Tag: Female Sexuality

Female Sexuality is the Real Horror in ‘Womb’

Womb poster
Written by Erin Tatum.

Today, I wanted to talk about a little film called Womb. It’s not very well known – Doctor Who fans will recognize it as one of Matt Smith‘s leading roles before his TARDIS fame. The film presents a fascinating introspective on the ethics of cloning while at the same time highlighting the difficulty of differentiating types of love, putting an oddly poignant spin on the sci-fi genre. Above all else, I enjoy director Benedek Fliegauf’s unabashed aggressiveness in deconstructing everything we romanticize about childhood and then punching us in the throat with our own sentimentality.

The symbolism of this fetus is going to get exponentially creepier.

First of all, the setting and cinematography is breathtakingly gorgeous in the most depressing way possible. The characters are constantly surrounded by haunting, saturated bleakness. This proves to be an effective backdrop for the ensuing emotional turmoil while underscoring the overarching question of morality that plagues the main character, Rebecca. The opening voice over is Rebecca’s exhausted yet serene affirmation that “it’s over now” and that her presumably dead lover has left her with a final parting blessing of pregnancy. If you haven’t looked up an overview of the plot, you are probably thinking that this is going to be a powerful romantic drama that ends in the tragedy of death mixed with the hope of the baby’s promise for the future. You’d be about a quarter right. It’s about to get all Freudian up in here.

Savor the wholesomeness while you can.

We begin by watching the blossoming childhood romance between Rebecca and her neighbor, Tommy. They are inseparable, spending all day playing together and developing little rituals unique to their friendship. Everything seems perfect until Rebecca announces that she and her mother are moving to Japan. Tommy awkwardly kisses Rebecca and she runs embarrassed out of the room. It’s genuine and heartfelt enough to make me almost forget my annoyance that we force heterosexuality on children by romanticizing the hell out of every opposite sex friendship, but I’ll let it slide because damn these kids are adorable. Later, he tells her that he has a plan to rescue her in the morning before she leaves. Alas, Tommy fails to show up and Rebecca leaves without saying goodbye. 

The one appropriate instance of romantic chemistry in this film.

After completing university, Rebecca returns to her original home in England. Of course, her secret primary motivation is to find Tommy, who just happens to live in the exact same place because apparently childhood defines your entire existence. Tommy dumps his current girlfriend like a sack of hot potatoes the second Rebecca finds him and the two attempt to pick up their relationship where they left off, except now with hormones and stuff. They briefly kiss, but Rebecca puts the brakes on, telling him it feels weird. Oh honey, if only you knew. She insists on accompanying Tommy to protest the opening of a national park filled with cloned animals. While they’re driving, Rebecca suddenly announces that she really has to pee. Tommy pulls the car over so that Rebecca can pee in a bush. He decides to exit the car for some reason and is promptly struck and killed by another car, marking the only time in cinematic history that a full bladder has served as the catalyst for the entirety of a film’s central dramatic plot.

Not yolo? Oh no.

Rebecca feels responsible for Tommy’s death and tells his grieving parents that they can totally bring him back because Rebecca plans to impregnate herself with his clone! Tommy’s mom is rightfully appalled, but Tommy’s dad is just like “Whatever, you do you.” This is the part where this film starts making your skin crawl. It’s really sweet and noble and you know Rebecca is willing to put herself through the inevitable confusion out of love for Tommy. However, it’s shortsighted and selfish and adds a whole new stratosphere to the definition of pedophilia, because it’s obvious that on some level, Rebecca chooses to bring Tommy back out of regret that they never consummated their relationship. Carrying a fetus with the subconscious intention of having sex with that future person somewhere down the line is a part of the id that I never want to think about. That said, this decision marks an important shift in how Rebecca’s sexuality is perceived. She declares herself to be a literal vehicle of perversion. From here on out, her desires are marked as obsessive, predatory, and unnatural, which is a striking contrast to when her innocence and devotion to Tommy was celebrated within the sanctity of revived childhood romance just a few weeks ago.
Just casually huffing my son’s preteen pheromones nbd.

Tommy’s parents decide that watching the clone version of Tommy grow up would be too painful and move away, leaving Rebecca to raise him on her own. She decides to tell her son that his father is the original Tommy, who died in a car accident before he was born. We jump forward to where cloned Tommy is the same age as the original Tommy was when he and Rebecca first met. Rebecca’s affections toward him are thus a bit too intimate – stroking his face a little too long, deeply inhaling the scent of his skin, sitting naked with him in the bathtub even though Tommy is clearly too old to need assistance. Eva Green, the actress who plays older Rebecca, does a great job of representing the bizarre fusion of the butterflies from your first crush with more physical adult desires. These scenes just left me wondering how on earth they explained this dynamic to the child actor. “Okay, you’re going to be in love with a girl your age and then come back later as a cloned version of your character, only now you don’t know that your former girlfriend is actually your mom. She still has a wildly inappropriate crush on you, but just act oblivious until it becomes relevant to the plot again.” I know that sometimes a film crew won’t explain darker themes to child actors to protect them, but surely they had to give him a heads up about this. I would be concerned if I were 11 and the 20-something actress playing my mom was sensuously smelling my neck.

Mother and child reunion…bow chicka wow wow.

My confusion was rather explicitly cleared up soon enough, when a playful mother-son wrestling match quickly progresses into a steamy moment of sexually charged flirting. Tommy pins Rebecca to the ground, forcefully straddling her. With an impish grin on his face, he breathlessly declares, “I could do whatever I want with you,” and there’s a little too much pleasure and excitement in his triumphant tone. The cataclysm of taboos makes this scene the most significant of the film in terms of social commentary on sexuality. For all of the times we want to pathologize Rebecca’s desires as the source of the problem, this exchange very much implicates Tommy in that deviance. The binary between childhood innocence and adult depravity is not as polarized as we’d like to think. Children can be sexual too, a cringe-inducing reality that society desperately tries to bury by creating strict scripts of innocence and chastity for childhood romance, immortalized by Hallmark cards and Hummel figurines.
Beyond making a case for the existence of children’s sexuality, Tommy’s actions also indicate that his desires may be a bit sadistic, only further shattering the haven of pre-pubescence. He clearly enjoys dominating Rebecca, tauntingly putting his face inches from hers knowing full well, even if only subconsciously, that they’re both in the heat of the moment and teetering on some level of sexual release. Again, we’re talking about 11-year-old Tommy. I also think that this is one of those moments that’s supposed to minimize the incest factor by implying that cloned Tommy has some sort of unconscious ESP link to the memories and feelings of original Tommy, but that small scrap of comfort is totally obliterated by the fact that you’re witnessing a completely consensual erotic moment between an adult and a child. Rebecca gasps, “Go ahead,” but the two are interrupted by Tommy’s friend calling his name. Tommy deliberately lets his face hover above Rebecca’s for a few more seconds, seemingly relishing her helplessness and obvious desperation. If you don’t think Tommy is now complicit in whatever freaky dynamic is going on here, you’re delusional. I found myself wishing that he would kiss her just to break the tension and then immediately wanted to drink myself to death for even letting the thought cross my mind. He reluctantly stands up and walks over to his friend, leaving Rebecca sprawled out in the sand and looking uncomfortably close to orgasm.
Genetic engineering: a proven birthday ruiner.
Rumors about Tommy being a clone isolate him from his friends because their mothers don’t want them to be associated with a “copy.” No one shows up for Tommy’s birthday party. The whole idea of clones as a metaphor for any oppressed minority that experiences overt discrimination might be more effective if the main character hadn’t gestated her boyfriend’s clone with the primary purpose of acting out her repressed childhood sexual urges, but at least it’s a valiant attempt. Tommy’s bewilderment at his sudden outcast status does pull at your heartstrings. Conveniently, Tommy’s new lack of social life means that Rebecca will be his only support system growing up. I’m sure that will only make their relationship healthier! Ah, there’s nothing like an incestuous dystopia to carry you through those troubled teen years.
This is awkward enough without the Freudian possessiveness.
Just in case you weren’t horrified enough yet, the unresolved sexual tension between Tommy and Rebecca is about to skyrocket off the Richter scale. Like his mother, Tommy returns to his childhood home, now the same age as when the original Tommy died. Unhappily for Rebecca, he arrives with his girlfriend, Monica, in tow. Rebecca mopes around the house, taking every opportunity to be jealous and pouty. She seems particularly disillusioned when she goes to wake Tommy, only to discover Monica in bed with him and connect the dots that they probably had sex the night before. The implication is that Rebecca has been single and celibate ever since the original Tommy died. On one hand, our sympathy leans toward her because she has sacrificed everything for Tommy and it’s a sad juxtaposition to watch her plateau in loneliness while Tommy’s life is filled with friends and opportunities.
Rebecca sulking over Monica’s failed olive branch pastries.
Still, here Rebecca’s motives start to acquire a distinctly vindictive, bitter undertone that erodes her original justification of everlasting love and devotion. She’s pissed that her relationship with clone Tommy hasn’t magically replicated into her romance with original Tommy, but she forgets that they’re different people and Tommy has no obligation to simply pick up the life of his original where it left off. Plus, her warped nostalgia creates impossibly high expectations on several counts, considering she never told him the truth and she should have anticipated that Tommy isn’t supposed to want to have sex with his own mother. Womb has a weird tendency to humanize incest in ways that make you feel dirty for even contemplating the scenario enough to formulate an opinion.
Giving new meaning to the phrase “sexy fishnets.”
Rebecca’s hostility toward Monica creates tension in Tommy’s relationship with Monica. Monica senses the growing distance between them and tries to keep their relationship alive with lots of flirting and sex, much to Rebecca’s chagrin. Despite Monica’s best efforts, everything falls apart when yet another play fight derails into not-so-subtle passion, culminating in Tommy shoving his head under Rebecca’s shirt. Monica has been watching them and realizes that they both look a little too aroused for family fun, prompting her to storm off. Tommy once again lets his face linger near Rebecca’s before chasing after Monica, giving her a particularly intense Stare of Rediscovered Lust with Inevitably Dramatic Consequences. That Tommy sure knows how to leave a lady wanting more. It’s a shame he only seems to be at the top of this game when he’s fighting off oedipal sexual urges.
This moment is too sad for a witty caption.
The last screw of Rebecca’s fantasy comes loose when Tommy runs into the original Tommy’s mother, feeling an eerie familiarity with her. He can no longer stand Rebecca’s silence and demands concrete answers about his genealogy. Rebecca caves and shows him old footage of the original Tommy protesting. He berates Rebecca for lying to him his whole life. It’s all quite heartbreaking and raw and I had to crank down my sound because Matt Smith’s anguish is so visceral it’s terrifying. The subtext that was once relegated to awkward pauses and unspoken taboos rapidly shifts to fear. Tommy rapes Rebecca and it’s brutally carnal, especially when compared to his naively bewildered romantic interactions as the Doctor (skip to the 2:15 mark and marvel at the sheer volume of flailing). The experience is filled with tears and anger and is so very obviously the opposite of everything Rebecca has been dreaming of for the past two decades.
I’m sure he’s off to more dismal horizons.
Tommy departs quietly and alone soon after the incident. The viewer knows that he impregnated Rebecca. The ultimate consensus of the film seems to be Rebecca making peace with the pain that both Tommys have caused her because now she will have Tommy’s child, which is implied to be the fulfillment she was searching for all along. This bittersweet romanticism appears to gloss over the fact that clone Tommy is a rapist, but I guess that puts us back at sum zero in terms of morality judgments. Rebecca was punished throughout the film for allowing her sexuality to transcend even the laws of mortality. Womb might be insinuating that female desire is the root of all evil, but then again, no one else walks away squeaky clean either.

