch grasps him and forces herself onto his back. After a dizzying aerial ride, Khoma drives the witch to earth by invoking Christ and beats her with savage anger, until she transforms into a weeping damsel-in-distress, who dies as he staggers away. The sexual dimension of the riding is clearer in Gogol’s prose: “his legs… lifted against his will… a wearying, unpleasant and at the same time sweet feeling… a demonically sweet feeling… suddenly he felt some kind of refreshment; he felt that his step began to grow more lazy… her wild cries… became weaker, more pleasant, purer.” Gogol uses supernatural paralysis and running motion to allegorically express concepts as crucial to understanding male rape as they are widely disbelieved: firstly, the effectiveness of sexual threat in inducing an involuntary freeze response and, secondly, the possible coexistence of “demonically sweet” arousal with traumatic mental repulsion and violation.

The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witchThe eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley's undead witch — The eerie repulsion of Natalya Varley’s undead witch

Once dead, the witch can become youthfully beautiful, revealing her aged ugliness as a device to emphasize the unwanted and repulsive nature of the pseudosexual encounter. Khoma is forced to read prayers over the dead witch, as her dying request. Gogol’s witch is as pitiful as she is aggressive, crying a tear of blood and inducing Khoma’s guilt for killing her – “he felt as though those ruby lips were colored with his own heart’s blood” – before demonically rising to violate him again. Khoma is told of Mikita, a huntsman whose infatuation with the witch “completely sissified him” before he allowed her to ride him; he was “burned completely out,” leaving only ashes, proving the fatal seriousness of the riding Khoma has survived. The film’s church scenes are masterpieces of brooding Orthodox iconography, steadily ratcheted tension and jolting jump scares. As the witch rises from her grave, Khoma desperately draws a chalk circle around himself, bolstering its charmed impenetrability by fervent prayer as demons fumble for him.

The frail boundary of chalk serves as a powerful imaginary line of bodily autonomy that the hero desperately defends, and our anxiety over its penetration drives the film’s second half. Khoma is forced to return on the third night by threats and the promise of a thousand in gold (for which he earlier refused to “corrupt himself”), being caught as he tries to flee. After dancing in wild abandon, his macho bravado drives him to return to the scene of horrors, intoxicated, to prove that “Cossacks aren’t afraid.” Khoma thus strives for some sense of control by proactively inviting a seemingly unavoidable threat. This is a common response to chronic abuse. On the final night, gigantic grasping hands grope for Khoma, while a wild assortment of nightmare ghouls crawl out of the church’s woodwork. The witch orders them to bring the Viy, a stumbling grotesque with dangling eyelids, from under the earth. Ghouls raise the Viy’s eyelids, unveiling his glittering stare. Khoma swears he will not look, but cannot resist turning as the Viy’s heavy footfalls approach. The Viy immediately stabs his finger at him, ghouls descend and Khoma dies of fright beneath their grasping hands. In a coda, his friend declares, “If he had not feared her, the witch could have done nothing to him.” As with Spike’s vampire-mother, it is Khoma’s fatal fear of facing the buried monster that is his doom, not the supernatural itself.

A frail circle of chalk is all that protects Khoma from gigantic grasping hands

Gogol’s earlier 1832 horror, Terrible Vengeance, shares deep parallels with Viy. Like Viy‘s beautiful witch, its sorcerer is superficially attractive, amusing crowds until a religious icon exposes his monstrous true face. The heroine, Katerina, fears the sorcerer and is ambivalently detached from her father, suffering horrifying dreams that he incestuously desires to marry her. Her husband, Danilo, eventually discovers that the father and the evil sorcerer are one, and are conjuring Katerina’s spirit from her body by night. That spirit’s statement that Katerina “does not know a lot of what her soul knows” remarkably suggests repressed memory and dissociation. Like Khoma’s pity for the weeping witch, Katerina feels bound to liberate her father even after realizing his true nature, yet simultaneously self-loathing for her inability to separate from him. Terrible Vengeance portrays a nightmare vision of intergenerational abuse, where ancestors feed forever on each other’s corpses in a deep abyss. The original sinner gnaws his own flesh and shakes the earth in his efforts to rise, eternally growing and distorting into a buried grotesque like the fearful Viy. In Mikhail Titov’s 1987 animated adaptation, Katerina, maddened by the loss of her husband and child, dances in wild, defiant intoxication, as Khoma does after his night terrors, even drawing a circle of fire to ward off her father, like Khoma’s of chalk. Such profound parallels between the quasi-maternal incest of Viy and the explicitly paternal incest of Terrible Vengeance send a clear message: it’s not about gender. Though Gogol’s sexually monstrous mother-figure has captured male imaginations and spawned imitations in a way that his sexually monstrous father has not, because of the overwhelming male authorship of our culture, yet both images are rooted in a potentially interchangeable empathy for survivors of sexual abuse.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEenjdEp8h4″]

Titov’s Terrible Vengeance. Triggery allegory

For women, male anxieties over female abusers combine great risk of demonization with great opportunity to forge connection. Men, like women, understand boundaries primally through their own bodies and identification. Rejecting one’s own abuse teaches one to fight against all abuse; excusing it teaches one to abuse. When Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction spooked male audiences, we could have pointed out that her behavior is stalking, experienced by one in six women in the USA, and her attempt to force Dan’s paternity is reproductive coercion, experienced by 16 percent of pregnant women. Instead, Susan Faludi’s Backlash read Alex as representing the demonization of feminism. Yet, Alex is an abuser. As Stephanie Brown points out for Bitch Flicks, you may meet Alex as you progress through life. Society does not technically favor men over women in intimate relationships. It favors abusers over victims, and codes abusive behaviors as masculine. As for bad mothers, Freud’s Oedipal “seduction theory” was created under intense pressure from the psychiatric establishment, as an alternative to his earlier exposure of parental incest’s links to PTSD in “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” So, why do feminists apply Oedipal interpretations, that evolved by mirror logic from rape apologism, to dismiss texts like Viy? Ultimately, whatever nightmares they fuel, bad mothers are neither monsters nor demonically unnatural women. They are flawed humans. By resisting the gendering of abuse, can we evolve human understanding?

The paranoid repulsion towards female sexual aggression that pervades the work of Nikolai Gogol has seen him uncritically labeled a misogynist, by virtually all modern commentators. Yet, renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol formed intense friendships with women like Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset, corresponding on philosophical topics with rare respect for her intellectual equality, and addressing her as “drug” (“buddy”). Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol wrote the 19th century’s most psychologically insightful and empathetic portrait of a female experience of paternal incest. Renowned misogynist Nikolai Gogol understood abuse far better than mainstream feminism. Time to stop dismissing and listen to the boys. Time to face Viy without flinching.

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever”

Brigit McCone freely admits to being a Gogol groupie, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and social justice warring.

‘Bessie’: Unapologetically Black, Female, and Queer

‘Bessie’ is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic.

Written by Lisa Bolekaja.

See-line woman
Wiggle wiggle
Turn like a cat
Wink at a man
And he wink back

Now child
See-line woman
Empty his pockets
And wreck his days
Make him love her
And she’ll fly away

Writer/director Dee Rees opens the film Bessie with the Nina Simone classic “See-Line Woman” playing as the camera takes in Queen Latifah in close-up, her face drenched in resplendent blue lighting. The color, framing and music told me from jump that the narrative would be coming from a place of womanist Blackness. Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, was signifying musically the proper introduction to Bessie Smith, the woman known in her day as the Empress of the Blues.

