10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? … In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative.

10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

This guest post written by Laura Shamas originally appeared at Venus in Orange. It is cross-posted with permission.


I’m not a horror film fan per se, but I’ve seen some scary, eerie stuff through the years, and Halloween is always a good time to view them. Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? C.G. Jung once wrote: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”

In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative. The 10 films detailed below (for adults, not kids!) have strong psychological components, too. I’ve divided them into well-known Halloween-ish folklore categories: monsters, strange illness, haunted house (ghosts), killer, losing one’s head (lost), witches, and vampires.

MONSTER

The Babadook

1. The Babadook (2014)
Written and directed by Jennifer Kent

This film is about a lonely widow, her young son, and their journey through grief. A mysterious book suddenly appears in their home, and launches a trajectory of events related to a home-invading monster. What a fascinating portrayal of aspects of motherhood in this film. The tone and cinematography are original; the key performances are strong. The conclusion is truly inventive, and, for me, unexpected. I can’t wait to see Kent’s next film. (Note: female protagonist. Available through streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix).

STRANGE ILLNESS

The Fits

2. The Fits (2015)
Written and directed by Anna Rose Holmer

This film took my breath away. It centers on the extraordinary performance of Royalty Hightower as Toni, an eleven-year-old tomboy who hangs out with her older brother in the gym. When an all-girl dance troupe rehearses in the same community center, Toni becomes fascinated by the aspiring performers, and joins them. Then a strange sort of “illness” descends on the girls. As I watched the film, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible came to mind; I’ve examined the film version of it before. I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending of The Fits was revelatory and mesmerizing. It involves a different sort of fear of the unknown and a transformation, but with tremendous female resonance. I eagerly await more of Holmer’s work as well. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

HAUNTED HOUSE (GHOSTS)

A Cry from Within

3. A Cry from Within (2014)
Written by Deborah Twiss, co-directed by Twiss and Zach Miller

This is a ghost story with a particular feminine twist. Twiss stars as a married mother with two young kids. The film examines what happens when a city family moves into a drafty old mansion in a small town. This is a familiar set-up, and some tropes from the “haunted house” genre are used here predictably. Yet, as the film gradually turns towards its true theme, it held my interest: a spirited quest to heal a gruesome family history. Perhaps some of it is melodramatic, but I appreciated the different sort of twist in the third act; it concludes with a strong depiction of the “shadow” side of motherhood and ensuing generational repercussions. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

The Invitation

4. The Invitation (2015)
Directed by Karyn Kusama

The film is about Will (Logan Marshall-Green), a grief-stricken man haunted by a past tragedy that occurred in his former house in the Hollywood Hills. As it begins, Will and his girlfriend hit a coyote in the rain on the way to a dinner party, hosted by his ex-wife and her new husband — a foreshadowing of what’s to come. At first it seems as if it’s going to be like The Big Chill: a gathering of old friends reminiscing, catching up, talking about what’s new. But then Will’s ex-wife and her new husband show a movie clip before dinner that sets the eerie tone of what’s to come. Let’s just say that if you’re invited to a dinner party in the Hills, this film will make you reconsider showing up. The house becomes a character of sorts, and old memories emerge like ghosts in flashbacks as terror reigns. (Male protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

The Silent House

5. The Silent House (2011)
Co-directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, written by Lau

This 2011 film, an American version of a 2010 Uruguayan film titled La Casa Muda,  is another “Haunted House” type of film with a twist at the end. Based on a “true story” from its Uruguayan origins, the movie is seemingly filmed in a single continuous shot, which gives it a lot of tension. The Silent House follows Elizabeth Olson as Sarah, a young woman who, along with her father and uncle, are moving out of a dark old family home near a shore, and encounter strange noises, specters, old photos that no one should see, and more. Of course, the power is not on. When Sarah’s father is knocked out on a staircase, Sarah knows there’s someone else in the house. The revenge component in the film’s conclusion will resonate with many. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon.)

KILLER

The Hitch-Hiker

6. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Directed by Ida Lupino, written by Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, and Collier Young

As part of this initiative, I’ve tried to catch up on many of Lupino’s films. The Hitch-Hiker is considered the first mainstream film noir feature to be directed by a woman. It varies from standard film noir fare because of its desert locales (as opposed to urban settings). A tale of two American men who are ambushed by a terrifying killer in Mexico, and their attempts to escape danger, the film’s original tagline was: “When was the last time you invited death into your car?” (Male protagonists. You can watch it for free on YouTube here. A version with higher resolution also streams on Amazon.)

LOSING ONE’S HEAD (or LOST)

The Headless Woman

7. The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008)
Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel

Made in Argentina, it’s perfectly titled. The film’s ominous psychological atmosphere produces a slow burn sort of scare and a dawning realization as you watch it; it’s not a conventional horror “scream” viewing experience. A strange auto accident on a deserted country road is at the center of a mystery; the protagonist is the driver Veronica or “Vero” to her friends (Maria Onetto), a middle-aged married dentist. We wonder: who or what has been hit? Is the victim okay? As the movie continues, we come to understand the true identity of the Headless Woman. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms, including Hulu.)

WITCHES

The Countess

8. The Countess (2009)
Written and directed by Julie Delpy

Starring Julie Delpy, the film is a bloody biographical account of Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory, who lived from 1560 to 1614. The film depicts the Countess’ fascination with death; even as a young girl, Báthory declared: “…I would have to raise an army to conquer death.” Thematically, this period piece examines the possibility that unrequited love could lead to madness, and that an obsession with youthful appearance could launch serial killings, as the Countess searches for virginal blood as a magical skin elixir. Because of the focus on bloodletting and torture in her story, Báthory became connected to vampirism through legend. But witches figure prominently in the film in several ways: Erzsébet’s estate is successfully run by a witch named Anna Darvulia (played by Anamaria Marinca), who’s also one of the Countess’ lovers; the Countess is cursed by a witch in a key roadside scene that changes her life: “Soon you will look like me”; and later, when she is on trial, Báthory is notably not tried for witchcraft, although she might have been. The ending brings information that forces a reconsideration of all we’ve just seen. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon).

VAMPIRES

Near Dark

9. Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red

I’ve long wanted to catch up on Bigelow’s earlier films, and have watched two so far as part of this initiative. But no Halloween film list is complete without a vampire movie, let alone a vampire Western like this one.

A lesson you learn quickly in Near Dark: never pick up hitchhikers at night in Kansas, Oklahoma or Texas. The movie is campy, bloody and violent; it debuted in October 1987, a part of the 1980’s vampire movie trend. The story revolves around Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a young cowboy in a small mid-western town who inadvertently becomes part of a car-stealing gang of southern vampires. The frequent tasting of death in the film, and its repeated reverence for nighttime, reminded me again of Jung’s quote about death: “But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.” The ending of this one also pleasantly surprised me. (Male protagonist, available on DVD.)

a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-5

10. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

This is a highly stylized, fascinating film. It’s a unique Persian-language film that follows a mysterious vampire figure named The Girl (Sheila Vand) who haunts the rough streets of “Bad City” at night in a chador, and encounters a young gardener named Arash (Arash Mirandi). Arash’s father is a heroin addict and his mother is dead; Arash is under threat from a tough character who keys his car as the film starts, and after that initial sequence, Arash befriends a beautiful stray cat who becomes part of the action. Amirpour’s film is so atmospheric, beautifully shot in black and white. The plot is untraditional; the ending was also unexpected. Some of the images are unforgettable, and the acting is strong. (Male and female lead characters, available via streaming.)


These ten “scary” films richly explore a range of psychological and social issues: grief; the arrival of puberty; abuse and repressed memories; the aging brain; unrequited love and growing old; justice; and becoming an adult. Most have plot surprises at the end, which makes the viewing all the more worthwhile.


See also at Bitch Flicks:

Why The Babadook Is the Feminist Horror Film of the Year
The Babadook: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale
Patterns in Poor Parenting: The Babadook and Mommy
“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: The Babadook, Mothers, and Mental Illness
The Babadook and the Horrors of Motherhood
The Fits: A Coming-of-Age Story about Belonging and Identity
Male Mask, Female Voice: The Noir of Ida Lupino
9 Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies
Kathyrn Bigelow’s Near Dark: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Scares Us
Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women


Laura Shamas is a writer, myth lover, and a film consultant. For more of her writing on the topic of female trios: We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. Her website is LauraShamas.com.

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’

julietacover

Written by Ren Jender.


The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters.

Julieta

I wanted to laugh when writer-director Pedro Almodóvar said after the press screening that this film is a “restrained” one. Compared to his other films, Julieta is subdued, but it also shows that even when he tries, Almodóvar can never tamp down his love of bright colors, ’80s fashion, overwhelming emotion and dramatic music — thank God! Julieta is one of his best films, a meditation on secular guilt, focusing on one woman’s life. Julieta (non-Spanish speakers: say, “who’ll-YAY-tah”) has all the little regrets most of us have, but circumstances beyond her control lead to some of those regrets becoming deep sorrow. He and Canadian writer Alice Munro (who wrote the short stories the film is based on) are a perfect, if unlikely, match. And Munro is two for two, so far, in films I’ve seen based on her work: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (with Julie Christie as the “her” of the title), another very different examination of guilt, was magnificent.

I was a little hesitant about Julieta before I saw it: Almodóvar swings wildly from making films that are my favorites to making ones that bore and offend me at the same time. The trailer shows that its lead actresses spend time in bad wigs (the film spans 30 years and in one amusing scene, we see the covered face of the actress who plays the younger Julieta, Adriana Ugarte, and when she’s uncovered she is Emma Suárez, the actress playing the older Julieta) but the wigs are the only non-outstanding elements in Julieta.

Praising a male director like Almodóvar for putting women characters at the center of his films and making them multilayered, with complicated lives that don’t revolve around men may seem retro. But after sitting through Paterson, with its I Love Lucy wife who has a wildly different ambition every day and plies her husband to fund her far-fetched “dreams,” and the fraudulent Manchester by the Sea, which in spite of some good acting (by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck — and only those two), has not one main woman character who seems to have a job or much of an identity beyond “wife/mother/girlfriend,” congratulating male directors for not being cavemen is apparently still necessary.

karlmarxcity_02

Karl Marx City

This documentary about the pervasive spying — using ordinary citizens as well as trained professionals — in the former East Germany where the co-director (with Michael Tucker), Petra Epperlein, was born and raised, blends satiny black and white cinematography with clips of vintage surveillance film and video. We follow Epperlein back home as she tries to get some answers about who was an informer and who wasn’t.

Epperlein transcends the divide between personal documentaries and the “talking heads” kind as she interviews everyone, not just her own family, but those in charge of disseminating the files meticulously kept on nearly everyone in the country until that country didn’t exist anymore. One of her best friends in school had parents who were officials who spied on the populace; she gets them to talk about their work (which they now regret). Epperlein explains that in a place where, the joke went, in every gathering of three people, one was an informant, people couldn’t trust one another so, “everyone was the enemy,” including, perhaps, her own father. Epperlein doesn’t just expose this culture of mistrust, she recreates it in this extraordinary film.

angeladavis

13th

At first, I was slightly disappointed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary but she confirmed when she spoke after the press screening something I had suspected: this film is not really meant for those of us who have already heard Bryan Stevenson speak about racism in the justice system or for those who have already seen Angela Davis, in a vintage clip from The Black Power Mixtape, speak about the particular history of violence Black people in this country have faced. 13th is an overview of the oppression of Black people by the U.S. criminal justice system meant for people who haven’t been exposed to this info in other venues — which is the majority of those who will see it on Netflix (the producer of the film, currently streaming it).

Still I can’t help wishing the film had fewer professors and writers explaining events — though one does have a great riff on how Angela Davis, when she was on trial, presented herself differently than other Black defendants would. Much more powerful is the cross cutting of Donald Trump’s incitements of violence, violence against protesters at his rallies, and a clip from the Civil Rights era in which an older man in a suit is attacked by young white men. Also unforgettable are the clips of the original Birth of a Nation with commentary explaining that the burning cross was an invention of the film, becoming a signature of the real Ku Klux Klan after it was reinvigorated by Birth of a Nation’s heroic portrayal. Don’t tell me harmful stereotypes in film don’t foster violence ever again.

tonierdmann_02

Toni Erdmann

I liked this feature from German writer-director Maren Ade, but I’m shocked so many other people like it too. Toni Erdmann has no score, no real laugh-out-loud moments past its first ten minutes, and its “jokes” go on for far too long. But as Ade explained after the press screening, the film is about humor but it’s not a comedy. A bear-like father (Peter Simonischek) puts on a (bad) wig and tells strings of lies in front of his grown, corporate-consultant daughter (Sandra Hüller), but unlike many “jokers,” his impulse doesn’t seem sadistic. As he glances out of the corner of his eye at his daughter Ines, he seems nothing more than a little boy who wants to play. Ines is matter-of-fact about the ruthless nature of her work, but she’s also melancholy and frustrated.

