Films By Women – Page 16

Lies The Government–and Movies–Tell Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ and ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Just last week, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi who makes inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

Meanwhile, the jihadi, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.

Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.

Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.

As I sat through Me and Earl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfmAllbYC8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Scavenging for Food and Art: Agnès Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda is nothing less than a cinematic treasure. Her career spans decades and she has gained critical acclaim for both her fiction and documentary films. Varda was, of course, a pioneering figure of the New Wave and Left Bank. In 1962, she directed the ground-breaking, feminist classic Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). In 1985, her powerful, lyrical film about a young homeless woman, Sans Toi, Ni Loi (Vagabond), won the Golden Lion in Venice. This year Varda was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was the first woman to receive the tribute. At the beginning of the Millenium, Varda also directed the documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). It is one of the most fascinating ever made.

Poster for The Gleaners and I — Poster for *The Gleaners and I*

Varda begins her documentary by providing the historical, aesthetic and linguistic context of gleaning. We are given the Larousse dictionary definition: “To glean is to gather after the harvest.” The director tells us that it was a mostly female, collective activity in the old days. Today, both men and women glean, more often than not on their own. François Millet’s painting of les glaneuses provides the stimulating starting point for Varda’s creative, humanist journey. Marrying the past and the present, the documentary features interviews with men and women of rural and urban France in the new Millenium who practice various forms of gleaning. People gather everything from vegetables, fruit, and oysters to old dolls, fridges, and TVs. We encounter an impoverished single mother picking potatoes, and homeless young people dumpster-diving outside a supermarket. We also meet a chef scavenging for fruit because he prefers to know where his food comes from, as well as artist gleaners who scavenge for junk to use in their pieces. One of the most interesting people Varda meets is a man with a master’s degree who picks discarded fruit and bread from city markets in the morning and teaches French to immigrants from Mali and Senegal at night.

The Gleaners and I is not directly political but rather a thought-provoking, humanist study of people on the margins as well as those with reject capitalist norms of production and consumption. Issues of waste and sustainable development have become more and more critical, of course, since the film was made. Interestingly, in an effort to combat waste and food poverty, France introduced new laws this year banning supermarkets from dumping and destroying unsold food. They are now encouraged to give edible food to charities.

Millet's Les Glaneuses — Millet’s Les Glaneuses

The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability. Her presence is, also often playful. At the beginning of the film, she recreates the actions of the wheat-carrying glaneuse in Jules Breton’s painting of a solitary female gleaner, all the while fixing her eyes on the camera. Varda has the inquiring mind of all great artists. Her humanity and inventiveness are consistently on display in The Gleaners and I. The director seems entirely invested in the subject as well as entirely empathetic towards the people she meets. Varda indeed identifies herself as a glaneuse. She gleans both memories and images in her life and art. In truth, the documentary is not only a study of gleaning but also a beguiling self-portait of an artist as well as an imaginative self-reflexive study of the art and craft of filmmaking.

Villagers being interviewed about the tradition

At once poetic and politically aware, The Gleaners and I offers a captivating portrait of the practice of scavenging. Both very French and very human, it’s a life-affirming film about how people survive and create. There are no subjects more important. The documentary is one of Varda’s essential works, as well as one of the most interesting and finest of all time.

Where Are All the Female Anti-Heroes?

As I sit writing this post, it’s 6 a.m. I’m up early not by choice but because my internal alarm clock has gone off three hours early. Usually when this happens, it’s because of two reasons: I’ve fallen asleep drunk and it’s my beer alarm, or I’m extremely anxious about something. In today’s case, it’s Day 21 of my Kickstarter campaign for my first feature film.

This is a guest post by Christina Choe.

Seeing my struggling artist friends, my friends’ mothers, former collaborators, and strangers donating to my film has been extremely moving. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, asking people for money so you can make your dreams a reality. And perhaps a very American concept. Like my immigrant mom says, “People in Korea only give you money if it’s a funeral or a wedding.”

During the lulls of the campaign, I’ve definitely thought to myself, I’m totally insane. Why am I putting myself through this masochistic process? Today, I was comforted by Robert DeNiro’s NYU commencement speech:

“When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You weren’t just following dreams, you were reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a musician, a filmmaker, a photographer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re fucked.”

It’s hilarious but brutally true. As an artist we have to rely on our passion to keep going. As a Korean-American growing up in a small all white town in New Jersey, I didn’t know anybody pursuing the arts. I was also the black sheep in my family, who came to this country for the American Dream and wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer.

I chose the irrational. I also chose to tell stories about outsiders, because of some deep need to connect to others through cinema. While getting my MFA at Columbia University, I wrote/directed several shorts that screened around the world (Telluride, SXSW, Slamdance, Rooftop Films, etc). From The Queen, a film about a Korean-American teen coming out at his parents’ dry cleaners, to I am John Wayne, about a young Black cowboy grieving his best friend’s death, I’ve been lucky to connect with audiences with my films. That’s truly what keeps me going.

Since making those shorts, I’ve been working on making my debut feature. The script, NANCY, is a gripping, psychological drama about a female imposter who lies to gain emotional intimacy. The film is inspired by the literary hoax of JT Leroy, Fredreic Bourdin (The Imposter documentary), the fake blogger, “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” and my own former writing professor who turned out to be a fraud.

Nancy is a woman on the edge of society. She yearns for emotional connection through lying. She is morally ambiguous, charming, disturbing, and complex, in the vein of many male anti-hero characters we love like Travis Bickle, Walter White, Tony Soprano, etc.