The story of Bessie Smith has been a long time coming, and it was quite timely that she should be given her due just a few days after the passing of the Blues legend B.B. King. Most people know very little about Bessie Smith, and it is almost a given that biopics are never truly satisfying, typically following a rise to fame and falling into trouble narrative. All I wanted to know was, would Rees be true to the highly unorthodox life of Smith? Or would we be subjected to a safe narrative that tip-toed around the raunchy, bisexual and profane realness of the Bessie Smith I read about in college?

Rees kept it real. Bessie is one of the rare mainstream films that shows an unapologetically Black, female and queer protagonist. That alone is groundbreaking in an otherwise straightforward biopic. Within ten minutes of the film, we see Bessie fooling around with a male paramour whom she beats up after he gets a little too fresh for her tastes, and then we see her in bed with her longtime female lover, Lucille (the gorgeous Tika Sumpter). It comes off natural, not some forbidden plot device to be used later to create conflict. It is what it is, and Bessie doesn’t waste time fretting over it. When she jumps on a train owned by Ma Rainey (Mo’Nique) to beg for a singing job and observes Ma interacting with her own female lover who prances around comfortably topless, Ma asks her straight out, “Watchu know about it?” Bessie tells her, “Same thing you do.” And that is that.

It was very powerful to see Black queer women openly affectionate with one another, and openly sexual in private spaces, especially for that time period. Black queer women, hardly ever get to see themselves on film without the narrative making them act secretive of fearful. Throughout the viewing, I kept waiting for Bessie’s bisexuality to become a big issue with her family, her band, or even her husband (and many lovers). It didn’t.

Ma Rainey takes Bessie under her wing, teaches her the ropes and how to sing the Blues to make the audience want more. She even teaches Bessie how to dress as a man and enjoy the thrill of smoking and gambling with men dressed that way. It reminded me of the stories I read that told of private clubs where women could be gender fluid and embrace masculine expressions without fear of bodily harm from violent homophobes.

Black love in all forms is front and center, and a new love comes in the form of Jack Gee (Michael Kenneth Williams being fierce and nuanced in this role), a man who sees Bessie perform, and goes to her hotel uninvited. As Bessie lies in bed, still in her nightgown and headscarf, her brother and business partner Clarence (Tory Kittles) watching her back, Jack Gee tells her his personal stats and proclaims without haste, “I’m auditioning to be your man.” He’s bold as brass and Bessie eventually marries him, and keeps her girlfriend Lucille too.

Jack seems very much Bessie’s equal, and they do go toe to toe with their hard loving, hard fighting and hard drinking. It’s a fragile relationship that hinges on Bessie’s Achilles heel, which is a bottomless hunger that stems from the loss of a mother at an early age, and the dysfunctional relationship she has with her older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander). Viola used to lock up food in the family refrigerator and beat on Bessie. This back-story told in flashbacks is the key to Bessie’s insatiable need for more success, more money, more lovers, and more control over her family. She eventually buys a large house without telling Jack, bringing everyone (including her sister Viola and Lucille) under one roof. She ignores her husband’s complaints and forces her will on everyone. She will live the life she felt was denied her, and even brings home a little boy on Thanksgiving to be her and Jack’s son. It’s Bessie’s world and everyone is expected to fall in line and gravitate around her.

The best part of Bessie is how she handles the intrusion of the White Gaze on the storyline. Bessie’s world seems insulated from white intrusion, and this allows us to focus on the Black characters just being themselves without having to focus on the known and ubiquitous racism. Whiteness does seep in through the colorism issues that Bessie encounters with the infamous paper bag test (Black performers, even in Black entertainment spaces of the period, did not hire darker skinned Black women who were not lighter than a paper bag). White intrusion is most prominent in two scenes, one involving the Klan showing up at one of Bessie’s performances, and the other at a prominent white patron’s home.

In the Klan sequence, Bessie simply walks outside and cusses the white men out and chases them away. She doesn’t quake in her boots or shrink behind the protection of Black men. She then turns around and goes back to performing, winning over the respect of the frightened Black men and women who were prepared to run away from White terrorism intruding onto Black space. In the home of Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt), a controversial patron of Negro artists whom he finds crude, primitive, and folksy, Bessie turns the White Gaze (and cultural appropriation) on its head by being true to her unfiltered Blackness. When a white woman puts her hands on Bessie in an attempt to hug her and says, “I heard that you were wild,” Bessie pushes her away and says, “Get the fuck off me.” Bessie in one fell swoop refused to let the white woman turn her body into a commodity. She turns on Carl Van Vechten too when he tells her about his book Nigger Heaven. This is a tremendous sequence because Bessie doesn’t allow the White characters to hijack the narrative and center the story on Bessie having to impress Van Vechten to get something from him for her survival. Bessie doesn’t give a fuck about anyone in that room except for herself and the two lovers she brought with her. In fact, Bessie doesn’t even care what Langston Hughes (Jeremie Harris) has to say when he tries to warn her about Van Vechten’s fetishizing of Black culture and Black people.

I found it fascinating watching Hughes take in Bessie’s behavior towards Van Vechten, because Hughes had to depend on White patrons much like Van Vechten to supplement his income in order to write and survive. Bessie didn’t. She had her voice and she had regular working class Black people who came out to see her when she travelled. Eventually she made records, (there’s the hilarious moment where she goes to a Black record company called Black Swan Records and discovers the company isn’t as Black as she thought, and that she is too Black for them), and was able to gain new revenue from vinyl sales. Bessie never had to water down her personality to make White folks feel comfortable. Unfortunately Hughes and other writers of their time (like my favorite Harlem Renaissance writer, Zora Neale Hurston) had to walk a thin line of creating the art they wanted without offending Whites who funded that art. It still happens today. Recently, poet and Buzzfeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones wrote about this same issue with his recent piece Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.

Bessie is a good primer movie for people who know nothing about Bessie Smith, and it is a breakthrough performance for Queen Latifah. The cast is flawless and I expect Emmy nods for Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique and Khandi Alexander. (Khandi can do anything and just be dynamite. Period.) It was a pleasure watching unapologetic Black, female, queerness. I hope HBO takes more chances on projects like this. Somebody get Dee Rees financing for a new movie stat. It is maddening to think that she hasn’t had an opportunity since Pariah in 2011 to show us her voice. She has more radical stories to tell. I can feel it.

#iamnotavessel: Joss Whedon’s Romantic Reproductive Coercion

Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Ripley, loving her "beautiful, beautiful little baby" — Ripley, loving her “beautiful, beautiful little baby”

Written by Brigit McCone.

The Alien saga offers some of the most powerful images of bodily violation in pop culture, from the metaphorical rape of the facehuggers to the victim’s resulting fatal impregnation. Ridley “Thelma and Louise“ Scott* fostered male empathy by casting John Hurt as the victim of this violation, while Sigourney Weaver’s badass Ellen Ripley defeated the monster. The sequel, Aliens, saw Ripley voluntarily assume maternal responsibility for a young girl, Newt, and fight an iconic battle against the Alien Queen to save her adopted child. In Alien3, Ripley realized she had been impregnated with an Alien Queen, and made a conscious decision to destroy herself and it. Then, in 1997, celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon scripted a fourth film in the series, Alien: Resurrection, which revived Ripley as an Alien/human hybrid clone.

