And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton.
Yes. This is it.
Let’s get to work, vagina. – Brandy Klark, The To Do List
The To Do List
This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
I remember leaving the theater after seeing Superbad and asking my friends if any of us could imagine a film like that being made about young women–quirky best friend teenage girls who were on a quest for those things that so many teenagers are on a quest for.
We agreed that we couldn’t imagine it (and then I probably delivered a lecture on the great harm of stifling female sexuality).
That notion–that those teenage “cumming-of-age” stories are reserved for boys only–has been deeply ingrained in us through pop culture. When American Pie came out while I was in high school, the message was clear: there’s a myriad of ways that teenage boys get to claim and act out their sexuality, but if you’re a woman who does the same, you will be singled out and considered an oddity, a freak or simply a prize.
Even before that, I remember always noticing that young adult novels or films about teenage girls that I enjoyed often de-sexed the female protagonist. Teenage female sexuality was either nonexistent or an anathema, set apart to frighten girls or teach lessons. I never saw myself and my feelings truly and fully reflected back to me.
“Sisters before misters”–best friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat), Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) and Wendy (Sarah Steele).
When I saw the trailer for The To Do List, I started to get excited. Maybe this is it–what I’ve been waiting for all of these years.
It’s set in the early 90s. My heart rate quickens.
I see the soundtrack‘s track list. I just can’t even.
And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton.
Yes. This is it.
It was everything I wanted.
I especially love how the “To Do List” itself wasn’t borne out of peer pressure. Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) is mildly affected when her peers shout “Virgin!” at her, but what makes her want to explore and understand her own sexuality is twofold: she wants to be able to be comfortable knowing what to do with hot guys (she’s the one who is attracted and drawn to the college guy), and it’s explained to her that college is like a sexual pop quiz, and she needs to study to ace it.
Brandy takes notes as her older, experienced sister (played by Rachel Bilson) talks about sex.
She understands studying. She understands her own blossoming sexual desires. So she opens up her Trapper Keeper, lines her paper into a grid, and makes a list of sexual acts she must complete before the end of summer, with the ultimate goal being “Intercourse.” (The fact that the film was set in 1993 is important not only for nostalgia’s sake but also for the fact that Brandy didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t easily look up the definitions of the “jobs” she was writing on her list.)
Brandy’s “To Do List” replaces buying shower shoes for the dorm with sexual exploits.
Early on in her journey, Brandy reads statistics about how few women achieve orgasm, and she’s incensed. She writes “Masturbation” on her list (and does so wearing a “Pro-Choice Pro-Clinton” T-shirt, which writer-director Maggie Carey said she wore frequently in high school). The masturbation scene is important because, as Carey says, “When you do see women masturbating, it’s usually a male fantasy about a woman masturbating, it’s not what actually happens.”
Brandy voices anger over the virgin/whore dichotomy, referencing Gloria Steinem. And yet as much as this film empowers female sexuality and independence, it does not do so at the expense of the men in the film. (Remarkable, how completely possible it is to have fully sympathetic male and female characters in a raunchy comedy.) Even Brandy’s father, a Rush Limbaugh-reading, overprotective man who is uncomfortable talking about sex, is portrayed in a sympathetic light.
The teenage boys have stereotypical sexual desires, but Brandy’s desire is always paramount. For the first time while watching a teen comedy, I got to reminisce and laugh from my own perspective–and oh, how I could taste that Pucker when I saw it on screen and feel those goosebumps when “Fade Into You” started playing–instead of imagining what life must have been like for boys I knew in high school.
The film also really has a “radical” message about virginity–not panicked, not preachy, but reasonable and realistic. Maybe most importantly, Brandy never has any regrets (“Teenagers don’t have regrets,” she says. “That’s for your 30s”). The To Do List is “nonchalantly” feminist from start to finish.
“When I read the script, I just thought it was funny, be it female or male, but I love that it was from a female perspective, and I’d honestly never seen anything that had explored the specifics of that time in a girl’s life when they’re experiencing all their firsts.”
This film is a first full of firsts.
And unlike most first-time sexual exploits, writer-director Maggie Carey knew what she was doing and made it really pleasurable for the audience.
“It’s a skort!” (And who doesn’t want to make out to Mazzy Star?)
A teenage sex comedy that subverts what’s usually “reserved for the boys” and shows female sexuality and agency as, you know, an actual thing (while celebrating 90s pop culture)? Check.
And just as Brandy will want more and more of the final exploit she checks off, I want movies like this to keep coming and coming.
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
The sex in ‘The To Do List’—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions. This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.
The To Do List poster
This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
I was moved to watch The To Do List after seeing Emily Nussbaum tweet about it over the Christmas break. It was a stinking hot Saturday afternoon in my corner of the world, so I thought I’d watch along with her as she tweeted her disillusion with the Aubrey Plaza vehicle.
Nussbaum’s main complaint was that the sex in The To Do List—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions.
This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.
The To Do List
It’s not a wholly ineffective idea: Brandy understands studying and academic excellence better than she does social mores, so making a project out of a desire to know what to do come college (pardon the pun) prepares her for the next chapters in her life: more academic aptitude and more sex.
Previously on Bitch Flicks, Leigh Kolb wrote in praise of The To Do List, asserting that in the film, “Brandy’s desire is always paramount,” but I don’t think this is the case. While Brady’s parents—well, at least her mum, played to scrunchie-wearing perfection by Connie Britton—and sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson) are portrayed as pretty sexually progressive, their dialogue doesn’t seem to connote “the joy of sex,” so to speak. For example, upon giving Brandy a tube of lube, Mrs. Klark tells her daughter, “As you move forward on your sexual journey, promise me one thing.” “To have fun?” Brandy asks. “No, to use lube,” Mrs. Klark replied. Here, enjoyment seems an afterthought.
A joyless kiss in The To Do List
Brandy’s sexually active sister, Amber, doesn’t seem to enjoy the copious amounts of sex she’s had, either. Though she does tell Brandy to “have fun getting your cherry popped” in the penultimate scene of the movie, it’s said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
It’s important to note that part of the reason Brandy decides to cultivate a “sex manual,” as the objects of her attractions are wont to call it, is due to peer pressure. She’s called a virgin during her valedictorian speech, and her friends insinuate that Brandy can’t go to college as inexperienced as she is. The tipping point in Brandy’s decision to do her… erm… The To Do List ultimately lies in her lust for shirtless guitar player/lifeguard Rusty (Scott Porter), but even that turns out to be about what other people will think of her landing a college guy. At the end of the movie, she tells Rusty, “Am I going to regret losing my virginity to you? No, you are going to be an awesome story to tell my friends.”
Brandy
So while The To Do List appears as part of the recent cannon of sex positive “chick flicks,” which includes For a Good Time, Call…, not everything is as it seems. The To Do List is more about peer pressure and the sexual experiences you should be having at that age than it is about actual young female desire.
Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about feminism, social issues and pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter here.
What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? ‘Belle,’ directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex ‘Belle,’ as is the issue of race.
What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? Belle, directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex Belle, as is the issue of race.
