Tag: Films By & About Women

What’s Missing ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ and ‘The Punk Singer’

Films like ‘Llewyn Davis’ make me particularly grateful for documentaries. Sini Anderson’s ‘The Punk Singer’ (disclaimer: I know Anderson slightly and produced one of her shows when she was with Sister Spit in the ’90s) is all about music and politics: feminism and women, while focusing on one person, Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and current front-woman of The Julie Ruin.

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis
Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis made many critics’ top ten lists this year, and a lot of people are rooting for the film this awards season. I’m not one of them. I see enough movies that one more about a white guy (Oscar Isaac, who plays the eponymous role, is Latino, but the script makes sure to establish the character is white) who is also an “asshole” as Carey Mulligan (unrecognizable in long, black, Beatnik hair and bangs: she plays fellow folksinger Jean) hisses throughout the film, should not faze me. The songs and their performances are as pretty and forgettable as the presence of Justin Timberlake, again foisted on an indifferent movie-going public, this time playing Jean’s husband and musical partner Jim. So why did this film piss me off so much?

Llewyn Davis and most of the folk performers he sees and interacts with are white guys (Mulligan is one of two women we see onstage. Davis heckles the second.) We see two people of color in the film: an African American man, who is asked to clean up shit in a nursing home (really) and an Asian American woman who is the butt of the joke at a dinner party. In most mainstream films we’ve become so inured to seeing the world through white-guy (asshole or not) eyes that we’ve mistaken their stories for the “true” and “real” stories of the time. But in 1961, when the film takes place, the rising superstar on the folk coffeehouse scene was a young Latina named Joan Baez, whose own fame gave a boost to the career of her-then boyfriend Bob Dylan (whose character has a cameo appearance toward the end of the film).

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xlmb8gG7HU” title=”Joan%20Baez%20%22Silver%20Dagger%22″ autohide=”0″]

Baez wasn’t an anomaly. Martin Luther King called Odetta “the queen of American folk music” when she, along with Baez, played at The March On Washington in 1963. The following song is from a live album Odetta recorded in Carnegie Hall just before the time the events of the film take place.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iZj6P-bkcY” title=”Odetta%20%22Sometimes%20I%20Feel%20Like%20A%20Motherless%20Child%22″ autohide=”0″]

In a year that has seen a breakthrough of African American directors making films about African Americans, some prominent Black writers have expressed discomfort with the stream of movies that show Black people being tortured and killed instead of just living their lives. Editing people of color out of a history, like that of Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, in which they had a prominent role, but were neither tortured nor killed, does not help this problem.

I don’t expect strict historical accuracy from a period film, but I would like it to at least resemble the place and time it depicts– and in more than just its album covers, clothes and hazy, smoke-filled interiors. As the adage about musical theater goes, “the audience doesn’t go out humming the scenery.” The absence in the film of performers of color belies the history of folk music in New York City, where in the decades before the sixties, performers like Josh White and Lead Belly popularized the genre.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiJ4QQG9WQ ” autohide=”0″]

Those performers didn’t just introduce the songs to the public, they directly influenced the performers who came after them: Pete Seeger gave credit to Lead Belly for his guitar playing style, which he then taught on record to fledgling folkies. Dave Van Ronk, whose posthumously published autobiography provides the loose basis for the script also cited gospel and blues as his musical inspiration. That influence is apparent in Van Ronk’s songs, which are a world away from the whiter-than white, radio-ready music we hear in the film. Oscar Isaac, who was a musician before he was an actor (he sings and plays well and has a striking screen presence in spite of the script) has said in interviews that his own style is more blues-influenced but that the filmmakers (and the music producer of the film, T Bone Burnett, who previously worked with the Coen brothers on the hit soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou) wanted the music to take a different direction.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=754sRFIHIrA” title=”Dave%20Van%20Ronk%20%22He%20Was%20A%20Friend%20Of%20Mine%22″ autohide=”0″]

Perhaps in part because of the African American influence even white folk performers from the coffeehouse scene were outspoken supporters of civil rights and other “progressive” (at the time) causes. The March On Washington featured not just Baez and Odetta, but Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. The civil rights movement for many young people (including, most famously, Dylan and Baez) led to the antiwar movement, which then, for many women, led to the feminist movement. Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is how rabidly (and anachronistically) apolitical it is. Because Black people barely exist in its universe, no one concerns themselves with civil rights. Even though one of the folk performers is a soldier in uniform who hitchhikes from his base every weekend to perform in the coffeehouses (the character is based on singer-songwriter Tom Paxton), no one (except that character himself) is antiwar.