When her identity is challenged, Ripley/Alien smiles, “I’m the monster’s mother,” equating motherhood with forced cloning in a lab. Realizing that Aliens have escaped, Ripley/Alien grins, later clarifying, “I’m finding a lot of things funny lately, but I don’t think they are.” Merging with the Alien has rendered her emotional responses irrational. As Ripley/Alien is anguished at being forced to destroy a room full of fellow clones, Ron Perlman’s pirate snorts “must be a chick thing”, in a franchise founded on transgressive gender-bending. Ripley/Alien weeps openly at the death of the Newborn, an Alien/human hybrid which has already devoured the brains of two people (including the film’s final person of color), which Brad Dourif’s scientist described as her “beautiful, beautiful little baby.” Whedon and director Jeunet thus systematically demolish Ridley Scott’s original metaphor by consistently representing Ripley’s experience of forced maternity as akin to both chosen motherhood and loss of self, and essentially different from the forced impregnation and reproductive coercion of the male characters.

Maternity may be forced, but motherhood is always voluntary. An adopted mother is a true mother, as Ripley is to Newt. An egg donor, a surrogate or a clone is not automatically a mother, as Ripley is not to the Newborn. Reducing the complexity of motherhood to automatic biology also implies that bad mothers are unnatural, rather than flawed humans, which aspiring writers may wish to explore in this Theme Week. As for Alien: Resurrection, Whedon’s ending was changed and he claims “they said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do.” However, three aspects of Whedon’s role as author of Alien: Resurrection still deserve scrutiny. Firstly, that it consistently rewrites and undermines the original feminist purpose of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Secondly, that it is only one of numerous dehumanizing portraits of forced maternity in the work of Joss Whedon. Thirdly, that Whedon’s status as a vocal male feminist does not restrain him from perpetuating this trope.

Sixteen percent of pregnant women surveyed by Lindsay Clark M.D. had been subjected to reproductive coercion (the sabotaging of birth control or the use of threat by male partners to force pregnancy). In a survey of women using family planning services, fully 35 percent of those who experienced partner violence had also been subjected to reproductive coercion. Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction is an iconic representation of terrifying reproductive coercion, but I can think of no equivalent portrayal of reproductive coercion by male characters targeting women, despite its staggering frequency in reality. Nobody wants to confront the possibility that a child might be unwanted, especially by their own mother. However, if we can’t admit that an acid-spitting, brain-eating Alien-child might ever, possibly, be unwanted, our denial has become dehumanizing. Male-authored horror, focusing disproportionately on women as victims of supernatural possession, almost invariably implies that women can be drained of selfhood and controlled by reproductive coercion, supporting the ideology of real-life abusers.

In The Omen, Gregory Peck’s father must confront and attempt to destroy his demon spawn while, in Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow’s mother gently rocks her demon spawn’s cradle with a tender smile. Paternity is an emotional bond mediated by rational judgment, while maternity inevitably entails loss of the rational self. Some female directors have challenged this trope. In Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, a mother’s love is alienated by her child’s sadism, joining the conflicted but humanized mothers of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Kimberley Peirce’s reimagined Carrie. Meanwhile, Roman “Rosemary’s Baby” Polanski, self-confessed rapist, has stated publicly that the birth control Pill “chases away the romance from our lives.” While celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon probably wouldn’t endorse that statement, his romanticized reproductive coercion nevertheless reflects that ideology.

Sady Doyle has praised Whedon’s Dollhouse for its exploration of the sinister implications of reducing women to manipulable male fantasy. As Doyle argues, Dollhouse can even be read as an interrogation of Whedon’s own role, as a writer who converts living actresses into creations of his fantasy. However, Doyle also highlights problems with the second season episode “Instinct,” which suggests that Echo’s being forcibly imprinted, to believe herself a mother, produces a biological response that cannot be erased, even though the woman’s entire personality can be erased, “because the Maternal Instinct has magical science-defying powers of undying devotion which are purely biological and not at all circumstantial” (Doyle’s words). Although the show’s entire point is the essential creepiness of depriving a human of consent, ‘Instinct’ suggests that the maternal instinct is capable of converting forced maternity into a positive experience. Nor is Dollhouse the only example of this.

Dawn, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is conceived by monks reprogramming the characters’ memories and emotions, echoing Dollhouse‘s premise. Since Dawn is an innocent and vulnerable being, Buffy’s decision to protect her is consistent with her established character as a natural rescuer, akin to Ripley’s decision to protect Newt at any cost. However, the show barely allows Buffy five minutes of outrage over the monks’ traumatic violation of her memories and emotional self (without even considering the implications of her fake robot pregnancy in the comics, or Black Widow’s becoming “monster” by sterilization because… dude). Like Echo’s positive experience of forced maternity, Buffy’s maternal instinct towards Dawn effectively cancels out the violation of Dawn’s conception. In the third season of Whedon’s Angel, the evil Darla’s entire personality alters through pregnancy, as she becomes mysteriously infected by the soul of her Prophecyfetus, recalling Ripley’s personality shift through Alien impregnation. Not only is Darla/Prophecyfetus redeemed by an explicitly unwanted pregnancy, but expresses her redemption through self-annihilation, staking herself to allow her baby’s birth.

Self-annihilation is likewise the ultimate expression of Buffy’s maternal instinct, the heroine killing herself for Dawn, her corpse bathed in the hopeful light of a new dawn (subtle). I can’t recall any comparable example of voluntary, fatherly self-annihilation as redemptive in the work of celebrated male feminist Joss Whedon (and even Michael Bay gave us Armageddon). Simon’s sacrifices, as adopted father-figure (and safeword-wielding controller) of sister River Tam, are rewarded with Kaylee’s love in Serenity, while Angel heroically chooses to wipe his son’s memory when paternity becomes too troublesome, and Giles dramatically rejects Buffy when she becomes too independent. Sure, there are complex undercurrents of male self-loathing and idolized female sacrifice going on here, but I can’t see how that actually empowers Whedon’s (routinely mind-controlled) women. As Angel points out in Angel‘s fourth season: “our fate has to be our own, or we’re nothing.” By this measure, Whedon’s women are constantly reduced to “nothing” by maternity.

When it comes to reproductive coercion, nothing beats the treatment of Cordelia Chase on Angel. Already forcibly impregnated by mind-controlling demon spawn in the first season’s “Expecting,” Cordelia agrees in “Birthday” to become half-demon herself, as an act of self-sacrifice to spare Angel from head-splitting visions. She eventually “transcends love” to become an omniscient “higher being” of pure light, but finds herself “so bored” by this power, echoing the vocal dissatisfaction of Whedon’s Ripley, Call, Buffy, Willow, Faith, and River Tam. If Whedon’s superstrong women didn’t all commiserate with each other about the terrible burden of power, they’d barely pass a Bechdel. In Season Four’s opener, Angel is trapped at the bottom of the sea, hallucinating visions of happiness with Cordelia. In one vision, Cordelia pledges her love as self-annihilation, foreshadowing the amnesia inflicted on her when she rejoins Angel, “I can’t remember what it was like, not knowing you”, before Angel vamps and drains her blood. At another vision’s cheerful feast, Cordelia exclaims “kill me now before my stomach explodes,” foreshadowing her next demon pregnancy, in which Cordy’s mind will be possessed yet again by the soul of her Doomfetus, just as Darla/Prophecyfetus and Ripley/Alien were.