The film is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (poignantly played by Mugu Mbatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed race child of Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and a woman named Maria Belle; her parents met on a Spanish slave ship. Dido’s mother dies before the story begins. The opening images of the film depict a child in a cloak in the shadows, a carriage ride on a rough road in England in the 1700’s, and then, the emergence of Captain Sir John Lindsay, who’s come to claim Belle as his daughter. But he’s unable to raise her, as he must sail away with the Royal Navy. He brings Dido to Kenwood House in Hampstead, the home of his aristocratic uncle, Lord Mansfield (sensitively portrayed by Tom Wilkinson), who is the Lord Chief Justice of England. He leaves Dido in the care of the Mansfields, but before Lindsay departs, he assures the girl that she is loved.
The pastoral Mansfield estate already has a young blonde charge on the premises: Lady Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon plays the older Elizabeth), whose own father abandoned her while he’s moved on to Europe. The young Elizabeth and Dido become inseparable, and as “cousin-sisters” grow up doing everything together: frolicking in the grass, sharing a bedroom, studying music, letters, French, and eventually, the proper mores of society as taught by their watchful aunts, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson) and Lady Mary Murray (Penelope Wilton). The Mansfields themselves are childless, and truly love their great-nieces. The two girls are raised on relatively equal footing in the home, with some notable exceptions. For example, when visitors come, Dido is not allowed to dine with them, due to being born out of wedlock. She is, however, able to meet and greet guests after dinner in the parlor.
The news of Captain Lindsay’s eventual death is delivered by letter; Dido becomes an heiress, afforded an sizable annuity, and therefore, is set financially for life; this is in direct contrast to Elizabeth, who has no dowry and must marry well, much as in a Jane Austen novel, in order to maintain the standards of her upbringing and lineage.
When male visitors do eventually arrive for dinner at Kenwood House, such as potential suitors James Ashford (Tom Felton) and his brother Oliver (James Norton), they stare and whisper in asides, sizing up “the mulatto”; director Asante aptly depicts the 18th-century concept of women as objects here. In a later carriage scene, Elizabeth directly expresses to Dido that choices facing them, as women, are depressingly limited; they are unable to work, and a good marriage seems to be their only hope for the future.
The motif of “looking” is emphasized further in other sequences in the film. There’s a very touching scene of Dido staring at herself in the mirror, and clawing, in agony, at her own skin, trying to come to terms with her own identity.
But when a painter is commissioned for a family portrait of the two girls, there are several separate shots of Dido holding a pose, gazed upon by not only the painter, but surreptitiously spied upon by another potential suitor, the budding abolitionist John Davinier (Sam Reid).
The film points to the multiple meanings of “gazing” at Dido: yes, due to her remarkable female beauty, as in the title, but also because she is “the Other” in 18th-century British society: aristocratic, educated, and biracial. In one scene, this is especially highlighted. Both Elizabeth and Dido are asked to play the piano for the Ashfords during their first visit to Kenwood House. Lady Ashford (Miranda Richardson) doubts that Dido will be able to play at all. But it is Dido who, between the two girls, is the more accomplished musician. In a later scene, the objectification of Dido in British society is more dire, as misogynistic James Ashford, who once called beautiful Dido “repulsive,” stares at her on a river bank, and then assaults her.
Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the freed servant in the Mansfield’s London home, is another character connected to “looking.” Dido and Mabel stare at each other upon meeting, a recognition of their shared heritage — and yet their different positions in society. Later, in front of a mirror, Mabel shows Dido how to comb through her hair properly, starting with the ends first. Mabel tells Dido that a man first showed her how to do it.
Courtship becomes a major crucible in the film. Who will get a viable marriage proposal? Dido’s first proposal occurs under the watchful eye of a marble statue of Aphrodite in a bathing pose, seeming to imply it’s a love match. But later, the romance falls apart. Earlier, Lord Mansfield tried to entrust the keys of the house to Dido, offering her the honored place that her spinster Aunt Mary holds — a Hestia position as household caretaker. Hestia is the virginal domestic Greek goddess of the hearth who never leaves home. Worried about her future, Lord Mansfield implies that Dido won’t be able to make a suitable marriage match, due to her liminal societal position: her ethnicity combined with her aristocratic background. But his offer greatly disappoints Dido, and so we know that a romance is in her future; she chooses the way of Aphrodite, not Hestia.
Classism and racism are key parts of a secondary parallel plot involving Lord Mansfield, who must render a judgment on the horrible Zong massacre of 1781, about insurers and the deaths of 142 slaves on a cargo ship. Davinier becomes secretly allied with Dido here, trying to convince Lord Mansfield to rule against the ship’s crew, in favor of the insurers. Although there are several points in the film that seem anachronistic, as if twenty-century sensibilities are in motion instead of the more likely constraints of the time period, it is Dido’s agency in this later part of the film that seems most modern, and perhaps unlikely. Still, it gives Dido an important activist goal, and the two plotlines come together well in the end: Dido’s ability to decide her own future, the verdict in the Zong trial, and romance.
The famous Zoffany portrait of the girls is revealed in the end, highlighting the focus on its unusual qualities: a handsomely gowned, pearl-wearing young black woman touched by a well-dressed white woman, given equal center space at eye line level. In the film, Asante has shown us other pictures of the era, where Africans in paintings are given little space, infantilized, or enslaved, depicted as property. The impact of the independent spirit of Dido in the painting, and the equality in stature of the two girls in the portrait, is evocative and satisfying. Director Asante again reminds us of the motif of looking, gazing, as we ourselves finally stare at the family portrait that our heroine dutifully posed for at Kenwood. And instead of Dido merely seated, she’s smiling and in motion. Symbolically, and in contrast to Elizabeth, she is going somewhere. The theme of “looking,” or gazing upon from a position of privilege as related to objectification, is explored thoroughly in Belle. The film challenges us: what do you really see and why do you see it?
Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays. Read more at her website: LauraShamas.com.
The Iranian feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967) led the way in both her life and art. Her pen foregrounded female subjectivity and desire while her independent lifestyle defied the gender norms of her time and place. Killed in a car accident at the tragically young age of 32, Farrokhzad is regarded as one of the great voices of 20th century Persian poetry. But the Tehran-born poet also occupies a special place in Iranian cinema. She wrote and directed ‘The House is Black,’ an award-winning documentary short film that is still revered by Iranian filmmakers and well-respected by critics and scholars. A landmark essay film of Iranian New Wave Cinema, it recently secured a place (235) on ‘Sight and Sound’s prestigious critics’ (2012) list of 250 Greatest Films.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
–Orson Welles
The Iranian feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967) led the way in both her life and art. Her pen foregrounded female subjectivity and desire while her independent lifestyle defied the gender norms of her time and place. Killed in a car accident at the tragically young age of 32, Farrokhzad is regarded as one of the great voices of 20th century Persian poetry. But the Tehran-born poet also occupies a special place in Iranian cinema. She wrote and directed The House is Black, an award-winning documentary short film that is still revered by Iranian filmmakers and well-respected by critics and scholars. A landmark essay film of Iranian New Wave Cinema, it recently secured a place (235) on Sight and Sound’s prestigious critics’ (2012) list of 250 Greatest Films.
The House is Black deserves all the critical acclaim it has received since its release in 1962. It is a powerful and rewarding film that should be more widely seen. It is also vital for critics, filmmakers, and lovers of cinema to remember and honor the work of women around the world who have made their mark in cinematic history. I acknowledge that some will find The House is Black a challenging viewing experience. It is a black-and-white documentary about a leper colony.