As many of us already know, female filmmakers are still a minority and as a result, there are fewer complex female protagonists on screen. For female filmmakers of color the statistics are even more dismal. But I truly believe with a village of supporters, this film will be made.

We have seven days left! Please consider donating to our campaign and spreading the word to your friends! We have awesome female director tote bags as Kickstarter rewards.

Christina Choe is an award winning filmmaker. She has received funding from New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Jerome Foundation, and Canada Arts Council for the Arts. Her short films, The Queen, Flow, and I am John Wayne, have screened at film festivals around the world, including: Telluride, SXSW, Slamdance (Grand Jury Prize), Los Angeles Film Festival, Aspen Shorts Fest, and Rooftop Film Festival. Her films have been featured on VICE, Hammer to Nail and Vimeo Staff Picks.

In 2012, she was invited to the Berlinale Talent Campus and The MacDowell Colony. In 2013, she was selected as one of two fellows for the HBO/DGA Directing Fellowship, shadowing directors on Girls, Boardwalk Empire, and Looking.

She received an M.F.A from Columbia University for writing/directing and is currently in development for her first feature, NANCY, which was selected for Emerging Storytellers at IFP Project Forum, Venice Biennale College Cinema Program, the Hamptons International Film Festival Screenwriter’s Lab, Film Independent’s Fast Track & Directing Lab. In 2015 she received the Roger and Chaz Ebert Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Filmmaker at the Spirit Awards.

‘Jupiter Ascending’: Female-centric Fantasy That’s Not Quite Feminist

So yes, ‘Jupiter Ascending’ provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy. What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills.

Poster for 'Jupiter Ascending' — Poster for ‘Jupiter Ascending’

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have entirely missed the existence of The Wachowskis’ space opera Jupiter Ascending. Bumped from last summer to a mercy-kill February release, it was panned by critics and ignored by audiences. Save the fannishly inclined, largely female Tumblr users who happen to populate my dashboard, who completely lost their minds over this movie. I blinked and missed its momentary theatrical release and had to wait for it on video to find out if it met the subculture hype. And I am here to report that Jupiter Ascending is a delightful cheesy sci-fi flick, if you’re into that sort of thing. And while it isn’t a feminist triumph in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road is (and even that movie’s feminism has been called into question), Jupiter Ascending is unusually suited to a female viewership, which is sadly still rather revolutionary, particularly for a genre flick.

Why does this spaceship look like a fancy mechanical fish? Why doesn't yours!? — Why does this spaceship look like a fancy mechanical fish? Why doesn’t yours!?

Gavia Baker-Whitlaw’s Daily Dot piece “Why Women Love Jupiter Ascending“ notes that its story “is the precise gender-flipped equivalent of all those movies where some weak-chinned rando turns out to be the Chosen One” usually with a hyper-competent and hot “Strong Female Character” acting as his guide through his Newly Discovered Destiny. In Jupiter Ascending, Mila Kunis’s Jupiter Jones is a mild-mannered housecleaner who discovers she is actually solar system royalty after Genetically Engineered Space Werewolf Channing Tatum rescues her from an alien attack. Jupiter finds that she is at the center of a war between three royal Jovian siblings (yes I just had to look up the demonym for Jupiter I love my life) who all seek to control Earth and its seven billion harvestable humans so they can rejuvenate their youth by bathing in Soylent Green Espom Salts. She has a claim to Earth because she is the reincarnation of their mother and is also immune to bee stings. Or something. (The intricacies of the plot are not important, I only recount them here because they amuse me.)

Bees don't sting solar system royalty for some reason. — Bees don’t sting solar system royalty for some reason.

So yes, Jupiter Ascending provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy (you really need to be MORE important, cishet white dudes?). What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills, as we see with our once-mundane male Chosen Ones from The Matrix‘s Neo to The Lego Movie‘s Emmett to Wanted‘s Whatever-James-McAvoy’s-character-was-named. She never eclipses the badassness of her Trinity-equivalent, the aforementioned Genetically-Engineered Space Werewolf, Caine Wise (one of the great joys of the film is when people call him “Wise” while he’s doing foolishly reckless things. I’m not sure if that was intentional). Caine needs to rescue Jupiter throughout the film; his preferred style of rescue is to give her a piggyback ride while he zooms around on his gravity-defying space rollerblades. If all these absurd details haven’t convinced you to watch this movie yet, I’m not sure what will. When she’s on her own, Jupiter’s “action” is largely about contract law.

Jupiter gets a lot of piggyback rides from Caine

Because Jupiter’s secret importance doesn’t come with previously untapped hyper-competence or the unique importance of her particular abilities, it is simply a royal birthright. She’s more along the lines of The Princess Diaries‘ Mia Thermopolis than Neo. And women aren’t really wanting for “you are actually a princess!” narratives. There are 30-odd Disney movies about that. Jupiter Ascending isn’t a power fantasy, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Women already have "you're really a princess!" stories — Women already have “you’re really a princess!” stories

But it is still a fantasy for women in a big-budget sci fi movie, which is incredibly rare. Is that why Jupiter Ascending flopped at the box office, or at least why the studio lost confidence in it as a potential summer release? I suspect it has more to do with the current difficulty selling big movies without source material. If even the Wachowskis’ own Matrix trilogy (which provided the very namesake of Tasha Robinson’s Trinity Syndrome) couldn’t bring in a new era of original sci-fi blockbusters (the only two I can think of are Avatar and Pacific Rim), the failure of Jupiter Ascending seems foretold. So hopefully studios will focus on Jupiter Ascending‘s lack of source material rather than its female protagonist when they try to avoid making other movies that meet its fate. Then again, only basing movies on properties that already exist will perpetuate male-dominated stories. So we’re kinda screwed either way, which isn’t an unfamiliar position for feminist film fans.

Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax (that's the kind of character name you get with 'Jupiter Ascending') — Eddie Redmayne as Balem Abrasax (that’s the kind of character name you get with *Jupiter Ascending*)

Jupiter Ascending might go on to be a cult classic, and if you like bizarre scifi you should help it get there. I didn’t even get into Academy Award Winner Eddie Redmayne’s astonishingly campy performance as Balem Abrasax, who prefers the cape-but-no-shirt look and only speaks in whispers and screams (in the alternate universe where Jupiter Ascending was released in Summer 2014, Michael Keaton gazes lovingly upon his Best Actor Oscar). While Jupiter Ascending deserves accolades for providing female-centric fantasy, it doesn’t go the distance to become a truly feminist film (it is certainly nine or ten notches below Mad Max: Fury Road, which doesn’t even meet the bar for some people). But while I can’t recommend Jupiter Ascending as a feminist film, I do recommend it as a fun film. They can’t all have Furiosa.

Robin Hitchcock is a Pittsburgh-based writer who sadly has been stung by bees.

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

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

This is a guest post by Ariana DiValentino.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauryn Hill Performs Signature Nina Simone Numbers at New York Premiere of ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ at the Apollo

Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in ‘Beyond the Lights’ and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”

S. Epatha Merkerson, Atallah Shabazz, Liz Garbus

This guest post by Paula Schwartz previously appeared at Showbiz 411 and is cross-posted with permission.

Lauryn Hill’s rousing performance following the screening of What Happened, Miss Simone? Monday evening at the Apollo Theater turned into a celebration and tribute to the genius and artistry of the musician/activist Nina Simone. The sensational evening was presented by Netflix and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (The documentary will air on Netflix on Friday, June 26.)

Hill, who first performed at the Apollo at age 13 where she was booed for singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” off key, got a very different reception last night.

Dressed in a white halter-top and flared pants, Hill looked terrific, and even channeled the legendary singer; her outfit resembled an outfit Simone wore in a legendary performance featured in the documentary directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus (The Farm: Angola, 1998).

Hill’s voice was raspy from some ailment mentioned by producer Jayson Jackson in his introduction before her set, but that that only made her voice sound even more like Simone’s baritone. In her nearly 50-minute set, Hill danced and swayed and sang signature Simone numbers.

The former Fugees singer opened with a moving rendition of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and followed up with a dynamic version of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” She sang backed up by a full orchestra that included lush sounds of string instruments.

There were problems with the sound mix and some failed starts and stops, but Hill is a perfectionist and demanding bandleader and it all finally came together. For her next number she enthused, “We goin’ try to rap with this,” and Hill performed a new rap song inspired by Simone’s music.

Afterward she introduced the terrific Jazmine Sullivan with, “She can sing for the both of us tonight,” and added, “Watch this!”

Sullivan launched into Randy Newman’s 1977 song “Baltimore,” a tune Simone memorialized, which with Baltimore’s current problems could have been written today: “Man, it’s hard just to live. Oh, Baltimore. Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live.”

The song is included in a Simone tribute album timed to be released in conjunction with the documentary, which includes artists Hill, Common, Usher, Mary J. Blige, and Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, a singer who also appears in the documentary and provides some of the film’s most poignant moments and insights into her mother’s life and career.

After Sullivan’s performance, Hill returned and ended on an even higher note, with her take of “African Mailman.” The long instrumental showcased the band with solos by the drummer, violinist, and backup singer. But the program was all about Lauryn Hill and her channeling of Simone, and despite the crowd’s stomping and cheering as the show ended its nearly hour-long set, there was no encore.

As suggested by the title, What Happened, Miss Simone? the documentary portrays a musical genius, but also a troubled artist who often fell on hard times. Driven by her art and social activism, and constrained by racism and her own inner demons – Simone was diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder – she was also controlled by an abusive husband/manager Andrew Stroud, a former cop. He furthered her career but also beat her. There are archival segments of the couple together and present-day interviews with Stroud, who did not attend the premiere. (Simone’s daughter, who is promoting her new album, also did not attend.)

Notable celebrities at the premiere included grandchildren and friends of Simone, along with her longtime musicians Al Schackman, Lisle Atkinson and Leopoldo Fleming. Atkinson, a bass player who played with Simone for five years, told me her legendary tantrums and difficulty as a performer were exaggerated and he never had a bad moment on stage with her. He told me he believed she would want to be remembered for her music.

Schackman, a guitarist with perfect pitch, performed with Simone throughout her career and his astute comments and obvious love and esteem for Simone provide for some of the film’s most perceptive and informative moments.

In her introduction from the stage to the film, Garbus thanked Netflix and all the contributors to the documentary and related a story from Simone’s memoir. “Friends say I might have trouble with the crowd here because the Apollo is well known for giving artists a rough time,” read Garbus from Simone’s notes. “And I’m well known for the same to audiences.” The audience laughed. “So the two of us getting together was looked at as a kind of championship boxing match with the Apollo as the champ and me as the contender. In the end we fought to a draw.”