Jasmine, the possessing being, forces Cordelia to seduce Angel’s son, Connor, primarily to provoke conflict between the male heroes, but also to conceive Jasmine’s Doomfetus vessel. Appearing in a vision, as the maternal mouthpiece of The Powers That Be, a reproductively purified and ex-evil Darla informs her son, Connor, that the fate of the world now depends on his choice, since Cordelia’s agency has been reproductively annihilated (Darla merely implies that last part). Cordelia is then forced into a coma by the birth of her demon spawn, just as Darla was dusted while giving birth, or Whedon’s Alien Queen decapitated by her Newborn. Meanwhile, Cordelia/Doomfetus has found time to bring forth a Doomsday Beast to destroy the sun (women are great at multitasking), forcing our hero, Angel, to lose his soul for various complex reasons, but mainly to confirm Cordy’s boundless power as mindless maternal mouthpiece. Powerful as she is, Cordelia’s lack of agency nevertheless reduces her, by Angel’s own logic, to “nothing.” Incidentally, Whedon’s treatment of actress Charisma Carpenter did nothing to dispel this impression.

Unmarried, pregnant Cordelia Chase is literally demonized

This feels familiar to an Irish viewer. Our feminine ideal, the “Wild Irish Woman,” gave us warrior goddesses, but never prevented pregnant girls being institutionalized as slave labor (a cultural demonizing of unmarried mothers criticized by Dorothy Macardle and Mairéad Ní Ghráda, before Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters and Stephen Frears’ Philomena drew international attention). Our pirate queen got her nationalist anthem, but our women had their pelvises broken by crippling symphysiotomy until the 1980s without anesthetic, for fear caesareans would encourage use of birth control. We boast history’s second female minister in government, army officer Constance Markievicz, but just last year, a woman raped by the murderers of people close to her underwent forced hydration (she was on hunger strike, becoming suicidal after five months pleading for an abortion) before a coerced C-section (her visa status prevented travel). Believe us, there is no connection whatsoever between celebrating women’s warrior spirit and respecting their reproductive rights. I’m a fan of Buffy. I also understand that teams of writers are involved, though Joss Whedon is ultimately responsible for the content of his television shows. I hate his portraits of reproductive coercion because this ideology repeatedly tortures and kills the most vulnerable women in my country. It’s nothing personal. Images of late-term abortions are commodified by Ireland’s forced maternity lobby, while the faces of suicidal rape victims and the corpses of women who died, denied medically necessary abortions, cannot be shown, ironically out of respect for their personhood; this is why fictional images of forced maternity become a battleground for hearts and minds. Ultimately, this torture of Ireland’s most vulnerable women is also the end goal of America’s forced maternity lobby.

* Yes, I know the rape scene in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is problematic. It’s not like the rapid rise in ass-kicking heroines was matched by a rise in female authorship. Time for a “Microscope on Male Feminists” feature?

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling, ducking and covering in anticipation of Whedonite backlash.

Vintage Viewing: Mabel Normand, Slapstick Star in Charge

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Mabel Normand was once known as “The Queen of Comedy” and “The Female Chaplin.” Her name was featured in the title of her shorts as their star attraction, which she soon parlayed into creative control as director. Normand mentored Charlie Chaplin as well as Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on to mentor Buster Keaton in his turn. Mabel is, therefore, a cornerstone in the development of the American slapstick auteur, but one whose role is regularly overlooked. Her indirect connection with scandals, from Hollywood shootings to Arbuckle’s sensational trial, was used to tarnish her image and spark campaigns to ban her films, exploited by what biographer Thomas Sherman calls “behind-the-scenes Hollywood power brokers seeking to reshape the existing order.” Because of her early death in 1930 from tuberculosis, Normand is now remembered mainly through portraits by male co-workers, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin, rather than her own words.

“Say anything you like, but don’t say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch. Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs. And get drunk.” – Mabel Normand (close friend of Mary Pickford)

Normand began her career as a model and bathing beauty. In 1910, she joined D.W. Griffith’s Biograph, where she met Mack Sennett and showed potential as a serious actress in The Squaw’s Love, The Mender of Nets and The Eternal Mother. At the rival Vitagraph, she was mentored in film comedy by the duo of Flora Finch and John Bunny, saying “every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies.” Comedienne Ruth Stonehouse had also been on the scene since 1907, but Normand would become the first director of this cinematic comedienne pack. As Mack Sennett’s lover, Normand left Biograph for Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in 1912. In 1914, Normand began to direct shorts and starred with her protégé, Charlie Chaplin, in Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length comedy, a fat-shaming extravaganza that nevertheless ends with solidarity between its female rivals and the rejection of their manipulative suitor. Dissatisfied with simplistic slapstick, Mabel strove for emotional authenticity, believing “if you seem to have any idea that you’re playing at something, you won’t get across” and claiming “no director ever taught me a thing.” Such naturalistic theories visibly influence the later aesthetic of Chaplin and Arbuckle. As Normand had in Mabel At The Wheel, Tamara de Lempicka would later use the image of driving to craft an icon of the empowered New Woman.

"Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti" - 1925 — “Self-portrait in the Green Bugatti” – 1925

In 1915, Normand’s engagement to Sennett broke up over his affair, with Normand suffering major concussion when rival Mae Busch hit her with a vase. This marked the end of Normand’s directing career, after less than two years. A male director would surely be assessed for future promise, yet even Normand’s defender, Thomas Sherman, writes dismissively that “she never had pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer.” Roscoe Arbuckle, however, highlighted Normand’s active collaboration, saying “Mabel alone is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture” (see Fatty and Mabel Adrift). Of Chaplin, Normand said, “We reciprocated. I would direct Charlie in his scenes, and he would direct me in mine. We worked together in developing the comedy action, taking a basic idea and constantly adding new gags.”

More than a collaborator, Normand’s biography contradicts claims of her limited ambition. Spurred to leave Keystone in 1916 by difficult relations with Mack Sennett, Sennett lured her back by offering her her own studio. The fact that Normand swallowed her pride, for the sake of her own studio, surely indicates how important creative control was to her. She dismissed three directors before handpicking F. Richard Jones to craft her star vehicle, tomboy Cinderella story Mickey, from a scenario by Anita “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes“ Loos. Normand was involved in every aspect of production. The release of Mickey was shelved for over a year, which Sennett blamed on lukewarm responses from distributors, pushing Normand to sign a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. Once released, Mabel Normand’s Mickey became the highest grossing film of 1918, only too late to save her studio.

Normand with Cheyenne co-star and friend, Minnie Devereaux

Mabel Normand was noted for her generosity in refraining from upstaging other performers, and for her insistence on a slapstick equality in which she took a pie to the face as often as she threw one, in shorts like That Ragtime Band. She was the original “girl tied to the train tracks” in Barney Oldfield’s Race For A Life, but rescued her love interest on screen as often as she was rescued. Normand’s slapstick should be appreciated for its pioneering stunt-work as much as comedy. Mabel’s stunts included: leading a lion on a string, piloting a plane, diving off a cliff into a river, wrestling a tame bear, riding a horse bareback, jumping off a second story roof, dangling from a third story roof, being thrown from a moving vehicle, being dragged through mud on a rope, brick-throwing fights, and driving speeding race cars.