Forough Farrokhzad
Filming people afflicted by disease is, of course, potentially problematic. The leprous body has traditionally been a site of anxiety and fear in the cultural imagination and those suffering from the condition have suffered terrible prejudice. Are the victims of disease being violated and exploited by the camera? Is the viewer being emotionally manipulated? There is, thankfully, nothing exploitative about Farrokhzad’s documentary. Her gaze never debases her subjects. She depicts their everyday lives and recognizes that they are not only active members of their community but also a part of their country as well as the human family. We see them pray, collect food, play games, enjoy music, apply make-up, attend weddings, and care for their children. They are not characterized as “other.” Note, however, that Farrokzhad does not shy away from the condition. Her gaze is direct. She has a poet’s grasp of detail as well as a poet’s empathy. Visibility is, in fact, crucial to her project. The producer’s voice-over narration at the opening of the documentary states: “There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more. But man is a problem solver. On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain no caring human being should ignore. To wipe out this ugliness, and to relieve its victims is the motive of this film and the hope of its filmmakers.” Throughout the film, Farrokhzad’s camera records and honors the experiences of the most marginalized of people.
Farrokhzad does not put herself in the frame but she also employs her own evocative voice. In her voice-over narration, she reads from her haunting verse. The documentary, in fact, incorporates the scientific, metaphysical, sacred and lyrical. Farrokhzad’s poetry serves to articulate the suffering of the afflicted while images of men praying are interwoven with glimpses of patients being treated. A more extended montage of patients being treated is, also, supplemented by a medical voice telling us that leprosy is a contagious but “not incurable,” treatable condition.
The House is Black is a 20th century film about an ancient condition. It is not only expertly executed — there are some fine tracking shots — but it also highly innovative. The poet-director’s use of close-ups, rapidly edited, thematically connected images, as well as repetition of images, endow the documentary with a poetic richness and potency. Sadly, The House is Black is the only film the poet directed. Who knows what other wonderful work she would have given us. Nevertheless, we should be grateful for this utterly unique contribution to World Cinema.
A useful piece of advice I received as a screenwriter was to make my main character proactive. If my lead was willful and had a clear goal, I would have no problem following them through their own actions to achieve, or not achieve, that goal. This was useful insofar as it allowed me to finally complete a script. With just a little finagling the plot points unfolded in all the right places and things made good sense. But naturally, I was therefore incapable of writing anything remotely true to my own life experience.
This is a guest post by Cat Papadimitriou.
A good friend of mine does an uncanny impression of me: he waits a moment to respond to something, and finally says “Well, yes, and no.” It’s true that I never have a one word answer for anything.
A useful piece of advice I received as a screenwriter was to make my main character proactive. If my lead was willful and had a clear goal, I would have no problem following them through their own actions to achieve, or not achieve, that goal. This was useful insofar as it allowed me to finally complete a script. With just a little finagling the plot points unfolded in all the right places and things made good sense. But naturally, I was therefore incapable of writing anything remotely true to my own life experience.
I had this film in my head about a girl who had a painfully pressing urge both towards and away from things she could not identify. For months I lived in the colors, sounds and smells of the world of this film, and with the feelings she had. But for the love of God I could not make this chick DO anything!
I decided to re-watch a few of my favorite films and play “spot the goal.”
Muriel listening to ABBA in Muriel’s Wedding
Muriel’s Wedding. OK, Muriel wants to get married. And the events that propel the film forward are in fact brought on by her own actions. But she isn’t really acting on her desire to be married. She’s acting on her desire to avoid everything that reminds her that she’s not. It’s more a film about low self-esteem and disappointment in life than it is a film about a girl who only wants to be a bride.
In Trainspotting, the first thing Renton declares is that he is going clean. There’s a clear goal! Except that goal is one he acts on by shooting up “one last time.” Before the film is halfway through he has gone through withdrawal and started using all over again. As soon as I’m asking myself, “was quitting the goal?” he is floored by the presence of Diane at a nightclub, and is on a quest for love. But that is short-lived as well. Renton seems to hop all over the place trying to figure out what he wants, and that’s part of what makes the film so engaging; his desires change constantly. He wants one thing one moment, but life has another in store. We’re not bored by his lack of conviction, we’re enthralled by his thought process through it all.
Trenton and Diane talking about drugs in Trainspotting
So I tried to get to know this Nia girl living in my head. When I met her, she didn’t really want anything. And when I went down the list, “do you want to graduate college?” “Do you want a better relationship with your mom?” and so on, the answer was always “Well… yes and no.” So I let her act, or not act, on the yes and the no.
I let her inner conflict steer the film, and a cool thing happened. The drama came FROM her, and not as a result of her.
Contrary to what I was warned, Nia wasn’t wishy-washy. That’s not what being ambivalent is. It’s about being conflicted. And I found that Nia’s choices were much more interesting, spontaneous, and genuine when she was acting somewhat in spite of herself. She was surprising me. As in real life, she was not really affecting the world around her in any tremendous way. Life was going on, as it does, and she was the one changing. There were larger things at play than what Nia might have wanted.
Nika Ezell Pappas as Nia in Nia on Vacation
I’m an atheist, by the way. Not because I am 100 percent positive that when I die my consciousness as Cat also ends. I believe this, but I also know that it is only a belief. We’re all agnostic by default. Ambivalence is the awareness that a single truth can encompass conflicting ideas—yes and no. Nothing is black or white. It’s usually black and white. Not so much grey, but checkerboard, or perhaps herringbone.
And the films I tend to gravitate toward are the ones that represent life, and people, in this way—truthfully.
Was the advice I got as a screenwriter good advice? You guessed it. Yes, and no.
If we’re not following actions taken by the main character, well, he or she is not the main character. But whether those actions are towards any one specific goal, or whether there is any awareness of a goal at all, is, I think, optional. Just think of all the amazing films we would be writing off if it wasn’t.
Guido, drifting away in thought in 8 1/2
Where is young Anton going in The 400 Blows? Or Benjamin Braddock, in The Graduate? All that’s really clear is that they both want something else.
It takes Guido, in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½,over 75 percent of the film to admit that he wants nothing more but to make one honest film, and to look at his wife without shame. Yet we are enraptured as we watch him half-heartedly muddling through the production of his current film project. We’re not really watching the film he’s supposed to be making. We’re seeing his heart where it really is: in the past, in longing, in his understanding of himself, as it unfolds.
Cat Papadimitriou is a Bronx born Brooklyn based filmmaker and story-teller devoted to telling stories of the under-represented. Her last film adventure abroad was as camera assistant and educator in a two woman crew on the project Fire in Our Hearts and she is currently working on her first feature narrative, Nia On Vacation. She is most proud of her cooking abilities.
When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.
When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.
But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).
Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-fundedShe’s Beautiful When She’s Angrylooks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makerswhich aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.
We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.
Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.
Ellen Willis
The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).
While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.
Rita Mae Brown (right)
Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”
Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Misan Sagay, the brilliant and passionate screenwriter of Belle, was in Manhattan recently to promote the film. Director Amma Asante and actors Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle), Miranda Richardson and Sam Reid also fielded questions from the press in separate rooms.