From the time she was a girl of 3, Nina Simone aspired to be the first Black classical pianist. “That was all that was on my mind,” she said in an interview in the doc, where in archival footage she famously said of her political activism that often got her into hot water, “I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

Earlier on the red carpet, I mentioned to Garbus that Nina Simone is having a moment. Gina Prince-Bythewood has her protagonist sing “Blackbird” in Beyond the Lights and Simone’s music seems to be getting a new audience as well. Garbus said, “It’s very interesting. You know I can’t explain that. I was in Starbucks this morning for half an hour and what was playing was Nina Simone. I guess we just needed her.”

Speaking of her inspiration for the doc, Garbus said, “I’m a conduit to bringing her to audiences that didn’t know her before or giving her audience who loved her a little more of her. That’s a wonderful position to be in.”

The director noted that Simone is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century who had 15 ways of singing the same song. When she undertook the project, Garbus told me she didn’t know Simone’s personal life: “But of course as soon as I started to peel away layers of that I was even more committed and desirous of bringing her story to the screen.”

As for what Garbus hopes audiences take away from seeing the film, she told me on the red carpet, “I want them to listen to her music all over again and for that listener it will be a delicious experience because you’re going to know what this woman went through and what she was bringing to that music.”

Celebrities who attended the premiere included John Leguizamo, Sandra Bernhard, S. Epatha Merkerson, Usher, Gina Belafonte, Ilyasah Shabazz, and D.A. Pennebaker.

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist

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

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

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

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

The Smiling Madame Beudet – 1923

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

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

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

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

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

Invitation to the Voyage – 1927

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

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

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

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

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

The Seashell and the Clergyman – 1928

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

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

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

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

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

Controlling Mothers in ‘Carrie,’ ‘Mommie Dearest,’ and ‘Now Voyager’

These three “bad moms” fashion themselves the Moirai, the Fates, the three women in control of everything on earth. … These films were just the start of audiences’ obsession with controlling mothers. We continue to see these tropes replayed in a multitude of ways.

This guest post by Al Rosenberg appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

Mothers who abuse their children, abandon them, or neglect them are easy to spot and label as “bad mothers.” Then there are the subtler forms of “bad mothering.” For these types it all comes down to control; control through religion, respectability, or ambition. It is in these three arenas that the Mommie Dearests of the world push their daughters to the breaking point. These three “bad moms” fashion themselves the Moirai, the Fates, the three women in control of everything on earth. These types of manipulation in the extreme are the things of nightmares, or of the big screen.

The insidious part is that it is meant to seem like this behavior stems from a slight corruption of maternal love, of wanting the best for your child. In the case of Carrie (1976), Margaret White (Piper Laurie) wants better for her daughter than she had for herself. Throughout the course of the film it’s revealed that Carrie was conceived after her mother was raped by her own husband, and now Margaret wishes constantly to cleanse Carrie of this sin through cruel and overbearing religion. After Carrie is tormented by her fellow students for finally getting her period, and having no idea what it is, her mother locks her away for prayer and reflection.

Of course, it being a horror movie based on a Stephen King novel, the outcome is not so simple as a terrifying “religious cleansing.” When Carrie and Margaret finally have a heart-to-heart it’s the biproduct of the telekinetic teenager having just murdered a good percentage of her high school. Margaret cannot suffer to let this witch live, and attempts to end her daughter’s life, a final act of ultimate control, and ends up on the wrong end of Carrie’s new found powers.

Movies have been curious about this maternal tension since the get-go. While Carrie may have had the super skills, all three of these mothers have very realistic power over their offspring. In Now, Voyager (1942), Bette Davis plays rich, mousey Charlotte Vale, a woman whose life is entirely dictated by her mother (Gladys Cooper). Mrs. Vale does not push Charlotte into closets, or chant biblical passages at her. In fact, this matriarch barely moves throughout the film. Instead, Charlotte’s life is controlled through her mother’s emotional manipulation. Like Carrie, Charlotte was an unwanted child and Mrs. Vale makes sure she knows it. She tells Charlotte what to wear, how to talk, whom to associate with, all in the name of ladylike propriety.

Through therapy and travel Davis’s character finds her own voice (and was a babe-in-disguise, perhaps one of the earliest films in that trope as well). When the two women meet again they’re at a stalemate. What is a controlling mother without a child to control? Mrs. Vale’s demise is more similar to Margaret White’s than one might expect from a “weepie” film, finally leaving Charlotte to be her own woman.

Hollywood would like us to believe that this kind of parent is just one bad turn away in everyday life. And maybe that’s true: Mommie Dearest is based on the memoirs of Joan Crawford’s (Bette Davis’s biggest rival) daughter. It’s the tale of Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) tormenting her adopted daughter Christina in bizarre, abusive ways. Again an unwanted child, but this time not by her mother. Though Joan chose Christina, it becomes clear that it was all an act, like much of Crawford’s life in this film.

Eventually Christina makes it onto the big screen herself, perhaps due to years of her mother’s ambition being shoved down her throat. But when she’s too ill to make it to set, Joan, a much older woman, takes the role from her. Joan doesn’t join Margaret White and Mrs. Vale in the Killed-By-Our-Daughters afterlife, but Christina did wait until after the death of her mother to publish these memoirs and, hopefully, find some resolution.

These films were just the start of audiences’ obsession with controlling mothers. We continue to see these tropes replayed in a multitude of ways. Carrie (1976) was recently remade for the second time, Carrie (2014). Though this time it offered a slightly more sympathetic view of both mother and daughter. Audiences may not have loved it as much as the first attempt, but it was still the Halloween pick for many movie-goers.