Mabel’s Strange Predicament – 1914

“I had nobody to tell me what to do. Dramatic actresses had the stage to fall back on, the sure-fire hits of theatrical history in pose and facial expression; but I had to do something that nobody had ever done before.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being a filmmaking pioneer)

The film that developed Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, begins like later Chaplin films, with the pathos of the disheveled Tramp’s rejection by Mabel’s hard-hearted snob. The focus then shifts to Mabel’s own predicament, locked out of her room in pajamas and falling prey to farcically escalating sexual misunderstandings. Pajamas were considered so provocative that the film was banned in Sweden, explaining Mabel’s panic. Mabel’s own “sweetheart” almost strangles her after finding her under his friend’s bed (hiding from Chaplin’s persistent advances). Her sweetheart’s married friend reveals willingness to harass Mabel, as soon as the two are alone. A wedge is thereby driven between Mabel and Alice Davenport, who sees Mabel as sexual competition. In all this, Chaplin is utterly useless, blindly pressing his own suit. Only Mabel’s dog offers unconditional friendship. This kinship with animals would fuel many set-pieces in Mickey. Despite the film’s flippancy and happy ending, the overall impression is of a Mabel constantly stifled by the possessiveness of others.

By shifting the focus from Chaplin’s scorned heart to Mabel’s predicament, our interpretation of both characters shifts, too. Mabel begins the film as the snooty girl, but ends as the victim of exhausting demands on her affection. Conversely, Chaplin begins sympathetically as the archetypal Tramp – a whimsically drunken, lovelorn underdog – but ends as an oblivious and entitled sex pest. Most accounts agree that Chaplin was infatuated with Normand, fueling tension with Sennett. In Mabel’s Strange Predicament, we understand her beauty as a nuisance and hindrance to Mabel’s liberation, not a mere motivator for men. Perhaps the resulting unflattering impression of Chaplin explains the film’s top-rated IMDb review by Michael DeZubiria, calling it “a disappointment for Chaplin fans, but it is a curiosity piece to see what results when he works under a different, and far less talented, director.” A Cinema History, however, spotlights the skill of the “far less talented” 20-year-old Normand’s dynamic editing, keeping a tight pace with cross-cutting and short duration shots.

Suggested Soundtrack: TLC, “No Scrubz”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5WtaPhTMQo”]

Mabel At The Wheel – 1914

“I hated to be simply a means by which someone else was creating something.” – Mabel Normand (showing pretensions to being an auteur)

Mabel At The Wheel showcases Normand’s daring as a stuntwoman, brawling, tumbling from moving vehicles into mud, and racing cars. Its dynamic climax also shows her mastery of parallel editing, rapidly cutting between simultaneous events to build tension, a hallmark of her original mentor, D.W. Griffith. Mabel at the Wheel is the film where tensions with Chaplin exploded, with Sennett restrained from firing him only by distributors clamoring for more Chaplin pictures. IMDb’s trivia suggests that this is owing to Mabel being “quick to dismiss [Chaplin’s] own ideas for more refined comic business,” though her slapstick is visibly subtler and more naturalistic than Chaplin’s at this point. As Mabel at the Wheel itself depicts, when men fight over Mabel, it’s always Mabel who gets hit. Chaplin’s autobiography, My Life In Pictures, and Thomas Sherman both suggest the real problem was Chaplin’s inability to “countenance this girl, years younger than himself, directing him in his films,” despite Normand being his mentor in cinema. The jealous saboteur and shrieking bully that Chaplin plays in Mabel At The Wheel is therefore interesting, not only for contrasting with his later self-authored image, but for reflecting his reported behavior on set.

Chaplin never found a comic partnership to rival Mabel’s with Arbuckle, Margaret Dumont’s with Groucho Marx, Flora Finch’s with John Bunny, Lucille Ball’s with Vivian Vance or Stan Laurel’s with Oliver Hardy. He never again found, or perhaps permitted, a co-star with Mabel’s ability to rival both his physical daring and his emotional range, despite the undeniable spark this gives their interplay. A “Battle of the Sexes” angle, that debates whether Chaplin or Normand is more talented, surely misses the point: couldn’t both have grown to their fullest potential through equal collaboration? Wouldn’t Chaplin have sparked off madcap Mabel, as her naturalist theories inspired the developing emotional depth of his comedy? Wouldn’t Mabel, who had never performed comedy for a live audience, have developed discipline and sharper timing by learning from Chaplin’s years of vaudeville experience? Chaplin’s insecurity is not solely responsible for torpedoing Normand’s directing career, but his support could certainly have saved it.

Suggested Soundtrack: Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuDqb1mp4oo”]

Mabel’s Blunder – 1914

“To make a farce heroine more than a mere doll, you must think out the situation yourself and, above all, you must pay great attention to every little detail in the scene. The little bits of business that seem insignificant are what make good comedy“ – Mabel Normand

Mabel’s Blunder, written and directed by Normand, suffers from Mabel’s lack of a really talented co-star, but further develops themes from her earlier films. As Chaplin does in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Mabel’s boss and future father-in-law finds himself sexually harassing a man who has been substituted for Mabel, making male viewers imagine themselves as the harassed woman. Mabel’s forced smile, while harassed by her boss, pointedly contrasts with her privately expressed disgust. Normand again symbolizes her independence in Mabel’s Blunder by taking the wheel, posing as a chauffeur to spy on her cheating fiancé. Mistaken for a man, Mabel is attacked by a jealous suitor for talking to another woman, once more exploring how jealousy suffocates female freedom. Her cheating fiancé applauds the jealous suitor, exposing his double standards. The pointedness of this gender commentary is undermined, however, by a traditional happy ending in which the “other woman” is harmlessly revealed as the fiancé’s sister, while the implications of his own father’s harassing Mabel are never really confronted. All in all, Mabel’s gender reversals are not as biting as Alice Guy’s, but the two have a comparable comic perspective, a distinctive voice that was suppressed by the exclusion of female filmmakers.

Suggested Soundtrack: Yoko Ono, “What a Bastard the World Is”

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

While Lois Weber and Mabel Normand were helping to shape Hollywood’s cinematic style, back in Alice Guy’s homeland, France, Germaine Dulac was busily birthing experimental film and auteur theory. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist. Stay tuned!

Brigit McCone performs stand-up and cabaret, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and slapping sticks.

16 and Healthy: ‘My Mad Fat Diary’ Is Teen Girl Fat Positivity Gold

This guest post by Ariana DiValentino appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.

Considering the number of things media aimed at teenage girls typically gets wrong, it’s refreshing to see a mainstream TV program getting it very, very right. My Mad Fat Diary is a British series about Rae Earl (played by Sharon Rooney), a 16-year old girl who is big in size and bigger in personality. Having just been released from a stay in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, the show follows Rae struggling with mental health and body image issues alongside the slew of other issues that come with being a teenage girl: friends, school, sex, and family.

From the outset, the show’s approach to Rae’s weight is spot-on. She’s not particularly confident in her appearance (what 16-year-old is?), but she is trying her damnedest. Unlike the pitfalls many “lovable fat person” stories fall into, happiness and overall self-acceptance for Rae aren’t attached to her losing weight—not even under the common guise of “loving oneself enough to take care of your body.” Weight loss is rarely the question for Rae. Working toward her own mental health, with the help of her straight-talking therapist Dr. Kester (Ian Hart), constantly is.