‘The Lifeguard’: A Female Anti-Hero on the Cusp of 30

The Lifeguard movie poster.
 
 
Written by Leigh Kolb
 
There’s something about 30.
When I turned 30 last summer, a switch went off inside of me–I was restless, searching and stuck deep in nostalgic thoughts, wanting to be 19 again. I was ruminating about this with my husband and he interjected, “I have indigestion.” I stared at him, and reminded him that I was having an existential crisis. “Hey, you’re dealing with 30,” he said. “I’m dealing with 31.”
I know that my experience is not special or unusual (another 30 realization–my life is really fucking normal, even though I’ve always thought otherwise), and a plethora of films support that theory. The latest film in the catalog of this kind of life crisis (oh, I guess it has a ridiculous name–the “thrisis”) is The Lifeguard, which was written and directed by Liz W. Garcia.
Leigh London (Kristen Bell) is an Associated Press reporter in New York City, and she’s having an affair with her betrothed boss. She covers a story on a tiger that was kept captive in a city apartment and died–and something clicked. She clearly sees herself as this tiger, locked up and trapped, and needs to get out.
She heads back to her hometown in Connecticut to stay with her parents. “I need some time out of my life,” she explains. Leigh–who was always a high-achiever (she was valedictorian)–decides to work as a lifeguard for the summer, just like she did when she was a teenager.
I normally don’t like to bring myself into film reviews, but there are some things you need to know. I was a mild high-achiever in high school and felt unfulfilled with my first jobs out of college, which were in journalism. I was a lifeguard in high school and college. In my scriptwriting course in graduate school, I pitched my final full-length semi-autobiographical screenplay as “like Garden State, but with a female protagonist” (“not enough action,” grumbled my professor). See above, in re: “thrisis.”
My name is Leigh.
I felt like there was a lot riding on this film for me.
Overall, The Lifeguard didn’t disappoint. Well, it didn’t disappoint me. It’s been getting largely unfavorable reviews, most of which echo the idea that this story has been overdone. But most stories have been overdone, and with a plot like this, there’s good reason–this moment in life is full of crises and tensions and people can relate to it.
“I’m the fucking lifeguard, motherfuckers.”
While there are a few minor questionable plot points and it sometimes feels like a first feature independent film (which it is), I was struck by the realistic portrayal of a life hanging in the balance between adulthood and the ache for youth.
Even the moments that felt unbelievable or clunky–well, that’s part of it. That’s part of trying to figure things out.
The filmography and soundtrack were lovely, and the actors were excellent. Leigh’s best friends–Todd (Martin Starr) and Mel (Mamie Gummer)–have lives that appear to be put together, but aren’t really. Todd is coming to terms with his sexuality, and Mel is a vice principal at their alma mater and she and her husband are trying to get pregnant, unsuccessfully. Each character is dealing with a unique but totally normal crisis.
Leigh is self-destructive throughout her journey to herself, and her friends come along for the ride. They smoke cigarettes and pot, buy beer for minors, and at one point, Leigh almost fails to see a struggling child in the pool because she’s stuck in a fantasy. Here’s the female anti-hero that we are always looking for (perhaps that’s why the mostly male reviewers were put off?).
The most destructive decision Leigh makes, though, is engaging in a sexual relationship with a teenager. In attempting to reclaim her youth, she also attempts to revise her virginal teenage experience. While on paper this seems like a dealbreaker, Garcia’s writing and direction made it–dare I say–work? The scenes are uncomfortable and incredibly sexy. They feel different than normal sex scenes, largely because of the focus on Leigh’s satisfaction.
We know it’s wrong. We know it’s destructive. But we are along for the ride, just like Leigh.
Leigh attempts to guide Jason (David Lambert) into better life choices. Their relationship is disturbing, sexy, destructive and strangely realistic.
It’s hard not to draw a parallel between The Lifeguard and The To Do List (The Lifeguard is like its much darker older sister). For the Type-A protagonists, their roles at a swimming pool allow them to be in control yet vulnerable and unclothed. The setting is important, because as female lifeguards, they experience power and vulnerability all at once. The position and pool are also seasonal and fleeting–just like youth. There’s something temporary about being a lifeguard. Leigh is trying to use that position, seeping with nostalgia, to gain something permanent.

In The To Do List, Brandy says, “Teenagers don’t have regrets–that’s for your 30s.” Leigh is trying desperately to hold on before her 30s hit.

Night-swimming in the pool–Leigh is caught between rules and control and wildness.
The Lifeguard delivers a female anti-hero and realistic struggles that women of a certain age face. The film doesn’t, as some reviewers suggest, sink. It goes into the deep end, treads water and gets out of the pool–just like most of us do.
The Lifeguard is available on iTunes and Video on Demand; on August 30, it will play in select theaters.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘The To Do List’: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For

Let’s get to work, vagina. – Brandy Klark, The To Do List

 

The To Do List.
Written by Leigh Kolb

 

I remember leaving the theater after seeing Superbad and asking my friends if any of us could imagine a film like that being made about young women–quirky best friend teenage girls who were on a quest for those things that so many teenagers are on a quest for.
We agreed that we couldn’t imagine it (and then I probably delivered a lecture on the great harm of stifling female sexuality).
That notion–that those teenage “cumming-of-age” stories are reserved for boys only–has been deeply ingrained in us through pop culture. When American Pie came out while I was in high school, the message was clear: there’s a myriad of ways that teenage boys get to claim and act out their sexuality, but if you’re a woman who does the same, you will be singled out and considered an oddity, a freak or simply a prize.
Even before that, I remember always noticing that young adult novels or films about teenage girls that I enjoyed often de-sexed the female protagonist. Teenage female sexuality was either nonexistent or an anathema, set apart to frighten girls or teach lessons. I never saw myself and my feelings truly and fully reflected back to me.
“Sisters before misters”–best friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat), Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) and Wendy (Sarah Steele).
When I saw the trailer for The To Do List, I started to get excited. Maybe this is it–what I’ve been waiting for all of these years.
It’s set in the early 90s. My heart rate quickens.
I see the soundtrack‘s track list. I just can’t even.
And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton.
Yes. This is it.
 
It was everything I wanted.
 
I especially love how the “To Do List” itself wasn’t borne out of peer pressure. Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) is mildly affected when her peers shout “Virgin!” at her, but what makes her want to explore and understand her own sexuality is twofold: she wants to be able to be comfortable knowing what to do with hot guys (she’s the one who is attracted and drawn to the college guy), and it’s explained to her that college is like a sexual pop quiz, and she needs to study to ace it.
Brandy takes notes as her older, experienced sister (played by Rachel Bilson) talks about sex.
She understands studying. She understands her own blossoming sexual desires. So she opens up her Trapper Keeper, lines her paper into a grid, and makes a list of sexual acts she must complete before the end of summer, with the ultimate goal being “Intercourse.” (The fact that the film was set in 1993 is important not only for nostalgia’s sake but also for the fact that Brandy didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t easily look up the definitions of the “jobs” she was writing on her list.)
Brandy’s “To Do List” replaces buying shower shoes for the dorm with sexual exploits.
Early on in her journey, Brandy reads statistics about how few women achieve orgasm, and she’s incensed. She writes “Masturbation” on her list (and does so wearing a “Pro-Choice Pro-Clinton” T-shirt, which writer-director Maggie Carey said she wore frequently in high school). The masturbation scene is important because, as Carey says, “When you do see women masturbating, it’s usually a male fantasy about a woman masturbating, it’s not what actually happens.”
Brandy voices anger over the virgin/whore dichotomy, referencing Gloria Steinem. And yet as much as this film empowers female sexuality and independence, it does not do so at the expense of the men in the film. (Remarkable, how completely possible it is to have fully sympathetic male and female characters in a raunchy comedy.) Even Brandy’s father, a Rush Limbaugh-reading, overprotective man who is uncomfortable talking about sex, is portrayed in a sympathetic light.
The teenage boys have stereotypical sexual desires, but Brandy’s desire is always paramount. For the first time while watching a teen comedy, I got to reminisce and laugh from my own perspective–and oh, how I could taste that Pucker when I saw it on screen and feel those goosebumps when “Fade Into You” started playing–instead of imagining what life must have been like for boys I knew in high school.

The film also really has a “radical” message about virginity–not panicked, not preachy, but reasonable and realistic. Maybe most importantly, Brandy never has any regrets (“Teenagers don’t have regrets,” she says. “That’s for your 30s”). The To Do List is “nonchalantly” feminist from start to finish.

After she read the script for the first time, Aubrey Plaza said,

“When I read the script, I just thought it was funny, be it female or male, but I love that it was from a female perspective, and I’d honestly never seen anything that had explored the specifics of that time in a girl’s life when they’re experiencing all their firsts.”