Mommie Dearest’s fame-driven mother finds a spiritual successor in Natalie Portman’s mother in Black Swan (2010). Portman is driven to the brink of insanity by her own ambition, but couple that with her mother’s drive and it’s just too much for the young ballerina. You can also watch moms incredibly similar to Crawford and her drive for success in any of the many seasons of Dance Moms available on Lifetime. Or watch the beginning of “no more wire hanger” relationships in Little Miss Perfect, and, my personal favorite, Toddlers & Tiaras. Audiences seem to love to hate the controlling pageant mom.

Mothers are important, they guide children through life in a multitude of ways, but some children get stuck with the women who never wanted them. Perhaps these mothers, raped, or widowed, or abandoned, see too much of themselves in their daughters and push too hard. Perhaps the real life version of these mothers deserve more of our sympathy than to be turned into monsters of the big screen in a multitude of ways. But these three mean moms? Maybe they got the ends they deserved.

Al Rosenberg is the Games Section Editor of WomenWriteAboutComics.com, a reviewer at Lesbrary.com, a Chicagoan, and a general nuisance. Follow on Twitter: @sportsmyballs

‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’s Abject Mother

The film relocates the fears surrounding motherhood away from the patriarchal fears of abjection to the female and feminist fears of fulfillment.

Written by Sarah Smyth as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

Western society and culture fears mothers. Through her grotesque leaky body and the ambiguous division of the mother/child during pregnancy, patriarchy marks the mother as strange and mysterious. She is nature, opposed to the “proper” masculine position of culture. So prevalent a fear within Western society, the mother is the ultimate embodiment of abjection. In this piece, I will use the theory of abjection in order to examine Lynne Ramsay’s exquisite 2011 film, We Need to Talk about Kevin. In doing so, I hope to locate the film within a post-feminist framework, demonstrating the ways in which the representation of abjection plays into our notions of maternal and female achievement. Ultimately, I argue that the film relocates the fears surrounding motherhood away from the patriarchal fears of abjection to the female and feminist fears of fulfillment.

The poster for "We Need to Talk about Kevin" — The poster for “We Need to Talk about Kevin”

The theory of abjection is most powerfully put forward by Julia Kristeva in her book, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Here, she discusses the abject as the grotesque, the repulsive, as that which we want to expel and dispose of. Particular examples of this include bodily waste such as excretions, secretions, vomit and menstruation, rotting food, and corpses. The significance of these abject moments and the reason we fear them so much is, as Kristeva says, not due to their lack of cleanliness or health “but what disturbs identity, system, order”: “What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. It is, then, the uneasy position between boundaries that causes or repulsion and rejection of the abject: death and life, clean and unclean, healthy and diseased.

Film academic, Barbara Creed, developed Kristeva’s theory of the abject to suggest the ways in which the maternal body, as particularly represented in horror films, embodies abjection. So obviously and relentlessly fleshy and visceral, the maternal body is linked to the “natural” world of birth, decay and death. Menstruating, lactating and gestating, the maternal body embodies this very ambiguous abject space. The boundaries of her body become blurred, setting her apart from the patriarchal world which continually attempts to remain “clean and proper”. For Creed, many classic horror and science fiction films including Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Carrie play on this idea of the monstrous abject maternal function. In all of these films, the pregnant woman, or the potential pregnant woman as represented through menstruation, provides the horror of the film through the very abjection of their female body.

Website, Ain't it Cool's poster for "We Need to Talk about Kevin" plays on the original poster for "Rosemary's Baby" suggesting the links between the two films — Website, Ain’t it Cool’s poster for “We Need to Talk about Kevin” plays on the original poster for “Rosemary’s Baby” suggesting the links between the two films

Although We Need to Talk about Kevin is not explicitly a horror film, it uses many of the tropes of the genre to create feelings of unease and fear around motherhood. Adapted from Lionel Shriver’s successful novel, the film focuses on Eva (Tilda Swinton), a travel writer, and her relationship with her (sociopathic? disturbed? evil?) son, Kevin (Ezra Miller). The film is told in a series of flashbacks as we learn that Kevin is somehow involved in a terrible criminal atrocity. As we discover what Kevin has done, the film also reveals the relationship between mother and son, posing the continually fascinating question: does familial and social upbringing wholly inform a person’s moral and ethical values or are some people just born evil?

As the film unpicks this question, it deconstructs traditional conceptualisations of the abject and identifications of the monstrous. For Eva, great pleasure is taken in the abject. During one of the first scenes in the film, Eva travels to La Tomatina festival in Spain. Through the shots of Eva wading through the semi-naked bodies and the vivid red tomatoes, the film emphasises Eva’s pleasure or even jouissance (a kind of excessive, orgasmic pleasure) in the visceral, bloodlike, grotesque experience. The film makes clear that Kevin disconnects Eva from these experiences she so craves. She’s not able to travel, and eventually winds up at a menial job in a travel agency. In one particularly painful moment, she finishes decorating her own room, her special room, with rare maps, which Kevin then destroys with paint. But not only is Eva unable to travel, write or occupy a room of her own, crucial activities for the active, challenging, and independent woman as Virginia Woolf so passionately advocated. She is also particularly separated from the physical and emotional experiences of pregnancy. The film gestures towards her pregnancy through an extreme close-up shot of cells splitting. Later, after childbirth, Eva sits quietly and almost mournfully in a cold, clinical hospital as Franklin (John C. Reilly), her husband, coos over the baby. The film presents her pregnancy through a scientific and technological lens, far removed from the abject experiences of pregnancy put forward from the previously mentioned films.