 The song from the film most likely to stay with audience members (for better or worse) is “Please Mr. Kennedy” in which the singer pleads that he doesn’t want to go “to outer space”. The song it’s based on is a doo-wop record released in 1962 in which the singer asks that Kennedy not send him to Vietnam.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW6lQKLn5B8″ title=”Mickey%20Woods%20%22Please%20Mr.%20Kennedy%22%20″ autohide=”0″]

 In its portrayal of the women on the folk scene, the film borders on science fiction. Jean tells Llewyn that she would like to have a baby with Jim and move to the suburbs when any number of women, (like Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones) who were in Greenwich Village at the time have written in detail that they (and the other women they knew) went to Greenwich Village to escape conventional, suburban family life. Had the Coen brothers bothered to read any accounts from women who had abortions when the procedure was still against the law, they would, as Van Ronk’s ex-wife Terri Thal’s excellent counterpoint notes, not have portrayed abortion as a matter-of-fact sideline for a licensed OB-GYN with a nice, clean, airy office and waiting room. As if the film weren’t dismissive enough of women performers, the script also posits that Jean has to fuck a sleazy club owner to get a gig, which Thal calls bullshit and I call misogyny– since it presents as fact the oldest dismissal of any woman’s accomplishments: “She slept her way to the top.”

Films like Llewyn Davis make me particularly grateful for documentaries. Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer (disclaimer: I know Anderson slightly and produced one of her shows when she was with Sister Spit in the ’90s) is all about music and politics: feminism and women, while focusing on one person, Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and current front-woman of The Julie Ruin.

Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna

The film spotlights the neglected history of the Riot Grrrl movement through Hanna’s trajectory. We see through interviews and video of live performances, what Hanna’s music meant to her fans (the best of these interviews are with other musicians like Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, Hanna’s husband, who gushes about her work in the way every artist wants her partner to) and to the culture. As someone who was not eighteen when Bikini Kill were on the scene I never saw them live, but the clips in the film are electrifying. Hanna is every bit the badass the fans remember, whether she is singing and dancing her way across the stage wearing a skimpy top and “Slut” written across her abdomen or when she commands rowdy young men in the audience (or as she calls them “fuckers”) to stand in the back so women can be safe in the front (or even sit on the stage to escape harm). At that time post-punk shows were an excellent place to get a head-injury: I remember the band L7 had to stop playing and the house lights in the club went up while we in the audience waited for an ambulance to come for someone who fell (or was hit) while crowd-surfing.

Hanna in the earliest days of Bikini Kill
Hanna in the earliest days of Bikini Kill

Every movement likes to think of itself as completely original, and Riot Grrrl is no different, but I would have liked to see and hear more about Hanna’s feminist musical influences and antecedents. I was eighteen during the first wave of post-punk bands and remember well that many of them (and the original punk bands) included women: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Penelope Houston, Pauline Black, hell, even the Go-Go’s started as a punk band. And some of those artists were unequivocal feminists: Styrene said she would shave her head if one more journalist called her a “sex symbol” and then followed through. The post punk Au Pairs were singing about feminist issues a good decade before the Riot Grrrl scene.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaiXfdYCZCw” title=”Au%20Pairs%20%22It%27s%20Obvious%22″ autohide=”0″]

Hanna wrote compellingly about Styrene when she died and what I missed most in the film was Hanna’s voice as a writer (rather than an interview subject). Hanna began as a spoken-word artist, so maybe she wouldn’t have been listening to most of the music I’ve listed, though she must have heard, and was perhaps influenced by that other spoken-word artist turned singer: Patti Smith.

The film includes a video of a feminist community meeting Bikini Kill holds when they move from Olympia, Washington to Washington D.C. and we see the only two Black women (besides a gratuitous inclusion of a Rebecca Walker Third Wave feminism clip) in the film, which reminds us that the problems white feminists have in making room for Black women and intersectionality have been with us for a while now.

I was a fan of the band Hanna formed after Bikini Kill broke up, Le Tigre, and Hanna’s description of their songs as music they would make if “everything were great” rings true. I saw them live very early on, when Sadie Benning was still part of the trio, before JD Samson joined: the film never mentions Benning, even though she was a founding member. Hanna had a long intro to one of the songs that instead of being the embarrassing ramble I expected was a sweet story about the neighbors who made her feel safe during her troubled childhood. Perhaps Hanna’s between-song patter is how she keeps in touch with her spoken-word roots.