Sagay discovered the subject of her Jane Austen-like drama a decade ago when she viewed the 18th century portrait by an unknown artist of a beautiful, biracial woman standing next to a blond, a woman in a pink brocade gown, in the galleries of Scone Palace in Scotland. The blond woman reaches out to the other woman who is slightly above here in the picture, and who wears a silk gown and an exotic headdress. She has a twinkle in her eye and exudes life and even has a sense of mischief. You cannot take your eyes off her.
Here are highlights of the interview with the screenwriter, who is also a medical doctor. Sagay speaks with a precise and clipped English accent, but she exudes warmth and passion, especially when she talks about the genesis and the message of Belle.
What was it like to see it fully realized from your script? Was it everything you envisioned?
I think it surpasses what I think that everything at every level more and more was brought to the thing and I think it’s a marvelous movie, so I’m very proud of it.
How did you first discover the story?
I was at university in Scotland. I was a medical student… It’s where William and Kate met. It’s a very traditional university, so quite often I would be the only black person around and so I went to visit Scone Palace and I was walking through and I came to a room and bang, there was a black woman in a painting, and I was stunned and intrigued and thrilled. She didn’t look like a servant or a slave. And I though, ‘Wow!’ and I looked at the caption and it just says, ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray,’ so Dido is not known. The black woman is unknown. She’s completely silent and I remember carrying this image with me for years and when I went back to Scotland years later and I saw it again, the caption had been changed to ‘The Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido, the Housekeeper’s Daughter.” I looked at that and I thought, ‘The Housekeeper’s daughter”? She doesn’t look like that, it doesn’t look right, and that was what was the jumping off point for me for the script. Who was she? Who was this woman who was gazing out of this portrait, not just with directness but with a mischief in her face, and who was pointing to her cheek as though, you know, “I’m what I am,” and I really wanted to tell her story.
Did you ever find out why they updated the portrait?
I think it’s almost a Teutonic shift that the older Mansfields were probably less accommodating to the view that this was blood and this was a relative and that the younger generation then are receptive to it. It may be it was updated because people began to ask, up until then no one had asked, and then people had begun to ask. Yes, I think it’s odd that was the story that was put there but that’s what they felt comfortable with I suppose.
It seems like that same story could happen today couldn’t it?
Absolutely. I lot of the research that I did was actually going to speak to people who had been adopted into very, very white environments and yes that story can play out today.
Dido was educated. She could write. There was no reason she hasn’t left a journal. She’s not left a word. This is a girl who lived very carefully about what she said and did. She may have been a Mansfield but she certainly wasn’t free. It was the same feeling I got when I spoke to people who lived in those environments, beloved and taken care of, but always slightly on eggshells.
What did you find out about her father?
That he was an Admiral… But what I found out, the two things that are really interesting, he must in some way he must have lived with Dido’s mother in the West Indies beforehand. And also when he came back to England that his relationship with Dido’s mother fell apart and he then married appropriately but appears never to have lived with that new woman. Whenever you’re doing research you always end up reading stories in the gaps between the stories and my romantic story is that they broke up that relationship and he never loved again. But he certainly never lived properly with his new proper wife, never had children with this new woman.
So you have archival material that no one else saw?
I don’t know that other people didn’t see it. I know that other people, who had seen it, did not – you look at the papers that were out that time – lots of them sort of fudged the issue of who she was. I think it was an issue who she was. I don’t want to say I was the only person, but I was prepared to name – and I wanted to name – what was there. I thought it was a lovely story.
How long did it take for you to develop this story?
I wrote the pitch in 2004 and I began to write the story then, and then the screenplay developed over (time). By 2010 it was over, so it was a long process. It’s a difficult script, many, many difficult decisions had to be taken in order to stay true to this central thing that it would be Belle’s story, so how do we do that? And also what is our aim? Belle herself did not marry until she was 32. It would be perfectly possible to write a long story of her as a life frustrated and a life from which she did not really fulfill herself until after everyone had died. I just didn’t want that for her! I wanted her loved! I wanted her to be beautiful! I wanted somebody to rip off her bodice and want to do so.
I wanted her to be beautiful and so that was why I took that decision that what might be the obvious story was not the way we would go; I would go with a love story.
I also wanted to make sure we looked at this cusp when she would really be discovering, really what being black meant. In the Arcadia of Kenwood and cocooned by childhood and wealth she would not have encountered that until she could encounter the point where she wanted to get married and that there is no place for her… The moment when you understand what your race actually means I think is a big one and I wanted that for her.
What other research did you do to make it factually true to the cultures and to the period?
This kind of thing needs massive research, especially when you’re writing about women. For example, the decision to put women and to have their relationships, which I’m always interested in, to write this sort of Jane Austen romance, made this research absolutely key, that finding the voices of women like this at this time. I was amazingly lucky to stumble on the diary, on the actually diary written by the Countess of Hardwick… much of what was the day to day life we see arise from looking at those women.
I was always looking for emotional truth. There weren’t video camera. We don’t know what actually went on. But it is true in that the Zong case happened. She was in his house. He had to deal with it, so there was a huge amount of that sort of research. (Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, handed down a decision in this case, which involved the massacre of slaves, and which became instrumental in the abolition of slavery. He also raised Dido as though she were his daughter.)
There are so many parallels with Belle’s story and even with stories of women of color today. What is the message you would like to get out?
It’s terribly important that this is a voice of black women, that’s what this film is. The main thing for me is this issue about your worth.
There are so many messages, and a lot of it is subliminal but from a very young age what are you worth, compared to other people? And I think it was something Belle had to encounter. What was she worth? She was worth loving but she wasn’t worth eating with.
At the moment where Belle herself had to say, you know what? I’m worth me. I’m worth loving and I can have it. And I can be myself and I think that is the message and I think at the end of the day when every screening I’ve attended the women will stand up and clap because the moment when she says that is a great moment for all of us. I think that it’s a terribly empowering moment and I think that that was the aim.
This movie is so unique, just by the mere fact that both the writer and director are black and female. What type of relationship do you guys have?
I was unwell and I left the project. In 2010 Amma came on as director and she – I believe and feel that at the moment where I maybe had flagged, because it had been seven years, but the script was there, the subject was there, everything was there, that Amma was able to take the baton and run with it, and run for her life with it and she has done an extraordinary, extraordinary job. She’s been true to absolutely everything that was the aim from the beginning.
I assume you’re talking a bit about the controversy. [There was a Writers Guild of America decision that credited Misan Sagay as the Belle screenwriter.] Whenever you see tough opinionated women, you will see tough opinions. And I think that’s what we have here, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for what she’s done as a director, and I think it’s a marvelous movie, marvelous.
What’s next for you?
I’m doing a historical story set in Burma during the Second World War. We always think that it’s white people who have fought that battle, which is called the Forgotten War, but in fact it was won by 300,000 black Africans that were taken over there as part of the British Empire and it was a war that Britain was losing and they brought the Africans and they fought their way through the jungle and helped. Without them the War in the East would not have been won but no one’s told their story.
You’re also a medical doctor. How does that inform your writing?
I think it informs my writing because one of the things you that you look for – maybe you all know this without being a doctor – you’re looking for truth. You look at what’s in front of you and you say what is the emotional truth here?
It’s not that different a process for me. I love doing both things. There’s an immediacy to medicine which there isn’t in this. It can take years looking for a story but to me they’re not that different.
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.
Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.
Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.
April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.
Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.
Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.
Mr. B. and April
The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).
Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.
Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”
Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.
Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).
Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.
Sterling and Davina
We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.
In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Directed by Shola Lynch, the 2004 documentary ‘Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed’ tells the story of Chisholm’s campaign for her party’s nomination, and without even trying to, the film offers a necessary antidote to popular culture representation of the dominant white male supremacist lens of history-making that is reified when it goes unchallenged.
If you’ve been following Mad Men this season then you know that the year is 1969, and Nixon has just taken office. Although the show is centered on white upper-middle class men and women, we are finally seeing a wee bit of narrative texture in the two minority women characters employed at the Madison Avenue advertising firm that is the show’s locus. But this is not a takedown of Mad Men, a show whose characters, writing, and style I find compelling even though I support the critiques offered by the likes of W. Kamau Bell and Daniel Mendelsohn. I bring up this series because, unless the writers this season will reveal otherwise, the New York City of 1969 on this show is not likely to highlight a major historical moment of this time and place: in that year and in that city Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Three years later, she would launch the first major bid by a woman for candidacy for the Democratic Party for the President of the United States. While there had been other candidates for third and fourth parties as far back as 1872 (Victoria Woodhull, to be precise), Chisholm’s campaign was serious in its determination to represent the United States and all its citizens in no uncertain terms. Directed by Shola Lynch, the 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed tells the story of Chisholm’s campaign for her party’s nomination, and without even trying to, the film offers a necessary antidote to popular culture representation of the dominant white male supremacist lens of history-making that is reified when it goes unchallenged.
Lynch’s film follows a familiar style of documentary that viewers have come to expect from the POV series. There are numerous interviews with politicians, activists, and intellectuals who worked alongside Chisholm on her campaign or are called upon to reflect on why they did not support her nomination even while they supported her as a politician. The accounts of author/activist Amiri Baraka and former Congressmen Reverend Walter Fauntroy and Ronald Dellums are especially fascinating in that they reveal the complex interplay of concerns over standing behind a candidate they believed in vs. one who they thought could realistically defeat Nixon. Chisholm understood these concerns, but nonetheless offered a direct challenge to the conventional wisdom of electoral politics in her campaign announcement speech:
“I have faith in the American people. I believe that we are smart enough to correct our mistakes. I believe that we are intelligent enough to recognize the talent, energy, and dedication, which all American including women and minorities have to offer. I know from my travels to the cities and small towns of America that we have a vast potential, which can and must be put to constructive use in getting this great nation together.[…] I stand before you today, to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for qualified candidates, simply because he is not right or because she is not a male. I do not believe that in 1972, the great majority of Americans will continue to harbor such narrow and petty prejudice.”
Though it is clear Chisholm sought the support of a united party, she was also explicit in her desire to bring together two groups to which she has dual membership: women and black people. After all, she opens her campaign announcement speech like this:
“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.”
The film’s archival footage is rich with evidence of her attempting to demonstrate her goal to encourage her party toward inclusiveness. We see her move with total confidence and self-possession through crowds of supporters on the campaign trail, on voter registration drives, and facing crowds of thousands. What is perhaps the most remarkable thing about her political presence is she seems to address each audience she encounters with an exacting sense of urgency to motivate all people to seize the rights and privileges of full citizenship. In interviews and behind-the-scenes campaign footage, Chisholm comes across as almost unbelievably authentic (especially for a politician), and embodies the film’s subtitle (taken from her 1970 political autobiography): she was truly “unbought” when it came to her refusal to make political deals that would compromise her constituents and “unbossed” by those who have her remain firmly entrenched in the status quo she was elected to challenge.
Although it’s no spoiler to say that she lost the bid to George McGovern (who would lose to Nixon), the film’s real dramatic force is in the enduring impact felt by those who would go on to realize their own political power as a result of Chisholm’s courageous work. For instance, U.S. Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) recalls when she first met Chisholm and joined the campaign. At the time she was both a student on public assistance and a single mother, and she remembers what Chisholm told her about her own will to act: “[She] told me, no matter what I do in life, use your power judiciously, use it with humility, but use it.”
I could spend all day quoting Chisholm; her famous 1969 speech on “Equal Rights for Women,” for instance, remains as relevant today as it did then (sadly). But rather than do that here, I’ll turn to reading and researching the words and history of a great human being who, as the Shola Lynch said, possesses “a story is an important reminder of the power of a dedicated individual to make a difference.”
People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants), with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released ‘Noah.’ Historical “realism” is not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.
People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants) with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in the historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released Noah. Historical “realism” is also not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of The Three Musketeers, have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.
Director Amma Asante, in her second feature, Belle tells the based-on-fact story (the script is by Misan Sagay) of a young biracial girl, whose Royal Navy Admiral father (Matthew Goode) takes her to the family estate just outside of London, so his great-uncle’s family and servants can raise her in late-18th-century, upper-class luxury her father says is “due to her.”
The girl, Dido, grows into a beautiful young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a star-making turn), wearing the finest dresses, often the same cut (with the outrageously low necklines and the upward thrust of breasts typical of the period–like a Maxim cover gone out of control) but in a different shade from those of her blonde, white cousin and companion Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). Dido carries her father’s last name, and, when he dies, inherits a £2,000 annuity which, as Elizabeth points out, makes her an heiress. But Dido is not allowed to eat dinner with the family–or the servants, because, as her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) tells her, neither situation would be “correct” for a woman of her color and social standing.
Dido’s isolation increases when her aunts take the initiative in finding a rich husband for her cousin who, because her father has remarried, has no dowry. Lord Mansfield hands the house keys to Dido and explains that since no gentleman will marry her (because of the color of her skin) and because of her social standing she cannot marry a man who isn’t a gentleman, she can soon replace her “spinster” Aunt Mary (Penelope Wilton) as the caretaker of the house.
Elizabeth and Dido
During the family’s stay in London, Dido does attract suitors, for her beauty, charm and for her money. Fans of Jane Austen may see some parallels with her work, especially in Dido’s initial fraught interactions with John (Sam Reid), the vicar’s abolitionist son. Belle fails to give the same sense, as the best adaptations of Austen do (like 1995’s Persuasion) of the death grip manners and custom combined with the mores and opinions of their families and social circle had on women, especially young women, at that time (and the film takes place some decades before the works of Austen do). The film pays little attention to the necessity of a young man and a young woman of courting age to always have a chaperone present, a tradition that survives today in some strict religious communities in which the prospective bride and groom spend hardly any time alone together before they are married.
We see the reason for chaperones when Dido is alone with the loathsome older brother of the penniless gentleman who wishes to marry her. The brother manhandles her as he tells her how disgusting he finds her, and then, out of the camera’s range, seems to sexually assault her. This scene is the only part of the film that, at that time of strict sex segregation among unmarried, unrelated gentry, shows how privileged, white men felt free to sexually prey on women of color. Although the film makes clear that Dido’s father loved her mother, the implications of his meeting her on a Spanish slave ship are disturbing: the mother is never called a slave, so we can infer Dido’s father never owned her (unlike Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, the mother of his children who were born into slavery) but the relationship (while not rape, as it would be between a slave and owner no matter how much one “loved” the other) would still be an abuse of power if Dido’s mother worked for her father as a paid servant, as Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the Black maid at the family’s London house, does.