This film is a first full of firsts.
And unlike most first-time sexual exploits, writer-director Maggie Carey knew what she was doing and made it really pleasurable for the audience.
“It’s a skort!”
(And who doesn’t want to make out to Mazzy Star?)
A teenage sex comedy that subverts what’s usually “reserved for the boys” and shows female sexuality and agency as, you know, an actual thing (while celebrating 90’s pop culture)? Check.
And just as Brandy will want more and more of the final exploit she checks off, I want movies like this to keep coming and coming.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Think There Aren’t Feminist Themes in ‘The Purge’? Think Again

Movie poster for The Purge
Spoiled by Stephanie Rogers.
Turns out, the best way to see the latest violent horror film is to watch it in a packed theater in Times Square. The audience laughed together, squealed together, shouted at the screen together, and collectively bonded over the most ridiculous features of the movie as well as the more progressive aspects.
As the credits rolled, a young Black woman sitting behind me stood up and yelled, “And the Black dude survives!” I mean, hadn’t we all been thinking it? We’re so used to filmmakers killing off characters of color, especially in horror films, that watching a Black dude walk into the sun at the end of a movie after saving a bunch of rich white people stood out as a fucking anomaly. The Purge is certainly problematic, but it surprised me to feel a sense of … hope at the end of it. Could this reversal of the white savior trope start a new trend in filmmaking? And did a film finally punish a Rich White Dude instead of celebrating his successes at the expense of others? And what would movies even be like if these became the new tenets of onscreen storytelling?
I like to do this thing sometimes where I show up at films with absolutely zero information about them. The Purge looked like a fun movie to try that with, and I’m glad I did it; if I’d known the premise of the movie in advance, I doubt I could’ve talked myself into paying 75 dollars to see it and spending 45 minutes slow-walking 3 blocks to the theater in the most crowded area of Manhattan. Luckily, the plot made itself clear within the first few minutes. 
Video footage of the annual Purge
It takes place in the future, nine years from now in the United States, which boasts a government known as The New Founders of America (NFA). The New Founders have instituted an annual day of murder and mayhem dubbed The Purge, allowing anyone to roam the streets freely in search of people to violate so that they might purge themselves of their lurking hate and rage. It lasts twelve hours and during that time no emergency services or police officers exist, making it a free-for-all. Not everyone is required to participate, but people are encouraged at least to indicate their support of The Purge by placing a vase of blue baptisias (baptism, get it?) on their front doorstep in a gesture of solidarity. While the family the film focuses on, The Sandins, appears not to necessarily enjoy The Purge or participate in the “festivities,” they support its existence, mainly because the institution of The Purge lowered the once-staggering unemployment rate to 1%, saving the economy and making the annual crime rate almost nonexistent. The main characters see it as a tolerable, necessary evil, and besides—they’re the richest people in their state-of-the-art secured neighborhood; what’s the worst that could happen to them? 
“Don’t forget to put the Baptisias on the porch, Honey!”
Well, they could help a Black dude avoid getting murdered by a bunch of creepy, self-proclaimed “highly-educated” white people in their twenties, who roam the gated suburbs carrying machine guns and machetes and wearing masks like they just wandered off the set of The Strangers. Your bad, Sandins, your bad. 
WTFWTFWTF
Let me take a step back.
The Sandins actually fucking suck for the most part, at least in the beginning. Ethan Hawke plays James Sandin, who works as a security developer and who clearly profits off the The Purge; the Sandins own the biggest house in their subdivision—a jealous woman neighbor sarcastically “jokes” that The Purge Survival Systems that James sold to everyone in the hood obviously paid for the new addition to the Sandins’ home—and James himself gloats during that night’s family dinner about his rise to the spot of Top Seller at his security firm. (Rich White Dudes profiting off the hardships of others … does that sound familiar to anyone?) Mary Sandin (Lena Headey) gives the impression she’s a homemaker; we see her cooking dinner and chiding her children (Zoey, a high schooler and Charlie, a younger teen) as she readies them for the pre-purge lockdown, and she leaves the house only to place the baptisias on the porch and speak with the neighbor who envies her family’s wealth. The Sandins seem truly clueless about the extreme jealousy all the less rich white people (minus the token, light-skinned woman of color) feel toward them, but the audience gets the message all over the place: Sandins, consider yourselves fucked. 
Uh-Oh
On the surface, The Purge aims to critique the sick shit going on in our country right now, albeit very problematically. Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture at the Media Research Institute called The Purge “an obvious attack on the Tea Party and Christians” and also argued that:
… the movie is a direct attack on the NRA, an organization filled with millions of law-abiding gun owners. The loony left’s reflexive hatred of the 2nd Amendment is founded in the concept that people who don’t break the law are somehow evil for exercising the Constitutional rights.
Okay, Dan Gainor.
The truth? No anti-Christian or even anti-gun message exists in The Purge, although the director, James Monaco, has said in interviews that the film does, in fact, allude to an indictment of gun culture. In reality, The Purge employs extreme gory violence that undercuts any potential critique of violence, and the gruesome knife scenes and weaponless face shattering against tables stick out way more than the gun stuff. At times, The Purge even seems to support gun ownership; the Sandins wouldn’t have survived those twelve hours without guns, and owning a gun for the protection of oneself and one’s domestic space is a much-touted NRA message. The anti-Christian thing, too, is a reach. The characters worship money for sure, and the film critiques that, but neither Christianity nor any religion ever come up.
Unfortunately, The Purge becomes muddled in its message about government; Big Government runs amok here—an old school conservative’s nightmare—and The New Founders essentially sanction the murder of the have-nots, the people on the lower rungs who can’t afford James Sandin’s security system to cordon themselves off from the annual purgers. If anything, it supports the old school conservative argument against Big Government, and a viewer could easily read it as a cautionary tale for a federal government that holds too much influence over its citizens. 
State-of-the-Art-Secured McMansion
On the other hand, neo-cons of 2013 seem to think they dislike Big Government while simultaneously inviting it into wombs all across America, so who the fuck even knows anymore. The point is, The Purge wants to yell from the rooftops, “How awful for the government to endorse the murder of its citizens!” but ultimately yells, “How awful for the government to endorse the murder of its citizens … but, wait, look how well it works when we rid the country of these homeless welfare seekers!” The Purge tries to have it both ways and fails to deliver any real cohesive message regarding guns, religion, or the role of government.
But I definitely heard the slam against the one-percenters loud and clear, and what a welcomed fucking change from the endless dumping of Hollywood Mancession films into the multiplex. The Purge imagines a science fiction-esque United States where the rich take over entirely and wage a violent war against the lower classes, even going so far as to pass a Constitutional Amendment (the 28th) to require its existence. (Most government officials naturally receive legal protection from harm during The Purge.) Simply put: this futuristic United States decides that murdering those most in need makes more sense than uniting together in support of them. In this way, the film does seem to offer a critique of the country’s current fringe groups (the Tea Party, most Republicans) by illustrating a worst-case scenario for a society that values capital over people—and fuck if it didn’t scare me a little. 
This is the scariest person I’ve ever seen on film
Because this is a film about class relations and capitalism, the less rich (white people) end up turning on the super rich (white people) during the night—another nod to the idea that unregulated capitalism leads only to societal destruction. The end of the film includes audio of newscasts that play over the credits, with broadcasters reporting that the high number of deaths made that year’s Purge the most successful ever. So, while the film might not necessarily conclude with any real epiphany by the United States and its citizens (yay for killing the homeless!), it allows the audience a glimpse into the lives of a few one-percenters who try to destroy one another, all because of money. Oh, and because Charlie Sandin (a not-yet-sociopathic teen) decides to help a Black dude. “And the Black dude survives!”
As a feminist movie critic, I adored these flips on conventional horror tropes, and several of them exist. 
Charlie uses his Robot Baby (omg) to help hide the Black dude from his parents
The White Savior: The Black dude, who seriously remains nameless, shows up in their neighborhood after the Sandins’ purge lockdown (where a hardcore security system barricades their entire home). Charlie Sandin hears gunfire in the streets and sees in the surveillance cameras the Black dude yelling for help, covering a bleeding wound. Charlie zooms in on the man’s terrified face and decides, “Duh, I need to help this guy.” So he unlocks the security system and yells for the shocked-as-hell Black dude to come inside, much to the dismay of his parents. At first, I thought, “This white savior trope again?!” but it didn’t last long. While Charlie helps the man, the older Sandins clearly want no part of it, especially after a group of asshole college kids (that I will forever refer to as “the highly-educated murderers”) threatens to break into their home if they refuse to release the Black dude back into the streets. See, “that homeless swine” belongs to them, and if they don’t get to kill him, they’re more than willing to kill the entire Sandin clan instead. So, duh, the parents torture the Black dude—in an effort to throw him back to the highly-educated murderers—while Zoey and Charlie freak the fuck out like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” 
Charlie watches the Black dude on surveillance cameras
The Protective Patriarch: All of this occurs in the name of James Sandin protecting his perfect, white nuclear family. He simultaneously apologize-stabs the Black dude several times while saying, “I’m sorry. I need to protect my family.” Mary Sandin, though, gets her, “James, you’re no better than the people out there!” on—because women and children always play the role of Moral Compass when men go astray. That trope unfortunately remains intact for the rest of the film, culminating with Mary’s decision not to murder her new home invaders (the less-rich jealous neighbors, at this point; did we NOT know they were gunning for the Sandins, too?). At one point Mary says, “Too many people have died tonight, so we’re going to end this night in fucking peace.” Or something. Even the Black dude says to James, “You need to protect your family,” offering up himself to the highly-educated murderers, but James experiences a swift change of heart and refuses to sacrifice him. Thanks to the women and children.
And in a way, I liked that the women and children felt compelled to protect the Black dude and not throw him to the wolves/preppies; I didn’t read their desire to do so as an employment of the white savior trope because these highly-educated murderers aimed to roll in there and kill everybody regardless. So the Sandins weren’t saving the Black dude as much as they were making it only slightly more difficult for him to get murdered. “And the Black dude survives!” in the end. And saves (most of) the Sandins. And walks off into the sun. After looking at Mary Sandin and saying, “Good luck” all deadpan. Ha. 
Zoey secretly making out with the bro her dad hates
The Sexual Teenage Girl: Zoey Sandin interests me. Her character follows conventional horror film tropes from the get-go: she dates an older boy, much to the dismay of her disapproving dad because Daddy’s Little Girl. She sneaks around behind her family’s back, and her boyfriend even hides out in her room, staying put for the Sandins’ home lockdown. They make out on her bed while she wears a fucking schoolgirl outfit slash uniform; the scene screams INNOCENT VIRGIN about to HAVE SEX and then DIE because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE. But. Her dad kills her boyfriend instead in a good ol’ Purge Family Shootout after her boyfriend pulls a gun on James out of nowhere (presumably to purge himself of the rage he feels for not being allowed to date Zoey), and James fires back in self defense. Zoey, a little devastated, runs off and hides for some reason, probably because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE and groups never stick together.
Eventually, the highly-educated murderers breach the Sandin barricade, and we find Zoey hiding under her bed while—duh again—she sees one of them STOP beside her bed. THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE. While this happens, she overhears another murderer—who’s stroking a photo of Zoey—say, “Exquisite. Save her for me, won’t you?” I immediately thought, please don’t rape her please don’t rape her because THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE, and horror films dole out punishment to their sexually provocative heroines hardcore. But the true highlight of The Purge, for me at least, occurred when Zoey murdered the fuck out of the photo stroker, saving (most of) her family and flipping the Sexual Activity Is Punishable By Death convention on its ass. 
Zoey hides under her bed (THIS IS A HORROR MOVIE)
So, all in all, and as unwieldy as The Purge gets (not unlike this review), I couldn’t help but enjoy most of it. The Rich White Dude gets punished, and the minority characters (including women) survive. That shouldn’t be a progressive movie ending in 2013. It is.