What makes My Mad Fat Diary stand out is how it brings all of these topics to life in a way that is undeniably entertaining. For one thing, it’s set in 1996, with throwback outfits and a soundtrack to match. When it wants to be, the show is dead funny, and not in a slapstick or grotesque way centered around Rae’s size. When she makes genuine jokes at her own expense—on her own terms, it’s funny; when neighborhood hooligans do, it’s righteously nauseating. Rae herself is a clever, sharp-witted and outspoken character who pokes fun at everything and anything, making her friends laugh as often as viewers. Surrounded by a quirky band of friends and an unconventional home life (her flighty mother is harboring her younger, non-English-speaking, undocumented immigrant boyfriend Karim from Tunisia in the house), Rae may describe herself as “mad,” but she is often the sanest character of the cast.

Some of the show’s best jokes (as well as troves of heart-wrenching moments) stem from Rae’s fully budded sexuality. Here still, there’s much less temptation to laugh at Rae than with her. While Melissa McCarthy’s overt sexuality in Bridesmaids, for example, derives its humour at least as much from the idea of a horny but sexually undesirable woman as from McCarthy’s truly hilarious farcicality, Rae’s sexuality doesn’t position her size as the butt of its joke. Rather, her private thoughts read like a Cosmo column that’s more colorful than internet literotica and yet more relatable than either of the two. Anyone who’s been a sexually frustrated adolescent can appreciate phrases like “sculpted piece of testosterone wonder” and her general outlook on butts. If only we had all had Rae’s wicked sense of humour at 16, not to mention her complete comfort with her own desires.

Rae’s maturity is about on par for her age, and as such, we cringe as she blunders through conflicts with boys, friends, and worst of all, her mother, with youthful brashness. Her adolescent perspective is written to a T, best exemplified in the sixth episode of Series 2, “Not I,” in which Rae is forced to confront the events of the past several months through the eyes of her pretty, popular, but equally insecure best friend, Chloe. Rae may be naïve at times, but the show itself is far from myopic. Even older viewers will be along for the ride as Rae deals with anxieties—such as her aversion to eating in front of people—that are perfectly expressed and at times, truly heartbreaking in their honesty.

And therein lies what makes the show such a wonderful example of fat positivity and feminism—Rae is, per her own description, mad and fat, but it takes less than a single episode to make it abundantly clear that she is so much more than that. Rae’s character and her problems are just so real. It’s rare enough for teenage girls to see positive representations of themselves onscreen, and even less so for those outside the typical beauty norms. Rae Earl is an extremely well-developed, well-written character—one we could all afford to take a cue from now and then when it comes to speaking up for others and advocating for our own well-being. My Mad Fat Diary and shows like it deserve to flood the airwaves from here to Lincolnshire.

Ariana DiValentino is a lover and budding creator of all things film and feminism, based in New York. Catch her in action on Twitter @ArianaLee721.

“Men’s Vows Are Women’s Traitors”: Helen Mirren Runs the Chastity Gauntlet in Shakespeare’s ‘Cymbeline’

After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin'. — Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin’.

Written by Brigit McCone.

Plots were not Shakespeare’s strong point. He borrowed most from history or other authors, before illuminating them with psychological insight and philosophical depth. One of his final plays, 1611’s Cymbeline, is particularly jarring because the Bard is actually plagiarizing (“reimagining”?) himself: King Cymbeline (King Lear) becomes enraged and imprisons his only daughter, Imogen (Desdemona/Cordelia), for daring to marry “poor but worthy gentleman” Posthumus (Othello), who is exiled and meets cynic Iochimo (Iago), provoking Posthumus to bet that Iochimo can’t seduce super-chaste Imogen. Iochimo fakes proof of Imogen’s infidelity, being Iago and all, so Posthumus flies into Othellish rage and orders Imogen killed. Imogen discovers the order and flees in drag (she’s also Portia and Viola) as “Fidele” (she’s faithful, get it?), taking a death-simulating drug along the way (did I mention she’s Juliet?) There’s a wise woman and a cryptic tree prophecy that comes true unexpectedly (unless you’ve seen Macbeth). We’re one suicidal Dane short of a Greatest Hits album here.

After five or six more annoying coincidences, the plot somehow resolves. But hang in there because, as ever, there’s human truth lurking in Shakespeare’s narrative tangle, and Cymbeline is probably his most feminist play. In theaters now: a radical new version with Ethan Hawke, that aims to prove the play really is interesting, by burying its interesting exploration of female fidelity and male double standards under guns! Bikers! Testosterone! And soldiers! If you watch the trailer closely, you may briefly glimpse Dakota Johnson, playing Shakespeare’s lead:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulaGT6b8tgg”]

Grit! Shakespeare! Guns! Blank Verse! Testosterone! Manpain! Grrr!

Centering the woman is admittedly a dramatic weakness of Cymbeline, though not as dramatically weak as its plot. The crushing double standards of Shakespeare’s age demanded purity from a heroine, unstained by the fascinating flaws of Lear, Othello, Hamlet or Macbeth. Imogen is, honestly, a little dull. Shakespeare’s good servant, Pisanio, pointedly calls Imogen “more goddess-like than wife-like” in her endless forbearance. But crucially, jealous Posthumus repents his rage before discovering Imogen’s innocence. Where murder was the conventional response to female infidelity, at least on stage, Shakespeare has his hero turn on the audience, while still believing his wife guilty, and demand, “you married ones, if each of you should take this course, how many must murder wives much better than themselves for wrying but a little?” (Screw biker gangs; where’s Deepa Mehta‘s update confronting arranged marriage and honor killing?)

Though Shakespeare is limited to absolute chastity in his heroine, he subversively tests the play’s men with Imogen’s dilemmas, demanding female fidelity be equated with male. Luckily for Bitch Flickers, there’s a 1982 BBC adaptation smart enough to cast Helen Mirren and let her rip. Mirren breathes full-blooded life and passion into Imogen, adding conflict and doubt to her dull purity. Her Imogen is faithful, not by natural chastity, but by choice. From the opening, Shakespeare evokes possessive claustrophobia, with Posthumus gifting Imogen “a manacle of love. I place it upon this fairest prisoner.”

Posthumus' manacle of love — Posthumus’ manacle of love

For her loyalty to Posthumus, Imogen is condemned as “disloyal thing” by her father, King Cymbeline, who demands that she marry his royal stepson, Cloten. Yet, when Cymbeline hears his own wife’s deathbed confession that she never loved him, only “affected greatness” (wanted his rank and wealth), he gasps: “but that she spake it dying, I would not believe her lips in opening it.” King Lear’s expectations clash with Othello’s. Imogen’s conflicting loyalties are embodied by Pisanio, a servant forced to swear loyalty to two masters, who justifies choosing the heart over vows: “wherein I am false, I am honest. Not true, to be true.” Compare Lady Macbeth: though stereotyped as a scheming manipulator, her inner monologues are devoid of personal ambition and filled with her need to fulfil her husband’s desires, taking the burden of his guilt upon herself. In her sleepwalking, she feels Macbeth’s victims sticking to her hands, even those of which she had no warning. Lady Macbeth ruins her husband, not out of selfishness, but out of a love so selfless that it sacrifices her moral judgment and her very identity. If only she had known when to be “not true, to be true.”