Dido and John
The customs and mores of the present day always corrupt the “realism” of costume dramas: the well-scrubbed faces and bodies of the actors belying the fact that daily bathing is a relatively recent innovation, their clothes, in the days before dry-cleaning are spotless (in very early silent films we see stained clothes–over a hundred years after the events of Belle take place–were the norm), their accents in 18th century England are an anachronism. We suspend our disbelief to ooh and ahh over the pretty dresses, grand mansions and drawing room antics.
The problem with Belle is: we have to suspend our disbelief about the rampant racism, and to some degree the sexism (Dido, at one point, is the only woman in a court full of men and not one of them tries to throw her out) of the time as well. We see plenty of racist sentiment directed toward Dido (especially from Miranda Richardson, who plays the gossipy, sharp-tongued mother of Dido’s gentleman suitor), but the “good” people like Dido’s great-uncle and John end up espousing beliefs about racial equality very much like those the “good” white people of today might. Even though one character wrote a court decision that (spoiler alert) laid the framework for the eventual abolition of slavery in England, and the other (spoiler alert) married a Black woman, giving these 18th century characters (especially those based on real people who lived at the time) the mindset of the 21st century has the effect, as in Downton Abbey and to a lesser degree in Mad Men, of downplaying the racism of the past, the legacy of which we still see in the present.
The real Dido and Elizabeth
Americans don’t have to go back nearly 250 years and over an ocean to find overt racism about the “mixing” of the races from “good” white people. Abraham Lincoln, who signed the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation about 80 years after the events of the film take place, espoused racist beliefs in historical documents. Film and television producers avoided showing white and Black people together in any relationship other than as master and servant (even on talk shows) well into the 1960s. In the 1970s, when my family lived next door to an interracial couple, the children in the neighborhood called their son and daughter “zebras.”
The second of Dido’s suitors, John, is radically forward-thinking for the time. Much religious rhetoric in those days supported slavery, the way a lot of religious rhetoric today supports homophobia, so John would have had to be something of an apostate too: an unusual position for the son of a clergyman. He also would have been considered a crank and an outcast (like many forward-thinking people throughout history) in most social circles of the time. Instead, he suffers from Perfect Man Syndrome, a disease that also afflicts the romantic leads in Short Term 12 and the upcoming releases Obvious Child and Dear White People: men who are so ceaselessly caring, who never say the wrong thing no matter how aggrieved they are, that they might as well sprout wings and fly into the clouds as angels. Sam Reid’s relative lack of skill as an actor doesn’t help: I had to suppress a giggle when he shouts, “I love her,” in a scene that isn’t supposed to be humorous. The flawless Mbatha-Raw, in particular, shows him up, as does the presence of Wilkinson, Richardson, Wilton and Emily Watson (who plays Wilkinson’s wife) in the film who all give the type of serviceable performances that will neither diminish nor enhance their reputations as great actors. The film score by Rachel Portman (one of the few women who regularly composes music for movies) is also uninspired: cuing the audience to feel emotions the film doesn’t quite earn.
That said, Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director’s film of a Black woman’s script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn’t a slave): an opportunity that doesn’t come very often for audiences, so you shouldn’t miss it. If the long line for the women’s restroom after the film is any indication (women are the main audience for costume dramas in film and on TV) Belle will probably be a big art house success. Still, we see glimmers of a better, deeper movie in too few moments of Belle: in Dido’s own initial snobbishness, the trappings of which have left her in a lonely, untenable position. Later, we see her two identities, as an upper class woman and a Black woman, at odds with each other, captured most poignantly when Dido is asked to sit for a family portrait. At first we don’t understand why she’s upset at the request, until she points out that in the paintings on the walls of the mansion, Black people are always positioned at the feet of white people (as pet dogs, cats and birds were often painted with children at the time: in the otherwise excellent A Royal Affair–which takes place during the same general period–a Black child is also portrayed as a “pet” for the white upper class). At the end of the movie the director unveils the real portrait that inspired the film and in the original Dido’s face we see an expression hinting at the more complex and nuanced conduit to the past Belle might have been.
Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
I was lucky enough to listen to Jill Soloway speak recently at a small gathering to discuss a new filmic voice for women, hosted by the genius and innovative Emily Best, CEO of the crowdfunding and distribution platform Seed & Spark. Soloway spoke so eloquently about her process and about women’s opportunities and struggles in the film industry. She was so engrossing and inspiring to listen to that there was a palpable feeling of magic in the room. One of the valuable lessons I took away from our discussion was about her career turning point — from producer to filmmaker — is that she realized that no one else was going to make it happen for her. It makes me wonder how many other women and men are waiting for permission to make their masterpieces, and license to make the characters within them bold, alive, and human.
Juno Temple and Katherine Hahn in Afternoon Delight
This is a guest post by Leah Rudick.
I recently made my first foray into screenwriting. Very exciting, no? A few months ago, I started writing a script about a woman in her early 30s who finds herself suddenly living in New York City, wading through the murky waters without direction, a passive observer in a sea of eccentric, cruel and hilarious characters. A woman searching for her purpose. Who’s excited? Did I pique your interest? Is that a resounding YES?! I wrote about 40 pages, got stuck, and showed it to my intuitive and brilliant better half who read it, gave me some very generous compliments, and then asked, “Why don’t you give Sarah [my heroine] some agency? What does she want? Is there a way for her to be bolder instead of having all of these things happen to her? A way to let her be the ignition for whatever construction or destruction occurs? Can we watch her be the cause rather than the reaction?” They were great questions. Why was I interested in writing something about a woman who seemed comfortable being so inactive? Who was satisfied sitting back and observing, judging, but paralyzed from actually stepping in and taking part.
It’s a manifestation of a struggle I’ve always had, the fight against my natural instinct to be the shy, passive observer. It’s something that my inspired 78-year old acting coach worked tirelessly to drill out of my head: “Leah, what do you want in this scene? You can’t exist in this gray area. It’s boring!” It’s an issue that I notice in many films that I’ve seen and worked on. The female character is the watcher, the muse, the victim, the object. And while I have been easily able to detect this trope in the work of others, I was totally oblivious to it in my own work.
When I watched Jill Soloway’s most recent feature, Afternoon Delight, I was, in the truest sense of the word, delighted. It was everything I wanted in a movie: Hilarious, tragic, deeply moving, beautifully shot with incredibly grounded and brilliant performances across the board. The story follows stay-at-home mom Rachel (Katherine Hahn) who takes in a young stripper named McKenna (Juno Temple) in an effort to save her and also to distract herself from her own upper middle class malaise.
This is a film about women’s agency, and watching it was an eye opener for me. The movie is so bold and colorful and also so feminine in a more real way than I think one often sees in film, even sometimes in those made by women. It is emboldening to watch, because it has been created by the voice of a woman who is seemingly unfettered by the much discussed “male gaze” in filmmaking.
Leah Rudick and Katie Hartman in web series Made to Order
I was lucky enough to listen to Jill Soloway speak recently at a small gathering to discuss a new filmic voice for women, hosted by the genius and innovative Emily Best, CEO of the crowdfunding and distribution platform Seed & Spark. Soloway spoke so eloquently about her process and about women’s opportunities and struggles in the film industry. She was so engrossing and inspiring to listen to that there was a palpable feeling of magic in the room. One of the valuable lessons I took away from our discussion was about her career turning point — from producer to filmmaker — is that she realized that no one else was going to make it happen for her. It makes me wonder how many other women and men are waiting for permission to make their masterpieces, and license to make the characters within them bold, alive, and human.