This film isn’t the kind that ends with the daughter giving up her career to start a clown college with her father. The changes the characters go through are small ones, and the connections they make are fleeting. But this lack of an easy resolution and the film’s portrait of the mendacity and absurdity of the corporate world are precisely what resonates with its audience.

lilygladstone

Certain Women

I fell asleep during part of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s new film, and sleep is legitimate criticism: whatever is happening on-screen isn’t engaging the viewer. But Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous actress who plays the young, soft-butch, half-Crow rancher in the film’s last interlude is an actress I could watch all day. Gladstone is the only one of the main cast who is from Montana, where the film takes place (and where Maile Meloy, the author of the collection of short stories the movie is based on, is from). The openness of her smile, her calm voice, and steady gaze make her character, Jamie, stick with us in a way the other characters (including Kristen Stewart’s Beth, the adult ed teacher and lawyer Jamie has a crush on) do not. Gladstone is beautiful wearing little to no makeup, but she looks like a woman who works on a ranch: she’s not as sylphlike as the other actresses in the film, and her hair, even when she’s trying to look “nice” is unstyled. I hope Gladstone becomes the big star she deserves to be, but I also hope she can remain unscathed by Hollywood’s physical expectations for actresses. We’ll see.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8″]


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

Bi Erasure in Film and TV: The Difficulty of Representing Bisexual People On-Screen

As frustrating as our erasure and stereotyping is, however, I’d like to go beyond the question of “good” and “bad” representations of bisexual characters to ask this: exactly what it is about bisexuality which makes it so hard to represent on-screen? And why, when bisexuality is visible, is it so likely to collapse back into dominant stereotypes of bisexuality as either promiscuous or merely a phase?

How to Get Away with Murder

This guest post written by Amy Davis appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation.


Positive and complex representations of bisexual and pansexual characters on-screen are so few and far between that film critics discussing bisexual representation are often left lamenting our erasure, or – on the rare occasions we are represented – our stereotyping and demonization.

In the 100 top-grossing domestic films in the U.S. in 2015, out of 4,370 characters (speaking or named), only 32 characters or .7% were LGBT, and only 5 of those characters were bisexual, according to USC Annenberg. According to GLAAD, 4% of regular characters on primetime broadcast television series are LGBT characters. Of the 271 LGBT characters (regular and recurring) on primetime, cable, and streaming television series, 76 or 28% are bisexual. According to Stonewall’s report on the representation of LGB people (unfortunately they did not include statistics on trans characters) on television series watched by young people in the U.K., in over 126 hours of programming, bisexual people were portrayed for just 5 minutes and 9 seconds, compared to 4 hours and 24 minutes for gay men, and 42 minutes for lesbian women.

When we do appear on-screen, bisexuality is often used to indicate hypersexuality, such as Bo from Lost Girl and Doctor Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At its most extreme depictions of reinforcing biphobic tropes, the character’s bisexuality is also used to code “evil” or “dangerous” or “murderous,” using their (hyper)sexuality as a method of manipulation and control, for instance Sharon Stone’s character in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct.

Basic Instinct

As frustrating as our erasure and stereotyping is, however, I’d like to go beyond the question of “good” and “bad” representations of bisexual characters to ask this: exactly what it is about bisexuality which makes it so hard to represent on-screen? And why, when bisexuality is visible, is it so likely to collapse back into dominant stereotypes of bisexuality as either promiscuous or merely a phase?

Narrative film and television, with its emphasis on conflict and resolution, is poorly equipped to represent bisexuality. The committed, monogamous couple continues to represent the pinnacle of romantic fulfillment in contemporary Western culture. As such the familiar romantic plot in narrative film and television involves some kind of conflict – usually an erotic triangle – which is resolved when the protagonist makes a choice between potential suitors and becomes part of a couple (see, honestly, any rom-com ever made). Within this format then, bisexuality can often only be a disturbance to the status quo. In 2010 comedy-drama The Kids Are All Right, for example, the lesbian relationship between Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) is disrupted when Jules begins an affair with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the sperm donor of their children. Throughout the film, Jules identifies as a lesbian, never declaring she’s bisexual or questioning her sexuality. So long as Jules’ infidelity persists, bisexuality has a spectral presence in the film. The narrative conflict presented by bisexuality/infidelity is resolved, however, when Jules ends the affair and the lesbian/monogamous status quo is restored. In the final scene, Jules and Nic are shown smiling at each other and holding hands, the threat of Jules’ bisexuality effectively repudiated. At best, bisexuality is depicted in The Kids Are Alright as a temporary phase, at worst, as non-existent; a mere moment of weakness within an overarching narrative of monogamous lesbian couplehood.

The Kids Are All Right

Of course the widespread misconception of bisexual desire as triangulated and therefore always split between two object choices is demonstrably false. Many bi spectrum individuals see themselves as attracted to people rather than genders and do not feel unfulfilled when they are in a relationship with a person of a particular gender. What’s more, many queer people reject the notion of the gender binary altogether, having relationships with people all over the gender spectrum, including genderqueer and non-binary people. Nonetheless, the notion that gender is binary and the overwhelming importance placed on (binary) gender as object choice in our society means that bisexuality is inevitably viewed as dichotomous desire within our society. In The Kids Are All Right, and numerous other films with bi potential, bisexuality then gets mischaracterized as an unstable, dichotomous desire which must be subsumed back into the monogamous, monosexual (straight or gay) status quo.

But to understand the mechanisms through which this occurs, it is necessary to understand the dominant logic of monogamy. In its most perfect and pure form, a narrative of monogamy involves the notion that there is one true partner for everyone. The truth for many of us, however, is that we have several romantic relationships and sometimes even several marriages in the course of our lives, which is described as “serial monogamy.”. For the logic of the “soul mate” to work alongside the realities of serial monogamy, however, is it necessary to de-emphasize the importance of past relationships or disregard them as mere mistakes on the road to finding one’s eventual life partner (“I thought I was in love but I didn’t know what love was”).

Within this dominant paradigm of monogamy, depictions of characters who have serial, monogamous relationships with men and women are rarely read as bisexual since their past relationships (with a particular gender) are dismissed as not meaningful. A classic example of this is Willow (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is depicted as straight for the first few seasons, during which time she has a relationship with boyfriend Oz (Seth Green), and upon entering a relationship with Tara (Amber Benson) is subsequently depicted as a lesbian. Her past relationships with and interest in men becomes re-written as “not real” (or not as as “real” as her newfound lesbian love) and thus any potential bisexuality is erased.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Too often bisexual visibility requires individuals to trace relationship histories which subvert the dominant ideals of monogamy, even if they themselves are consistently monogamous. Alan Cumming, actor and bi advocate, said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2014:

“I used to be married to a woman. Before that I had had a relationship with a man. I then had another relationship with a woman, and I since then have had relationships with men. I still would define myself as bisexual partly because that’s how I feel but also because I think it’s important to — I think sexuality in this country especially is seen as a very black and white thing, and I think we should encourage the gray. You know?”

I was struck, reading this quote, by just how familiar this form of bisexual storytelling is. I’ve told a version of this story myself when talking about my bisexuality, and heard it from friends and strangers alike. It’s a story designed to make one’s bisexuality visible and legitimate with full awareness that it could slip through the cracks, becoming subsumed into heterosexuality or homosexuality, at any moment. Cumming is all too aware that his expression of desire for men and women is insufficient in itself to make his bisexuality visible, and that in the context of his marriage to a man his “mere” desire could be easily dismissed to create a coherent homosexuality. His bisexual narrative instead involves emphasizing the importance of his past relationships and marriage, describing them alongside his current relationship and implying that while they are not current they are nonetheless still meaningful in his sexual identity.

Further, Cumming’s narrative involves relationships with men and women which are dispersed throughout time, rather than a series of relationships with women followed by a series of relationships with men, which could be easily subsumed into a gay (rather than bi) “coming out” narrative similar to Willow’s plotline. And although none of these relationships are depicted as non-monogamous in themselves, Cumming’s narrative disrupts the “one true love” logic of monogamy at the same time as making his bisexuality visible over time. In making explicit reference to his past relationships as significant to his current sexuality, Cummings refuses to be dismissed, revised, or excluded by monogamy’s “one true love” narrative or bi erasure.

How to Get Away with Murder

Similar disruptions accompany other moments of bisexual visibility in film and television. How to Get Away with Murder, for example, successfully depicts Annalise Keating’s (Viola Davis) character as bisexual or pansexual by bringing a past relationship into the present. In the course of season one, Annalise’s love interests are male. However, early in season two, it is revealed that she had a relationship with law school classmate Eve Rothlo (Famke Janssen) and the two briefly rekindle their relationship in the course of working together.

Given the dominant ideals of monogamy, had it merely been revealed that Annalise had a college relationship with a woman, it would have been too easy for audiences to dismiss her past relationship in order to reinscribe a current straight identity. On the other hand, had she kissed a previously unknown woman, audiences would likely have read it as a loose erotic triangle – involving the woman and on-again-off-again boyfriend, Detective Nate Lahey (Billy Brown) – probably requiring resolution into a straight or lesbian identity. However, Annalise’s sexual and emotional intimacy with Eve in the present avoids the bisexuality-as-narrative-disruption trope and instead functions to draw our attention to the importance of Annalise’s historic relationship with Eve. The previous relationship cannot (and should not) therefore be easily dismissed as a “phase,” simultaneously disrupting the logic of monogamy which relegate previous relationships to the past only and allowing Annalise to remain visible as a bi character.

As bisexual people, we get tired of the persistent association between bisexuality and non-monogamy, demonstrated through popular stereotypes which position us as promiscuous, confused, dangerous, greedy, deceptive, cheaters, and unable to commit. A familiar response to this charge is the reminder that, like straight and gay/lesbian people, bisexual people can be (and are) both monogamous and non-monogamous. While this refutes the myth that bisexual people are necessarily non-monogamous, it does little to explain how the association between bisexuality and non-monogamy emerged in the first place. And more importantly for our representation on-screen, the ways in which dominant narratives of monogamy create the conditions of both our erasure and our visibility.


See also at Bitch Flicks:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bisexual Representation
Is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Willow Rosenberg a Lesbian or Bisexual?

Exploring Bisexual Tension in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
: Joss Whedon’s Binary Excludes Bisexuality
LGBTQ Week: The Kids Are All Right
How to Get Away with Murder
Is Everything “That” New York Times Review Said It Is
How to Get Away with Dynamic Black Women Leads


Amy Davis is currently completing a PhD on bisexual erasure at the University of Wollongong. Amy is interested in feminism, queer and trans politics, animal rights, law, ethics and, most importantly, cats.

‘Jennifer’s Body’ and Bisexuality

We don’t have direct evidence of how Jennifer or Needy would describe their sexual orientations, but ‘Jennifer’s Body’ works as a depiction of the relationship between two young bisexual women. If nothing else, it subverts expectations around gender and sexuality in horror films. … Even when Jennifer and Needy resort to physical violence with each other, their conflict has an erotic, and even romantic, subtext.

Jennifer's Body

This guest post written by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.


While the feminist merits of the 2009 horror film Jennifer’s Body remain up for debate, there is no denying that it is a standout in its genre for being female-centric. Directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, Jennifer’s Body follows the story of Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and Anita “Needy” Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried), two teenage girls from a small town whose troubled friendship is shaken up when Jennifer is turned into a demon who must feed on human flesh. The film revels in Jennifer’s seduction and consumption of boys, but it simultaneously gives importance to the conflict between her and Needy. The film throws many heteronormative assumptions made by the audience into doubt. Jennifer isn’t afraid to talk about or act on her desire to have sex with men, but the most important relationship in her life is with Needy, and that relationship is eroticized at some key moments, including Jennifer referencing how they used to “play boyfriend-girlfriend.”

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Megan Fox describes Jennifer as a “cannibalistic lesbian cheerleader.” We don’t have direct evidence of how Jennifer or Needy would describe their sexual orientations, but Jennifer’s Body works as a depiction of the relationship between two young bisexual women.

If nothing else, Jennifer’s Body subverts expectations around gender and sexuality in horror films. Sexually active young women commonly meet their fates early on at the hands of the antagonist while their innocent/virginal counterparts survive. But as Gaayathri Nair observes in her article “Does Jennifer’s Body Turn the Possession Genre on Its Head?,” “Jennifer’s lack of purity saves her. The fact that she is not actually a virgin means that she gets a second shot at life.” Not only is she more than fodder for the sake of building tension, Jennifer becomes the most powerful character in the film, as Needy goes from her sidekick to her nemesis. Instead of being fueled by revenge or menace, Jennifer’s love/hate relationship with Needy is the driving force behind Jennifer’s Body. A competitive tension exists between their relationship and how they relate to the male characters that suggests an equal emotional, and even erotic, importance to their connection to each other.

Jennifer's Body

When Needy introduces us to the setting of Devil’s Kettle High School, we see a scene of her watching Jennifer performing with the flag team from the bleachers. The setting and camera work —  alternating between and slowly pushing in on Jennifer and Needy — acts as a visual homage to the cheerleader routine sequence from American Beauty. However, instead of emphasizing voyeurism and fantasy, as in the American Beauty scene, we see Jennifer and Needy smiling and waving, connected and mutually happy to see each other. Any potential voyeurism is also undermined by a classmate sitting behind Needy, who describes her relationship with Jennifer as “totally lesbi-gay.” The depth of the two girls’ connection reveals itself to be borderline supernatural even before the occult aspects of the film are introduced, when Needy senses Jennifer’s arrival to her house before we hear her at the door. “That’s fucking weird,” Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) comments.