Lust, Love, Duty, Sex: Female Experience in ‘The Deep Blue Sea’

Written by Rachel Redfern

Terence Davies’ 2011 film, The Deep Blue Sea, is based off the 1952 Terence Rattigan play of the same name and while it wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test, it is a film full substantive consideration, both strengths and flaws, of its female character; the film’s main premise hinges on the choices of it’s protagonist Hester Collyer, brilliantly acted by Rachel Weisz.

Hester is a women of education and status in 1950’s post-war England who is married to an affectionate and older high court judge, William (Simon Russell Beale). Hester’s marriage is one of comfort and companionship, surrounded by the consistent affections of her husband, but it lacks passion. Hester then begins an affair with a younger RAF pilot, Freddy (Tom Hiddleston): a heady, wild romance ruled by emotion and embodied by all the lust and anger that such a relationship brings. Ultimately, Hester leaves her husband before he agrees to give her a divorce and move in with Freddy (scandal!) a decision that places her between the devil and ‘the deep blue sea.’

Within the film, it could be seen as problematic that even though Hester is the main character, her choices, and even her world, revolve around the two men in her life and of course her choice between them; however, this slow, character-romance, deserves a deeper look.

Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston

The film is told in one day at the flat Hester shares with Freddy through a series of flashbacks; these flashbacks follow on the heels of a suicide attempt, an event, which then becomes the impetus for her break-up with Freddy and another choice she must make about her future. It’s a grisly catalyst that highlights Hester’s sense of desperation and I think, a feeling of being lost.

Hester is a woman craving life and passion but who is, of course, bound by duty; a plot that might seem overly familiar in its use, but because of its frequency we should consider the sad truth of its existence and representation as a struggle for many women. The Hours, Stephen Daldry’s excellent film (story by Michael Cunningham) about four women, presents the same familiar situation of the restlessness and searching for something more that was and is such a huge part of the female experience. It even put me in mind of Bette Friendan’s The Feminine Mystique and everything that she tried to piece together and understand about the frustration and extreme sense of duty that many women have felt throughout the years.

It is important to note that, as in so many of these stories, it is Hester’s sexual desire that also leads her into the mess and at the same time, out of dreary dark of her early life. Perhaps this is a function of the time in which the story was originally written (1952), but I would instead hope that it was more of a recognition of the great need for larger sexual experiences that influenced its central place within Rattigen’s story. The fact that many women still lived in a fairly sexually repressive society during this time (and unfortunately still do in many places) is no secret; Hester’s experiences with sexuality, lust and intimacy are a significant part of her transformation and the beginning of her journey into a (hopefully) more self-aware life.

Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea’s brilliance as a film is in the maddening silences and in the horrific feeling of helplessness that Hester emotes as she moves about her apartment and interacts with the small cast; these obvious feelings of entrapment are often shown by the limited space in which Hester resides and her long deliberations at the dingy window. There is a lack of light present throughout the movie: a literally dark look to the setting and an abundance of shadows which contribute to Weisz’s own performance as a woman suffocating and dying from a lack of something (the something of course being both a lack stability and passion and something additionally indefinable).

As the film progresses though and the flashbacks bring us closer to the end of this long day, things begin to unravel further: I appreciated that the film was able to explore the binary that exists between choices that we can control and choices that are made for us. For instance, in one scene, Hester begs Freddy to return home with her and as the audience, you can’t help but shout at the screen, “No! Don’t go down that road, keep your dignity, don’t be the girl who begs!” but deep down there’s the recognition that while uncomfortable to see, it is also Hester’s way of trying to hang on to the one thing in her life that made her feel alive for a little awhile, even if it is the very thing that makes her want to die at the same time. It is the intersection of these choices that creates potential for the future and unravels Hester’s present choices.

It’s apparent by the end of the film that Hester’s choices have completely pushed her out of a comfortable, if numbing life, and she must attempt to finally pull the pieces up around herself in order to move forward. I believe it’s very telling that the final shot is of Hester walking away, fully alone, as she goes into the future without the desires of her husband or lover influencing her. I love these sort of endings though; endings that, while not necessarily the girl-and-boy-happy-together-forever ending of so many romantic comedies, show a character moving into a space of possibilities of their choosing, a moment of an independent future where the character is finally choosing for themselves.

Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea

  
The Deep Blue Sea and Rachel Weisz were nominated for several different awards in the categories of Best Film and Best Actress at the Golden Globes, New York Film Critics Circle (won), the London Film Critics Circle, and the BFI London Film Festival among others. The film is beautifully shot and wonderful in its ability to conjure up a feeling of recovering, post-war England; likewise the acting is beautiful without being heavy-handed and Rachel Weisz is incredible in her role as Hester. The film does move slowly however, and I personally would have liked even more flashbacks, especially in showing the development of Freddy and Hester’s relationship and how that affected her.

While again, some viewers could see it as problematic that so much of Hester’s character revolves around the men in her life, I think it’s a worthwhile exploration of romance and duty and the way that the two often interact, especially from a female perspective. Besides, romance, lust and love are massive emotions that do dominate a significant portion of our lives; I think its productive and important to tell stories that highlight such a substantial aspect of humanity.

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

Penetrating History in ‘Hysteria’

Written by Rachel Redfern
When I first saw the trailer for Tayla Waxter’s 2011 period comedy, Hysteria, I was incredibly excited; I awaited it’s US release for the past year hoping that it would fulfill my need for clever comedy with smart female characters. However, we might as well just get it over with–Hysteria fell short of my expectations. 

The plot of this small independent film is a fictionalized account of the creation and distribution of the personal vibrator, an appliance that unbelievably has it’s roots in 19th Century England and was actually designed to abate the symptoms of female hysteria. Hysteria was considered a real condition during that time period and was assigned to troubled women (a quarter of the female population) who must then be driven to orgasm. Seriously.

I would suggest that everyone do a little Wikipedia search for ‘female hysteria’ because it’s some of the most entertaining and offbeat information I’ve ever heard. Doctors and midwives used to ‘massage’ women into orgasms (yes, male doctors and female midwives—how’s that for Victorian homoeroticism) to help with their anxiety, loss of appetite and even insomnia. During this period, it seems hard to believe that no one started some sort of morality campaign against the doctors who were pleasuring their wives in the name of science, but there you have it, folks. The fact that the entire European and American medical establishment willfully ignored the obvious logical conclusions about female sexuality (you know, that women like, need and enjoy sex just as much as men do) is both tragic and hilarious at the same time. 

One hopes that this advertisement for an ‘Electro-Massage Machine’ was a bit tongue in cheek

 One would believe then (or at least I did) that a film about such a ‘tragic and hilarious’ situation like female hysteria would be both comedic and portray some of the complications and harm that affected women because of these early medical beliefs. This of course leads to my fallen expectations: Hysteria was at most sweet and lighthearted, though from my viewpoint, naïve and lacking in any real substance.

Despite it’s very feminist-looking trailer and plot, the film still centers around the men who invent the vibrator and is, at it’s core, a romantic comedy with the guy getting the girl at the end of the day. The film lacks any kind of subtlety in the political messages that’s it’s pushing, nor does it expound upon complexities or gray areas. Maggie Gyllenhaal portrays the fiery, feminist, saintly Maggie Dalrymple who is a very positive representation of a ‘feminist’ character, though is what I would call Hollywood feminist ‘lite’: a glossy stereotype who strangely has few lines and a lack of screen time. Felicity Jones is prim and proper like a good English girl and then does an abrupt about-face into an independent modern woman just like a good character should, but without much struggle or enthusiasm. Hugh Dancy is the brilliant doctor, dashing but dull, who in a surprisingly original ending still saves the day and Maggie Gyllenhaal (sarcasm). 

Maggie Gyllenhall and Hugh Dancy

There are some redeeming characters though: a lusty prostitute turned housemaid named ‘Molly the Lolly’ and Rupert Everett as the wealthy eccentric inventor who steals the show with his dialogues about the queen and the telephone (make of that what you will). 

Sheridan Smith as Molly the Lolly and a vibrator

However, the movie is well made, well acted, with some clever dialogues and funny situations, which is really too bad because the plot and the idea of the movie had some incredible potential. While I know that not every movie needs to be The Hours, Hysteria was about as original as my title for this piece. The problem of the film is instead of exploring some of the more problematic and comedic situations, the film took the safe, clichéd route and left itself sweet, but mediocre. 

The first test of the vibrator with Jonathon Pryce, Rupert Everett, and Hugh Dancy

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

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Mrs. Danvers, or: ‘Rebecca’

Movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
This is a guest post by Amanda Civitello.

There is a trio of women at the heart of Rebecca. There’s a male love interest, to be sure – the dashing, wealthy, ostensibly noble Maxim de Winter – but at its most essential, Rebecca is a story of women: the unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. de Winter; Rebecca de Winter, Maxim’s first wife, whose seeming omnipresence at the de Winters’ country seat, Manderley, haunts her replacement; and Mrs. Danvers, Manderley’s housekeeper, and Rebecca’s personal maid, devoted to her mistress even after death. The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation might be the second Mrs. de Winter, but Rebecca – particularly the novel – doesn’t belong to her in the slightest. Despite a script which departs from the novel in several crucial instances and the talent of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, the story is Mrs. Danvers’s, and the film is Judith Anderson’s.

Rebecca recounts the story of the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), the new bride of the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who married him after a whirlwind courtship. Though not especially acquainted with her frequently secretive, moody husband, she nevertheless adores him and, despite her modest upbringings, resolves to do her best as lady of the manor at Manderley. She meets with resistance, of course, from a likely corner, the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), as well as from a more unlikely one, Maxim’s late wife Rebecca de Winter, who drowned tragically but whose ghost seems to haunt Manderley and its inhabitants in more ways than one. The second Mrs. de Winter finds herself at odds with Mrs. Danvers, who is by turns cruel and falsely sweet, and utterly bent on removing Mrs. de Winter from Manderley, at one point attempting to coax her into suicide. The film is something of a thriller, and so of course there are questions surrounding Rebecca’s mysterious drowning – particularly about Maxim’s part in it. Fortunately for our heroine and her romantic lead, Maxim is miraculously exonerated, in a disappointing departure from the novel, and Mr. and Mrs. de Winter, it is presumed, enjoy something of a happy retirement after the closing titles, despite a final act of revenge.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine)
Rebecca is frequently described as Joan Fontaine’s film, and while she’s excellent in her role, and clearly has the most screen time, her role is not, by far, the most interesting of the film. Her character, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never allowed to grow up: in spite of everything, by the close of the film, she’s much the same frustratingly childlike shrinking violet she was at the beginning. Fontaine carries off the ingénue type very well, and it’s not her fault that her character has bursts of growth – short-lived instances in which she takes her staff in hand, or speaks her mind to her husband – but then, inevitably, regresses. She’s beautiful and even sympathetic in her persistent naïveté, at least to a point, but as a woman, the second Mrs. de Winter is ultimately disappointing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she’s consistently portrayed as the opposite of Rebecca de Winter, who is never seen and never speaks for herself, in the film or the novel. She is the sweetness and light to Rebecca’s coldly Machiavellian, sinister calculation. The second Mrs. de Winter is innocent, concerned only for her husband, and perpetually unsure of herself, which makes her rather nice, but somewhat simpering, and sadly, not especially interesting. Rebecca de Winter is not, by anyone’s account, nice, but she’s certainly more interesting than her wide-eyed replacement, and hers is the silenced voice.

Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, but it’s also caught, somewhat uncomfortably, between genres. It doesn’t quite want to be a true Gothic thriller, because it shies from the moral ambiguity that makes the novel such a rich book, but nor is it a straightforward romance, for nothing is ever straightforward with Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the major casualty of this uncertainty is the novel’s most interesting female character: the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, a brilliant turn by Judith Anderson. In the novel, Mrs. Danvers haunts each page just as much as the ghost of Rebecca de Winter. In Hitchcock’s hands, Rebecca becomes a cross between a Gothic thriller and a mannered romance, ultimately tending towards the latter, but even this does not fully temper Mrs. Danvers’s omnipresence: she is the link between the unnamed protagonist and the unseen antagonist, not the husband they share in common. However, the novel is full of contradictions in its characterization of Mrs. Danvers which the film does not address. Through the second Mrs. de Winter’s eyes we see Mrs. Danvers as “tall and gaunt,” with “great, hollow eyes,” a “skull’s face set on a skeleton’s frame,” and possessing of “limp and heavy, deathly cold” hands. While Judith Anderson’s costuming is not, perhaps, as skeletal as du Maurier intended, she nevertheless embodies the chilly lifelessness of her character. Her Mrs. Danvers is ghostly in her carriage, but terrifyingly real in her interactions with her new mistress. Yet in the film adaptation, the other-worldliness never leaves her, and Anderson plays it masterfully, creating a character who is deeply unsettling and deliciously spooky. But du Maurier’s novel tempers this description; the Danvers of the novel is not always an evil, unbalanced ice queen. She’s desperate and half-mad with grief, still living in the past and passionate about her mistress.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca de Winter’s bedroom
In the film, Danvers is well written, but nevertheless tends towards one-dimensional in the part the script allows her to play; in the book, Danvers’s complexity is far more difficult to ignore. A novel of Rebecca‘s length must necessarily be condensed; the kind of explicated description possible in page upon page of prose is simply untranslatable for the screen. Much of Mrs. Danvers’s complexity in the novel, therefore, is sacrificed so as to streamline the narrative. Where the film paints Danvers as more sadistic than anything else, the Mrs. Danvers of du Maurier’s novel is significantly more multifaceted. She becomes the definite antagonist in the film, the cruelly calculated, disconcertingly creepy nemesis of the wide-eyed ingénue. This is necessary: the viewer needs to believe that, not only would Danvers definitely set fire to Manderley, but that she would perish in Rebecca’s bedroom and deserve it. (On this point, the novel says very, very little, and it’s only one possibility among many that it’s Danvers who torches the great estate, and no mention is made of her fate.)

Hitchcock, however, is a director unafraid of ambiguity and a master of great subtlety, and he addresses the Rebecca-Danvers relationship most decisively in the pivotal bedroom scene, which prompts the second Mrs. de Winter into assuming more control of her household. Throughout, Judith Anderson keeps her delivery crisp and preternaturally calm, conveying Mrs. Danvers’s madness only with her eyes and movement, to great effect. The scene is as utterly disquieting on screen as it is in the novel, perhaps even more so, given the refinement of Judith Anderson’s performance. Danvers catches the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca’s closed-off bedroom in the west wing, and then proceeds to show her new mistress Rebecca’s personal things: her furs, still hanging pristinely in the armoire; her hairbrush, laid in exactly the same place; her nightdress, still laid out for the mistress who won’t return. It’s very easy to make it entirely Gothic in character – a bit of ghostly theatre to unsettle the new bride – but really, there’s much more at play. Again, however, the film and the novel are at odds: in the novel, there’s an undercurrent of grief for the late Rebecca that cuts through Danvers’s cruelty, such that the housekeeper is mad with grief, and motivated by love for her mistress. Death has not relinquished the hold Rebecca had on Mrs. Danvers; in fact, it’s intensified it. Judith Anderson is frighteningly convincing as she caresses Rebecca’s lace underwear, such that the scene is laced with an almost palpable degree of sexual tension and lesbian subtext. Mrs. Danvers’s passion for her mistress is undeniable, and the nature of that passion is left unspecified. The question of a lesbian subtext to the Danvers-Rebecca relationship is one to which the novel alludes as well, and it gives a layer of richness to Mrs. Danvers’s character. If there was a degree of romantic passion on Mrs. Danvers’s part, her grief becomes more sympathetic; her madness, more understandable. But in Rebecca, the scene must be viewed within the context of the film as a whole. Where, in the novel, the reader ultimately feels a degree of pity and sympathy for Mrs. Danvers, despite the assessment of the narrator, on screen, it’s simply, in the end, a briefly penetrating look into an unbalanced, hostile, malicious woman’s madness.

Mrs. Danvers showing Rebecca’s furs to the second Mrs. de Winter, part of the subtext-laden bedroom scene
These perplexing editorial choices in the novel’s adaptation for the screen make for a viewing experience which leaves audiences with a distinctly different perception of the characters and the story. The viewers are denied the absolutely disquieting story of the novel. What’s so disturbing – and so Gothic – about Rebecca isn’t Rebecca herself, and not even the image of Rebecca, the spectre of her, that the different characters construct, but the moral ambiguity surrounding the characters we’re supposed to like and dislike. If a novel – or a screenplay – is meant to be a constructed world, one that functions according to its own rules, then du Maurier’s Rebecca wreaks havoc with that framework. The reader is guided to like certain characters, to dislike others, only to find those perceptions entirely spun on their heads: by the last few pages, the reader realizes that the romantic hero she’s come to like and defend is a murderer. Changing the ending removes the ambiguity around Maxim, and turns Rebecca into a Gothic-tinged romance, and casting Mrs. Danvers as, for the most part, the cruelly sinister, unsympathetic antagonist paradoxically makes Rebecca spookier but far less disquieting, far less unsettling, than the novel. 
———-

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Sleep Hollow, Downton Abbey and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘The Uninvited’ (1944) and Dorothy Macardle’s Feminism