The wide angle of this shot suggests the physical and emotional distance Eva experiences towards her pregnancy and her child

Most radically, however, in a reversal of gender, Kevin primarily embodies abjection within the film. He throws, smears and expels food, leaving it to rot and become covered in ants. He refuses to become toilet trained but shows an extraordinary level of control over his bowels as he defecates just after being changed, frustrating his mother greatly. When he’s older, Eva catches him masturbating but rather than feeling embarrassed or chastised, he menacingly holds eye contact with her until she hastily shuts the door and walks away. What’s interesting about these moments is the manipulation of the traditional abject mother-child relationship. As Creed points out, the mother not only embodies the abject body. She must also police the abject body; it is the mother’s job to map and uphold the “clean and proper” body of the child before he/she enters the paternal and patriarchal world of language and culture. In We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva refuses or is unable to exert this maternal authority in order to keep Kevin’s body “clean”. She doesn’t clear up the food Kevin throws. She cannot potty train or exert any kind of control over Kevin’s bowel movements. She is unable to extend any influence over Kevin’s masturbatory habits. As Sue Thornham claims, “Kevin denies [Eva] control, refusing her transformation of the unknown into an exercise of mapping, of motherhood into a teaching relationship. Instead, his behaviour insists on the messiness of the body, on the fleshy, the organic, the abject – and insists that Eva recognize this, together with her own rage and fear at her entrapment”.

Kevin's not at all concerned that his mother's caught him masturbating... — Kevin’s not at all concerned that his mother’s caught him masturbating…

The film’s deconstruction and blurring of the abject roles examines and challenges the post-feminist ideas and ideals of motherhood. In Unruly Girls; Unrepentant Mothers, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes that post-feminism purports to celebrate intensive mothering as the liberated woman’s enlightened choice when, in fact, it both replaces subservience to a husband with subservience to the child, and naturalizes motherhood as an essential part of womanhood. By refusing to embody her traditional position as the abject mother, Eva and, indeed the film, challenge the idea that every woman must become a mother, that every woman will find fulfillment in being a mother, and that every mother must take up her position as the abject figure in this patriarchal society.

In all, We Need to Talk about Kevin is not a misogynist depiction of the feared maternal figure. Rather, it is a feminist revelation of the fears mothers have themselves; that they may not love their child, that they may not fulfill the so-called ultimate expression of womanhood and femininity, and that they may, in fact, release the monstrous potential of themselves and their child through the very abjection of their maternal function.

Sarah Smyth is a staff writer at Bitch Flicks who recently finished a Master’s Degree in Critical Theory with an emphasis on gender and film at the University of Sussex, UK. Her dissertation examined the abject male body in cinema, particularly focusing on the spatiality of the anus (yes, really). She’s based now in London, UK and you can follow her on Twitter at @sarahsmyth91.

‘Riding in Cars with Boys’ and Post-Maternal Female Agency

‘Riding in Cars with Boys’ showcases a humanity to women who are mothers that our media lacks. Women are constantly punished and depowered for their sexuality, and their motherhood status is often used as another way to control in media.

This guest post by CG is part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

Being a woman in today’s society means following a particular script. You are to: be a quiet, pleasant child. Discover boys by puberty. Get good grades, wear a sparkling prom dress. Have a college boyfriend. Marry said college boyfriend. Be a quiet homemaker, be pregnant, raise your children accordingly. But rarely, if ever, do we get a glimpse into what life means outside of this script – particularly after motherhood. What happens to these women who follow the script, who find themselves the proper example of what the script can mean – and what happens to those who choose to forge their own path, and mix life in with the order of the script?

It’s rare to find that there is life for women beyond motherhood. For this, I turn to one example that has shown the full humanity of post-maternal female agency. This is 2001’s Riding in Cars with Boys.

Riding in Cars With Boys is a journey story, first and foremost. Radical even today, the story follows Beverly “Bev” Delfrino (played by Drew Barrymore) as she stumbles her ways through life. Even at eleven, Bev displays her zest for life and the zing of excitement. She wants to be a writer. She wants to go to college and rub elbows with the elite. And most of all, she wants to be desired…by boys.

In one of the first scenes, Bev’s father is flabergasted as she tells him that what she really wants for Christmas isn’t a bike, but a bra, to impress a classmate that she likes.

This kind of boldness is cemented into Bev’s character as she grows older. Even when she is rejected at a high school party by yet another classmate she is pining over, she finds comfort in Ray, a guy who really doesn’t have much going for him but comforts our heroine. She then has unprotected sex with Ray in the backseat of a car.

It isn’t long before Bev finds herself pregnant. And while most stories would end here, or move the heroine to find some meaning in her pregnancy and motherhood, Bev rejects this. She continues being the same selfish, flamboyant lover of life that she is at the beginning of the film, despite the constant pressure from others in her life (particularly men) for her to conform. Her father, with whom Bev has a close relationship with, not only rejects her but kicks her out of the house when he finds out she is pregnant. Ray, who Bev marries out of necessity, remains a static character as well. He is a well meaning individual whose irresponsibility outweighs Bev’s. Between forgetting basic essentials to falling into a haze of drugs, Ray’s unreliability mirrors the same gender roles that move along the film.