When Jennifer becomes a demon, her bizarre behavior (including the murders) strains Needy’s love for her, but also intensifies their connection. The one actual sex scene in the film, between Needy and Chip, is cross-cut with Jennifer killing and eating Colin (Kyle Gallner). Not only does this equate Jennifer’s consumption of a male body with the more conventional eroticism of Needy and Chip having sex because they love each other, but the two scenes blend together as Needy has visions of blood seeping through her ceiling, and a demonic Jennifer standing over a previous victim. “I need you hopeless,” Jennifer growls at her prey, as Needy begins to whisper “hopeless” over and over, without seeming to know why. Even when trying to satisfy their hunger or connect with someone else, they can’t separate from each other.

Jennifer poses a threat to the young men of Devil’s Kettle, but Jennifer’s Body pushes male characters to the side, relegating them to tropes often embodied by women or other historically marginalized groups. In the beginning of the film, Jennifer refers to men as “morsels;” even before she literally eats them, she views men who she wants to sleep with as disposable objects for her consumption. Roman (Chris Pratt), Jonas (Josh Emerson), Ahmet (Aman Johal), and Colin are Jennifer’s prey, brought into her story so that she can exercise power and prestige both before she becomes a demon (Roman is a police academy cadet, which Jennifer claims gives her legal immunity) and after (she feeds on classmates Ahmet, Jonas, and Colin to replenish her powers). In the extended cut, Needy tries to reason with Jennifer, stating that they need to look for a cure so she can stop “killing people.” “No, I’m killing boys,” Jennifer responds, “Boys are placeholders. They come and they go.” Where characters who wield threatening magic in horror films are usually from marginalized groups — for example, the stereotype of a Romani woman cursing someone — Jennifer’s Body has Low Shoulder, the good-looking, white, male indie rock band who turn Jennifer into a demon as a side-effect of their quest to be “rich and awesome like that guy from Maroon 5.” And then there’s Chip, who takes on the role of the dutiful if clueless partner who needs saving from the supernatural threat in the third act.

Jennifer's Body

If Jennifer were purely a stereotypical bisexual seductress sprung from a heteropatriarchal imagination, she would use erotic interaction between herself and Needy as an accessory to appear more attractive to the male gaze. Instead, Jennifer performs heterosexuality to get a response from Needy. Jennifer agrees to go on a date with Colin after Needy says that she thinks he’s cool, and threatens Needy by stating that she finds Chip attractive, intimating that she is going to fuck, kill, and eat him. In a role that is often filled by an attractive female character, Chip becomes a battleground between Jennifer and Needy.

Jennifer, Needy, and Chip’s dynamic allows space in the film for sexual attraction between characters of both same and other genders. If the film were to go with heteronormative expectations, Jennifer and Needy would be vying with each other for Chip’s affections. Rather, Jennifer and Chip are vying with each other for Needy’s time and attention.

Jennifer and Needy have been best friends since early childhood (“sandbox love,” as Needy calls it), and Jennifer doesn’t have much of an interest in supporting her friend’s romantic relationship. In the first conversation we see between them, Jennifer convinces Needy to ditch Chip and go to Low Shoulder’s show with her. In the next scene, Needy gets dressed to meet Jennifer’s specifications (“I could show my stomach but never my cleavage. Tits were her trademark.”), while Chip sullenly criticizes the low cut of her jeans from the background. Jennifer asks if they’ve been “fucking,” to which Needy giggles and calls her “gross.” Jennifer then indulges in some gloating as the two girls leave together. “You’re just jello because you’re not invited…” she tells Chip, “You’re lime green jello and you can’t even admit it to yourself.” “Stop kidnapping my girlfriend,” Chip responds helplessly. Chip’s insecurity about his standing with Needy is his Achilles heel. Jennifer isn’t able to seduce him as easily as Jonas or Colin, but she is able to lower his defenses by telling him that Needy cheated on him.

Jennifer's Body

Jennifer sees the female body as a weapon. She tells Needy that her breasts are “like smart bombs: point them in the right direction and shit gets real.” Jennifer receives an array of powers when she comes back as a succubus, but also becomes more aggressive, both sexually and overall. She makes rude, callous comments about the Melody Lane Fire and its victims; she uses her beauty and sexuality to lure her victims into secluded areas where she can kill and eat them. It would only make sense that she would use her body as a weapon against Needy once the conflict between them surfaces. And the conflict between them is definitely eroticized, but their preexisting close relationship adds a layer of depth to the violence that is not present when Jennifer hunts her prey.

After resurrecting as a succubus, Jennifer shows up at Needy’s house, covered in blood but smiling at her friend (albeit creepily). I imagine that being sacrificed to the devil and coming back to earth as a demon would leave one a little punch-drunk, but considering that Jennifer recounts later that “[she] woke up and [she] found her way back to [Needy],” it could be a smile of relief to see her friend. She pushes Needy against a wall and nips at her neck, both alluring and terrifying. After she eats Colin, Jennifer turns up in Needy’s bed (literally) and tries to seduce her. Although Needy stops her, the scene is shot quite differently from Jennifer’s seduction of Jonas or Colin, or Needy and Chip’s sex scene. There’s no distracting humor, such as Chip’s inexperience in putting on a condom, or the wild animals that flock to Jennifer’s presence when she’s in seduction mode. Instead of dialogue or soundtrack, the sound cuts out completely. The sequence also includes extreme close-ups of their lips and backs. These factors all give their make out scene a more intimate, sensual tone than their sexual encounters with boys.

Jennifer's Body

Jennifer’s reasons for trying to seduce Needy are never clearly outlined, but given that she had just fed on Colin and is at the height of her powers and confidence, it’s likely that she is reveling in her abilities by exerting control over Needy, or using their interaction as a celebratory indulgence. However, considering that this scene also includes her mentioning that they used to “play boyfriend-girlfriend,” and that Needy is active in their kissing before pushing Jennifer away, we are led to believe that there is some precedent in the two having sexual feelings for each other.

Even when Jennifer and Needy resort to physical violence with each other, their conflict has an erotic, and even romantic, subtext. When Needy tries to save Chip from being eaten, we get an exchange that is the closest the film comes to explicitly identifying either of them as bisexual. When Jennifer threatens to “eat [her] soul and shit it out,” Needy tells her, “I thought you only murdered boys.” “I go both ways,” Jennifer responds. This is a Diablo Cody script, smothered in sarcasm and quips, but given the prevalence of bisexual erasure, at least we have a little text to accompany the subtext.

Jennifer's Body

Their final fight begins with Needy gazing through a bedroom window at Jennifer, reminiscent of a typically masculine fetishistic role of voyeur (and Jennifer’s role of hunter). They grapple with each other in bed: Needy straddles Jennifer, who calls her “butch” for using a box cutter as her weapon. Jennifer begins to use her powers to levitate, but when Needy sees the matching BFF necklace from Jennifer’s neck, she becomes vulnerable for a moment and they fall back to the mattress in an oddly sensual slow-motion shot. It’s only when Needy metaphorically stabs Jennifer through the heart that she gets the opportunity to literally do so as well. But even death can’t separate Jennifer and Needy from each other: Needy’s narration informs us during the denouement that some of Jennifer’s demon powers transferred to her when she was bitten during their final showdown. The end credits document a more powerful, vengeful Needy unleashing a satisfyingly bloody revenge on Low Shoulder.

Jennifer and Needy’s relationship is not a very healthy one, characterized by a power imbalance even before Jennifer gains her demonic abilities. The supernatural forces at play in Jennifer’s Body serve as a metaphor for Jennifer’s narcissism, as well as forcing the tension in their relationship to the surface. But even if their friendship isn’t allowing them to be their best selves, their love for each other proves to be the driving force in the film, giving the audience a level of emotional engagement deeper than a conflict for survival between a human and a force of evil. By giving attention both to what Needy and Jennifer want and pursue out of sexual relationships with boys and delving into the romantic and sexual component of their relationship with each other, the film gives enough space to their emotional lives to depict desire for characters of both same and other genders.

Films are imbued with amazing powers when they delve into female characters beyond the depictions of prey and love interests. In the case of Jennifer’s Body, LGBTQ audience members can see an aspect of themselves reflected on the screen.


See also at Bitch Flicks:

Does Jennifer’s Body Turn the Possession Genre on Its Head?
Jennifer’s Body: The Sexuality of Female Possession and How the Devil Didn’t Need to Make Her Do It
From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women


Tessa Racked writes about depictions of fat people in cinema at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and displays Diablo Cody-level feats of wit on Twitter @tessa_racked.

Bisexuality in ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ and ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’

Both films, then, arguably fit a wider cultural pattern of bi erasure, suggesting that bisexual characters must “resolve” themselves as either gay or straight. I would argue, however, that what marks ‘I Love You Phillip Morris’ and ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ as something more nuanced and interesting than another tale of “inauthentic” bisexuality, is the subtlety with which they examine all sexual orientations as limited by our internalized need to socially perform.

220px-i_love_you_phillip_morris

This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. | Spoilers ahead.


How is bisexuality defined? If it is defined by sexual performance, then all the protagonists of the romantic comedies I Love You Phillip Morris and Kissing Jessica Stein must qualify: Steven Russell fathers a child with his wife while taking male lovers, while Jessica Stein and Helen Cooper are heterosexually active women who embark on a sexual relationship with each other. Yet, if bisexuality is defined by self-identification or by profound desire for both genders, then arguably none of these characters qualify: Steven Russell identifies exclusively as gay and appears passionless in his marriage; Jessica Stein is identified as straight even by her female lover, and cannot sustain sexual desire in her lesbian relationship; Helen Cooper, while attracted to men and women, appears emotionally detached and utilitarian towards all her male lovers, finding desire for romantic commitment only with women.

Both films, then, arguably fit a wider cultural pattern of bi erasure, suggesting that bisexual characters must “resolve” themselves as either gay or straight. I would argue, however, that what marks I Love You Phillip Morris and Kissing Jessica Stein as something more nuanced and interesting than another tale of “inauthentic” bisexuality, is the subtlety with which they examine all sexual orientations as limited by our internalized need to socially perform.

steven

In I Love You Phillip Morris, Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) is introduced as a pillar of the community, a proud family man, an active member of his church and a policeman. The film suggests that Steven’s discovery that he was adopted, and the trauma of rejection by his birth mother, are the psychological triggers driving his powerful need for social approval, which includes suppressing the fact that he is gay. When driving back from a rendezvous with a male lover, a collision destroys his sports car and puts him in a neck-brace. Shorn of his status symbol and physically restrained, Stephen is mentally released and resolves to come out of the closet — the first of many moments when the physical restraint of jail or hospitalization triggers emotional liberation.

It may be controversial even to consider Steven as a potentially bisexual character, when his marriage is dictated by the demands of a closeted life, in a conservative culture of compulsory heterosexuality. Yet his coming out of the closet does not instantly transform him from “living a lie” to authenticity. Rather, he plays another social role, sporting extravagant status symbols and elaborate grooming to win the approval of the gay community, discovering that “being gay is really expensive.” As Steven turns to fraud to finance his extravagances, the film has fun with the idea that he has been psychologically prepared for the socially unacceptable role of con man by the socially demanded con of compulsory heterosexuality. As both wife Debbie (Leslie Mann) and boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) unite to chase Steven and hold him accountable, we see that Steven’s compulsion to perform socially has been the driving force shaping both relationships, gay and straight.

Once in jail, I Love You Phillip Morris plays out like a rom-com spin on The Shawshank Redemption. Like The Shawshank Redemption‘s Andy Dufresne, Steven finds purification and transcendence by the power of his human will to cling to hope of escape, resisting the mental pressures of institutionalization. But where Andy’s sexual aspirations were represented only by a Rita Hayworth poster on his wall, Steven finds true love behind bars in Ewan McGregor’s winsome Phillip Morris. The famous Shawshank Redemption scene where Andy snatches an illicit moment to play Mozart over the PA system, is paralleled by a slow dance between Steven and Phillip to the strains of “Chances Are,” against a background of escalating prison brutality. Yet after emerging from prison, Steven’s lying and con-artistry rapidly resume, eventually alienating Phillip. Steven has been more deeply institutionalized by the society around him than he ever was by jail. As the film ends, he runs for freedom yet again, the dream of a perfectly realized love hanging over him as clear and yet elusive as a penis-shaped cloud.

jessica

As a representation of a bisexual woman, Kissing Jessica Stein‘s Jessica Stein (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a disappointment. Even after enjoyably consummating her relationship with Helen (Heather Juergensen), Jessica confesses to finding sex with a woman “all wrong.” However, if we accept Jessica as straight, made no more bisexual by her ability to perform sexually with a woman than Steven Russell is by his, then Kissing Jessica Stein (written by Westfeldt and Juergensen) changes from a bisexual rom-com into something else: a portrait of the price that the social institution of compulsory heterosexuality takes on a straight woman. Jessica is drawn to Helen by a Rilke quotation in her personal ad: “Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live their relation to another as something alive.” It is Jessica’s heterosexuality that is characterized by the film as a space of deadness, inertia, and monotonous repetition, urgently in need of radical renewal and dismantled preconceptions.