Movie poster for The Uninvited
This is a guest post by Nadia Smith.
[contains spoilers]
When I told a horror-fan friend in his early twenties that I was writing about The Uninvited, he said he had seen it. This came as a surprise, since it’s mostly older viewers and film historians who are aware of it. It turned out that he thought I was referring to the recent Korean film The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters, and not the classic haunted house movie that had audiences screaming in the 1940s and drew comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).
The Uninvited (1944), directed by Lewis Allen and released by Paramount Pictures, is an adaptation of a popular Gothic novel by the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958), also a playwright, historian, journalist, and prominent feminist campaigner. It was adapted for the screen by the British writer Dodie Smith, best known for 101 Dalmatians. The Uninvited, which easily passes the Bechdel Test, features some sexist characterizations and a conventional ending, stemming from Macardle’s complex views on gender as well as the demands of commercial romantic fiction and film production. Nevertheless, the film opens itself up to alternative readings and valuations of the characters.
In the film, siblings Rick, played by Ray Milland, and Pamela Fitzgerald, played by Ruth Hussey (who might at first be mistaken for a married couple), learn that the old house in Cornwall they have just purchased is haunted by two ghosts, one warm and benevolent and one cold and dangerous, and investigate the mystery surrounding the house’s previous residents in an attempt to end the hauntings. Rick falls for the much younger Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), whose parents, artist Llewellyn and his wife Mary, had once lived in the house with Carmel, an artist’s model from Spain who had an affair with Llewellyn. The Merediths and Carmel died when Stella was a small child, Mary by falling off a nearby cliff, and the shy, repressed, immature Stella, who idolizes her late mother, lives an isolated existence in the village with Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), her stern, morbid maternal grandfather. The Commander has an unhealthy obsession with his daughter’s memory, and Stella is virtually imprisoned in the house as the Commander tries to mold her in Mary’s image. So far, so Gothic. Local informants, as well as Mary’s friend Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), praise Mary’s virtue and angelic beauty to the Fitzgeralds, and denounce Carmel’s depravity. Rick’s frustration grows as he worries that Stella’s intense emotional investment in her mother’s ghost will lead to a psychological breakdown and prevent her from ever caring for him.
The Fitzgeralds initially think that Mary is the warm ghost, and Carmel the cold ghost endangering Stella, but a séance proves them wrong. Carmel, the warm ghost and Stella’s biological mother, refused to be silenced and unfairly maligned, instead returning to tell the truth, while Mary, the cold malevolent ghost, tried to prevent the exposure of family secrets about her true nature and adoption of Stella after Carmel gave birth in secret. In life, Carmel had been a nurturing mother who truly loved Stella, and Mary had been cold and uncaring, as well as asexual. Rick symbolically kills the “evil mother” Mary, banishing her ghost through ridicule, while Stella’s acceptance of the truth about her biological mother’s identity allows her to move forward and ensures that Carmel will no longer haunt the house. Commander Beech dies, and the film concludes with Rick announcing that he and Stella will marry, while Pamela will marry a local doctor who helped solve the mystery. The final frame shows the two couples together in the drawing room; Stella appears rather uncomfortable, with a forced smile, recalling her discomfort when Rick forcefully kissed her earlier in the film. Whether this was a directorial decision or simply reflective of the limitations of the young Gail Russell’s acting remains uncertain, but it opens up the happy ending to alternative interpretations, as is often the case in Gothic romances.
Dorothy Macardle used a ghost-story plot and Gothic conventions to frame a narrative about troubled marriages and mother-daughter relationships, family secrets that haunt the present, and transgressive sexuality, thereby setting up a critique of domestic ideology. The unsettling implications of such a critique in Gothic romances, though, are foreclosed by conventional endings in which the heroine embraces marriage and domesticity. While the novel refers to several alternative relationships and domestic arrangements, these are closed off at the end in favor of “normalization.” Although Stella has been traumatized by her upbringing—her grandfather was overbearing and repressive and her parents’ marriage was characterized by hatred and power struggles—her impending marriage to Rick is a foregone conclusion that meets the narrative demands of the Gothic romance. However, some readers and viewers of Gothic romances find the endings unconvincing and read beyond the ending, and may imagine that the naïve, inexperienced Stella, like the nameless narrator of Rebecca, will find that her real problems begin with her marriage to an older man she hardly knows, leading to a new Gothic narrative in the formerly haunted house they intend to live in. 
Dorothy Macardle
The Production Code affecting films in the 1940s meant that homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and out-of-wedlock births were referred to cryptically in The Uninvited to meet the imperatives of censorship. Viewers learn that Mary “feared and refused motherhood,” and is therefore blamed for her husband’s affair with Carmel. Mary, Carmel, and Miss Holloway are all punished for their respective sexual transgressions – asexuality, heterosexual promiscuity, and lesbianism – with death or, in Miss Holloway’s case, a mental breakdown. The character of Miss Holloway was recognized as a lesbian by the Legion of Decency, whose (male) leaders complained to Paramount executives about the scenes in which she speaks romantically to Mary’s portrait. Lesbian audiences in the 1940s also grasped the inferences and characterizations in The Uninvited, and film scholars note that it became a cult hit with lesbian communities in wartime America. Mary is depicted as asexual or possibly a lesbian by being non-maternal and too close to Miss Holloway, and the novel describes her as “unnatural,” tying in with discourses about motherhood and gender essentialism. Later film scholars have seen even more lesbian connotations, suggesting that the mother-daughter trope in the film can be a cover for lesbianism, since Stella has been in love with another woman, Mary, her whole life, much to Rick’s frustration.
Dorothy Macardle’s views on gender roles and motherhood were crucially shaped by her own family dynamics, and reflected in her Gothic novels. She perceived her English mother, Minnie, as a classic late-Victorian hysteric, or fake invalid, who used her fragility as a weapon to prevail in marital power struggles and prioritize her own needs, and viewed her Irish father, Thomas, as Minnie’s helpless and long-suffering victim. Her fiction is inattentive to alternative power dynamics in marriage; husbands are depicted as generally chivalrous figures vulnerable to abuse by manipulative women feigning fragility, rather than subjecting fragile, vulnerable women to abuse. Her novels all end with the metaphorical destruction of a malevolent maternal figure and her baleful power, suggesting that Minnie, like the vampires to whom a prominent Victorian doctor compared hysterical women, took a lot of killing. Macardle’s fiction overturned sentimental and politically useful Victorian notions of the mother’s gentle influence in the home, as her feminist convictions stemmed from the belief that women’s exercise of power should be transparent and directed outside the home. It enraged her that outwardly conformist women like her mother and the fictional Mary Meredith were praised for their virtue, and she tried to show the transgression and complexity behind simplistic notions of good and bad women in a novel in which an icon of conventional womanhood is exposed as a fraud.
The tensions and limitations of Macardle’s feminism and her use of hostile sexist tropes about predatory lesbians, frigid wives, and bad mothers in her fiction seem to stem not only from her understanding of her family dynamics, but also from her sense of herself as an Exceptional Woman, informed by social class privilege. She never married and spent years living alone or with other women, and spent some of her early life in female institutions, including an all-girls school and a women’s prison (for her Irish republican activism). While she enjoyed being a university-educated, professionally successful unmarried woman with no children, she thought most women should be wives and mothers, with their sexuality safely contained within marriage, a view shared by many interwar-era “maternal feminists” in Europe and the United States.
The two main (living) female characters in The Uninvited are Pamela Fitzgerald and Stella Meredith. Pamela demonstrates wit, assertiveness, and intelligence, especially when she solves the mystery of the two ghosts that had confounded the others. Stella is fragile and childlike, which greatly appeals to the older Rick. The circumstances of her upbringing have created a repressed, insecure personality who idealizes the vague memory of a loving mother. Despite Stella’s timidity, she demonstrates courage at the novel’s end when she confronts and reassures Carmel’s ghost. While normative heterosexuality is restored in the conclusion with plans for marriage, Rick’s love for Stella in the novel is unsettling, as he has constantly infantilized her and describes her as a child.
Miss Holloway, an “unfeminine” single woman and nurse who had been infatuated with her friend Mary and still worships her memory, is significant as a lesbian character in the days of the Production Code. Her name recalls London’s Holloway Prison, where suffragists were incarcerated earlier in the century, and the convalescent home she operates is a prison of sorts where female patients lose agency and autonomy. While Miss Holloway’s narrative seeks to contrast Mary’s moral perfection with Carmel’s depravity, the Fitzgeralds are so put off by this stereotypical sinister lesbian that they begin to think that things were not all that they seemed. The character of Miss Holloway shows The Uninvited’s indebtedness to Daphne du Maurier’s popular Gothic novel, Rebecca (1938; released as a film in 1940), as she bears a strong resemblance to Mrs. Danvers. Both are portrayed as sinister lesbians who idolize the dead woman at the center of the mystery and play a key role in reinforcing her iconization.
Overall, The Uninvited reflects a range of tensions and negotiations that intersected with contemporary discourses about gender, sexuality, feminism, and film censorship. While it falls prey to some hostile and stereotypical female characterizations common in the 1940s and later, it is complex and multilayered enough to allow for a range of readings and interpretations as it attempted to speak the unspeakable and represent the unrepresentable. Now that it’s finally available on DVD, maybe it will become at least as well known as The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters.

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Nadia Smith is a historian and writer based in the Boston area. She is the author of Dorothy Macardle: A Life.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston
  

This is a guest post by Martyna Przybysz.

Hurston’s novel has found a huge following not only amongst African-American readers and writers, such as Alice Walker, but ever since being brought into the spotlight back in the 1970s, it has had a growing female readership. It is not an easy novel to get through – the use of local dialects, and the ever changing narrative styles, make it an almost laborious read. As noted by a Black British writer, Zadie Smith, in the introduction to the novel from 2007 “Hurston rejected the ‘neutral universal’ for her novels – she wrote unapologetically in the black-inflected dialect in which she was raised.””Unapologetic” is the key word here – Zora, as the writer, and a woman, went against the grain, just like her character, Janie. That is what makes the novel compelling and draws the reader in. Similarly so, the character potrayed by Halle Berry is driving the film’s narrative.

Janie and Tea Cake
Janie Crawford is a survivor. In the opening scene of the film, just like in the novel, she has just come back from burying the dead – the only love of her life, a light-hearted slacker, Tea Cake. The first sentence signals the narrative that will later dominate the entire movie. It could be argued that film, being a visual medium, has an advantage over the written word in establishing the mood, and here it does so with the jittery camera movements, and extreme close-ups of Janie’s body. “There’s two things everybody got to find out for theyselves, they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living” she says, as she stumbles through a village path, in nothing but dirty overalls.

Isn’t it a powerful, universal statement? It is indeed; however, as the film progresses, we lose the sense of identity search that is so prevalent in the novel. We are instead invited to a roller-coaster ride that are Halle Berry’s… wait, Janie Crawford’s romantic endeavours. Because yes, as aptly pointed out by one of the reviewers, “she’s Halle Berry – and the movie never lets you forget it.”

Halle Berry as Janie
Perhaps because I got to watch the film prior to reading the novel, it was easier for me to accept Halle’s interpretation of Janie. I couldn’t, however, shake off the feeling that a multilayered novel has been reduced to a Harlequin-esque epic drama. Having Oprah Winfrey summarise the film in the trailer only made that impression stronger. What the film fails to do is adapt the strong visual imagination of the writer that built a much more complex identity for Janie.
Whilst the novel slowly introduces us to Janie, and goes as far back as her childhood, in the film we are immediately transported back to that unlucky afternoon when her Gran spots her kissing a regular farm boy and decides to give her away to a rich land-owner. Logan Killicks is a non-invasive older man, who places Janie in the role of a housewife. It is by his side that she grows into a woman and realizes that her romantic dreams of love may not be fulfilled. It isn’t long, however, until she meets a handsome gentleman called Joe Starks (played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and runs away with him. And here again, the search for her own identity as a female seems rather futile. Janie becomes an accessory and feels restricted by her relationship and the social role (being the Mayor’s wife) that she has to fulfill. “I think it keep us in a kinda strain,” she says. She’s just there to stay by her man’s side and should not have any further expectations, as according to Janie’s granmother “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” Janie, however, will not rest until she finds happiness in a relationship.
DVD cover
Without fail, Halle Berry conveys her character’s search with utmost sensitivity and attention to detail – it is all in the small gestures that we learn about Janie and her heart’s desires. She wants to feel and love and share that feeling with the world, but most importantly, she adapts this approach to life and the world in order to find her own sacred place in the arms of a caring man. That, for her, is the destination. As a contemporary woman, I find this concept a beautiful one in itself, but not quite liberating, and based on a presumption that a woman cannot be whole without a man. The search for female identity through the romantic love of a man emanates from the character of Janie throughout the film. She loves nature, and she loves God; she’s curious, and open, and somewhat free and wild. Through the camera work and sentimental music, Their Eyes Were Watching God explores that aspect of Janie’s personality, and when oppressed by her second marriage, she confesses to the audience that she is not “petal-open anymore.” What a striking, if slightly sentimental, analogy that brings to mind one of my favourite quotes from Anais Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

What the film, as well as the novel, are suggesting is not only that small town mentality is something that Janie has long outgrown, but by building her identity as a female in her own right, she is also going against the stale racial and gender stereotypes that enslave her community. When she finally meets “the love of her life,” Tea Cake (played by Michael Ealy), the passion between the two is undeniable, and so is everyone’s harsh judgment about their romance. But Janie is not a rebel; she simply follows her heart and is not afraid of being herself. Sexuality is an important aspect of her identity as a woman, and she is way ahead of her time with her natural and unconstrained ability to explore it.

However controversial or open-minded its description of sexual scenes was at the time when the novel was published (perhaps less when it was later read and fully acknowledged), Darnell Martin, the director of the TV movie, has made the scenes almost poetically erotic. The main sex scene between Halle and Michael brings us to a finale of the passion that has been building up between their protagonists – Janie looks and acts twenty years younger, just like a woman who has found herself by finding love in another. “I felt for the very first time like I was living my life – I had love, and it was real. Tea Cake gave me the whole world, every day.” That concludes Janie’s search for love, as well as her search for identity.

Although I find it thin and slow in places, I struggle to dislike Darnell Martin’s adaptation of Hurston’s novel. After all, it manages to carry a powerful message, despite it not being in favour of the current feminist perception of gender roles and female identity. Yet remembering that it is set in the early 20th century reality of African-Americans, one has to admit that it does a fair job at depicting a woman who goes beyond her time. Even if it does so not without pretense, and in a more simplistic way than Hurston’s beautiful novel.

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Martyna Przybysz is a Pole who resides in London, UK. She works in film production. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.

Please, ‘Turn Me On, Dammit!’