Imogen: "what is it to be false?" — Imogen: “What is it to be false?”

As Iochimo claims Imogen has cheated with him, our “worthy” Posthumus seems eager to believe the oath of this stranger over his wife’s vows, even when reminded by bystanders that the proofs are not absolute. Convinced of Imogen’s guilt, Posthumus launches into a misogynist rant, revealing paternity fraud as the root of his anxiety – “we are all bastards!” – as well as scapegoating male flaws on women – “there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part.” But his bet’s true motive is rather suggested by Iochimo: “he must be weighed by her value.” Imogen’s virtue is Posthumus’ status symbol, while Iochimo himself seems driven to prove the falsity of all womankind, as if the mere possibility of female loyalty would imply Iochimo’s responsibility for provoking past disloyalty. As objectifying is a classic strategy for denying your own impact on another, so Iochimo longs to “buy ladies’ flesh” in some way that will guarantee its not “tainting.”

This insecure craving for guaranteed affection becomes the counterproductive engine of his repulsiveness. Robert Lindsay’s Iochimo is like polished igneous rock: the hard, glittering bitterness of a cooled eruption. As he smuggles himself inside Imogen’s bedchamber, to memorize its decorations and the moles of her body as proofs of infidelity, Iochimo even peers into her bedside book, finding “the leaf’s turned down where Philomel gave up.” Philomel was a mythical Grecian heroine raped by her brother-in-law, whose tongue was torn out to prevent her testifying, an image central to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Lindsay’s choked gasp makes it clear that his character interprets Imogen’s reading matter as rape fantasy. Is she reading Philomel’s story as a cautionary tale, or has the pressure of stifling chastity really provoked “hot dreams” (Iochimo’s words) about the release of imaginary ravishment? Is it any of our damn business?

Iochimo, wearing Imogen's stolen manacle while being a creeper — Iochimo, wearing Imogen’s stolen manacle while being a creeper

Though restraining himself from rape, Iochimo’s compulsive need to test and “prove” Imogen’s virtue is itself a violation. By referencing Philomel, Shakespeare reminds us of Imogen’s vulnerability, which the 1982 production underlines by Iochimo’s hovering shirtless over her as she sleeps, monitoring her every sigh. We must remember that our noble hero, Posthumus, has given letters of recommendation to this total stranger, along with a hefty bribe to rape his wife (theoretically, “seduce” her), because Posthumus is willing to accept proof of sex (not of consent) as evidence of Imogen’s betrayal. Though Posthumus swears the deepest love for Imogen, his underlying misogyny (“there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part”) has driven him to betray her utterly, ironically to test her faithfulness. As Imogen howls, when she discovers his suspicion: “men’s vows are women’s traitors!” Posthumus’ vow of love betrayed Imogen into believing herself exempted from his misogyny. But conditional pardons are no security. As Mirren mutters, ripping up love letters, all his scriptures are turned to heresy. There are many ways to break faith.

Tragically, Imogen lived before the invention of chocolate chip ice cream

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest… meet Belarius, Cymbeline’s bravest soldier who, maddened by false accusations of treachery, kidnapped the king’s infant boys and raised them as his own. This apparently irrelevant subplot introduces the idea of unjust suspicion avenged by paternity fraud, just as Pisanio voiced Imogen’s divided loyalty. Belarius’ motive, “beaten for loyalty excited me to treason”, equally justifies Imogen in infidelity, by masculine logic. When his sons are returned to Cymbeline, the king asks if they are indeed his. Belarius does not answer “yes,” but “as sure as you your father’s.” Shakespeare proposes that no-one, male or female, can ever truly be verified. At least, not by the objective measure that Iochimo aspires to. Trusting their hearts alone, Imogen and her long-lost brothers love each other, without knowing their kinship.

Belarius, meanwhile, proves his “honest” courage fighting Romans, rallying fleeing Britons by yelling that only deer should be slaughtered while running away: “Britain’s harts die flying, not our men.” The pun is appropriate. Male culture promotes valor in warfare, but justifies defensive cowardice in love, provoking the very ruin it most fears. Britain’s hearts die flying, like its harts. Bayonets, bullets or biker gangs, they’re still metaphors for sexual insecurity. As in the battle, where some were “turned coward but by example” and needed only a rallying cry to regain courage, so Posthumus’ blistering “you married ones…” speech rallies Shakespeare’s audience to a more courageous love, where chastity is a faithful heart, not a flaunted status symbol: “I will begin the fashion, less without and more within.”

In a blind chaste test, 3 out of 4 women preferred Posthumus — In a blind chaste test, three out of four women preferred Posthumus

Shakespeare not only explores the hypocrisy of chastity testing and daughterly duty, but the exhausting demands of unwanted attention. Imogen’s suitor, Cloten, seeks to win her by conventional expressions of love, serenading her with music to make her obligated. Tellingly, he describes this wooing as battle – “I have assailed her with musics” – urging his fiddlers and singer “if you can penetrate her with your fingering, so we’ll try with tongue too” to emphasize the violation of his unconsensual serenading. If she yields, Imogen betrays Posthumus. If she remains silent, her silence will be taken for yielding. Finally, she is provoked into telling Cloten that she hates him, that if every hair of his head were a man like him, she would prefer Posthumus’ rags to the lot of them. Cloten takes this insult as provocation to plot the rape of Imogen. There’s just no escaping the bind of his manacle of love. At least, not until he tries that arrogant attitude on a man, and gets his head lopped off. Gotta love Will. A fiery Helen Mirren dominates, as she battles through Shakespeare’s chastity gauntlet. If only her exasperated “but that you shall not say I yield, being silent, I would not speak” felt less familiar to today’s woman.

By the finale, the Queen and Cloten, heartless plotters of murder and rape, are dead. But what of Posthumus, whose insecurity would enable a stranger to rape his wife? What of Cymbeline, shocked at his own wife’s lovelessness, but demanding loveless marriage for his daughter? What of Belarius, honest warrior but paternity fraudster? What of Iochimo, self-loathing “tainter” of womankind? Forgiveness is their punishment, conscience their natural judge. Though Iochimo stole Imogen’s “manacle of love” as false proof of her infidelity, he accepts his heart must bleed in its trap. Karma’s a bitch. Britons make voluntary peace with Romans. King Cymbeline declares: “pardon’s the word… to all!” After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Aren't double standards some bullshit, for sooth? — Aren’t double standards some bullshit, for sooth?

Brigit McCone can rant for days about how misunderstood Lady Macbeth is. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and working “a breach in nature for ruin’s wasteful entrance” into everyday conversation.

Being the Sun – Women and Power in ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 11

Is this Rhimes saying to all us die-hard female ‘Grey’s fans that we as women need to take the focus off of other people and put it back on ourselves in order to be the best version of, well, us? It certainly seems that way.

This is a guest post by Alize Emme.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read unless you have watched all current episodes of Grey’s Anatomy Season 11.

Grey’s Anatomy has long been a show about love stories. The show’s tagline when it premiered in March of 2005 was “Operations. Relations. Complications.” Relationships have always been part of the game. Showrunner and producer Shonda Rhimes has created characters who season after season will do just about anything in the name of love – specifically, the female characters. Type “Craziest Things Grey’s Anatomy Characters Have Done For Love” into Google and the Izzie Stevens entry page of Wikipedia is the first result.