The film opens with Jessica’s mother busily matchmaking her daughter in a synagogue. The men around her are reduced to a list of “suitable” qualities, from physical appearance to wealth and availability; Jessica is urged to force her feelings into finding their suitability attractive. Later, we see her endure a round of dates, each following the same formula of dinner and interrogation, and even taking place in the same restaurant. Jessica’s love life has become institutionalized. We also learn that she has already had a serious relationship with Josh (Scott Cohen), who will emerge as her final love interest. This earlier relationship failed because of Jessica’s intolerance over Josh’s perceived lack of ambition. Everything that we learn about Jessica’s loyalty in friendship indicates that she would be unfailingly supportive to a friend who was struggling in their career. But Jessica’s fixed, socialized preconceptions about the role of boyfriends or “husband material” mean that her lover must perform success, to become the expression of her own ambitions and perfectionism. It is heterosexual connection, not bisexuality, that Josh sees Jessica as “clearly not open to.” In a brilliantly acted and moving scene, Jessica’s mother (Tovah Feldshuh) reveals that it is this perfectionism that made her fear for her daughter’s happiness, while surprising her by accepting her lesbian lover.

This, then, is the role that bisexuality plays in Kissing Jessica Stein: the renewal of Jessica’s heterosexuality through the radical elimination of her romantic preconceptions, and through the thought experiment of reimagining female friendship as romance. Only in the ethics of female friendship, with its emphasis on unconditional loyalty, openness, and mutual support, does Jessica find the proper mental attitude from which to approach relationships, to live them in Rilke’s words as “something alive.” In a comic scene, Jessica pushes Helen towards a male lover because “he’s a sure thing” and Jessica would feel guilty if she was unable to perform. While this may be taken as yet additional proof that Jessica does not take Helen seriously as a romantic partner, it equally shows a classic female friendship’s ideals of unselfish support, that could even encompass a polyamorous relationship. Where are Jessica’s limits, once she releases herself from the narrow, social roles of compulsory heterosexuality? Is it ethical to reduce bisexuality to a plot device for exploring heterosexual frustrations? But, how else could those frustrations have been tackled?

Kissing Jessica Stein

Helen Cooper is introduced to us juggling male lovers: a married man whom she can call if she’s “hungry,” an intellectual she can call if she’s “bored,” and a younger, sexually enthusiastic messenger boy to call if she’s “horny.” This utilitarian attitude to her lovers is matched by a consistent emotional detachment in her dealings with them. Yet her gay friend Martin (Michael Mastro) uses the fact of her promiscuity alone to define her as straight, denying that she could feel lesbian attraction “because you have had more cock than I have, and I was a big whore in the 80s.” His denial of the possibility of bisexuality seems to stem from his need to assert his gay identity; bi erasure and biphobia are damaging and negatively impact and ignore bisexual people’s realities.

As Helen advertises for a lesbian lover, the women whose phone messages she receives seem trapped in fixed preconceptions of their own, as narrow as the expectations of the men that Jessica dates. They seek Helen as an emotional savior or to mother a child with them, rather than expressing openness to Rilke’s exploration of “something alive.” It is, perhaps, precisely Jessica Stein’s straightness that forces Helen to seduce her gradually and through the medium of friendship. In this combination of friendship with sexual allure, Helen seems to find committed romance for the first time. After she and Jessica break up, Helen moves into an apparently committed relationship with another woman, bickering good-naturedly over their sleeping arrangements before going for a friendly brunch with Jessica. Does this indicate that Helen has discovered her orientation as a lesbian? Is she a bisexual woman (since the gender of a person’s current romantic partner doesn’t determine their sexual orientation)? Or is she a bisexual woman who, like Jessica, was limited in her romantic satisfaction with men by her inability to see them as friends? Does it matter?

Surely, if there is a message to Kissing Jessica Stein and I Love You Phillip Morris, it is that social pressures and imposed roles must be unlearned before romantic fulfillment can be achieved. So then, at what point does a label become a limitation?


See also at Bitch Flicks:

LGBTQI Week: Kissing Jessica Stein


Brigit McCone is worried that her dating life may be becoming indescribably monotonous and unrenewed. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and staring at nature documentaries.

Daughters of Horror Masters: Examining the Films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch

I’ve chosen to focus primarily on the debut films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch: ‘Scarlet Diva’ and ‘Boxing Helena.’ … Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena

This guest post is written by Juliette Faraone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of abuse]


In this essay, I seek to explore the relationship between subject and object. I also seek to better understand how these concepts are influenced and informed by gender and the media. This essay seeks a lot of things. I’m thirsty.

I’m here to discuss the films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch. I’ve chosen to focus primarily on their debut films: Scarlet Diva, made in 2000, and Boxing Helena, released in 1993.

Neither Argento nor Lynch was wholly new to me — I’d come across Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things back in 2005 during my Winona Ryder phase. Ryder had a small part, if I recall correctly – it was during all the shoplifting fuss, and she’d taken sort of a hiatus at that point. I digress. Argento’s acting originally drew me into her work, and I first arrived to her films by way of her father, filmmaker Dario Argento.

Having been a massive Twin Peaks fan, I knew Jennifer Lynch primarily as the author of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Sometime after its publication, she served as a production assistant on her father’s film, Blue Velvet. Now, I have mixed feelings about David Lynch. Actually, I guess my feelings for David himself are mostly positive — it’s Lynch fans I have a problem with. But hey, that’s another topic for another day.

Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

I started with Scarlet Diva. I’ll admit I was turned off by the DVD cover, but decided to give it a shot. The movie itself was surprisingly contemplative – quiet even. Sole screenwriting credit goes to Asia Argento, and though there’s not much dialogue, in my mind that’s a skill in itself. The writing felt minimalist; Meg White on drums minimalist. It was nice – something a 25-year-old woman would make (whatever that means). And it was a road movie, which earned it extra points in my heart. There are probably a great many female-driven road movies, but I can’t really think of any not featuring male leads or love interests. Did you just name one? I’m proud of you — I could only really think of Boys on the Side – at any rate, the number is small. How many female-driven, Bechdel Test-passing, road movies have been made in the past 10 years? Whenever people complain about similarities in women-led films, I try to remind them Hollywood saw fit to release not just one but seven Fast & Furious films, so I think we can probably handle it. Not knocking the Fast franchise, but come on.

In Scarlet Diva, Asia Argento plays Anna Battista, an actress and aspiring director. The title sequence starts with Anna sitting alone on the bus. She stares out the window, observing the scenery but also looking at her own reflection. From the first shot of the film, we witness Anna as both subject and object.

Of course, in broadening our vision, we see Asia Argento not only as dual subject and object, but also as an outside force – the director. She exists apart from her creation, and this is especially important for women. I was once of the mind-set that greater numbers of women directors in film didn’t necessarily equate to progress because it was the content of the film that mattered. This line of thinking now strikes me as, well, pretty fucking stupid. Of course women’s voices matter; representation is crucial.

Asia Argento used a tripod to film many of the scenes in Scarlet Diva herself. Both she and her character display exhibitionist tendencies, but still assert their control over situations. This control is vital to Anna’s character. In one scene, Anna’s co-workers give her drugs. She’s a bit reluctant to take the drugs at first, but her co-workers persuade her to take them. Moments later, Anna awakens in bed beside the man and woman — all three are naked. The room is dark, and Anna is overcome with dread. She’s lost control, and she lets out a scream. This scene was, for me, the most painful in the film.

In moments like this, we learn that while Anna is self-aware, she isn’t omniscient. When Anna derides an actor friend for “selling out” to become a sex worker in L.A., he reminds her that she always said acting is prostitution. Anna’s quick to laugh at herself, and we see a continuation of this love/hate relationship for performance scattered throughout the film.

'Boxing Helena'

Boxing Helena began to take shape thirteen years before Scarlet Diva — in 1987, when Jennifer Lynch was just 19 years old. She was chosen to develop the story, written by Philippe Caland, into a film. I’ll admit, on the surface, Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena are two very different films. Scarlet Diva is intimate — confessional, even. A film shot entirely on digital video, it deals with personal subjects in personal settings, with little pretense along the way. Boxing Helena is slick and larger scale. It has the veneer of Hollywood and in parts, plays almost like a fairy tale. Unlike Scarlet Diva, some of the interactions in Lynch’s movie feel false, and Bill Paxton in black leather pants doesn’t help matters. Instead of a first person subjective camera, we are presented with a pretty conventional narrative structure, insofar as the film has a couple of main characters and follows them around from scene to scene. Nevertheless, the two films share ties.

In Boxing Helena, Sherilyn Fenn plays the title character, and if she has a last name, we don’t know it. Viewers aren’t told much about Helena, and we can’t really fault the character for any lack of personal dynamism — the narrative paints her as object from start to finish — even the film’s title suggests she is the receiver of the action.

I’m assuming at this point you’re all low-key aware of the plot of Boxing Helena. Helena spurns the advances of Julian Sand’s character, a doctor named Nick who is — spoiler alert — a major creep. Apparently, Helena and Nick dated for three seconds before she decided he wasn’t the guy for her and he’s been obsessed with her ever since. Helena gets into a car accident outside Nick’s home, and, being a doctor, he performs surgery on her. Pretty okay so far, except, you know, during surgery he amputates both of her legs. Nick keeps Helena hostage in this way throughout a lot of the film, until she’s had enough and tries to hurt him. At this point, Nick thinks it’s a good idea to get rid of her arms too.

Credit where it’s due: Helena gets in some good verbal jabs — at one point, she says to Nick, after witnessing an exchange from another room, “You’re a goddamn joke.” As a female viewer, I took pleasure in that moment. What woman hasn’t experienced the misery of male entitlement? That said, I’m not sure what Lynch was aiming for in terms of general audience response to her film as a whole, which is actually a big part of the reason I fight for it. I like a little confusion every now and then. It reminds me I’m human — neurons firing, gray matter doing whatever gray matter’s supposed to do, etc.

Nick is persistent in his obsession with Helena. Since a young age, he’s been taught anything in life is obtainable with enough perseverance. Nick sees Helena as not just a conquest but also as fulfillment of some childhood goal. He robs her of her limbs. He objectifies her both literally and figuratively, and, as the audience, we’re right there alongside him. Early in the movie, we watch Nick as he watches Helena. In these scenes, Lynch transforms the camera into the male gaze.

Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena were made nearly a decade apart and likely with different demographics in mind. Still, we can sense a trend in critical response. Neither work was well received. Boxing Helena was seen as too extreme – misogynistic, even – with a message that confused viewers (myself included). I’d really like to scratch out the last ten minutes of the movie and pretend they never existed. It’d be a much stronger film. Still, it has its moments. Scarlet Diva didn’t bomb, but it wasn’t exactly a hit with audiences either. I knew the film had been chiefly criticized for being “self-indulgent” – criticism I don’t disagree with. But so what? Of course it’s self-indulgent. And I don’t mean in the “all art is self-indulgent” sort of way. (Or maybe I do, but I tend to hate that argument.) It’s self-indulgent in the sense that sometimes getting noticed requires a little push and shove. Who else is going to indulge a young female filmmaker? And what, we then ask, are women to make films about? What would critics prefer? If these films were the product of real women’s thoughts, feelings, drives, perceptions – why was there such a resistance?

Both of these women filmmakers have gone on to direct other films. Would this have been possible without their already established family fame? Would they have even been able to get their first efforts funded? And what of the unknown director – what happens to her?

At one point in Scarlet Diva, Anna finds her friend Veronica bound and gagged in her apartment, and she hasn’t eaten in days. We learn Veronica’s boyfriend is responsible for this abuse. After untying her friend, Anna quips, “You’re like the American housewife who gets beaten but doesn’t tell on her husband.” The friend agrees with the comparison — but after all, she’s in love. (Yikes.) Interestingly, in an interview from around the time of Boxing Helena’s release, Jennifer Chambers Lynch described her film “as a love story, not a horror film”:

“Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It’s inviting, exciting, and animalistic. I’ve been there; I’ve been drawn to it.” 

I’d be foolish to directly contradict Lynch’s own view of her film. For all I know, she still regards her film as a love story. Nevertheless, it is (in my mind anyway) the duty of the critic to reflect on art and to interpret its role in a larger cultural context. In Boxing Helena, Lynch briefly takes the nightmare in Scarlet Diva to the next level – it’s not just the loss of control to be feared most — it’s resignation. To forget one’s passion and to acquiesce to another’s will is the ultimate self-betrayal.

Boxing Helena

Taking all of this into consideration, and despite both films being written and directed by women, I’m not comfortable calling either of these films feminist. I don’t think they’re actively misogynistic, but I do think as responsible consumers of art we should be discerning in our application of the F-word. It means something and I want it to keep on meaning something.