The 2011 Norwegian film, Turn Me On, Dammit! is, in a word, excellent. In the world of about a thousand American Pie films and cliched male teen sex comedies that usually revolve around bathroom jokes and well-endowed foreign exchange students, Turn Me On, Dammit! follows a more female centered theme that is as insightful as it is witty.
 
The star of Turn Me On, Dammit! is Helene Bergsholm who plays Alma, a 15-year-old girl who lives in a small town in Norway and is just realizing the amazing, albeit embarrassing, world of teenage hormones and sex. One night at a party, Alma’s crush, a boy at her school named Artur, exposes himself to her (or as the film’s refrain goes, “pokes her with his dick”) but when Alma excitedly tells her friends about the encounter, a jealous girl refuses to believe the story and spreads it around that Alma is a liar. Artur as well, embarrassed that he’s been confronted with the situation, denies that it ever happened, sending young Alma into the lonely world of high school drama.
 
The film’s writer and director, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, fills the film with an excellent commentary on the fact that often, men are believed over women in situations of sexual harassment and assault. Now, while Artur and Alma’s situation is slightly different since it was youthful, consensual experimentation and not assault, the point is still there: women accuse, men deny. Jacobson however doesn’t strike an agressive tone with this theme, rather she couches the exposition of it in terms of courage and cowardice. Artur is a young coward too scared to admit the truth and instead just watches as Alma is increasingly shunned and ostracized from her friends.
Malin Bjorhovde, Helene Bergsholm, Beate Stofring in Turn Me On, Dammit!

This theme is one that avoids blame and victimization, focusing instead on the human propensity to make stupid (and even cruel or damaging) mistakes and either be a coward about it, or face the consequences. A gender-relevant argument that doesn’t feel aggressive, giving the film a wide appeal to audiences.

While there is some slight “slut-shaming” that occurs in the film (Alma’s new nickname, “Dick Alma” is called after her by even small children), there is more of a focus on how Alma’s sexual activities lead the people of the town, as well as her mother, to think that she must be crazy or abnormal in some way. It’s a familiar sort of idea in the teen sex comedy, the raging sexual hormones of youth leading to a certifiably insane son or daughter whose activities seem to be those of pervert. Take for example the famous scene in American Pie when Jim decides to have sex with an apple pie because he believes it will simulate how sex actually feels; naturally, that is the exact moment that his father walks in the room.
 
The scene in American Pie, however, is so extreme that it could never be real, a problem that Jacobsen doesn’t have. Alma’s scene’s of “sexual craziness” are awkward and embarrassing to be sure, but never outside the realm of possibility, grounding her characters in in a more realistic comedy. Because of this, Alma is ultimately able to attain something that most characters in a teen sex comedy never can: self-respect. Turn Me On, Dammit! is at its core a film about growing up and gaining confidence in ourselves, a true coming-of-age story where Alma reaches self-acceptance and Alma’s mother is able to do the same for her daughter.
 
So many parental-child relationships are sacrificed in teen movies, parents becoming bumbling idiots whose outdated slang and terrible educational sexual analogies feed into cliched humor. It’s a shame that’s the case since Alma’s mother’s quiet confusion and occasional fear of her daughters healthy curiosity in sexuality lends a lot of subtle humor to the film. Alma’s mother feels her daughter must be abnormal in some way and so all she begins to see is the apparent erratic and embarrassing behavior of her daughter, not realizing the social exclusion her daughter is experiencing. Alma as well doesn’t see her mother’s loneliness and attraction to her boss; it’s a moment of selfishness for each character in their unwillingness to empathize with the other.
 
While the mother and daughter relationship is a strong plot point for the film, my favorite exposition is the very female-centered, sex-positive demonstration of female fantasy. So often visual sexual fantasy in films remains squarely in the center of the male gaze: women in bikinis washing cars, licking ice cream cones, and rising silkily out of a swimming pool come to mind. Alma not only has a very sweet, male phone sex worker friend (who is willing to also just listen to the problems of a young girl, albeit his solution to those problems are “booze”), but also fantasizes about her crush in both the sweet and the sexy, her boss (hilarity with a bike helmet and  “I’m bringing sexy back”), and most notably, a fantasy about her female friend. Female fantasy is often kept in the overly dramatic (when it is portrayed at all) and rarely are same-sex fantasies expressed from a straight woman, a fact I find unfortunate since it’s been scientifically proven that most straight women are actually more sexually flexible in their arousal than men.
 
I suppose that my analysis has made the film sound like the only thing that is ever discussed is sex; this is however, not the case–obviously the issue of first love is important, drugs make an appearance, as does a surprising commentary on the American legal system. One of the main characters, Alma’s friend Saralou, is a social activist concerned with the plight of American prisoners on death row, she in fact writes letters to American prisoners, often discussing the local high school drama with various offenders.
 
The strengths (as well the flaws) of female friendships are portrayed in the film, giving a varied look at the silly and serious side of young people. Instead of a world bound by stereotype and cheap laughs, Jacobsen has created a rich and deeply human world filled with genuine characters and issues. And sex.
Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and it’s intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

Horror Week 2012: The Roundup

The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’ by Jeremy Cornelius

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face [SPOILER ALERT!!!] a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.

As well as being a zombie aficionado, I spent my teen years deep in confusion and denial about sexuality and gender – and these two things are perhaps not unrelated. Vampires and werewolves are explicitly sexual and very gendered, but my movie monster of choice erases sex and gender entirely by its very nature. There are no alluring seductions, no monthly cycles, no explosions of pent-up masculine rage in the zombie: only a creeping sameness and inevitability, all social categories dissolved into nothingness, all physical difference literally consumed in the nightmarish Eucharist of undead cannibalism. Of course, this erasure of sex and gender does not mean that sex and gender are not explored in zombie films. On the contrary, there are some very interesting things going on, as we shall see in our whirlwind tour of the Three Eras of Zombie Cinema.

Not only is Kristen (Liv Tyler) the film’s protagonist, she’s a woman who is not presented as a helpless idiot…It is Kristin who loads the shotgun after James confesses he’d lied about going hunting with his father and doesn’t know how to work it. Ultimately, James fires the gun, but by loading it Kristin proves she isn’t an incompetent damsel-in-distress. Throughout the film she strives to fight back…The Final Girl phenomenon is problematic because it is predicated on society’s sexist notion that women are the weaker sex. But scream time results in screen time, and while watching a movie like ‘The Strangers,’ with whom is the viewer being asked to identify? The masked maniac? Or the woman frantic to survive? (Hint: it’s not the maniac.)

The Failure of the Male Gaze in ‘The Vampire Lovers’ by Lauren Chance

In both the novella and The Vampire Lovers, Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt) exclusively stalks female victims, showing little interest in the male characters as anything other than fodder or a means to an end; Ingrid Pitt’s Carmilla never looks quite as comfortable with the lone male in the film she interacts with in a sexual manner as she does with the various women she seduces and bites…indeed the appreciation of Carmilla is seen in the faces of the female characters and it is with tentative exploration that they approach the mysterious woman.

‘Absentia’ Showcases Terror, Strong Female Characters and Sisterhood by Deirdre Crimmins

While I could continue on about the remarkable characterization of Callie and Tricia, it saddens me a little bit that strong non-sexualized female characters in horror films are such a unique phenomenon. While there are plenty of ass-kicking final women in slasher films, and many smart lady doctors who help stop the spread of a zombie outbreak, it is rare to feature a realistic female friendship, or a complicated sibling rivalry, in a horror film. Both Callie and Tricia are attractive, but that is not why they are there. The purpose that they are serving goes so far beyond their gender and their bodies that the contrast to other horror vixens seems like night and day. And neither of them plays the victim, or the unnaturally stoic heroine. They are both complex, and with long histories that they carry with themselves, and impact their judgments.
ELLEN RIPLEY (Aliens): This is perhaps the only scary movie where the villain (a 7-foot alien) was actually slightly intimidated by the intended victim, in this case a female lieutenant trapped on board an alien-infested ship. If she was ever frightened by the aliens, Ripley rarely showed it. As one of the only women on the ship, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) often swooped down to save her fellow male shipmates from becoming dinner for the aliens without hardly breaking a sweat. This is why we love her.
The central pleasure of Jennifer’s Body — the confusing love Needy feels for Jennifer, and the trouble she takes to clarify that feeling, and act on it (revenging Chip), then act on it again (revenging pre-demon Jennifer) — might be precisely what turned off male reviewers. For all the promise of eye candy going in, this is a story about young women negotiating the horrors of the adolescent-to-adult obstacle course with some dignity, loyalty, and social conscience intact. The infamous male gaze has to work harder to appropriate a film told from the p.o.v. of cute but bookish, shy but self-respecting Needy, whose closest bond is, and might ever be, her friend Jennifer.
When Moira is not around a living straight man, a target for that sexuality, she is an old woman displaying a damaged eye where she was shot. She is presented as completely lacking in sexual attractiveness — not only in appearance but in demeanour as well. Her sexual nature is reserved for straight men…Moira does get to be seen as a tragic figure for this. We see her pain and her loss when her mother dies in a nursing home. We get to see her fear and frustration over trying to be free from the house and having her plans thwarted. We get to see her pain and anger in the face of Constance’s constant taunting and needling of her, still holding a grudge for her husband’s infidelity. But in all these instances we’re expected to sympathise with the older Moira — the good Moira, the non-threatening Moira and, tellingly, the non-sexual Moira. Sexual Moira is not a person to be pitied or a person due sympathy or who feels pain.

For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne…seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers to hide from other zombies. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color. Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far…I’m sorry, did the zombiepocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off…While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer/creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles…Why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes?…Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??