But this season, Season 11, has turned that theme on its head. The female characters are no longer doing things just for love; they’re doing things for themselves.

Rhimes deserves a lot of credit for creating a show about women who embrace their sexuality. And while critics over the years have questioned the idea that a medical drama could also be a romantic soap, Rhimes has shown that women can be sexually active AND successful, which is why focusing on just women getting back to their true selves feels like a natural and important transition for this show.

So far, this season has been about women standing in their power and kicking ass. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), who is definitely not the least interesting Grey’s character, is especially kicking in the ass department.

At the end of season 10, which saw the departure of beloved character and Meredith BFF, Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh), the two twisted sisters dance it out one last time – but not before Cristina offers some crucial parting words. In her Cristina way, she tells Meredith that Derek Shepard (Patrick Dempsey), aka McDreamy, aka Meredith’s husband, is “very dreamy. But he is not the sun. You are.” After ten years together and a relationship Rhimes says is based on her own Cristina, this is what her last words are. Essentially, stop revolving your life around Derek, start revolving around yourself… Or, you know, something more eloquent and science-y, but nevertheless make yourself a priority!

If ever there were a theme that needed to be explored in 42 minutes not including commercials on network television, this would be it!

During the multi-episode absence of Derek McDreamy Shepard, Meredith has made herself a priority and is quite literally kicking ass and taking names. And those names? They’re the names of all the people Meredith has consecutively saved since Derek has been gone. Yes, while her husband is away on a fancy project for POTUS, Meredith is 90 names deep in the lifesaving department. She literally hasn’t lost a patient since Nov. 14 of last year (Grey’s is real time, real world so, a while). And when Derek does return? Streak over. Patient gone.

This idea, this storyline that Meredith is at the top of her game when all the other factors in her life are taken out of the equation is so impactful. Her husband is across the country doing a job he thinks is more important than hers; her kids are being doted on by a sister-in-law and a surprise half-sister. All Meredith has to do is focus on Meredith and that means focusing on surgery. Is this Rhimes saying to all us die-hard female Grey’s fans that we as women need to take the focus off of other people and put it back on ourselves in order to be the best version of, well, us? It certainly seems that way.

Meredith isn’t the only female character who’s seen a general life resurgence this season. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) makes the completely gut-wrenching, completely unforeseen, and completely sense-making decision to end her relationship with Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw) because she has lost herself in the marriage. Callie used to dance around in her underwear; she used to be a badass bone surgeon. Despite still loving Arizona, Callie realizes being away from Arizona was the first time she truly started to find herself again. Callie makes the decision to stop trying to fix her marriage. A bold and heart-breaking choice, but Callie is choosing Callie and that’s what is most important.

Callie and Arizona’s heartbreaking break up. — Callie and Arizona’s heartbreaking breakup.

Amelia Shepard (Caterina Scorsone), who is not only Derek’s sister but also his replacement as head of neurosurgery, has also proven she can stand on her own two feet. After deciding she is the only brain surgeon who can remove Nicole Herman’s (Geena Davis) life-threatening tumor, she literally has to solidify herself not as Derek’s baby sister, not as a recovering addict, but as a badass brain surgeon. During a critical moment of self-doubt, when Amelia asks Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.), her unofficial sober companion, to bring Derek back from Washington to save her in the middle of surgery, Richard gives Amelia a similar speech Cristina gave to Meredith. “Derek isn’t here,” he tells her. “YOU’RE here.” In other words, Derek can’t save her; Derek isn’t “the sun.” Amelia needs to step out of Derek’s shadow and own her power. She not only rocks her surgery, but saves Herman’s life. She also earns herself a spot in the Derek Is No Longer The Sun Club.

All other female characters are doing their part to be awesome this season, too. Stephanie Edwards (Jerrika Hinton) is off being a superhero with Amelia. Newcomer Herman saves unborn babies and beats a terminal brain tumor. Arizona is Herman’s living legacy, saving babies left and right with magical knowledge and was basically Herman’s life saving catalyst. Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington) is the one who realized Meredith’s streak of bad ass-ness. April Kepner (Sarah Drew) is taking a tragedy and using it to better herself. And Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is using her voice to stand up for those who aren’t always heard. Bailey is also married to Ben, so let’s be real, Bailey wins by just waking up in the morning.

Let’s take a moment here to acknowledge Maggie Pierce (Kelly McCreary). I definitely had the thought earlier this season: Does Meredith Grey really need another sister? But Maggie is the sister Meredith needs and deserves. She’s the sister everyone needs and deserves. She fills a Cristina void, a Derek void and, most importantly, she’s just really good. She’s a good cardiothoracic surgeon, she’s a good sister, she’s a good friend. And she’s normal! Like, aside from not being able to form constructive sentences around attractive men, she is basically the most normal and balanced character Grey’s Anatomy has ever seen. So, yay for Maggie who apparently has been around in theory since Season 4.

Maggie Pierce just being her likeable self.

The male characters this season, while always interesting, have definitely taken a step back story-wise to make room for these women to really shine. Seasoned Grey’s fans will remember the days when the male characters were much more of a force to be reckoned with, adding a sexual undertone to all hospital activities. And as much as I, and every other viewer, loved Mark McSteamy Sloan, he was basically a walking sex education class.

Really this season has been about self-reflection, loss, and healing for the male characters. Richard is coming to terms with discovering a daughter he didn’t know he had. Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) is navigating being Meredith’s “person” while realizing he’s in it for the long haul with Jo. Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams) is coping with the loss of his unborn child. Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) is dealing with the loss of Cristina. And Derek is busy crossing lines with a woman who is not his wife.

While we know now that Derek did in fact kiss his subordinate, we also know that Meredith has handled Derek’s suspected infidelity with serene stability. The moment that really solidified Meredith’s coming into her own? During last week’s episode (1117) when Derek came back from Washington D.C. refusing to reveal his assignations, he told Meredith he cannot live without her. To which Meredith says she can live without him. Derek is no longer the sun in this moment. Meredith has found who she is without her husband. Of course, Meredith then says she doesn’t want to live without Derek, but still, Meredith is now revolving around Meredith and Derek is just some passing comet, pretty to look at but not a crucial heavenly body in this planetary system.

“You guys are a freaking romance novel,” Callie says to Meredith about her relationship with Derek. Everyone is pulling for these two. But what happens next is anyone’s guess. Meredith can survive without Derek. So Derek needs to majorly step up.

MerDer, the Living Romance Novel – kidding.

Every once in a while I’ll catch a bit of fan-generated Grey’s Anatomy reviews online. And if you are one of the surprising number of confused people who have no idea why the end title card for episode 1112 was a freeze frame image of Meredith jumping on a bed in her underwear — well, I’m going to tell you!

Season 11 has been all about Meredith getting back to who she really is. Instead of going to D.C. to work on her marriage, she checks into a crappy airport motel and works on herself. She watches movies, raids the mini bar, and, yes, strips down to her skivvies and jumps like a kid on the bed.

That whimsical image (set to the fantastic song “Priory” by The Weekend), is the message of this entire season and something we as women, and everyone, should be doing:

Get back to yourself, put yourself first, love yourself first.

A powerful message from Shonda Rhimes and the Grey’s writers, indeed!

Alize Emme is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Film & Television from NYU and tweets at @alizeemme.