There’s a famous Oscar Wilde quote that goes, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” In this age, complex questions of morality have gone out of vogue and have been replaced by a single phrase: “Is it problematic?” This question isn’t inherently harmful, but it does become dangerous when it’s used to avoid thinking critically. Instead of asking if a work is problematic (or at least in addition to it), we must train ourselves to ask a new set of questions: How does the narrative treat those subjects? Does it look on them favorably? Why or why not?

So let’s cut to the chase. If you take one thing away from this essay, let it be this: it’s absolutely imperative for a woman to write her own story.

Are you a woman? Do you have something to say? Of course you do. Write it down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you. You’re the fucking master of your own universe. Believe that with all your heart. I do.


Juliette Faraone studied digital media and film at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College before earning her BA in comparative literature from the University of Evansville. She is an editorial intern at Ms. magazine and a staff writer for Screen Queens. Her work has also appeared at Lesbians Over Everything, Slant and the Zusterschap Collective. In her spare time, Juliette watches a lot of old musicals and talks to her girlfriend and cats.

‘Colossal’ and ‘Lady Macbeth’ Tell Similar Stories of Violence and Empowerment at TIFF

Both Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, ‘Colossal,’ and William Oldroyd’s period piece, ‘Lady Macbeth,’ are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

'Colossal'

Written by Katherine Murray.


Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) saw the world premieres of Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, Colossal, and William Oldroyd’s period piece, Lady Macbeth. Both of these are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

In Colossal, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) struggles with problematic drinking, got fired from her job, and kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment. She moves back to her home town to get her life together, but soon discovers that she’s psychically linked to a monster that appears in South Korea every morning to blindly stumble into skyscrapers, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. This sounds like a completely bizarre and preposterous premise, but it works really well in the film. At first, it seems that Gloria will have to pull back on her drinking and behave in a more responsible way to deal with the monster, but it slowly becomes clear that there’s another antagonist in this story. At the risk of revealing one of the best twists in the film, it turns out that Gloria’s nice guy childhood friend, who initially seems destined to be her romantic interest, is actually a Nice Guy childhood friend – in that he secretly hates and fears women, and only pretends to be friends with them because he’s angling for sex. The second half of the film is about him getting increasingly vile and misogynist while she struggles to stand up to him.

At the screening I attended, Vigalondo explained that he’d been editing the film right up until the premiere and joked that all he could see were the mistakes he made. However, the mistakes don’t really show. There’s a little bit of fuzzy logic about the monster, and its origin story is built up to be more than it is but, overall, the film seems technically well-made and takes us on an understandable and unexpected emotional journey. The degree to which you enjoy this movie will be mediated by your Matrix quotient – meaning, if you were annoyed that Neo and Trinity killed a bunch of innocent people so they could look cool in The Matrix, you will be annoyed that Anne Hathaway’s monster kills a bunch of innocent people by drunkenly stumbling into a skyscraper. Colossal makes more of these deaths than The Matrix did, but not as much as it makes of the pain Gloria suffers herself.

That said, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Colossal and, even though I’m about to question the film’s use of violence as a path to power, this is a movie that deserves to land a distributor, so as many people can watch it as possible. There are interesting conversations to be had about the film, once it’s part of the cultural landscape.

lady-macbeth

Lady Macbeth is complicated, in that it’s an adaptation of an opera that was an adaptation of a Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which does not, itself, have anything to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Set in England, in the 1860s, the film follows Katherine (Florence Pugh), a woman who marries into a modestly wealthy family that hates her. The first act of the film depicts Katherine’s life as an endurance test – physical discomfort, humiliation, isolation, boredom, sleep deprivation, celibacy – that will apparently go on forever. By the time the murders start – and there are lots of murders in this film – we’re on her side.

This is Oldroyd’s first feature film (written by Alice Birch), after working mostly in theatre and, although everything looks gorgeous, there’s an overall broadness to the movie that would work better on-stage. All of the physical violence in the film is blocked and shot in ways that reveal it as pantomime; every line of dialogue and sound effect is crisp and loud as though there’s a chance we might not hear it.

Katherine intentionally goes from being sympathetic to villainous over the course of the film, and there are unanswered questions about some events – including what looks like a possible gang rape. The best explanation for the story came from Naomi Ackie, the actor who plays Katherine’s servant, Anna. During a Q&A, Ackie explained that to her, Lady Macbeth is about the choices people have when they’re oppressed, and how intersectionality leaves each of the characters with different options. The option Katherine chooses is to kill anyone who threatens her freedom and – without giving away too much – Gloria eventually resorts to violence in Colossal, too.

On the one hand, it feels great to watch these women fight back against men who threaten violence or have used physical violence to make them subservient – I got really emotional watching Colossal, and appreciated the care Vigalondo took developing the situation and exploring the misogynist undercurrents in what initially appears to be harmless behavior. There’s also a great moment in Lady Macbeth where Katherine stares at her father-in-law impassively during an outburst, and you can tell it’s because she’s already planned his death – it’s a much-welcome change after watching her bow to his wishes earlier in the film. On the other hand, watching these women meet violence with violence reinforces the idea that the best or only way to have power is to beat or kill someone else, which is an idea that’s bad for women (and many men) in the long run.

Men’s domination of women has historically hinged on physical strength and threats or deeds of violence. Although both Colossal and Lady Macbeth seem to propose that the best way for women to end their oppression is also through violence, the biggest gains women have made collectively in society didn’t happen because we started to beat men up – they followed from cultural change that placed more value on freedom, democracy, and equality. Some may argue that it’s important for women to learn to physically defend themselves, but the best way for us to ensure that women are treated like people rather than property is through dismantling intersecting systems of oppression and claiming an equal share of political, economic, and social power. Until we have that, women’s rights are an experiment that men can end at any time.

As committed to empowering women as both of these movies are – and I don’t doubt their commitment – the road to power on-screen looks a lot different than the road to power we’ve taken and probably should continue to take in life.


Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV, and video games on her blog.

‘As I Open My Eyes’ to Sex and The Police State: An Interview with Director Leyla Bouzid

Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film ‘As I Open My Eyes’ distinct from these other [portrait of the artist, coming-of-age films] are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.

'As I Open My Eyes'

Written by Ren Jender.


“My uncool parents won’t let me be an artist (or writer)” is such a common plot for coming-of-age films that a repertory theater could show a different one every night and fill at least a full month’s calendar. But girls and women usually need not apply as leads in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man genre. In these films, the wife and/or girlfriend of the main character rarely has a personality of her own. The male protagonist has a meddling (or mostly silent) mother. We see sisters as troubled or as comic relief, like in writer-director David Chase’s Not Fade Away, a lackluster semi-autobiographical account of a not very successful band in the 1960s.

Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film As I Open My Eyes distinct from these other films are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman, Farah (Baya Medhaffar) and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.

But Farah is a teenager (she’s 18), so she doesn’t believe she’ll get into trouble with the authorities. As her mother (Ghalia Benali) tries to dissuade her from performing with the band, which includes Farah’s slightly older, manbun-wearing boyfriend, Bohrène (Montassar Ayari), Farah says, “Everyone’s scared for nothing.”

Her mother sighs as she tells Farah, “I used to be like you.”

Like girls and young women all over the world, Farah blithely lies about why she’s late coming home which sends her mother into paroxysms of rage and frustration and leads her to vow to never speak to her daughter again. But the fractured family puts on a good front for their other relatives during Ramadan Iftar as they talk of Farah becoming a doctor and avoid any mention of her musical ambitions.

'As I Open My Eyes'

Bouzid, who is from Tunisia, (she now lives in France) co-wrote the script with Marie-Sophie Chambon and they capture the balancing act required of those who live under a police state. Even the band discusses which songs are (and aren’t) safe to play. When one member asks, “Aren’t we censoring ourselves,” we can see how younger people chafe against the restrictions that have defined their parents’ lives.

A great deal of the film takes place during the band’s performances and rehearsals, the songs commenting on the political situation of the country, similar to Cabaret‘s juxtaposition of musical performances and increasing oppression. But the music is North African with a tinge of punk: Farah’s style of singing sometimes reminds us of X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and Farah and her bandmates pogo to one song. Farah’s great curly meringue of hair (like her mother, Farah looks like a different person with her hair pulled back) is offset by an early-’80s-style “tail.”

Medhaffar is fully committed as a singer, sometimes seeming to be nearly moved to tears by what she sings, but she shines offstage as well. Too often, a teen lead is played by an actor several years older, a glaring discrepancy at that age. Medhaffar, if anything, seems younger than 18, perfect for the stubborn, determined, and love-addled Farah. Bouzid and Medhaffar expertly capture the intoxication that is a young woman’s first love and first (good!) sexual experience. Benali is also excellent, so much so that I wished the script added more clarity to her backstory. As I Open My Eyes is the second film I’ve seen written and directed by a Tunisian woman about a Tunisian woman becoming an artist (the other is Satin Rouge), a genre I hope we see more of — and not just from Tunisia.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgx_48jQAmE”]

I had the opportunity to talk with Leyla Bouzid, the director and co-writer of As I Open My Eyes, by phone last month. This interview was edited for concision and clarity.


Bitch Flicks: Baya Medhaffar is not just a great singer but also so good in the scenes that show her emotional and physical attachment to her boyfriend. Were there films that feature a young woman’s first love — and sex — that you were influenced by? Were there mistakes you’d seen in other films that you wanted to avoid?

Leyla Bouzid: We wanted to show the emotion. It’s her first love. The kiss at the start of the film is the first kiss and the time they make love is the first time she makes love, even if she doesn’t say it’s her first time. She just says, “It’s the first time I’ve seen a guy naked.” I was always thinking what was important for her. Because in other films, especially films from the Arab world, the issue would be she’s not a virgin anymore. This is not the truth; it’s not the real feeling this young woman would have. And I wanted the film to be very organic and very tactile, that we feel what you feel when someone is touching you for the first time. What I thought about were Jane Campion’s films, like The Piano. When the lovers touch each other you can really feel it. It’s a feminine way of showing love and attraction.

'As I Open My Eyes'

BF: I liked that the mother character starts out as seeming completely unreasonable, but then as the film goes on we see that she’s not. I’m wondering if you gave the actress Ghalia Benali [who is also a singer] any special direction.

LB: Ghalia was very afraid that we would think her character is hysterical. We talked a lot about the mother’s path. At the beginning of the film, she’s protecting her daughter so much that we think, “She’s crazy.” But at another point of the film we think, “She was right.” I pushed her to become this very protective mother. She trusted me. She said that how she was in the first part of the film reminded her of her own mother when she first started singing.

BF: Although the music is North African it also, especially in Medhaffar’s singing had a punk feel. And Farah has one of Patti Smith’s ’70s album covers hanging in her bedroom. What bands did you want Farah’s band to sound like or be influenced by?

LB: In Tunisia, there is not that much of a rock scene. There was when I was really a teenager but not during the period in the film. But there are a lot of Western bands that make rock and punk in Lebanon and Egypt and I was influenced by them. A band called Adif: it’s the band of the composer of the film [Khyam Allami]. It’s really rock but melancholy. I was also influenced by the Lebanese group called Mashrou’ Leila and by Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh. The idea was to have this mixture of traditional rock and traditional Tunisian music.

BF: The film takes place before the Revolution in 2010. Six years later, what do you think Farah would be up to? Do you think she would do as you did [Bouzid, like Deniz Gamze Ergüven, writer-director of Mustang attended the French film school La Fémis] and leave Tunisia?

LB: I think she’s still in Tunisia. She’s probably able to sing and has an audience and more of an ability to do concerts, but if she stays she’s probably disappointed — or depressed. When I was searching for the actress to play Farah, I met a lot of young women that were 22, 23 years old [which would be about Farah’s age now] and they were all kind of depressed. When I told them the story of Farah, they said, “Oh this is the story of my life, but I gave up and now I’m stuck with my family.” When watching the film, we can decide what happens. At the end it’s open, if she continues to sing or not.

BF: Your father is an acclaimed Tunisian director. Did you learn anything from him?

LB: The most useful thing I learned from him is: it is really hard in our country to make a film. In Tunisia making a first feature before turning 30 is unusual but part of why I could do it is because I had seen my father, how difficult it was every time for him to make a new film. Even though he was so famous in Tunisia it was still hard for him to get financing. I think when you start in cinema, it’s a dream and people idealize it. I didn’t. I knew it was really complicated.

BF: Muslims in France have been in the news lately. Your home is in France. Do the bans on Muslim women dressing how they want concern you?

LB: Yeah, I think really it’s just an empty, I don’t know how to say, a non-event. What the hell do you care about the clothes women wear when they swim? I’m relieved that the French courts stopped this. Politically, it was a very, very, very bad sign.

BF: Surveillance from the state, especially in the form of surrogates, like the “friend” of the band, is a big part of the film. Did you have experiences with state surveillance when you were in Tunisia? Did you know anybody who did? In the U.S., Muslims have been very much targeted in surveillance. Is the same thing happening in France?