The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl,” the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.
Instead, these little girls embody society’s growing fears of female power and independence. Fearing a young girl is the antithesis of what we are taught — stories of missing, kidnapped or sexually abused girls (at least white girls) get far more news coverage and mass sympathy than stories of boy victims. Little girls are innocent victims and need protection…Their mere presence in these films spoke not only to audiences’ fears of children losing innocence, but also the intense fear that little girls — not yet even women–would have the power to overthrow men. These girl children of a generation of women beginning a new fight for rights were terrifying — these girls would grow up knowing they could have power.
Call it The Nervous Wife, which is more concise than “women are super emotional, illogical and fearful and cannot be trusted.” The Nervous Wife is a staple of the haunted house film genre, and now that paranormal shows are slowly taking over the small screen, it can be found there, too. In the first season of the FX channel’s American Horror Story, the character Vivien Harmon had to be committed and impregnated with a devil baby, and her teenage daughter dead and haunting the family abode, before her husband would believe that something spooky was going down. Yes. Yes. I know. Science says ghosts and goblins and such don’t exist. True enough. It is natural for a body to be skeptical of supernatural claims. Would you believe it if you were told the portal to hell was in your laundry room? Likely not. The problem is that women in horror films are rarely, if ever, the skeptical ones. Logic is portrayed as a man thing. Little ladies are quick to believe the unbelievable. And to be frightened by it.
But really, I think that the guys who made this film have no idea what kind of culture they are feeding into. I think that V/H/S is a horror film, not because it is well-made, or clever, or scary, but because these are the stories we expect to hear. Girls are murderous. Girls are sluts. Girls won’t give it up. Girls can’t be trusted. Girls are victims. Girls. Are. The. Worst. Those girls? They’re even worse than those guys. But you know what, guys who made this film? When you feed into this culture, when you populate your brains and ours with these images, with these narratives, you make it more and more likely that the only option girls have when date raped, when stuck in a loveless marriage, when victimized, when traumatized is to strike out. To strike back.
I started thinking about the five college students in The Cabin in the Woods and how their roles ar e defined by gender. The two women, Jules and Dana, are defined as The Whore and The Virgin – two opposite ends of the spectrum whose deaths are meant to serve as bookends for the others. The order of deaths is irrelevant except in the case of the women. Jules, as the corrupted Whore, has to die first, and Dana, the Virgin, has to die last, if she dies at all. As Hadley (Bradley Whitford) says, “The virgin death is optional as long as it’s last.” The female characters are defined only by their sexuality – nothing else about them really matters. Still, the men don’t fare much better…What I find particularly interesting, though, is how the “puppeteers” (as Marty calls them) recognize that the five people they’ve selected for the sacrificed don’t easily fit into the prescribed archetypes.
[Bexy Bennett]: Strong women don’t necessarily need to be role models, though. I certainly wouldn’t want my children to raise the headless horseman from the dead to exact revenge for previous injustices, but I can admire Lady Van Tassel’s forbearance – she and her sister are left alone, as children, in the Western Woods, yet she ensures their survival and raises herself to a position of some importance in the village. Of course her motives are questionable but does that diminish her strength?
[Amanda Civitello]: Given the way that the other lead female character is portrayed, I have the impression that it’s a deliberate editorial decision to make the one strong female character into the antithesis of a role model. The audience is meant to identify – or if not identify, at least feel for – sweet Katrina Van Tassel, who does all she can to save the man she loves. But Katrina isn’t nearly as well-rounded a character as Lady Van Tassel. She’s more of a generic type of filler than anything else; to compensate for the lack of development of Katrina’s character, it’s as if they wanted to ensure that Lady Van Tassel would be so offensive and so off-putting that they made her into something bordering on a monstrous caricature.
The horror genre has a tradition of terrorizing women, of chasing them through the woods and attackingthem in houses. It also has a tradition of The Final Girl, a trope that is simultaneously empowering and reductive: the only survivor is a virginal woman who wields a phallic weapon and destroys the monster. The ‘Paranormal Activity’ trilogy features a different kind of Final Girl: she doesn’t kill the monster — she becomes it.
Ableist and sexist stereotypes of women and mental illness abound in horror movies and TV (American Horror Story, Orphan, Gothika, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, The Ring and Misery)…Society polices women’s appearances, language and behavior. We can’t let the ladies get out of control. Who knows what could happen??? Calling a woman “crazy,” doubting not only her veracity but her very sanity, is offensive. It’s also an attempt to control women, demean them and strip them of their power. Women with mental illness are often silenced, invisible from the media aside from victims or villains in horror. When we do see them on-screen, they instill fear as they are depicted as violent, volatile and uncontrollable…The “crazy bitch” trope and label — in both pop culture and reality — silences and dismisses women while simultaneously shaming and stigmatizing women living with mental illness.
Without a doubt, the movie is doing many exciting, transgressive things. I find particularly important the way the audience is analogous with “the gods” because we are the ones demanding these elaborate, repetitive sacrifices that push people into these stereotypical roles. It’s not only an indictment of the horror genre but of the voyeuristic spectatorship that perpetuates these horror tropes. However, I expected more from the feminist powerhouse team that created Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I find myself wishing Marty had been cast as a woman, and the two women, the fool and the non-virgin virgin, would be the pair of survivors who finally say “no more” to a horror genre that dismembers, kills, and punishes them for being women.
The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to…The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic.
Horror films are commonly seen as one of the most sexist film genres; utilizing the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifying the female body, and reveling in helpless women being victimized. I am not discounting these claims, but horror has the potential to be more than that: films which subvert the genre’s sexism and incorporate strong, distinct female characters do exist.

Horror Week 2012: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

This is a guest post from Libby White
I’m going to be honest, I chose Behind the Mask because of an instant love that came from my first viewing of it two years ago. As an admitted horror movie junkie, I mourned the end of the reigns of Michael and Jason, Chucky and Pinhead. The old days of seemingly immortal killers with a penchant for hacking up horny teens were long gone, and in their place, we had “torture porn” like Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects. But then came Leslie Vernon into my life. 
Warning: This review contains spoilers. If you have not seen the film, I suggest watching it before I ruin the plot for you. It’s so much better when experienced firsthand. 
The plot of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon takes place over two very distinct parts. For the first half of the film, we have a comedic documentary which gives tribute the infamous killers we love and know, revealing their “secrets” and all the work it takes behind the scenes to be an apt killer. Led by a naïve young intern, a local TV news crew is sent to document the activities of a budding serial killer, Leslie Vernon. In a world where Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger are living legends; serial killing has become a well honed art form. And under the guidance of Eugene, a former serial killer himself, Leslie adopts a macabre back-story for himself, and begins to meticulously arrange every little detail of his future killing spree. From picking the perfect location for a massacre, to his final “survivor girl,” we are able to get a sense of how difficult it is to do a serial killer’s work. 
During the second part of the film, we get our real horror film. 
In a somewhat surprising twist, it is revealed that Leslie’s real target was Taylor, the intern, and her crew all along. Knowing that she would not be able to stand by and watch as a group of teens was cut down, Leslie counted on her interference with the original plan to set in motion his real motive. Sweet and virginal, Taylor is the epitome of the horror movie heroine. And when it comes time to fight for her life, she doesn’t disappoint. One by one the characters are hacked off, leaving Taylor to battle it out with the gone psychotic Leslie Vernon. 
And while my confession at the start of this remains the same, upon closer inspection, I realized that Leslie Vernon’s treatment of women is left to be desired. While there is a lot of discussion about empowering the survivor girl to become a strong woman, it is described from a mocking male’s perspective. One scene in particular especially rubbing me the wrong way, in which Leslie discusses with Taylor how the faux survivor girl, Kelly, will imminently end up at an old shed to find a weapon. He describes her choice of weapon as “empowering herself with cock.” The axes, sledgehammers, and other long handled devices purposely phallic. 
Leslie: “She’ll be taking my manhood, and empowering herself with it.” 
Taylor is visibly uncomfortable with the conversation, but Leslie persists, going full out monologue on the relation of women to horror. 
While a lot of this ongoing discussion provides interesting insight into the symbolism in horror films, Leslie’s narrative can’t help but seem like total BS. And that’s the point. The first 2/3 of the film is treated as a joke by the interviewers, (minus one or two emotionally intense moments), until the cold reality of what they are participating in hits them. While Taylor, Todd, and Doug are somewhat uncomfortable by all this talk of murder, they are obviously detached from the real truth of the matter. Only when they realize that they have been the targets all along do the crew truly become invested in the outcome of Leslie Vernon’s plan for infamy. But Leslie’s wording doesn’t help either. 
Leslie: “Yonic imagery is extremely important in our work.” 
Taylor: “Yonic?” 
Leslie: “The opposite of phallic. Bit girl parts.” 
There is also a lot of mention of virginity, and why it is all final horror movie girls are “obviously” virgins. The word “pure,” and “good” thrown around quite a bit. Leslie justifies what he is doing as a way of balancing out the good and evil in the world; that he, Eugene, and the other serial killers have chosen to fulfill a role that society doesn’t like to acknowledge needs filling. The need for a virgin for the incident to revolve around is supposedly their way of pitting good against evil. And believe it or not, the serial killers are rooting for this girl. Leslie repeatedly states throughout the movie that he has high hopes for “Kelly,” and feels he is watching a glorious thing as she makes her transition from frightened girl to “empowered woman.” But in other scenes, virginity is treated as a joke, the wife of Eugene telling the crew to “get someone in her pants,” or “get the hell away from her,” if they ever want to survive a massacre. 
This perpetuation of the idea that women are only “pure”, or good, when they are virgins is incredibly harmful. But even more so given the context of the film. After all, it is only virgins who get to live. So now a woman’s sex life is determining whether or not she is worthy to live? And pity the male characters, who are doomed to die no matter what. 
And while I know that the film is merely mocking its famous predecessors, it felt as if the writers of Leslie Vernon wanted to have an honest discussion on the matter, but got scared away, and decided to fill in the blanks with a less-serious male narrated version. 
Still, I do give the film some props for trying. In their attempts to explore the female focus of horror movies, they unintentionally misstep. With a background character that constantly cracks smart-ass remarks at Taylor, and a gratuitous close up of breasts being fondled; Leslie Vernon’s feminism isn’t all it appears to be. 
Taylor, the film’s heroine, and true “survivor girl,” is an excellent female character, however. She is neither purely innocent, nor totally timid. She is given more than one chance to wash her hands of the matter or turn Leslie in, but doesn’t. But as per Leslie’s expectations, she continuously grows throughout the film, eventually fulfilling the destiny of “empowered woman.” 
From the very start of the film, you can feel her discomfort with the plan and her own inner insecurity. She constantly questions Leslie’s justification for murder, eventually working up the courage to get into a full blown battle with him about it. On the night of the planned killings, you can see that Taylor has just about had enough. By the time she interferes, and later battles for her life, she hardly resembles the girl we started with. 
Pushed to the edge, Taylor fearlessly takes on Leslie alone, and (seemingly) wins. 
Outside of Taylor, there are very few other female characters. We have the wife of Leslie’s mentor, a murdered librarian, (played by the lovely Zelda Rubinstein), and Kelly. Unfortunately, none of these women qualify as more than background characters; Kelly, the supposed lead, killed off mid-coatis at the start of the slaughter. 
In the end, I still like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. While it will never be a great feminist work, the plot, characters, and twists make it a fun watch. Anyone who grew up on the classic 70’s and 80’s slashers will be able to watch the cameos and obscure references with glee, and imagine a world in which the most well-known movie serial killers of all time actually make a living off their killings. 
Happy Halloween!
Libby White is a senior at the University of Tennessee, studying Marketing and Spanish full-time. Her parents were in the Navy for most of her life, so she got to see the world at a young age, and learn about cultures outside her own. Her mother in particular has had a huge influence on her, as she was a woman in the military at a time when men dominated the field. Her determination and hard-work to survive in an environment where she was not welcomed has made Libby respect the constant struggle of women today.