I also wish the film addressed Le Tigre’s participation in The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which many in the queer community and beyond have boycotted for years because the Fest excludes trans women. The band members’ silence on the issue isn’t consistent with their message of inclusion.

After years of chronic illness Hanna has started another band The Julie Ruin (whom we see perform in the last scene of the film). They just released a new record, and even though it’s front-woman is now 45, their songs are some of the best things I’ve heard on college radio. Viva The Punk Singer !

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwrXC5OXqgc” title=”%27The%20Punk%20Singer%27%20Trailer”]

 

 See also at Bitch Flicks: The Punk Singer and a Room of Her–and Our–Own, by Leigh Kolb

 

 

‘i hate myself :)’ is Self-Indulgence for the Sake of It

There is one thing that Arnow has in common with James – she really fucking hates the mainstream. Throughout the film, she references not wanting to conform to societal norms and complains that everyone’s disapproval stems from a collective brainwashing scheme to make her like everybody else. She echoed a similar contempt for coming-of-age narratives in the Q&A, saying that she didn’t find it realistic to have a protagonist grow up and have their lives together by learning a clichéd life lesson in the end. I totally agree with that. I think coming-of-age stories are incredibly boring and send the wrong message about what adulthood and maturity is supposed to be. However, there is a fine line between subverting pre-established scripts and just meandering aimlessly with zero narrative.

i hate myself :) title card.
i hate myself :) title card.

Written by Erin Tatum.

Many people don’t like to watch documentaries. We crave rational narratives and a steadily progressing plot with climax and resolution. Traditional cinema also sets highly unrealistic expectations of romance for the audience, to the point where it’s become almost mandatory for characters to suspend all reality in favor of a whirlwind love story. Filmmaker Joanna Arnow consciously undercuts these desires and takes great care to deny us a comfortable, comprehensible narrative. The problem is she doesn’t do much else. i hate myself :) chronicles Arnow’s relationship with “racially charged poet-provocateur” James Kepple (her description, not mine). The purpose of the documentary is allegedly for Arnow to determine for herself and her friends whether or not James is boyfriend material.

James being himself. Get used to this asshole because we'll be seeing far too much of him.
James being himself. Get used to this asshole because we’ll be seeing far too much of him.

i hate myself :) feels as vapid and self-absorbed as an episode of Girls adapted into a college screenplay. Arnow is clearly sipping a bit too much of the Lena Dunham koolaid. Namely, we get to watch an entitled white girl from Brooklyn create her own problems and passively refuse to seize any agency because her “struggle” (which is deliberately never outside of her control) is artistic. James essentially exists to make anyone with an invested interest in equality want to light themselves on fire. He is unapologetically misogynistic and racist to an astronomical degree. He’s a caricature of every 4chan and Reddit troll, right down to the fedora. To top it all off, he has a drinking problem and spends the vast majority of his time on camera drunk or indignant or both.

James sings while very drunk after the woman on his left tells him off for using the N-word.
James drunkenly sings after the woman on his left tells him off for using the N-word.

Making matters worse, Arnow just doesn’t seem to care about anything other than making the film. Her dynamic with James initially appears to be your run-of-the-mill plain Jane selling herself short because of low self-esteem and longing for the wild side of life. By the end, you have no sympathy for her and she winds up looking almost as smarmy as James. According to the live Q&A after the screening, it was Arnow’s intention to highlight that she wasn’t a victim and was complicit in some of the problematic aspects of their relationship. She totters after James with her camera as he frequents the Harlem poetry slam scene, dropping the N-word every 90 seconds and adamantly insisting to every person of color within hearing distance that his knowledge of racial politics is superior to theirs. She does nothing to intervene, forcing us to sit through scene after scene of his delusional, inflammatory diatribes and doubtlessly stroking his ego. There is a difference between having flaws and allowing your partner to shit all over a minority in their own community repeatedly to make yourself seem profound. It’s shock value, but at the expense of whom? Arnow would like to have you believe that she nobly sacrificed her own integrity at the stake of gritty realism, but what about all those people who just wanted to hear some goddamn poetry and were instead assaulted by two white kids with a superiority complex?

Spectators of the poetry slam are fed up with James being a racist dickhead.
Spectators of the poetry slam are fed up with James being a racist dickhead.