LB: Yes, in Tunisia this event in the film, it really happened to me, but not in the same situation. When I was 16 and 17 years old, I was in a cinema club. We were all young. Some were 22 and I was the youngest I think. And we met every Saturday and talked about cinema and started to make our films. There was a guy who was the only one who had his own apartment, so we were always having parties at his house. If we were doing something we had to hide or we wanted to make out or whatever, we always went to his house. And after 3 years, I found out that he was a cop and that he was there to watch us. This is something that happened to a lot of people. Also, all the taxi drivers, they were working for the police, so every seventh person in Tunisia was a cop.

In France, let’s say the atmosphere has been really special for the past two years. It’s more speeches and the media and especially television are openly racist and Muslims are targeted in that way. There is more suspicion. I have a neighbor who’s Jewish but her skin is brown. She looks much more like an Arab than I do. And she told me she’s getting a lot of harassment every day. Individuals say to her, “Go back to your home,” and, “We don’t want Arab people here.”

BF: I’ve now seen two feminist films from Tunisian women writer-directors: yours and Raja Amari’s Satin Rouge, which feature women who find themselves through artistic expression. Can you tell me how you’ve been influenced by other women artists in or outside Tunisia?

LB: In general women directors are very inspiring, like Jane Campion, but also Tunisian women directors, like Moufida Tlatli. Also, other artistic women and singers, like Patti Smith. I really liked what she wrote in her books. And Bjork. And Frida Kahlo: these kind of women who are really creating things.


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

‘Sense and Sensibility’: Sister Saviors in Ang Lee’s Adaptation

On first glance, it may well appear that the film follows the usual trappings of the romance genre, in which the young women eventually marry the men that they love, who fortuitously possess more than ample funds to elevate them and their families from poverty, thereby “saving” them. …If we delve a little deeper into Lee’s adaptation it becomes clear that the sisters are not saved by the men they marry, but rather by each other, and multiple times throughout the story.

Sense and Sensibility

This guest post written by Melissa-Kelly Franklin appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.


Much is made of the erotic undertones of recent adaptations of Jane Austen’s work, particularly the wildly popular BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice directed by Andrew Davies, and so it is easy for one of Austen’s most prevailing and insightful themes to be forgotten. Austen is deeply interested in the relationship between sisters and the almost mystical intimacy that stems from it. For Austen’s women characters, this sibling connection is vital in being able to cope with all the trials that family life, social circumstances, and a patriarchal world casts in their direction.

Amidst the clamor of swooning over Mr Darcy’s wet-shirt and Pride and Prejudice’s subsequent pop-cultural appropriations, the importance of the friendship between the eldest two Bennet sisters can sometimes be overshadowed. Indeed, the sensation around the “sexing up” of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice somewhat sidelines the memory of another superb adaptation of the Austen canon, released in the same year: Sense and Sensibility. Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Austen’s novel, beautifully directed by Ang Lee in his English-language debut, focuses on the relationship between sisters Elinor and Marianne, not only to highlight their divergent personalities and thus the “sense” and “sensibility” of the title, but how necessary the sisters are to each other’s survival.

The family of wealthy Dashwood women find their fortunes irrevocably altered on the death of their father, whose home and fortune legally passes to his eldest son from a previous marriage and his selfish, insensitive wife. The four women are left without a home and a mere £500 a year to live on (to put this into perspective, this translates to roughly £16, 980 in today’s currency — $22, 580 in U.S. dollars — according to the National Archives’ currency converter). By the end of the story, the two eldest sisters are happily married: Elinor (Emma Thompson) to a comfortably-off, kind-hearted gentleman turned vicar, and Marianne (Kate Winslet) to an exceptionally wealthy and honorable colonel.

Sense and SensibilitySense and Sensibility

Some may argue that this preoccupation with handsome, eligible men makes it “fluffy” or even unfeminist. On this point, I agree with Samantha Ellis, who recently discussed the application of the Bechdel Test and why it “doesn’t always work.” She believes it is a useful tool in holding us accountable to creating complex female characters, but it should not be the only way in which we measure gender equity in film — indeed this was never its intended purpose. Ellis asserts that “sometimes women’s conversations about men are feminist”; Sense and Sensibility certainly falls under this umbrella. In the film, women’s survival is inextricably bound to marriage, when legal traditions like primogeniture prevented them from inheriting financial independence, and social propriety prevented them from earning money professionally, as Elinor so eloquently expresses to Edward (Hugh Grant):

“You talk of feeling idle and useless; imagine how that is compounded when one has no hope and no choice of any occupation whatsoever…  At least you will inherit your fortune, we cannot even earn ours.”  

On first glance, it may well appear that the film follows the usual trappings of the romance genre, in which the young women eventually marry the men that they love, who fortuitously possess more than ample funds to elevate them and their families from poverty, thereby “saving” them. I would argue however, that if we delve a little deeper into Lee’s adaptation it becomes clear that the sisters are not saved by the men they marry, but rather by each other, and multiple times throughout the story.

Sense and Sensibility

When considering which sister is the “savior” of the Dashwood family, Elinor immediately springs to mind. The opening scenes in the film reveal Elinor to be a self-contained, capable young woman, holding together a family falling apart at the seams as she navigates the grief of her mother and sisters. While the others are stricken at the loss of their father, Elinor is already pulling herself together and thinking pragmatically about their physical survival, comforting her mother and even initiating her youngest sister Margaret (Emelie Françoise) into the realities of their situation.

The importance of Elinor’s capability in this situation cannot be overstated: she is the only one of the women who fully grasps the finer details of their financial situation. In a private meeting between Marianne, Elinor, and their mother as they search for a new home, the widowed Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) suggests a small manor house, which is certainly a down-size from their expansive home Norland Park, but Elinor has to remind her that it is well outside what they can afford on their small stipend. Even after they move to the tiny Barton Cottage which is to become their home, Elinor monitors the housekeeping expenses with even greater vigilance, even cutting “beef as well as sugar” from their already meager diets. Without Elinor’s practicality, the Dashwood women may well have found themselves in even more dire circumstances.

Sense and Sensibility

As much as Marianne relies on her eldest sister’s good sense to ensure her immediate survival, Marianne’s spirited nature provides Elinor some respite from the gravity of the path that lays before them. Where Elinor would politely hold her tongue at their sister-in-law’s money-grubbing behavior, Marianne refuses to surrender her family home without highlighting the injustice at every opportunity. Marianne is appalled at Fanny’s request for the key to the silver cabinet for example, and rather than keeping her candid remarks between herself and Elinor, she pointedly throws the question across the breakfast table the next day: “How was the silver? Was it all genuine?” Elinor sweeps in to change the subject to something more appropriate, but one cannot help but wonder if she sometimes wished she had Marianne’s free-spirited belief in not “hiding her emotions.” Further to this point, Marianne is an important confidante for Elinor: teasing, probing and encouraging her to open up about her feelings for Edward. The confidences the sisters share when alone become an imperative cathartic release from the social restraints of the day, particularly for the propriety conscious and emotionally reserved Elinor.

The sister’s relationship, like that of any sisters, is fraught at times: their divergent attitudes towards social propriety and emotional openness sometimes puts distance between them. Marianne laments to her mother that at times she does “not understand” her sister, while Elinor privately confides to Colonel Brandon (played with the perfect combination of sensitivity, warmth and tortured sadness by the late Alan Rickman) that “the sooner [Marianne] becomes acquainted with the ways of the world, the better.” Despite her wariness of the way in which Marianne’s free behavior can “expose [her] to some very impertinent remarks,” Elinor remains unwaveringly loyal to her sister. When Marianne espies her faithless lover Willoughby (Greg Wise) across a ballroom in London, it is Elinor who is by her side, sharing in the indignity of being socially snubbed by him and his wealthy new fiancée, and it is Elinor who catches her sister when she faints (unlike that other version in which Brandon, in a cheesy “hero” shot, catches Marianne while glowering in Willoughby’s direction). In Thompson’s adapted screenplay, Elinor is there for Marianne through every indignity and public embarrassment, without agenda and in spite of her private thoughts on her sister’s past behavior.

Sense and Sensibility

Marianne similarly supports her sister in potentially uncomfortable social situations. Despite her public humiliation and unequivocal rejection from Willoughby by letter, Marianne leaves the sanctuary of her room and puts aside her grief to greet Edward — the man she knows Elinor is deeply in love with — when he finally visits them. Marianne’s warmth and friendliness towards him is to both make him feel at ease in their family circle, and show her support for her sister’s choice, whatever her humorous misgivings about his passionless reading and reserved nature she expresses earlier in the film. She selflessly dismisses his questions about her own health and redirects the attention to her sister, insisting “do not think of me, Elinor is well you see? That must be enough for both of us.” Little does she know that Edward is secretly engaged to the other woman in the room, Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), an uncomfortable fact that only she is unaware of. At times, Marianne resents the secret she senses that lurks between her and Elinor and accuses her of hypocrisy when probed for the details of her intimacy with Willoughby: “That is a reproach from you, you who confide in no one.” Elinor replies that she has nothing to tell, but the audience knows she would share the secret if only Lucy had not elicited her vow of silence. Marianne retorts: “Nor I, we neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing, and you because you communicate nothing.” However, when the truth comes out, Marianne rallies to her sister’s side, insisting that she for once put her own desires above those of others.

It is not until we see Elinor open up to Marianne as she lays unconscious, begging her to live, that we fully understand that not only does Marianne’s survival depend on Elinor’s practicality and pragmatism, but Elinor’s survival equally depends upon Marianne. In the dead of night, after a day of nursing her sister and the doctor’s warning for Elinor to prepare herself for the worst, Elinor begs her sister to find the willpower to fight for her life. Emma Thompson’s performance in this moment is utterly wrenching; she runs her hand along Marianne’s leg, as if to memorize the details of her beloved sister’s body before gripping her hand. She barely contains the wall of emotion threatening to overwhelm her: “Marianne, try. Please, try. I cannot do without you. I try to bear everything else. Please, dearest. Do not leave me alone.”

Sense and Sensibility

The first conscious words Marianne utters after her life-threatening ordeal are, “Where’s Elinor?” which further emphasizes the symbiosis of their lives. Despite their differences and the tensions they create between them, the two sisters could not survive without the succor they provide each other by simply existing, let alone the many moments of tangible support they afford one another when life in many ways, has been unrelentingly hard on them both.

Too often, Jane Austen’s work and its various screen adaptations is dismissed as trivial or thematically narrow; a period “chick flick” chiefly concerned with the pursuit of a husband to save the protagonist and her family from poverty as a result of the evils of primogeniture. It is worth remembering however, that Austen herself was a pioneer in her day as one of the first women to earn a living by her writing. Equally unconventional was her active choice to remain unmarried, after causing quite the local scandal when she accepted and then rejected the proposal of a wealthy neighbor within a twenty-four hour period. She instead chose to live with her beloved sister Cassandra for the rest of her life. Such was the closeness of their relationship, that their mother is reported to have said, “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.”

Austen’s own experiences of sisterhood make her renderings of sisterly relationships nuanced and detailed. Her works explore the complexity and intimacy of that connection — which may make the relationship fraught at times, but no less vital. Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility depicts this beautifully, revealing through Ang Lee’s insightful direction, that the story is much more about sisterhood than it is about romance or finding the right man.


Melissa-Kelly Franklin is an Australian-born, London-based writer and director of independent short films, with an honors degree in English Literature and History. Her feminist period short film Portrait is soon to premiere at international festivals, and she has two other film projects cooking in pre-production.  Updates about her work can be found at melissakellyfranklin.wix.com/writer-director/ and she occasionally tweets @MelissaKelly_F.

Sisterhood and Salvation in ‘A League of Their Own’

Though the simmering sibling rivalry between Kit and Dottie is a thread that runs through the entire film, the importance of sisterhood goes far beyond this. For both women, sisterhood becomes a ticket to another world: a ticket out, but also a ticket in; to friendship, to competition, and to independence. As such, sisterhood exists as a source of empowerment.

A League of Their Own

This guest post written by Katie Barnett appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.


Early in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own (1992), Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanagh) is coaxed by her father into leaving him – and their small town – behind for a shot at a place in the newly-established All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). “Nothing’s ever gonna happen here,” he tells a tearful Marla, as they wait for her train. “You gotta go where things happen.” It is a sentiment that drives many women in the film, not least Kit Keller (Lori Petty). Unlike Marla, however, Kit cannot count on the support of her own parents. Instead, she turns to her older sister Dottie (Geena Davis) in her desperate bid to leave their sleepy Oregon farm life behind, forcing Dottie to make a decision about her own life in the process. Dottie’s sisterly sacrifice paves the way for both women to become part of the inaugural intake of the AAGPBL.

Sisterhood is central to A League of Their Own, and the film does not shy away from depicting its less grateful, more fractious elements. From the beginning, Kit strives to prove herself against an older sister who is always, it seems, a little bit faster, a little bit prettier, a little bit better. “Can’t you even let me walk faster than you?” Kit snaps as they walk home from a baseball game in which Kit has struck out, only to see her sister hit the winning run and secure the team’s victory. As the younger sister, Kit is doomed always to play catch up. “You ever hear Dad introduce us to people? ‘This is our daughter Dottie. And this is our other daughter, Dottie’s sister.’” Later, news reporters refer to Kit as Dottie’s “kid sister”; Kit fumes that their parents “should have had you and bought a dog.” It is perhaps particularly galling for Kit that, despite her own evident passion for the sport, it is Dottie who excels on the baseball field without seeming to break a sweat. It is testament to A League of Their Own that this sisterly rivalry is confined almost entirely to sports; refreshing that it is Dottie’s killer swing that Kit covets most of all. While Dottie is around, Kit is relegated to being the scrappy sidekick – the sister who will always struggle to measure up.