I’m grateful she had the realization, because Afternoon Delight is masterful at defying the norms of the comedy genre in such an incredibly subtle way. This conversation of agency begs another discussion about which genres best lend themselves to this kind of work. It is one thing to make an action film with a female lead and make her active and in control and awesome (I am so excited to see the Seed & Spark funded Sheila Scorned, a “grindhouse short starring a quick-witted stripper who’s out to get even with the men in her way” because it looks badass), but what about when the genre is one that typically does not allow for female agency?
I produce a web series with my comedy duo, Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting, called Made To Order about two sisters who start an underground food delivery service. It is a sort of high octane comedy about two women who forcefully throw themselves into a world they know nothing about at the expense of everything. With my very brilliant comedy partner, Katie Hartman, it has been thrilling to create two characters who do rather than watch and manage this in a completely unhinged way.
I love the idea of finding more ways to write female characters with agency in every genre, across the board. This awareness and need for these types of character in creative work has had a profound effect on my own writing and I know that I’m not alone in this sentiment. When we start allowing characters to do, rather than to simply watch others do, worlds open up and we can actually started having fun.
Leah Rudick is an actress, writer and comedian. Film credits include Cut to Black (Brooklyn Film Fest Audience Award), Lost Children (Desperate Comfort Prod., IFP Lab Selection), Bloody Mary (Sci-fi channel), Kids Go to the Woods, Kids Get Dead (Darkstar Entertainment), Prayer to a Vengeful God (Insurgent Pictures) and Jammed (Runaway Bandit Productions). She can be seen on the popular web series High Maintenance and on the webby-winning youtube channel Barely Political. She is a founding member of Lifted Yoke Productions, and is currently in pre-production for their feature dramedy, Sweet Parents. Their first short film, Blackout, can be streamed at Seed & Spark Cinema. She is a contributing writer to Reductress.com. She is half of the sketch comedy duo Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting (Edinburgh Fringe, The PIT, UCBT, NY Fringe Fest) and co-creator/co-star of their upcoming web series Made To Order (madetoorderseries.com).
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, ‘Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang,’ have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.
Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive and the experiences of girls and women within it are, sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives; instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or to be frightened by a man following too close on our heels.
Unlike a lot of other films discussed this week, the girls of Foxfire are not avenging a particular rape, but are instead rebelling against rape culture in many forms: catcalls, description of women by only their physical attributes, slut shaming, rape and molestation, predatory authority figures and the society that allows men and their opinions more power than women.
While rape revenge films are often criticized for using rape for titillation or as a means to justify nudity and graphic violence, the ideas are invoked here to make viewers think.
In these films, one girl is mocked by a teacher for her appearance and has her intelligence demeaned. One girl is groped while another is shamed. Yet another is offered a free typewriter by her uncle in exchange for sex; a fifth is spied on in the shower. During a trial, the defendant’s promiscuity is the most important factor in deciding her guilt. And when one girl returns home after being raped, her mother’s only response is to tell her to clean herself up before her father sees.
Forming a girl gang allows the characters to stop seeing sexual assault as the problem of each individual victim, but as something that effects all of them. When one girl, Rita, thanks the group for helping her, their leader assures her that she isn’t to blame–if Rita wasn’t the victim, it would have been someone else. Women need to band together instead of shaming each other if they have any hope of changing things.
Both films center on a passionate and androgynous leader, named Legs, who mobilizes the girls, first in a series of pranks and acts of rebellion small enough that viewers can cheer them on, then through several dangerous and criminal acts, before culminating in the kidnapping of a wealthy man at gunpoint. Maddy (Hedy Burress), Legs’s closest confidant, observes the events and acts are narrator, chronicling the group’s rise and fall.
The original 1996 film, starring Angelina Jolie as Legs, is clearly a product of the 90s Girl Power movement, a period known for being overly commercialized, but it’s an earnest effort with a female screenwriter, Elizabeth White and director, Annette Haywood-Carter. It’s also an attempt to modernize the novel, about working class 50s teens in Upstate New York, relocating the story to Oregon and dressing it in grunge fashion, with topics for discussion like sexism, female disenfranchisement, parental neglect, and masturbation. However, as a mainstream film, it’s sanitized, more playful than the book and as the girls are middle or upper middle class, the stakes are less dire. Foxfire never becomes a literal gang or a lifestyle, just an episode in their lives, that facilitates their coming of age.
For the remake, director Laurent Cantet restored the novel’s setting and stuck pretty faithfully to the book, attempting to cram in all the causes Foxfire rebels against, including ageism, racism, animal rights, and economic disparity as well as sexism. Lead by a cast of newcomers, Cantet’s film takes a more cautionary tone, as Maddy’s attempt to redeem Foxfire, now remembered only for their criminal acts, by telling their history and their original noble goals.
While Legs in the remake (Raven Adamson) was a classmate of the other girls who they had known for years, in the original, she’s an outsider, a drifter who enters into their lives one day and helps them find their voices. Legs is given a grand entrance, heralded by thunder and followed as she boldly trespasses through the school halls.
Punishing Mr. Buttinger for abusing Rita is the impetuous for Foxfire’s founding
Like a superhero, she arrives to save one of the girls, Rita (Rilo Kiley front-woman Jenny Lewis) who is being bullied by her teacher, Mr. Buttinger, for refusing to dissect a frog. Legs tells the student to “Make him stop,” and it’s a truly revolutionary idea, that a teenage girl could have any power over an adult. Her dream-like entrance and exit through the window, mark her as powerful and unconstrained by society’s rules, she doesn’t go to the school and Mr. Buttinger can’t punish her.
Legs is clearly marked as Other–she’s aggressive, with a leather jacket, heavy boots and swagger. As the camera pans up her body when she’s first introduced, not showing her face for several minutes, it’s clear viewers were meant to think momentarily, that she was a man. It is unclear why she goes by such a strange nickname, one usually thought of as objectifying; perhaps it is an attempt to reclaim something men have called out to her in the street.
Her relationship with Maddy is marked by obvious lesbian subtext, as they frequently flirt, confess their love for each other and share a bed, but her sexuality is never explicitly discussed. It is problematic that the character with the courage to fight against rape culture is the one given traits marked as masculine, while the girls she recruits, are mostly feminine and/or weak. It is also troubling that Legs’s suggested queerness is paired with her hatred of men, two things which are often falsely equated.
Legs enjoys driving the girls in the stolen car
In both cases, the girls are enamored with Legs, who quickly becomes their hero and undisputed leader. In the original, they are all introduced as broad high archetypes, Violet (“the slut”), Goldie (“the druggie”), Rita (“the fat girl”) and Maddy (well-rounded and popular), characterizations which become more three dimensional as the film goes on.
When the other girls learn Mr. Buttinger has been groping Rita’s breasts during detention, they originally hold her responsible. It’s Legs’s influence that makes them realize there is no excuse for Mr. Buttinger’s behavior and no way Rita could deserve his abuse. In the remake, Legs blames Rita only for not fighting back, telling her, “It’s up to you to decide how men are going to treat you.” Rita takes this message to heart, exposing him as sexual predator by painting statements about his attraction to young girls on his car.