The premise of the film is paperthin to start with and deteriorates even further as it becomes increasingly clear that Arnow is simply using the documentary as an elaborate way to thumb her nose at anyone she believes couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of her precious psyche…so conveniently pretty much anyone but her. Her family and friends reiterate numerous times that they think James is a terrible person and she should not be dating him. Some of her friends go as far as calling her out on using the relationship as purposeful self-sabotage to satisfy her need for drama and attention. I think we all have friends like Arnow who are exhausting to be around because they’re compulsively addicted to making every platonic and romantic relationship one big protracted ego wank. Arnow’s fixation on validating her own self-importance goes as far as bullying her parents into watching her sex scene with James during the screening of the final product. It was never about James. It’s about proving that she’s important enough both to associate with someone as exciting as him and to anger her loved ones by pissing away her potential and self-respect by association with this douche.

At one point, James' emotional abuse reduces Arnow to tears.
At one point, James’ emotional abuse reduces Arnow to tears.

There is one thing that Arnow has in common with James – she really fucking hates the mainstream. Throughout the film, she references not wanting to conform to societal norms and complains that everyone’s disapproval stems from a collective brainwashing scheme to make her like everybody else. She echoed a similar contempt for coming-of-age narratives in the Q&A, saying that she didn’t find it realistic to have a protagonist grow up and have their lives together by learning a clichéd life lesson in the end. I totally agree with that. I think coming-of-age stories are incredibly boring and send the wrong message about what adulthood and maturity is supposed to be. However, there is a fine line between subverting pre-established scripts and just meandering aimlessly with zero narrative. Although it may seem unfair that I’m dumping most of the blame on Arnow, she herself acknowledges that most people will find James revolting. Since she seems to have deliberately featured him to get a rise out of the audience, I’m not going to waste any more of my time by exhaustively enumerating the ways that he is the world’s biggest piece of shit because frankly I don’t want to give either of them the satisfaction. The most troubling thing to me is that Arnow thinks her story in itself is a philosophical commentary on the human experience that others can learn from when really it’s pure self-indulgence. Any possible sympathetic resonance that viewers who have also found themselves in unhealthy relationships might feel completely evaporates under the weight of her stubborn apathy.

An unlikely voice of wisdom comes from Arnow’s editor and apparent nudism enthusiast Max Karson, who does not put on a single piece of clothing for any of his scenes. I’m assuming that this was another quirky indie decision for lols, but I do admire his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. I just wish everyone and everything in this movie would stop trying so hard to be offkilter. Anyway, Max spends most of his screen time picking on Arnow and criticizing her personal life choices with very little sugarcoating. You almost wonder why they’re friends. Tellingly, whenever he tries to weasel a definitive opinion on her life or relationship out of her that would admit even the tiniest shred of culpability, she becomes as inarticulate as a bashful kindergartner. At one point he observes, “I think you’re so ashamed of yourself that you manipulate other people into saying what you want to say because you can’t take responsibility for anything.” Way to hit the nail on the head, buddy. Needless to say, Max is the character that I identify most with.

Every time James and Arnow get it on, a feminist's life expectancy is shortened by 10 years.
Every time James and Arnow get it on, a feminist’s life expectancy is shortened by 10 years.

In the end, Arnow actually shows the finished product to James. To give you an idea of just how shapeless this film is, when he asks her why she included the sex scene, she giggles and says “because it’s porn!” Like many things in her work, I call bullshit here. You’re the director. You know you consciously chose everything for a reason. Her childish disavowal of any coherent explanation for anything redefines grating. I know her aim is to be defiantly immature, but taken to this ludicrous extreme, it dilutes the impact of the film significantly. To James’ credit, he is disgusted to find out that she forced her parents to watch the sex scene and calls her a sadist. You know if James says you have issues, you’re fucked. They start having sex for no reason and stagger off camera before it finally cuts to black.

The title of the film really speaks to all its issues. The lowercase and the emoticon evoke teen angst and suggest a digital form of communication, alluding to the disconnect that many young people feel between themselves and society and reality. The film’s fatal flaw is not that Arnow failed to grow and progress, but rather that she wasn’t even a primary player in her own story and actively worked to dismantle accountability for any of her life choices by unfairly shifting blame onto people who were trying to support her. You can’t pretend other people are puppeteering your life when you’re the one behind the camera.

Arnow may hate herself, but I really just don’t care.