A League of Their Own

Though the simmering sibling rivalry between Kit and Dottie is a thread that runs through the entire film, the importance of sisterhood goes far beyond this. For both women, sisterhood becomes a ticket to another world: a ticket out, but also a ticket in; to friendship, to competition, and to independence. As such, sisterhood exists as a source of empowerment. It is only as sisters that Dottie and Kit ever make it out of Oregon and to the baseball diamonds of the Midwest.

Most obviously, it is Dottie who offers this alternative life to her younger sister. Their mother and father are nothing more than a barely-glimpsed specter of parenthood in the film. Only their mother speaks; when she does, it is to chastise her daughters for running, and to tell Kit to keep her voice down. At home, Kit knows she will always be stifled. It is to her sister whom she turns to facilitate her escape. “Please, Dottie,” she pleads, as the two of them prepare dinner in the Kellers’ claustrophobic kitchen. “I gotta get out of here. I’m nothing here.” Dottie is able to save her sister from a life where the best she has to look forward to is huddling around the wireless with her parents and fending off men like Mitch Swaley (Gregory Sporleder), who Kit declares is “one step up from a pig.” When the scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) refuses to take Kit to the try outs in Chicago unless Dottie comes along too, Dottie realizes she holds her sister’s future in her hands: to refuse would preserve her own quiet life, but would crush Kit in the process.

Inevitably, Dottie’s sisterly sacrifice becomes a weapon with which to hurt Kit when the two fight over Kit’s trade from Rockford to Racine towards the end of the season. “I got you into this league, goddamn it!” Dottie hurls at her sister, to the frantic whispers of their teammates. For all that Dottie has done to aggravate Kit – being hailed as the league’s ‘Queen of Diamonds,’ pulling Kit from the pitcher’s mound in a crucial game – this is the one that cuts Kit the deepest. Her sister may have facilitated her escape, but she will always be there to remind Kit of that fact.

A League of Their Own

If sisterhood saves Kit, however, it also saves Dottie. At first glance this is perhaps less obvious. Unlike Kit, Dottie feels no need to “go where things happen.” “I’m married. I’m happy. That’s what I want. Let’s not confuse things,” she counters, when Kit begs her to try out. Kit, however, is unrepentant. Though Dottie is apparently happy with her neat, conventional existence – once her husband returns from overseas, they will settle down, have their children, and settle into an unremarkable, if pleasant, life – Kit urges her sister to take advantage of the opportunity being presented to them. “But can’t you just have this first? Just so you can say you once did something? Something special?” she asks. Dottie’s desire not to “confuse things” does not convince Kit, who pushes her sister to seek something that will belong only to her – not to her husband Bob (Bill Pullman), not to their future children, but to Dottie.

Being married is a defining aspect of Dottie’s character, both before and after she joins the league. Her first reaction to Capadino’s attempts to recruit her to the league is to tell him she is a married woman, and therefore has no need of the opportunity he offers. News coverage of the Rockford Peaches reminds viewers that although Dottie “plays like Gehrig, and looks like Garbo,” she is romantically off-limits: “Uh-uh fellas, keep your mitts to yourself. She’s married.” She turns down an invitation to join some of the other players at a local roadhouse because – you guessed it – “I’m married.” Kit’s determination to have Dottie join the league is not an attempt to erase this identity, but rather to supplement it. Kit serves to remind Dottie that sure, she can be married to Bob, but she can have this, too. She can be Bob’s wife Dottie, but she can also be – as Coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) might have – “a goddamn Peach.”

Kit’s conviction is borne out in Dottie’s decision to return to the league to play in the World Series, despite earlier leaving with Bob to resume their married life together. For all her words to the contrary, the competition and the camaraderie has left its mark on Dottie. In this instance, her kid sister was right. “You are gonna miss this,” Kit insists as the sisters say goodbye following the Belles’ victory. “I don’t care what you say.” Though Dottie demurs, she does admit that she will miss the girls, and Kit most of all. There is an undeniable poignancy here, as the sisters say goodbye, as it seems clear that, as they climb onto different coaches outside the baseball ground, this will be the last time they will ever be together in the same way.

A League of Their Own

Yet there is also a quiet triumph, for Dottie, as she witnesses Kit finally get what she wants. If Dottie is happy to go back to Oregon with Bob and have children, Kit is equally thrilled to be staying in Racine with some of the other girls and carving out a slice of independence for herself. At the beginning of the film, the local crowd chant Dottie’s name, much to Kit’s disappointment; this is reversed at the end of the film, when Kit’s winning home run has her own name echoing around the stands. It is the moment when Kit finally steps out of Dottie’s shadow, and the moment when Dottie can rescind credit for Kit’s success:

Kit: Thank you for getting me into the league, Dottie.
Dottie: You got yourself in the league. I got you on the train.

Dottie and Kit, it seems, do not maintain a close relationship over the ensuing years. The bookends of the film – older Dottie’s journey to the Baseball Hall of Fame, to see the induction of the women’s league – make this clear; Dottie grumbles to her adult daughter that Kit “probably won’t even be there,” and their surprise at coming face to face hints at limited contact since the days of “dirt in the skirt.” And yet their tearful embrace is a testament to the power of sisterhood, and an acknowledgement not simply of time spent apart, but of gratitude for the life they – however briefly – gave each other as young women.


See also at Bitch Flicks: ‘A League of Their Own’: The Joy and Complexity of Sisterhood on a Baseball Field5 Reasons Why ‘A League of Their Own’ Is “Feminism: The Movie”We’re All for One, We’re One for All in ‘A League of Their Own’


Katie Barnett is a lecturer in film and media at the University of Worcester (UK) with an interest in representations of gender and family in popular culture. She learned the rules of baseball from Penny Marshall, the rules of espionage from Harriet the Spy, and the rules of life from Jim Henson. Find her on Twitter @katiesmallg.

The Sister as Revenant in Brian De Palma’s ‘Sisters’

‘Sisters’ displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.


Classical Hollywood horror cinema often positioned its monsters as threats to a conservative social order represented on film through family and the home. King Kong snatches Ann Darrow away from Jack Driscoll’s apartment and Dracula lures women from their intended husbands. In Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourner, 1942), a woman fails to consummate her marriage because sexual arousal turns her into a ferocious feline, and an adopted child brings a killer’s instincts to roost in The Bad Seed (directed by Mervyn LeRoy, 1956).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s Liberation and the Sexual Revolution provoked a swell of reactionary horror films that reframe domestication as a potential trap that can destroy women and cause social fragmentation. Nightmarish expressions of Second Wave feminist sentiments abound. In Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Roman Polanski, 1968), a newlywed (Mia Farrow) suffers spousal rape in a plot to breed the Antichrist. The Stepford Wives (directed by Bryan Forbes, 1975) depicts husbands replacing their wives with obedient fembots. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (directed by Tobe Hooper, 1974) locates its horror in a disturbing symbolic inversion of the American family homestead.

Brian De Palma’s 1973 film Sisters is a post-Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), pre-Halloween (directed by John Carpenter, 1978) proto-slasher that belongs to this loose cycle of liberationist horror cinema. For an early-1970s film directed and co-written by a man, according to journalist and film critic Julie Salamon some critics deemed a “perverse misogynist,” Sisters displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

De Palma’s films have inspired protests from anti-porn feminists, but critics also champion his depictions of women and illustrate that his films are “about misogyny.” For example, Carrie (1976), a film feminist scholars both attack and defend, is a film about women’s internalized misogyny from its opening scene onward: it nonetheless passes the Bechdel Test, privileges a woman’s perspective in almost every scene, and represents a broad range of women characters, including career women.

A rote observation about De Palma is that he takes up the mantle of Hitchcockian themes and motifs: guilt, suspicion, repression, voyeurism, psychoanalytic critique, and sexualized violence. Sisters maintains this trend in De Palma’s Hitchcockian oeuvre. De Palma hired Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann to compose the nerve-wracking score. Moreover, Sisters rewrites Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the pseudo-gothic thriller, Psycho, from a post-counterculture historical context.

Sisters grounds its thematic appraisal of domesticity within literal and metaphorical depictions of sisterhood, wherein the sisters are foils for one another. Margot Kidder plays twin Quebecois sisters Danielle and Dominique. As the plot unravels, Danielle and Dominique are conceived as Canada’s first conjoined twins, who are now separated. The film introduces the viewer to Danielle, the seemingly “sweet” sister with whom De Palma aligns our sympathies: Danielle is pleasant, flirtatious, and cast as the survivor of past trauma and an aggressive ex-husband. As an immigrant from French Canada, she is also positioned as an ambiguous “other” in a narrative that film critic and producer Steven Jay Schneider describes in The Horror Film as a “powerful depiction of monstrous female sexuality.” In this respect, the film is a sister-narrative to Psycho. The only way to conduct a proper post-mortem on Sisters — a deliberately nonsensical film — is to spoil its plot twists, so this would be a good time to pause and watch the film online.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

The film frames women’s expected domestication, reified through decades of Hollywood cinema, as a concern from the opening sequence onward. Model/actress Danielle meets Phillip (Lisle Wilson), an African-American man, on the set of an exploitative Candid Camera-style television game show, Peeping Toms. The exploitative show’s stereotyping attitudes are cemented when the host gives Danielle a set of cutlery for her participation, and Phillip, dinner for two at New York’s African Room. Phillip grimaces, but agrees to bring Danielle along at her behest.

Over dinner, Danielle insists she is not a Women’s Liberationist. Soon after, her stalker ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), pleads with her to leave with him. Emil is dragged away, and Danielle, now inebriated, convinces Phillip to escort her to her Staten Island apartment, where she seduces him (it is worth noting here that interracial sexual relationships, though becoming more frequent in independent films such as Sisters, were still seldom depicted in Hollywood films in 1973). As Phillip caresses his way up Danielle’s leg, Herrmann’s soundtrack escalates to a grating cacophony and the camera zooms in to reveal a large scar on Danielle’s hip. The soundtrack suggests this scar is a source of anxiety and monstrosity. What follows is a narrative about trauma and ability, or disability, both physical and psychological. At its root is Danielle’s desire for normalcy, which she interprets as heteronormativity and motherhood.

After Danielle and Phillip sleep together, she awakens from a dream that produces moans both tormented and orgasmic. She proceeds to the bathroom, where she grips her womb in pain and places two red tablets on the sink’s basin. The pills provide a stark contrast to the apartment’s virginal, all-white color scheme (Danielle typically wears white, as well). Since these pills keep Danielle functioning and therefore —as it is later revealed — liberated, they are somewhat analogous to the contemporaneous emergence of birth control technology and its role in the Sexual Revolution. Before Danielle can take the pills, she hears a woman’s voice calling her name and enters the corridor, where she argues with her sister, Dominique, off-screen. The argument, wherein Dominique labels Danielle “disgusting” for bringing a man home, wakes up Phillip, who proceeds to the bathroom and inadvertently knocks Danielle’s pills down the sink without realizing this blunder. Danielle assures Phillip her sister only stopped by because it is their birthday, and sends him out to renew her prescription. While Phillip stops to buy Dominique and Danielle a birthday cake, Danielle realizes she is out of medication, and, panicking, calls Emil for help.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

When Phillip returns, he grabs a knife from Danielle’s new cutlery set and brings her the cake while she is asleep under some blankets. Phillip’s last words are benevolently patronizing, uttered after Danielle grasps the knife: “Now you know you’re not supposed to cut the cake until you blow out the candles.” Danielle, in a moment of rage, pounces on Phillip and stabs him to death.

In this first split screen sequence, Danielle’s neighbor, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a liberal investigative journalist, witnesses the murder through her window and phones the police. The detectives predictably bungle the investigation, preferring to waste critical time railing against Grace for writing an op-ed where she called police racist “pigs.” The senior detective immediately assumes Grace is imagining things, while his partner reveals his racism when he tells her, “Take it easy, lady, these people are always stabbing each other.” The police are only motivated to investigate because they fear Grace will give them more bad press. Meanwhile, the viewer watches in split screen as Danielle wakes up and Emil arrives. Emil promptly discovers the murder, but Danielle has no memory of the event. Instead, she whispers, “Dominique, what have you done?” Emil appears shocked by Dominique’s presence, but he exerts a patriarchal control over the situation, shaking Danielle out of her catatonia and telling her, significantly, “Put on some makeup. It must look as though nothing has happened.” In a scene reminiscent of Norman cleaning up after “Mother” commits murder in Psycho, Emil helps Danielle clean the apartment and stash the corpse in a fold-out sofa (if that sounds implausible, De Palma films this action in one shot to demonstrate it is possible to hide a body this way). He avoids running into the police with a garbage bag full of blood-soaked rags by seconds.