In the original, Legs tells the girls that the only way to stop his is to band together. During Rita’s detention, the girls gang up on him, physically assault and threaten him. Rita begins to come out of her shell, finally gaining the confidence to confront her abuser, threatening to castrate him if she ever touches her again. The next day, the girls are called into the principal’s office and suspended, despite their claims of sexual harassment, which are ignored.
The girls perform a candlelit ritual in their headquarters, during which they give each other tattoos
Legs’s idea, that they can fight against abusive men only if they all stick together, but not as individuals, leads them to start Foxfire as their own collective, their own subculture. Before they had banded together, the girls went to the same school and had shared experiences, but cliques kept them segregated. Maddie, from her privileged perspective as a popular girl, looked at someone like Goldie as a sideshow, dismissed Violet as a slut and disdained Rita’s shyness as pathetic, and the cause of her own problems. Later, when they become friends, Goldie is hurt when she notices Maddie’s art project includes an unflattering Polaroid of her, clearly posed as someone to mock.
They begin to gather in an abandoned house in the woods, which they use to make a community and a safe space. Hanging around in the house, they become real friends and partake in typical teenage bonding practices, drinking, dancing, ogling guys, and laughing together. They cement their bond by tattooing each other’s breasts with a small flame logo, marking themselves as part of Foxfire, grouped together for life.
In the remake, the girls rent a house and live together in their own cloistered society as Legs intends to create an institution that would outlast her. The idea of a formal female gang with a manifesto, rules, ritual tattooing, criminal practices and recruitment, is an example of young women adapting masculine rough culture and altering it to suit them. Gangs are typically the province of disenfranchised youth (usually male), those neglected by mainstream society, such as racial minorities and the working class. Foxfire suggests the characters are disenfranchised as women and it is natural for them to act out against the society that oppresses them, as the men around them, in their own gangs, have been doing for years.
Maddy admires her tattoo
In the original film, rape culture is tied to sports culture, as both are posed as masculine spaces men feel women have no right to infringe on nor attempt to police. Their attack on Mr. Buttinger upset a group of jocks who respect him as the coach of their football team and they resent the girls. The boys begin harassing them, visiting their house in the woods and attempting to attack them, eventually trying to rape Maddy. Struggling to escape the jocks, the Foxfire girls steal a car and are arrested for it. At their trial, is implied that the jocks lied and blamed the girls for everything, leading to a “he said, she said” dynamic where the boys’ testimonies are taken more seriously. Legs in sentenced to juvie, while the others are on parole. For trying to dismantle rape culture and save themselves from attack, they are punished and lose Legs, the heart of the group.
There are also girls who help the jocks; one lures Maddy into an ambush, understanding the goal is to rape her, and lies at their trial. Later she gains some redemption when she confesses to the judge. Early on in the remake, the girls in Foxfire are reluctant to let Violet, a beautiful girl all the boys are crazy about, join. They decide Violet is promiscuous because she attracts male attention, without any evidence she returns their interest, and look down on her for it. In the remake, Legs’s mental state begins to deteriorate as she becomes disillusioned with her vision of women helping each other as a community after watching women fighting each other in juvie.
After juvie, both versions of Legs turn to darker, more violent acts. Narrating the remake, Maddy says the committed many crimes against men but most of their were not reported because their male victims were ashamed of having been attacked by girls. The films suggest revenge is acceptable to a certain level, where it’s exposing men who have who they know to be predators or teaching lessons to men who have wronged them, but is wrong once the focus moves away from specific individuals. When Foxfire starts targeting men in general, moving out of the area of defensible grey morality, Legs moves into villainous territory herself.
The Foxfire girls use their members as bait to rob men
Strapped for cash, Foxfire (in the remake) begins to use its most conventionally attractive girls to bait men, luring them into secluded areas and then ambushing them and stealing money. One girl, Violet, finds she can make more by pretending the man tried to rape her and acting afraid until he gives her money to try and comfort her. Though baiting, these girls attempt to turn rape culture on its head and make it work for them. These acts are justified in their eyes as Foxfire begins to operate with the view that all men are rapists deserving punishment, even casting out any girl involved in a relationship as the enemy.
Out of the group in the original film, only one girl, Goldie (Jenny Shimizu) has a dysfunctional home life. In one scene, her father orders her into his car and hits her while her friends watch. Instead of struggling or hitting back as would be expected from the character, Goldie submits. When the girls discover Goldie has been using drugs, Legs goes to her father, demanding money to pay for rehab. When he refuses, though he can clearly afford it, she kidnaps him at gunpoint and ties him up, continuing to pressure him for money. The girls, as both teenagers and girls, would ordinarily be powerless to help Goldie, here, as in many areas of their lives, they find they can only get results through violence. In these scenes, the other girls surround her yelling that she’s gone too far.
In the end, Legs leaves town to escape arrest, as well as the loss of the other girls’ respect. These girls who had previously viewed Legs as a hero, looked at her with disgust and disappointment and admitted to being afraid of her. In the remake, we get some understanding of Legs’s family and background, as her father, an alcoholic, condemns her at her trial and refuses to let her live with him. Conversely, the original leaves Legs’s origins a mystery. She’s clearly damaged and something must have happened to make her, a teenage girl with a criminal record, no place to live, and roaming from town to town. The easiest explanation, is that she may have left home because of her own abuse and it’s easy to speculate that her anger at society, particularly fierce towards Goldie’s father, comes from projecting her own experiences onto their relationship.
Everything begins to go downhill when Legs is released from juvie
Moreover, the 1996 version is framed as a coming of age story, cast as the year Legs came to town, changing everything, making Maddy question her perfect world and then disappeared never to be seen or heard from again- merely an episode in her life. But while the Maddy is central to the remake as its narrator, her observations of Legs and Foxfire’s history form the thrust of the narrative, rather than her own maturation. Both films end with the mystery of Legs’s disappearance and Maddy’s continuing obsession. In the original, Maddy’s decision not to go with Legs when she leaves town is framed as the one decision of her life she has always looked back on, wondering “what if?”
While the original film shows what happens when the leader of a group becomes an extremist or is mentally unstable, the remake suggests the whole group, excluding Maddy who defects, has begun to reject the rules and laws of society. Toward the end, most of the other girls are excited by their efforts at baiting and see Foxfire as one big, dangerous game that allows them to reject the limiting framework they grew up in. For her part, Legs always means well, trying, in the only way she understands, to help her friends and women as a whole.
Both endings are bittersweet. Foxfire disbands and the girls stop fighting for their causes, but they’ve helped some people and made their mark. But Legs is gone and it’s uncertain what ideas viewers are meant to come away with. It’s tricky to judge, as the films are full of feminist ideas and urgings for female empowerment, yet have dark endings where characters are hurt and disgraced. A tagline for the original celebrates the girls’ rebellion and encourages the teenage girl viewer to follow suit: “If you don’t like the rules, Make your own.”
In more light-hearted moments, the girls still have fun together
But what are these films saying about young women who dare to break the rules? That their efforts will succeed unless our leader is unstable? That movements for rape revenge will always become uncontrollable and dangerous or that they’ll succeed only while punishing the guilty, but not when attempting to change the culture?
In the end, what the girls of the Foxfire films have is a strength they might not have found otherwise. That strength and the idea of community are what viewers should remember.