It seems odd to praise a film like this, where the mother figure is such a notable “bad mother”, but that in lies the beauty of this film. Riding in Cars with Boys doesn’t negate or try to water down Bev. She remains an individual first and foremost, and the role of mother becomes secondary to that. And there are far and few media representations that allow women to embody themselves fully like this.

Bev is surrounded by men in the film – her father, Ray, her son Jason – and they all embody some part of the responsibility and gender roles that Bev is fighting against. Jason ends up being the voice of reason in the film, growing up feeling resentful and grateful for having Bev as a mother. In one of the final climax scenes of the film, we see Jason’s frustration bubbling over as he tells his mother “I raised you!” Bev’s reaction? To pout and throw a temper tantrum.

Do you see how great this is?

Riding in Cars with Boys showcases a humanity to women who are mothers that our media lacks. Women are constantly punished and depowered for their sexuality, and their motherhood status is often used as another way to control in media. We see this in everything from Scandal to Flowers in the Attic to Lizzy Bordon Killed a Man. Rarely are women granted that full spectrum of emotions and flaws in the way that men and men who are fathers are allowed to be. Bev Delfino proves that there is life beyond motherhood, and that a woman doesn’t stop being who she is once she has children.

Though this film came out in 2001, I still hope that more people can watch Riding in Cars with Boys and can see the importance of post-maternal female agency in our media.

CG is a writer, blogger, and fangirl from New Jersey. Most of her online writing can be found on her site (blackgirlinmedia.com).

‘The Babadook’ and the Horrors of Motherhood

Amelia didn’t need to be possessed to have feelings of vitriol towards her son; they were already there, lurking inside her at the beginning. Rarely, if ever, is a mother depicted in film this way. Mothers are expected to be completely accepting and loving towards their child 24/7, despite any hardships or challenges their child presents to them.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

The Australian horror film The Babadook is a chilling story that takes you on an insanely thrilling and mentally stimulating ride, shot in striking gothic charcoal hues. The best part of The Babadook is its contribution to telling an honest and complex female story. The Babadook subverts common horror tropes in electrifying ways. While The Babadook has many themes, such as the monster being a metaphor for depression and grief, but one it particularly touches on is motherhood. Director/writer Jennifer Kent uses The Babadook to question the meaning of what it means to be a mother. “I’m not saying we all want to go and kill our kids, but a lot of women struggle. And it is a very taboo subject, to say that motherhood is anything but a perfect experience for women,” she said in an interview.

The story of The Babadook centers on a woman, Amelia (a powerhouse performance from actress Essie Davis) who is the mother of a little boy, Samuel. Samuel has violent tendencies and frequent temper tantrums. He is constantly getting in trouble in school. Amelia is left utterly exhausted, coming home from a long day at work to a child who is relentlessly difficult. Amelia’s sister has a strong disdain for Samuel and the way Amelia raises him. Samuel also gets in trouble by accidentally hurting his cousin. Trouble follows him everywhere and it seems Amelia can never get a break with him.

Aside from his behavior problems, Samuel’s mere existence comes with a lot of baggage for her. Samuel was born the day his father died–in a car accident on the way to the hospital. Amelia is not over her husband’s death, and this will always darkly shadow her feelings for Samuel. “I can’t stand being around your son,” her sister Claire says to her in one scene. “And you can’t stand being around him yourself.” Amelia does not deny it. There’s a scene where Samuel lingers sadly by the bed asking for food while Amelia screams about needing sleep. Samuel keeps her up every night hiding from monsters. She later corners him growling, “You don’t know how many times I wished it was you, not him, that died.” “I just want you to be happy,” Samuel replies.

The audience’s feelings are constantly being juggled between Amelia and Samuel. We can empathize with Amelia for being frustrated with her challenging child, but at the same time we are offered glimpses that remind us that Samuel is just a child; he can’t help the way he came into the world.

Often, mothers in horror films are either the saviors of the child or the villain, taking the bad mother trope to a whole other level. We recall the terrified Wendy Torrance scuffling Danny out of the bathroom to stay and face the ax-wielding Johnny in The Shining, or Kathy running from her demon-possessed husband in The Amityville Horror. As for mother villains, we’ve had the famous mother from Stephen King’s Carrie, or Jason’s in Friday the 13^th.

The Babadook is unique in making the vessel of evil be the mother, or having the mother be possessed and her child as the victim. But The Babadook subverts this even further for Amelia’s antagonist feelings towards her son have been there in the beginning, before any evil presence or possession. Amelia didn’t need to be possessed to have feelings of vitriol towards her son; they were already there, lurking inside her at the beginning. Rarely, if ever, is a mother depicted in film this way. Mothers are expected to be completely accepting and loving towards their child 24/7, despite any hardships or challenges their child presents to them. A mother’s love for her child must be unwavering; to be acknowledged as anything else is not permitted in society’s eyes. It is refreshing to have a film that depicts motherhood in a way that is rarely seen but is felt by many women everywhere.

The Babadook is unique for it portrays the true (but often overlooked, or afraid to be touched upon notion) that motherhood is not always the greatest. That sometimes loving your child can be difficult. Children are not always perfect and it is not an easy or always enjoyable feat to raise them. The Babadook is a brave and human look at what it means to be a mother, led by a well-crafted and fully fleshed-out female protagonist that is rarely seen in horror, let alone film at all. The fact that her actions cannot entirely be wholly attributed to demonic possession is what makes The Babadook both frightening, thought provoking, and one of the most original and exciting horror films in recent history.

Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is working on an MA in Cinema Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: On ‘The Babadook,’ Mothers, and Mental Illness

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about ‘The Babadook’ concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill.

This guest post by Elizabeth King appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

I don’t typically like horror movies. I have always been sort of a scaredy-cat when it comes to anything horror-related, and I was completely terrified when I watched The Babadook with my roommates several months ago. To tell the truth, I barely saw the Mr. Babadook creature himself, because I would immediately cover my eyes when I sensed an appearance was pending. For many reasons, the film is truly horrifying.

To summarize (and spoil) the film’s plot: the two main characters are a mother and son, Amelia and Sam. Amelia’s husband and Sam’s father died in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital while she was in labor and about to give birth to Sam. We join mother and son, several years later in the present day, and see that Sam ostensibly has some severe behavioral issues (including self-hard and violence towards others), and that Amelia has not yet recovered and found peace after her husband’s untimely death.

One evening, Sam pulls a book off of his shelf for Amelia to read to him at bedtime. What he brings to her is a book neither of them have seen before, and the contents quickly reveal themselves to be very dark and violent. The title of the book is Mr. Babadook, and Mr. Babadook is a threatening, scary, and sinister monster that foretells of his haunting of homes and ability to provoke violent behavior and terror from others. Naturally this scares the hell out of Sam, and he fixates on this character both as an object of his fears, and the sense of protection he feels for his mother. As Sam’s obsession and fear of the Babadook worsen, Amelia’s nerves fray, and she is emotionally and physically exhausted trying to care for her son and ease his fears. Her exhaustion turns to madness, and she eventually turns on Sam, drugging him and attempting to harm or kill him.

The film resolves in an extremely satisfying way (the best I have ever seen a horror movie end) with the family managing to face their fears after being consumed by them, and saving their own lives as mother and son. So yes: the film is disturbing and exceptionally scary by my standards, but with a message so powerful that it warrants further conversation.

Most people I talked to and most of the reviews that I read about The Babadook concluded that the film is about motherhood or mother-son relations. While I agree, I also really tuned in on the complicating element to this whole narrative, which is that the mother is mentally ill. Throughout the film, Amelia is very obviously in the deepest darkest depths of a major depressive episode, initiated by her husband’s death, and felt helpless in the face of her maternal responsibilities. I interpreted Mr. Babadook not as the difficulties of motherhood personified, but rather as an excruciating metaphor for depression, and the ways that mental illness can be further complicated and stigmatized when they are present in mothers.

Throughout The Babadook, Amelia is judged and later rejected by her sister when Amelia expresses her desperation regarding Sam’s behavior. Amelia can’t live up to her sister’s expectations of a perfect mother, and is therefore deemed unworthy of support. Sam’s school administrators also stigmatize Amelia’s condition and her parenting abilities, and appear to conspire against her instead of offering support. They all see her as a bad mother, when in fact she is struggling to cope with depression, and needs their help more than ever.

Amelia is also in denial of her depression, and seems to internalize the “bad mother” judgement, in large part due to her understandably complicated feelings towards her son. She feels resentful and claustrophobic around Sam, as she sees him as the cause of her pain: the death of her husband. Motherhood not only was the birth of her depression (her husband died the day Sam, her only child, was born), but also what exacerbated her depression and ultimately made it unbearable.

What clinches the depression metaphor for me is Amelia’s strong denial and inability to acknowledge the extent of her problems. She repeatedly says she is fine, and never names her depression, which takes shape as the terrifying and destructive Babadook. Denial is never a good thing, particularly when addressing mental illness. As the Babadook says, “The more you deny me, the stronger I’ll get.” This is perhaps the most true threat the Babadook made, and also the best possible way to describe what will happen when depression goes unchecked. Unacknowledged depression like Amelia’s is bound to reach a tragic critical mass unless measures are taken to cope and heal.

As her depression symptoms intensify (we see repeated scenes of Amelia staying awake all night, not eating, lacking the energy to work, becoming paranoid, etc.), Amelia devolves into the Babadook, and is totally possessed by her illness. As a result she seeks to eliminate the ostensible source of the problem: her son. Instead of being a mother to Sam, the illness warps Amelia into an imminent threat that Sam has to protect himself against. And yet, the one person who doesn’t see Amelia as a bad mother is the subject of her angst and pain: her son.

At the extremely touching and horrifying climax of the film, Sam has his mother bound with ropes on the floor of their basement at the peak of her possession by the Babadook, Sam yells at his mother, “I know you don’t love me! I know the Babadook won’t let you!” I was simultaneously terrified of what was happening, and heartbroken by Sam’s message to his mother. He needed her to understand that it wasn’t her, it was her depression, the unaddressed grief she felt that was destroying their family. She was a good mom and wanted to love her son, but the Babadook’s power over her made it impossible for that to happen.

After Amelia, with Sam’s help, is able to confront her pain and can no longer deny her depression (she screams at Mr. Babadook: “This is my house!” a sign that she is ready to reclaim her life), she and Sam are able to cope and move forward. At the very end of the movie, we see Amelia tending to the Babadook creature, shackled and very tightly locked away in the basement of her home. She tells Sam that they can discuss the creature when he’s older. Not only has Amelia confronted her depression, she also acknowledges that while she will never be able to completely subdue the pain of her husband’s death, she must face it.

Elizabeth King is a freelance writer based in Chicago, Ill. She is an ardent feminist and environmentalist, and a huge fan of ice cream. You can find her on Twitter @ekingc, and Instagram @mr.sweatpants.