Casual and institutional sexism repeatedly thwart Grace’s attempts at investigation. When Grace and the detectives confront Danielle, the police sympathize with Danielle, and the viewer can appreciate why they would: Danielle is charming, demure, beautiful but modest — a traditionally feminine woman who represents herself as a victim, the lonely divorcee. Grace, on the other hand, is anything but her namesake: shrill-voiced, abrasive, accusatory, and clumsy enough to drop the cake she discovers, destroying a key piece of evidence. The police threaten to charge Grace unless she drops the matter.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

Grace stubbornly refuses to abandon the investigation, and viewers can assume this is partly an act of rebellion against her mother, who belittles her journalism career and berates her about finding a husband. Eventually, Grace confirms her suspicion that Danielle had a sister, about whom she is lying. While watching a documentary, Grace hears a psychiatrist in patriarchal clergy robes describe Dominique as “disturbed” and Danielle “sweet” and “so responsive,” but says the latter can only be that way because of her sister. After, Dominique is said to have died during an emergency surgery that separated the conjoined twins.

De Palma once responded to accusations of misogyny with a quip: “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach — chopping up women, putting them in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?” (Caputi 92). While this blasé attitude might not have won him more feminist fans, Sisters’ tragic denouement has a Brechtian pedagogy meant to gall and galvanize liberal viewers.

When Grace raids the psychiatric hospital where Emil conceals Danielle, the investigation falls apart. After an encounter with a patient who shrieks because Grace asks to use the telephone (the incident presents another metaphor for women obsessively seeking false security in a domestic space), Emil easily convinces his staff that Grace is another deluded patient who needs sedating. Grace is dosed (as in Rosemary’s Baby, wherein Rosemary is restrained on a bed before being penetrated and drugged with a needle, the incident plays out like rape), and Emil begins to use hypnosis to convince her there was no murder.

'Sisters' Brian De Palma

The sequence that follows is metacinematic, unreliably narrated, and only logical in a surrealist sense: Grace imagines herself as Dominique, attached to Danielle, in the documentary she had viewed on the sisters. Therein, it is revealed that Danielle was traumatized as a child when others called her “freak.” Later, in the context of an inappropriate relationship with her doctor, Emil, she developed a strong desire to have a baby. Unfortunately, Dominique was always there to observe Danielle’s sexual relationship with Emil. In a surgery scene that plays out like a black mass attended by a host of spectators, Emil separates the sisters using a cleaver from the cutlery set Danielle was given at the beginning of the film. The film’s metaphor imagines Danielle and Grace as sisters, with women’s domestication and innate urges for procreation being to blame for career women’s suffering. For Danielle to have the “normal” life she desires, it is necessary to excise less “feminine” qualities and pursuits, as represented through Grace and Dominique.

After this sequence, Danielle is provoked by traumatic memories. Emil assures her he loves her and kisses her, which of course triggers her to murder him. Since the police now know Danielle is a murderess, they are ready to believe Grace. Unfortunately, Grace has been brainwashed by a patriarchal representative of the psychiatric establishment and she refuses to cooperate. She tells the police “there was no murder” from what looks like a teenager’s bedroom at her mother’s house, having regressed to a childish state where she now depends on domestication.

As with Rosemary’s Baby, Danielle’s desire for motherhood becomes a site of horror. Similar to Irena (Simone Simon) in Cat People and Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski, 1965), Danielle’s murderous tendencies erupt when she is sexually aroused or confronted. And like Norman Bates, she dissociates herself from the act of murder by adopting the persona of a dead female family member that once kept her bound in place. Sisters is, perhaps, ableist in how it associates congenital disability with horror. Yet Danielle’s monstrosity is located more in the discrepancy between her desire to fulfill a “normal” feminine role by denying her disability and the mental illness this provokes after her sister’s death. In De Palma’s film, the sister is the revenant reminding Danielle of the expense paid for her traditionally feminine identity, her liberated actions, and her domestic desires. Since Danielle’s desire for a child preempts Dominique’s accidental death (or murder), the opening credit sequence is more harrowing in retrospect: twin sisters, developing in utero.


See also at Bitch Flicks: The Scary Truth About Sisters in Horror Films; When Sisterhood Sours in Horror Films


References: Caputi, Jane (June 15, 1987). The Age of Sex Crime. Popular Press. p. 92.


Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

‘The Virgin Suicides’: Striking Similarities Between the Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

Two sets of sisters, different in circumstance but alike in experience: the four Romanov Grand Duchesses of Russia and the four Lisbon sisters from 1970s Michigan in ‘The Virgin Suicides.’ … Clear links between the two sets can be drawn, but ultimately reveal that in both situations, living in a gilded cage only leaves behind a haunting memory.

'The Virgin Suicides' | Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

This guest post written by Isabella Garcia appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood.


Two sets of sisters, different in circumstance but alike in experience. The first sisters are the four Romanov Grand Duchesses of Russia: 22-year-old Olga, 21-year-old Tatiana, 19-year-old Maria, and 17-year-old Anastasia. The second are the four Lisbon sisters from 1970s Michigan in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides: 17-year-old Therese (Leslie Hayman), 16-year-old Mary (A.J. Cook), 15-year-old Bonnie (Chelse Swain), and 14-year-old Lux (Kirsten Dunst). Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the fifth Lisbon sister, is excluded here because the similarities between both sets of sisters come rushing in after her suicide in the beginning of the film. Clear links between the two sets can be drawn, but ultimately reveal that in both situations, living in a gilded cage only leaves behind a haunting memory.

As Grand Duchesses, the Romanov sisters were normally in the public eye and considered to be the most photographed royals of the early 20th century. From the outside, they were thought to be fashionable, charming, pretty, and inaccessible. Rarely apart, they were seen as a single force rather than individuals, wearing the same white lace dresses and hats. This didn’t seem to bother the girls, and instead, the sisters would reinforce this by collectively referring to themselves as OTMA, the first letters of their names. While the Romanov sisters were continually in the limelight, the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides were under the watch of the neighborhood boys’ eyes. Seen as unattainable and ethereal in their white peasant dresses, much like those that the Romanov princesses wore, the boys fell for them. They become so enamored with the idea of them that at one point after Cecilia’s suicide, the boys pore over Cecilia’s discarded diaries in an effort to get into the sisters’ minds, much like what historians do with the preserved Romanov sisters’ diaries:

“We started to learn about their lives. Coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl. The way it made your mind active and dreamy and how you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

Despite what fantasies others created of them, both sets of sisters were just simple girls. Helen Rappaport’s book The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra sheds light on this very fact, delving into the duchesses’ often speculated private lives. It may come as a surprise that they weren’t treated as royally as everyone thought; instead, they were brought up quite humbly, living rather repetitive lives. In an article about Rappaport’s book, writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya comments on her bewilderment at the fact that “the girls take baths, play hide-and-seek, drink tea, get measles, [and] love each other” when she was expecting something more grandiose and compelling. The Romanov and Lisbon sisters fell in love with unattainable boys, complained about not being able to go out, and silently worried about their future. Even their rooms, which carried an ethereal quality to them, seem to be alike. The duchesses covered the walls with colorful throws and shawls and placed small knick-knacks, icons, and pictures on their bedside tables to make the room more welcoming.

'The Virgin Suicides' | Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

Although the Grand Duchesses would seldom go out, their birthdays were events to be celebrated. Most likely the sisters’ favorite night was Olga’s 16th birthday debut in the Palace in Livadia at the Crimea. Escorted to the ball by her favorite officer Nikolay Sablin, Olga beamed with joy and danced for the rest of the night. Tsarina Alexandra wasn’t fond of frivolous aristocratic balls and only allowed Olga and Tatiana, whom she called the “Big Pair,” to attend three more balls in their lifetime. Even so, this quick appearance from the girls caused partygoers to realize that “despite the limitations of their till now sheltered lives, ‘they were simple, happy, normal young girls, loving dancing and all the frivolities which make youth bright and memorable’.” In much the same way, the Lisbon sisters’ last taste of freedom comes when Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) begrudgingly allows them to attend the homecoming dance with dates from the football squad. The sisters attend the dance wearing four identical white flowery dresses with slight variations, but they don’t complain as they’re too excited to finally get a chance to go to a school dance. During the night, the girls have their first kisses, slow dance with their dates, and Lux and her date Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) win homecoming king and queen. Nearing the end of the dance, the eldest sister Therese turns to her date and delightedly tells him that she’s having the best time. Unfortunately, the girls get thrust back into their restrictive reality after Lux doesn’t make it home with them that night. She spends the night on the football field with Trip and doesn’t come home until the next morning, much to her parents’ anger.

'The Virgin Suicides' | Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

It’s because of this and their exposure to the dangers of the outside world that Mrs. Lisbon and Tsarina Alexandra chose to isolate their daughters from everyone. Seeing it solely as a benefit to their safety and well-being, both mothers tucked them away — into the Lisbon household and the Romanov palaces. For Mrs. Lisbon, she seeks to protect her daughters from the prying eyes and hands of high school boys, while the Tsarina wished to keep OTMA away from the charged political climate of the time and possible assassination threats against the family. Mrs. Lisbon pulls the girls out of school after Lux’s failure to make curfew, while the Grand Duchesses were privately tutored at their home. Both sets of girls didn’t make or have friends their age apart from each other. The Romanov girls could only make friends with their tutors and the soldiers that oversaw their daily lives. Desperate for any contact with the outside world, Anastasia and Maria would routinely ask the soldiers to tell them stories about people on the outside. Rappaport sympathizes with them:

“With hindsight one might say that in being denied contact with young men and women of their own social standing and the life experiences that went with it, the sisters were trapped in a stultifying, artificial world in which they were perpetually infantilized.”

This also applies to the Lisbon sisters where at one point in The Virgin Suicides, Lux tells her mother, “I can’t breathe in here.” To which Mrs. Lisbon responds, “Lu, you are safe in here.” For both Mrs. Lisbon and Tsarina Alexandra, their children are their life. Even Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting Elizaveta Naryshkina recognized this, but knew that Alexandra “does not understand that there are consequences to all mistakes, and especially her own.” Both mothers ardently desired for their children’s safety, but it only did more harm than good: pushing them further away from society. Little did both mothers know that hiding their families away would help incite their downfalls: the Lisbon girls’ suicides and the public’s distrust and then imprisonment and deaths of the Romanovs.

'The Virgin Suicides' | Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

Tsarina Alexandra was quickly disliked by Russian citizens for seeming too distant and cold, which wasn’t helped by the fact that she made her family shy away from the public eye as often as possible. With the revolution breaking out in 1917, Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate while Alexandra and her children were placed under house arrest. It was only a year later when they were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg and ultimately met their demise. While there, the Romanov sisters lived a much stricter life than their house arrest. Like the Lisbon sisters, they weren’t allowed out apart from a stroll in their gated garden once a day. The Romanov sisters noted in their diaries their boredom and monotony, with each day passing just as the day before. Their dreary isolation didn’t go unnoticed by outsiders. Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was the same age as Maria, wrote in her book:

“I suddenly understood that I was much happier than these unfortunate girls: after all, I could run around with the dogs on the street, make friends with the boys, not learn my lessons, make mischief, go to bed late, read all kinds of junk and fight — with my brothers and anybody else…”

After not seeing the Lisbon sisters for a couple of weeks, the neighborhood boys that longed to save them from their confinement believed them to be “living in the dead, becoming shadows.” The girls would have disappeared from their lives altogether if they hadn’t reached out to the boys by speaking with them via Morse code using their lights. When that doesn’t work as well as it should, they take to calling each other and playing songs that represent their feelings — from “Alone Again” by Gilbert O’Sullivan to “Run to Me” by the Bee Gees. When allowed over one night by the girls, the boys believe they’re helping the girls escape, but they end up being witnesses to some of their suicides. Although the Romanov family was under strict lockdown, two boys, Vladimir and Dimitri Storozhev, sons of a priest that would occasionally visit the family, also managed to get in contact with the girls by gesturing and talking over the fence to them. But nothing resulted of this contact. The Romanov family was violently executed by Bolshevik soldiers in a cellar on the night of July 16-17, 1918.

'The Virgin Suicides' | Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

Both sets of deaths, the Lisbon suicides and the Romanov murders, were shrouded in mystery for some time after. For the Lisbon girls, people wondered why they did it; for the Romanov girls, people fantasized that maybe one of them managed to escape death. This theory has since been proven false, but that didn’t stop people from hoping. In The Virgin Suicides, the neighborhood boys describe their confusion about what happened to the Lisbon sisters as having only some “pieces of the puzzle, but however we put them together, gaps remained — oddly shaped emptiness, mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.” And yet, only one thing is for certain. Despite being lumped together as a group and despite being seen as ethereal beauties, they were just girls. They wanted freedom to live their lives. They had hopes and dreams for a future taken from them too soon.


See also at Bitch Flicks: The Repurcussions of Repressing Teenage Girls in ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and ‘Mustang’Sofia Coppola and the Silent Woman; Director Spotlight: Sofia Coppola


References: Rappaport, Helen. The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: St. Martin’s, 2014. Print.


Isabella Garcia is a California-based aspiring TV writer who can be found crying over movies, books, and TV on Twitter @isabellagrca and It’s Just About Write.